The tone was set at the top. Colonel Clay Tice, base commander, gave a welcoming speech that one incoming pilot remembered as “Welcome to Nellis AFB, men. The finest fighter weapons school in the world. We’re going to do one of three things to you here—wash you out, kill you, or make you one of the best fighter pilots in the world. The choice is yours. Now I want you all to go out, drink a pint of ‘panther piss,’ eat a pound of raw meat, find yourselves a strange woman, and we’ll see you bright and early Monday morning.”
During and after the Korean War, the air force reveled in the glory of its fighter pilots and their machines. The Sabre was “the vehicle in which the new aces of the jet age were achieving stardom, and MiG Alley was their stage,” explained General T. R. Milton in an official air force history. Changing metaphors, Milton said the dogfights “had taken on the aura of an international sporting event.”
The sport—which grew in popularity as it tilted in America’s favor—produced thirty-nine aces. By their own admission, these pilots found addictive pleasure in risking death to kill MiGs. “The one thing that never left me was the intense, gripping anxiety and excitement that occurred when I saw some kind of movement which indicated the enemy pilot had seen me and one of us wasn’t going home. That remained and has to this day been the greatest thrill of my life,” wrote Major Frederick “Boots” Blesse, who shot down ten MiGs.
For the pilots who shot down the most MiGs, the push to risk everything had tragic, if predictable, consequences. Four out of five of the aces with thirteen or more “victories” died violently and before their time, one lost in action, two in aircraft accidents, and the fourth in a car accident. Major George A. Davis, a remarkable marksman with a .50-caliber machine gun and a daredevil pilot with fourteen kills, won a posthumous Medal of Honor for attacking a dozen MiGs on February 10, 1952. He shot down two before a third MiG got him. His peers later said Davis had more self-confidence than good sense: he believed all MiG pilots were his inferiors.
Aces played an outsized role in winning the air war. Only 4 percent of the thousand pilots who flew Sabres in Korea shot down five or more MiGs, yet they accounted for 40 percent of confirmed kills. Flying skill and courage were not the whole story behind these numbers. Aces tended to be flagrant violators of combat rules, crossing into Manchuria and picking off MiGs that were taking off or landing. As many as twenty-five of the thirty-nine aces flew into Manchuria.
Fame and touring actresses notwithstanding, risking everything for glory did not make sense to most American fighter pilots in Korea. The great majority flew a hundred mostly dull missions and went home, unfamous but alive. Bud Mahurin, the rule-breaking air force colonel with the Fifty-first Fighter-Interceptor Wing based near Seoul, said only a fraction of his pilots would seek out a fight. Out of the one hundred pilots whom Mahurin regularly addressed in preflight briefings, he said, “I could pick, say, eighteen who could actually be depended upon to mix it up with the enemy and perhaps do some shooting. Another seventy would never see the enemy or fire a gun. The rest would inevitably develop some sort of mechanical, mental or physical difficulty sufficient to cause them to turn back home.”
These careful, cautious, unexciting Americans were No Kum Sok’s soul mates. To his great relief, they were the kind of pilots he encountered most often.
From Dandong airfield, No flew nearly every day, sometimes two sorties a day. On two-thirds of these missions, he did not see a single Sabre, which suited him just fine. Even when he saw the enemy, nothing would usually come of it. No and a Sabre pilot would eye each other at a range of several miles. Both would squirt off a few rounds in the general direction of the enemy. No would skedaddle to a higher altitude and head north. In almost every case, the American pilot did not try to follow him home.
IV
By midsummer of 1952, Kim Il Sung had had enough of his dreadful war. It had wrecked Korea without unifying it. Searching for a way out, the Great Leader sent an urgent message to Stalin. He complained that armistice talks, already a year old, seemed likely to go on indefinitely, as the misery of North Koreans increased daily.
“Over the past year of negotiations we have virtually curtailed military operations and moved to a passive defense,” Kim said. “Such a position has led to the fact that the enemy almost without suffering any kind of losses constantly inflicts on us huge losses in manpower and material values.”
He complained, too, that American bombing had destroyed “all the electrical stations” in North Korea and that U.S. Air Force patrols do “not allow us the possibility to restore them.” Most upsetting, Kim said, was the constant bombing of Pyongyang.
“In only one twenty-four hour period of barbaric bombing . . . more than six thousand peaceful inhabitants were killed and wounded,” Kim said, referring to a massive American bombing operation on July 11, 1952, five days before Kim sent his plaintive telegram to Stalin.
That bombing involved nearly every operational UN air unit in the Far East. Characterized in an official U.S. Air Force history as “savage,” it was the Korean War’s biggest air assault up to that point. The 1,254 aircraft sorties that day managed a direct hit on an air-raid shelter for the elite, reportedly killing more than four hundred North Korean government officials. This was apparently the hit that riled the Great Leader.
Air force generals had been unhappy for months with their bombing campaign, which had failed to force Communist concessions in truce talks. So they launched Operation Pressure Pump, which was intended to use “destructive power as a political tool” and have a “deleterious effect” on North Korean morale. The air force began bombing hydroelectric dams and then strafed them to prevent repairs. It also used fighter-bombers to drop napalm and delayed-action bombs on seventy-eight towns and villages suspected of sheltering the enemy. “Lucrative targets” became increasingly hard to find. So six weeks after pounding Pyongyang with the ferocious all-day bombing that caused Kim to complain to Stalin, the air force did it again—this time over two days with more than fourteen hundred sorties. Again, it was a leisurely exercise in destruction, with no North Korean, Chinese, or Russian MiGs to fight back. (The MiGs almost always stayed well north of Pyongyang, patrolling only the Yalu River area.)
The stepped-up American bombing campaign was intended to demoralize Kim Il Sung, and it apparently worked. In his telegram to Stalin, Kim asked for antiaircraft weaponry and help in preparing for active military operations. He also implored Stalin for permission to talk more seriously with the Americans about ending the war.
“We need simultaneously to move decisively toward the soonest conclusion of an armistice, a ceasefire and transfer of all prisoners of war on the basis of the Geneva Convention,” Kim wrote. “These demands are supported by all peace-loving peoples and will lead us out of a passive position.”
Because the Chinese were fighting his ground war, Kim sent the same urgent end-the-combat message to Mao in Beijing. But his requests fell on deaf ears. Mao wanted the war to continue—and so did Stalin. Human suffering aside, they felt that the war was turning out to be a good and galvanizing thing for global Communism. They also viewed it as a useful device for humiliating the United States, weakening the Truman administration, gathering intelligence about America’s weapons, killing its soldiers, and bleeding its treasury while teaching Communist soldiers how to fight against a superpower. Stalin also found value in the war because it required China to depend on military and economic assistance from the Soviet Union. This lessened the chances that Mao would follow Yugoslavia’s lead and wander off the Communist reservation.
Mao wrote back to Kim to say that negotiating an end to the war “is highly disadvantageous to us.” He conceded that continuing the war would kill many more Koreans and Chinese soldiers but argued the sacrifice was justified because it provided useful “experience in the struggle against American imperialism” and inspired “peace-loving peoples of the whole world.” As important, Mao sai
d, the war “limits the mobility of the main forces of American imperialism and makes it suffer constant losses in the east” while allowing the Soviet Union to rebuild from World War II and spread revolution around the world.
A month later, Stalin weighed in with an even more enthusiastic endorsement of prolonging the war. His blanket refusal to consider Kim’s desire to stop it included a cold-blooded assessment of the insignificance of the dead and dying in North Korea.
“This war is getting on America’s nerves,” Stalin said in a meeting in Moscow with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai. “The North Koreans have lost nothing, except for people.”
Stalin said that of course he knew death and destruction were making North Korean leaders panicky. But they should take a deep breath, he said, and understand their “many casualties” in the proper context—a context that would encourage “patience and lots of endurance.”
By dying without surrendering, Stalin said, North Koreans were performing a useful service for international Communism.
“The war in Korea has shown America’s weakness,” Stalin said.
Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buying and selling. Germans conquered France in 20 days. It’s been already two years, and U.S.A. still has not subdued little Korea. What kind of strength is that? America’s primary weapons . . . are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise. They want to subjugate the world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea. No, Americans don’t know how to fight. After the Korean war, in particular, they have lost the capability to wage a large-scale war. They are pinning their hopes on the atom bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don’t have much infantry; the infantry they do have is weak. They are fighting with little Korea, and already people are weeping in the U.S.A. What will happen if they start a large-scale war? Then, perhaps, everyone will weep.
This chilling pep talk was not intended for the ears of the leadership in “little Korea.” But the core message found its way, via the Chinese, to Pyongyang: The war, the bombing, the destruction, and the dying would continue because they suited Stalin.
Living in a bunker, utterly dependent on Mao and Stalin for his survival, Kim Il Sung had no leverage. He had to play the toady, saying in one telegram, “We consider that your analysis of the present situation is correct.”
In the late summer of 1952, with the ruins of Pyongyang still smoldering from American bombs, Kim was invited to Moscow for his third and final visit with Stalin. The Soviet leader had heard from Zhou Enlai that the North Koreans were getting “panicky.” So he sent a special plane to fetch Kim.
At their meeting on September 4, Kim was shrewd enough to tell the Boss what he wanted to hear.
“What is the mood of the Korean people?” Stalin asked.
“The mood is good,” Kim lied.
“What about in the armies?” Stalin asked.
“In the armies the mood is also good,” Kim lied.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Kim dared to prick Stalin with a sliver of truth.
“The overall situation is favorable,” he said, “if you do not include the bombing raids.”
Stalin knew, of course, about the catastrophic effects of American airpower. But he had no intention of investing enough Soviet resources to stop it. Instead, he promised to give Kim some additional fighter aircraft and antiaircraft artillery—and quickly changed the subject.
For all his kowtowing to Stalin and Mao, Kim was never completely acquiescent. Before his September meeting with Moscow, he had asked for his patrons’ approval in taking the offensive to the Americans. The North Korean air force had no large long-range bombers trained for night action inside enemy territory, but he told Mao that he did: “It is necessary to send already trained air force bomber units on night actions deep in enemy [territory], to boldly carry out air battles [and] subject to bombardment a number of airports.”
One of the North Korean pilots who had been trained to attack airports in enemy territory was No Kum Sok.
CHAPTER 9
Attack Maps and Defection Bribes
I
No received the order for secret training in June 1952, when he was twenty. Along with seven other North Korean pilots, he left Dandong airfield and flew deeper inside Manchuria. After they landed at Anshan air base, where two years earlier Russians had taught them to fly, their regimental commander said they would soon attack American jets inside South Korea. Because North Korean MiG pilots could not seem to hit Sabres in the air, Kim Il Sung’s government had decided they would hit them on the ground.
“We are here to train you to destroy Sabres before they get into the air,” Colonel Tae Kuk Sung said.
The target was Kimpo Air Force Base, on the western outskirts of Seoul. Western reporters called it “the Home of the MiG Killers.” The U.S. Air Force Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing was stationed there, and its Sabre pilots were responsible for more than half of the MiGs shot down in the Korean War. Out of the thirty-nine American aces in the war, twenty-five of them flew for the Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing. Between missions, they slept, ate, showered, and drank near the airfield in steel Quonset huts and in poorly insulated wooden huts called hootches.
Using live ammunition, No and the other pilots practiced destroying American Sabres by strafing wooden fences laid down on the tarmac at Anshan. When exploding fragments from cannon shells bounced up and punched holes in their MiGs, they stopped firing live ammunition and did flyovers while shooting pictures. At night, No studied maps and models of Kimpo. He learned the orientation of the runway, north to south, and saw what longitudinal degree to follow across North Korea to reach it.
The planned attack on Kimpo was by far the most audacious plan he had ever been a part of. Whoever came up with it, No thought, would surely be aware that it could provoke an all-out American counterattack on air bases in Manchuria, one that could annihilate all the aircraft that the Soviet Union had shipped east for the war. The plan suggested to No that the Communists were becoming desperate. The Chinese could not train pilots quickly enough to replace those who had been killed. Newly arriving Russian pilots were inexperienced and increasingly unwilling to engage the Americans. The air war was all but lost.
What motivated No to study the maps and models so diligently was his own audacious plan. When he flew to Kimpo, he did not intend to strafe the runway. He would land on it. He would surrender himself and his MiG to the famous aces of the Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing. He would ask to be taken to America.
His fear of defecting had faded.
For that, he could thank the North Korean air force and his Great Leader. They gave him access to superb maps of South Korea’s airports and ordered him to memorize them. Back in January, when he was flying a mission near the South Korean border and thinking about defecting, he had hesitated because he was not sure where to land. Now he knew. There were three airports in the South with runways long enough for a MiG. Thanks to the maps, he had calculated the distances to the airports, the times, the approaches, and the required fuel—and filed it all away in the top secret and hyperactive part of his mind where for five years he had been pretending to love Communism. Although his training with all-weather navigation instruments on his MiG was rudimentary, he convinced himself that his mastery of the maps would allow him to find Kimpo or another airport, even in cloudy weather.
No could also thank a North Korean aircraft mechanic who told him the thrilling story of Lieutenant Lee Kun Soon.
Lee was a flight instructor in the North Korean air force and the best pilot in his training division. At twenty-four, he was in charge of the first generation of cadet fliers. He was also a devout Catholic, which he tried to keep secret. His faith became known when he was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, but his commander tolerated him because of his flying and teaching skills. As a flight instructor, Lee had a reputation for bein
g tough and uncompromising. He was harsh in enforcing military discipline, and students dreaded flying with him.
Two months before the start of the Korean War, Lee defected. Leaving his wife behind, he took off from Pyongyang in an Ilyushin Il-10, a Soviet-made single-engine propeller aircraft of World War II vintage. He landed in the South Korean city of Pusan, where he was greeted warmly and welcomed into the South Korean air force. Had he stayed in the North flying an Il-10, he probably would have been killed. Americans shot down nearly all of these outdated attack planes.
At the time of Lee’s defection, there was no law in North Korea that authorized the government to punish, imprison, or execute family members of defectors, so nothing happened to his wife or parents. Lee’s good fortune held throughout the war. When South Korean forces moved north in the first year of fighting and briefly occupied Pyongyang, Lee went along and found his wife and parents. They all fled together when the Chinese pushed UN forces south. Lee and his wife raised four children in South Korea, where he rose to the rank of colonel in the air force and became vice-commander of the South Korean Air Force Academy. After retiring, he worked as a civilian adviser until he was killed at age seventy near Seoul in an automobile accident. The North Korean mechanic did not, of course, know the entire story of Lee’s defection. But he told No enough to dispel his fear.
If one North Korean pilot can do it, No asked himself, why can’t I?
The North Korean government never publicly acknowledged Lee’s defection, and few North Koreans were aware of it. But Kim’s regime was taking no chances. In the fall of 1951, it authorized the execution of family members of any defector and publicized the decree.