The "Ashley Five" included 1st Lt. Gilbert Ashley, A2C Hidemaro Ishida, 1st Lt Arthur Olsen, 2nd Lt John Shaddick, and 1st Lt Harold Turner. On May 24th, 1953, the U.S. military attempted a rescue mission of the five but were fired upon and aborted the mission.

1953 rescue effort haunts Korean War pilot:

Flying deep into enemy territory in the dim light of daybreak, Air Force Maj. David M. Taylor was about to execute an airborne "snatch" of five escaped American POWs waiting to be rescued. All had gone without a hitch, but as Taylor sensed trouble as he flew his propeller-driven C-47 up a North Korean mountainside at treetop level. "It just didn't look right to me," Taylor recalled of that moment on May 24, 1953, two months before the Korean War would end with an armistice that sealed the fate of an undetermined number of U.S. POWs. Over the radio came the clearly recognizable voice of one of five American flyers on the ground, B-29 bomber pilot 1st Lt. Gilbert L. Ashley Jr., guiding Taylor's approach to a mountain top clearing for the pickup. Suddenly Taylor spotted two poles jutting up from the clearing, parts of a contraption Taylor airdropped to the men days earlier. With a hook dangling from his black-bellied transport, Taylor was to snag each man in a harness attached to a rope looped between the poles and reel him in like a fish.

There was still that feeling of something amiss. "That's when I called Ashley on the radio," Taylor says, recalling the final seconds of his approach. "I told him, 'If there's anything wrong, now's your chance to tell me.' He came back, 'Everything is fine.'" In an instant, machine gun fire ripped into the underside of the C-47. "The poles down there weren't poles. They were .50-caliber guns," Taylor recalls. "We were so close the bullets were coming straight up from the 'poles.'" Stunned but unhurt, Taylor maneuvered his plane away, climbed through a wall of gunfire that erupted from the surrounding valley and flew his crippled C-47 back to his clandestine unit, known as "B Flight," behind friendly lines.

As with many episodes on the shadowy side of the Korean War, this one appears in no official public accounts of the 1950-53 conflict in which more than 33,000 Americans died and 8,100 are still listed as missing. For decades, it was hidden in official secrecy. Among the missing thousands are Ashley, who was from Rock Hall, Md., and the four from his B-29 crew: Airman 2nd Class Hidemaro Ishida, of Richmond, Calif; 1st Lt. Arthur R. Olsen, of Chicago; 2nd Lt. John P. Shaddick, of Coral Gables, Fla.; and 1st Lt. Harold P. Turner, whose hometown could not be determined. The U.S. government long ago declared them dead, although relatives still wonder.

Taylor, now 76 and living in Santa Fe, N.M., agreed to discuss the case after reading a recent Associated Press account of a declassified Air Force report that briefly mentioned the aborted rescue mission and said Ashley and the others were alive at the end of the war. Also interviewed for this story was Robert Tucker, who was aboard Taylor's rescue plane.

The Air Force report did not say how it was known that the five were alive at war's end in July 1953, nor did it say what ultimately happened to them. Because the Korean War ended with an armistice agreement and not a peace treaty, the communist North and U.S.-backed South remain technically at war. Only in the past 18 months has reclusive North Korea begun allowing the United States to search for remains of its war dead and to seek answers from North Korean war records of what happened to missing Americans.

The families of Ashley, Olsen, Shaddick, Ishida and Turner were never told of the aborted rescue mission or even that the five were alive in captivity. "The Air Force told my parents they never had evidence that the men ever hit the ground" after their B-29 was shot down over North Korea on Jan. 29, 1953, said David R. Olsen, brother of the plane's navigator-bombardier.

"It was a rotten thing" of the Air Force to keep from the families that the men survived, Olsen said. For his part, Taylor wonders why Ashley allowed him to be ambushed. Ashley may have been under the threat of death by North Koreans, although U.S. officials at the time thought the five Americans were being protected by a South Korean guerrilla leader supposedly working for American intelligence. The guerrilla leader had been airdropped behind enemy lines in January 1953 and, in a chance encounter, liberated Ashley and the four other POWs from the back of a North Korean army truck. Using his American radio, the Korean guerrilla then alerted his U.S. handlers to the rescue opportunity. In preparation for the rescue, Taylor even airdropped a homing pigeon, along with a camera and film, to the men. The bird returned to U.S. intelligence headquarters with film that pictured the guerrilla leader at the mouth of the mountain cave. The five Americans were not in the picture.

Taylor also spoke by radio to Ashley numerous times before the rescue day. Taylor is convinced Ashley, for whatever reason, deliberately betrayed him. "I consider him a traitor," Taylor said. "He could have warned me off, and he didn't. I wanted to napalm the whole area that's how mad I was." Instead, Taylor said he returned to the area several days later in a B-26 bomber rigged with a voice recording system. Using personal information about the five airmen provided by U.S. intelligence, Taylor circled above their mountain hideout and spoke briefly with each to verify he was alive. To his great surprise, the men spoke as if nothing unusual had transpired. "They gave me no hint whatsoever" of distress, Taylor recalls. That was the last contact he had with them, and he has wondered at their fate ever since.

Gilbert L Ashley Jr