Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  He waited in the big briefing room with about fifty others from the First when the familiar call to attention— “Ten-shun”—rang out, and there was tension aplenty as Mahoney strode down the aisle. Tom knew this was serious business from the expression on his face.

  “Men, this is it. We are departing tomorrow at one AM for Korea. Our planes will be flown to the coast and ferried over on a carrier. We will go as a group to Travis Air Force Base, and be flown over in Military Airlift Command airplanes. Pack everything you need, because I understand we’ll be living under pretty primitive conditions for a while.”

  When the buzz died down, Mahoney went on. “As you know, the Chinese and the Soviet Union are backing the North Koreans. They are using a brand-new Soviet fighter, the MiG-15. It’s about the same size and performance as the F-86, and it’s better than anything we have in Korea or in Japan now. They are shooting the hell out of our B-29s, and we’re going to stop them.”

  The trip over was the usual amalgam of hurry up and wait, made easier by the continuous poker games played in the air and on the ground. It was November 23 when they finally reached Japan, and Tom was three hundred dollars poorer than when they had left. Word came that it would be another two weeks before their airplanes arrived and a week after that before they would be ready to fly. Word was wrong; the F-86s had been placed on carrier decks and suffered badly from corrosion. Magnesium had been used in the construction of the wings, elevators, and rudders of the F-86 to save weight, but wherever it was riveted to aluminum, the dissimilar metals reacted to the salt spray and corroded. Of the seventy-five Sabres shipped over, only thirty-two would be airworthy when they arrived. This meant a lot of Sabre pilots would be milling around, waiting for the repairs.

  Tom was on his way to the mess hall when he heard his name being called over the base loudspeaker system. As he stopped to listen, a tall, bandy-legged pilot grabbed his arm. He was a major or a lieutenant colonel; his flying suit insignia was so dirty, Tom couldn’t tell.

  “Are you Captain Tom Shannon?”

  “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “Captain Shannon, I’m Lieutenant Colonel Howard Fisher. I’ve got amended orders for you right here in my hand. You are now a member of the 7th Fighter Squadron, 49th Fighter Group. Grab your bags and meet me at Flight Ops; we are going directly to Korea.”

  Tom looked at the orders, checking the serial number to see if there was a mistake. There wasn’t. He saluted, turned, and trotted into his barracks. Mahoney wasn’t around, so Tom left a note on his bunk explaining what had happened and asking him to recall him as soon as the airplanes were ready. Forty-five minutes later he was sitting on a cold steel bucket seat in the back end of a grimy C-47.

  Fisher showed up at the last minute and slid into the seat beside him, carefully placing his chest-pack parachute on the floor at his feet. He grinned at Tom and said, “Just like the Royal Navy, eh, the way they used to impress sailors. I picked up five pilots today, and we need every one of them.”

  Tom looked around—they were the only pilots in the back of the C-47; the rest of the people were enlisted personnel, mechanics, judging by their toolboxes.

  Fisher saw the look and said, “I’ve sent them on ahead, this morning. Yours was the first name on my list, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I had the loudspeaker going, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  Fisher put his legs out in the aisle, shoved a ditty bag behind his head, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. He didn’t wake up until the C-47 made the first of its four bounces landing at K-13, Suwon Air Base, South Korea.

  Yawning, Fisher unsnapped his safety belt, said, “I needed that,” and asked, “How much time do you have in the F-80?”

  “F-80” still sounded unusual to Tom; they had changed the designations of fighters from “P” to “F” in June 1948, but he still thought of it as the P-80.

  Tom thought for a moment. “Maybe three or four hours. Not much.”

  “Well, you must have had some time in the T-bird?”

  “About the same.”

  “Well, don’t worry; I’ll give you two hours in the F-80 before we go on a mission. It’s a piece of cake after flying the F-86.”

  A wet wind accelerated the biting cold, and Tom was grateful when a helpful sergeant directed him to his new home, a bunk in a twelve-person squad tent, canvas on wooden frames, with wooden doors. A tiny coal-burning stove flickered, trying vainly to make up its mind whether it was there to warm or asphyxiate the pilots. He stored his few possessions in an ammunition box that stood on end by the bunk. Fisher came in and took him to dinner at the mess hall—two Quonset huts joined together.

  Fisher smiled at him. “The food’s pretty bad, but you’ll get used to it. Breakfast is the best meal of the day; for some reason they are able to get real eggs here, not the powdered kind. We usually have sandwiches brought down to the flight line while we are refueling and rearming, and then if things cool down a bit, get a late supper. By then we’re so hungry it doesn’t matter how bad it is.”

  Tom nodded and kept silent, wolfing down a helping of stew that Dinty Moore would have refused, knowing that he shouldn’t inquire about the source of the few pieces of stringy meat.

  At 0700 the next morning, Tom ruefully checked his equipment. He’d been issued a brain bucket, a helmet so old that it had adhesive tape stretched over the cracks and rubber pads torn from some insulating material as cushions.

  Fisher put him in the cockpit of an F-80, showed him where the various switches were and how to start the engine, then got down and ran to his own waiting airplane. They took off in formation, and Fisher took him for a quick tour of the local area, then signaled that they would go back in and land.

  “You can handle it OK. Let’s go do an hour on the gunnery range, and I’ll put you down for this afternoon’s missions.”

  Tom swallowed and remembered one of the things his dad used to tell him and Harry. It was, “If you are in a new organization, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open for at least three months. Listen to everything your boss says, and don’t volunteer any ideas unless they ask you specifically for them. After three months, you’ll be one of the boys, and you’ll get along.”

  The gunnery session went well—Tom had always been an expert at gunnery, especially deflection shooting, and when they came back from the range Fisher complimented him. “You did good, Shannon. Just remember tomorrow you’ll be a lot heavier than we are today, so don’t get frisky too soon.”

  They ate sandwiches—pink Spam, white bread, and yellow mustard—as Fisher briefed him on the first mission.

  “Good mission coming up. The North Koreans have a column of Russian T-34 tanks moving up to the line. The only way we can hurt them is to concentrate on the turret—if you do it just right, you can open it up with the six .50-caliber guns. If you don’t, maybe the next guy will. Don’t bother to shoot at their tracks or try to hit their fuel tanks or anything. Just chip the turret open, and the slugs going inside ricochet around enough to kill the crew and start a fire.”

  “We can do that with fifties? The Germans had a hell of a time working on the T-34s with 37mm cannon.”

  “Yeah, and I wish we did, too, but what we’ve got is six fifties, and if you use ’em like I said, you’ll be surprised. They put out a lot of lead, and the turret top is the only weak point for us. Try it; you’ll see.”

  The first mission, a flight of four, took off at one o’clock. Fisher, in Red One, led the way directly to the map coordinates where the T-34s were supposed to be on the move. Even though heavily loaded, the F-80 was a pleasure to fly, especially when Tom remembered his days in the Grumman Wildcat.

  Fisher rocked his wings and Tom saw the tanks at once, eleven big, lumbering T-34s with infantrymen crowded on top and with clouds of dust spraying out from the tracks. They were well spaced out, with perhaps two hundred yards between them, but the narrow road ran between steep hills, leaving the tanks nowhere to go except forward or in rev
erse.

  Fisher set up a firing pattern and called, “We’ll attack in elements of two. Red One will take the lead tank; Red Two takes the last tank; Red Three and Four work over the tanks in the middle as we come back for another pass.”

  Tom was Red Two and he lagged behind Fisher a bit to let him make his attack. He followed Fisher down, picked up the turret of the last tank, a mud gray and green monster, carrying a circled red star insignia. The infantry spilled away like a broken necklace losing beads, diving for cover in the shallow ditches beside the road.

  Tom’s first slugs hit the turret, popping it off like a beer-bottle cap. He flew past the tank, then climbed back to pattern altitude. As he turned he could see that Fisher had stopped his tank, too. It was billowing smoke and as Tom leveled out to set up the next pattern he saw it blow up. The other nine tanks were trapped. The damn fifties worked!

  Fisher led him out wide, assessing the damage that Red Three and Four were doing. Another one of the tanks was smoking, and the rest moved to find whatever cover they could. Two T-34s drove into houses by the side of the road. The structures collapsed around them, giving no concealment but perhaps making the tankers feel better. In the meantime the infantry were flat on their backs firing their rifles and machine guns, setting up the wall of lead through which they would fly in the next minute.

  “Red Two, I’ll take the tanks at the far end; you work the rear again.”

  Tom double-clicked his mike button to acknowledge and rolled in. This time his guns seemed to have no effect—he was battering the turret, but nothing happened—and he pulled up, looking back in time to see Jim Miller in Red Three fly directly into a tank, disappearing in a boiling ball of black smoke and red flame.

  Fisher said, “They’ve got a 20mm flak battery set up at about the middle of the run. I’m going after it; you work the tanks over again. This will be our last pass; we’re getting short on fuel.”

  The flak battery disappeared in the hail of Fisher’s six .50-caliber guns, and Tom torched another tank. Red Four joined up with them and they flew back to Suwon in silence.

  After they had debriefed, Fisher said, “Well, Tom, what do you think about your first mission?”

  “I’m sorry we lost Miller; I’m not sure exchanging a pilot and an F-80 for four or five T-34s is good business.”

  “It’s not, Tom, except that it’s the only business that is keeping the North Koreans out of Pusan. If we don’t stop them, they’ll push the South Koreans and the Americans into the sea.”

  “That’s true, I know. But there has to be a better way. This is no different than World War II, and not much different than World War I. It doesn’t make sense to fight an attrition war against countries that don’t care if their people are killed.”

  The missions assumed a regular tempo over the next few days, and not all of them were so costly. They were operating off pierced-steel plank runways. When the armament load included either one-thousand-pound bombs or napalm, the ordnance would sometimes scrape against the steel runway, sending a shower of sparks back. When heavily loaded, the F-80s could have used another thousand feet of runway for safety. Instead, the runway led to a riverbed, usually dry, but quite wide after heavy rains. Beyond the riverbed was a sheer drop of about eighty feet and on another half mile was the beginning of the ridgeline that looked like a barricade when Tom was sitting on the end of the runway, running up full power and waiting for clearance to go. He picked out a little dip in the ridge that lined up pretty well with the departure heading. Sometimes, if the weather warmed just a little, he’d find himself flying right through the dip, unable to coax any more altitude out of the F-80’s wheezing jet engine. There were lots of accidents. In February the USAF announced that it had lost 221 planes in Korea—but only 10 of them in combat. The rest were accidents because flying went on whatever the weather or the experience of the pilots.

  The 7th Squadron operated on a simple premise: if you were past the front lines, you shot at anything that moved. Sometimes they would catch a convoy of trucks in the open, and just shoot the hell out of them. If Tom was lucky, some of the trucks would be carrying ammunition or fuel and set off secondary explosions. All too often, though, the trucks would be a setup for a flak trap and the Chinese would throw everything at them, 20mm, 37mm, and 57mm, all in a furious barrage that seemed impenetrable but which in fact rarely hit anyone.

  What finally hit him was considerably smaller. Tom came back from a mission dying from thirst, his mouth cottony from the tension. Drenched in sweat that he could feel freezing on him, he jogged toward the operations shack where they would debrief. En route he diverted a hundred feet to get to the mess hall, where he knew they kept a jug of purified drinking water. It always tasted of chlorine, but they kept it cold, and he had just finished one glass and started on another when a cook ran out and yelled, “Stop—we haven’t purified that water yet.”

  It was too late. From late that afternoon on, Tom wished he’d been shot or had some other relatively pleasant accident as the diarrhea took hold. Eighteen days later and weighing thirty-two pounds less, he was sent back to Japan to recuperate. Score: Korean E. Coli 1, Tom Shannon 0.

  • THE PASSING SCENE •

  Red Chinese retake Seoul; Seoul recaptured; General MacArthur relieved of command; peace treaty signed with Japan; Albert Schweitzer wins Nobel Peace Prize; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sentenced to death; Jersey Joe Walcott knocks out Ezzard Charles.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  October 23, 1951, Korea

  Harry’s seemingly endless flight from Wright-Pat to Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, was Kafkaesque with its interminable delays, cancellations, sudden departures, and catalog of maintenance problems. There was only one way to react without going crazy, and that was passive acceptance, using the downtime to read his B-29 manuals, and when the incessant WARNING, CAUTION, and EMERGENCY notices began to bore him, he would switch to the pack of paperback Kenneth Roberts novels he carried with him. When he was not reading, Colonel Harry Shannon thoughtfully considered the Korean War and his contributions to it, which, to date, could only be called not much. While Tom had covered himself with glory flying F-80s, Harry had been stuck with non-combat jobs that he hated even though he knew intellectually that they were important.

  Harry had irritated his boss, Al Boyd, with constant requests for combat duty, and he volunteered for F-84s, F-86s, and B-29s. Each time his request had been turned down. Now he was on his way to combat at last—assigned as an observer, in a B-29 that had been pulled out of storage, refurbished, and manned by a crew of reservists who vastly resented being called back to war. Fortunately, the 307th Bomb Wing commander was an old friend and, instead of making Harry fly in a jump seat, checked him out as a copilot. The 307th was shorthanded, and with Harry’s long experience in bombers, it made sense, even though it contravened at least twenty Strategic Air Command directives.

  His job was straightforward enough; he was to fly with B-29s out of Kadena and assess the threat of MiG-15 attacks when the bombers were escorted by fighters. Unescorted bombers no longer could operate in the regions where the MiG-15 appeared, and whether the F-80s, F-84s, and relatively few F-86s could defend against them was uncertain.

  The MiG-15 had come as a tremendous surprise to the USAF, though it should not have, for the Soviet Union had proudly debuted the airplane at Moscow’s Tushino Airdrome air show in 1948. What was even more surprising was the massive numbers of the airplane in the theater, an estimated 450 all told, compared to fewer than seventy operational F-86s. The nature of the war and the geography gave the MiGs an almost unassailable advantage, for they could operate out of Soviet and Chinese territory with impunity, while the U.S. aircraft had to be careful not to intrude across the North Korean borders.

  There was a mystery about who was actually doing the fighting. All of the MiG-15s were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and they were allegedly furnished to the North Koreans by the Red Chinese. But many of the aircraft encountered in combat
still bore the markings of operational Soviet units. Rumor had it that most of the airplanes were flown by Soviet pilots, for the intercepted radio transmissions were generally in Russian. There was also a report, possibly apocryphal, of a MiG-15 pilot ejecting close enough to be observed by the F-86 pilot who had shot him down. In the story, the MiG pilot had long flowing blond hair.

  The initial attack on June 25, 1950, had carried North Korean forces to the Pusan Perimeter, where they were halted by a tough defense, a lack of supplies, and the interdiction of their supply lines by the American Far Eastern Air Force. In September, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had launched his brilliant but risky invasion at Inchon. The overextended North Korean Forces had fallen back past the Thirty-eighth Parallel, streaming toward the border with China. The People’s Republic of China announced that if the pursuit was continued, it would intervene. General MacArthur discounted this, and the UN forces were totally surprised when hundreds of thousands of Red Chinese soldiers swept across the Yalu and once again drove the UN forces back down the peninsula, threatening to throw them into the sea. Airpower, ruthlessly applied, saved the day. The front was stabilized, and the UN forces advanced again under the cover of airpower, to a point almost coincident with the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

  The air war was just like the ground war—an up and down battle—but while the ground war eventually bogged down after several massive military defeats had been inflicted on the Red Chinese forces, the air war continued at a hectic pace. Now the ground war was heating up again, as the Red forces massed for another attack intended to drive the UN forces into the sea. The Red Chinese army, far from being an undisciplined horde, fought according to Soviet tactics, employing artillery and manpower en masse and ignoring casualties. The only means to stop them was airpower, choking off their supplies and rendering them incapable of a sustained offensive.