Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (59 page)

U.S. jets typically used Fairchild gun cameras, which were plagued with problems. Additionally, the film was left over from the last war and, according to several pilots, functioned inconsistently.
^*
Squadron intelligence officers usually did the reviewing and gave credit for a kill based on the number of camera frames showing bullet strikes. One source stated that if thirteen hits were observed, then a kill was assessed; however, considering the relative size of a .50-caliber round, this was optimistic unless a vital engine component or the pilot was hit. Maj. Sergei Kramarenko, a double-war Soviet ace, reported that MiGs often returned to base with “forty or fifty holes” from the Sabre “peashooters.” In the end, hard evidence is limited to official admissions of loss or incontrovertible eyewitness accounts.

In examining just the Sabre combat, F-86 pilots claimed 800 MiG-15’s destroyed. Sources from the post-Soviet era admit to 319 combat shoot-downs, with 309 to the Sabres. PLAAF archives acknowledge losing 224 MiGs, all to F-86 pilots. KPAF records don’t exist, but a defector guessed that at least 100 MiGs had been shot down.
^*
Allowing for his overestimation, 75 kills seems a reasonable approximation. This brings the total to a believable 608 MiG-15s lost in combat.

The USAF confirms that 78 Sabres were shot down in air-to-air fighting. Another 14 went down from battle damage or fuel starvation resulting from dogfighting. Twelve more are listed as “Unknown” but were somehow lost in combat. That brings the total F-86 count to 104. Yet 47 pilots were killed, 26 were captured, and a further 65 were reported missing in action. So if 138 pilots were casualties, it’s valid to assume that the aircraft were lost too. Taking the two total numbers between Sabres and MiGs, we get a 4.4:1 kill ratio in favor of the F-86.

American B-29s flew 21,000 sorties and dropped 167,000 tons of ordnance over the course of the war, yet only seventeen of the big jets were lost to the MiGs. Given that bomber interception was the primary mission of the MiG-15, the Sabres undeniably did their job.
^*
Without detracting from the 224 USAF aircraft lost directly in air-to-air combat, it’s definitely worth mentioning that more than twice that number went down during close air support, reconnaissance, and surface attack missions. A total of 579 USAF fighter, bomber, or attack planes were lost over 57,665 air-to-ground sorties. Marine air flew 32,190 close air support sorties, and in addition to thousands of trucks, tanks, and other targets destroyed, Marine pilots shot down 37.5 aircraft. Marine fighter pilots flying Sabres with USAF squadrons accounted for half of these. Maj. John Bolt, the sole USMC ace from Korea, got his five kills with the F-86 as part of the 39th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. Maj. John Glenn got three kills flying Sabres with the 25th FIS and Navy Panther pilots shot down five MiGs. All told, over one million combat sorties were flown.

Air superiority was never in doubt once the F-86 made its appearance, but the ground situation was entirely another matter. Eerily reminiscent of the Western Front thirty-five years earlier, the defensive positions had hardened and the armies were largely stagnant. Chinese emplacements included a fantastic network of tunnels, which generally negated UN air attacks. However bleak the ground situation was, General MacArthur never advocated the use of atomic weapons to deal with the Chinese. In fact, it was Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who first proposed placing nukes at MacArthur’s disposal. President Truman agreed with that in the fall of 1950 but later retracted his statement.

Recapturing Seoul in mid-March, MacArthur then issued an astounding communiqué directly to the Chinese government. In it, he proposed a cease-fire and openly discussed policy-level issues such as China’s bid for a UN seat and the situation with Taiwan—all this from a military
theater
commander. Added to his continued arrogance and catastrophic misreading of China, this was the proverbial last straw, so he was finally relieved on April 11, 1951. Quoted a decade later in
Time
magazine, Truman said, “I fired him [MacArthur] because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

Fortunately, MacArthur was replaced by Gen. Matt Ridgway, a true combat soldier and a much better commander.
^*
Even by this point, both sides wanted out of the war, but they couldn’t agree on how to do it, nor would either Korea recognize the other. So while the political wrangling continued, men died. The air war became a vast proving ground for improved variants of old aircraft and, more important at this point, tactical refinement. This was particularly true of ground attack and close air support.

The North Korean chief delegate for the initial cease-fire talks admitted that airpower had prevented defeat for the UN side. Lt. Gen. Nam Il said, “Without the support of the indiscriminate bombing and bombardment of your air and naval forces, your ground forces would have long ago been driven out of the Korean peninsula by our powerful and battle-skilled ground forces.” The exaggeration of North Korea’s military might aside, this admission revealed the profound effect that tactical airpower had upon the enemy. In fact, aircraft accounted for 72 percent of all artillery destroyed, as well as 75 percent of all tanks and nearly half of all enemy troop casualties, according to USAF statistics.

But by early 1953 several great events occurred that would end the stalemate in Korea: Joseph Stalin had finally died, and Dwight D. Eisenhower had become president of the United States. Even-tempered, worldly, and a tremendous compromiser, the former general had never been a combat soldier, but he thoroughly understood the military in a way impossible for Truman. Also, and perhaps most important, his credibility was unassailable. At this point in history he was precisely what the United States needed. In any event Eisenhower wanted America out of the war. By the time a truce was signed in July 1953, UN forces had suffered nearly 500,000 dead, wounded, or missing against 1.2 to 1.5 million Communist casualties.
^*

As the Korean War passed into history, it left the U.S. military struggling to deal with the complexities of a “limited” conflict and the notion of fighting for an ideology rather than an unambiguous cause. From an aviation perspective, Korea became a division between the past and the future. In barely three decades man had gone from flying fragile, fabric-covered, open-cockpit airplanes to a jet fighter capable of breaking the sound barrier. It was a gray area of old ideas, new realities, and rapidly emerging technologies. Indeed, technology is relative to time and, as we’ve seen, weapons, tactics, and aircraft all evolve to meet the situation.

By the early 1950s aircraft had achieved capabilities that meant guns and cannons would not remain the only weapon solutions. A new killer, the air-to-air missile (AAM), was being developed to answer the challenge of high-speed, high-g targets. Similarly, conventional anti-aircraft artillery guns were inadequate against fast jets at higher altitudes, though they were, and are, still remarkably lethal against anything fighting down low.

To counter the threat posed by advanced fighters, the surface-to-air missile (SAM) was also about to make its appearance. Radar development would go hand in hand with these new systems. Increased speeds and maneuverability necessitated better targeting solutions both in the air and on the ground. It was apparent to those who fought the war, and those beginning their fighter pilot careers, that aircraft had changed faster than the weapons. But had they also evolved faster than the men?

Throughout the first fifty years of fighter combat, men had always risen to the occasion and done what was needed. Would they continue to be able to do this in the future, in an aviation arena that demanded vast amounts of technical knowledge, previously unimagined physical demands, and sheer guts? No one knew . . . yet.

But, as always in this century, there would be more situations that, if handled badly, could lead to another war. In this case, it was an obscure Asian country known, in the 1950s, as French Indochina and an entire generation of American fighter pilots would soon come to know it by another name.

Vietnam.

CHAPTER 13

BOMBS, GUNS, AND GUTS

“
THERE THEY ARE
.”

The man leaned over the cheap metal chair and pointed at the rectangular display. “You see the radar picture? We call it a spike . . . a target return like that.” Although wearing a plain, dark green uniform with no rank, he was obviously an officer. In fact, he was a Soviet colonel named Lubinitsky.

Behind him the two most senior students dutifully jotted that down in their little olive drab notebooks. The cheap paper tended to come apart in the humid air, so they wrote carefully. The younger one, whose Russian was better, spelled it out phonetically. Later he’d transpose it into his native Vietnamese, but now there wasn’t time.

The radar operator, also a Russian like the other seated men, was twiddling a small dial under the screen with his left hand. With his right, he was slowly spinning a large black wheel next to his right knee, physically moving one of the antennas mounted on the van next to this one. All the men here were crammed into an eight-wheeled trailer called a UV. Inside were three big gray consoles along the left wall, with a chair for each operator, and on the right side was a smaller station facing the door. There was just enough space in the narrow aisle for the fire control officer to squeeze behind each chair. The FCO, who was also the missile battery commander, had responsibility for the tactical analysis and any launch decisions. There was a chair for him as well, but Lubinitsky liked to stand so that he could monitor the azimuth, range, and elevation search displays at each console. The Viets were clustered on both sides trying to watch this amazing new technology in action.

“You see, it’s fairly easy to find a target in azimuth, and then we use this spike to steer the other antennas.” Lubinitsky laid a hand on the back of the last chair. “Usually elevation is next. Then”—he gestured at the middle console—“range is fixed last.”

The nodding Asians understood about every fifth word, but the concept was clear enough. All three operators had stopped using the coarse adjustment wheels and were fine-tuning their solutions. The elevation operator clicked his wafer knob to the right, then paused, staring at the display.

“Seven thousand meters . . .”

The first operator nodded and tapped the glowing rectangle on his console. “. . . and bearing two, six, zero degrees. There is more than one target. Maybe three or more.” The SNR-75 radar could track six targets, though he’d never actually seen it hold more than four.

The FCO looked at the center station. “Range?”

“Thirty-five . . . thirty kilometers . . . closing.”

Then the man straightened a bit and pointed at the scope. “No, wait . . . distance increasing. Thirty-three . . . now forty kilometers.”

“They are aware of us?” the Viet lieutenant colonel asked. “Their detection gear, perhaps?”

Shaking his head, the Russian pointed at the azimuth console. “See . . . the angle has changed and now is steady, heading away.” The officer was fairly certain about what was happening, and this was a good chance to impress these little monkeys. “Watch. It will reverse again.”

And it did. The Viets murmured, nodded, and smiled as the target’s aspect angle changed and the range once again decreased. They all stared for few moments until the Soviet colonel turned and explained. “It’s an orbit. The Yankees call it a ‘racetrack’ and use it to keep their aircraft in one location.”

“Why?” one of the officers asked tentatively. He’d been edging closer, trying to see and understand. The man understood the theory behind radar but had never seen it put to use. Once the Americans began arriving he, like the other North Vietnamese air defense officers, had eagerly anticipated the arrival of this missile system. They’d been briefed on its effectiveness and fervently hoped it could counter the threat of U.S. aircraft. After all, this same system had destroyed an American U-2 spy jet flying over the Soviet Union and another over Cuba. There were rumors that it had also shot down a Nationalist Chinese reconnaissance plane.

“They remain in one place until a threat is detected.”

“Like one of our MiGs.” A Viet grinned proudly.

You mean one of
our
MiGs,
Lubinitsky thought sourly.
We just loan them to you and learn from your mistakes.
But he smiled. “Correct. Like a MiG. Then they will attack from their cap. This allows them to stay on station longer and save fuel.”

“How do they have coverage for radar control way out there?” another asked, peering at the display.