Truckbusters From Dogpatch
Preface
by
William J. "Sandy" Colton
I’ll never forget that early morning August flight from Ashiya, Japan to K-9 just east of Pusan Korea.
It was dark when we took off. The center aisle of the C-46 was piled high with cases of supplies covered by a huge tarpaulin. The passengers sat slumped in hammock seats along each side. Most appeared deep in thought, some smoked nervously, one was asleep on the floor wrapped in the tarpaulin overhang.
Shortly after takeoff the sun rose, casting beams of light through the smoke filled cabin from the right side porthole like windows. I was a young, wet-behind-the-ears would-be writer about to enter my first combat situation and I was scared.
Looking around me in the brighter light I could see many other apprehensive faces. I wasn’t the only one afraid.
Peering out of the porthole window near me I soon saw an approaching coastline. Korea! Then came a terrible odor.
The small figure under the tarpaulin woke up and shouted “Who shit!”
“You’d better get used to it,” the crew chief shouted down to the small figure laying near his feet.
“The Koreans fertilize their fields with the stuff and you can smell it at ten thousand feet!”
It was later that I learned the small figure on the floor was Lt. Phil Conserva, an F-51 pilot with a great sense of humor.
We began to descend and soon made what sounded like a terrible landing on a runway made of perforated steel mats. I thought that the airplane was being torn apart!
When the door was opened we had our first look at our new home, a former rice paddy turned into an air field! What a mess! But before I left this outfit, a much wiser young man, I was going to see many more messes, much worse than this one.
During my nine months with the 18th many things still stick in my mind. I don’t remember which field it was but I remember a four-holer set out in the middle of a field all by itself for all to see that served officer and enlisted man alike.
I remember the luxury of a makeshift cold shower--a 55-gallon drum hanging over your head!
I remember, sadly, the Army units pulling back through us at Pyongyang East [airfield] at Thanksgiving time after the Chinese entered the conflict. We fed them cold turkey in the drafty old hangar that served as our mess hall, one of the few good meals we had in those days. They looked terrible and had only the old horse hair sleeping bags. It was cold with those Siberian winds howling down out of the north.
I remember too the exploding ammo and fuel dumps as we left that base. At Wonsan we only used the base as a staging area but it gave me a chance to sneak away with the ROK Capitol division for awhile and see the 51’s in action from the point of view of the infantryman on the ground in need of support.
Later, when I was with the Stars and Stripes, I got to cheer them on many times while on patrols with the Army or Marines.
In June of 1950 when the North Korean Army invaded South Korea, it was five years since the end of World War II. Korea and Japan were staffed with garrison soldiers, spoiled and out of shape for combat. The brand new U.S. Air Force, competing with Russia’s MIG fighters, had put all its money on jet fighters and air-to-air combat, ignoring ground support. The old and now obsolescent F-51’s were shipped off to National Guard duty and military advisory groups around the world. The jets at the time might have been great in a dog fight with another jet but lacked the fuel capacity to stay around very long and, because they were designed for speed, they could not get close enough to the ground to identify a small target.
With the invasion of South Korea it was time to call in the obsolescent F-51s for much needed ground support.
National Guard units throughout the United States lost their F-51s, which were loaded onto the aircraft carrier USS Boxer for rapid delivery to Korea. A few were rounded up around Asia and sent to Korea to join the few Col. Dean Hess and his KMAG [Korean Military Advisory Group] unit had.
Pilots were also needed who knew how to fly the ‘51. For the most part that meant old WW II pilots [early in the war].
The 13th Air Force in the Philippines provided that first group, all volunteers and pulled out of their new jets to join Hess in Taegu and form a unit called “Bout One,” later to become the 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing.