Troubles & Triumphs

The Air Force proclaimed one of the most successful weeks of the war in MIG Alley. In a hot series of air battles, the U.S. Sabres downed 15 MIGs and scored 25 more as damaged, with a loss of only two of the U.S. jets. In Washington, the Air Force gave Senator Lyndon Johnson's Preparedness Committee the totals up to March 25: 218 MIGs downed as against 28 Sabres. This is a ratio in the Sabres' favor of 7-9-to-1.

Unfortunately, the Sabre saga is not the whole story of the air war, though it gets most of the headlines. On their untouchable--or at least untouched--bases in Manchuria, the Communists now have an estimated 1,700 planes, of which 800 to 900 are jet fighters. While the enemy strength has been rapidly growing, the U.S., because of slow production and commitments in other theaters, has been unable or unwilling even to replace its losses in Korea. Some of the Air Force's 18 wings, including the only two Sabre wings in Korea, are under strength; they probably muster about 600 planes, of which fewer than 150 are Sabres. Navy and allied planes bring the U.N. total to about 1,050. Thus the enemy outnumbers the U.N. about five to three in all categories, about six to one in top fighters.

Very Tiger. Since the Reds have not attacked the allied front line, they have lost practically nothing to U.N. ground fire, whereas the great majority of the U.N.'s losses (about 890) are due to enemy flak. Red antiaircraft fire, increasing constantly in quality and quantity, now curtains long stretches of railroad, and on the highways Red flak-wagons guard the truck convoys. Around some sensitive targets in North Korea, the flak, automatic and radar-directed, is as deadly as the fiercest German concentrations of World War II.

The planes that go in against this lethal fusillade are the fighter-bombers: the Air Force's Shooting Stars, Thunderjets and propeller-driven Mustangs, as well as the Navy's Panthers, Skyraiders and Corsairs from carriers off the east coast. The Shooting Stars and Mustangs, although admirable for "deck" work (lowlevel attacks), are no longer in production, and parts are hard to come by. The squadrons that fly them have had to cannibalize some of their planes in order to keep going. The pilots grouse about their dangers and difficulties, and they fiercely resent the Red sanctuaries beyond the Yalu, but they are very "tiger" (Air Force lingo meaning "eager to fight").

Hold-Backs. The greatest triumph in the Korean air war is the fact that the Reds have--so far--not dared to throw their air potential against the U.N. lines. This Communist timidity has brought about a situation unprecedented since the airplane became a weapon: the side with fewer planes has used them to kill thousands of enemy soldiers and to harass enemy supply and transport, without suffering retaliation in kind. Whatever the Communists may do in the future, up to now they have been just as afraid of "widening the war" as the U.N. Perhaps, on the record, a little more so.

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