Korean Combat (Yeoman Series)

by Robert Jackson

  Gaining height, and narrowly missing a pair of Panthers as he did so, Yeoman pulled the Meteor round in a tight turn and headed for a flak emplacement that was situated right on top of the dam. Somehow, it had escaped the attentions of the Panthers and was throwing 40-mm shells into the path of the other Meteors. Yeoman and Sweeney attacked it ferociously with their cannon, one after the other, and saw their shells churn powdered concrete from the dam’s parapet. The smoke and dust momentarily obscured the enemy gun, but when they cleared Yeoman saw that the weapon was tilting at a drunken angle, with no sign of the crew nearby.

  ‘Anzac Leader, this is Anzac Dog Four. Attack completed.’

  Yeoman looked back over his shoulder in time to see the silvery shapes of the last two Meteors zooming up through the smoke that now covered the whole target area.

  ‘Roger, Dog Four. All Anzac aircraft, reform to the south. Nice work.’

  The US Navy jets, too, had completed their strikes on the other sections of the hydro-electric complex and were now turning out to sea. Their leader called up Yeoman.

  ‘Looks like we really hit ’em, Anzac. Thanks for your company. Good trip home.’

  Yeoman returned the compliment, then reassembled his squadron and set course southwards for Kimpo, joined a few minutes later by some Sabres returning from their patrol area in MiG Alley. Later, Yeoman discovered that no MiGs had offered combat; many of them had been seen to take off, but they had flown away towards the interior of Manchuria. The theory was that they had dispersed in panic, thinking that the armada of fighter-bombers had been on route to strike at their airfields.

  All air strikes that day had been successful. When the fighter-bombers flew away, they left every major hydro-electric plant in North Korea utterly devastated. One American F-84 pilot summed the operation up in typically American fashion:

  ‘The Commies will be reading by candlelight tonight.’

  Yeoman and Dick Thornes were delighted with the success of 493 Squadron’s first ground-attack operation, particularly since no aircraft had been lost. Some of the Meteors had sustained slight damage — in one case, this was caused by flying debris-but it was repairable at Kimpo, and the aircraft involved would be fully serviceable again the next day.

  From the beginning of November, 493’s Meteors were assigned to attacks on North Korea’s railway system. A USAF Colonel from the Intelligence Staff at Pusan came up to Kimpo on the first day of the month to brief the Australians and tell them what it was all about. Using the big wall map in the briefing room, he described how the enemy’s railways were organized.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he told them, ‘that the railroad system in the north is in the form of a big letter “H”, with lines running north and south along both coasts and linked by lateral routes running across country. Since August, Fifth Air Force has been engaged in Operation Strangle, with the various fighter-bomber wings assigned the daily task of taking out a selected stretch of track between fifteen and thirty miles in length. Attacks are usually made by between thirty-two and sixty-four aircraft, each carrying a pair of 500-pound bombs, and the strikes are always covered by a Sabre escort. As you know, the MiGs have been operating as far south as the Chongchon River lately, and we have some reason to believe that they are planning to step up their air offensive in a bid to make some areas of the north too hot for us to handle.’

  General Krylenko again, Yeoman thought, sucking on his pipe. The MiG pilots seemed to be losing none of their expertise, and some of them-doubtless Russians-were good, very good indeed. The Sabre pilots who opposed them had dubbed them ‘honchos’, after the Japanese word for ‘boss’.

  The USAF colonel cleared his throat and continued: ‘Our fighter-bomber pilots generally favour two methods of attack-dive-bombing or else a long, shallow glide approach. The latter method has been found to be more accurate, although the risk from defensive fire is greater. The flak is heaviest here’ — he tapped the map with a pointer — ‘along the lateral rail route from Samdong-ni to Kowon. This has been hit repeatedly by Navy planes from Task Force 77, and I have to tell you that they have suffered very heavy losses in what the Navy pilots have come to call ‘Death Valley’ — so much so, in fact, that the Navy has switched its attention to the more lightly-defended east coast route.’

  The colonel was pulling no punches, and Yeoman was well aware of the casualty figures. Between the beginning of August and the end of October, the United Nations had lost ninety-one aircraft in railroad attacks, together with nearly five hundred damaged.

  ‘We’ve managed to slow down the enemy’s rail movements,’ the colonel said, ‘there’s no doubt about that. We have damaged their lines to such an extent that they have had to cannibalize hundreds of miles of track to keep the more important routes open. But we have not succeeded in stopping them; the bulk of their rail traffic is still flowing. They are very clever at bypassing cuts in the lines; they simply unload supplies from a train on one side of a cut and load them on to another on the opposite side. They are also very good at fooling our reconnaissance aircraft. For example, we thought that our airplanes had knocked out the bridge at Sunchon, until a night reconnaissance showed that the Reds were bridging the gaps with prefabricated spans after dark, and removing them before dawn.’

  He set down his pointer and gazed at the Australians for a few moments. They all knew what was coming next.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the bridges are the key. Knock out the rail bridges, and you really sow confusion. That will be the task assigned to you by Fifth Air Force: to interdict the bridges along the lateral route. There are fifteen of them, and destroying them will require some very precise work indeed. You have been selected because we believe that you are one of the best-qualified units to do the job.’

  ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ Dick Thornes muttered in an aside to Yeoman. Later, when they were alone, he said:

  ‘I think this is going to be an absolute bastard. What do you think?’

  Yeoman, who had had some experience of attacking railway targets while commanding a Tempest squadron late in 1944, agreed with him.

  ‘Depends, though, on how we approach the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I don’t much like this dive-bombing idea. I’d rather go in low and fast with a small number of aircraft-a maximum of four, say-and make use of the terrain to achieve surprise. It makes a small target such as a bridge just that bit more difficult to hit, but I don’t think we’ll take anything like the losses we’d sustain if we do it the American way. Replacement pilots are not easy to come by, as you know.’

  He was right, and Thornes knew it. There was a critical shortage of pilots. Indeed, some of 493 Squadron’s old hands who had done their stint over Korea and been sent home-or down south, as the Australians called it-had volunteered for a second tour of operations to meet the pressing demand. Arrangements were also being made to bring some RAF and New Zealand fighter pilots into the squadron, but this would not happen for several more weeks.

  After studying the available reconnaissance photographs and other intelligence data, they decided to try out Yeoman’s idea against a bridge near Sariwon, which did not appear to be heavily defended. Approval for the strike was obtained from Fifth Air Force HQ, and on a grey November morning four Meteors-flown by Yeoman, Thornes, Sweeney and a flying officer named Tinkler — took off from Kimpo and set course for this objective.

  As the bridge was only fifty miles beyond the Thirty-Eighth Parallel the pilots were not unduly concerned about fuel consumption and they stayed low all the way to the target, hurtling through valleys and the numerous passes cleaving the ridges that wrinkled the spine of Korea. Occasionally, small-arms fire spat at them from vehicles dotted here and there on the cratered and pock-marked roads, but their speed carried them safely out of harm’s way.

  They had studied the route to the target with infinite care, memorizing every landmark and pinpoint, so that on the final stage there was no need to climb in order to fix their position by reference to the surro
unding countryside. In line astern, the four Meteors swept down on the bridge like a whirlwind, literally standing on their wingtips as they rounded a steep hill that overlooked the river over which the railway line passed.

  As he levelled his wings, the scene before him etched itself vividly on Yeoman’s mind. There was the bridge, a metal structure supported by stone piles and carrying a single narrow-gauge railway line; all around it, both river banks were pitted with water-filled craters, the relics of previous attacks. The bridge was still intact-or at least, if it had been damaged, it had been expertly repaired.

  There was a stationary row of flat cars on it, bearing Russian-built T-34 tanks. It was a bonus Yeoman had not expected.

  He let fly with his four cannon as he bored in, seeing his shells explode in a series of sparkling flashes over the iron structure of the bridge and the vehicles on it. He kept his thumb hard down until the moment came to release his two 500-pound bombs. The Meteor rose sharply as they dropped away, curving down towards the bridge, but he stayed low, jinking along the course of the river until he was out of range of the heavy machine-gun fire that was beginning to come up as the enemy got over their initial surprise.

  He pulled back the stick, taking the Meteor into a climbing turn to the left, and looked back. He was just in time to see twin columns of water beginning to subside at the spot where his bombs had exploded in the river, just short of the bridge.

  There was no time for disappointment. He could see small groups of enemy troops by the railway line at the northern end of the bridge; that was where the defensive fire was coming from. Pushing the stick forward again, he dived towards them, firing his cannon in short bursts, covering Dick Thornes as the latter made his attack.

  Thornes made no mistake. As Yeoman swept past the bridge in the opposite direction, he saw the Australian squadron commander’s bombs explode squarely on the centre span with a thunderclap that brought boulders tumbling down from the surrounding hillsides. There were two brilliant flashes, and for a while everything was blotted out by a great cloud of dirty yellow smoke.

  In the third and fourth Meteors, Sweeney and Tinkler, unable to see the target, abandoned their bombing runs and pulled up sharply, circling some distance away to the east. Yeoman grinned as Pete Sweeney’s voice, sounding extremely petulant, came over the R/T.

  ‘Aw, hell, boss, did you have to go and spoil it for us?’

  The centre span of the bridge was a tangled wreck, collapsed into the river, its remains mingled with that of the flat cars and two or three tanks. Two flat cars with their cargo of T-34s still stood forlornly at the northern end.

  ‘See if you can knock some more of it down,’ Yeoman instructed. ‘And get those tanks, if you can.’

  The two remaining Meteors whistled down and unloaded their bombs on the target. More of the metal structure tilted crazily and folded up into the water, taking the last of the flat cars with it. Only the last span, at the southern end of the bridge, remained in one piece.

  ‘Well, that’ll just about do it,’ Yeoman said over the radio, well content. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Back at Kimpo, Yeoman found to his surprise that he had collected a hole in the tail fin of his aircraft. On one side there was a small, neat puncture, but on the other, where the bullet had torn its way through after flattening out, there was a ragged tear the size of a man’s fist. He had not felt a thing.

  Yeoman now felt confident that the Squadron could do all that was asked of it in its latest task, although he was equally aware that the real test would come when the Meteors were called upon to hit one of the heavily defended key bridges. No. 77 Squadron’s pilots were watching with interest, too, for although they were still flying fighter sweeps over MiG Alley there was a strong possibility that they, too, would be turned over to the ground-attack role before much longer.

  Both squadrons were still called on to carry out strip alert; in fact, during most of November it was all they had to do, for bad weather came sweeping across the Korean peninsula and brought air operations to a standstill.

  Strip alert was a task detested by the Meteor pilots, especially as the weather turned colder with the onset of winter. The duty pilots and ground crews had to wait beside their aircraft, trying vainly to keep warm in tents that were designed for summer use, and when the temperature dropped below freezing the wings and cockpit canopies had to be protected from ice by canvas coverings-which promptly froze solid and took a considerable time to remove.

  Apart from anything else, the Meteor’s heating system proved to be totally inadequate for operations in the extremes of the Korean winter. As a result, pilots had to fly muflled up in thick clothing, which seriously restricted movement in the cockpit and was a dangerous obstacle during combat manoeuvres.

  Already, early in December, air and ground personnel at Kimpo were feeling the effects of the increasing cold; it sapped both strength and morale, and no one was looking forward to January, which was traditionally the coldest month of the Korean year.

  The attacks against the enemy’s railway system continued in December, with a few changes in the overall plan. Seriously worried about the build-up of Communist flak along the railways which had been repeatedly hit during the preceding three months, Fifth Air Force now directed its fighter-bombers against other, more weakly defended targets. The immediate result was a higher percentage of rail cuts and a drop in aircraft casualties, although many fighter-bombers were damaged by blast when their bombs bounced off the frozen ground and exploded in the air during low-level attacks.

  No. 493 Squadron resumed its offensive against rail bridge targets, but Yeoman played no part in it. In December, to his chagrin, he once again found himself grounded on the orders of Air HQ, and had a feeling that it was only a question of time before he was posted back to the United Kingdom. At the end of the month he would have done a year’s tour in Korea and Japan, which was six months longer than average. He was tired-apart from a couple of leave spells in Japan during the summer, he had been on the go almost continuously-and, as the weeks wore on, he was missing Julia and the baby terribly. He was more than ready to go home.

  At the same time, he knew that this was likely to be his last operational tour, and was prepared to stretch it to the bitter end. Looming ahead of him, he could see the prospect of years of flying a desk, or alternatively of leaving the Service. Neither appealed to him.

  So 493 Squadron flew on without him, under its rightful leadership of Dick Thornes, who had now received a long-overdue promotion to Wing Commander. Day after day, when the weather was clear, Yeoman watched the Meteors take off for some target in the north, and counted them on their return; sadly, on all too many occasions, not all of them came back.

  He had seen it all before, too many times.

  Sometimes, a little light relief entered the daily routine at Kimpo. One such occasion occurred at the end of the first week in December, when the American F-80 and F-84 squadrons that shared the base with the Australians received orders to move to Suwon, together with all their supporting equipment. There was a party of amazing proportions in the mess that night, and the weather obligingly provided a blanket of low cloud which promised to bring a halt to operations for twenty-four-hours.

  Yeoman found himself growing very drunk very quickly, which was by no means characteristic. Neither was the fact that he was drinking whisky. Several times, he found Dick Thornes looking sideways at him; both men were propping up the bar, but in Yeoman’s case it was a matter of necessity, for his legs were slowly giving way.

  ‘George, are you okay?’

  Thornes’ voice came to him from a long way off. Yeoman, peering through a haze of tobacco smoke, had difficulty in framing a reply, but managed it after a few moments.

  ‘ ’Course I’m okay. Why shouldn’t I be bloody okay?’ His voice was truculent, its tone causing one or two officers who stood nearby to turn their heads towards him in surprise.

  ‘No reason at all, George,’ Thornes said placating
ly. ‘Just thought you didn’t look too good, that’s all.’

  Yeoman glared at him, and deliberately drained another glass of whisky. He belched slightly, gave a small shiver and said:

  ‘Mind your own bloody business.’

  He set the glass down and levered himself upright. In front of him, Dick Thornes’ concerned face seemed to expand and contract. The noise in the bar reached deafening proportions, swelling to a crescendo that stabbed deep into his brain.

  Thornes caught him as he fell.

  Chapter Nine

  HE ROLLED OVER IN BED, GROANING, HIS HEAD HURTING abominably. The bed felt different, somehow; softer than the one in his room.

  It was not his own bed. He opened his eyes. There was another one adjacent to it, empty, separated from the one in which he lay by a locker. Grey daylight filtered in through a window, and even this wan light stabbed at his eyes so that he closed them again, quickly.

  When he ventured to open them again, it was to see someone in a white coat standing beside the bed. He recognized the medical officer, the American major.

  ‘So, you’ve come round at long last,’ the major said cheerfully. ‘Feel like something to eat?’

  Something to eat was the last thing Yeoman felt like. He regarded the major through half-closed lids.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. His voice was little more than a croak.

  ‘A combination of exhaustion and booze is what happened,’ the major told him. ‘You passed out. In fact, you’ve been asleep for nearly thirty-six hours.’

  ‘Good God.’ Yeoman pushed himself up weakly until he was sitting upright in bed. He shoved a pillow into place behind his back for support.

  ‘My mouth tastes like the inside of a Japanese wrestler’s jockstrap.’ He grimaced.