Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Carrier fliers, together with the USAF fighters and B-52s that operated out of U-Tapao, Thailand, made round trips of only three or four hours. The Guam-based B-52s, by contrast, started out almost three thousand miles east of North Vietnamese targets. Most crews dropped their bombs only after a nine-hour passage to targets, and had travelled more than eight thousand miles before landing back on ‘the Rock’ after at least one rendezvous with Okinawa-based tankers. Though some autopilot slumber was possible, even before encountering the enemy the handling of a B-52 was immensely demanding. Jim McCarthy wrote: ‘Unlike a high-performance fighter or the newer B-52 models, the B-52D does not have powered controls. It takes a lot of old-fashioned muscle power to fly precision formation or maneuvers.’ Handling the D, wrote the pilot, ‘has been compared to driving an 18-wheel truck without power steering, air brakes or automatic transmission in downtown Washington during the rush hours’.

  Every mission committed an armada of aircraft of many types and functions. Ahead of the Stratofortresses, fighters struck at enemy gun and missile sites. Electronic counter-measures aircraft strove to jam communist communication channels and radar signals. F-4 Phantoms strewed ‘chaff’. Alongside the bombers, more Phantoms provided close cover against MiGs. B-52s were manned by crews of six: two pilots; a two-man ‘defense team’ consisting of an electronic-warfare officer and a gunner, who sat peering into their screens and dials in rear-facing seats a few feet behind the cockpit; and an ‘offence team’ of navigator and radar navigator – the latter being what was once known as the bombardier – in a compartment below. The four .50-calibre machine-guns in the plane’s tail were a hangover from World War II, and six miles up seldom did much harm to the enemy, though they claimed two MiGs during Linebacker II.

  On Guam the B-52s were maintained by five thousand ground crew based in ‘the Bicycle Works’. It was a huge task to sustain a type designed in 1949 and first flown four years later – some planes bombing Hanoi were seventeen years old. The Stratofortress had ten independent hydraulic systems and four big generators, powered by hot-air turbines, for which compressed air was bled from the engines, in which temperatures reached 250 degrees Celsius. A leak could be disastrous, for ducts ran alongside control cables, fuel tanks, oxygen lines.

  When Andersen or ‘U-T’ was operating at high pressure, a bomber could be fuelled and bombed-up in four hours – half the usual Stateside time – and major inspections were completed in eight hours. A full internal load consisted of eighty-four 500-pounders in pre-packed cells. The demands were enormous on those shifting ordnance in temperatures that could exceed a hundred degrees, periodically interrupted by tropical rainstorms. Ground crews sometimes displayed heroic commitment: when one bombed-up plane burst a tyre as it taxied for take-off, a wheel replacement that normally took 150 minutes was made in fifteen, without killing the engines.

  Before every mission, planners spent hours debating targets, offset aiming points and optimum axes of attack amid the mosaic of SAM sites and radar installations marked on maps and air photographs taken by high-flying SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft. Two ‘cells’, each of three B-52s carrying up to thirty tons of ordnance apiece when the wing-racks were filled, could eliminate almost every living thing within a ‘box’ – a rectangle on the ground five-eighths of a mile wide, two miles long: here was the most chilling refinement of ‘carpet-bombing’. In the light of the latest intelligence and target selections, ‘frags’ – fragmentary orders – were issued to crews. Targets were located in one of two zones, respectively identified as low- or high-threat, according to the density of ground defences. A priority target caused a mission to be designated a ‘Press-On’, which meant that crews must go through with it, whatever level of opposition or aircraft system failures they encountered.

  After briefing, chaplains offered Catholics last rites, which some found helpful, but caused others to recoil. Crews rode out to their planes laden with bulging survival vests, side-arms, ration boxes and oversized briefcases filled with aircraft technical manuals, bombing computation tables, celestial navigation data and classified briefing material. They also carried cold-weather gear, redundant if the aircraft heating system functioned, but indispensable if it failed, plunging the cockpit temperature to minus 56 degrees Celsius.

  Fighter pilots called the B-52s ‘Buffs’ – Big Ugly Fat Fellers – the last word commonly expressed as an obscenity. Strategic Air Command preferred the more dignified phrase ‘parade of elephants’ to describe a column of the huge bombers progressing down the taxiway to take-off. Operational launches drew a crowd of spectators, ground personnel and off-duty aircrew, standing in clusters on the flight lines, outside offices, on balconies. One by one the Buffs accelerated to take-off, black smoke belching from engine tailpipes as injected water increased thrust.

  Gaining height they passed over the Russian trawler that lay offshore, counting heads. Crews settled for the long haul west: the two navigators might play chess, or write letters. One airman addressed the problems in a school algebra textbook; others pursued correspondence courses, one of them in dentistry. When they wanted to be indiscreet, crack jokes or question a procedure, they passed each other notes, to escape scrutiny by SAC inspectors who monitored cockpit voice recordings. Over the sea, whole crews often fell asleep. It was wise to start out feeling fit and well, because flying at high altitude with a heavy cold, blocked ear or sinus was intensely painful, threatened serious infection. Unpredicted weather raised issues: headwinds increased fuel consumption, sometimes necessitating extra airborne refuelling.

  Nobody stayed asleep when the bombers approached targets. By December 1972, North Vietnam possessed formidable MiG, flak and missile defences. SAM-2 crews began launching salvoes skywards the moment American aircraft approached within range. Cockpit reactions varied: pilot Robert Clark, who led the third wave of bombers on 18 December, said: ‘I was ready to do it; my nav was just absolutely terrified; my gunner was a hawk; my electronic warfare officer was horribly curious about whether his equipment was going to work – he was excited but scared.’ Les Dyer felt insouciant: ‘I was young, bulletproof, and invulnerable.’ Bruce Woody described himself as ‘scared out of one’s wits’. Jerry Wickline said: ‘The whole time I thought I would be dead the next second … Several times I was blinded by a near missile detonation or from the brilliant glare of their rocket trails as they went past me. The B-52 right behind me was shot down.’ He added: ‘I found out on that mission I was not a coward. I begged for an excuse to turn that airplane around and not fly through those missiles, but I was more afraid of being branded a coward than of dying.’

  Accurate bombing demanded four minutes of stable, straight flight during the target approach, heedless of upcoming missiles. Three-ship cells flew in close formation to confuse enemy radar: if one bomber drifted or a nervous pilot manoeuvred, the protective envelope was weakened. Crews might hear heart-stopping words from the electronic-warfare officer: ‘SAM UPLINK!’ A pilot would ask, ‘How far out from the target are we, Radar?’ ‘We’re ten seconds out. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. BOMBS AWAY! Start your … turn, pilot.’

  This opening attack of the campaign began at 1945 on 18 December, when the first of a long trail of cells released. There was a slight shudder as thirty tons of ordnance fell away from each aircraft. A steep turn could temporarily black out radar-emitters, masking a plane’s defences for seconds that could prove lethal. Col. Hendsley Conner, flying as a mission commander, described an experience as his pilot swung the huge bomber one moonlit night: ‘KABOOM! We were hit. It felt like we had been in the center of a clap of thunder. The noise was deafening. Everything went really bright for an instant, then dark again. I could smell ozone from burnt powder, and had felt a slight jerk on my right shoulder.’ Over the interphone he quizzed Cliff Ashley, the pilot, who responded: ‘I’m fine, but the airplane is in bad shape.’

  The enemy missile had exploded off the B-52’s port side, taking out two engines and the wing tip. Flames w
ere streaming from the stump, cabin pressurisation was gone, together with most instruments. Though based on Guam, they set a course for Thailand and called for escorts: two F-4s replied almost instantly, ‘We’re here, buddy.’ They began a rapid descent from thirty thousand feet, desperate to avoid bailing out over North Vietnam or Laos: ‘We knew they did not take many prisoners in Laos.’ Thirty minutes later, they felt a surge of relief as they crossed into Thai airspace, and started to think they might be able to land. Then one of the accompanying F-4 pilots warned that flames were intensifying, the whole left wing blazing: ‘I don’t think you’ll make it.’ All six regular crew members had their own ejector seats, and a few seconds later the red ABANDON light came on. BAM! The navigator vanished. Conner, with no seat of his own, clambered over wreckage to the hole through which the last man had vanished, and gazed at the ground far below. Then he jumped, and seconds later pulled the ripcord on his parachute. He glanced up to see the plane burning fiercely as it spun towards the ground. He landed in the midst of a cluster of Thai villagers, who offered him water. Twenty minutes later he was rescued by a Marine helicopter, which had already retrieved the B-52’s six crew members.

  On Linebacker II’s first night, Richard Jones counted fifty-six SAMs fired at his formation, and John Filmore Graham saw thirty during an attack on Hanoi’s Phuc Yen airfield. Major Don Aldridge, flying as a deputy airborne controller, scribbled impressions of his glimpses of the night sky: ‘Started to see [flak] … most of it was around 20–25 thousand feet, but fairly heavy. MiG activity west of Hanoi, but were being engaged by F-4s. Starting seeing SAM firings … some 122mm unguided rockets … Gunner reports … cell moving as one aircraft. SAMs getting pretty thick but most missing by at least one-half mile … 120 seconds to go – the two SAMs at one o’clock are well off target – exploded high about one half-mile horizontal range … SAMs over the aircraft – I can see the exhaust – they both explode above … then straight and level, on bomb run heading … 31 SAMs fired at Green Cell.’

  After Captain John Alward’s B-52 suffered severe damage from a missile near-miss, with two engines dead and two more ailing he headed south across the DMZ towards Danang, which was close but had a desperately short runway for a big, crippled bomber. He approached in poor weather, to find the base suffering a communist mortar and rocket attack. Alward, a relatively inexperienced pilot, discussed with the crew whether to bail out over the sea. They agreed to try a landing, but came in fast. When the co-pilot pulled the lever to activate their tail drag chute, however, nothing happened: its cable was cut. Surging along the runway towards a minefield, Alward clawed the throttles and dragged the huge plane back into the air. They circled for a second approach, which was miraculously successful.

  The Americans discerned a clear pattern of competence and otherwise among enemy gunners and SAM teams. One Vietnamese missile battalion was mocked as ‘F Troop’, after the TV comedy show, because of its low success rate. By contrast another, south-west of Hanoi, was dubbed ‘Killer Site VN-549’, and became the target of repeated attempts to knock it out. North Vietnam’s MiG fighters often took up station at a safe distance alongside the B-52s: the Americans grasped that they were ‘playing traffic cops for the SAMs’ – relaying fixes on the bombers’ altitudes to enable missile crews on the ground to fire even without achieving a radar lock. To many pilots the flak was even more frightening than the missiles, because crew could not see shells until they exploded: North Vietnamese 100mm guns were effective above thirty thousand feet.

  Five miles below, a Russian anti-aircraft adviser, twenty-one-year-old Lt. Valery Miroshnichenko, said: ‘We were watching Liberation, a movie about World War II brought in by the mobile cinema. One minute tanks were firing on the screen, the next minute explosions started outside too. We wondered if there was a thunderstorm. Then we looked up and saw B-52s: we saw one aircraft falling, flaming like a torch.’ The North Vietnamese today refer to the December 1972 bombing as ‘the Dienbienphu of the air’, meaning that they claim to have inflicted a decisive defeat on the USAF. The campaign followed a bad time earlier in the year, when the failures of missile batteries caused a slump in their crews’ morale. One man wrote: ‘Some people whispered that we were incompetent and impotent,’ in the face of intensified American electronic counter-measures.

  One day that autumn Lt. Nguyen Kien Dinh had just launched two SAMs towards a US aircraft at a range of six miles ‘when I heard somebody shout “Watch out, there’s a Shrike!”’ The battalion commander rejected their urgings to reduce power on their own tracking radar, to lower its profile and thus vulnerability. Kien wrote: ‘Two or three seconds later a shattering explosion blew me against my screen. When I turned around I saw that the van’s door had been blasted open, and the air was full of smoke and dust. Almost everybody in the guidance van had been wounded, and our equipment was wrecked.’ In the site’s generator truck, Kien found a comrade slumped motionless at his controls. ‘I called to him but he did not respond. His body was limp and a few drops of blood were visible on his chest. A small fragment of metal from the Shrike had pierced his heart.’ It was the first time in six years’ service that Kien had seen a man die, and he was shocked – also filled with remorse, because he felt that his team had blundered.

  The real US objective in the Christmas attacks was not material but moral: planners sought to cause maximum distress to the population by striking at night – and succeeded. Late on 18 December, Kien slumped exhausted onto his mat ‘hoping for a few minutes’ rest to regain my strength’ after engaging with two waves of B-52s. He had scarcely closed his eyes when a new alert came – this time prompted by incoming F-111s. When they had gone, once again Kien lay wearily down, only to hear just before 0400 on the 19th that a third wave of B-52s was approaching, their jamming bands swamping North Vietnamese screens. By the time a chilly dawn came, the exhausted missile crews ate breakfast disconsolately: their regiment had engaged six waves of US aircraft, and failed to shoot down one, though other units claimed three B-52s. By the early morning of 21 December ‘we had endured four or five combat alerts and everyone was exhausted by lack of sleep and nervous strain. When we heard the gong clanging everyone threw off blankets, pulled on shoes and ran to his action station in defiance of freezing cold’: a few days later, cluster bombs dropped by a US F-4 wiped out his battery.

  In the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, among the American PoWs the sound of exploding bombs prompted extraordinary scenes of jubilation. Prisoners leapt up and down and applauded, causing a bewildered guard to challenge Col. Robinson Risner: ‘But these planes are trying to kill you.’ The prisoner replied defiantly: ‘No they’re not, they’re trying to kill you!’

  As for civilians, Nguyen Thanh Binh lived many miles east of Hanoi, but during Linebacker she often stood with a host of others, gazing on the distant horizon, which seemed to them to resemble ‘an erupting volcano’ as wave upon wave of bombers discharged their loads. The young woman said: ‘B-52s seemed to cover the sky, to blot out the moon,’ a description that was surely figurative, since the planes were far too high to be visible in darkness to those who peered upwards, or crouched in ill-lit shelters. All that was certain was that the bombing prompted fear and bitterness among millions of Le Duan’s people.

  Miles above, American EWOs and radar navigators in their ‘black holes’ glimpsed nothing of cities and villages, prison complexes and SAM sites. They inhabited a weird universe, with a view only through radar scopes. Navigator Phil Blaufuss said enemy fire was ‘an evil [you] had to ignore … when you’re … stuck in the belly of an airplane with no windows to see all the hell that’s breaking loose, no guns to shoot, no ECM equipment to jam with, and no control column or throttle to maneuver’. Yet for an electronic-warfare officer it was a bleak experience to watch his aircraft’s potential SAM-2 nemesis approach as a dot on the scope. One such, Major Allen Johnson, just had time to cry out ‘They’ve got us!’ before a violent explosion fatally crippled the aircraft and killed him.
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  All young men flying over enemy territory are sustained by training and discipline; they solace each other with shots of bravado. Radar navigator Dick Parrish recalled a night when his pilot glimpsed repeated SAMs, together with a fireball that must have been created by an exploding B-52. They took drastic evasive action when the gunner sighted two missile traces on his radar scope. Just as they began to feel a little safer, approaching Laos on the run back to U-Tapao, from the cockpit they saw another big explosion on the ground, almost certainly an American aircraft. Parrish said later: ‘All of the sightings the pilot made, plus what we had experienced on our own, sort of got to us, I think. As we headed on down-country and towards the water, I tried to break the ice with some weak joke. Dick Enkler, our EWO, had been staring at all that wild stuff on his scope … He promptly chewed on me for trying to act happy … Then I got to thinking, “What the heck. We did the job and we’re out in one piece. I think there’s plenty to be happy about.”’

  John Allen and his crew used to sing along to the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Listen to the Music’, patched over the intercom, in sheer relief as they headed east over the Pacific, back towards Andersen. Yet no mission was over until it was over. Ken Simpson, a navigator, was once sent back by his pilot to investigate a warning light indicating a bomb hung up, just before they were due to land back at base. Finding the bomb bay clear, he crawled into the wheel well, plugged in his intercom cable and reported the good news. This prompted the pilot to lower the landing gear, leaving the parachuteless Simpson gazing in terror upon the early-morning sun glinting on the Gulf of Thailand, far below. He somehow clung on until the pilot was persuaded to retract the gear again, enabling the shaken airman to regain his seat.