Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (55 page)

Seeing a flash of silver, Davis watched a Sabre arc clear of the fight and turn in his direction. Eyes flickering to the fuel gauge, he knew they had to leave. There was at least 150 miles of Indian country to cross, and who knew what they’d meet on the way.

“Chevy One . . . splash two . . . egress one eight zero.”

Flipping the Sabre over, he banked around to the south, rolled out, and stared over his wings at the La-11s milling around below. Shame to leave them . . . but if his flight was out of fuel and then ran across some MiGs, they’d be up shit creek.

But a single Tupolev had turned all the way around and was now in front of him, maybe 4,000 feet lower and running the other way.
Too good to pass up
. . . Davis shook his head, pulled the throttle back to save gas, nosed over, and glided down for the attack. Ignoring the radar, he kept the pipper on the canopy and waited till it filled the dots. But the Chinaman must’ve seen him, because even as Davis fired, the bomber rolled up and away. Releasing the trigger and adding power, he saw some of his shells chew through the right wingtip, which came off.

Trading speed for altitude, Davis zoomed up to 25,000 feet and looked back. Two more Sabres were swinging in from the southwest, and his own wingman had rejoined on the right side about a half mile back. Suddenly a black dot fell from the maimed Tupolev . . . then another. White mushroom tops parachutes appeared and he grinned.

“Chevy One . . . Pistol One.” A new voice.

“Go ahead.”

“Pistols are south ten miles, inbound, and tally your fur ball.”

Davis nodded. More Sabres . . . that was good. They could finish up.

“Pistol . . . probably six Bats remaining and a dozen LAs . . . you’re cleared in below two five zero . . . we’re southbound for the Emerald Palace.”

Kimpo was hardly a palace, but compared to a rice paddy in North Korea it was positively opulent.

“Pistol copies all. Got your cons.”

Davis twisted sideways and looked back over the tail at his thick white vapor trail. Didn’t matter . . . they were on the way out.

“Chevy One . . . Buick Three . . .”

“Go!”

“Ah . . . Three is east Sahol by nine miles . . . wounded bird.”

Davis frowned. Three was Ray Barton, and his jet was damaged. “Come southwest . . . we’ll try and pick you up.”

“Chevy One . . . ah, I’d love to, but I’m about to have some company up here . . . bandits inbound from the north . . . whole gaggle climbin’ out over the river.”

“Chevy Two say fuel.”

“Bingo minus two.”

Without being asked, the other element leader added, “We’re both Bingo minus four.”

Options flashed through his mind and were discarded. He’d already set a low combat Bingo of 1,200 pounds, and that was barely enough to get back to Kimpo from MiG Alley. Zippering the mike, he replied, “Three . . . you’ve got the lead. One’s off to the north.”

Banking back around toward the Alley, Davis spotted a thin gray trail against the blue sky. Following it to the source, he saw a silver Sabre heading south.

“Buick Three . . . where are the bandits from your position?” he asked, quickly glancing at the fuel totalizer and rounds counter. His kills had taken nine seconds’ worth of bullets, about 1,100 rounds, and he had 520 remaining. Most pilots, himself included, didn’t load the ammo up to full capacity because the guns could jam.

It was enough.

He smiled grimly.
Four seconds of ammo is two short bursts against . . .
He strained his eyes at the fast-moving black dots.
At least twenty MiGs.

“Ah . . . Blue One . . . they’re about five miles at my seven o’clock in a climb . . . looks like they’re about twenty K . . .”

“Roger that . . . come right.” He glanced at the compass rose and did the geometry in his head. “Heading two two zero. I’ll be on your nose for three miles high. Pass below and blow through to K-fourteen. I’ll pick you up after.”

“Copy all . . . in the turn.”

Davis watched the other Sabre crank up and come right. As expected, the trailing dots immediately came harder right to cut off the American jet. They smelled blood.

So do I.

The turn plus the damaged Sabre’s slower speed gave the MiGs cut-off angles for the intercept. This would happen fast. However, they were all fixated on the smoking F-86 in front of them, a classic combat mistake. Buick Three zipped past off Davis’s left wing and nosed over slightly, trying to accelerate. The MiGs were badly spread out, but the leader and his wingman were out front and plain to see. Every time the leader’s jet moved, all the others moved too. There must be two dozen of them, he realized.

Wish I had more ammo
.

As the leader hit the ten o’clock position, Curly smoothly rolled and pulled, staying high through the turn. He didn’t want to flash his wings or cross the horizon until it was necessary. Both would give him away.

The F-86 was slicing through the air, engine throbbing, and he felt the fighter’s power straining against his hands. Leaving the throttle up, he held the jet on its left wing and paused.

Not yet . . . not yet . . .

Now!

Racking up to 6 g’s, Davis grunted and pulled down hard, coming in right off the wing line. The fat MiG continued straight ahead, the Chinese pilot not seeing anything besides his target.

Gonna be close
. His eyes flickered back and forth between Buick Three, the MiG, his wingman, and the gunsight. He couldn’t slow down. He didn’t dare, not with twenty other MiGs running up his tail.

A thousand feet . . .

Nine hundred . . .

Now!

He hammered down at 800 feet.
One . . . two
. . .

The Brownings spat again, and a stream of shells slammed into the Chinese fighter. Instantly bunting, rolling, and pulling right, Curly aimed in front of the MiG wingman and fired again. As the first jet blew up, the recoil from Davis’s guns stopped abruptly, and the high-pitched whirring of the electric motors filled the cockpit. No bullets.

The other MiG panicked and rolled hard away to the right. Davis flashed through the smoke and rolled up to the left, hanging on a wingtip. If he had to, he’d draw the Chinese fighters off toward the south, where other Sabres would be coming from.

But they must’ve thought the same thing, and even as he watched unbelievingly, the entire gaggle broke away north toward the Yalu. Swallowing hard, he held his course away from the damaged F-86 for a few moments to make certain, then pulled the throttle back to hold 0.80 Mach. Leveling off, he unhooked the sweaty mask and exhaled, eyes bright and scanning for MiGs.

But they were gone . . . and the sky was empty.

WHAT WERE PLANES
made in California and Texas doing in a river valley between Korea and Red China, in a place that few Americans had ever heard of and fewer cared about? Unlike the relatively black-and-white struggle during the world wars, this hard little peninsula had become a flashpoint between two diametrically opposed ideologies. It could have happened in other places, such as Eastern Europe, for instance, or even Indochina. But it was here.

With the end of World War II, even empires that didn’t collapse immediately, namely the British and French, had to cope with millions of disaffected colonials in India, Asia, and the Middle East. These regions would become catalysts for many of the bitter conflicts that would dominate the world after 1945.

Japan’s defeat had left much of Asia fragmented and rudderless. China’s civil war had just ended, with the Communists under Mao Zedong in a state of exhausted victory. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had retreated to the island of Formosa (later Taiwan), which the Communists vowed to conquer. Korea, like French Indochina, was suffering in a power vacuum. Ironically known as the “Land of the Morning Calm,” it had been a Japanese protectorate since the turn of the century, though its difficulties went back much, much further. During the Cairo Conference in late 1943, Chiang Kai-shek of China, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill had agreed in principle to future dismemberment of the Japanese Empire. China would get back Manchuria and Formosa, while “in due course Korea would become free and independent.”

In August 1945, following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, two young Americans pulled out a
National Geographic
map of Asia. One of the men was Dean Rusk, a State Department officer and future secretary of state. By the simple rationale that it lay in the center of the country, the 38th parallel was chosen as a demarcation line between the Soviet and American spheres of influence. Ignoring the practical demographics of population, industry, and agriculture the United Nations agreed.

Over the next five years Korea became a petri dish of discontent and suspicion. Added to this nasty mix were healthy doses of nationalism and corruption. Above the parallel the Korean People’s Republic (KPR) railed against the United States and their friendly treatment of the Japanese who’d brutalized Korea for so long. While not strictly correct, the American occupation forces had understood their former enemies much better than the subtle, scheming Koreans they’d encountered. Unfortunately, this meant using the National Police, who’d collaborated with the Japanese and brutalized their fellow Koreans. The Japanese were eventually sent home, but the locals were promoted and supported by the United States. To be fair, the American troops were not peacekeepers, but combat troops who just wanted to go home. So the quickest way for stabilization appeared to be utilizing those who’d ruled the country for so long.
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Below the parallel, Dr. Syngman Rhee and his Korean Democratic Party (KDP) offered an alternative. Urbane and charming, with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, Rhee told the Americans what they wanted to hear, which was primarily that he would resist the Communists and preserve a democratic state in the south—meaning a state centered around himself. Given the anti-Communist paranoia running wild in the West and the rise of McCarthyism in America, Washington took the path of least resistance and supported Rhee.

President Truman had promised to “contain” Communism while promoting liberalism and American-style democracy across the world. Admirable goals, however impractical, and diametrically opposed to the goals of the Soviet Union, which was attempting to promote its own system. In early 1948 the United Nations proposed supervised Korean elections, followed by independence and a joint withdrawal of the foreign military presence on the peninsula. Moscow and Pyongyang dismissed the whole idea and boycotted the elections. In effect, this failure by both sides ended any hope of unification because it officially recognized a divided Korea.

The inherent conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States had significantly worsened following World War II. Communist expansion into eastern Europe and Asia alarmed Washington, and when Stalin sealed off Berlin in 1948 the United States countered with the famous airlift that saved the city while humiliating Moscow—as did the $12 billion in American aid that the Marshall Plan provided to rebuild nations devastated by the war. The idea was that stable, productive countries would be less likely to fall prey to Communism—and in the long run this was correct. The Soviets could not compete with the West economically, but they believed they could do so militarily. On August 29, 1949, they demonstrated this by detonating an atomic bomb.

So at 4:00 a.m. on June 25, 1950, as four North Korean spearheads crossed the 38th parallel heading south, the United States paid attention. Ten divisions with 100,000 men, supported by T-34 heavy tanks and more than 130 aircraft, slammed into the South Korean defenses. With no armor or air force to speak of, the army of the Republic of Korea (ROK) collapsed almost immediately. Given that no one in Washington wanted a land war in Asia, Washington reacted with admirable speed and authorized action the very next day, perhaps to avoid escalation into another world war or maybe because this generation of leaders knew appeasement simply wouldn’t work.

Non-Communist members of the United Nations were asked to contribute: Australians, Canadians, Turks, Greeks—even the French. The British immediately dispatched HMS
Triumph
with her forty aircraft and two cruisers to the Yellow Sea. The situation was correctly viewed as an opportunity to prove the UN concept and to act as a check on Communism.

Seoul fell to the northern Korean People’s Army, on June 27, the same day that USAF Lt. William Hudson of the 68th Fighter Squadron opened air combat over Korea by shooting down a Yak-11. Two days later the USS
Juneau
shelled enemy shore positions, and on July 3, 180 miles off the coast, the USS
Valley Forge
turned into the wind and began launching aircraft. By noon they were over Pyongyang escorting interdiction and reconnaissance aircraft. Ens. E. W. Brown from the “Screaming Eagles” of VF-51 blew a Yak-9 out of the sky with a 20 mm burst from his F9F Panther. His flight lead, Lt. (j.g.) Leonard Plog, shot down another Yak, and U.S. naval aviation was officially in the air war.

But it wasn’t enough to slow the North Korean advance, and the American 24th Infantry Division fought a delaying action south through Chonan, Chochiwon, and Taejeon. Most of the U.S. military was in deplorable shape by the summer of 1950, and it showed. Some of this was understandable given that World War II had only ended five years before and everyone wanted to get on with life. Many believed, as others had in 1918, that it had been the last war. After all, there were nuclear weapons in the mix now, so who would risk a fight?

The U.S. Navy had taken a particularly brutal hit in the postwar demilitarization mania. In 1945 there were thirty-eight fleet carriers on active service, and by the summer of 1950 just seven remained. Of these, only three were attached to the Pacific Fleet, and they were all
Essex-
class carriers left over from World War II.
^*
At 35,000 tons and about 800 feet long, they could carry approximately a hundred aircraft. While the newer 60,000-ton
Midway-
class carriers were assigned to the Atlantic Fleet to counter the Soviet threat. With the Japanese vanquished, there was no perceived naval threat in the Pacific, and this was part of the reason the Navy was losing the budget battle to the USAF. China had no navy, and the Soviet Union was occupied in Europe.