B-29 Superfortress "Hog Wild" flies over North Korea, Search for North Korea's Atomic Bomb.

   of the Hog Wild  

    Полёт “Дикого Зверя”   

                                                                                                                                    Bill Streifer

                                                                                                                                    Irek Darvishevich Sabitov  

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“The Circumstances of the case give me the greatest anxiety…”

“The more I read of your research, the stranger the whole affair becomes. Some of your work is bringing back memories and questions I had at the time but dismissed as contemporary events, overwhelmed my attention”

Hog Wild’s Radio Operator

This a photo of the Hog Wild and its original crew, although (suspiciously) at least four of the regular crewman were replaced by squadron level officers for this mission.  Although the airplane commander, pilot, navigator, Strilky, and others are in the photo... it's not the crew of the 13 that were shot down by the Soviets.

On August 29, 1945 , on the very day that General Douglas MacArthur became Supreme Commander of Allied Forces after the Japanese had surrendered, and coincidently on the day known by Koreans as a “day of national shame,” the U.S. sent a B-29 called the Hog Wild on a mission to Konan in northern Korea , a city now known as Hungnam .

Under the guise of a “mercy mission” to a former Japanese POW camp, now under the control of the Soviet Union , three B-29s with supplies for 600 men were sent to the camp believed to house only 156 British and Australian prisoners.

It is becoming apparent that the true mission of the third B-29 to arrive at Konan that day was not as it appeared or had pretended to be. In actuality, the Hog Wild was on a photo recon mission over an area of Korea which the American military had never seen before.

The Airplane Commander, Lieut. Joseph Queen, was under strict orders to “forget dropping supplies and return to Iwo Jima if the plane encountered trouble.” As he was soon to discover, “trouble” was an understatement.

While the Hog Wild suspiciously circled over the POW camp once too many times, four Russian Yak fighters were sent up to force the B-29 to land. According to a Soviet report, one of the Russian pilots, “on his own initiative” began firing on the B-29, causing engine #1 to burn fiercely. The B-29 engine, made partly of light-weight magnesium, could not be extinguished by the automatic fire-extinguishing system on board and, despite their best efforts, a ferocious fire continued to burn out of control.

Seven members of the crew were instructed to remain in the plane as it crash landed - badly damaged and afire - on a Russian airfield in nearby HamHung, after six others had bailed out into the cold, Sea of Japan , also known as Korea ’s East Sea . Despite extensive damage and an engine on fire, 1st Lieut. Joseph Queen managed to land the B-29 safely, and, despite a published report to the contrary, not a single crewman died.

The Hog Wild, built in June 1945, was a late-model “Superfortress,” equipped with the most sophisticated radar system available, and a portable, large-format, high-precision “aerial reconnaissance” K-20 camera which the Soviets had never acquired through lend-lease.

The true mission of the Hog Wild  (with an irregular crew, including four, squadron-level officers) may never be discovered, however, in the opinion of Lieut. Col. Earl J. McGill (USAF Ret.), the Hog Wild was a “spook,” a spy plane whose mission was known by a select few. If interrogated, the crew would repeat their “mercy mission” cover story, and any accusation of spying or photoreconnaissance would be denied.

According to Professor Cumings of the University of Chicago , a Korean history expert, spy missions over North Korea prior to the Korean War were not uncommon. The Hog Wild may simply have been one of the earliest. In any event, the members of the Hog Wild crew were the only American military personnel to have set foot in the area for decades,

In late-August 1945, there had been no written agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to divide Korea into two halves, only an understanding between the parties. General MacArthur’s General Order #1 of August 15, 1945 unilaterally decreed that the Soviets would control the north half of the Korean peninsula above the 38th parallel, and the United States would control the southern half. “The Soviets never publicly agreed to it, never signed anything… they just agreed to it de facto.” In early August, a Soviet communiqué prohibited firing on American aircraft, but by late August, that ban had been lifted.

So technically, an invasion of Soviet airspace by the Hog Wild on August 29, 1945 was not a violation of any agreement since no agreement existed. Rather, it was General MacArthur asserting his authority as Supreme Commander.

On Sept. 4, 1945 , MacArthur sent a cable to the Soviet High Command expressing, in no uncertain terms, his outrage at the Soviet downing of an American plane. If MacArthur had not done so, this incident may very well have faded into history, and if the Soviets had not replied immediately with an apology, the incident may have become into an international incident. MacArthur’s cable (which we now know contained a number of errors) read as follows,

“On August 28 at Kanko (HamHung), Korea , a United States B-29 of the 75BW, while engaged in dropping supplies to prisoner of war camps at Chosen Branch: 30 deg 53 min N 127 deg 38 min E was shot down by Russian fighters. The American plane was plainly market and its mission could not fail to have been identified as purely benevolent. The circumstances of the case cause me the gravest anxiety and I request that immediate and decisive steps be taken to prevent a reoccurrence of so deplorable an incident. A prompt reply is requested pending which the much needed dropping of supplies to prisoners of war in this area had been stopped.”

On September 16, Supreme Headquarters (headed by MacArthur) announced that the Soviets had “officially apologized” for the downing of the Hog Wild.

Once the Hog Wild crew had satisfactorily explained the situation to Soviet commanders, they were permitted to roam freely within the former-Japanese POW camp and throughout the surrounding city. They met Russian pilots and officers, Korean doctors and a professor, as well as British and Australian POWs, many of whom they befriended. This permitted them to make discoveries which, until now, have remained buried in secret Army documents for over sixty years.

Through a discussion with a Korean professor - a student of Albert Einstein -- they discovered why North Koreans had accepted Communism so readily and why the plan to divide Korea into North and South would not work, and would inevitably lead to a “civil war.”

They discovered that Soviet fighters were made of wood, and that British POWs were forced to manufacture the “precursor” of chemical weapons under inhumane conditions, the manufacture of which some believe are still being carried out today in North Korea.

Despite theB-29’s sophisticated radar system and a crew capable of operating it, the Russians bought the American version of the story that they were simply unable to locate a POW camp due to bad weather and deficient maps. Once high-ranking Soviet officers and flight engineers, who refused to believe that the B-29 had been shot down, accepted the Hog Wild’s “cover story” of a POW mission gone bad, the crew were permitted to return to their plane and radio for assistance.

One explanation, is that Russian commanders naively accepted Queen’s explanation, and permitted the thirteen-man crew to roam freely about, eventually becoming friends of sort, sharing food, drink, dance and song. At one point, they were offered free passage home through the Soviet Union , which they graciously declined after being forewarned by a Russian pilot that by doing so they may be placing their lives in jeopardy.

A more plausible explanation is that the Russians suspected the true mission of the Hog Wild, but when General MacArthur sent the cable to the Soviet High Command warning them that their actions were unacceptable, the Russians were in a bind. Not returning the crew could have resulted in an international “Cold War” incident like the U-2 spyplane downing over the Soviet Union some fifteen years later.

Still, the similarities between the New York Times reporting of the Hog Wild (1945) and Gary Powers’ U-2 (1960) incidents are intriguing. With respect to the U-2 incident, the Times wrote, “Soviet Downs American Plane; U.S. Says it was Weather Craft” And in 1945, the Times wrote, “Four Russian fighter planes shot down an American B-29 which was on a mercy mission…”

According to David Snell, a future LIFE Magazine investigative reporter, the Russians had secretly occupied a nearby Japanese nuclear facility, kidnapped and tortured six nuclear scientists inside, and returned the scientists to Moscow . By befriending the crew, retrieving the K-20 camera on board (and the photos that may have been taken), and permitting the safe return of the Hog Wild crew into American hands, perhaps the Russians mistakenly believed that the incident might quickly go away, and be forgotten.

But now, for the first time, suspicions of nuclear and chemical weapons facilities in North Korea , as far back as 1945, can now be supported. One day, perhaps, the true identity of the Japanese “counter-intelligence” officer Snell interviewed, the names of the six, Japanese nuclear scientists supposedly captured and tortured by the Russians, and the full text of the interview by Cecil Nist (head of G-2 Army Intelligence, XXIV Corps) of the Hog Wild crew may be revealed.

By the end of WWII, the Americans had the atomic bomb and a plane capable of delivering it to its target, and the Soviets had neither. Stalin had seen, with his own eyes, how the Americans had used B-29s to drop atomic bombs with great success on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , just a few weeks earlier.

According to Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, after the success of the B-29 called the Enola Gay, Stalin’s interest in acquiring an American strategic bomber was renewed. Stalin’s written order, dated June 1945, confirms this. The United States possessed the B-29 “Superfortress,” the greatest bomber in history, and yet was quite unwilling to share it with the Soviet Union .

What began as a scholarly analysis of a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union on August 29, 1945 in northern Korea during peacetime has evolved, quite unintentionally and unexpectedly, into significantly more. This is a unique examination of American-Soviet relations, Japanese-Korean relations, Stalin’s attempt to acquire Japanese nuclear and chemical weapons technology, as well as a Soviet nuclear delivery system. And - for the first time - a look at the infancy of North Korea’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs, as seen through the eyes of thirteen American airmen and three British POWs. It may also shed new light on one or more top-secret missions during the Korean War.

It is not surprising to what extent the U.S. Army and Air Force has gone to bury this incident in history. When Eugene Harwood, the Hog Wild’s navigator, was asked during an unaired interview by Iowa Public Television, if he had been a POW himself, he responded “in a manner of speaking.” When I asked the same question of Arthur Strilky, the Hog Wild’s radio operator, I received a similar response with the additional caveat, “I never knew why the Russians shot us down.” Perhaps the POW camp where Queen, Harwood, Strilky and the others were interned for eighteen days was intentionally misidentified by the Army Air Corps as being, not in extreme North Korea but rather, in South Korea - near Seoul .

When the Air Force was asked what had become of the plane, they responded, “It appears that the aircraft was lost as missing after a collision on 19 Sept 1945 ,” when in fact there had never been a collision. In reality, the Hog Wild and its top-secret components were examined by a Soviet B-29 expert, on the ground in Korea . Their intention was to use the information they acquired to created the Soviet version of the B-29 called the Tupolev Tu-4, through a process called “reverse engineering.”

While most experts believe that the process had begun in 1944 when the Russians acquired the Ramp Tramp and other B-29s, the reality is that all B-29s acquired by the Soviets had been fired upon, and serious development of the Tu-4, according to a Soviet publication, didn’t begin until early 1946 - long after the downing of the Hog Wild.

Although Army Air Corps protocol requires that a Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) be filed after two days, none was filed for the Hog Wild, perhaps believing that would end an inquiry into the plane’s fate. But the military had failed to destroy the Hog Wild crew’s detailed account of the incident, the press reporting of an Air Force news briefing, and other documents. Perhaps now they will wish they had done so.