5
Korea
In making their decision to go to war with the UN forces in Korea, the Chinese Communist leadership had understood and accepted the fact that total naval and air supremacy would reside with the United States. But the Chinese armies were prepared to fight under these circumstances and clearly believed that they would prevail. In their judgment, tempered by years of conflict with the non-Communist world, they had developed the most suitable military tactics in consideration of the UN’s areas of clear superiority. The Chinese and their North Korean allies tried to constrain their movements to periods when darkness or low visibility limited U.S. air operations. By day they hid from air observation in villages or through camouflage, in which they became consummate experts. They knew that any troops or vehicles spotted by UN forces would be attacked immediately.
The U.S. military commanders in Korea were equally confident that complete air and maritime superiority in the theater could be established quickly as U.S. military forces were deployed. But the problem remained: How to utilize this air and sea power to defeat a semiguerrilla army operating in a relatively primitive industrial state. There were no sea lanes to interdict, no important industrial centers to demolish. The war against the Chinese in Korea would have to be fought with air and sea tactics different in many ways from those used in the past. Korea would be a conflict of opposing ground troops. The role of the Air Force and Navy would be as the supporting arms for the troops on the ground. There would be differences from the targeting and tactics used against Germany and Japan in World War II and the operations planned in case of a NATO war against the Soviet bloc.
This was not considered a major problem. Aircraft are easily adaptable to new tactics, and the carriers would be the principal naval forces employed against the enemy, their mission almost entirely in the role of supporting the ground forces. Surface warfare and antisubmarine operations would be essentially irrelevant except to maintain proficiency in those areas. The enemy presented no actual threat from submarines or major surface combatants. Even gunfire support, so important in the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific in World War II, was limited in that so much of the critical land battle would be fought in the center of the Korean peninsula.
Of the four basic types of air-to-ground tactics for carrier strike aircraft — close air support, strikes against fixed installations, road reconnaissance, and main supply route (MSR) interdiction — only the first two (close air support and coordinated strikes) were routinely practiced by the carrier squadrons before Korea.
When the carriers commenced persistent combat operations in Korea, it became evident that close support of ground troops would always be a high priority in a land campaign but that strikes on large, identifiable targets such as bridges, factories, and airfields could only be useful in the early days of the campaign before the limited numbers of these targets were all destroyed. With the Chinese and North Korean troops relying on camouflage and evading detection, it was the reconnaissance-type missions that became important — scouting the roadways for traffic and then pouncing on any discovered troops or vehicles or, in the case of interdiction, attacking areas in which friendly intelligence suspected troop dispersal areas or supply depots.
The tactics for road reconnaissance were developed on the spot by the first Navy pilots to be assigned those missions after the Valley Forge arrived on station in July 1950. Those pilots passed on the tactics that had proved most effective, and the fleet air gunnery unit (FAGU) at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at El Centro, California, became the coordinator of these evolving doctrines, teaching them to the carrier squadrons during their two-week live-weapons training deployment prior to going overseas.
WEATHER AS A FACTOR
Regardless of the ingenuity of our tactics and the skill with which we flew, an entire mission of a half a dozen sorties could be wiped out if the weather turned bad.
On 5 July 1953 I was launched at 0615 from the USS Boxer to lead a VF-52 four-plane Panther flight on an interdiction mission against a supply dump and billeting area near Ipo-ri, about twenty miles north of the front lines. The weather during July in Korea was generally not too favorable for these kinds of missions. There was usually a low layer of clouds over the peninsula that went down to below a thousand feet in the valleys where the targets were located, with cloud tops at two or three thousand feet, often with a couple of higher layers as well. The low stuff in the valleys would also sock in the Air Force bases, and for the first week in July, the Fifth Air Force in Korea had been unable to get any tactical sorties off the ground.
At Point Oboe, the reference center in the Sea of Japan for TF 77 carrier operations, the weather was flyable with the ceiling at three hundred feet. The layer was not thick and there were enough holes or thin spots in the overcast where a division of planes in tight formation could let down. Panthers were minimally equipped for instrument flying, having only a barometric altimeter, airspeed indicator, needle-ball instrumentation, and artificial horizon. The low-frequency direction finder was the pilot’s best friend in the cockpit. When manually tuned to a prescribed frequency, it would reliably home on the emitting station. It provided direction only, no distance. Flying blind, the pilot knew when he had arrived at the homer’s emitter only when the needle reversed itself as the plane flew over. The carriers all operated their homers on a frequency of 414 kHz, so it was doctrine that only one carrier or ship in the formation had a low-frequency homer activated.