The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  Eleven months later, around the time No’s nerves were rattled by his first encounter with a Sabre, the number of America’s premier fighter jets in Korea had increased to 127. They were still outnumbered, more than four to one, by MiGs piloted by Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans. But with each passing month, the Americans brought in more Sabres and more highly trained pilots. And with each passing month, the air war over Korea took on a superpower-versus-superpower life of its own. The aviation historians Douglas C. Dildy and Warren E. Thompson describe a high-speed, high-altitude, high-tech contest waged above the gore and muck of the ground war: “The best [pilots] from both sides sparred and dueled, fought and killed—or died—in an arena almost completely detached from the World War I–like trench warfare far below . . . It was a battle much more for the prestige of the nations engaged—and the reputation of their respective aerospace industries—and for the glory of the fighter pilots involved than for its effect on the conduct or the outcome of the conflict.”

  No was not ready for this kill-or-be-killed game. His lack of readiness began with his lightweight blue cotton pants.

  In a fighter jet, a pilot is subjected to extraordinary g-forces that can cause exhaustion and blackouts. Coming out of a dive, a pilot can experience up to nine g’s—nine times his body weight—slamming against limbs and torso, slowing the flow of blood to his brain.

  Specialized pants—the kind found in a G suit, the kind that automatically squeeze a pilot’s legs, ensuring that plenty of blood reaches his brain—were standard equipment for American fighter pilots in the Korean War. MiG pilots did not have them.

  No had never seen a G suit, although he knew the Americans wore them. His commanders assured him that as long as his plane could endure the strain of dogfights, so could he. But the more he flew, the less he believed. Veteran Soviet MiG pilots, he noticed, looked old at twenty-five.

  The guns in the nose of No’s MiG were even more problematic than his pants.

  Prior to going into combat, he had never fired them. And they remained silent on his first few combat sorties because he did not see anything to shoot. When that first flight of Sabres attacked, he did not have the time or presence of mind to shoot back.

  When he finally managed to fire a few rounds on a later mission, he was frightened by the vibration from the cannon and the noise. Hitting anything with the plane’s two 23 mm cannon or the slower-firing 37 mm cannon was almost impossible. At speeds above five hundred miles an hour, the World War II–era gun sights on his MiG did not provide a reliable read as to where the shells might go. Kill-minded MiG pilots had to fly behind their target, squeeze off a couple quick bursts of tracer bullets, and then guess at a trajectory that might hit the enemy. On nearly all of his combat sorties, No flew out and back in large formations of twenty or more MiGs, which gave him little opportunity to maneuver into a position with a legitimate shot at an American aircraft.

  He knew, though, that the North Korean air force expected him to shoot down Americans. To keep his superiors happy and burnish his reputation as a kill-hungry Red, No began blazing his cannon across the sky, spraying shells at impossibly distant targets, and flying home with his ammunition patriotically wasted. He fretted less, over time, about harming an American. Even if he had wanted to, he could not shoot well enough to do it. As far as he could determine, he never hit anything. Neither did most of the other North Korean MiG pilots.

  III

  As dogfights escalated and Americans continued punishing his country with bombs and napalm, Kim Il Sung needed to find a way to escape responsibility for the devastation he had unleashed. He knew that when the war ended, he would be vulnerable and that many North Koreans would demand his head. His cold-blooded genius was to give them the heads of rival Korean politicians, particularly those who had come to Pyongyang from the Soviet Union, China, and South Korea and held powerful positions inside his government.

  By making a scapegoat of these rivals, he increased his own power, distracted the masses with showy, Stalinist-style human sacrifice, and danced away from accountability for his failures as a military commander.

  It was quite a show, and each performance consisted of three acts, according to Yu Song Chol, Kim’s onetime translator and a top commander in the war. First, an elaborate plot was concocted to trap a rival. Second, the trapped individual was publicly criticized at party meetings. Finally, he was stripped of power, imprisoned, and in most cases killed.

  Kim had to strike quickly. Many of the men he wanted to ruin had loyal followers and foreign backing and were smart enough to use the failed war to ruin him. Before they could act and long before the war was over, Kim began scheming. His first target, in the fall of 1951, was Ho Kai, the highest-ranking Soviet Korean in the North.

  Ho was conscripted in the mid-1940s by Soviet authorities to go to the Korean Peninsula as a translator. He joined thousands of other ethnic Koreans who had been born and raised in the Soviet Union and spoke Korean and Russian. Yet Ho was always a cut above the bilingual schoolteachers and low-level bureaucrats who, on Stalin’s orders, seeded Communism on the Korean Peninsula.

  Ho had joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1930, at the precocious age of twenty-two. He had become well known in the Soviet Far East by the mid-1930s as “a young Korean of remarkable willpower, intelligence, and organizational skills,” writes the historian Andrei Lankov. He was accomplished enough to become the second-ranking official in a district that was home to the Soviet Union’s largest group of ethnic Koreans, and he was nimble enough to dodge a purge by Stalin that eliminated many of his peers.

  Arriving in North Korea in November 1945, Ho moved immediately to the upper ranks of the bureaucracy that the Soviets erected around Kim Il Sung. He was the only high-ranking Korean speaker who knew from personal experience how to assemble a Stalinist party machine. Prior to the war, his organization worked more efficiently than government ministries in American-financed South Korea. Ho became known as the “Party doctor.”

  His skills as a politician and public speaker, however, were negligible. He had no grassroots political support. In the spring of 1950, he gave a speech to naval academy cadets, including No Kum Sok, who had lined up in the academy parade ground. Ho was memorably fat and did not speak Korean very well. He read his speech in a monotone, and none of the cadets understood what he was talking about.

  As the war began, he was first secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, a post that made him second, after Kim Il Sung, in the Communist hierarchy. Working with Kim, Ho was involved in early planning for the invasion of South Korea and in trying to mobilize underground Communists in South Korea. Ho also helped groom Kim as Great Leader, according to Lim Un, a onetime colleague of both men.

  “Ho Kai was not only the closest cooperator of Kim Il Sung, he was virtually his patron and guardian,” Lim wrote. “He played the role of maternity nurse when the leader Kim Il Sung was born. These facts were for Kim Il Sung sufficient reason to purge Ho Kai.”

  Kim had another compelling motivation: his souring ties with Stalin.

  In the days before China’s army rescued North Korea, Stalin had made it humiliatingly clear that he viewed Kim as a man of no consequence. As long as the Soviet Koreans, led by the coolly competent Ho, exercised power in Pyongyang, Kim feared that it might please Stalin if he were killed and replaced.

  Fortunately for Kim, the presence of Chinese troops in North Korea had weakened the Soviet Union’s influence. The time was ripe for Kim to embark on a purge of Ho.

  It began when Kim asked Ho to examine the behavior of party members who lived briefly under UN occupation during the early months of the war. When American and South Korean soldiers controlled the North, many cadres had burned their party cards, renounced Kim’s government, and welcomed the occupiers. Ho zealously checked out these turncoats, denying party reinstatement to nearly everyone who could not produce an old membership card. He also t
ightened qualifications for new party members, embracing factory workers but excluding poor farmers.

  At a plenum of the party’s Central Committee in November 1951, Kim announced that Ho had gone too far. He criticized Ho for denying membership to toiling peasants who gave the party a populist base and for refusing to readmit party members who had done nothing wrong. His crimes were called “closed-doorism” and “liquidationism.”

  Ho was soon caught in another trap. He was asked to edit a draft document that contained flowery language praising the all-knowing magnificence of Kim.

  “Is this really necessary?” Ho reportedly asked the man who gave him the document. Ho then used red ink to edit out florid passages. A politician who wanted Ho’s job took the document directly to Kim. When Ho later visited Kim in his office, the Great Leader slyly pulled out the edited draft.

  Criticized in the party plenum and humiliated in Kim’s presence, Ho was stripped of his leadership position and expelled from the party. Kim then opened the door for party membership to peasant farmers, which swelled the ranks to more than a million and helped Kim claim a popular mandate. Later, Kim assigned Ho an impossible task: fixing American bomb damage at a major water reservoir. When Ho failed to complete the repair work on schedule, Kim accused him of “bureaucratism” and mismanagement.

  With his life unraveling, Ho visited the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, where he told a Soviet diplomat that he was being punished, in part, because he had been skeptical about “excessive praise” for Kim. Two days later, Ho was dead in his own house.

  Officially, it was suicide. But Lankov found strong circumstantial evidence of murder and suggests three motives: Kim feared Ho was plotting against him, he saw Ho as an instrument of Soviet control, and he worried that Ho would return to the Soviet Union and cause trouble.

  “His body lay in the small bed of his son, with a hunting rifle in his hands and a belt from his wife’s dress tied to the trigger,” Lankov writes. “Some of those who were there during the first minutes and hours thought that he had definitely been murdered and that the appearance of a suicide was merely a set-up. All the people I met during my studies who had known Ho well, including those whose orientation was pro–Kim Il Sung, were almost unanimous in believing that he was murdered.”

  Ho’s father-in-law, Choe Pyo Dok, was a senior general in the North Korean army who commanded armored troops that seized Seoul in 1950. Choe had gone to see Ho on the night before he was supposed to have committed suicide. They spent the evening together, and the general detected nothing that made him believe Ho would want to end his life. Instead, he talked about his desire to get out of Korea and perhaps return to the Soviet Union. He also talked lovingly about his young son.

  After learning that Ho was dead, Choe became convinced that he had been murdered. He was so certain that he telephoned Kim and accused him of murder, according to Lankov. Choe then resigned from the army and left the country.

  Ho’s wife, who was outside Pyongyang when she heard that her husband was dead, rushed home to bury him. By the time she arrived, he was already in the ground. She tried to talk to aides, servants, and a driver, but they had all been transferred to new jobs.

  IV

  Three days after the Great Leader moved his MiGs inside North Korea, the Americans spotted them.

  An air force reconnaissance aircraft reported on November 10, 1951, that more than twenty MiGs were parked on the runway at Uiju airfield. That sighting prompted mission planners in the Fifth Air Force headquarters in Nagoya, Japan, to draw up a full-scale attack. They planned to pulverize the runway and destroy all the MiGs they could catch on the ground. The attack would include B-29 and B-26 bombers and an escort of fighter jets.

  Before the mission could be approved, four American Sabres happened to fly over Uiju on the morning of November 18, and one of the pilots noticed MiGs parked in a zigzag pattern at the south end of the airfield. Two Sabres circled above to provide cover while Captain Kenneth Chandler and Lieutenant Dayton Ragland swooped down. Flying ten feet above the runway at near supersonic speed, they strafed the airfield with .50-caliber fire. In his report on the raid, Chandler said he destroyed four MiGs and damaged several others.

  No Kum Sok got up at five that morning in his farmhouse bunk. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, put on his flight suit, and ate breakfast before riding a truck to the airfield. There he and the twenty-three other pilots in his fighter squadron were ordered to go on Alert One, the highest level of combat readiness. A third of the pilots had to climb into the cockpits of eight MiGs parked on the runway’s apron, where they were expected to be ready to start their engines. The pilots hated Alert One. They believed that sitting in a fighter jet on an exposed runway made them sitting ducks. If there were a good reason for the highest-possible alert, they reasoned, why not take off and go to it? But they dared not complain to their commanders.

  Starting at 8:00 a.m., in rotating shifts lasting one hour, they began an Alert One rotation. The squadron’s first battalion went first, while pilots from the second and third battalions stood around and shot the breeze. No, who belonged to the second battalion, chatted with Senior Lieutenant Chung Young Tae, a friend from the third battalion.

  “You’ve grown taller,” Chung told No.

  They had first met at the naval academy two and a half years earlier, when No was seventeen, short, and skinny. Chung was about three years older. They had a friendly argument over which Chinese city—Tianjin or Shenyang—had the larger population. No said, correctly, that it was Tianjin. Chung changed the subject, talking about the phenomenal number of aircraft the Americans manufactured to win World War II.

  After an hour, it was No’s turn to sit in a cramped cockpit and try to stay alert.

  At ten, when pilots of the third battalion took their turn, No climbed down from his MiG and began walking along the edge of the runway to stretch his legs. That’s when he noticed his regimental commander, Colonel Tae Kuk Sung, waving his arms wildly and screaming at the pilots to take cover. No also saw two VIPs, senior officers, walking together on the tarmac. One was a Soviet air force general, the top adviser to the North Korean air force. The second was the North Korean air force commander, General Wang Yong.

  When General Wang heard the colonel shouting, he looked up at the sky.

  “Look out!” he hollered in Russian.

  No turned his head toward the northern end of the runway. Two planes were coming in fast, dragging contrails of dark smoke. No thought at first that they were Soviet MiGs hit in dogfights and approaching for emergency landing. But they did not slow down. Then he saw red tracers and heard machine-gun fire. He dove to the ground, pressing his face in the dirt as bullets kicked up dust on the runway and punched two holes in the MiG he had just gotten out of.

  Not far away, General Wang and the Russian general had thrown themselves into the dirt, while the panicked airfield ground crew ran around in circles.

  The raid’s toll, as measured by destroyed aircraft, was not nearly as impressive as Captain Chandler later reported, an exaggerated tally that would find its way into the official air force history of the Korean War. One MiG, not four, was destroyed. Its fuel tank was hit, setting it ablaze. The airfield did not have a fire truck, and the burning MiG melted down to a few bits of blackened metal. It had been unoccupied, and no one near it was hurt.

  Three other MiGs were slightly damaged. In one of them, a .50-caliber shell grazed a pilot sitting in the cockpit; it scratched the chin strap of his flight helmet. The pilot sitting in the cockpit of the MiG that No had occupied was also unhurt.

  But the pilot in the third MiG—Chung Young Tae, No’s friend—was not so lucky. A bullet cut through his neck. Before he could be removed from the cockpit, he was dead.

  That strafing was just the beginning. More robust American efforts to wreck Uiju airfield and blow up its MiGs would soon begin. Twelve B-29s dropped eight
y tons of explosive on the runway within two weeks, leaving 454 craters on the runway and making it unusable. Some of the craters were twenty feet wide. Trying to destroy hidden MiGs, night-flying bombers blanketed the Uiju area with five-hundred-pound bombs that exploded before they hit the ground, spraying shrapnel in all directions.

  No and the other North Korean pilots could not take off at night to fight the Americans. (Only one North Korean air squadron was trained for night flight during the war, but it never entered combat.) Instead, the pilots stayed on the ground and hoped that shrapnel would not find the farmhouses where they struggled to sleep. No went to bed in his clothes, listening for the drone of B-29s, ready to run if he sensed that a bomb was heading his way.

  American bombing tested the sanity of North Korean jet mechanics. Unlike the pilots, they slept in tents next to the airfield. A chief mechanic who befriended No was in his bunk beside the runway when he felt a dull, ground-shaking thud in the middle of the night. The next morning he looked out and saw a one-thousand-pound bomb—a dud—sticking out of the earth.

  The Great Leader’s decision to park MiGs at Uiju airfield lasted five weeks. When it was reversed on December 15, Chinese army engineers were called in to repair the cratered runway so the MiGs could take off. After two days, it was ragged but serviceable. No and the other pilots happily flew away and resumed operations in Manchuria.

  CHAPTER 8

  An International Sporting Event

  I

  Back in Manchuria, No could sleep at night without fear. He was back with the honchos, dining opulently at tables covered with white linen and indulging his fondness for steaming-hot borscht, which eased the winter chill. The convivial Russian pilots persuaded him to apply thick layers of butter to his black bread. Supposedly, it eased the pain of g-forces during dogfights. For the hell of it, No would top off the butter with a thick smear of caviar and wash it down with vodka, courtesy of his comrades, whose drinking had increased over eight harrowing months in MiG Alley. No also began smoking Great Production cigarettes, a supposedly premium Chinese brand that was bitter and often rotten. Still, they calmed his nerves.