The Wingmen, page 6
Another senior officer impressed Williams during his first few weeks in Korea.
“So I get into K-3, which was our base over there, and we’re having a big squadron meeting, you know,” Williams remembered forty-five years later. “And there’s two guys standing over there, maybe 60 to 70 feet. And I look and say, ‘That looks like the right stuff to me. . . . One of them was John Glenn.”
Major Glenn arrived at K-3 twelve days after Williams. Given his yearning to serve and an impressive résumé—two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a spot on the commandant’s staff at MCS, test pilot work at Patuxent River—Glenn became a valuable asset to the squadron. Immediately assigned to the post of assistant operations officer, he soon took over as operations officer, a vital job that he had previously performed with the Hellions in Guam and the Death Rattlers at El Toro. After 311’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Francis “Ken” Coss, and executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Art Moran, Glenn considered the role “sort of third in command, although there may be other senior people.”
The operations officer occasionally planned missions and briefed the entire squadron, but by far his most challenging task was assigning flights, or “hops.” Per Marine regulations during the war, when a pilot reached one hundred combat missions, they were either reassigned to a desk job or sent home. Some officers hoped to cram in as many flights as possible.
“All the fellows are really hot to go and get griped when anyone gets ahead in missions,” Glenn wrote Annie in February. “Of course, some of them may have this ‘100 missions to relief’ in their heads and want to get them in for that reason, but it’s so unusual to see a whole squadron so eager. Guess the jets have a lot to do with it. If we were all pushing throttles on the ‘bent-wings,’ some of the eagerness would probably dwindle.
“Any guy who is always around trying to get a hop is a ‘sniveler,’ so with a whole squadron like this, it makes it rough on ‘snivelers’ like myself because we have so much competition.”
But even John Glenn did not care for one particular duty assigned to all pilots within 311. Two-hour combat air patrol (CAP) shifts were scheduled half an hour before sunrise or half an hour after sunset, and pilots sat in the cockpit of their Panther, on the runway ready to take off at any moment. Oftentimes, the plane never left the ground: “Hate these weeks where we have this blasted CAP. Sit in the plane and sit and sit,” he wrote Annie. The transistor radio on which he listened to orchestra music helped Glenn pass the time. He also brought his Kodachrome camera aboard; during missions, he snapped photographs from thousands of feet in the air.
Despite the CAPs, as Glenn told Annie that spring, he was having “the time of my life. May even pass up my first R&R.”
Ted Williams was not a sniveler, and certainly not having the time of his life. Beginning with his arrival at Willow Grove to begin retraining—“I’m still praying for a truce in Korea,” he told reporters that day—to his departure from California, Williams had resented his recall. And once he arrived at K-3, he was more focused on the food in the mess hall and where he might get a haircut than fulfilling his one hundred missions.
“Looks like I’ll beat the 15th of Feb. deadline for my first missions as the day after tomorrow should be ‘it,’” he wrote to a friend in the U.S. “You can say that again about me being in any more outfits. This is the last.”
By the middle of February, the reluctant, fatalistic Reservist and the eager, optimistic active-duty regular Marine had each settled into the same spot for the foreseeable future. And from the outset neither knew what to make of the other.
“When Glenn joined the squadron I didn’t know who he was,” Williams remembered. “None of us knew much about him.”
“I didn’t know what to expect from him,” Glenn said. “I didn’t know whether he would be a guy who only talked about baseball.”
Both men’s initial assessments were wrong: Williams avoided the topic of baseball, and several members of 311 knew quite a bit about Glenn.
Upon hearing of Glenn’s arrival to K-3, a pair of second lieutenants approached Lieutenant Colonel Art Moran. They urged the squadron’s executive officer to ensure that Glenn was assigned to 311, not 115. Moran asked why.
“He is the greatest guy and the best instructor ever to have been seen in the Navy’s flight school,” replied one of the two young lieutenants who had likely earned their wings at the naval air station in Corpus Christi, where Glenn instructed pilots from 1949 to 1951.
A few of the more seasoned officers already flying missions for 311 knew Glenn as well. Majors James G. Fox and Robert Sabot had served alongside him in China after World War II.
And Major Julian Craigmiles, a pilot in the photo squadron, had served with Glenn in the Marshall Islands as part of VMO-155. While at K-3, Craigmiles told others of Glenn’s leadership and abilities in the cockpit, but also his subtle humor.
“When we were going oversees on an aircraft carrier, we were sunbathing on the deck,” Craigmiles remembered about their time together in World War II. “Glenn remarked that the voyage reminded him of the fellow who fell off the Empire State Building; and as he was passing each window, called out ‘Everything is all right so far!’”
Not everyone knew Glenn’s reputation when he first arrived. Many of the Reserve pilots at K-3, like Ted Williams, had been inactive for several years before war broke out. Aside from brief refresher courses and retraining stops, they had not been near a Navy or Marine air base since World War II. To Reserve pilot Robert “Woody” Woodbury, Jr., a first lieutenant in VMF-115, Glenn “was just a nonentity; just another Marine pilot.”
No one would say the same about Captain Williams. The tall baseball star and national pitchman for Chesterfield cigarettes, Thom McAn dress shoes, and Johnson’s Car-Plate Auto Wax stood out like a sore thumb.
Several officers playfully chided Williams when he arrived. Every pilot, including John Glenn, took to calling the lifetime .347 hitter “Bush,” short for “bush leaguer” or well below acceptable standards.
“Let’s see now, Bush, in 1948 you batted .269, didn’t you?” one might say.
“No, no, you’re cheating ole Bush,” added another. “He hit .270 that year.”
Williams would laugh, and reply, “Look it up, fellows, it’s in the book.”
Even Lieutenant Colonel Moran, teased him, saying Williams was safer flying jets over Communist North Korea than he was “dodging all those pop-bottles” at Fenway Park.
And a fake memo that circulated among 311 pilots, written in response to the CO’s real memo, joked about whether or not Williams “could get to first base with Marilyn Monroe. . . . DiMaggio didn’t.” The starlet had recently told a Hollywood reporter that she and Joltin’ Joe were “just good friends.”
Still, there was no denying that K-3’s newest resident was a bona fide national celebrity. Marines who wrote home to their wives and children mentioned just seeing Williams around the base. On the day he joined 311, Glenn wrote a letter to Annie. Among the many details about the base, his quarters, and familiar officers, Glenn told her, “Ted Williams is in outfit. Lives in next hut. Met him—seems OK.”
Both enlisted men and officers encouraged Williams to join the base’s occasional softball game. The public information officer of the First MAW read through weekly requests from the Associated Press, the International News Service, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Colliers, and Sport magazine for interviews with Williams. Six weeks before the start of spring training, Williams was answering reporters’ questions about the Yankees, the Indians, and the Red Sox’ wacky young outfielder Jimmy Piersall.
Williams preferred not to talk about the Red Sox, other major-leaguer stars, his homer one afternoon in Chicago that defeated a fellow pilot’s local club, or anything of the sort.
Second Lieutenant Harold Breece, an electronics officer at K-3, did not care much about baseball. He had no idea who patrolled left field for Boston. Someone introduced him to Williams at the Officers’ Club and the two made pleasantries. Eventually Breece, born and raised in Yakima, Washington, mentioned his interest in fishing. Williams perked up, and they talked at length about their favorite spots all over North America.
“Well, lieutenant colonels and colonels would come by and interrupt our conversation and talk baseball,” Breece recalled. “A few days later I bumped into him. We met on the flight line or someplace, just going our different ways. I go up to him and apologize for not knowing who he was. He said ‘I didn’t mind. I’m up to here with baseball. I go to the club and that’s all they want to talk about! . . . I’m full of it. That’s my occupation. I love fishing.’”
New arrivals to K-3 in late 1952 and early 1953 immediately endured two overwhelming blows to the senses.
“Pohang had a terrible smell, especially when the wind would blow,” remembered Sergeant Fred Miser, a member of the Air Maintenance Squadron. “Human waste was their main fertilizer used in growing rice.”
John Glenn noticed it too, although the scent of a traditional Korean food fermenting outside the neighboring homes bothered him nearly as much.
“He didn’t care for kimchi,” David Glenn remembered. “Something about that really put him off, I think maybe it was the strong garlic smell or something or his New Concord palate back then in the early 1950s.”
But it was the intense cold of, not the smell carried by, the wind that made a deeper impression on Glenn and every member of Marine Aircraft Group-33.
K-3 sat below Yongil-man, a six-mile-wide bay cut out from the Sea of Japan. With temperatures twenty degrees Fahrenheit or lower, winters so close to the water were brutal.
Aware of the frigid conditions on the peninsula, the Marine Corps sent personnel slated for deployment to cold weather battalion training at Camp Pickel Meadows in the Sierra Nevada’s Toiyabe National Forest. Chosen for the high altitude, craggy terrain, and thick snow, the spot twenty miles north of Bridgeport, California, closely resembled the landscape of Korea, making it an ideal location for fifteen-mile training courses and mock battles in the snow.
“Nobody can fight in bitter cold, but those Commies never got the word,” Marine Corps Gazette explained. “As long as they do it, we’ll just have to learn.”
For several days, both enlisted men and officers slept in sleeping bags and ate C rations out of a rucksack. Eventually they moved on to cozier quarters inside Quonset huts and dined at a makeshift mess hall. During his week-and-a-half training in January, Ted Williams caught a virus that stayed with him for months. On the route to K-3, his Navy transport stopped for a few days in Tokyo, where “everybody went out on the town except me. I stayed in bed for two days feeling lousy.”
The accommodations at K-3 didn’t cheer Williams up any.
Officers at K-3 were housed in long rows of small square huts. During World War II, the Army used these canvas-lined huts in the tropical climates of the Central and South Pacific. In Korea, during the winter, Marines practically froze in the poorly insulated quarters. “These huts are like a screen,” one officer at K-3 wrote from underneath four blankets.
“Korea is the coldest hole I have ever even imagined and here we are in these damn tropical huts,” recalled First Lieutenant Rylen B. Rudy, who arrived at K-3 in December 1952. “You got strings going across that you can hang your clean laundry on and you’d sit there and watch the socks or skivvies or whatever wave in the breeze ’cause the wind was going through that darn tropical hut.”
Each hut housed three men, who slept inside mountain sleeping bags atop cots far too short for the six-foot, three-inch Williams. With no indoor plumbing, pilots relieved themselves in the squadron’s outdoor latrine or one of the upright pipes (“piss tubes”) located around the base. Shaving and teeth-brushing were done standing over a small tin basin using a compact mirror and jerry cans of water. Bathing was available at the nearby “shower hut.”
In the middle of each individual hut sat the most important equipment, a potbelly stove that burned kerosene when there was enough and jet propellant (JP) when there wasn’t.
“The Army was the one that controlled the oil for the potbellied stoves that we had,” said First Lieutenant Rudy. “Well, they gave us about four hours per day of oil and that’s all. The thing that they didn’t realize, we’re flying jet airplanes. JP-3 is coal oil so what we’d do is we’d take an airplane refueler down through the hut area into these fifty-gallon drums that we had sitting outside and we’d fill those damn drums with JP and we had a hot stove twenty-four hours a day.... If you were more than about four feet away from the potbellied stove that sat in the middle, it was cold.”
Fresh off a rough night’s sleep, pilots within 311 carried out daily flights, or sorties, from within F9F Panthers. Introduced by the Grumman Engineering Aircraft Corporation in the late 1940s, the Panther became the highest-performing fighter of both the Navy and the Marines during the Korean War. By the time Ted Williams and John Glenn reported to K-3 in February, 311 flew three different versions of the single-seat plane: the F9F-2, the F9F-4, and the F9F-5. By late April, 311 would use the F9F-5 model exclusively.
Spanning 38 feet and powered by a 6,280-pound-thrust Pratt & Whitney J48 turbojet engine, the F9F-5 could attain 543 miles per hour (Mach 0.82) in level flight at 35,000 feet. At the end of each wing was a fuel tip-tank, which could be jettisoned if necessary. Combined with the internal fuel, the two tip-tanks gave the Panther a range of approximately 1,000 miles.
“[The Panther] wouldn’t go as fast as a lot of other jets,” Glenn recalled, “but it was a very tough airplane and would take a lot of hits, which I found out later was to my advantage.”
Both the F9F-4 and F9F-5 models reflected improvements that strengthened the wings to carry up to four thousand pounds of weaponry affixed to multiple pylons on the underside of each wing. The pylons were designed to accommodate general purpose (GP) bombs of several different weights up to a thousand pounds, napalm incendiary bombs, and two types of fin-stabilized rockets.
Sporting a five-inch diameter warhead, the steel-encased high velocity aircraft rocket (HVAR) streaked toward its target at more than one thousand feet per second. The HVAR was highly effective against most enemy ground transports and targets, but not the Soviet-built T-34 tank that both North Korea and China utilized. To combat the T-34, the Navy air weapons station at China Lake, California, modified the HVAR with a six-and-a-half-inch, shaped-charge warhead. This improved weapon was called the anti-tank aircraft rocket (ATAR).
Depending on weather conditions, MAG-33 Panthers flew north every day from Pohang into Communist-held territory above the 38th Parallel. GPs, HVARs, ATARs, and napalm tanks, dropped from a few hundred feet above, pounded enemy supply lines, ammunition depots, and troop shelters. In early 1953 targets in the North resided in places such as Sinanju, Wonsan, and Songchon. Occasionally 311 and 115 teamed up for larger strikes featuring as many as thirty-six planes.
Flying strictly air-to-ground sorties, pilots rarely encountered or engaged enemy aircraft during these strikes. Although on July 21, 1951, a Soviet-made MiG-15 shot down Richard Bell, a first lieutenant with 311, who survived two torturous years as a prisoner of war. In addition to interdictions (i.e. attacking enemy resources), some missions, known as close air support (CAS) sorties provided aerial cover for Marines and United Nations ground forces. Deploying GPs and dropping napalm tanks (“nape scrapes”) required flying hazardous, low-level pinpoint attacks within range of rifle and anti-aircraft cannon fire from enemy ground troops below.
“Our job was to support the ground-pounders on the front lines,” Ted Williams remembered. “We’d dive down on the Chinese, drop our load, and get the hell out of there as fast as we could.”
After a while, MAG-33 became known as the “Blow and Go Group,” a moniker posted on the official sign that hung outside K-3.
Before joining the Blow and Go Group on daily sorties, new pilots underwent additional training by way of lectures, briefings, and review of procedures listed in the exhaustively detailed “VMF-311 S.O.P for Tactical Flight Operations” handout. The fifty-one-page document outlined everything from cruising speeds, landing procedures, bombing tactics, and flight patterns to emergency protocols such as ejecting from the cockpit, parachute deployment, and survival gear. In addition to a first aid kit, pilots carried flares, a life vest (referred to as a “Mae West”), and shark repellent in preparation for a crash-landing in the freezing Sea of Japan or the Yellow Sea. For encounters with friendly or unfriendly locals, each also carried a blood chit, cerise (friend or foe) panel, barter kit, knife, and revolver.
“What the hell good that peashooter was going to be, only God knows,” Williams recalled. “Mine was never loaded. I’d decided that if I was forced to parachute out behind Chinese lines, I was going to float down with my hands up in that air. ‘I’m Captain T.S. Williams,’ I was going to tell the gooks, ‘and I don’t know a fuckin’ thing.’”
In addition to operational study, “familiarization” or “fam” flights, also known as “cream puff hops,” were required. The cold weather, winds, and physical terrain differed greatly from Cherry Point, El Toro, and Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. And as the new assistant operations officer, John Glenn became fixated on studying the detailed maps posted around the S-3 Operations Office.
The peninsula was vastly different from the atolls and islands that he had navigated while in the Pacific during World War II. Glenn became especially focused on the mountain ranges throughout Korea.
“This is a really rough area to fly over,” he wrote Annie, “but I guess it would be worse to walk over.... Mountains, mountains, all over the place.”
Five fam hops, each roughly an hour, offered new pilots a chance to get the lay of the land as well as learn the important code words for particular hot spots and situations.
