it's from Wiki, but I'm feeling lazy this morning.
The dogfight was scrubbed from U.S. Navy and
National Security Agency records, and Williams was sworn to secrecy about the incident—so much so that he never told anyone about it, not even his wife nor his pilot brother, until the Korean War records were declassified in 2002.
[3] The record of the incident in Navy records said only that he shot down one enemy (not listed as "Soviet")
[6] plane and damaged another, for which he was awarded the
Silver Star in 1953.
[8] However, the dogfight was recorded in Soviet archives which were released after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The Soviet records confirmed that of the seven MiGs, only one returned to its base.
[7] A 2014 Russian book,
Red Devils over the Yalu: A Chronicle of Soviet Aerial Operations in the Korean War 1950–53, reported the battle and named Williams.
[9] The four MiGs were flown by
Soviet Naval Aviation pilots, with Captains Belyakov and Vandalov, and Lieutenants Pakhomkin and Tarshinov being shot down.
that's amazing because the Mig was a better plane than the Panther, and the Soviet pilots at that time were top notch. too bad our country waited until the guy is basically on his deathbed to award him the medal.
edit: he said that the soviet pilots "made mistakes" in the battle. that probably meant they tried to slow down to maneuver against the Panther. that would have been a *huge* mistake. During WW2, some Me262 pilots initially tried to fight a traditional dogfight until it became standard knowledge to use the ME's higher speed to advantage. These soviet pilots, no matter how good they were, were most likely fresh to MiG jets after spending their careers in highly maneuverable prop fighters like Yak and Laggs. So they fell back on their instincts, lost the MiGs advantage, and got smoked.
