by Adam Makos
Wilkie glanced left and saw Jesse’s face fixed forward, his helmet and mask unmoving. Behind his goggles, his eyes were steady and oblivious to the tracers around him.
Jesse’s wings erupted with light as gunfire leapt from his muzzles. He must have spied their target. Wilkie’s eyes tracked Jesse’s tracers into the urban maze. The bullets careened into a shadowy street, but Wilkie still couldn’t spot anything military-looking. He lifted his finger from the gun trigger.
The Corsairs plummeted through 6,000 feet, then 5,000, then 4,000. Wilkie hovered his thumb over the bomb release button. Jesse’s words were still fresh in his mind: “Just drop when I drop and you’ll get through just fine.” As the city came into focus, Wilkie’s eyes flashed with horror. Just above his aim point he spotted a walled compound. Within the walls, civilians were scattering. Small civilians.
Children.
“Oh, shit!” Wilkie muttered. Down to 3,500 feet, 3,000 feet. The compound resembled a school—and it lay just a few streets above his aim point, in his flight path, not in Jesse’s. Wilkie began breathing heavily. His mask squeezed his cheeks. If his aim was off, he’d hit the school.
From the corner of his eye, Wilkie saw a green blur fall from the belly of Jesse’s plane as his bomb released. Jesse pulled up, but Wilkie kept diving. The bomb-ravaged city swelled in his windscreen, yet the rubble still obscured the cannons. Wilkie could see the children clearly. Some were scattering—some looked frozen in their tracks.
Wilkie shifted his thumb away from the bomb release button and hauled back on the control stick. With the bomb still slung tight, the Corsair swooped from its dive so low it rattled the roof tiles.
Ka-boom!
Several streets behind Wilkie’s tail, Jesse’s bomb exploded. A split second later, Wilkie ripped over the school and saw the Korean children looking up, unharmed. Wilkie tore his oxygen mask from his face and breathed deeply. He checked his rearview mirror. Gray smoke rose from Jesse’s bomb blast: He had placed his bomb precisely.
Wilkie raised his gear and throttled forward to catch up to Jesse, who was darting toward the river. Spurts of green tracers tracked Jesse’s tail and soared over Wilkie’s canopy from behind. Enemy gunners were tracking them both. Wilkie ducked his head and took the Corsair lower, almost hugging the rooftops. He could smell the burnt city below.
The tracers slackened abruptly and Wilkie lifted his head. He looked around. The enemy gunners had shifted their fire to new targets—the six Corsairs of Fighting 33 were coming down.
The bomb.
Wilkie had nearly forgotten. He reached forward and flicked a switch to deactivate the radio fuse before the bomb self-detonated. The young pilot glanced ahead of each wing as the charred enemy capital slipped beneath him. His face clenched with frustration. He couldn’t dump the bomb, not with civilians living in the rubble.
The radio crackled and drew Wilkie’s attention.
“Bogeys! Eleven o’clock high!” a nervous voice announced.
“Roger, I see ’em!” replied another voice.
The voices came from Skyraider pilots, high above the city.
Wilkie glanced over his right shoulder, ahead of the Skyraiders. Above the bridges, white contrails crept eastward through the sky at thirty thousand feet. There were fourteen of them, coming from Chinese airspace. Wilkie squinted. At the tip of each contrail flew a silver machine with a stubby nose, swept wings, and a bubble canopy.
MiG-15s.
Soviet jet fighters.
The MiGs were the Soviet’s newest technology, built using German research captured in WWII. The MiGs had first shown up two weeks earlier, when the Chinese entered the war, and they seemed to guard the bridges. Reportedly, Chinese “volunteers” were behind the MiGs’ controls, but no one really knew.
Wilkie glanced forward to his leader. Jesse was low above the river, following it south, away from the bridges. In front of him flew the skipper, his wingman, and then Tom Hudner. Wilkie shook his head in dismay. No one was in position to intercept the MiGs—it would take eight long minutes to climb to their altitude.
Credit 29.2
F9F Panthers
Wilkie glanced above. Open air stood between the MiGs and the lumbering Skyraiders. The Soviet jets were poised to attack.
Then the radio crackled: “Tally-ho! Let’s take ’em, boys.” Wilkie recognized the voice and broke from his gaze. Over his left shoulder he spotted new contrails coming from Korean airspace. The contrails trickled from eight blue jets with sleek noses, straight wings, and high tails.
F9F Panthers.
Navy jets from Fighting 31, the Leyte’s jet squadron.
Above Sinuiju, the Panthers flew head-on into the MiGs and a dogfight erupted. The jets twisted and chased one another’s tails, their contrails intertwining.
Wilkie wanted to watch and cheer his shipmates on, but he had to escape the city. When the muddy water slipped beneath his wings, he broke left and followed the river. Thirty feet above the Yalu, he raced past warehouses and fisheries and leapt over fishing boats. In twenty miles, the river would dump into the Yellow Sea between Korea and China.
Wilkie glanced behind him and caught a glimpse of the dogfight—a MiG was twirling from the sky and the remaining enemy pilots were turning toward Chinese airspace, leaving the Panthers behind, unable to give chase. Wilkie’s shoulders lowered with relief. The Skyraiders were nearly over the bridge, unmolested.
Jesse’s Corsair gradually stretched in Wilkie’s windscreen—he had slowed so that his young wingman could catch up. Wilkie nestled into formation on Jesse’s right wing. Jesse glanced over at Wilkie, his eyes lowering to the bomb, still attached. Jesse’s eyebrows rose with surprise. He grinned and shook his head as if to say, “What can you do?” Mechanical malfunctions were often the cause of hung bombs. Wilkie forced a tight-lipped smile—he’d explain later.
At the Yalu’s mouth, the muddy river slid behind the Corsairs and the waves of the Yellow Sea assumed their place. High above, the skipper and the others were assembling.
Wilkie followed Jesse into a climb to re-form.
As he flew, Wilkie kept an eye on his altimeter needle. When the needle wound above 2,500 feet, he took a deep breath and hoped that the skipper wasn’t watching. With his thumb, Wilkie mashed the bomb release button. The bomb jettisoned, fell, and splashed harmlessly into the waves. His record was intact—he hadn’t killed a soul. But something felt hollow about it, after the bravery his friends had shown. Wilkie shook his head in frustration.*2
—
At twelve thousand feet above the Yellow Sea, Tom followed the plane ahead in a leftward orbit. In another patch of sky, ’33’s Corsairs circled. Higher yet, the Panthers’ contrails patrolled the blue.
Tom breathed steadily, having reaffixed his mask. He kept an eye on the distant bridge. From a distance, it resembled a prop in a toy railroad diorama. Its tiny humps spanned a river that looked spray-painted and set against brown papier-mâché mountains.
The Corsairs had done their job—the flak cloud over Sinuiju had thinned from black to a pale shade of gray—and now ten dark specks could be seen motoring through it. The specks were the Skyraiders, the navy’s flying tanks.
Tom leaned forward in his seat. He had flown a Skyraider prior to joining ’32. The plane was anything but graceful—its nose seemed too small, its canopy too forward, its body too wide—but it could pack a punch. Each of the distant specks was carrying a thousand-pound bomb and a two-thousand-pounder.
“Lead to flight,” the Skyraider leader radioed his pilots. “Deploy dive brakes on three—three, two, one!” Beyond the sight of Tom and the Corsair drivers, dive brakes extended like small doors from the Skyraiders’ flanks and bellies.
The lead Skyraider peeled from formation and dived, revealing two square wings and a body shaped like a cross. Between glances at the plane ahead of him, Tom’s anxious eyes tracked the attack. The cross dived toward the middle of the bridge and then abruptly pulled up. Behind it,
two minuscule splashes leapt from the river.
“Near misses!” a pilot reported.
It’s okay, Tom thought. They’re just getting started.
More crosses dived and new splashes jumped from the river. The radio crackled with disappointment.
“No-go!”
“No dice!”
“Damn close!”
A flash of light burst from the middle of the bridge and smoke billowed.
“A hit! It’s a hit!” a pilot announced.
A smile cracked Tom’s face. The following crosses shifted their attacks to a span closer to the Korean bank. Bombs kept falling, the river kept splashing. A new flash burst and fresh smoke rose.
“On the money!” a pilot shouted.
Tom shook his fist.
The smoke swelled across the bridge so thickly that the last crosses bombed blindly.
One after another, the crosses ran for the Yellow Sea and slowly reassumed the meaty shapes of Skyraiders. More specks appeared on the eastern horizon. Skyraiders from the carrier Valley Forge had come to pummel the other “twin,” the railroad bridge. But all eyes were turned toward the highway bridge.
Behind the Skyraiders, the smoke settled. In the middle of the bridge, one hump leaned into the Yalu, shattered. Nearer to shore, another hump sat sunken on the river’s bottom. The Skyraider leader radioed all Leyte planes: “A-1 job, boys.”
Tom couldn’t restrain his grin. He patted his jacket’s hip pocket and felt his pipe. It was wrapped in a tobacco bag, packed with leaves, and ready to light. This time, Tom didn’t need to cool his nerves—this smoke would be ceremonial. When the Corsairs and Skyraiders descended to approach the carrier, he and the others would remove their masks and light up pipes, cigarettes, and cigars. But that was still to come.
For now, they left the Yalu smoking.
* * *
*1 The U.S. military was cautious not to escalate the conflict with China because the Chinese had signed a mutual defense treaty with Stalin in 1949 that stipulated that an attack on either would spark a war with both. Before the first bridge strike, naval admiral C. Turner Joy reminded his pilots: “Our government has decided that we cannot violate the air space over Manchuria (northeastern China) or attack on Manchurian territory regardless of the provocation. If such attacks were made, the world might be thrown into the holocaust of a third world war.”
*2 Today, the pilots who flew this mission agree that the North Korean military had intentionally placed the flak guns near populated schools and civilian centers to throw off the American raids, just as they had placed their anti-aircraft weapons across the Yalu, knowing that the Americans wouldn’t risk an attack.
CHAPTER 30
A CHILL IN THE NIGHT
That afternoon, after the bridge strike
Aboard the USS Leyte
THE AIR GROUP’S FLIGHT SURGEON PUSHED a stainless steel cart, wheels squeaking, through the Leyte’s dining room. Music drifted from the squawk box on the wall and officers chatted at tables. Over the squeaking wheels, the clinking of a dozen glass bottles could be heard coming from the cart. The officers’ ears perked up, and their eyes followed the sounds as the flight surgeon steered toward ’32’s ready room.
—
Inside the ready room, the conversation swirled around Tom, Wilkie, Jesse, and the skipper’s wingman. Their buddies pumped them with questions about the bridge strike. Word of the bridge’s destruction had traveled the ship along with the news that the Valley Forge Skyraiders had damaged the railway bridge, too. The strike had been so successful and the ground war was so quiet that the Valley Forge would detach from the fleet the next day to steam home.
Tom smoked his pipe between answers and Wilkie smoked cigarettes at Jesse’s side. The men were freshly showered and had donned clean uniforms. On the fringes, Cevoli and Marty eagerly followed the conversation.
Word of the mission would soon travel the world. In Japan, General MacArthur would review the strike photos, then President Truman in Washington. The carrier pilots had possibly prevented five hundred thousand Chinese troops from entering Korea and may have helped win the war. They also had just fought the Soviet Union, although only the Soviets knew it.
Soviet pilots, not Chinese pilots, had been behind the controls of the attacking MiGs, and one had been killed in the dogfight, a lieutenant named Tarshinov. On Stalin’s orders, Soviet pilots had begun flying combat from China. They flew in disguise, wearing black Chinese uniforms and badges showing the face of the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Zedong. And they were forbidden from flying far beyond the Yalu, so that if a pilot were to be shot down, he would not be captured by U.N. forces. Stalin was not prepared for all-out war with the forces of democracy, but the MiGs still allowed him to fight. *1
All conversations ended when the flight surgeon wheeled his cart into the ready room. Tom grinned at the sight, while other pilots gazed sadly.
“Okay, fellas, who flew today?” the flight surgeon asked. Tom, Wilkie, Jesse, and the skipper’s wingman raised their hands. The skipper was away, probably typing up his report of the mission.
The flight surgeon slid a drawer from the cart, revealing tiny glass bottles of brandy.
The Leyte was a dry ship with one exception—the flight surgeon. His bottles of brandy were known as “medical rations,” and he issued them to help pilots relax after combat, to protect their psychological well-being.
“I’ll take a scotch,” Tom said.
The flight surgeon shook his head good-naturedly and handed Tom a brandy.
“Gin and tonic?” Wilkie said, and the other pilots laughed. The flight surgeon handed Wilkie a brandy.
The flight surgeon had other squadrons to visit, and every time the pilots would jokingly place orders as if he were carting around a fully stocked bar.
The flight surgeon handed a bottle to Jesse, who quietly accepted it. A few pilots raised their eyebrows. Once the flight surgeon had departed, Jesse passed his bottle to Cevoli, who uncapped it and toasted Jesse. This was their routine.
Tom drank his brandy and felt it warm his throat. A fuzzy calm flooded his brain and he slumped down in his seat. Wilkie’s face twisted as he sipped—he didn’t like the taste, but drank it anyway.
A pilot turned to Tom, Wilkie, and Jesse. “It’s not fair,” the pilot joked. “You’re going to all get medals, too!”
Tom dismissed the idea—he wasn’t one for medals to begin with. Tom was the same pilot who wouldn’t sew the squadron patch onto his leather jacket because it would be “showing off.”
“Nah, I doubt you’ll get anything,” said another pilot. “The skipper doesn’t believe in medals.”
The circle turned quiet. It was true. After almost two months of combat, the skipper hadn’t nominated anyone for an award.
“He has his reasons,” Marty said.
Tom and the others turned to Marty with surprise. Marty Goode, defending the skipper? Tom thought.
At Cannes, everyone knew that the skipper had kept Marty from his French girlfriend and they all assumed that Marty hated the man. But Marty had come to realize the skipper had, in a roundabout way, been protecting him. Now, in the war zone, Marty was glad that he didn’t have a French girlfriend to worry about, halfway across the globe.
Marty leaned forward and the others leaned closer.
“I heard the skipper’s kid brother was an aviator in the last one,” Marty said in a hushed tone. “Story goes, the fleet was under attack off Saipan and the skipper’s brother raced straight into a mess of sixteen torpedo bombers and fighters to break up the attack. That was the last they ever saw of him.”
The pilots remained silent, some wondering how Marty had heard the story.
“You know what award they gave him?” Cevoli chimed in. “An air medal.”*2
Someone let out a whistle of disgust. An air medal or even the Distinguished Flying Cross was a paltry tribute to a kid who had given his life that way.
“So that’s why the skippe
r won’t hand out medals willy-nilly,” Marty said. “The bar’s set pretty high.”
The pilots quickly shifted the conversation, which suited Tom just fine.
—
Later that night, the cabin was dark but for a single lamp that hung over the desk where Jesse was sitting. Jesse was keeping the lights low because Koenig was still sick with the flu, tossing and turning in his bunk, trying to fall asleep. Gong-like sounds echoed through the steel ceiling as steam pipes clanged. The floor hummed from the ship’s four propellers.
Jesse cleared his desk of any letters and clutter. He wrote to Daisy almost nightly and told her about his missions but never admitted that the enemy had actually shot at him.
Since Sasebo, Jesse had added to his nightly routine. He’d begun a long-distance college course in international law—but he wasn’t studying. He was a subscriber to Architectural Forum magazine—but he wasn’t reading. He opened a drawer and removed a wide pad and some pencils and rulers. He flipped the pad open.
In the center of the paper, he had begun to draw a house. Only the first floor had taken shape so far. He’d drawn a front door that led onto a porch with an awning over it. He’d penciled in windows and wooden sidings. At the top of the first floor, the house faded away to blank paper.
Jesse leaned over the desk, focused his eyes, and used the rulers to steady his pencil as he drew. He and Daisy had spent days planning the house together. They called it their “dream home.”
The dream home was simple. A single story. All-American styling. Painted red, Daisy’s favorite color. They had agreed to build it whenever the opportunity arose. Jesse had barely four months remaining in his active duty commitment. In March, he’d revert to the reserves and resume his studies to become an architectural engineer, who selects the building materials for an architect. Afterward, he would build the dream house. He and Daisy planned to stand on their porch and see Pam off to her prom.