Re: The Korean air war

["Diego Zampini" <dzampini@hotmail.com>]

Mr. Ronald:
What follows are my oppinions about your thoughts. I must say that I am not 
American, but Argentine, so I fully understand your passion and patriotism, 
you evidently are a true believer in the ´free society´ superiority, but I 
will try to give you a different and impartial perspective, supported by 
solid data.

>Cookie, you know that our aircraft and
>personel were far superior to the
>enemy. I can tell you about a dozen fights
>personally to prove this. Our people were
>smarter and better educated than the enemy
>and the main point is that they came from a
>"free society" rather than a "totalitarian" one
>so that they had what we will loosely call "free will".
>The boys from a totalitarian regime didn't have this
>important quality and in many cases they lacked the
>will. They were used to being told what to do and when
>to do it and that's where we had the edge.

I have serious misgivings about such assertions. It is true that sometimes 
the Soviets were too much dependent of gound control, but I would not say 
that the difference between US pilots and Soviet pilots was a ´free will´ vs 
´totalitarism´ battle. Actually many of the Soviet pilots were so smart and 
so educated like the American pilots, and were so aggressive and independent 
as the best American ace.
Take into account the MiG-15 pilot Col. Yevgeni Pepelyayev, CO of 196 IAP, 
324 IAD: he shot down at least 9 US planes -plus 3 more that I consider 
quite likely to be finally confirmed- among them 5 F-86s; one on July 11 
1951 (Conrad Allard, POW), 2 on October 6 1951 (BuNo 49-1178 and BuNo 
49-1319, the second one, piloted by Gill M. Garrett, landed in the sea shore 
and became the Sabre captured and taken to the USSR), one on November 28 
(Dayton W. Ragland, POW) and one on January 15 1952 (Vernon Wright, POW). He 
developed a maneuver, the Boevoj Razvorot (a climbing turn at a roll angle 
of 45 degrees) which allowed him to shot down Garrett on October 6 1951, 
maneuver which took advantage of the climbing capacity of the MiG-15 forcing 
the Sabre to loose airspeed while trying to follow the MiG, becaming the 
F-86 a sitting duck for a counterstrike. And you said that the Russians were 
fools?
Other example: Captain Nikolai V. Sutyagin (17 IAP, 303 IAD) shot down 9 
F-86s: one on June 19 1951 (Robert Laier, MIA), one on June 22 (Howard 
Miller, MIA), one on July 29 (BuNo 49-1098), one on Sept.26 (Carl G. 
Barnett, MIA; plus an Australian Meteor badly shot-up that same day, the one 
piloted by Ernest Armit), one F-86 on November 8 (Charles Pratt, MIA), one 
on December 15 (William Prindle, rescued), one more on January 6 1952 
(Lester Page, MIA; plus the F-84 of Donald Grey that same day), and finally 
another F-86 on January 7 (Charles Stahl, POW) and January 11 1952 (Thiel M. 
Reeves, MIA). If he would not have an ´free will hunting´ MiG-15 pilot, with 
iniciative and aggressiveness, he would not shot down 9 F-86s and 1 F-84, 
plus a seriously damaged Meteor.
My last example: Nikolai Ivanovich Ivanov (726 IAP, 133 IAD). He shot down 
at least 3 F-86Es and one RF-86, so he did not look as a ´lack of will´ 
pilot. I will excrept part of one account of him:

"What to do? I had to say that I remembered Napoleon's words that, in the 
decisive moment, when you don't know what to do, it is better to do 
something than do not do anything..."

Ivanov have such thought minutes before of shot down the F-86E of Felix Asla 
on August 1 1952 (I can give you the full account if you want, and I remind 
you that Asla was a pilot credited with 4 MiG kills, so he was not a 
rookie). Can you believe in an ´poorly educated´ MiG-15 pilot thinking in 
the rules of Napoleon? I do not think so. Besides Asla, Ivanov had the 
following confirmed kills: one F-86 on July 16 1952 (Richard Drezen, MIA), 
one more on August 20 (Norman Schmidt, rescued) and one RF-86A on September 
5 (William Sney, rescued). Again, I do not think that a pilot with no ´free 
will hunting ability´had been able to shot down 4 enemy planes without a 
single scratch. Certainly neither Pepelyayev, Sutyagin or Ivanov were fools 
or poorly educated, or they would not blasted 5, 9 and 4 Sabres out of the 
sky respectively.

>The P-51 Mustang was the premier prop fighter and
>was superior to almost everything the enemy had e.g. Il-10, Yak-9, etc.  
>except the Mig-15 jet. But
>the F-86 Sabres would kick-ass when up againt the Mig-15.

The P-51 and F-86 planes were not decissively superior to the Yak-9 and 
MiG-15. The difference was the quality of the pilots and the tactics. 
Certainly the F-86 Sabres kicked the Soviet asses in cases like July 4 1952, 
when they shot down 11 MiGs and only loose 2 F-86s (5:1 kill ratio). But 
then the main factor was the poor training of the pilots of the 190 IAD.
But when the Sabre pilots found ´Honchos´, the kicked asses were the 
American ones, not the Russian ones: on October 6 1951 Yevgeni Pepelyayev 
shot down 2 F-86As (the BuNo 49-1178 and BuNo 49-1319 already mentioned) and 
later the MiG-15 pilot Konstantin N. Sheberstov (176 GvIAP, 324 IAD) shot 
down the F-86E BuNO 50-671. There were no Soviet losses that, and that meant 
a 3:0 kill ratio in favour of the MiG drivers. On October 24 1951 Dmitri 
Samoylov and M.Zykov (523 IAP, 303 IAD) shot down the F-86s of Bradley Irish 
and Fred Wicks respectively (both became POWs) and that day only one MiG was 
lost when Lt.Col. Harrison Thyng shot down the Soviet pilot Georgii 
Dyachenko. That meant a 2:1 kill ratio in favour of the MiG drivers. And I 
can mention other occasions where the things did not work fine for the US 
pilots.
Summarizing: It is clear to me that the main difference was the quality of 
pilots and tactics, not the filosophy behind them, and there were very smart 
and well educated pilots facing your countrymen in 1950-53.
Respectfully yours,
Diego Fernando Zampini

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