The first step toward using the rotor-blade aircraft in the mission most closely related to the USMC basic helicopter concept—that of transporting troops and supplies by vertical envelopment—was accomplished 13 September 1951. In Operation WINDMILL I, HRS choppers carried out the first Marine mass helicopter combat resupply operation in history. A lift of one day’s supplies was made to 2/1 in the Soyang River vicinity. A total of 28 flights were executed in overall time of 2½ hours (a total flight time of 14.1 hours) to transport 18,848 pounds of gear and 74 Marines a distance of seven miles.
HMR-161 first applied the Corps’ new concept of vertical envelopment on 21 September when, despite heavy fog, it transported 224 fully equipped Marines and 17,772 pounds of cargo from the reserve area to the MLR. This was the first helicopter lift of a combat unit in history. Company-size troop lifts inevitably led to more complicated battalion-size transfers. In the 11 November Operation SWITCH, HMR-161 effected the relief of a frontline battalion, involving the lift of nearly 2,000 troops. Twelve of the 3½-ton aircraft made 262 flights in overall time of 10 hours (95.6 hours flight time).
The tactical and logistical possibilities of the multi-purpose rotor craft attracted considerable attention. So impressed, in fact, were Eighth Army officers by the mobility and utility displayed by Marine helicopters that in November 1951 General Ridgway had asked the Army to provide four Army helicopter transport battalions, each with 280 helicopters. Korea, Ridgway said, had “conclusively demonstrated that the Army vitally needed helicopters,”[714] and he recommended that the typical field army of the future have 10 helicopter transportation battalions.
[714] Futrell, USAF, Korea, pp. 533–534.
Ridgway was thereby renewing requests for helicopters made in the early days of the war by both the Army (through General MacArthur) and the Air Force (by General Barcus). But the UNC Commander’s enthusiasm, although understandable, turned out to be the undoing for substantial Army use of the rotary-blade aircraft in Korea. The scale of operations[715] envisioned by Ridgway unwittingly led to a “jurisdictional controversy”[716] about possible duplication of aerial functions not reconciled by the two services until a year later. Although both services had helicopters in limited use, “hostilities were in their last stages before either the Army or the Air Force began to receive the cargo helicopters which they had put on order in 1950 and 1951.”[717]
[715] Hermes, Truce Tent, p. 184, comments: “In order to insure a steady flow of replacement craft, he [Ridgway] suggested that procurement be started on a scale that would permit manufacturers to expand production immediately.”
[716] Futrell, USAF, Korea, p. 534.
[717] Ibid.
A successful three-day Army regimental supply exercise in May 1953 and a combat maneuver the following month in which the choppers formed an air bridge to a heavily attacked, isolated ROK unit caused General Taylor, then CG, EUSAK, to observe: “The cargo helicopter, employed in mass, can extend the tactical mobility of the Army far beyond its normal capability.” He strongly recommended that the Army make “ample provisions for the full exploitation of the helicopter in the future.”[718]
[718] Ibid., p. 535.