OVER THE YALU

SABRE PILOTS FLY IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

"The first MiG was a piece of cake! I was going one way, and he was going the other way. And he was higher than I was. I did a 180 turn and nestled in on his butt. I looked around; nobody behind me, so I put my speed brakes out to get co-equal speed and fired .50-caliber bullets right up his rear! The MiG exploded, and the pilot jumped. It's unusual to see a man going by you in his seat with no airplane attached."

-Steve Bettinger, 2003

"COCKY AND IRRESPONSIBLE: FIGHTER MATERIAL ONLY"

Since that long-ago AT-6 training flight over Spence Field, Georgia, during WW II's last stages, an instructor's one-line evaluation had hung advisedly and with considerable personal relish in the back of Steve Bettinger's mind. But since his arrival in Korea, "Cocky and irresponsible: fighter material only" had begun to take on an entirely new shade of meaning. Oh, the relish for a good scrap hadn't changed for this brash, stiff-necked native of Newark, New Jersey. He had proved his mettle during WW II while flying P-47s with the 66th FS of the famed 57th FG from Corsica.

"I was flying with Dick Johnson, the 66th's Ops officer," recalls Bettinger. "He was a hell of a pilot. But he was a kind of quiet, tough guy; he was 24 and we were 19, and he had a college degree. And when he spoke with that quiet authority, I guess he wanted us to do things. But, you know, a lot of times we didn't do things.

"We were flying over Northern Italy, and I spotted some bogeys that turned out to be 109s. Dick didn't see 'em, so down I went, and boy, what a debacle! There were three of them. I fired so far out of range that the sons of guns turned around and came right back, all three of them firing at me. Wow!"

Nonetheless, Bettinger held his ground and scored his first and only kill of WW II.

"Korea was a different kind of war. We didn't fly in whole squadrons like we did over Italy," adds Bettinger. "Because I was a major and had been through WW II, I flew one, maybe two, training missions. Then I flew element lead a couple of times before I started to lead a flight of four Sabres."

Though Bettinger, who flew with the 336th Fighter Interceptor Squadron of the 4th FIW, was a wing operations officer, he never made squadron commander in any theater of operation. "Those jobs," says the ace (with a trace of cynicism) "... were much coveted by the personal best friends of the wing commander."

While squadron integrity was maintained on the parking ramp at their South Korean field of K-14 at Kimpo, it was not, he was soon to discover, maintained in the air. "When we took off in 16ship groups, our basic unit was a flight of four. We might take off with a flight from each squadron, or two flights, each from the same squadron. Apart from our flight, we couldn't have cared less about the squadron identity of the planes behind us. A flight gave us all the guns we needed. Anyway, keeping eight or 12 ships together is just impossible when there's a lot of MiG activity."

The flights generally took off from Kimpo at two- to three-minute intervals to join the stream of flights that headed north for famed "MiG Alley" in the northwest corner of North Korea, where the Yalu River marked the Manchurian frontier. MiG Alley was little more than 20 minutes away. Bettinger liked to enter the area at an altitude of somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 feet. "Early in the war, we would just cruise with our [auxiliary fuel] tanks on, until we were hit by MiGs. But we found that all we were doing was defending ourselves and not getting any kills for our troubles. So we started to drop our tanks [on arrival in the Alley] and push the Mach number up to around point-nine. But you wanted to leave a couple of points for your wingman, so he'd be able to stay with you in formation. Lose your wingman, and you lose your eyes. It was then, when the MiGs hit, that we were equal. That's when we started killing MiGs.

"Everybody had their own tricks. I liked to stay in the con [contrail], so I could see anybody coming up and anybody coming down. Some people liked to be just below the con, so that they could see the long white streak of anybody coming down." Loitering time on station in MiG Alley could run as long as 20 minutes or more before bingo fuel; usually 1,500 to 2,000 pounds suggested that it was time to turn south. "But, of course, if the MiGs hit, you would push up whatever speed you could and keep your wingman with you. If you're fighting at full throttle, you might have only five or 10 minutes; it depended on how long you had been cruising the area."

But over Korea, Bettinger's greatest concern, and "responsibility," soon proved to be the rules of engagement. In this arena, the enemy seemed to have it all on their terms. They flew the Sovietbuilt MiG-15, which sported heavier armament, flew at higher altitudes and, if the odds weren't in their favor, had the option of a quick turn north across the YaIu River into the sanctuary of Red China, where the Sabres were forbidden to follow.