The Wingmen, page 7
Communist territory, north of the Main Line of Resistance (MLR), was considered “Indian Country,” and anyone hit by anti-aircraft fire caught an “arrow.” Pilots flying at the end of a formation, known as “flak back,” were most vulnerable to arrows. On-again, off-again peace talks took place in “The Holy Land,” a location in between Panmunjom and Kaesong. Flying near there was strictly forbidden. Colloquialisms also applied to the terrain. Bodies of water were dubbed the “Boot,” and the “Nutcracker Lake.” Key spots along the Rimjin River, near the Main Line of Resistance, were known as “Double Bend” and the “M in the Rimjin” (because it resembled the letter). And a noteworthy twin-peaked mountain range became “Marilyn Monroe.”
On Saturday, February 14, Jack W. Campbell, Jr., who had also served as an instructor at Pensacola during World War II, led Williams on his final fam. The hop doubled as a reconnaissance mission, with the two captains surveying the MLR and reporting back to K-3.
The next afternoon, Williams joined Mission Number 3333, a routine interdiction (ID) of enemy supply lines. He executed a preflight checklist and inspected the Panther assigned to him as well as its accompanying ordnance. Back in the squadron’s Ready Room he observed a briefing from the mission leader, Major Lloyd Dochterman. Twenty-five minutes before takeoff Williams trotted out to the runway. The fifth and final strike conducted that day would be comparatively small, just five pilots: Dochterman, Williams, Captain Joseph Carruthers, Captain Charles Street, and Captain William B. “Bill” Clem.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Clem had attended the University of Louisville before World War II interrupted his business administration studies. The twenty-year-old sophomore joined the Navy aviation cadet program and earned his wings at the naval air station in Livermore, California. Stateside throughout the fighting, Clem was attached after World War II to the Volunteer Reserve out of the Fifth Marine Corps Reserve District.
A real estate salesman in his hometown, he was recalled to active duty the same week as Ted Williams. Following retraining stops at Cherry Point and Roosevelt Roads—in North Carolina he went to a few restaurants and a ballgame with Williams—Clem left his wife, Marian, and young daughter, Barbara, for California in January 1953. During cold weather battalion training at Camp Pickel Meadows, he reconnected with Williams, and the two journeyed to Japan and then Korea aboard the same Navy transports.
By the time both men joined 311, Clem considered Williams one of “the guys” with whom he regularly socialized. In letters home to Marian and Barbara, he often spoke of “Ted.”
Five minutes before the scheduled liftoff at 1430 Hours, Williams, Clem, and the rest of the strike team “lit up” their airplanes; then they taxied along the runway, accelerated to 110 knots IAS (indicated air speed), and climbed. At twenty thousand feet in the air, the planes rendezvoused, checked in with the flight leader via radio, and headed northwest to an area fifteen miles outside of Sariwon.
Williams, Clem, and Carruthers—each on their first-ever combat mission—knew that fighters in 311 had encountered meager to intense automatic weapon anti-aircraft fire on similar bombing missions during the previous few days. Clem remembered feeling “nervous, but not too scared.”
“Boy I really had my eyes open for anything that looked like flak or MiGs,” Ted Williams wrote that evening. “But the trip was uneventful except we blew a bridge out and a rail cut.”
At 1534 hours, the planes reached their primary target, the rail line, and deployed thirty GPs. One confirmed cut was observed, and two more were considered probable. The mission having been deemed successful, the team swung around to make the 250-mile flight back to K-3. Forty minutes later the planes arrived and initiated landing procedures, beginning with the leader, Dochterman.
Clem attained a seventy-degree bank, reduced his engine’s revolutions per minute (RPM) to 70 percent, extended the landing gear and flaps, checked that the wheel indicators and hydraulic gauge read ninety degrees, and laconically reported on his radio: “One-Four, turning base. Wheels indication down and locked. Pressure up.” But as he neared Runway 09, he completely missed his mark and smashed the hull. According to one report, the munitions on an adjacent aircraft caught fire as a result.
Medical and fire personnel hurried to the runway to discover an unsalvageable airplane and an unharmed pilot. Nevertheless, Clem went to the hospital, where the only medicine prescribed was a shot of brandy.
“Luck was with me and I haven’t a scratch,” he wrote home.
That night pilots on the successful railroad cut, as well as others from MAG-33, relaxed and visited the Officers’ Club. Released from the hospital, Clem joined them, but did not stay long. The afternoon’s crash continued to bother him.
“I’m real mad at myself because it was all my fault,” Clem wrote to Marian and Barbara. “I had to see that all the guys got their free drinks at the bar tonight. I left early cause I don’t feel too glad about the whole thing.”
Clem worried about being grounded, perhaps permanently, as punishment for the crash.
“There is a big strike planned for tomorrow, I hope I can fly,” he continued. “I’ve got to redeem myself.”
Clem would indeed redeem himself. The following morning, he participated in the large-scale attack below the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. With exact precision he deployed all eight of his 250-pound GPs at once, triggering a secondary blast that shredded a Communist storage warehouse. And just for good measure, upon his return to K-3, he executed a textbook, easy landing, leaving the plane in pristine condition.
His friend Ted Williams, a part of that very same mission, could not say the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three Runs, Three Hits, Three Errors
Major John Glenn was not part of the enormous raid that Bill Clem helped successfully execute. Even the highly decorated and thoroughly trained pilot needed five cream puff hops, familiarization with his issued equipment—“I have never seen so much survival gear,” he told Annie—and review of the squadron handbooks before jetting out on missions. He spent his first several days inside the S-2 Intelligence Office studying and refining the small maps that he would carry with him inside the cockpit.
“One week since my arrival in this beautiful land and [I] still have yet to cross the bomb line,” he wrote to Annie. “I’m a little more than somewhat disgruntled.”
But he had already settled into his bitterly cold quarters and learned the names of the Korean waitresses inside the officer mess hall (“Ingrid,” “Hedy,” and “Lara”) as chaos began to encircle K-3.
“Hey, they got the Bush Leaguer! Ted Williams!” a radio operator shouted to anyone within earshot. “He’s on fire and going down near Kyomipo!”
“What!” responded Martin Loski, a freelance reporter visiting K-3 to interview Williams. “Anybody with him?”
“No one.”
“Now someone is telling him to ditch!” the radio operator continued to narrate.
“Looks like the Boston Red Sox will need a new outfielder,” Loski replied.
On the morning of February 16, two hundred Allied planes began to converge over the North Korean town of Kyomipo, twenty-five miles south of Pyongyang. While F-86 Sabre jets from the United States Air Force engaged Soviet-made MiGs, four additional Air Force wings and two Marine aircraft groups (MAG-12 and MAG-33) were to bomb dozens of Communist supply buildings and troop shelters. Nineteen pilots from VMF-311 and sixteen from VMF-115 flew for MAG-33. From K-6, near the western city of Pyeongtaek, pilots in MAG-12 would join with MAG-33 in the air above Kyomipo.
Prior to takeoff, Major Marvin “Pinky” Hollenbeck pulled aside Captain Ted Williams. The thirty-one-year-old Hollenbeck had been made leader of a four-plane division on the mission and was assigned Williams as his wingman. Well aware of the Reservist/ballplayer’s lack of combat experience, Hollenbeck told him, “Ted, I don’t care whether you hit the target or not, I just want you to get home safe.”
The thirty-five MAG-33 pilots left K-3 starting at 0935 hours and arrived at the target eighty minutes later. Just as Bill Clem did, Hollenbeck unloaded his eight 250-pound GPs, pulled up, and headed for the rendezvous far away from the target: Blow and Go. Hollenbeck’s wingman Williams trailed right behind and unloaded his GPs on a target he believed to be a tank and infantry training school. On his way out of the drop, small arms fire from Communist troops below missed Hollenbeck soaring by at several hundred miles per hour but was perfectly aligned with Williams. Multiple hits perforated the plane, which caught on fire.
Williams had learned at Cherry Point the previous summer that his Panther’s controls were very sensitive: “I can handle one with my little finger, actually.” The controls, also known as “the stick,” governed pitch (nose up and nose down) and roll (left and right wing up and down). But after his plane was hit over Kyomipo, Williams noticed a drastic change as he pulled up.
“I felt the plane mush up on me for an instant but I didn’t even know I was hit,” he said. “The first warning I had was a tightening of the controls. The stick got stiffer on me and I knew I had lost my hydraulic system. Then the electrical system went out on me. No radio, no fuel or speed gauges. No nothing.”
With the plane now difficult to control and leaking fuel, Williams followed standard procedure. He turned off the leaking hydraulics system, meaning the brakes and assisted control of the throttle no longer functioned. Several warning lights appeared on the cockpit’s console, including one which indicated that the engine was on fire. Despite flying a smoking, leaking, instrument-less, bullet-riddled aircraft, Williams was actually fortunate.
“John Glenn told me later that I was lucky the whole plane didn’t blow up on me,” he said.
With his plane still intact, Williams barked the standard “Mayday” call into his radio, which no longer worked. He could, however, see comrades in the air through his canopy. Several urged him, via hand signals, to eject from the plane and parachute to safety.
Williams, who had now removed his oxygen mask, foresaw two major problems with their suggestion. First, given how close to the target he had been hit, he remained in enemy airspace. Kyomipo was at minimum sixty miles from Allied-held territory. His barter kit, unloaded revolver, and salty demeanor—“I’m Captain T.S. Williams . . . and I don’t know a fuckin’ thing”—would not do him much good that deep into Communist territory.
Bailing out posed another concern for the thirty-four-year-old who hoped to one day return to baseball. Because he was much taller than most combat pilots, just squeezing into the cockpit had become a challenge for Williams and the ground crew at K-3.
“We actually had to physically jam Capt. Williams down with our feet to get his shoulder harness straps fastened,” one of the crewmen recalled. “We really had to cram him into the cockpit. We often thought ‘Boy, if he ever has to crash-land, he’ll come out of the cockpit like a spring.’”
The tight confines didn’t really bother Williams. The SNJ-4 that he had flown for two years at Pensacola was by no means spacious. But a rumor circulating among jet pilots terrified him.
“Ted told me later the reason he didn’t want to get out,” John Glenn said. “He’d heard about some Navy pilot a short time before that [who] ejected and his feet had hit the canopy and cut his feet off as he was being ejected. And Ted said he didn’t want to take a chance on that and so he’d rather ride this thing in.”
Refusing to bail out left Williams with just one option: climb as high as possible. This served two purposes. At that altitude the atmosphere contained less oxygen, which meant the engine fire that was indicated by the cockpit warning light could not burn as fiercely. Although the plane was rapidly leaking fuel, if Williams could reach roughly twenty thousand feet he would benefit from the thin air by flying with less drag. And if the engine did fail, he could then coast without fuel for miles, hopefully finding a safe place to land. Pilots referred to this method as flying “dead stick.”
Jerry Coleman—the New York Yankees second baseman who had joined Williams for a Navy physical examination the year before—served on the mission near Kyomipo. A pilot in VMA-323, which flew Corsairs, not jets, Coleman was attached to MAG-12. Around the time that Williams’s plane came under fire, Coleman unloaded his two thousand-pound bombs on his target. Suddenly, he heard over the radio great commotion, pilots yelling out “Mayday, Mayday.” Coleman had no idea that the pilot was his teammate on the 1950 American League all-star roster.
“You listen and here comes another young pilot, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you, you’re burning, I’ll take you to [K-13]’ and so off they go,” Coleman recalled. “And so whether you realize it or not that’s your brother, that’s you, when you listen.... Finally, the next morning we found out that that was Ted Williams, had an angel on his shoulder.”
The angel was twenty-two-year-old First Lieutenant Larry Hawkins.
Hawkins had enlisted in the Marines as a high school student in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, outside Harrisburg. While Ted Williams was winning his third and fourth American League batting titles in 1947 and 1948, Hawkins served as the Pine Grove High basketball team’s manager and sports editor for the school yearbook. (“Would like to be a test pilot” accompanied his senior year photograph.) Just to be accepted for basic training at Parris Island in South Carolina, Hawkins needed his parents to sign a waiver.
After preflight school in Pensacola, Hawkins earned his wings as a second lieutenant in November 1951. Again, because he was still a minor, his parents had to formally approve the commission via telegram. Less than a year later, he was assigned to K-3, and he had already flown forty missions for VMF-311 by the time he witnessed Ted Williams’s plane spewing white smoke from the engine and leaking fluid along the fuselage. By now the fuselage was on fire, not just the engine, something which Williams later said that he was unaware of.
“If I had known then that my ship was on fire, I damn well would have shot my canopy and jumped,” Williams soon wrote in the Saturday Evening Post.
Meanwhile, Hawkins continued to tail Williams, who without knowing it continued to head north, farther into Communist territory. Hawkins pulled alongside, and the two began exchanging hand signals: Hawkins tried in vain to coax Williams into ejecting.
Following Hawkins and his rudimentary instructions (tapping his chest to indicate “follow me”) Williams slowly turned south, continuing to climb, toward Allied territory. Realizing that Williams had no chance of reaching K-3, Hawkins radioed Major Hollenbeck, asking for instructions. The division leader, now also trailing Williams, told Hawkins to guide the plane to the nearest Air Force base, K-13. Hawkins radioed the tower at K-13, located roughly twenty-five miles south of Seoul, where the field had become crowded. Not only were Air Force F-86s returning back to base from the mission, but twenty-five pilots from VMF-311 and VMF-115 were now following or escorting Williams to K-13, each running low on fuel. As pilots scrambled to clear planes off the runway, fire and medical personnel prepared for Williams’s arrival. Meanwhile, First Lieutenant Hawkins continued to monitor the damaged bird in the air.
From thirty-five hundred feet Hawkins gave Williams the “gear down” signal to ready a landing. Without a functioning electrical system, Williams prepared to “blow” his gear down, in other words ignite a cartridge that would manually open the wheel well doors so that the landing gear dropped.
“The minute he hit the gear handle down, the wheel well doors came down, and immediately the fire erupted right underneath the fuselage,” Hawkins said. “So I called out over the radio ‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’”
Sitting atop billowing smoke and fire and unable to hear through his inoperable radio, Williams continued to descend and target the ground. Fortunately the runway at K-13 stretched ten thousand feet long, twice the length at K-3. At roughly 225 miles per hour—more than double the normal speed of a conventional landing—Williams brought the plane in. With the hydraulics system turned off, his dive brakes—essentially air flaps that increased drag on the plane, thus slowing it down—no longer worked. And with only one wheel barely protruding down from its well door, there was another problem. With the wheel well open, leaking fuel might collect beneath the fuselage, where fire had already broken out. Williams wisely pulled the lone wheel back into the well and closed the door.
From that point on, he would have to “belly” the plane in, sliding on the fuselage along the runway and relying on time, distance, and friction to stop the Panther.
As sparks flew, a piece of the plane, possibly the metal panel covering the wheel well, ripped off, smashing into the K-13 mess hall. Coasting for more than a thousand yards prompted Williams to do something unusual.
“If I ever prayed in my life, the only goddamn thing I said was ‘If there’s a goddamn Christ this is the time old Teddy Ballgame needs ya,’” he remembered. “I had to lean that way.... I have to feel that Christ is responsible, somebody’s responsible for this. Somebody’s gotta be in charge.”
Dozens of Air Force crew and pilots surrounded the runway to watch the speedy wreck, still unaware that the pilot inside had famously once ended the 1941 All-Star Game with a towering three-run home run. The spectators hit the ground as the Panther, and its 20 mm cannons, skidded by: they knew heat from the fire might set off the ammunition. While the plane started to slow down and the fire crew covered the hull in flame-retardant foam, two members of the K-13 rescue team helped Williams open the canopy and exit the cockpit. He climbed onto one of the wings, jumped down to the runway, then, according to First Lieutenant Rylen Rudy “took off for high cotton; he ran the 880 in absolutely world record time.”
Finally, the plane veered slightly off the runway into a dirt road, then came to a stop, twenty feet from a fire truck that the ground crew couldn’t get started.
