August 29, 1950: The First British Troops Land at Pusan

Today in 1950 · Tuesday, August 29, 1950

HMS Unicorn leaves Hong Kong for Pusan carrying men of the Middlesex Regiment, September 1950 — a follow-up lift for the brigade whose first contingent landed August 29

HMS Unicorn leaves Hong Kong for Pusan carrying men of the Middlesex Regiment, September 1950 — a follow-up lift for the brigade whose first contingent landed August 29 · Imperial War Museum photograph GOV 2742, Crown copyright expired, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, the British 27th Infantry Brigade — the 1st Battalion Middlesex Regiment and the 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders — landed at Pusan from Hong Kong under Brigadier Basil Coad. They were the first UK ground troops committed to Korea, and the first non-American UN ground combat force to reach the peninsula.

They came in a hurry, and it showed. The two battalions were understrength and had left Hong Kong only about four days earlier with almost no warning of a combat deployment. They arrived without their own artillery, armor or transport, borrowing all three from the Americans.

Within a week the brigade was in the line on the Naktong River, defending the Pusan Perimeter attached to the US 1st Cavalry Division's sector. After Australia's 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment joined in October, the formation was redesignated the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade — the beginning of the multinational ground coalition that would define the UN war effort.

Also on this day

  • The International Longshore and Warehouse Union was expelled from the CIO amid the labor federation's purge of communist-led unions.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — a folk song adapted by Lead Belly, who died broke in December 1949 — one year before it became the biggest hit of 1950. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: Ex-circus acrobat Burt Lancaster was doing his own swashbuckling stunts in “The Flame and the Arrow,” still among Variety's twelve biggest grossers.
⚾ In sports: Brooklyn's Gil Hodges crushed four home runs off four different pitchers on August 31 at Ebbets Field — 5-for-6, nine RBIs — while the surging Yankees swept past Detroit into first.

Sources: Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum · Korea veterans ministry: UK forces · Robert Lyman: the 27th Brigade lands · Wikipedia: August 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from August 2026

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