The pilots in the flight had heard the complete exchange on VHF. And apparently, so had other Navy pilots over Korea who also were tuned in on the TACC channel. This became obvious when I saw the formation had grown to six, with the addition of two more Navy Panthers, which, according to their tail markings, were from the USS Princeton. With hand signals they indicated their wish to join our flight, and with a responding thumbs up, they were welcomed on board. No radio transmissions. No need to clutter up the air with the obvious.
Now six of us had the same problem, no place to land. To let down through the overcast and hope to break out underneath was unthinkable. All of the airfields were reporting clouds down to the deck. With the mountainous nature of Korea, our chances of putting the plane down in a flat spot were about one in ten. The reverse odds were that we would run into a mountainside. At 150 knots that would be a crash, not a crash landing.
I instructed the flight that we would continue to look for a hole to let down through, but after the first plane hit a fuel state of five hundred pounds, the pilots, on my orders, would eject in rapid succession from a six-plane echelon, last man in the formation first. I wanted to keep the parachuting pilots as close as possible so we could quickly get together after hitting the ground. On the other hand, I didn’t want to chance an ejecting pilot being struck by a following jet.
In one of our squadron bull sessions some time ago, the pilots had discussed the possibility of ejecting over Korea. So our pilots registered no surprise and there were no questions when they were asked to acknowledge the instructions. The two Princeton Panther pilots must have thought this was a VF-52 SOP (standard operating procedure).
Now the main concern was to parachute into safe territory. In the periodic general-situation briefings by the intelligence officers, several sizable areas were highlighted on the map of South Korea as being under the nominal control of guerrillas. These were North Korean troops who had been trapped by the Inchon landing, had escaped capture, and gone to the hills. The area was not precisely defined but was in the rugged mountainous terrain toward the center of the peninsula north of Andong. The ROK had opened some of the important roads in the area but had not undertaken to hunt down the well-armed guerrillas. Also, I wanted the flight to be under the control of Tactical Air Control (TAC) when we bailed out so that the Joint Operations Center would know where we had gone down and get a ground force to our position as soon as possible to recover the group.
While these details were being arranged over the voice radio, we were in a wide left-hand orbit. I switched the flight to the TACC frequency and asked the controller to take us under positive control for a controlled ejection into a safe area. The controller had given us the initial vector when I sighted a dark spot in the undercast, just a thin rift in the clouds. I could tell from the mountaintops it was near the coastline. It might be a hole we could sneak through. Breaking off from the TAC vector, I headed for the spot in a sixty-degree diving turn. Unbelievably, there were water, coastline, and about two thousand feet of pierced-steel runway. I immediately recognized K-18, the ROK strip at Kangnung. There were too few fields in Korea for me to be mistaken. I switched to guard channel and told the K-18 tower that six F9Fs were on a steep approach for an immediate landing. The tower came back with a negative — repeated twice for emphasis — the field was closed due to zero visibility. I replied that I could see two thousand feet of runway, the east end, and that we were going to touch down there and make our landing run-out in the soup.
The control tower’s transmission was understandable. They were in the fog. The tower was in the middle of a seven-thousand-foot runway, and only two thousand feet at the approach end was in the clear. I repeated that we had the field in sight from five thousand feet altitude and were low on fuel with no alternative but to crash into the sea or eject. The tower’s comeback was that if we were going to land, that was our responsibility, but that the runway was clear. Finally a positive note. Somebody on the ground was being helpful.
I motioned the rest of the flight to ease back to take a good interval for landing. They all had been listening to the VHF traffic and like the real pros they were, didn’t have to be told twice what to do when time was so important. How long the hole in the undercast would remain open was unpredictable. It was probably the result of the local coastal configuration. The mountains, a river valley, a delta, and the ocean all came together at that point and must have caused unusual air currents and temperatures.
Each pilot made a steep approach to final, touching down close to the end of the runway at minimum flying speed in order to have the plane on the deck and well under control when we entered the fog bank. The transition from clear skies to a half-mile visibility was sudden. The runway lights were on and truck and jeep headlights outlined the single taxiway at the west end of the runway. All six F9Fs landed safely and parked on the apron generally reserved for TF 77 aircraft. A detachment of a dozen sailors from a Japan-based FASRon worked out of a Quonset hut to provide line maintenance services in this area.
K-18 was crowded but orderly. Our six Panthers were the only planes from the carriers. The leader of the two Princeton fighters said that after he and his wingman were catapulted, the rest of the launch was cancelled. Jehovah had decided the forecast weather was too bad for carrier operations and the JOC had reported all target areas in Korea were obscured. By the time the decision to cancel TF 77 air operations had gotten to the carriers, the six of us were already on our way. K-18 had been open briefly earlier in the week because there were a number of Army, Air Force, and Marine administrative and light aircraft on the tarmac that normally would not have been there. Kangnung was a ROK air force field.
Our six pilots spent two nights in a Quonset hut bunk room, and the FASRon provided us with blankets. The U.S. Army advisory group detachment at the airfield had set up a consolidated mess and “club” in a Quonset hut. Although we lacked a toothbrush and a change of clothes, we were not only comfortable but also able to socialize with our FASRon hosts in their modest club. This is how things worked on the front lines. The thunder of artillery to the north and west was constant and not too far away. The local ROK were concerned they might be overrun by the Chinese at any time and were nervous. We Americans just depended upon being evacuated before that happened.
Two days later the weather improved, and commander, TF 77 sent us a recall through the FASRon communications. As we taxied out for takeoff, all of the other transients were leaving at the same time. With the single taxiway, the line of departing aircraft was moving very slowly. Because of the jets’ high fuel consumption on the deck, I called for takeoff priority and got it. The other prop planes didn’t like it, but it was SOP for the jets to go to the head of the line. This especially irritated the Corsair and AD pilots, who thought jet pilots were spoiled kids. We accepted our perks gladly and attributed the prop pilots’ attitude to envy.
As I made the turn from the taxiway to the runway, my left wheel hit a hole in the Marston matting. Marston matting was essentially six-bytwelve-foot interlocking rectangles of steel pierced with one-inch holes and placed over packed earth to form runways, taxiways, and aprons. When a steel plate broke or became loose, the taxiway in that spot became a mud hole. My left wheel was stuck. Nothing else to do but add enough engine power so the jet blast would kick me free. As I was adding power, and lots of it, to get moving, a figure in Air Force flight coveralls ran in front of my plane waving his arms. As I continued to blast, he was joined by a second, more portly figure also very agitated. By then I had gotten out of the mud hole, the Panther was moving ahead smartly, and I was turning onto the runway for takeoff. I looked back briefly to see what was the cause of the excitement. It was immediately apparent. Just behind the mud hole and the spot where I had turned onto the runway was an olive drab C-47 transport, identical to the hundreds of other C-47s in Korea except in one respect. This had two blue stars in a large white flag displayed on the fuselage aft of the cargo door. Its tail had been toward my jet blast, and now the C-47’s rudder was dangling from the plane’s vertical fin. Obviously, the jet blast hitting the rudder surface from the wrong direction — astern — had broken the hinges. The C-47 was not flyable, nor easily fixable. I jammed the throttle full open, roared down the runway, headed for the Boxer, and didn’t look back until Kangnung and K-18 were lost in the haze.