by Orr Kelly
He spotted Myers waving from the ditch near the wreckage of his plane. Fisher assumed Myers was hurt. So as soon as he stopped, he began to unbuckle himself to go to Myers’s aid. But Myers, with a full surge of adrenaline, dashed from his hiding place with a stream of bullets following him and clambered up into the plane. Fisher reached back and pulled Myers into the cockpit headfirst.
The first words from the grateful Myers were: “You dumb SOB, now neither of us will get out of here.”
But Fisher pushed the throttle full forward, and they did get out, flying at treetop level until they gained enough airspeed to climb up through the overcast, away from the enemy guns. Myers later explained that he could see the enemy troops had set a trap for anyone trying to rescue him, and he would have warned them away if he had had any way to communicate.
Fisher became one of five air commandos to receive the Medal of Honor during the war in Southeast Asia.
Fisher’s heroic rescue of Myers came two years after a severe crisis involving both equipment and the morale of air commando crew members.
Beginning in 1963, there was a series of crashes of B-26s and AT-28s that had little or nothing to do with enemy actions. The old planes were simply coming apart, the result of age and the strains of operating fully loaded off rough, bumpy airfields; maximum-performance takeoffs to get above enemy ground fire; and daily dive-bombing missions. To compound the problem, it was not until months after they had begun combat operations in Vietnam that the B-26s were fitted with meters to tell the pilots how much stress they were putting on their wings when pulling out of dive-bombing runs.
One B-26 lost a wing on 16 August 1963. Another crashed a few days later, with the loss of two American and one Vietnamese crew members. That crash was blamed on enemy fire.
Crew members grumbled about “flying garbage cans,” but the danger from continuing to fly the aging planes received little attention until early in 1964, when two incidents brought the issue into public view.
On 11 February 1964, the Air Force arranged an air-power demonstration at Hurlburt and invited the press. During the show, a B-26 lost its left wing and crashed, killing the two crew members.
In May, U.S. News & World Report magazine printed a series of letters written by Capt. Edwin G. Shank, an air commando AT-28 pilot who had been stationed at Soc Trang since November of the prior year. He told of crashes of both B-26s and AT-28s and complained that the World War II aircraft “have been through so many wars and dogfights that they are coming apart.”
Adding strength to Shank’s message was the fact that his letters were printed after his death on 24 March 1964. He and another AT-28 pilot were both killed on the same day in separate accidents when the wings tore off their planes.
The secretary of the Air Force was called to testify before alarmed congressmen. He explained that the planes had undergone intensive rebuilding and testing to be sure that they were safe. However, both the B-26s and AT-28s were taken out of service by the air commandos.
They were replaced by a plane that was to become one of the most reliable workhorses of the conflict: a Korean War-era Navy plane called the Douglas Skyraider. The single-seat Navy version was known as the AD-6, the two-seat model as the AD-5. The Air Force overhauled 150 of the planes at a cost of $123,000 apiece and rechristened the single-seat plane the A-1H and the two-seat model the A-1E. These modified planes were hurried to Vietnam beginning in May 1964 to replace both the AT-28s and the B-26s. It was this kind of plane that Fisher and Myers were flying at A Shau in 1966.
The propeller-driven A-1 was an almost ideal weapon for the work of the air commandos. It had a big twenty-seven-hundred-horsepower engine, a top speed of 350 miles an hour, and a range of twenty-five hundred miles, and it could remain aloft for as long as nine hours, loitering over a threatened outpost waiting for the enemy to make a move. Most important to the pilots, it was a rugged machine, capable of taking a battering from enemy guns and still bringing its pilot back in one piece.
The A-1 quickly picked up the nickname of the Spad—a World War I fighter. It was also known, from its call sign, as Sandy.
While a variety of planes were used by forward air controllers during the course of the war, three planes saw primary service in that role. First came the Cessna 0-1 Bird Dog, a plane first flown by the Army in 1950 and not much different in appearance from the small planes flown in the Burma operation of 1944. It was replaced by the Cessna O-2, an unusual craft with one propeller in the front and the other in the rear of the fuselage. The most effective forward air control aircraft was the OV-10 Bronco, introduced in 1968. It had two engines, carried a pilot and observer, and was armed with four machine guns, with room to carry bombs or marker rockets.
The air commandos also flew another unusual plane, a converted jet trainer known as the A-37 Dragonfly.
Because it was derived from a trainer, the pilots of the powerful F-100, F-4, and F-105 fighter-bombers looked down on the Dragonfly and didn’t consider it a serious warplane. They had a derisive name for it—the Tweetybird—because of the high-pitched sound made by its engines. For the air commandos, however, it was an almost ideal plane: light, maneuverable, easy to maintain, and a real workhorse, providing quick reaction to reports of enemy movement or troops in trouble on the ground.
As the United States adapted old planes to fight this new kind of warfare, the most dramatic success story involved one of the oldest planes in the conflict, the C-47, the same plane that had served the Air Commandos and the Carpetbaggers so well in World War II and their successors in Korea.
CHAPTER 16
Death from the Sky
The C-47 flare ships had been flying for three years when a small outpost in the delta came under attack and called for help. Although the troops on the ground didn’t realize it, they were about to help make history. Responding to their call for help was a new kind of weapon—the gunship.
The defenders were well prepared. They had a large wooden arrow mounted on a swivel with flare pots along the head and shaft. When they heard the sound of the C-47 engines approaching, they swung the arrow in the direction of the attack and lit flares to indicate the distance, with each flare pot indicating one hundred meters.
Normally, the C-47 would drop flares, providing enough light for fighter-bombers to see the men attacking the outpost. But, on this night, the situation was different.
An official Air Force history gives this dramatic account of what happened next:
“Since the gunship was flying blacked out, it could not be seen from the ground. All that could be heard was the drone of its engines—and then a terrible roar as a tongue of fire seemed to burst from the heavens and lick along the ground. Then only the drone of the engines again. As the defenders shifted their arrow to the next target, there was another roar and the tongue of flame again seared its way through the enemy ranks. Still a third burst and the Vietcong fled in terror.
“Never having seen an FC-47 [the designation was soon changed to AC-47] before, the defenders inside the fort were filled with the same fear and awe as the enemy. What was this dreaded monster that breathed fire and destruction upon its foes? They began to gesture wildly toward the sky and scream, ‘Rahng, Rahng,’ Dragon, Dragon. Thus was born Puff, the Magic Dragon, the first of a family of USAF fixed-wing gunships.”
The Air Force fixed-wing gunship—as distinguished from the Army’s helicopter gunship—was one of the most innovative and important new weapons to be introduced during the Vietnam War and certainly the most important in the history of Air Force special operations.
Ironically, this new weapon system began with one of the oldest pieces of machinery still flying—the twin-engine C-47. When the civilian version of the plane first flew on 18 December 1935, it was a technological marvel. But by the time it underwent conversion to the gunship configuration, three decades had passed and the airlines had long since consigned their DC-3s to the junk heap or sold them off to third-world airlines.
Ac
tually, the idea of a fixed-wing gunship was even older than the plane itself, but no one had previously moved the idea from the back-of-the-envelope sketch to the battlefield.
The concept is simple. If a pilot flies in a circle—in what is called a pylon turn—he can keep the tip of his wing pointed at a specific spot on the ground. If a gun is fired along that same line, the bullets will hit the spot on the ground. In 1926 and 1927, 1st Lt. Fred Nelson mounted a .30-caliber machine gun on a World War I-era DH-4 bomber and, using an aiming device fastened to a wing strut, fired accurately at a target on the ground.
The advantages of such a system are obvious. In a fighter-bomber, the pilot makes a strafing run over a target on the ground and must then circle around and come back to make another attack. Since he is passing over the target, most of his bullets fall short or long, and even if he is very skilled, only a few hit the target. But if the pilot of a circling gunship fires accurately, all his bullets hit the target.
The concept was resurrected during World War II but did not get beyond limited experiments.
One of those who pushed the concept toward the end of World War II was a lieutenant in the coast artillery named Gilmour Craig MacDonald. In 1961, by then a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, he resurrected his idea for use in the low-intensity, counterinsurgency type of warfare that was then commanding the attention of President Kennedy and of many in the military.
But it was not until late 1962 that his idea was picked up by Ralph E. Flexman of the Bell Aerosystems Company, who did some tests and pushed the concept within the Air Force.
For a year and a half, a small group of dedicated Air Force officers experimented with the gunship concept. A series of review boards scoffed at the idea and even turned down requests for funds for testing. Several tests were carried out anyway, camouflaged as parts of other test programs. The project, at this time, had the unfortunate name of Tailchaser, accurately reflecting the view of the critics.
In the summer of 1964, a fighter pilot named Ronald W. Terry came across a report on Project Tailchaser and became intrigued by the concept. He had just returned from a trip to Vietnam, where he had spent almost six weeks touring bases in the country, under assignment from the Air Force Systems Command, trying to learn what kind of equipment and tactics were needed in this new kind of warfare. The gunship seemed to him an ideal way to protect isolated hamlets and outposts, operating as a kind of policeman on the beat to move in at the first sign of trouble. Terry volunteered as project pilot for Tailchaser.
An Air Force history of the project summed up the importance of Terry’s involvement this way: “His personality projected a subtle blending of tact and tenacity, self-confidence and openness, intelligence and common sense, and, most significant for the progress of the gunship, an uncommonly convincing salesmanship.”
In September 1964, three rapid-firing miniguns were installed in a C-47 for a test. This combined one of the oldest items in the Air Force inventory with one of the newest. The brand-new electrically driven minigun had six barrels mounted so they rotated about a central axis, rapidly coming into firing position and then moving on. With its six barrels, the Gatling gun—named for Richard Jordan Gatling, who developed a crank-operated predecessor of the machine gun that was used in the Civil War—was capable of firing at the rate of six thousand rounds of 7.62mm bullets a minute, although the gun was fired for only a few seconds at a time. Each 7.62mm projectile is tiny—the same size as the standard NATO cartridge fired by the M14 rifle—and not powerful enough to knock out a hard target, such as a tank. But, rained down on enemy soldiers attacking an outpost, the little bullets were devastating.
In 1964, the United States was still technically at peace despite its growing, toe-in-the-water involvement in Vietnam. And in peacetime, the military habitually makes decisions at a glacial speed, especially when they involve controversy, spending money, and innovation. It is a testament to Terry’s ability as a salesman that he and a colleague, 1st Lt. Edwin Sasaki, managed to wangle an audience with General LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, to argue for a chance to demonstrate what the gunship could do.
LeMay was briefed on 2 November 1964. The presentation by Terry and Sasaki must have been impressive. Many in the Air Force were bitterly opposed to the gunship concept. And even LeMay later expressed his own reservations: “It’s not a very good platform, and you can’t carry the load. You don’t have the range, staying capacity, or anything else. They’re too vulnerable both on the ground and in the air.”
But LeMay was sufficiently impressed to give his approval to modify a C-47 as a gunship and test it in combat in Vietnam.
Exactly a month after the session with LeMay, Terry and a test team arrived in Vietnam. Miniguns were installed in two air commando flare ships. The first daytime combat mission was flown on 15 December. A week later, the gunship was called in to hit a building that a number of Vietcong had been seen running into. When ground forces checked the building, they found twenty-one bodies and reported that the building “looked like a sieve.”
The first night mission was flown on 23–24 December. In quick succession, the plane fired a total of nine thousand rounds, driving attackers away from two outposts west of Can Tho, deep in the delta region.
On a typical mission, the gunship flew in a circle around the target at about three thousand feet. While the crew members in the cargo compartment prepared the guns, the pilot used a simple sight on his side window to tilt the plane so the guns were pointed at the target. When he pressed the trigger, a sheet of flame erupted from the side of the plane, and bullets rained down on the target. The slant range from the plane to the target was about a mile, putting the plane safely outside the range of the rifles and machine guns with which the Vietcong were normally equipped.
At first, the gunships were flown out of Bien Hoa, the original home in Vietnam of the air commandos. Later, they were based at Tan Son Nhut, Da Nang, Pleiku, Nha Trang, and Binh Thuy. The 1st Air Commando Squadron called its planes Puff the Magic Dragon, or, more often, just plain Puff, or the Dragonship. When the 4th Air Commando Squadron was set up and began flying the planes in late 1965, they adopted another call sign: Spooky. A third gunship unit, the 14th Air Commando Squadron (later known as the 3rd Air Commando Squadron), was added in the fall of 1967.
Colonel Charles A. Riley, who flew with the 4th Air Commando Squadron, recalled a typical night for a gunship crew in a memoir written for the ACA Newsletter in 1990.
While flying nighttime alert, his crew received an urgent call to help a fort under attack by a reinforced battalion of Vietcong troops. Riley describes the situation:
“The crew made repeated passes under heavy ground fire, destroying five heavy-mortar positions and a heavy machine gun that was giving us trouble, as well as the fort. Heavy casualties were inflicted upon the Vietcong battalion, which quickly withdrew.
“After landing to rearm and refuel at Binh Thuy, we again assumed airborne alert over the area. During the early morning hours, following another fire support mission, we were called by a downed Army helicopter pilot who was under heavy attack on the ground and in imminent danger of being overrun. We chased the bad guys off and stayed with the crew until daylight, when they were rescued. From dusk until dawn, we had flown all night for a total of over thirteen hours of combat flying.”
Understandably, the gunship quickly became a favorite of the Americans and Vietnamese defending the vulnerable little outposts, often located in remote parts of the country.
Riley recalls meeting several young GIs in a restaurant in Saigon as the soldiers were preparing to return home after a year of combat near the Cambodian border.
“Roy [Capt. Roy White] and I were in civilian clothes, causing one of the GIs to ask where we worked. We replied that we were ‘Spooky’ pilots from the 4th Air Commando Squadron. This brought big smiles of recognition: ‘You guys saved our asses more times than I can count. If it wasn’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be going home.’ Whether w
e were actually ‘those guys’ or not I’m not sure, but it was nice to hear.… After finishing our meal, the waiter informed us that the GIs had paid our bill and left him a big tip.”
The GIs’ enthusiasm for the gunship was not shared by many among the Air Force brass.
General Walter C. Sweeney, Jr., head of the Tactical Air Command when the gunship was first introduced, was one of its most outspoken critics.
“This concept will place a highly vulnerable aircraft in a battlefield environment in which I believe the results will not compensate for the losses of Air Force personnel.…” he said. “We should continue to vigorously oppose the offensive … employment of all such highly vulnerable aircraft.”
Heinie Aderholt got a strong dose of the opposition to the gunship while commanding a group of pilots at Hurlburt in the mid-1960s. He tells what happened:
“The Army requested we put on a demo of the gunships to show their capability. I said, ‘We’re going to knock the Army’s eyes out. We’re going to show them what this gunship will really do.’ We were planning this big show. And I got called in by the commanding general.
“He said, ‘I want you to downplay this operation.’
“I said, ‘Why?’
“He said, ‘The old man, Momyer [Gen. William W. Momyer, at that time commander of the Tactical Air Command], doesn’t like the gunship, doesn’t think it’s good for the Air Force. And he doesn’t want this show to go off as you planned this big deal.’
