Shoot at your Fuel Tank before Landing

The air war over Korea is often thought of as shiny F-86 Sabres dogfighting MiG-15s flown by inept pilots high above the Yalu River. However, the air war saw many types of actions, and included many types of aircraft, from the old propeller-driven Polikarpov U-2 biplane to the F-51 Mustang and the most modern jets of the early 1950s.

The Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star is somewhat of an unsung design of the Korean War. The first American jet fighter had been deployed to the Far East Air Force (FEAF) before the Korean War, and in May 1950 365 of the 553 operational aircraft in the FEAF were F-80Cs. After some initial successes, the MiG-15 proved to be superior to the F-80, and the latter was mainly assigned ground attack missions. It served very well in that role, carrying bombs and rockets in thousands of sorties against North Korean and Chinese troops until May 1, 1953, when the F-80s stood down in a fighter-bomber role. A few F-80s remained in the interceptor role up to the ceasefire on July 27 that same year.

As opposed to today’s Koreas, North Korea was the industrialized part of the peninsula, while South Korea remained agrarian. The short and rough airfields in South Korea initially limited the use of jet aircraft, and the F-80s had to fly from bases in Japan. This highlighted one of the big problems with early jets: short range. The F-80s could make it from Japan to Korea, but there was little or no time to loiter or search for targets.

However, this was to be addressed before the Korean War broke out by the two lieutenants of the 9th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, Robert Eckman and Edward R. “Rabbit” Johnston. They had just finished the Far East Gunnery Meet of 1949 with top honors, and they wanted to fly their own F-80s to the Nellis Air Force Base to compete against other USAF pilots.

They simply added two middle sections from Fletcher tanks to the standard Lockheed tanks by extending the bolts that held the sections together, thus creating the so-called Misawa tanks, named after the air base in Japan where the unit was stationed. The added middle section increased the tanks capacity from 165 gallons (624,6 liters) to 265 gallons (1003,1 liters), and this meant that the combat radius was increased from 225 miles with Lockheed tanks to some 350 miles, depending on the mission. Time over target was likewise increased from about fifteen minutes to approximately forty-five minutes.

 

F-80 with Misawa tanks on a rainy airfield. <yellowlegs-and-others.com/1950/1950-06/Notes-1950-0600/19500600_0000_usafik0-05902usafik0.htm>

The Fletcher tank was mainly used on the T-33 trainer, which was based o the Shooting Star. <www.bvmjets.com/jetkits/F-80/f-80_t-33.htm>

The tanks were tested by Johnston and Eckman, but the USAF Air Materiel Command was initially unwilling to approve of the installation of Misawa tanks, since the Materiel Command deemed that the heavier tanks placed dangerously high loads at the wingtips, and the project was ordered to be shut down.

This was to change as North Korea invaded the south on June 25, 1950, the situation became increasingly desperate. General Earle Partridge, the commander of the 5th Air Force, overrode previous decisions and ordered full-scale manufacturing of the Misawa tanks so that all F-80s of the FEAF could be equipped with the tanks. However, new problems materialized: the tanks were in short supply for several months. Also, the first tanks made were lacking internal baffles to prevent the fuel from sloshing back and forth in the tank. This was not a problem in normal flight, but the stresses of combat maneuvers, especially when pulling up from a steep dive, could make the sloshing cause a Misawa tank to tear off a from the wingtip, which did cause damage to some F-80s as well as losses.

Further, pulling up and otherwise placing stress on the tank could make the tank feed malfunction, and then the Misawa tank couldn’t be jettisoned. Landing with one empty tank and one full was extremely difficult at best, so some unique solutions had to be devised. Lieutenant Ed Jones of the 80th Fighter-Bomber Squadron recalls dealing with this particular issue: “On one mission, we were heading north towards the bomb line and I could not get either of my tip tanks to feed. After relaying the problem to my flight leader via the radio, he told me to jettison my bombs and external tanks and head back to base. Upon punching the jettison button, all of the right side let go, but nothing happened on the left side! I was heading south at the time, and getting close to our base at Suwon. We had been told that you could not land the F-80 with full tanks on one side and empty on the other because the jet could not be trimmed out enough to make it safe. I decided to use my .45 pistol and try to shoot a hole in the left tank. I cranked the canopy back and got my pistol out. I shot two holes in the front of the tank and fuel began to stream out. After a short while, enough had leaked out to trim the aircraft out. I lined up with the runway and made a smooth landing, and after rolling down the strip for about 2,000 feet, the control tower came on the radio and told me that my left tip tank had just come off, and that it was bouncing down the runway behind my aircraft!”

Sources:

Warren Thompson. F-80 Shooting Star units over Korea. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001

William T. Y’Blood. Down in the weeds : close air support in Korea. Air Force History and Museums Program, 2002

 yellowlegs-and-others.com/Equipment_Vehicles_Weapons/Misawa_Tank.html

 misawa.af.mil

Calling names - the Origin of Gook

Dehumanizing the enemy is part of many, if not most, conflicts throughout the history of mankind, and using derogatory names is part of such efforts. In some cases such names may not be seen as serious pejoratives, such as calling Germans "Fritz" or British fighting the Americans referring to the latter as "Cousin Jonathan", but when racial differences are added to the cultural differences, name-calling rapidly changes into full-forced slurs and bigotry. The term “gook” is indeed derogatory, but it has nevertheless been used quite a bit during the 20th century. It has become well-known outside military circles through both film and literature about the wars of the last century in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

As so often happens, it is difficult to determine exactly when this word came into use.  It has been claimed that the word was initially used by U.S. Marines fighting in the Moro Rebellion (1899-1913 and unconnected to the Philippine-American war of 1899-1902), and that the word was influenced by the word “gugu”, which in turn supposedly is derived from the bark of the “gu-gu” tree that was used by Filipino women to wash their hair. Another, perhaps more reasonable, explanation states that the term is derived from the attempts of American soldiers to mimic languages spoken by the Filipinos, languages that derisively described as “dog languages”. The languages were ridiculed and infantilized as being “goo-goo” or “gugu”, and this evolved into “gook” in a process not unlike ancient Greeks referring to non-Greek speech sounding like “bar-bar.” Claude F. Line, a young private in the Philippines at the time, wrote in a letter home not only of his love of home and family, but also his delight at terrifying two Filipino civilians: “They were the first goo-goos I ever saw turn white." It should be noted that the U.S. involvement in the Philippines also led to the Tagalog word “bundok” being assimilated into American English as the word “boondocks.”

A Moro tribesman during the turn of the previous century (<www.savageandsoldier.com/articles/asia/Moro.html>)

Filipinos were thus referred to as “gooks”, and the term traveled on with the Marines to Nicaragua in 1912, with the local Nicaraguans also being referred to as “gooks”.  When Marines deployed to Haiti in 1915, the word “gook” was once again used for local inhabitants.

However, in 1893, the word “gook” was already to be found in a dictionary, and it was described as a “low prostitute”, synonymous with “barrack hack” and “tart”, and since the Philippines were Spanish possessions up to 1898, the term predates any U.S. military involvement. Could it be that the term had traveled over to the United States via commercial links with the Philippines or some other region in Asia and that the term was already used by merchant mariners before the U.S. involvement in the Philippines to connect contempt for natives with contempt for "promiscuous" women?

The term “gook: was apparently used up to the Second World War in various, primarily Asian, theaters of war, but more specific ethnic slurs such as “nip” or “chink” seem to have been preferred by U.S. servicemen. Gook was also used as derogatory term for North African Arabs, and the term may have lived on in the French community during the Algerian War (1954-1962).

(waeguk.com)

The Korean War did however bring back “gook” with full force into the American military slang. The Korean the term for foreigner or alien is “waeguk-saram” or just “waegukin.” It has been claimed that when U.S. servicemen were addressed as “waegukin” this was interpreted as “we gooks”, and thus the word “gook” was re-discovered as a derogatory term early in the conflict. The use rapidly became so widespread that General Douglas MacArthur gave orders that term be discontinued since it “gave "aid and comfort to the enemy" by calling into question the U.S. commitment to democratic ideals. Official U.S. sources later stated that the term wasn’t used by U.S. soldiers later on in the war, but that is, of course, far from the truth.

With her brother on her back a war weary Korean girl tiredly trudges by a stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea., 06/09/1951
Item from Record Group 80: General Records of the Department of the Navy, 1804 - 1983

With many Korean War veterans still in service when the Vietnam War escalated, the word “gook” once again came into use as a derogatory term for Vietnamese. With the Vietnam War being part of mainstream media and popular culture, “gook” has been heard in any number of circumstances. In 2000, Senator John McCain referred to his wartime experience while attempting to apologize to the Vietnamese community at large by stating that “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live… I was referring to my prison guards and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend.”

Sources:

Dirk deRoos. Lightning from the Clouds: The U.S. Army and the Moro Wars. <www.savageandsoldier.com/articles/asia/Moro.html>

               John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley. Slang and its analogues, past and present. A dictionary,

 historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred

 years. With synonyms in English, French, German Italian etc. 

1893 <www.archive.org/stream/slangitsanalogue03farmuoft/slangitsanalogue03farmuoft_djvu.txt>

Robert G. Kaiser. Friend or Foe, He’s still A GOOK. St. Petersburg Times, October 20, 1969. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=9fwNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-nsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7218,7089053&dq=gook>

 

Jason Ma. McCain Apologizes for ‘Gook’ Comment. Asiaweek, February 24, 2000

 

Jason Renshaw. The Korean notion of “waeguk-saram” (foreigner). October 1, 2009. <http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2009/10/the-korean-notion-of-waeguksaram-foreigner.html>

 

David Roediger. Gook: The Short History of an Americanism. Monthly Review, 1992, Volume 43, Issue 10 (March) <http://www.davidroediger.org/articles/gook-the-short-history-of-americanism.html>

 

Raymond Leon Roker. How Come McCain’s “Gook” Slur Isn’t Bigger News? Huffington Post, October 20, 2008

Soldiers Revive ‘Gook’ as a Name for Korea Reds. Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1950.

 

Waeguk Blog. <waeguk.com>

 

<www.archives.gov/research/military/korean-war>