Seventy years ago, we were in the middle of the Korean War (1950-1953). Or in other words, thirty years MORE will take us to the centennial – hardly possible to believe!
Bath’s George Haley, a Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot in World War II, returned to air combat for Korea, stayed in that time, served again in Vietnam, and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Sharing the air with him were John Glenn (90 combat missions and four enemy planes shot down, not counting World War II), Buz Aldrin (66 missions, two “kills”), and Neil Armstrong (78 missions, shot down once). Aldrin and Glenn each got two Distinguished Flying Crosses.
Glenn sometimes partnered as a “wingman” with baseball great Ted Williams (39 missions, mostly attacks against ground targets). Williams had served during World War II, in non-combat roles.
Jolly TV host Ed McMahon, who also served stateside in World War II, flew 85 combat missions in Korea, all of them right on the spot, using an UNarmed Cessna, controlling either artillery or bomber attacks.
Two Hammondsport men who died in Korea had also fought in World War II. Each of them had brothers who died in World War II. You can find all four fellows on the Gold Star Memorial in Hammondsport Central School.
Actor James Garner was wounded twice as a National Guard rifleman in Korea. (His “Rockford” TV character was also a Korea vet.) Fellow actor Sir Michael Caine fought in Korea with the British Royal Fusiliers. After facing a human-wave attack (foreshadowing his film “Zulu”) he wrote, “The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep.” His first movie role was for “A Hill in Korea.”
The active Korean War was “only” three years long, but some of our future public leaders shouldered responsibility there. Our military was theoretically desegregated by then, and the Air Force did it pretty well, but the army was dragging its feet. Future U. S. Representative Charles “Charlie” Rangel was a segregated field artilleryman near the Yalu River when a tidal wave of Chinese troops swept southward. His division was surrounded as it tried to withdraw, and broke apart when it was attacked by night, with no U.S. air cover. With the temperature below zero, a wounded P.F.C. Rangel led 40 men on a breakout, and got them safely back.
“Pete” McCloskey, a fellow future Member of Congress, was wounded twice as a Marine Corps officer in Korea, where he earned the Navy Cross (excelled only by the Congressional Medal of Honor). An angry McCloskey spent almost half a million dollars documenting that Reverend Pat Robertson’s claims to be a Korea combat veteran were false – Pat’s father, a senator, apparently pulled strings to get him out.
A couple of times as a teenager I met John H. Chafee, who went into Guadalcanal as a Marine Corps private, into Okinawa as a second lieutenant, and into the Chosin Reservoir disaster as a captain… also taking time in there to finish Yale, graduate Harvard Law School, get married, and see the birth of their first child (two days before he left for Korea). He would later be a governor (six years), Secretary of the Navy (three years), and senator (33 years, until his death).
As a company commander at Chosin, habitually armed only with a walking staff, he led his men through struggles with the terrain, the subzero weather, the Chinese, and a clueless high command headed by Douglas MacArthur. He led them out, too, through a fighting retreat that threatened constantly to become a catastrophe.
Chafee was one of that now-extinct species, the liberal Republican (natural habitat, the northeastern U.S.). But like his politics or not, hear what author James Brady, who served under Chafee in Chosin as a completely green platoon commander, wrote: “Nowhere, at any time, did John Chafee serve more nobly than he did as a Marine officer commanding a rifle company in the mountains of North Korea. He was the only truly great man I’ve yet met in my life.” I think those who knew him would mostly agree.