The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  When all else failed on the MiG-15, the ejection seat occasionally failed as well.

  Then the MiG-15’s high T-shaped tail functioned as a kind of guillotine. It sometimes dismembered escaping pilots who crawled free from the cockpit. When the ejection seat worked, there was still a significant risk of death, although North Korean pilots were not told about it. They were taught that they could safely bail out at any altitude above sixteen hundred feet. During the war, they never learned about several MiG pilots who bailed out above thirty-three thousand feet and froze to death before reaching the ground.

  To master these “quirks,” to transform the MiG-15 from a flying booby trap into an effective fighting machine, most pilots needed several years of flying experience in other kinds of aircraft, then a year of expert fighter-jet instruction, and about three hundred hours (seven forty-hour weeks) of solo flight time in the cockpit.

  With this kind of training, they could take maximum advantage of the aircraft’s speed, high-altitude maneuverability, and astonishing climbing ability. They could also get in many hours of gunnery practice, which they needed in order to hit an enemy flying at several hundred miles an hour. The MiG-15’s gun sights were rated as somewhere between poorly designed and useless.

  The Russian honchos—the pilots No had dined with, the ones who rattled American nerves in the fall of 1951—had this kind of experience and training. The majority of them, before coming to the Far East, had spent about three hundred hours in jet fighters.

  So had American fighter pilots in Korea. In fact, they usually had more. Most of the fighter pilots from the U.S. Air Force Fourth Fighter-Interceptor Wing, which flew the hottest fighter jets, were combat veterans of World War II. All of them had spent a year and a half with their fighters before they began arriving in Korea at the end of 1950.

  IV

  No Kum Sok did not get enough training to become a honcho. Neither did the other North Korean pilots, and neither did the Chinese.

  Stalin had no patience for it. He sent angry telegrams to his air force generals in Manchuria, scolding them for “very slowly” training Koreans to fly jets and for trying to “make professors rather than battle pilots out of the Chinese.”

  To push them to the front faster, he ordered that the typical Soviet pilot training course be cut in half, from a year to six months. This was a hurry-up-and-die order, given the educational background of most of the student pilots taking flight training in Manchuria.

  Few spoke Russian, and many of them, particularly the “peasant soldiers” of China, had left school between the ages of eight and fifteen. In any language, they struggled to understand aviation and navigation concepts. It took at least twice as long to teach aviation basics to these students as it did in the Soviet Union—so even the best of the Chinese and Korean students were exposed to about a quarter of the information that was drilled into the greenest Russian pilots.

  Then, for those Chinese and Korean pilots who had stumbled through a basic aviation course, jet training was squeezed into two months.

  By the time a Chinese pilot flew off to fight the Americans, he had somewhere between fifty and eighty hours of total flight time—and about sixteen hours in a MiG-15. This was not nearly enough training to prevent Chinese MiG pilots from killing themselves by mistake. In the first half of 1951, more than a hundred died in accidents. China’s own air force regulations called for at least three hundred hours of flight time before entering combat.

  When Chinese-piloted MiGs confronted the best American fighter jets, they became prey. This quickly led to a widespread reluctance to engage. When the Chinese saw the enemy coming, they fled. Chinese veterans who piloted MiGs in the Korean War have attributed this well-documented pattern of flight, not fight, to a rational understanding of their own inexperience and incompetence.

  No’s training was marginally better—thanks to his conversational Russian, his educational background, his aptitude for flying, and his good fortune in finding time for a few extra pre-combat hours in the jet.

  His training, however, did not start well.

  In mid-April 1951, after his Soviet instructors suddenly departed to fight the Americans, taking their MiGs with them, No and the other North Korean pilots traveled to another Manchurian airfield. Dongfeng air base had a runway, but it did not have any MiG-15s or any aircraft of any kind. Nor was there a single instructor who had ever flown an airplane.

  The instructors were North Koreans who had been selected because they spoke Russian. They translated Russian-language MiG flight manuals into Korean, and from these translations No and the others tried to grasp the theoretical principles behind the operation of the jet engine that powered the MiG-15. The teachers were usually confused by technical language in the manuals. No stayed at Dongfeng for a month and learned next to nothing.

  His next stop was Tianjin, a sprawling Chinese city near Beijing and far from the war. Serious instruction finally began there, with classes and jet training flights from dawn to dark seven days a week for two months. The pace was grueling, but No felt exhilarated. Within a few days, he soloed in a Yak-17, a straight-wing turbojet with a top speed of about four hundred miles an hour.

  His Soviet instructor-pilots were part of a newly arrived MiG division. They wore brightly colored sport shirts and enjoyed vodka, often to excess, and sometimes did not show up in the morning because of headaches. But the Russians were friendly, talkative, and skilled as teachers. No liked nearly all of them, the pilots and the mechanics. As a Russian speaker, he was eager to hang out with them on the flight line.

  Stuck on a Chinese air base with nothing to do but work, the Russian jet mechanics loved to talk about their sexual triumphs. No listened keenly and learned lots of dirty words. North Korean pilots were not supposed to talk about women; wartime love affairs were strictly forbidden. But with the Russians, No ignored the rules and began telling spicy tales of his own romantic triumphs.

  As a storyteller, No could not rely on firsthand experience with women, sex, or romance. He was a nineteen-year-old virgin. He had never had a girlfriend. He did not even have a sister. But he had been to the movies, and his imagination had been working overtime for the past three years as he pretended to be a loyal North Korean Communist. It was not that much of a stretch to pretend to be a Casanova who specialized in Russian maidens.

  So he invented a lover and called her Natasha (a name he remembered from a Soviet film called The Melody of the Great Siberian Land). His exploits with Natasha tickled the Russians, perhaps because of his boyish face, his iffy understanding of sex, and his determination to sound worldly while speaking Russian in a Korean accent. They teased him about his lover, asking, “How is Natasha?”

  No soloed in a MiG-15 near the end of his two-month stay in Tianjin. Because the jet was damnably difficult to control and because North Korean student pilots often damaged them on their first solo flights, only one student was allowed to solo at a time.

  On that first go, a Russian airman stood on a ladder that leaned against the MiG’s cockpit and strapped No into his parachute and then into his seat. A green flare gun fired a signal for him to take off, and within minutes he was several miles high. When he stopped accelerating and tried to level off for the first time, the altimeter began spinning backward, giving him the alarming news that he was descending at an uncontrolled rate. He was barely in control.

  He had, as always, memorized the landing procedures he had learned in class. But he was not at all confident he could do them. He approached the runway too fast and, at touchdown, scraped his right wingtip on the tarmac. But he did not wreck his MiG, as many other students did.

  At the end of June, No and the other pilots moved closer to the North Korean border—and to the war—for final flight training at Anshan air base, where seventy shiny MiG-15s were waiting for them. Each pilot was assigned his own fighter. No’s had the number 008 painted in red on both side
s of its nose. Because of manufacturing mistakes, some of the MiGs had asymmetrical airframes; others had buggy engines or stiff control sticks. No’s MiG was one of the good ones, or so he was told by one of the Russian instructors who sometimes borrowed it. Every morning, No participated in simulated dogfights. His jet instructor was a Ukrainian, Captain Pisanenko, who taught him how to fly in formation while maintaining a constant speed of 620 miles an hour. The Ukrainian told him that if he flew slower than that, he would not have a chance against the Americans.

  When No’s training concluded at the end of the summer of 1951, he had fifty hours of flying time in a MiG, more than twice as many jet hours as the average Chinese MiG pilot who flew in the Korean War. No considered himself to be the best pilot in the North Korean air force, based on what he had seen of his peers’ flying ability. He had soloed in four different Soviet planes earlier than most student pilots. His aerobatic skills, as demonstrated in training drills, were unsurpassed. He won a simulated dogfight against his flight leader.

  But compared with Russian honchos—and the American pilots who would soon be trying to kill him—he was easy pickings. His flight instructors had neglected to teach him how to fire the guns on his MiG, and he had not asked how to shoot them, assuming that it would come up later.

  CHAPTER 7

  Return to North Korea

  I

  In November 1951, Kim Il Sung ordered twenty-six newly trained MiG pilots to leave their sanctuary in Manchuria, fly across the border, and establish a combat presence on North Korean soil. The pilots and their MiG-15s were sent to Uiju, with the newly constructed airfield that Kim and his son had inspected a month earlier. The timing made some sense. The total number of MiGs in the war—flown by pilots from the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea—had mushroomed to more than five hundred. They created a formidable shield along the border between China and North Korea.

  The real intent of the move, though, was political. Marginalized and living underground in Pyongyang, Kim desperately needed to blow his horn and assert his greatness. China controlled the ground war he had bungled, and he feared that after the war Mao would force him into a subservient role or get rid of him altogether. Moving MiGs to North Korea showed gumption. It suggested that Kim’s war-battered government was getting up off its knees, standing up to American airpower, and defending the homeland with Korean pilots flying the Communist world’s most ferocious fighter jet.

  But the move also showed, yet again, that Kim was a reckless adventurer, more concerned with image making than with military strategy or the well-being of his men. Had he allowed his elite fighter pilots to remain at air bases in Manchuria, where they had excellent support, reliable communications, and quick access to the fighting in MiG Alley, they could dogfight all day and rest easy at night. American bombers and fighter jets could not attack them on the ground. But if Americans spotted MiGs on the ground at Uiju, they and their pilots were fair game for annihilation.

  So it was that No Kum Sok, on orders of the Great Leader he had chosen not to shoot, began his career as a combat pilot at an air base ripe for destruction from above.

  After a quick flight from Manchuria, No landed at Uiju on November 7. It was more landing strip than air base, with a runway that stretched for seventy-two hundred feet, plenty long enough to accommodate a MiG. Administrative offices, such as they were, consisted of a few wooden huts made from railroad containers the Soviets had used to transport MiGs to the Far East. Flight orders were relayed to the huts by radio from Dandong air base in Manchuria, where Soviet and North Korean radar monitored American aircraft as they flew north from airfields in South Korea, Japan, and Okinawa. An apron ramp at Uiju connected the runway to twenty bunker-like revetments (parking places for aircraft) lined with sandbags, each of which could shelter two MiGs. At each end of the airfield, sandbag bunkers protected antiaircraft batteries. Scattered in the nearby hills, other antiaircraft guns were draped in camouflage.

  In the expectation that American bombs and fighter jets would soon come, No and all the MiG pilots bunked five miles from the airfield in farmhouses with boards nailed over the windows. On his first evening in the farmhouse, with combat coming in the morning, No was too worried to eat. Lights went out soon after dinner, and most of the pilots went to bed. No lay awake for hours in the long darkness, as fear seized his body like a contagion, causing cramps in his stomach. It would be many years before he could shake the night terrors that infected him in Uiju.

  Like all the young North Korean pilots, No was untested. He doubted that his flying skills were good enough to survive air-to-air combat. Yet that was only part of what kept him awake. Returning to North Korea had awakened his long-suppressed terror of being exposed as a fake. He would be shot for sure in this combat zone, he thought, when commanders found out he was a pretend Communist.

  With his first mission in the morning, there was something new to dread: killing an American.

  No had volunteered for the air force in the hope that this day would never come. He had convinced himself that Kim’s malignant reign and his disastrous war would come to an end long before he learned how to fly a fighter jet. Since childhood he had wanted to make a life in the United States; the last thing he wanted to do was kill one of its citizens. All through flight training, political officers had assured him that American pilots were bullying weasels who only cared about money. When confronted by a swarm of MiGs, the political officers predicted, “the cowardly Americans will flee and desert their comrades to certain death.” As he lay awake on that first night in Uiju, No found himself hoping that for once the political officers had told him the truth.

  He learned they were liars as he flew in formation with seven other MiGs at forty thousand feet in scattered clouds near Pyongyang. He had been flying sorties for a week, without seeing a single enemy aircraft. But on the morning of November 15, four American fighter jets screamed out of the sun and attacked his formation from the rear. Machine guns blazing, they sliced down through the North Koreans, who panicked and skittered off in all directions. One MiG managed to veer away, lock in behind an American jet, and put its tail in his gun sights. But before the MiG pilot could fire, three other American jets counterattacked, forcing him to flee.

  The attack taught No a simple and sobering lesson: what he had been told about the Americans was nonsense. With his own eyes, he saw that they were better fliers than the North Koreans—and at least the equals of the Russian honchos. The Americans hunted like wolves in a pack, protecting one another at great personal risk. No was frightened by their will to fight and win.

  Russian advisers had told No how fortunate he was to be flying a MiG-15, which they proudly described as the world’s best jet fighter. But the Americans attacked in a fighter jet—the F-86 Sabre—that performed as well, if not better.

  Days after his first dogfight, No discovered that a Sabre could dive faster than a MiG. He watched from a distance as a Sabre pursued a MiG descending at its maximum safe speed of Mach 0.95, just below the speed of sound. The MiG pilot dared not go faster because as his jet approached Mach 1 it began to shake uncontrollably and the control stick became unmanageably heavy. Not so for the Sabre. In a dive, it smoothly pushed past the speed of sound and closed rapidly on the fleeing MiG.

  When No returned to Uiju to break this alarming news to his North Korean commanders and his regiment’s Russian adviser, they already knew. They did not want to talk about it.

  II

  The cold war race to build the best fighter jet dates to the final days of World War II, when the Americans and the Soviets marched into Germany. Both armies discovered records of the Third Reich’s advanced aerodynamic research—the Americans in Bavaria, the Soviets in Berlin—showing that fighter jets could fly at or beyond the speed of sound if they were designed with swept wings, a high tail, and a stubby, open-nosed fuselage.

  The Soviet Union’s version of this design was the Mi
G-15; the name comes from the initials of Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich, founders of an aircraft design bureau. The fighter was rushed into military service in June 1949. Five months earlier, the U.S. Air Force sent its first version of the Sabre, the F-86A, into the field.

  The two fighter jets looked alike and had similar capabilities. Engineers in both countries tweaked newer models of the planes throughout the Korean War, keeping them roughly equal when flown by pilots of equal skill. Broadly speaking, the MiG could climb faster and operate at higher altitudes, but the Sabre was easier to fly, especially at low altitude. It was also more comfortable and less prone to shakes, sputters, and death spins because of mismatched wings and other manufacturing flubs. Unlike the early MiG-15 model that No trained on, the Sabre had hydraulic controls; pilots need not lift weights to handle its stick.

  The cockpit of the Sabre was roomy and ergonomically sound, with gauges and toggle switches logically positioned. The fighter had good cockpit pressurization and temperature controls. Visibility was excellent, with a bullet-resistant, blown-plastic canopy that did not fog up. Pilots could see who was attacking from the rear. Guns on the Sabre, six .50-caliber machine guns, three on each side of its nose, were smaller and less lethal than those on the MiG. A Sabre pilot usually had to fly close to an enemy aircraft and hit it repeatedly to bring it down. But unlike a MiG pilot, he had radar to calculate distance to his target, and gun sights used gyroscopes to show him how far to fire in front of an enemy aircraft in order to hit it. “We were driving Cadillacs while they had Fords,” one Sabre pilot said.

  The Truman administration had hoped to keep these Cadillacs out of Korea, holding them in reserve in case the cold war turned hot in Europe. But Stalin forced the Americans to play their first team. Soon after MiGs began prowling the border region in November 1950, one of them shot down a B-29, unmasking the hulking bombers as vulnerable prey and alarming the air force. To protect them, the air force chief of staff, Vandenberg, decided within one day to send Sabres to Korea. Within a week, the first squadron of F-86As was loaded as deck cargo on navy tankers bound for Japan. The first seven flew into Kimpo Air Force Base near Seoul in mid-December.