Thud Ridge (3 page)

The basic operating unit in the fighter business is a flight made up of four individual aircraft. The flight leader is the eyes, ears and brain of his three charges and maintains absolute authority in flight. Each of the two-ship elements making up the flight maneuvers in close proximity to the other so as to provide the mutual support and protection that are essential when the shooting starts. The man who taught me this game, Gen. C. T. (Curley) Edwinson, impressed me from the start with flight discipline. I went where he went, and I fully accepted his edict that if he flew into the ground there would be three holes alongside his.

Fighters may attack in a single night of four, or several flights of four may be committed to a single attack in what is termed a strike. In attacking the Hanoi area we usually used about five of these four-ship flights to make up a twenty-ship strike effort. The individual flights in a strike maintain their integrity and their leadership, but—as in the flight structure— they support and respond to the lead man in the lead flight. The wing draws the outline of the mission and the squadrons fill out the strike force with aircraft and pilots. The wing designates the strike force commander, and while this is not necessarily pegged to rank or job position, in our wing the leaders on the ground were the leaders in the air. The man in the number one aircraft assumes complete control of and responsibility for the wing effort, and from the time when, two to three hours before the first engine turns, he gathers his people together to brief them as to what he will do and what he expects, until the last engine is shut down after the mission, those men and machines are his and his alone.

When you are on the wing staff, as I was, you are assigned to a particular squadron for the purpose of flying your missions. We always tried to balance the assignments so that each of these squadrons had about the same overhead load to carry. I am sure that often they felt they were carrying a load, but in our case, all of our staff people were highly qualified, not only in the aircraft, but in the overall business of fighter combat. This function of flying with the squadrons was a most vital portion of the operation of a good wing. To do the job properly, you had to lead by example. This is true in most fields of endeavor, but it is of greater importance when you are directing a life-or-death effort. You had to put your leaders out in front and show your people how you wanted the job done, then insist that they do it your way. If you did not lead well, or if you did not have your people following you to the letter, pilots got hurt and aircraft were lost. Nowhere was this truism more valid than in the Hanoi area. There was simply no room for error. Those who made mistakes—and even many who did everything properly—are either dead or guests at the Hanoi Hilton.

To lead well in this environment, you had to be a perfect combination of automatic responses and flexibility. Automatic because you had to develop a precise plan and lock the details inside you so as to spill out without conscious demand. Much of this was accomplished through target study and through the premission briefing that you, as the leader of the strike, gave all of your pilots. It was like preparing yourself for a final exam every time you went North. All of the detailed information needed to chart the course to the target and put the aircraft in the precise position to put the bombs on the target was catalogued and stored by intelligence specialists assigned to the wing, and the specifics for a particular mission were sorted out and prepared a half day in advance by the pilots who would fly that mission. Because you had to prepare for multiple missions in the event trfat weather or some other factor caused you to divert, the mass of papers and maps that we lugged to the pilots' briefing was terrific. You could almost fill the cockpit with the paperwork, yet it was all necessary because you had to have specific alternate places to put those bombs if necessary. North Vietnamese noise about wanton bombings is sheer nonsense.

Once the maps and charts were prepared, it was no small task to digest the information in front of you. I found it helpful to prepare the general plan of attack in conjunction with the leaders of the other flights within my strike force and also the members of my particular lead flight Then I found it mandatory to withdraw after this initial planning phase and study alone. You simply had to drill on details. I considered myself prepared to lead a strike only when I could recite my complete route from take off to the target and back, with the compass headings, airspeeds, altitudes, call signs of other units and a dozen other details. As I recited this to myself, I also had to be able to visualize a map presentation of the route I was to follow. After a few mental trips through the area, I would insist that my minds eye be able to conjure up a picture of the exact terrain features that I would see.

I had a map hung on the wall in my office that was 10 feet high and 20 feet wide and covered the entire Hanoi-Thud Ridge area. It was a 1 to 50,000 scale and thus showed each peak and valley on Thud Ridge, each bend and turn in the canals and roads and the outline of towns and villages. I paced back and forth in front of this map, flying the mission with my hands. I entered the area, turned down Thud Ridge, cleared the Russian-built, Russian-installed and Russian-advised surface-to-air missile sites—known to us as Sam— avoided the heaviest flak concentrations, streaked past the Russian- and Chinese-built Migs at Phuc Yen, spotted my lead-in indicators, whether they were roads, rivers or towns, made last-minute adjustments in my airspeed, rechecked my armament settings, started my pull-up to gain altitude and better see my target, rolled in on the target (even in the dry runs I visualized the areas I had better avoid, knowing that they would be black with flak), examined the target in detail, rolled my beast into a breathtaking 45-degree dive, picked my aiming point based on the winds I had been given, went through the activation of switches required to drop the bombs, and pulled my guts through the bottom of the seat to avoid the ground and the guns, relighting the burner and following my specific landmarks as I egressed, jinking, rolling, climbing and diving to present the worst possible target to the enemy. When I was mentally back out of the target area, I paced some more and started all over again. I found that about two hours of this preparation put me in pretty good shape for only one target. With this degree of prestudy, I could concentrate on looking and reacting, and the details automatically fell into place.

Yet I had to be flexible as well as automatic because it was not too often that everything fell neatly into place. Somebody, often me, was always nursing a sick aircraft. Some of the complex systems were always out of their advertised best form and any strike can well be affected by one sick bird. The weather was a terrific factor and could cause you to alter your route of your entire plan. This was not the straight and level B-17 type bombing that many in and out of the Air Force seem to be playing the broken record on. I would be the last to take anything away from the all-weather, night harassment effort. I think it is great and I am glad that we have those who like that sort of thing. But if you are going to employ a tactical weapon like the F-105 in a strategic bombing role, which was what we were doing, then you have to use a little imagination in order to survive and still complete a meaningful strike effort. If you dragged your force in too low, the ground fire got them. If you brought them in too high, where the Mig was in his preferred envelope, he could force you to lighten your aircraft for better performance by jettisoning your bombs, lest he outmaneuver you and shoot you down. If you flew straight and level, without terrain masking, either in clouds or in the clear, the Sam could get you if the enemy wanted you badly enough to fire. If you flew on the top of an undercast, you couldn't see Sam when he launched, and if he accelerated and came bursting out of the clouds unannounced, he most probably would gobble you up.

When I was there, we flew taking advantage of these triuisms and our know-how. They now have standard rules and standard tactics directed from a headquarters thousands of miles away. But in that environment, the true payoff depends on the airborne smarts and tactical flying skill of the mission leader and his team. Nothing else will get the job done right with minimum losses, but unfortunately the only ones who know this are those who have been there, or those who will listen to those who have been there. I am constantly amazed at the number of instant experts who have lost the ability to listen. The North Vietnamese don't read the academic studies done in Washington or Honolulu and they don't undertand or respect the great straight and level strategic bombing prowess that many of our current leaders acquired in the 1940's; they don't know they are not supposed to shoot down standardized, headquarters-directed and stereotyped flights. I shudder when I think of the worthless loss of people and machines this ironclad party line of stupid and inflexible tactical ignorance has caused. I understand fighter tactics, and I've been there, and I feel very strongly that the astronomical and unacceptable fighter losses, which skyrocketed in the latter part of 1967 to double their previous numbers, were largely due to ineptness, dictatorial enforcement of minuscule and incorrect details of tactical mission accomplishment, and lack of good sense and understanding of the actual air-war situation in the North on the part of command leadership at a high military level. I could well pursue this subject in detail and may do so later. For now, I note it in passing and return to the healthy and stimulating atmosphere of the air war at wing level.

It is important that you know the people you fly with and that you know what they are doing. This does not come from sitting in an air-conditioned office and clucking sternly over unimportant details. It comes from getting hot and sweaty and from getting your fanny shot at. There is no way to shake out people and procedures except by being a part of them. You only learn part of the game when you fly the easy ones; you have to take at least your share of the tough ones. The troops watched that schedule pretty closely. They knew who was leading for effect and who was for real, and they responded accordingly.

The best way to get this togetherness was to work generally with the same group of pilots and definitely in the same squadron. It can be argued that we all should know the same basic job and we are all the same black box that is plugged into the rest of the machinery and thus it should make no difference who flies with whom on any specific mission. I suppose this theory might have some validity in the realm from which it originated and probably any big airplane driver can move his monster from point A to B and back as well as another; it just isn't so in the fighter business. Anyone who has played ball knows that there are combinations based on talent and the experience of working together that get the job done better It was even more so in this big league.

Any specific fighter wing can be assigned many tasks out side its basic mission of launching a combat effort. My trst year in Southeast Asia centered around our wing s role mother hen for a new fighter base emerging from the gre jungle of Thailand. Our task was to maintain our basic combat posture, and at the same time to provide the pilots, aircraft, support equipment and support people to conduct con-bat strikes out of Takhli, Thailand, until we could physically establish a wing that could stand on its own down then While this was being accomplished, I shuttled back and from Japan to Thailand, and when the job was finished moved into the new wing for full-time duty.

I had not been the only one involved in building a new wing or a new base. From the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, it became clear that America was committed to an extensive air effort in North Vietnam and that facilities had to be expanded rapidly to accommodate this effort. South Vietnam was about to sink into the sea from the sheer weight of the American effort there, and was not the place for new airfield construction or expansion. While we stewed under the wraps of security, the news media of the world had little difficulty pinpointing our effort in Thailand. It was well into 1967 before formal press visits to the Thai bases were sanctioned, and even then the clearance was not universal, but the world was informed that we were operating Republic-built F-10 fighter-bombers out of our location at Takhli, Thailand, while the Avis wing was operating the same type of aircraft further to the east at Korat, Thailand. The McDonnell RF-101 reconnaissance aircraft and newer additions to the lineup (the fighter and reconnaissance versions of the McDonnell F-4C were visible to the press from Udorn, Thailand, to Da Nang and Saigon in South Vietnam. The rescue helicopters and their slow but sturdy propeller-driven escorts, the Douglas A IE, were dispersed wherever they would stand the best chance of dashing into hostile territory to recover a downed airman. The giant airborne command and control aircraft, which could help you with a radar vector when they were in flight, and the huge Boeing KC-135 tanker aircraft were very obviously in place when the press entered the scene, and in case there was any doubt in anyone's mind, their presence confirmed the fact that current fighter-bomber aircraft needed to refuel in flight when they were committed to the North with their heavy bombloads. This the North Vietnamese already knew since their radar watched us daily as we refueled in flight and headed their way without the benefit of surprise.

Thus our force was in place to operate from Thailand to North Vietnam. We had Thuds to strike the enemy and we had either bombing or Mig escort help from the F-4C "Phantoms." We had tankers to help us keep the fighters full of gas. Our reconnaissance aircraft could take target photographs before and after raids and our choppers, which needed their A1E escorts (we called them Spads, because the AlE's age and performance approached that of the World War I machine with the same nickname), could sometimes get in and out of enemy territory to accomplish a rescue. Except for occasional equipment modification, the buildup of the force that was to fight in the North was complete and we were ready to probe the Hanoi area.