By Richard Roesler
Stars and Stripes
The news came crackling over the Armed Forces Radio as Bud Biteman was driving his family to Sunday Mass: North Korean troops had surged over the 38th parallel in a massive assault that threatened Seoul.
Church would have to wait. The 26-year-old first lieutenant, who had flown P-51 Mustang fighters over China during World War II, had his wife drop him off at the air group’s intelligence office.
"I knew immediately that I would become involved in the war — that’s what we were based in the Far East to counter," Biteman said in a recent e-mail exchange. "I was very naïve, thinking that our superior air forces could finish the little police action in Korea within three to four months."
Less than two weeks later, he was shipping his wife and daughter back to the States, and preparing to leave for a primitive airfield in someplace called Taegu.
The U.S. Air Force had withdrawn its last unit from South Korea in 1949. For the airmen remaining in Asia — at 11 air bases throughout Japan, plus more in the Philippines and on Okinawa — postwar life had been easy.
"I had a young indigent that cleaned my room, polished my shoes and kept my clothes neat," said Reginald Cooper, a crew chief at Yokota Air Base, Japan, in 1950. "Next to the barracks was Club Zanzibar, an NCO club. We had ball fields, skating, swimming pools."
They also had shiny new planes, the F-80 Shooting Star, the first jets Cooper and his crew had ever worked on. "It was the most beautiful plane I had ever seen," he said.
Unfortunately, the Shooting Stars would also prove largely useless in the early stages of the war. Their gas-guzzling jet engines kept the fighters from doing much of what was so badly needed: hovering over the battlefield, showering steel and napalm on North Korean ground forces rolling south.
A day after the North Korean attack, the U.S. ambassador in Seoul called for evacuation planes. Fifth Air Force, headquartered in southern Japan, activated its plan to evacuate noncombatants. On Tuesday, U.S. C-54s, C-46s and C-47s flew more than 700 Americans to Japan.
Meanwhile, U.S. fighters and light bombers guarded the skies over the Norwegian ship Rheinhold, carrying hundreds more Americans from Inchon to Japan. The U.S. pilots shot down eight North Korean warplanes en route, according to documents at 5th Air Force archives at Yokota.
From the first day of the war, South Korean President Syngman Rhee had been pleading for U.S. aircraft to help support his ground troops, which, without heavy weapons to stop North Korean tanks, were being routed.
A week after the North Koreans attacked, U.S. President Harry Truman authorized sending 10 F-51 Mustangs. Formerly designated P-51s, the war-tired fighters had been stripped down for use towing aerial gunnery targets. The planes arrived in Taegu, where they were to be crewed by inexperienced South Korean pilots who’d been flying little T-6 Texans.
"It was a hopeless task," Biteman later wrote in <CF22>Unsung Heroes</CF>, an account of his experiences.
"Trying to upgrade from a 650-horsepower T-6 trainer to a tricky 1,350-horsepower fighter while flying combat missions against the enemy … an impossible situation."
By the time Biteman and the second batch of pilots arrived, a day or so after the first wave, the Far East Air Force decided to put the U.S. pilots in the cockpits.
In Taegu, conditions were primitive. The airstrip was an open patch of pastureland. The surrounding rice paddies stank of human waste, used for fertilizer. The operations center, Biteman recalls, consisted of a room in a packed-dirt farmhouse, with a single map tacked to the wall, some empty ammo crates, and a hand-cranked field telephone. Bathing was done in the river, or out of a helmet.
It was a far cry from soft garrison duty in Japan or the Philippines.
Things were about the same at nearby Pohang, where Reginald Cooper arrived July 13 to find his bags, which had arrived first, submerged in a mud puddle.
By then, the unit’s shiny F-80s had been replaced with more old F-51s, which could operate on Korea’s gravel airstrips and hover over the battlefield for hours. Delicate jet engines need debris-free concrete runways, which were nowhere to be found in South Korea.
The war was going badly, though, and soon the airmen could see exploding fuel drums at the nearby Pohang docks. Infantry platoons would roll through, returning in tatters from nearby ambushes.
Finally, the North Koreans came over the hills at the foot of the runway.
"When we were close to being overrun, our pilots and planes would start strafing before their landing gear retracted," Cooper said. "Thanks to our pilots and quad 50s (each plane’s four .50-caliber machine guns) firing into them, we were able to fly out of Pohang and back to Japan to regroup."
One irony of the early months of the waris that while U.S. ground troops were being relentlessly driven back by T-34 tanks, artillery and infantry assaults, U.S. pilots largely owned the skies over Korea. North Korean anti-aircraft fire — which would later improve dramatically — was still feeble.
The North Korean air force had grown considerably since early 1949, when U.S. intelligence pegged the force at 36 planes and 800 men. By June 1950, officials learned from interrogating captured or defecting North Korean pilots, the number of planes was now between 122 and 140. The planes were Japanese trainers or Soviet-built propeller warplanes, like the Yak 7B and Yak 9 fighter.
But the inexperienced North Koreans were reluctant to dogfight with the U.N. pilots, who soon included British and South African fighters. The North Koreans would typically pop up out of the clouds to get a quick shot at U.N. fighters, then duck down and hide in the cloud cover, or bolt to safety across the Yalu River into Manchuria.
"Enemy air power was used to practically no extent against friendly ground forces at any time," said a 5th Air Force report.
In mid-September, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s high-risk amphibious assault at Inchon severed the North Koreans’ supply lines, and reversed the rout. U.S. B-26 medium bombers, untroubled by enemy warplanes, were sent unescorted to destroy North Korean bridges, supply yards, rail lines, convoys and trains.
By Oct. 1, U.S. intelligence estimated that North Korea had five fighter planes left.
"During the last week or so of (October), 5th Air Force pilots were having difficulty finding enemy targets," reads a declassified historical report. So were the Marine air wings and Navy Corsair fighters working from aircraft carriers off the Korean coast. (The Marine pilots included John Glenn, later to become an astronaut and U.S. senator.)
By the start of November 1950, U.N. troops were within 20 to 40 miles of the Manchurian border, and closing.
The war seemed to be won.
But despite the fact that its air force had been almost completely destroyed, North Korea continued to repair runways. U.S. analysts poured over reconnaissance photos and scratched their heads.
On Oct. 18, 1950, a reconnaissance plane spotted 75 to 100 aircraft near Antung airfield, a Manchurian military airfield just across the Yalu River border from North Korea.
Two weeks later, U.S. officials were startled by reports of an unidentified enemy plane — a jet — sighted near Yongbang. The same day, an enemy jet with swept-back wings was spotted over Seoul.
By Nov. 5, the North Korean Air Force suddenly seemed to have come back to life. U.N. pilots reported "continuous" sightings of enemy planes crossing the Yalu River, including the puzzling new swept-back-wing jets and B-29-type bombers.
"All indicated that elements of an air force other than the North Korean Air Force had entered the Korean War," a 5th Air Force history report states.
Intelligence estimated that North Korea now had 250 fighters, 175 ground-attack planes, 150 twin-engine light bombers and 75 transports.
The jets with swept-back wings proved to be MiG-15 fighters, the best in the Soviet arsenal, with some piloted by Soviet pilots. The U.S. air crews, who’d grown used to air superiority, were suddenly faced with an enemy fighter as good — or better — than their own.
"When the MiGs began to appear, we in the Mustangs huddled much, much lower in our cockpits, hoping that we would not be seen by them," Biteman said.
By 1953, there were more than 800 MiGs, flown by Chinese and Soviet pilots, fighting in the skies over North Korea.
Fortunately, a new jet fighter, the F-86 Sabre jet, was about to arrive. The MiG could go higher more quickly, and turn tighter than a Sabre, according to British author Max Hastings, who published a history of the war in 1987. The MiG’s guns were deadlier, said Hastings, but the Sabre was more stable at high speeds, and the U.S. pilots proved better fliers.
On Nov. 8, 1st Lt. Russell Brown shot down a MiG-15, in what was the first all-jet dogfight in history, and the first downed MiG of the war.
Despite their large numbers, the MiGs would time and time again turn tail and bolt back over the Manchurian border, rather than fight, according to U.S. fighter crews. The Americans were prevented from going across the border by a military directive. MacArthur’s chafing against this limitation — and his atomic saber-rattling — would soon lead President Truman to yank him from command.
"Knowing that Russia and China were supplying the North Koreans with weapons and men, we were pissed off that President Truman stopped us from doing the job we knew we could do," Cooper said. "That would have saved many lives and changed the history of the world."
Life in the air bases settled into a busy routine: fly sorties, work on the flak-damaged planes when they returned, curse and duck into foxholes or behind sandbags during night air raid alerts, and go to Japan for a few days of rest and recreation every other month.
"Enlisted men took R&R at Fukuoka (Japan), five days every six weeks," recalled Jim Rogers, an Air Force corporal when he arrived at Suwon, Korea, in January 1952. "We looked forward to steaks, fresh vegetables, and lots of other good stuff to eat."
Rogers was a crew chief for an F-80 Shooting Star, which frequently broke exhaust compressor blades in the engine. These were easy to fix, he said, but took a lot of time, because crews had to remove the entire tail section to get access to the problem.
Rogers said he once sent his plane out with bubble gum pressed into a small fuel leak on the wingtip tank, a patch that held until the jet came back.
"Replacement parts were scarce, and midnight requisitions — stealing parts off someone else’s plane — were common," he said.
In June 1951, U.S. air forces launched Operation Strangle, a massive bombing campaign, targeting military supply lines throughout North Korea.
But an air strategy that had worked on the industrialized supply lines of Germany nearly a decade earlier didn’t work nearly as well on the communists’ dispersed supply lines, which relied on horse carts and porters with wooden "A-frame" backpacks, not trains and truck convoys.
The MiG-15s were taking a heavy toll on U.N. planes as well, and the North Koreans had by then improved their anti-aircraft artillery, using searchlights and radar-directed guns. The yearlong Operation Strangle devastated North Korea’s industrial complex, severing rail lines, flattening factories and cratering roads. But it also cost U.N. forces 343 warplanes, and by the summer of 1952, the North Koreans seemed no closer to ending the war.
In some ways, historians such as Hastings have pointed out, Operation Strangle and its lack of success were a preview to the failed Vietnam War attempts to sever the Ho Chi Minh trail by carpetbombing.
The following year, after a new bombing campaign targeting North Korean irrigation dams, North Korea signed the armistice.
Today, the aging veterans are left with memories of high-flying adventure, youth — and of their buddies who died on the battlefield, or who were last seen in a parachute floating down, far behind enemy lines.
Biteman, who retired a lieutenant colonel after more than 22 years in the Air Force, still vividly remembers flying the Mustangs into combat — the roar of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the momentary slowing of the plane when firing its machine guns, the press of his backpack parachute, Mae West life preserver, .45 automatic and one-man life raft in the Mustang’s cramped cockpit.
He remembers the black-and-white puffs of flak over the Sinmak rail yards, all around the little Mustang and so heavy that he later referred to the scene as "polka dot skies." He remembers sailing over brilliant fall foliage in North Korea, and musing whether he should drop his napalm on the forest to drive hiding troops into the open. He remembers watching a fuel fire burning in a hole in his wing tank, 150 miles behind enemy lines, and trying to decide whether to bail out and likely be killed, or risk an explosion and race full-power for home.
And he remembers a flight over the Iron Triangle, near Chorwon, where he suddenly sailed over a large body of troops marching down a dirt road.
"I was too close to strafe them, so I turned tightly in a circle to line up better," he said. "By the time I’d completed my turn, I could see the troops re-formed in the middle of the road, forming a gigantic ‘U-N.’ They were either brilliant communist tacticians, he and his wing man concluded, or friendly prisoners of war. The fighters didn’t attack.
"We heard later that a train was found in a tunnel nearby, with 75 massacred U.S. troops inside," Biteman said recently.
"I can still visualize the olive-drab ‘U-N’ formation on that road near Chorwon."