It was decided that the air task groups would conform as closely as possible to the commissioned air groups, but the individual squadrons would be ordered to a specific carrier, reporting directly to its commanding officer for duty. The air task group commander would also be a member of the ship’s company, and the ship’s commanding officer would delegate to him operational command of the air task group, requiring that he fly periodically with these units to exercise operational control and administrative oversight. Additionally, there would be ordered to one of the squadrons in the air task group two LSOs, a maintenance officer, and an operations officer to form the air task group staff. They would be attached to the squadron for administrative purposes but operationally would receive their orders from the air task group commander.
I drafted this proposal for air task groups as an AirPac directive, but the three-star admiral commanding Naval Air Forces Pacific Fleet sent it to the commander in chief, Pacific Fleet to sign it out as a fleet directive. This concept of the air task group as an augmenting asset during times of urgent mobilization endured for the next twenty years as a convenient expedient to quickly and effectively meet emergent requirements to fill carrier flight decks.
My work on the air task group project had a major personal benefit. I wanted very much to transition from a bomber pilot to a jet fighter pilot, but this was hard to do at my rank. The introduction of jets to carrier aviation had not been without its problems. The jet was substantially superior to any of the propeller fighters in any services, but it was better suited to long, straight runways than to the confines of a carrier deck. Jet blast was causing new and difficult problems. The endurance of jets was less than an hour compared to the cycle time of the Corsairs and the Bearcats they were replacing. The greatest concerns, however, involved the flight characteristics of these early jet aircraft, with their high approach speeds, lack of stall warning, and slow acceleration on takeoff. For the first jet squadrons in the U.S. Navy, the commanding officers and flight officers were carefully selected from the most experienced and aeronautically competent aviators. Some young Naval Academy graduates, like my brother-in-law Wally Schirra, finessed the system by requesting duty with the U.S. Air Force, in which all of the tactical aircraft were jets. Wally flew F-86 Sabres in Korea and bagged a MiG before returning to the U.S. Navy and the astronaut program.
As I finished up my work on the air task group project and it was time to move on to a squadron, Captain Bauer asked me if I would like to be the operations officer of the first air task group to deploy, Air Task Group 1 on the Valley Forge. I would be assigned to VF-111 for administrative purposes and flight duties. I knew VF-111 was flying brand new F9F-2 Panthers and I would be making the transition to jet fighter pilot. I accepted.
The commanding officer of VF-111 well understood my unique assignment to VF-111 and the considerations that went into the organizational concept of Air Task Group 1. He was, in fact, glad to have me in his squadron for this precedent-setting deployment of the first air task group. Unfortunately, this understanding was not shared by most of the other officers in the squadron, who were a tight-knit group, most of whom had made one previous deployment to combat in Korea with VF-111.
The squadron was three-quarters of the way through its training cycle and the tactical organization had been established. The division and section leaders and wingmen had all been assigned in a permanent organization. I would have to fly whenever I could wrangle a flight when a regular squadron pilot was not available because of duty or some other overriding reason. Even then my presence in the lineup would not be too welcome, because I was not an original member of the team and had not shared the previous cruise with my flight mates. I had not even gone through the bulk of the redeployment training with them.
This was not unexpected. I had seen the same thing in Bombing 3 when the landing signal officer and air group operations officer would come into our ready room to get themselves listed on our flight schedule. But I felt that this reluctance in VF-111 to include me would be overcome after a month or so of living with the squadron pilots and sharing their ready room and liberties ashore. The important thing was that I had broken the barrier. I was a qualified jet fighter jockey, and my future assignments would reflect this qualification.
In 1953 I returned to Korea as executive officer of VF-52 in the USS Boxer, again flying F9F-2 Panthers. On that cruise both my wingman and my commanding officer were downed in action against the Chinese. In the three-month period from May to July, eight VF52 aircraft were shot down, but most of the pilots were recovered. On two different occasions my own plane was shot up to the extent I could not return to land aboard the carrier and was forced to make an emergency landing at a South Korean air force airstrip.
The war in Korea was a bitter struggle. It took three years and thirty-seven thousand American lives. Twice the commander of U.S. forces in Korea proposed to the JCS that all U.S. troops be evacuated to avoid them being pushed into the sea. And twice the president said, “Stay and fight.” In the first year of the war, Americans and their allies defeated the invading army of North Korea, driving all organized units out of South Korea. Then the Chinese Communists attacked without warning across their borders with the purpose of forcing the Americans off the Korean peninsula. Overcoming the initial surprise Chinese offensive, our troops rallied and drove back the Chinese regulars and held them near the original line of demarcation along the thirty-eighth parallel, where the fighting eventually ceased. The entire war, in which more than four million men, women, and children were killed on both sides, involved twenty-two nations and was fought entirely on the Korean peninsula, a piece of land approximately the configuration of Florida and only 25 percent larger.
UNPREPARED
The United States did not expect to fight, and had no plans for fighting, the Korean War, but it was a war the country had to win. Half a century later, viewed in the broader context of the Cold War, Korea has evolved as one of this nation’s more important wars in terms of its long-term impact on world history.
The Korean War came at the beginning of a much larger and more desperate struggle that lasted for four decades: the Cold War. And during this epic conflict between the Western democracies and the Communist bloc, the very survival of the United States was at stake. For the first time the United States committed troops to combat in its armed confrontation with the Communists. Had the United States not elected to fight in Korea, and not been able to conclude the war successfully by driving the North Koreans and Chinese back to the line of original demarcation, the Cold War could have had an entirely different outcome, most probably to the gravest disadvantage to our country.
It has been argued that the United States won the war in Korea. However, it is probably more reasonable to suggest that the United States was not defeated in Korea. Obviously it was not a clear-cut victory such as was achieved in World War II, with the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan. It was a limited war, and Korea was concluded on limited terms, but ones entirely acceptable to the United States. We achieved a cease-fire with the national borders approximating the status quo ante. South Korea remains an independent democratic nation and has developed into an industrial powerhouse in the Far East. North Korea and China have not again attacked South Korea, which has proved to be a reliable U.S. ally.