VF-653 was part of a temporary carrier air group cobbled together with reservists and active-duty squadrons. Each was far from home and bound emotionally to a new family: a group of men who depended on one another, in one case, for spiritual sustenance in the other, for their lives. Andrew-on-Hudson seminary (now the Culinary Institute of America) in Hyde Park, New York, and seemed to have the most in common with Joe. Peter was a Jesuit, working as a cook at the St. But his letters to his older brother Peter were more candid. One of 10 children in a tight-knit Polish-American family, Joe Sanko wrote mainly to reassure his wife and siblings about his safety. His letters home-to his wife Millie, who was expecting their second child, and to his sisters and brothers-were collected and shared with me by his son Dan, who was three years old when his dad left for the war. He was an F4U Corsair pilot with VF-653, a Naval Air Reserve squadron from Akron, Ohio. If aviators ditched at sea, Sanko explained, they would be in waters where “temp gets so low that a pilot can survive only five to eight minutes without a submersion suit.” He added: “I’ve got a real fight on my hands this winter.” Sanko, who had fought in the Pacific in World War II, wrote his brother that his chances of being shot down would be “much greater than in the war with Japan.” Surviving a hit would be much harder. By the end of the war, the carriers of Task Force 77, lying 125 miles from the coast of North Korea, would launch more than 255,000 sorties against the communist forces. They would be spending a lot of time over enemy targets, and to destroy them they would have to fly low. The pilots had been briefed they knew what awaited them. On his way to fight in the Korean War, Navy Reserve Lieutenant Joe Sanko confessed his fear to his older brother: “To date we haven’t lost a single life,” he wrote, “ we are going to lose some and perhaps quite a few.” Sanko’s letter, written on November 23, 1951, anticipated the arrival of the aircraft carrier Valley Forge in the Sea of Japan to join Task Force 77, the main striking force of the U.S.
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