13th Bomb Squadron Cannon in Korea

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As I've mentioned elsewhere on this site, I didn't meet my grandfather until I was 25. When I finally did meet him, he regaled me with all kinds of tales of his time in Korea...., which by that point was 50 years before. Like an idiot, I didn't write down very much of what he told me. Now, as I write this, those conversations I had with him are almost 15 years old. I have a good memory, but I'm starting to question how accurate my recollection of his stories are.

Here's one thing I do remember him talking about. He talked at length about the general mission of the Invaders in Korea - to strangle off the enemy supply line by targeting the "three T's"; Trains, Tracks, and Trucks. He talked about how they would hit the Koreans hard early on, which made the Koreans switch to moving the supplies at night. Then he talked about how his unit, the 13th Bombardment Squadron, and the rest of the 3rd Bombardment Group, would fly these material interdiction missions at night. To make things easier, they would fly low along the railway tracks until they found a train and would blow it up. The Koreans began countering this by stringing up "X" shaped wires across the tracks to cut the planes to ribbons as they flew past. This cat and mouse game went back and forth like this. Eventually, the Koreans took to hiding the trains in the tunnels to keep them safe from the bombers. That's when the Americans mounted a cannon on the front of one of the planes and they would fly it to the tunnel and blow up the engine, trapping the train inside. Or so the story goes to the best of my recollection.

It's a well known fact that the Invaders did experiment with cannons. 35 of them were equipped with a 75mm cannon. A much smaller number than that were equipped with 37mm cannons. There was at least one that had a 105mm cannon. But all of these were tested during the height of WWII. By the time Korea rolled around most of the cannon-equipped models were stricken from the record or scrapped. And of all of the photos of Invaders I've seen in Korea, none had a cannon. I started to doubt the story, or at least my recollection of it. Maybe what he said was they were thinking about using cannons? No, I'm pretty sure I heard him right.

Well, I was processing more files from NARA Archive roll K0401, and I came across a monthly summary from the 13th of great interest. This particular report is for July 1951 (pages 330-412 on the roll). Much of the roll is very badly faded and I'm working on trying to restore some manner of legibility to it. But, the very last few pages show something quite remarkable - photos a secret project where they installed a 20mm Cannon into the nose of an airplane! My grandfather was right, they DID have a cannon. It just wasn't the cannon I was looking for. I was looking for a big gun, one of the calibers that was widely known, not a 20mm. But there it is, clear as day in the report.

Due to the badly faded nature of the report, I can't tell exactly which plane had the cannon. All I know is that it was a 6-gun nose. They replaced the two outermost barrels on the navigators side with the cannon, so this plane had 5 barrels instead of 6. I scanned other reports. A lot of the reports from this period are badly faded, but of those that I can read, it looks like the unit expended between 2,000 and 2,500 rounds of 20mm ammo every month, until March of 1952, when 20mm ammo is no longer listed. The only deduction I can make from this is that the plane was either shot down or struck off (class 26'd) due to an accident or serious battle damage.

With that in mind, I looked at KORWALD again for planes that were listed as lost between December 1951 (the last month were I can clearly read 20mm ammo on the report), and March of 1952, the next legible report where ammo is not listed. That gives us a 60-day window between Jan 1st and Feb 28 to find the plane. KORWALD shows 3 planes from the 13th that are lost during this period. The first plane is no help. KORWALD shows a serial number of 44-347901. That's not even an Invader number. For one thing, it was 1 digit too many. Secondly, there are no Invaders that start with 33-347..., so it just doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it. KORWALD has a lot of errors, which Ill cover on another page. I was able to get the right serial number, 44-34372, by cross-referencing the date of loss against planes lost on that date on the list provided by the 13th Bomb Squadron Historical Society. That plane, BC-372, had an 8-gun nose and wasn't the plane in the photo. The other two Invaders are 44-34200, a 6-gun nose that disappeared on Jan 6th during a night mission, and 44-34281, a plane that started out with the 8th Bombardment Squadron during WWII as "Lethal Lady". She also had 6-guns. It could be either of these two. It could also be a plane that was just class 26'd, as those won't show up on KORWALD unless the crew was killed.

Now that I can prove they did have a cannon (I'll post a photo of the actual cannon from report soon), I just need to ID the plane. I'm going to start by trying to restore as much text as I can from the report. I'm hoping that they will mention it by number in the engineering section.