Korea Series #3: Korean War ALO Wilbur "Bill" Creech
Author’s Note
This article uses a post-retirement interview from TAC CC Wilbur “Bill” Creech as a case study on Air Liaison Officers during the Korean War. The bulk of the article is excerpts from the interview, ending with my own editorial commentary on the content. There are lessons to be taken from Creech’s experience, and further connections will be made in future articles to elaborate on the role and function of TACP in the Korean War. I am of two minds about Creech’s commentary in his interview. On one hand, it is valuable and highlights age-old lessons that TACP has learned and taught time and again.
On the other hand, he said some things I disagree with and failed to properly acknowledge his enlisted counterparts. Treat him with some grace – he was an admiral and important leader later in his career, and he spoke from the perspective of a fighter pilot who was forced to do something he did not sign up for during one of the worst times of the Korean War. He was, in this interview, recalling a life experience from the perspective of a young first lieutenant.
General Creech during his tenure as the TAC Commander
One aspect of the TACP in Korea that stands out is the reliance on the ALO and how important a good Air Liaison Officer was to effective close air support in the war. Yet the USAF could not motivate or force pilots to stay on FAC duties for longer periods, indicating the lack of recognition for the importance of the close air support mission in Korea. While research on the enlisted side of the TACP remains elusive for the period, some stories from the officer side have come to light.
This article zooms in on the experience of (then) First Lieutenant Wilbur Creech and his short-lived time as an ALO during the Korean War. Bill Creech went on to become one of the fathers of modern-day technological and doctrinal advances in the Air Force. He pioneered advances in TAC that include, but are not limited to, the Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night (LANTIRN) pod, and he oversaw the development of the F-15, F-16, and A-10. Do not assume to take Bill Creech’s words in the following interview excerpts as gospel for close air support during the Korean War.
As a fighter pilot first and foremost, the future four-star General experienced the Korean War from a limited experience that included only a three-week rotation as a regimental Air Liaison Officer. While valuable for connecting the historical dots for TACP and close air support in the Korean War, take his word for what it was – a valuable but limited perspective on close air support in a complicated, messy war. And he was an ALO in the most complicated, messiest portion of the Korean War.
Long before his 1978-1984 tenure as the Tactical Air Command commanding officer, Lieutenant Wilbur “Bill” Creech flew 103 combat missions in the F-86 during the Korean War.[1] A safe assumption is that most FAC tours were similar to First Lieutenant Bill Creech’s, who said in an interview that, “Yes, I did (do some forward air controlling on the ground), and that is an interesting story as well. We were taking turns going up to be forward air controllers with Army units. My turn came, and the tour was three weeks… I was up there mid-November 1950.”[2] In other words, even though Bill Creech had done three weeks as an ALO during one of the hottest times of the war (the Chinese began their phase 2 operations toward the end of November, and U.N. forces could barely function in the face of a surprise force of 300,000 fresh troops), yet his time in the TACP was still nearly just a periphery in his Korean War experience.
Young First Lieutenant Creech in his F-86 during the Korean War
It is understandable that Creech would have seen his experience as an ALO as peripheral to his time in the cockpit. It was, after all, a miserable experience. He described his experience in late November as such:
“On November 26th or 27th, by now I had been assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, and was called the Wolf Hounds. They had become rather well known at the time because of the lieutenant colonel that led them was a man named Mike Michaelis, who later became a four-star general… so I thought this was a first-class outfit. But one morning at 3 a.m., with me in my sleeping bag, I heard a loud bugle behind us. I didn’t even know that the Chinese Army had bugles, but I knew instantly that the Chinese were all over the place. The Army was neither expecting nor prepared for a Chinese attack, and I will come back to that. It is a very unflattering story for General Douglas MacArthur.
At any rate, the Chinese were attacking and blowing bugles behind us, and the fat was in the fire. That was the massive Chinese intervention where we got our butts kicked good. As fate would have it, about halfway through the next day the receiver failed on my radio jeep. I still had my transmitter but I couldn’t receive, so I still called in a few air strikes but couldn’t be very effective. So I said, ‘I’m wiling to give it a try to go back and try to get another radio jeep back at Division Headquarters and come back.’ Michaelis said, ‘you are running a big risk, young man, because there are Chinese behind us as well.’ I said, ‘well, I’m not much use to you without an effective radio.’ I almost paid with my life for that idea.
As I headed South, I soon ran into the Chinese, and they were firing rifles at me, so I had to abandon the jeep, and then I had to evade. I made it back to the Division CP 3 days later, so it wasn’t a piece of cake. I had one Air Force enlisted man with me, now we were separated from everybody. I will never forget if I live to be 1,000.
We were evading, with enemy troops all around, and it was bitter cold; I mean bitter cold. It may not get as cold at the Arctic as it gets in Korea in the wintertime… It is one thing to be at a football game and get cold, but you know you are going to get warm. It is another thing to be cold and think you are never going to be warm again; so one of the things I told myself was, if I live, I will always understand what the priorities are: As long as you are warm and fed all the rest is background music.”[3]
So, the most eventful moment of Creech’s time as an ALO consisted of close air support utilizing one-way communications and evading the Chinese in the cold. But that was not all, he also recalled performing an important liaison function he performed by commandeering an Army L-17 liaison plane:
“We (Creech and an Army Lt. Col.) went up and were up for about three hours over the front lines… I never saw so many enemy troops in my life! Clearly, they were Chinese because we had been taking Chinese prisoners for at least three weeks. They were very distinctive, so you could tell…
After going back and forth over the lines for hours, we come back and land. The lieutenant colonel had radioed that he wanted to see the division commander when we landed. He took me with him, so I touched history a little bit here. We went to the trailer of the 25th Infantry Division commander, Major General Kean… The lieutenant colonel is, by this time, almost apoplectic. He almost totally lost his cool…
After hearing the Army lieutenant colonel wax energetically about how many Chinese troops were up there, General Kean – I got the impression he didn’t really want to believe it – turned to me and said, ‘Young man, what did you see?’ I said, ‘most people I ever saw in my life was at the college all-star game at Soldier Field in Chicago…’ I said, ‘They announced on the PA system that there were 106,000 people there. I don’t know how to count people, but I saw at least six times that many today. You couldn’t count them, but they are just like flies…”
While I’m standing there listening, he gets Lt. Gen. Willoughby, who is Douglas MacArthur’s G-2, on the phone, and they talk at great length on this subject. He said, “Clearly we are in a whole new war…”
We expected something to happen! Nothing happened. The next day the word was, ‘Go down to the regiment. We are attacking…’ Strangely enough, we attacked.. As far as I’m concerned, [MacArthur] is a god damned phoney.
What bothered me most about this was, there is only one of two plausible explanations for what happened there.
Either Willoughby got the word to MacArthur – and it’s kind of hard to believe he wouldn’t have – and MacArthur chose to ignore it because he wanted a wider war; therefore, a lot of American and allied boys died because of his megalomania.
Or – and the other answer isn’t very flattering either – he had so isolated himself as the American “Emperor of Japan” that his staff was afraid to give him news he didn’t want to hear.
Now take your choice, but it has to be one of the two, because I know it got to Willoughby; I know it got to Willoughby in living color.” [4]
Gen. MacArthur viewing the pre-landing bombardment of Incheon before the X-corps landings, a month and a half prior to Creech's time as an ALO. The success of the landings and ensuing push North toward the Yalu likely led to a degree of arrogance for MacArthur and his staff
After an extended tirade on MacArthur’s incompetencies, the interviewer pried more TACP information out of Bill Creech:
Interviewer: “When you were a ground controller, were those Rover Joe Jeeps?”
Creech: “We had Jeeps with radios.”
Interviewer: “How would that work; the Army would request an air strike?”
Creech: “Yes, and you would call it on the land line, then when it showed up, you had a radio callsign. Mine was Lunch Box 14; I’ll never forget that. You would call the fighter flight leader and tell him what coordinates to strike. If you were up near the front lines, you would actually direct the strike. It was typical forward air controller activity; nothing unusual about it.”
Interviewer: “Was that something that had to be relearned in Korea that had been lost from WWII?”
Creech: “No, I don’t believe so. We knew that part of it. What we kind of reinvented in every war – and we invented in Korea with the Mosquito FACs, the T-6s that they flew as airborne FACs – was, we had to reinvent airborne FACs, which were useful; but I think we have always pretty well understood how to do the ground FAC role.”
Interviewer: “Did you ever guide some troops into contact versus close air support on a fixed position?”
Creech: “No, I was never, except on the occasion when the Chinese got behind us, up at the front. I was either at a regimental CP or division CP because I was the regimental air liaison officer (ALO), so I wasn’t up at the platoons.”[5]
This Jeep would have been nearly identical to the radio Jeep that Creech referred to in his interview.
Again, while valuable, General Creech had a limited CAS experience, and his most exciting and notable event of his ALO tenure was a 3-day evasion in the freezing winter that resulted in a frostbitten foot. Yet there are important lessons to be drawn, especially regarding the liaison function of the TACP. Think of Creech’s initiative to go above and beyond his CAS function and use available tools to integrate an air power capability (ISR) to help his ground commander. He found a horde of Chinese troops and routed that precious intel up the chain. The Army didn’t see it, the organic ISR capabilities within the Air Force didn’t find it – an ALO with the initiative to contribute to the ground effort found the hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. He found those troops because he was keyed in to both the ground and the air perspectives as well as the needs for both air and ground commanders, and he was open-minded enough to do something sketchy (commandeer a liaison plane) and take a look.
It is terribly unfortunate that the intel was not acted upon, and many U.N. soldiers paid for that failure with their lives. Seoul was lost a second time, and the American Army again nearly forced off the Korean Peninsula because MacArthur and his staff failed to trust the information passed to them by a relatively low-ranking individual of an obscure air-to-ground integration function. MacArthur’s inaction spurs memory of a similar mistake made by General Hagenbeck almost exactly fifty-one years later, when he failed to listen to his relatively low-ranking air-ground integration experts in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Had MacArthur heeded Creech’s warning, it may have made a difference, it may have only made a slight difference, or it may not have made a difference at all. We’ll never know, and this historian does his best to avoid “what-ifs.” Nonetheless, you can’t help but wonder.
An important lesson to draw here is the value of a TACP outside of controlling close air support. While controlling CAS is clearly the most exciting part of the job, and it’s often why young men become TACPs, it is also not always the most critical task. Sometimes, when there’s not enough CAS to go around or when the TACP’s aligned unit isn’t a priority, the TACP can always use the resources around them to add value to the Army (and potentially the Air Force). The Army will always need, but not always appreciate, the extra value and resourcefulness that a TACP brings to the table. Bill Creech’s commandeering of an L-17 to survey the battlespace ahead of his regiment is a perfect example of him using his resourcefulness to make himself useful beyond that of a mere forward air controller.
And he was only there for three weeks! Imagine if Creech had been an ALO for an entire deployment. Imagine if he had the luxury of pre-deployment training to learn his Army counterpart, build a relationship with his regimental staff and the division staff above him. Imagine if he knew how to communicate up and down the chain of command effectively, and that chain of command did the same above him, and folks at higher echelon learned how to respond when their underlings raised their hand.
Remember that there was a solid system for this function in WWII, and close air support and the TACP were quite literally decimated between WWII and the Korean War. In his interview, Creech said that there wasn’t much that had to be relearned from WWII. In that statement, he was terribly wrong. For one, he didn't earn his commission until four years after WWII and had no first hand, and likely little second-hand, knowledge of the CAS system of WWII. His statement may have been true for front-line forward air control TTPs, but it was not true for the TACS/AAGS system as a whole. TACP is a crucial bridge in the air-ground integration system, and that system is very forgettable, especially in peacetime. The Air Force and Army have been forced to relearn the air-ground integration system between every single war since WWII. Don’t think they won’t forget again and be forced to relearn in the next war.
On a side note, it is a shame that Creech failed to mention his enlisted TACP counterparts in his interview. We know they were there because he mentioned evading with an enlisted Air Force guy in his busted radio jeep. The ROMADs were there in Korea - they fought and bled with the Army. History has forgotten them so far, but not for long.