Valley of the Shadow

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Text originally published in 1955 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

BY

WARD M. MILLAR

Major, United States Air Force

Foreword by

GENERAL O. P. WEYLAND

United States Air Force

United States Air Force Photo

Captain Millar in Seoul, Korea, shortly after his escape

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 6

FOREWORD 7

1. 8

2. 16

3. 23

4. 28

5. 34

6. 41

7. 47

8. 55

9. 60

10. 66

11. 73

12. 80

13. 88

14. 94

15. 100

16. 106

17. 113

18. 120

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 123

DEDICATION

To my wife

whose faith never wavered

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I WISH TO express to Clay Blair, Jr., my great gratitude for all his help and assistance in writing this book. It was he who first persuaded me that my story should be told. Without him this book would never have been started, and without his constant encouragement and advice it would never have been written.

I am also indebted to Major William J. McGinty, Chief of the Magazine and Book Branch, Office of Information Services, Department of the Air Force, who acted as my trusted adviser and handled the official details concerned with the publication of this book.

W.M.

FOREWORD

THE KOREAN conflict was a war far different than any this country had been called upon to fight in the past.

America was shocked at the inhumane treatment, tortures, and degradation American prisoners of war suffered at the hands of the Communists. Our fighting men have met the test of combat wherever and whenever called upon, but the insidious attempts of the Communists to alienate men from the country of their birth by torture, threats, and brainwashing were something new.

Faced with these conditions, Air Force personnel downed behind Communist lines, even when badly wounded, managed to survive by sheer wits and an almost unbelievable courage. A few made successful escapes to freedom, many more tried, and untold numbers lost their lives in the attempt.

This was a bitter lesson. It has always been the duty of Air Force men shot down over enemy territory to attempt to escape, and it will continue to be their duty. The experiences of the limited numbers who did reach U.N. lines in Korea will remain a valuable lesson. Few of us realize our capacity for suffering, either mental or physical, until faced with such a situation as told in this book. The courage of those who did escape is an inspiration to the youth of future America, and such exploits well deserve their place of honor in our nation’s history.

I have never doubted the physical, mental, and moral fiber of our air crews. These qualities have been proven wherever the Air Force has been called upon to fight, and they will be proven again if required. It is my privilege to serve with such men; I am both honored and proud to be a member of the team.

O. P. WEYLAND

General, United States Air Force

Commander, Tactical Air Command

Langley Air Force Base

Hampton, Virginia

22 September 1955

1.

THREE AIR FORCE pilots who were shot down and captured by the Communists during the Korean war escaped and succeeded in returning to United Nations lines. The first was Captain William D. Locke, who hid under the floor of a school-house in Pyongyang, where he had been temporarily interned during the North Korean retreat of October, 1950, and waited there until U.N. troops advanced to his position. The second was Lieutenant Melvin J. Shadduck, who crashed behind enemy lines on his eightieth mission, in May, 1951. He was injured and consigned to a Chinese frontline medical aid station, from which he escaped after thirty-four days behind the lines. Later he directed United States infantrymen to the same aid station and effected the rescue of four other wounded soldiers. I was the third and last man to escape. For a long while I was asked to keep the account of my escape secret for security reasons. But now such restrictions are no longer necessary.

My story begins in October, 1950. At that time I was a third-year G.I. student—a veteran of the World War II Air Force—studying nuclear physics at Reed College, Portland, Oregon. I was married to Barbara Robben, a native of Portland, and we had one child, a daughter, Adrian, aged one and a half. To help stretch the meager family budget and to keep a hand in flying, I had joined the Portland Air Force Reserve Unit, based at the Municipal Airport. On October 26, 1950, as part of the general mobilization of the Air Force, I was called to active duty and suddenly wound up a captain in uniform again, flying Air Force transports out of Tacoma, Washington. A month later, in December, 1950, my unit was transferred to the Far East, and within a matter of hours, I was winging in and out of Korea in support of the war effort. Barbara stayed in Parkland, Washington, to await my return.

In World War II, I had been trained to fly P-38 fighters. Even in reserve status, I had never cared much for the multiengine planes. After a few weeks in the Far East, I began to have the feeling that I was nothing more than a truck driver, carting supplies between Japan and Korea. Moreover, the sight of the new jets freewheeling through the skies intrigued me, and I wondered how they performed compared to the old P-38. The temptation was irresistible; by April, 1951, I had wangled my way into a jet outfit, the 49th Fighter-Bomber Group, based in Taegu, Korea. Glad as I was to be with the jets, I had still another reason to be happy: after a hundred missions, pilots were rotated back to the States, a policy that was not in force in the transport unit.

Like all pilots coming from conventional-powered planes, I was sent through a jet transition course in Japan. I was not disappointed; the jet was smooth, fast—much faster than my old P-38—capable of carrying a fairly heavy load, and, all in all, a good plane in which to fly combat. Of course, I would have preferred flying F-86’s against the MIG’s in the alley, but I was happy enough just to be out of transports. In my first thirty days of combat duty, mostly during May, 1951, I flew twenty-eight missions, an average of almost one a day, which figure was a little under par. Squadron duties prevented a higher rate.

At that time the enemy was in general retreat all along the front and therefore was forced to move often in the daytime and expose himself and his equipment. This meant good hunting for our unit, and we took advantage of it, destroying many of his trucks and trains and napalming his staging areas. Our pilots flew two and three missions a day. I discovered, like the other pilots, that the most rewarding missions were the deep-penetration flights, where enemy convoys, bridges, and supply dumps were plentiful.

In late May, many of the senior men in our unit were temporarily transferred to Japan to check out in a new jet fighter-bomber, the F-84. As a result, I became the senior captain in our squadron and was appointed Acting Squadron Operations Officer. Thus, it became my duty to schedule the squadron flights against the enemy and to take charge of a lot of burdensome paper work dealing with aircraft maintenance, intelligence, and personnel. Ordinarily I would have enjoyed the new responsibility, but as it turned out, the job absorbed so much of my time that I was unable to fly combat missions, and this caused me no little concern because, like all of us in Korea, I wanted to get home as soon as I could. As June rolled around, my daily mission average fell close to zero, and my morale took a comparable drop.

There was another problem. Hot weather had set in, and with the warmer air, our heavily loaded jets had a difficult time getting off the ground, so it became necessary to lengthen the runways. While this construction work was in progress, we had to adopt a rather unwieldy procedure for our operation: pilots took off empty from our airfield at Taegu, called K-2, flew back to Tsuiki Air Force Base in Japan, where there were long, concrete runways, bombed up, and then flew to the front. After the mission, the jets returned to K-2 again, empty. Under the circumstances, it was impossible for one man to fly more than one mission a day. Thus, even when I could get in a day’s flying, I didn’t advance my score much.

It was June 11 before I squeezed in my thirtieth mission. Leading a flight of four F-80’s, I took off from K-2 at 1150 o’clock and landed at Tsuiki at 1230. Intelligence briefed us for an attack on an enemy bivouac about thirty miles behind enemy lines on a line due north from Seoul. We loaded napalm tanks under each wing, refueled, checked our fifty calibers, and were airborne at 1329. At 1410 we passed over K-2, flying at 22,000 feet, and when I checked with the tower, I was informed that weather over the target was spotty, and that it would definitely be bad when we returned to K-2. In order to make sure we touched down with at least a hundred gallons emergency fuel reserve in our tanks, I set the Josephine—the time of return—a little higher than usual. Then I checked Snowflake—the Joint Operation Center—and since he had no immediate request for priority frontline support, we crossed the bomb line and turned toward our target.

There was a heavy undercast beneath us, but as we flew farther north, it began to break and soon disappeared altogether. Our target lay near the confluence of two rivers, and when I spotted the juncture, I gave the signal for the attack. Check armament switches, I called on the VHF. This was standard procedure, for sometimes a pilot forgot to turn on his gun switches after crossing the bomb line. I knew that at the same time each pilot would move the napalm toggle switch from SAFE to DROP in salvo position.

At Tsuiki, during the mission briefing, I had told the other pilots that we would attack the target by making a long, sweeping dive from altitude, firing simultaneously as we came into range. As we flew over the bivouac at housetop level, we would also toggle our napalm simultaneously. This was not a conventional attack plan. However, enemy flak in that area had become very heavy of late. I did not want my flight to attack the same target twice, after we had lost the advantage of surprise, so it was the best way to inflict maximum damage on one pass.

We flew toward the target in a long, shallow dive, keeping our speed below five hundred miles an hour so that the napalm tanks would not rip off. When we were no more than two hundred feet off the ground, I pressed the trigger on my stick, and white, fifty-caliber sparks began zipping along the ground. As expected, we caught them by surprise; Chinese soldiers were running in every direction, obviously in confusion. Seconds later, I eased back on my stick, and when we were about twenty-five feet above the rooftops, I pressed the bomb-release button on the control stick. I knew that the other pilots had done the same and that eight ninety-gallon tanks of jellied gasoline were hurtling toward the bivouac beneath us. I rammed on full power, and the jet slowly began to pick up speed and climb.

At that instant my wingman came on the radio with an unpleasant surprise for me—my napalm tanks, he said, had not dropped. I immediately checked my toggle switch. What had gone wrong? Then I got worried. When the napalm tanks are toggled, a phosphorous grenade inside the tank is automatically armed to explode on impact and ignite the jellied gasoline. Had the toggle armed the napalm? Was I carrying around a couple of hot tanks, either one of which might go off if they were jostled loose on landing?

By then the flight had formed up alongside me. I told the other pilots to circle, while I made a run on another target to try to shake off the tanks. I picked one to the west of our primary target, farther away from our lines. This time I set my toggle release to drop the tanks in train, and as I passed over the bivouac alone with fifty calibers firing, I pressed the release twice. Then I climbed out, and the other three planes joined up. This time the wingman did not have to tell me; I knew the napalm had not dropped.

There was one final method I might try to get rid of the hung-up tanks—release them manually, by jerking a cable that ran through the wings. The prospect of the napalm exploding on the runway when I landed at K-2 was uninviting, to say the least, so I picked out a third target, told the flight to stand by, and began my run. As I came over the enemy, firing my fifty caliber, I gave a mighty tug on the manual release, but nothing happened. The cable was stuck. I climbed back out, and as the other planes joined up, I began to worry in earnest. We were nearing our Josephine.

As we flew along, I kept my head down in the cockpit, tugging on the obstinate manual release. Then, all at once, it gave way. As it did so, my left and right tip tanks flew off, and then the left napalm tank. But the right napalm tank refused to fall, and out of balance as it was, the plane suddenly flipped on its side. I started to pull the stick to the left to raise the wing, and at that moment, discovered the stick was very stiff. I had lost the hydraulic boost control for my aileron. With some effort, I righted the plane, and was just thinking, this sure is a fouled-up mission, when my wingman jarred me with still another radio report:

There’s a long stream of vapor coming from your tail pipe.

I yelled back that the vapor must be hydraulic fluid because I had lost my booster control, but before I could finish, he broke in and shouted:

You’re on fire. Get out of that thing! I heard somebody else say that there were flames thirty to forty feet long streaming out of the tail.

Like other pilots, especially those who fly over enemy territory, I had long since made plans for any emergency that might arise. I knew exactly what I would do if my plane ever caught fire. Only the week before, one of our pilots had been in the same fix and tried to glide back to friendly lines. His plane blew up before he made it. Later it had been my duty as Acting Operations Officer to get together with the other pilots of the squadron to discuss the accident. We decided that in case of fire all pilots must bail out immediately without any thought of crash landing.

So I answered my wingman, Roger. I’m bailing.

I heard one of the other pilots say, Let’s get on the emergency channel and get help, as I reached down to pull a red, T-shaped handle that would automatically eject my cockpit canopy, the first step in the bail-out procedure. I was at 4,000 feet, still climbing about 400 miles per hour, when I gave the first pull on the handle. But nothing happened; apparently the handle was corroded, locked shut. Since the ejection seat would not operate until the canopy had been ejected, I was, in effect, sealed in the flaming plane.

Suddenly, in a fit of near panic, I reached down, wrapped both hands around the handle, tugged with all my might—and then some. I pulled the handle, bracket and all, away from the side of the plane, and at the same time, the canopy ripped off. The suction created in the open cockpit snatched my helmet and oxygen mask off my head; maps, papers, and a few other odds and ends followed. With the canopy gone, the roar of the slip stream was deafening.

When I took my hand off the stick to struggle with the canopy-ejection handle, the plane, unbalanced by the right napalm tank, began a slow roll. I did not want to bail out upside down, so I grabbed the stick and tried to level the plane. As I did so, I accidentally pressed the machine-gun trigger, and my guns blasted away into space. Then I folded up the armrests of the ejection seat, put my feet in the stirrups, leaned back, reached under the right armrest, and squeezed the firing trigger. There was a loud explosion, and I blacked out.

When I opened my eyes again seconds later, I could see nothing distinctly—just a whirling mass of brown, blue, and green. My arms and legs were outstretched, and I was sailing through the air like a pin wheel. I was acting automatically, and the next move was to detach the ejection seat, since the parachute would not open while the seat was strapped to my body. Only a few weeks earlier a pilot had ejected and failed to get out of his seat. He had dropped into the Yellow Sea like a rock.

I had to pull hard to get my arm down—centrifugal force was holding it out—to flip the quick release on my safety belt. The seat broke away and arched over my head. I reached up, grabbed the D-ring on my parachute, and pulled the rip cord. When the chute opened, I was moving so fast that I rolled up into the risers and then spun back down again, I looked around and saw I was only about five hundred feet in the air, floating down into a narrow bowl-shaped valley. At first everything seemed abnormally quiet. Then below me, I heard Oriental voices shouting, followed by small-arms fire, and I remembered that I was over enemy territory.

When one member of an Air Force jet flight was shot down in Korea, there was an established rescue procedure for the other three planes of the flight: one plane would immediately climb high enough to contact Snowflake on his VHF radio, tell him of the accident, the location—all of Korea was divided up into co-ordinates like city blocks and exact positioning was not difficult—and the fuel supply of the remaining jets. Once the alarm was given, Snowflake would immediately contact Third Air Rescue, an Air Force unit