To the Courageous Jet Pilots: the 1953 leaflet offering $50,000 for a jet

A two-sided Korean-language leaflet of April 1953 over General Mark W. Clark's printed signature, from the Far East Command's 1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Group. It offers Communist pilots US$50,000 for a flyable jet, $50,000 more to the first, asylum and secrecy, with landing directions for Kimpo.

What the leaflet says

One face is a letter, in Korean mixed with Chinese characters, dated 20 April 1953 and closed with the general's name and rank. The other face repeats the offer in shorter form and shows a photograph of a Polish air force officer who, the caption says, flew a Soviet-built MiG-15 to Denmark. A line in Chinese asks anyone who finds it to pass it to a pilot who reads Korean.

勇敢한 젯트機 操縱士들에게! 自由世界로 오는길!

[Translation] The Far East Command will give 50,000 US dollars reward to any pilot who delivers a modern, operational, combat-type jet aircraft in flyable condition to South Korea and an additional 50,000 US dollars to the pilot of the first such jet aircraft received by the UN Forces. [...] Upon initial contact with UN aircraft, or if at any time UN aircraft attempt attack, escapee will immediately lower landing gear and rock his wings violently. [...]

HE DID IT, WHY NOT YOU?

Who issued it

This leaflet is signed. FRAME credits the Far East Command under Gen. Mark W. Clark, through the 1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Group, 8239th Army Unit, for the United Nations Command. The scan is from Wikimedia Commons, which took the file from the unit's command report for 1 to 30 April 1953 in NARA Record Group 407, entry 429. The archive files the effort under the name Operation Moolah.

How to read it

FRAME tags it bandwagon, for the photograph and its caption, and glittering generalities, for a "free world" that is promised but never described. Those are fair. The rest of the leaflet is unusually concrete: a price, a route, an altitude, a signal to give when an escort appears, and a promise to keep the pilot's name secret.

Of all the ways to take an enemy aircraft out of a war, an offer of money and asylum to the man flying it is among the least violent. Nobody is threatened. The pilot decides. A government that makes such an offer in writing, under a commander's own name, can be held to it. The record here does not say whether any pilot answered this leaflet, and this page does not claim one did. A different 1953 leaflet for Chinese troops carried no name at all.