An EA-1F Spad Skyraider pilot throttles up to full power as the cat officer signals for launch on the USS Intrepid.
The three-year United Nations “police action’ from June 1950 through June 1953 on the Korean peninsula involved many attack missions flown by American and British naval aviators, most of whom had incurred air combat experience in World War Two. In the Korean conflict, these men struck at and savaged the infrastructure of their North Korean enemy, destroying eighty-three enemy aircraft, 313 bridges, 262 junks and river craft, 220 locomotives, 1,421 rail cars, 163 tanks, nearly 3,000 support vehicles, and 12,789 military buildings. They utilized their considerable WW2 experience to accomplish these feats in Korea, a U.N. action which was only approved by that body in the absence of member nation the Soviet Union which happened to be boycotting the U.N. Security Council when the Council approved going to war against the invading forces of North Korea. Had they been present for that vote, the Soviets would have undoubtedly used their veto to prevent the United Nations from acting.
John Bolt had flown U.S. Marine Corps Vought F4U Corsair fighters in the Pacific campaign during WW2 and had been officially credited with downing six Japanese Zeke fighters. He would become the only Navy Department jet ace of the Korean War, in which he shot down six MiG-15 fighters.
Bolt, known as Jack, still felt the need for speed and air action in 1950 when the North Koreans moved south to kindle war in Korea: “I chose an Air Force exchange tour of duty because at that point the only thing standing up to the MiG-15s were the F-86s. I knew that none were coming to the Marine Corps, and I was anxious to get back to the air-to-air fight. The only possibility of doing that was by getting in an F-86 squadron. The MiGs were beating the hell out of everything else, and the F-86s were our sole air superiority plane in Korea from early on. So I managed to get a year’s tour with the Air Force, and toward the end of it I managed to get into an F-86 squadron of the Oregon Air National Guard.
“I would grind out the hours in that thing, standing air defense alerts. Those were the days when the threat of nuclear war with Russia hung heavily over our heads. We really thought we were going to get into it. It was late 1951 or early 1952 and the squadron was part of the Northwest Air Defense Command. Our guys were on standby and would be down in the ready room in flight gear, not sitting in the planes the way they did later. They would be playing bridge and so forth, but I would be up flying, getting hours in that F-86. When my guard tour was over, I was able to get out to Korea in about May of ’52 and flew ninety-four missions in F9F-4 Panthers, interdictions, air-to-ground, and close air support. We were down at K-3, an airfield near Po Hang Do, with VMF-115.
“We were using napalm to attack rice-straw thatched-roof targets. They were all supposed to contain enemy troops, but I’m sure most of them were probably innocent civilians. We were attacking the villages with napalm. Then, of course, the proper military targets used thatching for waterproofing too, a supply depot for food or materiel, fuel or ammo. We used lots of napalm against all of those targets.
“My tour in Panthers came to an end and I took some R and R. I looked up an Air Force squadron commander named George Ruddell. I had met him at El Toro in 1947 when he flew an F-80 over to lecture our squadron about it and give us a little demonstration of what that airplane could do. I found George at K-13 where he was commanding the 39th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. I told him about my 100 hours in the F-86F, the same type of Sabre his squadron was flying. I had the experience he needed, and he was friendly towards me and let me take a few fam flights with some of his boys. On a second R and R trip around Christmas of ’52, it happened that Joe McConnell, who was to become the top-scoring U.S. fighter ace of the Korean War with sixteen kills, had just been grounded from operations, and Ruddell very generously sent him over to teach me some tactics. I flew a few fam hops with McConnell and he was good. We became friends and he taught me a lot about his tactics in the F-86. He was very deserving of the fame that he had earned as the leading ace of that war. Tragically, he was killed soon after the war on a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
“After that second R and R, I put in for another Air Force exchange tour. The Group Personnel Officer said: ‘Bolt, I know you’ve been trying to worm your way into this, going up there on R and R. I’ll tell you, you’ve had a year with the Air Force and you ain’t goin’ up there. You think you are. I’m telling you now, it ain’t gonna happen.’ They felt that I’d had more than my share of gravy assignments, so I got in touch with Ruddell and he got the general up there to send a wire down to the Marine Corps general. They only had two F-86 groups, the 4th and the 51st, and they had two Marines in each. One of them, a guy named Roy Reed, was leaving shortly. This was the opening I needed. The Air Force general’s wire read: ‘We’re willing to have your pilots, but they come up here having never flown the plane, and they present a training burden on our people. But now we have a rare instance of having a pilot who’s shown enough initiative to come up here and get checked out, and he’s ready to go. Would you mind appointing John Bolt?’
“There was nothing else the group could do. I was put in Ruddell’s squadron and I was flying on McConnell’s wing for my first half dozen flights. I was in Dog Flight. Ruddell was a very tough guy, but he was as nice as he could be. He had four or five kills, but the MiGs had stopped coming south of the Yalu River and we weren’t allowed to go north of it. The Chinese were yelling about the ‘pirates’ that were coming over there, but that’s where the action was.
“When McConnell left, I took over the command of Dog Flight, a quarter of the squadron with about twelve pilots. We lived in one big Quonset hut.
“Ruddell wasn’t getting any MiGs because they weren’t coming south of the river. He’d been threatening everybody that he’d kill ’em, cut their heads off if they went north of the river after MiGs. But one night he weakened. He’d had a few drinks and he called me into this little cubbyhole where he had his quarters. During the discussion tears came to his eyes—running down his cheeks—as he was saying how he wanted to be a good Air Force officer, and he loved the Air Force, and if they told him to do something, he’d do it, and if they told him not to do something, he’d not do it. But getting those MiGs meant more to him than his career and life itself. And, since he had been beating up on his own flight about not going across the river, he’d be embarrassed to ask any of them to go across it with him. He didn’t know whether they would want to anyway—two or three members of Dog Flight didn’t like to do it. They would have been in big trouble if they’d been identified as going up there. I don’t know if the ones they picked up later on, who were shot down north of the river, were ever disciplined when the war was over. But at the time, the threat was believed and hanging very heavily over us. Ruddell said: ‘Would you give me some of your flight? I want to go across the river. I’ve gotta have some action.’ Ruddell’s boys had been several days with no action. I said, ‘Sure, I’d be delighted’, so we planned one for the next day.
“I was to fly his second section. On a river crossing flight, we would take off and go full bore. We’d fly those planes at 100 per cent power setting until we got out of combat. Engine life was planned for 800 hours and we were getting about 550 or so. Turbine blade cracks were developing. We were running the engines at maximum temperature. You could put these little constrictors in the tailpipe—we called them ‘rats’—and you could ‘rat ’em up’ until they ran at maximum temperature. They were real hot rods. You’d run your drop tanks dry just about the time you got up to the river, and if you didn’t have a contact, you weren’t supposed to drop your tanks. We skinned ’em every time anyway.
U.S. Navy pilots relaxing in the ready room of their squadron during the Korean War in 1951.
“On at least four occasions, by the end of the flight I had been to over 50,000 feet. When it was empty and I still hadn’t pulled the power back from 100 per cent, the airplane would really get up there. The MiG-15 could get right up there too.
“On the flight with Ruddell, we got up there and dropped our tanks. At least the pilots going across the river dropped them. There were big clouds up as we crossed the river. It was early morning and we heard on the radio that there was a fight going on. There were some MiGs flying this day. We came from the sunny side of the clouds to the backside of a big cumulous; there were some black puffs of flak and there were some planes down there. We were half blind from the diminished illumination on the backside of the cloud. It was a confusing situation. We drove down and there was a MiG. Ruddell got it in sight and we dropped from 43,000 feet down to about 15,000, just dropped straight down. He got into shooting position behind the MiG, but didn’t shoot … didn’t shoot … didn’t shoot. I tore past him and blew up the MiG. I had experience at jumping planes and one of the things you did when you came down from extreme altitude (MiGs were frequently found down low when north of the river) was put your armour-glass defrost on full bore. It would get so hot it was almost painful, but it kept the front windscreen clear. You also tested your guns and your G-suit. Ruddell’s windscreen had fogged over. He was sitting there in a kill position and couldn’t see properly to shoot. So, I went by him and got the MiG. Of course, the squadron was abuzz that the Colonel had started crossing the river and gotten aced out of his first kill up there. I was a MiG-killer. I’d gotten three or four. When I got back, they had all these signs pasted up all over the Dog Flight Quonset hut. One read: ‘Marine wetback steals Colonel’s MiG.’
“The ‘kill rules’ were, if you got seven hits on an enemy aircraft, you would be given a kill. The MiGs didn’t torch off at high altitude; they simply would not burn because of the air density. So, incendiary hits would be counted (we had good gun cameras) and if you got seven hits in the enemy’s fuselage, the odds were it was dead, and they’d give you a kill. We knew that every third round was an incendiary so, in effect, if you got three incendiary hits showing on the gun camera film, it was considered a dead MiG.
“My first kill was at about 43,000 feet. I had missed a couple of kills before it by not being aggressive or determined enough. I was almost desperate for a MiG kill. I was leader of my flight and I’d screwed up a couple of bounces. My self-esteem and my esteem in the Flight were low, and I decided that the next MiG I saw was a dead man and I didn’t care where he was.
“The next MiG was part of a gaggle; MiGs as far as you could see. I made a good run on one of them and pulled into firing position, but other MiGs were shooting at me and my wingman, and they were very close. I got some hits on my MiG and he went into a scissor, which was a good tactic. I think the F-86 may have had a better roll rate. I was trying to shoot as he passed through my firing angle. Each time I fired I delayed my turn, so he was gaining on me and drifting back. He almost got behind me and was so close that his plane blanked out the camera frame. I think he realized that I would have crashed into him rather than let him get behind me, and he rolled out and dove. Then I got several more hits on him and he pulled up (he was probably dead at this point). That scissor was the right thing to do; he just shouldn’t have broken off. He was getting back to a position where he could have taken the advantage.
Just time to write a letter home.
“The salvation of the F-86 was that it had good transsonic controls; the MiG’s controls were subsonic. In the Sabre, you could readily cruise at about .84 Mach. The MiG had to go into its uncontrollable range to attack you, and its stick forces were unmanageable. As I recall, the kill ratio between the F-86 and the MiG was eight to one. This was due almost entirely to the flying tail of the Sabre, although it had other superior features. The gun package of the MiG was intended for shooting down bombers like the B-29 and B-50. It carried a 37mm and two 23mm cannons, which was overkill against fighters. Although the F-86 used essentially the same machine-guns as a World War Two fighter, the rate of fire had been doubled, and it was a very good package against other fighters.
“Down low, where we were out of the transsonic superiority range, we wore a G-suit and they didn’t. You can fight defensively when you are blacked out, but you can’t fight offensively. If you had enough speed to pull a good 6G turn, you would ‘go black’ in twenty to thirty degrees of the turn. The MiG pilot couldn’t follow you because he was blacked out too. You are still conscious, though you have three to five seconds of vision loss. When you had gone about as far in the turn as you thought you could carry it, you could pop the stick forward and your vision would immediately return. You had already started your roll, and the MiG was right there in front of you, every time, because, not having a G-suit, he had eased off in the turn. His G-tolerance was only half of yours. So he was right there and most probably would overshoot you.”
Paul Ludwig, a former U.S. Navy attack pilot: “With little more than a hundred hours in the AD Skyraider, I got orders to an AD squadron on the west coast. After I got there I wanted some additional cross-country time so a friend and I flew our Skyraiders up the coast to NAS Alameda near Oakland. While over Los Angeles that night I felt very uneasy because everywhere I looked all I could see was a sea of lights. Over Los Angeles is not the place to lose an engine in a single-engine airplane. There was no place to set down if the engine quit. For several long minutes we flew along over that huge city with me thinking that if the engine quit I would have to ride that free-falling anvil into any unlighted patch I could find. I didn’t want to drop an AD into a house. There were no black holes to be seen.”
Bill Hannan was a U.S. Navy jet engine mechanic in the 1950s: “During the Korean War, our task force was operating in concert with other carriers, the Boxer, Bon Homme Richard, Philippine Sea, Oriskany, Princeton, Valley Forge and Essex. It wasn’t unusual for a fatigued pilot, returning from a stressful mission, to land on the wrong ship, in spite of the huge identification number painted on their flight decks. When it happened on our carrier, the Kearsarge, the errant aviator had to suffer the humiliation of returning to his own ship with derisive graffiti painted all over his airplane, such as: NO, WE DON’T SERVE BEER HERE EITHER, and ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, THIS IS THE KEARSARGE, WHO ARE YOU?”
Frank Furbish, former U.S. Navy pilot: “Cat shots never bothered me. You are as much passenger as pilot. Even if you shut down the engines and set the parking brake, you were going off the cat. Just five knots slower. There is no way to practice cat shots. The first one is the first one. It was memorable and very exhilarating. My subsequent shots were in unison with hooting and hollering, maybe another reason why instructors don’t ride along. Once you’ve finished your required number of traps, you sit on the deck refueling and anxiously waiting for the radio call from the LSO and the magic words: ‘You’re a qual.’ Back on land, we were all very excited and animated. I had been in the Navy for only a year, and flying for only eight months. That night I slept like a baby. The next step was advanced jet training.”
Paul Ludwig: “One day when I was flying wing out over the ocean west of Miramar, my engine began making grinding sounds. I asked my section leader to take us home. When we arrived, I wrote up the bad engine. The crew chief refused to believe my write-up because I was the new kid, the most junior officer. I tried to convince him about what I had experienced, and left the ops shack to return to the squadron area. Soon after I got there, the chief phoned me to chew me out, saying I was wrong, that it had only been carburetor icing. Obviously, he didn’t want to go to work checking the oil filter on the opinion of a snot-nosed ensign. I was just a kid and he an old chief. My mistake was in not contesting his judgement or challenging his lack of respect. He released the plane for ops without checking the oil filter. The next day a squadron buddy of mine flew that same Skyraider and suffered engine failure on take-off, but managed to get it back on the runway. The filter had metal particles in it. The chief did not apologize for his stupidity.”
Demand for the Vought F4U Corsair was so great that Goodyear and Brewster were contracted to help meet it.