His new airfield was near Dandong, just north of the Yalu. It had become the primary forward base for the Communist air war, with 170 MiGs flown by pilots from the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. It had one narrow, congested, and intermittently deadly runway. The Chinese were based at the runway’s east end and always took off to the west. The Russians and North Koreans were on the west end and took off to the east. All the MiGs, especially the newer models with bigger engines, were extraordinary fuel guzzlers. Most of them ran low on fuel in about an hour; a few could fly at full power for only thirty-five minutes. Then they returned to Dandong in panicky flocks, often landing from the east and the west at the same time, squeezing past each other at high speed on the narrow runway. Pilots struggled to keep to the right, and a few collided head-on. No had many near misses, but in the process became accustomed to landing amid runway chaos that would horrify most pilots.
From nearly a year of studying MiG pilots over MiG Alley, American fliers were wise to who was good (most of the Russians) and who was not (most of the Chinese and North Koreans). The Communists unwittingly assisted the Americans’ ranking system by color coding some of their jets. The MiGs in No’s regiment, with poorly trained pilots who could not shoot straight, had a red nose and a red ring painted around the fuselage behind the wing. The distinctive pattern seemed to say to Sabre pilots, “Come kill me.”
In early 1952, to No’s enormous relief, the red on every MiG was covered with silver paint.
On New Year’s Day 1952, the twenty-four MiGs in No’s regiment took off, climbed to forty-two thousand feet, and headed south. Following the regimental commander, Colonel Tae Kuk Sung, they flew over bomb-shattered Pyongyang and continued south. The day was clear. Visibility was excellent. Best of all, the Americans were celebrating the New Year’s holiday by keeping their fighter jets on the ground. No’s usual stomach-churning fear had ebbed. He relaxed and enjoyed the view.
“That smoky scene in the southern horizon is Seoul,” Colonel Tae told his pilots over the radio.
No had never flown so close to South Korea. It struck him that this might be his best chance to make a run for it. He could peel away from his formation, dive to a lower altitude, and perhaps find a landing strip in South Korea before Sabres could be scrambled to shoot him down. If he made it, he could quit pretending.
Exhilarated and terrified at the same moment, he had only seconds to take inventory of his chances. Other MiGs, he guessed, would give chase and fire at him. If he eluded them, where, exactly, would he land? He knew little about runways in South Korea. He worried, too, that the Americans would spot him on radar and target him with antiaircraft fire.
Over the radio, the regimental commander ordered his pilots to turn north and head back to Manchuria. In tight formation, No made the turn.
A cold calculation had canceled his daydream of defection: he figured he would not survive. The same calculation had stopped him from shooting the Great Leader on the runway at Uiju. No had no interest in making a grand statement. He did not want to die as a symbol of opposition to Kim Il Sung. He wanted to live in the United States.
To improve his odds, he reasoned, he needed more experience as a pilot. As important, he needed precise map coordinates for airfields in South Korea. He needed to know which ones could accommodate a MiG. He flew back to Manchuria, at peace with his decision to wait for a better opportunity to escape and relieved to see that the Americans were still taking the day off.
But for the rest of the year, indeed for the rest of the war, the risk of his being killed in air-to-air combat continued to build.
II
The honchos were going home. Their mastery of the MiG and appetite for confrontation had remade the air war: providing essential cover for Chinese supply routes, seizing superiority over MiG Alley, and forcing the Americans to rush their best fighter jets to Korea. Thirty-nine honchos had shot down five or more American aircraft; eighteen were proclaimed Heroes of the Soviet Union.
A final accounting of the air war between Sabres and MiGs shows that the Americans won an overwhelming victory, with an overall “kill ratio” of nine to one. But that ratio included all of the MiGs in the war, as flown by Chinese, North Korean, and lesser-trained Russian pilots. When the Soviet pilots of the elite 324th and 303rd fighter divisions were in the cockpit, the kill ratio was nearly even. The honchos fought the Americans to a draw in the air, just as the Chinese fought them to a draw on the ground.
By March 1952, though, the elite Russian fliers were exhausted and breaking down. One pilot had a heart attack after landing, another vomited into his oxygen mask and nearly collided with his group leader, a third blacked out and fell into a spin. Doctors gave them injections to increase their strength, but between a third and a half of them were no longer fit to fly. All were eager to leave. Thirty-two had been killed, including No’s former instructor and friend, Captain Nikichenko.
The night before the honchos left Dandong, No heard them carousing all night in their barracks, drunkenly singing Russian folk songs. The next morning, one pilot told No it had not been a victory celebration. They were relieved to be alive.
Soviet replacement pilots were not nearly as good, and many were soon killed. Stalin seemed to be losing interest in the war, sending rookies to fight it. These pilots arrived from the Soviet Union with fewer than fifty hours in the latest-model MiG. Less than 20 percent of them were veterans of World War II. In Moscow, their training had focused on instrument flying, not dogfighting. They were not much better than the Chinese or the North Koreans. With each passing month, Sabres shot them down in steadily increasing numbers—and with fewer American losses.
As the best Russian fliers left, the Americans brought in more deadly aircraft. The new F model of the Sabre had a more powerful engine and slightly larger wings. It could climb to high altitudes that had been the exclusive preserve of MiGs. Once there, the new Sabres could maneuver more precisely. By the middle of 1952, No believed it was suicide for any MiG to engage a Sabre, especially at low altitudes. He was not alone. Russian MiG pilots began shying away from air-to-air combat. Many others refused to fly, claiming chronic battle fatigue. A Soviet commander in charge of the laggards was sent home in disgrace. By the final year of the war, Sabre pilots could plainly see that many MiG pilots were “pitifully incompetent” and did not have the stomach for any kind of fight. At least seven times, American fliers watched as MiG pilots failed to execute tight turns above thirty-five thousand feet, fumbling their aircraft into deadly spins from which pilots usually ejected before the MiG crashed. Some MiG pilots surrendered immediately in response to attack. When a Sabre fired at them, they bailed out and floated down in a parachute. An air force intelligence report noted, “A new inexpensive, highly efficient ‘MiG Killer’ technique has been found! If the pilot sees you, he bails out; if he doesn’t see you, you shoot him down. What could be more effective?”
For No and many North Korean fliers, the fear of being blasted out of the air was compounded by anxiety about being punished on the ground. A pilot in No’s regiment, Sin Yoon Chul, who had flown more than fifty combat missions, was suddenly dismissed from the air force after a security officer learned the pilot’s brother had fled to South Korea early in the war. The commander of a division of propeller aircraft flying out of Manchuria, Colonel Kim Tal Hion, was suspected of planning to defect—and was executed by firing squad.
As mortifying for No was the incompetence of senior flight officers in his regiment. Instead of flying in tight clusters of four fighters that could hide behind clouds, these senior officers almost always led large formations of twenty to twenty-four MiGs, which created massive vapor trails that could be seen for at least eighty miles. These formations, No observed, invited attack and usually resulted in the deaths of North Korean pilots. As stupid, No believed, his commanders did not take advantage of the MiG’s greatest strength: its capacity to operate above forty-five thou
sand feet. His division often entered MiG Alley at much lower altitudes and at less than maximum speed, making it easy for Sabres to pick them off.
One of No’s worst scares occurred when he was flying east of Pyongyang in a formation of twenty-four MiGs at about forty-one thousand feet. A smaller formation of Russian MiGs—presumably under more experienced command—was flying well above them.
From behind, four Sabres attacked, scattering the North Koreans and shredding their capacity to fight back. No lost his wingman, who was supposed to stay behind No but had turned away to elude machine-gun fire. No veered sharply to the right and was accelerating north for Manchuria when he saw red tracer bullets over his cockpit. A Sabre flew directly behind him at a distance of about three thousand feet. It kept on shooting. No panicked, swerved his MiG sharply to the left and then to the right, and accelerated into a climb. The Sabre could not keep up. No was out of range. If the American pilot had been more patient, if he had held his fire until he closed to within a thousand feet, No probably would have been shot down.
On the ground, No could not relax or unwind. There were no weekend passes. He had not had a single day off since the war started. Although he had written his mother many letters, there was never a reply from her or from anyone in his family. He believed his mother must be dead, killed by American bombs. Then, in the spring of 1952, his risk of dying increased exponentially.
The Manchurian sanctuary—the single most important advantage that Communist air forces enjoyed during the Korean War—suddenly evaporated. American Sabre pilots decided to start killing MiGs inside China, ignoring the rules of combat that governed the Korean War. They did so with a wink and a nod from their commanders in South Korea.
No watched it happen in early April, on a sunny morning when he was not flying. Shortly after the morning fog lifted at Dandong airfield, about fifty Russian-piloted MiGs took off for MiG Alley. They returned about an hour later, desperately low on fuel. As No, who was standing on the southwest apron of the runway, listened to the throaty roar of MiGs decelerating to land, he heard an unexpected whine: the high-pitched signature of Sabre engines. He looked up and saw more than a dozen of them.
Flying at low altitude and high speed, they converged on the airfield from three directions, seeking out MiGs that had slowed down and were on approach to land. No watched Sabres hit three MiGs with machine-gun fire. None of the Russian pilots managed to eject before their jets crashed and exploded. Two other wounded MiGs crashed northeast of the airfield, sending towering plumes of black smoke into the sky.
From then until the end of the war, Sabres showed up almost daily over Communist airfields inside Manchuria. The Americans were highly selective. They never strafed aircraft parked on the ground, as they always did inside North Korea. Instead, they swooped and soared around Manchurian airfields like eagles, picking off MiGs when they were easiest to kill. In the first six months of 1952, one Russian fighter division lost twenty-six planes over its own airfields. Chinese losses also soared.
“We shot them down in the landing pattern, we shot them down on local test hops, we shot them down on training flights, and we shot them down anywhere we could find them,” explained Colonel Walker “Bud” Mahurin, who organized and participated in many attacks inside China. “We considered it slightly dirty pool to shoot them down just as they were trying to land, but each victory added up.”
No observed that American pilots had no compunctions about killing MiGs as they tried to land. Indeed, it was their preferred moment, with MiGs low on fuel and in no position to fight back.
Mahurin and American pilots had to screen and destroy cockpit film that showed them operating in Manchuria. “We just couldn’t let anything incriminating get away from our base,” Mahurin said in his autobiography. “Our pilots were coming back from missions [in Manchuria] with some of the damnedest pictures.”
The United States never officially approved this predation, and for decades the air force minimized it or tried to cover it up. Air Force Magazine, in an article published a half century after the start of the Korean War, misleadingly said, “The air war was a fluid encounter conducted almost solely over North Korean territory. The exceptions were rare . . . a few inadvertent excursions across the Yalu River by wandering U.S. airmen.”
Throughout the war, air force generals frequently sought but never received top-level approval for a policy of “hot pursuit,” which would have allowed Sabres to chase MiGs into Manchuria. On this subject, MacArthur had been categorical. “The border,” he said, “cannot and must not be violated.” The air force commander in East Asia, General Stratemeyer, said he was “ready” to take the air war to China, but only if politicians gave the order. The decision to use “our fighters beyond the confines of Korea is not one that should be made by the field commander,” he said. “It might be wise to point out that the military man implements foreign policy in our democratic form of government—the military do not formulate foreign policy.”
Yet the Sabre pilots who formulated and implemented the policy of shooting down MiGs inside China got away with it.
Their commanders rarely disciplined them, unless incontrovertible evidence of Manchurian mischief reached Washington. Such evidence included cockpit film and, most damningly, radar records. Air force radar monitoring stations could monitor and record unauthorized border incursions, but only if a Sabre pilot turned on a small device in his plane called an IFF (identification, friend or foe) set, which sends a unique geo-location signal to friendly radar.
When incriminating radar records did not exist, air force generals ignored the games Sabre pilots played. Mahurin described how it worked:
One day the six of us [pilots] were summoned to Fifth Air Force Headquarters. Our commander, General Frank Everest, came storming in and he was as mad as could be. He pounded the table and said, “You guys are violating the demarcation line; you’re crossing the Yalu River. It’s got to stop! All the trouble this will cause with the State Department! I am going to court-martial every one of you. I was in my control center just the other day, watching on radar. I saw your pilots take off, fly over the Yalu River . . . My God, this has really got to stop!”
We all stood up at attention. He stalked out of the conference room and slammed the door. We were all looking at each other, when he poked his head back in and said, “If you’re gonna do it, for God’s sake, turn off your IFF system, because we can track you on radar.”
Soon, all Sabre pilots felt competitive pressure to kill MiGs in Manchuria. As Major Thomas Sellers told his wife in a letter, “I’m determined to get a MiG as are most of the boys around here and it seems there is only one positive way of doing it and that is to go north of the Yalu.” A month later, on a mission inside Manchuria, Sellers saw fourteen MiGs taking off from an airfield and led an attack. He shot down two of them before his Sabre was hit by enemy fire and crashed. His posthumous Silver Star citation said he died inside North Korea while protecting American aircraft from MiG attack.
After interviewing fifty-four Sabre pilots who fought in the war, the historian and former air force pilot Kenneth P. Werrell asked in his account of the air war why pilots “took it upon themselves to cross the border.” His answer: “To paraphrase the famous 1950s bank robber Willie Sutton, that’s where the MiGs were. And therein lay the fame, glory, and the essence of being a hot fighter pilot: killing MiGs.”
III
As seen from the United States, the conflict in Korea was mostly a downer. Its main event, the bloody ground war, was an unsatisfying, inconclusive bore. As the historian Bruce Cumings has written, the war “began to disappear from consciousness as soon as the fighting stabilized.”
Air battles in MiG Alley were much sexier. For starters, the U.S. Air Force won most of them, especially after the honchos went home. As important, the air war plugged into a powerful postwar ethos of self-congratulation: our boys were whipping those nasty Commies with ne
wfangled American technologies and old-fashioned American guts.
Hollywood loved jet-age dogfights and churned out movies like Sabre Jet and Jet Attack. The fight over MiG Alley sold newspapers. When a Sabre downed a MiG, it was often front-page news—much more so than when the air force napalmed North Korean cities and killed large numbers of civilians.
Sabre pilots themselves were smitten by their own sexiness. The best and most aggressive of them became obsessed with shooting down MiGs. The coveted goal was five kills, and those who reached it became aces. During the war, the significance of being an ace was difficult to overstate—for career advancement, for bedding women, for respecting oneself as a man.
“If you shoot down five planes you join a group, a core of heroes. Nothing less can do it,” the novelist James Salter—himself a Sabre pilot—explains in The Hunters, his first novel. “There were no other values. It was like money: it did not matter how it had been acquired, but only that it had. That was the final judgment. MiGs were everything. If you had MiGs you were a standard of excellence. The sun shone upon you. The crew chiefs were happy to have you fly their ships. The touring actresses wanted to meet you. You were the center of everything—the praise, the excitement, the enviers . . . If you did not have MiGs, you were nothing.”
Before they arrived in Korea, the air force drummed MiG killing and risk taking into Sabre pilots. At Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, where many of the Sabre pilots who fought in Korea learned to fly, the average death rate from flight-training accidents was one a week. The “overriding philosophy was that if you weren’t having accidents you weren’t training realistically,” writes John Lowery, a Sabre pilot who trained at Nellis before heading to Korea. “The lack of concern for safety was exacerbated by the demand for seemingly mindless aggressiveness.”