In August 1945 few Americans foresaw the Cold War with the Soviet Union which was to develop in the next few years. The years immediately after the war were quiet ones for the armed forces, as men and women were demobilized and the defense budget slashed. But these years did produce a new reserve component, the Air National Guard, on September 18, 1947.
A New Reserve Component The National Guard Association began lobbying for a National Guard arm of the Air Force when it was still a part of the Army. When a separate Air Force was created in 1947, its leaders were not enthusiastic about an air arm of the National Guard--they envisioned an active Air Force so large that reserve components would not be necessary. But political realities and a shrinking defense budget helped insure the creation of the Air National Guard in 1947. The Air Force immediately began wrangling with the states over the location of Air National Guard bases, training, flying hours, and a host of other details.
To the struggle between the Air Force and the Air Guard was added the bureaucratic struggle between the Air Force and Army sides of the National Guard Bureau, then still a Department of the Army activity. Relations between the two became so strained in the late 1940s that a joint Army-Air Force Inspector General team had to be sent in and a special board convened to study the problem. It was resolved in 1950, when the National Guard Bureau was reorganized into two divisions, Army and Air Force, with day-to-day operational authority residing in the two division chiefs. Not until 1958 was the Bureau officially made a joint activity of both the Departments of the Army and the Air Force.
The Korean War In June 1950 South Korea was invaded by communist North Korea. South Korean forces and their 500 United States military advisors were pushed back to a small perimeter around the southern port of Pusan, to which reinforcements were rushed from Japan. When the Soviets made the mistake of walking out of an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, that body directed that the United Nations would send troops to South Korea.
The supreme commander of United States forces in the Far East, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, landed the 1st Marine Division at Inchon, halfway up the Korean coast. It was the tactical masterpiece of his long career, and by October, United States and South Korean forces had chased the North Koreans almost to the Chinese border. At this point, the Chinese Communists entered the war with a huge force. The United States Eighth Army was completely overrun. The encircled 1st Marine Division, in the greatest fighting retreat in history, managed to battle its way to the coast for evacuation. Even before the disastrous Chinese intervention, it was recognized that the Regular Army, spread thinly around the world, could not handle the situation in Korea without help. The first Army National Guard units were mobilized in August 1950. Eventually, 138,600 men from 1,698 Army National Guard units, including eight infantry divisions and three regimental combat teams, would be mobilized for active duty.
This was the first partial mobilization in the National Guard's history; only about one third of the Army Guard was called to active duty. National security planners worried that Korea was a feint, with the real blow to come in Europe, and did not want to employ all our reserves.
Some Guard units were cannibalized for replacements and equipment and never left the United States. Some, however, were rushed intact to Korea when the Chinese intervention made it clear that the war would not be over soon. The first Guardsmen arrived at Pusan in January 1951, and by August they made up a sizable percentage of corps troops in Korea.
Combat in the "Police Action" Prominent among the first-deployed National Guard units were field artillery and engineer outfits. Artillery was particularly useful in breaking up the "human wave" attacks, in which hordes of Chinese, often at night and sometimes to the eerie accompaniment of drums and bugles, tried to storm United States positions. Two National Guard field artillery battalions, the 196th (Tennessee) and the 204th (Utah), were awarded Navy Presidential Unit Citations for helping the outnumbered 1st Marine Division beat off a succession of Chinese attacks.
Korea is one of the most mountainous countries in the world, and the fighting there required a great deal of engineer support. Michigan's 1437th Engineer Treadway Bridge Company arrived in the combat zone in time for the communists' 1951 spring offensive. As territory seesawed back and forth in the fighting, the 1437th had to pull some of its own bridges to deny them to the enemy.
Of the eight mobilized infantry divisions, four remained in the United States, two went to Europe, and two, the 40th and 45th, were sent to Korea. The two divisions arrived in Japan for further training in April 1951. Their future deployment soon became a topic for argument.
General Matthew Ridgway, who had taken command after President Truman fired MacArthur for insubordination, did not want to commit these green divisions to combat, preferring to use their personnel as individual replacements. But the Army Chief of Staff knew that this would provoke a storm of opposition from politicians and the National Guard Association, and Ridgeway was ordered to use the divisions. A "swap in place" of mission and equipment was arranged: the 45th would take over from the 1st Cavalry Division, and the 40th from the 24th Infantry Division.
The swaps were accomplished without a hitch in November 1951, and both divisons went on to prove themselves in combat. The Guardsmen found themselves in a strange kind of war, the first "limited war" the United States Army had ever fought. President Harry Tru man and his advisors had decided that to defeat the North Koreans would be too costly; instead, the United Nations forces would try to maintain the prewar border at the 38th parallel. By the time the Califomia and Oklahoma Guardsmen of the 40th and 45th Infantry Divisions reached the combat zone, the war had settled into a pattern oddly reminiscent of World War I. Both sides operated from heavily-fortified positions on the Korean mountainsides, sending out patrols, often at night, for reconnaissance and ambush. The Chinese mounted enough of their terrifying man attacks to vary the "routine."
The Air Guard in "Mig Alley" In contrast to the relatively small number of Army National Guard units mobilized, almost all of the Air National Guard was called into active federal service. A total of 66 squadrons were mobilized for 21 months. Fifty remained in the United States; four went to Britain and six to continental Europe. Six squadrons saw combat in Korea itself.
Three Air Guard fighter squadrons, the 111th and 182nd (Texas) and the 154th (Arkansas), were formed into the all-Air Guard 136th Fighter-Bomber Group. The group began flying its F-84s into combat from their base in Japan in June 1951. In October, the 136th moved to Korea, where a jet runway had finally been constructed. One month later, the group commander was shot down while leading a mission, one of 101 Air Guardsmen to be killed or listed as missing.
The 116th Fighter-Bomber Wing, made up of the 158th (Georgia), 159th (Florida), and 196th (Califomia) Squadrons, arrived in Japan shortly after the 136th. In order to increase their combat time over the Korean peninsula, these Air National Guard squadrons became the first in the United States Air Force to experiment with in-flight refueling.
Before these squadrons saw combat, the Air Force had been skeptical about the proficiency of Air National Guard pilots. Most of the Guardsmen were World War II veterans. The Air Force, then known for the youth of even its senior officers, felt that jet fighters could only be flown successfully by young men. But the Air Guard pilots' previous experience made them more skillful, and, at the same time, more cautious in aerial combat. The World War II veterans of the Air National Guard racked up a proportionately higher number of kills than their younger, active Air Force counterparts.
The 1950s When the truce ending the fighting in Korea was signed in June 1953, more than 50,000 Americans had died. Korea put an end to the theory, popular at the end of World War II, that saturation bombing and atomic weapons had made the more traditional forms of combat obsolete. The Korean War proved that there was still a need for ground combat forces. As one of these forces, the Army National Guard once again found itself facing questions about its future role. The Air Guard, smaller and more easily integrated into the Air Force, was largely left out of these debates; it had "proved" itself to the Air Force during the Korean War. In 1953 the Air Force began the Runway Alert Program, which put Air Guardsmen on active duty with the Air Defense Command. The Gaining Command concept, adopted in 1960, further integrated the Air Guard with the active Air Force. Under this concept, Air Guard training and inspections were placed in the hands of the major Air Force commands under which the Air Guard units would serve after mobilization.
The Army Guard's future was not so rosy. Supporters were put on alert when an Assistant Secretary of Defense stated that the Guard's primary role in the atomic age should be civil defense. In 1954 President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense publicly labeled the National Guard a "haven for draft dodgers;" he was forced to retract his statement.
The sweeping Reserve Forces Act of 1955 did not even mention the National Guard by name, in order to prevent amendments denying federal funds to states which segregated their units by race. This 1955 act gave a tremendous boost to the Reserves, and as the number of Reserve units rose, so did their share of the defense budget. Although the act did not mention the Guard specifically, it did mandate six months of basic training for recruits in all Army components. The National Guard had always conducted its own basic training, and congressional committee rooms rang with arguments about the application of this new ruling. This time, the Guard was forced to compromise, and by 1960 National Guard recruits were attending Army basic training.
Previous Page