18th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Korea

INTERROGATION TOOLS - - ‘Clues from the Brews’

Taegu, South Korea, July 1950

After Typhoon Gloria had swept across Japan on July 22nd, 1950, just a week after our arrival in Korea, and we'd caught the downpour of the fringes of the storm, we set up four twenty-foot tents in the middle of our flightline parking area. One was used for maintenance and supply storage, the second for our Operations Office ...since we had promptly outgrown our limited space in the adobe shack, and needed a place to store parachutes, life rafts and other flying gear between flights.

The third tent became my Intelligence office, where I could brief the mission assignments and interrogate returning crews. The fourth tent became our "Pilot's Lounge", a place to lay down in the sultry shade to rest between missions. None were fancy; packing crates for chairs and tables, straw mats for cots ...but it was an improvement over sitting under the wings of the fighters, trying to get a few minutes of relaxation. And it made my task of interrogation somewhat easier, because the returning pilots could be prevailed upon to sit for a few minutes so that I could question and record the results of their missions, and pass the information on to Fifth Air Force Headquarters.

Their adrenalin was still flowing, understandably, when the pilots landed from an exciting, oftimes scary combat mission; their nervous energy was not conducive to sitting and answering a lot of detailed questions.

Typically, it was easy to get them to talk about the mission ...each was anxious to tell it in "war story" fashion; to tell how rough it was, and how close they came to getting their ass busted. But it was much more difficult to get them to recall an exact location of a certain event, or to estimate specifically how many trucks or tanks were seen at a certain target area, or to guess how many troops were seen in which location. Even under the best of circumstances, with no one shooting machine guns at you from the surface, it's extremely difficult to see clearly while traveling at 350 to 400 miles per hour while maneuvering fifty feet above the ground ... it is more normal to concentrate on clobbering the enemy than counting them!

My friend, Lieut. Don Bolt, formerly of the 67th Squadron at Clark, had been administratively “grounded” by the Air Force economy purges of the previous year; and had been taken off of flying status, but had been offered the chance to fly again if he would "volunteer" to fly combat in Korea. He jumped at the chance, and sent word to me that he would be coming through Tokyo on his way to Taegu, in case there was anything I wanted him to pick up for me on the way over.

By that time I had found a need for a couple of lockable storage lockers, and asked him to pick up a couple of the nice aluminum foot lockers available at the Tokyo PX and, as an afterthought, said that he might just as well fill them with as many cases of canned beer as he could fit into them ...and I would pay him for the whole works upon delivery.

When Bolt arrived with my two footlockers and TEN CASES of individual cans of beer... two hundred forty cans, I knew that I had found my answer to holding the returning pilots in the interrogation tent until I finished their mission critiques ... I donated one free can of beer to each returning pilot, as long as he would sit and answer my questions while he consumed it.

It was "weather-cooled"... in the heat of July, but it was thirst-quenching and refreshing, and above all, it was the ONLY BEER ON TAEGU air base at that time!

World War II pilots in most theaters of operation received a one ounce "shot" of "Mission Whiskey" upon return from a combat flight. This, too, was one of the neglected oversights of the early Korean air war. The omission was not even considered by most crews; who were much more concerned with the floorless tents, cold showers from 55 gallon drums and the shortage of every conceivable item necessary to get a combat F-51 into the air... including spare airplanes and pilots. Reportedly, the traditional liquid relaxant was eventually made available for the later Korean combat crews, but the distribution did not commence until long after the author... the Squadron Intelligence Officer.... had completed his One Hundred Mission Combat Tour behind enemy lines and left Korea eleven months later, in mid June, 1951.

The ten cases of donated beer lasted almost two weeks and, at the 1950 Tokyo BX price of $2.50 per case, I figured it was $25 well-spent to help me get my post-mission interrogation job done properly.

Duane E. 'Bud' Biteman,
Lt. Col, USAF, Ret
‘...One of those Old, Bold Fighter Pilots’
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