The Captains Read online

  The only sure way to get them out was by air, by Stinson L-5, a single-engine aircraft used by the army to direct artillery fire from the air, to supervise movement of armored or logistic columns, and as sort of an aerial jeep. But it would take either three L-5s, or three flights by one L-5, because the tiny aircraft were capable of carrying only one passenger at a time. Furthermore, the colonel realized that he had better things to do with his L-5s. They were not only the best eyes he had, but they were absolutely essential to carry messages. Communications, never very reliable, had already started to go out, probably because of sabotage. He was very much afraid that he was going to have to leave the three KMAG instructors to fend for themselves.

  And then the colonel remembered that there was a Supreme Commander, Allied Powers (SCAP) L-17 Navion sitting at Kimpo Airfield. One of MacArthur’s palace guard, a colonel in military government, was enamored of a State Department civilian lady at the Embassy, and had arranged to fly over from Tokyo to see her. It was a four-passenger airplane, big enough to pick up the three officers at the 17th ROK Infantry CP. The colonel considered begging the use of it from the SCAP colonel, but decided not to do that. The SCAP colonel, probably still asleep in the arms of love, might very well decide that the Big Picture required his immediate return to the Dai Ichi Building. There was time, the colonel decided, for the L-17 to rescue those poor bastards on Ongjin, and then fly the SCAP colonel out.

  He motioned a master sergeant to him.

  “Take a jeep and go out to Kimpo, and find the pilot of a SCAP L-17, and ask him to go get the officers with the 17th ROK,” he said. “If he won’t do it, you get him on the horn to me. At pistol point, if you have to.”

  (Four)

  Kimpo Airfield

  Seoul, Korea

  25 September 1950

  Captain Rudolph G. “Mac” MacMillan, Army Aviation Section, Headquarters, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers (SCAP), had flown one of SCAP’s L-17 Navions to Seoul from Tokyo the day before, landing just before noon after a two-day, 1,000-mile flight.

  MacMillan was Scotch-Irish, out of Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania. He had enlisted in the army ten years before, at seventeen, after two years in the anthracite coal mines where everybody else he knew worked out their lives. He had no idea what the army was going to be like, but it couldn’t be worse than the mines. The possibility of becoming a commissioned officer and a gentleman had never entered his mind. His vaguely formed dream then was to get up to corporal in four years, so he could marry his sweetheart, Roxy, and maybe up to staff sergeant before he had thirty years in. With a staff sergeant’s pension, he had dreamed, he could save enough money to buy a saloon, and then he and Roxy would be on Easy Street.

  World War II had changed all that.

  There were three L-17s in the fleet of army aircraft assigned to the U.S. Army of Occupation in Japan. The Navions (from North American Aviation) had been bought “off-the-shelf” with funds reluctantly provided by Congress, less to provide the army with airplanes than to assist North American Aviation in making the transition from a manufacturer of warplanes (North American had built thousands of P-51s during World War II) to a manufacturer of light aircraft for the civilian market.

  The L-17 Navion bore a faint resemblance to the P-51. There was a certain sleekness in the Navion that no other light aircraft, except perhaps Beech’s “Bonanza,” had; and the vertical stabilizer of the small aircraft looked very much like the vertical stabilizer of the P-51. But it was a civilian airplane, despite the star-and-bar identification painted on the fuselage and the legend US ARMY painted on the sides of the vertical stabilizer.

  The seats were upholstered in leather, and the instrument panel, probably on purpose, looked like the dashboard of a car. There were four seats under a slide-back plexiglass canopy. There had been a notion among certain North American executives that all it was going to take to fill America’s postwar skies with Navions flown by business executives and salesmen, and even by Daddies taking the family out for a Sunday afternoon drive through the skies, would be to convince the public that the Navion was nothing more than a Buick or a Chrysler with wings. They had designed the Navion to fit that image.

  An airplane, of course, is not a car, and the idea never caught on as people hoped it would, but a number of Navions were built, and about forty of them were sold to the U.S. Army. They were used as transport aircraft for senior officers who wanted to fly, for example, from Third Army Headquarters in Atlanta to Fort Benning when there was no convenient (or available) means to do so by commercial airlines.

  Some of the Navions were sent to the army overseas, to Germany and the Panama Canal Zone, to Alaska and Japan. Unofficially, they were assigned on the basis of one per lieutenant general and higher. By that criterion—which worked in the States and in Europe—Supreme Headquarters, Far East Command, U.S. Army, Japan, should have received but two L-17 Navions, for there were only two officers in the Far East in the grade of lieutenant general or above.

  Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker commanded the Eighth United States Army, the Army of Occupation of Japan. Above him was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. Custom, not regulation, dictates the rank of senior officers immediately subordinate to a five-star general. When General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded the Army of Occupation of Germany from the Farben Building in Frankfurt, his chief of staff had been a full, four-star general, who himself had a three-star lieutenant general for a deputy. Five other lieutenant generals were scattered through the command structure.

  When five-star General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had requested a suitable officer to serve him as chief of staff in the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo, the Pentagon could find no officer suitable to serve the Supreme Commander except a lowly major general, Edward M. Almond, whose most distinguished previous service had been as the commanding general of a division in the Italian campaign whose troops were almost entirely black.

  MacArthur rose above that studied insult, as he rose above others, including the somewhat unequal distribution of L-17 Navion aircraft. Headquarters, European Theater got thirteen of the winged Buicks, and Headquarters, Far East Theater got three. MacArthur simply made the L-17s availble to whoever needed aerial transportation around Japan and to Korea.

  At the lower echelons, however, among the brigadier generals and the colonels in the Dai Ichi Building, and especially among the small corps of army aviators, use of the L-17 became a matter of prestige, of privilege, of honor.

  The SAC (for Supreme Allied Commander) army aviation officer, a full colonel, and his deputy, a lieutenant colonel, flew most of the missions in the L-17s. With the exception of Captain Rudolph G. “Mac” MacMillan, the other pilots permitted to fly the tiny fleet of L-17s were the other lieutenant colonel aviators, and a few, especially well-regarded majors.

  MacMillan, who frequently got to fly one of the L-17s, was a special case. He had several things going for him, even though, having learned to fly only four years before, he was a newcomer to army aviation. For one thing, in 1940, Rudy MacMillan had brought prestige to the Department of the Philippines by winning the All-Army Light-Heavyweight Boxing Crown. The contests had been held that year at Fort McKinley, near Manila; and MacArthur, then Marshal of the Philippine Army, and a boxing fan, had watched MacMillan train, and had personally awarded him the golden belt.

  MacMillan had not been with MacArthur in the Philippines during the war—which always granted a special cachet—but he had done the next best thing. He’d won the Medal of Honor. If there was one little clique around General MacArthur for whom he did not try to conceal his affection, it was those few men entitled to wear, as Douglas MacArthur himself wore, the inch-long, quarter-inch-wide piece of blue silk, dotted with white stars.

  MacMillan’s award had been for his “intrepid gallantry and valor in the face of overwhelming enemy forces.” MacMillan had been trapped on the wrong side of the river during Operation Market-Garden, his fifth jump into combat with the 82nd Air
borne Division. He didn’t learn that he had been awarded the Medal, or the battlefield promotion to second lieutenant and officer and gentleman, until some months after the action. He spent some of that time in a German POW camp in Poland, and some of it escaping from the camp and leading twenty-two others on an odyssey to freedom that earned him the Distinguished Service Cross to go with his new gold bars and the Medal.

  So no one had really been surprised, when the orders were cut for Colonel Jasper B. Downs, General Staff Corps, Hq, SCAP, to proceed by army aircraft to Seoul to confer with KMAG, that Captain MacMillan had been assigned as his pilot. A flight to Seoul was a good deal.

  Mac MacMillan had come to Seoul with instructions from Mrs. Roxanne “Roxy” MacMillan, the twenty-eight-year-old redheaded woman to whom he had been married for a decade, to get her eight yards of a really nice green silk brocade. Roxy wanted some to make herself a dress, and some to send home to her sister in Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania.

  There were a number of things available in the enormous Tokyo PX that were unavailable in Korea. If you knew what you were doing, you could make the Seoul trip with one extra, nonsuspicious Valv-Pak full of the right things, and come home with an empty Valv-Pak and a nice stack of either Army of Occupation script or real green dollars; or if you liked that kind of stuff, with the Valv-Pak full of silk brocade, maybe wrapped around some three-hundred-year-old vase.

  When the master sergeant from Headquarters, Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG), burst into MacMillan’s room at the bachelor officer’s hotel at Kimpo Airfield, the silk brocade was in his Valv-Pak, wrapped around a nearly transparent china tea set MacMillan had been solemnly informed was at least three hundred years old.

  In his bed was a large-breasted blond he had not planned on, but who had been at the Naija Hotel roof garden when he’d gone there for a drink, and who had soon made her desires known. Mac MacMillan’s philosophy was that while he didn’t go running after it, he didn’t kick it out of bed either. He always wore his wedding ring. If he was going to get a little on the side, it was better to screw a commercial attaché, or something like that, an American broad from the Embassy who had as much to lose as he did, than fuck around with either the nips in Tokyo, or the slopes here.

  But he was embarrassed when the master sergeant came barging into his room at the BOQ and caught him in bed with her like that.

  “What the hell?” he said, sitting up in bed. “Goddamnit, Sergeant, didn’t anybody ever teach you to knock?”

  “Captain, the North Koreans are attacking all over the goddamned parallel.”

  The blond looked at him in disbelief for just a minute, saw that he was serious, and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Oh, my God!” she said.

  “Jesus Christ!” MacMillan said, and got out of bed and picked up his shorts where he’d dropped them on the floor.

  “Are they coming here?” the blond asked, holding the sheet in front of her, more frightened now than embarrassed or outraged.

  “It’s no raid,” the sergeant said. “It’s a war, that’s what it is.”

  “Jesus Christ,” MacMillan said again. He pulled his tropical worsted Class “A” trousers on, and then dipped into the nearest of his two Valv-Paks and came up with a small Colt .32 caliber automatic pistol. He ejected the clip, confirmed that it contained cartridges, replaced it, and put the pistol in his hip pocket.

  “The colonel sent me to ask you to pick up three officers on the Ongjin peninsula,” the master sergeant said.

  “Why?” MacMillan asked, as he put on his shirt.

  “Because they’re cut off, is why,” the sergeant said.

  “I got my own colonel to worry about,” MacMillan replied.

  “Unless you go get them,” the sergeant said, “they’re gonna get run over.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go get them,” MacMillan replied. “What I said was that I got my own colonel to worry about.”

  “What happens to me, Mac?” the blond asked. She was now out of bed, her back to the men, picking up her underpants from where she had dropped them the night before.

  “The sergeant will take you into Seoul to the Embassy, or wherever you want to go,” Mac said. “If I were you, I’d go to the Embassy first.”

  “All right,” she said, as if making a decision.

  “The guys at Ongjin know I’m coming after them?” MacMillan asked.

  “We told them we’d try to get somebody up there,” the sergeant said.

  “That’s not what I asked,” MacMillan said angrily.

  “Their radio’s out,” the sergeant said.

  “Which means they could already be rolled over, doesn’t it?” MacMillan said.

  “We have to try,” the sergeant said.

  “We have to try?” MacMillan said. “Shit!”

  There was a peculiar whistling sound outside. MacMillan’s face screwed up as he tried to identify it. Then there came the scream of propellers on aircraft flying low.

  “Goddamnit, they’re strafing the airfield,” MacMillan said and went to the window, pushing the curtain aside. He saw a Russian-built YAK fighter pulling up after a run on the terminal building across the field. “Shit, if they get the Navion, we’ll all be walking,” he said.

  The blond, oblivious to the amount of thigh she was displaying, hooked her stockings to her garters, pulled her dress down, and slipped into her shoes. MacMillan sat down and put on his shoes and socks.

  “Let’s go see if I still have an airplane,” he said. He put his leather-billed cap on, picked up his two Valv-Paks, and walked out of the BOQ.

  The Navion, parked across the field from the air force and civilian terminals of the airfield, was intact. MacMillan put his Valv-Paks in the plane, one in the luggage compartment, one in the back seat, and then turned to face the blond and the sergeant.

  “I want you to find my colonel,” he said. “Colonel Downs, he’s in the Naija Hotel. Tell him what I’ve done and that I should be back here, if I can still get in here, in an hour. If I can’t get in here, I’ll go down to Suwon.”

  “Yes, sir,” the master sergeant said. He had just noticed the fruit salad on MacMillan’s tunic. He didn’t think much of army aviators, and wondered if this one was really entitled to wear the blue ribbon with the white stars on it.

  “You’ll be all right,” MacMillan said to the blond. “They’ve got an evacuation plan, in case something like this happens.”

  She raised her face to be kissed. It turned into a passionate embrace. MacMillan was grossly embarrassed. She was hanging on to him like that not because she was horny, but because she was scared.

  He freed himself, stepped up on the wing, and crawled into the cabin. He busied himself with the preflight checklist, not looking up until he heard the sounds of the jeep starting up and driving away.

  Then he got out of the cabin again and walked around the plane, making the preflight. After that, he got in again and cranked it up. When the propeller was turning and the engine smoothing out, he closed the canopy, released the brakes, and moved onto the taxiway.

  There was no response when he tried to call the tower, so he simply turned onto the active and pushed the throttle to the firewall. Even if he was taking off downwind, he had enough runway to get it into the air.

  He took off toward the city, made a steep, climbing turn to the right, passing over the KMAG Skeet and Trap Club on the banks of the Han River, and then changed his mind about the altitude. The YAK fighters might come back. He lowered the nose and flew at treetop level through the low mountains until he reached Inchon and the sea. Then he pointed the Navion’s nose toward the Ongjin peninsula.

  (Five)

  MacMillan made a power-on approach to the command post of the 17th ROK Infantry Regiment. With his flaps down and the engine of the Navion running at cruise power, he had two options. If he saw the Americans he had come to fetch, he could chop the throttle and put the Navion on the ground. If he didn’t see the Americans, or, as
he thought was entirely likely, he saw North Koreans, he could dump the flaps and get his ass the hell out of there.

  There was nobody in sight as he flew over the command post, and he had just about decided the unit had been rolled over when he spotted three people furiously waving their arms and what looked like field jackets at the far end of the short, dirt runway. He was too far down the runway by then to get the Navion on the ground, so he went around again, came in even lower, dropped his landing gear, and when he was halfway down the dirt strip, touched down. He hit the brakes as soon as he dared.

  Now that he was on the ground, rolling toward the three men, he could see they were Americans. As he taxied toward them, he wondered where the hell everybody else was. And then there was an explosion which both shook the Navion and sprayed it with dirt and rocks. He had landed at the 17th ROK Regiment thirty seconds before they blew up the CP.

  The first of the three Americans scrambled onto the Navion’s wing before MacMillan had finished turning around and before he had the canopy open. He lurched to a stop, unlatched the canopy, and slid it back on its tracks. One by one, almost frenziedly, the three American officers climbed into the cockpit.

  MacMillan was pleased to see that the last man to climb in was the senior of the three officers. The senior officer would most likely be the last. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  “Is that all?” MacMillan shouted, over the roar of the engine.

  The officer beside him vigorously shook his head, “yes.”

  MacMillan turned to slide the canopy closed. There was a pinging noise on the side of the fuselage. He turned around and rammed the throttle to the firewall. The Navion began to move. The officer beside him slid the canopy home and latched it in place. The Navion lifted off the ground. MacMillan pulled the wheels up and then immediately pushed the nose down to put a rise off the end of the dirt strip between him and the machine gun.