“Glenn was flying into communist North Korea with just one comrade: Captain Ted Williams.”
Most people know that NASA pioneer and four-term United States Senator John Glenn served bravely as a fighter pilot for the United States Marine Corps during two wars.
Similarly, almost every baseball history buff knows that Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams carried out dozens of combat missions during the Korean War.
But few fans of either man are aware that during the Spring of 1953 Major John Glenn and Captain Ted Williams flew side-by-side above North Korea in matching jet aircraft, all the while dodging hostile enemy fighters and ground fire.
Non-fiction Adam Lazarus’ new book, The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams, tells the story of these two American icons’ relationship, which was forged in war, then ebbed and flowed over the ensuing decades, but continued until the day Williams died in 2002.
Below is an excerpt from The Wingmen, which chronicles several of the missions that Glenn and Williams flew together as pilots in the Marine Corps’ VMF-311 squadron, a component of Marine Aircraft Group-33 (MAG-33) and a part of the First Marine Aircraft Wing (First MAW). From K-3, their base located near Pohang, South Korea, these two officers boarded separate Grumman F9F Panther jets and flew across the 38th Parallel. From just a few hundred feet off the ground the pilots then launched a variety of weapons on Chinese and North Korean troops and supply lines throughout the northern part of the peninsula. The ordnance included general purpose bombs (GP), 20 mm canons, and two different types of fin-stabilized rockets, the High Velocity Aircraft Rocket (HVAR) and Anti-Tank Aircraft Rocket (ATAR).
Glenn, dubbed “Old Magnet Ass” by his fellow pilots because his aggressiveness and risk-taking in the air seemed to attract enemy fire, had been a decorated Career Marine who flew 57 combat missions in the Pacific during World War II.
Williams—who missed several weeks of service in the Korean War due to a bout of pneumonia that sent him to a Navy hospital ship docked near Inchon—was a Recall Reservist with no combat experience prior to the Korean War and very little training on jet aircraft. Rather than living on Marine bases and learning to fly jets, Williams spent the immediate years after World War II winning the Triple Crown and two American League Most Valuable Player awards. Still, fellow pilots at K-3 playfully ribbed the perennial batting champion, nicknaming him “The Bush Leaguer,” or “Bush,” for short.
But together this unlikely pair carried out several successful—and a few calamitous—missions during the Korean War, and along the way forged a friendship that not only spanned half-a-century but flourished despite two polar opposite worldviews and lifestyles.
IN THE wee hours of an early spring morning, John Glenn awoke in his tiny, half-open tropical hut. Although the weather at K-3 had become far more pleasant than the seemingly arctic conditions of the weeks before, winds off the Sea of Japan still blew harshly. Glenn dressed in his flight suit and loaded up a plethora of supplies, including his pistol, knife, first aid kit, and escape and evasion equipment. He then hurried to the squad- ron ready room. As flight leader, Glenn was responsible for briefing the officers chosen to fly the day’s first hop, Mission Number Acme 33.
In a mission known as a “road recce,” short for “road reconnaissance,” a small group of planes would take off before dawn—pilots referred to this type of assignment as an “early-early”—in an attempt to catch Communist trucks moving supplies and troops along roads and bridges.
With his briefing prepared, Glenn turned his attention to the simpler task of executing the standard preflight combat protocols that each officer carried out before going into combat. Although clearly outlined in Chapter II, Section 200, Paragraph 2 of the VMF-311 Standard Operating Procedure for Tactical Flight Operation manual, by now every pilot already knew to:
- Check the bombline on their
- Check the condition of various alternate
- Procure an authenticator and shackle code
- Procure the
- Mission Number
Perhaps he was in a daze from waking up so early or operating on a mostly empty stomach. Maybe something or someone waylaid him. Maybe he just plain forgot. But in his haste to deliver the briefing and meet the mission’s 0525 hours start time, Glenn bypassed the very first step: Check the bombline on the small map he used inside the cockpit.
During each preflight briefing pilots received coordinates from the Joint Operations Command (JOC). Based near Seoul, JOC ensured that multiple squadrons, groups, divisions, and branches of the military communicated to operate in unison. Still, air strikes on or near Allied soldiers did occur in the Korean War. In February 1953, three members of the Army’s Seventh Infantry Division’s 17th Regiment were killed, and several others wounded, when an Allied plane bombed its own troops. A similar incident weeks earlier had killed fourteen American soldiers and wounded nine more. The results of a Marine board of investigation were submitted to the First MAW’s commanding officer, General Megee, but never made public.
“Some of our troops had recently taken casualties from friendly fire,” Glenn remembered. “Our group commander [Colonel Robertshaw] had put out orders saying that the next time it happened the flight leader was going to be held responsible and court-martialed.”
But the six-digit coordinates, aligning with Military Grid Reference System (MGRS), handed out to each pilot only corresponded to the general vicinity of their target. To assist pilots thousands of feet high in the air, Marines or other ground personnel marked the intended location.
“We worked closer into the front lines to our people on the ground than any of us had ever done before, any flying we had done,” Glenn said decades later. “The usual procedure was that they would either use a grenade or a mortar round that was white phosphorous—Willy Peter it was called, WP—and they’d fire it out and try and hit the spot that they wanted us to hit with the airplanes right on the enemy lines. So you knew exactly where you’re to hit. It wasn’t left up to a grid pattern or reading a map, you had something there on the ground.”
Well before sunrise on April 22, Glenn’s three-man team climbed into their individual F9F-5 Panthers, were strapped in by enlisted crew members, and launched on time. Not long after pulling away from K-3 and heading northwest, Captain Lenhrew “Ed” Lovette began rocking his plane’s wings back and forth, the visual signal for “I have an emergency and must land this pass.” His entire communications (radio) system had malfunctioned. Protocol dictated Lovette return to base.
Now Glenn was flying into communist North Korea with just one comrade: Captain Ted Williams.
Despite arriving at K-3 only 12 days apart, Glenn and Williams had not flown a single mission together. Between Williams’s procedural and medical groundings, the subsequent stay aboard the Haven, and his first R&R in Japan, he’d missed more than four weeks of active duty. During that time Glenn flew 25 missions. Even when Williams finally returned to duty and both men were regularly flying missions (nine for Glenn, six for Williams), none overlapped. Until Mission Number Acme 33.
“We got up before light and we took off in the dark,” Williams remembered. “And we tried to get over the 38th Parallel just at light . . . and we were there to greet ’em and say, ‘Good Morning.’”
Glenn and Williams delivered their first wakeup call at 0607 hours. Alternating altitudes—Glenn flying low, Williams about a thousand feet above, then switching—they reached an area not more than 10 miles from the bombline, in the county of Pyonggang.
The duo each dropped one of their two 500-pound GPs on a road bridge, returned some cursory anti-aircraft fire with 20 mm cannon-fire of their own, then exited the smoking scene in a hurry. By all indications it had been an effective strike, but the mission was not yet over.
Over the decades, Glenn frequently told the story of his first combat mission alongside the baseball hero. Although he recalled carrying HVARs, separate, official command diaries for MAG-33 and VMF-311 indicate that on Mission Number Acme 33 the two Panthers carried a total of 12 ATARs, not HVARs. Glenn also mentioned an important nuance, fuses, to the weaponry both Panthers carried.
As opposed to the contact fuse—which detonates upon impact—the proximity fuse detonates when it reaches a specific distance from the target. A radar sensor on the bomb triggers the explosion before impact. A different type of fuse delayed detonation a few seconds, until after impact. This delay fuse gave the bomb a chance to collide with and embed into a target, then explode, greatly increasing the weapon’s destructive capability.
More importantly, the delay fuses gave pilots a few precious extra moments to escape the blast radius.
“If dropping those with instantaneous fusing, you must drop high and be level by a minimum of 1,000 feet or you get caught in your own bomb blast,” Glenn explained. “With delays you can really carry the mail right on in there and only worry about dropping with enough altitude to get out of your dive above the terrain.”
The official MAG-33 Command Diary for Glenn and Williams’s mission explicitly states that the weapons they employed carried delayed fuses, not proximity fuses. So rather than HVARs with proximity fuses, as Glenn remembered, each pilot was hauling ATARs and two five- hundred-pound GPs with delay fuses, particularly fuses with a “4 to 5 second delay tail.”
Regardless of the distinction, pilots operating aircraft with these radar- and delay-fuse weapons were instructed not to bring them back to base.
“There had been some problem with proximity fuses,” Glenn recalled, “so the orders were that you never landed with proximity fuses, for fear one of them might give some problem after landing. So if you didn’t use those HVARs, why, you unloaded them either out over the water, just shoot them into the ocean, or shoot them at a target of any kind you just happened to pick in North Korea just to get rid of them.”
Heading west from their strike in Pyonggang County but still very close to the bombline, Glenn searched for a good spot for the pair to unload the rest of their armament, two more delay-fuse five-hundred- pound GPs and all twelve ATARs. Along the Rimjin River, Glenn discovered the perfect target, a bridge. Both pilots unloaded their half of their ATARs but not yet their remaining single GP. Glenn swooped around, made another run at the same area, and deployed his last GP on the already-destroyed bridge’s abutment.
Williams followed behind, and along the same run he attempted to dump his last delay-fuse GP as well. But the GP didn’t launch. Williams had forgotten to turn on the master arming switch before engaging the bomb. He swerved and headed back around—toward Allied territory— armed the system and fired. Glenn watched in horror as the ordnance, unexpectedly to him, jolted from beneath Williams’s wing. In a magnificent hail of fire and smoke the GP destroyed a small troop assembly.
“On my chart I thought he had hit in our own lines,” Glenn said, “and I could just see my court-martial coming up.”
Glenn promptly headed back to base, Williams trailing behind him. At 0705 hours they reached K-3. Sweating, pale, and irate, the seemingly unflappable “Clean Marine” dressed down Williams.
“I was calling him everything but good,” Glenn remembered.
Desperate to report the incident as soon as possible, Glenn sprinted to the Operations Office adjacent to the airstrip. Williams followed, listening to Glenn’s reprimands the entire way.
“You made that 180, you were shooting south, towards our troops!” Glenn said.
Inside the Operations Office, Glenn pulled out the paper map that he’d brought with him on the mission. While still in the air, he had marked on it the exact location that Williams’s GP hit. Comparing the small map to the mural-sized map pinned to the back wall of the Quonset hut gave Glenn both great surprise and great relief.
Glenn’s failure to complete objective “a” of Chapter II, Section 200, Paragraph 2 of the squadron manual meant that he did not have the most up-to-date geographical information. In recent days, the bombline had moved several hundred yards south. North Korean personnel, not Allied, occupied the area Williams had blasted. Still, rather than catalogue the mission’s blunder, the official unit diary recorded that “two (2) 500 GPs were jettisoned in the K-3 jettison area and six (6) ATARS were returned to base.”
“I never took off on another mission without closely checking the ops office chart against my flight chart,” Glenn later wrote. “I made that part of the squadron briefing from then on.”
Williams, nationally known as a high-strung, temperamental ball- player, remained unmoved.
“I knew where I was shooting and let ’em go,” he told a fellow Marine in 1999. “But I could see the headlines, ‘Major Glenn and Ted Williams fire on American line.’ But we didn’t and everything turned out all right.”
Adam Lazarus is the author of The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams. In addition to his many non-fiction books, His writing has appeared in USA Today, ESPN the Magazine, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other publications. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Kenyon College and a master’s degree in professional writing from Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and twin boys, and can be found online at AdamLazarusBooks.com.
