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 de-icing 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 shovelled these in a long stream out of a funnel at the rear of the aircraft, with the aid of a paddle. Later, the nails were replaced by purpose-designed tetraheydrons, 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 with that of the launch of the Sputnik satellite a few years later. Some fifty MiGs were initially deployed, flown by Chinese and Soviet pilots. 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 started to suffer a steady drain of losses to fighter attack, coupled with the impact of radar-controlled anti-aircraft 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 theatre, 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 US 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, the UN 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 programme 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 manoeuvre. 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 aeroplane’, in the words of Lieutenant Jim Low, one of the Korean aces; ‘it was a beautiful plane that sort of wrapped around you.’
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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 reared 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 north-west
jetstreams 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.
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Some American fighter pilots in Korea went weeks, even months, without glimpsing an enemy aircraft. Others, in inexplicable fashion, seemed to possess a 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 recognised 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 amongst 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 fliers, among whom were the foremost aces of the war – 68 per cent 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.’
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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.
They cast off their wingtip tanks and swung towards 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 to those of World War II, save only that at higher speeds, the aircraft manoeuvred across greater spaces. The flight leader might radio to his second pair: ‘You take the bounce!’ indicating that he himself would watch the higher sky, cover the rear, while the other men dived, at a speed of perhaps five hundred 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 two hundred yards, and to gain an accurate shot a man might be flying as slow as two hundred knots.
The MiGs’ cannon could be deadlier killers than the six .5 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 channelled – 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.
Flight-Lieutenant John Nicholls was an unusual member of the 4th Fighter Wing for which Low also flew, for he was an Englishman. While the Royal Air Force provided only a Sunderland flying boat squadron in Korea, its leaders were anxious to share the rewards of experience in the new art of jet warfare. A select group of British pilots was distributed among the American squadrons. Nicholls was twenty-four, one of the generation of fliers very conscious of having just missed World War II. He found his eight-week Sabre conversion course outside Las Vegas a revelation of the scale of American military power – ‘there were more aircraft on the flight line at Nellis Air Force Base than in the whole of Fighter
Command.’ The instructors’ motto was: ‘Every man a tiger.’ Nicholls was much impressed by the emphasis upon gunnery and air-to-air combat. His generation of British fighter pilots had been schooled overwhelmingly for the task of intercepting enemy bombers. He exulted in airborne visibility so much better than he had ever known in England. He also learned to have a cautious respect for the impact of G-forces at high speed.
Nicholls was fascinated by the Americans he joined at Kimpo: ‘There were such a variety of types and backgrounds.’ He discovered the existence of ‘the warlovers’, men like Jim Low and Pete Fernandez. Around half the pilots, he reckoned, were men determined to do their best, but also to stay alive.
Another 25 per cent didn’t give a damn – and that went for the ground crew as well. The other 25 per cent saw this as a great professional opportunity. If they could make their names in Korea, their careers were made. There was a lot of jockeying for position in the USAF. Shooting down a lot of MiGs was a passport to fame, though oddly enough in retrospect, few of the big MiG-hitters prospered professionally. There was a general acceptance of the need to do what we were trying to do, but they were not particularly articulate about it. There was no doubt that anything to do with communism was bad, and had to be resisted. In my experience, the American view of war is different from the European view. They still fight their wars in a remote sense, far from home. They send their people away to war – not like the Europeans, who have seen so much war around their own countries and homes. At Kimpo, it was rather like our participation in the Boer War. There was a vaguely early twentieth-century feeling about the place.
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