Cowardice in Korea

On the autumn day in 1951 when Private William Speakman of the Black Watch won the Victoria Cross for heroically beating off a Chinese assault with hand grenades (TIME, Jan. 7, 1952), Private Patrick E. Lydon, 26, lay in a nearby trench, cringing with fear. Last week, before a court-martial, his lieutenant told what had happened:

"I said . . .'Lydon, where are you going . . . where's your rifle?' He said, 'I'm hurt, I'm frightened' ... He said he had broken his little finger, but it seemed perfectly all right to me. He was lying on the floor under a shelf dug into the side of the trench the whole time ... I said several times, 'Get up and fight,' and Lydon replied, 'I can't. I'm hurt, I'm afraid.' " Lydon took no part in the desperate battle around him. Finally, the Chinese swarmed up the hill, and one soldier tried to pull Lydon away. He wouldn't go. and when the Chinese arrived, they captured Paddy Lydon.

Lydon came home from 21 months in the P.W. camps to find himself facing charges of "misbehaving before the enemy in such a manner as to show cowardice." Last week, in a bare, hot courtroom at Catterick barracks, Lydon heard combat officers debate his fate with civilian psychiatrists.

The prosecution: Lydon is "a coward who did not, in everyday language, have the guts to go on in these horrible circumstances."

The defense: "Whatever Lydon did ... it was not the result of a criminal mind, but something over which he had no control ... He was mentally ill." Two members of his family had had nervous breakdowns and Lydon himself is "socially inadequate," suffers from "pathological anxiety." and has a mental age of twelve. Lydon, a psychiatrist testified, should never have been sent into combat in the first place.

For 20 minutes, the five members of the court--combat officers all--pondered the case. Their verdict: guilty. The sentence: "You will be jailed for a year and discharged from the army with ignominy." He was the first & only British soldier to be accused of cowardice in Korea.

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