Thud Ridge
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1. The Thud
To the men who fought there, the string of small mountains that stretches like a long bony ringer to the north and west of Hanoi is known as Thud Ridge. From Hanoi’s view the ridge must have been a geographical indicator that pointed out the direction from which the attacking fighter-bombers would approach the heartland of North Vietnam. For me, as an attacking fighter pilot, Thud Ridge was one of the few easily identifiable landmarks in the hostile North, marking the route to the modern fighter pilot’s private corner of hell—the fierce defenses and the targets of downtown Hanoi.
Thud Ridge sometimes poked its scrubby peaks through the mist and clouds that hung almost incessantly over the area to tell me the weather would never let me get to my target that day. Sometimes Thud Ridge provided shelter from some of the piercing radar eyes of the enemy as I streaked past its sides, leading my companions as low and as fast as I dared to go. To those of us engaged in this most demanding facet of this most peculiar of all wars, Thud Ridge, once we saw it, always served as a reminder that we were among the privileged few to take part in the grimmest contest yet conceived between sophisticated air and ground machinery and people. This singular piece of real estate is the locale of the statistics that have appeared in many a newspaper, and its slopes and peaks now hold the carcasses of the majority of our aircraft classified as “missing in action.” The F-105, affectionately known to her pilots as the “Thud,” carried the bulk of the load against Hanoi from the very start, and these machines and their pilots daily rechristened Thud Ridge.
Someone must tell the story of Thud Ridge and as there are so few of us who have had the opportunity to tell it from the firsthand vantage point of the seat of a Thud over Hanoi, I feel something resembling a duty to set the story down as I see it. It is more than a duty. It is a desire to give permanence to some of the briefing room jazz that flows so wonderfully from pilot to pilot, never to be registered again except over a cool one in the stag bar or through the medium of a less vivid conversation when two comrades in arms meet again after months or years. It is never quite the same the second or third time around. Those of us who were in this thing all went different ways within a short time after our most personal involvement in fighting and surviving. The rapid changes in surroundings and people either dim or brighten the remembrance of the events. And, oh so often, there is just no time to spend in re-creating the feelings when you meet that old wingman again years later. He is rushing past your life, you are rushing past his, and the chance meeting is never satisfactory. It is sure good to see old so-and-so but—got to run—see you again soon—if you are ever in town, give me a call and the wife and I will have you out to dinner; it just isn’t the same.
I have lived this story day and night for what now seems like most of my conscious life. I entered West Point shortly after I turned seventeen, and after an accelerated course that crammed the normal curriculum plus flying training into an unbelievably compact three years, I pinned my wings and bars on my runic and found myself in the middle of the fascinating world of fighting aircraft and fighter people. I have flown every operational fighter plane the Air Corps, and later the Air Force, has owned, from the P-47 to the F-106—with one exception: I never got to fly the F-94, and by the time I recognized that fact, it was a museum piece. (I understand I did not miss too much.) I have about as many fighter hours as anyone, and as I was fortunate enough to break into the jet set early in 1949, my jet fighter time and experience puts me right on top of that heap too. It all adds up to 216 fighter combat missions, but the sense of accomplishment is tempered by the humility you learn from leading your people and equipment into the caldron of aerial combat.
I have also had a part in helping develop the skills and techniques that have made the jet fighter a formidable weapons system. We started the process in Nevada with the Lockheed F-80 “Shooting Star,” when we reopened the desert gunnery school in 1948. I learned a great deal about precision and about extracting the maximum from man and machine as I led the Air Force acrobatic team, the Thunderbirds, from 1954 through 1957. Every time I was due to move on from that job I managed to wangle a new and faster aircraft from the inventory and accept new challenges that culminated in 1956 with the world’s first supersonic precision acrobatic unit. I reveled in the challenges of making the electronically complex F-106 and her pilots perform with distinction through three windswept, subzero winters in Minot, North Dakota, and I wept when I lost superior people because I had not yet fought hard enough to rid the Air Force of the F-106’s bugaboos, among them the killer ejection seat. (My Air Force career almost terminated during a few emotional shouting matches about this ejection seat hi 1964, but we did clean up the F-106 and for the moment reliability and pilot survival triumphed over sterile and unduly complicated engineering and manufacturing techniques.) I even found minuscule areas of satisfaction in the professional education programs that have led me to a master’s degree in the various military and civilian halls of knowledge, but when I completed the National War College in 1965, I knew that the thing I wanted most was to get back with my fighter guys in the real big league of the air war over North Vietnam.
Surprisingly, this was not the easiest thing to accomplish. There always seems to be someone around who wants to manage your career for you, and while I had been relatively successful in the past in dodging the snares of the personnel specialists intent on saddling me with innocuous jobs, I found it much harder to do as a colonel. There are many, many positions, especially in the Washington area, that are filled by virtue of the colonel rank and with little attention to experience. If you engage in a few casual conversations around Washington, you will find that the productive output from these positions is quite often inversely proportional to the amount of assembled rank and the length of the job title. The Air Force has established a section known as the Colonels’ Assignments Branch and their unrewarding task is to select round colonels to fit all the square boxes on all the organizational charts hung throughout the world. The high-level service schools, such as the National War College, are most lucrative hunting grounds for these personnel specialists, and while many prospective selectees succumb to the headquarters pressure, there are some who fight it. There is, however, no guarantee that the fighter will avoid the assignment that he considers less than an honor, and the career implications demand that the fighter use deftness in the attack lest he offend the one he may wind up being assigned to.
The rationale behind the decision to fight or not is quite simple. Once you have a few years under your belt as a colonel you have to make a basic decision. If your prime goal in life is to become a general officer, your best odds, by far, come from going the big staff route. If you fight to stay with operational command in the action areas of the world you will find yourself less liable for promotion, and recent selections give credence to the thought that the farther you are removed from the battle, the better off you are, at least hi terms of your career. Even in an organization designed around airplanes and people, the support expert and the politician regularly outdistance the combat leader in striding toward the highest-level positions. In my case, while I was still at the National War College, I was interviewed for two positions that were clearly oriented toward the easy, nonopera-tional route to promotion. Early in the school year I managed to wriggle out of an assignment to an administrative position in charge of the General Officers’ Assignment Section. (The incumbent was promoted to brigadier general a few months later.) Two months after that it looked like I was hooked for sure on the second interview, and I received a set of printed orders that told me I was designated as Chief of Plans, Office of Legislative Liaison, Headquarters, United States Air Force. It just did not seem to me that the assignment was the best place for a forty-year-old colonel with a wealth of jet fighter experience and’a burning desire to go and fight another war. My maneuver in personnel banditry took some discreet handling and still almost blew up in my face. But although I came close enough to the new and unwanted
assignment to attend a welcoming cocktail party, I managed to pull off a last-minute switch and the day I graduated from the National War College I headed for Southeast Asia.
I spent my first year there assigned to a fighter wing whose home base was in Japan. Normally a fighter wing can best be described as a unit of up to five thousand people who are all responsive to some need of the three fighter squadrons assigned within that wing. The squadrons are the small, semi-independent units—each owning about twenty fighter aircraft—which actually accomplish the job involving the pilot and the aircraft. With the complexities of current equipment, the squadrons would not survive very long without the direct support of all the specialists within the wing structure. Usually the wing commander, his assistant or vice-commander, and selected members of the wing staff are seasoned fighter pilots who inherit an administrative command by virtue of their position, and who sometimes earn an operational responsibility and respect through their airborne accomplishments.
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 drag
ged 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.