Kevin Brooks wrote:

Guy Alcala wrote in message ...
Mike Marron wrote:

snip

Captain Joseph M. '
Mac' McConnell is buried in a spot of honor in the Victorville
Cemetery. his sixteen jet-vs-jet victories have not been surpassed
to this day.

Incorrect if you include foreign pilots. The IAF's number one ace, Giora
Even, is credited with 17. There are excerpts from his diary for each of
his kills on the IAF's own web page at

http://www.iaf.org.il

(I'm having some difficulty connecting to the english version at the
moment -- I hope they haven't removed it). And some of the Russian pilots
that flew in Korea are credited with more (N. Sutyagin is listed as 23
IIRR, as is Evgenii Pepelyaev in some sources), but the Soviet claim
system includes group kills and is also more liberal than contemporary
western kill criteria, judging by the research conducted by historians
with access to both side's records from Korea.

ISTR that the Russians also claimed to have shot down something like
seven F-94's during a single engagement, at a location
(Shenyang/Mukden) that would have taxed the Starfighters range, and
supposedly on a date in July 1951 that preceded their entry into the
theater of operations!

Simple case of mis-identity, I imagine. It would be pretty easy to mistake F-80s or even F-84s for F-94s, especially if
youd heard they were due in theater (and how many ME-210s or long-nosed FW-190s did allied pilots claim before either were
in use in Europe, or for that matter He-100s in Europe or ME-109s in the Pacific)? And of course number of kills almost
always tends to be exaggerated.

And BTW, the guy making this rather amazing
claim was Comrade Pepelyaev!

Comments I've read by Pepelyaev tend to be free of propaganda, blunt and honest, and not the usual Soviet-era crap (but he
was making them after the fall of the SU). ISTR that he himself only claims 6 or so kills for certain, freely admitting
that he didn't have the luxury to watch others crash or see the pilots eject. His comments about the poor state of A/A
training in many of the Soviet fighter units sent to Korea (he said that he insisted on realistic, no-holds barred ACM for
his regiment before they deployed, rather then the usual canned, very conservative, safety first approach that was the norm
for Soviet units; gee, was this guy talking about the FSU in Korea, or the USAF in Vietnam?), and the relative merits of the
MiG-15 and Sabre, could have come from any western pilot. Doesn't make him gospel, but he does come across as a credible,
reasonably unbiased witness, in the same way you could say that about, say, Robin Olds (or Ed or Walt). Try and find a copy
of Yefim Gordon and Vladimir Rigmant's book on the MiG-15, as it includes Pepelyaev's and other pilots comments, as well as
those of one of the senior commanders in Korea; the latter tends to sound just like the 'official soviet line', while
Pepelyaev's a breath of fresh air, talking about the problems and screw-ups as well as the successes.

Guy