Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce Dennis
I am prepared to be shot down in flames for this by those who may know better, but I recall some time ago reading the autobiography of an American pilot, exWWll & Korea, who described Japanese pilots flying for the South Koreans. Is this correct?
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There were no ethnic Japanese pilots in either Korea's armed forces but there were Korean pilots who had flown in the Japanese Army in WWII when Korea was ruled by Japan. An early hero of the ROKAF was Col. Rhee Geun-Seok (subject to various latin letter spellings) who had been a combat fighter pilot in the JAAF in WWII. While serving with the 77th Fighter Regiment flying the Type 97 Fighter he was shot down in combat with 67th Sdn RAF and the AVG over Rangoon December 25 1941 and became the first Japanese POW in that theater. Then a Sargent, he was known at the time by either the Japanese name he took, Aoki Akira, or the Japanization of his Korean name, Ri Kontetu. July 3, 1950 he was killed leading the first ROKAF F-51 combat mission, attacking an NK tank column. His plane was either hit by AA or flew accidentally into the ground.
Lee Wahl, deputy chief of the NK air force at the beginning of the war, was another ex-Japanese Army pilot.
Many or most senior ROKA/AF/N officers in 1950 were veterans of the Japanese forces. A few had been Japanese Army officers (like Park Chung-Hee, later long time President/dictator of ROK in 1960's/70's) though most had been enlisted. Some in NK forces too but not nearly as many: the politics were different, and the NK's had a bigger reservoir of men with combat experience in the Soviet Army, ethnic Korean units of the PLA, etc.
Re: Nokose: Almost all US pilots by time of KW were officers, and the general practice of US pilot training (and probably most AF's) was not to take men who had already fully learned to fly elsewhere (civilian or military), because they were viewed as having 'wrong' basic flying habits that would have to be broken. And rightly or wrongly, the US air arms did not view themselves as being in need of learning directly from the combat experience of Axis pilots by making them directly into US pilots; those where the air arms they'd just beaten in part by having generally better trained pilots, in the US view. So I'm sure there were at least a few immigrants who'd served in Axis armed forces in WWII then joined or were drafted (non-citizens lving in the US were subject to the draft) as enlisted men in US forces in Korea, but very unlkely any ended up as US military pilots in any type of a/c.
Joe