Disguised as North Koreans, the Soviet Union used MiG-15s during the Korean War to attack the U.S. Air Force. This much is well-documented. But midway through the war, American pilots reported seeing American planes shooting at them. Could these planes have been aircraft stolen from American prisoners of war and used against the American Air Force?
1. What cases were there of American planes shooting at other American planes?
2. Why would the American military have reason to believe that the Soviet Union was using American planes during the war?
3. What has been the consensus opinion on the Russian military's possible use of American planes during the war?
4. How many American pilots were downed during the Korean War?
5. What does the story of P.O.W. Charles McDonough contribute to our understanding of possible use of American war planes by the Soviet Union?
1. AMERICAN PLANES SHOOTING AT AMERICAN PLANES
During the Korean War, several American pilots reported seeing and sometimes being attacked by American planes. Most of the incidents occurred from the end of 1951 and into 1952. Air Force intelligence believed that the Soviet Union had acquired several American planes, presumably taken during the war, including the United States' military's new F-86.
If these American war planes were taken during the war by the Soviets, this would also mean that several American prisoners of war were taken, prisoners who were never found or accounted for. And it is presumed these P.O.W.s were taken to either Siberia, North Korea, or China.
In the 1990s, there was a joint attempt on behalf of the American and Russian government to account for some of the missing P.O.W.s but nothing came of it, the U.S. claiming that Russia was delaying the process to uncover the missing soldiers. There was another attempt to revive the issue in 2010, again claimed to be blocked by the Russian government. This delay on recovering missing P.O.W.s suggested to some that the discovery of these American military men would reveal the fact that their planes were also confiscated and used against the American Air Force.
2. AMERICAN PLANES WANTED
Most of the new information regarding the mystery American airplanes and the missing P.O.W.s comes from recently declassified documents from U.S. Air Force intelligence and C.I.A. documents. Now it is known that during the Korean War, American and Soviet military forces were waging an air war against each other.
The Russian government used MiG-15 planes which looked like the planes of North Korea and China and made frequent attacks agains the U.S. The Russian government stepped up its strategy by beginning to look into how to reverse engineer American planes. This would allow them to appear to be American fighters themselves and make attacks.
Already the Soviet Union was using TU-4 bombers which were copies of American B-29 bombers, bomber planes that the Soviet Union had obtained during World War II. But during the Korean War, the Soviet Union was looking to purchase or steal several different U.S. fighter planes, including the F-86, newer B-29 bombers, American helicopters, and also other reconnaissance planes like the RB-45. The Soviet Union eventually acquired, though not known how, one or two F-86s.
3. THE PLANE SIGHTINGS
In over a dozen instances from 1951 to 1952, U.S. Air Force pilots reported seeing American planes flying in formation with the enemy MiG-15s or attacking them. These includes F-80s mainly. To some American fighters, it seemed to be the case that these fighter planes were captured from American pilots and now being used against them.
There is not uniformity of opinion that this is the case, however. A few explanations were offered regarding these sightings. Since the popularity of flight, pilots the world over have mistakenly reported seeing unidentified flying objects which were not there or at the very least could never be independently accounted for.
Another explanation on offer was that some of the instances were cases of mistaken “friendly fire.” Perhaps American pilots were controlling some of the planes that shot at other American planes but did so as a matter of misidentifying the enemy.
Still another explanation was that it was true that the people who were attacking the U.S. Air Force were Russian pilots. But they were not flying American planes. Instead, they were flying planes that they had designed themselves to look like American planes.
The American pilots' report of hostile attacks when encountering these other American planes were also short in duration. American military superiors argued that if the Soviets were using American planes, they would probably be employing the planes more effectively.
American authorities also challenged the sheer plausibility that the Soviet Union would even want to put American war planes immediately into the conflict even if they had captured some American pilots. Firstly, it would have been difficult to put into flight a captured plane. It was suggested that if the Russian military in fact captured an American plane like the F-86, they would probably keep it, study how it was built, and then build their own planes rather than waste knowledge of their technology by immediately putting them into battle.
The fact is, the record is not clear. At turns Air Force intelligence reports, now declassified, were inclined to support the possibility that these were captured American planes and other times not.
About 60 American pilots were killed during the Korean War, 25 captured, and 65 listed as missing in action. In these cases, American pilots were flying F-80s, F-84s, and F-86s. Assuming that some of the planes that crashed were salvageable, the Soviet Air Force is presumed to have studied the planes and either copied them or repaired them and put them back in use.
There is also conjecture that the Soviets, North Koreans, or Chinese who captured the surviving American pilots made use of these pilots to teach them how to fly the planes. The truth about this conjecture might never have been known, given that the deal struck between the U.S. and Soviet governments after the Korean War was made with a view of recovering physical remains of American military at well-known sites of conflict.
Were it not for news that came out in 1994 in The Washington Post, the general public would not have known that such an account could be true. This came with news of Captain Charles McDonough.
Captain Charles McDonough of the U.S. forces was shot down during the Korean War on 5 December 1950. He had been flying a spy plane. Initial news to Charles McDonough's wife back home was that he had gone missing and that the plane had disappeared.
44 years later, new evidence was revealed that Soviet planes had not only shot his plane down but that they had captured his and used him to understand the spy plane he was fighting.
Charles McDonough had been flying an RB-45, a converted jet bomber that the American Air Force was using for photo reconnaissance, the most advanced in the world at the time. Charles McDonough was familiar with the type of plane since he had also served as a pilot that had used similar during World War II. His regular missions during the Korean War involved leading a three-plane detachment out of an air base in Japan over North Korea.
News of Charles McDonough's capture as well as other American pilots came to light with the discovery of a list of captured U.S. airmen from the Russian government. The list was released during the Korean War and reveals that Charles McDonough and other prisoners of war were captured and interrogated by the Soviet military.
P.O.W.s' families persisted in petitioning the U.S. government to find out about their fathers' whereabouts. But it was not discovered until October of 1993 that Charles McDonough among those cases died two weeks after he was shot down. This was found out by an investigator who uncovered declassified documents from the Russian archive and tracked down other sources inside of Russia and inside the American military to find out what happened.
Charles McDonough was held as a prisoner in North Korea. He was interrogated by the North Korean soldiers and Russian soldiers. The Russian soldiers were interested in procuring information from Charles McDonough regarding how to retrieve American planes that had been downed during fighting. They used him to find out how to recover these planes, although there is no news of how successful the recovery missions were.
After the North Korean and Russian soldiers used him to full effect, they prepared a gruesome execution for him. On 1950 December 18, just a couple weeks after his capture, the North Korean army put a sign on him that read “Korean War Criminal.” They brought before a crowd of angry North Korean people and he was beaten to death.
Other declassified C.I.A. documents and testimony from Soviet military officials themselves have also claimed that at least a dozen Americans were captured during the war and shipped off to the Soviet Union, never to return. Given that the reason Charles McDonough was viewed as valuable for the Russian military, it now seems more likely that other Americans were used in similar ways.
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