Korean Combat (Yeoman Series)

by Robert Jackson

  Timms began to relax a little. Every mile they put between the dangerous skies over the Yalu and themselves was a mile closer to safety; the MiGs, he knew, did not venture far south of the river. Still, it was comforting to have the Shooting Stars alongside. He knew that the fighter pilots must be taking something of a risk by staying back to escort the damaged bombers, for they must be running low on fuel by this time.

  The flight to Kimpo took forty agonizing minutes, the B-29 losing height steadily all the way. Once the airfield was in sight the two F-80s, on the instructions of the controller, sped ahead to land first in case the crippled bomber came to grief and crash-landed, blocking the runway.

  There was no time for niceties. With just enough height left to scrape in over the airfield boundary, Timms ordered his crew to take up their crash stations and lowered the B-29’s undercarriage. The flaps were out of action, so this was going to be a flat, tricky approach, requiring plenty of power from the two good engines.

  On the ground, the crews of the fire tenders and ambulances held their breath as the big bomber came skidding in over the boundary, the pilot fighting hard to retain control. There was an audible clatter as the B-29’s main undercarriage slammed down on the pierced steel planking that formed the runway surface, and puffs of smoke drifted behind the bomber as the friction wiped rubber from its wheels.

  The B-29 sped on down the runway, scarcely losing momentum, or so it seemed. Then, very slowly, the nosewheel came down to make contact with the ground and the aircraft began to slow down, the racing fire tenders and ambulances gradually overtaking it. The B-29 stopped just short of the far end of the runway and Timms, juggling with the throttles of the two good engines and using the steerable nosewheel, turned the bomber on to an area that normally served as a readiness platform for jet fighters. The runway was now clear for the second damaged B-29.

  But the second bomber never arrived. Later, Timms learned that its pilot had made a belly-landing in a field ten miles to the north. Apart from some cuts and bruises, the crew were safe.

  Timms’ crew clambered wearily down from their B-29. None was hurt, and the ambulance men looked rather disappointed, the colonel thought wryly, that their services would not be needed. The bomber crew stood off to one side, shivering in the cold, and waited for the truck that would take them to the airfield buildings, while the crash crews sprayed foam on the damaged engines and wing, just to be on the safe side.

  Fifteen minutes later, the twelve men of Timms’ crew were gratefully sipping steaming hot coffee in a large, communal crew room on the other side of the airfield. The room was heated by two big iron stoves which coughed out puffs of smoke from time to time, adding to the tobacco haze that hung in grey folds under the roof. Outside, invisible through windows made opaque by a layer of ice on their panes, jet engines screamed almost continually as aircraft took off and landed, taking the war to North Korea or returning from their sorties, their ammunition expended.

  The door opened, admitting a brief blast of icy air, and two men came into the room, stamping snow off their flying-boots. Timms, who had been studying some silhouettes of enemy aircraft pinned to the wall, regarded the newcomers with mild curiosity as they threaded their way among the tables and chairs and entered an adjoining room, where rows of cubicles had been set up to provide lockers for flying clothing and other paraphernalia.

  A few minutes later they re-emerged, having shed their outer garments, and obtained two mugs of coffee from the wizened Korean who stood attentatively behind a small semi-circular bar that had been built into one corner of the room. Timms saw that one of the men was a colonel, like himself; a lanky individual with ginger hair cut short, whose features seemed to be stamped with a perpetual air of mild amusement. His companion, who stood half a head shorter, wore the uniform of a Royal Air Force officer, with three light blue rank bars on the epaulettes of his battledress. The medal ribbons he wore under his pilot’s wings were strange to Timms, but there were a considerable number of them, and the B-29 pilot, who knew that the British did not give away medals lightly, could not fail to be impressed.

  Timms set down his mug on one of the tables, stepped over the outstretched legs of his bombardier, who had dozed off in the warmth, and made for the two men at the bar, his hand outstretched.

  ‘Name’s Timms,’ he volunteered. ‘I guess you guys must be F-80 jockeys?’

  The tall colonel took Timms’ hand and nodded, grinning. When he spoke, it was with an unmistakable Texas drawl.

  ‘You got it in one, colonel. Name’s Jim Callender, 726 Wing. This foreign gentleman here’s Wing Commander George Yeoman, RAF. We’re old buddies; I taught him all he knows.’

  Yeoman shook Timms by the hand and laughed. ‘At least they didn’t have to pull me out of retirement to fight a war, you bloody colonial,’ he joked. Then he looked at the B-29 pilot and said in a more serious tone:

  ‘You had a pretty rough ride out there, colonel. Are your chaps all okay?’

  Timms nodded. ‘They’re fine-thanks to you guys. What happened out there today was bloody murder,’ he said savagely. ‘B-29s don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against those MiGs.’

  Callender agreed with him. ‘It would be a different story,’ he said, ‘if Fifth Air Force would release us to hit ’em on their airfields. But we aren’t allowed to, and there it stays. And when it comes to mixing it in a dogfight, the MiG has the edge over an F-80 every time. Still, they don’t always get away with it, do they, George? Old George here chewed the balls right off one this morning.’

  Timms raised an eyebrow. ‘You got a MiG? Say, that’s real good going!’

  Yeoman pulled a battered pipe from his pocket and fiddled with it, looking embarrassed.

  ‘It was a bit of a fluke, really,’ he said. ‘I just managed to get on his tail and I let him have it in the right place, that’s all.’

  ‘Hell, listen to this guy’s modesty,’ roared Callender, who suffered from no such attribute. ‘The MiG he “just happened” to shoot down is the thirty-third enemy airplane he’s knocked out since 1940, if my arithmetic is right.’ Ignoring Yeoman’s muttered ‘Oh, do shut up, Jim,’ the tall Texan went on: ‘That’s how long ol’ George and I have been cruising around the skies. Nineteen-forty; Jesus H. Christ, that was a year to remember.’

  Mercifully for Yeoman, Callender’s rhetoric was interrupted by the arrival of a corporal, who told the American that he was wanted on the telephone. Timms’ appetite, however, had been thoroughly whetted, and he was in no mood to let Yeoman off the hook.

  ‘You and the colonel have known one another for a long time, you say?’

  Yeoman nodded, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘That’s right. We flew Hurricanes together in the Battle of France, and then Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.’

  ‘But that was before the United States was in the war.’

  ‘Right again,’ Yeoman told him. ‘You see, Jim Callender’s mother was English; he saw which way the wind was blowing and volunteered for the RAF in 1938, just after Munich. Joined up in Canada. A lot of other Americans did the same, a year or so later. He’s right about one thing: he did teach me a lot. I was as green as grass when we first met. That was flat on our faces in a slit trench on an airfield in France, the day the German blitzkrieg started.’

  Timms eyed Yeoman’s medal ribbons. They included the Distinguished Service Order, the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Bars, the French Croix de Guerre and the Polish Virtuti Militari, that country’s highest decoration for gallantry.

  ‘I guess you learned pretty quickly,’ the American said. The RAF officer gave a little smile, and said nothing. But it was true; he had learned quickly, for in that summer those who had not learned quickly had died, quickly and brutally, in the flaming wreckage of their aircraft. He had earned his decorations the hard way, too, in five years of almost ceaseless combat, and the second Bar to his DFC had been awarded for service in Malaya in 1948. He looked older than his years; h
e was three months away from his thirty-first birthday.

  ‘I didn’t know any RAF guys were mixed up in this little fracas,’ Timms continued, changing the subject abruptly when he realized that Yeoman did not wish to pursue the subject of his career. The RAF officer lit his pipe before answering.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘a squadron of RAF Sunderland flying-boats has been operating out of Hong Kong, patrolling the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, since last July. That’s the main RAF commitment. Apart from that, a Royal Navy task force centred on the aircraft carrier HMS Theseus has been hitting North Korean targets since October. And don’t forget the other British Commonwealth air units; two Australian squadrons and one South African, all of them flying Mustangs, have been in action right from the start, too, and RAF chaps have been attached to them. I’m actually with one of the Australian units; I came up here to get in some time on F-80s.’

  Timms felt mildly admonished, and changed the subject once again. He passed a hand wearily over his eyes.

  ‘Sure is a different kind of war,’ he murmured. ‘My squadron’s been training to drop atomic weapons for the past three years, and now we suddenly find ourselves loaded up with 500-pounders and assigned to hit targets we’ve never heard of. Hell, I lost two fine crews today.’ He looked suddenly old and haggard, and Yeoman sympathized with him.

  Jim Callender returned from the telephone to inform Timms that a meal had been arranged for the B-29 crew. Later, a C-47 transport aircraft would fly them to Ashiya Air Base, in Japan, from where they would return to Okinawa. Callender also said that helicopters were bringing in the crew of the B-29 that had crash-landed to the north.

  The crew room was beginning to fill up, mostly with F-80 pilots returning from escort missions or from strikes against enemy targets. Callender and Yeoman learned to their relief that all the F-80s out that morning had got back, including the one damaged in combat with the MiGs over Sinuiju. The pilots, having made their reports to the Intelligence Section, were now eager to relax for a while over coffee and a sandwich. They might have to fly again that afternoon.

  As things turned out, the weather brought them respite. A blizzard came sweeping down from the north, laying a fresh carpet of snow over the roads and mountain passes. Ground crews hurried to get the F-80s into the shelter of the temporary hangars that had been set up at Kimpo, for the sub-zero temperatures the blizzard brought with it had been known to produce dangerous cracks in the metal of wings and fuselages. On the readiness platform at the far end of the runway, Timms’ B-29, still waiting to be towed in for repair, became a white ghost, its outline softened by the snow, until it was lost altogether behind the white curtain.

  But the weather had been kind to the United Nations for six days, and in that time the fighter-bombers had wrought fearful havoc on the enemy. Between New Year’s Day and 6 January, UN pilots had flown two and a half thousand sorties and killed as many as fifteen thousand communist troops. The onslaught had continued after dark, too, with night attacks carried out by the B-26 light bombers of the USAF’s 3rd Bombardment Wing assisted by C-47s, specially adapted to drop flares and nicknamed ‘Lightning Bugs’. Igniting at 5,500 feet, these flares turned night into day for five minutes, giving the B-26s ample time to locate and hit their targets with devastating effect before the Communists could scatter for cover.

  It was not enough. On 5 January, masses of Chinese infantry began to cross the ice-covered Han River, north of Seoul, and the evacuation of the South Korean Capital began.

  Forty-eight hours later, the Shooting Stars of the 726th Fighter Intercepter Wing, their airfield threatened by the advancing Chinese, took off from Kimpo and headed for Itazuke in Japan. Behind them, engineers set fire to everything that would burn, including Colonel Timms’ battered B-29.

  And still the Chinese advance continued, the troops and armour swarming down the narrow roads into South Korea, driving the battle-weary troops of the US Eighth Army before them. With the weather preventing air attacks, it was no longer a question of holding the North Koreans and their Chinese ‘volunteer’ allies on a firm line south of Seoul. The question now was whether the United Nations forces in Korea could be saved from complete annihilation.

  Chapter Two

  AT THE END OF JANUARY 1951, THE SOUTH KOREAN TOWN OF Pusan was not a pleasant place to be. Every day streams of refugees arrived from the north, bringing fresh tales of horror; there were an estimated two million on the march, fleeing from the Chinese terror, and countless numbers of men, women and children perished by the roadsides, the snow and ice shrouding their pathetic bodies.

  Those who reached the temporary safety of Pusan lived in squalor, in makeshift shelters fashioned from bits of packing cases and cardboard cartons that had contained rations for the UN forces. Some of the refugees, with typical Asiatic enterprise, set up their own small businesses in the overcrowded camps, selling cigarettes and chocolate obtained from God knew where. They also sold their wives and daughters, and with the troops of nineteen different nations crowding into Pusan there was no shortage of buyers, despite all the warnings and penalties such risky liaisons involved.

  The children were the worst. Half naked for the most part, many of them orphans, many of them lacking arms or legs or displaying other fearful wounds, they wandered through the nightmare camps in temperatures that often fell to fifteen degrees below freezing, begging for food. Many were used by professional racketeers, who saw the mites as a passport to the warm hearts and generosity of the European and American soldiers.

  The freezing sub-zero temperatures had one beneficial effect: there was no epidemic among the refugees in Pusan. But still they came, in a human river of horror and misery. One day in January, a line of freight cars arrived in Pusan’s railway yards, crammed with refugees; the roofs of the cars were covered by what seemed to be dozens of lumpy sacks, their outlines frosted over. The ‘sacks’ were people who had frozen to death, their bodies welded into place by ice.

  Of one family of six, a woman and her baby survived, both of them unconscious. When she regained her senses and found what had happened, she went mad. Before anyone could stop her, she climbed the steps to a nearby water tank, smashed the ice and held her child under the surface until the spark of life went from it.

  Such was Pusan, in that terrible winter of 1951.

  Pusan’s neighbouring airfield was code-named K-9, and some unknown wit, playing on words, had nicknamed it Dogsville. Despite determined efforts by senior American officers to rename it Unityville, which they felt was more in keeping with its international flavour, the previous nickname stuck. As far as most of the personnel who were forced to live there were concerned, the name Dogsville was usually preceded by one of several unkind adjectives.

  Built during the war by the Japanese, the airfield lay about nine miles east of Pusan city on the shore of the Japan Sea. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, swarms of American engineers had descended on the place and, after clearing away the debris left by the Japanese five years earlier, had turned it into an airfield once more, laying a pierced-steel plank surface and erecting long wooden huts with concrete floors for the comfort, if that was the right word to use, of the personnel. The huts were warmed by petrol stoves which, in the winter, burned twenty-four hours a day.

  In late January 1951, Pusan was the base for four squadrons-two Australian and two American-of piston-engined F-51D Mustang fighter-bombers. The latter were the 39th and 40th Fighter Intercepter Squadrons, while the Australian contingent comprised Nos 77 and 493 Squadrons.

  Both the Australian squadrons had been based at Iwakuni, Japan, as part of the British Commonwealth Air Component which had flown in to help occupy the Japanese home islands at the end of the Second World War. Both had quickly been assigned the US Far East Air Forces following the invasion of North Korea, and deployed to Korean bases with their American colleagues.

  The officer who commanded the RAAF contingent at Pusan, Wing Commander William McPh
erson Craddock, was an immensely popular man who, at some stage in his career, had lost his left arm. Consequently he no longer flew as a pilot, but at every opportunity he went along as an observer in one of the little Piper Cubs-nicknamed ‘Mosquitos’ which were used by both the Americans and the Commonwealth forces to direct air strikes and artillery fire on to enemy positions. It was dangerous and highly skilled work, for the little aircraft had to buzz up and down in the vicinity of the front line, pinpointing the location of the enemy and making use of whatever cover was available to escape ground fire.

  Craddock believed, with some justification, that one of the secrets of being a good commander was to keep every man under him informed about what was going on, so far as the conditions of secrecy permitted. That was why, on this morning of 1 February — a morning that had witnessed a carpet of fog creep in quite unexpectedly from the sea, bringing a total halt to flying operations-he had decided to assemble his pilots in the base’s briefing room in order to bring them up to date with the current situation. There were thirty or so pilots in the room, many of them displaying medal ribbons that denoted active service in some theatre of war. They were listening with varying degrees of attention to what the one-armed Craddock was telling them. The news was certainly more optimistic than it had been hitherto.

  The Communists, Craddock said, had suffered an estimated 38,000 casualties, about half of them caused by air attack. Not even China’s huge reserves of manpower could continue to sustain losses of this magnitude, and in several sectors it was reported that the Reds were pulling back to rest and regroup.

  What was letting the enemy down all along the line was a complete lack of air support. If the Chinese had decided to commit their air force to all-out ground attack they could undoubtedly have kept up their offensive, but they had clearly been reluctant to take this step. After they attacked Colonel Timms’ B-29 formation over Sinuiju on 6 January, MiG-15s had appeared only once more, a week later, to attack a lone RB-29 reconnaissance aircraft, and even then the enemy pilots broke off the attack after only a minute or so, leaving the RB-29 to escape unharmed. Apart from an abortive attack on a B-26 by a North Korean Yak-9 fighter on 16 January, the only other enemy air activity had taken the form of what the Americans called ‘Charlie raids’, in which ancient PO-2 biplanes droned over the UN positions at night and dropped anti-personnel bombs. The psychological effect of these attacks was far greater than the damage they actually caused.