Airpower

The Korean War was a smaller and different conflict than the big war Americans had won only a few years earlier. So was the air war. The newly independent United States Air Force (USAF) flew only a fifth of the combat sorties and dropped a fifth of the bomb tonnage in Korea as had its predecessor, the Army Air Forces (AAF), in World War II. In contrast, U.S. Marine and Navy aviators flew almost as many combat sorties in the two wars, but dropped almost three quarters more bomb tonnage (AAF 1945, USN 1946, USAF 1953b, Cagle and Manson 1957). United Nations Command (UNC) airmen dominated the Korean air war, flying 697,000 combat sorties and dwarfing the 90,000 sorties flown by the Chinese and the Soviets. The USAF accounted for three fifths of the UNC’s combat sorties, the Navy and Marines one-third, and other UNC forces (Republic of South Korea Air Force [ROKAF], Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF], and South African Air Force [SAAF]) the remainder (USAF 1953b, Cagle and Manson 1957, ROKAF 2000, Zhang 2002, RAAF 2012). ¹ Air power played an important role in the Korean War, although not as dramatic or significant as in World War II.