Unconditional Surrender in Korea

Commissar

Banned
F2H-2 had a combat ceiling (500 fpm climb rate, 60% fuel remaining), internal fuel only, of 49,500 feet and a speed of around 440 knots. Max power for a B-36D at a weight of 248,000 pounds got 500 fpm at about 42,000 feet with a maximum speed at that altitude of just under 360 knots. At a combat weight of 15,640 pounds the F2H had a wing-loading of 53 pounds per square foot, the B-36D, 52 pounds per square foot. The MiG-15bis had an even lower wing loading and a better thrust to weight ratio than the F2H. It's not a significant difference and the roll rate is far more important here. You can pull all you want, but if the other guy is doing barrel rolls waiting for you to begin your turn, a theoretically tighter turn won't help.

The ceiling you listed is the old official one that was released to lull the Soviets into a false sense of security. The actual sustained cruise altitude was 47,720 feet for the B-36D and many operated at 50,000 feet.

See Convair B-36: A Comprehensive History of Americas Big Stick byMeyers K. Jacobsen.

Of course, that's really all quite irrelevant because turning and burning is not how you do a bomber intercept. Boom and zoom and high speed frontal or side passes are the way you train and fight. Relevant video

You do realize they had to make wide angle turns in that video to get those shots in and the difficulty they had demonstrating the tactics at even reduced speeds with no shooting or maneuvering by the B-29s?

They never did the interception trial the USN was pushing for, so I do believe you're mistaken on that. That's also of course dependent on:
1. Detection range
2. Distance of base to target and B-36
3. No standing CAP despite high altitude cruising capability of the F2H.

Because such a public trial would let the cat out of the bag and tell the Soviets they needed to build even higher performance aircraft. Also a B-36 coming over its target in the USSR has been climbing for hours and is at 50,000 feet or more with some at 52,870 feet. No fighter in the 50s could climb fast enough to get up there in time before the bomb load was dropped.

On top of that, the USSR had massive gaps in its Radar Coverage till well into the late 50s so the USSR wouldn't see the attack coming either.

Again I refer you to the book I put down.
 
The ceiling you listed is the old official one that was released to lull the Soviets into a false sense of security.

Except, of course, I was not referring to public PR documents, but to the official standard aircraft characteristics sheet, which was not released to the public and was in fact classified at the time.

The actual sustained cruise altitude was 47,720 feet for the B-36D and many operated at 50,000 feet.

See Convair B-36: A Comprehensive History of Americas Big Stick byMeyers K. Jacobsen.

Page numbers and direct quotations por favor. Please include evidence that these were at fuel and payload states similar to those that would be the case penetrating Soviet airspace.

You do realize they had to make wide angle turns in that video to get those shots in and the difficulty they had demonstrating the tactics at even reduced speeds with no shooting or maneuvering by the B-29s?

And they would be needing to make tight angle turns because...?

Also, the only difference in real life would've been higher speeds (slower being for the demonstration purposes) and shooting back by the B-29s. Combat boxes don't maneuver (rather defeats the purpose) and if you maneuver and bleed off your energy like you propose the B-36 could/would do, it just sets you up for the interceptor's wingman.

Because such a public trial would let the cat out of the bag and tell the Soviets they needed to build even higher performance aircraft. Also a B-36 coming over its target in the USSR has been climbing for hours and is at 50,000 feet or more with some at 52,870 feet. No fighter in the 50s could climb fast enough to get up there in time before the bomb load was dropped.

Hasn't been climbing for hours, you'd exhaust the fuel supply in short order (jets being necessary for it to attain such heights). Cruise altitude was fairly low and trying to go on a continuous ascent from take-off to 40,000 feet drops your combat radius tremendously (down to a maximum of 2380 nautical miles with an average speed of 272 knots at altitude or as low as 1,560 nautical miles at an average speed of 350 knots).

And quite frankly, it's a silly argument that it'd let the cat out of the bag when the USN published photos from one of its interceptors taken at higher than 50,000 feet and the Nazis flew recon planes at altitudes near 50,000 feet above both the UK and the USSR (with the UK downing one).
 
The "why" is because the West thought NK and PRC were taking orders directly from the Soviet government. So rather than analyze this as, "Let's punish North Korea for daring to engage in aggression", it was, "Okay, the Soviets can't be just seizing SK, it's not worth the risk of world war, what opening are they trying to get elsewhere?" Committing to anything more than repelling aggression would allow the Soviets arbitrarily raise the stakes until they thought they'd weakened us enough to hit their real target. Similarly, the entity the West assumed an unconditional surrender demand would have to be issued to Moscow, and the only way to get such a surrender would be to fight from occupied Germany across Europe to Moscow (and beyond), a bunch of cities getting nuked along the way.

After Inchon, the new thought was, "Hey, maybe this can be handled just by crushing NK", and US/UN rhetoric became about uniting Korea—a de facto adoption of unconditional surrender. When the Chinese came in, it was seen as proof that this was a mistake, and analysis reverted to the "coordinated Soviet plan" model.

So, what you've got to do is arrange things so the West believes that it can demand unconditional surrender of NK without committing itself to fighting World War III.
 
It has always been a question of mine why in World War II the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Axis powers but a short five years later not take the same position in regards to North Korea?!? The enemy was similar, a totalitarian regime waging a war of aggression on it's neighbor. So why not demand that only unconditional surrender would be accepted from North Korea?

How does North Korea count as a totalitarian regime conducting a war of aggression against its neighbor. Both Korean governments considered themselves to be the legitimate government of Korea and that Korea was a single country. An attack by North Korea against the South to unite the country would be no more an act of aggression then the attack on Fort Sumter.
 
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