Korean Combat

In June 1950, communist North Korea had waged war with the Republic of Southern Korea…

Two months prior, the vast and brutal armies of Red China had demonstrated their North Korean alliance when they stormed the United Nations divisions in Manchuria.

By the time North Korean forces crossed the border known as the 38th Parallel into South Korea, the UN was preparing for a full-scale war.

In the meantime, Russian and Chinese pilots – allies in North Korea – began ruthlessly swarming the skies in an attempt to secure a North Korean victory.

The UN knew this was a war that could only be won in the air as ground forces were dangerously outnumbered and UN directives restricted advance in favour of defence.

Except assumptions of UN air superiority were shattered when the North Korean Air Force unveiled a new weapon, the MiG-15 – newly engineered aircraft jets from Soviet Russia.

The jets annihilated the previously superior American B-29 jets which had been successful in Japan.

The battle that followed was on a smaller scale than the one which preceded it, but the pilots, many of them already suffering from nervous exhaustion, soon realised that it was an air operation of intense ferocity.

This is their forgotten story, a story of comradeship, of victory and of loss and of a new, terrifying type of military warfare.

Korean Combat is the thrilling ninth book in the immensely popular Yeoman series.

Robert Jackson was born in the north Yorkshire village of Melsonby in 1941. A former pilot and navigation instructor, he was a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, experience that strongly influenced his writing career. A prolific writer, he has written more than fifty factual works devoted to aviation and military subjects, including Air Force: The RAF in the 1990s, operational histories of a wide range of aircraft, and reference works such as the Guinness Book of Air Warfare. He has also authored more than twenty novels, most of which take place against the backdrop of World War II, and has written popular science features for the Press Association. He also enjoys rugby football.