Prize Catch

For months, U.N. commanders in Korea tried by various devices and ruses to lay hands on one of the enemy's Russian-built MIG-15 fighters. For months, the Reds foiled them. In London last week the British Admiralty proudly told how a splendid specimen of the sleek MIG was grabbed at last for U.N. scrutiny.

The enemy jet had been shot down in the shallow water of the Yellow Sea, a few miles off Korea's west coast. British carrier planes fixed and photographed the position of the ditched fighter and a U.S. helicopter dropped a marking buoy. A British 1,600-ton frigate, a South Korean motor launch and a U.S. Navy shallow-draft landing craft equipped with a crane moved in through treacherous sand bars to retrieve the prize, while a cruiser and carrier planes stood by to ward off enemy interference. Darkness and high tide interrupted the operation and the allied craft had to stay on the spot all night. Next morning they got the MIG on board and made off with it safely.

Last week the MIG was under study at the U.S. Air Force's experimental base in Dayton. First discovery: the engine, which almost everyone had feared was a redoubtable fruit of Russian-plus-German technology, was an unmodified, British-made Rolls-Royce Nene. Britain had shipped perhaps 100 jet engines to Russia before the trade was stopped in January 1948.

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