Korean Combat (Yeoman Series) Page 3

  It was now apparent, Craddock told the assembled pilots, that the Chinese New Year Offensive had petered out to a great extent, enabling the United Nations forces to stabilize their front line south of Wonju, two-thirds of the way down the peninsula. It looked, he warned, as though the UN might have to fight a prolonged war of attrition.

  His situation briefing at an end, Craddock cleared his throat and laid aside the snooker cue he had been using to indicate various points on a wall map, then half-turned towards the officer who had been seated on his right throughout the talk.

  ‘Now, gentlemen,’ Craddock said, ‘most of you will remember Wing Commander Yeoman, who was attached to us for a few days last December before he went dashing off to get some operational hours in with the Americans. Now he’s back on attachment to us for the next few months, and he’ll explain the reason himself, in just a moment. First of all, though, I want to say that he’s no stranger to 493 Squadron. Nearly ten years ago, he flew Hurricanes with the unit in North Africa. No doubt if any of you want to know about that particular episode, he’ll be happy to oblige over a beer, later on. In the meantime, he’s got a bit of news that might be of interest to you; we’ve been saving it up for reasons that will shortly be apparent. Over to you, George.’

  The pilots looked at Yeoman as he stood up, his blue-grey battledress contrasting with the darker blue of the Australian wing commander’s. He removed the briar pipe that until now had seemed a permanent part of his features, and addressed the audience.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ Yeoman said. ‘I hope you haven’t got too attached to your Mustangs, because very soon you’re going to lose ’em.’

  A murmur ran through the briefing room as the pilots looked at one another, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ Yeoman went on, privately relishing the expectation on the Australians’ faces, ‘the aircraft carrier HMS Warrior sailed from Renfrew, in Scotland, bound for Japan. She is carrying your replacement aircraft, which are the latest variant of the Gloster Meteor-the Mark 8.’

  There was another buzz of conversation. Yeoman waited until it had died away, then said: ‘Let me give you a few details about the Meteor 8. It represents a big advance over the earlier Mk 4. Power is provided by two Rolls-Royce Derwent turbojets which give it a top speed of about 590 miles an hour at sea level, while the operational ceiling is 44,000 feet. The rate of climb is quite phenomenal. Fixed armament is the same as on earlier Meteors — that is to say, four 20-mm cannon in the nose-but there is also provision for two thousand-pound bombs or up to sixteen rocket projectiles on underwing racks.’

  He paused for a moment to let them digest this information, aware that he now had their full attention, then continued:

  ‘I am aware that many of you have known for some time that you would eventually receive replacement aircraft, and those of you who were expecting more advanced machines might well feel disappointed in the choice of the Meteor. Well, don’t. I’ve had a love affair with the Meteor for a long time; in fact, I commanded one of the first three Meteor squadrons back in 1945, so I know how well the basic design performs under operational conditions. And don’t forget that, in the Meteor 8, you’ll be flying a machine that’s only just beginning to enter service with the front-line squadrons of RAF Fighter Command. It’s powerful and it’s robust, it packs quite a punch and you’ll have the distinction of flying the first twin-jet aircraft to become operational in this theatre. I am confident that it will enable you to meet any potential opponent on very favourable terms.’

  Privately, Yeoman did not feel anything like as confident as he pretended. The Meteor 8 had been tested in mock combat against older jet types, such as the de Havilland Vampire and the Lockheed Shooting Star, and had shown itself to be superior on almost every count; but how it would fare against the MiG-15 was quite another matter. He would have a better idea when he’d had a chance to put the Meteor through its paces against the latest American fighter, the F-86 Sabre. That opportunity, he hoped, would come soon; one USAF fighter Wing in Korea was already operational with Sabres, and the Wing commanded by Jim Callender was also about to receive the fast jets. It would be fun, he thought, for Callender and himself to pit their wits against one another in mock combat.

  What was important now, Yeoman knew, was to sell the idea of the Meteor to the Australians. He was only too well aware, from his own experience, of how a squadron’s morale could drop if the air and ground crews thought that they were receiving an inferior aircraft. One or two of the men in front of him were already looking sceptical.

  ‘HMS Warrior,’ Yeoman went on, ‘is bringing thirty Meteor 8s and four two-seat Mk 7 trainers; they will be divided equally between the two RAAF squadrons. Conversion will be carried out at Iwakuni by myself and three other RAF pilots, all with lots of jet experience. What will happen is that you will be pulled back to Japan in batches of six, three from each squadron; then you will return to Mustang operations until both squadrons are fully converted, when the aircraft will be handed over. The same procedure will apply to the ground crews; an RAF engineer officer and a small team of technicians are setting up technical facilities at Iwakuni, so your engineering personnel, starting with officers and NCOs, will begin to receive instruction more or less right away. They won’t find it difficult; apart from the fact that it’s a jet, the Meteor is a pretty conventional aircraft — and I know that some of you, both air and ground crews, have already been on technical courses to initiate you into the mysteries of turbojet engines as a preliminary to converting to Vampires, which I understand the RAAF is to receive sometime in the future.’ There were a few nods from members of the audience.

  Yeoman grinned suddenly. ‘One other thing. You’ll be glad to know that, unlike earlier British types, the Meteor 8 is fitted with an ejection seat. So if you are unlucky enough to get into trouble at high speed, all you have to do is pull the handle and out you go. I hope that won’t be necessary.’

  He went on to give more technical details, then concluded his brief talk with a cautionary word about secrecy.

  ‘Ordinarily,’ he told them, ‘you’d have known that you were getting Meteors long before this. The reason for all the secrecy is that we want the Meteor to come as a nasty surprise to the opposition. We’ll need to develop new air fighting tactics, and we don’t want to be at a disadvantage while we’re doing that.’

  Later, two of the Australian pilots, both of No. 493 Squadron, strolled towards the mess hut, discussing what Yeoman had said. One of the pilots, Flight Lieutenant Peter Sweeney, had flown Thunderbolt fighter-bombers in Burma at the tender age of eighteen during the final drive that destroyed the Japanese there. His room-mate, Tim Duncan, had joined the RAAF a year or two later and was a Flying Officer. By sheer coincidence, both men came from the same place: Longreach, in Queensland. They had lived in different areas of the town, gone to different schools and had never met one another, as far as they could remember, before joining the RAAF.

  The two men walked in silence for a while, shadowy figures in the fog, pondering over what they had heard in the briefing room. Then Sweeney asked suddenly, ‘What d’you reckon to this Pom wingco, Tim? I’ve just realized why his name seemed familiar. He’s one of the top scorers, isn’t he?’

  His companion nodded. ‘Yeah. More than thirty, they reckon. Puts him in the top league, all right. Seems a decent enough bloke, but you never can tell. My first station commander had been quite an ace, too; you might know him.’ He mentioned a name, and Sweeney nodded. ‘Well,’ the other went on, ‘apparently he was a great bloke and one of the boys when the action was on, but as soon as the shooting stopped he turned into a real bastard, full of rules and regulations. Didn’t give a damn whether a bloke could fly or not, as long as his hair was trimmed and he wore his cap at the regulation angle.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with peacetime,’ Sweeney ventured. ‘Blokes get geared up to fight a war, then can’t settle down when it’s all over and start taki
ng it out on everybody else. Must admit, I was starting to feel a bit bolshie myself, before this lot blew up.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it looks like we’ll be here for quite a while, so there’ll be plenty of opportunity for you to get rid of your built-in frustrations. Any other kind of frustration might take a bit longer to overcome, stuck in this dump.’

  Sweeney laughed, clapping his friend on the shoulder. ‘Never mind, mate. Back to sunny Iwakuni before long. Think of that nice big American swimming pool, and those nice big American nurses. Now why the hell can’t we be supplied with creature comforts like that?’

  They reached the mess and went inside, shaking droplets of moisture from their caps. Outside, a light breeze was beginning to stir the grey vapour. Before long it would disperse, and the air over Pusan would once again vibrate to the crackling roar of Packard Merlin engines as the Mustangs once more took off to battle.

  Chapter Three

  IT WOULD BE THREE WEEKS MORE BEFORE THE METEORS ARRIVED in Japan, and in the meantime there was much fighting to be done. During the first week of February-a week that saw the light snow that covered Pusan disappear as if by magic, leaving a thin layer of mud that was quickly turned to dust by a keen wind-the four Mustang squadrons that shared the base were joined by a US Marine squadron, flying Grumman Panther jets. The Panthers were regarded by the Mustang ‘jockeys’ as something of a nuisance, because when they ran up their engines at the end of the runway their hot jet exhaust blasted away the earth under the pierced steel planking, causing it to subside. Not only that: they kicked up huge clouds of dust that drifted over the airfield and got into everything. It was no coincidence that, soon after the Panthers arrived, the Mustangs began to suffer a succession of engine failures.

  One of them had catastrophic results. Not far from Pusan airfield there was a huge prisoner of war compound — or rather, a series of compounds-holding many thousands of Chinese and North Korean PoWs. One day late in February, a Mustang of one of the American squadrons had an engine failure just after take-off. Carrying a full load of bombs and rockets, the aircraft plummeted like a stone into the middle of the PoW camp and exploded, killing fifty prisoners and injuring a hundred more.

  For Yeoman, February was a frustrating month, for he was forbidden to fly on the direct order of the Officer Commanding, British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Tokyo. Countless protesting telephone calls produced only the same result. ‘Be patient, Yeoman,’ he was told. ‘Your experience is too valuable to be thrown away on some ground attack operation that can be flown quite satisfactorily by other pilots. Your turn will come soon enough.’

  So he attached himself to the Joint Operations Centre in Pusan, helping to co-ordinate attacks on enemy targets. Attacks by the Pusan Mustangs were fully integrated with strikes by American F-80 and Panther jets. No MiGs were encountered during these operations, which were well to the south of the Yalu, but on one occasion four Mustangs of 493 Squadron ran headlong into three North Korean Air Force Ilyushin II-10s-elderly fighter-bombers used to good effect by the Russians against German tanks during the latter stages of the Second World War, but now very much past their prime-and sent all three down in flames.

  Fighting a war from outside the cockpit of an aeroplane was not to Yeoman’s liking, and it was with considerable relief when, late in February, he learned that HMS Warrior had just entered Hiroshima Bay, bearing her precious cargo of jet fighters. Hours later, he received a signal ordering him to Iwakuni. With him, on the RAAF ‘mail run’ Dakota that made daily flights to and from Korea, went the first six pilots who were to undergo the conversion course.

  Iwakuni airfield, which lay between rich farmland and the sea in southern Honshu, was luxuriously different from Pusan. It had originally been built as a training establishment for Japanese Navy pilots during the war, and boasted a long concrete runway in addition to steel hangars and extensive living quarters. There was also a slipway and a wharf, protected by a breakwater and the sunken wreck of a Russian cruiser captured by the Japanese in the battle of Tsushima in 1905. A massive crane, standing on a concrete platform near the edge of the tiny harbour, had once been used to load rocket-propelled Kamikaze piloted suicide flying-bombs on to vessels for transportation to Okinawa, where they were taken on their last journey slung under the bellies of bombers. A further reminder of those desperate last-ditch Japanese tactics was the island of Miya Jima, which lay north of Iwakuni at the entrance of Hiroshima Bay; it was here, at a sacred shrine, that the Kamikaze pilots had rested and prayed before going off on the mission that would obliterate them.

  A still grimmer reminder of the war lay twenty miles away. Steel and concrete had repaired the devastation inflicted on Hiroshima on that morning of6 August 1945, when the city had died under the mushroom cloud of the first operational atomic bomb, but nothing could hide the terrible scars and injuries displayed by many of the inhabitants. Only death would eliminate those.

  There were some who said that Iwakuni Air Base had just about everything, and they were not exaggerating. The base possessed facilities not only for the operation of landplanes and flying-boats, but also for storage and maintenance on a huge scale. It was a veritable crossroads of the air, with up to twenty different types of aircraft to be seen there in any twenty-four hour period.

  The base was under American command, but part of it was allocated to the RAAF. In addition to the two Mustang squadrons-now in Korea — which were normally based there, there was an RAAF transport squadron, a communications flight and a maintenance squadron, as well as a detachment of Sunderland flying-boats from the RAF’s Far East Flying-Boat Wing at Seletar, Singapore. The whole lot came under the control of No. 99 (Composite) Wing, RAAF, which in turn was under the operational control of the US Fifth Air Force.

  Yeoman soon found that the Officer Commanding No. 99 Wing, Group Captain John Trayce, was not in a particularly good mood, and that this was occasioned indirectly by the arrival of the Meteors.

  To his consternation, Yeoman learned that the veil of secrecy that was supposed to have concealed the Meteors’ arrival in Japan had been ripped aside while HMS Warrior was still west of Suez. When the carrier called in at Malta’s Grand Harbour en route, her deck cargo of Meteors had been photographed by newsmen; the same thing had happened at Singapore. There had been more unwanted publicity a few days later, as the carrier passed close to the coast of Formosa on the last leg of her journey; the Chinese Nationalists, in a high state of tension as a result of what their communist enemies were up to in Korea, had suddenly announced that they were going to bomb the ‘unidentified’ carrier in their waters. Only high-speed intervention by the British Government had averted a disaster.

  Then, as though that were not enough, a senior Australian Government minister had announced to the press that Australian pilots would soon be flying the British jets in action over Korea.

  ‘It’s an absolutely appalling situation,’ Group Captain Trayce told Yeoman. ‘I’ve been hounded by reporters and war correspondents and the like ever since that damn carrier dropped anchor, and now the General’ — he referred to the commander of the Commonwealth Occupation Force — ‘the General has issued this.’

  He waved a slip of paper under Yeoman’s nose. The wording on it absolutely forbade the release of any further publicity on the Meteors until after the jets had been in combat.

  Yeoman gave a grunt. ‘I don’t see that it makes any difference, now,’ he said. ‘The damage has been done. I’d like to bet that the Chinese already have three-views of Meteors plastered all over their crew rooms.’

  They went to station workshops to have a word with the engineer officer who was supervising the overhaul of the Meteors after their long voyage, then drove to the mess for lunch. To his delight, Yeoman found a fat letter awaiting him from his wife, Julia; he peeped inside and found that she had enclosed the latest photograph of their little daughter, June, who would be two years old in a couple of months’ time. He tucked the letter away in his pocket, decidi
ng to save it as a treat until later.

  A Japanese waiter, obsequious and bowing (was he really of the same race that hurled itself to destruction in fanatical banzai charges, Yeoman asked himself?) came up to them as they settled themselves in the comfortable mess anteroom and took their order, bringing them two large gins and tonic. Large gins at Iwakuni cost twopence each, and consequently their popularity was not inconsiderable.

  Lunch was one of the best Yeoman had ever eaten: prawns and oysters from Hiroshima Bay, followed by fillet steak with all the trimmings. These excellent rations were all provided by the Americans. So was the food at Dogsville, Yeoman thought, but the quality was nothing like as good. The caterers on the big bases in the rear areas clearly looked after their own.

  Three RAF pilots were to assist Yeoman in the process of converting the Australians to Meteors; they were due to arrive the following day. There was no real hurry, for it would be some time before the Meteors could be made fully airworthy. Before leaving Scotland, each aircraft had been treated with special anti-corrosive paint as a precaution against the ravages of salt spray; the snag was that it took a long time to get it off again. The only real method was to scrape every inch of the airframe with a perspex scraper, then wash it down with paraffin and finally soapy water.

  Yeoman counted himself fortunate in the high calibre of the ground staff who had been assigned to the Conversion Flight. It had come as a pleasant surprise to find that he already knew one of the senior NCOs, a Warrant Officer Adams who had served at Boscombe Down, in Wiltshire, just after the end of the war, when Yeoman had been a test pilot there. Boscombe Down was where the latest combat aircraft intended for the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm were evaluated, and Yeoman had flown some quite extraordinary machines during his time there.