Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  Lieutenant Frank Robison in the cockpit of his F-86E Sabre Jet right after engine start in September 1951 at Kimpo Air Base, K-14, near Seoul, on his way to “MiG Alley.”

  The Korean War was in its third year in November 1952 when Sam Myers’s crew and another aircrew relieved two RB-45C crews from the 91st SRW at Yokota. It was the fourth rotation for the small RB-45C detachment at the sprawling Yokota airfield. Sam’s navigator was Frank Martin, who, like Sam, was assigned to the 322nd SRS of the 91st Wing. “Our standard missions,” Sam Myers recalled during our interview, “were day missions over North Korea. We were tasked by FEAF Bomber Command, and as soon as we returned from a mission, their intelligence specialists would retrieve our film, process it, look at the target area, and then task the B-29 bombers at Yokota and Kadena, Okinawa, against the targets we had located. Some of our missions were deep penetrations into China and the Soviet Union. We flew other missions along Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, often escorted for part of our flight by F-84 fighters. We had a 100-inch lens camera mounted at a 30-degree angle in the bomb bay. We could fly at 25,000 feet over water and shoot into the Soviet Union and get great pictures of their airfields. We used our powerful bomb bay camera for high-altitude photography and the nose camera for low-altitude work. Nearly 90 percent of our missions were day photography, the remainder were night radar photography.

  The black RB-45C, tail number 48027, at Yokota Air Base, Japan, used almost exclusively for night reconnaissance missions.

  “If our missions were flown at night, we always tried to use our black RB-45C, tail number 48027. There was a US Army searchlight detachment at Yokota. My predecessor, Major [Louis] Carrington, had run a test to determine how visible our aircraft was at night if we were picked up by a searchlight. The Koreans and Chinese used searchlights prodigiously. In the test Carrington ran, the RB-45C flew at 35,000 feet when it was picked up by the Yokota searchlights. The aircraft shone like a bright star. They then painted one aircraft black and flew the test again. The searchlights couldn’t track the black RB-45C, so at night we flew aircraft number 48027. On December 17, 1952, I flew a deep penetration mission over the Soviet Union and China. We took off from Yokota, crossed the Sea of Japan, and coasted inland at 35,000 feet altitude, just south of Vladivostok. Then I turned northwest toward Harbin, then back south toward Mukden [Shenyang]. After passing an airfield near Mukden I made a programmed 90-degree banking turn, and I could see MiGs taking off below me. They didn’t catch us. We crossed North Korea and headed toward Japan. When we flew over the battle lines, there were searchlights operating on both sides. The battle lines were lit up all the way across the peninsula, a spectacular sight from 35,000 feet. On other missions we staged first to K-13, Suwon Air Base in South Korea. There we refueled, and then we’d go out over the Yellow Sea, up the west coast of North Korea. We’d penetrate into China and took photographs of activity along the coastal areas, especially ships being loaded. Much of what was being loaded was going to North Korea. The B-29s then would try to catch the ships as they were unloading in North Korean ports.

  F9F Panther of VF-72, from the USS Bonhomme Richard, piloted by Lieutenant Charles E. Myers, in 1952, over North Korea.

  “The closest I came to getting shot down was over Wonsan on the North Korean east coast, returning from a night mission over China. We had two 50-caliber machine guns mounted in the tail of this aircraft, not the black one. Although it looked like we carried a gunner back there, we didn’t. The two guns in this particular aircraft were fixed. One gun pointed straight aft, the other pointed downward at a 30-degree angle. I could fire the guns from the cockpit. We were cruising along at 35,000 feet, heading for the Sea of Japan, when by chance I overheard a flight of two navy F9F Panthers calling their carrier, which was sitting right in front of us. The lead navy pilot was saying they had spotted an IL-28 bomber heading for the carrier and they were going in for the attack, thinking my RB-45 was an IL-28. Luckily, I happened to be on their frequency. My adrenalin level rose instantly, and for a moment I felt like the bull’s-eye at a rifle range. I immediately called back to let them know that I was friendly. The shipboard radar had seen us coming from the north, assumed we were hostile, and launched the Panthers. The F9Fs finally got the word and broke off their attack, but not before making a pass at us close enough to rock the aircraft with their jet wash.”

  The second RB-45C at Yokota had two 50-caliber fixed machine guns mounted in its tail. The guns could be fired from the cockpit—there was no gunner. The black paint and the installation of the 50-caliber guns were local modifications, and they were removed once the aircraft transferred back to the United States. The RB-45C came with a set of tail guns; SAC decided they were not necessary for its reconnaissance aircraft and had them removed and put in storage. The guns were reinstalled when the RB-45Cs were transferred to the United States Air Forces Europe, USAFE.

  Lieutenant Frank Martin, Sam’s radar navigator, sat in the nose of the aircraft and spent most of his time with his eyes glued to his radar scope. “I had none of the panoramic views of Korea or Vladivostok Sam had from the cockpit of the aircraft,” Frank noted during our interview. “On several occasions we flew up the Yalu River from Antung until we could see Vladivostok. Those were daylight missions for which we had navy fighter escort. I recall one mission over Tsingtao [Qingdao], on the Yellow Sea. There were three MiG airfields in that area. I’ll bet you there were a hundred MiGs sitting on the aprons. I could see them on my radar scope. They didn’t have a clue we were there. They didn’t have the radar to see us, nor, I presume, did they think we would do that in broad daylight. My crew flew a total of thirty-one missions over North Korea and the maritime provinces of China and the Soviet Union.”

  The World War II tradition of crews naming their aircraft and painting often gaudy images on the nose section was carried over into the Korean War period. Many bombers pulled out of storage still sported their World War II monikers and designs. SAC largely ended that practice after Korea.

  “HONEY BUCKET HONSHOS” OF THE 91ST STRATEGIC RECONNAISSANCE SQUADRON (1952)

  The B-29s were trained to go up there to Manchuria and destroy the enemy’s potential to wage war. They were trained to bomb Peking and Hankow if necessary. They could have done so. The threat of this impending bombardment would, I am confident, have kept the Communist Chinese from revitalizing and protracting the Korean War.

  —General Curtis E. LeMay, Mission with LeMay

  Over the years, Yokota Air Base, near Tokyo, Japan, hosted nearly every air force reconnaissance aircraft imaginable, from the venerable RB-29 and RB-50 to the jet-powered RB-45C, RB-47, and various versions of the RB-57 and RB-66; and, of course, the feisty little F-86 fighter turned into an amazing reconnaissance platform. Master Sergeant Arthur E. Lidard in 1952, purely by chance, found himself assigned to the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Yokota Air Base, Japan, flying the RB-29 as a flight engineer. He had generously taken the place of a friend whose wife was expecting, but he didn’t have the faintest idea what he had gotten himself into. Lidard was better known as “Lucky,” and he was going to need all the luck he had in his account to get him through this combat tour. In addition to a small SAC RB-45C photo reconnaissance detachment at Yokota during the Korean War years, there was a much more sizeable presence of aging RB-29 and RB-50 aircraft, both photo and electronic reconnaissance. The ELINT aircraft were known as Mickey ships, an old World War II label. Lidard’s aircraft was a photo reconnaissance version with the handle of “Honey Bucket Honshos.”

  “I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 24, 1926,” recalled Lucky Lidard when I interviewed him. “My first flight in an airplane was with Colonel Roscoe Turner, flying a Fokker monoplane. I was six years old. Roscoe Turner was a well-known barnstormer, three-time winner of the Thompson Trophy, and an experienced fighter pilot. My father admonished me, ‘Don’t you tell your mother about this,’ because he had spent five dollars to take me on that flight. It was 1931
and times were bad. After that breathtaking flight, my dream was to become a pilot and fly airplanes when I grew up. When the war started, I was two years behind in school because my dad was crippled and I had to go to work to help my family. I attended Loyola High School in Baltimore. They sent me to take the aviation cadet examination. I finished in the top 10 percent. I enlisted in the Army Air Forces, waiting for a flying slot to open up, but as the war was winding down in 1944, they didn’t need any more pilots. Instead, they sent me to B-17 armaments and electronics school at Lowry Field, near Denver, Colorado. Then I was sent to Maxwell Field, Alabama, where I flew as a scanner. When the war ended, I extended for a year because I had no job to go home to. I was transferred to Alaska, into air rescue, on a B-17E as a crew chief. We carried a twenty-foot wooden boat with twin inboard Packard engines slung underneath its belly. I never actually had to drop the boat to rescue anyone. In October 1946 I was discharged and went to work for the post office. Two days before Christmas I called a recruiting sergeant and asked him if it was possible for me to come back into the air service. The day after Christmas, they swore me back in. I missed being around airplanes, and they sure didn’t have any at the post office. I came back in as a buck sergeant, a three-striper. Promotions were frozen and I stayed in that rank for five years—seventy-eight bucks a month for five long years. Hard to make a living on that. I was assigned to Bolling Field in Washington, DC. When I showed up, the line chief said, ‘We need crew chiefs—I’m going to give you a T-6.’ I said, ‘No, Sarge, that’s single engine. I’ve been crewing B-17s, multiengine aircraft.’ He said, ‘I’ll fix that for you.’ And I ended up with two T-6s. The most important tool in my toolbox turned out to be a can of metal polish. Man, we shined those things until you could see your face in them. All the brass at the Pentagon did their flying at Bolling. The chief came out one day and said to me, ‘You’ve done a hell of a job, Lucky. I wish I could promote you, but I can’t. But I can put you in a multiengine aircraft and you’ll get some flying pay.’

  “The chief gave me a C-45. It was my baby. I did everything including the twenty-five-hour inspections. The pilots came over from the Pentagon to fly. One old colonel I will never forget. He had four sets of different prescription glasses. He’d come out and say, ‘Hello, Sergeant. A nice day today. Good day for flying. We’ll take it up for a while.’ I knew that ‘for a while’ meant four hours, to get his flying pay for the month. I got the crew chief next door to hold the fire bottle, because I had to sit in the right seat. The colonel never brought a copilot along. Then he would say, ‘Start ’em up, Lucky,’ and I’d crank ’em up. ‘Read the checklist,’ he’d say. I read the checklist for him. Ran up the engines, and he’d turn it onto the runway, take the power up, and we’d start to roll. That’s when he switched glasses, scary. We’d roll, break ground, and he’d say, ‘You’ve got such and such on the bird dog?’

  B-17E air rescue aircraft, with boat beneath fuselage, flown by Colonel Eugene Deatrick, then a young lieutenant just out of West Point and flying school. He along with Lucky Lidard were assigned to the 10th Rescue Squadron at Adak. The squadron was commanded by the famed Arctic explorer, a Norwegian by birth, Colonel Bernt Balchen.

  “‘Yes, sir,’ I’d reply.

  “He’d say, ‘Clean her up, and you got it. Take us up to 8,000 feet.’ We’d get to our assigned quadrant in the local flying area and he’d say, ‘Fly it around for a while, Sarge. When it’s time to go in you wake me up. It’s been a busy day in the Pentagon.’ That’s how things went, time after time. I flew around for a while, then woke him up when we got close to having four hours in the air. Going home was a rerun of what it’s been before, only in reverse. This happened once or twice every month. I got to thinking, this isn’t for me. I’m getting twenty days a month flying pay—not even a full month’s pay—and I had to fly with anybody who came along. Some of the landings were pretty awful. I went to headquarters every day. There, they had a bulletin board on which they posted arrivals and departures as well as available assignments. Off to Alaska I went, to the 54th Troop Carrier Squadron flying C-54 transports. Our commander was Colonel Sammons, General Nathan F. Twining’s son-in-law. The colonel had a southern drawl you could cut with a knife. He assembled all of us late one evening and told us that we were leaving on a thirty- to sixty-day TDY to Germany. ‘I want them off the ground heading for Germany as soon as they’re ready.’ I worked all night changing an engine.

  “We got off the following day with three crews aboard and a bunch of maintenance men, as well as their toolboxes, carbines, and helmets. We flew to Great Falls [Montana], then on to Scott Field and Westover, Massachusetts. There, we crew-rested for eight hours, then flew on to Lajes in the Azores, where we stayed on the ground long enough to eat. Took off in the evening and landed at Rhein-Main the following morning, July 1, 1948, and the airplane went into Berlin that afternoon. During the Berlin airlift I flew almost entirely with my own airplane and kept it running. When I returned to Anchorage on February 7, 1949, I had made 185 round trips to Berlin. In 1951, a friend of mine got an assignment to RB-29s at Yokota Air Base, Japan. His wife had just gotten pregnant. So I volunteered to take his assignment, if they allowed me to do so. I had flown B-29s at Maxwell, so I knew the airplane and I liked it. A lot of people didn’t like flying the B-29. So I put in my request and was informed that I could take the shipment. I reported to Randolph Air Force Base, near San Antonio, where I was assigned to a crew. We went through training together at Fairchild Air Force Base, Spokane, Washington, and then reported to the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Yokota. The 91st had RB-29s and a small detachment of SAC RB-45Cs attached. Our tail marking was a circle X for the 91st SRS; the 98th Bombardment Wing’s B-29s, a SAC wing, also at Yokota, were circle Hs.32

  The letter on the tail fin designated the bomb group the aircraft was assigned to and was a hold-over from WWII. Circle E was the 22nd Bomb Group, assigned to FEAF during the Korean War. A circle or a square displaying the group letter in its center designated the numbered air force an aircraft was assigned to; in this case, the circle represented the 15th Air Force.

  “From 1951 until I left in 1952, I flew thirty-five photo missions, three of which were over Beijing; and eighteen Yoke missions, for a total of fifty-three. Yoke missions were sea lane surveillance flights off the coast of the Soviet Union. We’d fly out over the Sea of Japan at three hundred feet off the water and twelve miles off the coast. We’d take pictures of Russian ships. The Russian sailors waved to us as we passed. We’d wave back at them. The 91st SRS also had two B-29s without numbers on them and no tail markings. Those two B-29s, painted black, carried special equipment. When we briefed for those airplanes they sent some of our gunners back to the barracks. We still took our Central Fire Control (CFC) gunner, but the two waist gunners and the tail gunner we left behind. We also sent the photo men home, because the aircraft was a Mickey ship, full of all kinds of electronics. On those missions we turned in our identification except for our dog tags. They’d give each of us a little box, which we carried in the leg pocket of our flight suits. The box held several Mickey Mouse watches—the good ones. There also were several gold ingots in there, and a blood chit that said I was worth 25,000 American dollars in gold, and half that if dead.

  “The Mickey airplane had Curtis electric props. The electrical motors changed the propeller pitch automatically. With them we could get up to altitude without a lot of prop problems. At high altitude, the conventional props would constantly change their pitch and hunt. Sometimes they would go so fast I thought they would spin off the airplane. Then I’d shut down the engine and feather the props. The Curtis props didn’t hunt. They were steady even at 43,000 feet. We could get up to that altitude if we burned off enough fuel. We would go as high as the plane would go before we entered China. When we got what we had come for, the Mickey operators would tell us it was alright to turn around. Heading east, we’d pick up the jet stream, and all of a sudden that plane almost tu
rned into a fighter. The trip into China took forever, but the trip back didn’t take much time at all.

  “My regular photo-recce plane was Honey Bucket Honshos. The name was painted across the nose of the airplane. My pilot was Captain Zimmer. I was the flight engineer. We would take off from Yokota and head out over the Sea of Japan, climbing all the time. We’d climb maybe two and a half hours, all the way across Korea if we were heading for China. We’d be at 40,000 feet when we penetrated. The Korean missions we flew around 20,000 to 25,000 feet. The DMZ, at night, was always lit up with searchlights. Pyongyang also had a lot of searchlights. When they shot at us, I could see the rounds coming up, looking like corkscrews. The old stuff glowed yellow and didn’t get up to our altitude, but the new stuff, glowing silver, did. Sometimes single MiGs came up and paced us. They seemed to call the altitude down to the AAA. The AAA never shot a barrage at us, only single rounds.

  “On June 13, 1952, we were to fly a Yoke mission, but it was canceled. I don’t know why. We had already preflighted our airplane and were ready to go. They said that Captain English’s crew could fly part of the Yoke and also do recce near Sakhalin. There was no need for two of us to go. Captain English’s flight engineer came over and asked me if he could borrow my watch, since I wasn’t flying—his had quit running. I said OK. He promised to return it as soon as they were down. It was a good automatic watch. It’s probably still running on a skeleton in the Sea of Japan. They got shot down by a Russian fighter near Sakhalin with the loss of twelve airmen.” It was grim news but not totally unexpected by the men of the 91st SRS, who knew that the Russians were touchy around Sakhalin. The navy had lost a P2V seven months earlier near Sakhalin, on November 6, 1951, with the loss of ten. The 91st would lose another RB-29 in October over the Sea of Okhotsk, near the Kurile Islands, with the loss of eight of its crew. The squadron started with twelve airplanes in late 1950, by 1954, when the remaining RB-29s were replaced with newer RB-50s, only eight of the original twelve remained. Lucky Lidard didn’t think it could happen to him. “I was young and felt immortal.” But there came a mission in 1952 over North Korea when Lucky nearly lost his belief in his immortality.