The Korean War (53 page)

In the view of Jack Singlaub, the greatest single cause of the Americans’ difficulties in running effective operations in the North was that almost every anti-communist in the country had long left it. When Eighth Army retreated south in the winter of 1950, North Korean refugees followed in their hundreds of thousands: ‘The lesson was – “don’t strip out all your friendlies”. We had made the mistake we repeated in Vietnam – offering everyone who wanted to leave, everyone with pro-Western sympathies, the chance to go. There was simply no one left in the North likely to help us.’
⁷

It was a lesson that was learned at bitter cost in Korean lives: several hundred infiltrators and agents were landed in the North between 1951 and 1953, and pitifully few of them returned. It is difficult to regard the manner in which they were recruited and dispatched as any more than cynical exploitation of a supply of manpower whose depletion no one would bother to question. But for the CIA’s future, the Korean operation paid off handsomely. In 1949 its covert activities branch possessed a staff of 302, seven foreign stations, and a budget of $4.7 million. By 1952, the staff had swollen to 2,812, with a further 3,142 ‘overseas contract personnel’ on the payroll, forty-seven stations, and a budget of $82 million.

The simple truth was that, at this moment of history when the Cold War seemed so close to becoming a hot one, Washington’s craving for information about the communists around the world was so great that it seemed necessary to seize upon any means by which to gain it. The crushing shocks of the North Korean invasion, the Chinese intervention, the sudden ruthless gambits of the Russians in Eastern Europe, created a desperate need to know more, much more, about the enemy. An organisation to achieve this had to be created from scratch. The wartime reputation of Bedell Smith, the Agency’s director, did much to give the CIA credibility, and bankability, in Washington. Lower down the scale, among a number of distinguished and highly professional intelligence operatives, it is not surprising that the expansion of the CIA made room for a small army of adventurers, charlatans, and men
more temperamentally suited to becoming rodeo riders. Let loose around the world with astonishing freedom of action, it was these men who conceived the plans to poison Patrice Lumumba’s toothbrush, to parachute a long succession of doomed agents into Eastern Europe to foment hopeless revolutionary programmes, and to organise guerrilla operations in North Korea and China. To give the CIA its due, throughout the later war in Indochina, its intelligence assessments were consistently more realistic and better informed than those of the Pentagon. But in Korea, it is difficult to judge that its operations remotely justified the scale of resources it eventually deployed, or the lives that were squandered in its name.

14 » THE BATTLE IN THE AIR

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, reconnoitring and photographing the battlefield below. The see-saw 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 footsoldiers 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.

Viewed objectively, 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 thirties, who believed that air attack could terrorise 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 defence intellectuals, in the years following World War II they were less enthusiastically adopted by professional airmen. Throughout their arm’s brief history, 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 post-war bombing surveys, which cast doubt on the achievements of the bomber offensive 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 post-war strategy, as a result of the invention of the atomic bomb. It was The Bomb, and the USAF’s new stature as its carrier, that clinched the American air force argument for becoming a separate and equal service in 1947. In the post-war 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 co-ordination and close support techniques. It carried its obsession for 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 question: ‘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 sceptical 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 co-operation 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 USAF. ‘US 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 commander 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 non-existent, 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 USAF’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 seven hundred fighter-bomber sorties a day, matched by a further three hundred from the offshore carriers. One of the most experienced and respected air commanders in the USAF, General O. P. Weyland,
was dispatched to Tokyo to direct 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 industrialised nations, which deployed vast mechanised power upon the battlefield. It would be absurd to dispute that the UN – or rather, overwhelmingly the US – 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 26 June 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 crystallised 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 calibre 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 motorised 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 five hundred yards, then swing back to machine-gun the blazing ruins. But as the enemy became more practised 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.