They broke jets, he fixed them

[thedrifter]

They broke jets, he fixed them

Rough landings Bouncing bombs Sad duty

By Ron Simon
News Journal


MANSFIELD -- William Miser, 74, never met Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams. But he remembers the day Williams put his Marine jet into a rice paddy during the Korean War.

"I did know Gerry Coleman, the Yankees' second baseman. I helped strap him into his plane plenty of times. Couldn't meet a nicer guy. He'd talk to you after he came back from a mission," Miser said.

In his long Marine career, Sgt. William Miser met plenty of famous people in the Marine's air arm, including a second lieutenant named John Glenn.

"Of course, officers and enlisted men don't talk that much. I just remember that red-headed officer at Cherry Point,'' Miser said.

Miser was a jet aircraft mechanic during the Korean War, working with F9F2 Panther jet fighters and the older prop-driven Corsairs.

The home base for Miser's unit, Marine Fighter Squadron 311, was K-3, or Pahong.

"It was located on top of a mountain, so to speak, as the end of the runway was a long drop. If planes didn't get airborne in time, they made that drop," he said. That's what happened to Ted Williams' jet when it made that drop into a rice paddy.

"He wasn't injured," Miser recalls.

"Pahong had a terrible smell, especially when the wind was blowing. Human waste was the main fertilizer used in growing rice," Miser said.

Then there was Gunny, Miser's pet dog, who loved orange juice and gin.

"Needless to say, a few drinks and he would lay where he passed out. You didn't dare to pet him the next day," he said. "One day I missed Gunny and was told he wound up being a meal for hungry Koreans living nearby."

Miser said that was one of the hardest things to get over in Korea.

The other was the loss of a friend who, after receiving a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend, shot himself to death.

Miser did two tours of duty on the Peninsula during the Korean War. The first lasted 12 months and the second, served with a photo reconnaissance group, lasted 17 months.

Miser admits that between tours of duty, he managed to upset his superiors -- the second tour was a pointer to "shape up."

Life at Pahong, his usual stop in Korea, was non-combat.

"We were always on the alert during my tour of duty. I was assigned to a 30-caliber machine gun along with another Marine," Miser said. But the Chinese Army never quite made it to the Marine airfield.

But there was always some kind of excitement.

"Quite a few times planes would come in with a hung bomb, one that failed to eject from the bomb rack. As soon as the plane set down on the runway, the bomb would drop off and start bouncing down the field along with the incoming fighter. At times, the plane would pass the bomb and then the bomb would pass the plane, back and forth until the bomb would finally go off. The plane would be hit by flying parts of the bomb," he said.

It made more work for the mechanics.

Miser said the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy lost 2,000 planes during the war, most of them shot down by enemy anti-aircraft fire. He knew many of the Marine pilots who didn't come back.

"We lost 24 pilots when they knocked out a North Korean power plant," he said.

Miser, a gunnery sergeant who served 20 years and made five cruises in the Mediterranean, said his hardest duty came when he was a Marine recruiter in Mansfield during the Vietnam War. He recruited in Richland, Knox, Morrow, Marion and Wyandot counties, with some disastrous results.

"Seventeen of the men I recruited were killed in the Vietnam War," he said.

In every case, it was his job to inform the families. He recalls one distraught father who came at him with a gun, blaming him for his son's death. Miser managed to talk the man out of using the gun, but sees the incident as a sign of how personal the war became. He said each death left him with a load of personal guilt.

At one point during the Vietnam War, he worked at a Marine base in Taiwan. He turned down an officer's commission there.

"It would have meant being put in command of a rifle company in Vietnam," he said.

A native of Beckley, W. Va., Miser had five brothers who all served in the Navy.

"I was the only Marine," he said. He also was the oldest boy in a coal-mining family that moved from one mine community to the next. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he tired of it and joined the Marine Corps in 1947.

As he recalls, he did not weigh enough to join. So, at the suggestion of his recruiter, he ate bananas, countless numbers of them, until he came up to weight. In boot training, it was milk and grits and hard physical labor.

As a new private, he flew to Cherry Point, N.C., to begin his duties, which started with his first European cruise with the Navy. As an aircraft mechanic, he served aboard aircraft carriers including the Siboney, Midway, Leyte, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lake Champlain.

Those cruises took him to every country on the Mediterranean Sea, and he took most of the available tours of places like Athens, Barcelona, Venice and Gibraltar. He visited most of the ports in the Persian Gulf, long before the Gulf War. He also visited Pacific port cities including Tokyo, Yokohama, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Join the Marines. See the world.

He married Jeanetta Marie Rutledge in 1955 and they had one son, Fred, now a doctor at The Ohio State University Hospital. There are five grandchildren.

"Two of them are enrolled at Wheaton College," Miser said.

After retirement, Miser settled in Richland County, serving as a deputy sheriff for 11 years and working in home improvements.

Some have termed the Korean War "The Forgotten War," but for Miser, it's a time he'll never forget.

rsimon@nncogannett.com (419) 521-7230



Dave Polcyn/News Journal


William Miser of Mansfield recalls his days as a U.S. Marine in Korea.




Ellie

[thedrifter]

May 16, 2005

The Lore of the Corps
AU-1 Corsair was Corps’ ‘workhorse’ over Korea

By Robert F. Dorr
Special to the Times


The F4U Corsair was one of the great fighters of World War II. Marines flew the Corsair from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, Japan, and even on long-range missions against the Japanese home islands.
In the Pacific, Navy and Marine Corsair pilots flew 64,051 sorties from airfields and carrier decks and racked up 2,140 aerial victories with only 189 air-to-air losses.

During the Korean War, Marine aviators sought improvements to a plane they considered almost perfect. Fighting in Korea was different from that of World War II, requiring constant low-level close-air support where gunfire was intense.

“Anti-aircraft fire in Korea was often more intense than in World War II,” said retired Col. Austin J. “Jim” Bailey Jr., 83, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who flew F4Us in both conflicts. “The Corsair was tough, but we always knew you could take hits to the oil coolers or to other vulnerable parts of the aircraft.”

For close-air support missions in Korea, Marines received a different kind of Corsair — not a “thoroughbred” but a “workhorse,” as one veteran put it.

The new version was first called the F4U-6. But experts decided that it was not a “fighter” but an attack plane. It became the AU, the only version of which was the AU-1.

It first flew on Jan. 31, 1952, but it didn’t go nearly as fast or as high as the F4U-4, which was the version then in service with the Corps. The familiar external oil coolers of the F4U were moved inboard to reduce vulnerability, and the aircraft was given new layers of armor for protection against hostile fire.

Fully loaded for combat, an AU could weigh about 20 percent more than a fully loaded F4U. It could also carry about 20 percent more ordnance. A typical load consisted of two 1,000-pound bombs under the fuselage and six 500-pound bombs on the outer wing racks.

In Korea, some AUs carried 10 5-inch, high-velocity rockets. Because of the extra armor and weapons, the AU was rated at only 238 mph at medium altitude with a service ceiling of less than 20,000 feet. In contrast, an F4U could reach 446 mph and 37,000 feet.

Despite the intentional trade-off of performance for armor, Marines loved the AU because it could take punishment and dish it out. According to a Web site devoted to the history of Marine Fighter Squadron 323, the AU “was strictly a low-altitude aircraft with a two-speed supercharger, versus the two-stage, two-speed supercharger in the F4U. It had more power at the lower altitudes, but was a ‘dog’ up high.”

Even with its armor, the AU was not invulnerable. On Aug. 5, 1952, Col. Robert E. Galer was leading 31 warplanes to a target near Wonsan, North Korea, when gunfire ripped into his AU. Galer had witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and received the Medal of Honor for his actions on Guadalcanal as an F4F Wildcat pilot. Although his AU went down, Galer bailed out, was rescued by a helicopter and later retired as a brigadier general.

A few AU Corsairs remained in service briefly after fighting in Korea ended in July 1953, but the last was retired in 1957.

Robert F. Dorr, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is the author of books on military topics, including “Chopper,” a history of helicopter pilots. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net.



Ellie