Retired U.S. Navy Capt. E. Royce Williams has been awarded the Navy Cross for his actions on Nov. 18, 1952.
On that day, Willams had engaged in a 35-minute dogfight alone against seven Soviet MiG-15s while on combat air patrol near Hoeryong, North Korea. Williams shot down four of the MiGs and likely hit two others. He managed to escape back to the carrier, out of ammunition and with a damaged plane that had 263 holes. The dogfight is now considered as the longest dogfight in U.S. Naval history.
He was awarded the Silver Star Medal for his actions on May 7, 1953. Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Carlos Del Toro upgraded the award to Navy Cross after “having reviewed the findings of now numerous investigations related to the case.”
“I have determined this case to be special and extraordinary,” said Del Toro.
Since 2014, there has been a campaign to award the Medal of Honor to Williams for his heroic feat. However, there were no record of the encounter in the declassified U.S. documents for the Korean War as the U.S. Navy and National Security Agency scrubbed the incident away. Worried that acknowledging about the incident might draw the Soviets into the Korean War.
The only official record of the dogfight are in the declassified Soviet documents on the Korean War. Igor Seidov, a Russian military historian, wrote about the dogfight in his 2014 book “Red Devils Over the Yalu: A Chronicle of Soviet Aerial Operations in the Korean War.” According to Seidov, of the seven MiGs that left Vladivostik that morning, only one returned to base. The other four were shot down by a single U.S. aircraft, one plane was severely damaged and crashed on its way back, and the seventh plane was never found.
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