How a Soviet pilot’s defection to Japan benefitted MiG The largest of these was in Naamsi, which would have concrete runways and be capable of staging jet aircraft. American aerial reconnaissance had detected construction work on 18 airfields in North Korea. The turning point of the war came in October 1951. It was the site of the first large-scale jet-vs-jet air battles between Russian MiG-15s and U.S. It became the site of numerous dogfights. A lot of the action took place in "MiG Alley" – the name given by western pilots to the northwestern portion of North Korea, where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea. The Korean War produced some of the most enthralling dogfights seen in the history of modern air combat. Many of them had returned him so badly damaged they simply had to be written off, for it would have been impossible to fix them up.” Prelude to Black Tuesday Karamarenko adds: “We were sure that the corps’ pilots had shot down a lot more enemy planes than the 1097 credited but many of those had fallen into the sea of crashed during landing in South Korea. In comparison, the Soviets lost 319 MiGs and Lavochkin La-11s. “Of that number the (Russian) corps’ anti-aircraft artillery shot down 153 planes and the pilots killed 1097,” he writes.
According to Karamarenko, during the 32 months that Russian forces were in Korea, they downed 1250 enemy planes. Hundreds of western fighters were able to escape into South Korea because the Russians turned back as they neared the coastline or the border.ĭespite such limitations, Russia came out on top. Since aircraft are at their most vulnerable while fleeing (because they have either run out ammunition, are low on fuel, or experiencing technical trouble), it meant Russian pilots were denied easy kills. The last restriction was crippling – it meant Russian pilots were prevented from giving chase to enemy aircraft. This was to prevent their capture by the Americans. And finally, Russian pilots would under no circumstances approach the 38 th Parallel (the border between the two Koreas) or the coastline. Secondly, while in the air, the pilots would communicate only in Mandarin or Korean the use of Russian was banned. One, they would fly under the markings of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force or North Korean Peoples' Army Air Force. However, in order to keep Moscow’s involvement a secret, Stalin imposed certain limitations on the Soviet pilots. Is Russia helping China build hypersonic weapons? But as the western armies – nominally under UN command – threatened to overrun the entire peninsula and seeing the quality and shortage of Chinese pilots, Stalin took the decision to involve his air force in the war. So initially it was just China that militarily supported the North Koreans. World War II was too recent a memory and Moscow did not want a conflict with the West that could lead to another global war. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had no intention of entering the war in Korea. It is a story that is well-hidden for obvious reasons – pride, prestige and the traditional western resistance to admit that the Russians won.
In reality, the air war over Korea was a bloodbath for the western air forces. Former fighter pilot Sergei Kramarenko writes in his gripping book, ‘Air Combat Over the Eastern Front and Korea’ that according to the most realistic (western) researchers, “the ratio of jet fighters shot down in engagements between the Soviet and American Air Forces was close to 1:1”.īut even this new parity accepted by western writers and military historians is nowhere near the truth. When the Russians declassified their archives after the end of the Cold War, and ex-Soviet pilots were freely able to present their side of the story, the West’s story could no longer hold up.