The flight had just gotten into the recce formation and I was the low man at about three hundred feet as we got to Kodo-ri, where the road climbs through a mountain pass. As I came around the first tight bend in the road, there ahead of me was a column of trucks. I was going fast and a little bit high, but I was in an ideal position for a rocket attack. I shoved the stick forward to get the nose down and get the pipper on the lead truck, at the same time reaching forward with my left hand to select rockets on the armament panel and to flip up the master arm switch. All this took a second or two, and I was closing the target very quickly. I still had to make a final adjustment to get the sight on the first truck with the proper amount of lead to compensate for my angle of dive and the distance to the target — the mil-allowance for HVAR. (We had lead computing sights, but only for air-to-air gunnery.) By now I was much closer than I intended to be, or should have been. I could see the drivers scrambling out of the cabs. With a three-thousand-foot precipice on their right and a two-thousand-foot cliff on their left, they had nowhere to go. I had a clear image of the lead truck. It was a U.S. Army Studebaker of the type we had seen so frequently in Japan and South Korea. This far into North Korea, though, I had no concern that it might be a friendly. I fired off two rockets and pulled back on the stick. Nothing happened. Or at least nothing much happened. I could tell from the intense pressure of my G-suit that I was pulling lots of Gs, maybe over nine. I didn’t look at the accelerometer. My eyes were fixed on the ridge line ahead, which I was going to have to get over unless I wanted to end up as a flaming monument to pilot error. The plane’s response was unusually sluggish.
I did clear the ridge, but just barely. The high section as well as the number two pilot had spotted the truck column and, in accordance with the doctrine of section initiative, the second section leader had come down to join in the attack. As I circled and climbed for a second pass, I could see the bombs of my wingman missing the target by only ten feet in deflection to the left, but they missed the road entirely and exploded at the bottom of the precipice three thousand feet below. The second section did better. With more time to select their weapons, they set up their runs carefully and were boring in with rockets and scoring hits. I came around a second time in a much more conservative approach for a strafing pass, breaking off early enough to clear the ridge comfortably. After a third run to assure ourselves that the trucks and their cargo were completely destroyed, we continued our recce north to Hagaru-ri without encountering any other targets. Then we made a strafing pass at the AAA positions in Hungnam before going “feet wet” and returning to the carrier.
I was shaken from my close call in clearing the ridge. The reason was simple: I was making my run with a full load of internal fuel and at an altitude of about five thousand feet. Normally road recce attacks are made at much lower altitudes and with about half of the fuel load depleted, reducing the weight of the aircraft by three thousand pounds. That’s what I was used to. At Koto-ri I had not taken into account my full internal load and the altitude, as a prudent pilot should have done. But in the rest of my flying days, in F9Fs and A-4s, I never made that particular mistake again.
6
Korea
By the third week in July 1953, the massive Chinese offensive had torn holes in the eastern front of the UN line, shattering entire ROK divisions and sending others reeling. The 3rd U.S. Army Division had fallen back to avoid being outflanked with the collapse of the ROKs but was able to regroup in a supporting position behind the 1st ROK Army. But on the Chinese side, the requirement for logistics, the resupply of fuel, small-arms ammunition and artillery shells, as well as the need to bring up replacements, was finally slowing down Gen. Peng Teh-Huai’s advance.
On 13 July my F9F had taken a hit from a piece of shrapnel during a strike on the North Korean airstrip at Hyesanjin, just south of the Yalu. The skin on the horizontal stabilizer had been pierced and torn near the elevator hinge, and I was reluctant to attempt a carrier landing with this damage of an unknown extent to the plane’s control surfaces. So I elected to divert to K-18 at Kangnung. This airfield, a single, six-thousand-foot runway of Marston matting, served as the divert field for TF 77 carrier aircraft that had suffered battle damage or were low on fuel.
By the thirteenth, the Chinese salient was approaching Kangnung and the steady rumble of Chinese heavy artillery and the disorganized stream of ROK troops and army equipment moving south along the main supply routes were sobering if not alarming. I would feel much more secure when I returned to the carrier. I was relieved when I was picked up late that afternoon by an AD Skyraider from the Shangri-La; it delivered me home, landing on the Boxer en route to the “Shang.” The pilot, by chance, was a United States Naval Academy classmate with whom I later served at the Naval Aviation Ordnance Test Station at Chincoteague, Virginia.
Four Essex-class carriers were continuously on station at Point Oboe, conducting coordinated and overlapping operations in support of the UN ground forces, providing close air support to engaged ground units, and striking the main supply routes north of the front lines to interdict the flow of fuel, munitions, and replacement manpower. Although weather was a problem, the Boxer was making every scheduled launch, its aircraft going to secondary weather-divert targets when the primary objective was obscured. On almost every sortie, enemy elements were heavily engaged, the evidence being the heavy flak that our planes were encountering on every mission.
Then, on 19 July, another one of our VF-52 F9Fs was hit while on a CAS mission. With fire in the after fuselage and his engine losing power, Lt. (j.g.) Al Brunner managed to stick his Panther into a seven-hundred-foot L strip, a dark brown gash in the rice paddies bulldozed as a forward landing facility for the light aircraft of the forward air controllers. These were L-3 and L-4 liaison aircraft and T-6 trainers that flew along the front lines and provided spotting for the artillery and air support of the ground forces. Brunner went in wheels up and the plane was demolished, but he was uninjured and returned to the ship the next day. His was the seventh VF-52 F9F-2 that had been lost to enemy ground fire in July.
VF-52 pilots were now regularly flying two hops per day, and on the morning of 20 July, I was scheduled to lead a four-plane mission of F9F-2 Panthers for close support of U.S. Army troops in the vicinity of the village of Kumhwa, one of the points of the Iron Triangle. The tasking had been posted the evening before, and prior to turning in on the nineteenth, I had looked over the available intelligence and discussed the tactics with my section leader. There was not too much we could plan on. We would simply check in with the TACC then be passed down the line to the TADC and then to the FAC, who would designate our targets for us.
Our bomb load had been specified as four 260-pound fragmentation bombs, fused instantaneous, and two HVARs. I asked the schedulers to eliminate the HVARs, as the winds were forecast to be light and variable. I doubted very much that there would be sufficient wind over the deck to get us off with that full load. It would save time if the rockets were deleted from the armament plan now, rather than having to take them off with the planes on the catapult, as the carrier struggled to get a couple more knots of wind over the deck. None of the pilots really liked to leave it to the judgment of the catapult or flight deck officer whether there was enough wind to fly or not. We preferred to make that decision ourselves. It was always uncomfortable being on the borderline of maximum weight and drag for a cat shot. The staff armament planners had no problem with my request to cancel the HVARs. Four frag bombs plus full 20mm ammo was a good load for CAS.