Exciting accounts of a key crossroads in military aviation history

Despite American success in preventing the conquest of South Korea by communist North Korea, the Korean War of 1950-1953 did not satisfy Americans who expected the kind of total victory they had experienced in WW II. In Korea, the U.S. limited itself to conventional weapons. Even after communist China entered the war, Americans put China off-limits to conventional bombing as well as nuclear bombing. Operating within these limits, the U.S. Air Force helped to repel 2 invasions of South Korea while securing control of the skies so decisively that other U.N. forces could fight without fear of air attack.

A stunning pictorial record from the personal photo archives of Korean War veterans. A detailed account of Allied air operations features dramatic, real-life combat stories that took place during the 1950 to 1953 war.

Following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing myth in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, among other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. Packed with first-hand accounts and covering the full range of US Air Force activities over Korea, MiG Alley brings the war vividly to life and the record is finally set straight on a number of popular fabrications. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver expertly threads together US and Russian sources to reveal the complete story of this bitter struggle in the Eastern skies.

The Korean War was the first armed engagement for the newly formed U.S. Air Force, but far from the type of conflict it expected or wanted to fight. As the first air war of the nuclear age, it posed a major challenge to the service to define and successfully carry out its mission by stretching the constraints of limited war while avoiding the excesses of total war. Conrad Crane analyzes both the successes and failures of the air force in Korea, offering a balanced treatment of how the air war in Korea actually unfolded. He examines the Air Force's contention that it could play a decisive role in a non-nuclear regional war but shows that the fledgling service was held to unrealistically high expectations based on airpower's performance in World War II, despite being constrained by the limited nature of the Korean conflict. Crane exposes the tensions and rivalries between services, showing that emphasis on strategic bombing came at the expense of air support for ground troops, and he tells how interactions between army and air force generals shaped the air force's mission and strategy. He also addresses misunderstandings about plans to use nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in the war and includes new information from pilot correspondence about the informal policy of "hot pursuit" over the Yalu that existed at the end of the war. The book considers not only the actual air effort in Korea but also its ramifications. The air force doubled in size during the war and used that growth to secure its position in the defense establishment, but it wagered its future on its ability to deliver nuclear weapons in a high-intensity conflict—a position that left it unprepared to fight the next limited war in Vietnam. As America observes the fiftieth anniversary of its initial engagement in Korea, Crane's book is an important reminder of the lessons learned there. And as airpower continues to be a cornerstone of American defense, this examination of its uses in Korea provides new insights about the air force's capabilities and limitations.

The first virtually all-jet war, the conflict in Korea saw F-86 Sabres of the USAF take on MiG-15s of the North Korean and Chinese air forces. Although the Allied pilots were initially taken aback by the ability of the communist fighter in combat, sound training and skilful leadership soon enabled Sabre pilots to dominate the dogfights over the Yalu River. In all 39 F-86 pilots achieved ace status, and a number of these are profiled in this volume, as are notable pilots from the US Navy, Marine Corps and Royal Navy and, for the first time, the handful of MiG-15 aces.

The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first - and only - full-scale air war in the jet age. It was in the skies of North Korea where Soviet and American pilots came together in fierce aerial clashes. The best pilots of the opposing systems, the most powerful air forces, and the most up-to-date aircraft in the world in this period of history came together in pitched air battles. The analysis of the air war showed that the powerful United States Air Force and its allies were unable to achieve complete superiority in the air and were unable to fulfill all the tasks they'd been given. Soviet pilots and Soviet jet fighters, which were in no way inferior to their opponents and in certain respects were even superior to them, was the reason for this. The combat experience and new tactical aerial combat tactics, which were tested for the first time in the skies of Korea, have been eagerly studied and applied by modern air forces around the world today. This book fully discusses the Soviet participation in the Korean War and presents a view of this war from the opposite side, which is still not well known in the West from the multitude of publications by Western historians. The reason for this, of course, is the fact that Soviet records pertaining to the Korean War were for a long time highly classified, since Soviet air units were fighting in the skies of North Korea "incognito", so to speak or even more so to write about this was strictly forbidden in the Soviet Union right up to its ultimate collapse. The given work is in essence the first major work in the post-Soviet era. First published in a small edition in Russian in 1998, it was republished in Russia in 2007. For the first time, the Western reader can become acquainted with the most detailed and informative work existing on the course of the air war from the Soviet side, now in English language. The work rests primarily on the recollections of veterans of this war on the so-called 'Red' side - Soviet fighter pilots, who took direct part in this war on the side of North Korea. Their stories have been supplemented with an enormous amount of archival documents, as well as the work of Western historians. The author presents a literal day-by-day chronicle of the aerial combats and combat work of Soviet fighter regiments in the period between 1950 and 1953, and dedicates this work to all the men on both sides who fought and died in the Korean air war.

The Korean conflict was a pivotal event in China's modern military history. The fighting in Korea constituted an important experience for the newly formed People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), not only as a test case for this fledgling service but also in the later development of Chinese air power. Xiaoming Zhang fills the gaps in the history of this conflict by basing his research in recently declassified Chinese and Russian archival materials. He also relies on interviews with Chinese participants in the air war over Korea. Zhang's findings challenge conventional wisdom as he compares kill ratios and performance by all sides involved in the war. Zhang also addresses the broader issues of the Korean War, such as how air power affected Beijing's decision to intervene. He touches on ground operations and truce negotiations during the conflict. Chinese leaders placed great emphasis on the supremacy of human will over modern weaponry, but they were far from oblivious to the advantages of the latter and to China's technological limitations. Developments in China's own air power were critical during this era. Zhang offers considerable materials on the training of Chinese aviators and the Soviet role in that training, on Soviet and Chinese air operations in Korea, and on diplomatic exchanges over Soviet military assistance to China. He probes the impact of the war on China's conception of the role of air power, arguing that it was not until the Gulf War of the early 1990s that Chinese leaders engaged in a broad reassessment of the strategy they adopted during the Korean War. Military historians and scholars interested in aviation and foreign affairs will find this volume of special interest. As a unique work that presents the Chinese point of view, it stands as both a complement and a corrective to previous accounts of the conflict. Xiaoming Zhang earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Iowa in 1994. He has had works published in various journals, including the Journal of Military History, which has twice selected him to receive the Moncado Prize for excellence in the writing of military history. Zhang currently resides in Montgomery, Alabama, where he teaches at the Air War College. Zhang's study is masterful in placing the Chinese air war in Korea in the context of China's development in the twentieth century. In addition to providing important new evidence on China's role in the Korean War, Zhang offers a particularly noteworthy analysis of Sino-Soviet relations during the early 1950s. William Stueck, Distinguished Research Professor of History, University of Georgia; author of The Korean War: An International History (1995) and Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (2002)