Jet Fighter Death Match: Russia's MiG-15 vs. America's F-86 Sabre (Who Wins?)

Key Point: In the end, the Sabre vs. MiG duel made for great newsprint. But much like the Korean War, it ultimately counted for little.

The Korean War was the first of the post-1945 small wars, those millstones that dragged the American eagle through Vietnam and then Afghanistan and Iraq. Communist and UN armies surged back and forth over the Korean hills, without quite understanding who they were fighting and what they were fighting for.

But the air war over Korea was a throwback to the past. Not World War II, even though many of the pilots in Korea had drawn first blood in that earlier conflict. That massive global struggle was industrialized aerial warfare, where the combatants flung thousands of aircraft at each other and pilots and machines were just so many expendable munitions.

As F-86 Sabres battled MiG-15s over North Korea, in the first jet vs. jet battles in history, the dogfights most resembled World War I and its famed "knights of the air." Not that there was anything chivalrous about Korea in the air or on the ground. But compared to the trench warfare below, "Mig Alley" was almost romantic, an arena where relatively small numbers of fighters dueled in a conflict carefully managed to avoid escalating into World War III.

"Here, the best from both sides sparred and dueled, fought and killed--or died--in an arena almost completely detached from the World War I-like trench warfare far below to the south, and even from the results of the war as a whole. It was a battle much more for the prestige of the nations engaged--and the reputation of their respective aerospace industries--and for the glory of the fighter pilots involved than for its effect on the conduct or the outcome of the conflict," write authors Douglas Dildy and Warren Thompson in F-86 Sabre vs MiG-15: Korea 1950-53 by Osprey Publishing.