Korea

 

In mid April, 1953 I got orders to report to Camp Stoneman outside San Francisco, a staging area on the way to the Korean war. No military air was available from Detroit so I was given a commercial ticket from Detroit Metropolitan to San Francisco International. After Autumn and I said a sad and teary goodbye my parents drove me to the airport, and I went out on a Northwest Airlines flight to Chicago.

I arrived at O'Hare in the early afternoon to find that my connecting flight to the coast had broken down somewhere down south. It was past midnight when its replacement arrived — a DC 3! A civilian gooney bird! We took off like a herd of turtles and cranked on toward the west coast. Even though we gained two hours during the flight it was nearly noon by the time we landed. A bus from Stoneman was there to whisk military arrivals like me off to the camp.

After you were assigned a bunk at Stoneman you were on your own, except that you had to check a bulletin board each day before noon to see if your name was on an order to ship out. Any day your name didn't come up you had the next 24 hours to goof off. At Stoneman I met three other fighter pilots, two of whom would be close friends for the rest of our lives: Henry (Rog) Gillespie, Charles MacBeth, and William McCafferey. I lost track of Willie after we left Korea, and Mac died of Parkinson's not long ago, but I still have lunch once a week with Gip (Gillespie) when we're in Florida. With time on our hands the four of us spent almost every evening in San Francisco. We'd wander the streets and see the sights for a while, then go up to the Top of the Mark lounge at the Mark Hopkins hotel and have a drink. Each fighter squadron in Korea had a bottle of fine Bourbon stored behind the bar at Top of the Mark. You could get a free drink from your squadron's bottle, but it you got the last shot you had to buy a new bottle. If we'd known which squadron we'd be assigned to we'd probably have tried it.

Finally, on April 27th we were hauled over to Travis AFB and loaded into a C-54, a four-engine prop-driven airplane which is the military version of the DC-4, for the trip to Japan. The airplane had uncomfortable bucket seats along both sides of the fuselage and a few hammocks hanging above the seats. Since there was no finishing inside the fuselage, the interior of the airplane was noisy as hell, but we arranged to take turns in the hammocks for some sleep.

After hours and hours and hours we landed at Hickam AFB in Oahu and stayed on the ground long enough to refuel and change flight crews. An hour later we were airborne again grinding on and on and on across the Pacific until early morning when we landed at Wake island. The airport at Wake was minimal, but the flight crew gave us two hours to wander around the place. A couple of us walked down a road and found two burned out WW II two-man Japanese tanks. Wish I'd had a camera on that trip.

Finally we flew on to Tachikawa Airbase, just outside Tokyo. Tachikawa was another staging area, the Japanese version of Stoneman. We spent a few days there and got a good look at downtown Tokyo, but on May 15th we received orders assigning us to the 58th Fighter Bomber Group at K2, the airbase outside Taegu. They packed us into a C-119, an airplane whose official name was the Flying Boxcar but that was affectionately known as the "whistling shithouse" because of the weird noise its propellers made when it was taxiing and the unfinished state of its interior. There were seven of us newbies on that flight and two guys who'd been shot down over North Korea and brought out by chopper. It wasn't a particularly auspicious introduction to The Land of the Morning Calm.

When we got to K2, I and my three friends were assigned to the 69th Fighter Bomber Squadron. We were given bunks in some WW II Japanese barracks where, as one guy put it, you could throw a cat through the wall. There's an extensive collection of pictures from Korea on my web, but I didn't include our living arrangements in that collection. This picture will give you some idea of what they were like. I took this picture with a shutter delay and a tripod after I'd managed, as you can see, to bring all sorts of comforts to the place. I was lucky enough to get a bunk next to a propane stove, but during the winter I backed into it one morning when I was dressing, and years later I still had the burn mark on my butt. In the morning a houseboy would come banging in after a breakfast of kimchi (Google it), and if you weren't awake already the smell would wake you up.

Before we were cleared to fly combat we were required to complete a series of orientation and training flights. The flights were hard to come by because almost all the operational airplanes were on combat missions — daily, and sometimes nightly. We were sent up to a Fifth Air Force control center outside Seoul and watched raid stands* representing flights of aircraft being pushed around on a huge horizontal map of Korea. At one point some of the raid stands were north of the Yalu river. A general came in and told the Colonel in charge to move the stands (but not the aircraft) south of the river since we weren't supposed to be crossing into China.

The molasses-slow training went on for a couple months, getting slower and slower as, with the end of the war in sight, Fifth Air Force mounted a maximum combat effort. One day all the flyable airplanes were on a run just south of the Yalu, and the guy who bunked across from me was in that gaggle. I've forgotten his name but I remember he came from the almost non-existent town of Keswick, Michigan, which isn't far from Omena and Suttons Bay. After the bomb run he got separated from his flight. He was above a solid overcast and couldn't see any clues to his location on the ground, so he tuned his primitive radio direction finder to the frequency for the radio beacon at Seoul. When he swung what he thought was Seoul (it actually was a KPA spoofer) he tried to tune in K2 but couldn't get it, so he simply headed south. After a while he was able to get the K2 beacon, but by then he was perilously low on fuel. Finally, just as he swung K2 and called the tower, he flamed out and bailed out. The word flashed around the base and we all ran outside to see him pop out of the clouds and land just outside the fence.

Finally we were finished with training and I was scheduled for my first combat mission — to the Haiju peninsula, which reportedly was loaded with enough flak to make subsequent missions seem easier. The mission was to take off on the afternoon of July 27th, but the truce was signed at ten o'clock that morning, and we never took off.

During these first months our squadron commander had been Major Hood, a good old, laid-back farm boy who was an excellent pilot and easy to get along with. Not long after the war ended Hood went home and his replacement was Lt. Colonel Taras (Ted) Popovich. I managed to get off on the wrong foot with the new commander without delay.

Popovich had to go through the usual series of orientation flights before he was cleared to fly combat, and by some weird turn of fate I got assigned to lead a training flight of four to the Naktong gunnery range with Popovich on my wing. We flew our mission, fired our guns, and then found that K2 was socked-in — below minimums. We diverted to our alternate, which was a Marine base on the east coast. The marines were flying F9 Panthers out of that base, and the runway was pretty short. I wasn't comfortable having the flight take off from that short runway with full tip tanks, so I told the maintenance sergeant to fill just the internal tanks. Popovich argued with me. He wanted the tip tanks filled so we could fly another training mission on the way home. I suggested that since he was the unit commander he could take over the flight, but he couldn't really do that since he hadn't finished his training. We took off and flew home, and he never got over it.

On August 9th (August 8th back in the States) a guy from the chaplain's office tracked me down and handed me a telegram. Clint was born! Autumn and Clint were both in good shape. It was an occasion that called for gathering my friends at the bar and buying the beer. I also made a trip to the BX for cigars and passed them out to everybody in my barracks.

On August 26th, almost a month after the end of the war, a bunch of us were sent up the peninsula to K46 at Hoengsong for escape and evasion training. After a couple days of lectures we were taken out into the hills and left to find our way back to the base without being apprehended by the locals. Geography wasn't the problem. We knew where we were and where the base was, and we could get there using our maps and compasses, but the area was full of kids looking for us, and the kids had been offered rewards if they found us. Actually, it was a pretty realistic situation because that was exactly what you faced if you had to bail out over the north. In the end, we got caught. But getting caught didn't get you back to the base. You still had to do that on your own. It was a long hike back and it was the middle of the night when we crested the last hill and looked down on the lights of K46. But we weren't there yet. We had to climb down the face of what, next morning, showed itself to be a cliff. It's a good thing it was dark. I'd never have gotten down that cliff if I'd been able to see what I was doing.

I didn't seem able to stop irritating Popovich. He was sucking up to Col. Williams, the group commander, and Williams had decided to run for the chairmanship of the officers' club board. Popovich sent around a flunky telling everybody to be at the meeting of the board and vote for Williams. For some reason, that really ticked me off. I went around and suggested we all go to the meeting and vote for somebody else. Williams was defeated. I don't know who the fink was, but Popovich found out what I'd done, and let me know that he knew.

The next problem was when I came back from a flight with one tip tank that hadn't fed properly. The left one was still full and the right one was empty. Tip tanks are designed to let you carry extra fuel, but if it looks as if you're going to get into aerial combat you drop the tanks to gain maneuverability. Trying to land with one tank full and one empty is asking for a problem since each F84 tank holds 226 gallons. At 6.79 lb/gal that means the tank holds 1,535 pounds of jet fuel. The imbalance between a full tip tank and an empty one is what killed Jim Cooksey (see Pilot Training) when he rolled into his heavy tank close to the ground. So before I landed I flew over the drop area off the end of the runway and punched off my tanks. Popovich was furious.

During this period each of us was given "additional duties." For a while I was assigned as assistant to the commandant of the correction center. K2 had the main brig for Air Force people in Korea, and we had some really hard cases. But we also had kids who'd go AWOL and soon discover that trying to live on kimchi and lucky whiskey (booze made from kimchi) wasn't cutting it. They'd sneak back into a mess hall line where an alert cop would pick them up. I suspect that during the winter some of them went AWOL and got caught on purpose. It was a lot warmer in the correction center than in most of our barracks.

My main additional duty was to escort the Neutral Nations Inspection Team (NNIT), a team made up of two members from Communist countries and two from free countries — mostly Switzerland and Sweden. Every time a cargo or passenger airplane landed at K2 the NNIT was authorized to go through it and look for items prohibited by the truce agreement. I had to steer these guys around and make sure they didn't poke into stuff they weren't entitled to poke into.

I also was sent to Yokota AFB when my airplane was due for periodic maintenance, and spent six days in a small trailer next to the runway doing runway control. But the additional duty that turned out to be the most fun was when I got sent up to the Naktong gunnery range to man the range tower for a week. I went down to the flightline and found that my transportation up to Naktong was a an L-20, the Canadian Beaver, a high-wing, single-engine bush plane. On the way up I said something to the pilot about how nice it was to be able to get a good look at the countryside from a low, slow aircraft. He said, "Yeah. This ain't an endurance contest. This is flyin." It was my introduction to what became my all-time favorite airplane. Later on I logged hundreds of hours in the L-20 flying out of Great Falls, Montana and Beausejour, Manitoba. In the winter I'd fly the Beaver with skis instead of wheels.

One day I was number two in a flight that made a simulated bomb run on the east coast. On the way back we got into some pretty heavy weather. When we swung the K2 radio beacon and started our letdown we were in close formation. If you were flying someone's wing, which I was, you had to concentrate completely on the airplane next to you, but for some reason I made a quick glance at my gyro compass and saw we were heading directly toward the highest mountain in the area. I keyed my mike and said, "Check your standby compass."** Suddenly the lead aircraft pulled up sharply and disappeared into the soup, leaving the rest of the flight in confusion. I started a slow, climbing turn away from the mountain and got the other two guys to join up on me. We went back to the radio beacon and started the letdown again on the right heading.

The worst thing that happened to me while I was in Korea happened close to the end of my tour. All three squadrons in the 58th group were scheduled for a massive night flight to maintain night proficiency. Popovich wanted to impress Williams by having every airplane in the 69th squadron in the air.

The flight was to last a couple hours and we were to fly three times around a large triangle with turning points south of K2 on both coasts. I was the lead for a flight of four, but my number four had an airplane problem and aborted. One of my remaining two wingmen was a guy named Dean Methfessel, but I don't remember the name of the other pilot, who flew number two position. We took off and climbed to our assigned altitude of 30,000 feet. I led the first run around the triangle. When we got back over K2 I moved number two into the lead and Dean and I joined up on his wings. When we got to the first turn, on the west coast, the leader rolled the flight into a left turn. I was on his right and Methfessel was on his left. The turn got steeper and steeper until it looked as if we were going to go inverted. I called lead but couldn't get an answer. Finally I told Dean to break off. By then the lead was inverted and was descending in a tight spiral. Dean joined up on my wing and we circled for several minutes until finally we saw a flash on the ground. We headed straight back to K2 and landed.

I left Korea soon after that and never got to see the accident report, but many years later, after I'd put Twenty Years to Asia on my web site I got an email from one of the guys who'd flown that night. The pilot who went down was a close friend of his and he'd done some investigating on his own. According to him, maintenance wouldn't sign off on the airplane that night because of possible problems with the oxygen system. Popovich overruled the maintenance chief and released the airplane for flight. Thinking about it made me flash back to my oxygen problem that night at Webb (see Pilot Training). When you're becoming hypoxic you don't really know it's happening. I'll never understand how Popovich came out of that investigation in one piece.

Finally, on March 25th, 1954 the four of us who'd come in on that C-119 got our stateside marching orders.  I was to go to the 740th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Rapid City, South Dakota, but with extended temporary duty at Tyndall AFB, outside Panama City, Florida to learn to be an intercept controller.

We had a small going-away party and Popovich made a short speech about the four of us. When he got to me he said, "Lewis is the only second lieutenant I've known who'd tell a lieutenant colonel to kiss his ass." A couple years later I had a chance to read the efficiency report he'd given me. It was bad, but Popovich couldn't write for sour beans and the personality clash between us came through loud and clear. That ER never interfered with my later career.

 

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* I tried to Google "raid stand," and found we're now so far from WW II and its aftermath that Google hasn't a clue. A raid stand was a small stand made out of what looked like a bent wire coat hanger that held a plaque with the call sign for a flight of aircraft. It showed the position of the flight on a horizontal plotting board: a huge map of the area of interest. Plotters stood around the plotting board wearing earphones. At regular intervals a controller would give a plotter the current position for a flight and he'd move the flight's raid stand to the new position

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**There were two compasses in the F84. One was a gyro-stabilized compass that sometimes got out of whack. The other was called a "standby compass." The standby compass was partially stabilized by the fluid it lived in, but wasn't stable enough to use as your primary direction reference. Nonetheless, when you rolled out on a new heading it always paid to cross-check and make sure both compasses at least more or less agreed.