Curtains for Bed Check

Nobody was sure of Bed Check Charlie's ancestry. Some Air Force officers thought he might be a Russian-built PO2 single-engined training biplane. To G.I.s the canvas-covered,wire-strutted plane looked like a cross between a box kite and an orange crate. They had named him Bed Check in the first place because at Pyongyang last fall, they used to stay awake nights until he came buzzing over from behind the enemy lines, dropped a bomb, a sack of bolts or nails, or maybe fired a few shots from a pistol and then headed for home.

Last week Bed Check was making a nuisance of himself again. Every night he came wheezing and clanking down from his North Korean hideout and bombed U.N. positions with 44-lb. mortar shells, apparently chucked over the side. For good measure, his rear-seat man did a bit of strafing with a burp gun. For two successive nights and twice each night, Bed Check attacked a U.S. airbase at Seoul. No one chuckled more heartily at the Air Force's embarrassment than U.S. foot-sloggers. They pointed gleefully to hurriedly dug foxholes around Air Force installations, howled when one flustered young Air Force officer appeared during one of Bed Check's attacks decked out in pajamas and bathrobe with a .45 strapped on over the ensemble.

Try as they might, Air Forcemen could not spot Bed Check's home base, thought it probably was a small field in North Korea, perhaps even a dried-up river bed. They also failed to pick him up on their elaborate radar screen, because he slithered in and around Korean, hills at such low altitude.

Antiaircraft batteries seemed confused by Bed Check. One ack-ack officer said he had orders not to fire on planes until they committed hostile acts. Asked if dropping bombs and strafing was regarded as hostile, he grinned: "Well, it certainly is unfriendly."

Near week's end Captain Richard M. Heyman, flying a B-26 Invader near Seoul, dropped down to investigate a suspicious blip picked up by radar. At 500 ft., he sighted an enemy plane that looked in the moonlight as though it might be Bed Check Charlie's crate. Captain Heyman fired a single burst from his .50-cahber guns, and the plane flew apart in midair. Air Force officers were pretty sure they had finished off Bed Check, but refused to say so definitely, suggested that other Bed Checks might turn up. If that happened, one G.I. from Texas offered to help the Air Force catch them: he would be glad, he said, to lasso them down.

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