I encountered the Wright Project and its successor, the 868th Bomb Squadron of the Thirteenth Air Force, quite by chance, and decided to research and write this story as a consequence of this encounter. On a bright September day, traveling a paved road which ran along the southern coast of South Korea, I happened across a bridge which ran from the mainland to an island. The building of this bridge, the first to connect the island of Namhae to the Korean mainland, had been built a couple of years earlier with the aid of US funding. My companion that day, a local US Embassy employee who had been involved in contracting for the bridge, suggested we drive across and have lunch in Namhae village.
I was in my third year as a U.S. State Department diplomat with assigned duties as the Heavy Industry Development reporting officer in the Embassy’s Commercial Section. My actual employee at this time was the CIA, and I was serving as a first tour officer in the Agency’s Seoul Station. During this trip to Korea’s south coast we had spent a week visiting several ongoing projects- a new shipyard, a nuclear power plant, and other large-scale projects that were beneficiaries of US loan programs. That morning we had departed a shipyard on Koje Island and I had elected to take a secondary road approach to the main highway that would connect us to home in the nation’s capital of Seoul.
As our jeep came onto the island and entered the village of Namhae at midday we noticed that the village was almost devoid of people. Driving around we found an elderly man and asked after the inhabitants. His response was a cryptic “Of course, they are all up on the mountain, with the American airmen.” He motioned in the direction of Mount Mangun, a rocky form that dominated the island, and added “If you wait, they will be down within a couple of hours.” I was intrigued- what “American airmen” could be atop this promontory on this remote island? Quizzing our new friend brought no answers beyond “Pharmacist Kim will explain everything.” And, of course, I elected to wait.
As promised, a couple of hours later, with the sun now blocked by Mangun-san, a stream of locals appeared, bringing life back to the village. Shops reopened and we quickly found the single “Yak-kuk” or drug store where Pharmacist Kim sat behind the counter. He was waiting for us and we adjourned to his cramped living space in the back of the store. We sat cross-legged on the laminated “ondol” floor which was still the norm in rural Korean homes and drank the local version of barley tea. We talked for a good two hours as he related his story. He described the rainy night in early August 1945 thirty years before, when the quiet was shattered by a violent fight in nearby Yosu Bay. The sound of an attacking aircraft was heard, first approaching, then circling, and finally boring into the bay where Japanese ships were docked or anchored awaiting their war cargoes.
Minutes later the night was illuminated by red tracers of anti-aircraft fire reaching out to find the intruding plane. The villagers knew from hidden radios that the Americans had finally brought the war to the Japanese Homeland, but were amazed that the military complex and shipping in the port at nearby Yosu City was being struck at night. The Pacific War had come to Korea.
Soon, the peak of Mount Mangun flashed to life and explosions were heard, rolling blasts that cascaded down the mountain and shook the village. The fires atop the mountain continued to burn and ammunition could be heard exploding. It was obvious that an American aircraft seeking to strike Japanese ships had met its fate. Hours later at sunrise Kim collected a score of villagers, most of them small shop keepers or farmers, and explained that it was their obligation to climb the mountain to see if anything could be done. The Americans had come to Yosu, and to Namhae Island, to strike at the despised Japanese Empire which had held Korea as a colony for forty painful years.
It took nearly an hour for the villagers to reach the peak of the mountain. The rain had stopped and they found the wreckage of a shattered aircraft scatted over a hundred-foot wide clearing. The debris was still smoking and it seemed the exploding bombs had further destroyed the plane. Among the wreckage the villagers discovered the bodies of eleven young men, many in their flight suits, and it was obvious that they had died the moment the plane impacted the rockface of the mountain top. The villagers, mostly of the Christian faith, collected the remains and buried them quickly, in shallow graves covered by stones. They knew that the Japanese soldiers from Yosu Port, and from a nearby military airfield, would soon arrive, and correctly assumed these “occupiers” were already headed by boat to the island to investigate the crash.
Later that day, back in the village, with the Japanese soldiers at the wreck site, the villagers waited. The Japanese disinterred the shallow graves, recovered pieces of wreckage, dragging several parts down the mountain. They transported them by boat to the mainland where they exhibited the wreckage as proof of Japan’s viability in the Pacific War. As soon as the Japanese departed the island, Kim led the villagers back to the top of Mangun-san. This time they dug proper graves, piled a deeper layer of rocks over each, and held a Christian burial ceremony, erecting small crosses. In the following days the villagers returned to the mountaintop to put in place a crude marker, with words carved and painted in a piece of timber. The humble marker read… “That which has been paid for in blood shall be repaid in peace by the next generation.” The 17-syllables of this statement were written in the Korean language, Hangul script. This act in itself was an affront to the Japanese colonial powers that had for thirty long years attempted to ban the use of the Korean language.
“That which has been paid for in blood shall be repaid in peace by the next generation.”
A few days later the Japanese soldiers came back to the village to arrest the group that had returned to the mountain top and buried the bodies a second time. A group of ten were tied and ferried to the nearby airbase for interrogation. All but Pharmacist Kim were released. Identified as the ringleader, Kim was tortured and accused of being an American spy. As proof, the Japanese had ransacked his house and discovered a poster of Abraham Lincoln which he had pulled from a magazine and pinned to a wall. Kim’s fingers were broken, he was severely beaten, and eventually dumped in a rice field outside the military base. On that day, 15 August 1945, the Emperor of Japan opted to surrender to the Allies. Kim found his way home, crossing back to his island by fishing boat, only learning of Japan’s defeat as he recovered from his wounds.
The following year, in the Fall of 1946, Kim organized an informal group of villagers, which he called the “Namhae Association Honoring the Sacrifice of the American Airmen”, posting a sign board above the entrance of his drug store. That September, coincident with Korea’s annual fall harvest festival, the first formal assemblage at the mountaintop site was held. The villagers then committed to create a more substantial monument for the site, and island-wide donations began to that end. (Not coincidentally, I was born in July of that same year. My US Navy aviator father had returned home from the war, disembarking the day after Japan surrendered from an aircraft carrier. He had then been preparing to depart for the Pacific where the invasion of Japan was pending. Another member of our “Greatest Generation” whose life was spared by the dropping of two atomic bombs.)
Sometime in the 1946-1947 period, Kim related, a U.S. Army graves registration and recovery team had been led to the site of the crash and recovered the remains of the U.S. Army Air Force crewmen. The recovery team returned those remains to the States, or, as some would request, to the U.S. Military Cemetery of the Pacific, located at the Punch Bowl outside Honolulu, Hawaii.
As Kim continued his story, I took notes as best I could. He recounted how four years later, in June 1950, North Korean soldiers overran his island. The Korean War had begun and the Communists arrived at the village with their own list of suspected American spies. Kim was frog-marched out of his store, subjected to interrogation and a good beating, but he refused to admit that he was a “traitor to Korea”. He explained that that he could not be an American spy as he did not speak a word of English! His captors were not convinced. His arm and ribs were broken and he was dumped in a remote part of the island when the American and Korean counteroffensive mounted in July drove the North Koreans off the island.
To many in the village he was considered a lucky man as he escaped execution. (A year earlier a Korean doctor had returned to his native Namhae village from America to treat the people of his youth and was promptly assassinated by a roving band of Communist agents.) The North Koreans had destroyed the simple wood carving and, as the villagers began to rebuild their lives, it was decided that a permanent memorial to the Lady Luck II’s crew was still required.
Kim had survived both the Japanese and North Koreans and was more determined than ever to complete his memorial to the fallen Americans. By 1956 the residents of Namhae Island and their Association were ready to unveil the stone memorial that Kim and his friends had spent a year carving into the rock face of the mountain top. The then President of the Republic of Korea, Dr. Syngman Rhee, learning of this memorial, contributed his own monument stone, which was similarly inscribed to stand next to the Namhae stone. A ceremony was held that included hundreds of islanders and government officials, with U.S. Air Force officers in attendance, to dedicate this site and the memorial. The following year, some 16,000 islanders gathered at the Namhae Girls Middle School to hold the annual celebration, an event that continues to this day, held every Fall.
As I rose to leave Kim’s humble home, he called me back. He handed me a fire-singed photo and made a request: he had removed this small item from the flight jacket of one of the crewmen the day he and others had first buried Lieutenant Edward Mills and his men. The photo showed eleven young airmen standing at the nose of their aircraft, the “Lady Luck II”. (I later found another photo taken at the ceremony in 1956 which provided the names of men in the Mills crew.) Handing his photo to me he asked if I would please try to find the men with whom the Ames crew had flown.
He requested that I tell those men the story of Namhae and the villagers who had cared for the dead airmen, their “liberators”, and how the island continued to honor their memory. He assumed (correctly) that these fellow airmen had gone home not knowing the fate of the Mills crew. Now, some thirty years later after Namhae’s American airmen had come to rest on the mountaintop, Kim assumed their colleagues would like to know their fate. I promised to try my best but I knew that this would not be easy.
The following week I reached out to Australian historian Steve Birdsall, author of the acclaimed “Log of the Liberators”, to see if he could help. He replied quickly, said he could not identify the unit involved, but would try. About a month later, at 3AM in Seoul, I received a call directed to my home by the U.S. Embassy operator. As I tried to clear my head, I realized that I had three men on the end of a line from the States, excitedly talking at once. The repeated phrase was “Have you found the Ed Mills crew? They are our last missing crew!” I explained that perhaps I had, and we set a follow-up call.
That time there were more men on the line, inundating me with questions, most of which I could not then answer. and they piled questions on me. We began corresponding and the information flowed both ways as I explained all that I knew about Pharmacist Kim and the villagers of Namhae. From their side, each man shared what he could offer of their U.S. Army Air Force unit- the 868th Bomb Squadron.
They later invited me attend their next reunion, with the understanding that I would make a presentation on the fate of Edward Mills crew and the story of the Namhae Island celebration of eleven young men. I did attend, spent three days with these men, by now all in their early sixties, and spoke at their dinner. The following day it was agreed that the 868th Veterans Association, otherwise known as “the 868th Snoopers”, would create its own memorial plaque and send this to Korea for presentation to Pharmacist Kim and his association.
I coordinated this effort and one year later the plaque arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, where the U.S. Ambassador wrote his own letter of commendation and appreciation that would accompany the plaque. Days later the 868th veterans’ plaque was delivered to Namhae by a senior U.S. Embassy diplomat and presented in a ceremony held in the village town hall. Pharmacist Kim had his wish fulfilled- the surviving men who flew with the Ed Mills crew in those final weeks of the Pacific War to liberate Korea were now expressing their own admiration for the decades-long devotion Kim and his villagers had extended to their fallen fellow airmen.
Another event which occurred at the San Francisco reunion was a late night sit down organized by the President of the association, Dr. Vince Splane, himself a command pilot who had flown with the Wright project. A half dozen men proposed that I write the story of the Wright Project and the 868th Squadron, insisting that, if I agreed to take this on, they would respond to any all requirements that I might have. One commented “Look, we are all retired or will soon be, still have sharp memories, and we have the time to contribute. But each of has only one six or nine- month piece of a four-year story. Many of us never met Dolan, and Dolan’s people never met Bayliss Harriss. You can put it all together!” At first, I resisted, but the next morning we met again and I agreed. Little did I then appreciate the magnitude of the task ahead or that the “Nightstalkers” story would be more than thirty years in the making.
“A half dozen men proposed that I write the story of the Wright Project and the 868th Squadron, insisting that, if I agreed to take this on, they would respond to any all requirements that I might have.“
During the three years that transpired after my chance encounter with Namhae Island and Pharmacist Kim, I completed my tour in Korea, returned home for a tour at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and was busy preparing for my next tour of field duty in Western Europe. That last-mentioned assignment was slated to begin in the summer of 1980 but the needs of the organization saw me rushed to Europe with almost no notice in January. In the scramble to relocate, my research work was disrupted and the materials assembled to date were dispatched to storage in my home town.
After accepting the mandate from the 868th Snoopers to compile and write their story, I had used those years to work the contacts made at the reunion to secure as much first-hand information as possible. Establishing personal relationships with almost twenty men whose time in the unit spanned the full period of the war, we exchanged letters, military documents including their movement orders, photos, and other materials as I built individual files. Many of the exchanges were personal, one man sending the love letters he had exchanged with his girlfriend in Australia. But every letter I received was packed with the level of detail that only a command pilot, bombadier or radar operator who flew the combat missions could provide.
Meanwhile, at the CIA Headquarters building in 1981, I was fortunate to “hit the data jackpot” when a senior analyst on the Intelligence Directorate side of the Agency called me to his office and pointed at a massive four drawer safe. He intoned, “Son, I am retiring next week and that safe is packed with Rad Lab radar stuff from World War Two, all now declassified. Word here is that you are interested. So, have at it.”
Simply put, among the assorted collection of intel reports on Soviet radar dating to the 1950’s, packed in the safe over the career of the DDI’s “Mr. Radar”, there resided in a jumbled way, a goldmine of information that informed key aspects of my project. Beyond the technical reports I discovered a collection of all the issues of “RADAR” magazine, a Rad Lab bi-monthly classified “SECRET” publication describing the latest developments in the evolving technology. Not surprisingly, the first issue featured a profile of LAB system and the Wright Project first deployment of LAB in combat at Guadalcanal. From Vince Splane and other veterans, I obtained individual mission reports, some secured from the National Archives by B-24 Liberator expert Al Blue. Correspondence with MIT generated more historic information on Rad Lab itself and a collection of photos taken by Rad Lab technicians assigned to work with the Dolan’s First Sea Search Attack Group at Langley Field.
Almost all of what I had accumulated could be defined as “primary source materials”, from the letters I exchanged with the Project pilots, aircrew and technicians, to tape recordings of interviews, to mission reports covering the two years of combat missions (albeit with a few important gaps) and Rad Lab technical reports related to the Dolan period at Langley Field. Also useful were the copies of the Vince Splane-organized and published “Snooper News” booklets produced annually to celebrate the squadron reunions that occurred in the 1980’s. The vignettes contributed to the Vince Splane publication were often in the context of “And this is how I recall it…”, and therefore a bit of a challenge to validate.
Importantly, I sought out photography in the possession of the veterans, most of which had never been seen before in public print, accumulating about 200 photos. Unfortunately, many of these were damaged or written over (at veteran events individual photos would be spread on a table and individuals too often would write over them in ball-point pen, identifying airmen or aircraft for others), to the extent that I would have to reconstruct several of the photos to restore them for use in the book.
Perhaps the most important single component allowing me to assemble a comprehensive narrative was the exchange of letters. A typical two-way exchange would see my asking a dozen mission-specific questions and receiving a ten or twelve-page written response from airmen still in their prime, still sharp to detail, referencing the mission reports that I had sent them. Often I would be able to confirm open issues when a pilot or crewman would begin his comments with “This mission report is not correct. One of those damn intel debriefers wrote this on the ground when we came back in at dawn. That mission did not happen that way. Here is what really happened…”
This series of exchanges went on for four years, ending when I departed Vienna in another rushed transfer, in 1982, this time to Tokyo, Japan. At that point my new collection of information went into a household shipment that ended up in my warehouse back in Peoria, joining other materials I had shipped there in 1980. There they would rest for over thirty years!
By Spring 2020 I had arrived at a point where I could finish what I had started some three decades before. In 1987 I had left the Agency after fifteen years of duty in the Clandestine Service, deeply satisfied that I had done my best to serve my nation. I then entered the private sector to co-found a company that would specialize in foreign market entry in telecommunications. In 2002, in the wake of 9/11, I was asked to return to US Government service, agreeing to join the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, serving as the Under Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Here I served for five years with Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, again a highly-rewarding experience. I reentering the private sector in 2008 at the conclusion of the Bush ’43 term. Exiting government service for a third time in my life, I founded a strategic consulting firm which is focused on Asia, where I remain active to this day.
COVID-19 descended on us all in the Spring of 2021 and, as the Chinese four-character admonition states “From chaos springs opportunity”, I found time to focus on personal pursuits. I realized that I had a huge obligation that I had left unfilled, that is, the writing of the story of Rad Lab, Bid Dolan, the Wright Project and the 868th Bomb Squadron, It was time to take up the challenge. My wife, Mimi, was adamant and encouraging. I had an obligation to recover and assemble all the materials I had collected over a dozen year period, to organize and draft a manuscript that was worthy of publication, a manuscript that told the story of these men in their time, and do them justice in that telling.
This effort required over a year of work. In organizing the material, I found myself amazed to discover that, when we brought the various collections out of storage, we had at hand a great quantity of information. As I drafted and developed the narrative, I felt a deep sense of guilt that it had taken so long to apply myself to this demanding task. But the story came together well, the piece parts began to fit nicely. A respected publisher, Casemate Publishing (UK), expressed interest in the draft manuscript. There I had a champion, Senior Editor Ms. Ruth Sheppard, who encouraged and guided me and my book through the publication process.
Along this path, I was also encouraged by the late, distinguished Pacific War historian and author John Prados, and Lieutenant General Bruce “Orville” Wright, President of the U.S. Air Force and Space Association, to see the process through. Both men agreed to endorse the book, with John Prados confirming to me that “This story, of LAB, MIT’s Rad Lab and its LAB technology, the Wright Project, and the 868th Squadron, has never been told before.”
The book was slated for publication by Casemate in Summer 2022. The book was completed and ready for publication in early 2022 and offers for pre-publication purchase appeared on Amazon in April 2022. In the event, Casemate Publishing could not find the combination of the high-quality type-setter and printer and the desired paper which that firm determined the book should have until late 2022. As a consequence, the book did not appear for sale and delivery until April 2023, a full year after some eager buyers had paid their good money for pre-orders.
But, at least to this author, the wait was worth it, as Casemate delivered a great product. The only criticism in reviews to this date relates to the quality of the photography presented in the book. Real aircraft and history enthusiasts crave detail and in truth the photos could have a higher resolution.
This website, so well-crafted and presented by my associate Patrick Killoran, attempts to provide the additional detail that this story requires. We hope you enjoy it and understand that it remains a work in progress.
Richard Phillip Lawless
October 2023
Great Falls, Virginia
Dear Mr. Lawless,
Greetings from Sejong Korea. Currently I am affiliated with local university in Daejeon. I came across the story of fallen airmen in Namhae thru my friend who has private practice of medicine in psychiatry in downtown Masan. I found your name and books via internet and my university purchased the hard copy of your latest book(Nightstalkers) for my research.
While I browsed some chapters of the book and this blog, there seemed some typos: 1) Kim Duk-hyung(김덕형), 2) Mangun San(망운산). Especially, the mountain Mang-un, two syllabi word means look up to and clouds, respectively. So it is advised to put “Mang Un” instead “Man Gun”.
On my mind, the story of galant pilots and crew of Lady Luck II, the invaluable deeds of Mr. Kim and your dedication and honoring the two are impressive.
Hope you find my corrections and comments of use.
All the best,
SY Park
My father-in-law, Robert E. McLaughlin, Sr. was the radio operator for the Philip Hoffman crew. He is pictured with the crew in front of B-24J “Long Distance”. He passed away in 2020 and is now interred at Arlington National Cemetery. I have digital photos from his time at Langley with the 3rd. Search Sqdn. through his service with the 868th in early 1945. Are you still collecting information about the 868th? If so I would like to contribute what I have.
I’m looking for any information you might have on my uncle 2ndLT Leo A Biron who was killed on my 18 Oct 1945 on a test flight on Okinawa. He was a member of the 868, but my family has little information about what his activities in the squadron.
Mr. Lawless,
Thank you for the research you’ve performed and the history you’ve preserved.
For years I’ve been researching my father’s cousin 2nd Lt. Foster McClellan Hill. I believe he was on “Gremlins Haven” when it was shot down on September 28, 1943. Was Foster assigned to “Gremlins Haven” or was he a volunteer for for the mission? Is Foster in the crew photo?
My father served in WWII and had seven relatives and inlaws out to his 2nd cousins that died in WWII. Two were father and son, two were physicians, and all but two were combat deaths. One died from a state side heart attack and another died on a Japanese “Hell Ship” (Col. William Riney Craig, M.D.).
Sincerely,
David Foster
Hello, I came across the website for your book and have immediately ordered it. I have been researching the men from my hometown and adjacent communities that died in the service and two of these men served in the 868th. I hope to converse with you in regards to any information you may have found related to either of these men to help me better tell their story. I also am very excited to read your book!