The Rise of the Helicopter During the Korean War

The ground troops did not realize the “extreme vulnerability of helicopters” to enemy groundfire because of their slow speed, low altitude and sensitivity to damage, the report said. As a result of those risks and the shortage of helicopters, the Eighth Army barred their use on missions involving the danger of enemy fire. The restrictions, however, “did not prevent pilots from evacuating patients from units surrounded by the enemy, nor did it prevent the evacuation of casualties sustained by patrols operating forward of friendly front lines.”

“Actual operations violated every one of the general rules, undoing standard operating procedures and revealing wide capabilities,” according to an Army history. For example, on August 18, 1951, Captain Arne H. Eliasson, commander of the 8192nd, braved enemy mortar fire on multiple trips to evacuate 14 wounded soldiers from a patrol in front of the lines.

By the end of 1951, historian Lynn Montross observed, “evacuations of casualties by helicopter was no longer a Marine Corps specialty. It had become the American way.” During their first 12 months of operation in 1951, Army helicopters carried 5,040 wounded. By mid-1953, despite the shortcomings of the early helicopters, Army choppers evacuated 1,273 casualties in a single month. “Costly, experimental and cranky, the helicopter could be justified only on the grounds that those it carried, almost to a man, would have died without it,” an Army historian concluded.

Army commanders quickly found, as the Marines had, that given the mountainous terrain and poor communications that plagued allied forces, helicopters were valuable command-and-control aids. An Army report said the helos “have been established as an extremely useful tactical tool of command in combat and their use has permitted commanders to have a more intimate knowledge of conditions with their command than ever before possible.”

As useful as the small Sikorskys and Bells were, all the services saw the need for larger helicopters. The transport helicopters that Craig had requested arrived in Korea on September 2, 1951, when Marine Helicopter Transport Squadron 161 flew into Pusan with 15 HRS-1s (the Marine Corps designation for the H-19). The HRS-1s “were a cut above the original helos,” said retired Colonel John F. Carey, who flew with HMR-161 in 1952-53. “They could carry 10 or more Koreans and about eight fully equipped Marines.”

The squadron conducted the first mass helicopter resupply mission on September 13 during Operation Windmill I. In the course of 28 flights it transported 18,848 pounds of gear and 74 Marines into a ridgeline position in the Punchbowl area. A week later, it conducted the first combat troop movement, Operation Summit, quickly shuttling 224 Marines of the division’s Recon Company and 17,772 pounds of supplies to a remote hilltop in the same area.

Less than a month after arriving in Korea, HMR-161 tried a nighttime supply mission, Operation Blackbird. The devices used to mark the landing zone proved unsatisfactory, and as a result that experiment was never repeated. But the squadron joined VMO-6 in evacuating casualties at night, even though the choppers had few instruments and no electronic navigation aids.

On November 11, the squadron flew a battalion of the 5th Marines to the mountainous front line and took out a battalion of the 1st Marines in Operation Switch. “They thought that was a helluva lot better than taking trucks,” Carey said of the airlifted leathernecks. Even bigger movements of troops and supplies would follow, including lifting 1.6 million pounds of cargo to resupply two regiments in Operation Haylift II, on February 23-27, 1953. Although they operated along the front lines, none of HMR-161’s troop lifts or supply missions were into hot landing zones, and they did not lose any helicopters to enemy fire.