HEROES: Chopper Pilot

HEROES Chopper Pilot At Fort Lewis, Wash, last week, Marine Captain James V. Wilkins recalled an experience he had had in Korea. “On July 3, 1951,” he said, “I was flying a Corsair with my squadron along the east coast of Korea, 15 miles inland and about 20 miles south of Wonsan. We ran into heavy ground fire from a road reconnaissance outfit; my plane was hit and began smoking heavily. I bailed out at 800 feet and landed on the inland side of a small bowl east of the main supply route. The North Koreans were lined up on the road, firing away. A half-hour later—it was late afternoon now—a solid overcast blew in from the ocean and completely covered the mountains. The minute that happened, I took and went up the mountain.” “There He Goes.” Meanwhile, intelligence of Captain Wilkins’ plight flashed back to naval headquarters at Wonsan Harbor, and Navy Lieut, (j.g.) John Kelvin Koelsch, a 27-year-old helicopter pilot from Hudson, N.Y., volunteered to try a rescue. It was the sort of mission Koelsch liked: he had voluntarily passed up rotation home after a long tour of combat duty because he felt that his rescue work was urgently needed. In the gathering dusk Lieut. Koelsch and his crewman, Aviation Machinist’s Mate George M. Neal, took off, without fighter escort, to look for Wilkins.

“A little while later I heard a putt-putt-putting,” Wilkins continued, “and I realized it was a chopper. So I scrambled back down the mountain to my parachute. I got down into the bowl just as the chopper was finishing its first search of the area, flying at about 50 feet. He was way out near the main road, and I figured, there he goes, because the ground fire was thicker than the overcast.” A burst of ground fire rocked the helicopter, but Lieut. Koelsch managed to keep it under control. “I figured he would surely back out,” said Wilkins. “Then, by the Lord, he made another turn back into the valley a second time. It was the greatest display of guts I’ve ever seen.”

On his second pass Koelsch spotted Wilkins. “He dropped the sling and I got into it. The North Koreans had every damn gun they had firing. Frankly, it was so bad I would rather have taken my chances at staying on the ground . . .” When Wilkins was dangling about three feet off the ground, another blast of Communist fire struck the hovering whirlybird and it crashed to the ground. “The chopper’s door opened, and I saw Jack Koelsch and George Neal hanging upside down in their belts. ‘Are you O.K.?’ I yelled at them. ‘Never mind that,’ Jack answered. ‘Are you O.K.?'”

Wilkins was burned on the legs and his left knee was twisted, but he managed to wriggle free of the wreckage. The three men headed for the mountain.

“Won’t You Come In?” After three days a Korean reconnaissance patrol came up the mountain, looking for the three. “We decided we’d better get the hell out of there on foot,” Wilkins continued. “We got to the coast in seven days, moving mostly at night. We hadn’t had anything to eat in nine days, and damned little to drink.” At dusk they sneaked into an abandoned bombed-out house near a fishing village. “Jack took the watch, and Neal and I sacked out. We were there about three hours, and I was half-dozing, when suddenly I heard Jack say in a perfectly normal voice: ‘How do you do. Won’t you come in?’ “

Their callers were Communist soldiers, who promptly sprayed the house with machine-gun fire. The three Americans decided to surrender. “They tied us up and marched us through town, with all the civilians shouting threats and throwing things at us, to a headquarters. During all this time, Jack was constantly pointing out my burns to the Koreans and insisting that I needed hospitalization. I had maggots in my legs, and they looked pretty bad. So finally they gave me two guards and moved me out. I never saw Jack again.”

Both Captain Wilkins and Machinist’s Mate Neal survived their ordeal as captives and were repatriated. But three months after Wilkins last saw the man who saved him, Jack Koelsch died of malnutrition and dysentery in a Korean P. W. camp. His valor was not forgotten. Last week, in a ceremony at the Pentagon, he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first helicopter pilot in history to win his country’s highest decoration.