14
Throughout the great conflicts of the twentieth century, professional airmen have asserted their claims to a unique status. They have argued that their ability to pass over the ground battlefield, to carry the campaign to targets miles behind the front lines, exempts them from the traditional precepts of warfare. In the First World War, until the last months, the technical limitations of aircraft restricted their role. Although they carried out some bombing operations, their principal importance was as scouts, reconnoitering and photographing the battlefield below. The seesaw struggle for air supremacy, waged between fighter aircraft, focused chiefly upon securing freedom for reconnaissance. The first generation of heavy bombers, the British Handley-Pages and German Gothas, inflicted some damage upon targets and civilian populations behind the lines in 1918. But it was the prophets of air power who were most excited by their achievements, who anticipated a future conflict in which great fleets of bombers could inflict fatal damage upon an enemy’s industrial heartland while the armies were still contesting irrelevant strips of earth hundreds of miles behind them.
The Second World War confirmed the decisive importance of aircraft in tactical support of ground and naval operations. But the conflict’s message was far less certain about the effectiveness of bombing either as a means of destroying an enemy’s industrial capacity to wage war or in a long-range interdictory role, preventing an enemy from moving men and weapons to a battlefront. No one disputed that air attack had inflicted great damage upon lines of communications. Yet the fact remained that the Germans had been able to continue moving sufficient supplies to the front to fight with formidable effect for the last eleven months of the war, even in the face of absolute Allied command of the air. While vehicles moving in the open presented targets that could be attacked with devastating results, the impact of bombing upon foot soldiers in broken country—or well dug in—remained far less impressive. Japan’s surrender was precipitated by the effects of two air-dropped atomic bombs, but these demonstrated the intolerable consequences to humanity of the use of nuclear weapons much more convincingly than they argued a new dimension for air power.
Objectively perceived, the experience of World War II suggested that air forces employing conventional weapons were subject to much the same constraints as ground and sea forces. The bomber possessed none of the mystic force with which it was endowed by the prophets of the 1930s, who believed that air attack could terrorize a civilian population, or cripple vital industries, regardless of the scale upon which it was employed. The successful employment of aircraft, like that of any other instrument of military power, depended upon the weight of force available, the skill with which it was employed, and the suitability of the targets that it was offered. The more closely air forces worked in harness with ground or naval forces, the more effective they were. Their pursuit of a strategy independent of the other services produced more questionable results.1
Yet while these conclusions were readily accepted by generals and admirals, and even by military historians and defense intellectuals, in the years following World War II they were less enthusiastically adopted by professional airmen. Throughout the brief history of their arm, the world’s military airmen had striven for an independent role, divorced from the control of unsympathetic groundlings. Many senior airmen both in Britain and the United States simply declined to accept the unpalatable conclusion of the official postwar bombing surveys, which cast doubt on the achievements of bomber offensives against Germany. They continued to assert that bombing had been a decisive—indeed, in the view of some, the decisive—force in the defeat of Germany and Japan. They were also enthused by the vital role they gained in postwar strategy as a result of the invention of the atomic bomb. It was The Bomb, and the U.S.A.F.’s new stature as its carrier, that clinched the American Air Force argument for becoming a separate and equal service in 1947. In the postwar years of straitened service budgets, it was Strategic Air Command which absorbed the lion’s share of funds for its big bombers. The Air Force sometimes gave the impression of wanting to forget all that it had learned with such pain during World War II about ground-air coordination and close-support techniques. It carried its obsession with arranging matters differently from the ground forces to remarkable lengths: airmen wore their name badges on the opposite breast of their uniforms to the Army, their officers even signed documents at the opposite corner of the paper. In 1948 a seminar was held at the Air University at Maxwell Field, Alabama, to discuss the theme “Is there any further need for a ground force?”
The air war over Korea gave birth to a new concept—combat between jet aircraft—and revived all the traditional arguments about air support for ground operations. From the first days of the war there was intense and often bad-tempered debate between the ground commanders and senior officers of Far East Air Force about the quality and quantity of close air support they received. This was heightened by Army jealousy of Navy and Marine organic air support, which the soldiers considered both more dedicated, and more professional, than that of the Air Force. “Whenever we received close support from the Marine Air Wings,” said a skeptical army consumer, Colonel Paul Freeman of the 23rd Infantry, “it was better than anything we got from the Air Force. “2 It was not that the Army disputed the vital importance of close support—indeed, soldiers freely declared that the Army could not have stayed in Korea without it. The argument hinged upon the weight of Air Force effort that should be given directly to the ground forces, and at whose discretion this should be allotted. “There was a lack of cooperation between the Air Force and Army at all levels,” said Group Captain “Johnnie” Johnson, a British World War II fighter ace who flew some B-26 missions in Korea with the U.S.A.F. “U.S. Air Force morale was very high, and they thought they were doing a vital job. But there were not the army officers present at briefings that we had in Europe in World War II. In the first months, forward air control seemed very limited.”3 The ground forces were constantly frustrated by the difficulty of getting air support when it was needed, rather than when aircraft chanced to reach position over the forward area. Battalion commanders were irked by the arbitrary arrival of a flight of fighter-bombers whose commanders would radio laconically, “I have twenty minutes on station. Use me or lose me.”
There is little doubt that in the first months of the war, thousands of the interdiction missions flown by the Air Force were valueless because of inadequate targeting. “The Air Force bombed and bombed all the main routes during the winter retreat of 1950,” said Major John Sloane, an officer on the ground with the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, “but they achieved very little because they didn’t understand Chinese techniques. The Communists simply weren’t on the main routes.”4 Attempts to identify and bomb Communist troops on the move, especially during the first weeks of the war when target intelligence was almost nonexistent, caused substantial casualties among friendly forces and refugee columns fleeing desperately from the battlefield.
From the first day of the Korean War, the importance of fighter-bombers in a close support role was beyond doubt. The Yak piston-engined fighters of the North Korean Air Force were cleared from the skies within a matter of weeks, and the U.S.A.F.’s Mustangs, together with carrier-based American Corsairs and British Seafires and Sea Furies, played a critical tactical bombing role. In the last months of 1950 land-based UN aircraft were flying almost 700 fighter-bomber sorties a day, matched by a further 300 from the offshore carriers. One of the most experienced and respected air commanders in the U.S.A.F., General O. P. Weyland, was dispatched to Tokyo to direct the Far East Air Force. But serious problems quickly became apparent in determining the effective employment of medium and heavy bombers. There were pitifully few targets in North Korea large enough to justify attack by bombers in the big formations they were trained and accustomed to fly. How could fast modern aircraft fly effective interdiction missions against an enemy who moved most of his supplies by porter and bullock cart? This was a problem that would become familiar a generation later in Indochina. In Korea the United States Air Force encountered the difficulty for the first time, after a decade in which its commanders and its pilots had focused overwhelmingly upon the problems of fighting industrialized nations that deployed vast mechanized power upon the battlefield. It would be absurd to dispute that the UN—or, rather, overwhelmingly the U.S.—air forces contributed greatly to the supply difficulties of the Communist armies. But the central reality remained, that the North Koreans and Chinese continued to be able to move tolerable quantities of food, arms, and ammunition to their front-line forces from beginning to end of the conflict. The Air Force commanders sought refuge for their disappointments and failures in incessant protest about the political limitations on their operations around and beyond the Yalu. But there remains no reason to suppose that, even had all political restrictions been lifted, strategic bombing could have decisively crippled the Communist ability to sustain the war any more than it was able to do so in the next decade in Vietnam.
• • •
Lieutenant Oliver Lewis had spent the last months of World War II in the Pacific ferrying B-17s and B-29s, for he was too young to fly combat missions. On June 26, 1950, he was flying F-80s when he was abruptly ordered to the Far East. He had just time to take his wife home to Salt Lake City before reporting to Travis Air Force Base. There he was issued with a .45 pistol, a mosquito net, and a water canteen before boarding a C-54, still coated in coal dust from its role in the Berlin Airlift, for the long haul to Japan. He expected to be posted to fighters, but with his heavy aircraft experience, he was sent to the 3rd Bombardment Wing, flying B-26 bombers out of Iwakuni. “The whole thing was pretty bad in Japan at that time,” he said. “You can’t believe the confusion. They were trying to get the dependents of the Australian Mustang squadron off the base and away home. They were trying to find some targets in Korea big enough for us to hit. They simply had not crystallized how to fight this type of war, when we had aircraft designed for large-scale formation operations.”5
Lewis spent forty-five minutes being “checked out” on the B-26, flew two mail runs into Korea, and was then rostered for combat operations. At first they flew by day. Each pilot was allotted a stretch of road to patrol for a given period of time, with instructions to shoot up anything that moved upon it. Occasionally they were directed to a specific target, perhaps a warehouse “believed to contain war materials.” They had standing orders to attack all trains or suspicious concentrations. “Trains were the best targets,” said Lewis. “Hitting one made you feel like a king. But the Koreans got pretty good at blowing off steam from the engines to make themselves hard to see.” Within a few weeks of the outbreak of war, the Communists had abandoned any attempt to make major movements by day. The bombers, too, were transferred to night operations. They carried a variety of ordnance: rockets, high-explosive and fragmentation bombs. Some aircraft carried a devastating battery of fourteen fixed .5-caliber machine guns in the nose. Even in the darkness, at low speed and low level, the pilots found that they could see reasonably well with the instrument lights extinguished. Above all, they could detect motorized movement. In the first weeks of the Chinese intervention, crews sometimes found and attacked great convoys of trucks moving with their headlights ablaze. The bombers would fly down the column, toggling a bomb every 500 yards, then swing back to machine-gun the blazing ruins. But as the enemy became more practiced at giving aircraft warning, as the extraordinary Chinese network of road sentries developed, halting every vehicle when a bomber was heard, it became far more difficult to spot targets. Novice crews preferred to fly in moonlight. The more proficient found that it was easier to identify enemy movement on clear dark nights, when the mountains were stripped of the haze that hung around them under the moon.
For the crews, a tour of operations consisted of fifty missions. Most wanted to get it over as speedily as possible and go home. Thus they would seek to fly every night, and some did. As winter came the reflection from the snow made it possible to see more in darkness. But the lack of heating and deicing gear in the aircraft began to cause serious problems. There were shortages of everything, in the air and on the ground. The weather became as dangerous a killer as the enemy. Every pilot had to make his own decision about the trade-off between layers of clothing to fight the cold, which caused some to climb into their cockpits looking like overstuffed teddy bears, and the clumsiness this created, hampering their ability to respond to the controls.
As the months went by and the problems of fighting a primitive enemy became more apparent, new equipment and new techniques were introduced: PQ-13 bombing radar, terrain radar to defeat the chronic bad weather. At the other extremity of the technological scale, some aircraft were fitted with troughs into which the crews laboriously loaded the contents of keg upon keg of roofing nails. Over a North Korean road the engineer would shovel these, with the aid of a paddle, in a long stream out of a funnel at the rear of the aircraft. Later the nails were replaced by purpose-designed tetrahedrons, designed to cripple the bare feet of men and beasts.
The more thoughtful pilots were far more conscious than some of their commanders in Tokyo of the uncertainty of assessing what they were achieving. “We were very aware of how imprecise was our ability to judge what was being done,” said Lieutenant Lewis. “But of course the intelligence people are always eager to have you say that you’ve done well.”
The first MIG-15 jet fighters appeared in the skies over Korea in November 1950, sending a shockwave through the West comparable to that of the launch of the Sputnik satellite a few years later. Some fifty MIGs, flown by Chinese and Soviet pilots, were initially deployed. The Communists revealed their advance to the frontiers of technology. Within six months there were 445 MIGs operating from the political sanctuary of air bases beyond the Yalu. By 1953 there were 830, mostly flown by Chinese pilots, though a Russian air corps also participated. The Soviets, like America’s allies, used Korea as a proving ground where their pilots could be rotated in and out, to gain experience of the new shape of air warfare. The American B-29 bombers began to suffer a steady drain of losses to fighter attack, coupled with the impact of radar-controlled antiaircraft guns. A struggle for air superiority began over North Korea, which continued until the end of the war. For the first few weeks after the MIGs’ arrival, the available American fighters in the theater, notably the F-80 Shooting Stars, were disturbingly outclassed. But then came the Sabre, the F-86 which became the principal weapon of the UN. The first wing was deployed in December 1950, reinforced by a second a year later. Sabres were in chronically short supply to maintain U.S. air strength worldwide, and there were never more than 150 deployed in Korea, against the much greater number of MIGs. But the West, and the United States in particular, has always produced pilots of exceptional quality. From beginning to end, they proved able to maintain air superiority over North Korea, despite all that the Communist air forces could throw against them. More than that, the Korean War and the shock of discovering the Communists’ possession of the MIG stimulated the United States to an extraordinary program of technical innovation and aircraft development which continued long after the conflict had ended.
In Korea, as in every war, the fighter pilots considered themselves the elite, despite the irony that their prospects of survival were significantly better than those of the ground-attack pilots. Three squadrons of Sabres were based on the huge airfield at Kimpo, a few miles west of Seoul, where they shared the strip with a squadron of Australian Meteors and another of B-26s. Each night the squadrons’ “fragmentary orders” clattered down the Teletypes from headquarters decreeing the number of aircraft that would be required the following day. The pilots slept in Quonset huts, little less cold or uncomfortable than those of army rear elements. Each morning the rostered officers mustered for briefing to be allotted their respective roles: high cover and close cover for daylight bomber missions or routine combat patrols.
They took off one by one at three-second intervals, then climbed into formation, spreading out across the sky to cross the bomb line above the confronting armies. They patrolled at around 40,000 feet, or as low as 20,000 if they were escorting fighter bombers. At those heights the Communist flak presented a negligible threat. They flew in fours—the famous “finger four” created by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the basis of all fighter tactics ever since. Larger formations were too difficult to control or maneuver. Number three commanded the flight, but the essential combat unit was the pair, each of the two leaders being protected by his wingman. They cruised steadily, for there was no purpose in exhausting their fuel at .9 mach if there was no enemy in sight. Pilots liked the Sabre—“a very honest airplane,” in the words of Lieutenant Jim Low, one of the Korean aces, “it was a beautiful plane that sort of wrapped around you.”6 Men who had trained or fought on the old propeller-driven fighters found the jets simpler to fly, without the problem of countering torque, and far less prone to technical failure—the lack of vibration placed less strain upon every mechanical element. At first, for a pilot trained to fly with the constant roar of a piston engine in front of him, the muted vacuum-cleaner whine of the jet was almost unnerving. A careful pilot could extend his patrol endurance to as much as ninety minutes. A less skilled one—or a man feeling the strain of combat flying, eager for an excuse to return to the ground as fast as possible—might need to land after forty-five. In winter their endurance was extended by the strong prevailing northwest jet streams that pushed them home. It was also easier to spot the enemy in those months, when the cold, damp air created a prominent condensation trail behind an aircraft. In summer they could only look for the glint of silver in the sun.
Throughout the war the Sabres achieved almost undisputed dominance of the skies over Korea, North and South. Senior American airmen became exasperated by the manner in which the military took it for granted that they could conduct ground operations without the slightest threat of enemy interference in the air. “It’s a terrible thing to say,” remarked General William Momyer thirty years later, “but I think we would be in a much stronger position today with regard to the importance of air superiority if the enemy had been able to penetrate and bomb some of our airfields and had been able to bomb the front lines periodically. It would have brought home to our ground forces and other people the importance of air superiority. The Army has never had to operate in an environment where it had to consider: ‘Do we dare make this move at twelve o’clock noon because that road is under the surveillance of enemy aircraft, or can we move that division from here to here during this period of time?’ Those considerations are absent in all of the planning by virtue of this experience: they have never had to fight without air superiority.”7
Some American fighter pilots in Korea went weeks, even months, without glimpsing an enemy aircraft. Others, in inexplicable fashion, seemed to possess some magnetic force that drew the MIGs into the corner of the sky through which they flew. Jim Low, a twenty-six-year-old Californian, shot down an enemy aircraft on his first mission in Korea. Low was widely recognized as a natural hunter—indeed, a killer. It was a pilot in his squadron, James Horowitz, who later wrote the popular novel about the Korean air war, The Hunters. The picture that the book painted, of a group of men among whom a few were ruthlessly, competitively dedicated to “making a score,” was readily acknowledged by some of the survivors. Low himself suggested that there were three identifiable groups of fliers within his squadron, within most of the Korean squadrons. There were the average pilots, who merely did the job. There were the veterans of World War II, some of them highly skilled pilots, among whom were the foremost aces of the war—68 percent of pilots who destroyed MIGs in Korea were twenty-eight or over and had flown an average of eighteen missions in World War II. But more than a few of the veterans had lost something of their cutting, killing edge with the passage of time. They wanted to stay alive. There were reservists among them, “the retreads,” men recalled from civilian life to fight again, who resented their presence in Korea. And finally there were the young gladiators, the men like Low who had joined the Air Force not merely to fly but to fight. “I think wars are designed for twenty-three-year-olds,” said Flight Lieutenant Roy Watson, a British pilot flying F-84 Thunderjets. “I enjoyed it very much—it was the time of my life.”8 Their enthusiasm, their hard-living, hard-dying, high poker-playing life-style repelled some of their comrades. But in the air, few could dispute that they were good. When the priceless radar stations out on the islands off North Korea reported a “bandit train”—perhaps eight successive elements of two MIGs—making for their sky, the hunger of their response could not be gainsaid. A flight leader once ran his entire flight out of fuel to reach a MIG and get a kill. Despite the strict rules against crossing into Chinese air space, many Sabres in hot pursuit did so; some claimed to have shot down aircraft on the traffic pattern at Mukden.
They cast off their wingtip tanks and swung toward an estimated rendezvous with the enemy, clawing height out of the sky, for the MIG’s greatest advantage was its superior ceiling—that and its tighter turning circle. The tactics of fighter combat in Korea were identical with those of World War II, save only that at higher speeds the aircraft maneuvered across greater spaces. The flight leader might radio to his second pair “You take the bounce!” indicating that he would watch the higher sky, cover the rear, while the other men dived, at a speed of perhaps 500 knots. Sometimes they would push their aircraft to its limits, frighten themselves considerably, shattering the sound barrier in their dive. If the MIGs saw them as they came, the enemy pilots would break sideways. Then, for the most part, there was merely a chase as the Communist aircraft fled for home. On the rare occasions when the MIGs stayed to dogfight, the Americans knew that their opponents were uncommonly determined and were likely to prove unusually skilled. Optimum killing range was around 200 yards, and to gain an accurate shot a man might be flying as slow as 200 knots.
The MIGs’ cannon could be deadlier killers than the six .5-caliber machine guns in the nose of the Sabres—if they could be brought to bear. But the Sabre was a more stable fighting machine at high speeds than the MIG, and the American pilots were of higher quality than the Chinese, or even the Russians when the Soviets sent a “volunteer” air corps to fly some aircraft over North Korea. Each encounter came and went so fast: after weeks of boredom, one June morning on patrol Low’s flight spotted two MIGs crossing the Yalu at low level. The Sabres rolled over, diving from 30,000 feet to 2,000 to intercept. Then Low channeled—made a fast climbing turn to the right—and fired a burst into a MIG’s belly, momentarily glimpsing its pilot in a red silk scarf. The Communist fighter exploded, its debris smashing the Sabre’s windscreen. The Americans went home.
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If an American aircraft was hit, in winter the pilot would try to bale out overland, for the sea was too cold to offer much prospect of survival. A pilot who ditched in the winter months could last three minutes in the water before reaching his dinghy, and seven minutes thereafter before his saturated flying suit froze. But in summer he would always opt for the sea if he could, where the huge and efficient rescue organization might reach him, even under the Communist guns. On the ships and the offshore islands, helicopters waited at constant readiness—for this, too, was the first war in which the “whirlybirds” played a significant role and became lifesavers for so many wounded soldiers and downed airmen. If a wingman could mark his companion’s ditching position, a rotating procession of fighters would fly cover above him until he was rescued. Gillies, a Marine pilot in the 4th Fighter Wing, was retrieved from the very mouth of the Yalu after the first helicopter sent to rescue him itself ditched. Sometimes the overhead fighters would be called in to drive off Chinese patrol boats. Over North Korean territory, F-80s often attacked Communist ground troops again and again to keep them away from a downed pilot waiting desperately for a chopper. Scores of pilots were rescued successfully from the coastal areas of North Korea in the course of the war, an immense boost to the confidence of UN aircrews and a tribute to the extraordinary UN command of air and sea, even close inshore.
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Kimpo was a dreary place, surrounded by rice paddies. There was little to do when off duty except play poker or gin rummy, or pay an occasional call on the nearby nurses’ compound. The pilots were relatively rich, with their $60 a month combat pay and two-bottles-a-month ration of Old Methusalem whiskey, which most gave away, for few fliers cared to drink seriously. It was mostly the older men who drank, and cured their hangovers by flying on 100 percent oxygen the next morning.
The Australian Meteor squadron, also based there, had a fine reputation, but the Australian pilots were chronically jealous of the Sabre. The Meteor was considered to be an aircraft that could take punishment, but it also possessed a highly vulnerable hydraulic system that could be crippled by a single small-arms round through a leading edge. Heavy on the ailerons, it was hard work to fly from its cramped cockpit. The pressure on the pilots was intense: one British officer flew 114 Meteor sorties in six months, on one occasion five in a day.
Four Sabres sat permanently at readiness on the runway, the Alert Patrol, in case of some sudden report of an enemy takeoff by the radar controllers. The pilots recognized the key role of the controllers in making their scores possible—Low took them a few cases of beer whenever he made a kill. Each flier had pet preferences about his aircraft and his weapons. Some loaded extra tracer in the guns. Many carried solid tracer at the end of their belts to give warning that their 300 rounds were close to exhaustion. Most pilots wore silk scarves, and many affected the old soft leather World War II helmets until they were ordered to change to modern molded designs.
The enthusiasm of the enemy varied greatly from month to month. Sometimes weeks would go by without a UN squadron seeing combat. Then, without warning, the MIGs would embark on a flurry of activity. In a characteristic month—December 1952— the statistics tell the story: 3,997 MIGs were reported seen in the air by UN pilots; attempts were made to engage 1,849; twenty-seven were confirmed destroyed. Enormous effort was expended to achieve modest results in direct damage to the enemy. But much more important, air supremacy over Korea was constantly maintained. Men like Jim Low, with his flamboyant taste for enormous Havana cigars, his growing reputation as a “honcho”—a top pilot—revelled in the struggle. “I enjoyed all of it,” he said later, “the flying, shooting down aircraft. I was too young to think about the politics. It was just a job we were over there to do.”9 Each pilot flew around 100 missions, perhaps six months’ combat duty, before being rotated back to the United States. There was, perhaps, less tension among the squadrons in Korea than in World War II because the dominance of the American pilots was so great, their casualties less alarming. Some celebrated pilots were lost: Bud Mahurin, a World War II group commander, was shot down by ground fire; George Davis, one of the most celebrated aces, was brought down by a MIG when his score stood at fourteen victories. But the odds on survival were good. Even those who were lost were scarcely missed when men were coming and going constantly on routine rotations. And as Flight Lieutenant John Nicholls of the RAF, who flew the Sabre with the Americans, put it, “In England after a flying accident, there was a funeral. But in Korea, somebody just wasn’t there anymore.” Jim Low went home after ninety-five missions with five MIGs to his credit, and not a scratch on him. He went on to fly fighters over Vietnam and survive five years in a Communist prison camp. The Sabre remained unchallenged as the outstanding aircraft of the Korean War: of 900 enemy aircraft claimed destroyed during the war by U.S.A.F. pilots, 792 were MIG-15s destroyed by Sabres, for the loss of just seventy-eight of their own aircraft. It was, inevitably, a Sabre pilot who became the war’s top-scoring ace, Captain Joseph McConnell, with sixteen confirmed “victories.”
If at least a proportion of fighter pilots found their occupation glamorous, it is unlikely that any of the heavy bomber crews would have said the same about theirs, flying a dreary daily shuttle to industrial and military targets in North Korea. Joe Hilliard was a twenty-seven-year-old Texas farmboy who just missed World War II and spent his first flying years as a navigator in what was then the U.S.A.F.’s only designated nuclear bomber group. He was newly returned from a tour of duty in England when Korea came, and he was rushed to Okinawa with the 307th Bomb Wing. They met none of the traditional comforts of combat aircrew: the only permanent accommodation on the base was occupied by another wing. They found themselves living in tents, which were razed to the ground at regular intervals by hurricanes. Their B-50 aircraft were taken from them and they were given instead old B-29s, just out of mothballs, which posed chronic problems with mechanical defects: “We were really mad about that. We got the feeling that the U.S.A.F. just didn’t want to waste its first-line equipment on Korea.”10 To their disgust, they found that even the flight rations with which they were provided were of World War II manufacture.
Almost every morning the wing—part of the five B-29 groups operating over Korea—dispatched a formation of nine aircraft on a daylight bombing mission, in accordance with orders from Fifth Air Force headquarters in Tokyo. Then, with the coming of darkness, a succession of single aircraft was sent off, at intervals of ninety minutes. They flew and bombed under ground control. The next day it was the turn of another squadron to provide the force, and so on in rotation. It was a round-the-clock war. The lights burned in the operations room twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Yet it was also war reduced to a cold-blooded, mechanical discipline. Daily orders laid down the grid coordinates of the target, the altitude—perhaps 28,000 feet—the bombload—probably 144 hundred-pound bombs, or 40 five-hundred-pounders—and the fuse settings, usually variable delays up to seventy-two hours. An average mission lasted around eight hours, from takeoff to touchdown, which hardly seemed a serious business to men who had been training under LeMay to fly seventeen-or eighteen-hour missions to Russia. They flew the first 500 miles, from Okinawa to the southern tip of Korea, at 4,000 feet, then began climbing to reach designated altitude around the 38th Parallel, flying at around 240 knots. The navigator and bombardier clambered down the fuselage to the bomb bay to remove the cotter pins from the nose and tail fins of the load, their flying suits wringing wet from the exertion. In winter they found flying very cold. In summer it was intolerably hot: “For most men, it was boring going up, boring coming down,” said Hilliard. “One night our wireless operator slept all through the flight, after a heavy drunk.”
In daylight they flew in a formation of three loose vies, which tightened only as they approached the target. They attacked on the orders of a “lead crew.” For a big operation, a “Maximum Effort,” there might be as many as seventy-two aircraft in the stream. The flak seldom troubled them. Most days they saw no sign of enemy fighters. But one morning, suddenly, they might reach “MIG Alley,” twenty minutes short of the target, and hear their own radar controllers report urgently, “Twelve trains leaving the station.” Then they knew that within a few minutes, the Communist fighters would be swinging in to intercept. If the enemy was in a determined mood, the Sabre top cover was seldom completely successful in keeping him away. The eternal controversy about the most effective means of giving fighter protection to bombers continued vigorously in Korea. The bomber men wanted escorts close in where they could see them. The fighter men insisted that they could do much more for the bombers by ranging wide and aggressively in their own manner than they could achieve—with fuel for only twenty-five minutes “loiter” over MIG Alley—hanging on to the edges of the bomber wings. Both methods were tried, and neither prevented some MIGs from breaking through. When they did so, for all the B-29’s formidable weight of defensive armament, the gunners placed little faith in their ability to do more than throw off the aim of the MIG pilots. In the autumn of 1951 the bombers found themselves under growing pressure from MIGs, until in October casualties began to mount alarmingly. Five B-29s were lost in the month to MIG attack. The figure was a fraction of relative World War II bomber losses, but the aircraft were vastly more expensive and the commitment less absolute. Daylight operations were canceled abruptly. Thereafter the big bombers attacked by night.
The crews’ enthusiasm was not increased by the living conditions on the base: rats in the tents, cold showers, naked light bulbs. One night when a typhoon blew, all the crews had to man their aircraft and sit in them through the night, engines turning into the wind for fifteen hours. Off base, there were a few whores and a few restaurants, and the chance of an occasional trip to Japan. Many men had wives at home in the United States who were less than enthusiastic about their husbands’ role in Korea. Hilliard’s was sharing a house in New Mexico with his flight engineer’s wife. In World War II there had been a sense of hardships shared among fighting men, in whichever theater they were. Every man fighting in Korea was conscious that most of his fellow soldiers and aviators around the world were living lives of infinitely greater comfort.
A man flew thirty-five missions to complete a bomber tour—ten more than the European wartime standard, a recognition of the better prospects of survival. There were few of the problems of stress that afflicted World War II bomber squadrons. One officer in Joe Hilliard’s squadron suddenly declined to fly any further missions and was simply given a ground job. But in Hilliard’s view, “morale wasn’t good. We didn’t think we had enough support.
“When Vandenburg came down to inspect us, we really let him have it about that. A lot of us thought that if we were taking this thing seriously, we should have been able to bomb across the Yalu. We felt we should have had some better targets, or else some people felt that we shouldn’t have been there at all. It was very discouraging when we found that they were repairing so many of the targets that we were hitting. There was a lot of criticism of Truman. Later, one looked back and felt that the whole thing had been a rehearsal for Vietnam—we just weren’t getting the support from our government. Maybe if we had really hit North Korea with everything we had, it would have saved lives—there wouldn’t have been any Vietnam.”11
It was a source of constant irritation to the aircrew that they could approach targets close to the Chinese border only on an east-west course to avoid the risk of infringing Chinese airspace. Again and again they were compelled to watch the enemy’s fighters scrambling from the invulnerable sanctuary of their base at Antung. The American fliers’ great fear was of capture, not death. Joe Hilliard was haunted by a vision of years of confinement on a diet of cold, soggy rice: “I resolved I would starve rather than eat it.” The experience of some Americans who were indeed taken prisoner suggests that Hilliard’s fears reflected the reality. The bomber crews received lectures on escape and evasion from comrades who had bailed out and survived. Most of those who had not suffered such a trauma found it chilling to think too much about the prospect. It was easier to get through a tour if you treated it as a job, a routine, and brooded as little as possible about the brutality of the enemy beneath. Yet it was the strange irony of the bomber men’s business that, in six months of raining death and destruction upon the Communist enemy in Korea, they never, even once, set eyes on the face of a Korean.
Throughout the Korean conflict one of the most important assets of the UN Command was its ability to deploy aircraft carriers relatively close inshore, almost parallel to the front lines, wherever these might be. The Americans and British—the dominant naval forces, with some support from the Canadians and Australians—divided their areas of responsibility from the beginning of the war. The British Far East Fleet operated west of Korea, in the Yellow Sea, and normally deployed two aircraft carriers and their escorts on a rotating basis. The American Seventh Fleet cruised on station in the Sea of Japan, east of Korea, with up to three carriers at any one time providing strike aircraft. From the outset the U.S. Navy vigorously defended the claims of its carrier-based aircraft to operate independently of the land-based air forces. “Command and control became a major problem in Korea,” as a senior air force officer wrote.12 Only relatively late in the war did the Navy concede the logic of joint target planning with Far East Air Force. The case for the independence of seaborne air operations normally rests upon the independence of the naval operations which the aircraft are supporting. Yet in Korea the allied fleets were merely providing mobile platforms for aerial sorties in support of the ground war. Without absolute command of the sea, the UN campaign could scarcely have been fought, since almost every soldier who fought, and every ton of supplies he consumed, was brought into Korea by ship. But since the Communists never significantly challenged the UN’s naval forces, their principal role became that of providing floating air bases.
For most of the ships’ crews it was a curiously unreal war. While the smaller vessels, destroyers and minesweepers, often worked close inshore and sometimes found themselves under fire from enemy shore batteries, the big bombarding cruisers and carriers steamed their racetrack courses, round and round a few square miles of sea, living out a daily routine that involved much hard work, much boredom, and only the smallest risk of enemy action. Yet aboard each of the carriers lived a few score men who were seeing the war at the closest and harshest proximity. The men of the air groups flew each day to the battle, then returned to the strange, cozy cocoon of their parent ship, where 2,000 men labored, most of whom never heard a shot fired in anger. As a British Fleet Air Arm pilot put it, “You could fly four sorties in a day, then come below, change into mess undress, and sit down for an evening of sherry, bridge, and brandy.” The American Navy and Marine pilots, of course, on their “dry” ships, were denied the Royal Navy’s alcoholic refinements. But the seesaw contrast in their lives between days of war and nights of naval comfort imposed almost a greater strain than the monotone discomfort of life on the line.
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The vast majority of the 1,040,708 aerial sorties flown by UN aircraft in the course of the Korean War were close support, or fighter cover. Their importance was undisputed. But America’s leading airmen persistently urged a more ambitious role for their forces in Korea and chafed at the frustrations of ground support. General Jacob Smart, Far East Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff (Operations) for most of 1952, complained bitterly about “the opinion so often expressed or implied, that the Eighth Army is responsible for winning the Korean War, and that the role of the other services is to support it in its effort.”13 Here, yet again, was the airmen’s search for a decisive independent role. Yet between June 1951 and the summer of 1952, the U.S. Air Force attempted overwhelmingly its most ambitious independent contribution to the struggle, and suffered the most galling failure.
“Operation Strangle” was a systematic attempt to cut off the Communist ground forces in the front line from their supplies by the sustained exercise of air power. It began with a campaign of bombing the road network in North Korea, and in August 1951 was extended to the railways. Three quarters of all land-based bomber effort and the entire carrier capability were dedicated to this task. Day after day and night after night, the enemy’s communications were pounded from the air. In a fashion disturbingly reminiscent of World War II, and prescient of Vietnam, air force intelligence officers produced extraordinary graphs and statistics to demonstrate the crushing impact of the campaign on Communist movement. Yet, by the summer of 1952, none of this could mask the reality on the ground: the enemy’s supplies were still getting through—between 1,000 and 2,000 tons a day continued to cross the Yalu at the height of “Strangle,” it was later discovered. Prodigious feats of repair by civilian labor gangs working around the clock kept just enough of the road and rail network open to move food and ammunition. Constantly improving Communist antiaircraft defenses emphasized the eternal conundrum: to bomb low meant accepting unacceptable casualties; to bomb high meant a fatal loss of accuracy. “Strangle” cost the UN air forces 343 aircraft destroyed and 290 damaged, mostly fighter-bombers. It proved to objective observers such as Ridgway that there was “simply no such thing as choking off supply lines in a country as wild as North Korea. “14 In World War II, Allied intelligence estimates of German transport requirements proved to have been hopelessly distorted because a German division required only a quarter of the daily supply of its Allied counterpart. In Korea the ratio was even more dramatic: a Chinese division operated with a mere 50 tons of supply a day, against 610 for its American counterpart. The only means by which “Strangle” might have been made effective was to match the bombing of supply routes with intense pressure on the ground to force up Communist consumption of supplies. The will for this—or, rather, the will to accept the UN casualties involved—never existed.
“Strangle” was finally abandoned in the summer of 1952 in the face of severe aircraft losses for dubious strategic return. The airmen claimed that the campaign had at least prevented the Communists from building up supplies to mount a major offensive, but most thoughtful observers doubted that this had been the enemy’s intention. The air forces turned instead to a succession of selective attacks upon power plants and dams in North Korea, about whose destruction the Communists were expected to be especially sensitive. Operation “Pressure Pump” was designed to impress upon the Communist delegation at Panmunjom the urgency of signing an armistice. Bomber attack, wrote Bradley as Chief of the JCS in November 1952, “constitutes the most potent means at present available to UNC, of maintaining the degree of military pressure which might impel the Communists to agree, finally, to acceptable armistice terms.”15 Yet American attacks upon the huge Suiho hydroelectric plant on the Yalu in June 1952 aroused intense controversy around the world, and especially in Britain, where strategic bombing in Korea was a sensitive issue. Installations in Pyongyang were hit again by massed bomber raids in July and August, along with key mineral workings. By the end of 1952 every worthwhile industrial target in the North seemed to the planners in Tokyo, poring over their photo mosaics, to have been battered into ruin. Pyongyang and other major cities had been flattened, hundreds of thousands of North Korean civilians killed. Yet there remained no evidence of the predicted collapse in the Communist will to win. In the summer of 1953 the airmen claimed that the Communist signature on the armistice document represented a last victory for air power, following a new campaign of attacks on dams critical for the irrigation of North Korea. There remains no decisive evidence to support or deny their claims. It is probably fair to assume that once the Communists had reached a political decision to accept the armistice, the prospect of further serious damage to North Korea’s national infrastructure can scarcely have encouraged them to delay.
The lessons of the Korean War for air power seemed self-evident to the ground force commanders, and to those politicians who took the trouble to inform themselves about such things. The experience of World War II showed that intensive strategic bombing could kill large numbers of civilians without decisive impact upon the battlefield, or even upon the war-making capacity of an industrial power. Bombing could inflict a catastrophe upon a society without defeating it. North Korea was a relatively primitive society that contained only a fraction of the identifiable worthwhile targets of Germany or Japan. Nor could the airmen claim that this problem had never been foreseen. Alexander de Seversky was only one among many thoughtful students of air warfare. As early as 1942 he wrote, “Total war from the air against an undeveloped country or region is well nigh futile; it is one of the curious features of the most modern weapon that it is especially effective against the most modern types of civilization.”16 In Korea the U.S.A.F. belief in “victory through air power” was put to the test and found sorely wanting by many of those who were promised so much from it.
“The Eighth Army soldier [wrote an American officer in 1953] cannot but accept the destruction of that ‘doctrine’ [of air power] through demonstrations, costly to him, staged by his enemies the armies of Red North Korea and Communist China. For their troops and supplies moved, despite harassment from our air, consistently and in quantities sufficient to meet their needs. . . . Notwithstanding the all-out efforts of the air force in Korea, there was never a day when the trains did not run and the trucks did not roll behind the enemy lines in North Korea, from the forward enemy areas. . . . The air force in Korea did not fail to apply all the power of which it was capable. But it is plain that it could not, or at least did not, accomplish the mission Air Force theorists had repeatedly told the Army and the American people was sure to be accomplished, under conditions of such overwhelmingly one-sided aerial strength.”17
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No one could seriously dispute that to be bombed was a deeply distressing experience, and UN strategic bombing added greatly to the Communists’ difficulties in sustaining the war. But of all the governments upon earth, those in Peking and Pyongyang were among the least likely to be deterred from continuing a commitment to the conflict merely because of the distress it caused to their peoples. Given time and labor to introduce countermeasures, above all putting key installations underground, the air-dropped conventional bomb proved as limited a weapon in the second half of the twentieth century as in the first. It is not surprising that the airmen’s limitless faith in what they could achieve remained undiminished after Korea, as it had after World War II. If they admitted some of the bitter truths revealed by those wars, a critical part of the U.S.A.F. rationale for its own independent operations would cease to exist. But it remains astonishing that ten years later, in Vietnam, they were allowed to mount a campaign under almost identical circumstances to those of Korea, with identical promises of potential and delusions of achievement, and with exactly repeated lack of success.