355 Meals

MK note: The title of Arc's tale doesn't say how many meals
were eaten. It refers only to about how high up they
were, in meters, when they had a chance to eat them. MK.

The three platoons of G Co were entrenched around the top of 355. The 3rd platoon was on the left, the 1st platoon (the one I was in) and the company CP were located around the topographical crest, and the 2nd platoon extended down the east ridge line to the next company. The 3rd platoon tied in to the Aussies on our left flank.

The weapons platoon machine guns were interspersed among the platoons to get enfilade fires across our company front. The mortars were on the reverse side of the hill. Cpt Marshall was the company commander and Lt Roger Peterson was the XO.

The positions were reached by climbing up 300 or so steep steps from the kitchen, which was at the bottom of the hill and to the rear. We could never walk on top of the hill or the Chinese would begin shooting at us. So we moved about in trenches which covered the entire hill.

As I recall, we ate C-rations for breakfast and evening and relied on a home made apparatus to get a hot meal for lunch. (It might have been cold at lunch and hot the other times.) A large "dead man" had been put in the ground behind the CP. A heavy duty pulley was tied to the dead man and a steel cable was looped from the kitchen and through the pulley, then back down to the kitchen. At meal time, a 1/4 ton trailer was loaded with marmite cans of rations, mail, sundries etc,  and hooked to the cable. The other end of the cable was hooked to a 2 1/2 ton truck. As the truck pulled away, the trailer was towed up the hill. Most of the time it worked. When it failed, we had cold C-rations again and no mail. Arc.

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