Changing of the Guard [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

05-03-03, 07:42 AM

It was painfully apparent that the B-29s were going to need fighter escort if the interdiction raids were to continue. Knowing the need for fighter cover was one thing. Doing something about it was another. There simply wasn't a friendly fighter in Korea suited for the night-fighter role. Enter Willie the Whale and Marine Night Fighter Squadron (VMF(N)) 513.

No sooner had Lieutenant Colonel Homer G. Hutchinson's VMF(N)-513 "Flying Nightmares" become operational with their new F3Ds than FAF put them to work escorting B-29s over North Korea. Hostile MiGs rising to challenge the bombers soon learned that they had met an aircraft that was more than their match. This was demonstrated less than 72 hours after the squadron assumed its escort duties. Maj William T. Stratton Jr. and his airborne intercept operator (AIO), MSgt Hans C. Hoglind, blasted a Soviet jet out of the sky over the heavily defended communist airfield at Sinuiju. It was the first time that an enemy jet had been shot down at night by an aircraft using airborne intercept radar equipment, and it was only the beginning.

As fast as they went up, the MiGs were batted down. In only a few short weeks, bomber losses declined to the point of being negligible, while MiG losses soared. The MiGs, dependent on visual sightings, were no match for the on-board radar fire direction system of the F3Ds, which made it possible to destroy a MiG without either the pilot or the AIO ever seeing it. Communist pilots, totally unaware that they had even been detected, were acquired first by the F3D's radar, then shredded by a stream of 20 mm projectiles guided unerringly to their target.

It was one such mission that provided a mystery that lasted nearly 50 years. In the early morning hours of 30 May 1953, an F3D-2 piloted by Captain James B. Brown, with Sergeant James "Red" Harrell as AIO, disappeared from ground approach radar while preparing for its final descent to its base at Kunsan's K-8 Airfield on South Korea's West Coast. There was no inclement weather, and there were no other aircraft airborne in the area. An extensive daytime search uncovered no trace of the aircraft or its crew. The cause of the disappearance was never determined.

On 27 July 2001, a South Korean family vacationing on the beach west of Kunsan came upon human remains and dog tags belonging to Harrell. The remains were sent to the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, where they were determined to be those of Red Harrell. With many of his old squadron mates from VMF(N)-513 in attendance, Harrell was laid to rest in Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery on 1 Feb. 2002.

Augmented by Navy pilots and AIOs from Fleet Composite Squadron (VC) 6, the Flying Nightmares of VMF(N)-513 made the night skies over the Yalu hazardous to the health of MiG pilots. MiGs were going down nightly, blown out of the air by deadly accurate radar-controlled 20 mm gunfire. By the end of the Korean War, the unique Navy-Marine team of VMF(N)-513 had destroyed more enemy aircraft than any other Marine or Navy day-fighter squadron. The F3D, supposedly inferior to other fighters, had proven itself the master of them all.

Thought to be obsolete the day it was born, the F3D outlived any jet fighter of the Korean War. Reconfigured as an electronic warfare platform, the warhorse continued in service long after its contemporaries had been retired. In the spring of 1965, when LtCol Otis W. S. Corman took his Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron (VMCJ) 1 to Vietnam from its base at Iwakuni, Japan, old, reliable Willie the Whale was among the first to land at Da Nang.

Editor's note: Maj Bevilacqua, a former enlisted Marine and later an instructor at Amphibious Warfare School and Command and Staff College, served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. He is a frequent contributor to Leatherneck and has been writing a continuing series of Korean War articles to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that war.

© 2003 Marine Corps Association

Sempers,

Roger