Seems to me that without God,
they’re progressing mighty slow.
On September 15, 1953, the last day of the POW exchange, Barney Dobbs was released. “As they were getting ready to release us, they assembled us in a large camp, gave us decent food for several days and clean clothes. Then they put us on a train to our final camp. On the last day of the prisoner release, I was put on the last truck. I thought I was going to be left behind. Prior to my release, my wife, Kay, had no idea if I was alive or dead. All she knew was that I had been declared missing in action. As the POWs were released throughout September 1953, each day the names of the latest batch of prisoners to be released were announced on TV. It went on for days, and finally she saw my name. I still have the prison suit in which I returned home. My life as a prisoner, although much of it taken up by interrogation and by nine months of solitary confinement, included being harnessed to a cart like an ox and pulling it through the village. Fish heads, barley, and occasionally rice was the food I was fed. I constantly thought about meat and vowed that when I got home I would open a barbecue restaurant, Barney’s Barbecue, to ensure I had a guaranteed supply of barbecued ribs for the rest of my life. Of course that didn’t happen. Three months after my release, I was back flying airplanes. I retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1969 and settled in Riverside, California.”
Barney Dobbs after his release from a Chinese POW camp, 1953. B. Dobbs.
Colonel Richard G. “Dick” Schulz
Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal (5)
While Barney Dobbs arrived in Korea as a replacement pilot in December 1952 and flew from austere fields in South Korea, Dick Schulz, a Detroit native and one-time B-29 bombardier based in England during the Berlin Airlift, flew his combat missions over Korea from bases in Japan. Dick and twenty other pilots left San Francisco in November 1949 on the troopship USS Darby. In December he arrived in Yokohama and was assigned to the 13th Bomb Squadron, 3rd Bomb Wing, Light, at Yokota Air Base, near Tokyo. Each of the 3rd Bomb Wing’s squadrons had sixteen assigned aircraft. In several months’ time, his wife and young son joined him. Unlike Barney Dobbs, who got no training in the B-26 before flying it into combat, Dick was thoroughly checked out in the B-26 by an experienced instructor pilot. Dick Schulz was slowly introduced to his new aircraft, first flying easy local-area missions in daytime and in good weather. Next, he got plenty of time to practice takeoffs and landings. Finally, after much ground school and twenty-one hours of flying, he was declared a combat-ready pilot in the B-26.
Dick Schulz first enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1943. He didn’t see combat during World War II but qualified as a gunner, bombardier, and finally as a radar observer on B-29 aircraft. In 1949 he gained his pilot rating. His first assignment was to B-26s in Japan. “Life was good in Japan. Between a not-too-strenuous flying schedule, frequent golf tournaments, and my family, I was enjoying occupation duty.” The Korean War started in June 1950 as a “come as you are” war. There simply was no time to prepare, and units were thrown against the onrushing North Korean army with whatever they had available. The 3rd Bomb Wing flew its planes to Ashiya Air Base in southern Japan on June 24; they then moved to Iwakuni. On June 25 the North Koreans invaded, and on June 28 the 3rd flew its first combat mission. That mission was a brutal lesson of war. “Out of the thirty-two aircraft that flew that day, six did not return. One crashed, killing the crew. The other five damaged aircraft landed at other air bases.” Only days earlier, the men had relaxed with their families in the early summer sun, played ball with their children, gone to church, done the things Americans do while working and raising a family. Suddenly they were at war. The wives read about their husbands in Stars and Stripes. Families occasionally were allowed to visit Iwakuni, where they could watch the men take off in their bomb- and rocket-laden aircraft and then wait, hoping and praying that they would return.
Dick’s flying schedule was heavy. At first he flew low-level missions against targets of opportunity. “They wanted to stop the North Koreans wherever we found them. My targets were trucks, trains, and tanks. As the days passed, my targets shifted to ammunition-storage areas, warehouses, and bridges—lots of bridges to impede the flow of the North Korean army. Aircraft losses continued to rise, and we shifted the bulk of our effort to night operations, because that’s when most of the movement was taking place. Our combat losses continued to be high, primarily due to the low-level missions we were flying but also because the B-26 at low altitude could be an unforgiving airplane if a pilot momentarily lost his concentration. For example, on a strafing run, the airplane could exceed four hundred knots. If you didn’t start to pull up in time, you would fly into the ground. On one occasion several congressmen visited Iwakuni, and we were to demonstrate the capability of the B-26. One of our most experienced pilots, Major Joe Stein, put on a strafing demonstration over the bay, which was off the end of the runway. Stein was our operations officer, with over four thousand flying hours. After making several low-level, high-speed strafing runs, he must have momentarily lost his concentration and neglected to watch his airspeed and altitude and flew into the bay, killing everyone on board.
“Combat missions and their low-level nature were bad enough and were taking their toll on our crews. Even normal night and weather operations could quickly turn into disaster. On a typical night search-and-destroy mission I took off at four in the morning. The weather was clear and forecast to remain so. I computed my fuel for the length of the mission plus thirty minutes. At Okchon I sighted a train, and I blew away three of its cars with rockets. Then, southeast of Taejon I blasted a locomotive with my 50-calibers, the steam streaming out of numerous holes from the hapless engine. Next, we turned to Sintansin and I destroyed four more boxcars, leaving them burning on the tracks. As I returned to Iwakuni, I was informed that the weather was getting progressively worse. Well, things happen. Once I arrived I elected to make a GCA radar approach. The controller gave me heading and altitude. When I arrived and he said I was over the runway and ‘Take over visually,’ I was still three hundred feet up and couldn’t see the ground. I executed a missed approach. On the second approach I elected to fly the same pattern, but I descended to one hundred feet, and I still couldn’t see the runway. As I again aborted my landing attempt, my crew chief told me that we had just enough fuel remaining for one final approach. I really didn’t want to bail out. I told the GCA controller of my fuel situation, and he gave me an abbreviated pattern. I was following his instructions when suddenly the usually calm and crisp voice of the controller rose in pitch, and he screamed, ‘Climb, climb, climb!’
“I had my hand on the throttles. I pushed them to full power and pulled back on the yoke as far as it would go. We climbed out of there at a maximum rate. We leveled off at four thousand feet, and I contacted the controller. ‘This is it,’ I told him. ‘After this approach, we’ll be out of fuel.’ The weather had deteriorated to zero-zero—zero visibility, zero cloud height. The shaken controller told me he would take me over the end of the runway. I was to land if I could see anything or not. ‘I will tell you when you pass over the numbers (the runway heading painted on the runway’s end),’ he said. The controller did a perfect job. ‘Over the runway,’ he announced, his voice steady and professional again. I saw the numbers pass under my left wing, eased back on the yoke, pulled the power, and we settled down to a perfect landing. The engines sputtered as we taxied, then died. A tug towed us into our parking area. The controller did a superb job of bringing me down, but he made a most unusual error when he tried to bring me in on that third attempt. He gave me a reciprocal heading, nearly flying me into a nearby mountain.
“I flew a total of thirty-nine B-26 combat missions. In November 1950 I broke my leg. After it healed, I was assigned to the 9th Bomb Wing at Yokota as a B-29 copilot and flew another eleven combat missions, for a total of fifty. Out of twenty Class 49C flying-school classmates that went to Japan with me in late 1949, only a handful returned home alive. We tried hard to stop the
North Koreans to give the army a chance to build up its strength. We succeeded but paid the price. The high attrition of Pilot Training Class 49C earned us the dubious nickname ‘Class 49 Crash!’”
Dick retired from the air force in 1975 and went to work as manager in a large construction company doing work in Saudi Arabia and on the Los Angeles Metro project. He now resides in southern California.
Chapter 6
The B-29 Bomber War
On October 28, 1951, the last daylight B-29 attack was conducted. From then on Bomber Command would operate only at night.
Harry G. Summers Jr., Korean War Almanac
Our missions were not only long—twelve hours—but often bone-chillingly cold and mind-numbingly boring. Time over the target was brief. The rest of the eleven hours and fifty minutes, we just droned on through an empty sky, trying desperately to stay awake.
Joe Gyulavics, B-29 pilot
Colonel Joseph J. Gyulavics
In 1951, Second Lieutenant Joseph Gyulavics, fresh out of pilot training, found himself in the cockpit of a B-29 flying out of Okinawa, carrying his bomb load up the Yalu River to strike a North Korean airfield. It was soon after an RB-45C had been shot down by Russian MiG-15s in the same area. B-29 bombers, based at Yokota Air Base, Japan, and at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, were the principal users of the important pictorial intelligence gathered by the high-flying RB-45C reconnaissance jets also based at Yokota. “Suddenly, my aircraft was at the center of several Chinese communist searchlights. We were fired upon by flak from their side of the Yalu, the side we weren’t allowed to bomb. I was nearly blinded by the intensity of the lights, unable to see or do anything. A strange thought passed through my mind: ‘How did I get to be here?’ When I passed beyond the range of the Chinese communist flak, the lights suddenly shifted away, leaving us in near total darkness. That was almost as disconcerting as the initial illumination. We made it back to Kadena without further incident.
“Halfway through my pilot training, the Korean War broke out. The minute I graduated, I was assigned to Randolph Field for B-29 combat-crew training. I crewed up as a copilot with a bunch of misfits, or so I thought. A regular leper colony. An old ex–B-17 pilot (he was in his early thirties), a bombardier who was an alcoholic, and a radar navigator who was an overweight schoolteacher. Before we went to Korea, the former B-17 pilot thought we should take a shot at getting the flight surgeon to ground us or at least have him declare us unfit for combat duty. He claimed he had enough wartime experience flying in the Eighth Air Force out of England in 1944. He could pop his right arm out of its socket with ease and had one of the crew do it for him. He—with his arm dangling—the bombardier, and the navigator walked into the flight surgeon’s office asking to be medically excused from flying combat. The flight surgeon took one look at them and kicked them out of his office.
“Our leper colony actually turned into a pretty good combat crew. We flew missions against North Korea out of Kadena as part of the 19th Bombardment Group. It was a long haul to Korea and back—twelve hours. We got to Kadena about the time they lost seven B-29s on one day and nine B-29s the next, shot down or damaged beyond repair. We thought, ‘Oh God, here we go. World War II all over again.’ Someone at headquarters wised up, and we started flying our missions at night. The Koreans didn’t have night fighters worth a damn, but their searchlights were good. They would pinpoint us, and then the flak started working us over. We only got hit once, in the number two engine (the inboard engine on the left side). That time we landed at Fukioka, Japan, on New Year’s Eve 1951. We went into the Officers’ Club in our sweaty flight suits and joined the ongoing New Year’s celebration. No one took notice of us. On one of our early missions, we flew in a bomber stream up the Yalu River. Our target was Sinuiju Airfield, just south of the river, one of their big fighter bases. The searchlights were on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, and we were not allowed to hit them. It was then that I flew my first ECM mission. On that particular flight, we were getting ready to go when a staff officer held us back, saying, ‘No, you are not going to be part of the bomber stream. You are going to go in first, by yourselves, and then you are going to orbit south of the target. You will take this black box with you, and the radar operator is going to turn it on when you get into your orbit.’ He handed the navigator a black box. Unbeknownst to us, our aircraft had been modified with the necessary antennas and cabling to accommodate the ECM transmitter, which was a simple noise jammer, preset to the frequency of the radar that guided the searchlights. All the radar navigator had to do was turn it on and off.
“The night was very dark. We pulled off into our orbit after we dropped our bombs. Then we watched the bomber stream come along behind us with the searchlights pointing right at the B-29s. On top of each tepee—the top of two, three, or more searchlights—there was a B-29. The flak was zeroing in on them. We turned on the jammer, and then the searchlights fell off. Pretty soon they came back again. We turned the jammer on and off and broke the searchlights’ tracking ability. We got to thinking, as we sat in our orbit, if they found out who was doing it to them, we were a sitting duck. We were scheduled to orbit until the last bomber made it through. The jammer worked. We made it home.
“When flying up there, we would nearly always fly over Wonsan Harbor and turn up the peninsula to our IP, the initial point. Well, every time we came near Wonsan Harbor, our own navy would shoot at us. Our navy sat in that area with its carriers. You would think anybody in the U.S. Navy would know that when you had a stream of bombers coming over from the south, they were ours. But their ships would fire at us every time. Fortunately, nobody got hit. I guess it was an example of a lack of coordination or procedures, or maybe just a lack of common sense. We complained about it, but it didn’t do any good. Every single time we went near Wonsan, our navy would fire off at least a few rounds.
The B-29s of the 19th Bomb Group on Okinawa still bore their World War II nose art. Command Decision once flew with the Twentieth Air Force in World War II and was back again with the Twentieth, fighting another war, 1951. J. Gyulavics.
“While I was on Okinawa, two of our squadron aircraft were shot down by flak. One we never heard from again. The other crew was captured. The pilot lived in the same Quonset hut I lived in. He was forced to make propaganda announcements over the radio about the imperialist Americans and what they were doing to the Korean and Chinese people. We couldn’t believe that he would do that because he was such a gung-ho fellow. He carried a big knife from World War II with a swastika on its handle. He carried the knife and all kinds of other stuff. He told everybody he was going to go down fighting if he ever had to bail out. I don’t know what they did to him. Intelligence asked me to identify his voice. Sure enough, it was him.
Atomic Tom carried plain five hundred–pound bombs, 1951. J. Gyulavics.
“The bottoms of our B-29s were painted black. They were World War II aircraft which had been pulled out of the boneyard in Arizona. That’s the way they were painted when they went there in 1945. Every aircraft still bore the nose art some World War II air crew had painted on them. We also had one modified B-29 on the base, but it wasn’t in our bomb group. It could carry the ten thousand–pound blockbuster bomb. I don’t know who flew that plane or what targets they attacked. We flew our mission, came home, took a shower, went to the club, and ate. That was our routine. We didn’t discuss our missions a lot with the other crews, so we never learned anything about that strange B-29. Our other targets, besides airfields, were mostly bridges all over North Korea.
“Our missions were not only long—twelve hours—but often bone-chillingly cold and mind-numbingly boring. Time over the target was brief. The rest of the eleven hours and fifty minutes, we just droned on through an empty sky, trying desperately to stay awake. But the inevitable moment of stark terror every airman dreads came. We were coming home from a Yalu River mission about two or three in the morning. Everybody was sleepy. We were on autopilot, descending from our bombing altitude
. When you were descending, you pulled your throttles back, and you lost your heat. We were freezing and half asleep. When I glanced out the window to my right there was another airplane, right off our wing, gliding past us like a ghost. We were nearly touching. No matter how much you try to separate the airplanes, eventually you are all heading back the same way. Had it been a midair collision, nobody would have known why it happened.
Roland Eskew and Andrew Grybko were gunners on Joe Gyulavics’s B-29, 1951. J. Gyulavics.
“We never flew formation. Our bombing altitude was usually twenty-five to twenty-eight thousand feet. It took a lot of fuel to get to altitude. Over South Korea we’d begin our climb. Right after the target we’d descend again. We carried forty five-hundred–pounders. With a twenty-thousand–pound bomb load, it was routine for us to use up nearly every foot of the runway on takeoff. We didn’t do any weight and balance calculations in those days. We’d taxi to the end of the runway, put the power up, and off we went. With a good crosswind at Kadena and a wet runway, we would have to use our brakes and throttles to stay on the runway and not get blown off. In order to add more power on one side, we had to pull power off on the other side. By doing that we increased our takeoff roll. At times it was pretty dicey getting airborne when we ran out of concrete. I flew twenty-five missions out of Kadena, just under three hundred hours flying time. Then we went home.”
Chapter 7
B-Flight out of Kimpo Special Operations
Headquarters, Far East Air Forces, APO 925, General Orders Number 303, 30 June 1953.
By direction of the President, under the provisions of the Act of Congress approved 9 July 1918, . . . the Silver Star for gallantry in action is awarded to MAJOR DAVID M. TAYLOR, 13618A, United States Air Force. MAJOR TAYLOR distinguished himself by gallantry in action against an armed enemy of the United Nations as a pilot, 6167th Air Base Group, Fifth Air Force, on 23 April 1953. On that date, MAJOR TAYLOR flew an unarmed, unescorted C-47 cargo-type aircraft on a search mission behind enemy lines. In the vicinity of Yulli, North Korea, near which an F-84 had been shot down, MAJOR TAYLOR flew his aircraft at tree-top level for approximately one hour to search for the downed airman. In making the search, eight or ten passes were made over the same spot, each pass under fire from enemy troops. With no thought of his own safety, MAJOR TAYLOR disregarded the intense light arms and automatic weapons fire which resulted in hits and damage to the aircraft, and continued the search until directed to leave by the Controller. By his high personal courage in the face of the enemy and outstanding devotion to duty, MAJOR TAYLOR reflected great credit upon himself, the Far East Air Forces, and the United States Air Force.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 13