One of the most difficult restrictions to understand was the one put upon our troops where the SAM sites started rearing their ugly heads in North Vietnam. The sites look like nothing else in this world, and it did not take a great deal of smarts to figure what they were up to. In that the fighter pilots felt most personally involved with these budding sites, and in that they knew the end product was meant for them alone, they were most anxious to dispatch them the moment they started to appear up North. What could be more logical to a stupid fighter pilot than to knock these potentially dangerous developments off the face of the earth as soon as they appeared? But we obviously did not understand the big picture. We did not visualize the merit of allowing the free movement of construction equipment and people as they scratched out the sites and stockpiled the equipment and missiles. We failed to see the logic of allowing them complete freedom until the first six sites were finished and firable before they became targets. We also failed to see why the next sites entering the construction phase got the same immunity as the first six even after the first six were firing. Perhaps I should be more impressed with the importance of protecting blond-haired, blue-eyed missile experts shooting at me. Sorry—I’m not. But, protected they were, and the direct order was out that you would not attack these sites. Period. That’s it. No questions please.
The man I am discussing accepted these dictates with the same degree of distaste as many others, but they were the rule. He was on a late afternoon mission way up North and things got hot and heavy as usual during his bomb run. As he pulled off the run, he came under exceptionally heavy fire and as he horsed his Thud to avoid this unexpected fury, he fojind himself looking into the middle of one of the six partially completed sites. The thing was full of construction equipment and people and they were scurrying about their task of getting the defense position ready to shoot at him with the least possible delay. The delay would probably not be too great, as the site had missiles already on hand. The supporting guns were well ahead of schedule and they were already in good positions that had allowed them to cover him as he came off the target, and they were still in fact giving him fits. Those following him would get the same welcome and the chances of losing people were high.
This was the time for action and he plugged in the burner, pulled his Thud up and over the top and attacked the site with his cannon, the only armament he had left. He shot up a storm. He blew up construction gear that burst into flame. He ripped open SAM fire-control gear that would never be recovered to fire at us. He ignited SAMs that raced about the area like fiery snakes gone wild and chasing their masters, and he shot the guns and the gunners who were shooting at him.
When he got back to the base and went through his debriefing chores, he was asked the routine question—did you see anything unusual? “You bet your ass I did,” he replied, and gave them the full scoop on his destruction of the SAM site, which promptly entered the mechanized reporting system that takes the information to everyone in the government who makes more than forty cents an hour. The difference between debriefing on the late mission and briefing on the early, early mission is only a few hours and he had himself set to go on the first one in the morning as the target was hot and he was the natural one to lead. He had a quick bite of food, a couple of hours of sleep and went back to work.
He got off on schedule the next morning, long before the sun popped into view. He was over the target area of Hanoi before the frenzied telephone calls came cascading down the line of command. Instructions were that he was to be immediately grounded, and court-martial charges were to be prepared against him for striking an unauthorized target. It was academic. By the time the telephone was hung up and confused and bewildered supervisors at wing level tried to figure out what to do, he had been shot down. Ironic? It’s more than that, it’s sick.
It’s sick because we handcuff ourselves on tactical details. First, we oversupervise and seem to feel that four-star generals have to be flight leaders and dictate the details of handling a type of machinery they have never known. Second, we have lost all sense of flexibility, and we ignore tactical surprise by insisting on repeated attacks without imagination. Third, our intelligence, and the interpretation and communication of that intelligence, is back in the Stone Age. Fourth, our conventional munitions are little improved over 1941 and those who insist on dictating the ultimate detail of their selection, fuzing and delivery do not understand or appreciate their own dictates. (This, of course, assumes that they have adequate quantities and varieties on hand to be selective.) Fifth, we have not advanced far enough in the field of meteorology to tell what we will have over the homedrome an hour from now. Our degree of accuracy on vital details like bombing winds over the target is abominable. Sixth, many of our high-level people refuse to listen to constructive criticism from people doing the job. The refusal to listen to anything that is not complimentary to our system is costing us people and machines. In defense of my tirade, I hasten to add that pilots do miss, but when they do, it is usually because there is too much stacked up against them. They certainly don’t miss from lack of desire, because when it is your head that is on the block, you spare no physical effort to do the job properly, knowing that if you don’t, you will be back to try again.
Unfortunately, hit or miss, we often find ourselves repeatedly fragged against targets that have already been bombed into insignificance except for the defenses that are left, and reinforced, to capitalize on our pattern of beating regular paths to each new target released from the “Restricted” list.
They figure if the Americans want to keep coming back here again and again, they might as well move in all the guns they can and get as many of us as possible. This is not a new approach to the battle between aircraft and ground defenses, and it usually resolves in favor of the defenses. The big advantage of fighter aircraft involved in an air-to-ground struggle is the element of surprise, and the ability of the aircraft to be flexible in the attack. When you take these factors away from the airman, you put him in a position of dueling a fixed and stable platform from a rapidly moving and unstable platform, and most of the odds go to the guns. A good gun defense is made up of several mutually supporting guns or groups of guns. It is not like being able to roll in and pick one specific, well-defined spot on the ground and saying, “If I can hit that: spot, I can silence the guns.” You have to look for the optimum spot to cover all the guns in the complex and hope that your ordnance will get maximum coverage for you, or else you have to pick the most formidable single gun or group of guns and go after them while their buddies have at you. Even if you are able to cover a fair number of guns, all the guns for miles around can rapidly identify your intended routes of attack and they are quick to respond to cover your ingress and egress.
The ideal way to beat these forces is to hit each defense only once, get the job done and get out. If we were perfect all the way, as regards ordnance available, fuzing utilized, intelligence, weather, tactics, targeting and delivery, this would be possible. It does not happen too often, and when we get a strike that works out like that, the joy level is high. If you do not put all the bombs exactly where they belong—and there are many who have never been there who do not accept the fact that there are reasons why this can happen—you have to go back. If the bomb damage assessment by one of the many reconnaissance vehicles available does not satisfy all concerned as to what you saw or claimed, back you go. Perhaps the greatest source of irritation along this line is the interpretation of the photos the reconnaissance aircraft bring back. You can have as many assessments of damage as you have viewers of the pictures. Unfortunately, the groups known as photo interpreters are not always of the highest level of skill or experience, and their evaluation quite often does not agree with that of the men doing the work. I have bombed, and seen my troops bomb, on specific targets where I have watched the bombs pour in and seen the target blow up, with walls of structures flying across the area, only to be fragged right back into the same place because the film didn�
��t look like that to the lieutenant who read it way back up the line. I have gone back on these targets and lost good people and machines while doing so, and found them just as I expected, smashed. But who listens to a stupid fighter pilot?
But the photo guys are sometimes quite correct. If the complex is large enough, they can sometimes tell what percentage of the structures are still standing and how effective the complex may still be. The problem then is with those overzealous to the point that they want each and every outhouse flattened. This you can do, eventually, but what is it worth, if the complex is already broken, to get that last little 20-foot by 20-foot outhouse? I don’t think it’s worth an aircraft or a guy, yet how many of each have the outhouses cost us? This is where the defenses take us apart little by little. They know where we can bomb and where we can’t. Thus, the forbidden areas can be less heavily defended, as long as the enemy can recall their deployed defenses at will. When they look at the areas we hit, their problem then becomes only one of where to put the most emphasis. Their answer is quite simple. Put them where the Americans struck yesterday. They know we will be back, and they know we will be back again, probably from the same direction at the same time of day and with the same number of aircraft. They move the guns in, and we oblige by providing more gunnery practice and the game compounds while we assume they must be protecting something very valuable, yet our pilots return and say there is nothing there but guns. We back ourselves right into the corner we abhor and wind up dueling fixed gun positions, and then we wonder how we lost so many people and machines on little targets or little pieces of larger targets.
We started this game around Pyongyang in Korea and were amazed at how rough that little rail yard became. Of course, we went the same route everyday and even had canned routes where we would hook around the tracks to the north and come thundering down the tracks like the Kimpo express, at the exact same time each day. We lost our fanny regularly. It would even have been fun to go around the course backward, or at least an hour earlier or later. In North Vietnam we fell into the same trap in a much rougher league, and on a larger scale. The flexibility is just not being utilized and it is costing us.
And what of fuzing on our bombs? This, plus the size of bombs used, is worthy of some consideration. Fuzes accomplish one of three basic things. They set a bomb off just before it hits the ground and the resultant fragmentation and blast destroys targets such as guns sitting on the ground. Another type sets the bombs off the instant they touch the ground and this is effective against personnel or against something relatively light that you want to blow over or collapse. The third type will delay the detonation of the bombs until they have penetrated the surface of the targets and this approach is most effective for blowing up or cratering hard surfaces. The size of the bomb is another factor that weighs heavily on the outcome of a particular mission. In the simplest of terms you can carry several small bombs or a few large bombs. If you are trying to hit a big target hard, the big blast is the answer. If you want coverage, take more of the smaller bombs. Even from this most basic armament discussion, it should be clear that several small bombs that go off the instant they touch a big strong bridge are going to do little more than scar the surface. By the same token, if you drop an instant load on a dirt road, for example, you will sure dust off the area, but there are no pestholes afterward. By the time the dust settles, it is apparent that you might as well have stayed home. Our command mismatching in this segment of our operation has been gross. We have not done our homework properly, and this makes for useless return trips and needless exposure of our resources.
The weatherman can force you to go back to a target several times. The most obvious way is a bum area forecast. When you get one of these and are sent North, only to get within a few miles of the target and then have to return, the frustration index is immense. Perhaps one of the most damaging aspects of this is that you have telegraphed your punch, and the enemy knows what you are after. We get so full of pressure on getting some crumb that might have been released to us that we don’t quit once we get lined up on a course. Needless to say, the enemy is well prepared when we break through those last few miles of marginal weather after we have had him going through dry runs for days ahead of time. But a more subtle weather factor is the prediction of wind direction and velocity in the target area. In a closed-circuit operation like Vietnam, the pilot is not overly concerned with winds en route to the target or winds at 30,000 feet. These winds play a part in the game, but we know where we have to go and about how much of everything it will take to do it. The wind we need is the wind from the point in our dive-bomb run where we punch the release button to the point where the bombs hit the ground. This is the payoff for the whole effort. If you tell that stupid bomb that the wind is going to be 10 knots at his back and that is why you are releasing him pointed toward a place short of his target, the bomb can’t do doodle-doo about it. He falls the same way each time that you release him at a specific speed and in a specific dive angle. Now, if that wind is correct and if the pilot has set his bombsight properly, that bomb has no choice but to crash directly into the target, to be triggered by his fuze. If you dispatch him into a wind that is not what you told him—if it is 10 knots in his face—he can’t possibly do the job for you. Imagine the effect this can have when you are aiming at a 20-foot square building. Wind errors like this are not uncommon, nor are they due to a lack of desire to do the job right on the part of the weathermen. They simply are not prepared to give accurate winds over a strange spot on the ground. Each hill produces its own eddies and under our present degree of understanding our bombing winds are just not good enough.
We went to the big steel mill one day with a wind that was forecast out of the south at 20 knots, and that is a fairly tough wind to compete with in the solution of the bombing problem. My assigned portion of the complex was the northernmost of three large buildings whose long axis faced almost due east and west. To hit my target, with the reported winds, I had to displace my aiming point to the south of the building, or into the wind. My run was a good one and the sight picture as I aimed and pressed the bomb release button was just what I wanted. We found out from pilot reports that the bombs got a surprise. The wind was 20 knots all right, but it was from due north, not from due south. Fortunately for my ego, Ho Chi Minh had the foresight to slide the southernmost of those three buildings right under my two 3,000-pound bombs and I clobbered it, preserving my accuracy record—no thanks to the weatherman.
It was such a target, refragged through a combination of these factors, that set the stage for a story about one of our older warhorses. As one of our more venerated heads, he was flying in the number three spot on one of our nastier assignments when we returned for about our tenth strike on a hot little railroad and bridge area. The place had claimed many of our Thuds and people, and the claims were valid. The place was hot to start with, and as we returned time after time, the North Vietnamese figured they could make the best of a good thing by moving more guns into the area, which they promptly did. Someone figured it was worthy of another strike. We hadn’t thought so when it gobbled up five Thuds over a couple of days from the Avis wing, and we hadn’t thought so a few days ago when we had been there, but we were on the way back. On the most recent one, I had been leading the wing and our warhorse had been leading one of the other flights. We had split just before the target and as I came off target, SAM appeared in two flights of two. The first two went between my flight and his and turned his number two man, one of our fine young captains, into three long stringy globs of flame and junk that seemed to stop and hang over the target like a grotesque oriental lantern. The second two SAMs goofed and hugged the deck. They -went out of sight, in perfect formation only a few hundred feet above the ground, accelerating to full speed in a wild chase to the northeast and the Chicom (Chinese Communist) border—but none of us were there. I’ve got that picture locked in my memory and would love to be able to paint it.
I could tell from the tran
smissions within his flight that the old warhorse would much rather have been up there in the number one spot. We entered, did the job, faced the problems, and suddenly were on the egress route. Everyone was so tense that anything different that had happened would have been welcome. Halfway back to the water, he blurted out in his unmistakable tones, “Lead, if you would kindly slow down a bit, it might be possible for some of us back here to catch up with you and rejoin.”
Lead came back with “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but we’re behind you.”
There was a short pause while the veteran contemplated a suitable reply to fling at the fledgling flight lead he had obviously not followed properly. “Well, in that case we are in good shape,” he retorted.
But he couldn’t win. Number four piped up with “Now that we have that straightened out, three, how about slowing down so I can catch up with you.”
5. The All-American Boy
Every night except Sunday at five o’clock, we had what we called a stand-up briefing. The reason we omitted Sunday was that we liked to have some indicator of time passing, do something different once in a while. So Sunday no stand-up, but every other day at precisely 1700 we launched into a, routine that took thirty to forty-five minutes depending on how formal you wanted to make it. When I first got to the wing, I personally felt that the stand-up was a little too much of a show affair and that we could save some time and effort and still get the job done. Our deputy commander for operations at the time was Col. Aaron J. Bowman, and Bo shared my views. Whenever the boss was not on the scene, Bo or I would run the show, depending on who was available, and we would compete to see who could cut the affair down the most. I managed to get it down to seventeen minutes, by urging everybody on and not tolerating the wandering self-effacing approach. One night when I was still airborne, and the boss was gone, Bo took it and pared it down to fourteen minutes, then, in one super push after that, I got it down to twelve minutes. But it didn’t work. Because the boss was there much of the time and liked a very thorough briefing, both Bo and I gave up the capusle idea and went along with the program.
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