HOW IT WAS! KUNSAN AIRBASE 474th FBW (1951-1953) 474th FBG (1953-1954) Page 3 of 5

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The War Drags On: Flying from K-8

In addition, between June 1952 - October 1952 there was a stalemate along the battle front while truce talks were stalled on the POW repatriation question. Hill battles raged on Baldy, Whitehorse, and elsewhere. U.N. forces were fighting -- and dying -- for worthless pieces of real-estate. In The Korean Air War (p141), it states, "On 4 October 1952, FEAF mounted a raid on the North Korean Tank & Infantry School, which was roughly Kim Il-Song's equivalent of Fort Benning. This was one of many targets on which intelligence experts kept a constant eye: It had been visited often enough, but photo analysis from RF-80A missions persuaded the top brass that the full treatment was due. The term "maximum effort" took on new meaning with this attack, which included 150 F-84 Thunderjets (49th, 58th, and 474th FBW), 70-plus F-80 Shooting Stars (8th FBW), and an escort of 65 F-86 Sabres (4th and 51st FIWs). Also participating in the strike were Marine F9F Panthers."

The results of the raid were rather anti climatic. The Korean Air War (p142) reports, "-- no MiGs appeared; flak was light to medium -- the raid on the North Korean school went remarkably well. One of the pilots, lst Lt. Donald T. Mageean, rolled in on the target in his F-84E (49-2196), saw rubble left by a previous attacker, and had the satisfaction of watching his bombs head all the way to his target and explode."

On 8 October 1952, the Truce talks recessed at Panmunjom as there was a complete deadlock. It was adjourned "indefinitely."

Judging from the napalm used on the F-84Es that Ken Mendell mentioned earlier, it is certain that the 474th's aircraft were involved in these actions providing CAS -- in addition to interdiction. The attacks on rail yards and manufacturing plants were most likely done in coordinated actions due to the antiaircraft hazards. Ken goes on to add, "We flew more daylite than nites. Had both close support & so called hunting missions - looking for trucks & trains. Also did bombing of various cities & manufacturing plants."

Around November 1952, the F-84Gs were starting to arrive. According to The U.S. Air Force in Korea (p637), the Fifth Air Force ruled that "the 49th Wing would first equip itself with the new F-84Gs, the 58th Wing would continue temporarily with F=84E's and F-84G's, and the 474th Wing would build up its strength with the F-84E's released by the other wings." It continued, "Since the F-84E';s released by the 49th and 58th Wings proved to need substantial depot overhaul, the 474th WIng's complement of these older Thunderjets shrank through attrition in the winter of 1952-53. In the spring of 1953, however, the 474th Wing was able to slowly to begin to convert to F-84Gs."

Bill Oliphant of Knoxville, Tennessee was with 429th Fighter Bomber Squadron between October 1952 - August 1953. He wrote, "Upon arrival at K-8, Kunsan by the Sea, I was assigned the bunk of someone who had been shot down...again, talk about your humble pie. Next I remember well the cocky feeling of that shoulder holstered Colt 45 and flight jacket as we made our initial ground visit to the front lines. For me, Korea was distinctly three segments...at first it was awesome, bewildering and frightening to go on those early missions because everything was so new and unfamiliar. Then there was the period in the middle when you were no longer the new jock; you were less afraid; you still had a whole bunch of missions to go; and you were getting pretty damn good at what you were doing. Finally, there were those last few missions, flown with great awareness that you might be going home (the most frightening missions of my tour...even the easy ones)."

Bill relates his feelings regarding the general axiom of war -- "War is a young man's profession." "Was hit by ground fire on two occasions; was jumped, hit once (when we were supposed to be covered and protected by F-86 "jokes"). They say war is a horrible thing, and it is...but for a young man, it is an exciting and exhilarating adventure. Korean memories are memorable...four-ship flight, flying No. 4...under overcast...puffs tracking No. 2, Limey Nigel Baine...call, "Break, No.2, they're tracking you!"...No. 2 does Immelmann with "Er, roger, old chap!" Flew first three of four consecutive missions against the Sinanju Bridges...heaviest damn flak imaginable. On third mission, while flying evasive maneuvers out mouth of frozen river, the F-84 in front of me hit by ground fire and crashes into the ice. You are dumbfounded when you have to report the loss over the radio."

Normally the F-84s flying CAS and daylight road recces had little to fear from MiGs as the U.N. forces had achieved air superiority over Korea early in the war. The F-84s only had to worry about those pesky anti-aircraft guns that made their air-to-ground attacks a hazardous proposition. However, that doesn't mean that they were free from danger of MiGs attacks. Bill relates one of his missions, "Flying No. 4 in 36-plane gaggle mission near Yalu, jumped three times by MiG's while the F-86 jokes flew above...after the second break, still hanging onto element lead Ralph Ritteman and looking straight at him, I radioed, No. 3, are you going in to drop?, " to which he replied, "I've already dropped," (which I could have seen if I hadn't been so scared -- he was READY TO FIGHT MiG's)...so, straight and level I toggled off my first 1,000 pounder, flanked right, saw a MiG boring in at 4 o'clock...broke right just as the cannonshell hit my 84...rolled out of break to find fire warning lights and no radio...but not another plane visible ANYWHERE! Squawked "Mayday"...throttled back...turned twice to look for smoke...fire warning light blinked, no smoke evident and engine running okay, so I started a slow descent toward the water in the general direction of Haiju Peninsula. Found that the fire warning light seemed to say on less at lower rpm's, so I flew the long route over Choto to K-13 and landed to a welcoming party of fire engines and ambulances. Luckily, that cannonshell deflected off of my tailpipe, cut several wires, and made 7 holes in the fuselage. I was still shaking even after debriefing an hour later." Ken Mendell, the crew chief of his aircraft, remembers being stuck at Suwon fixing the damage from that MiG attack.

He wrote about another mission, "After leading a 4-mission flight on a dull mission on a sunny day, I turned the flight over to No. 3 to lead us home. Rounded final half asleep and announced, "Gear down and locked," but that 84 didn't slow down as I started to overtake the planes on the runway...finally woke up and hit the throttle in time to avoid collision, but scraped 1/4" off my speed brake on the PSP and was ordered to report immediately to the Colonel, "Head up and locked, Sir! I was asleep." The base joke became, "Oliphant, didn't you hear mobile control yelling for you to go around?" Then some wise guy chimes in and says, "He couldn't hear them because the gear warning horn was blowing too loud!" Grounded, three weeks mobile control officer duty...returned to flight status as leader of 12-ship ground support mission...flawless to superb mission...heavy ground fire...major hits on supplies with lots of secondary explosions...a memorable way to return from shame, embarrassment and exile. Leading a 4-ship flight targets of opportunity mission with slim pickings...finally found a small but beautiful bridge in the Haiju Peninsula...instructed 3 and 4 to hang while No. 2 and I made a pass...pulled up to the left to admire my work (made a great, but lucky, hit on the bridge, killing my airspeed. The bridge hit must have stirred up the natives, because I found myself hanging at low airspeed in the middle of bursts of ack-ack, one of which hit my left tip with a sound heard well within the cockpit. After No. 3 reported my underside okay and clear with gear down, we landed at home base without further incident."

Bill also remembers the loss of friends and the end of his tour at K-8. "Les Garrow and I took on Itazuki ferry trip and a Tokyo R&R together. Les was shot down on a mission when I was in flight operations following the progress of missions from K-8. ... Was somewhat dismayed on arrival back in U.S. when I found that no one seemed to know or care about the Korean Conflict."

Later in the war the FEAF decided to experiment with the F-84s as night fighters. The reason for this was that the noise of the B-26 engines alerted the communist convoys of their presence in the area. In Crimson Sky -- The Air Battle for Korea by John R. Bruning (pp. 112-113) says, "At the same time, some convoys began carrying their own organic light anti-aircraft weapons, machine guns being the most common. The North Koreans stationed observers every few hundred yards along their supply routes to warn passing trucks of danger. When a lookout sounded the alarm, the convoy halted and deployed its air defense systems. The B-26s usually had time to make only one pass before the guns were ready for action. After that, the Invader would be facing an alerted and frequently well-armed enemy. As a result of these tactics, night intruder missions became increasingly hazardous." However, the F-84 could cruise unseen at 30,000 feet and glide silently down onto the convoy at idle power. But the F-84 was really not designed for this role and these night missions were very dangerous. As a result, they were strictly voluntary.

The night sorties were extremely hazardous because of the mountainous terrain with low visibility. Ken Mendell added, "Very seldom did we fly 2 missions at nite . B-26s used to take off all times of the nite. Usually we went out in the early evening. Back home by 10:00-12:00 pm."

Wes Jacobson a pilot with the 430th FBS wrote, "I guess the Fifth Air Force decided to try night mission in day fighters sometime in the fall or winter of 1952-3. I think what was happening was the North Korean's were posting soldiers along the Mail Supply Routes with shotguns and when they heard the B-26's coming they would fire there shotgun. I don't know which was which, but it was either 1 shot or 2 shots for the A/C warning and/or the all clear. The rest of the time the trucks were driving down the roads in a convoy with their lights on. We found that with the F-84, we could be assigned about 50 miles of supply routes that was all ours for about 20 minutes and from about 25 to 30 thousand feet we could see the highway for may 200 miles if there was no lower clouds. With idle power we could glide on in and at about 5000 feet, line up with the line of trucks and with a dive angle of about 30 degrees, drop on the trucks from about 3000 feet above the ground, and then add power to climb on out and then is when the soldiers would hear us and by then it would be to late to warn the trucks. By sending an airplane in every so often, we could tie up the truck long enough so an early morning recce would catch them still on the road before they could hide them for the day."

Periodically, an F-84 got a chance to be a fighter...though the opportunities were rare. Usually it was when the F-84s were jumped by MiGs. Wes talked about one night mission when he got a chance. "On one of my missions, two of us from the 430th were on the same road assignment and I was the 2nd A/C, but the Russians had Mig's up there flying around ad night and one came down and shot down my friend, The Radar controller asked me if I wanted to play fighter pilot and I said Yes, so I got rid of my bombs and he vectored me to where he last observed the first F-84 and I found a big fire burning on the ground so he marked the site on his radar and vectored me in to the Mig at the correct altitude and said if I could see him I could shoot him down. Our gunsight had a range finder indicator on it and I picked up his range and when I got to less than 500 feet, I got a short sighting of the fire up the tailpipe of his engine, but the night was so dark (10:30pm), I couldn't see the airplane at all. I decided the best thing to do was to back off and go home."

But his story is not over. He wrote of his return. "When I got back to K-8 a B-26 with 14 machine guns had a new pilot landing and he froze and forgot his gear and fired off all his .50 Cal ammunition and bellied in on the runway. I had to circled between K-13 and K-8 at 35,000 ft to see if I had enough fuel to land at K-8. Also the runway had no lights, so they had three flare pots on one side of the runway, one at each end and one in the center, at the side of the runway. They swept off the bullets from the guns and I did land against the B-26 still on the runway and stopped before I would have hit him. They wanted to see who returned in the airplane."

Wes mentioned some notes about night missions for the F-84s. "I remember that the first I had heard of night mission was in either December 1952 or January 1953 and Fifth Air Force was asking for volunteers to fly them. A number of pilots from the 430th responded as I know did from the other F-84 squadrons. When we checked out for these I don't think there was any requirements set up so they were made up as we went along. At K-8, we flew a number of night flights just in the local area to get used to night flying and night approaches and take-offs and landings. We lost one pilot because the F-84 altimeter was like a three pointered clock with a long arm for hundreds, a medium arm for thousands and a short arm for ten-thousand, and we think he misread the short 10,000 arm and when he should of been at 10,000 feet turning inbound on a tear-drop letdown, he hit the water and was killed."

In talking about night missions, he mentioned the F-84 folks had a little trouble believing the "bean counts" for truck kills tallied up by the 3rd Bomb Wing. "We also had a bombing range somewhere's around east of the airport that we would drop practice bombs at night on and also we got to fly a mission with the 3rd Bomb Wing so we could see what they did on their missions. I got to fly mine with the Deputy Wing Commander of the 3rd Bomb Wing so I thought I was lucky. Later at a base wide pilots' meeting called by the 3rd Bomb Wing, the speaker pointedly asked one of our pilots from the 430th Squadron his feeling about the night missions and his answer was that he wished that we could get our bombs from the B-26 Group because they always claimed more trucks per mission than we did."

Another 474th alumni flying his first combat missions in those days was James V. Hartinger, who went on to become Commander NORAD and SPACECOM. He flew with the 474th FBW starting from December 1952.

The Bridges at Sinanju and Yongmidong (January 10-15 1953):

Air Power, The Decisive Force in Korea (p156) states that on 9 Jan, "18 Okinawa and Japan-based B-29s rode through intense antiaircraft fire to radar-aim 170 tons of bombs on the Sinanju-Yongmidong bridges, flak batteries, and railroad marshalling yards. Less than 12 hours later over 300 Fifth Air Force fighter-bombers dived 282 tons of high explosives on eight of the key rail and highway bridges and 27 of the antiaircraft gun positions defending the complexes. These two attacks kicked off the massive 5-day air assault on the Sinanju-Yongmidong bridge corridor."

"For the next four days and nights FEAF bombers, fighter-bombers, and fighters hammered the two-by-four-mile bridge area in relentless, coordinated, round-the-clock attack. Great formations of 200 to 400 fighter-bombers roared down in wave upon wave to keep the area under constant demolition. Eight fighter-bombers per minute went into target, two each 15 seconds -- including roll, track, and release. It was a formidable demonstration to the enemy he could not stop determined air attack regardless of concentration of flak."

"By night flak-suppressing B-26s joined the fighter-bombers in hammering anitaircraft positions and strewing time-fused and frag-clustered bombs throughout the area to pick off defending personnel. The daylight assault was taken over at night by B-26s and B-29s. Large numbers of F-86s, by day, and F-94s, by night, escorted the attacking aircraft, effectively screening the operations against intruding MiGs from the Yalu region. Both day and night, high-and-low altitude harassing attacks kept the area under complete air cover, picking off ack-ack positions, searchlights, and anything that moved or that had been left untouched in the mass attack."

There were 1116 sorties flown by the work-horses of the Korean air war--the fighter-bombers. In the morning of 13 January, 197 fighter-bombers from the 8th, 474th, 49th, 58th, and MAG 33 were involved. In the afternoon of 13 January, 172 fighter-bombers from the 8th, 474th, 49th, 58th, 478th, and MAG 33 were involved -- along with 8 B-26s from the 3rd BW.

At the close of the first day, Sinanju-Yongmidong lay "smouldering, a reeking mass of gnarled steel, wrenched earth, and jagged chunks of concrete torn away and hurled hundreds of yards over the landscape." Reconnaissance pilots in post-strike interrogation reported the "entire area torn up, the approaches to the bridges, the bridges themselves, and the area between." One pilot commented, "the bridges look like some giant picked them up and twisted them around like pretzels...it's a wonder if there is anything left."

In February 1953, The U.S. Air Force in Korea (p624) states, "the "strike of the month" was against the Sui-ho hydroelectric power plant, where photo interpreters believed two generators were again operating. The Reds evidently expected another B-29 attack for they were defending Sui-ho with 141 heavy guns and only 26 automatic weapons. Exploiting the Communist mistake on the afternoon of 15 February, the 474th Fighter Bomber Wing sent 22 Thunderjets to Sui-ho, each armed with two 1,000 pound semi-armor-piercing bombs. While 82 escorting and covering Sabres drew off 30 MIG's, the Thunderjets drove into Sui-ho at low level and put their bombs into the long, concrete generator house. The fighter-bombers suffered no damage, and their bomb hits halted power production at Sui-ho for several more months. In a notable two-day effort against the North Korean tank and infantry school at Kangso, on 18 and 19 February, the 8th, 49th, 58th, and 474th Wings and Marine Air Group 33 made 379 sorties to destroy at least 243 buildings. The commander of Marine Air Group 33 led the attack, which was one of the largest all-jet fighter-bomber strikes of the war and the largest number of aircraft ever led by a Marine."

Restrictive Flight Procedures:

It continued, "Restrictions also resulted from a concerted effort to reduce combat losses. It was readily apparent that, with the slowing tempo of the war, there were few if any targets that were worth the loss of a plane and pilot. Studies showed that the greatest amount of aircraft damage had been sustained at altitudes below three thousand feet and on the second and third passes at targets. As a result, accuracy suffered, but combat losses were substantially reduced."

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