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> begin 644 US 1942-069683 P-63A to SovietAF USAFColl.jpg
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> Attachment decoded: US 1942-069683 P-63A to SovietAF USAFColl.jpg
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MY BRIEF WAR WITH RUSSIA

By Alton H. Quanbeck March 4, 1990
We were skimming the tops of clouds at 37,000 feet when I decided to
start our letdown into the target, 10 minutes earlier than planned. We
armed our .50-caliber machine guns in preparation for action.

It was Oct. 8, 1950, early in the Korean War, and two of us -- myself and
my wingman, Al Diefendorf -- were on a mission over North Korea. Only
later did we learn that we had strayed and were, in fact, a few miles
inside the Soviet Union.

At 10,000 feet I spotted a small hole through the clouds. We dropped our
F-80s in tight circles through the opening and found ourselves above a
broad river valley with mountains on each side. Following the river, I
proceeded southeast, a heading which I thought would bring us directly to
the coastline and well away from the Chinese and Soviet borders.

In the days preceding this mission, signs of the enemy had been scarce,
so I was surprised when I saw flashes of anti-aircraft fire from the top
of a two-story building in a small town about 500 yards off our right
wing. I alerted Diefendorf.

About 20 seconds later I spotted a truck heading west on a dirt road.
"Let's go in and get it," Dief said. An instant later, he shouted, "Look
at the airfield, it's loaded!"

It was the kind of target that fighter pilots dream about. Parked in two
rows were about 20 aircraft of the P-39 or P-63 type. Thousands of them
were built and flown by Americans in World War II, and some were sent to
our Soviet ally. Those below us had large red stars surrounded by a
narrow white border painted on the side of their dark brown fuselages.

I had only seconds to make a decision. At our speed, the airfield would
soon pass beneath us unless I positioned us for an attack. We were also
nearing minimum fuel. Our low altitude and the low hanging clouds
prevented me from seeing more than a mile or two in any direction. Even
if I could have identified distinctive terrain features, it was unlikely
I could have related them to the crude maps I carried on the mission.

What made me decide to attack? First, we had had intelligence reports of
an expected movement of aircraft down the northeast coast of Korea;
second, the planes' markings were nearly identical to those used by the
North Koreans; third, I had used caution in my dead-reckoning navigation
so as to hit the coast well south of Soviet borders. More important, they
had shot at us first.

Two uncertainties bothered me. First, P-39 type aircraft had never been
seen before in North Korea, and secondly, I was not certain where we
were. Our target was an airfield at Chongjin on the far northeast coast
of the Korean Peninsula, some 430 miles north-northeast of our base at
Taegu Air Field in South Korea and only 40 miles south of the Chinese
border and 60 miles southwest of the Soviet border. The airfield below
didn't match the description of the one at Chongjin, which was reported
to have a hard surface.

But I did not hesitate. We went in for the attack.

In our intelligence debriefing later, we claimed one aircraft destroyed
and two damaged. We were conservative. Several months later an
intelligence officer assigned to Far East Air Force Headquarters told me
"the airfield burned for a week." The aircraft we saw burn must have
triggered a series of secondary explosions which reached the other
planes. The attack quickly had international repercussions. The Soviet
government protested in the United Nations and the United States admitted
responsibility. The story was front-page news but it soon became clear
that both governments preferred to forget the matter, each for its own
reasons. Nonetheless, some historians believe the mission profoundly
affected the behavior of the Soviet leaders toward their Korean allies at
a critical time. It probably drove another nail into the coffin President
Truman was fashioning for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's tenure as commander of
American and U.N. forces in Korea.

By early October 1950, MacArthur had enveloped the North Koreans with his
amphibious landings at Inchon and the breakout from the Pusan perimeter
to the south and was driving north across the 38th Parallel dividing the
two Koreas. The People's Republic of China reacted by mobilizing its
Manchurian army and committing it to attack across the Yalu River into
North Korea as the U.N. forces approached.

Stalin was concerned not only with the possible defeat of his North
Korean surrogates but also with the prospect that U.N. forces could soon
be located near the Soviets' 15-mile-long border with North Korea. Stalin
had to decide whether to intervene actively.

As I sat in the briefing tent of the 49th Fighter Group at Taegu, I was
little concerned with these questions. I was being briefed for an armed
reconnasissance flight over Chongjin. Our group had flown a mission there
the previous day but couldn't find the airfield. Another flight had
reconnoitered Chongjin that morning but found no activity. Chongjin
received all this attention because our intelligence reported 200 North
Korean pilots training in the northeast part of Korea, close to the
border.

We were briefed about an hour before takeoff. The briefing officer didn't
have much to show us, only a target folder and messages reporting the
negative results of the earlier flights. During that stage of the Korean
War, photographs or detailed maps of the target areas were not available.

Since we had to fly practically the entire mission without reference to
the ground, and since there were no radio navigational aids along the
entire flight path, our heading after takeoff and the time of flight
would determine our letdown into the target area. A dominant factor was
the forecast winds, especially at high altitudes where they were usually
strongest. Unfortunately, the Soviets since mid-September had encoded all
their weather reports, preventing us from knowing the weather over
Siberia, north and west of Korea. The tops of the clouds rose along our
path, so we climbed to 35,000 feet and later to 37,000 feet to stay above
them. This caused our first deviation from the pre-flight plan.

Then, about 40 minutes after takeoff, flight leader Bud Evans called me
on the radio and said his engine had thrown a blade from its exhaust
turbine, forcing him to return to base. That was how Dief and I happened
to be dropping through the clouds and going after those 20 planes sitting
so invitingly on an airstrip somewhere near the Soviet-North Korean
border.

I positioned our aircraft for a strafing pass on the northern line of
aircraft, then made a sharp, banking turn to the left and fired on the
southern line. I could see tracers carving through the aircraft and knew
we were getting lots of hits, but there were no explosions. On my last
pass, I decided to make sure of one clear kill. I concentrated my fire at
one plane and saw it start to burn. Dief followed me closely in each
pass. We exhausted our ammunition and were down to minimum fuel -- 400
gallons. Time to go home.

As I pulled off the target, turning right to our homeward course, I saw
an island off the coast. "Oh, oh," I thought, "there's no island near
Chongjin." After four minutes heading south, I could see a coastal point
that matched the coastline at Chongjin. Now I was worried. Dief and I
checked our maps and concluded we had struck an unimproved airfield shown
at Rashin (now called Najin), 40 miles north of Chongjin and only 20
miles from the Russian border. I felt better.

That evening, after an initial debriefing and dinner, we were summoned to
headquarters by Maj. Gen. Earl E. Partridge. I went over the mission
completely. Then Partridge laid out a large map, pointed to an area
inside the Soviet Union southwest of Vladivostock and asked if we could
have attacked there. There were marked similarities to the terrain
features we had described at Rashin. It was possible, but certainly not
probable. I thought to myself, "My God, the wind would have to be much
stronger than we expected to blow us way up there."

(I later figured the winds must have blown from 240(from the southwest)
at 200 miles per hour, twice as strong as predicted and 90 off the
direction predicted by our weather forecasters. At that time, such high
speeds of winds aloft were poorly understood. Only two months later I
flew an F-80 westward over southern Japan with a ground speed of over 600
mph, which translates as a 200-mph tail wind.)

As we were leaving, Partridge said gently, and with some affection,
"You'll get either a Distinguished Service Cross or a court martial out
of this mission."

Dief met me when I returned from a mission the next day. His succinct
words were: "It's hit the fan."

Soon the game was to be played at high levels. Dief and I became pawns as
the big boys took over. The headline of the San Francisco Chronicle for
Oct. 10, 1950 read: "Moscow Says U.S Jets Strafed Russian Airfield." From
The Washington Post: "U.S. Raid on Soviet Plane Base Charged . . . ."

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko delivered the Soviet
protest on Oct. 9:

"On October 8 at 16 hours 17 minutes local time two fighter planes of the
U.S.A. Air Force of the type Shooting Star F-80 grossly violated the
state frontier of the U.S.S.R. and, approaching in a hedge-hopping flight
the Soviet aerodome situated on the seacoast in the Sukhaya Rechka area,
100 kilometers from the Soviet-Korean frontier, fired at the aerodrome
with machine guns. As a result of the firing, damage was caused to
property of the aerodrome."

To the Soviets, the mission was a surprising and confusing violation of
their territory and frustrating evidence of their vulnerability.

Soviet radar probably picked up our F-80's about 100 miles from the
Soviet border, then tracked us through the descent and lost us in ground
clutter when we dropped into the river valley. A general alarm went out,
but the Soviets had no aircraft, guns or missiles to meet the attack.
Besides, it was Sunday afternoon; no one was around to do anything. To
them, it was like Pearl Harbor, a dastardly sneak attack.

The Oct. 8 incident forced Soviet leaders to recognize the vulnerability
of their forces, especially in the east, and their inability to defend
against the more modern, experienced U.S. Air Force. Stalin decided to
disengage from North Korea and stopped all further aid on Oct. 22, only
two weeks after our attack.

Back in Washington, President Truman was dismayed by the attack. He held
MacArthur responsible, suspecting him of deliberately acting to
precipitate a war with the Soviet Union. Almost immediately after the
incident, Truman ordered MacArthur to meet him at Wake Island, where they
talked privately in Truman's airplane. MacArthur would survive as
commander for only six more months.

On Oct. 19, Truman had Warren Austin, the chief American delegate to the
U.N., admit the attack. His letter to U.N. Secretary Trygve Lie added:
"The commander of the Air Force group has been relieved and appropriate
steps have been taken with a view toward disciplinary actions against the
two pilots concerned." Austin identified the pilots as 1st Lt. Alton H.
Quanbeck and 1st Lt. Allen J. Diefendorf. In the meantime, Dief and I
were in limbo. The Air Force's investigating officer, Maj. Harry W.
Christian, discovered no physical evidence of a crime, and there were no
gun-camera records because our base had run out of film."There is no real
evidence in this case," Christian concluded.

But because of the political pressures from Washington, the Air Force
ignored his recommendations and scheduled our general court-martial for
Nov. 18 in Nagoya, Japan. We were accused of violating an order to stay
clear of the Manchurian (Chinese) border, of strafing Soviet territory (a
"country at peace with the United States") and of violating an order to
make no attack without positive identification.

Our attorney, Maj. Bernard Katz, argued that the government was trying to
locate us "in Manchuria on one count and in Russia on another count" and
added: "They did positively identify a target, and they strafed a target
that they positively identified. They identified it as a North Korean
airfield, on which was contained certain aircraft, bearing the mark of a
star. They had been briefed that any aircraft marked with a star found in
North Korea was good game . . . ."

Both of us were found not guilty of all charges. But the court martial
was closed to the public, and the results were never released. Air Force
leaders wanted the Russians, and probably President Truman, to believe we
had been properly punished.

The Air Force would not permit Dief or me to fly any more combat
missions, reasoning that we would be in jeopardy if we were shot down and
captured. Instead, Dief was assigned to a fighter squadron in the
Philippines, where his new bride could join him. I was reassigned to a
fighter-interceptor squadron in Japan, and then became aide-de-camp to
Brig. Gen. Delmar T. Spivey, who had been present at our initial
debriefing. I finished up my tour as a combat crew instructor with F-84's
back with the 49th Fighter Group.