Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Nevertheless, he tried. Class 52-F had more than its share of training accidents and fatalities. The pace was stepped up and the transition to jets and to basic combat training was made as realistic as possible—a prelude to even more realistic training for those who would go to Nellis. But Boyd chafed under the regimen. “A lot of the things they were doing there I had already learned, and I wanted it to go a bit faster to pick up the pace,” he recalled. “I felt as if I was being held back—that is, until I got that first jet ride, then I really liked it.”

  He began his jet training in the F-80 “Shooting Star,” a single-engine, straight-winged jet that was slow and underpowered. Early models of the F-80 had no ejection seat, so if the aircraft caught fire or “flamed out” or had a mechanical problem, the pilot was in serious trouble, especially a pilot as tall as Boyd. The least he could hope for was banged up knees. If he was flying a model of the F-80 with an ejection seat, he would be lucky if his legs were not broken or even amputated.

  Tall F-80 pilots were solicitous toward their mechanics.

  Boyd found the rules were different when flying a jet. Ease the throttle forward in the T-6 and there is a rising thunder of noise and a surge of power that can pull a pilot through a loop or around the corner in a tight turn. But careless throttle application in a jet caused a new phenomenon known as “flame out.” Some of the early jet engines were unreliable and suddenly stopped in flight. And when young pilots pushed the outside of the envelope during tactical engagements, they sometimes overestimated their flying abilities and crashed in the desert.

  Boyd never worried about any of this. “I started to do my dirty tricks again—I just could not avoid them,” he said. Part of advanced flight training at Willy was what Boyd called “stupid cross-country trips,” where the pilot would report in regularly by radio. Rather than flying these trips, Boyd took his F-80 down to where he knew friends from Luke AFB were flying F-84s in simulated air-to-air combat and joined in. Several times when he was supposed to be on a cross-country flight, he went out to where the instructors practiced simulated air-to-air to “bounce” them. They did not like this, especially when he won.

  During his Oral History interview, Boyd was asked what he thought about when he found himself on the defensive in those early air-to-air engagements. He manifested both the macho nature of a fighter pilot and the thinking of fighter aviation at the time when he replied, “I had to bend the shit out of that airplane” and “hose” the opponent.

  To “bend” an airplane was to pull more Gs than the enemy, to put one’s aircraft on the inside of the pursuit curve and gain the advantage from which he could fire.

  When a jet fires its guns, tracers allow the pilot to correct his aim. If the jet is pulling Gs, the stream of tracers bends and looks like the stream of water from a hose that is moved quickly. Thus, to “hose” an enemy is to get him in the pipper, follow him with tracers, and—as pilots say—wax his ass.

  Halfway through the training, the instructors looked over the best of the young pilots, those who manifested not only stick-and-rudder skills, but who had what has been described as “the spirit of attack borne in a brave heart,” and selected them to transition into the F-86 Sabre. Boyd was selected.

  On September 13, 1952, Boyd reported for duty at Nellis for combat training in the F-86. If Willy was tough, Nellis was tougher. Nellis was the only base in the Air Force that sent fighter pilots straight into combat. If a pilot were not trained to a sufficient level of skill, the aggressive MiG pilots, many of whom were highly professional Russians, would shoot him down in his first engagement. So at Nellis the idea was to push the aircraft beyond the envelope, to make the training as much like combat as possible. The saying of the time was “The more you bleed in peace time, the less you bleed in war.” This is another way of saying that normal rules of safety and common sense often were ignored. The thinking among pilots was “If you survive Nellis, Korea will be easy.”

  Nellis was in fact a gladiator school. The pilots were young and cocky and flying the most advanced jet in the U.S. Air Force, and they were about to go into combat. This was not just any war, this was a war to protect the land of the free and the home of the brave from the ravages of Godless Communism. Training had to be warlike. And if young men died, so be it. No price was too high. Not when losing meant being overwhelmed by Communism.

  Pilots fought in simulated air-to-air combat, always maneuvering to get on the other pilot’s six-o’clock position. A siren to rally personnel when there was a crash was located near the flight line, and its wail echoed across Nellis at least once each week, sometimes twice. Soon afterward an official blue staff car would drive slowly down the streets where pilots lived, the driver looking for the correct address. All along the way, the wives—Mary among them—who had heard the siren stood at the window and prayed the car would not pull into their driveway. So many pilots died at Nellis in those days that incoming F-86 students were told, “If you see the flag at full staff, take a picture.”

  Boyd says that one year, more than seventy pilots were killed. A historian at Nellis says he probably was conservative—that wing commanders sometimes doctored statistics if too many pilots died.

  Already Boyd was coming to believe there was more to air-to-air combat than “bending” the jet and muscling it through high-G turns. Embryonic ideas about aerial tactics were beginning to form, not so much in an academic but in a practical sense. He began defeating his instructors, some of whom were combat veterans of Korea.

  In December Boyd reached eighty hours of what the Air Force called “applied tactics” and was ready for Korea. His last advice from Nellis instructors was simple: “Stay inside. Hose him down.”

  Before departing, Boyd was allowed an extended leave because Mary was pregnant and about to deliver her firstborn. Mary and Boyd drove to Ottumwa. She was glad to leave Nellis: the desert and the scrubby bushes and the cactus and the endless wind were not like the familiar green fields of Iowa. Jets took off and landed from dawn to dusk. The smell of aviation fuel, so beloved by pilots, nauseated her.

  Stephen Boyd was born February 14, 1953, a child conceived in his father’s world at Nellis and delivered into his mother’s at Ottumwa. Boyd had a picture taken of him holding his infant son aloft, and he carried it in his wallet until it was creased and darkened with age and falling apart. Often a father is close to his firstborn, especially if the child is a son. But Boyd was unusually close to Stephen, almost as if he were unconsciously aware of what soon would come into Stephen’s life and wanted to hold onto the boy so he would have the good days to remember.

  Soon it was time for Boyd to depart for combat. He had missed World War II, but he would have a part in Korea. He was doing what the young men of Erie always do when America is at war, but in Boyd’s case, this was just the first step of his destiny.

  What Boyd learned in Korea would be the foundation for his life’s work.

  Chapter Four

  K-13 and Mig Alley

  ONCE again, Boyd arrived late for war.

  On March 27, 1953, he and a host of other young men, most of them sporting the silver bars of a first lieutenant on their collars, arrived aboard a C-54 transport at Suwon in South Korea. They looked around with all the confidence of men in their midtwenties who had survived Nellis and who considered themselves to be the best-trained pilots in the world. They looked across the tarmac at the row of shiny F-86s and they were anxious to kill MiGs.

  For the first few weeks in Korea, they flew relatively safe and uneventful missions as wingmen or the type of missions older pilots did not want—weather reconnaissance or escort duty. Air Force planes went into combat in flights of four. The flight consisted of the flight leader and his wingman, accompanied by an element leader and his wingman. The flight leader and the element leader were the gunslingers, the shooters, the ones who initiated the attack. The sole and inviolate duty of the wingman was to cover his leader’s sixo’clock position, to protect him from enemy ai
rcraft. A new pilot had to fly about thirty missions as a wingman before he could be promoted to element leader and become a shooter.

  Suwon was known to pilots as “K-13” and was about thirty miles south of Seoul and two hundred fifty miles south of the Yalu River. K-13 was home of the 25th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Group. The 25th did no bombing or ground-attack missions; its job was air supremacy. Pilots of the 25th were headhunters. The 25th was the “red squadron” and its F-86s had a red stripe across the top of the tail, while its pilots wore red scarfs. Anyone hearing an F-86 pilot identify himself on the radio with a call sign of a bird, as in “Eagle Six,” knew he was listening to a pilot from the 25th.

  Pilots from the 25th slept in tents bordered on the bottom with corrugated siding. The eight-man tents usually had ten occupants. Not even Erie winters compared with the cold of Korea.

  Lieutenants newly arrived in Korea were called “smokes.” And before a smoke could be unleashed against Communist pilots, he had to go through a few orientation and training flights. Each squadron had its own way of doing this. The 25th sent its smokes to “Clobber College.”

  Two curricula existed at Clobber College, one formal and one informal. The formal curriculum said the smokes had to crawl into an F-86 and follow one of the combat veterans as he showed them the U.S. side of the combat zone, pointed out emergency fields, and familiarized them with local weather patterns. They performed a few instrument approaches. But most of all they learned the ROE—the rules of engagement—that dictated when, how, and where (mostly where) they could engage MiGs in battle. Under no circumstances could an American pilot cross the Yalu River and go into Manchuria, where North Korean aircraft were based. American pilots most often encountered enemy aircraft in “MiG Alley,” the thirty-mile-wide stretch south of the Yalu where MiGs patrolled. If an F-86 pilot had a MiG in his pipper and the MiG fled across the Yalu, the F-86 pilot had to disengage. Manchuria was a sanctuary that America would not violate.

  Or, at least, that was the official policy; young warriors mounted in an F-86 did not always follow the rules. Countless times young pilots chased MiGs back to their sanctuary and shot them down as they were landing. Many MiG kills were disallowed because the guncamera film showed runways in Manchuria, and for the pilot to claim the kill meant he would be shipped home. (So many MiGs were shot down in Manchuria that pilots said, “No aces are made south of the Yalu.”) The proscriptive ROE in Korea foreshadowed the even more rigid rules America would impose on its pilots in the next war.

  The informal curriculum at Clobber College called for one of the combat veterans to take up a smoke and see what he was made of—to have the young lieutenant get on his six and see how long he could stay there as the experienced pilot banked and climbed and pulled heavy Gs. Then he would get on the six of the new pilot, tuck in close and tight, and see if the new pilot could shake him. Tactics used by experienced F-86 pilots were essentially the same tactics used by P-51 pilots in World War II but at higher altitudes and greater speeds.

  In his oral history, Boyd told what happened when he went up for the informal part of his training. He and an experienced pilot climbed to altitude over K-13 and the combat vet ordered him to get in trail. The lead pilot rolled and snapped and flung his F-86 all over the sky. His intent was to force Boyd to disengage or to throw him out front so he would become the target. The usual procedure for the aircraft in pursuit is to match the fleeing aircraft maneuver for maneuver, to be glued to his six, and to wait for that split second when he can fire his guns. But Boyd didn’t play the game. He pulled up and off to the side, and as the pilot came out the bottom of a roll, he pounced on him, still locked on his six, still with the advantage, and with a firing solution.

  Then the two reversed positions. Now Boyd was the target. As he tells the story, “… I took that son of a bitch and in a crazy roll, I just sent him forward.” When a fighter pilot is being closely pursued and slows abruptly in a maneuver that flings his pursuer forward, he is, in fighter-pilot vernacular, “watching the crowd go by.” Boyd honked his F-86 into a high-G barrel roll, one that instantly slowed it, and caused the other pilot to shoot past him and become the target.

  On a flight designed to show the young pilots a bit of humility and to teach them the dangers of combat, Boyd turned the tables and defeated a combat veteran. He was elated. He considered himself ready for combat, and he believed that once the enemy pilots knew he was there, most of them would park their MiGs and go home.

  In early spring, Mary took Stephen on a ten-hour train ride to Erie to show him off to his grandmother. She was nervous about the trip because this was the first time she would be alone with her intimidating mother-in-law. But she thought with Boyd overseas she ought to get to know her mother-in-law and let her mother-in-law get to know Stephen.

  Elsie and Mary were puttering about in the kitchen when John’s mother asked about her son and what he said in his letters and how he was doing in Korea. Mary dissembled, not telling Elsie she had only written one letter.

  “John loves it over there,” she said.

  Elsie was astonished. She stopped in her tracks and turned her basilisk stare on Mary. “What do you mean he loves it? He’s in a war.”

  “Yes, but he is doing what he was trained to do. He’s excited about being there.”

  Elsie was so angry she flounced from the room.

  While in Erie, Mary went sailing several times with Jack Arbuckle. “My son is over there in Korea, at war, and you’re out on the lake with another man,” Elsie complained. Never one to mince words, she also told Mary she was “irresponsible.”

  Mary left Erie after five weeks. She thought her mother-in-law would have enjoyed a visit, if not so much from her daughter-in-law, then certainly from her new grandson. But later Elsie said to her, “Five weeks! I thought you would never leave.”

  Back in Ottumwa, Mary found a letter from Boyd. He wanted to know why Mary didn’t write more often. “Some of the guys here get a letter every day,” he said.

  Mary was casual in her response. “I thought you are where you wanted to be. I thought you were having a good time.”

  And he was. He might be miffed about not getting as many letters as he thought he should have, but he was having a good time, a great time.

  A few weeks after Mary went sailing on Lake Erie, Boyd completed his twenty-ninth mission and logged his forty-fourth combat hour. Any day he expected to be promoted to element leader and thereby become a shooter. He believed he would soon be bagging MiGs in record numbers.

  “I was not worried about getting my head pounded in,” he later said. “In fact, I thought about that for a couple of nights. Jesus Christ, I really like this stuff. If I could only get five on a mission. Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!”

  On June 30, 1953, several weeks before the war ended, Boyd was officially credited with damaging a MiG-15. No details of the engagement could be found, but years later he would tell the Acolytes how he sneaked across the Yalu and shot down a MiG but could not claim credit for the kill. Boyd said a Royal Air Force exchange officer, Jock Maitland, had asked him to cross the Yalu as his wingman on an illegal foray into a MiG-rich environment. They were at 40,000 feet but no MiGs were up, so they descended though dense cloud cover. Shortly after breaking into the clear, at about 19,000 feet, they sighted a gaggle of MiGs, fourteen or sixteen aircraft. Maitland and Boyd dove into the formation. Maitland maneuvered onto the six of a fleeing MiG but did not shoot. He was 200 feet behind the MiG, locked on its tail, and not shooting. Boyd got on the radio and said, “Damn, Jock, why don’t you shoot? Goddamn, Jock, those other guys are coming. You have to hose that guy.” Maitland did not answer.

  The two pilots horsed their aircraft all over the sky, caught in a gaggle of MiGs. What Boyd did not know until later was that Maitland had an electrical failure and his guns would not fire. Then the two pilots came under attack from anti-aircraft fire. They were low on fuel so they disengaged and climbe
d back to altitude and returned to K-13. Boyd led the descent through the clouds with Maitland on his wing. (Maitland confirms this story.) The two men were fortunate they were not sent home. In the last few months of the war, the 25th sent home six pilots for crossing the Yalu.

  By June the hotshot Soviet pilots were no longer flying in North Korea, and American pilots shot down seventy-seven MiGs without the loss of a single F-86. It was a turkey shoot for F-86 pilots, so a question naturally arises: if Boyd was so good, and if he was there at the best time for an F-86 pilot to be there, why did he not shoot down MiGs?

  The answer is that he never had the chance. Hostilities ceased before he was promoted to element leader, so he never was a shooter. But even if he had been a shooter, it does not follow that he would have bagged a MiG. Some pilots seemed to find MiGs almost every time they went up. Other pilots flew twenty or thirty missions—one flew fifty-one missions—without seeing a MiG.

  The most important part of the Korean War for Boyd was not that he never shot down a MiG, but rather what he did and what he discovered after hostilities ceased. Rarely in the life of a man are successes so clearly stacked one atop the other in a precise, easy-to-see evolution as they are in the life of John Boyd. The accomplishments of Korea are the foundation of that evolution.

  First, Boyd’s ability as a pilot was outstanding. After hostilities ceased, most of the high-time combat veterans quickly rotated to flesh out fighter squadrons at other bases around the world. F-86s still patrolled MiG Alley, and on the return flights, if there was sufficient fuel, the pilots engaged in simulated air-to-air combat. On days when there were no reconnaissance flights, the pilots slid into their Sabres, climbed to 30,000 feet, and fought until the fuel was exhausted. Boyd clearly was the best F-86 driver in the squadron, so good that on October 20, 1953, he was made the assistant operations officer.