Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Muskogee-born Air Force ace recorded the first enemy shootdown of the Jet Age
On the afternoon of May 20, 1951, over the Yalu River, a 27-year-old captain who stood five feet five and had once eaten carrots by the fistful to beat a vision test stayed in a fight he had been told to leave. One of his drop tanks would not jettison.
The F-86 was handicapped, low on fuel, and outnumbered. James Jabara shot down two MiG-15s anyway. With those fifth and sixth kills he became the first American jet ace, and the first ace in the history of jet-against-jet combat.
He had been born 28 years earlier in Muskogee, the grocer’s son.
James “Jabby” Jabara was born in Muskogee on October 10, 1923. His parents had emigrated from Marjayoun, a hill town in southern Lebanon just north of what is now the Israeli border. His father was John Jabara.
The family settled first in Muskogee, then, when James was about nine, moved to Wichita and opened a grocery on Murdock Street.
He worked the store. He later said he had been brought up as the grocer’s son, Jimmy, like his two brothers, and that he had the same instincts as any of the kids back in Muskogee.
The ambition that set him apart started early. By sixth grade he was reading Eddie Rickenbacker and pulp air-combat novels and had decided he would be a fighter pilot. At Wichita North High School he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated in May 1942, five feet five, wearing glasses, and immediately enlisted as an aviation cadet at Fort Riley, Kansas.
The eyes were a problem. Fighter training was selective, and corrective lenses were a strike against him. He ate twenty carrots a day on the folk theory that it would fix his vision. It did not. He got through anyway. After four flying schools in Texas, he won his wings and a second lieutenant’s commission at Moore Field on October 1, 1943.
Jabara flew the P-51 Mustang in Europe on two tours. The first, from early 1944 into the fall, was with the 363rd Fighter Group of the Ninth Air Force, supporting the ground armies after Normandy. The second, in 1945, was with the 355th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force. Across both tours, he flew 108 combat missions.
He was credited with one and a half German aircraft in the air and four destroyed on the ground, and came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross and oak-leaf cluster and the Air Medal with eighteen oak-leaf clusters. The missions were not clean. On an escort to Germany a German fighter shot his canopy off. He still got a kill and flew back in below-freezing air.
He survived two midair collisions, one with another Mustang, one with a German aircraft.
After the second, both pilots floated down, shook hands, and walked away. Fellow pilots called him the Ceegar Kid. He smoked them in the cockpit when he could.
He thought about getting out and going to college. He stayed. At Tyndall Field in Florida, he went through tactical school. From 1947 to 1949 he was on Okinawa with the 53rd Fighter Group. There, in 1948, he flew his first jet, a Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star. It was entirely different, he said
. He was at 10,000 feet before he remembered to raise his landing gear. It was so quiet and fast. He guessed that was probably the happiest moment of his life.
By the time the Korean War began, he was a captain and a flight commander in the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, flying the North American F-86 Sabre out of New Castle County Airport, Delaware. The wing was the first Sabre unit sent to the Fifth Air Force.
Jabara arrived in Korea on December 13, 1950, with the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. The fight was jet against jet, American Sabres against Soviet-built MiG-15s, mostly in the strip of northwestern Korea the pilots called MiG Alley. He damaged a MiG in January. His first confirmed kill came on April 3, 1951, another on April 10, a third on April 12, a fourth on April 22. He moved to the 335th to chase the fifth.
On May 20, thirty-six Sabres met a large MiG formation near Sinuiju. American reports said nearly fifty. Later Soviet figures put the number closer to thirty. Jabara dropped his tanks and one hung. Doctrine said abort. He did not.
With the six .50-caliber guns in the Sabre’s nose, he set one MiG on fire and watched it explode, then caught the last aircraft in a six-ship element and sent it down in a spin. His own jet was hit. Two other Sabres drove the rest off him, and he glided a nearly dry airplane into K-13 at Suwon.
Those two kills made him the first jet ace of the war and the first jet-versus-jet ace on record.
Far East Command awarded the Distinguished Service Cross two days later. The citation is blunt: alone, low on fuel, outnumbered, he flew into the formation to break it up and shot down a second MiG, bringing his number of kills to six and making him the first jet ace in history. Superiors also told him he should have turned for home. He had flown into the fight with a hung tank on purpose.
The Air Force pulled him for a publicity tour he did not want. Wichita gave him one of the largest parades in the city’s memory. The grocery on Murdock was packed for days. He and his father went on radio and television. A newsreel song, “That Jabara Bird,” made the rounds.
The service sent father and son on a goodwill trip through the Middle East, and Jabara spoke in John Jabara’s hometown of Marjayoun. John, who in 1942 had tried to keep his son in the store, understood the next part better. When he heard Jimmy was being held in the States, he said Jimmy would not like that.
He did not. After a Pentagon tour and a training assignment at Scott Air Force Base, he asked to go back. He returned in January 1953 as a major. The second-tour score was a seventh MiG on May 16, two on May 26, two on June 10, one on the first mission of June 30 and another on the second, after the engine flamed out while he was evading and he got it restarted, and a fifteenth on July 15.
All fifteen of his Korean credits were MiG-15s, all in the F-86. He flew 163 missions in the war. At the armistice he stood second among American aces, behind Joseph McConnell’s sixteen, and was a triple ace. Later Soviet records have been used to argue that some American claims in MiG Alley, including some of Jabara’s, do not match Communist loss logs.
The Air Force credit stands at fifteen. The historical first does not depend on the final tally. No American had five jet kills before May 20, 1951.
He came home in July 1953 and took command of the 4750th Training Squadron at Yuma, later Vincent Air Force Base, Arizona. By 1957, he was at Eglin with the 3243rd Test Group, flying the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. He commanded the 337th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Westover, Massachusetts, and in 1958 and 1959 flew F-104 missions during the Taiwan Strait crisis.
He graduated from the Air War College at Maxwell in 1961, then checked out in the Convair B-58 Hustler with the 43rd Bomb Wing at Carswell in Texas, a fighter pilot’s detour into the strategic bomber. In 1964 at Luke, he trained NATO pilots in the F-104. In 1965 he took command of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing at Homestead, Florida, and was promoted to colonel, among the youngest in the Air Force.
He volunteered for Vietnam. In July 1966 he flew an F-100 Super Sabre on a strike that damaged Viet Cong buildings in South Vietnam, then came home on leave to move the family before a longer combat tour. It was his only Vietnam mission.
The decorations by then included the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, seven Distinguished Flying Crosses, one with a “V” device, the Air Medal with more than twenty oak-leaf clusters, and the British Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded in 1955. He was a command pilot.
He married Nina, identified in 1951 newspapers as his wife from McKinney, and they had four children: James William, born in 1949; Carol Anne, born in 1950; Cathy, born in 1952; and Jeanne, born in 1957.
A Fort Worth Star-Telegram photograph from June 1951 shows the new ace giving two-year-old Jimmy a piggyback while Nina holds eight-month-old Carol Anne. The family followed the assignments through Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and back to Florida.
On November 17, 1966, they were in two cars on the Sunshine State Parkway near Delray Beach, Florida, driving to a new house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Nina and the children would wait out the Vietnam tour. Carol Anne, sixteen, was driving a Volkswagen. Her father was in the back seat. Nina and the other three children were in the car behind.
In a construction zone Carol Anne drifted onto the grass median, corrected, and lost the car. It returned to the median and rolled. James Jabara was dead on arrival at the Delray hospital, of head injuries. Carol Anne died two days later, on November 19. Nina, James Jr., Jeanne, and Cathy were not hurt.
A memorial service at Homestead included a missing-man formation. Father and daughter were buried together in a single grave at Arlington National Cemetery, Section 2, Site E-478-D, on November 24, 1966. He was 43.
A columnist wrote, “Good-bye, Sir. Well done.”
Colonel James Jabara Airport, northeast of Wichita, carries his name. Since 1968 the Air Force Academy’s Association of Graduates has given the Jabara Award to an Academy graduate for superior work in aerospace. He was inducted into the Kansas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006.
The oddity of the life is the ending. The man who survived two midairs over Europe, a hung tank over the Yalu, and a flameout in a MiG fight was killed on a Florida highway, in the back seat, on the way to one more war.
He had already said he was not a killer by instinct. He was the grocer’s son from Muskogee who had wanted, since the sixth grade, to fly fighters, and who, for one afternoon in 1951, was the first to do it in the jet age and come back an ace.
