Each attack carrier also embarked two fighter squadrons, F-8 Crusaders for the converted World War II Essex-class and usually two F-4 Phantom outfits for the “big deck” Midway- and Forrestal-class ships. Occasionally an air wing had a squadron of F-8s and one of F-4s.
The Vought F-8 Crusaders were marginally useful for bombing—each plane could carry precisely two bombs. Crusaders were single-seat, single-engine, thousand-knot fighters, pure and simple. The single engine was equipped with an afterburner that gave the light airframe a tremendous acceleration or dash capability. F-8s were armed with four 20-millimeter cannon and could shoot heat-seeking Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.
As the North Vietnamese were about to find out, F-8 Crusaders were excellent MiG killers. Without a radar or computer to help with the interception problem or the necessity to learn the craft of dropping bombs, F-8 pilots practiced dogfighting in the old style: find your enemy with your eyes, maneuver to get behind him, and hammer him with your guns or put a missile up his ass. They were good at it. In the air war over the north, Crusaders shot down nineteen North Vietnamese fighters—sixteen MiG-17s and three MiG-21s—while only three Crusaders fell to MiG-17s. Partly due to problems with the cannon shells jamming in the feed trays to the four 20-millimeter cannon during high-G maneuvers, only four of the F-8 kills were made with guns, the rest with Sidewinders.
The F-8 was difficult to land aboard ships because of the tendency of the wings to lose lift rapidly if optimum airspeed were lost. The small carriers, with their pitching decks and plumes of opaque stack gas, made getting the supersonic fighter aboard even more interesting.
The Crusader set records from its inception—only two years from initial flight to the fleet. More remarkably, as the Navy’s first supersonic fighter, it broke Mach 1 on its maiden test flight in 1955. The long, lean Vought just kept going faster, as the classic F-8E was rated at Mach 1.8, or about twelve hundred miles per hour.
It became a cult machine, flown by aviators with a perverse pride in its astronomical accident rate: the 1,219 Crusaders were involved in 1,106 incidents and accidents. With its speed and range, the F-8 inevitably became a reconnaissance aircraft. Cameras replaced guns in the RF-8A, and in 1957 a Marine major named John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record in one. Navy and Marine F-8s were instrumental in giving President Kennedy vital information during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Many were remanufactured as the RF-8G and remained operational until 1987.
The photo Crusader’s mission profile—low and straight—translated to significant losses. Among naval aircraft it sustained the highest loss rate and by far the highest hit rate by AAA fire. RF-8 pilots also suffered the second-highest killed-or-captured ratio among naval single-seaters, narrowly exceeded by Skyhawks. In fact, the last loss over the Thanh Hoa Bridge was a photo Crusader in 1972.2
The French Navy flew F-8s from 1964 until 1999, ending a remarkable forty-two-year career for this classic carrier jet.
Essex-class carriers also had several attack squadrons embarked, flying either A-1 Skyraiders, a piston-engined, straight-wing, single-seat attack bird that carried guns, bombs, and rockets, or A-4 Skyhawks. Although slow, the A-1 could remain airborne for up to ten hours and deliver a terrific punch. A-1s were used extensively in Korea. The South Vietnamese Air Force would use them throughout the Vietnam War for close air support and the US Air Force for search and rescue in low-threat environments. The Navy was quick to discover that the Skyraider was too low, slow, and vulnerable to survive in the high-threat inferno that North Vietnam was soon to become and removed them from aircraft carriers.
The venerable Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, a single-engine, single-seat jet, was designed to deliver a nuclear weapon carried on a center-line belly station. But if it wasn’t tossing a nuke, the Skyhawk still did a great job with conventional ordnance and rockets, if the load was light enough. The highly maneuverable delta-winged A-4, or Scooter, was small, with a wingspan of only 26.5 feet. It also lacked an afterburner, so with a full load of external weapons aboard, it was slow, often struggling to indicate 250 knots at fifteen thousand feet. Weapons delivery was by visual bombsight, which could double as a gunsight when the two internal 20-millimeter cannon were used for strafing.
The Navy’s newest attack plane, the A-6A Intruder, was just arriving on the big decks of the fleet in the mid-sixties—finally, an attack plane with all-weather capability. The A-6A had twin engines without afterburners mounted inside the fuselage; carried two radars, a search and a track; plus a computer, inertial navigation system (INS), and a Doppler radar that enabled it to fly at tree-top level at night in any weather to find and attack its target. The plane was subsonic because the wing was optimized to carry an enormous load of bombs, up to fifteen thousand pounds of them, plus an ample supply of fuel. A pilot flew the two-seater while a bombardier navigator (BN) operated the electronic suite. The crew sat side by side because the radars in the nose demanded a large nose cross-section. The pilot could also deliver the bombs visually. The Intruder lacked guns, thanks again to the admirals who blithely assumed the day of the gun was over, and although it could carry Sidewinder missiles for self-defense or gun pods on wing racks for strafing, to the best of the authors’ knowledge it never did so during the Vietnam War. With only five hard points—two on each wing and one on the belly—the Intruder’s ability to carry bombs, its raison d’être, would have been drastically reduced with gun pods or Sidewinders.
The Intruder was cutting-edge technology when it was designed in the late 1950s, yet the A-model flown in Vietnam was a severe maintenance hog. Keeping the delicate radars and computer working were tasks that required the patience of Job and a fully stocked maintenance pipeline, which the Navy never had. The computer was so rudimentary that it didn’t even use software—Bill Gates was still in diapers and software hadn’t yet been invented when the computer was designed. The entire program was contained on a rotary drum, much like an antique piano roll, which revolved once every .52 seconds. If the drum froze for any reason, the recommended fix was for the BN to kick the computer, which resided in a pedestal between his legs, in the hope that the impacts would set the drum revolving again. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t.
Nevertheless, the Grumman-built A-6A was a formidable dive-bomber during the daytime, with up to twenty-two five-hundred-pounders under its wings, or fifteen one-thousand pound bombs, or five two-thousand pounders, and, when the system worked, a terrific all-weather day-or-night bomber. In Vietnam the belly station was usually used for a two-thousand-pound drop tank, giving the plane eighteen thousand pounds of fuel for its mission, leaving the two external stations on each wing for ordnance. A better digital suite for the A-6 was on the way, with one solid-state phased-array radar and a state-of-the-art digital computer that rarely failed. This version would be called the A-6E and made its debut in 1971, but because the technology was absolutely cutting edge, A-6Es were never used in Vietnam, a strategic decision to ensure that none were lost for the Soviets to examine and clone. The technology was constantly updated through the years and so tightly held that the A-6 was never exported to American allies. Intruders were finally retired in 1997.
The A-6B model of the airframe was set up to shoot anti-radiation missiles, Shrike, and Standard ARM. Another version, the KA-6D, had the radars and computer completely removed and was used as a carrier-based aerial tanker for fuel-thirsty fighters, usually F-4s. The KA-6D was routinely configured with five two-thousand-pound drop tanks so that it could carry and pump twenty-six thousand pounds of fuel.
Navy Intruder crews called their aircraft BUFs—big ugly fuckers. Resembling a flying drumstick with the fat end going first, the appearance of the plane took some getting used to, but its performance and all-weather capabilities endeared it to its crews and naval strike planners.
The Ling-Temco-Vought A-7 Corsair II made its appearance on Navy flight decks in 1967 and was first used in Vietnam in December of that year. Designed as a replacement for the
A-4 Skyhawk, it was a single-seat, single-engine attack plane without an afterburner. The Corsair carried two 20-millimeter guns to strafe with and a reasonable load of bombs that could be delivered visually with the aid of a radar and computer. The pilot pointed the nose of the plane directly at the target and pushed a button designating it for the computer, which began calculating an attack solution and presenting heading and pull-up information to the pilot. The computer released the free-fall weapons automatically. By using the computer, much of the guesswork and Kentucky windage was taken out of the visual dive delivery, so accuracy improved markedly, if the pilot could visually acquire the target.
The Air Force was reluctant to adopt another Navy design, but the Army was pushing them to develop a genuine close-air support aircraft. Although the A-7 Corsair II wasn’t a supersonic hot rod, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decreed that the Air Force was going to use it anyway as a replacement for the A-1 Skyraider, the F-100 Super Sabre, and the F-105 Thunderchief. Navy Corsair pilots like to refer to their bird as a SLUF, or short little ugly fucker. One pilot wit noted that the A-7 “is not fast, but it sure is slow.” The Air Force version, the A-7D, had a more powerful engine that the Navy adopted for the A-7E. The Air Force’s A-7Ds became operational in Vietnam in September 1972.
The A-7A entered service with Pratt & Whitney’s TF-30 engine, originally rated at 11,300 pounds of thrust, increasing to 13,400 in the Charlie model, and finally to 15,000 pounds with the Allison TF-41 in the ultimate A-7E variant. The SLUF never fully replaced the Scooter on Tonkin Gulf flight decks, but from 1968 onward it bore an increasingly greater share of the load.
In Southeast Asia the Navy lost a hundred A-7s from 1967 to 1972; the Air Force lost six during 1972–1973. Corsair IIs also fought in Grenada (1983), Lebanon (1983), and Libya (1986). US Navy use ended with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with Air Force retirement coming two years later. Additionally, A-7s flew for Portugal and Greece, with the last one retiring from the Hellenic Air Force in 2014, a forty-seven-year service life.3
The Navy-inspired F-4 Phantom that equipped the larger carriers was intended as an interceptor that would shoot down its victims with missiles. Its radar and computer were optimized for the interception role, so it had no ability to find land-based targets. Navy F-4s were often used as dumb bombers, being given an A-4’s bomb load of six five-hundred-pounders, which they delivered like an A-4 with an optical-mechanical bombsight. The Phantom could carry more ordnance, but fuel usage rose dramatically when it did. The Phantom’s thirst for fuel when used as a bomber bothered the Air Force not at all—the Air Force used KC-135s, the size of Boeing 707s, as tankers. Unfortunately, however, the big tankers couldn’t be shoehorned onto a ship, so getting gas aloft for the fighters was always a problem for the Navy, which used converted A-3s as tankers, then A-4s with a buddy store, A-7s with a buddy store after they replaced the A-4s, then KA-6Ds. The “buddy store” was a drop tank configured with a hose and reel from which a plane needing fuel could get a drink: “Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime?”
Arguably the Phantom was the deadliest-looking plane in the American military during the Vietnam War, a distinction it reluctantly surrendered when the F-14 Tomcat came along in 1974, after the Vietnam War ended. With its upturned wingtips, downward-turned horizontal stabilators and massive intakes, the F-4 looked fast and mean even on the ground. Sitting on a catapult, with the nose gear extended eighteen inches for the shot as both afterburners shot white-hot flames ten feet out the tailpipes, the bird reminded one of a Top Fuel dragster ready to pop the clutch.
The F-4 was also a tricky plane to handle off the catapult. Just a slight over-rotation put the plane into a fully stalled condition in which each increment of power, if the pilot had any to add, only deepened the stall. The region was called “the back side of the power curve,” and any pilot inadvertently entering this flight regime found his afterburner exhaust creating a rooster-tail in the ocean with no way to increase his speed unless he jettisoned his ordnance. Over-rotating off the catapult at night in an F-4 was a good way to find out how you stood with Jesus.
Rounding out the air wing were the “cats and dogs” from fleet support units that provided detachments of special-mission aircraft. They included reconnaissance, electronic warfare, early warning, and aerial tanker duties, although the huge A-3 Skywarrior was still deployed in squadron strength aboard some ships. Increasingly, however, the Douglas “Whale” became the KA-3 dedicated tanker.
Finally, a helicopter detachment was available for rescuing downed fliers and transporting personnel and supplies from ship to ship.
Commanding the air wing was a veteran aviator, an attack or fighter pilot who usually was qualified in at least two of his three or four primary aircraft. He was a commander, equivalent to Air Force lieutenant colonel. The squadron COs were also commanders, as were their executive officers, whereas special-mission detachments were led by lieutenant commanders (equal to an Air Force major). Carrier air-wing commanders were called “CAG”—rhymes with “rag”—after the World War II term for commander air group, although McNamara’s Department of Defense changed naval air groups to wings in 1962. But CAG remains even today, partly from tradition but largely because no one wants to be called CAW.
Carrier skippers were captains—equivalent to Air Force colonels. They were former CAGs who had done well enough in their “deep draft” ship assignments to earn a flattop. After successfully conning a fleet oiler or replenishment ship, a carrier became a possibility. Though few aviators enjoyed “driving boats” as much as flying airplanes, carrier command was the final step to an admiral’s stars. One extremely accomplished pilot reflected, “I could fly formation at five hundred knots. How hard could it be keeping station on a carrier at twelve knots? Well, I learned!”4
The Vietnam generation of aviators came up through a succession of increasingly capable aircraft. Two of the most significant carrier planes of the nine-year Vietnam War were a subsonic attack aircraft, the A-4, and a supersonic fighter, the F-8. Between them they accounted for a large portion of the first two years’ operations against the Dragon’s Jaw.
The Douglas A-4 Skyhawk—also called the “Scooter,” “Tinker Toy,” or “Bantam Bomber”—began life as a carrier-based attack airplane to keep the Navy in the Armageddon nuclear-bombing business when the Air Force seemed intent on gaining a monopoly. Instead, the A-4 had a forty-year career. When delivered to the fleet in 1956 the plane was already obsolete. The Navy’s original nuclear bomb that the A-4 was designed to carry was huge, so the plane sat on long, spindly legs and was taxied without nose-wheel steering, just differential braking. (As you would imagine, this created problems on wet, greasy flight decks, so a tow bar was installed on the nose wheel that a sailor maneuvered to get the plane positioned on the catapult.) By the time squadrons began flying the jet, much smaller nukes were available, but the landing gear design was set and there was no going back. Single-seat attack pilots trained rigorously to deliver nuclear weapons, quipping that the A-4 was “one man, one bomb, one way.” And the cockpit was so tight that pilots said, “You don’t get in an A-4—you put it on.”
Simply designed with a delta wing, the Scooter was subsonic—typical max speed was about 650 miles per hour—but it was incredibly rugged. A-4s returned shot full of holes that could have destroyed a lesser airframe. Nonetheless, more A-4s were lost in Southeast Asia than any other naval aircraft: 271 Navy and 91 Marine.
This was because Scooters logged nearly twice as many sorties over North Vietnam as the A-6 and A-7 combined, and thus over twice the combined losses. A-4s had the third-highest loss rate of tailhook aircraft, behind reconnaissance Crusaders and RA-5C Vigilantes.
Two-seat TA-4s were produced as advanced jet trainers and also served as Marine Corps forward air controllers, or FACs. Skyhawks left the fleet in 1975, but the last Navy A-4s, flown as adversary trainers, remained until 2003.
For an interim design, the A-4 proved remarkably popular.
Skyhawks were purchased by ten nations and logged combat time for the militaries of Israel, Argentina, Indonesia, and Kuwait. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the A-4’s long Vietnam service is that none of them were lost while directly attacking the Thanh Hoa Bridge.
Beginning in May 1964 Seventh Fleet carriers launched covert “Yankee Team” reconnaissance missions over northeastern Laos, providing the nominally neutral Vientiane government with information on Communist rebels’ movements. One of the first aircraft lost in Laos was an RF-8 Crusader off USS Kitty Hawk, shot down on June 7. Secretary of Defense Robert S. NcNamara, a self-made bastard, callously thwarted a rescue effort, and by the time President Lyndon Johnson approved a rescue attempt, the pilot, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Charles F. Klusmann, was captured. Amazingly, Klusmann managed to escape in late August, one of the few successful escapes from Communist captivity during the Vietnam War.5
Carrier aircraft featured prominently in the controversial Tonkin Gulf incident that the Johnson administration had willingly accepted, despite the confused and contradictory reports, for a perceived political advantage over the hawkish Republicans.
From August 1964 the “Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club” flew support and recon missions in South Vietnam from “Dixie” Station as well as increasingly “Up North” from “Yankee” Station. Naval aviators had heard about the Dragon’s Jaw before they began flying against the bridge. A fighter pilot recalled, “The first story I heard about the bridge after arriving on Yankee Station was that MiG-17s had gotten behind a long chain of F-105s rolling in on the target and shot down the tail-end Charlies. Also heard the rumor that Air Force guys actually spoke with the French engineers that built the thing.”6 Of course, the bridge that existed in 1965 was designed and built by the Vietnamese, but the rumor illustrated the notoriety and soon-to-become-legendary status of the toughest target of the war.
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