SABRE ACE RACE
“TELL JABARA THE MEXICAN GOT TWO.” THE TRANSMISSION FROM U.S. AIR FORCE CAPTAIN MANUEL J. “PETE” FERNANDEZ JR., INBOUND FROM MIG ALLEY ON MARCH 21, 1953, LIKELY STUNG THE PRIDE OF HIS 334TH SQUADRON MATE MAJOR JAMES “JABBY” JABARA.
Once Fernandez’s ninth and 10th MiG-15 victories were confirmed, Pete (whose ancestry actually traced from Spain to Cuba) joined an exclusive club of double jet aces. Meanwhile, since returning to Korea that January, Jabby seemed to have flamed out in the Sabrejet ace race.
Jabara (himself of Lebanese heritage) had won the April-May 1951 sprint to crown America’s initial North American F-86 Sabre ace. “Stick him out in front and see what he can do,” ordered then–Fifth Air Force commander Lt. Gen. Earle E. Partridge.
After downing his fifth and sixth MiGs on May 20, Jabara was whisked Stateside for the sort of homecoming later bestowed on astronauts. “If you shoot down five planes,” novelist James Salter, himself a Sabre pilot, wrote, “you join a core of heroes. Nothing less can do it.”
Jabara’s feat, achieved during his 63rd mission, came when USAF dominance in MiG Alley—an area in northwestern North Korea along the Yalu River bordering Manchuria—was doubtful. As Blaine Harden, author of several incisive Korean War books, explained in an interview: “When the Korean air war began, the MiGs made it a kind of slaughter. And their pilots were Stalin’s elite.”
New to the “core” of aces that September were Captains Richard S. Becker and Ralph D. “Hoot” Gibson. Arguably, these earliest jet aces stood out for dueling Stalin’s “honchos” while piloting F-86s
