They say if you survive the 1st month of combat, you will be OK... HELL NO! I have to tell you, I almost didn't make it home to my pregnant wife and unborn son. My 21 year old body should have been shipped in a cheap wooden crate with the American flag draped over it just like many other fallen soldiers from the Forgotten War.

It all started on my 23rd combat flight on May 14th, 1952, in North Korea during a close air support flight. I was young with no smarts flying a Corsair as number 2 in a F4U-4B. I was the second of a 4 plane division. The mission was to assist an Army company being shot to shit and overrun by a bunch of North Koreans. The ground action was in the bottom of an ancient "blow-out" Volcano called the "Punch Bowl" by my leaders of the ground support.

When my flight checked in with the forward air controllers, he said, "I hope y'all in time- our boys and the Gooks are blasting their balls, hand to hand, too close to pick out the good guys.” He rolled-in and fired a smoke rocket where he told me to blast the hell out of it and work it over. Hey, I am a kid from Pensacola, Florida. I’d never been anywhere outside the county line. Now there I was, flying around with bombs and rockets in the middle of the Korean Peninsula. All I could think about is my beautiful 18 year old wife, only 18 years old, bearing my unborn son. We married 2 weeks before I was deployed to the godforsaken peninsula.

My flight leader acknowledged and we "broke-up” communications and started our run-in from about 10,0000 feet. My 1st run was hell. No Picnic. The North Koreans had placed their own anti-aircraft guns on the top rim of the Punch Bowl and were shooting at me each pass I made to bomb their asses. The bullets flying through the atmosphere resembled small meteorites. It was extremely difficult to tell our guys, my buds, from the people that I was shooting. Pick a God damn target and try to dodge the spray of anti-aircraft flack was not an easy task.

I tried to spray the anti-aircraft positions with my 50 caliber machine gun, trying to suppress some of the flack. Obviously, I was not successful. On my 4th dive bomber attack, I saw a Quad-50 Caliber machine gun (a captured American weapon) spew out a blast of bullets as I zipped by. I didn't even have time to shit in my pants, nor pucker, as the rounds crashed into my cockpit. I was hit. Scrap metal and shards of glass exploded into my face, ripping holes into my body.

Blood went flying. My face, my vision, my mental stability, all gone. Hell, the left side of my face resembled hamburger meat. I looked into the mirror with what little sight I had and said, “Shit. I am going to die.” Again, the images of my wife and unborn son flashed through my head.

Immediately without any vision, I jammed the emergency climb power on and pulled up to get the hell out of dodge. As the wind roared through the cockpit, the tough old WWII Corsair still responded to my flight controls. I called my flight leader and reported that I had been hit in the cockpit and I was bleeding to death. Actually, death sounded good at that time since it would relive me of the enormous pain I was suffering. My face was destroyed. I could not see. Blind. Like a stuck hog. Death indeed appeared to be my faith that day.

One of my wing-men joined in, looked at my plane, and said through the radio, “You only got blasted on the left cockpit; you might want to throttle back. HELL CATCHING YOU CORLEY!!!”

My adrenaline was smoking. I got to tell you, none of my flight training had prepped me for the next few minutes of pure flight terror! To start with my face, chin, nose, ears, and throat was bleeding like crazy. I had a lap full of blood and every time I talked on the radio my lips were stung with electric jolts from my blood in the microphone.

Now what to do? Bail out or find a landing strip to lay this mother, loaded with bombs, down. Am I going to kill myself? Will my son never see me? My young wife, what will happen to her? Bail out? NO! I am Winon Corley! I’m a goddamn Marine. NO BAILING OUT. I have to find a field to land his plane.

I am a coward when it comes to jumping out of a planes, so I told my wingman to pick me out a field. He said the closest was a mere 1,500 ft. long. Shit. I had never landed on anything less than 6,0000 ft. This was it. I am bleeding to death and can't possibly land with these bombs on this small dirt strip. It was not an air field, merely a dirt road.

My 1st pass- aborted. Normal touch-down is 65-70 knots. I was cruising at a minimum of 120 knots. Everyone on the ground ran like hell to get away from me since I was crash landing this monster with massive bombs and rockets. So I jammed the power on and pulled up. Boy, I really abused that R-2800 HP engine, but it didn’t blow up… Thank god.

The next pass I settled down, realizing I needed to get on the deck before bleeding to death. I wiped the red liquid spewing from my eyes and flew a wide pattern with a longer straight-in to line up. Boy, I tell you, that field looked shorter than it did before.

I finally touched down, screaming down the sorry excuse for a landing strip hot and fast. I slammed on the breaks, nosed up and went sliding off the end of the dirt road into a ditch. In all the excitement I forgot to lock my shoulder harness and the sudden stop caused my head to bang into the gun sight. The old Corsair then fell back onto its tail, balancing out for good.

As they say in the Marine Corps Aviation, “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing.” Well, my feat weren’t on the ground since a couple of Army guys slung my body onto stretcher then onto the skids of a MASH helicopter bringing me to safety.

“Hell!” I thought to myself, “I just crashed. Hell! I just survived. I just had the pure flight-fright of my life and this damn Army guy is going to kill me now!” The chopper lifted and hummed away.

Hey, I like a happy ending. And you know what, after three weeks of R&R aboard the USS Consolation Hospital, being patch-backed to pieces like a quilt by a few beautiful nurses, I was back in my Corsair flying up and down North Korea shooting, bombing and rocketing every fucking thing that moved while loving every second of it. Maybe it was my ignorant youth, or just my ignorant self, but I forgot the terror that grasped my body several weeks earlier. And looking back on it, no matter how dangerous it was, no matter how horrifying it could have been, I still look back on those days more than five decades ago and realized that they were the best years of my life. SEMPRE FI!

2nd Lt. Winon E Corely.
US Marine Corps
VMF 323 “The Death Rathers”
K-6 South Korea
Summer 1952

RIP to all the unfortunate ones who didn’t survive the perfect fright flight

(Photograph above: a shot-down American plane displayed at the Korean War Memorial Museum in Pyongyang, North Korea)