Skip to main content

A Little Bit about the Air War

A plane from Vic's squadron atop an aircraft carrier (probably the Rendova) in 1951.

Dumb little joke with my students: I often assert that my first love in history was the War War II, in particular the story of aviation in that war. If we were to get very, very narrow, I'd say that it was the planes America flew in that war. This project has given me a chance to indulge in that old love a little bit, and learn about what happened with that topic in the Korean War.

The Air War in Korea is both a fascinating and maddening topic. Fascinating in that a lot went unexpectedly for the United States. At the beginning of that war, we found ourselves outclassed by what the Communists were flying. Our F-80s and F-84s really just couldn't keep up with their MiGs. Eventually our F-86s closed the gap between what our assets and theirs could do. 

MiG-15 from Korean War era.

F-86 from Korean War era. 
An admission: I don't find those cutting edge planes from Korean nearly as attractive as our stalwarts from World War II, or as attractive as the next generation of jets which came into service later in the 1950s and 1960s. 

The air war in Korea is also aggravating to learn about for all the limitations our air crews experienced in that conflict. Political realities prevented us from flying into China, which created something of a sanctuary for our foes, and created a corridor (MiG Alley) that we could never achieve air superiority in. Any industrial centers there were also off limits, which made strategic bombing quite impractical for the U.S. as a means by which to hasten the war's end. In fact, even interdiction efforts, efforts to prevent the flow of supplies for the enemy, proved maddingly hard to pull off in that war, also. 

This has helped me better understand the particular contributions of my veteran, Vic, who flew with an activated reserve squadron of Marines flying off of a flat top in the Yellow Sea. His squadron, VMF-212, executed close air support missions, dirty but necessary work that our prop planes were left to do. While the jet pilots duked it out with one another, it fell to Navy and Marine pilots the grunt work of supporting the grunts on the ground. And I'm coming to appreciate the challenge of that work. Flying close air support at that time made the pilot vulnerable to ground fire, and Vic was flying a Corsair which had more vulnerabilities than the newer Skyraiders our Navy began to employ in the war. To avoid getting shot down, pilots engaged in steeper and steeper dives which often led to their windows fogging up as they fell so quickly in altitude. 

I suppose this is an area Vic's squadron was interested in targeting. I got this photo from Vic's son.

Planes in VMF-212 readying for takeoff.

Ordinance for Vic's squadron.

Navy aviators, it seems, were left quite aggravated by this narrow role in the war effort. The more glamorous job of dogfighting went to the air force in their jets. When the Navy made attempts at launching interdiction missions, they found that the gains weren't usually enough to justify the costs. So to them fell the important but fussy and dangerous work of supporting soldiers and Marines on the ground, leveraging the advantage of our control of the seas we wore down the Communists' patience and drove them to the peace table. 

The duty that Vic rendered in the Korean War wasn't glamorous. He was part of an effort by the U.S. to find strengths they could leverage to arrive at victory in the midst of stalemate, which in many ways is symbolic of our effort in Korea. It was ultimately a victory, but certainly not one as glamorous as what we seemed to achieve in the previous decade. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some Thoughts on Liberation

One of the markers placed by the French and Belgian governments to mark the path of the liberators.  My greatest takeaway from this most recent trip involves some refined feelings about liberation. I'm writing this post in a time of high cynicism. And the were matters of which one could be cynical back in 1944, the year in which Charlie fought and died. This trip, however, left me with renewed appreciation for what our country did back in that war, helping me refocus on what I've had the chance to see and do the past few years. Christopher is the military historian who accompanied us on this voyage. In one of our webinars this spring, he made an offhand reference to a piece of scholarship about the Holocaust he said was worth reading. It's entitled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's heavy. I can't say I read every chapter. But I read most of it on our bus rides this summer. And I'm glad I did. My unassigned reading. Saying that Bloo...
1 comment
Read more

Day of Days

It's the seventy-third anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-Day. That means it is also the seventy-third anniversary of Bill's death. Bill, of course, is 1st Lt. Edmund William Duckworth. A map Lauren uncovered in her research.  To learn about the circumstances of Bill's death, I have done a lot of reading to better understand what led up to and took place on D-Day. I saw a post today on Facebook that discussed, quite well, the anxiety, unease, apprehension, and even frivolity that characterized the soldiers on the night before the invasion. D-Day was months in the making, and the soldiers who landed on those five beaches on June 6 had been preparing for the invasion for weeks or even months. In the immediate week before the invasion, they were queued up in embarkation areas and on ships, awaiting their chance to go. They were penned up for days. Knowing this adds more weight to the very difficult call General Eisenhower had to make, whether or not to go on June 6...
Post a Comment
Read more

Normandy American Cemetery: Our Students' Eulogies

Bill's name is visible on the First Infantry Division Memorial found between the Normandy American Cemetery and Omaha Beach.  The culmination of our Normandy Institute experience took place on Tuesday with the students’ eulogies. Each of our students had the task of offering appropriate words of remembrance at their soldier’s grave. Typically these eulogies lasted approximately five minutes. We worked through the cemetery from back to front, which means Lauren offered her words second. Altogether fifteen students spoke. I didn’t once feel tempted to look at my phone or check the time. It was the most meaningful day I’ve spent with students in a long time. Our procedure at each grave followed the same pattern. Lynne and Amanda would scout out where the grave was and the rest of the group would find them there. At each grave, Frank would assist the student in putting sand on the soldier’s name, rank, unit, and state so that the information would stand out. The studen...
Post a Comment
Read more