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 US 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.
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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 they 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, cosy cocoon of their parent ship, where two thousand
men laboured, 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 US Navy and Marine pilots, of course, on their ‘dry’ ships, were denied the Royal Navy’s alcoholic refinements. But the see-saw 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.
The Royal Navy’s carriers worked a nine-day cycle of operations: four days’ flying, one day’s replenishment at sea, another four days’ flying, then a brief trip to Japan. They aimed to fly 544 sorties in nine days, sixty-eight a day. Each aircraft might be called upon to fly up to 120 miles from the ship, and to remain in the air up to two hours. Aircraft took off in waves through the day, perhaps five or six in each, every two hours. The crews were briefed the previous night for the next day’s operations. If it was summer, with dawn around 5 a.m., soon after four a Chinese steward might be shaking his officer awake: ‘Must have blekfuss, Mr Jacob. Otherwise other officer have two blekfuss.’
Lieutenant William Jacob was posted to a Firefly squadron aboard the 23,000-ton light fleet carrier HMS
Ocean
in the spring of 1952. He was the son of one of Winston Churchill’s best-known wartime staff officers, Sir Ian Jacob. As a boy, he was sent to Dartmouth, and felt deeply cheated that the Second World War ended when he was seventeen, just too young to take part. After a stint as a destroyer navigator, and with 350 hours’ flying experience behind him, this gaily adventurous young man was thrilled to receive a posting to Korea: ‘I simply loved the flying.’
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The piston-engined Firefly was an old aircraft by 1952, slow and notoriously prone to bounce on making a carrier landing. If its pilots encountered MiGs over Korea, they were instructed to cut their speed to 125 knots, put their flaps down, and turn tightly; the jets should then have great difficulty in flying slowly enough to hit them. The merit of the Firefly as a ground support aircraft was that it could carry a heavy load – normally sixteen rockets and four
20mm cannon. But its pilots remained secretly somewhat jealous of the faster and smarter Sea Furies, of which
Ocean
also carried a squadron. Once, miraculously, a Sea Fury even shot down a MiG.
As always with carrier operations, take-offs provided some of the most frightening moments. The Fireflies ideally needed twenty-five or thirty knots of windspeed over the deck to get them into the air, fully laden. But
Ocean
could barely manage twenty-four knots, and on a still day the aircraft would sink alarmingly over the bows as it bolted from the catapult, then lumber uncertainly upwards towards 10,000 feet, collecting the other two or three aircraft in the flight as it climbed. Every hour of the day, one aircraft was detailed to fly a monotonous ASPRO anti-submarine patrol ahead of the carrier, while a flight of Furies mounted a Combat Air Patrol against the remote chance of enemy attack. But most days, most sorties were directed against enemy ground targets inland.
Operating in summer was the worst experience, with temperatures in the glasshouse cockpit soaring to 140 degrees, the crews flying in underpants and overalls, soaked in sweat from take-off to landing. Yet still they wore their chamois leather gloves and scarves, and covered every inch of exposed flesh against the dreaded risk of fire. Accidents accounted for a high proportion of carrier casualties – such daily mishaps as that of a man on
Ocean
who was blown overboard one morning and never recovered when a pilot ignited his Rocket Assisted Take-Off Gear without warning. Somebody had exchanged the positions of his RATOG and radio switches without telling him. Over the target, the tail fins of their 3-inch rockets were prone to break off after launching, and could hole the radiator, with fatal consequences. And always, of course, landing and take-off errors could prove fatal. On the ship, the intense physical demands of what the aircrew were doing magnified small irritants: the delayed arrival of mail, the absence of a new wardroom movie, an argument over who should lead a given sortie.
Yet still Jacob, and many of his colleagues, enjoyed immensely
what they were doing: ‘I adored it. We had a marvellous time. It was so good to be doing it all with friends.’ For all the lectures they received about the political purpose of their mission, they cared little for the high politics: ‘If we thought about it at all, we felt that we were really there to “show willing” to the Americans,’ which indeed was a crudely accurate manner of expressing the view of the British government. Navigation was easy, and more often than not, they were shown a photograph of their target at briefing the previous night. The Fireflies possessed no sighting equipment for unloading their bombs and rockets. The pilots merely attacked by eye. The key factor was to judge the angle of dive correctly.
A few pilots became very ‘wound up’ by the strain of operations. But most treated it as a job: a dangerous job, sometimes a terrifying one, but most often exciting and satisfying. They flew, they attacked their targets, and sometimes they did not come back. They accepted it all without profound passion. Bill Jacob’s logbook recorded a characteristic succession of strikes, near-misses, and brief tragedies: ‘. . . Dicky O shot down and killed . . . he was last seen going into a hill upside down . . .’; ‘. . . went on to strafe a number of villages and generally look around. I strafed an oxcart and I think hit it while I missed another. Each of the two runs I did and also Purnell’s runs left the cart surrounded in dust and smoke from which emerged an oxcart going like a train. The man, however, was killed . . . My landing was good for a change . . .’
On 27 August, Jacob identified and photographed a communist radar station. The next day, he was sent back to attack it. Ground fire holed his radiator and coolant pipe. Knowing what would happen a few seconds later, he dragged back the stick and staggered hastily back up to 6,000 feet. There, the engine stopped. The Firefly began to drift downwards, belching smoke. Jacob dithered desperately. ‘Prepare to bale out,’ he told his navigator. ‘No, we’ll take her down and ditch.’ ‘No, let’s bale out.’ In the back seat was a chief petty officer with vast experience and two Distinguished Service Medals, named Hernshaw. The CPO was not impressed.
‘Make your mind up,’ he told Jacob crossly. ‘I’ve been shot down seven times, and I don’t mind what you do as long as you make your mind up.’ Jacob ditched.
The Firefly cartwheeled as it hit the water, but to their overwhelming relief came to a stop the right way up. They tore open the canopy, conscious of the eight seconds in hand before the aircraft sank, and slipped into the brilliant warm water. Then they swam the few yards to the shore of the island of Chodo, where the UN Command maintained its superbly efficient Air-Sea Rescue Service. Within a few minutes, four F-86s from Kimpo, four US Marine Corsairs and four British Furies were circling Jacob’s ditching position. Jacob was briskly interrogated by an American radar officer on the island, then swam back out to his aircraft in the shallow water, to dive for his radio set, gyro gunsight and other secret equipment, which they brought ashore in a dinghy. That night, Jacob and Hernshaw were back on
Ocean
. The following morning, they were sent to attack the radar station again. It was Jacob’s 121st sortie: ‘I thought my luck must be beginning to run out.’ But it did not. A few weeks later, he completed his tour in one piece, and was posted home.
The vast majority of the 1,040,708 aerial sorties flown by UN aircraft in the course of the Korean War were like those of Lieutenant Jacob – to provide 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’.
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Here, yet again, was the airmen’s search for a decisive independent role. Yet between June 1951 and the summer of 1952, the US 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 labour gangs working around the clock kept just enough of the road and rail net open to move food and ammunition. Constantly improving communist anti-aircraft defences emphasised 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’.
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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 fifty 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 anyway 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’.
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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 nation without defeating it. North Korea was a relatively primitive society, which contained only a fraction of the identifiable and 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 civilisation.’
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In Korea, the USAF belief in ‘victory thru air power’ was put to the test, and found sorely wanting by many of those who were promised so much by it.