Presentation Date: November 15, 2001
CAPT John Shannon USAF (Ret.)
Fighter Pilot, Korean War. 100 Combat Missions over Korea, Flying the F-80 "Shooting Star", 26th F.S. 23rd F.S. in Germany Flying the F-84 "Thunderjet" Fighter Pilot, Korean War. 100 Combat Missions over Korea, Flying the F-80 "Shooting Star", 26th F.S. 23rd F.S. in Germany Flying the F-84 "Thunderjet"
Far Beyond the Passing Grade
John Shannon says in 1949 he was a 19 year old city boy, living in a boarding house, unemployed and wondering what he was going to do with his life. Even though he was a high school graduate, John remembers walking down San Francisco's Market Street, looking for help-wanted signs - - when he saw an Air Force recruiting office and decided to inquire inside.
The recruiter told Shannon two application tests were required for Aviation Cadets. For the 2-year college equivalency test, John got a special offer from the recruiter. Shannon says the recruiter told him, "I'll do something for you. They're all multiple choice questions, with four possibilities for each question. If you just flat don't know something, leave it blank and for every four blanks I'll give you a point." Shannon took the test, and passed by one point. The recruiter had given John three points for skipping twelve questions. The next day was the aviation cadet entrance test, and again, John passed by a single point.
About six months later, having gotten a letter from the Air Force to report for primary training, John Shannon was driving his 1941 Ford to Connelly Air Force Base, Waco, Texas.
"I was highly motivated, because I had nothing to go back to," remembers John. "And the Air Force was one of the best things that ever happened to me. All those uniforms, 85 dollars a month, three meals a day and seconds, and a big yellow bird to fly out there."
That yellow bird was a T-6 Texan trainer, and soloing within 30 hours was Shannon's biggest hurdle in the Cadet program.
Shannon quickly discovered his fellow classmates were mostly West-Point graduates, among them future astronaut Frank Borman. Given the education which enabled them to gain high marks in the classroom and recognition from the teachers, Shannon realized if he didn't put out extra effort, he might not make the cut to fly jet fighters.
"One Sunday I took my little old Ford out to the end of the runway and started studying, from about 10 o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the evening. The test was on instrumentation... how instruments work. It was the most technical unit in our study program."
The next day, the cadets took the test and the teacher announced Shannon had the top grade, which John proudly acknowledged with a big smile when all the cadets turned around to look. One by one, John was clearing the hurdles to realizing his dream to fly fighters. By studying hard, he was able to pass the tests and that brought a realization he didn't have to feel as if he was a second class citizen.
At 6' 3", John's height also worked against him. But he succeeded in passing the physical requirements yardstick by flexing at his knees when an airman measured him.
"The main reason was I was able to succeed was because I had a very soft-spoken, very nice-guy instructor. There were other instructors who had high-pitched irascible voices, who never shut up. They had four students and would wash out three of them."
About three months into the training, the big question came - - did each pilot want to fly F-51s, B-25s on the multi-engine track, or jet fighters. Shannon requested jets, was granted that request and got orders to report to Williams Air Force Base.
There, he first flew the T-28, of which Shannon says, "they were brand new and they seemed to land themselves." Shannon's jet training consisted of three dual flights with an instructor in a T-33, before his instructor told him to pick out an F-80 "Shooting Star", take-off, fly around for an hour and come back.
Shannon's fondness for the F-80 shines through, describing the simplicity of getting the Shooting Star off the ground.
"There's only a couple of switches you need... to activate the APU or the battery to get the engine turning. Another switch gives it the spark, and then you're bringing the throttle around the horn from stopcock to idle and she cranks right up. Real easy. Taxiing's a breeze - - right brake when you want to go right, left brake if you want to go left..."
Taking off, John climbed out at about 280 mph to about 10,000 feet altitude. "I said to myself, if I keep going in one direction, I'll get lost. So I made a great big loop, about three of them, around Williams... in about a ten mile radius." He didn't want to lose sight of the air base. "I wasn't the only one to do that."
Shannon says during his jet training he heard few compliments, due in part to the competitive nature of the work as well as the personalities of instructors. But he did receive a compliment on one flight - - a very meaningful compliment.
On a cross-country flight to Norton Air Force Base, with three other cadets and an instructor in a T-33, Shannon was given the number three position in a "fingertip formation" of F-80s.
"We came in for landing and the four aircraft went into echelon formation. We all did 360 (degree) overheads. One landed on one side of the runway, then Number Two landed on the other side. They were staggered landings. I landed behind Number One, about 200 yards back, and as I was braking, along comes Number Four. He passed me up on my left and I could see from the exhaust that he had full power. He was trying to go around... he's not going to make it. If I had waited one more second, it would have been a catastrophe. I called 'Able One and Two. Get off the runway, now. Number Four's going around. He just passed me on the ground and is coming up behind you.' "
Shannon says the front two jets split and two seconds later, Number Four flew right between them. He has no doubt that if he hadn't spoken when he did, there would have been a dead instructor and three dead cadets in the wreckage of their F-80s. All of them knew he had saved them.
When the squadron commander later asked what had happened, Shannon says the explanation he gave brought a simple response. In an understated, quiet voice, the squadron commander told Shannon 'well done'. Those simple words, more than five decades later, still mean the world to him.
Shannon's next training venue was Nellis and the Combat Gunnery School and he recalls three months of flying strafing ait-to-air gunnery, and strafing patterns with a high G-force half loops and a roll out (Immelmans) on each pass.
"It was tougher than combat, as a matter of fact. I remember the oxygen mask was coming off my face. I had a terrible sweat (and thought)... 'what a way to make a living.' "
Okinawa was Shannon's next stop - - the 26th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, a pool to give pilots heading to Korea a couple hundred more hours of flying experience before they entered combat.
"My flight leader was one of these guys with a chip on his shoulder. He was something else. The first week I was there he took me up in a T-33, on an orientation ride. I'd heard he was a multi-engine pilot who had checked out in an F-80... a flight leader who hadn't had a lot of experience."
Shannon says when they got up on the orientation ride, the flight leader started calling things out Shannon couldn't see, because they were about to pass over them. On one call, while told to keep a specific heading, John says he quickly banked his T-33 to look down for the landmark and got a little off the heading. That started a rash of 'chewings-out' by the flight leader, a rash that would continue right into an Air Force / Army exercise three weeks later.
Shannon says the flight leader picked John to fly the Number Four position for the simulated combat, which began with the four F-80s in trail formation.
"He must have forgotten we were there. Or he just didn't know the untenable position he put us in." John says the whole base was watching as the flight leader started doing what seemed to be a solo aerobatic performance, close to the ground, with green pilots trying to stay with him. Rather than flying subtle turns to keep the formation smoothly together, Shannon says the leader was making hard turns. Like "riding a whip", this required progressively tighter turns by the pilots in trail, forcing Shannon into gut wrenching maneuvers to maintain his position, for nearly a half hour.
"He flew between the hills, over trees, going in for a simulated gunnery run, pull up hard... and we were just fighting for our lives to stay with the guy. The Naha Officers Club was on top of a hill of Okinawa, and he went over the top at one hundred feet. Now, Number Two went over it at 50 feet. Number Three went over... skimming, practically on the aerials on the top of the club. And I, believe it or not, was looking in the front door at 300 miles an hour. I waited until the last split second to pull up and go over the club and then drop back down so I could see the others in front of me."
The final pass was a diamond formation, during which John says his knees were shaking badly after the harrowing experiences. After landing, Shannon says from his cockpit, fifty yards away, he could hear the squadron commander chewing out the flight leader for his reckless display with green pilots. He heard the squadron CO say that he thought Shannon had crashed because even though they were within a mile of the runway no one had seen Number Four for 20 minutes. This would prove to be the most dangerous flight Shannon would ever fly, even in combat.
February, 1952 saw Shannon with the 80th Fighter/Bomber Squadron, stationed at K-13 air base in Korea. Half the base was dedicated to F-80 "Shooting Stars" which flew interdiction (ground support, bombing and strafing) missions, and the other half supported F-86 Sabre jets of the 51st Fighter Wing providing air cover for the fighter bombers.
By this time in the Korean War, the Inchon landing had succeeded, battle lines had stabilized, and the Allied forces were fighting a war of attrition with the Communists. Due to American air superiority, days were relatively quiet and targets were hard to find - - enemy trucks were parked out of sight and trains stayed in tunnels. Railroad tracks became the targets for the 80th.
"On a typical dive-bomb run, we came into the target area at about 18,000 feet, dropped the dive brakes and then throttled back. We didn't push the nose down because we didn't want to pull negative Gs with a couple of bombs on board. So we just rolled the plane over and the nose pulled through into a dive of about sixty degrees."
Lining up the gun sight "pipper" on the tracks, Shannon says the pilots would pull out their jets at between two and three thousand feet and drop the bombs. More often than not, he says, they would miss the tracks by a few feet.
"It really was hard to hit something three and a half feet wide. They didn't expect us to, feeling that if enough bombs were dropped in the area, someone would cut the tracks. My response was, 'it's the wind.' Sometimes you could see all four of our bombs were in a row, exactly a couple of yards from the railroad tracks."
The hazards on interdiction missions included flak, cables strung across valleys near targets, and smoke - - the enemy lit smudge pots, hoping to hamper the pilots' vision.
The smudge pots nearly took a toll one time. Shannon says his flight had climbed up from 18,000 to 20,000 feet to save fuel. As he was "checking six" for the flight, he saw a flash just above his cockpit and just below his jet. He immediately asked his flight leader, "What was that?" and was told he'd just flown through a flight of F-84s. Due to low visibility (about two miles) from the smudge pots the flight leader didn't have time to warn John. They dropped back down to their assigned 18-thousand feet altitude, reminded that 20,000 feet belonged to the F-84s.
And on one occasion for Shannon, the hazard came from target fixation.
John says he was cruising for targets with another F-80 pilot one evening. They had gotten word the enemy was starting to move vehicles at dusk. Flying through hills, Shannon spotted a pair of trucks and radioed his wingman to make sure he saw them. The two jets banked right and began shooting.
"But we were both converging, on the same truck. We both had target fixation, so neither one of us realized we were converging. I got this feeling I wanted to pull out in a hurry, but just as I started to pull out, his wing was coming over the top of my canopy. We were nearly having a mid-air collision. I pulled the throttle back, tried to slide out from under him, but it was very, very tight because there was a hill right in back of the road... I slid out, somewhat, but I was basically underneath him. It was very, very close."
Back at the Quonset hut at K-13, Shannon's wingman asked if he saw him nearly fly into the truck due to target fixation? John replied, "You won't believe this, but I was underneath you."
One of the most hazardous and memorable of the ground support missions John flew, was captured on film by a photo recon F-80 flying behind him. In a series of four missions, Shannon and the 80th FB Squadron hit a supply depot at Suan, southeast of the North Korean capitol of Pyongyang. Two pilots were lost that day, the squadron leader (in his first mission with the 80th) and the flight leader in front of Shannon.
The day started typically, with a 4:00 am wake up call. The first mission was flak suppression, and Shannon dive-bombed an antiaircraft gun post with a pair of 500-pound bombs. The other three missions involved bombing enemy supply stores, using napalm. John pointed to a picture which centers on his F-80 a few yards above the treetops, at least five medium AA rounds racing up towards his jet, and a napalm canister dropping free from the F-80's port wing hard point.
"Here's a building, here's a building, here's trucks, all kinds of stuff... and I'm being fired at. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was the gun that got Coffee, because he was the leader of the flight just ahead of me. And as I pulled off I could see a big area of black smoke, and the guys were all yelling... and that was him."
Despite the flak and the loss of squadron members that day, Shannon hit his target on that run. The image of Shannon's F-80 dropping ordnance on his treetop run over the North Korean supply depot made it into several magazines. It now hangs as a portrait in the Pentagon, as one of the best photos of Korean War fighter-bomber operations.
John Shannon left Korea after completing 100 Combat Missions flying the F-80 "Shooting Star". For his service he received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters.