The Americans dropped more than thirty-two thousand tons of napalm on Korea, about double the amount that fell on Japan in 1945. During an “average good day” it amounted to about seventy thousand gallons. The human toll even horrified MacArthur. After Truman fired him, he told Congress, “I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was [in Korea]. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.”
Stalin never used airpower to protect major North Korean cities from American napalm. Mass death of civilians in the Korean War, Soviet archives show, meant nothing to him and was never a factor in his strategic calculations. But as the war heated up, as MacArthur’s airborne ferocity gathered momentum, as Chinese forces absorbed devastating losses from American air strikes, Stalin reversed his own policy of not helping China from the air. He committed more and more fighter jets to the Yalu River corridor to protect Chinese troops and their supply routes into North Korea.
For a while, Stalin tried to keep his best jet pilots out of this fight, sending his second team instead. But they did not have the flying skills, combat experience, or self-confidence to mix it up with the hotshot American fighter pilots who now escorted B-29s to and from their targets. By March 1951, after several months of crashing into each other and getting shot down, these neophyte Soviet pilots “began evading and breaking off combat,” and the Communist side of the conflict over the Yalu River became “one of flight and panic,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Pepelyaev, who commanded an elite flight squadron.
So Stalin reluctantly played his aces.
Just as No was preparing to move from classroom to runway, from jet propulsion principles to the cockpit of a MiG-15, Stalin ordered all the excellent Russian instructor-pilots at Anshan air base into combat. The airspace over the Yalu River soon became world famous as MiG Alley. The first jet-powered aerial war was on. No’s instructor, Captain Nikichenko, the homesick family man, joined the fight.
No, too, would be thrown into the air war, but not for several more months.
He had yet to get his hands on a MiG.
And now, thanks to Stalin, he could not find one. When his instructors rushed away to war, they took all sixty-five of their MiGs with them.
CHAPTER 6
MiGs
I
The Great Leader left his Pyongyang bunker in early morning darkness, bringing along Kim Jong Il, his nine-year-old son and future heir. In a Russian-built limousine painted olive drab, they traveled northwest toward the Chinese border. Their convoy included seven sedans and five trucks carrying a security detail with about a hundred plainclothes police and uniformed soldiers.
It was early October 1951, and the convoy was bound for Uiju, a border town in the heart of MiG Alley. Chinese engineers there had just completed construction of a concrete runway. Located about a half mile south of the Yalu River, it was the only airfield in North Korea built for fighter jets.
When the limousine stopped at the runway’s edge and the Great Leader emerged, eight newly trained North Korean fighter pilots saluted. They had landed minutes earlier in MiG-15s after a short hop from Anshan airfield on the Manchurian side of the border. The pilots had been told that the Great Leader wanted a firsthand look at the fighter jets that would soon be based in Uiju. If he offered to shake hands, they were told not to squeeze too tight.
The youngest pilot on the runway that unseasonably warm autumn morning was No Kum Sok, then nineteen. He was still playing the faux-Communist role he had chosen for himself more than three years earlier, after seeing the Great Leader on the fertilizer mountain. But jet training had stirred his imagination and complicated his performance. He fantasized about exiting the war in his MiG-15. So far, though, he did not have the flying skills, the nerve, or a plan. He was torn between escape fantasies and cold feet.
At Uiju, No’s second sighting of Kim triggered a new and suicidal fantasy: he would shoot the Great Leader. With an inchoate rage that had been smoldering since his father’s death, No blamed Kim for splintering his family and ruining his childhood. He also hated him for poisoning Korea with Communism, paranoia, and fear.
As he eyed the men protecting Kim and his son, it seemed that the plainclothes bodyguards were worried more about the uniformed soldiers, each of whom carried a submachine gun, than about the MiG pilots. No had a loaded service pistol at his side, a Russian-made Tokarev TT-33 semiautomatic. He was a decent shot. He reckoned he could draw his gun and pump several bullets into Kim Il Sung before security guards could open fire.
But he did not touch the pistol. He had come too far to give in to a postadolescent urge for instant justice.
Shaking off his daydream, he watched and listened to the two Kims, who had dressed for the morning’s MiG inspection in matching Mao suits with puffy Mao caps. War seemed to have aged the Great Leader. For a man who was thirty-nine years old, his face was wrinkled and careworn. His hair, jet-black three years earlier, was flecked with gray. He was fatter than before.
As Kim Il Sung walked around one of the MiGs, the three guns in the plane’s snout caught his eye. He was especially taken with the biggest one, a 37 mm cannon, which fired high-explosive shells that weighed one and a half pounds each and had a range of up to a mile. A MiG-15 could shoot eighty of these rounds in five seconds. Two direct hits could bring down an American fighter jet, Soviet engineers believed, while eight could knock a fifty-two-ton B-29 out of the sky.
“This is quite a weapon,” Kim said, seeming to think out loud. “With a weapon like this we could kill even the granddaddies of Americans.”
He turned to his son and asked if he would like to fly a MiG when he grew up.
“Yes,” said Kim Jong Il, who climbed a ladder to look down into the jet’s cockpit.
“If you want to fly this plane,” his father said, “you will have to study hard.”
The father-son inspection ended as abruptly as it began.
Without giving a speech or shaking a hand, Kim walked back to his limousine and climbed in. He and his son were whisked away, having come and gone in less than fifteen minutes. No and the other pilots followed suit, climbing into the cockpits of their jets and roaring back to Manchuria. In a month’s time, Uiju would become the first and only MiG base in North Korea.
Brief though it was, No’s encounter with Kim and his son was on-the-ground proof that something fundamental had changed in the air war over Korea in 1951. The Great Leader felt safe enough to risk exposing himself—and his precious son—to a possible American air attack while strolling around on an exposed runway under clear blue skies.
Kim took the risk because American bombers had been stymied. In the Yalu River corridor, they could no longer embark on leisurely, risk-free missions to blow up bridges, supply depots, and airfields.
MacArthur attributed the change to the murderous rise of the MiG. “Modern high performance type jet aircraft” operating out of Manchuria, he said, were seriously challenging American air superiority.
In the month that Kim visited Uiju airfield, fifty-five American airmen were killed, as MiGs shot down eight B-29s. It was the worst month of the war for the U.S. Air Force. The worst day was October 23, which became known as Black Tuesday, when eighty-four MiGs shredded an American bombing formation, damaging all five of its B-29s and shooting down three. In the process, MiGs outmaneuvered and outfought fifty-five American Thunderjets, which were escorting the bombers and trying to protect them. American claims to the contrary, not a single MiG was lost, and only three were damaged. It was “one of the most savage and bloody” air battles of the Korean War, according to the official U.S. Air Force history of the war.
MiGs were itching for a fight. UN pilots counted more than twenty-five hundred of them in the Yalu River corridor in October, and 85 percent behaved in a manner suggesting they were eager t
o engage in aerial combat. So many B-29s were shot down that month that the Americans canceled daylight bombing operations in MiG Alley.
On the ground in the fall of 1951, the conflict between Chinese and UN forces had settled into a grim World War I–style, trench-warfare stalemate. The first cease-fire negotiations began in July amid nasty but inconclusive ground fighting that would go on for two more years. The real action in the Korean War—the stuff that made front-page headlines—was no longer on the ground. It had risen into the sky over MiG Alley.
II
The MiG pilots responsible for Black Tuesday—and for the Communist surge that made Kim Il Sung feel secure enough to visit Uiju airfield with his son—were the Russians who had eaten caviar with No Kum Sok.
Beginning in April 1951, while based in Manchuria’s Dandong airfield, a few miles from the North Korean border, they confronted, outflew, and outgunned some of the best combat pilots in the U.S. Air Force. With respect and fear, American pilots called them “honchos,” from a Japanese word for “boss.”
The honchos flew under orders from Stalin that were as secret as they were bizarre. Before they could engage the Americans, they had to pretend to be Chinese. They took fake Chinese names and wore Chinese flight uniforms, with blue pants, orange-red boots, and khaki jackets. They never flew with identification papers. Colonel Kozhedub’s unit painted its MiGs with the colors of North Korea, while another elite Soviet fighter unit disguised its fighters with Chinese markings.
The Russians signed nondisclosure forms, promising not to tell anyone they were fighting in the Korean War. In case of capture by the enemy, they were supposed to explain their white skin by saying that they were European Chinese of Soviet extraction. In case of capture by the friendly forces of China or North Korea, their lack of identification papers could be a life-threatening problem, because Chinese and North Korean ground troops were inclined to view Caucasian pilots as imperialist bastards.
On the radio in their MiGs, the Russians were ordered to speak Chinese, a ridiculous, much-resented, and utterly impossible order, given that they did not speak the language. They secretly buried their recovered dead (with the exception of senior officers, who were transported back to Moscow) in the Far East Soviet enclave of Port Arthur.
The orders from Stalin were part of a “carefully orchestrated ballet” intended to protect the Soviet Union’s Chinese allies without provoking the United States into a wider war. It never fooled the Americans, who often heard MiG pilots speaking Russian on the radio. The United States, though, decided not to react. It was, as Shen Zhihua, a Chinese scholar of the Korean War, has called it, “a curious case of double deniability.”
Like Stalin, Truman did not want to pour gasoline on a regional fire. He and other officials in Washington believed it would be imprudent to tell the American public that Russians were blasting American boys out of the sky. They feared the rise of popular sentiment for a larger retaliatory war against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.
So everyone lied for the sake of a larger peace. The Soviet air force contributed about seventy thousand pilots, artillery gunners, and technicians to the war. And the United States publicly blamed the catastrophic turn in the air war on China. It was then a much less formidable military power, and the American public already knew that Chinese soldiers were fighting in Korea. After returning from a visit to the Far East in the fall of 1951, General Hoyt Vandenberg, the air force chief of staff, gloomily and mendaciously explained the air-war crisis to the Washington press corps: “Almost overnight, Communist China has become one of the major air powers of the world.”
The cover-up continued on the American side through the end of the Korean War and on through the Eisenhower administration. The Soviet Union never officially acknowledged its role in the Korean War, an omission that probably helped keep the cold war cool.
Russian pilots, though, were irritated by the pretense. So they made racist jokes about it.
First Russian: We have the best pilots in the world.
Second Russian: How is that?
First Russian: Because they can fly with no hands.
Second Russian: Why do they do that?
First Russian: They use their hands to slant their eyes so the Americans will think they’re Koreans.
On Stalin’s orders, the Russians could not go on the offensive. They never coordinated with Chinese ground forces or flew close air support to help the Chinese or North Korean infantry. They were under strict orders not to fly over the sea, over any American-held territory, or even near a battle line, lest they get shot down and be discovered as Russian. These orders seem to have been carefully followed. During the war, not one of them was taken prisoner by UN forces.
The Russians had to be patient predators, waiting for American bombers and jet fighter escorts to attack bridges and supply lines along the Yalu River. Only then, with American aircraft already in the air, could the Russians swoop in and try to shoot them down.
This, too, annoyed the Russians.
“We had to sit stewing in our cockpits for hours on end,” said Lieutenant General G. A. Lobov, commander of the 303rd Soviet Air Defense Division. “We had to be on duty waiting, but the Americans could choose the time. This was extremely demoralizing. When a report came in of an American sortie, I had only seconds to prepare my men. I could never plan an operation in advance.”
For all their frustration, for all their disguises, for all the Stalinist red tape they had to wrap themselves in, the elite Russian pilots and their MiGs were extraordinarily effective. For nearly a year, they protected the Chinese, contributed significantly to the survival of North Korea, and tormented the entire U.S. military operation. MiGs chased off bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. They gave the North Koreans and the Chinese a chance to build new bases and repair old ones. Without eyes in the sky, American generals struggled in 1951 to keep tabs on the whereabouts of Chinese reinforcements pouring into the ground war.
III
With the MiG-15, Stalin had hit on a winner. It was much faster—by a hundred miles an hour—than any aircraft the Americans had in the Far East during the first six months of the war. More important, it could climb quicker and fly higher than any American fighter.
On his first solo flight in a MiG-15, No was astonished—and unnerved—by the jet’s thrust. Off the runway, the cigar-shaped jet could climb at nearly two miles a minute. It was like riding a rocket with wings.
The Soviet Union manufactured about twelve thousand of these fighters, and in the early 1950s most of them were sent by train to Manchuria.
For all its speed, however, the MiG-15 was flimsy, uncomfortable, and difficult to control. Chuck Yeager, the legendary American test pilot, called the MiG-15 “a flying booby trap” and “a quirky airplane that’s killed a lot of its pilots.” Another American test pilot, Tom Collins, described it as “a little, light, peashooter machine.” The plane pitched up its nose unexpectedly, stalled without warning, and rarely recovered from a fatal spin. Its instruction manual warned that flying for more than ten minutes at full throttle could set the engine on fire. Poor quality control in Soviet factories meant that a MiG-15’s two swept-back wings were almost never the same exact size. As the plane approached the speed of sound, the mismatch caused sudden and uncontrollable rolling movements.
The cockpit was an ergonomic horror. It forced a pilot to sit low in a cramped seat that offered poor visibility. Bad heating and air-conditioning made the MiG-15 intolerably warm on a hot tarmac and freezing cold at high altitude. Cabin pressure and the oxygen supply were reliable, if a MiG was expertly serviced. If not, a pilot sometimes had to fiddle with a little knob beside his seat to maintain cabin pressure, and to breathe safely above forty thousand feet he had to pay careful attention to a valve on the oxygen system. Open it too much and all the plane’s oxygen could be lost. Open it too little and a pilot’s fingernails would turn a bluish purple
, the early sign of oxygen deprivation, which could quickly lead to loss of consciousness and death.
In several dangerous and infuriating ways, the cockpit inhibited a pilot from seeing an enemy fighter creeping up on his tail. There was no rearview mirror. At high altitude, the Plexiglas cockpit canopy could ice over if it was not serviced properly. Ice began forming at the rear of the canopy at about forty thousand feet and then crept forward until it covered the pilot’s entire field of vision.
“At forty-five thousand feet, you felt as though someone had pulled a white bag over your head,” said Collins. “If you had sharp fingernails or a knife, you could scrape a little hole to look out. [At lower altitudes], this ice melted, but it became a wet vapor on top of the canopy that obscured your vision.”
Even when the canopy was not shrouded in ice or occluded by fog (and good maintenance usually kept it clear), the MiG’s T-shaped tail had a high horizontal stabilizer that kept pilots from seeing planes approaching from above and behind.
Russian flight instructors told young North Korean pilots to lift weights so they would be strong enough to manipulate the stick on an early model of the MiG-15 that arrived in Manchuria in late 1950. The stick did not have hydraulic assist and was almost impossible to control at high speed and low altitude. No did a hundred push-ups a day (part of the regimen he began in the naval academy) but still struggled to control the stick. That early MiG model also had quirky German-made buttons on a cramped control panel. During flights, a pilot trying to press a single control button often pressed several others by mistake.
At the relatively low speed (for a MiG) of 130 miles an hour, the lateral stability of the plane “goes to pot,” according to Collins. “The MiG starts wallowing around and you’re sitting up there really whopping the stick around to try to hold it steady . . . You can see that a guy could be approaching a stall, lose control and the airplane would immediately go into a spin.”