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That's fascinating you witnessed (participated I
guess!) in that. It's covered in some detail in the book "With the Yanks in
Korea Vol 1" which is about the Commonwealth AF's in the first 18 months or so.
But the same attack, by 77 Sdn RAAF according to the book also struck ROKA
reinforcements moving fwd, killed 29 people altogether and blew up an ammo
train.
As an overview from reading, for Korea but not so
different from other wars until recently (perhaps) airmen especially in ad hoc
armed recon type attacks (as opposed to set piece bombing with careful before
and after photo recon) as a rule exaggerated their effect, sometimes a lot.
OTOH judging from things like later POW interrogations and what was found as the
UN advanced back out of the Pusan Perimeter in September '50 the constant air
attacks did gradually wear down the KPA, it was a significant factor from their
perspective.
For one example interrogations of a bunch of
KPA armor unit prisoners in an Operations Research Office report had the
consistent theme that though nothing like the claimed number of tanks were ko'd
by air, and not many listed air attack as the thing they feared most when asked.
But cumualtively a significant % of their initial tank force was ko'd by air
(crews generally espcaped even naplam hits which eventually completely burned
out the tanks) and their further replacement tanks moving down the roads later
were thinned out seriously by air. They had to be more circumspect using
their tanks in good visibility in numbers starting around the second week
in July. And many mentioned the loss of
almost all their trucks at around the same time to air attacks and how the
corresponding loss of tools and spares, and resupply cap'y, limited
their further ops. It's generally similar to the common feedback of German armor units under
Allied air superiority in later WWII.
Joe
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