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.