On the crowded flight deck, crewmen began clearing takeoff lanes.
Escorted by a guided-missile frigate, the huge carrier—nearly as long as four football fields—was bound for the Gulf of Tonkin, from which its 59 fighter-bombers would resume pounding North Vietnam. Normally, most of the jets would be on the hangar deck while the carrier was in transit. But today they were packed together on the flight deck; the hangar deck below had been emptied so the crew could play basketball and watch movies while docked in Sasebo.
Epes controlled the air wing, but the carrier itself was commanded by Captain Kent Lee, a forceful South Carolinian who’d flown carrier planes in World War II and the Korean War. With a master’s degree in nuclear physics, Lee had leapfrogged a number of more senior officers to become, at 44, boss of the Enterprise, the Navy’s most prestigious sea command.
Despite their close working relationship and similar career arcs, Lee didn’t like Epes. Lee viewed his superior as a poor air commander and a “creature-comfort admiral”—too attached to perks like fresh tablecloths, polished silverware, and new drapes in his flag quarters. Nor did Lee think much of the admiral’s habit of leaving strict instructions that he not be disturbed while he watched a movie in his stateroom every night.
When Lee wasn’t needed on the bridge, he enjoyed drinking coffee and swapping sea stories with a fellow captain, Frank Ault, who formerly commanded the carrier USS Coral Sea off Vietnam. Ault was now Epes’s chief of staff, but he was no more a fan of the admiral than Lee. Epes didn’t seem to know a lot about the carrier’s nuclear dynamics, which Ault and Lee frequently had to explain to him. Ault also regarded his boss as indecisive.
Now Epes was faced with a very tough decision. Another message came in from the Pueblo. With North Koreans firing at and trying to board it, the surveillance vessel clearly needed help.
On its way to Japan, the carrier had been enveloped by a typhoon that damaged a number of jets. Mechanics were working on them, but only 35 aircraft were now flyable. About three hours would be needed to fuel and arm them, brief their pilots, and get them over the Wonsan area. In the carrier’s war room, Epes and Ault gathered all available intelligence on the port city’s air defenses, which appeared to be strong. Any attacking planes would have to run a gauntlet of 14 antiaircraft batteries, two surface-to-air missile sites, and as many as 75 MiG fighters.
Epes considered his options. By the time any sizable group of his jets reached the Pueblo, it would be dark—sunset was at 5:41 p.m.—and the spy ship probably would be in Wonsan harbor. Epes stood to lose a significant number of aircraft, maybe even enough to render the carrier and its 5,500 crewmen vulnerable to counterattack by North Korean planes.
If many American pilots were killed, or the carrier was damaged or even sunk, the pressure on the United States to retaliate would be tremendous. If it did so, the communists might then execute the Pueblo crew. Where would the escalation end? And all this over a rinky-dink surveillance ship that hadn’t directly asked the Enterprise for assistance.
Epes didn’t want to jeopardize his flagship. He didn’t want to do something that might entangle his country in another Far East war. At 3:06 p.m., his cautious approach was confirmed by a higher authority. A message from Admiral William F. Bringle, commander of the Seventh Fleet, told him to take “no overt action until further informed.” The decision was finaclass="underline" No rescue attempt would be mounted from the carrier.
At Fuchu Air Station, north of Tokyo, the man who controlled all land-based American combat jets in Northeast Asia was furiously working the phones.
Air Force Lieutenant General Seth McKee was determined to help the Pueblo. He sat at a phone-strewn table in a glass-walled war room, flanked by a dozen members of his battle staff, all of them making call after call. McKee commanded the Fifth Air Force, comprising all U.S. military planes in Japan, South Korea, and Okinawa.
He knew he didn’t have much time. Minutes earlier, an aide had handed him a copy of the Pueblo’s rescue plea. Like the officers of the Enterprise, the general had never heard of the spy ship, although he knew his fighters had been alerted that they might have to protect the Banner on a couple of its 16 missions.
McKee fired question after question at his staff. On the other side of the glass was a command center, where airmen posted markers on wall maps showing the positions of American and hostile aircraft in the region. It was like a scene from an old movie about RAF Bomber Command.
The 51-year-old general spoke very rapidly, in clipped but precisely worded sentences accented with the rich drawl of his native Arkansas. After nearly 30 years in the Air Force, he was accustomed to crises. During World War II, he’d flown 69 combat missions over Europe in a P-38 Lightning, downing two enemy aircraft. He flew cover for the Normandy landings during the bloody Armageddon of D-day. During the Battle of the Bulge, he commanded an air base in Belgium that lay directly in the path of advancing German tanks.
So far, he was having little luck scrounging up combat-ready planes for the Pueblo. McKee had jurisdiction over two Marine fighter squadrons at Iwakuni Air Base in Japan, just 375 miles—less than an hour’s flight—from Wonsan. But only four planes were available there, and their ground crews needed three hours just to load ammunition. Two other American bases in Japan were switching to modern F-4 Phantoms from older fighters, and none of the new aircraft could be ready to fly in less than several hours.
McKee also was in charge of American air units in South Korea. But with the Vietnam War sucking up planes from bases everywhere, the only ones in South Korea were six Phantoms, configured for nuclear bombs, which were part of the Pentagon’s global standby network of aircraft, submarines, and intercontinental missiles that would rain atomic destruction on the USSR in the event of war. McKee ordered the Phantoms reloaded with conventional 3,000-pound bombs. But that would take several hours, and the jets still had no air-to-air guns or missiles to fight MiGs. Even properly armed, a handful of Phantoms wouldn’t stand much chance against dozens of MiGs, many of which, McKee knew from intelligence, already were in the air.
There was another possibility. The South Korean Air Force consisted of more than 200 combat aircraft, some located at Osan Air Base near Seoul, only 25 minutes by air from Wonsan. McKee told a subordinate to check on their availability through U.S. Army General Charles Bonesteel, an eye patch–wearing former Rhodes scholar who commanded all United Nations forces in South Korea, including that country’s air force.
But Bonesteel had no intention of further inflaming a South Korean public already angry and frightened over the Blue House raid. To many southerners, the outrageous attempt to kill their president represented a dramatic escalation of their long-running blood feud with the north that could be answered only with massive retaliation, even invasion. The Pueblo hijacking, Bonesteel believed, would only intensify that sentiment. And if multiple southern pilots died while trying to rescue the ship, the resulting public rage might be just enough to tip South Korea into war. Since many South Korean jets were aging U.S.-built F-86s, no match for North Korea’s advanced MiGs, southern casualties indeed could be heavy. Bonesteel passed word that South Korean planes were off-limits in any attempt to save the Pueblo.