Personal Recollections of
Henry L. "Hank" Marois, Jr.
Electronics Intelligence Officer
Tierra Verde, Florida
I arrived to the 11th Squadron after the war's end, in 1955. With the truce, the hostilities were over and the squadron was officially moved to Japan, actually to just outside of Osaka, at a base called Itami Air Base. Although we were assigned on paper to Itami, actually, we were then immediately sent on into K-14, which was Kimpo AFB.
We were there for about two years, rotating back to Korea on temporary duty (TDY) to fly the same missions. Our TDYs were a couple of days or sometimes a couple of weeks. Under the terms of the truce, you couldn't upgrade any equipment in country, so we solved this by transferring the squadrons to Japan, then reassigning them back to Kimpo on temporary status. This cleared the way for an upgrade to jets.
Late in 1955 or so, the 11th and 12th squadrons both went PCS (permanent change of station) to Yakota, where we retrained into the Douglas RB-66. We called it the "Lead Sled" because it used to measure every inch of every runway we ever used. We could fly the same missions right out of Yakota then, as the jets had a longer range and were a bit faster than the -26.
At that point, we retired all of the RB-26s. Well, actually all of the RB-26s were converted to bombers, and we flew them down to Clark AFB, in the Philippines, where we turned them over to the French who took them into Vietnam. After that, I don't know what happened to those airplanes.
