Mikoyan-Gurevich MIG-15: The Soviet Union's Long-Lived Korean War Fighter

by Yefim Gordon

Release Date: September, 2001

Edition: Paperback

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Good Technical Source But Not-So-Good History.

Right up front, I have to admit a bias in this review: I have been fascinated with the Mig-15 ever since I was a child growing up on Long Island (right between the Grumman and Republic aircraft factories--there were Panthers and Thunderjets buzzing my home daily) when Chicago-based Hawk Plastics issued the first plastic scale model of this fascinating little fighter in 1952. And that interest has continued to this day, so, having bought a number of previous AeroFax editions, I ordered this book as soon as I saw it. And it was money well-spent. For a paperback of this size and scope, it is one of the finest technical source materials of its kind. Replete with hundreds of photos not seen in the West before, many of which deal with one-of-a-kind experimental versions of the FAGOT, and pages of detailed line drawings and color profiles depicting most of the different versions and color schemes of Mig-15 service around the world, the book is indispensible in its depiction of how this important first-generation jet fighter was designed and built. The genesis of the Mig-15 involved considerable risk for its designers. In the mid-1940's, this was a giant leap for an aviation industry that had never before built an aircraft incorporating such new and untried aerodynamics as the swept main wing and high 'T' tail (so common on many current airliners today), borrowed Western engineering (its Rolls-Royce engine) and a whole new metallurgy. Mr. Gordon spares nothing in his description of how this was accomplished in less than three years, and, for historians, THIS is the real value of this book! If you want to know how this airplane came to be, this is the book for you! It's the finest I have seen so far on the Mig-15.

However, it has an important, major flaw! Not content to limit his work simply to design, development and production, Mr. Gordon spends considerable effort relating the FAGOT's operational history, particularly its use by Russian, Chinese and North Korean aircrew during the Korean War, and it is THAT discussion which keeps me from giving it the five-star rating it otherwise so richly deserves. You are going to see this book listed as source material in any treatise on the air war in Korea, and you are definitely going to hear about it in the hot discussions concerning victory claims now raging since the Russians started declassifying and releasing its records in the early 1990's. Russian writers and historians have since been engaged in rewriting the air war history of that brutal conflict, and they invariably tend to discount (or argue away) Western reports and records while accepting Communist documentation at face value. The goal (particularly regarding the combat performance of the F-86 vs the Mig-15) seems to be to attack US claims of a 10-1 kill ratio, and to install a claimed 2 or 3 to one ratio in favor of the Mig when Soviet pilots were involved. Mr. Gordon consistently falls into this trap in this book, and that is unfortunate. In some cases, his pro-Communist bias glaringly shows through his use of blatant sarcasm, which is NOT the mark of an objective, professional historian. Throughout his discussions of operational history, he spends a great deal of time explaining how a particular event couldn't have happened the way the UN/US says it happened (offering some fairly tortured analyses and descriptions to prove his points), all the while accepting Communist versions of the event, verbatim and in toto, as the TRUTH!

Nothing in war is always what it seems, and there is probably good reason to revisit that famous 10-1 kill ratio; it probably should be downgraded considerably. But, Soviet claims that there is a 3-1 kill ratio in the Mig's favor are just plain ludicrous. If Cold War history tells us anything, it tells us that we need to bring a bag of salt and a jaundiced eye to the table when dealing with Soviet claims about the wars they fought. I have four of Yefim Gordon's books on Soviet combat aircraft, and in every one of them he fails to appreciate this when he relates air combat with US aircraft.

In short, forget the history, and enjoy the tech talk, art and those fabulous photographs!

A Definitive Study

* Yefim Gordon's MIG-15 is a detailed survey of the Soviet Union's
premier jet fighter of the early Cold War. It provides a close-up of
the type's development, evolution, and service, discussing such items
as Chinese, Czech, and Polish production; listings of foreign
operators; and descriptions of even very minor subvariants. This book
is heavily illustrated, with scores of photographs, including a set of
color plates, as well as an extensive set of line drawings and a few
pages of color side plates. It covers the subject matter about as
well as anyone might conceive of covering it, which is at the same
time both this book's strength and weakness.

I have read other books by Yefim Gordon and this one follows the
pattern: he does an enormous amount of legwork to write a definitive
document, but makes little effort to make the material easy to read,
simply rolling out the details in a sequence from beginning to end and
leaving the reader to sort it all out as best as possible. MIG-15
would be much easier to read if it began with a short chapter that
basically summarized the rest of the book, giving the reader a
"roadmap" to make the following chapters easier to sort out.

That said, this book is a gold mine, with much interesting
information. It does a superlatively balanced comparison of the
MiG-15 versus its main Western rival, the F-86 Sabre. Of course, Mr.
Gordon argues that Western kill claims on the MiG-15 during the Korean
War were exaggerated -- sure they were, everyone exaggerates their
kills, the "fog of war" makes it inevitable -- but says that the
gun-camera evidence used by the Americans to validate kills was only
about 75% reliable. Me, I would have simply assumed the number of
kills claimed was *twice* the number of actuals. He argues that the
two aircraft were very closely matched, and I give him high marks for
fairness.

Another fun bit was a discussion of some of the slighting claims Chuck
Yeager made about the MiG-15 in his autobiography, which Red pilots,
including some Yeager claimed had agreed with him, responded
indignantly were "BULL****!" Mr. Gordon suggested that these claims
were probably an invention of Yeager's co-author -- apparently being
unaware of Yeager's notorious windiness and baffling inclination to
exaggerate accomplishments that might seem to be impressive enough not
to require it.

A third interesting item was the translation of OPERATION MOOLAH,
the successful attempt to bribe a MiG-15 pilot to defect during the Korean
War, as OPERATION MULLAH. I imagine that translating an archaic and
generally forgotten bit of 1940s slang like "moolah" -- meaning "lots
of money" -- into Russian and then back into English again could lead
to such confusion.

Like I said, this book is gold, close to the last word on the subject.
It's just not *pure* gold; a little work on user-friendliness would
have made it close to perfect.