by Robert Coram
When Mary asked Boyd what he wanted to do after graduation, he told her he wanted to go into the Air Force and fly jets. Her brow wrinkled. But she shouldn’t worry, he would fly only for a few years and then he would do something else.
After their junior year, ROTC students go to a summer camp that serves as an indoctrination course for young men about to become military officers. Boyd was en route to summer camp in June 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. Suddenly America was in another war, this time against Communism. It was the first conflict of the Cold War and it was seen as a contest of good versus evil.
Boyd’s last year of college was like his last year in high school, in that he knew when he graduated he was going to war. He decided early on he would go as a fighter pilot. He said in his Air Force Oral History interview that he knew bomber pilots were “a bunch of truck drivers” and “I did not want to be in a crowded bus and have a bunch of people continually telling me what to do.” He went to Omaha to take the physical examination and the psychological tests that determined whether or not a person had the capability to become a pilot. He passed them all.
Now that he was accepted for pilot training, he talked to Mary at great length of the airplanes he would fly. After December 1950, there was only one for him—the F-86 Sabre jet.
On December 17, a Sabre had shot down a MiG near the western end of the Yalu River, over a town called Sinuiju, and it made headlines across America. The F-86 suddenly was the most romanticized instrument of war in history, a flashing streak of silver whose guns spoke for America.
By 1950 America had largely forgotten that the Luftwaffe had jet fighters near the end of World War II. And most did not remember that the XP-80, America’s forerunner to the venerable F-80, flew in 1944. After World War II, both the Soviets and Americans had access to Germany’s research on jet fighters, and both countries went into production on jets based in large part on the German research. The Soviet MiG-15 and the American F-86 Sabre were remarkably similar. Both had swept wings and were about the same size, the MiG being slightly smaller.
Aesthetically the a Sabre was the most appealing jet imaginable, with its swept wings and bubble canopy and, in the “D” model, the beak over the air intake that gave it a menacing and aggressive appearance. Here was an aircraft not pulled by a propeller but pushed by fire and thunder. A jet. Even the name had a hard new magic about it. In the Sabre, America saw Newton’s Third Law in all its glory: light the fire and stoke the burner and the opposite reaction is a burst of amazing speed in a jet that slices through the heavens. Few aircraft had ever gripped America’s imagination as did this one.
In what was then considered an amazing display of brute power, the F-86 climbed at a forty-five-degree angle. It flew 680 mph and broke every existing speed record. It was sleek and beautiful and in the skies of Korea it became the very symbol of America’s new love affair with jet fighters, of the newly independent U.S. Air Force, of America in the battle against Communism. And it was the last truly great fighter aircraft the Air Force had until almost twenty years later, when Boyd was instrumental in designing a better one.
Boyd told anyone who would listen that this was the only aircraft for him.
Mary listened to all this with one ear. She knew by then that Boyd was the man she would marry. She thought he had been about to propose, but then this war in Korea came along and now all he talked about was jets, jets, jets. After graduating in February 1951, she went home to Ottumwa to await his proposal. She rented an apartment and began looking for a job. She finally became an assistant to a local doctor, giving shots and handling menial chores. And she waited.
Living by herself was lonely and after only a few weeks she moved back home with her mother. She was grown now, but that did not stop her mother from ordering her about. “I did not like mother telling me what to do,” Mary said. “But it was comfortable.” She took driving lessons and, at twenty-two, had her first driver’s license.
Mary and Boyd often talked by phone. He came down on the bus from Iowa City almost every weekend. He graduated in June 1951 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force. Elsie and Ann came to Iowa for his graduation. Mary was also there. She had awaited this event for months, thinking that when Boyd graduated he would propose. She remembers being intimidated by Mrs. Boyd. Mary tried to be nice and solicitous, but Elsie walked about with such a stern expression on her face and with such bold penetrating eyes that it seemed she was angry at everyone except her son. She made it quite clear she thought her son could have done better in his choice of a girlfriend.
Mary had never been around anyone with a physical disability and was terribly uncomfortable watching Ann limp. It was not a good weekend for her. And it was made all the more unpleasant by the fact that Boyd did not propose.
Boyd was ordered to Albuquerque, New Mexico, until the next flight training class opened, and Mary returned to Ottumwa. Maybe Boyd would propose soon. But what if he met someone else? What if he waited until his flight training was over and then he was sent to Korea? The chances of finding a husband in Ottumwa were slim.
Mary would wait.
Chapter Three
Fledgling
SECOND lieutenants, called “butter bars” because of the single gold bar they wear as an insignia of rank, often are given the most menial of jobs, tasks that must be done by officers but that higher-ranking officers would not deign to perform. This is particularly true for second lieutenants about to begin flight training. These young men believe they are Godlike beings, and to nonrated officers they are not only insufferable but will grow more so once they complete flight training and pin silver wings over their left-breast pocket. If there is any group on Earth with healthier egos than fighter pilots, they have yet to be discovered. Bureaucrats who run the Air Force personnel system believe that a menial job might teach humility to these fledglings. Over the years they have discovered this belief is founded more on hope than on reality—no fighter pilot ever has been or ever will be humble. But the bureaucrats keep trying.
When Boyd was commissioned, there was a need for an assistant secretary in the officers’ dining room at Kirkland Air Force Base (AFB) in Albuquerque. So Boyd went to New Mexico. He was there only a month, but it must have seemed an eternity.
On August 1, he was ordered to report to the 3301 Training Squadron at Columbus AFB, Mississippi, where he would begin flight training. Flying-school classes are numbered according to when the students are scheduled to graduate. Boyd was a member of 52-F. Because experienced Air Force pilots were needed in Korea and were considered too valuable to waste their time teaching basic flying, the instructors at Columbus were civilians. Boyd’s instructor was C. Wayne Lemons, an employee of California Eastern, the charter and freight airline that won the Air Force contract to teach young men how to fly. Boyd first went on what was called the “dollar ride,” an orientation flight over northeastern Mississippi, where he would be flying for the next several months. He was shown the numerous unpaved auxiliary strips, some of them narrow slices down the middle of a cotton patch. Then he began his classroom work in aeronautics, meteorology, the theory of flight, navigation, cross-country flying, morse code, radio procedure, and a host of other arcane disciplines.
Boyd was in a class of about forty lieutenants who had received their commissions through ROTC, and about one hundred ten aviation cadets. The forty lieutenants all knew each other after a few weeks, and the camaraderie of learning to fly and the knowledge they soon would be going to war welded them into a tightly knit band of brothers. Many would go on to become high-ranking officers or would achieve great things in combat; some would become legends in the Air Force. But for the remainder of their lives, they would be tied together as members of 52-F.
In the six months he was at Columbus, Boyd became known among the young lieutenants not only for his flying and leadership abilities but for several personal attributes. He could eat an inordinate amount of food, and he could eat it faster than
anyone else in 52-F. At the dining room he stacked his plate so high that when he walked to the table, food tumbled to the floor. He sat down, leaned over, and looked neither right nor left as he forked down the food. It was as if he were shoveling coal to stoke a furnace. His hand seemed never to stop in its round trip from plate to mouth to plate. And he apparently did not chew. Usually his squadron mates had barely begun eating when Boyd finished, sighed, rubbed his stomach, pushed his chair back, popped what seemed to be a full pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum into his mouth, and began talking. He chewed so much gum and chewed so vigorously that he was known to members of 52-F as the “Juicy Fruit Kid.” While his squadron mates were still eating, Boyd expounded on aviation tactics, how frustrated he was about having to follow the Air Force training regimen when he was ready for advanced maneuvers, and how he was going to be the best fighter pilot in the Air Force.
Every morning the students flew the T-6 “Texan,” a venerable tandem-seat, single-engine aircraft that in World War II had served as an advanced trainer. The qualities that made it an advanced trainer in an earlier war made it suitable as the basic trainer for men about to transition into jets. The narrow landing gear on the “Terrible Texan” caused many students to lose control after landing and make a sharp horizontal turn known as a “ground loop,” a maneuver that could fold or even shear off the landing gear. The common expression was, “There are two kinds of T-6 pilots: those who have ground-looped it and those who are going to ground-loop it.” Despite its tendency to bite unwary pilots, the T-6 was sturdy and cruised at a stately 135 mph. The redline, or never-exceed speed, which could be achieved only in a power dive from considerable altitude, was about 260 mph.
From the beginning of his training, Boyd walked around the base as if he were a general. He was not shy when it came to lecturing the other students about aerial tactics. He was independent to the point of being ornery and often argued with his civilian instructor about what he thought was the slow pace of instruction.
During his breaks, Boyd traveled by train to Iowa to see Mary. On one of those weekends, he finally proposed. He and Mary found a ring at a small jewelry store in Ottumwa and she began planning the wedding.
Back in flight training, Boyd quickly went through basic maneuvers and soloed. And then he went out and threw the T-6 around the sky in such a fearless manner that it seemed to others as if he had done it a thousand times. It was difficult for his classmates to accept that he was a student just as they were, that he had never had flying lessons until now. He was, quite simply, a master of the T-6.
To realize the significance of this, one must understand that the first time a young man slides into the cockpit of an aircraft and looks at the strange collection of instruments, a feeling of awe washes over him. No matter how intensely he wants to be a pilot, there is an inherent sense of wonder simply sitting in the cockpit. And when he goes aloft for the first time and realizes he is moving in a three-dimensional world, when he realizes that a moment of inattention can lead to a crash and a fiery explosion, he sometimes finds he has too much respect for the airplane. A pilot can be too cautious. He can be too methodical. He reads and memorizes the specifications, knows the boundaries of the performance envelope, and is careful never to nudge up against the performance limits. But Boyd did not believe the performance specs and had no fear of the aircraft. He jostled the T-6; he pushed it and horsed it around the sky. He flung the airplane up against the outside edges of the performance envelope and then beyond. If the book said the aircraft should never exceed 260 mph, Boyd pushed it to 265 or 270 or 280. He knew intuitively by the sound of the aircraft when it was approaching not the book limits but the true limits, which, for those bold enough to search for them, always are slightly greater. Test pilots do the same thing, but most of them are engineers and highly skilled pilots tuned to a razor edge of proficiency. Few student pilots are so bold.
Pilots who pride themselves on their finesse, who never deviate more than fifty feet from their assigned altitude or more than ten knots from their airspeed, or who fly maneuvers strictly by the book, would say that Boyd was “heavy-handed.” And they would be correct. But there is little finesse in air combat. Many civilians and those who have never looked through the gun sight—then called a pipper—at an enemy aircraft have a romantic perception, no doubt influenced by books and movies about World War I, that pilots are knights of the air, chivalrous men who salute their opponents before engaging in a fight that always is fair. They believe that elaborate rules of aerial courtesy prevail and that battle in the clear pure upper regions somehow is different, more glorified and rarefied, than battle in the mud. This is arrant nonsense. If anything, aerial combat is far meaner and grittier than ground combat. It is a primitive form of battle that happens to take place in the air. Fighter pilots—that is, the ones who survive air combat—are not gentlemen; they are back-stabbing assassins. They come out of the sun and attack an enemy when he is blind. They sneak up behind or underneath or “bounce” the enemy from above or flop into position on his tail—his sixo’clock position—and “tap” him before he knows they are there. That is why fighter pilots jink and weave and dart about like water bugs in a mason jar. They never hold a heading or a position longer than six or eight seconds. Aerial combat is brutally unforgiving. To come in second place is to die, usually in a rather spectacular manner. Most casualties never know they are targets until they are riddled with bullets, covered with flames, and on the way to creating a big hole in the ground. Those who want to engage in the romanticized World War I pirouette of a fair fight will have a short career. Thus, aerial combat favors the bold, those who are not afraid to use the airplane for its true purpose: a gun platform. There is nothing sophisticated about sneaking up on someone and killing him. Aerial combat is a blood sport, a knife in the dark. Winners live and losers die. Boyd instinctively knew this and his flying was, from the beginning, that of the true fighter pilot.
A month before he graduated, he took Christmas leave and, after an engagement of only three months, he and Mary were married in the Presbyterian church in Ottumwa. Boyd wore his Air Force uniform. Elsie and Ann were there. Boyd had little money or time for a honeymoon, so he and Mary drove twenty-five miles to Fairfield, home of Parsons College, and rented a hotel room for several days. Then, together, they set off for Columbus.
During the last months of flight training—when it is clear they will graduate and be awarded the wings of an Air Force pilot—the trainees are divided into those who will go to multiengine aircraft and those who will fly fighters.
Fighter pilots were what the Air Force needed. On the bomber side of the Korean War, the B-29s and B-50s of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) suffered heavy losses flying daytime missions and were reduced to flying almost entirely at night and in smaller numbers. SAC was neither prepared nor equipped to fight a small conventional war; SAC was geared toward delivering nuclear weapons. It was different on the fighter side of the war. Six fighter wings were stationed in Korea, one in Japan, and another in Okinawa—all dedicated to the war in Korea. A wing consists of three squadrons, each theoretically comprised of twenty-four to thirty-two aircraft. A fighter wing has about ninety-six aircraft. Thus, these six wings had a theoretical maximum of 500–600 aircraft, although the actual number was about half that. F-86 pilots rotated to noncombat duty after one hundred missions, and there was always a demand for replacements.
Korea was a fighter war, not a bomber war, and chances are slim that a fighter pilot as skillful as Boyd would have been sent to bombers. But as Boyd tells the story, there was a plot afoot to keep him out of F-86s. Boyd claimed the Air Force told him he was too tall to be a fighter pilot and would have to fly bombers. “Bullshit, I will not go to multi-engines. I will not stay in the service if I have to go to multiengines,” he recalled telling them. He threatened to resign his commission.
If Boyd did deliver such an ultimatum, a big part of it was bluff. He knew if he tried to resign the Air Force would keep hi
m on active duty, give him a demeaning job, and make his life miserable until he was discharged. Boyd was too committed to flying jets simply to walk away. If indeed he was told he was going to fly bombers, and if he did threaten to resign, the most likely reason is that he wanted to prove the point that he would rather leave the service than fly bombers. This might sit well with superiors who appreciated a passionate approach. Whatever happened, Boyd got his wish and was assigned to fighters, and the story of Boyd’s ultimatum, like that of tearing down the hangars in Japan, was valuable primarily for what it revealed about his mind-set. For the remainder of his career, Boyd would see plots and punishment in every new assignment. Again and again there would be a campaign to embarrass or humiliate him with a nonflying job, a bureaucratic battle would ensue, and he, against great odds and with his career on the line, would ultimately prevail.
Williams AFB in Arizona was known as “Willy” or the “Patch” and, as the incubator for fighter pilots, was one of the most famous bases in the Air Force. Here, pilots climbed into jets for the first time. Willy also was the jumping-off point for specialized training. If a pilot was to fly the F-84 fighter-bomber, he would transfer from Willy to Luke AFB, also in Arizona, for combat training. If he was to fly the F-86, he would be sent to Nellis AFB in Nevada.
Instructors at Willy knew that every pilot they trained would be sent to Korea, and they took it as their solemn and sacred duty to make sure the young pilots were well-trained and highly professional. Upon arriving at Willy in April 1952, class 52-F gathered in an auditorium for their welcome. A colonel stood in front of them, stared belligerently, then said, “If I had my way, we’d kill half you sons of bitches. The other half would leave here as fighter pilots.” He let them chew on that for a moment and then said, “But the goddamn Congress won’t let me do that.”