C-130 Hercules

by Martin W Bowman

  3 A Trash Hauler in Vietnam; Memoir of Four Tactical Airlift Tours, 1965-1968.

  4 1st Lieutenant Ragland had been shot down over Korea in November 1951by a Soviet Ace pilot, Colonel Yevgeny Pepelyayev in his MiG-15, forcing Ragland to bail out of his F-86E. Prior to his shoot down, Ragland had shot down a Soviet MiG flown by Lieutenant Alfey Dostoievsky and he and Lieutenant Kenneth Chandler had performed an audacious strike against North Korean airbase of Uiju ten days earlier, on 18 November, destroying four MiGs on the ground). He was a PoW in the Pyok-Dong prison camp for two years.

  5 John Gargus was awarded the Silver Star. In part, his citation said: ‘In the face of heavy enemy anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile fire, Major Gargus skilfully managed all navigational systems and equipment to insure precise navigation and accurate timing on target which were essential for completion of this dangerous mission. As a result of Major Gargus’ heroic efforts, the force arrived at Sơn Tây without incident, the enemy ground forces were completely surprised and the mission was successfully completed.’

  6 US intelligence may have identified this the day before the raid, but the raid was sent anyway. Three commando teams landed at the camp: The first team intentionally crash landed a helicopter right in the middle of the camp to get into position as quickly as possible. The second landed 400 metres away by accident, at what turned out to be a base for Russian and Chinese military advisers. The team attacked the headquarters and killed an estimated more than 100 people at the base. The third team landed outside the main complex and assisted in securing the facility. The raid succeeded completely at its technical objective of seizing control of the camp. There were no prisoners present to rescue, though 26 minutes after the first helicopter intentionally crash landed all US commandoes were recovered and flying home. One US soldier was wounded in the leg and one broke his ankle in the intentional crash landing. An unknown number of North Việtnamese soldiers were killed in the raid. The unsuccessful mission did bring an ironic success for Simons and his troops. The attempt to rescue prisoners brought the world’s attention to the inhumane treatment of the American PoWs. The raid on Sơn Tây altered how the North Việtnamese housed, treated and interacted with the foreign prisoners. Some have questioned whether the real intention of the raid was dual purpose and in addition to the attempted rescues of PoWs was designed to send a message to the Russians and the Chinese assisting the Việtnamese.

  7 Caribou C-7B 62-4161 of the 459 TAS, 483 TAW at Phú Cat was approaching the Đức Phổ Special Forces camp, about 20 miles south of Quảng Ngai on 3 August 1967 when it was hit by a shell from a US Army 155mm howitzer. The aircraft had flown into the line of fire and the shell blew off its entire rear fuselage and tail section. Captains Alan Eugene Hendrickson and John Dudley Wiley and Tech Sergeant Zane Aubry Carter were killed.

  8 F-4D 65-0637 in the 12th TFW at Phủ Cát crewed by Captain Hedditch and 1st Lieutenant T. McLaughlin was taking part in a ‘Steel Tiger’ night mission in southern Laos. Hedditch was making his third pass on a target near Ban Tampanko [in Savannakhet Province, Laos] when his aircraft was struck by ground fire. Both crew ejected successfully and were rescued by a USAF helicopter. Vietnam Air Losses by Chris Hobson (Midland Publishing 2001).

  9 Once Xuân Lộc fell on 21 April 1975, the PVN battled with the last remaining elements of III Corp Armoured Task Force, remnants of the 18th Infantry Division and depleted ARVN Marine, Airborne and Ranger Battalions in a fighting retreat that lasted nine days, until they reached Sàigòn and PVN armoured columns crashed throughout the gates of South Việtnam’s Presidential Palace on 30 April 1975, effectively ending the war.

  10 The merchant ship’s crew, whose seizure at sea had prompted the US attack, had been released in good health, unknown to the US Marines or the US command of the operation before they attacked. Nevertheless, the Marines boarded and recaptured the ship anchored offshore a Cambodian island, finding it empty. It was the only known engagement between US ground forces and the Khmer Rouge.

  11 The incident took place between the Kingdom of Cambodia and the US less than a month after the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital Phnom Penh ousting the US backed Khmer Republic. It was the last official battle of the Việtnam War. The names of the Americans killed, as well as those of three US Marines who were left behind on the island of Koh Tang after the battle and were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge, are the last names on the Việtnam Veterans Memorial.

  12 On 19 June 1968 Operation ‘Charlie’, the final evacuation and destruction of the Khê Sanh Combat Base began. The Marines withdrew all salvageable material and destroyed everything else. The NVA continued shelling the base and on 1 July launched a company-sized infantry attack against its perimeter. On 9 July the flag of the Việt Công was set up at Ta Con (Khê Sanh) airfield. On 13 July Hồ Chi Minh sent a message to the soldiers of the Route 9 - Khê Sanh Front affirming their victory at Khê Sanh. It was the first time in the war that the Americans abandoned a major combat base because of enemy pressure.

  13 The ‘Raven’ Forward Air Controllers, also known as ‘The Ravens’, were fighter pilots used for forward air control in a covert operation in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency in Laos. The Ravens provided direction for most of the air strikes against communist Pathet Lao targets and People’s Army of Việtnam’s infiltrators in support of the Laotian Hmong guerrilla army.

  14 On the night of 14 April three 374th crews were briefed for airdrop missions over An Lôc the next morning. After an initial mission delay, the three C-130Es took off from Tân Sơn Nhầt for the short flight to An Lôc. The first crew over the DZ, took hits. The second crew elected to approach the drop zone from a different direction.

  15 Although the two C-130 crews, including one with Iosue, Brya and Highley, thought they identified the drop zone, it turned out that they had been given the wrong coordinates and the loads were not recovered.

  16 Vietnam Air Losses by Chris Hobson (Midland Publishing 2001).

  17 ‘Sp4 Shearer was the Huey crew member that had the job of getting out of the Huey to make a close up visual of the wreckage. I found out much later that he was positive he would find a group of mangled bodies in the wreckage and not knowing the fate of the survivors was something that was to haunt him for 32 years, which is when we met at the coffee shop of Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, in 2004.’

  18 One of the eight districts of the Kampot Province, at the eastern part bordering Việtnam to the east, Banteay Meas District to the north, Kep Province to the west and the Gulf of Thailand to the south.

  19 The Strela-2 system along with the more advanced Strela-2M it achieved 204 hits out of 589 firings against US aircraft between 1972 and 1975 according to Russian sources.

  20 See Vietnam Air Losses by Chris Hobson (Midland Publishing 2001).

  Chapter Five

  Operation ‘Dragon Rouge’

  In mid-November 1964 the C-130Es and crews of the Tactical Air Command rotational squadron from Pope AFB, North Carolina were called back to their temporary duty base at Évreux-Fauville AB, France. The crews were told simply to go to their barracks and get some rest, because something big was brewing. On Tuesday evening, 17 November the crews were told to report to the operations room on the Margarite where the planes were deployed. The crews were told to rig seats and take-off. Just before take-off, each navigator was given a Manila envelope and instructed not to open it until their airplane had reached 2,000 feet and there were no mechanical problems to make them turn back. When the crews opened the envelopes, they learned they were going to Kleine Brogel Air Base in the municipality Peer outside Brussels. When they got to Kleine Brogel each plane loaded with paratroopers wearing red berets and then took off again after being handed another envelope. This time it told them to head south for Morón Air Base in southern Spain, 35 miles southeast of the city of Seville. At Morón the navigators went into Base Operations where they were given maps and instructions for the next leg o
f their flight, to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, where they arrived eighteen hours after leaving France. By this time everyone knew they were on their way to Africa, but first there was a time of ‘hurry up and wait’ on secluded Ascension, where the rescue force was out of sight of the prying eyes of the world. While they waited, the American airmen and Belgian paras got to know each other and began working out procedures to drop the Belgians.

  On Sunday before Thanksgiving the force left Ascension and flew across the Atlantic and much of Africa to Kamina, an airfield in the southern Congo. There the crews and paratroopers waited again. By this time all hopes of negotiation had vanished and that evening the American and Belgian commanders were told to launch Operation ‘Dragon Rouge’.

  ‘Red Dragon’ was one of the most dramatic military missions undertaken during the Cold War. It involved a flight of more than 4,000 miles by USAF C-130s carrying paratroopers of the crack Belgian 1st ParaCommando to rescue hostages who had been held for more than three months in the Congolese city of Stanleyville. The former Belgian Colony of Congo (now Zaire) was granted independence in 1960 and almost immediately became the site of chaos. When the crisis ended in early 1964, a new one broke out as Congolese rebels calling themselves ‘Simba’ rebelled against the government. The Congolese government turned to the US for help. In response, the US Strike Command sent JTF LEO, a task force made up of a detachment of C-130s, communications personnel and 82nd Airborne security team to Leopoldville. By early August 1964 the Congolese, with the help of the LEO force and a group of white mercenaries led by Major Mike Hoare was making headway against the ‘Simbas’. In retaliation, the ‘Simbas’ began taking hostages of the whites in areas under their control. They took them to Stanleyville and placed them under guard in the Victoria Hotel. In Washington and Brussels the United States and Belgium were hard at work trying to come up with a rescue plan. Several ideas were considered and discarded, while attempts at negotiating with the Simbas failed - no one could be found to negotiate with!

  Sam McGowan, who flew C-130s as a loadmaster with the USAF in Việtnam and authored The C-130 Hercules Tactical Aircraft Missions, 1956-1975.

  In the early hours of 23 November 1964 five C-130Es took off from Kamina, each with 64 Belgian Red Berets in full combat gear seated on the red nylon troop seats in its cargo compartment. Behind the assault force came seven more Herks, with ‘Chalk 12’ configured as a hospital ship. The C-130Es flew north at high altitude and then dropped down to treetop altitudes to follow the Congo River as they neared the city of Stanleyville. At exactly 0600 hours on the morning of 24 November, as the sun was breaking over the horizon out of the African Veldt in the former Belgian colony of Congo, the five Hercules transports appeared only 700 feet above the Sabena Simi-Simi airport on the outskirts of the city of Stanleyville. A CIA A-26 Invader flown by a Cuban mercenary pilot made a strafing pass over the airport. Right behind the A-26 the first C-130 roared low over the runway. As the first Hercules, with ‘US Air Force’ stencilled in large block letters along the fuselage, approached a narrow swath of grass alongside the airport’s main runway, navigator First Lieutenant John Coble called out ‘Green Light’ over the aircraft’s intercom. Immediately, the co-pilot, Captain Robert Kitchen, reached down to the panel by his right armrest and flipped the paratrooper jump lights from red to green. As the lights in the cargo compartment changed from the red ‘Prepare to jump’ signal to green for ‘Go,’ 50-year old Colonel Pierre Charles Laurent, commander of Belgium’s crack Régiment Para-Commando, leaped out into the cool, moist dawn air, followed by 64 other troopers spilling from the doors on either side of the airplane into the African skies. Within seconds, 310 paratroopers were in the air and then landing on the strip of grass alongside the runway. The five jump planes came around for another pass to drop the jumpmasters and bundles of equipment. As the planes came off the drop zone, they began taking fire from a .50-calibre machinegun. After dropping the troops, ‘Chalks Two’ to ‘Five’ left the area for Leopoldville, where they were to refuel and stand-by. ‘Chalk One’, carrying the C-130 mission commander, Colonel Burgess Gradwell and flown by Captain Huey Long of the 777th TCS, orbited over the airfield until they were hit by several heavy shells that knocked out hydraulics. Long pointed the battle-damaged airplane toward Leopoldville.

  C-130E 62-1816, one of fourteen Hercules were used to fly one of the fourteen C-130 crews that flew part of the 500 Belgian paratroopers to the Belgian Congo to quell a native uprising. Sergeant Norman Page, mechanic and flight engineer (front row, left, squatting) recalled: ‘We dropped the paratroopers at 500 feet. Their chutes popped open as their feet hit the ground. The Belgian commander told me, ‘We’re down here to fight. Drop them low so they hit the ground fast. Two days later the troopers won their little skirmish and we flew back in and picked them up. We flew them back to Leopoldville. When we landed we found our airplane was full of bullet holes; one through a wing tank. One of our guys stuffed a big rag in the hole and plugged it with a piece of broom stick. We flew home with it like that. When you’re in a war zone you do funny things.’ A few days later Page and his crew were ordered to fly to Stanleyville and rescue Dr. Paul Carlson, a California physician (pictured on the front covers of Time and Life magazines) who worked his wonders treating Congo natives. ‘We found out Dr. Carlson and 28 of his nurses had been murdered two days earlier and their remains wrapped up in blankets lying on the ground’. The C-130s flew the corpses out.

  Events of Thanksgiving week of 1964 in Africa were the direct results of years of political unrest in the Congo, which began within days of Belgium’s declaration of Congolese independence in 1960. An outbreak of fighting in the newly independent country led to United Nations intervention as USAF transports under the control of the 322nd Air Division, US Air Force Europe (USAFE), airlifted a peacekeeping team made up of military personnel from several nations to Leopoldville. For three years, the UN peacekeeping force remained in the Congo, supported by C-130E and Fairchild C-124 cargo planes. Within weeks of the withdrawal of the UN force in the summer of 1964, fighting again broke out in the Congo. Christophe Gbenye, a Marxist who declared himself ‘President of the Congo,’ led a rebellion of fierce tribesmen calling themselves Simbas - ‘lions’ in Swahili. The rebels soon captured large sections of the northern half of the country, leading foreign governments, including those of the United States and Belgium, to urge their citizens to flee the threatened areas.

  To combat the rebellion, 45-year old Congolese President Moïse Kapenda Tshombe recruited 44-year old Major Michael Hoare. a fiery Irish mercenary leader known for military activities in Africa (and his failed attempt to conduct a coup d’état in the Seychelles in 1978) and gave him authority to raise a mercenary army of white Africans to assist the black Congolese army. Hoare would become a legend in the world of the professional soldier; during World War II he had fought in Burma with Brigadier General Orde Wingate and then became a professional soldier after that conflict. With his reputation already made from leading an earlier band during the Katangan secessionist revolt - in which Tshombe had been a participant - Hoare had no trouble training a 300-man unit of mostly South African ‘mercs’ that he dubbed 5 Commando. Hoare, often called ‘Mad Mike’ by those who knew him, enforced only two rules among his men - that they shaved and refrained from drinking before battle. Aside from that, he ‘cared not a whit’ what they did.

  Tshombe also turned to the United States for assistance. Lessons from World War II, Korea and the French Indochina War indicated that air support and air transportation were crucial for combating a large rebel force. President Lyndon Johnson responded to Tshombe’s request for aid by sending Joint Task Force (JTF) Leo, a United States Strike Command task force consisting primarily of three Tactical Air Command C-130s and support personnel, to Leopoldville. The transports were from the 464th Troop Carrier Wing, based at tiny Pope Air Force Base (AFB), adjacent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. A platoon of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Divis
ion provided protection for the C-130s while they were on the ground at remote African airstrips. A fourth C-130 was part of Leo, a ‘Talking Bird’ communications package that allowed longrange radio communications between the task force and Strike Command headquarters at McDill AFB as well as the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House.

  Another aspect of US aid was a mercenary air force made up of North American T-28 Trojans and Douglas B-26 Intruders flown by Cuban expatriate pilots in the employ of a civilian corporation under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency. The Congolese air force consisted primarily of World War II-vintage North American T-6 trainers, which, like the Cuban-flown T-28s, had been converted into attack planes.

  In August the Simbas captured the city of Stanleyville with its large concentration of Europeans and Americans. For a time the whites were treated relatively well. But later, with additional American-supplied firepower and airlift support, the Congolese army made steady gains against the rebel forces. As the Simbas saw the tide begin to turn against them, their radio station in Stanleyville began denouncing the United States, accusing it of sending combat troops to aid the government forces. Rebel hostility caused fear for the safety of whites in rebel-held territory, especially after news of atrocities performed by the revels against their own people reached the outside world.

  While the whites were under a semblance of protection by the rebels, Stanleyville’s black residents were not and a reign of terror began as the Simbas systematically tortured and killed prominent Congolese. Then, evidently realizing that the whites in their territory could serve as bargaining chips, the rebels began taking hostages. On 5 September US Consul Michael Hoyt was taken into custody, along with other members of the consulate staff and thrown into the city’s Central Prison. Other whites were seized. Some were thrown into the prison with the Americans, while others were held in the Victoria Hotel. Over the next two months the Simbas arrested foreigners from as many as twenty countries, placing them under custody in hotels, prisons and military bases. The rebels began making threats that the hostages would be killed if the United States did not withdraw its support for the Congolese government.