Lieutenant Thomas Hudner stared down from the cockpit of his F4U Corsair at the wreckage scattered across the snow-covered valley below. The broken fighter was still, its pilot pinned somewhere beneath the twisted fuselage. Seconds earlier, they had all assumed Jesse Brown was dead. Then they saw him move.

Hudner watched his wingman struggle, trapped under the weight of his own aircraft, bleeding in the freezing Korean winter. Behind them, somewhere in the surrounding mountains, roughly 100,000 Chinese soldiers were closing in. Darkness was coming quickly. A rescue helicopter had been called, but nobody could say when it would arrive, or whether the man on the ground would last that long.

Hudner made his decision. He radioed that he was going down. It was 1946 when Jesse Leroy Brown, a bright young man from Mississippi with humble beginnings, first set his sights on naval aviation. He had fallen in love with flying at the age of six, after his father took him to an air show.

He graduated at the top of his high school class, went on to college, and there learned about the Navy’s aviation cadet training program. Segregation was still very much the law of the land in those years. While there had been Black pilots in World War II, most notably the famous Tuskegee Airmen, naval aviation remained a barrier that had yet to be broken. Brown understood the odds.

When he joined the program, there were more than 5,600 cadets in his class. Only fourteen of them were Black. He braced himself for antagonism, but found that most of the other cadets were welcoming and friendly. Only late in his training did he experience discrimination, from a single instructor and a handful of classmates.

He pushed through it, completing his training in late 1947, and earned a reputation as a skilled pilot and a capable unit leader. In 1949, Jesse Brown was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy. The racism that had plagued him in training largely dissipated once he became an officer. Former Navy pilot Peter Hayes, reflecting on that time, believed the reason was simple: the men he served with saw a naval aviator first, then the man.

“I see a Naval aviator first,” Hayes said, “and then someone who’s been through the same things I have, had the same drill instructors yell at them, flew the same airplanes from the same runways, sat in the same classrooms. I look at them as an aviator first, and then I look at the person. ”

Brown was assigned to the USS Leyte and given his dream aircraft, the F4U Corsair. When he received his naval aviator badge, he became the first African American in American history to do so.

His achievement made news across the country, including an appearance in Life Magazine. The Corsair was a legend of the Pacific War. It had taken the fight to the Japanese, dominated the skies, and served superbly as both a dogfighter and a ground attack aircraft. It was fast, deadly, and still the pride of the Navy.

For the next year and a half, Brown and his unit, Fighter Squadron 32, trained rigorously. They practiced maneuvers, dogfighting tactics, and ground attack. Although the United States was not at war, they would be ready if conflict ever came. The squadron became one of the most respected in the Navy.

The conflict came on the night of June 25, 1950, when roughly 990,000 soldiers of the North Korean People’s Army launched a massive invasion south across the border. The South Korean army and government were woefully unprepared and quickly fell into full-scale retreat. To prevent the collapse of South Korea, the United Nations opted for military action, led by the United States. Brown and the Leyte were stationed in the Mediterranean, on the other side of the world.

But the American brass wanted their best men on the front lines. The Leyte and Fighter Squadron 32 were summoned to the Pacific, and they were officially headed to war. While the carrier made its long journey across the globe, the war intensified. The United States and other UN countries sent infantry into South Korea to aid in its defense.

Then the Chinese entered the war on the side of the North Koreans, sending their massive People’s Volunteer Army to fight against the UN and South Korean forces. Support from the Corsair pilots would be crucial for the Americans on the ground. They had two main roles. The first was close air support: flying low to bomb enemy tanks and troops that were pressing against friendly ground forces.

The second was interdiction: going behind enemy lines to find and destroy rail yards, storage facilities, and production facilities. The air threat was real, but generally limited. The greater danger was ground fire. The Chinese had not yet developed surface-to-air missiles.

What they had was small arms fire and anti-aircraft artillery, and for a pilot flying low over the terrain, that was threat enough. In the winter of 1950, 100,000 Chinese soldiers moved south and encircled 30,000 United Nations troops in an area known as the Chosin Reservoir. The trapped force included 15,000 American soldiers. Outnumbered and surrounded, they were in desperate need of air support.

Fighter Squadron 32 answered. For the next two weeks, the Corsair pilots delivered vital air support to keep the UN troops alive until a rescue could be made. Often flying in at treetop level, they attacked Chinese troops in the thick forests and mountain areas. The message was clear: to reach the soldiers on the ground, the Chinese would first have to deal with hell from above.

The air attacks dealt heavy losses to the Chinese and slowed any advance to a crawl. During those difficult days, the squadron flew dozens of sorties every day. Their efforts came at a high cost. On December 4, 1950, at the height of the battle for the Chosin Reservoir, Fighter Squadron 32 was assigned to another ground attack patrol, as they had been many times over the past weeks.

Jesse Brown was part of a six-aircraft flight supporting the trapped soldiers below. It was the height of winter, and the weather was far from ideal, but it did not stop the airmen from doing their duty. Brown’s wingman for the flight was Lieutenant Thomas Hudner, a fellow Corsair pilot from the same squadron. Like many of the other fliers, Hudner and Brown had become close over the preceding months.

Regardless of background, status, or color, these men were brothers. The flight of F4Us took off from the USS Leyte and flew the thirty-minute route to their target area. They stayed at low altitude, often below one thousand feet, for the entire mission. This minimized the risk from enemy fighters and let them spot targets in the terrain below.

About an hour into the mission, with no Chinese forces yet spotted, another Corsair pilot radioed Brown that his aircraft appeared to be leaking fuel. The damage had likely come from small arms fire on the ground. It was a common tactic of the Chinese to hide in the snow and ambush the low-flying American aircraft, firing up at them with rifles and whatever other weapons they had. One of those shots had found its mark on Brown’s F4U, severing his vital fuel line.

The Corsair had one big fuel line running from the tank up to the engine. The engine needed a constant supply to keep running. Cut that line, or put a big enough hole in it, and the engine would fail entirely, or run at a reduced setting that was not enough to keep the aircraft airborne. In either case, the pilot ended up belly-landing somewhere, if he was lucky.

Brown was losing fuel pressure, and his control of the aircraft was deteriorating. He could not make it back to the carrier. He located a snow-covered clearing near one of the mountains and began to bring his plane down. With his control over the Corsair hindered by the damage, and with no better landing area available, the fighter came down hard.

The aircraft broke apart violently on impact, and the other pilots watched in horror from above. They assumed Brown was likely killed. But as they flew over the wreckage in the snow-covered valley, they saw him. He was waving.

It was not a wave of joy. Brown had been thrown about in the crash and was now pinned beneath the heavy fuselage of the Corsair. His fellow pilots immediately issued a Mayday call for a rescue helicopter and began scouting the area for any Chinese troops that might threaten him on the ground. The helicopters available in 1950 were painfully limited.

Modern helicopters are powered by turbine engines with a high power-to-weight ratio. In the early fifties, helicopters still ran on piston-powered gasoline engines, which produced far less power for their weight. They could not carry much load. In the summer, high temperatures degraded their performance even further.

They had no modern stability augmentation systems or redundant flight controls. They could barely take any damage. Flying one of those early helicopters into a combat zone, knowing a single hit could be fatal, required a special kind of courage. That was all they had.

The pilots were told a helicopter would arrive as soon as possible, but it quickly became apparent that time was not on their side. Watching from above, the other Corsair pilots could see Brown struggling. They grew increasingly worried that the fire in the wreckage would spread to where he was pinned. For a minute or so, Thomas Hudner tried desperately to radio Brown instructions on how to free himself.

It was in vain. Brown’s situation was too dire. Hudner decided what he had to do. Deep behind enemy lines, surrounded by hostile Chinese troops, with darkness approaching, he radioed that he was going to crash land his own Corsair in a final attempt to save his fellow pilot and friend.

It was an enormous gamble. From the air, the ground looked smooth and snow-covered, but nobody knew what lay beneath the snow. Rocks, tree stumps, anything could have turned Hudner’s own landing into a second catastrophe. He dropped his airspeed, lined up his nose, and brought his F4U down, hoping he would not find himself in the same rough landing Brown had just experienced.

His plane came down softly. He leapt from the cockpit and sprinted across the snow to Jesse Brown. He found his friend seriously injured, the fuselage of the Corsair pinning him down, blood loss severe. The massive engine of the wrecked aircraft was nearly impossible to move.

Hudner tried with everything he had to shift the plane off Brown. The other F4Us continued to make their presence known, keeping any Chinese forces from approaching through the surrounding forests. The wreckage would not budge. The fire from the crash was starting to grow and would soon reach them.

Then the rescue helicopter arrived. Its pilot extinguished the fire and jumped out to help Hudner free Brown, who was beginning to slip in and out of consciousness. For forty-five minutes, the two men did everything they could to get Brown out from beneath the plane. They could not.

Jesse Brown lost consciousness around that time. His final recorded words to Hudner were a message for his wife. “Tell Daisy I love her. ”

With darkness approaching and enemy forces around them, they had no other option but to abandon the effort.

The Corsairs above had to depart soon for fuel, and the helicopter could not operate at night. Thomas Hudner was forced to leave his friend and wingman behind. During the entire time that Hudner and helicopter pilot Lieutenant Charles Ward worked to free Brown, no Chinese forces ever threatened them on the ground. The intense air cover from the Corsairs above had kept them safe.

Jesse Brown is believed to have succumbed to his injuries and passed away shortly after Hudner left him. The next day, Hudner begged his superiors to let him return to the wreck to recover Brown’s body. He was refused. The risk of ambush to the vulnerable helicopters was too great, and they feared more casualties.

To prevent Brown’s body from falling into the hands of North Korean or Chinese forces, the United States Navy bombed the crash site with napalm two days later. The pilots involved reportedly recited the Lord’s Prayer over the radio as they watched the flames consume Brown’s body, still trapped beneath the aircraft. Because of the remote location, the remains of both Jesse Brown and his F4U were never recovered. For its critical close air support, the 30,000 surrounded UN troops at Chosin Reservoir were able to escape, inflicting heavy losses on the Chinese.

Nearly all of them made it out. For his actions on that mission, Lieutenant Thomas Hudner was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award for valor presented by the United States military. Ensign Jesse Brown posthumously received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart, and the Air Medal. His widely publicized death inspired numerous other African Americans to become pilots, including Frank Peterson, who would go on to become the first Black Marine Corps general.

Hudner remained close to Jesse Brown’s widow and family for the rest of his life, making many trips to visit them in Mississippi. In July of 2013, Thomas Hudner returned to North Korea in an attempt to recover Jesse Brown’s remains from the crash site. Despite cooperation from the North Korean government, he was unsuccessful, in part due to the hazardous and unpredictable weather in the area.

Thomas Hudner passed away in 2017 at the age of ninety-three.