군법을 어기고 군수창고를 열어 피난민에게 담요 군복을 나누어준 리처드 위트컴 6.25참전 미군 장성 실화

■ 리처드 위트컴 장군 (Richard S. Whitcomb)과 그의 부인 한묘숙 여사에 대한 전설적인 실화

6.25 한국전쟁에 참전한 미군 장성, 위드컴 장군
그는 당시에 미군 군수사령관이었다.

1952년 11월 27일, 부산역 건너편 산 판자촌에 큰 불이 났다. 판자집도 변변히 없어 노숙자에 가까운 생활을 하던 피난민들은 부산역 건물과 인근에 있는 시장 점포 등이 유일한 잠자리였는데 대화재로 오갈 데가 없게 됐다. 입을 옷은 커녕 먹을 것조차 없었다.

이때 위트컴 장군은 군법을 어기고 군수창고를 열어 군용 담요와 군복, 먹을 것 등을 3만 명의 피난민들에게 골고루 나눠주었다. 이 일로 위트컴 장군은 연방 의회의 청문회에 불려갔다. 의원들의 쏟아지는 질책에 장군은 조용히 말했다.
"우리 미군은 전쟁에서 반드시 이겨야 하지만, 미군이 주둔하는 곳의 사람들에게 위기가 닥쳤을 때 그들을 돕고 구하는 것 또한 우리의 임무입니다.
주둔지의 민심을 얻지 못하면 우리는 전쟁에서 이길 수 없고,
이기더라도 훗날 그 승리의 의미는 쇠퇴할 수 밖에 없을 것이기 때문입니다.“
라고 답하자, 의원들은 일제히 기립, 오래도록 박수를 쳤다.

다시 한국으로 돌아 온 뒤 장군은 휴전이 되고도 돌아가지 않고, 군수기지가 있던 곳을 이승만 정부에 돌려주면서
"이곳에 반드시 대학을 세워달라."고 청하였다. 부산대학이 설립된 배경이다. 그러나 부산대 관계자도, 교직원도, 졸업생도 재학생도 이런 역사적 사실을 거의 모른다. 그리고 장군은 메리놀 병원을 세웠다. 병원기금 마련을 위해 그는 갓에 도포를 걸치고 이 땅에 기부문화를 조성하기 위해 애썼다.

사람들은 '장군이 체신없이 왜 저러느냐'고 수근댔지만 개의치 않았고 온 맘과 힘을 쏟았다.
전쟁 기간 틈틈이 고아들을 도와온 위트컴 장군은 고아원을 지극정성으로 운영하던 한묘숙 여사와 결혼했다.
위트컴 장군이 전쟁 고아들의 아버지로 불리는 이유다.

그리고 그는 부인에게 유언했다.
''내가 죽더라도 장진호 전투에서 미처 못 데리고 나온 미군의 유해를 마지막 한 구까지 찾아와 달라''고...
부인 한묘숙 여사는 그 약속을 지켰다. 북한은 장진호 부근에서 길죽길죽한 유골만 나오면 바로 한묘숙 여사에게로 가져왔고, 한 여사는 유골 한 쪽에 300불씩 꼬박꼬박 지불했다.

그렇게 북한이 한 여사에게 갖다 준 유골 중에는 우리 국군의 유해도 여럿 있었다.
하와이를 통해 돌려받은 우리 국군의 유해는 거의 대부분 한 여사가 북한으로부터 사들인 것들이다.
한 여사는 한 때 간첩 누명까지 쓰면서도 굴하지 않고 남편의 유언을 지켰다.
남편만큼이나 강한 여성이었다. 장군의 연금과 재산은 모두 이렇게 쓰였고, 장군 부부는 끝내 이 땅에 집 한 채도 소유하지 않은 채 40년 전에 이생을 달리했다.

부산 UN공원묘원에 묻혀있는 유일한 장군 출신 참전용사가 바로 위트컴 장군이다.
끝까지 그의 유언을 실현한 부인 한묘숙 씨도 장군과 합장되어 있다.

이 땅에는 이러한 장군을 기리는 동상 하나가 없다.
부산에도, 서울에도, 아니 부산대학교에도 메리놀병원에도 물론 없다.
그런데 오늘, 장군이 떠난지 꼭 40년 만에 뜻있는 사람들이 모여 위트컴 장군 조형물을 만들기로 결의했다.
늦어도 너무 늦었지만, 국가 예산 말고, 재벌 팔을 비틀지도 말고, 70여 년 전 수혜를 입었던 피난민 3만 명, 딱 그 수만큼 1인당 1만 원씩 해서 일단 3억을 마련하기로 했다.

브라보!
민주주의의 생명은 참여다. 보은도 십시일반 참여해야 한다고.
오늘 그 첫 결의를 했다. 1만 원의 기적을 이루어보자.

70년 전, 전쟁고아들을 살뜰하게 살피던 위트컴 장군을 생각하면서,
메리놀 병원을 세워 병들고 아픈 이들을 어루만지던 장군의 손길처럼,
대학을 세워 이 땅에 지식인을 키우려던 그 철학으로,
부하의 유골 하나라도 끝까지 송환하려고 했던 마음을 생각하며 각자 내 호주머니에서 1만 원씩 내보자.
딱 커피 두 잔 값씩만 내보자.

1만 원의 기적이 한국병을 고칠 수도 있지 않을까?
'설마 이 땅에 1만원씩 낼 사람이 30만 명도 안 되지는 않겠지?'라고 생각하니 

또 내 마음은 두둥실 하늘을 날 것만 같다.
그리고 정부는 장군에게 무궁화 훈장을 추서한다는 소식이다.
너무 늦었지만 감사한 일이다.

정말 기쁜 날이다.
팝콘이 탁탁 터지듯이 그렇게 내 온 몸의 세포들이 기쁨에 겨워 꿈틀거린다.
에스프레소 덕분인가?
까뮈 엑스오 덕분인가?
이제 나는 죽어도 한묘숙 여사를 만나 웃으며 두 손을 잡을 수 있게 됐다.
브라보!

* 부산 출생인 박선영 국제대학교 교수 페이스북 글

 

Richard T. Whitcomb Is Dead at 88; Revolutionized the Design of Jet Aircraft

By Dennis Hevesi

·         Oct. 25, 2009

Richard T. Whitcomb, whose understanding of the way air rips around an airplane as it approaches the sound barrier revolutionized the way jets are shaped, allowing them to fly faster on less fuel, died Oct. 13 in Newport News, Va. He was 88 and lived in Hampton, Va.

The cause was pneumonia, his nephew David Whitcomb said.

Testing his ideas in supersonic wind tunnels, Mr. Whitcomb came up with three design changes that solved problems that had confounded his fellow aviation engineers. One enabled combat jets that had been built to break the sound barrier, at about 740 miles an hour, depending on temperature and atmospheric pressure, to actually do so.

Mr. Whitcomb did his work while he was a researcher at the Langley Memorial Aerodynamic Laboratory in Hampton Roads, Va.

The laboratory, now a division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was run by a NASA predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, when Mr. Whitcomb started working there in 1943. He retired in 1980.

 “Richard Whitcomb was arguably the most influential aeronautical engineer/researcher of the jet age,” the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum said in a statement.

The museum’s senior curator of aeronautics, Dr. Tom Crouch, said in an interview Wednesday that Mr. Whitcomb’s “intellectual fingerprints are to be found on virtually every major high-speed commercial and military aircraft flying today.”

All three of Mr. Whitcomb’s innovations succeeded in reducing the air drag that slams a jet — much as snow piles up in front of a too-eager snowplow — when it approaches the speed of sound.

His first breakthrough, made in 1951 but kept secret for military security reasons until 1955, is known by several nicknames: the “Coke bottle,” the “Marilyn Monroe” or the “wasp waist” design, because it calls for a sloping indent in the plane’s fuselage where the wings are attached. More scientifically, it is known as the “area rule.”

Dr. Crouch explained that the ideal shape for an aircraft to surpass the speed of sound “is something like a 50-caliber bullet.” But the wings create drag, and the Air Force needed jets that could maneuver, even in dogfights, at the highest possible speeds.

 “When they first built the F-102 jet fighter, it was designed as a supersonic interceptor, but they couldn’t get it through the speed of sound,” Dr. Crouch said. “Whitcomb came up with the area rule: If you pull in the fuselage, make it ‘wasp waist’ near the wings, you reduce the drag.”

The new design increased the speed of supersonic warplanes by up to 25 percent without any increase in engine power. A plane capable of 800 miles per hour with the conventional straight-line fuselage jumped to 1,000 m.p.h. when its fuselage was indented.

 

In the early 1970s, Mr. Whitcomb came up with another breakthrough. The supercritical wing, as it is called, was far less curved on top than the conventional wing — indeed, it was almost flat — and curved on the underside at the rear. It, too, greatly improved operating economies of high-speed planes by enabling them to fly as much as 100 miles per hour faster without any increase in engine power.

The supercritical wing is now part of the design of nearly every commercial airliner and has saved billions of dollars in fuel costs and flying time.

Later in the 1970s, Mr. Whitcomb introduced winglets — small, inclined panels that are attached to the tips of wings and reduce drag. They increase fuel efficiency by as much as 6 percent to 7 percent.

“It’s intuitive,” Mr. Whitcomb once said, according to the National Air and Space Museum statement. “I didn’t run a lot of tests to arrive at an idea, and I didn’t run a lot of mathematical calculations. I’d just sit there and think about what the air was doing, based on flow studies in the wind tunnel.”

His intuitions, he said, first came to him when he was a boy making model planes.

Richard Travis Whitcomb was born in Evanston, Ill., on Feb. 21, 1921, one of three children of Frederick and Gladys Travis Whitcomb. His father, an engineer, had flown balloons in World War I. After the family moved to Worcester, Mass., Richard virtually took over the basement to build model planes.

“He concentrated exclusively on airplanes that would fly, not merely mantel decorations,” The New York Times wrote of Mr. Whitcomb in 1955. “In the process, he developed a method for doubling the power ordinarily obtained from rubber bands used to turn the propellers.”

Mr. Whitcomb graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1943 and was soon working at the Langley laboratory. He never married, and he spent many nights sleeping on a cot at the lab, his nephew David said.

“More than once, the accounting department had to come down and yell at him for not cashing his paychecks,” David Whitcomb said. “He would use them for book marks.”

He did accept awards, among them the Collier Trophy in 1955 for the most significant aeronautical advance of the year and the National Medal of Science in 1973.

Besides David Whitcomb, Mr. Whitcomb’s survivors include a sister, Marian Conley; a brother, Charles; and a step-brother, Kenneth.

“There’s been a continual drive in me ever since I was a teenager to find a better way to do everything,” Mr. Whitcomb told The Washington Post in 1969. “If a human mind can figure out a better way to do something, let’s do it. I can’t just sit around. I have to think.”

He never learned to fly.

 

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 26, 2009, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Richard T. Whitcomb Is Dead at 88; Revolutionized the Design of Jet Aircraft.