Captain George Goddard;37th Bomb Squadron - 17th Bomb Wing;K9 Korea APO 970

At the time we were operating out of K-9 otherwise known as ‘Pusan East and to us as Dogpatch. Company Grade officers were housed in tar-paper barracks with composition roofs built of wood from old bomb crates. Each of the buildings had four bays and each bay had 8 cots. In my room there were two crews of three officers each, plus the Squadron Adjutant and myself, the Squadron Material Officer.

I flew several missions with each crew but my first was a wild one with Sheehan's crew where he got into a fight with a ground ack-ack gun, which was a draw. The mission with the sink was the crew’s 50th and for several days we tried to think of an appropriate finale. We finally came up with the idea of dropping the kitchen sink since we had dropped everything else. Of course the Koreans didn’t normally have such hardware so I got the guys in the shop to make one.

To make it better, the mission came up on the Fourth of July. As you can see in the 2nd picture (Not available), our armament guys used two 500 pound GP bombs to anchor the sink and then ten 250-pounders to complete the internal load.

We took off in Tail number 366 as the first plane in the squadron at 18:00 and crossed the front line about an hour later. It was just at dusk and by changing speed and altitude and direction we confused the radar guns to the point they never fired. Our mission was interdiction on one of the routes from north to south on the East side of the peninsula.

We cruised up and down the roads for about half an hour before we found a convoy and attacked the trucks, first with our four 500 pound wind bombs and then with our sink and the two 500-pounders. They failed to drop and we were really worried. If we did not get rid of our load we would have to fly to Miho, Japan to land since we would not be allowed to land at K-9 for fear that damaging the only runway, shutting down the Group. Court Marital-and possibly prison time were also certain.

Fortunately, on the second try, with a little shaking, the load dropped and we breathed easy. So by 22:30 we were in the club enjoying a 50-mission party.