The Korean conflict was less than six months old on the morning of November 30, 1950, when a U.S. Air Force B-29 Superfortress, attacking an air base in North Korea, was lightly damaged by a fighter that overtook the bomber too fast for the attacker to be identified, much less for the Superfort’s gunner to fix it in the sights of his gun’s tracking system. Straight-wing Lockheed F-80 jets escorting the bomber made a token pursuit, but the accelerating fighter rapidly shrank to a dot, then disappeared.
The bomber crew’s reports sparked an organized panic that sizzled through the U.S. chain of command. Although the airmen’s description of the intruder matched no aircraft known to be operating in the theater, U.S. intelligence officials quickly made an educated assumption. The attacking aircraft was a MiG-15, most likely flying from a base in Manchuria. Before the incident, analysts believed that the only use Stalin had authorized for MiGs supporting communist China’s air force was protecting Shanghai from attack by nationalist Chinese bombers. The MiG was an ominous sign: China’s involvement in Korea was increasing, and Soviet technology was spreading.
For the crews strapping into the lumbering Superfortresses, the jets slashing through their formations became a source of suffocating dread. “I’ll tell you, everybody was scared,” says former B-29 pilot Earl McGill, as he describes the notable absence of radio chatter while he held his four-engine Boeing—the weapon system that had ended World War II—short of the runway for a mission against Namsi air base, near the border between North Korea and China. “On my first mission, we were briefed for heavy MiG interception. I was so scared on that day that I’ve never been frightened since, even when I flew combat missions in the B-52 [over Vietnam].” Earlier, the ready-room chatter had been filled with black humor. “The guy who briefed the navigation route had been an undertaker,” McGill says. He delivered the briefing in an undertaker’s stove-pipe hat.
On one disastrous day in October 1951—dubbed Black Tuesday—MiGs took out six of nine Superforts. McGill’s first encounter with the craft had been typically brief. “One of the gunners called him out. He was a small silhouette,” McGill says. “That’s when I saw him…. [The gunners] were shooting at him.” McGill says the bomber’s centrally controlled firing system provided some protection against the fighters.
MiG-15 pilot Porfiriy Ovsyannikov was on the other end of the B-29’s guns. “When they fired at us, they smoked, and you think, Is the bomber burning, or is it machine gun smoke?” he recalled in 2007, when Russian historians Oleg Korytov and Konstantin Chirkin interviewed him for an oral history of Soviet combat pilots who fought in World War II and Korea. (The interviews are posted on the website lend-lease.airforce.ru/english.) The historians asked Ovsyannikov to rate the B-29’s defensive weapons. His reply: “Very good.” But MiG pilots were able to open fire from about 2,000 feet away, and at that distance, says McGill, they could savage a B-29 formation.
“The MiG-15 surprised the hell out of us,” says National Air and Space Museum curator Robert van der Linden. Compared to the North American F-86 Sabre, hastily introduced in combat after the MiGs showed up, “the MiG was faster, could outclimb it, and had more firepower,” he says. And Sabre pilots knew it.
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