One Kill, No Credit

IHF NOTE: This story was related to IHF Researcher Johnathan Clayborn personally by Mr. Carroll during an in-person discussion in 2005. He has presented the story here to best of his ability and recollection. Any errors in the details below are assumed to be Mr. Clayborn's error in transcribing the story.

It was early 1953. The squadron had taken off for night ops, as per our normal operations. On this night we were all split up across Korea looking for targets of opportunity. We searched all night and blasted a few trucks into the recycle heap. We dropped our bombs on a section of track and circled the area one last time to survey the damage before heading back. That's when we heard it, THACK THACK THACK THACK, the sound of bullets striking our plane! The pilot, Cpt. Emil Pindzola, immediately took evasive action, but the sound came again. I looked frantically out of the windows in the back, scanning the ground for the AA battery, but I couldn't see the tell-tale muzzle flash anywhere. Suddenly, our Navigator shouted over the intercom "Bogey at 3 o'clock! It's a damn plane!" I looked out the window just as the bastard flew by. Finally, I had something to do. I flipped the periscope on and tracked the plane with the turret. It was hard to see him in the dark, but I tracked what I thought was the faint glimmer of light reflecting off the canopy. He opened up on us again and his muzzle flash confirmed his position, I gave him a little lead time and then opened up with my double barrel .50s. I could smoke coming from the engine as he turned and broke off. I called up to the cockpit. "Get after him! I hit him, he's smoking. Don't let him get away!" Captain Pindzola was pissed that enemy had the nerve to shoot up his plane so he obliged. Even with the damage to the engine, this plane was still just a little faster than we were. Officially, the tech sheet said we could fly 355 mph, but with no ordnance and more than half of our fuel gone, we were a little lighter and we could push it closer to 370, maybe 375. This little plane, a Yak-9, even with a damaged engine was doing about 390. He was slipping away from us. The Captain occasionally gave him a burst from the forward guns, just to let the plane know we were still back here. We must have chased him a good 10 minutes in the pre-dawn morning when our Navigator, Lt. Roy L. Compton, warned us that we were coming up on the border. We had standing orders not to cross the border and not to engage targets on the other side. If we went down behind enemy lines... Captain Pindzola asked him if he was sure and told him he should double check. Roy asked me how badly I wanted to get this sonabitch. I told him very badly using a colorful analogy I don't quite recall, and Roy said he might be mistaken about where the border was. About 5 minutes past the border and the enemy plane slowed and turned into a tight turn, he was circling back around on us. He climbed up and then dropped down on us from above. He opened up right at the same time that I did, my turrets could track him anywhere he wanted to go. He ripped a few dozen holes into our topside and I blew his engine up. I watched with grim satisfaction as the fiery streak of his plane streaked down past us and exploded into the mountainside below. Roy said he thought it was high time we hightailed it back across the line and returned to base, the sun would be up soon. We landed and our crew chief met us at the revetment. We disembarked the plane and were walking to base when he called us back. "What the hell did you guys do to my plane?" We all looked at each other. I shrugged and said "One of the trucks had an AA gun on it." The crew chief stared us down. "No it didn't." Roy backed me up, "Of course it did. Shot us all to hell." The chief folded his arms and didn't move. "Then maybe the Captain would like to explain why he was doing aerobatic maneuvers in plane that is expressly prohibited from doing loops or rolls?" Pindzola was flustered, "wait, what are you talking about?". The chief walked over and pointed to a few holes on the bottom of the wings. "These holes here, sure, I'll buy that they came from an AA gun." He climbed up on top of the plane and pointed very dramatically, "but unless you were flying upside down or the AA gun can float, there's no way in God's Green Earth that these holes up here came from an AA gun. So, I'll ask again, what happened?" We all looked at each other, we knew wed been caught. Emil waved him over and the chief climbed down and joined us. "Look, we were jumped by a Yak-9, he must have thought we were easy pickings being faster and more agile, but Fred put a few holes in his engine and he was limping. We finished him off and shot him down." I jumped in, "I shot him down." We all laughed. "That's great, You should report that and I'll finally get to add a plane marker to the old' girl." Roy cleared his throat. "If you do that, you'll probably be working with a new flight crew by the end of the week. You see, we had to chase that bastard all the way across the border." The chief just stared deadpan. "We shot him down on their side of the border," Emil said again. The chief shook his head. "oh, shit. You better not report that! If you report that you shot it down at all they'll want to verify the crash site, and when it's not on our side of the border they'll have your asses in a sling. You'll all probably be court-martialed for disobeying an order." And so, with the crew chief covering our secret, he didn't report it. We chased him, we shot him down, but you wont ever find a record that we did that because claiming credit for that kill wasn't worth the ass-chewing that would have come our way. But I'd be lying if it wasn't satisfying. Our chief did paint an aerial kill marker, way up inside of the nose wheel landing bay where no one else would ever see it.