L-19 Bird Dog Pilot in Korea (updated)

welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about today we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance for one of their celebrity lectures let's go see what cindy has for us today welcome everyone to the Western Museum of Flight I'm Cindy maka and I'm the director of the museum in the domain of been-there-done-that our speaker today certainly qualifies as a charter member he's no stranger to the domain of tough assignments either in this season of jack-o'-lanterns ghosts and zombies nothing from any costume shop promises to be as hair-raising as some of the exploits that became routine tasks for the pilots who flew these extraordinary missions please sit comfortably at the edge of your seats while we welcome Bob Cashman the business of directing artillery fire is really kind of fun how many of you here have have been on the ground when they a significant artillery piece was fired off yeah it's so loud it's unbelievable almost instantly you have a hearing problem you could report in for sickbay right then after one shot and probably qualify this is an L 19 Cessna built about 3,000 of these they're an incredible airplane they're a modification of a Cessna 172 C on this field here I'm sure this is the interior of the airplane if you look at it it's the old old old style gyro this is the left wing root of this airplane this is a pretty modern one if you'll notice the red switches up here after we had a lot of trouble talking people into targets and I'll talk about that they added some white phosphorous rockets and it takes two switches to fire a rocket you one-armed or rocket and when to fire the rocket it also had some flares to light up the ground fires out has a little parachute on it that burns for about four minutes and it lights up the ground so you can see what's going on down there to figure out who to send the guns after the artillery spotter is really the baddest guy in the theater and of course he then becomes the top target in the theater here's an L nineteen in Korea and get a look at the hillside look at the terrain this is why it's very difficult to teach a guy to figure out where he's at from looking at the ground or looking at the maps or putting the combination together they all looked the same and there's almost no roads bridges roads and so forth really didn't exist of any consequence so it's very difficult to tell which is our guys and which is their guys and whose Hill is which if you look at Korea the middle of the country is right across here that's our Demilitarized Zone within the the little figure Eight's our airports we had to locate ourselves close to an Air Force Airport to get fuel we got our fuel in a little two-wheel trailer and we'd pump it out with a little hand pump a wobble pump Magali up in the top is where you hear all about the f-86 is fighting the MiG's and the line right across here is north of there is China the Chinese stayed on their side of the line but they resupplied everything so there are large ammunition dumps just across the river and the Navy and the Air Force patrol that River very carefully this area here was full of ships and there was activity on the ground all the time between the Royal Marines sneaking in at night and blowing things up and just they just kept everything stirred up all the time bottom line is we came in here right down here and that Airport looks like this and this is a real bunch of cats and dog airplanes this is an l5 stinson which was a very common airplane there's another one right here down there is another l5 down here is an El 17 which is an Avion and over here is a piper or a it's one of the L two three or four seriously that was the aviation equipment at the time we got there there was literally none as we brought the first Ella 19's to Korea and it was a huge giant step to give us the time over the target or the range this is the guns that were in my outfit we were the 400 second Field Artillery of the 45th division we had self-propelled hundred 55 millimeter guns at 16 of them we had 42 trucks and five jeeps and some other minor equipment of any consequence about 40 radios which became very important this is our first deployment of these guns they had been brought ashore at Incheon and were stored at Incheon and we went and got him and brought him over and brought him into the into a position they are in a firing position here they moved up about a hundred yards from here and actually were fired the terrain behind us this is what they called the iron triangle that whole series of battles that you heard about Heartbreak Ridge sand castle pork chop hill that whole string is right there that's the range of mountains that's what they looked like the only decent flat area is where we were right there and we we built that into an airport the next assignment for me was the airport at Suwon and this was a class act it had tents with wood floors here we are our unit was arriving we don't have a picture of the airport but there was nothing on the airport except 5l 19 s at that point we had problems with fuel because the fuel was lousy and had water in it and we had to pour it out through into jerrycans through us to through a chamois skin and then you'd take it and then you rinse the chamois skin then you'd pour it back into another chair it's very canny and you'd still pick up water and you do that three four times to get the water out of it so we could bring the planes up this is a group that was from Merced California this is a rifle company and you can see that they're pretty well equipped some brilliant soil back at the Pentagon figured out that the 39th division was on the line and had been there for well over a year and the 40th division was to come in and replace him the 45th division did replace the 38th division which was on the left or the west side of the of this of these mountains where I was the in their brilliance they figured out that you is the rifle that all the infantryman could keep their weapons and stuff and the 40th was in Japan the 40th was in Japan 30 already loaded with all its equipment and at full strength so they said gee whiz we'll let the 38th leave their equipment there in the 40th will leave their equipment in Japan and just trade the personnel back and forth and we won't have to haul that stuff around brilliant idea by somebody who wasn't around because the reality was the 40th got there and the 38th didn't have any equipment it had all been destroyed used up worn out of their radios they only had seven that worked which should be almost impossible to get anything to work of their field pieces their unit their guns were one 105 millimeter howitzers nearly all of them had no tires were not movable they were there but you couldn't do much with them they had no ammunition they they literally used up everything and they didn't have good winter weather so the 45th which was a which was a wealthy division by the standards at that time was merged together with the two and Ridgeway himself came down and engineered this and he reassigned the people and he fired the general that was in charge of that whole operation and replaced him and that way the 40th got some decent equipment the clothing that they're wearing came from the 45th and we were kind of glad to give it to him because a white uniform meant that you're gonna go up to the front and if they want my white uniform here it is guys no problem there is a 40th division with the 45th division gun man by 40th division guys going into position just at the bottom of the Iron Triangle and you can see the size of the bullets the thing is such that you can unscrew the top and dump out little powder bags inside and the powder bags are numbered 1 to 9 and the firing order depending on how far you wanted to shoot and what your boy you're shooting it you'd put in the right number of bags or the right number two bags and then screw the lid back on then you had a fuse and you could set the fuse either to go off in seconds from the time of firing or at an altitude depending on the kind of huge you had some of them we had both kinds but the ones that were firing at ltitude didn't work the way you got your ammunition was really modern these were Republic of Korea troops that we sort of drafted for the job and they're carrying two shells each shell weighed about 80 pounds so each guys carrying about 160 pounds the reason they're walking is because there's no Road the army when it first went there the 39th that we came in and replaced had mules but the mules kept disappearing and and they figured out finally that the guys were they were stealing him and eating him here we are air dropping ammunition into the same thing these are 105 millimeter shells were dropping in here in support of a different unit than the one I just showed you this is just over the hill that first hill that you see in the rise there it was it was not easy place to get to but we had a hell of a time getting the guns over the hills but once they were in position then we armed them pretty well and then we could supply them with it by air this is taken from my plane looking down with a key 20 camera of the aerial camera and the film is five and a half inches wide and 56 feet long and you would wind it up with a spring and then you would you could automatically you could shoot a series of films until the spring came unwound then you wind it up again it's a little bit of an illusion because we were at about 5,000 feet and the planes which were c-119 drop that at about 2500 feet so they were almost 2,000 feet below us although it doesn't look at the general headquarters for the military or the army and the air flow actually the entire UN operations was at Osan Korea Osan was a hundred and fifty miles south of the Demilitarized line and we were flying around the hills and this was taken out that left window of the airplane the idea of it was to show the railroad track which is down underneath there because there was a there was a double track railroad for Pusan to Seoul and that was our main navigating device we followed that railroad track up if you got lost you headed east or west or they get the track or the water one or the other and then you knew pretty well where you were and then you'd start figuring out where you wanted to go because everything looked the same and you could get lost trying to go home in these these trips on that point we had a directional finding radio on the airport and it moved with us it was and it broadcast Simpa signal on about the two hundred megahertz bands just above the broadcast band which is where our communications radio were and we had a roll around a loop in the top of the airplane and you could actually reach up and turn the loop or the some of the later models had Eddie cable from there back to the middle of the back of the airplane to turn to turn that loop and you'd look for the null where the loop would go it neither be a strong signal or a weak signal depending on the way the loop was pointed you'd put it on the strong signal then you turn the radio down to where you can just barely hear it and if the signal went away you're going away from the station if it got louder you're headed to the station and that's the way we got home and that was a fairly common practice at that time even among Airlines the telephone wires are the other point as soon as a artillery unit lands somewhere plants its feet they run a telephone line somewhere well the somewhere is a fire control center which is out in the middle of those guns the fire control center is a usually has a lieutenant or two who take the orders from the fire from the combat Information Center and triangulate it into headings and directions to fire the guns the guns were kind of tricky because when you plant a gun on the ground you have to figure out where you are and where you want to shoot the first thing you have to do is line it up on some known place and you have a bubble or a level to level the gun and it's a it's a completely so you level it all directions when you level the gun so once it's level then you could line it up with your compass to get your north and you could theoretically then walk it around from things in artillery school they taught us that you line up outside the city and pick the church steeple line up on the church steeple and and you then a new because it's marked on all the maps and you could then in turn figure out exactly what you could do you could walk it over from the church people in 100 yard units not shooting but in mathematics to where you'd be lined up on the road or the bridge or whatever it is which is your default target whenever a gun stops it sights in a default target so if everything goes to hell you you can fire immediately and blow something up that's going to be a threat to you and the threats were the bridges are these little passes through the mountains or things like that the problem is there are no church steeples in Korea if there was a one in the entire country by the time we got there the guys had already blown it up but neither the Buddhists weren't into religion the North Koreans and Chinese there's another world there were no church steeples in fact there's nothing to line up on think to coordinate your gun so you're gonna know where the doggone shell shoots well this this group we thought we were provost because we're the 45th you know where the extras that's artillery school is at Fort Sill in our territory right the 40th guys came out and some of you may know or may have known he just recently died Gil Ferguson who was our bird Colonel in the 40th Colonel Ferguson with the Eagle was from Orange County he was part of the Santa Ana triple nickel 105 millimeter artillery unit he wasn't too familiar with the one-fives he never worked with them but then again he's a colonel so he knows everything the we set the gun up and we fire we got ready to fire it and Lieutenant McDonald who became a close friend of mine took off and went out to look for the impact and we'd find an impact point and then we'd build everything off of that impact plane so they set the gun up and they loaded it and they fired it and McDonald is up there and he says no impact no sight didn't see it nothing happened did the gun fire well must have misfired so they got some sandbags put him up put about a 150 foot rope on the breach of the gun went back behind the sandbags pulled it and opened it up it's gone the bullet had fired see what the hell happened well he started trying to put two and two together and about that time a jeep drives up with with three Brits and one of them also had to parry he had a senior officer they had different kind of symbols but he made it very clear that he was ranking over mr. Ferguson in any event they pushed the numbers from 0 0 1 to 1 0 0 so instead of firing almost straight north they fired almost straight east well it wound up on the bank of a river just across from them from the British artillery centre and needless to say there was some heated discussion and we were close enough to hear some of the discussion and it was really pretty good this this a British officer was very very uh loquacious in any event they learned something from that Ferguson in his defense got his real-world job was with the Irvine Company as a public relations guy he was a publisher of the Irvine World News and some things like that so he knew the right people he contacted his boss who contacted the governor Earl Warren who is technically the commander of our National Guard and he flew to Korea and met with with Ferguson and was there and I saw her a warrant at that time and he was telling him about the flight of their division with no equipment and they couldn't get any response from the military and they couldn't get anything anywhere and he went from Korea to Washington or Warren who later became a judge and he got the dam broke and all of a sudden they've got all kinds of equipment and then we had more stuff than we even wanted which was kind of fantastic because we were very short of shells very short of ammunition countermanding standing order general Van Fleet who was there who was our direct in line commander gave us the authority to fire well if we had targets of opportunity here's a target of opportunity it was just beyond the range of our guns we had one radio frequency one radio and one radio frequency we would in turn contact with our fire control center which was the unit right at the at the guns they in turn had a telephone line over to the combat Information Center and the combat Information Center monitored our frequency all the time and they would turn we'd see a gun and they were our initial contact point is the combat Information Center CIC and we think it stood for Christ I'm confused but if they were the contact to us on everything and both our fire control center and combat Information Center and sometimes the Navy and the Air Force we're all monitoring it to see what's going on out there well this one time we caught an ammunition dump and we caught him on the ground with with their with their trucks those are all Chinese trucks trucks are very scarce and there were very few to people that can even drive them in the North Korean and Chinese armies and the only carried ammunition all troops walked and they carried their own food the combat Information Center contacted the Air Force and these guys were coming back from up around the Magali area and they vectored him in to us and then he came over on my frequency and I talked him into the target and that's taken with the K 20 camera out of the L 19 he got the ammunition dump and they turned around there were two of them there's two F 80s or P 80s we called him in there were two of those and the other guy came in and machine gun the trucks and we got them all every single truck got Burt got they as soon as he hit a truck with a bullet from the machine gun they'd get they'd explode because they're all carrying ammunition this is just over the hill at Iron Triangle they were coming in and refueling or resupplying the guys that we were looking across the hill from good thing about being an artillery guy it's generally you don't fly out beyond the range of your guns because there's no reason to find a target out there because you can't get it so it's a degree of safety because if you're at 10,000 feet and an L 19 you can glide 10 miles so you've had a real degree of safety because we're picking up small arms fire all the time we every at least once or twice a week we'd have a little bullet hole in the plane and we just cut out a piece of duct tape and stick on it and move on look inside make sure it didn't hit a cable and or a fuel line you're good this is a picture that I got out of a book it's a b-26 built by Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and Fort Worth Texas and this was an incredibly successful airplane in Korea we were directing them into a target and we talked him for maybe 20 or 30 min to get him to the right place because they were about six hills down the way looking for the target and couldn't find it so then they finally fire-control asked us to come and he'd come down to our frequency and ask us to talk him into the target and we did we talked him into the target which was the railroad center two hills over from where the fighting was and it was a risky trip from my point of view because we couldn't guide home from there we couldn't we were well with on the arrange of our guns and not a good place but these b-26s were incredible they came in and they nailed that railroad yard those are explosions this was taken with our camera Jerry McDonald had the film but those are railroad tracks and there was a train on there and with those secondary explosions those trains were full of ammunition and we just saved millions of lives I think that was just one of these lucky days when everything just worked anyway our typical day was we get up at 4:00 and we'd go down to get something to eat over at the triple nickel which had food and it was a 40th but we're 45th but either way we would then head down to the combat Information Center and there'd be an officer there with something and he'd have a bunch of pictures taken the day before and we he'd to show him us he chose a map and he chose of pictures and each oh hey we want to see what's going on there it looks like there's some digging or something here and and whatever that thing is we don't know what it is find that out and they're putting up sandbags over there see what's cooking and then we would get an overlay and we had a new overlay every day and it was a piece of film they actually took a picture of the draw the overlay took a picture of it and developed a piece of film and it was 12 by 12 inches and we had our maps we're 12 by 12 we folded we had a a lap board flip board and we put our map on it we folded 12 by 12 and our zone of interest was about 20 miles wide about 20 miles deep so we had a relatively small area and we we get to know it so well because we flew literally every day we got to know it so well that every time somebody moved to rock we knew it and this overlay would lay on top of the map and it would have numbers across the top numbers on the side and he's square then on the map would be a location and that's how we communicated and we'd get the new overlay every day now it may have been an overlay that we had three weeks ago were recycled but either way it was every day it changed and other people had that overlay to our artillery guys everybody else had it so we could talk ordnance on the map and nobody else could tell what they were because the numbers meant nothing to anyone anyway we didn't go down to the airplane we'd have to hustle we'd go to the trailer we usually had get it get our parachute once a week and we kept it during the week you'd get it out of it they had a trailer where we could pick up our parachutes and we'd head down to the airplane and we'd have to mess around with it because it was never full of fuel and there was there were three guys assigned to us and our unit was four airplanes and it was basically Pete REMS Jerry MacDonald al Hebel and myself and we stayed together and in the same tent and spent all our time together we would one day I'd be the artery officer the next day I'd be the pilot or vice versa whatever anybody wanted to do the pilots job was actually pretty boring the artillery officers was a heck of a lot more fun and and I can tell you I got a real high out of blowing up those trains it was it was really something that was a typical day you'd work through your fuel and you'd get the airplane and then you try to be up over the area before daybreak because if the few roads that were there you had a chance to catch somebody like that f80 that we just saw or p80 the idea in the morning at first light is you'd see two trucks run together or a truck with a hood open and in there those were targets and we could shoot those and that was that was that was fun we didn't take very long before we could nail him on the bike the second shot they only ran the trucks on the road in the middle of the night we totally controlled the air there's only one time in my entire time in Korea that I ever saw an enemy airplane other than in the middle of the night when they would come over and throw hand grenades out of the plane and just to get us out of bed and get us down into such wrenches or something we called him bed check charlie and he was pain in the neck this particular picture when we moved to Seoul we were camped out in the racetrack and one night it was raining and miserable and there was a guy down at the gate and says he wants to talk to some pilots he wants in and he's soaking wet he just he drove up in an open jeep from Osan and he got the ride in the Jeep and they dropped him off and the Jeep kept going so he was standing there at the gate soaking wet and I mean he was soaked to the skin and just he looked like he was half-dead and there's nobody wanted to get out of the damn gate cuz it's a half quarter a mile half a mile down the way so anyway I went down to the gate and there was a guy and it was Jimmy Joe Berra and that probably doesn't mean anything but to us it did he was a five-time ace in the Korea at the beginning and his first and he was back for his second to her duty and he'd been up ordered for his second tour 2k14 which was kimple which was the other side of town and the but he'd gotten the ride to this side of town the race track was on the east side of town Keppel was on the west side of town well he was 20 miles away nobody wanted to take him to kemple we brought him in got him dried off and and we finally figured out who he was when he when he took off all his clothes off his or goats a rain thing poncho and the he went on to become a nice again in his second tour I think he had 12 bigs killed Jimmy Joe Berra later we were flying the same direction he is and we had found some artillery pieces that had been moved in the night before these guys were out of hemp ok 14 and they were headed up to Magali and they were intercepted by the combat Information Center and directed to us to direct them to the to the artillery pieces that we'd spotted they looked like 105 millimeters but it's kind of hard to tell Chinese artillery has got a shorter barrel and it's a funny-looking machine but it's pretty damn good there were pretty good shots with it these guys came past us and turned in we were flying toward it we were pointing it out to him and they came right alongside because they couldn't see it even though we could see that they couldn't spot it and finally they did spot it and this is when they turned and that was Jimmy in the right in the upper airplane this is another case where where we were doing something that we were not really supposed to be doing we were assisting the Air Force this is the Navy the plane here you see a plane in the top that's an f2h banshee and it came off the carrier Philippine Sea there were two of them there's another one right behind him that's still behind me the target was that bridge we'd blown it up before we'd blown it up three or four times in fact and son of a gun there we were up there looking around and there's back Ted hands up bridge again so we decided we do something about it they we didn't decide anything command center decided that we do somebody we took orders we didn't do anything we did not have the opportunity to look for targets of opportunity we had we'd find a target we had to call in and get permission to fire commission to do something did not like the Air Force which had Corsairs and the Marines had Corsairs which would go out and look around for targets of opportunity if they found it they had the authority to shoot we did not we did not have any authority to do anything without permission this plane Dovan behind me and went under me and dropped a bomb and there's a bomb right here there's another bomb right there both those bombs hit the bridge so this guy was good he pulled up in front of me then climbing out and the second pilot was maybe just maybe less than a half a minute behind him and he was looking for the bridge and they said we can't tell you where it is the whole area this big around was all explosion and dust and dirt and everything in the sky we couldn't see anything it just everything blew up but he went in behind him and dropped his bombs too and the bridge was gone the next day when we came out we did a lot of leaflet dropping we did it around the Demilitarized Zone or the area the air force using T sixes we're tossing leaflets out north of where we were up all the way up to the Elbe River this is a typical leaflet it says you will be given food and shelter and clothing and we won't shoot you in the Chinese had been told that if we captured them we would torture him and kill him and they believed it I think and in some cases this is actually is true this is what bloody Ridge looked like or actually that whole area after we fought over it a few times there so it's all covered with trees when the war started but we blew it up and bombed it and did everything to it so much that the trees are all gone we literally destroyed all the trees we have a present here any fella who was a ground controller in that they hold up your hand you come up let me introduce you this is where you were this is Dave Hawkins he was a forward fire controller come on over and tell us a little bit about your background there where you were there at the beginning of the war we landed during the Pusan Perimeter on the 15th of August 1950 and fired our first missions on the 22nd of August 1950 and from that point on until we got to the Yellow River or within close proximity of the Yellow River we were on the move and as I say in their infinite wisdom I was attached and the s2 and he find a lot about that too to the TAC air unit which was had started in the Second World War to where forward observers were sent up to work with the Air Force the Air Force had a jeep with a pilot in it and a forward observer and they were in contact with the mosquitoes at t6 Texans and I had my little Jeep with a SCR 608 and a 606 in and a 619 and I could talk to our l5 s we didn't have bird dogs we had little L fives and I could talk to the fire Direction Center so as he told you Korea was there was only two levels in Korea straight up or straight down nothing flat so sometimes we would have when the infant had issues to where they couldn't move and by this time we had started moving north we were moving every day North Koreans were on the run but when we would they would run into an issue then they would call us and we worked as a kind of a detached unit we had the airforce Jeep my Jeep and a company of our infantry and we had a m24 tank with a twin 40 on it and a half track with quad 50s and they kind of was our support so we'd go up to where they were having issues and the bird dog or the mesquita would go around if you know we can't get to it terrains too steep we can't we can't there's no blinds to go down firing gun lines so we would have our liaison come in and then we would try to register artillery strikes on it which worked very well and that my career as an active soldier ended November the 30th when the Chinese came across the Yellow River and we were overrun actually two days later we were trying to get back and then got caught on the MSL and and it went from bad to really bad and I spent the next three years as a very unwilling guest of the Chinese People's Liberation Army so that was uh that was kind of my story when you get up to the real front you realize that being a pilot is a pretty good job and you know it rained a lot and the trenches Roy's mud it wasn't dirt and and everything was dirty and you even uh even a sea raishin you opened it up and it had dirt in it by the time you got it to where you could eat it it just and it was cold and it was miserable and everything about it is miserable and you realize where the real heroes are in this whole battle over here and the whole Korean thing and I'm not one of them it becomes very very parent when you get there I think they sent us up there as a wake-up call because as a second lieutenant you tend to get a little on the cocky side around the place too and we were we thought we we owned the world this is a 45th division the Oklahoma group these guys are from hominy Oklahoma which is north of Oklahoma City I went up and I spent about a full day with them that's a marine aircraft coming across and he makes a direct hit on a strong clean of some sort it was probably a mortar outfit because they had a lot of mortars that was a very effective weapon for the Chinese they could carry it the other more Chinese could carry the more the weapon didn't require trucks it didn't require anything they they were really into mortars si is antenna here they're a signal car radio Mille built by allied signal we called them command sets they were made of aluminum they used them in airplanes and they used them on the ground they used him everywhere these are 45th division guys - and this is just cold and miserable and not a hell of a lot going on and if you look at him he's got a coffee grinder he cranks that is the generator to run the radio that he gives you an idea how antiquated some of this equipment was this is all left over from World War two here is a different outfit on the same point this is what we call pork chop hill pork chop because it had a point down at one end of it and the Chinese wanted that point and we wanted to keep it I guess although there was no real value to it and after fighting over it for about three months the US abandoned it and let the Chinese have it because at that time we thought that the armistice would be signed and this is all academic and let's not fight over it you know let's get on with the world but the important thing here is that this group had just come over the top of this hill and there is a tank right there and that tank had us all cold if they were alert and watching and sauce and reacted quick enough they could kill all of us but they weren't and we were right this side of the hill perhaps a hundred and fifty yards from where those guys were standing was a 45th division 105 millimeter howitzer and it fired three rounds into that tank hit one dead on a tank is a hard thing to kill with a piece of artillery because you have to hit it you can't hit next door to it or close if it's a truck or if it's individuals troops or even even a a bunker you can blow it down but a tank will stick that take the hit shake itself up and maybe you can blow the tread off of it if you can't quite hit it but you got to hit it just right dead-on to kill it these guys hit it dead on on the third shot this is kind of funny we were in the middle of a semi firefight there was lots of activity on the other side of the line nobody was invading anybody but there were company strength probes going on by that I mean 200 250 Chinese would be creeping around below our positions positioning themselves and down next to us at the British sector on our right east of us was a British sector and we used to go over there because their food was fantastic and they had booze they had gin and if the rumor was that they had on on the HMS Manchester which was a I don't know what it was some kind of ship because there was a USS Manchester which was a cruiser and it was around too but the HMS Manchester had a still in the engine room and was manufacturing gin and they said they had a brewmaster right out of the B theatre company that had been recruited or drafted or volunteered with a gun in his back to brew gin on the boat and it was a big deal to go somehow or rather to get some of that and we worked our way over there fairly regularly anyway there was enemy troop activity in the in the in the in the in the in the theater and they everybody all the officers in all the units all came down to the this is just outside of Seoul to their British camp which was about 30-40 years and just north is just it's about 25 miles east of Seoul is the British headquarters and their general headquarters was quite close to the front come doors are so cool sign was 150 miles from the front there's was like 20 miles from the front there General Headquarters and they had their senior staff everybody was there well what do you know they called the war to a halt they said hey timeout we've got to have a memorial service for the King the King had died and what do you know all the officers in all the unit's New Zealand Canadian all of them showed up for a memorial service and if you look at it they got a piano they got a priest this is a damnedest thing you could imagine because we're sitting here with guys 20 miles away were walking in our direction do I need to kill us and and they they just shut down and had this memorial ceremony we had to go over to see it because we heard coming down and we didn't believe it the positioning of the war at that time was to get the most amount of ground when they called the crews that would be the line and therefore if we capture it now we get to keep it and they were looking for weak points in our line all the time but it wasn't no there were no huge attacks no big massive artillery barrage as everything was kind of quiet and so they transferred me over to a new place called hell hosts Holland song which was a ak-47 the east side of the peninsula and our job was to patrol that East Coast and help the Navy because there was a tremendous amount of activity along that coast by the North Koreans or Chinese they would have fishing boats and the Navy would watch the fishing boats and all of a sudden they were monitoring the radio frequencies and they'd hear it transmitting and see how that suckers got a transmitter on it and they'd blow it up but there wasn't just one fishing boat there were probably hundreds of fishing boats maybe even thousands I mean you couldn't believe the number and we're talking about two hundred and thirty mile stretch from the Demilitarized Zone up to China and these boats were anywhere from a mile offshore to 20 miles offshore all over the place and it's kind of hard to believe so they asked us to come out and help them because they had planes off the carriers looking for him too we were all lucky form and they would spot one and they'd send a destroyer escort or a destroyer over and blow it up this is coming up on the fleet my job was to drop on this particular flight to drop a pouch with the overlays in it and the overlays are numbered so we can tell them we'll be on overlay numbers such as such and they in turn would pull that out of the pilot to read it and the idea was to come up on the philippine sea drop it on the deck and so we came up on the philippine sea dropped it on the deck it bounced twice and went right out in the water and but they did put down a boat and retrieved it and so it worked out the the sent us back the next day with another pouch and to drop on him and what do you know it went the water - it's not as easy as it seems of boats going about 20 miles an hour and we're going about a hundred and that task force there were probably 50 ships all big patrolling that coast was was kind of neat because there were a lot of targets more targets there to shoot at then there were on the land and the Navy didn't have the restrictions on ammunition that the army had one day we were patrolling just after daybreak about 180 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone and another 60 miles roughly from China and they got a firing order target request from the from the ships command and we said well we don't see a thing out here there's nothing to shoot at it was one of those days we were about a mile offshore maybe half a mile offshore and because that's healthy there were to you that round in the water to shoot at you and you're a mile offshore we were probably 10,000 feet in the air two miles up and so we could see 10 miles inland easy and there was just nothing out there to shoot was one of those days we looked around and there was they said well we need a target we want it we want to fire a gun we want it we need a target give us a target he said where there aren't any targets I'm sorry there's nothing here to shoot that he says well there's something out there lieutenant you can find it and he says we have a bunch we have a congressional party on board and we want to shoot the guns for well hell look there's nobody here there's two peasants down there with a pushcart he says lieutenant that's a target we want the coordinates we sign oh crap if we blow up a bunch of civilians we'll get court-martialed what the hell do we do so we added a thousand yards to the to the target and gave him the coordinate and they fired him and we were 20 miles anyway from the ship because the ship was out of sight over the over the horizon and you can see the red glow on the horizon and we thought holy crap and you could actually see two of the bullets or the projectiles flying in the air and they went over there and they went down into that into a hill and the whole damn Hill blew up the the the head by the wildest imagination the Chinese had been running ammunition down that railroad track that we were trying to catch a train on run right on the beach all the way down they'd have track and they'd offload it and carry it over and hide it inside this hill and he'd hollowed out the whole damn hill the the thing blew we were at 10,000 feet the debris came up to our altitude and was still going up and in one case there was a tree that was perhaps the truck was this big around and it had roots hanging out the bottom and leaves on the top and they'd hollowed out to where the intercepted the roots so it was a weak point like like the cork and a barrel and it blasted up and it would buy us and kept on going it probably went to 15 or even 20,000 feet and the shock wave hit us so hard that the plastic bakelite microphone hook broke the dock my glasses off knocked we just it just knocked the airplane just all over the place we were worried that it might come apart it was that violent needless to say we saw that coming and we immediately turned to so it would be to our tail and not broadside to the wings to the shockwave but either way we were able to turn fast enough or do it it just blew the whole damn thing up we were directed back to Osan which was the general headquarters for new orders because we were pulled off of that site can we went down to co-sign to get our orders and what do you know Eisenhower had come in that morning he's flown in in a dc-3 from Japan and he'd flown on United Airlines to Japan and he had been elected president but he had not yet taken office he brought a crew of one with him one guy and that's the master sergeant sitting here his son major Eisenhower was part of the command staff at Osan and he did the son joined him later but by the time the son showed up I would we were already gone he was up in the Sun was up in Seoul when he came in nobody knew he was going to be there he just showed up that day and there he is sitting there eating a child like the rest of us it's pretty incredible we got new stuff here this is something that we did not have before see this is a flak jacket what it is is two layers of canvas sewed with pieces of steel little steel plates fitted in them separate plates and we did not have that prior our fight suits were a pair of pants and a shirt and a field jacket and the field jacket was either a light weight field jacket or a medium weight field jacket we've given away most of our medium weight field jackets to the 440th guys so all we had were lightweight jackets this was a big big thing also his carbine is the gun that we carried in the airplane on a regular basis we did not have sidearms 45s and that sort of stuff it's just as well because I don't think I could have hit anything with him anyway anyway we went back to to the racetrack at Seoul and we were at the racetrack for about two months almost three months and one night we routine patrols not a lot of action on the field not anything new digging nobody wrote no the rocks didn't move everything was pretty cool a lot of probing at night 200 man patrols by us and by them but there's so damn many hills and so many valleys and everything that you could go you could pass within 200 yards of each other not knowing they're there I didn't do any of that sort of thing that's one of the advantages of being a pilot the one night at about 4:00 in the morning on March 22nd I think the day is I've got to remember a little bit I am not too accurate on the dates but I March 20th something woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning and our 155 millimetres were firing at will well you never fired at will even when they had mass charges with Chinese all over the place you'd fire around and you could kill one of these mass charges that the Chinese did you could set the guns up so they fired about 200 yards apart the shell impact and you could literally run the China Chinese would run in there you'd fire around it'd just clear them out like crop circles you see them in the in there in the Midwest they'd kill everything in those zones then ten minutes later fill up with people again you fire them again and they fill up with people and you'd fire them again and you do that but we never fired and then as fast you can reload fire again and as fast you can reload fire again and that in doing this they were walking him about a hundred yards around so they started literally at the bottom of our Hill and went a hundred yards apart all the way back across the valley we rolled out a bed at four o'clock in the morning and headed down to Pete REMS took off in the Nell 19 and the night take off is kind of interesting you had a barrel and you put some gas in it and you lit it at the end of the runway you'd line up on it with your directional gyro and you'd open the throttle and the airplane got off so quick it wasn't really a big it wasn't as hazardous as it sounds because the airplane would be airborne him in a 300 400 feet P tramps took off and headed and we headed down to combat Information Center to find out what what what are we supposed to do and what's going on and diving down there we went by our guns and these are our guns firing this is the four hundred and second field artillery and this is the 40th division but the composite division became a 40th division and these are our guns in any event the Chinese made a major attack that that night Pete went down and flew over the area and fired flares and the flares could let everybody spot what was going on and help us direct our fire and and and zero in on what we were doing and we just killed literally thousands people that day but they also did the same thing they came up and actually overran our positions at the top of the hill and this is Heartbreak Ridge and came down the backside of it they captured the five high five triple nickel 105 millimeter guns the guys all bugged out headed south our guns they came right up to this position and our guns are simple you start the engine and you drive out of there the 105 you had to find a truck and you had to get it hooked up and then you had to get it out of there so most of the guns were lost and they were lost so quickly that they didn't even spike them they didn't even put hand grenades in the breech and fire him off the they actually lost the guns that Chinese turned him around and used up the remaining ammunition shooting at us it was a bad night the by the time the end of the day we s it was estimated that we'd killed 12,000 Chinese the interesting thing about it wasn't everything quieted down and we were on the phone all the time down at common Information Center and we were out looking around and interesting thing happened the decided they would have a ceasefire for two days for them to recover their bodies and we could recover ours it was sort of a mutual understanding and the we recovered ours very quickly because they're all on our side of the line but they had they're scattered all over the hills and interesting the they went down and they stripped them of their clothes and the bags and their arms and left the body they didn't recover they're dead and the three four or five days later the entire area smelled of decaying bodies because this whole valley was just kind a little cup there between the hills and it in the estimated 12,000 people did in that Valley and they didn't recover their people which is the surprise to me would it's not incompatible with our way of thinking in any event about four days later when there was still lots activity going on I went out and was flying with I was a pilot Eddyville was a controller and we were looking for targets and we were looking over these dead bodies all over the place and wow they're not picking him up but what's going on and about that time we saw two flashes in the sky we didn't see any airplane just a flash like like a like a anti-aircraft show went off but then we the binoculars you looking at there were four airplanes that came in we think they came in off the bottom Richard not the Philippine Sea and they think there were phantoms the f9f and two MiG's had jumped them and shot both two and got two of them in the first pass and the other two turned and headed out to sea immediately and the remaining two MiG's looked around and one of them stayed up high they were probably 20,000 feet or more when they when this was happening and one of them circled or came over and circled they came down by us we're at ten and he came right up beside me right from here to that wall away and he looked at me and I looked at him and we said oh [ __ ] and then he turned and left so I figured we're out of here he's gone and then I saw him turn back and then I figured we're in trouble so we started a tight spiral and we spiraled down to about 20 feet off the ground and headed south and as fast as our little wings would carry us and we made it probably three-quarters of the way to the safe zone we were probably a mile and a half short short of the safe zone that's what we considered it we crested a hill and at about 20 feet and a mortar we were still on the bad guys side and they'd fired a mortar at some other target somewhere and it went through our right-wing about four feet from the wingtip and it just punched hole right through the wing went right on up did not set off until it was 30 or 40 or 50 feet above us he we think we were so low that it did not have time to arm and otherwise it would have exploded on contact but it went up 40 50 feet above us and blew and it came back and shattered the whole airplane into little pieces of metal and I got hit really hard right here in the chest and that flak vest saved my life and it hit my left leg it rusted it actually shot some holes in it we basically crested another hill push the nose down and didn't bounced along on the in the valley and a little hill which is sort of a draw because when it rains everything runs to those little straws and it goes and we stopped and Edie Hebel my my controller at that time had a piece of metal right through his neck and he was dead and I jumped out and put a hand grenade on the seat and ran like hell down the hill down the hill and then finally it was obvious I couldn't get out of there so I crawled up in the side and of the draw and hid in the weeds and I crawled into those weeds so tight you couldn't believe it and I stayed there for probably a day and a half and I see guys walking up and down the hill and I could look down and I could see their feet but I couldn't see the people and the you'd look at them and they'd have canvas stripes like our half tents cut up in strips and wound around their feet for shoes so I figured those aren't my guys and then pretty soon a group came along with combat boots on and they were kind of strange because they were hollering and screaming and making all kinds of noise and and you'd think they'd be creeping along stealthily not the case they'd be at all kinds of noise they were shouting yeah it's just unreal because you know all around us there were bad guys the guy that fired the mortar had not be more than a hundred yards from where I was at and that means there were more than just one troop up there but I hollered at him and roll out and it was a group of turkeys soldiers on patrol and they looked at me and they didn't know quite what to think and we a little bit and finally a little broken English we got by and and we had the the the Thunderbird patch patch you know American American you know and they decided I was okay and they stopped and but they weren't going to go back take me back they I had to go with him on the rest of their tour I could stay there I didn't want to stay there so I went with him on the rest of the tour and they took a breath they had all had that long a sword and every time they'd stop for a break I'll come the sword and they sharpened that sucker they needed shot you couldn't need sharpening they sharpened it 15 minutes ago but they were sharpening it again they were into that thing and we they took a tree and whack whack and made a little crutch for me and I walked around the rest of the thing with him and back to the troops and then I was taken from there well let's see we wound up at their command post this is a Turkish command post and that we crossed up their line crossed into their lines and that is their lines if you look he's got a 50 caliber machine guns there's looking out and there they transferred me from there to a hospital ship that was in the unshin Harbor and then onto Clark Air Force Base and then finally back to Oklahoma City Oklahoma to their Veterans Hospital and that's kind of the story of my military career so that is the end but maybe not quite because I still have an airplane I still fly it regularly I'm 80 years old this year and last year I flew more than 300 kids more than a hundred separate flights of young Eagle kids and free airplane rides for them and things like that and it's a fun it's a fun thing to do that's sort of my story that's it thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about here at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance I'm Betty wheat I'll see you next time you

Channel: PeninsulaSrsVideos

Views: 10,660

Rating: 4.9361701 out of 5

Keywords: L-19, Cessna, Bird Dog, O-1, observation, plane, aircraft, veteran, Korea, Betty Wheaton, Peninsula Seniors, Western Museum of Flight, POW, pilot, ace, war birds, Army, artillery, Air Force, Korean War, EAA, air show, Oshkosh, war, history, documentary

Id: vuH5_JOEM20

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2016