Five hundred U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps bombers roared northward over Korea one day this week for the biggest bombing raid of the two-year-old Korean war. Their payload was more than bombs: they carried political explosives.
Without opposition from 200 MIGs spotted on nearby airfields, and without loss of a single aircraft, the formations blasted five North Korean power plants which supply not only 90% of all power for Communist North Korea, but also power for Communist Manchuria. The principal target was the great Suiho power project on the south bank of the Yalu, keystone of the hydroelectric development which pipes electricity to the Chinese "Ruhr" in Manchuria, to Soviet bases in Port Arthur and Dairen, and to the Russian port of Vladivostok. It lies only 3,000 ft. from Manchurian soil. The bombers spared giant Suiho Dam itself.
"We shorted about 10 million volts this afternoon," said one of the raiders. Politically, the raid represented a relaxation of one of the restrictions which U.S. policy has laid on itself in fighting its limited war in Korea. Through the first two years of war, Suiho, fourth largest power installation in the world, has been sacrosanct territory: Washington feared early in the war that an attack on it might bring Communist China into the battle; feared later that the power plant was too sensitively interlocked with Russia itself.
At the Far East Air Force headquarters in Tokyo, officers said that the go-ahead for the raid came from "higher up." In Washington the Pentagon was quick to point out that the U.N. has still not struck beyond the Yalu, but is getting weary of the futility of its own self-imposed restraint. "We now realize," said a Pentagon officer, "that the best chance of breaking the deadlock at Panmunjom is to hit the enemy with the force at our command."