Luck was with us. All four of the primary aircraft had become airborne and Air Operations Center decided to launch the spares because of the urgency of the request for air support for the troops. By the time my radio direction finder showed that I was abeam of the carrier — which I could not see because it was below the overcast — the six-plane flight had rendezvoused. I added power to 97 percent, made a sweeping turn to a course of 265 degrees magnetic, which would take us to the designated coast-in point, and commenced climbing to our ingress altitude of ten thousand feet. The carrier was about sixty miles off of the coast, and although the cloud level was solid under us, the rugged mountains of Korea were clearly visible, poking their tops up through the cloud layer ahead. Even from this distance I could see the cumulus building in between the mountain ranges, an indication that finding our way into the assigned target was going to be tricky.
During the run in to the beach, there was no radio conversation among the members of our flight. We had been flying together for almost a year, with the same pilots in each section and division. The only change was my wingman, Lt. (j.g.) Pete Lebuski, who was replacing Lt. (j.g.) John Chambers, my original wingman, who had been shot down and wounded the previous month during a strike on a Chinese troop-marshaling area.
As we crossed the coastline, I called the carrier to report “feet dry” and that I was shifting to the TACC control. Going to button three on my VHF, I called up the TACC and reported inbound with six Panthers loaded with four 260-pound fragmentation bombs each and scheduled for close support. From the amount of chatter on this already-overworked circuit, it was apparent that there were a lot of requests for air support and that the weather over the front lines was not conducive to the tactical aircraft getting together with the FACs. I had been on the TACC circuit less than a minute when the controller told me to switch to button 4 and contact the flight leader of a flight from the USS Lake Champlain, who had been departing his target area when he had spotted a lucrative target. His flight was low on fuel and out of ammunition and had to go home. The controller then directed our six planes to divert from the CAS mission — all of the FACs were saturated, anyway — and attempt to follow through on the sighting reported by the Lake Champlain jets.
The Lake Champlain flight leader reported that on a diversion from his assigned CAS mission he had spotted a column of trucks and tanks headed south on the main supply route leading into Kumsong. At this point, I was flying over the Hwachon Reservoir, which because of its very distinctive shape was easy to recognize and provided a solid navigational fix. There were enough breaks in the clouds that there was a promising chance we could find our way to Kumhwa, a good-sized town, and then head up the relatively wide and flat valley running to the northeast to Kumsong.
I called up TACC and requested permission to divert from the preplanned CAS mission and proceed to this target of opportunity. The controller had been on the net and listened to my conversation with the Lake Champlain flight leader and right away called back with an okay. Rogering the instructions from the TACC, I reported “going button 4.” With the complexity of the chain of command and the paucity of radio channels, meticulous radio discipline was essential. With hand signals I moved my flight into a modified trail formation, presuming that each pilot had been listening in on the conversations between the Lake Champlain flight and the TACC.
The loose trail formation was almost a tail chase, but each pilot alternately moved out far enough to the right or left of the flight line of the leader, which made for easy station keeping and allowed every pilot to maintain a lookout of both the air and ground picture. We had gotten a good fix over the Hwachon Reservoir, and from the gridlines on the 50,000-scale chart, I estimated a course that would put us over Kumhwa in about three minutes. Kumhwa appeared on schedule through a break in the overcast, and from ten thousand feet we could clearly see the artillery bursts north of the city but had no idea which side was under fire. It was evident that there was heavy fighting going on around Kumhwa and the truck convoy that had been spotted on the main supply route from the north was bringing down ammunition for the enemy troops and mortars. A heavy firefight such as we were witnessing could not go on long without ammo replenishment. As our flight crossed over Kumhwa, I changed course to about 020 and nosed over to lose altitude and get down to the level of the tops of the cumulus, which were at about seven thousand feet. As our flight moved north toward Yodo, the northern terminus of the route on which the convoy had been sighted, the broad valley narrowed to a virtual mountain ravine and the mountain peaks and the cloud bottoms were blending together at about four thousand feet.
Now some hard decisions had to be made. Should we pull up and proceed on top and hope for a break in the overcast? Or should we go under the low cumulus, which appeared to bottom out at about four thousand feet, and hope we weren’t heading up a dead end valley? To compound our difficulties, we had begun to pick up flak after leaving Kumhwa, and at five thousand feet were running into some bursting stuff and a whole mess of tracers coming from all directions and passing between the planes in the formation. It was at this point, just north of Kumsong, that I picked up the convoy. It was not hard to find, just a case of following the road north. The weather had given us a break. The ceiling in the vicinity appeared to be between three and five thousand feet but very irregular, with patches of scud and rain under the base of the cumulus.
I called to the flight on our tactical channel that the column of trucks was at one o’clock and that I would swing around the target in an arc so that each plane could peel off and take separation in order to avoid the preceding aircraft’s bomb blast. We would make only a single pass, dropping all four bombs on that run. The decision to drop everything on the first pass was a judgment call. If we attempted to drop one bomb on each of four runs, we stood a good chance of either losing the target in the very changeable weather or losing a couple of planes. Each plane was going to have to come down the same chute because of the low ceiling and the steepness of the mountains on both sides of the road. That would ease the problem for the Chinese gunners, unfortunately.
In order to get more separation between each of the aircraft in our trail formation, I pulled out hard to the right and then broke back left again in an S-maneuver, letting down all the time. It must have been a wild ride for the rest of the flight, because it was certainly an exciting one for me. I was doing about four hundred knots and pulling over three Gs, trying to keep the plane at a high speed and also within the very confined area of the mountainous valley.
It was only about a mile from the lead truck in the column that I was able to get the wings level over the road at about three thousand feet. I nosed over and put my pipper on the first vehicle. I reached up with my left hand and hit the master armament switch on and selected “guns” in the same motion. Then I pulled the trigger. All four of the 20mms grouped in the nose of the F9F opened up. I shifted my eyes from the pipper to the tracers and saw that I was hitting about fifty feet short and some ricochets were going over the truck column. I nudged the stick back a hair and squeezed off another burst, and it was satisfying to see this very tight pattern of 20mm shells impacting on the first three trucks of the column. But at 350 knots, the range was closing so rapidly that I had already reached my minimum release height. So in that instinctive reaction I had developed on the bombing ranges at El Centro in California and sharpened in the mountains of Korea, I pulled my nose up enough to get the proper mil lead on my illuminated gunsight, jam my thumb on the bomb pickle (the projecting button on the pilot’s control stick that releases the bombs), and pull back on the stick until the hardening pressure from my anti — G-suit on my legs and stomach told me that I was pulling more than four Gs.