Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Once the North Vietnamese identified the targets that the Americans favoured, they concentrated guns around bridges, barracks and suchlike. Older pilots asserted that the fire was worse than they had experienced over Germany. The communists developed frightening expertise at box barrages: ‘They could fill a five-square-mile column with murderous flak from 3,000 to 20,000 feet,’ wrote Commander John Nichols. ‘It was awesome. It was spectacular, it was perilously close to beautiful. The light guns, 23mm and 37mm, burst with white smoke. The 57mm shells exploded in dark gray and the heavy 85mm and 100mm stuff exploded in black clouds. Mix in occasional strings of colored tracer from heavy machine-guns arching up to perhaps 5,000 feet, and you can imagine all these vari-colored clouds bursting somewhere in that cone of air every second for several minutes.’ Commanders urged pilots not to jink, which was no help in evading a box barrage, but instead to concentrate on hitting the target: luck alone would determine their own fate.

  MiG-17s first appeared during a fifty-plane raid south of Hanoi on 3 April 1965, and the following day the USAF lost two F-105s. On 17 June Sparrow missiles secured their first two MiG kills. Pilots experimented with tactics. For a time they favoured high-speed, low-altitude approaches until at a designated point they switched course and gained height to dive on a target – the ‘pop-up’ method. Its limitations were that it required fliers making five hundred knots to identify several landmarks, and also made aircraft vulnerable to light flak. They carried a formidable array of electronic defensive equipment in pods on wing pylons. The navy also deployed EA-3B Skywarriors and EF-10B Skyknights as ECM – Electronic Counter-Measures – aircraft. Attackers released chaff to baffle communist radar, and fired Shrike AGM-45A missiles at the enemy’s guidance sets. Both sides played deception games: sometimes US jammers believed they had identified the enemy’s fighter-direction frequency, only to discover that it was playing recordings of pilot chatter, while the MiGs’ real business was done on another channel. The defenders also learned to keep tracking radar switched off until the last seconds before a missile launch, to avoid attracting a homing Shrike.

  The enemy fighter threat waxed and waned, but was less feared than flak. North Vietnamese pilots were tightly controlled from the ground, instructed even about when to ignite afterburners. MiG-17s were wonderfully nimble, MiG-21s less so, especially at low speeds. They usually attacked only with a clear tactical advantage, especially of altitude, fired their Atoll missiles – equivalent to American Sidewinders – then scooted for home after a single pass. On 21 June 1966 New Yorker Lt. Phil Vampatella was flying one of four Crusaders, covering a shot-down RF-8 pilot until a rescue helo could reach him. Suddenly his plane shuddered – he had been hit by flak. Haemorrhaging fuel, he broke away to find an airborne tanker. Then over the radio he heard the warning, ‘Tallyho, MiGs!’ – the remaining fighters had been set upon by MiG-17s. He turned back to support them, found himself behind a communist plane chasing an American. He called urgently, ‘Break right!’ but it was too late: the Crusader went down.

  Vampatella found another MiG-17 closing on his own stern and dived, his plane bucking and yawing at six hundred knots. He pulled out almost at tree height, expecting to have shaken off the enemy. The MiG was still behind him, but had turned away, apparently towards home. Given the damage to his own aircraft, Vampatella took the huge risk of going after it. He loosed a Sidewinder, watched the MiG explode, then found a tanker to give him just enough fuel to cover the sixty miles to Hancock. Vampatella’s display of courage was afterwards cited at training schools, but persistence in combat aboard a damaged aircraft was usually a quick way to earn a ‘Missing’ telegram for the folks at home.

  The navy was for years embarrassed by the fact that its fighters shot down far fewer enemy aircraft than the USAF, in part because many of its Sparrow air-to-air missiles missed. Sidewinders were much more effective, cannon – which only the navy’s F-8s carried – better still. The wiseacres who had claimed that missiles made guns redundant were proved wrong. The navy’s air-combat performance improved only in the war’s last phase, when the tactics and doctrine school at Miramar, California, created its Top Gun course, whose graduates proved impressive MiG killers.

  By the time strike aircraft pulled out of the target towards the sea, in the words of a pilot ‘about three minutes – and one or two eternities – had elapsed’. As they approached the shelter of the mother carrier, a landing officer’s ‘talker’ sustained a radio running commentary on the deck status: ‘Foul deck … foul deck … foul deck, gear set, Skyhawk. Foul deck … Clear deck!’ It was a nice judgement call whether the pilot of a damaged aircraft should attempt a landing or eject over the sea: a crash could not merely kill a flier, but also wreak havoc across the flight deck. Undamaged planes set down gratefully, bounced a tad before halting abruptly in front of the arrester wires. Another day’s work was done.

  Fliers averaged sixteen to twenty-two combat sorties a month, a few made twenty-eight: a handful eventually totalled five hundred. By autumn 1966, the pressure of operations was generating shortages of munitions – especially bombs – and also of equipment and aircrew. A dismaying number of the latter found that a tour of operations ended with a one-way ticket. Jack Broughton wrote of the day an unnoticed SAM took out one of his F-105 squadron: ‘The first sign of trouble was a large rust-colored ball that enveloped his aircraft … [which] appeared intact, but he started a stable descent with his left wing dipped slightly low. His only transmission was “I gotta get out. I’ll see you guys.” With that, he pulled the handles and we saw a chute and heard the beeper as he headed for Hanoi via nylon.’

  The USAF’s Maj. Fred Cherry was the son of black farmworkers in Virginia who had reached flight school in 1951 by sheer persistence, after many rejections, and flew fifty-three missions in Korea. On the morning of 25 October 1965 he was leading an F-105 squadron on his fiftieth mission when, a few minutes short of the target, he heard a fierce thump. He switched off electrics and hydraulics, but the plane filled with smoke. At low level he ejected and prayed, just as the Thud blew up, its instrument panel slashing his face. He was forty miles north-east of Hanoi, just two minutes’ flying time short of the coast and safety. He landed in a crowd of militia and children: ‘I thought they might chop me into little pieces with all those farm tools, but they just stood back and giggled.’ Told to put up his hands, he pointed out that his left shoulder was smashed, his ankle broken up. The forty-third American airman to be captured, a crowd followed him as he staggered to the road. A soldier said, ‘You a criminal.’ He was taken to Hoa Lo prison, the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. Later he was transferred to a jail known to PoWs as ‘the Zoo’, where he found himself sharing a cell with a navy North Carolinian named Porter Halyburton who at first spurned him because he would not believe that a black man could be a USAF major, and branded him a French spy. Yet familiarity, shared privation, bred between the two men not merely respect, but something close to love. After Cherry’s wounds became badly infected, ‘Hally’ cared for him devotedly. When their jailers moved the Southerner out of his cell, ‘I never hated to lose anybody so much in my entire life.’

  Norm McDaniel, born in 1937, was one of eight children of a black North Carolina sharecropper, and grew up with terrible family tales of their experience during the Depression, when his father picked cotton for a dollar a day. In Norm’s childhood he often went to bed hungry: ‘If my father got to the whiskey store before the grocery store, we had a problem.’ His mother, an orphan, had a fanatical belief in education and embraced the mantra ‘Make the best of whatever you have.’ It was a notable achievement that in 1959 her son advanced from a mechanical engineering degree at North Carolina’s segregated A&T University to become a commissioned navigator in the USAF. He loved air force life, and flew for several years with a Stratofortress wing. Only when he and his wife Jean-Carol travelled off-base did racial issues beset them: ‘In Mississippi and even Utah, hotels and restaurants wouldn’t have us.’

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p; In the autumn of 1965, McDaniel was posted out of B-52s to serve as an electronic-warfare officer with an EB66C squadron flying out of Thailand. ‘I didn’t have any apprehension about going. I just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to.’ Their aircraft was notoriously underpowered, however, using up the whole runway on take-off, especially on a hot day. McDaniel said a little prayer every time, ‘not for me, but for my family’. Missions customarily lasted around three hours, of which twenty-five minutes were spent orbiting the target area at twenty-five thousand feet, monitoring and jamming enemy radar transmissions. When a threatening signal was detected, they voiced the strike pilots, ‘Red Alert, enemy aircraft,’ ‘Missile tracking’ or whatever, then later reported, ‘All clear.’ McDaniel was one of four ‘Ravens’ peering into a battery of scopes in their B-66’s EW compartment, a windowless cell behind the cockpit.

  The campaign became a routine: a pilot was required to complete a hundred trips ‘Up North’, as aircrew referred to enemy territory, before being recycled homewards. Back at their comfortable base, McDaniel read a lot, worked out, played ping-pong. In the officers’ club there was a running game of ‘Dead-Bug!’: when a flier shouted the words, they all hit the floor. Last man down paid for maybe sixty drinks, but alcohol was so cheap that such a forfeit did wallets little harm. McDaniel would have enjoyed his tour at Takhli but for missing his family and knowing they were missing him. He said: ‘I was never much scared. We figured this mess was going on for years. We just thought about clocking up our hundred missions, then going home in eight or nine months.’ On their twenty-ninth trip, near Hanoi they suffered a SAM-2 lock-on and had to take violent evasive action. Only after what seemed a stomach-churning eternity did the crew hear the terse, infinitely reassuring words over the intercom: ‘Breaking lock.’ They figuratively wiped their brows and went home to hot, sticky, comfortable Thailand. McDaniel thought, ‘Hey, I’ve had my big scare.’

  Yet two missions later, on 20 July 1966, approaching a target near Hanoi the plane gave a terrific lurch, ‘like flying right by a big air pocket’. The crew asked fast, frightened, explosive questions, to which pilot Bill Means responded reassuringly, ‘That was a near miss, but we’re still flying.’ Not for long. Seconds later Means lost control, and the plane began to plunge erratically. When it levelled off, they waited in vain for more news from the pilot. Communications were gone, however, along with oxygen. Smoke began to fill the EW compartment. The four ‘Ravens’ were required to eject in sequence, and McDaniel, in the forward left position, was due first. ‘It was decision time. We had flames and smoke, and I thought, “I’m outa here.”’ He followed procedure, pulling down his helmet visor, activating the personal oxygen bottle, tucking himself up tight before pulling one lever to jettison the hatch, then a second to blast himself into the sky.

  Everything worked perfectly until, as he hung on his parachute, he glimpsed holes appearing in its canopy: people were shooting at him. The moment he hit the ground he was surrounded by peasants, soldiers, militia who stripped him to his shorts and T-shirt. It was 8.30 a.m., and he was thirty miles north-west of Hanoi. At first they tried to push him into a pit, where he was sure they planned to shoot him. Then, instead, he was blindfolded, led to a vehicle, and eventually driven to the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, where he arrived at evening.

  He was for a time haunted by misgivings that he was the only one of his crew to bail out; that the rest were safely back at Takhli mocking his panic-stricken exit. Soon enough, however, he found that all but one man, who perished soon after capture, were also PoWs, as they remained until 1973. Back at home, after the family heard that he was missing, fate unknown, his mother told Jean-Carol: ‘Mac’s alright. I visited him in a dream. He’s in a little room lying down. I said “Mac, are you alright?”, and he said “Yes, Mam. You take care of yourself.”’ McDaniel’s mother’s tale proved to be sort of true. Yet many other families with missing loved ones had similar otherworldly visions, which went unfulfilled. Only after eighteen months of agonising suspense did the North Vietnamese belatedly disclose that the navigator was a PoW.

  In Hanoi, McDaniel fared better than many: ‘Though the food was garbage, it was quite healthy garbage, and I was used to being hungry from my childhood.’ Like most of his comrades, he was periodically subjected to cruelties, in some cases amounting to torture. Evidence from both Vietnamese and Russian sources suggests that the communists gained significant operational data from aircrew interrogations, but the prime objective was to secure ideological dominance, to inflict punishment on the only accessible examples of a hated enemy. Back in the US the barbarities inflicted on prisoners, which were real enough, roused enduring public outrage. Yet it deserves emphasis that communist captives in the hands of both Americans and South Vietnamese were subjected to equal and worse things, often before being killed. When CIA man Frank Snepp’s revelatory Vietnam book Decent Interval became a bestseller in 1977, the author was astonished how few readers seemed troubled by his account of ‘enhanced interrogations’ and torture of captives, the veracity of which has never been challenged. Doug Ramsey also wrote with repugnance about his colleagues’ ‘casual toleration of the abuse of prisoners’. Indignation about the cruelties inflicted upon Hanoi’s captives could be justified only by an assumption that American capitalists should expect more humane treatment in enemy hands than Vietnamese communists.

  Norm McDaniel, in July 1966 the newest guest at the Hanoi Hilton, possessed an equable, relentlessly cheerful temperament, which proved of great service to him through almost seven years that followed. While some prisoners nursed hatred of their North Vietnamese captors, he thought this counter-productive: ‘I consider myself an eternal optimist. We knew that Vietnam prisoners were an elite compared with the way PoWs in Korea had been treated. You had to reach beyond yourself: I had my faith in God and my family.’

  A significant minority of pilots were veterans with immense experience. Commander Richard Bengler was forty-two years old. He had flown B-17s and B-25s in WWII, then fighters in Korea. In July 1966 he survived ejection into the sea when his F-8 was shot up by a MiG-17. Four months later he was able to turn the tables, shooting down the navy’s first MiG-21 with Sidewinders. Back on his carrier he said exultantly, ‘I’ve waited twenty years for something like this. It was a tremendous feeling.’ Capt. Jack Nolan from Freeport, Long Island, was already thirty-six when he went to war. He was a lawyer’s son and briefly a medical student: ‘There was a girl involved. I married her, by golly.’ His heart was in flying, however: ‘I was fascinated by airplanes after I took an invitation ride in a Stimson at five years old.’ In 1952 Nolan joined the USAF, shipped to Korea, and was in mid-Pacific when the armistice was signed. After a decade as an instructor, and rearing five children, late in 1966 he was posted to a Thud wing based, like Norm McDaniel’s EB-66s, at Takhli in Thailand. ‘What did my wife think about it? I never asked her.’ On the big base they lived in comfortable cinderblock buildings, two beds to a room. The squadron’s twenty pilots flew whichever aircraft they were allocated that day – the planes had no personalised names, no artwork, just green-and-brown camouflage on the upper surfaces, blue undersides. The F-105 was very comfortable to fly, capable of supersonic speeds at low level. On missions against North Vietnam it usually carried six 750lb bombs, an ECM radar baffler and Sidewinders, though Jack Nolan never fired one.

  On operational days they might rise any time between 0230 and 0700 for breakfast and the long, painstaking preparation of equipment. A veteran pilot said one day as he entered the briefing room before another trip down ‘Thud Ridge’, ‘Anyone who is not completely terrified doesn’t understand the problem.’ The same morning in the latrines, Jack Broughton heard a man throwing up, and knew that it was a fellow-flier. Broughton wrote of the long wait and taxi to take-off on a sun-roasted Thai base crowded with aircraft: ‘You sweated so badly that sometimes you could hardly see. The flight line was organised confusion as one flight after another hit the starter button and
filled the air with the stench and smoke of the black-powder cartridge starter that spun the engine through its initial revolutions. The noise was deafening … I mused, What’s it going to be – a SAM day or a MiG day?’

  When Jack Nolan was airborne among the usual sixteen ships and two stand-by reserves, they cruised at 450 knots in flights of four, ‘at 15,000 feet every damn mission’. Before entering enemy airspace, they closed on one of two KC-135 fuel tankers for a ten-minute top-up, then slid apart into tactical formation as they approached the IP – Initial Point. F-4 flak suppressors aimed to reach targets fifteen to thirty seconds ahead of the bombers, attacking with cannon and Zuni rockets every muzzle-flash they spotted on the ground, until with ammunition expended they pushed the hand-held throttle sideways to ignite afterburners. These provided a surge of power, enabling the aircraft to soar away, at the cost of dramatically increased fuel consumption. The Thuds attacked next, slipping into a forty-five-degree dive before bombing from five thousand feet, ‘then running like hell’ – or rather, feeling the force of four to six Gs as they pulled out.

  The targets might be bridges, railyards or airfields. There was always flak, which cost maybe one lost aircraft a day between their two wings, and the occasional white streak of a SAM, which pilots ignored unless they received aural warning that its track was personal. ‘I saw one of ours go down, watched the pilot bail out, though he was never heard of again.’ The best tactic after a SAM launched was to make a very steep turn against its track – the missile should eventually break radar lock and explode. Nolan, like many pilots, viewed his role with dispassion interspersed with spasms of fear: ‘I didn’t think much about what was on the ground. I was just doing a job, trying to stay alive and get promoted to major – which didn’t happen.’ They recognised that a lot of ordnance was falling short, especially the 3,000lb bombs they threw at bridges: ‘It was frustrating to see the pontoons lined up on the bank, ready to fill the gap if we broke a span.’ One day as Nolan’s flight dived on a span near the Chinese border he caught a burst of automatic-weapons fire under the right wing that crippled his hydraulics, making it impossible to couple with a tanker to get home. He jettisoned his bombs into the river and nursed the big plane to Danang, escorted by his leader. On approach he cranked down the undercarriage by hand, and landed safely. He caught a ride back to Thailand in a C-123, and headed for the bar. Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Combat Operations staff of Seventh Air Force, analysing target data: ‘That experience reinforced my feeling that a lot of bombs were falling short, but nobody cared.’