I Always Wanted to Fly Read online

  Marilyn Monroe on a USO tour, cheering up the boys at Pusan, 1950. C. Schreffler.

  Chapter 5

  Night Interdiction in the B-26 Invader

  During the Korean War the Far East Air Forces lost 1,986 aircraft, 1,144 air crew died, and four U.S. Air Force pilots won Medals of Honor. All four medals were awarded posthumously. One Medal of Honor pilot was Major Louis J. Sebille, flying an F-51 Mustang; another was Captain John S. Walmsley, flying a B-26 Invader.

  Extracted from Harry G. Summers Jr., Korean War Almanac, and The United States Military Experience in Korea, 1871–1982

  As I sit here and dream of home

  and ones I love so dear,

  I pray to God that some day soon

  their voices I will hear.

  But if God wills that I remain

  to die on foreign soil,

  Then comfort bring to those I love

  through all of life’s turmoil.

  Byron Dobbs, B-26 pilot shot down over North Korea

  Lieutenant Colonel Byron A. Dobbs Jr.

  Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal (4), Purple Heart

  Barney Dobbs slowly taxied his heavily laden Douglas B-26 Invader toward the end of the runway at K-8, a desolate airstrip near Kunsan. Barney was assigned to the 8th Squadron of the 3rd Bomb Wing. It was the early-morning hours of February 19, 1952. Only four weeks earlier he had turned thirty-two. Barney applied the left brake to his swaying aircraft. Slowly the Invader turned to face down the runway. There were no lights. He didn’t need any. He would steer down the center of the strip and when he reached 120 knots pull back on the yoke and lift off. He intended to hit his target hard and get out of the area quickly. To linger was a sure invitation to a Chinese rest camp—or worse.

  “I always flew alone at night. You can’t worry about a wingman while moving at 240 miles per hour at 250 feet above the ground. Neither in World War II in the Pacific nor in Korea did I ever fly in a formation larger than two aircraft. Mostly I flew alone. I liked it that way. I made a quick final check of the instruments dimly bathed in red light to preserve night vision. Everything looked good. RPM and manifold pressures were in the green. The engines sounded smooth, my crew chief had seen to that. I carried fourteen forward firing fifty-caliber machine guns, eight in the nose and three in each wing. At times when I fired, trucks just blew apart when they were hit by that many guns at once. On each wing I carried five five hundred–pound bombs. I intended to use every round of ordnance and every bomb I carried. We knew the Chinese were building for a big push, but without ammo and supplies they couldn’t get far.

  “My crew chief sat to my right. The top turret gunner sat behind and above us. It was our twenty-second mission in twenty-eight days, or nights, because I never flew during daylight hours. I had talked to the pilots who bombed my target in daylight. I knew approximately where the antiaircraft guns should be. I moved the throttles forward to full takeoff power. The engines responded smoothly. I released the brakes. Then I concentrated on the dark runway ahead, our liftoff, and my first heading. There were landmarks, dimly outlined against the night sky, which served as my reference points. There was no need to worry about the good guys shooting at us as they had in World War II. The bad guys didn’t have airplanes which came down low to bother the troops on the ground.”

  Captain Byron Alexis Dobbs Jr. was born in Phoebus, Virginia, on January 14, 1920, under the muzzles of the quiet guns of Fort Monroe. His father was a carpenter. When the depression hit, his family barely managed to stay alive, moving from one relative to another, always chasing the next dollar or the next meal. “One summer we stayed on my grandmother’s forty-acre farm. My dad got a contract from the Heinz company to grow pickles. I recall riding the pickup loaded with cucumbers down to their plant. The job only lasted for the summer but that gave us enough money to make it through the winter. Eventually we settled in Birch Run, a small village in Michigan. Both of my parents were from Michigan. I graduated from high school in 1937. I tried to enlist in the navy. They wouldn’t take me because the doctor said I had hammer toes. I tried again in 1939, but that time I went to the army recruiting office. The doctor who examined me asked, ‘Is there anything else I should know about your health, Barney?’ Well, I always tried to be honest, so I told him the navy had turned me down in ’37 because I had hammer toes. ‘I don’t care which way your toes point,’ the doctor said, ‘as long as there are five on each foot.’

  “I was assigned to Selfridge Field. They had P-35s there. At night I would go and sit in the cockpit of a plane and think about flying. I dreamed of being a pilot. When I sat in one of those planes, I was on top of the world. The officers were gods to me. They treated us real well, and I did everything they told me to do. By 1941 I made corporal and my pay was increased to forty-two dollars a month. A year later I was promoted to staff sergeant, and I applied for enlisted pilot training. I was accepted. Late that year I got my wings and was promoted to flight officer. I ended up at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, where I checked out in the P-38. What a beautiful airplane! After only forty hours in the P-38, we were sent to Hamilton Field, near San Francisco, for reassignment in the Pacific Theater. On Monday morning, August 2, 1943, our group loaded on a B-24 cargo ship with secret orders and instructions not to open them until two hours into our flight. My close friend Al Blum and I speculated where we were going. When we ripped open the envelopes, we found our destination was Amberly Field, Brisbane, Australia. Once we arrived in Brisbane, we were told our final destination: the 8th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron at Port Moresby, New Guinea. We stayed in Brisbane two nights and thought they were crazy when they issued us six blankets each. But after the sun went down we discovered the reason: though it was August, it was midwinter there.

  “In Moresby they were glad to see us. Their numbers were pretty well depleted. We lived in tents, and our comfort depended entirely on how hard we worked at it. Lumber was nearly impossible to get, but Al and I managed by hook and by crook to build us a little hut with a tent for a roof. At least we had a clean place to put our feet in the morning. The air was so humid our B-4 bags began molding after only a few days. Cigarettes absorbed so much moisture they were barely smokable. There were five or six landing strips in the area identified by their distance from Port Moresby—three-mile strip, five-mile strip, seven-mile strip, and so on. We were to fly the F-5, the photo version of the P-38 fighter. Al Blum and I stayed together as much as we could throughout our tour, flying missions all over that part of the world. I spent thirteen months and flew eighty-eight combat missions from Australia and New Guinea, fighting mosquitoes, malaria, jungle rot, and Japanese. Al flew one hundred combat missions. Al kept a diary of his day-by-day experiences in the Pacific. Years later, he sent a copy of his diary to me, and on the cover page he wrote, ‘I occasionally reread it. I can still feel the anxieties, fears, frustrations, satisfactions, joys, memories of friends and comrades, sadness when someone didn’t return, and the many other emotions of a shavetail involved in the greatest transition of his life—from farm boy to combat pilot.’ I sure loved Al’s diary, and I’m glad he sent me a copy. It brought back those bittersweet memories of when we were young men and thought we were indestructible.

  “In 1946 my wife and I left for our new assignment in Germany. Both Al and I had gotten married in 1943 in San Francisco, two days before we shipped out for Port Moresby. I flew P-61 night fighters out of Schweinfurt for a while until the Black Widows were phased out of the Army Air Force inventory and given to allied nations. In 1948 I found myself at Oberpfaffenhofen, where I prepared fighter aircraft for turnover to allied nations. I was quickly drafted into the evolving Berlin Airlift. I was sent to Wiesbaden to fly as a copilot in C-47s. I had always flown fighters, and I knew nothing about the C-47 transport. It makes my hair stand up in back of my neck when I think of that time in the C-47. They put us fighter jocks in the right seat. I knew enough to keep the thing right side up. I flew into Te
mpelhof, landing between five-story apartment houses. It was awful. But the GCA radar controllers were superb. I was awfully glad when the airlift was over and I went back to the used-aircraft business.

  “From Germany I was reassigned to the Military Air Transport Service at Westover AFB in Massachusetts. While there I flew C-97 Strato-cruisers, the military version of the Pan American double-decker airliner. I hated every minute of it. One day while flying a huge four-engined C-97, I surreptitiously joined up with a formation of fighters coming in for a landing. I think they would have court-martialed me, but a war had broken out in Korea, and I volunteered to be an F-51 replacement pilot. That saved me. Once in Korea, I was assigned to K-8, “Kunsan by the Sea,” as we referred to it, flying the twin-engine B-26 Invader. The B-26 was no fighter plane but the closest thing to it. I soon fell in love with the airplane.

  “In the dark early morning hours of February 19, 1952, I skimmed across the craggy Korean countryside at five hundred feet above the ground, intending to be at no more than two hundred feet above the terrain in our target area. My crew and I had been to this target before, and we were good at identifying trucks moving on dark roads with their lights out. If there wasn’t anything happening at the location, we had plans for two other sites. I saw the telltale shadows of slow-moving trucks thrown up against the side of the road by residual fires from the daylight raids. I pointed the nose of the Invader down the valley and made my first pass. I dropped my bombs to bottle up the trucks. The ten bombs slammed into the lead trucks, blowing two of them off the road. Explosions lit up a string of trucks reaching back into a tunnel. As I emerged from the valley, banking to my left, I heard a call from a C-47 flare ship asking me if I wanted flares dropped. ‘Roger, no flares,’ I told the flare-ship pilot. I had no time to chat with the fellow. I was busy concentrating on flying my airplane down a dark mountain valley adjacent to the one I had passed through.

  3rd Bomb Wing B-26s lined up for takeoff at Ashiya Air Base, Japan, 1950. R. Schulz.

  “ ‘I can’t go home until I drop my flares,’ the flare-ship pilot continued to badger me. I ignored him. I was lining up for my second pass. I knew I had surprised the antiaircraft gunners on my first pass, but this time they would be ready for me. I figured they’d expect me to reenter the valley the way I exited. I made a shallow, wide turn instead, flying down the adjacent valley, planning to reenter the way I came in on my first pass but from the opposite side. I was concentrating on my approach to the target with no further thought of the flare ship. I could clearly see the trucks on the winding mountain road. I was lined up, ready to fire my guns, when a bright flare lit up the valley, blinding me, destroying my night vision. To the North Korean gunners I must have looked like a target at their gunnery school. I pulled the aircraft up, cursing the flare ship. I was going to get that pilot’s ass when I got home. But first I had to get out of here. Then the flak hit. I felt the impact of the shells as they ripped into the left engine. Fire was everywhere.

  “Get out, I yelled and jettisoned the hatches. The crew chief exited over the right wing. I couldn’t see the gunner exit, but I thought he was out when I abandoned the aircraft. My chute opened. I swung once or twice and then I was in the trees, on the ground. I was dazed, it all happened so fast. The damn flare ship, I thought. I remember unbuckling my chute and how quiet it was. I was alone. I looked around for my crew. Only silence. I knew exactly where I was and prepared to make my way back to friendly lines. A river ran below, and I toyed with the idea of crossing over to the other side to throw off any search parties which I knew were going to come looking for me. I discarded that idea and decided to move inland and south. There was a slight moon to aid my travel. I felt the cold. The snow reminded me that escape was going to be difficult. Someone surely would pick up my tracks. I could hear dogs barking in a village below me. I decided to hide and wait until daylight. I was dressed for the weather and thought I’d be able to stay fairly comfortable if I found a good hiding place. But by morning the dogs had tracked me down, and three villagers escorted me down the mountain, where they turned me over to soldiers. I didn’t know if they were Korean or Chinese. My crew chief was there too. No sign of our gunner.

  “We were kept for several days in a back room of a simple cottage. One day a Russian officer showed up. The Russian was friendly and spoke English well. He loaded me into the back of a truck and to my amazement drove me out to my aircraft. The damn aircraft didn’t crash. It made a smooth belly landing and was barely damaged. The Russian was a ground pounder and didn’t know what questions to ask. What he seemed to want to know from me was what we had in our aircraft that allowed it to belly land, nearly undamaged, without a pilot. Of course, we had nothing. I don’t know how that airplane landed in a mountain valley without tearing itself to pieces. I eventually ended up in a permanent camp near the Yalu River. I thought myself lucky. I was alive. I had no broken bones. I thought of what might have happened to me, and that kept me going.”

  For nearly nineteen months Barney Dobbs endured torture and degradation as a prisoner of war of the Chinese People’s Army. He was interrogated repeatedly. He recalled seven different interrogators who tried to convince him to admit he was using germ warfare. He was deprived of sleep, food, and water to make him compliant. He didn’t break. He was repeatedly put in solitary confinement, including imprisonment in a three-by-six-foot hole in the ground for six months. Finally, his interrogators gave up and put him in an unheated shack with twelve other uncooperative prisoners. When Barney lay in the hole in the ground, he thought of something to hold onto, to keep his sanity, to be able to endure and survive. He tried to recall every hymn he ever sang in church, and in time he composed his own hymn in his mind, writing it down on paper once he was released.

  Korean Solitary

  The accusation, it was made:

  of course it was denied.

  They said on them germ bombs I’d dropped,

  and about it I had lied.

  A bomb that’s filled with flies and fleas,

  dear Lord, I’ve never seen;

  but men for propaganda’s sake

  can sure be mighty mean.

  Interrogators came and went,

  their lies were all the same.

  “Confess,” they said, “and you’ll go free,

  or here you will remain.

  God can’t help you, he’s not real,

  you’re living in a dream.”

  “Not so!” said I, “He’s real to me,

  so go to your extreme.”

  “An execution is your fate,

  since you’ve made up your mind

  not to confess and tell the truth

  about your heinous crime.”

  So, they threw me in a hole,

  never to return.

  And, I’m ’fraid their souls will rest in Hell

  and burn, and burn, and burn.

  The hole was deep, not very long,

  and only three feet wide.

  The sun and air through a window came,

  six inches on each side.

  The roosters woke me up at four,

  the guards came round at five.

  They brought me food,

  ’twas just enough to keep a man alive.

  Fish heads and rice were all I had,

  sometimes a piece of bread.

  But I ate it with God’s blessing

  who watched from overhead.

  Soap they gave me, but water none.

  Tobacco, but no fire.

  They called it “lenient treatment,”

  but it only aroused my ire.

  I’ve seen men come,

  and I’ve seen men go.

  But some men stayed for ever.

  They paid the price for that plot of ground,

  on the Yalu River.

  I’ve seen ’em beg

  and scream and yell for a doctor and some pills,

  to stop the dysentery,

  and drive away their ills.r />
  The guard just laughed

  for ’twas a joke to see a Yank a’dying,

  they called it “lenient treatment”

  and friend, I ain’t a lyin.

  Walls do not a prison make,

  nor iron bars a cage.

  For thoughts have wings and they are free

  as wind across the sage.

  As I sit here and dream of home

  and ones I love so dear,

  I pray to God that some day soon

  their voices I will hear.

  But if God wills that I remain

  to die on foreign soil,

  Then comfort bring to those I love

  through all of life’s turmoil.

  As I look ’round me at the foe

  who’ve never heard His name,

  I wonder where their souls go

  when they’re through life’s earthly game.

  Never to have heard His word,

  nor felt His saving grace,

  nor seen the love of Jesus Christ

  for the human race.

  For they are children under God

  the same as you and I.

  But I wonder where their souls go

  when their earthly bodies die.

  For in this land of Commie rule

  church bells are never heard.

  And folks don’t go to Sunday School

  to study Jesus’ Word.

  4,000 years they’ve gotten by

  with oxen and with hoe.