The Cold War (21 page)

The U.S. Air Force responded with a trump card of its own. On November 8, 1950, the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing and its F-86A Sabrejets were ordered to Korea. The F-86 had begun as a straight-wing design configuration. Converted
to a swept-wing with the aid of the same German technology that contributed to the MiG, it still suffered from a plethora of teething troubles. Like the MiG, the Sabre was intended as an interceptor, not an escort or airsuperiority fighter. Even with wing tanks, its combat range was only about five hundred miles, good for no longer than twenty minutes over the Yalu when flying from bases around Seoul. Its armament of six .50-caliber machine guns often did no more than chew at the tough Soviet fighters. Its operational ceiling was lower than that of the MiG, which also could climb faster. What the Sabre had was dive speed, a better gun-sight system—and pilots. The 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing included some of the world's most experienced jet pilots. Also, many were veterans of aerial combat in World War II: men like James Jabara, America's first jet ace, and Colonel Francis Gabreski, who had scored twentyeight kills against the Luftwaffe. They were to set the measure of the air war in MiG Alley.

Almost 70 percent of the MiGs shot down in Korea fell to men at least twenty-eight years old, with the self-image of cool, calculating professionals, as opposed to the stereotypical fighter jock. Gabreski claimed his first jet kill when his flight spotted a lone MiG at ten thousand feet: “I kept on descending till I was about five hundred feet below—in his blind spot. It took three passes before the MiG went down. I remember one of the guys … needling me: ‘Good shooting, Colonel, but he was a sitting duck.’ I answered, ‘I like mine easy.’”

Some MiG pilots were indeed easy targets. Chinese pilots had been training on MiGs in the Soviet Union since the start of the war, but they were so far behind their prospective opponents that they were not committed to combat until the spring of 1951. North Korea's air force began receiving MiGs in November 1950, but almost all the experienced pilots had been lost in the war's earlier weeks. Lieutenant Kum Sok No had only fifty jet hours when he tackled his first F-86s: “Suddenly I heard the staccato of machine-gun bullets. We had wandered into the middle of the [dispersed] Sabre groups by mistake…. The fight was over in an instant…. [My] formation was badly scattered, so I turnedand raced thankfully the forty miles toward home.” From the days of the Fokker monoplane in 1915 to the air war over Iraq in 1991, novices have told similar stories—if they survived the experience.

From the beginning, then, the burden of the air war over the Yalu was borne by the Soviet air force. Records and reminiscences made available since the end of the Cold War describe MiG formations sent to China as early as February 1950, but their pilots did not initially expect to take part in the Korean fighting.

Some Russians were selected for Korean service. Others were asked to volunteer. Little encouragement was necessary, however, at least in the war's initial stages. Like their American counterparts, Soviet pilots were willing, often eager, to test themselves and their planes.

Senior Soviet officers have stated that their main objective was to shoot down bombers; engaging Sabrejets was only a means to an end. In practice, Korea offered a golden opportunity to learn state-of-the-art fighter-jet tactics against first-rate opposition. Moreover, in contrast to the Royal Air Force in 1940 and the Luftwaffe in 1943, it was a matter of relative indifference to the Soviet air force just how many bombs fell on North Korean targets. Almost immediately, the air war in MiG Alley took on the qualities of a personal duel.

By no means did the Soviet pilots have a free operational hand. Like their U.S. opponents, they faced politically imposed restrictions. Enemy aircraftcould not be pursued beyond a line extending from Pyongyang to Wonsan, in the northeast. Combat over the sea was likewise forbidden, another reflection of the Soviet Union's reluctance to expand the war by accident. Soviet participation in the war was a top state secret, and preserving secrecy may have been a factor in the decision to rotate complete units through the combat zone, as opposed to replacing pilots individually. As a result, every six weeks or so meant a set of newcomers at the bottom of the learning curve. Base and maintenance facilities in Manchuria were primitive even by Soviet standards. Mountainous terrain limited the ground-based radar and communications systems on which their fighter tactics heavily depended. They suffered, too, from a training system emphasizing flight safety rather than risk-taking. Meanwhile, those with wartime experience had often lost what Colonel Evgeny Pepelyaev, who commanded a MiG regiment during the war, calls “combat awareness.” Stress levels grew so high that entire units were affected. Colonel Boris Abakumov, who scored five F-86 kills, recalls that in October 1951, “our medical board offered many pilots of our division the chance to return to the USSR…. Many pilotswho left had to be given medical aid” for physical and emotional stress.

The U.S. Air Force had sent a wing of F-84 Thunderjets to Korea along with the Sabres, but this straight-wing design was so far out of the MiG-15's performance league that its original escort mission rapidly gave way to ground support, in which the plane was very successful. The best jet available to British and Australian pilots was the Gloster Meteor, obsolescent since the late 1940s. The Sabres stood alone.

For a year the MiGs faced a single wing, the 4th, with only two of its three
squadrons actually deployed in Korea: a theoretical strength of fifty planes. Maintenance problems under the inadequate conditions of a still-developing airfield network around Seoul, combined with operational wear and tear, kept increasing numbers of F-86s on the ground. Meanwhile, the original first team of MiG killers was beginning to rotate home. New blood was reaching the squadrons—pilots such as Second Lieutenant Jim Low, who shot down his fifth MiG six months after graduating from flight school. But not every youngster was a Jim Low. Replacements also included an increasing number of recalled reservists, men in their thirties whose reflexes had slowed and whose killer instincts were often dormant, when not atrophied. Colonel Harrison Thyng took command of the 4th on November 1, 1951. After evaluating his command and its mission, he sent a direct message to the air force chief of staff, Hoyt S. Vandenberg: “I can no longer be responsible for air superiority in northwest Korea.”

On October 22, though, Vandenberg had ordered another seventy-five Sabres to Korea, including some of the new E versions. A wing of F-80s, the 51st, converted to Sabres. The 4th received its third squadron. The odds were still not even, but the balance stabilized, despite maintenance problems that in January 1952 put 45 percent of the Sabres in Korea out of action. By the fall of 1951, the Soviet, Chinese, and Korean MiG inventories totaled over five hundred, but not all of them were on the front line. Lieutenant General Georgy Lobov, who commanded the 64th Fighter Corps in 1952, has insisted that at that stage of the war, “the total strength of our aircraft did not exceed the strength of the Americans' [Sabre] Wings.”

Technically, the MiG and Sabre remained remarkably well matched. The F-86E featured a more reliable engine than its predecessor. The F-86F, which reached MiG Alley in the summer of 1952, had a redesigned wing that significantly improved its ceiling and maneuverability. On the other side, the MiG-15
bis,
which had begun reaching the front a year earlier, incorporated a number of minor technical improvements over the original version. Still, for practical purposes, the adversaries' principal characteristics were unchanged. The MiG had a higher ceiling and a faster rate of climb; the Sabre was more maneuverable and could dive more rapidly. While pilots on both sides praised their respective mounts, few were willing to bet their lives on the technical superiority of one aircraft over the other. Pilot skill, tactics, and luck were the crucial determinants of success.

Nor were Sabre pilots averse to stacking the deck with what amounted to a
pattern of violating Manchurian airspace, sometimes in hot pursuit of fleeing or damaged MiGs, at other times coming in from the Sea of Japan to evade enemy radar and secure the advantage of height against MiGs as they took off. This behavior was subject to condign punishment if discovered officially, but it continued throughout an air campaign that essentially stalemated by mid1951.

U.S. bombers and fighter-bombers kept striking targets in MiG Alley; Soviet pilots, reinforced by increasing numbers of Chinese and North Koreans, maintained an effective defense. B-29s still carried the war into MiG country, but by October 1951 their loss and damage ratios had grown so high that the Superfortresses switched from daylight raids to night operations. Nevertheless, MiG-15 night interceptors proved such a threat to the lumbering four-engine bombers that specialized jet night fighters, air force F-94s and navy F3Ds, were used increasingly as escorts. These straight-wing planes' exponentially superior electronics—a critical factor in night flying—made up for inferior speed and maneuverability relative to the MiG.

The results of the bombing were, however, marginal. To tip the balance required either an infusion of strength or a widening of the combat zone to degrees neither side was willing to risk. General Carl Spaatz, a World War II hero, grumbled that the debacle of 1950 might not have happened if “the air power could have gotten into play, and gone in to a depth of two or three or four hundred miles back.” General O'Donnell thought that “for a very small cost in casualties we could have really hit them hard and perhaps even stopped them.” But air strikes across the Yalu remained forbidden by both the Truman and the Eisenhower administrations.

The MiGs stayed in a defensive role as well, making no effort to contest most of North Korea's airspace. That task was left to another technical anachronism in the first jet war. Polikarpov PO-2s—canvas-covered biplanes whose ancestors had been respected even by the Wehrmacht—had flown night raids since the start of the war; in 1951 these became systematic. These “sewing machines” defied radar and challenged the naked eye. Their slow speed and high maneuverability made them difficult targets, and cannon shells occasionally passed through wings and fuselages without exploding. Often dismissed as merely a nuisance, PO-2 raids—which concentrated on airfields—disrupted sleep, disturbed operational routines, and occasionally destroyed or damaged badly needed aircraft. Corsairs that were adapted for night operations, and later specialized night fighters, piston-engined and jet-propelled, took to the air
against these pests; however, until the war's end, “Bedcheck Charlie” remained a feature of Korea's night skies, insouciantly defying both old and new U.S. technologies.

As the Sabres held the ring in MiG Alley, the air war took on new forms. Close air support made perhaps its greatest contribution of the war in November 1950, when the Chinese sledgehammer sent MacArthur's overextended forces reeling south. Artillery positions were overrun; guns could not find targets. But fighter-bombers filled the gaps. In particular, the 1st Marine Division's withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir was covered all the way by marine pilots determined to see that as many foot soldiers as possible, whatever their uniforms, got out of the Chinese meat grinder. Marines climbing steep and icy slopes to cover the roads below went in behind a screen of bombs, rockets, and cannon shells—not always but often enough for their presence to send the message “Hold on! You're not alone! We'll be back!” Some strikes came in so low that mortar rounds arched across their flight paths. A veteran marine sergeant major remarked of those airmen that “it was as though part of them was right there on the ground with the riflemen.”

Despite its achievements, the marine air-ground team did not survive the retreat from Chosin. Continued air force insistence on integrating marines into an overall air-support system culminated on December 11, 1950, when it was announced that in the future, marine pilots would be available to the entire Eighth Army. The reorganization was more cosmetic than substantive. Misdirected air strikes continued to plague ground operations; for example, on April 24, 1951, a marine Corsair napalmed D Company of the Royal Australian Regiment. Differences among the services on the best and most practical ways of supporting ground operations remained unresolved. On one occasion the commander of the 1st Marine Division said he wanted marines supporting his riflemen, or no air cover at all.

Ground-support technology improved as the war progressed. Proximityfused bombs became standard issue. Some experiments were made with radarguided bombs. Ground-control parties were increased in number and given improved communications equipment. But as the front stabilized and the Chinese and North Koreans constructed increasingly elaborate defensive systems, air strikes of any kind diminished in effectiveness. Deep dugouts were far harder to destroy than troops maneuvering in the open. Enemy antiaircraft also was more effective in defending fixed targets.

Forbidden to cross the Yalu, less and less effective in ground fighting, the airmen
turned to interdiction: isolating the battle zone by choking off supplies and reinforcements. Killing men on the move seemed a promising alternative to trying to demolish bunkers. Later in the year, aircraft embarked on a round-the-clock campaign against Chinese and North Korean lines of communication. Initially given the suitably warlike name Operation Strangle, it targeted primarily roads and railroads, in particular their vulnerable points: bridges and tunnels.