Korean Combat (Yeoman Series)

by Robert Jackson

  The coastline drifted towards him. No fighters rose to meet him, no anti-aircraft shells reached up to tear him from the sky.

  Ahead, close to a road junction, there was what appeared to be a clear patch of ground. Trying to judge the wind direction, he lowered the semi-retractable undercarriage and brought the trainer curving down, fishtailing a little to lose excess speed as he passed low over one of the roads. Out of the corner of his eye he saw some drab-Coloured vehicles racing towards him, but there was no time to worry about that now.

  The Yak’s undercarriage hit the rough ground with a jolt and the aircraft bounced several times before settling down for good. At the end of its landing run its wheels sank into a soggy patch and it nosed over quite gently, its tail high in the air.

  Trembling suddenly with reaction, Semyenov reached up and, with some difficulty because of the Yak’s nose-down angle, hauled back the long cockpit canopy. Freezing air flooded in, burning his lungs and making him gasp. He was suddenly conscious that, in his hasty departure, he had forgotten to put on adequate cold-weather clothing.

  He unfastened his seat and parachute harnesses, bracing himself against sliding forward in the cockpit by placing a hand on the instrument panel, and stood half upright in the tilting cockpit, grasping the canopy rail on either side.

  Two vehicles had stopped on a road a couple of hundred yards away, and a line of soldiers was advancing towards him. He swung his legs out of the cockpit and slid ignominiously off the wing on to the frozen ground.

  An automatic carbine stuttered and bullets crackled over his head, unpleasantly close. A second burst of fire churned up clods of earth close to the Yak’s buckled wingtip. In the distance, he heard shouts of command.

  He pulled off his flying helmet and threw it on the ground. Then, very slowly, he walked round the wing of the trainer into the view of the approaching soldiers, ready to hurl himself into cover if they opened fire on him. He stretched his hands high above his head in the universal gesture.

  Several soldiers approached him, carbines levelled, looking in astonishment at his blond hair and Caucasion features. Semyenov noted with relief that they were not South Koreans. A man with two white bars on his helmet, who seemed to be an officer, addressed him in a strange language.

  Semyenov spoke no English, but he had memorized five words, repeating them to himself over and over again. He spoke them now.

  ‘I wish for political asylum,’ he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  LIEUTENANT GUY P. LORING HAD NOT EXPECTED TO BE SENT INTO action so soon.

  The squadron of which he was a member had arrived in Japan only days earlier, and he had expected that it would be at least a month before it would be assigned to operations. Even then, the aircraft it flew — Lockheed F-94 Starfires-were so new and secret that he had not anticipated that they would be sent over enemy territory. The Starfire was a big, powerful jet night-fighter, armed with six .5-inch machine-guns and crammed with the very latest airborne radar.

  Looking after the complex radar and interpreting the information it gathered was the job of Loring’s fellow lieutenant and friend John T. Mayes, Jr, who sat behind him in the long cockpit, with his head down and his eyes fixed on his array of dancing cathode ray tubes.

  Like Loring, Mayes was astonished to be flying a night sortie over North Korea. The two had only just qualified as an operational crew on the F-94. But here they were, along with seven other Starfires patrolling in a long line at ten thousand feet in the icy darkness north of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, and their briefing had left them in no doubt that they might expect trouble.

  It was believed that, before dawn, large numbers of enemy aircraft would try and slip over the Parallel to make a series of hit-and-run raids on United Nations targets. A defecting Communist pilot, it was widely rumoured, had spilled the beans.

  They had been on patrol for less than half an hour when Mayes saw something on his radar display. He hesitated for a moment until he was quite sure, then said excitedly:

  ‘Contact at two o’clock, low, ten miles. No, two-three contacts, close together! Steer zero-four-five to intercept.’

  Loring swung the big fighter round on to the heading that his radar observer had given him, opening the throttles and sending a fresh surge of thrust through the F-94’s Pratt and Whitney turbojet. All the while, Mayes was feeding fresh information to him.

  ‘Target speed is one-eight-zero, heading one-five-zero, range now five miles, dead ahead. You going for a stern attack?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘Okay, keep your present heading. I’ll tell you when to turn.’

  Their teamwork was smooth and effortless, born of many hours’ practice. This was when the arduous training paid dividends.

  ‘Range is now two miles. Descend one thousand feet and make a rate one turn starboard, coming round on to one-five-zero.’

  ‘Roger.’

  Loring throttled back as he turned and lost height; the targets were flying at less than half the F-94’s speed, and he did not want to ruin his interception by overshooting.

  ‘You are astern now. One mile. Target speed still one-eight-zero. Three targets confirmed.’

  Loring peered ahead into the night. There was no moon, but a thin layer of cloud several thousand feet below reflected the winter starlight and the pilot picked out the three aircraft almost immediately. They were flying close together, almost wingtip to wingtip, and he identified them as Ilyushin Il-10s.

  Throttling back still further, he opened fire on the right-hand aircraft. Six streams of tracer disappeared into its black silhouette. There was a dull red glow, followed instantly by a series of bright explosions and streamers of white flame. The Ilyushin went into a dive, shedding blazing fragments.

  It was finished. Pulling as tight a turn as he dared, for at this low speed it would be all too easy for the heavy F-94 to flick into a spin, Loring went after the other two, which had broken away hard to the left as though bent on escaping to the north.

  With the Starfire’s ultra-modern fire control system, it was almost impossible to miss. Loring’s second burst caught the next Il-10 in the middle of its turn and tore a wing off it. The rest of the aircraft, tumbling wildly, fell towards the cloud layer below.

  The Starfire was right on top of the third Il-10, which was shooting back. From the rear of its long cockpit, tracers flickered past the American jet’s wingtip. The Il-10 was diving hell-bent for the cloud, and Loring knew that he was in danger of losing it. He pulled the throttle right back and kicked the rudder bar, yawing the Starfire violently and firing at the same time. The luminous pipper of his gunsight traversed the enemy aircraft from nose to tail.

  There was just time to see the flashes of his fifty-calibre bullets striking home before he was blinded by a terrific glare as the Ilyushin exploded. He felt a series of thuds as flying debris struck the jet fighter. Then the shock wave struck it and, already teetering on the edge of a stall, it went into a vicious spin, losing six thousand feet of altitude before the sweating pilot managed to recover. Black shapes loomed ahead of him as he levelled out and he crammed on power, taking the Starfire into a steep climb and narrowly missing a range of hills.

  In the rear cockpit, Mayes let out his breath in a sharp explosion. It took Loring a second or two, also, before he could speak. He asked the radar observer if he was okay.

  ‘I guess so, but for Christ’s sake don’t make a habit of that,’ Mayes answered shakily. Then a note of elation crept into his voice. ‘Hey, Guy, we got all three! Our first combat sortie, and we got three!’

  ‘Sure we did,’ Loring answered, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘Sounds as though the other guys are having some fun, too.’

  Over the radio, they could hear the excited voices of the other Starfire pilots, calling to one another and to ground control. All over the sky north of the Parallel, they were making contact with the enemy and destroying them. As Loring and Mayes climbed back above the cloud to resume their p
atrol they could see, in the distance, red sparks that were aircraft falling in flames.

  Between them, the deadly Starfires accounted for eighteen Ilyushins and PO-2s before dawn lightened the sky. Many more of the enemy, seeing the clouds glowing red with the burning remains of their comrades, turned back. Others inevitably got through, only to be shot down by the ground defences or, harassed by flak and night-fighters, to drop their bombs wildly before speeding northwards to safety.

  And the day was only just beginning.

  What happened after first light on that day in December 1951, was not a turkey shoot in the manner of that famous air battle over the Marianas in the summer of 1944, when American airmen destroyed four hundred Japanese aircraft in a single day; but in the fight that raged in the weird silence of the stratosphere north of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, the Sabre pilots destroyed five MiGs for every one of their own jets that went down. And, for the most part, the men they were fighting were highly-skilled Russians, not Chinese.

  As soon as the sun was up the MiGs came swarming over the Yalu. American pilots counted 130 of them, in two trains. At forty thousand feet they flew south across the Chongchon, one to the east and the other to the west, and the ice-cold December sky was thick with their contrails.

  The two MiG trains curved towards one another in a great pincer movement, aiming to rendezvous over the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, and it was then that the Sabres hit them. Sixty-odd American fighters, split into two groups, had been cruising below contrail height against the glow of the rising sun, their pilots watching the MiGs forge steadily towards them; now, as the enemy jets turned in to cross over each other near Pyongyang, the Americans climbed rapidly to the same altitude and hit the rearmost aircraft of each train. After one deadly firing pass, three MiGs fell burning from the right-hand train and two from the second.

  The Sabres made only a single pass, then dived at high speed towards the Parallel. Some of the MiGs broke away and went after them, which was exactly what the United Nations pilots had planned.

  A few miles north of the Parallel, the Sabres suddenly turned on their pursuers and the latter, taken completely by surprise, suddenly found themselves with a stiff fight on their hands. Then more Sabres appeared, high up, cutting off the MiGs’ escape route to the north, and now the enemy pilots realized the snare that had been sprung on them.

  They fought desperately, but their fuel was running low and their opponents held all the advantages. All the Communist pilots could do was to try and avoid being shot down until they spotted a gap in the Sabre screen, and then make a run for it.

  Two were shot down as they tried to escape. The rest got away, only to run into more Sabres returning from the main scrap around Pyongyang, and two more were destroyed as the Americans met them head-on.

  So ended the first big battle of the day, with the score nine MiGs down for the loss of two Sabres. It was arithmetic that was acceptable to the United Nations-but only just, for the Sabre squadrons were still heavily outnumbered.

  The MiGs came over the Yalu again in mid morning, this time in a single big train of a hundred aircraft, and patrolled the area between the Yalu and Chongchon Rivers. Small detachments of up to a dozen aircraft pushed cautiously southwards as far as Pyongyang, then returned to join the main force.

  Not a single Sabre came north to challenge them, and after forty-five minutes or so the MiGs flew away across the Yalu and landed at their bases to refuel. Their movements were tracked by a solitary stripped-down RB-45 Tornado of the USAF Strategic Air Command Reconnaissance Detachment, circling over Sinuiju, at a height safe from interception.

  As the dust-clouds settled from the landing runs of the last MiG squadrons, the RB-45 flashed a signal to the leader of forty Panther jets of the US Navy’s Task Force 77. They had been orbiting at low level thirty miles off the west coast of Korea, and now, slipping into battle formation, they came streaking in from the sea to hit the North Korean airfields of Namsi and Taechon, where at least thirty MiGs had landed short of fuel after the dawn battles.

  The Panthers made two blazing, low-level passes with rockets and fragmentation bombs, carpeting the open blast shelters where the MiGs stood, waiting for supplies of fuel to reach them by road. One Panther was hit by a 37-mm burst and spattered itself across Namsi in a great ball of blazing fuel, but the remainder sped clear of the flak and headed out to rejoin their carriers. Tall columns of smoke rose from the two airfields, where at least fifteen MiGs had been reduced to wreckage.

  In his headquarters at Antung, General Krylenko listened to the reports of the morning’s operations with mounting fury. Nothing was working according to plan. It seemed, in fact, that everything had been going wrong for the past couple of days, ever since that fool Semyenov went missing.

  What had possessed his aide to go off like that, on an unauthorized flight, Krylenko would never know. He believed that Semyenov had committed suicide by crashing his aircraft somewhere in the mountains, or out at sea; the thought that the man might have defected had not even crossed his mind. Still less would he have dreamed that Semyenov might have given away his plans to the United Nations. As much as he had despised Semyenov, he firmly believed that his aide had been a dedicated Soviet officer.

  It was too late to change his plan now. Heavy snowfalls were promised during the next forty-eight hours, so this might be the last clear spell for a long time. Soon, the bitter Siberian wind would bring weeks of fog and snow sweeping down over the peninsula.

  Krylenko well remembered how, under similar conditions, Russian troops had hurled Hitler’s Wehrmacht from the gates of Moscow. Now, in the weeks to come, Chinese and North Korean troops would mount their own offensive, pushing the United Nations forces back from the Parallel and capturing Seoul, together with its adjacent airfields. But the series of blows Krylenko intended to strike at the United Nations air strength as a preliminary would be a vital factor in the success of such an offensive.

  The Ilyushin-28s were standing by, ready to hit their assigned targets just before nightfall. But it was now mid-day, and the MiG squadrons had not yet succeeded in drawing the whole of the United Nations fighter strength into combat. The chances of achieving a decisive victory in the air before the bombers were committed were receding with every passing hour.

  A hundred and eighty miles to the south, Colonel Jim Callender was also worried, but for a different reason. His Sabre pilots had been on the alert since dawn, but had not been ordered to take off to intercept the big formations of MiGs that had crossed the Yalu. No one had told him why, and it had been frustrating in the extreme to stay on the ground and watch other Sabre Wings streak overhead to do battle in the north.

  The Australian pilots of No. 493 Squadron were equally as frustrated, The whole squadron had been placed on strip alert, and it looked as though they were going to spend yet another day waiting for an air attack that would not come. The whole situation seemed even more incongruous and unfair because their colleagues of No. 77 Squadron had been in action that morning, skirmishing with MiGs during a sweep as far north as the Chongchon.

  Yeoman had gone across to the Air Observation Flight in the hope of getting another trip before he left Kimpo for good, but as the day wore on he too looked like being disappointed. Welsh told him that the artillery seemed to be quiet on both sides of the front, and that no troop movements had been reported. However, the Flight had been ordered to stand by in case the Austers were needed to search for pilots who might bale out or make forced landings close to the front line.

  ‘That seems odd,’ Yeoman commented. ‘Most rescues are made by helicopter, as you know, a long way inside enemy territory. It must mean that Air HQ is expecting some action close to the Parallel. I wonder just what’s going on?’

  He decided to stick around in the hope of finding out. He had a feeling that something big was afoot, but whatever it was being kept a firm secret by HQ. No doubt they had a good reason.

  The reason, in fact, was straightforward
. Already, too many people on the United Nations side knew about Semyenov’s defection, and the information he had brought across with him. The colonel who commanded the Starfire night-fighter squadron, for example, had been given all the details by an Intelligence Officer who ought to have known better, and had in turn told his pilots. The need for secrecy had since been impressed upon them. If the enemy believed that the United Nations Command knew nothing of their plan to commit the Ilyushin-28 jet bombers to the fight, so much the better. When the bombers came, the UN fighters would be waiting for them-and the possibility of forcing one down south of the Parallel, and examining it intact, was an exciting one.

  That was why the Meteors of 493 Squadron were being kept on strip alert at Kimpo. Their reaction time-in other words, the length of time it took them to get off the ground to make an interception-was better than the Sabre’s, and so it was thought they would have a better chance of catching low-flying bombers that were not detected until the last minute. Moreover, the II-28 was known to carry a tail armament of two 20-mm cannon, which had a greater range than the Sabre’s machine-guns; the Meteor, on the other hand, also had a cannon armament, which meant that pilots making an interception would not need to get in so close before opening fire, and so run less risk of being damaged by the Russian bomber’s weaponry.

  From what Semyenov had told them, UN Command Intelligence officers were certain that the II-28 attack would be covered, at least as far as the Parallel, by large numbers of MiG-15s. Taking them on would be the task of Callender’s Sabre Wing, its pilots fresh and ready for combat.

  The other Fifth Air Force fighter wings, with their earlier model F-86A Sabres, continued to hold their own throughout the afternoon, and to inflict losses on the enemy. The MiGs came south of the Chongchon in relatively small numbers of twenty or thirty aircraft at a time, and were parried by even smaller numbers of Sabres. The pilots of the latter reported that their opponents were generally mediocre, lacking the fighting ability of some of the MiG squadrons encountered earlier.