18th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Korea

CLOSE AIR SUPPORT - -
The fighter pilot’s most dangerous, but most gratifying missions

Pusan's Shrinking Perimeter, Taegu Air Base (K-2), South Korea, Late July, 1950

Typhoon Gloria swept across Japan on July 22nd, 1950, and we in Korea caught the downpour on the fringes. We were missed by the highest winds, but the low clouds ... right down onto the deck, and heavy rains prevented us from doing much flying. If we had sent anyone off, even for a weather check, he would never have been able to find his way back down to land at Taegu. Instead, we used the time in an attempt to improve our living conditions; we erected a couple of 20 foot pyramidal tents to replace our little one-man pup tents, putting them up during a pause in the rainstorms. Unfortunately, we pilots... novice tent erectors, did not allow sufficient slack in the dry ropes to compensate for shrinkage when they became rain-soaked.

That night, during a heavy downpour, the lines tightened like fiddle-strings and, one by one, pulled the tent pegs out of the ground. Around midnight, the last two or three pegs came loose, and the whole thing came down around us like a giant, clammy elephant skin. The tent pole tipped, gradually, until it rested across my straw sleeping mat. Combined with the weight of the heavy canvas, it was too much to move, so I just slid the straw mat out from under the pole and away from the trickle of water that was making a small rivulet from one side of the tentto the other, used a carbine rifle as a prop to hold the canvas away from my face and went back to sleep ...there would be time enough to make repairs in the morning ..in daylight.

Flying weather improved enough on July 23rd to resume our mission pace, but the heavy rains had changed the red Korean dust to red Korean mud... sticky, clay-like mud. It was picked up and stuck to our shoes, jeep tires, airplane landing gears ...everything it touched. Our grimy flying suits, already filthy from sweat and dust, became caked with mud.

At that time, our bathing facilities were limited to the water we could carry in a steel helmet. With little spare time, and less concern for personal appearances, we were dirty and unshaven most of the time during those first few weeks. We looked almost as bad as our airplanes. Shortly after the rains, when we could finally stand it no longer, we had the Koreans build a framework to hold a couple of 55 gallon drums, and devised a shower head below. We had no clean water, except the little used for cooking, which was transported from the city, and we had to have water carried from a nearby creek to supply our "shower". It was cold water, even in late July, and it was far from being considered "sanitary", but we were finally able to rinse off part of the grime that had accumuated during the past weeks. The basic facilities were extremely primitive, but they were the least of our worries, and we soon became used to doing without the small amenities.

By July 30th, when the twenty-five "new" Mustangs arrived aboard the USS Boxer, with several new pilots as well, and the 67th Squadron arrived in Ashiya from the Philippines ...things began to look up for the 12th Squadron’s "Foxy Few", which we had chosen for our new logo (the Dallas Provisional Sqdn. had been redesignated ‘12th Fighter-Bomber Sqdn.' the previous week.) I had just logged my twentieth combat mission ... averaging two per day for ten straight days, three days of which I had to stay down to work my intelligence chores. My tail was beginning to drag from the intense pressure of the daily pace ...flying combat during the days, and doing the vital paperwork far into the nights. On July 30th and 31st I flew four missions each day, hitting targets all along the battlefronts to the west, north and east of our tenuous little airstrip ... all within 30 miles of our home base at Taegu.

We were getting our asses whipped, in no uncertain terms, and it was becoming just a matter of short hours before we would have to give up the base at Taegu ...evacuate, or be over-run by the North Koreans.

The situation on the east coast, where the enemy in Hunghae were already shelling the airstrip at Pohang, was no more promising than ours at Taegu. We were fighting as if our heads were on the chopping block ... because they were!

By early August, 1950, the momentum of the North Korean's three-pronged drive into the south had proved immensely successful. They had completed their end-around on the west and south coasts, their east coast drive had progressed far enough to force evacuation of the 35th Group fighter squadrons from Pohang air base after only a few days' active use of the strip, and their central thrust was in the process of crossing the Naktong River to knock on our last bastion of defense ... our home base at Taegu.

The North Korean's objective, to surround Taegu, then march on Pusan and have control of the entire peninsula, seemed just a few days short of accomplishment. We were in deep, deep trouble!

Despite our intensive aerial firepower from dawn to dark every day, we just didn't seem to have enough airplanes or pilots to stem the North Korean's onrushing tide. In our favor, though, was the fact that we were forced to concentrate our air strikes over an ever-decreasing geographic area as the Reds tightened their noose around what ultimately became the "Pusan Perimeter". As the distances to the front lines shrunk, it meant that we would fly shorter missions ... many as brief as 25 to 30 minutes from take-off to landing; and that, of course, had the same effect as multiplying our striking power.

On the darker side, it also increased the time we were actually in physical combat with the enemy. We were down close to the ground where they were shooting at us a much greater percentage of the time ... with the result that we were taking a lot more battle damage, and losing many more airplanes to ground fire.

During the first ten days to two weeks of the war, the Reds had raced madly forward in broad daylight, with little opposition to hinder their movements. By the third week in July, when our meager Dallas Squadron opposition began to take effect, their losses mounted to an uncomfortable level, and the North Korean commanders were required to modify their tactics.

By the first week of August they were forced to travel only at night, and hole-up in the villages during the day, camouflaging their tanks and trucks inside buildings and under trees in an effort to keep them from our fighter pilot's sights. Their attempts at camouflage were rather futile at first, for we could usually pick out the tank tracks in the dirt leading thru the fields to a house or a grove of trees; and we would then conclude that there was a worthwhile target inside ...as was usually the case. Their camouflage techniques improved with time and practice, but it was also a time-consuming precaution which helped to slow the momentum of their advance, because of the time it took prior to dawn each day to try to hide their equipment from us.

They found, too, that there was a maximum travel distance which they could move supplies within a single summer night's darkness, and as they tried harder to tighten our noose, needing more and more replacement arms, their supply lines became more and more exposed to our interdiction attacks. At some time during the long trip south from the Yalu River or from Pyongyang, every train, tank or truck would be exposed to our air attacks.

But as the enemy lines closed in on Taegu from two directions ...from the west and from the north, and our Army forces had to back steadily into an ever-shrinking defensive perimeter, we found it necessary to direct almost all of our mission effort to close tactical support of the frontlines, thereby reducing the number of sorties we could send north to interdict their replacement supplies.

It was a "Catch 22" situation: we couldn't afford to slack off on our interdiction attacks because the armor coming onto the line would jeopardize our fragile hold on the perimeter's front lines ... but if we didn't help our troops on the front, there wouldn't be any perimeter left to defend!

It is not possible to adequately describe the intense feeling of gratification we fighter pilots felt when we could hit the Reds attacking our front-line troops.

By August there were enough radio jeeps operating on our frequencies, and airborne T-6 Mosquito spotter planes, that we could work with reasonable safety within just a few hundred yards of our own Army troops. When the verbal orders of the man on the ground were insufficient to tell us precisely where to strike, we'd ask the spotter to fire a smoke rocket, or the ground artillery to place a white phosphorus shell onto the target. With positive target identification like that, we could work over the Red's dug-in positions with a venegence. It was doubly gratifying because we were not only taking the enemy pressure off of our troops, but they would often stand right up in plain sight to cheer us on.

We knew that our close-support efforts were deeply appreciated, so we would inevitably press our attacks a little harder ...a little closer, or a little lower than was prudent for the safety of our own hides. But we knew, too, that when we finally ran out of ammunition and had to head back over the nearby hill to our base at Taegu, those poor characters below had to stay in their muddy foxholes all night to protect our position and our lives. Too often they didn't make it through the night, for that was when the Reds liked to attack ... at night, when our planes weren't around to break up their thrusts. We picked up a lot of damage to our battered Mustangs on those close support missions, mostly small arms: rifles and machine gun fire which, if we could get the ships back to base, our mechanics could often quickly repair with a sheet of aluminum and a rivet gun ...or, in an emergency, even a piece of cloth tape.

The F-51 was fondly nicknamed the "Spam Can" because, from the side, the shape of it's fuselage looked as deep and flat-sided as the namesake tin-can used for packing the processed meat. In those days we, for a fact, used the tin from Spam cans to patch bullet holes in the skin of our airborne Spam Cans (it's true, I swear!)

Sadly, not all holes were minor; we started losing more and more pilots to enemy ground fire. Some were fortunate and were able to land unhurt, or with minor wounds... crash landing behind our lines to be picked up by the Army, as Danny Farr, Owen Brewer, Ed Hodges, Harry Moreland and several others of our group were able to do. Many were not so lucky, as our mounting casualty lists reflected.

But, unbeknownst to us or, reportedly, even to the 5th Air Force commander, General Partridge, the Army was planning to make last ditch stands north of Taegu and at the Naktong River.

So on the evening of August 5th we at Taegu air base were racing to complete our evacuation preparations before dark; 'planning to move out ... to Bug Out, on the following day ... on 6 August 1950.

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