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4: Korea
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
76 Chapter Four Korea On the appointed day we left Clark in a C-124, one of the large military transport planes of those years, which was powered by four radial gasoline engines. Because of its bulbous proportions, the C-124 was often called the Pregnant Guppy. Flying northward over the Philippine Sea, we stopped briefly on Okinawa for refueling and late in the afternoon landed at the U.S. Tachikawa Air Base near Tokyo. Two days afterward we were driven across Tachikawa’s runways to a waiting C-47, the venerable twin-engine workhorse known as the Gooney Bird, which had been in service since the 1930s. Unlike our flight over the sea in the C-124, whose numerous travelers included two dozen military chaplains on their way to a conference in Japan, we seven were the C-47’s only passengers, a circumstance that we supposed reflected on our membership in the elusive 581st. Piloted by two air force lieutenants, we flew westward across the Japanese home islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, then north across the Korea Strait to the southern tip of Korea and on northward up the Korean Peninsula. Supposedly we were still unaware of our destination, but by then we had gleaned that it was most probably K-16, the “Spook Base” noted in chapter 3. In perfectly clear, calm weather, flying well under ten thousand feet above sea level, it was a lovely scenic flight until in the dusk of early evening, on our low approach to K-16, the seven of us got our first introduction to a shooting war when the sky around us was filled suddenly with the bursts of antiaircraft shells. 76 Some of the peoples’ names in this chapter have been changed. K o r e a 77 All of South Korea had been Allied domain since March 1951, and this terrifying barrage from one of our own antiaircraft batteries had resulted from a brief breakdown in the local IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) radio code apparatus , whose failure prompted the battery to try to shoot us down. We landed unscathed. The only casualty in this example of “friendly fire” was a civilian reporter for Life or Look who, while dashing out of a nearby war correspondents ’ tent to see what was going on, was wounded in the leg by a piece of falling flak. Once on the ground we were met by an air force captain who said he was expecting us. After examining our orders, he handed us over to the corporal driver of a weapons carrier, our transportation to the headquarters of Fifth Air Force Advance, which lay some miles away on the other side of Seoul. Fifth Air Force Advance was quartered in parts of the old Japanese University of Chosen.1 Our billet for the duration of our Korean tour was to be in a hospital building that had belonged to the university’s medical school. We reached our destination by a meandering route, most of which was known to our driver, but it was late at night when we got there, and not knowing much about the layout of the Fifth’s headquarters he let us out in front of a little building that had housed the school’s surgical amphitheater. A marbletopped table stood in the center of the small circular room and around it, in ascending circles, were the tiered benches once occupied by medical students. Rolling out our issue blankets, we spent our first night here, after arguing over who was to get the operating table instead of the curved bleachers. Pontoon bridge across the Han River, June 1953 (photo by author) [54.210.85.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:37 GMT) 78 C h a p t e r F o u r The next morning we found our way to the old building, whose rooms had once held hospital patients but which was now a makeshift BOQ and the office and quarters of a Major Scott, who served as 581st (Thirteenth Air Force) liaison to both Fifth Air Force and Eighth Army. The amiable major, who was to treat us like younger brothers, assigned us rooms and handed each of us a mimeographed copy of an order signed by Col. Hall, “Chief [Eighth Army], Psywar.” Brief and otherwise uninformative, it assigned us individually to components of either the Fifth Air Force or Eighth Army Psywar effort, i.e., Intelligence, Operations, Leaflets, and Loudspeakers. I drew...