At the end of World War II, the United States’ first priority was the return of the civilian soldier to his home. Millions of tons of ammunition, supplies, and equipment had to be abandoned overseas. However, the greatest capital investment in weapon systems was in ships and aircraft, all of which were fortunately mobile. Great numbers of these modern assets were brought home and mothballed, the ships in freshwater estuaries and the aircraft on desert air bases. When the North Korean invasion caught the newly established Department of Defense at its nadir, the services turned to their mothballed equipment.
The Navy carrier force grew to nineteen fleet carriers, enough to maintain four off Korea as well as two constantly in the Mediterranean for the support of NATO. P51 Mustangs, veterans of World War II campaigns in Europe and the Pacific, became the main ground attack aircraft for the U.S. Air Force and our allies. F4U Corsairs, which had fought Japanese Zeroes in the Pacific, again flew from Navy carriers and Marine shore bases in support of UN ground forces. It was this air support that achieved total air superiority over the Korean battlefield and formed the third leg of the UN’s combined arms triad of infantry, artillery, and air. By the Chinese army’s admission, UN air power was the equalizer that offset the Communists’ vast superiority in ground forces.
Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers came out of mothballs to provide seagoing artillery to support the UN flanks. The evacuation of General Almond’s X Corps, with its combat vehicles, out of Hungnam in December 1950, would not have been possible without the ring of fire delivered by these major combatants and the sealift provided by amphibious and auxiliary ships.
TWO EPIC BATTLES
Although called the forgotten war, the Korean War nevertheless contributed two unforgettable military operations to brighten the legacy of U.S. arms: Inchon and Chosin.
At the west coast port of Inchon, just fifteen miles southwest of Seoul, the U.S. Navy, in an amphibious operation conducted under the most difficult conditions of terrain and tide imaginable, put ashore fifty thousand troops, led by twenty-five thousand Marines, on 15 September 1950. The troops drove east to link up with the Eighth Army, breaking out of the Pusan perimeter to complete a massive rout of the North Korean army. The 1st Marine Division made the assault landing, secured Inchon in one day, reached Seoul on the eighteenth, and liberated the capital of South Korea five days later. By the end of September, the Americans had routed the North Koreans and reached the thirty-eighth parallel. By means of the amphibious landing at Inchon, the United Nations in just three months had accomplished what it had set out to do: repel “armed invasion and restore peace and stability in South Korea.” In the long term, Inchon was more than a boldly conceived operation, a masterpiece of technical execution, and a pivotal victory. It was an essential lesson for our new Department of Defense that advancing technology would not necessarily make obsolete the proven fundamentals of warfare. In 1949, Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had stated in congressional testimony that amphibious landings were a thing of the past. Never again would it be feasible to assemble and concentrate the shipping required for such an operation, since it provided too inviting a target for atomic bombs. Bradley implied that a U.S. Marine Corps was no longer needed as part of our defense establishment.
Chosin was a different sort of campaign. On 25 November, when the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army first entered the Korean conflict, catching U.S. intelligence and UN forces by surprise, the 1st Marine Division was deployed deep in North Korea, west of the Chosin Reservoir, at the end of a seventy-eight-mile two-lane dirt road winding through some of the most mountainous country of the Korean peninsula. Surrounded by 120,000 regular troops of the Chinese Communist army, battling deep snow and temperatures down to thirty below zero, the 25,000 Marines of the 1st Marine Division fought their way out of the trap, defeating seven Chinese divisions in the process. China was so determined to destroy the Marines — and equally sure they would be able to do so — that staggering losses were accepted. Sixty percent of the 120,00 °Chinese engaged became casualties, including 30,000 killed or missing in action. Marine losses were a thousand killed and missing, but the 1st Marine Division battled their way out and destroyed two Chinese armies in the fighting.
The extraction and survival of the 1st Marine Division could be characterized justifiably as a successful tactical operation for the 1st Marines and a tactical failure for the Chinese. The mission of the Chinese army was to trap and destroy the Marines, and the People’s Republic of China failed to do so. The objective of the 1st Marine Division was to “advance to the South,” fighting their way through the encircling Chinese army groups and linking up with UN forces in the south. The Marines were successful, bringing out their wounded, most of their dead, and most of their military equipment. It was clearly a tactical success for the UN, the United States, and the Marines and a defeat for the Chinese.
Marine Corps historians make it clear that the “advance to the south” could not have been successful without total air superiority. Maj. Gen. Field Harris, USMC, the commanding general of Marine Air Wing 1, encompassing all Marine aviation in Korea, said the withdrawal of the entire 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir area would not have been possible without close air support. Most of this support came from carriers, Marines flying from Task Group 96.8 CVEs off the northwest coast of Korea, and Navy planes operating from the three Essex-class carriers in the Sea of Japan. General Harris, in an official dispatch to Rear Admiral Ewen, USN, commander, Task Force 77, stated specifically that the 5th and 7th Marine Regiments trapped by the Chinese at Yudamni on 2 December 1950 would never have made it to Hagaru-ri without TF 77’s air support.
4
Korea
It was 2 June 1953, and the USS Boxer was operating off Korea in the Sea of Japan. The weather was overcast with showers. As the Panther taxied up the deck and made a sharp turn to line up with the port catapult, the F9F’s thin tires were skidding on the wet Douglas fir deck. The yellow-shirted plane director, who was finding it difficult to keep from slipping, leaned into the forty knots of wind as the rain buffeted the flight deck. The wind was not a problem for me. The Panther needed all it could get. Loaded with four 260-pound fragmentation bombs and two 200-pound general-purpose bombs, the F9F was at maximum weight for launching. I was leading a six-plane F9F strike against a Chinese army marshaling area at Kisong-Ni in North Korea, about fifty miles north of the front lines, and would be the first plane off on the 7:30 AM launch. I heard the clank of the catapult bridle and then felt the jet squat slightly as the cat took tension on the aircraft. The catapult officer gave the turnup signal and I pushed the throttle hard against the forward stop. The revolutions per minute (rpm) dial showed 100 percent. I watched the gauge for three seconds to be certain the rpm reading was not just a surge, and then, bracing my hardhat against the ejection seat’s padded headrest, I saluted. There was the short delay, and then bang! the catapult fired. In two seconds I was off the catapult, over the ocean, ahead of the carrier, and flying at 125 knots.