as told by Arnold Leo Murphy - (Cont'd)
ON TO KOREA
About the 15th of October 1950, all flying crew members except pilots, a couple of navigators and plane crew chiefs left for Camp Stoneman in Northern California. Pilots and crew chiefs flew our planes to Japan. The rest of us flew to Japan on planes chartered from all the major airlines. It took us about 36 hours to reach Tokyo with stops in Honolulu and Wake Island. The plane I was on arrived in Tokyo about 10 p.m. and we were bussed to an old prison camp to spend the night. It smelled like an outhouse. We later learned that the whole country smelled like an outhouse.
The next morning we were bussed back downtown for a ceremony to show off our new uniforms. The 452nd Bomb Wing was the first unit in the Air Force to be issued the new blue uniforms. Until then, the Air Force was still using Army uniforms. As you can imagine we stood out in a crowd.
At 10 o'clock that night we had to board a train at the main railroad station in Tokyo for the trip to our new home, Itazuke AFB just out of Fukuoka, Japan. We passed though Nagoya and Hiroshima on the way down and they were a pretty sad sight. Our planes started arriving within a week and the main portion of the personnel about two weeks after that. Things were pretty disorganized for awhile but, we finally started flying missions to Korea across the Sea of Japan. That was a pretty good haul from one shore to the other. Before my crew arrived, I had flown three missions with others as fill in for someone sick.
There was a little excitement while waiting for our planes. One morning we noticed a B-29 flying in a big circle around our base. Word soon got around that they had been on a mission over Korea and had a fire that knocked out most of the electrical equipment on the plane. They still had forty 500 pound bombs on board. They flew around for seven hours to burn up most of the fuel before landing. When they started a long, low approach to the runway, everyone on our base was out to watch and there were between twenty to thirty thousand Japanese as well. The runway was 6,500 feet long. The pilot made a touchdown on the left main gear because the fire was at the base of the right wing. Sure enough, when he set it down on the right gear, it collapsed. They went down the runway about 3,000 feet, then it just turned off to the right, just enough to clear the runway. Luckily, there were no explosions or fires.
One thing I have to say for the fire department, entirely manned by Japanese, they were squirting foam on the 29 before it stopped sliding. That may have prevented a fire.
Our first few missions were exciting but relatively easy. They averaged about 5 to 6 hours in length. In the early days we did a lot of front line close support. Sometimes we were bombing and strafing within three or four hundred yards of our own troops.
Somewhere around my fifth or sixth mission, I was gunner for a pilot on his first mission. We went off rather late for a long mission. It would have been 7 hours if we made it back to Itazuke. We left the target about sundown. By the time we got near Pusan, the pilot told the Flight Leader he was low on fuel. He was told to land at a field designated as K-9. This being his first flight into Korea, he had no idea and no chart showing where it was. Another pilot said he knew where it was and he would lead us to it. When we got to K-9 there was not a light one on the entire field. A C-119 had crashed there about 30 minutes before and knocked out all electricity in the area. We had no choice but to try to land. We were out of fuel. They lined up a bunch of trucks and jeeps to outline the runway. This field had mountains around three sides and the ocean on the other. They decided to make a pass inside the mountains and land toward the ocean. We landed, but the nose gear collapsed. My compartment was behind the bomb bay, so when the nose gear went down, the tail went up rather abruptly. This broke my seat belt connector and I rattled around like a loose pea in a pod.
I was out of action for about a week, then I was back flying. My back was always sore, but no one made x-rays of it until about a year later. They showed that I had cracked a couple of vertebrae and damaged some muscles in the same area.
About the end of November 1950 one of my buddies and I came down with pneumonia. They sent us to the Army Hospital in Fukuoka. About the time we got there a big battle got going full bore. There was a steady flow of Gooney Birds (C-47's) flying into Itazuke with wounded troops. There was a steady flow of ambulances from the base to the hospital. On the way back, they took the worst cases to be flown to Tokyo or the states. After spending five days in the hospital where we were given two aspirins, we were told they needed our beds, so we had to leave because we were not bleeding. We caught a ride back to the base in the front seat of an open-air ambulance. It was raining, snowing and sleeting.
When we got back to Itazuke, we were told the outfit was moving to a new base called Miho near Matsue, Japan. We stood in the rain for four hours before boarding a train. On this overnight trip we had liverwurst sandwiches, ginger snap cookies and tomato juice. That would wipe out a healthy person.
When we got to Miho, they took my friend and I off on stretchers and straight to the base hospital. I was in there for a month.