The Cold War (20 page)

Though Stalin came to believe that his unleashing of the North Koreans had been a mistake, the old man still took consolation in contemplating the huge U.N. air losses, which his lieutenants led him to believe were mostly the handiwork of his MiG-15s. The losses, as Showalter acknowledges here, were indeed great; ground fire, not the dogfights of MiG Alley, accounted for most of them. As for air battles with MiG-15s, Sabrejets actually earned a respectable advantage in kill ratio—and did even better at the end of the war, as Chinese and North Korean pilots took over from the Soviets.

Korea may have been the first jet war, but piston-driven propeller planes still had their pride of place, including some famous names out of World War II, such as YAKs, Sturmoviks, Mustangs, Corsairs, B-26 Invaders, and B-29 Superfortresses. In the last year of the Pacific War, the B-29 had ranged over the Japanese Home Islands, practically unopposed by enemy fighters. That was not the case in the Korean War when these ponderous targets were jumped by MiG-15s; they were forced to begin flying only at night. That did not prevent the B-29s from turning much of North Korea into a vast crater field. They firebombed cities like Pyongyang with napalm, something that gave Prime Minister Winston
Churchill pause. “I do not like this napalm bombing at all,” he told an acquaintance, adding, “We should make a very great mistake to commit ourselves to approval of a very cruel form of warfare…. I will take noresponsibility for it.” As Stanley Sandler points out in his excellent summation,
The Korean War,
“In light of the death tolls of the Tokyo fire raids, the two nuclear bombings, and of similar raids on Pyongyang and Sinuiju, the B-29 can be said to have killed more civilians than any other aircraft in history.”

American bombs may have come close to rending the social fabric of North Korea, but they did not keep supplies from the front or otherwise help to end the war. By the time a truce was signed in July 1953, the Communist armies were better fed than they had ever been and were able to lay down mass barrages that even a World War I artilleryman would not have disparaged.

In Korea, the past may have been recaptured on the ground. But in the sky, the future took shape.

DENNIS E. SHOWALTER is the past president of the Society for Military History, joint editor of the journal
War in History,
and the author of
The Wars of German Unification
and
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires
. He is a professor of history at Colorado College.

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 27, 1950
, eight Soviet-built, piston-engined IL-10 attack planes of the North Korean Air Force were attacked over Kimpo Airfield by four American jet fighters, F-80 Shooting Stars. Within minutes, four of the North Korean planes were down. Lieutenants R. E. Wayne—who shot down two planes—and R. E. Dewald and Captain Raymond Schillereff had scored the first jet kills of the U.S. Air Force. But this historical milestone was not the first American victory of the air war. That same morning, five North Korean fighters had tangled with an equal number of U.S. planes and lost three of their number to an aircraft that was little more than a footnote in aviation history. The F-82 Twin Mustang, essentially two P-51 fuselages linked by a stub wing and a tail section, had been cobbled together in the aftermath of post-1945 budget cuts as an interim night fighter and long-range escort.

These two very different encounters reflected the ambiguous nature of the air war over Korea. Jet aircraft had made their first appearances during the final stages of World War II. Nazi Germany's Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter was not the potential war winner of legend. Nevertheless, it shocked the U.S. Eighth Air Force even in the small numbers the Luftwaffe finally deployed. The Allies were slow to react. Britain managed to send a single squadron of Gloster Meteors, roughly similar to the Me 262, into combat before V-E Day, but the German jet's only losses came when two of them collided while returning to base. The United States began designing and ordering jets during the war, but none came into service until after 1945. The Soviet Union was even further behind. Both superpowers depended heavily on German jet technology once it became available.

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 ranged 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.