While United Nations forces struggled to hold onto the Pusan perimeter in the late summer of 1950, the U.S. 1st Provisional Marine Brigade was rushed into action to reinforce U.S. Army and Republic of Korea (ROK) troops defending that precarious pocket in the southeast corner of South Korea. The undermanned 5th U.S. Marine Regiment and its support units had barely arrived at Pusan when they were moved in borrowed Army trucks to stop a North Korean assault near Chindong-ni, on the perimeter's western edge. Brigade commander Brigadier General Edward A. Craig knew little about the terrain his Marines would have to cross, so he climbed into a Sikorsky HO3S-1 helicopter and lifted off to scout the route, give directions to the lead battalion, pick a spot for his command post and meet with his Army superiors. Returning from the meeting with Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, the Eighth Army commander, Craig stopped three more times to confer with his unit commanders. That crucial trip aboard a chopper from Marine Observation Squadron 6 (VMO-6) on August 3, 1950, was a harbinger of the increasingly vital role rotary wing aircraft would play in three years of tough fighting in Korea.

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"Fortunately, Marine helicopters attached to VMO-6 were always available for observation, communication and control," Craig recalled. "These aircraft made my day. Without them I do not believe we would have had the success we did." The VMO-6 choppers soon were pressed into service to deliver water and other critically needed supplies to grunts struggling over hilly terrain. And they often carried out wounded Marines on return flights.

While the Marines were inaugurating the use of the underpowered Sikorsky helicopters in command-and-control, light resupply and medical evacuation roles, the Navy was flying those same choppers from aircraft carriers and a few large warships operating in the Sea of Japan. The Navy helos were used at first to pluck downed fliers from the sea and undertake short logistical missions between ships. But they quickly took on added duties such as gunfire spotting for the warships. Later in the conflict they became key elements in the prolonged effort to clear coastal waters of mines.

U.S. Air Force Air Rescue Service units would soon be flying similar helicopters, designated as H-5s, from land bases to pick up downed pilots, often behind enemy lines. Within months, Air Force helicopters joined the Marine choppers in rushing badly wounded leathernecks from frontline aid stations to field hospitals and later to a Navy hospital ship offshore, sharply reducing delays in providing lifesaving medical care.

Early in 1951, Army helicopters also began to fly medevac missions, sparing seriously wounded soldiers punishing ambulance trips over Korea's wretched roads. Between their rescues of downed airmen and isolated ground troops and flying ambulance missions, U.S. helicopters were credited with saving tens of thousands of lives during the war. "Few technical innovations were equal in importance to the growing use of the helicopter for medical evacuations," one Army history declared. With the arrival of larger, more capable helicopters later in the conflict, the Marines and Army would demonstrate the usefulness of vertical lift aircraft in the tactical movement of troops and supplies — a role that would become the hallmark of another Asian war a decade later.

Korea was not actually the first time rotary wing aircraft had been used in combat. The Marines had tested — and rejected as unsuitable — the Pitcairn OP-1 autogyro, a hybrid aircraft with a four-blade rotor, for liaison and medevac missions in 1932, while fighting guerrillas in Nicaragua. The Army bought its first helicopter, a Vought-Sikorsky XR-4, on January 10, 1941, and operated a few improved models of that aircraft in Europe and Asia during the later stages of World War II. The first recorded use of a U.S. helicopter in combat came in May 1944, when an Army chopper rescued four downed airmen behind enemy lines in Burma.

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