Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel Nole
Hi: Very interesant the theme.
1. The first one was the Apr 3, 1951. This day was loss the the 49-1173 of Maj Ronald D. Shirlaw. The official version say: "crashed behind enemy lines due to fuel exhaustion " .Korwall speak of:" Instrument malfunction, fuel exhaustion, bellied in on river bank 10 mi NW of Kaesong".
And what is the version the V-VS?
"A MiG-15 pilot of the 176th GIAP, Kapetan Ivan Yablokov,
caught by surprise the F-86A BuNo.49-1173 flown by Major Ronald D. Shirlaw, and riddled the fuel tanks and the fuel
boost with 23 mm shells. Shirlaw managed to belly land his crippled Sabre over NK territory, only to become a POW."
Iam near certain , this plane can be counted as a victory for the MiGs but is not so in the "official version".
2. The F-86A-5 49-318 was used for the photo sessions with James Jabara after the combat of May 20, 1951(Actually this day he had used the 49-1319). After that, no more informations are available about the loss of this plane.
|
Hi Daniel, I welcome someone new interested in this topic which so fascinates me. May I make minor comments about just the two points above
1. The problem shown by the source you quote is what I might call the 'Korwald feedback effect'. Some researchers have in recent years read Korwald as well as published accounts from Russia, but then the info in Korwald kind of 'feeds back' into the Russian accounts to imply a neat correlation of facts from each side that wasn't really there. For example, the quote you gave tends to imply that the Soviets later found Shirlaw's plane to have been riddled by cannon fire causing a fuel problem, but there's actually no evidence of that. The Soviets didn't do their own wreck surveys at that time, and their verification comment for this downing is very vague, in fact it says the a/c crashed into the water and the fate of the pilot was unknown, though Shirlaw obviously turned up in the hands of their allies eventually, spent the war as prisoner and was released in 1953.
The part about "riddled fuel tanks" comes from the assumption or imagination of the writer of the website you quoted, putting together the Korwald entry including a fuel issue with knowledge that a Soviet claim was registered the same day.
Also note that Korwald is not 'the official version' in sense of some publicity release. Those explanations of loss are in almost all cases directly from then-secret records.
As best I can tell from April 3 '51's intelligence summary of the 5th AF, which has details of each flight, Shirlaw's particular flight didn't contact MiG's, though others did, which would explain the Soviet claim. It seems he really did get separated and have a navigation problem, and ran out of fuel. He also said so in his POW de-brief interview after his release in 1953. These were all secret documents at the time. I rate this incident 'probably not MiG' in my database, though I admit it's not 100% certain.
2. 49-1318 was damaged in air combat November 29, 1951. Although a photo dated December 5 seems to shows the damage to be relatively minor, there was a severe parts shortage for F-86A's in Korean in late '51; and 1318 was probably cannabalized for spares, and officially written off January 2, 1952, code M (combat loss). I count this as 'MiG loss/writeoff'. This is one of the legendary 'F-86's that were damaged and never repaired but the USAF didn't count them as losses'...except there are only a handful of such later write offs, and some *were* counted as combat losses.
Joe