It certainly would have played a role in Korea if the Panther hadn’t been available…

The USN decided in late 40’s it preferred the F4U for the remaining prop fighter role alongside jets, and there were actually F4U squadrons which fought in Korea which had converted from F8F’s before the war. VF-113 was an example of that, F8F in late 40’s, transitioned to F4U-4’s in early 1950, saw action with the second USN air group to reach Korea, CVG-11, with the then somewhat standard line up of 2 jet (F9F in that case), 2 F4U and one AD sdns plus specialist version F4U and AD detachments and helo’s. Some F8F’s remained in active Atlantic Fleet units into the Korean War period, though. Maybe if the USN had had no jets at all it would viewed things differently, but then would have been in a bad situation by 1950. F8F’s (like F6F’s) were available to the French earlier because the USN preferred the F4U; though after Korea F4U’s (AU-1’s) became available to the French and they got new-build F4U-7’s too.

Joe

James, you know better than that…( unlike many here, you usually don’t go for cheap laughs to make the U.S. look bad…:D)

History lesson time… (did I sound like Mr. Chips?)

The title was Sercetary of War (whether there was a war or not) until September, 1948. The person is appointed by the President and sits in the President’s cabinet and is the civil leader of the military…

Why the shift to “Defense” rather than “War”?

The War Department was in charge of the Army (including the US Army Air Force, though after the 1942 re-org it was already virtually an independent service from the Army Ground Forces). Prior to 1947 there was a co-equal Navy Department with its own cabinet secretary, also responsible for the US Marine Corps. The 1947 reorg renamed ‘War’, ‘Army’ and folded it, the Navy Dept and a new AF Dept together under one cabinet secretary as Dept of Defense. ‘Euphemism’* can be suggested as reason for the particular name ‘Defense’, but naming the whole thing ‘War’ would have implied the Army ran things, according to previous US terminology, if ‘names are important’.

*one man’s ‘euphemism’ might be another man’s setting out of a principal against which a society or organization can be judged. If you pursue wars that aren’t legitimately defensive (of yourself or others), you’ve broken the standard you set in declaring ‘defense’ as the military’s purpose. The intellectual change in the West, picking up serious steam after WWI, was concept that aggrandizing war (or conquest/colonialism in the now ‘third world’) wasn’t OK. Before that, it wasn’t even agreed it wasn’t OK. That’s progress, to take a ‘glass half full’ point of view. Although, it obviously doesn’t mean all wars since then by everyone calling their military ‘defense forces’ have all been justified, so that’s potential hyprocisy that wasn’t there before, to take the glass half empty view.

Joe

If we are looking at combat records, then all 4 listed fighters (P-51D, P-47N, F4U-4, or F6F-5) have one year or less in which to be considered.

The P-51 had a much smaller combat record in the PTO, with only P-51B/C models, and only in Burma… until the P-51D finally arrived in late 1944, which were first flown from re-captured Philippine bases. By that stage of the war, Japanese fighter opposition was rare, and Philippine-based Mustangs mostly performed close-support work. The only consistent fighter work the P-51D saw was during the B-29 escort missions (which it shared with the P-47N).

I agree with most of that, however P-51B/C’s were used a fair amount in China from 1944 (part of China-Burma-India theater but to distinguish from use of P-51A’s in Burma proper from 1943). And it met the Japanese Type 4 (aka Ki-84 Frank) there, the Japanese Army sent the Type 4 to China first in part to counter P-51’s.

Also PI based P-51’s did missions to Formosa, China coast etc at one way ranges up to ~800 miles. This is another point: range. The longest US fighter missions were flown by long range P-38’s up to ~900 mile radius, but 51’s and 47N’s came close (for example P-47N’s from Ie Shima to the Seoul area, that’s almost 800). There were remarkable ranges, however the Japanese themselves noted the greater persistence of USN fighters, especially over Japan, less of an eye on the fuel gauge (Iwo Jima based P-51’s were still ~600 over-water miles from home when they dropped tanks and started burning fuel at max throttle rate).

Also re: earlier comment P-38L’s flew some missions from Ie Shima/Okinawa base complexes to Japan proper in the final days of the war.

Another factor to consider is use by P-51D’s in very late war of very high octane fuel and high boost settings; they could considerably exceed the published P-51D stats or real performance experienced in ETO.

But as was said ‘best’ in WWII usually naturally focuses on ‘last’, what got in under the wire to fly a few missions at the end v what was just too late. It’s of limited meaning. Overall the P-38 was by far the most *important* USAAF fighter in the Pacific, and the F6F likewise for the USN, F4U for the USMC (USN F4U’s were also a quite late war thing, and even regular USMC F4U ops from carriers only began in January 1945).

Joe

Looking for the serials and every information available of the sixteen B-29 which were converted to SB-29 to carry lifeboats in rescue missions.

The best published source on B-29’s by serial number is “The B-29 Superfortress-A Comprehensive Registry of the Planes and their Missions” by Robert A. Mann. As the title implies, the book consists entirely of tables with career of each plane by serial, sub-type, use in Korea, use by the RAF, etc. mainly based on examining all Individual Aircraft Record Cards of B-29’s; plus some tables of WWII B-29 missions. There’s a link to a sample chapter in a post above. As I said best published IMO, but per my own research on Korean War B-29’s, using IARC’s and records to determine various things plane by plane, the book is not infallible, though nothing so large could be.

Mann lists 25 confirmed SB-29’s per IARC’s, plus 4 listed by Lloyd “B-29 Suprefortress in Detail and Scale Part 2” which were not or couldn’t be confirmed by IARC, all 44- prefixes:
61671 SB-29 per Lloyd, IARC not found (Papa Lima’s post notes photo)
69957
69971
70119
84030
84078
84084
84086
84088 SB-29 per Lloyd but not per IARC
84112
86303
86308
87644
87665
87761 SB-29 per Lloyd but not per IARC
47308
27312 SB-29 per Lloyd but not per IARC
62190
62194
62210
70089
70101
70117
70131
84034
84096
86259
86335

Among others listed already on this thread but not in Mann’s list:
44-69982: this first hand account link describes it as SB-29
http://www.air-and-space.com/b-36%20wrecks.htm#44-69982
Mann lists only its career with 444th BG (which is mentioned on web too but with Mann as source it seems)

44-84123: as noted already Mann includes it in the KB-29P conversion list, and in the main body of his book it’s listed as serving w/ 91st Strategic Recon Sdn (which did operate KB-29’s during the KW)

Joe

Early in the Korean War the Soviets used the ‘regular’ MiG-15 with the RD-45 engine, slightly Sovietized Nene. For most of the war their air units used the MiG-15bis with the VK-1, a significantly Sovietized engine with their own bona fide improvements. Nonetheless they surely benefited from that engine/technology purchase.

The F-86’s engine, the J-47, however had virtually no connection to the Nene. It was axial flow. The only connection to British technology at all was indirect through earlier pretty different GE engines of WWII. The J-47 was apparently a less reliable engine than the VK-1, though reliable enough in general. But OTOH the slender profile it allowed in the F-86’s tail section, compared to the stubby shape of the MiG-15 to accomodate a centrifugal flow engine, was one reason that F-86’s could exceed Mach 1 in a dive (once control issues were dealt with, ie. F-86E’s and onward could routinely do so) and the MiG-15 firmly stopped out below the Mach. That was actually tactically signficant in Korea.

In contrast the J-42 used in most models of the Navy’s F9F, which also fought the MiG-15 in Korea, was a license built Nene.

Joe

…Ron D. Guthrie…
*** First man to eject in combat since World War II. Highest known bailout and longest descent at that time

The first part of that notation is strange, coming from a site giving examples of Korean War combat ejections prior to that one. The first would seem to be 1LT Edwin T. Johnson, ejected from his F-80C June 30, 1950 after it was hit by AAA fire (though the site has a typo saying June 3), with a few dozen at least between that one and Guthrie’s more than a year later (though not necessarily all listed on that site). Even just counting *air-air* combat, it’s quite a few if we include ejections from MiG-15’s.

Joe

This just highlights the issue of overclaiming, which was as we all know pretty endemic in WW2; however, the two examples that you quote are those where the practice has always seemed me most extreme (Luftwaffe day fighter pilots and US bomber air gunners).

One suspects that the problem that those who sought to achieve star status were the worst offenders – can anyone point me to a well researched work that compares the claims of people like Galland, Molders, Bader, Stanford-Tuck, et al with that damage that they actually did based on study of the “other side’s” records?

It’s certainly true you can’t compare claims apples to apples across a/c types, air arms and periods as if they all represent the same level of real damage done to the enemy, they don’t.

And it’s true the bomber gunner claims were sytematically less accurate than fighter claims, especially bombers in big formations because it was impossible to accurately deconflict duplicated claims, plus a bomber could not stick with its target to assure and see destruction. OTOH the morale effect of crediting claims was an opposing consideration. Even war time intel assumed that fighter losses to US bombers were around 25% of claims (a number hard to verify, some celebrated cases were much worse, but some of those have been misreported as worse than they were, other cases were are high as 1/3 accurate, but it’s in the apparent ballpark). But that wasn’t just true of US bombers, they just operated on a very large scale in daylight compared to other AF’s.

However I don’t agree that German day fighters were sytematically high overclaimers. In some periods they were, especially late in the war, but for much of the war LW day fighters seem to claimed more accurately than the air arms they faced. The RAF claimed more accurately late in the war, but overclaimed at a considerable rate at certain times earlier. See the discussion in Foreman “Fighter Command Diaries” for example about the ‘circuses’ over France ca. 41-42. It was known from Ultra that the credited claims were out of line with German fighter losses several to one, as German records also reflected postwar, German claims were considerably more accurate in those combats, a situation different than BoB. Likewise Mediterranean, see for example Cull et al “Air War over Yugoslavia, Crete and Greece” RAF fighter claims and those of the Italians against them were about equally and pretty highly, overstated. Against the Japanese early in the Pacific War again US and Brit claims were roughly similarly and seriously overstated while the Japanese had the upper hand; in that period the notorious Japanese overclaims were not always worse than Allied. Again, later on British (and US and other Western) fighter claiming got more accurate while Axis claiming got worse. You can’t make an (accurate) single statement that this air arm claimed more accurately always than that one, even for one type a/c.

It’s harder to evaluate individual scores; the general situation is the ace in question and a bunch of other friendlies make claims; the total recorded losses of the enemy are less than that total. Who scored what? Sympathetic analysis of the ace will often give the ace ‘first dibs’ on whatever victories the opposing records ‘make available’ but that distorts the probably real situation by assuming the ace was a more accurate claimer than his comrades. Your thesis that he tended to be less so might be true, but it’s hard to prove either way. One example is Marseille; his accuracy is feasible to see, often small combats, in eg. Shores “Fighters Over the Desert” and was pretty good. The day he claimed 17 Allied fighters, the WWII record, he seems to have downed fewer but not many fewer. In general many German super scores were amassed in periods where their claiming can be seen to have been pretty accurate overall (eg. in East). It stands to reason many of the real scores of those pilots, though still in all probably less than they were credited with, were still very high compared to Western Allied aces’ ‘real’ scores.

This is a huge topic, I don’t think it’s practical to give one list of sources. I think we’d have to focus on a particular period/theater. But again, just tallying the total claims by type doesn’t tell you much, I agree.

Joe

Legend has the British Tallboys being converted at Guam into a radio controlled bomb termed Tarzon or the VB-13. It had an RCA radio controlled system and a circular wing. It was highly successful in Korea blowing bridges and was used to attack a Korean dam.

The development of Tarzon started before the end of WWII, so I don’t think the actual bombs were Tallboys from a later test, they were the Tallboy design though, with the radio control device from the smaller Razon, and additional control surfaces. The development was put on ice after WWII and resumed in 1950. http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/asm-a-1.html

Tarzon success in Korea was mixed. Three 19th BG B-29’s were modified to carry them. Most sources say 30 were dropped starting in December 1950, for 6 hits, surely better than would have been achieved with unguided bombs against the same small (bridge) targets but not overwhelming. Their use was suspended after 45-21749 was lost with all crew March 29, 1951: two engines had failed and it was believed its Tarzon detonated after being jettisoned ‘safe’. The 19th also used 1000# Razons before and after that, until daylight bombing was mainly discontinued at the end of October ’51 due to unacceptable, albeit small absolutely by WWII standards, B-29 losses to MiG-15’s.

Joe