Korean Combat (Yeoman Series)

by Robert Jackson

  The major indicated a tray on the bedside locker. There was a glass on it, full of some pinkish liquid, and a solitary pill.

  ‘Take those,’ he instructed. ‘You’ll feel even worse for a while, but it will soon pass. You can get up this afternoon.’

  He half-turned to leave, then paused and looked at Yeoman seriously.

  ‘You might as well know it now,’ he said, ‘but your flying days are over-in Korea, at least. You’ve had enough; I know the signs. We’ll arrange to fly you back to Iwakuni as soon as possible, and then I guess it’s home for you.’ He smiled. ‘With any luck you’ll be back in England for Christmas. Wish I was going home, too.’

  Yeoman felt no emotion; it was, after all, the kind of news he had been expecting for some time. He doubted, though, whether he would be back home for Christmas, which was only a fortnight away; the New Year might be a more realistic target. He would be able to catch one of the regular Transport Command flights via Singapore and the Middle East.

  That afternoon, still feeling shaky but glad now that he had been able to eat something, he sought out Dick Thornes and told the Australian that he would soon be leaving, subject to his movement order being sorted out.

  ‘I’ll be here for another week, I suppose, then that’s it,’ he said. ‘And I’m firmly grounded in the meantime. A pity, but there it is. Has much been happening while I’ve had my head down?’

  Thornes shook his head. ‘No, it’s been very quiet since the Yank fighter-bomber boys left, and we’ve only had one operation. No losses, thank God. Incidentally, we’re going to have some company. A Wing of F-86s is coming up here from Suwon; in fact they were supposed to arrive this morning, but there was some fog about, so they must have delayed the transfer. All the ground crews and equipment are here, though, over on the other side of the airfield.’

  ‘Which unit is it?’ Yeoman wanted to know. The other shrugged.

  ‘Couldn’t say. It’s fresh over from Japan, apparently, and operating F-86Es. Things might just get interesting around here, over the next few days. How are you planning to fill in your time?’

  Yeoman thought for a moment or two, then said: ‘Oh, I expect I’ll find things to do in Operations. Might even pop across and visit the helicopter rescue detachment. I know next to nothing about helicopters, and it’s time I learned. You never know, I might get a trip or two-as a passenger, of course.’

  Thornes looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘George,’ he said quietly, ‘why push your luck? Damn it, you’ve done more operational flying than the rest of us put together. Why not just take it easy, have a few beers, put your feet up and catch the first available Dakota back to Iwakuni?’

  ‘I’ll let things run their course,’ was all Yeoman would say. His friend shook his head in bewilderment. It was as if Yeoman did not want to go home at all. In a strange sense, this was partly true, for Yeoman knew that he would never again fire the guns of an aircraft and this thought brought with it a feeling of loss that was hard to describe or even to justify.

  Apart from a short spell as a junior reporter on a weekly paper in Yorkshire before the war, he had known no other life.

  Yeoman’s spirits rose a little later, however, with the arrival of the Sabre Wing from Suwon. The Australians turned out in force to watch as the fast, swept-wing jets-thirty-six of them-swept overhead in fours and then broke into line astern for the landing. The immediate impression was one of a well-drilled, efficient unit, and a few minutes later, as the American fighter leader climbed down from his cockpit, Yeoman knew why.

  The USAF wing commander was Jim Callender.

  He shook Yeoman’s hand warmly, and said: ‘Good to see you again, George. I tried to call you to tell you I was coming, but they said you were knocked out in hospital. You okay now?’

  Yeoman nodded. ‘Yes, but they won’t let me fly on ops any more. As a matter of fact, Jim, they’re sending me home.’

  The tall American’s face creased in a grin. ‘Hey, George, that’s good news. Sorry we won’t be able to fly together, though. It would have been like the old days. Seems a hell of a long time since we were riding MiG Alley in the old F-80s.’

  ‘Yes. A lot has happened, in less than a year.’ Yeoman laughed, although he did not feel much like mirth. ‘The only thing that hasn’t changed is the Panmunjom Talks.’

  They both laughed at that. The East-West Armistice Talks in the North Korean town of Panmunjom had been dragging on for months, and getting nowhere. They broke down with monotonous regularity, usually because the Communist delegates made the wildest objections to the most insignificant points on the agenda. To the men who were doing the fighting on behalf of the United Nations, Panmunjom was a huge joke.

  The Australians looked over the new Sabres with envy, and wished that they were similarly equipped. One or two of the pilots took comfort from the fact that the other land-based Commonwealth squadron in Korea, No. 2 (South African Air Force), was still flying Mustangs-but there were rumours that the South Africans might receive Sabres in the new year.

  Callender’s Wing plunged into operations almost immediately, flying their first sorties to MiG Alley the next day. By now, No. 77 Squadron had also been withdrawn from fighter sweeps and was assigned to ground-attack operations, with the occasional escort sortie as far as the Chongchon River, so Sabres and Meteors no longer flew together to the Yalu.

  Yeoman, during the next couple of days, alternated his time between Operations, where he was able to listen to the fragmentary, disjointed voices of the Sabre pilots as they engaged enemy jets in battle, and two other units that shared Kimpo: the 33rd Air Rescue Squadron, or rather a detachment of it, and No. 1700 Air Observation Flight, Royal Air Force.

  The latter, equipped with Auster light aircraft, was a recent arrival, and its basic task was to ‘spot’ for United Nations artillery. Although it was an RAF unit, the Flight was staffed entirely by Army personnel, and the pilots and observers sported an array of regimental insignia that was reminiscent, Yeoman thought, of how the Royal Flying Corps must have appeared in its early days.

  The flight commander was Captain Roy Welsh of the West Hertfordshire Regiment, and he seemed to have had more than his fair share of narrow squeaks. On one occasion, his Auster was turned completely upside down by a 37-mm shell burst, and escaped without so much as a hole in its fabric-but he was less lucky another time, when a ‘friendly’ American T-6, the kind the Americans used for their observation work, nearly brought him to grief.

  ‘I was walking across the end of the runway one day-we were based on an advanced strip right up front, then-when I saw this T-6 bearing down at me out of the murk, smoking like mad,’ he told Yeoman. ‘Apparently he had been hit and had just managed to stagger back over the lines, and our strip was the first bit of flat ground he saw. Well, since he was pointing right at me, I started running like hell in the other direction. I heard an almighty crunch — the T-6 had wiped off its undercart in a ditch-and risked a look over my shoulder, just in time to see it skidding along on its belly and overhauling me very rapidly indeed. I spotted a hollow in front of me and threw myself into it, right in the middle of the foulest, stinkingest patch of water in Korea. The T-6 bounced over my head, smacked down a few yards further on and burst into flames. The crew got out all right, though.’

  Yeoman pressed Welsh for details of the Flight’s operations.

  ‘It mainly involves visual reconnaissance and communications flying,’ the captain told him. ‘On the more routine trips, we often carry a passenger-either a senior officer who wants to see what’s going on, or a platoon commander who wants a bird’s-eye view of the terrain, or maybe a mortar platoon officer or NCO who’s supervising a shoot.’

  ‘D’you do much work behind the enemy lines?’ Yeoman wanted to know.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Welsh replied, ‘if circumstances demand it. For instance, we might be called upon to make a low-level search for members of a patrol who’ve gone missing, and we might need
to go behind the enemy positions for that. Actually, in the early days we used to go as much as five miles into enemy territory, but now they’ve got so much light flak that it’s a very risky venture, and we don’t serve any useful purpose by getting ourselves shot down.’

  He grinned suddenly. ‘They’ve been known to throw all sorts at us,’ he said. ‘Shooting at an Auster with a 37-mm is a bit like potting at a sparrow with a twelve-bore, but it can be very unpleasant, as I know personally.’

  Yeoman, who had flown Austers in Malaya, was interested to find out how they stood up to the rigours of the Korean climate.

  ‘The American Cessna L-19 is better,’ Welsh told him, ‘but then it’s a later design and it has a more powerful engine, a 220 hp Continental. The Auster’s not so bad in summer, but in the winter we have all sorts of problems getting the aircraft started and de-frosted.’ He smiled ruefully, and added:

  ‘There’s no such thing as pilot comfort, incidentally. In the winter, we put on as much clothing as we can, otherwise we’d freeze solid. Our sorties can be as long as three hours. So we sit there, muffled up to the eyes, with our circulation being slowly strangled and our extremities like blocks of ice. I’ve seen chaps have to be lifted from the aircraft after a long sortie in winter.’

  Yeoman was beginning to realize that the winter discomforts of the Australian and American fighter pilots were insignificant, compared to those which the army co-operation crews accepted cheerfully as their lot.

  Yeoman learned that on counter-bombardment sorties-spotting for the artillery-the Auster pilots flew solo, carrying parachutes. The cockpits were armour-plated, to give some protection from shell splinters. Although most sorties were flown above five thousand feet, out of range of small-arms fire, 20-mm and 37-mm flak was a perpetual nuisance, and Welsh told the RAF officer that the Communists had a lot of it in their forward areas.

  In a normal day the Austers flew up to seven sorties, three or four of which were usually counter-bombardment. Welsh explained that the big ‘Long Tom’ guns of the Americans were used against enemy artillery emplacements and bunkers, while the lighter 25-pounders of the Commonwealth Division were employed against troops and supply areas closer to the front line. Some sorties were flown at dusk, so that the spotter pilots could observe the flashes from the enemy’s guns and direct counter-fire on to them.

  ‘You’ve got to be a bit careful not to get in the path of your own shells,’ Welsh said, ‘especially the Long Toms. I knew an American pilot who had his L-19 smashed to bits by the shock wave from a salvo of Long Tom shells. He just managed to bale out in time.’

  Yeoman discovered that the Auster Flight had adopted three South Korean boys, all of them orphans, who had been found wandering and starving near one of the forward airstrips close to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. They had been kitted out with bits and pieces of British uniforms and, well-fed now, accompanied the Flight on its travels, fetching and carrying and generally making themselves useful. Yeoman wondered what would happen to such youngsters when the war ended-if it ever did end.

  Later, on Welsh’s invitation, Yeoman flew as a passenger in the captain’s Auster on a routine reconnaissance sortie. He was not, he told himself, contravening orders; they had mentioned nothing about passenger flying, and in any case the Auster would not be penetrating into enemy territory.

  From five thousand feet over the front line the enemy positions were clearly visible as lighter mounds and slashes against the dark earth, surrounded by the shell craters of previous bombardments. Yeoman, muffled in thick protective clothing and seated behind the pilot, had borrowed a pair of binoculars and was scanning the enemy-held terrain in the hope of seeing some movement.

  ‘If you spot anything,’ Welsh had told him, ‘let me know right away, and I’ll show you how fast we can get the guns on to it.’

  They did not have to look very hard. After only a few minutes on patrol, Welsh suddenly pushed over the control column, sharply swinging the little aircraft away from enemy territory and then just as sharply turning back again.

  A hundred yards away, four big black puffs of smoke hung in the air, like balls of soot.

  Welsh was busy on the radio; there was no intercom, so Yeoman could not hear what he was saying. A moment later, however, the pilot half-turned his head, and Yeoman caught his shouted words, barely audible above the noise of the engine.

  ‘See it?’ Welsh was pointing with his left hand, indicating something his passenger could not make out, below the aircraft and on the port side.

  ‘No, what?’ Yeoman yelled back, mystified. He could see only the smoke of the 37-mm bursts, drifting well astern of the Auster now.

  ‘Watch!’ the pilot shouted, still with his gaze fixed on a spot in the hills to their left.

  What happened next was so sudden that Yeoman started involuntarily. On one of the brown hillsides below a series of wicked red flashes appeared, seeming to criss-cross over a particular spot. Seconds later there was a bigger explosion, and a tall geyser of smoke burst upwards.

  Welsh spoke briefly into his microphone and then turned to Yeoman again, raising a thumb.

  ‘Twenty-five pounders,’ he bawled, ‘right on target, That’s what I call flak suppression.’

  Later, however, he confided to Yeoman that the enemy guns could only be classed as neutralized, not destroyed; nothing more could be done that day, as it was growing dark by the time the Auster landed, but the following morning the Americans would bring their heavy guns to bear on the spot.

  As they walked away from the Auster, Welsh looked up at the sky and said:

  ‘It’ll snow soon, I think. That makes our job easier, because we can spot vehicle tracks and so on. I say, would you care to come for another ride before you leave? We’ll be fairly busy during the next few days, I expect.’

  Yeoman promised that he would. It was a promise that was to have unforeseen consequences.

  Chapter Ten

  GENERAL KRYLENKO STOOD ON A SMALL HILL OVERLOOKING A Chinese Air Force bombing range fifty miles inland from the Yalu, looking at the eastern sky through powerful binoculars. His aide, Andrei Semyenov, and a small group of Russian officers stood a little way to the rear, gazing in the same direction.

  ‘Here they come.’

  Krylenko could make out a dozen black dots, approaching at low level over the hills to the east. In seconds, they had resolved themselves into the silhouettes of twin-engined Ilyushin-28 jet bombers, flying in four tight boxes of three aircraft.

  Krylenko’s binoculars followed the first three as they screamed past the watching officers. Lower down on the hillside, a Chinese film crew tracked the passage of the jets with their cameras; the film, much doctored and falsified, would be shown later for propaganda purposes.

  Clusters of small practice bombs fell from the bellies of the II-28s, curving down towards the wooden targets that had been set up on the dusty valley floor that served as the range. Puffs of dust, followed by a burst of orange marker smoke, showed the spot where they had impacted.

  Krylenko lowered his binoculars for a second or two, his mouth curving in disgust; all the bombs had fallen a considerable distance wide of the objective.

  The other flights of Ilyushins swept down on the valley in turn, the screech of their VK-1 turbojets echoing from the surrounding hills. One after the other, they unloaded their bombs; one after the other, they missed the target. Only the last two machines came anywhere near the wooden markers, and even then they failed to score hits within what Krylenko judged to be an acceptable limit.

  Andrei Semyenov fished a lace-edged handkerchief out of his tunic pocket and dabbed nervously at his nose-end, eyeing the back of his superior’s neck, which had turned bright red. This, Semyenov knew from bitter experience, was a sure sign that Krylenko was about to launch into one of his towering rages, and then everyone around him suffered.

  It was not, Semyenov thought, going to be a very pleasant afternoon.

  Krylenko suddenly exploded, wavi
ng his clenched fists in the air. For a moment, Semyenov thought the general was about to hurl his binoculars in the wake of the retreating bombers.

  ‘Useless, incompetent Chinese bastards!’ he roared, unmindful of the fact that two Chinese officers, both of them Russian-speakers, were standing a short distance away. On hearing the general’s expletive, they shuffled their feet in anger and embarrassment. One of them, who appeared to be the senior of the two, plucked up courage and approached Krylenko, his face a stony mask.

  ‘Comrade General,’ he began, ‘in the interests of friendly relations between our two great peoples, I must respectfully ask you to — ’

  He never had a chance to finish, for Krylenko rounded on him in fury.

  ‘Shut your mouth, Sung. Damn you, shut your mouth!’

  The Chinese recoiled, his face now murderous, and Semyenov made to step forward, fearing that the two men might come to blows. Enough damage had been done already. Suddenly, however, Krylenko’s anger appeared to subside. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over him.

  ‘Sung,’ he said, and his tone was icy, ‘Sung, let me remind you that for weeks now, my instructors have been striving to teach your Chinese bomber crews the rudiments of attacking a target with some hope of success. Not a moving target, mark you; oh, no, we would not wish to complicate matters to that extent. But a big, stationary target, such as an airfield.’

  He waved a hand towards the bombing range, across which the marker smoke still drifted. ‘So far, Sung, we appear to have failed. And why is this so? Let me tell you. It is because your crews are incompetent.’

  He turned away from the Chinese abruptly, as though the man no longer existed, and swung round to face Semyenov. The anger in his eyes was replaced by distaste, which was his habitual expression when addressing his aide.

  ‘Semyenov, I want a top-level conference arranged for four o’clock this afternoon. All senior air commanders of the rank of colonel or above to be present. See to it.’