US Pilot Shot Down Four Soviet MiGs in 30 minutes – A secret for 50 years | Hacker News Reader

US Pilot Shot Down Four Soviet MiGs in 30 minutes – A secret for 50 years

cnn.com

153 pointsbkohlmann39 comments

There is an old manual on USAF dog fighting tactics written by Frederick Blesse after the Korean War. It's pretty interesting: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/delimitedoptions/files/do...

"Assume every pilot you meet is the world's best (you can swallow your pride that long) and maneuver your aircraft accordingly until he shows you he is not."

"When in doubt - attack!"

I read the article carefully, but I still can’t figure out how Royce Williams managed this feat. It seems like a situation out of a movie in which the bad guys miss when they fire, but the good guy always hits when he fires. He should have lost a dogfight against only one MIG, since the MIG was the superior aircraft. Was he just unbelievably lucky?

He probably both flew well and was very lucky! He mentions the Soviets also flew well but made mistakes. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they simply were as unlucky as he was lucky.

The Migs put 263 holes in his aircraft. Grumman combat survivability and skills got him back to the carrier.

Obviously this account didn’t make it, but if you enjoy hearing about air combat actions, I can highly recommend the series “Dogfights” from the history channel.

It gets really in depth about what’s going on, the encounters, the tactics, the technology. For me it was edge of your seat TV.

I think History put many of these on YouTube.

My only lament is that I can’t seem to find the pilot episode (or, rather, the show they did that eventually turned into a series).

That show had a great account of Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s action in Vietnam. The only Naval Ace of the Vietnam War, he, too, shot down 3 aircraft in a single engagement. That awarded him the Navy Cross.

He became a disgraced congressman convicted of fraud and corruption. That may be why we can’t find that show anymore. But it was a compelling account, broadcast before the scandal.

Anyway, if this topic is interesting, I highly recommend “Dogfights”.

What I find fascinating is that the Vietnamese air force (not just the Soviets helping them) was quite capable, giving the USAF much trouble. The Vietnamese even had fighter aces! You don't hear about that too often.

Retired naval aviator Ward Carroll interviewed Royce Williams and got a firsthand account of the engagement.

https://youtu.be/7tqHWH1bYb0

Ward puts out quality content on his channel. He frequently interviews professional military analysts and asks the kind of questions professionals want answered, not the puff-piece talking head interviews on the major networks.

The article states that the Russians released information that corrected the record from 3 to 4 kills. I would love to see actual military reports from both sides of the encounter.

Why only the second highest medal? What types of things are required to win the highest medal?

Self-sacrifice and very high risk of one's own life (a not insignificant number are given posthumously)

So a lot of medal of honor recipients are infantry pulling wounded squad mates out of danger in extreme circumstances.

The entire air force has only 17, the army has over two thousand.

He did risk his life when he interjected himself between the fleet and the approaching MIGs and then spent the next 30 minutes in a dogfight to down 4 of them. It's probably a lot harder in the Air Force to get one but I would consider that one.

He was brave, and did his duty. But, is this different than infantry advancing while under fire?

GIYF, there are specific requirements for each medal. The highest one, the Medal of Honor actually gives the holder certain privileges and is as close to sacred as these awards get. If other lives or an entire mission had been at risk, or if he had died in the process of rescuing others, you might see a Medal of Honor here.

The highest is the Medal of Honor for "Conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor

Yeah to get a better idea of what that means there might be an example on Army writer. You have to write these a certain way and the granting authority will have their own quirks.

I imagine the comparison to gritty heroics on the ground, face-to-face, means it's harder for pilots to earn that.

Why did the Soviet pilots open fire? Are there any records that give more information as to their motives? Surely the Soviet brass wanted to avoid direct confrontation with the Americans as well!

This was in 1952. Soviet pilots started flying over Korea in 1951, posing as Chinese or Korean pilots [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_and_the_Korean_Wa...

At first, a direct interview of the said pilot shows no shotdown of four aircrafts.

direct source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SImG_7g-Lvg

I mean, he doesn’t count them off, but he describes what he saw at the time - talks about the hits he saw, the planes he saw going down.

The CNN article actually says that four kills were only confirmed by the release of Soviet records in the 1990s, so even at the time he only thought he’d got three.

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