—Jack Kleiss, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot.
“We had just left Majuro anchorage on our way to Hollandia. We were getting close to Hollandia, in an area where strict security required a darkened ship. AOM2/c Petty had left Fighter Armory with AOM1/c F.S. Rice, heading toward the port bow. It was one of those nights when you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. Both men were cautious and felt somewhat safe because they thought the ‘safety chain’ was up across the bow. Neither realized that we had spotted two F4U night fighters at ‘ready’ on the catapults, with the pilots in them prepared for instant take-off. The safety chain was down.
“Petty was a step or two in front of Rice when suddenly Rice heard a muffled grunt. It didn’t take him long to realize that Petty had walked off the bow. Rice immediately ran aft to the LSO (Landing Signal Officer) platform where he grabbed some float lights and, without thinking of the consequences, threw some of them overboard. What a sight to suddenly see lights behind the ship in that total darkness. Alert men on watch were quick to report. GQ (general quarters) was sounded and this particular GQ caught everyone at a time when ‘tense’ didn’t begin to describe how jumpy we were.
“The Officer of the Deck sounded ‘Man Overboard’ and every division met for immediate muster and roll call. Destroyers guarding the rear of the task force were given the OK to search for Petty. They directed their efforts to the float lights, but there was only one thing wrong with that. The length of flight deck that Rice had to travel to get to the LSO platform would take a fast runner forty to sixty seconds and the ship was moving at a fair rate of speed. In the time he took to run that distance, the closest light to Petty was judged to be a half mile away. Seas were also running choppy at four feet. The odds of finding Petty were in the needle-in-a-haystack category. We were thinking we would never see him again.
“However, there are survivors, some of which are extremely lucky and some personally self-sufficient. Petty was both. The whale boats which the destroyers sent to look for him did an ever-expanding circle search out from the float lights. They had just decided to halt the search when they heard Petty whistle. He could not see them, but he heard their voices, so he managed to whistle with his fingers to his teeth. That is what saved him. He also helped himself by tying knots in his dungarees and filling them full of air as a float.
“We were back at Pearl in January 1944. Petty had gone on liberty and come back with tattoos of a rooster on one foot and a pig on the other. Old seamen’s lore has it that a sailor who does that will never drown. When we next returned to Pearl in July, we had sailors by the dozen getting tattooed with pigs and roosters on their insteps.”
—M.S. Cochran, formerly assigned to the USS Enterprise
“I was wired to the port catapult of the San Jacinto when the boing, boing, boing went off, followed by ‘This is no drill!’ I saw a Japanese Jill aircraft coming across the front of our ship, starboard to port. He was low, about 100 feet, and every ship in the fleet was shooting at him. I started yelling at the catapult officer to launch my plane. It seemed to take forever. I charged my guns while waiting. The Japanese plane had bore-sighted another carrier to our port side. Finally, the cat fired. The Jill, with bomb or torpedo in plain view, was crossing my launch path. I squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The gear was still down. The guns are not supposed to fire with the gear down. I hit the gear-up lever. The Jill was closing at full deflection. I was squeezing the trigger. At last all six .50s were firing just as the Jill crossed in front of me. It exploded as it flew into my line of fire. I had been in the air less than thirty seconds. My aircraft was hit several times by shrapnel, but I continued my combat air patrol and landed just under four hours later.”
—James B. Cain, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot
“After reinstallation, every jet engine was thoroughly checked out, and the more ‘Walter Mitty-like’ mechanics, including me, eagerly looked forward to this task. One did feel slightly elated, clambering into the cockpit, starting the engine and testing it. While stationed at land bases we sometimes needed to taxi the aircraft short distances, and one couldn’t help wondering how it would feel to actually take off.”
—Bill Hannan, former U.S. Navy jet engine mechanic
A survivor of the Argentine attack on the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Sheffield being rushed from a rescuing helicopter to the sick bay of the aircraft carrier Hermes during the Falklands War in 1982.
KOREAN AIR WAR
U.S. Navy Chance Vought F4U Corsair fighters over the carrier USS Boxer during the Korean conflict in the early 1950s.
The main British front-line fighter in Korea was the Hawker Sea Fury, which was operated from Royal Navy carriers including HMS Glory.
FROM JUNE 1950 UNTIL JUNE 1953, a war called “a police action” raged on the Korean peninsula, during which attack missions flown by U.S. and British naval aviators took a huge toll on the military assets and infrastructure of their North Korean enemy. The pilots destroyed eighty-three enemy aircraft, 313 bridges, 12,789 military buildings, 262 junks and river craft, 220 locomotives, 1,421 rail cars, 163 tanks, and nearly 3,000 support vehicles. The Korean conflict was one of only two events in which United Nations forces had gone to war against an aggressor nation. It was only the absence of the Soviet Union from the UN Security Council (which it was boycotting when war broke out in Korea) that enabled the UN to approve military action there under its auspices, as the Russians would certainly have exercised their veto had they been present.
John Franklin Bolt flew U.S. Marine Corps F4U Corsairs in the Pacific during World War II. He came home with six Japanese Zeke fighters to his credit, and a few years later was to become the only Navy Department jet ace of the Korean war, having disposed of six MiG-15s in air action there.
Jack Bolt wanted a piece of the Korean action. “I chose an Air Force exchange tour of duty because at that point the only thing standing up to the MiGs were the F-86s. I knew that none were coming to the Marine Corps, and I was anxious to get back to the air-to-air fight. The only possibility of doing that was by getting in an F-86 squadron. The MiGs were beating the hell out of everything else, and the F-86s were our sole air superiority plane in Korea from early on. So I managed to get a year’s tour with the Air Force, and toward the end of it I managed to get into an F-86 squadron of the Oregon Air National Guard.
“I would grind out the hours in that thing, standing air defense alerts. Those were the days when the threat of nuclear war with Russia hung heavily over our heads. We really thought we were going to get into it. It was late in 1951 or early 1952 and the squadron was part of the Northwest Air Defense Command. Our guys were on stand-by and would be down in the ready room in flight gear, not sitting in the planes the way they did later. They would be playing bridge and so forth, but I would be up flying, getting hours in that F-86. When my guard tour was over, I was able to get out to Korea in about May of ’52 and flew ninety-four missions in F9F-4 Panthers, interdictions, air-to-ground, and close air support. We were down at K3, an airfield near Po Hang Do, with VMF-115.
“We were using napalm to attack rice-straw thatched-roof targets. They were all supposed to contain enemy troops, but I’m sure most of them were probably innocent civilians. We were attacking the villages with napalm. Then, of course, the proper military targets used thatching for waterproofing too, a supply depot for food or materiel, fuel or ammo. We used lots of napalm against all of those targets.
“My tour in Panthers came to an end and I took some R and R. I looked up an Air Force squadron commander named George Ruddell. I had met him at El Toro in 1947 when he flew an F-80 over to lecture our squadron about it and gave us a little demonstration of what that airplane could do. I found George at K13 where he was commanding the 39th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. I told him about my 100 hours in the F-86F, the same type of Sabre his squadron was flying. I had the experience he needed, and he was friendly towards me and let me take a few fam flights with some of his boys.
The cockpit and instrument panel of a MiG-15, the primary Soviet fighter of the Korean War era.
“On a second R and R trip around Christmas of ’52, it happened that Joe McConnell, who was to become the top-scoring U.S. fighter ace of the Korean war with sixteen kills, had just been grounded from operations, and Ruddell very generously sent him over to teach me some tactics. I flew a few fam hops with McConnell and he was good. We became friends and he taught me a lot about his tactics in the F-86. He was very deserving of the fame that he had earned as the leading ace of that war. Tragically, he was killed soon after the war on a test flight at Edwards Air Force base in California.
“After that second R and R, I put in for another Air Force exchange tour. The Group Personnel Officer said, ‘Bolt, I know you’ve been trying to worm your way into this, going up there on R and R. I’ll tell you, you’ve had a year with the Air Force and you ain’t goin’ up there. You think you are. I’m telling you now, it ain’t gonna happen.’ They felt that I’d had more than my share of gravy assignments, so I got in touch with Ruddell and he got the general up there to send a wire down to the Marine Corps general. They only had two F-86 groups, the 4th and the 51st, and they had two Marines in each. One of them, a guy named Roy Reed, was leaving shortly. This was the opening I needed. The Air Force general’s wire read: ‘We’re willing to have your pilots, but they come up here having never flown the plane, and they present a training burden on our people. But now we have a rare instance of having a pilot who’s shown enough initiative to come up here and get checked out, and he’s ready to go. Would you mind appointing John Bolt?’
“There was nothing else the Group could do. I was put in Ruddell’s squadron and I was flying on McConnell’s wing for my first half dozen flights. I was in Dog Flight. Ruddell was a very tough guy, but he was as nice as he could be. He had four or five kills, but the MiGs had stopped coming south of the Yalu River and we weren’t allowed to go north of it. The Chinese were yelling about ‘the pirates’ that were coming over there, but that’s where the action was.
“When McConnell left, I took over the command of Dog Flight, a quarter of the squadron with about twelve pilots. We lived together in one big Quonset hut.
“Ruddell wasn’t getting any MiGs because they weren’t coming south of the river. He’d been threatening everybody that he’d kill ’em, cut their heads off if they went north of the river after MiGs. But one night he weakened. He’d had a few drinks and he called me into this little cubbyhole where he had his quarters. During the discussion tears came into his eyes—running down his cheeks—as he was saying how he wanted to be a good Air Force officer, and he loved the Air Force, and if they told him to do something, he’d do it, and if they told him not to do something, he’d not do it. But getting those MiGs meant more to him than his career and life itself. And, since he had been beating up on his own flight about not going across the river, he’d be embarrassed to ask any of them to go across with him. He didn’t know whether they would want to anyway—two or three members of Dog Flight didn’t like to do it. (They would have been in big trouble if they’d been identified as going up there. I don’t know if the ones they picked up later on, who were shot down north of the river, were ever disciplined when the war was over. But at the time, the threat was believed and hanging very heavily over us.) Ruddell said, ‘Would you give me some of your flight? I want to go across the river. I’ve gotta have some action.’ Ruddell’s boys had been several days with no action. I said, ‘Sure, I’d be delighted,’ so we planned one for the next day.
Practicing water survival exercises at NAS Pensacola.
“I was to fly his second section. On a river crossing flight, we would take off and go full bore. We’d fly those planes at 100 percent power setting until we got out of combat. Engine life was planned for 800 hours and we were getting about 550 or so. Turbine blade cracks were developing. We were running the engines at maximum temperature. You could put these little constrictors in the tailpipe—we called them ‘rats’—and you could ‘rat ’em up’ until they ran at maximum temperature. They were real hot rods. You’d run your drop tanks dry just about the time you got up to the river, and if you didn’t have a contact, you weren’t supposed to drop your tanks. We skinned ’em every time anyway. On at least four occasions, by the end of the flight I had been to over 50,000 feet. When it was empty and I still hadn’t pulled the power back from 100 percent, the airplane would really get up there. The MiG-15 could get right up there too.
“On the flight with Ruddell, we got up there and dropped our tanks. At least the pilots going across the river dropped them. There were big clouds up as we crossed the river. It was early morning and we heard on the radio that there was a fight going on. There were some MiGs flying this day. We came from the sunny side of the clouds to the back side of a big cumulous; there were some black puffs of flak and there were some planes down there. We were half blind from the diminished illumination on the back side of the cloud. It was a confusing situation. We dove down and there was a MiG. Ruddell got it in sight and we dropped from 43,000 feet down to about 15,000, just dropped straight down. He got into shooting position behind the MiG but didn’t shoot … didn’t shoot … didn’t shoot. I had experience at jumping planes and one of the things you did when you came down from extreme altitude (MiGs were frequently found down low when north of the river) was put your armor-glass defrost on full bore. It would get so hot it was almost painful, but it kept the front windscreen clear. You also tested your guns and your g-suit. Ruddell’s windscreen had fogged over. He was sitting there in a kill position and couldn’t see properly to shoot. So I went by him and got the MiG. Of course, the squadron was abuzz that the colonel had started crossing the river and gotten aced out of his first kill up there. I was a ‘MiG killer.’ I’d gotten three or four. When I got back, they had all these signs pasted up all over the Dog Flight Quonset hut. One read: MARINE WETBACK STEALS COLONEL’S MIG!
U.S. Navy pilots relaxing in their ready room between combat air patrols during the Korean War in 1952.
Bill Hannan served as a jet engine mechanic on board the USS Kearsarge off the coast of Korea in 1951. He is seen here atop a Grumman F9F Panther.
“The ‘kill rules’ were, if you got seven hits on an enemy aircraft, you would be given a kill. The MiGs didn’t torch off at high altitude; they simply would not burn because of the air density. So, incendiary hits would be counted (we had good gun cameras) and if you got seven hits in the enemy’s fuselage, the odds were it was dead, and they’d give you a kill. We knew that every third round was an incendiary so, in effect, if you got three incendiary hits showing on the gun camera, it was considered a dead MiG.
“My first kill was at about 43,000 feet. I had missed a couple of kills before it by not being aggressive or determined enough. I was almost desperate for a MiG kill. I was leader of my flight and I’d screwed up a couple of bounces. My self-esteem and my esteem in the Flight were low, and I decided that the next MiG I saw was a dead man and I didn’t care where he was.
“The next MiG was part of a gaggle; MiGs as far as you could see. I made a good run on one of them and pulled into firing position, but other MiGs were shooting at me and my wingman, and they were very close. I got some hits on my MiG and he went into a scissor, which was a good tactic. I think the F-86 may have had a better roll rate. I was trying to shoot as he passed through my firing angle. Each time I fired I delayed my turn, so he was gaining on me and drifting back. He almost got behind me and was so close that his plane blanked out the camera frame. I think he realized that I would have crashed into him rather than let him get behind me, and he rolled out and dove. Then I got several more hits on him and he pulled up (he was probably dead at this point). That scissor was the right thing to do; he just shouldn’t have broken off. He was getting back to a position where he could have taken the advantage.
“The salvation of the F-86 was that it had good transsonic controls; the MiG’s controls were subsonic
. In the Sabre, you could readily cruise at about .84 Mach. The MiG had to go into its uncontrollable range to attack you, and its stick forces were unmanageable. As I recall, the kill ratio between the F-86 and the MiG was eight to one. This was due almost entirely to the flying tail of the Sabre, although it had other superior features. The gun package of the MiG was intended for shooting down bombers like the B-29 and B-50. It carried a 37mm and two 23mm cannon, which was overkill against fighters. Although the F-86 used essentially the same machine-guns as a World War Two fighter, the rate of fire had been doubled, and it was a very good package against other fighters.
The Chance Vought F4U Corsair fought its last major action in the Korean War.
The cockpit of a North American F-86 Sabre jet fighter of the Korean War era;
The famous North American-built trainer known as the Harvard, Texan, and the SNJ, which was the naval version.
Right side gun ports of the Sabre;
“Down low, where we were out of the transsonic superiority range, we wore a g-suit and they didn’t. You can fight defensively when you are blacked out, but you can’t fight offensively. If you had enough speed to pull a good 6g turn, you would ‘go black’ in twenty to thirty degrees of the turn. The MiG pilot couldn’t follow you because he was blacked out too. You are still conscious, though you have three to five seconds of vision loss. When you had gone about as far in the turn as you thought you could carry it, you could pop the stick forward and your vision would return immediately. You had already started your roll, and the MiG was right there in front of you, every time, because, not having a g-suit, he had eased off in the turn. His g-tolerance was only half of yours. So he was right there and most probably would overshoot you.”
The Bird Farm Page 12