On the afternoon of 4 December 1950, a Navy fighter pilot looked down at a burning wreck on a frozen North Korean mountainside and made a decision his own training told him not to make. His wingman was alive, trapped in the cockpit, and smoke was rising from the engine. So Lieutenant (junior grade) Thomas Hudner left his wheels up and put a perfectly good fighter into the snow beside him.

The trapped pilot was Ensign Jesse L. Brown, the first African American to complete the US Navy's basic flight training programme and, by then, a combat veteran of 20 missions over Korea. The story of Jesse Brown and Thomas Hudner is one of the most famous in US naval aviation: a sharecropper's son from Mississippi, a grocer's son from Massachusetts, and an attempted rescue that failed and still became a legend.

It ended with a Medal of Honor, two warships, a pilgrimage to Pyongyang at the age of 88 and a Hollywood film. It began in a squadron ready room at Quonset Point, Rhode Island.

From Hattiesburg to a Navy cockpit

Jesse LeRoy Brown was born on 13 October 1926 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, into a poor family that moved between turpentine work and sharecropping. His father took him to an air show when he was six, and he never let go of the idea. He graduated as salutatorian of his segregated high school in 1944 and went north to Ohio State University, where he studied architectural engineering and worked nights loading boxcars.

In 1946 he joined the Navy's V-5 aviation cadet programme. He trained at Glenview, Ottumwa, Pensacola and Jacksonville, and on 21 October 1948 he received his wings as a naval aviator. The Associated Press ran the story and Life magazine printed his photograph. One historical footnote matters here: Oscar W. Holmes had earned naval aviator status in 1943, so Brown is best described as the first African American to come through the Navy's own basic flight training, rather than the first Black naval aviator of all.

Yarnhub's animated account of Jesse Brown and Thomas Hudner, one of the most watched films about the Chosin rescue attempt.

Brown was commissioned as an ensign on 26 April 1949 and joined Fighter Squadron 32, VF-32, flying the F4U-4 Corsair from the carrier USS Leyte. He had married his high-school sweetheart, Daisy Pearl Nix, in secret during training, because cadets were not allowed to marry, and the couple had a daughter, Pamela.

Thomas Jerome Hudner Jr. came from very different circumstances. Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1924, he went to Phillips Academy and the US Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. He only turned to flying in 1948, qualified as a naval aviator in August 1949, and joined VF-32. In a 2017 obituary, Military.com recounted his memory of their first meeting: Brown did not offer to shake hands, Hudner believed, to spare a white officer the embarrassment of refusing, so Hudner put out his own.

Iroquois 13 goes down at Chosin

Leyte was in the Mediterranean when war broke out in Korea. She was ordered east in August 1950, sailed via the Panama Canal and joined Task Force 77 off north-east Korea around 8 October. When Chinese armies entered the war and encircled US Marines and soldiers at the Chosin Reservoir, the Corsairs of VF-32 were flying close air support in brutal winter weather.

At 13:38 on 4 December 1950, six Corsairs took off from Leyte to search for Chinese troops on the west side of the reservoir, near Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri. Brown, flying under the call sign Iroquois 13, had Hudner as his wingman. They were down at around 700 feet when, at 14:40, Lieutenant (jg) Bill Koenig radioed that Brown appeared to be trailing fuel. Small-arms fire from Chinese infantry hidden in the snow had most likely ruptured a fuel line.

Brown jettisoned his drop tanks and rockets and put the stricken fighter down on a snow-covered mountainside near Somong-ni, roughly 15 miles behind Chinese lines. The Corsair broke up on impact. The circling pilots assumed he was dead until they saw him pull off his helmet and gloves and wave. His leg was pinned under the crumpled fuselage, the temperature was around minus 9 degrees Celsius, and smoke was coming from the nose.

The flight radioed for a rescue helicopter. It would take time to arrive, and the fire would not wait.

A deliberate wheels-up landing

Hudner had been told, like every pilot in the squadron, not to try anything heroic if someone went down. He did it anyway. He made a wheels-up landing on the rough slope near Brown and ran through the snow to the wreck. His Medal of Honor citation records that he packed the fuselage with snow with his bare hands to keep the flames away from the trapped pilot.

He could not pull Brown free. Hudner went back to his own wrecked Corsair and radioed for a helicopter to bring an axe and a fire extinguisher. At around 15:00 a Marine Corps Sikorsky helicopter flown by Lieutenant Charles Ward landed on the slope. For about 45 minutes the two men hacked at the wreckage, but the axe barely marked the metal. At one point, at Brown's own request, they considered amputating his trapped leg.

Brown was drifting in and out of consciousness. According to the Naval History and Heritage Command, his final words were a message for his wife: "Tell Daisy how much I love her." Other accounts of Hudner's recollection give a shorter version. As darkness fell, Ward's helicopter could not stay. Hudner promised Brown they would come back for him, and left with Ward. Brown is believed to have died shortly afterwards from his injuries and the cold.

Hudner asked to go back. His commanders refused, fearing an ambush of the vulnerable helicopters. Two days later, VF-32 pilots attacked the crash site with napalm so that neither the body nor the aircraft would fall into enemy hands. Brown's remains have never been recovered. He was the first African-American US Navy officer killed in the Korean War.

The Medal of Honor and a widow in the room

Hudner had hurt his back in the landing and was grounded for a month. Leyte's commanding officer, Captain T. U. Sisson, recommended him for a decoration rather than a court-martial for wrecking a fighter. On 13 April 1951, President Harry S. Truman presented Hudner with the Medal of Honor at the White House. It was the first Medal of Honor presented in the Korean War, although others were later awarded for actions before 4 December 1950.

Daisy Brown was at the ceremony. The two stayed in touch for decades. Brown was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously, along with the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. The Navy, for its part, drew a different lesson: commanders later issued orders forbidding pilots from crash-landing to help downed wingmen, and Hudner said around 90 people told him over the years that he had been reckless.

Hudner later said he did not consider himself a hero. Black newspapers at home treated the story as something larger than a combat action. The Norfolk Journal and Guide ran it under the headline "A Lesson In The Brotherhood Of Man", Military.com reported. Brown's example also inspired a young sailor named Frank E. Petersen, who would become the first African-American Marine Corps aviator and, later, a general.

Period footage of President Harry S. Truman presenting the Medal of Honor to Lt (jg) Thomas J. Hudner Jr. at the White House in April 1951.

Hudner went on to a long Navy career. He flew with the US Air Force on exchange, commanded the Crusader squadron VF-53, and served as executive officer of the carrier USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War before retiring as a captain in 1973. Later he ran the Massachusetts Department of Veterans' Services.

Two warships, a trip to Pyongyang and Devotion

On 17 February 1973 the Navy commissioned the Knox-class frigate USS Jesse L. Brown in Boston. Daisy, who had remarried, attended with her daughter Pamela, and Hudner gave the dedication. The ship served until 1994 and was then transferred to Egypt.

Hudner's words that day, reported by Military.com, are often quoted in Navy histories of the pair. He described a man who had died with courage and dignity in the wreck of his aircraft.

Hudner never stopped trying to bring Brown home. In July 2013, aged 88, he travelled to Pyongyang hoping to reach the crash site. North Korean officials said flooding made the roads impassable and told him to return in September, when the weather would be more predictable. The remains are still on the mountain.

In May 2012 the Navy announced that an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer would carry his name. Hudner attended the christening of USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) on 1 April 2017. He died at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on 13 November 2017, aged 93, and the destroyer was commissioned in Boston on 1 December 2018.

Their friendship reached a wider audience through Adam Makos's 2015 book Devotion, written with Hudner's cooperation over seven years, and the 2022 film of the same name directed by J. D. Dillard. Jonathan Majors played Brown and Glen Powell played Hudner.

Hudner himself told his story many times on camera before he died. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society's oral history below is the best place to hear it in his own voice.

Thomas Hudner tells the story of 4 December 1950 in the Congressional Medal of Honor Society's Living History series.

Jesse Brown and Thomas Hudner shared a cockpit type, a squadron and one terrible afternoon. The rescue failed, and Hudner never pretended otherwise. What lasted was the choice itself: a pilot who could have circled overhead decided that his wingman would not be alone on that mountain.

Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command, Congressional Medal of Honor Society, Military.com, Wikipedia, US Navy (All Hands), Theodore Taylor (The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown), Adam Makos (Devotion)