Alan O’Hagan, Sapper whose career included a hair-raising operation during the Korean War – obituary

Major Alan O’Hagan, who has died aged 99, was a Royal Engineer involved in perilous service during the Korean War when he infiltrated Chinese lines and entered a tunnel the enemy had built into a hillside.

The Royal Engineers (Sappers) performed a vital role in Korea, where O’Hagan commanded a troop in support of the Scottish regiment, the Black Watch. The actions that O’Hagan played his part in were centred on “The Hook”, a topographical feature of tactical importance in the United Nations line south of the 38th Parallel, where UN patrols regularly went in search of tunnels the Chinese had built as shelters for soldiers and equipment.

None of the numerous patrols that the then Captain O’Hagan had been a member of had succeeded in locating any tunnels, until – in command of a patrol for the first time – he set out one November night in 1952, in the company of three Black Watch infantrymen.

“The night was dry and relatively still, but as we continued we heard the sound of a cock pheasant some distance ahead of us,” O’Hagan recalled in Fight, Dig and Live, General Sir George Cooper’s history of the Royal Engineers in the Korean War. “We then became aware of a ring of pheasant calls, concluding that these particular pheasants were potentially hostile.”

The quartet included a radio operator, whom O’Hagan instructed to call for a supporting artillery strike. Shells rained down over their heads – some of them uncomfortably close – before O’Hagan made the decision to move on, the “pheasant calls” that were a favoured Chinese form of communication now silenced.

The tunnel the men found had an entrance protected by a mound of earth, which O’Hagan proceeded to lever himself over while his comrades stood guard outside. “Halfway over the mound,” he said, “with my head on the ground inside and my feet in the air behind me, I felt extremely vulnerable.”

Once he was able to stand, O’Hagan felt his way in pitch darkness 10 yards along the tunnel until he reached a T-junction, whereupon he switched on his mine-marking lamp. “Whether it is possible for eyes to turn in opposite directions simultaneously, I cannot be sure,” he wryly recalled. “All I know is that it was with profound relief that I saw that the two spurs of the tunnel, to the left and to the right, were empty.”

The group made it back to their own lines by dawn, after an operation that had lasted some 10 hours. Three nights later, the Chinese launched a major attack on the Hook and one of the men who had been on the patrol with O’Hagan was killed.

O’Hagan was a profound believer in the peace-keeping aspect of the Army’s purpose, never more so than when he had served in Palestine in the late 1940s in the wake of the creation of Israel and the ending of the British Mandate.

It was there that he had his first experience of extreme danger, in an incident which started when the Jeep he was travelling in on the road from Qastina to Jerusalem came across six coachloads of mainly Arab women and children cowering in a ditch next to the vehicles.

They had come under attack from Israeli gunmen positioned on a hillside leading down to the road. O’Hagan, armed only with his .38 Enfield revolver, led a small group of men up the slope and saw them off – an act of spontaneous bravery that probably saved dozens of civilian lives.

Alan Bernard O’Hagan was born on January 6 1925 at Bordon Barracks in Hampshire, where his father, Captain Bernard O’Hagan, a Gallipoli veteran, was a quartermaster with the Essex Regiment. The O’Hagans were Catholic Irish who had left Dungannon, Co Tyrone, for London in the late 19th century. O’Hagan’s English mother, Margaret Balsom, had worked in military recruitment during the First World War.

His father’s frequent Army moves, both within the UK and abroad, led to Alan being brought up, from the age of eight, by an aunt and uncle, Duncan and Emily Plunkett, in Wrexham, where he attended Grove Park Grammar School. But he spent his summer holidays with his parents, who by 1939 were stationed in Egypt.

It was in September that year, with war just declared, that Alan, aged 14 and unaccompanied, made his way home from Port Said aboard an Imperial Airways flying boat, a five-day adventure that helped to forge his love of aviation.

He was granted a War Emergency Commission in 1945 and a Regular Commission in 1948. In addition to the Middle East and Korea, his service embraced spells in Singapore, Malaya and Germany. Less than perfect eyesight had scuppered his hopes of joining the RAF, but as a Sapper he took to the air as a Troop Commander in 9 Parachute Squadron, and in civilian life he earned a private pilot’s licence and learnt to fly gliders.

Retiring from the regular Army in the mid-1960s, he maintained his presence in the military world with an appointment to a role in charge of Sapper recruitment, based at the Royal Engineers HQ in Chatham.

The post involved him in visits to Kenya and Aden where, for use in training, he made two 35mm films depicting Sappers at work – camera, sound, editing and narration entirely a one-man operation. For the last 16 years of his career he was the Senior Executive Staff Officer to the Kent Army Cadet Force.

In retirement, O’Hagan worked as a guide at Leeds Castle in Kent, and he completed 50 years of fund-raising on behalf of the Royal British Legion, raising tens of thousands of pounds through its annual Poppy Appeal and spending many years as chairman of the Legion’s Tenterden branch. He was also a parish council vice-chair, a local history society chair, an active member of the Army and Navy Club, and was prominent in the Anglo-Jordanian Society.

A man of warmth, charm and energy who thrived on supporting others and who always liked to have a project on the go, he had a wide range of enthusiasms – among them photography, Battle of Britain aircraft, the Pembrokeshire coast (he walked the 186 miles of the county’s coastal path aged 70), and the jazz violin of Stéphane Grappelli, a performer whose concerts he attended on dozens of occasions and whom he befriended. O’Hagan was himself an accomplished pianist who had played in Army jazz bands and retained a gift for extemporisation.

Alan O’Hagan married, in 1953, Heather White. She died in 2005. He is survived by his partner Jenny Crickmore-Porter and his son Simon; his son David predeceased him.

Alan O’Hagan, born January 6 1925, died April 30 2024