Free Republic

The American F-86 Sabres stopped the MiG-15s—and their Russian pilots—at the Yalu. In August 1950, a Soviet air division with 122 MiG-15 jet fighters arrived in northeastern China and set up headquarters at Antung on the Yalu River, the dividing line between Chinese Manchuria and North Korea. On Oct. 18, an American RB-29 reconnaissance aircraft spotted 75 fighters on the ramp at Antung, but that did not raise much alarm for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s United Nations Command or the US Far East Air Forces. Nor was there any great concern on Nov. 1 when a flight of F-51 Mustangs was...

NORFOLK Don Dencker was a 19-year-old draftee on Oct. 20, 1944, when he became part of one of the most storied military operations of World War II. A soldier in the 96th Infantry Division, Dencker was hauled ashore at 10 a.m. by an amphibious vehicle on Leyte, an island in the Philippines, after occupying Japanese troops there had undergone relentless bombardment from an armada of Allied ships offshore. Scrambling across the beach toward the hills beyond, his outfit wiped out the remaining Japanese resistance within three hours. Around 2 p.m., on a beach 30 miles away, Dencker's boss made a...