Busiest Week

U.S. airmen were busier last week than at any time since the war began. With Chinese Communist soldiers and equipment pouring from Manchuria into North Korea, every bridge across the Yalu River became a target. By the hundreds, U.S. jets and piston-powered planes bombed, rocketed and machine-gunned roads, supply points and assembly areas. The tempo of the allied air attack brought Russian-made jets (see below) racing across the border into dogfights with U.S. jets and piston planes. The Reds lost 48 planes in ten days. Maximum demolition and fire bomb attacks were delivered by 6-293 upon the key river-crossing cities of Sinuiju (temporary North Korean capital), Uiju and Manpojin. And though enemy antiaircraft fire came up from both sides of the Yalu against U.S. planes, the allied bomb line stayed strictly, south of the center of the border river.

Heaviest strike of the week and second heaviest of the war (the biggest was along the Naktong River near Waegwan) hit

Sinuiju (pop. 100,000) at the mouth of the Yalu where two great Antung-Sinuiju bridges were carrying the bulk of the Chinese armies across. Three hundred U.S. fighters and 79 6-29 Superforts dropped 630 tons of bombs, including 1,000-lb. demolition bombs and 85,000 incendiaries. The Air Force said that 90% of Sinuiju's military targets--warehouses, factories, locomotive sheds and railroad marshaling yards--had been destroyed, and the approaches to one of the bridges knocked out. Later in the week the U.S. Navy knocked out three of the Yalu River bridges, including the one at Sinuiju missed by the B-29s. In all of these actions two U.S. planes were reported lost or damaged.

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