Were jets the wave of air power's future? In principle, it seemed so—until the shooting started over Korea. On the one hand, jet fighters, by now entering a second design generation represented by the swept-wing MiG-15s and F-86 Sabres, dominated the peninsula's skies whenever they were present. But at the same time, piston-engined veterans of World War II like the Mustang, the F4U Corsair, the B-26 light bomber, and the B-29 Superfortress played vital roles in the air campaign from the Pusan Perimeter to the armistice at Panmunjom. Nor were these old warhorses kept in service merely for want of more modern alternatives. The U.S. Navy's propeller-driven AD Skyraider saw its first combat in Korea. Fifteen years later, it was to play a major role in Vietnam.
The air war was complicated by politics as well as technology. For the first time in their respective histories, all four of the U.S. armed services were directly and primarily involved in the same combat zone. World War II's scope had been sufficiently broad that the U.S. Army, Army Air Forces, Navy, and Marine Corps were usually able to find enough for their aircraft to do without getting in one another's way. In Korea, doctrines and policies on the use of airpower clashed directly. At stake were the military budgets and the nature of national strategies for years, if not decades, to come.
The North Korean invasion began on June 25, 1950. U.S. transport aircraft began evacuating Americans from Seoul the next day. As South Korean defenses crumbled, U.S. ground troops were committed as well, with the first units landing on July 1. Even before their arrival, U.S. combat planes were executing the three types of missions that would define the air war: air superiority, close air support, and interdiction.
Any question of the immediate priority of driving the North Koreans from the sky was settled on June 29, when General Douglas MacArthur flew to Suwon to observe the fighting personally. Almost as if planned, four North Korean fighters tried to attack the airfield. All were shot down by Mustangs, but five-star generals seldom appreciate being used as targets. MacArthur promptly fixed control of the air as a primary campaign objective. Whether flying jets or propeller-driven planes, U.S. pilots, often seasoned in the great air battles of World War II, proved exponentially superior to their enemies. In a matter of days, the Americans virtually owned the skies over the Korean peninsula.
How could that advantage be put to best use? Since its emergence from the army's shadow beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. Air Force—which became an independent branch of the armed services in 1947—had been committed to the concept of airpower as an autonomous entity. During World War II, its energies had been focused on striking directly at an enemy's economic and psychological centers. Now Major General Emmett O'Donnell, commanding Far East Air Forces Bomber Command, recommended that North Korea be told “to stop the aggression and get back over the thirty-eighth parallel or they had better have their wives and children and bedrolls to go down with them, because there is not going to be anything left up in Korea to return to.”
O'Donnell's apocalyptic rhetoric found little favor with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who feared both having to rebuild what the Superfortresses had demolished and acquiring a reputation as aerial terrorists. President Harry Truman, adamant that fighting be confined to the Korean peninsula, was even more reluctant to risk provoking the Soviet Union and Communist China with an allout bomber offensive.
The airmen had more immediate problems to consider. Far from intimidating the North Koreans, American ground troops had proved unable to check a retreat that seemed ready to become a disaster. As U.S. and South Korean troops pulled back in increasing disorder, everything with wings was thrown in to strike everything wearing a red star and moving south. The North Korean army was not a self-sustaining light-infantry force; it was heavily motorized, depending on trucks for logistical support. Crowded onto South Korea's limited road network, North Korean vehicles were destroyed by the thousands during the war's first months. North Korean troops went hungry; North Korean gas tanks, unfilled; North Korean weapons, empty.
Interdiction of the battlefield was complemented by an increasing emphasis on direct air support of ground troops. Even in World War II, this had not been a high institutional priority for an air force whose doctrines and commanders alike consistently warned against the risks of tying aircraft too closely to ground operations. But with the North Korean Air Force destroyed and strategic bombardment limited for reasons of national policy, MacArthur's command had a surplus of planes available to strike ground targets.
But were they the right planes? The principal aircraft initially committed to ground-support missions, the F-80 jet, had such high fuel consumption that its loiter time over Korea was restricted to a half hour. It was so fragile that it could not be deployed to primitive Korean forward bases. In the summer of 1950, a half-dozen F-80 squadrons turned in their jets for F-51s. The Mustang's liquidcooled engine, however, made it less than an ideal fighter-bomber: Even a small-caliber bullet could inflict fatal damage. Mustang squadrons suffered over twice the losses of jet formations on similar missions. An air force firmly committed in principle to becoming all-jet responded by equipping F-80s with wing tanks, improving their strike capabilities, and insisting they were better overall fighter-bombers than their piston-engined counterparts.
An alternative position emerged when the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade began arriving at Pusan in August. From Tarawa through the Marianas to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the experience of World War II had suggested to the Marine Corps that aircraft flown by marines and controlled by marines could save marine lives by promptly and precisely striking small targets. The brigade sent to Korea in the summer of 1950 included an organic air group with no jets but three squadrons of Corsairs, two of them fighter-bombers.
The Corsair had seen its first action over Guadalcanal in 1943, and it subsequently established a formidable reputation as a ground-support aircraft. The latest versions used in Korea, the F4U-5 and AG-1, were armed with four 20mm cannon, carried over five thousand pounds of bombs and rockets, and could absorb extremely high levels of damage. Their marine pilots delivered the mail quickly, spectacularly, and with what seemed like millimetric accuracy. Over half their strikes were within a half mile of the front lines. This was in sharp contrast to an air force whose difficulties with air–ground coordination resulted in numerous cases of friendly fire, the most notable being the napalming of a British battalion on September 23, 1950.
Air support for MacArthur's end-run amphibious landing at Inchon was a marine-and-navy show—and a showcase. The newly organized 1st Marine Division and its army stablemate, the 7th Division, enjoyed air power à la carte. Ground-control parties could summon almost at will Corsairs and Skyraiders already in orbit with full combat loads. Army general Edward Almond, in operational command of the Inchon campaign, embraced marine concepts of close support with the zeal of a convert, insisting at every opportunity to the correspondents who flocked to his headquarters that the marines and navy were light-years ahead of an air force that seemed perfectly willing to trade riflemen's lives for doctrinal purity and technical sophistication.
The air force responded by dispatching a study group to Japan. The army sent its own independent investigator, Brigadier General Gerald Higgins. Both sets of reports, based on inquiries conducted in November and December 1950, warned against tunnel vision. Close air support was making headlines in good part because of the initial success of the air-superiority campaign conducted earlier. Even more to the point, the piston-engined planes being praised so highly could not be expected to survive, much less perform, against modern aircraft and air defenses.
These conclusions reflected a major change in the nature of the air war. Despite the restrictions imposed from Washington, U.S. B-29s supported by carrier aircraft had hammered such industrial plants as North Korea possessed to the point that one bored Superfortress crew reported chasing a soldier on a motorcycle and dropping bombs on him until one finally hit. As United Nations ground troops advanced into, then across, North Korea, the bombers rang
ed closer and closer to the Yalu River border with Communist China, eventually striking not only targets on the Korean side of the riverbank but international bridges across the Yalu as well. China's diplomatic warnings that it would intervene unless the invasion ceased were supported by a growing concentration of aircraft across the Yalu. Mustangs and F-80s easily countered initial sorties by piston-engined YAK-9s. Then, on November 1, 1950, a forward air control plane and its F-51 escort were attacked by—but managed to es-cape—six jets that looked and performed like nothing ever seen over Korea. They were MiG-15s, the latest Soviet frontline fighter.
Six days later, the MiGs struck again, this time at a B-29 formation and its escort of F-80s. In history's first all-jet air battle, first honors went to Lieutenant Russell Brown, who shot down the first Communist jet to be lost over Korea. The kill reflected pilot skill and a bit of luck rather than any inherent capacities of the F-80. The U.S. jets were clearly outclassed by the MiG, a swept-wing design with a top speed of over 600 miles an hour, a ceiling of 50,000 feet, and an armament of three cannon heavy enough to shred any U.S. aircraft. It owed much of its airframe design to German technology. Its engine was based on British turbojets purchased in 1946—a decision by the newly elected Labour government that allegedly led Joseph Stalin to exclaim, “What fool will sell us his secret?” But the plane itself was archetypically Soviet: compact, simple, and so reliable that it acquired the nickname “aircraft-soldier” from its pilots. As Chinese troops swept across the Yalu in late November and sliced through overextended and overconfident U.N. ground forces, the MiG-15 seemed poised to reverse the course of the air war.
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 re
ceived 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.
The Cold War Page 16
