Air Commando One: Heinie Aderholt and America's Secret Air Wars
336
Air Commando One: Heinie Aderholt and America's Secret Air Wars
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Overview
Drawing on official records, personal papers, and interviews with Aderholt and many who worked with him, Air Force historian Warren A. Trest details the life and career of this charismatic, unconventional military leader who has become a legend of the Cold War Air Force. He tells how Aderholt’s vigorous support of low-flying, propeller-driven aircraft and nonnuclear munitions pitted him against his superiors, who were steeped in doctrines of massive retaliation and “higher and faster” tactical air power. In the mid-1960s Aderholt’s clash with Seventh Air Force Commander General William W. Momyer reflected a schism that still exists between the traditional Air Force and its unconventional special operations wings. The book also integrates U.S. Air Force and CIA accounts of some of the most pivotal events of the past fifty years.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781560988076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Smithsonian Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 04/17/2000 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 665,779 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
THE CALL TO ARMS
When the Korean War broke out in late June 1950, Captain Aderholt was in the Canadian backwoods vacationing with his wife and mother-in-law. They had driven leisurely up from Alabama to Ontario's scenic Algonquin Park to enjoy the great outdoors and fish the freshwater lakes for perch and trout. Upon returning to their cabin at dusk one evening, he turned on a shortwave radio and heard the news that the North Korean Communists had invaded South Korea. General Douglas MacArthur's Far East Command headquarters in Tokyo had deployed a holding force to engage the aggressors, while politicians at home negotiated a combined military response under the flag of the United Nations. The captain told his family to pack their bags. "I've got to report back to Maxwell Field," he said. "And we'd better step on it, or the war will be over before I can get there."
The rush home in the Aderholt's 1949 Ford contrasted sharply with the relaxed twelve-hundred-mile drive the family had made a few days earlier. They stopped only for brief rest periods, once in Tennessee to purchase and eat a watermelon alongside the road, and arrived back at Maxwell Field the following night. After a few hours' sleep and an early-morning run, the refreshed captain reported for duty and volunteered for an immediate combat assignment flying P-51 fighters. Like most Americans, he believed the war would end quickly when the mighty armed forces of the United States stormed ashore on the Korean peninsula. Few people realized the extent of the postwar drawdown in U.S. military might, or foresaw theramifications of a limited war being fought under the auspices of the United Nations. It was to be a wake-up call for the nation and for its unprepared fighting men who slogged through that first year of bitter combat on the Korean peninsula.
A few days after Captain Aderholt's return to duty, a personnel officer called to inform him that a combat tour in fighters was out of the question because of an overage in fighter-qualified volunteers and to alert him that a quota for transport aircrews was on its way. Near the end of July, he received orders to form a crew (comprising a copilot, a navigator, a flight engineer, and a radio operator) and to pilot a C-47 Skytrain (the indomitable "Gooney Bird") to the West Coast, where the plane would be modified with eight one-hundred-gallon internal tanks before departing on a transoceanic flight to the Far East. Disappointed at having missed another opportunity to fly fighters, Aderholt consoled himself with the reality that he had "to play with the hand that was dealt him." He looked forward to the challenge of combat in Korea, but was nostalgic about leaving. Over the coming months, his thoughts would return often to the years at Maxwell Field and their influence in his life.
Interlude at Maxwell Field
The nearly five years that he was stationed at Maxwell Field were formative ones for the young captain. Upon coming home from Italy in the summer of 1945, he was uncertain about pursuing a military career but was in no hurry to return to civilian life. When Captain Edward "Eddie" Rickenbacker, the famous World War I ace, approached returning "military pilots with Gooney Bird time" about going to work for his Eastern Airlines, Aderholt turned him down. With the war over in Europe, he longed to get into the fray in the Pacific before it ended. So he volunteered for any combat assignment flying the B-29 Superfortress. "I knew damned well I couldn't get a fighter job this late in the war," he said, "but I figured they would lose enough B-29s that I might get in those." In August he was in B-17 instructor training at Lockbourne Field, outside Columbus, Ohio, awaiting a B-29 assignment, when the war's two most historic Superfortresses, the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered.
Upon completing B-17 instructor training in September, Captain Aderholt transferred to Maxwell Field as a staff pilot with the Army Air Forces Eastern Flying Training Command. The assignment to Maxwell, which was only one hundred miles from his hometown of Birmingham, soon convinced the Alabama native that he had "found a home" in military aviation. "The pay was good and I loved to fly," Aderholt recalled in later years. "When I got to Maxwell, there were more than one hundred airplanes (a B-17, B-25s, B-26s, C-45s, a couple of C-47s, a C-46, a couple of T-6s) on the ramp. I flew them all. Often on local flights I flew the B-17 alone. It was great. I loved it." Now that he knew he wanted to stay in the Air Force, however, he was faced with the problem of postwar retrenchment having drastically reduced career opportunities in all branches of the armed forces.
In the young captain's favor, he was well liked and admired at Maxwell and had won the backing of senior officers there. In addition to serving as the assistant base operations officer and running the instrument school, he comanaged Maxwell's world-champion baseball team. Sports had been his first love and he had briefly been player-manager of a semipro baseball team before joining the Army Air Forces in 1942. All of his fellow officers knew him as Heinie, the nickname he had answered to since his glory days of football and baseball at Woodlawn High. Near the end of the 1946 baseball season, the base commander (Colonel William E. Covington) called and told him that Maxwell was facing drastic manpower cuts and would lose a lot of pilots. The colonel advised him that he had "to get a real important job," if he wanted to stay in the Air Force. "Have you ever handled black people?" Covington asked. "Hell, I grew up with them," Aderholt replied. The colonel then explained that he was having "all kinds of problems" with the black squadron on base. Assuring the colonel that he could resolve those problems, Aderholt became the new squadron commander in September 1946, the same month that the Air University was established at Maxwell Field.
Meanwhile, Aderholt's military career got a boost from another direction. Explaining how this came about, Aderholt recalled that he "was a pretty good drinker" in those days. He and other junior officers used to "hang out" with a line officer who was greatly admired at Maxwell. That officer was Colonel John M. Price, who was known to the men as "Big Jack" and described by Aderholt as "an All-American, a West Pointer [class of 1932], and a legend." When they were holding forth at the officers' club bar one evening, Big Jack suggested that he should think about applying for a Regular commission. "I have no college education," Aderholt replied. "I haven't a chance." Big Jack grinned and said, "I'm going to be on the board. You've got a good chance."
Soon after submitting his application to the board, presided over by Colonel Price at nearby Fort Benning, Georgia, Aderholt married Jessie Reid of Montgomery in December 1946, adding a new sense of purpose and direction to his career plans. The popular newlyweds were overjoyed the following October when he was awarded his appointment in the Regular Army. The news was timely because the appointment coincided with the transfer of the Army's aviation resources to the newly established United States Air Force, created in September by the National Security Act of 1947. From this point in time, there was never any doubt about Aderholt's resolve to be a career Air Force officer. Two of his brothers also became career military men: Warren, an Air Force fighter pilot who also flew and fought in three wars, and Robert, who was a chief petty officer in the Navy.
Warren had gone through flying training a year after his older brother and joined a fighter group in Italy while he was there. "My younger brother comes over as a hot-shot fighter pilot, and there I was driving B-17s and air transports around in noncombat roles," Aderholt said, laughing. He recalled that on Warren's twenty-third combat mission, his P-51 experienced a vapor lock over the Po Valley and he had landed on a German airfield rather than bailing out and exposing himself to enemy fire. Intentionally overshooting and sliding his crippled fighter down to the end of the runway, Warren jumped from the plane and escaped into tall grass surrounding the airfield. Italian partisans reached him before the Nazis did, and he made his way back to the American lines. He returned to a sector that was controlled by the famed Japanese-American unit, the 442d Regimental Combat Team. When a sentry asked where he had come from, Warren pointed to an open area behind them. The sentry exclaimed, "Goda'mighty, Lieutenant, you just walked through our minefield!"
The brothers spent a few days in Naples together before Warren returned to his group. A "canned" message that Aderholt sent to his mother informing her that Warren was alive and well arrived two days before she received official notification that her son was missing in action. "The war ended, he went back to his unit, and I caught a boat home," Aderholt recalled, proud of the way his brother stood up to the rigors of combat. There was a tinge of envy in his voice when he said, "I had served twenty-one months over there ... mostly flying and not getting shot at a hell of a lot. That was my only regret ... that I didn't go over there and shoot somebody or drop bombs on them."
Aderholt's "tough, but caring and fair" brand of military leadership—tempered by the challenges and the camaraderie of war—had a telling effect on Squadron F at Maxwell. The inroads that the segregated black squadron made under his command remained a source of great pride and satisfaction throughout his life. He often said that he had "really learned more there about leadership and about people" than at any other time in his career. The squadron consisted of himself, an adjutant, and five hundred black troops who were completely demoralized by the government's failure to redress their plight as second-class citizens in the aftermath of World War II. Not only denied equal opportunity and treatment, black troops throughout the armed forces lived in segregated conditions both on and off base and were assigned to perform only menial tasks. Aderholt recalled that Squadron F's men were used "as nothing but service troops," worked in the motor pool as "drivers" and "tire changers," and "did all the janitorial work" for the Air University after it started classes at Maxwell. He said his superior officers just wanted him to keep the black troops satisified, to keep them on their side of the base, and to keep them from causing trouble. But the troops wanted more, and Aderholt wanted more for and from them.
Determined to make a difference as the squadron commander, Aderholt set about trying to improve his troops' military performance and their quality of life on the segregated base. He had not anticipated that his greatest obstacle would be the squadron's black first sergeant, who stood between him and the troops and resisted efforts aimed at improving the situation. "The first shirt had been there forever but made a bad mistake when he told me that commanders come and commanders go, but he stayed put," Aderholt said. "He implied that he was there when I came and he would be there when I was gone." After looking into the situation, Aderholt learned that the first sergeant (who had nearly thirty years' service) was using his position for personal gain. Among other schemes, he was in charge of slot machines in the club and split the profits with owners downtown. Aderholt confronted him. "Sergeant, I'm asking you to volunteer for reassignment, and if you don't, I'm going to court-martial you," Aderholt said. "He went. I stayed."
"I replaced him with a Tuskegee graduate named Earl Garrett, a fantastic first soldier," Aderholt continued. Garrett said, "Captain, you tell me what you want and we will get it done." Aderholt said the first priority was "to establish control" of the squadron, to get "discipline straightened out," to instill military pride in the men, and to motivate and move them in the right direction. As squadron commander, he had the authority to appoint duty NCOs and give them spot promotions. He asked Garrett to pick out six or eight men to be appointed as duty NCOs. "I want you to get the best soldiers in the outfit, the best dressed, the best disciplined," he said, "and I want you to issue them a nightstick and give them three stripes. Explain the rules and the dress regulations, and I want you to start implementing them."
That the root problems of segregation between black and white America precluded a full measure of reconciliation at military installations was true throughout the postwar armed forces, however. Mutinous riots by some black servicemen—the largest occurring at MacDill AFB near Tampa, Florida, the month after Aderholt became squadron commander at Maxwell—created fears that racial unrest might spread to military installations nationwide. The base commander raised the subject at his weekly staff meeting, and Aderholt assured him there was no problem with his squadron. Late that evening First Sergeant Garrett called and said, "Captain, you'd better come down here. We've got a riot."
Aderholt and his adjutant Lieutenant Harold Poole drove to the orderly room, where Sergeant Garrett and the duty NCOs were waiting. Retrieving a Colt .45 from his office safe, he turned on the floodlights in the squadron area, then strode to a line of unlit barracks with First Sergeant Garrett at his side. Their demeanor suggested a great deal of mutual trust and respect between the young white captain and the older black first sergeant, whose impeccable military record showed in his beating and in the firm set of his jaw. Stopping at the entrance to the first barracks, the captain barked, "We're coming in, and if any son of a bitch has his head above the covers, I'm going to shoot him right between the eyes." He later admitted he was not that good a shot, but it seemed like the right thing to say at the time. The way he recalled the event, "We kicked open the door ... it was summertime ... and I flipped the light switch. There were sixty-four sheets up over sixty-four heads. We went right on through—it was the same in each barracks." The night was eerily quiet as they completed the walk-through and departed the squadron area.
At muster the following morning, the commander reassured the troops that no official action would be taken against them, individually or collectively, for any unruliness the evening before. He promised to deal quickly and severely with any future refractions, however. When he told the men that if any of them wanted out of the service, they should just tell him and he would have them out "in a very short time," Aderholt said there were "no takers." Then vowing to do all within his power to address their grievances, he said, "I want to know what the hell your problems are. You can speak off the record. Nobody is going to do anything against you."
Over the ensuing months the commander worked against the grain to improve the living and working conditions of his troops. He gained the confidence of the base commander and the troops for his efforts, but deep down he knew the real solutions were "above his pay grade." Some of the white officers at Maxwell were supportive of his actions; others were not. He received helpful insights from Colonel Noel Parrish, who had been a wartime commander at Tuskegee and was one of the few senior white officers advocating integration of the armed forces. In a thesis submitted to the Air Command and Staff College in May 1947, Parrish recognized that segregation not only was morally indefensible, but "was the prime cause of low morale among blacks."
Help finally came from above in the spring and summer of 1948. The Air Force was concerned "about the impact of segregation upon its own effectiveness" and announced a decision to integrate during the spring. This was followed in July by President Truman's Executive Order 9981 to foster equal opportunity in the armed services. Well before then Aderholt had begun to instill pride in the squadron by insisting on their inclusion in base activities. "We started molding that place over," he recalled proudly. "We won every damned parade. Every time we had a review, Squadron F won it hands down."
He fought to include black athletes in Maxwell's sports programs while commanding the squadron. When he took charge, the black troops were not allowed to play on white baseball teams, so he organized and managed a team that played against other black teams. He was the only white person at these games. The squadron faced similar discriminatory practices when basketball season came around, but Aderholt overcame opposition from white players to schedule his team against others at Maxwell and nearby Gunter Air Station. He met with the base commander and said, "I'm going to have a basketball team, and I want us to play in the league." The other teams threatened to withdraw from league play, but he called their bluff, telling the airmen in charge to schedule the squadron against the best team on base. "We went up there, and we just kicked the living hell out of them," he said. "We never lost a game, and we played all year."
He recalled with a thin smile "the unenviable task of integrating the Maxwell USO Club there in the heart of the Confederacy." The top men in the squadron were singled out and groomed for the task. They were bused to the USO on Saturday evening with orders not "to get drunk," but to be on their best behavior. "When the black airmen went in, all the Montgomery belles went out," Aderholt recalled. They eventually trickled back when the shock wore off and when the squadron continued to send its airmen to the USO weekend after weekend. Pride in this "grassroots" involvement toward racial equality sparkled whenever he discussed the early days of integrating the Air Force. Laughing, he told about using the experience, years later, to punctuate his remarks on the Air Force's rejection of counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam. "You think it is hard to get the United States Air Force to accept its role in counterinsurgency, low-intensity warfare," he said at an Air University dining-in in the late 1960s. "You ought to try to integrate the blacks into Montgomery society at the USO club on the base here. Hell, it is nothing compared to that."
The distinguished black leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, reported to the Air War College as a student in 1949. The assignment of a black student to the Air War College—unthinkable when the Air University was established at Maxwell three years earlier—was a first step toward breaking down the color barrier to professional military education within the Air Force. Davis had endured exceptional racial prejudice as the U.S. Military Academy's first black graduate of the twentieth century, but rose above bigotry and discriminatory treatment to become the Air Force's first black three-star general. He was proud that the Air Force took the lead in integration in 1948 and reassigned the men formerly "grouped on predominantly white bases in all-black 'F squadrons' ... worldwide into white units." He spoke less favorably of the year spent as a War College student at Maxwell, however, observing that the base "was guilty of some of the worst foot-dragging" on integration. The only black officer on Maxwell at the time, Colonel Davis said he and his wife "had no social life of any kind off base, and Montgomery was like a foreign country."
Aderholt remembered Davis being at the Air War College as a colonel and described him as "a real gentleman." He later served under Davis, who assumed command of Thirteenth Air Force in the Philippines while Aderholt led the Air Commando Wing at Nakhon Phanom in 1967. General William W. Momyer, the Saigon-based Seventh Air Force commander whose heavy-handed leadership style made life miserable for Aderholt and the air commandos at Nakhon Phanom, also studied at the Air War College in 1949, staying on as a faculty member after graduation. Ironically, while commanding the 33d Fighter Group in North Africa during World War II, Momyer filed a report rebuking the performance of the group's 99th Fighter Squadron—the famed Tuskegee Airmen led by Benjamin Davis. Momyer recommended the squadron's removal from combat. Davis successfully refuted the allegations, and after receiving the new P-51 long-range fighters, the black airmen went on to compile one of the most impressive combat records of the war. No bomber formation escorted by the black pilots ever lost a plane to enemy fighters.
As a company grade officer who was not part of the Air University faculty, Aderholt did not interact socially or professionally with either Colonel Davis or Colonel Momyer while they were at Maxwell. He had no way of knowing the contrasting roles that both men would play in his life nearly two decades later in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, his forceful and fair-minded leadership while commanding the black squadron at Maxwell caught the attention of his superiors. His efficiency report for the period highlighted his special qualities "as a commander of men," describing him as "a morale builder, firm in his convictions, and respected by officers and men alike."
In his final days at Maxwell, he did a favor for a senior officer who would become an important influence on his career. Aderholt and the newly formed crew were getting ready to leave for California when Colonel Cecil H. Childre, a chief instructor at Air Command and Staff College, came to them and said he was told they were on their way to Korea and had a layover in San Bernardino. "Captain, I'd like for you to take my dog to San Bernardino," the colonel said, explaining that he would be following them to Korea in a few weeks and that his wife was staying in California while he was gone. Aderholt described Childre as "one helluva good guy," whom he had known slightly at the officers' club and elsewhere on base. He did not think twice about taking the family's pet dog to San Bernardino, an act that unwittingly stood him in good stead with the man who would be his new boss in Korea.
To Korea with the Kyushu Gypsies
The runway was steaming when Captain Aderholt and his crew lifted off from Maxwell Field in late July. Their flight suits were drenched but would dry as they climbed to cruising altitude and leveled off. Jessie and the other wives were at the flight line to bid them Godspeed. Viewed from the cockpit and the windows of the C-47, the waving arms of the well-wishers faded rapidly into the vaporous landscape below. A popular country-and-western tune—"I'm Moving On," by Canadian recording star Hank Snow, destined to be a Korean War classic—crackled through the static on the plane's radio. Aderholt smiled. They were on their way.
The ground patterns below were as familiar as his reflection in the windshield. He had flown religiously while at Maxwell. After completing his tour as Squadron F commander in August 1948, he had gone on temporary duty to Tyndall AFB, Florida, as a student at the Air Tactical School—the only formal classes of his career other than pilot training. Returning to Maxwell in December, he was assigned to base operations managing a variety of activities, including flying training, the instrument training school, the checkout program, and flying safety. He was current in at least six airplanes at Maxwell and often flew alone. He said that flying the large multiengine planes with no one else on board "got lonesome," but he loved it. "I was having a helluva good time," he recalled.
Making two refueling stops in Texas (Fort Worth and El Paso), the C-47 touched down at San Bernardino late the same day. Colonel Childre's wife met them at base operations to take the canine passenger off their hands. Captain Aderholt and the crew "twiddled their thumbs" for nearly a week at San Bernardino, waiting for their plane to undergo engine maintenance and have eight one-hundred-gallon fuel tanks installed in the fuselage. Then on a balmy southern California morning, the captain and his crew departed for Hawaii, the first and longest leg on their flight across the Pacific. They were carrying sixteen hundred gallons of fuel, enough to last them twenty-three or twenty-four hours in the air, more than sufficient for the Hawaii leg, which took about nineteen to twenty hours. It was a long, wearing journey, wrapped in a Plexiglas cocoon of flight instruments, sky, and ocean.
Just past midnight, a light appearing in the darkness ahead broke the monotony. Only Aderholt was awake, flying the plane on automatic pilot. Seeing the light grow larger, he rubbed his eyes and nudged the sleeping copilot. "Is that light another plane, or what?" he asked. "Jesus Christ, I think that's an airplane," the half-awake copilot responded. They were surprised to be overtaking another plane, since the Gooney Bird was on cruise control with a zero wind factor and was "going along at about 110 or 115 miles per hour." They crept up on the other craft, flying at the same altitude, and slowly flew past what they recognized as a Martin PB2M Mars, a mammoth four-engine sea-plane the Navy had acquired for transporting cargo in World War II. Cruising at about 105 miles per hour, the lumbering behemoth was on a milk run between Alameda and Honolulu.
Arriving at daybreak, Aderholt and his crew stayed at Hickam AFB overnight and departed for Johnson Island the following morning. From Johnston they flew to Kwajalein, to Guam, and on to Tachikawa Air Base, on the outskirts of Tokyo. "Everywhere we went we spent the night," Aderholt said. "It didn't seem like anybody was in a big hurry." The aura of Mount Fuji—a great oriental shrine breaking through the clouds—rose to greet them as they turned for the descent into Tachikawa. Reporting to the 374th Troop Carrier Wing, they were put on crew rest awaiting further orders. Nearly a week had gone by since they left California, and they "sat and waited" another week at Tachikawa.
Just after the Korean War erupted, Far East Air Forces (FEAF) beefed up the 374th Wing's two squadrons of C-54 transports at Tachikawa by stationing a squadron equipped with C-47s at Ashiya Air Base in southern Japan. The rugged Gooney Bird was ideal for airlift operations supporting the hard-pressed U.S. and South Korean defenders because the small, unimproved airstrips on the war-torn peninsula would not accommodate heavier planes. The squadron initially flew some C-46s into Korea but discontinued using them because the runways could not support their landing weight. The initial buildup of C-47s at Ashiya was accomplished with planes borrowed from other FEAF bases—a temporary measure until additional C-47s arrived from the United States. The planes were assigned to the 21st Troop Carrier Squadron, better known as the Kyushu Gypsies, a former C-54 unit that had moved sans aircraft from the Philippines to Ashiya in early July.
Because Kyushu was the southernmost of the main islands, Ashiya and its neighboring installation, Itazuki, were two of the more strategically situated bases available to FEAF at this desperate stage of the ground war. When the North Korean onslaught drove defending forces back to the southern tip of the war-ravaged peninsula in July, General MacArthur ordered Eighth Army Commanding General Walton H. Walker to hold the Pusan perimeter at all costs. MacArthur did not want another Dunkirk on his hands, and preserving a foothold on the peninsula was vital to his plans for an amphibious assault on South Korea's waistline at Inchon. His daring maneuver to cut off the enemy's main line of advance and drive the aggressors back across the thirty-eighth parallel was contingent upon the arrival of essential reinforcements by September. Meanwhile, the C-47s flying out of Ashiya, sitting across the narrow strait from the Pusan perimeter, were a primary source of resupply and emergency evacuation for General Walker's besieged Eighth Army. Similarly, the 8th Fighter Bomber Group and other fighter units at nearby Itazuke assured Eighth Army of readily available tactical air support.
Impatient to end the delay and join the airlift action into Korea, Captain Aderholt exploded in frustration when finally told why they were being held over at Tachikawa. The 374th Wing would not let him fly the C-47 to Ashiya because local procedures prohibited pilots from operating in Japanese airspace unless they were flight-checked and qualified by Fifth Air Force. "Boy, was I pissed," Aderholt said. "Here we were ready to go to war, and they made us sit on our hands at Tachikawa." There was no one else available to fly the C-47. The group had only C-54 pilots assigned at Tachikawa, so Aderholt and his crew had to wait for a "qualified" pilot to arrive. "It was Catch-22," he recalled. "They sent us a second lieutenant who had a total of about seven hundred hours in the air. He got us to Ashiya all right, but then taxied my perfectly good airplane that I'd nursed across the Pacific into a damned utility pole and tore the right wingtip off. That was my introduction to Far East Air Forces."
The squadron singled out Aderholt to be operations officer, but he begged off with the explanation that he had come there "to fly." So he started "flying the line" into Korea, night and day. The airlift of cargo into Korea was a continuous operation. Base operations scheduled the flights. "The planes were all lined up in a single row," he explained. "They were ready to go, and you just took the first aircraft in line and flew to Korea. When you got to Korea and somebody wanted you to do something, they sent you around. When you decided you'd had enough, you came home. You put your airplane at the end of the line, and they checked it. It was pretty well organized." The aircrews, consisting of a copilot, flight engineer, and radio operator, were never the same people. "Since we had pretty good nondirectional beacons, we didn't really need a navigator," Aderholt noted. He recalled that he spent most of his time in Korea. "They always kept one or two planes in Korea," he said, "and we often stayed two or three days before returning to Ashiya. When we couldn't find a bunk, we slept in the planes."
The squadron's name, the Kyushu Gypsies, was an appropriate one. "We were gypsies," he recalled. "It wasn't like being in a squadron. We never saw anybody. We just flew. We did a hell of a lot of flying. The guys who wanted to fly got to fly, and those who didn't push didn't have to do too much." The squadron airlifted thousands of tons of urgently needed arms, ammunition, rations, and supplies from Ashiya to Eighth Army units through early September, while transporting endless manifests of passengers, including the evacuation of wounded troops to hospitals in Japan. Aderholt started flying with the squadron in early August, and by the end of the month he had chalked up seventy-two sorties and nearly two hundred flying hours—a feat that put him in the top 10 percent of the 130 pilots assigned to the squadron at that time.
Recounting these early missions, he said there was "such a confused front when we had the Pusan perimeter" that pilots never had a clear picture of the ground battle. When Army troops were being resupplied, they normally laid out panels and the pilots dropped on those panels. Many times the pilots had to land on airfields that were under attack, and these missions "could get hairy." Flying emergency resupplies into Pohang (K-3) when the field was under siege was one such mission. "We were flying ammunition in, and the artillery was all around the perimeter," Aderholt said. "I just taxied around and off-loaded it where the artillerymen were firing." They were "shooting it up" as fast as the pilots could bring it in. "We spent two days doing nothing but hauling ammo from Taegu (K-2) to Pohang," he said. He also recalled that the enemy was on "the hill above Taegu (K-2) and stayed there" until the North Korean forces withdrew from the Pusan perimeter. "We didn't know whether the field would still be ours when we came in some nights," he said, adding, "Some people don't know how close we came to getting our ass kicked off that peninsula."
While Aderholt was away in early September, his squadron moved from Ashiya to nearby Brady Field. The mission did not change, but the squadron came under operational control of the newly formed FEAF Combat Cargo Command after relocating to Brady. The move was part of a larger realignment to centralize all theater air transport under Major General William H. Tunner (architect of "Over the Hump" airlift in World War II and the Berlin Airlift) initially as commander of FEAF Combat Cargo Command, later of the 315th Air Division. Colonel Cecil Childre arrived in the theater about the same time and became deputy commander of the 21st Squadron's parent unit, the 374th Wing at Tachikawa. In October, Childre moved to FEAF's forward headquarters in Seoul and established the air terminal units of the Combat Cargo Command. On the first of the month, Aderholt activated a special air missions detachment in Korea, operating briefly out of Taegu (K-2) and then from Kimpo (K-14) on the outskirts of Seoul. Upon relocating to Kimpo, the detachment worked for and got its instructions from Colonel Childre, a rugged, soft-spoken Texan who rose to three-star rank after the war and took a personal interest in Aderholt's career.
The shake-up in combat airlift coincided with MacArthur's amphibious assault at Inchon in mid September where Marine landing forces "backed by devastating naval and air bombardment ... readily defeated the weak, stunned North Korean defenders." The enemy's main invasion force had advanced south of the thirty-seventh parallel, well below Seoul, where it stalled because of Eighth Army's stubborn defense of the Pusan perimeter. The North Koreans' "long, exposed lines of communications" were overextended and under constant attack by air and naval fire. Their "logistical problems worsened daily." On the heels of the Marine landing, the Army's 7th Division came ashore and struck south toward Suwon, helping to facilitate Eighth Army's breakout at Pusan. By the twentieth, the Marines had taken Kimpo airfield and "were pounding at the gates of Seoul." Nine days later Seoul had been recaptured and the North Korean Army's withdrawal "had turned into a rout."
During preparations for the Inchon landings, pilots from the 21st Squadron were brought to Tokyo for training in airborne operations. MacArthur's headquarters planned to drop the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team into Korea at the time of the Inchon landings. The 21st was designated as one of the squadrons to support the airborne assault. Having flown paratroopers in training at Fort Benning and in Sicily, Aderholt was one of the few pilots in the squadron who had airborne experience. All of the pilots needed to hone their skills in formation flying. After completing the training, they were told that the airborne assault had been put off because the 187th RCT would not arrive in Japan in time for the Inchon landings. Aderholt learned that he was going to establish the special missions detachment working for Colonel Childre in Korea when he returned to the squadron with the other pilots.
"Our mission was a little bit of everything ... strictly combat support and combat operations," he said, "and we supported nearly everybody ... Fifth Air Force, Far East Command, Army G2, and anybody else that needed us." When the detachment moved from Taegu to Kimpo, Aderholt asked Colonel Childre what he wanted him to do. The colonel's matter-of-fact response: "Your job is to keep everybody in Korea off my back." The detachment never had more than a dozen pilots available to fly five or six planes, and they flew night and day. "We flew all kinds of missions, even taking the frag order around at night," Aderholt said. "It was terrible for the pilots. We just flew the pilots into the ground." When not flying, they lived in conditions that were "about as primitive as they could get." "We had about sixteen to eighteen officers crammed into a quonset hut," he said. "No toilet facilities. No bath facilities." Then he paused for a moment and reflected, "But we had it better than those poor bastards slugging it out on the ground."
Participating in the long-delayed airdrop of the 187th RCT, which had shipped to Korea and was in GHQ Reserve around Kimpo, afforded a break in the routine. In October, after President Truman and the UN Security Council assented, General Walker's reinforced Eighth Army and other UNC forces launched an all-out drive across the thirty-eighth parallel (including an amphibious assault at Wonsan) to punish the retreating aggressors and to take North Korea. When Eighth Army troops captured Pyongyang on the nineteenth, MacArthur ordered the airdrop of the 187th the next day near the towns of Sukchon and Sunchon to entrap the North Koreans and keep them from fleeing across the Yalu River to Manchuria. Approximately fifty C-47s from the 21st Troop Carrier Squadron, and an equal number of C-119s of the 314th Troop Carrier Group, carried out the airdrop. Aderholt flew deputy lead to the 21st Squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Phil Cage. "It was just another day at the office," he said. "We had total air superiority and got no flak from the North Koreans."
All hell was about to break loose "in the Land of the Morning Calm," but nobody believed it. General MacArthur reported that the airborne landing of the 187th had been a complete surprise and spelled the end for the North Koreans. From Tokyo he confidently predicted the war would be "coming to an end shortly." "The troops thought they'd be home for Christmas," Aderholt recalled. This optimism faded quickly, however, when U.S. and ROK forces clashed with Chinese troops below the Yalu River at the Changjin Reservoir and at Onjong in late October and early November. While UNC forces were engaged in defeating the North Korean Army, intelligence reports estimated that as many as 180,000 Chinese troops had crossed the border undetected. The Chinese abruptly broke off the encounter on 6 November, allowing UNC forces to fall back and regroup. Although the enemy's intentions were unclear at this point, it would soon be evident that the fog of war settling back over the ravaged land was the harbinger of a harsh and savage winter.
Flying the Dark of the Moon
The threat of Chinese intervention changed the outlook of the war, imposing urgent new mission requirements on Aderholt's detachment. Around the time U.S. and Chinese forces first clashed near the end of October, Colonel Childre called to tell Aderholt he was sending an Army captain out to see him. "Whatever this guy wants, give it to him," Childre said. The Army captain was Bob Brewer, a case officer assigned to special intelligence within Far East Command's forward headquarters. He was responsible for collecting "essential elements of information" about opposing military forces, a highly classified project involving clandestine operations deep inside North Korea. Brewer was one of three case officers charged with collecting and analyzing this information, known in the trade as human intelligence (HUMINT). He had gone to Colonel Childre seeking Fifth Air Force's help airdropping agents over the north.
Constraints imposed by MacArthur's headquarters prior to the Inchon landing had limited Brewer's project to using boats for inserting agents behind the lines—an option that he found "unsatisfactory." Meanwhile, he prepared for the eventuality of parachuting agents into the north, by carefully choosing seven (three women and four men) of his "best Korean spies," training them "in a safe house how to jump out of an airplane," and keeping them in good physical condition. After successfully parachuting these operatives into North Korea at the time of the Inchon landing, Brewer developed a continuing program of insertions by air and gained approval to implement it. When he ran into problems finding regular, qualified air support for the project, he turned to Colonel Childre. "You go out to Kimpo and talk to Captain Aderholt," Childre said. "He is the man you are looking for."
Despite Childre's assurances, Brewer's disappointing experience with earlier air support had him primed "to expect a little trouble convincing my Air Force counterparts to fly the kind of mission that would get the job done." For such clandestine missions to be successful, the agents had to be dropped with pinpoint accuracy without being detected by the enemy. This meant that the supporting aircraft had to penetrate at low altitude and at night, "flying by the dark of the moon and below the rim of the mountains wherever possible," to avoid detection and to navigate with precision to the objective. If radar tracked the plane's penetration, the enemy could plot the probable drop zone and zero in on the agent. Likewise, an agent who landed outside the zone had to move through unfamiliar territory to the objective and was susceptible to capture. It was a mission demanding "the utmost in skill and guts" by all concerned.
Brewer was pleasantly surprised when he got to Kimpo and found that "Aderholt and some of his assistants were all ready for me." Aderholt looked back on the meeting as the start of "a lifetime friendship with Bob Brewer." He recalled Brewer explaining his mission and complaining that he "had all these agents to drop and the Air Force hadn't given him any qualified flying crews." "Well, you just tell us what you want us to do, and we'll take care of that," Aderholt told him. Brewer agreed that they "immediately hit it off" and became the best of friends. He noted that Aderholt's strong points—"the ability to innovate and to communicate"—were ideally suited for the heat of combat and the exceptional risks of clandestine operations. "He communicated with everybody and everybody knew exactly where he stood," Brewer said.
Aderholt's terse account of the detachment's first flight supporting Brewer's operation could not mask his thrill in the mission:
He had about eighteen or twenty Korean agents all parachuted up and a big map on the wall, and he pointed out where we were going. I looked where he was pointing, and we were going up on the Yalu River. I remember thinking, What in the hell are we going up there for? We got on the airplane, and he became the damned navigator. He took my ass all the way on the deck up to the Yalu River and down the Yalu River, and we were dropping these poor sons of bitches out. My navigator was this second lieutenant, just commissioned, and he kept saying, You are going to let this Army captain get us killed. When we got back, that was the last time we ever saw the navigator. He went back to the squadron in Japan and he never returned.
The operatives they dropped that night were part of a growing pool of trained Korean spies known as "Rabbits" in the intelligence community. "These guys looked tough, and they were tough," Aderholt said. Some were North Korean refugees "who had a score to settle with the Communists." They parachuted into the heart of enemy territory, carried out the assigned mission, and made their way back to prearranged rendezvous points inside friendly lines. Often allowing themselves to be captured and interned by friendly forces, agents then used prearranged signals to gain release from prisoner of war (POW) cages. Intelligence officers immediately debriefed them and reported the information obtained from their mission.
Taken on as a recurring mission, the detachment's support for Brewer's operation grew in importance. Entailing more than just airdropping the agents, the mission included monitoring signals by some agents and resupplying them when required. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had developed radios and other equipment for clandestine work during World War II, but these items were not available in Korea. Some agents carried heavy SCR-300 backpack infantry radios and relayed information to a detachment aircraft orbiting overhead. Aderholt's radio operator, Staff Sergeant Robert Gross, rigged "a long coaxial reception antenna trailing behind the aircraft," where he could communicate with agents on the ground ten miles away. As operations progressed, they developed other innovative means of communicating with the agents. Brewer emphasized how important communications were to the success of a mission. "When you told agents you would be back the next night at a certain hour and they could hear that plane wandering around the sky, they would break their backs for you," he said, "but you could kiss the mission good-bye if you failed to keep your word or they thought you didn't care."
According to Brewer, during the ten months or so that he and Aderholt's detachment worked together, they averaged about twenty missions a month for Far East Command—all at night and many of them flown "in the dark of the moon." They airdropped approximately one thousand agents in all, with over seven hundred of them either returning on time or coming up over the radio on time. Brewer interpreted a delay of more than two days to mean an agent had been compromised. He claimed their success rate of above 70 percent far exceeded that of other wars. "It was because we were accurate," he said. "We put people in exactly where we said they were going to go, and once they were on the ground, they knew where to go and carry out their mission."
Meanwhile, the detachment continued to carry out its regular air transport tasks, providing routine and emergency airlift, flying the ambassador and other VIPs around, and making the frag run each night to a growing family of Allied bases. Another part of its regular mission was psychological warfare, which included aerial broadcasting of loudspeaker messages and "wide-ranging leaflet drops urging Chinese and North Korean soldiers to surrender or face inevitable death." Always innovative and willing to try new ideas, Aderholt decided that because they were flying over enemy-held terrain anyway and nearly always spotted tempting targets, they might as well make the most of the opportunity. In the saga of what has been described as the first and last C-47 "Bomber," the detachment rigged some of its planes to hold "two seventy-five-gallon napalm bombs under the transport's belly." The C-47 had paracontainer racks underneath that were used to drop bundles. Aderholt's crews screwed aerodelivery shackles into the racks and hung napalm canisters the same way it was done on fighters. When the last agent had parachuted from the plane, Aderholt and his crews flew "armed reconnaissance," dropping the napalm canisters on trucks and other lucrative targets on their way home.
Aderholt and Captain Lou Droste made the first C-47 napalm drop against a target that Fifth Air Force intelligence had identified as an enemy headquarters. On Christmas Eve they made a reconnaissance run over the target, observing a large barnlike structure sitting in the open with tracks leading through the snow into the building. "At dawn the following morning, flying at minimum altitude, fifty feet off the ground, we delivered a Christmas present—two napalm canisters crashing through the front door at the same time," Aderholt recalled. "The building erupted in flames. Nobody got out." That was the first time the 21st Troop Carrier Squadron's planes had dropped napalm and was believed to have been the first napalm dropped in combat from a transport aircraft.
The detachment believed higher headquarters was unaware of its midnight bombing runs until Colonel Childre called and said, "I know you have been dropping napalm." Hesitantly, Aderholt answered, "Yes." "Well, officially I've got to tell you not to do it," Childre said, "but I know you are going to do it anyway." Months later, as Aderholt was nearing the end of his tour in Korea, Childre called and asked him to come to Tokyo. The colonel had left Korea in February 1951 to become deputy commander of the 315th Air Division at Tachikawa. He explained that the division was planning a napalm saturation mission using C-119s and could benefit from the detachment's experience. Aderholt flew to Tachikawa and briefed Childre and his staff. The division subsequently massed a large formation of C-119s loaded with fifty-five-gallon drums of napalm. Their target was a hill where heavily fortified enemy troops persisted in beating back attacks from exposed UNC positions below. After the C-119s saturated the hill with napalm, fighters roared in and ignited the fire. Aderholt learned later that they burned off the hill, but enemy troops were well dug in, and most survived the firestorm.
As the detachment's reputation in flying special missions grew, more agencies asked for support. Already lean in resources, the unit got a few more men and planes for the increased workload, but mostly "sucked it up" with what was already available. "Aircraft were hard to come by, and my outfit had so few people," Aderholt said. "Nobody wanted to fly with us when they could live in Tokyo." Bringing to mind the lieutenant who never returned, he said the detachment's C-47s rarely had navigators. "Navigators were hard to come by, and none of them wanted to fly with us," he said. Pilots like Droste, Jack Nabors, and John McDonald (captains at the time) who flew the hard missions and were always there when you needed them "had balls of steel" and were crucial to detachment operations.
Among the detachment's new missions were more daring penetrations deep into North Korea in support of Fifth Air Force intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, the latter having far-reaching implications for Aderholt's career. These missions did not begin until January 1951, however, amid perhaps the harshest winter endured by American fighting men since Valley Forge and the "Winter of Despair" nearly two centuries earlier. The convulsion of the bitter Korean winter of 1950-51 into a hellish struggle for survival might have been averted had General MacArthur and his staff heeded intelligence gleaned from prisoner interrogations and partisans dropped into North Korea by Aderholt's detachment.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix | |
| Prologue: The Man and the Mission | 1 | |
| 1. | The Call to Arms | 16 |
| 2. | On Assignment with the CIA | 51 |
| 3. | Cold War Rituals | 64 |
| 4. | Shadow Wars and the Tibetan Airlift | 75 |
| 5. | The Secret War in Laos | 99 |
| 6. | The Air Commandos: A Breed Apart | 125 |
| 7. | Faces of a Misbegotten War | 157 |
| 8. | The Tigers of Nakhon Phanom | 182 |
| 9. | Weathering the Storm | 213 |
| 10. | Mission Accomplished | 234 |
| Epilogue | 262 | |
| Acronyms | 273 | |
| Notes | 277 | |
| Selected Bibliography | 309 | |
| Index | 313 |