When Nicholls first saw a MiG, it was too distant to have a chance of catching it up. He touched his gun button and watched the tracer lance into it, a glimpse of flame appear, before it disappeared into cloud. He could submit only a ‘damaged’ claim. By his ninety-ninth mission, he was becoming a little desperate,
having fired at a succession of enemy aircraft without bringing them down. Colonel Royal Baker, one of the group’s most celebrated ‘MiG-getters’, with a legendary talent for finding enemy aircraft, invited the Englishman to change his luck by flying with him. Sure enough, just south of the Yalu they jumped a flight of four, and Nicholls achieved the only kill of his tour. Despite the strict rules against crossing into Chinese air spaces, many Sabres in hot pursuit did so: some claimed to have shot down aircraft in the traffic pattern at Mukden. On this occasion, as Nicholls was following his stricken prey down, desperate for confirmation, he heard his wingman give his fuel warning call: ‘Bingo one first.’ A few seconds later, he radioed: ‘Bingo minus two,’ and finally the crisis code: ‘Joker.’ At that moment, to Nicholls’ exultation, the MiG below him began to burn, flew into the ground, and exploded. ‘Can you see him?’ Nicholls asked his wingman urgently. Having got his witness, he turned exultant homewards, with a bare minimum of fuel for landing.
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 organisation might reach him, even under the communist guns. On the ships and the offshore islands, helicopters waited in constant readiness – for this, too, was the first war in which the ‘whirlybirds’ played a significant role, and became life-savers 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 were called in to drive off Chinese patrol boats. On 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, a great boost to the confidence of UN aircrew, and a tribute to the extraordinary UN command of air and sea, even close inshore.
Kimpo was a dreary place, surrounded by rice paddies. There was little to do out of hours save play poker and 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 whisky which many 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 per cent 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 known as 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 take-off by the radar controllers. The pilots recognised 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 three hundred 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 moulded 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 1951 – 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. Butmuch 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.’
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Each pilot flew around a hundred 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 famous 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 John Nicholls put it, ‘in England after a flying accident, there was a funeral. But in Korea, somebody just wasn’t there any more.’ 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 USAF 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 USAF’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 USAF just didn’t want to waste its first-line equipment on Korea.’
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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 – an element among five B-29 groups operating over Korea – dispatched a formation of nine aircraft on a daylight bombing mission, in accordance with orders from 5th Air Force Headquarters in Tokyo. Then, with the coming of darkness, a succession of single aircraft was sent off, at intervals of ninety minutes, which 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 co-ordinates of the target, the altitude – perhaps 28,000 feet – the bombload – probably 144 hundred-pound bombs, or forty five-hundred-pounders – and the fuse settings, usually variable delays up to seventy-two hours. An average mission lasted around eight hours, from take-off 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 five hundred 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 vics, 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 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 at their own discretion than they could achieve – with fuel for only
twenty-five minutes’ ‘loiter’ over MiG Alley – hanging on to the flanks of the bomber wings. Both methods were tried, and neither prevented some MiGs from breaking through. When they did so, for all the B-29s’ formidable weight of defensive armament, the gunners placed little faith in their ability to do more than throw 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 cancelled 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. Offbase, 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, 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 the Second World War, there had been a sense of hardships shared among fighting men, in whichever theatre 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.
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It was a source of constant irritation to the aircrew that they could only approach targets close to the Chinese border on an east–west course, to avoid the risk of infringing Chinese air space. 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.’ His fantasy was not entirely fanciful – not a few American prisoners in communist hands indeed starved rather than eat what they were offered. 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 upon the face of a Korean.