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TEC Note: The following is the unedited text from an April, 1953 article in SAGA magazine entitled:
You're flying to the heart of Red Korea,
with three targets to hit and 80 planes
to bring home. This is interdiction
BETWEEN THE UNCEILINGED BLUE SKY and the mountainous Korean terrain, which at 30,000 feet looks likesmeared, yellow~brown finger~painting, you're flying your F-80 fighter bomber on the most important mission of your life.
You are Colonel Levi Chase. A group leader as well as a combat pilot, you have a lot on your mind. You fly brilliantly and alertly, yet only a part of you is concentrating on your instruments, the planes around you, the potential MiG, and other traps ahead. Most of you is anticipating the action that will take place when you reach I.P.-the Initial Point- where, according to plan, your airborne devastation is supposed to commence.
Fanning out behind you are the 80 planes of the three squadrons of your outfit, the Eighth Fighter Bomber Group, loaded with thousand-pound bombs and rockets. "For immediate delivery in Pyongyang and never mind signing any receipts," you reflect grimly to yourself, as you automatically scan the cloudless brass-and-blue dome ahead for MiGs. You check the position of your wing men and your fuel supply. In a fighter bomber you're forever checking fuel supply. It seems that you're always flying F-80 sorties at extreme range with just enough fuel to make it back to your base if you're careful. And the Pyongyang operation is no exception.
This is your 357th combat mission in two wars and you've been hoping for it for a long time. The Commies have it coming to them. For months they've been using Pyongyang for a buildup, somehow bringing in supplies and material despite the bridges and the locomotives you and your group have been blasting and the rails you've been cutting over and over again.
You know that up to now there has been little harassing of the North Korean capital itself. But the other day Lieutenant General Glenn 0. Barcus, commanding general of the Fifth Air Force, told you that the lid was off and you nodded soberly and waited for the final briefing.
When the tacticians and the strategists, the logistics experts and the intelligence officers put it down on paper it looked easy. On July 11th, 1952, you Colonel Chase were to take your group over the northwest sector of Pyong yang and knock out three all-important, primary objectives with pinpoint bombing: a roundhouse and locomotive repair plant, an ordnance manufacturing plant and adjoining ammunition dump, and a telephone and communications equipment factory.
But when you're doing interdict work, raising hell with the enemy in general and pinpointing your targets, there's a lot that the experts can't put down on paper. For one thing, they can't quite call their shots as they do with saturation bombing by the heavies. And you can't leave much to chance like in fighting air-to-air.
Interdiction has a technique all its own whether you're flying at 45,000 feet or at 25. You may do both before your mission is completed. And a lot of the stuff isn't in the text books. Like when- you're interdicting a hard-to get-at cave full of enemy in a boxed-in canyon. Your napalm isn't going to explode at 40 feet unless you've got another fighter bomber diving in behind you to machine-gun it, a neat little interdict trick developed by "Rice Paddy" Reusser and Charley Garber. But there won't be time, or room in the sky for neat little interdict tricks on this mission. Or napalm, either. It is strictly a bomb-and-rocket job.
You check your fuel again. You look toward your wing men. Then forward, up and back. The Group is flying in perfect formation and by the book everything is going exactly according to plan.
It's what you expect, of course. The Eighth Fighter Bomber Group is an-outfit of which you're mighty proud. And understandably, you're proud of your record with it. Since taking command you've increased the sortie rate and, at the same time, cut losses by 50 per cent. This meant hard work and anxiety. Hard work you've always been used to.
The anxiety came with the Korean War. Back in the old days, you won your Air Force wings at Maxwell Field, Alabama, two months before Pearl Harbor, trained as a fighter pilot and got a speedy introduction to combat in North Africa. You were pretty hot. Flying P-40 Warhawks from a sandy airstrip in Tunisia, you soon became the top American ace in the North African- campaign. Eight German fighters, one German diver bomber and one Italian fighter went down under your blazing guns, and the Nazis hated your guts so much that they bombed your squadron base 36 times before they were driven out of North Africa.
The hero-loving press tried to give you the glamor treatment when you began to receive your combat medals, three Silver Stars, a Legion of Merit, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, Bronze Star, the -French Croix de Guerre. But the more you went into combat-and came out of it alive the more you realized the deadly seriousness of what you were doing. You dodged publicity as you did enemy planes, leaving the glamor stuff to the wild-blue-yonder boys. In becoming one of the nation's most highly decorated combat pilots, you also remained the one least known to the public. That was the way you wanted it.
From North Africa you went to the China-Burma-India theater where you were one of the first Aiir Force pilots to use napalm, a new weapon then. There in the jungle you developed a miniature interdiction campaign of your own, knocking out bridges and raIlroad tracks. One day a Jap bullet brought you down near Rangoon, some 50 miles inside enemy territory. Fortunately for you, a tiny L-5 liaison plane flying from a secret base in enemy territory, picked you up and flew you to safety. Before you left the theater you got revenge by. knocking down three Zeroes, bringing your score of enemy planes to 13.
When the war was over you left the Air Force for civilian life and went to law school for a little while. Then the Korean war broke out and because the Air Force still was in your blood you joined up again. Eight months after returning to active duty you were flying Sabrejets over the Yalu River and it was like beginning all over again. The planes were faster and the interdict targets were even harder to locate than those in the Burma jungle. And you were no longer a spring chicken. At 34, you are flying with kids who were still in school when you were mauling Nazis over Tunisia.
After your first three missions you began to feel better about things and by the time you got in 15 missions with the 51st Fighter Interceptor Wing, you knew that you hadn't lost your old touch. The 51st was flying F-80s and getting the works thrown at them-from the ground with flak, in the air by MiGs, and even from snipers' hangouts on the sides of Korean mountains.
You carried on a ceaseless interdiction program, hitting everything that moved, blowing hell out of the enemy, co-ordinating napalm, bombs, .50 calibers and rockets with each mission. One day you were cutting rails, the next fighting air-to-air. Always you were available for close support work for our ground troops or blasting enemy concentrations 15 or 20 miles behind the Red lines.
Then you took over the Eighth Fighter Bomber Group and discovered that skillful interdiction had been a sort of warmup for this particular mission. Minutes from the I.P., you check your fuel and frown as you look ahead in the still untroubled sky. Not a MiG in sight. It would be stupid to think the Reds didn't know that Pyongyang was about to be on the receiving end of an interdict. You're far too wise to underestimate the Commie intelligence. The enemy probably knew when your Group left its base.
He must be prepared to give you a hot reception and you've got a pretty good idea of what the main dish will be. A few months before, when you led four fighter bombers over Pyongyang you ran into a formidably impressive curtain of flak. The enemy has had plenty of time to reinforceit since.
"They'll probably throw up a flak barrage such as you've never seen before," you warned your pilots in the final Group briefing back at base. "We've got to come in lower than they expect. Under the flak layer. We go out the same way."
Now, 30 seconds out of Pyongyang, the Eighth is coming in over the northwest sector according to plan, and as you make a final check and head for the I.P., you are no longer thinking ahead, but concentrating intently on the business immediately at hand. At this precise instant the enemy barrage goes into action, trying to blast your Group out of the sky and it's got a fairly good idea, not only of your targets, but also of the I.P. where the devastation take-off begins. The blue sky has suddenly ceased to be blue, and is filled with smoke and exploding shells. Like a sinister curtain, the flak spreads high above the wings of the fighter bombers, then falls swiftly as though trying to ensnare them.
You grunt to yourself in satisfaction as you reach I.P. and prepare to make your own run. Your initial evasive tactic has been successful. To the last plane, the Group has come in under the flak layer. The layer is lowering fast, but the F-80s are moving faster still. You hope this luck will hold. The F-80s roar in behind you in perfect coordination, target bound. For months, on hundreds of sorties your Group has been working on this split-second precisioh timing. It has to be for 80 fast-flying planes to stay in the air and out of each other's way. None of this "drop your load, Charley, and head for home" stuff of World War II. Right now you're flying in the world's fastest company and you're flying strictly according to schedule. Your fighter bombers knock out gun emplacement A and proceed to plaster position B before dealing with objective X.
There's extra heavy stuff coming up at you from the vicinity of the roundhouse and engine repair set-up. It isn't the kind of a target which can be camouflaged and the enemy has made no attempt to do so. But as you go in on it and the planes behind you begin.unloading their thousand-pounders, concealed anti-aircraft guns around the objective go into action, throwing up a cone of fire. Your rockets seek out the guns but it is a long time before the intensity of their barrage diminishes.
You pull out and begin leveling on and suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a lethal barrage which seems to be concentrating on you, exclusively. "This is the guy we really want," the shells seem to scream. "This is the bastard we're going to get right now."
Maybe It's just coincidence. Maybe the Commies down below are trusting to sheer dumb luck, but the crew of one of the radar-controlled heavies has picked out your particular F-80 as the most important one to hit. You can see the flak marching ominously across the sky. And so can your wing men who are quick to warn you.
"Break right, colonel, it's creeping in On you, the voice of a pilot cuts in amidst the staccato chatter of air-to-air.
You've already anticipated that. You've angled away.
"That's fine. Now break right again."
You follow instructions, like in the old days when you were a student pilot listening to your instructor through training headphones. Now the flak is jumping around and you try to anticipate the enemy gunners.
"Break left, colonel," advises a voice. It's your other wing man. As you obey another pIlot's voice cuts in.
"What the hell is this, a waltz?" it demands. "Let's go get those dirty-"
Fiery-fingered rockets begin reaching for the radar heavy. They close in around it just about the time that the second primary objective, the ordnance plant and ammunition dump are hit. A pall of ugly brown black smoke studded with tiny flashes of fire rises from the exploding ammo.
"Jeezus. That's doing it!" says a voice in your ear.
You recognize the voice of a young pilot. You're not quite sure whether he's impressed with his own accuracy, or with the sum total of devastation. It doesn't matter. You hear a lot of voices. A lot of swearing. The boys have to let off steam. You're breathing easier. Some of the flak came pretty close.
Especially 'from that radar heavy. The F-80s are coming through the smoke, eager to get at the third objective, the telephone and communications equipment factory.
"We then proceed from primary objective B to primary objective C and-" The words of the briefing officer come back to you now as the fighter bombers roar on target. The rockets blast the anti-aircraft guns with a withering barrage. Mostly they're where our intelligence said they would be. They're knocked out methodically according to plan.
You soon discover 'the enemy has a few surprises of his own-hidden gun positions. It seems as if two new anti-aircraft guns are going into action for every one that is silenced. If anything, the flak is again increasing in intensity.
You've got your fingers crossed as the thousand-pounders begin hurtling toward your third objective. You keep them crossed as the F-80s pull out, wondering how in hell they'll be able to avoid being hit by all the upcoming stuff.
Now you've got an urgent personal problem of your own. Another radar-controlled heavy has singled you out and is reaching for you. You start breaking right and left again.
Smoke is billowing from the telephone plant and rising thickly from several direct hits. It is creeping upward, joining the smoke from the exploded ammunition dump, spreading an awe-inspiring blanket across the sky over Pyongyang.
The F-80s disappear into that smoke and as you hit it you're grateful for the fleeting moment of concealment. The radar heavy has lost you. Maybe it was knocked out by rockets. Maybe it's seeking another target. Whatever happened it's off you. When you emerge from the smoke, you're headed for base. Automatically you check your fuel. You're going to make it back.
You scan the sky. It's filled with planes F-8O fighter bombers. You look behind you at a grim and terrible spectacle you will never forget. A curtain of flak is rising into the brown-black sky like a solid wall. It seems a miracle that any plane could pierce that wall without being shot down. In a way it was a miracle of split second precision and timing.
You took 80 fighter bombers in. You brought the 80 of them home. You went through an intense enemy barrage without major damage or the loss of a single aircraft.
That is interdiction.
THE END
Annotated Photopages: WWII | Korea | Vietnam | Post-Vietnam & Retirement | Roots
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by Thomas E. Chase © 1998 |
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tec12@bigfoot.com
