Meanwhile pilots and crews visited the air intelligence spaces to look at aerial photography, radar photography if available, and whatever intelligence existed on each individual target. Then in individual ready rooms around the ship the crews assigned to each mission received a weather brief, briefed the mission, read the maintenance logs on their assigned aircraft, donned their flight gear, and climbed a steep set of stairs—a “ladder”—or rode an escalator to the flight deck to man their planes.
Flight decks always appeared to be orchestrated bedlam. Actually, a better simile was a very large football team in action. Men performing various functions wore different colored jerseys: purple was for fueling personnel, red was ordnance, yellow for plane handlers, white for safety supervisors, and green for catapult and arresting gear personnel. Blue was for the heaviest labor—the guys who carried, installed, and broke down tie-down chains. Any plane without a pilot in the cockpit and engines running had to be secured to the deck with chains. The supervisors of each group communicated via short-range radios that doubled as sound suppressors.
Carriers on Yankee Station routinely flew for twelve hours a day, from noon to midnight or midnight to noon. Because there were usually at least two carriers on station, they alternated shifts, with occasionally some overlap during the day so they could launch a coordinated Alpha strike. Typical cyclic operations called for eight launches—or “events”—an hour and a half apart, with the final recovery taking place an hour and a half after the last launch. The Navy standard work week at sea was nominally twelve hours a day, seven days a week. During cyclic flight operations some sailors worked as many as twenty hours a day, every day. The pace was hectic and brutal.
From the time when ancient mariners first went to sea, sailors have had to not only sail their ships but also maintain and repair them. No differently, in addition to the flight deck operations and the squadrons with their maintenance departments, the ship’s company had to sail, maintain, and repair the carrier. Bakers, shipfitters, pipefitters, electricians, engineers (aboard nuclear-powered ships nukes who ran the reactors), supply clerks, medical personnel, signalmen, communications techs, radar technicians—the list goes on and on. USS Enterprise, the largest American carrier to serve in Vietnam and the only one nuclear powered, carried five thousand men.
Lower-ranking enlisted lived in large berthing areas with the bunks stacked three deep. Each man had a small locker for his personal gear and perhaps a drawer. Petty officers (E-4 through E-6) lived in compartments with fewer roommates and more personal space. These men ate on the mess deck, a large space barely above the waterline that was also used for bomb or missile assembly when not being used for meals.
Chief petty officers (E-7 through E-9) had their own berthing spaces and their own mess. Junior officers had six- or eight-man bunkrooms, a locker, and a personal desk with a safe for classified documents, personal weapons, and, often, illegal booze. Depending on the spaces the ship had, lieutenants and above usually ended up in two-man staterooms, and commanders had staterooms of their own.
Commissioned and warrant officers had two wardrooms to choose from: the formal wardroom below the hangar deck, with white tablecloths and stewards and real china, or the “dirty shirt” wardroom up forward between the bow catapults where the food was served cafeteria style on plastic trays and you bused your own table. Because one had to be in uniform to eat in the formal wardroom, at sea ship’s company officers usually ate there while aircrews in flight suits and officers in jerseys who worked the flight deck ate in the dirty-shirt wardroom amid the cacophony of catapults throwing planes off the pointy end just over their heads.
Ship’s systems never ran at 100 percent capacity, especially on older vessels, where much maintenance had been deferred to meet operational schedules. Regardless of its age, every Vietnam-era carrier had to ration water for bathing. Seawater had to be desalinated by evaporators. The priority for fresh water went to the boilers that made steam to run the engines and catapults, then for drinking and cooking, and finally, for the crew to bathe in. The ship’s engineering department controlled the valves in the water system, and on older ships they often secured the fresh water to the showers for as much as twenty-two hours a day. The hours when water was going to be available in showers were published in the ship’s plan of the day and were known as “water hours.” Some Vietnam-era carriers went on water hours when they unplugged from the NAS North Island or Alameda water supply at the pier when they got underway and didn’t come off them until they docked upon their return nine months or so later. When the water was flowing, all sailors, from the admiral to the lowest swabbie, took “Navy showers,” which involved turning the shower head on to get wet, then turning if off, soaping up and scrubbing, and turning it back on just long enough to rinse off. If the engineers secured the water before a man rinsed off, they got a royal cussing, although there are no recorded incidents of foul language ever causing more water to flow from the showerhead.
Salt water taken from the sea was used to flush commodes and urinals, which led to pipes becoming encrusted with salt, causing urine and sewage to overflow onto the floors of the heads.
And finally, there was air conditioning—or, rather, the lack thereof. Steel ships operating in the tropics are floating ovens. Circulating outside air inside the ship can only lower the internal temperature to the ambient temperature outside, if that. Enterprise reputedly had the best air-conditioning system in the fleet during the Vietnam years, yet the system was designed to lower the air temperature inside the ship just ten degrees below the ambient temperature outside. Further, the spaces where test equipment and computers had to be cooled had first priority for cool air. These spaces often had limited access, partly because some of the test and repair equipment was classified but also to keep sweaty riff-raff from crowding in to cool off. Both the air circulation and conditioning systems had to be secured during general quarters, when the compartments were made water- and airtight. In the US Navy GQ, or battle stations, drills are run at least once a day.
The social tensions rocking America during the Vietnam War were also present aboard Navy ships. During the 1960s the Navy had no trouble filling enlistment quotas with young men who didn’t want to get drafted into the Army but who scored high on the qualification test. Black youth, relegated to poorer educations throughout most of America, were few in the Navy’s enlisted ranks, and young men with the lowest test scores got the most menial jobs. In the early 1970s, as the nation backed away from the draft, high-quality enlistees became harder for Navy recruiters to find. More young black men without any more education than their predecessors came into the Navy, and racial tensions aboard ships escalated. Kitty Hawk suffered race riots in 1972, and the violence spread to Constellation and the fleet oiler Hassayampa, among others.
Then there was the antiwar movement, with radicals attempting to inspire sailors to commit sabotage aboard their ships. At least two carriers, Forrestal and Ranger, had far too much of it, including fires and damaged machinery. A few guilty sailors were court-martialed, but most weren’t caught.
Drug use was epidemic outside the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, and inevitably some of it went to sea.
Despite all that, a management expert would have been amazed at how well these hot, filthy, overworked young sailors performed. Young men only six months to a year out of high school became valuable members of highly specialized teams led by a chief or senior petty officer. These men worked together, ate together, berthed together, and went ashore on liberty together. Slackers, malcontents, and those who lacked the emotional maturity to do a man’s work or be away from home and mama were usually quickly weeded out. Solid friendships were often formed. Ask any former sailor of whatever age or length of service what ships he served aboard, and you will hear genuine pride in his voice as he answers. Some of these young sailors found the Navy so congenial that they decided to stay for a career. These “lifers” were and are the backbone of every military servi
ce.
The first-fleet A-6 squadron was Attack Squadron 75 (VA-75), the “Sunday Punchers,” and they went to Vietnam aboard the USS Independence—“Indy.” In mid-1965 the VA-75 commanding officer, Puncher One, was Commander Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., a naval aviation professional from the Annapolis class of 1947, the same year Jim Stockdale graduated.
A former test pilot and flight instructor, Denton helped develop fleet tactics, having graduated from the Armed Forces Staff College and the Naval War College, where he received the President’s Award for the most outstanding thesis in the senior course. In 1964 he earned a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University. Then he returned to the cockpit to conduct international affairs in an A-6 Intruder.
On July 18, 1965, Denton briefed an Alpha strike against a supply complex adjacent to the Thanh Hoa Bridge. It was his thirteenth combat mission, three days past his forty-first birthday. Denton’s BN was thirty-year-old Lieutenant (Junior Grade) William M. Tschudy, a former Marine who enlisted because his father served in World War II and a brother served in Korea.
The target was the Ham Rong port facility, a cluster of warehouses on the south side of the Ma River just a mile east of the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge. Denton led Indy’s twenty-eight plane strike inland, bypassing the target and descending before turning eastward so the jets would be pointed toward the Gulf of Tonkin when egressing.
The weather was unusually clear, so the aircrews had no trouble seeing the target—warehouses with barges tied up alongside in the river.
Denton keyed his mike, telling the strike group, “Rainbow Leader rolling in,” and dove for the target. He tracked the target in his bombsight, and passing six thousand feet at 500 knots true airspeed, about 440 knots on the airspeed indicator, pushed the pickle button on his stick, and felt the jolts as the bombs ejected from the racks.
He began his pullout… and his Intruder rocked from the impact of a major detonation. Denton’s plane suffered massive damage. The generators failed, both hydraulic systems failed, the throttles were unresponsive. With a total electrical failure, neither crewman could talk to the other or transmit on the radio.
Then the jet began an uncommanded roll that couldn’t be corrected with stick or rudder. The plane was dying—the crew had to get out.
Jerry Denton, the cool test pilot, waited for the wings to come level with the horizon before pulling the face curtain on his ejection seat and blasting upward through the canopy. Bill Tschudy’s seat on the right side of the plane went through the canopy an instant before Denton’s.
Then, as Denton recalled, “We were falling from one world into another.”6
Tschudy descended into a village, where an officer shouted, “Hands up, Yank!”
Denton splashed into the water. Not the Gulf of Tonkin but the middle of the Ma River. His left leg was injured, so he couldn’t swim very well. Two Vietnamese civilians overtook him in a canoe, one visibly enraged and wielding a machete. The man swung the blade several times, hitting Denton on the back and neck and drawing blood.
Soldiers on the riverbank forced the civilians away and dragged Denton ashore. “Dazed and bleeding as I was, my principal emotion was fury,” he said. “I was mad as hell at being shot down and even angrier at being captured.”
Denton and Tschudy had not been shot down. The A-6 had been a victim of its own ordnance. There had actually been an A-6 lost in June to the same cause when a five-hundred-pound Mark 82 bomb exploded shortly after release over Laos. That crew ejected and narrowly escaped capture on the ground in the dark jungle; they were rescued by an Air America helicopter the next day. The cause of the loss was not immediately known, so flight operations continued.
An Independence A-4 Skyhawk pilot recalled, “We were an ‘all-electric fusing air wing’ with a standard whirly-gig nose fuse with a wire as the back-up second fuse. We didn’t manage to shoot down any Scoots, but I distinctly remember being in a 60-degree dive in a crowd and a b’jesus HUGE explosion amongst us. What kind of flak was that?
“As I recall, when the bomb left the rack, it pulled out a cord with a connector to the bomb, which initiated the electric fuse on separation. I think that was when the bombs blew off the Intruder’s wings. Until they officially quit using electric fusing until a remedy was found, a whole lot of us not-so-dumb boys would only arm the mechanical fuse. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be on the bleeding edge of technology.”7
Then, on July 24, another Sunday Puncher crew ejected over Laos after another premature detonation. The fliers were rescued, but clearly the Intruders could not continue using the suspect fuses. Corrections to solve the problem included fusing and wiring changes and adding ejector racks that pushed bombs away from each other to prevent collisions after they were pickled off.
During July 1965 the carriers lost six planes, including Independence Intruders to their own ordnance. But Navy casualties doubled in August. That month three of the five WestPac carriers lost thirteen planes on combat missions—three a week. Six of those came from Midway. The war was becoming even more expensive.
The first Navy aircraft loss over the Thanh Hoa Bridge came on August 24, 1965, before the Seventh Fleet assumed larger responsibilities for the Thanh Hoa region.
Commander Fred A. “Bill” Franke was the thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn-born CO of VF-21 aboard USS Midway. Crews from his squadron had scored the first Navy MiG kills of the war on June 17. Franke came into the Navy as an apprentice seaman in 1944 in the aviation cadet program and was discharged in 1946. He attended Louisiana Polytech and the University of Oklahoma, then was awarded a direct commission in the Naval Reserve in 1948. He logged about two thousand hours flying F4U Corsairs before transitioning to F9F Panthers and Cougars, then to F3H Demons. His commission was upgraded to regular Navy. Finally, Franke transitioned to F-4 Phantoms. In the summer of 1965 he had about a thousand hours of experience in Phantoms.
Franke was an extremely accomplished aviator, having gone through the Naval Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, then, after gaining some operational test and evaluation experience, returning to the Test Pilot School for a tour as an instructor. By that day in August 1965 he had logged about fifty combat missions. He and his wife, Jackie Louise, had a son and two daughters.8
Recalling the campaign to destroy the Dragon’s Jaw, Franke said, “We’d go up there on a regular basis to knock it down or at least try to put it out of commission. The poor Spad [Douglas A-1 Skyraider] pilots carried a load of old World War II dumb bombs and used fixed sights to aim with while flying through heavy ground fire… that was quite a feat. My hat was off to those pilots. The A-4 teams had a little advantage with speed and altitude, but not much of one.
“There wasn’t a pilot in the air wing with World War II experience, too long ago, and just a few holdovers from Korea. All those strikes on the bridge were led by CAG Bob Moore or one of the attack skippers.”9
On the afternoon of August 24 Franke and his RIO, today Lieutenant Commander Robert Doremus, escorted a bridge strike, their second mission of the day. A reserve naval flight officer (NFO) since 1956, Doremus was a New Jersey native who first flew aboard early-warning aircraft in Hawaii. He left active duty in 1958 but was recalled three years later and put to work training antisubmarine crews. Then the Navy sent him to NAS Miramar to become an F-4 radar intercept officer. Doremus joined VF-21 in April 1963 and frequently flew with Bill Franke, who became the squadron CO. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Bob Doremus had been in the backseat and helped pilot Ed Batson score a MiG kill on June 17.
Inbound to Thanh Hoa on August 24, Franke and Doremus in Sundown 112 and their wingman were the target of multiple SAM launches. Making about 350 knots at eleven thousand feet, Franke was unable to evade a SAM, which detonated close to the Phantom.
The effect of the four-hundred-pound fragmentation warhead was devastating to Franke’s fighter. The shrapnel blew off much of the port wing. Warhead fragments riddled the left side of the aircraft, se
vered fuel lines, and snuffed out both engines. With a fire blazing aft of the cockpit, no electrical power, and dead engines, the crew ejected.10
In F-4s, upon ejection the backseat fires first so that the rocket blast from the pilot’s seat doesn’t fry the RIO. So out they went, Doremus first and Franke a fraction of a second later. They landed in a rice paddy near Phu Banh, north of the target, where the Vietnamese immediately captured them. As Franke recalled, “My wingman reported seeing no parachutes, so we were officially listed as killed in action shortly thereafter.” In any case, no rescue attempt could have been made with darkness descending. Some shot-down aviators were simply beyond help.
While aircrews were flying and bleeding, the summer of 1965 was a weird, wiggy period in the United States. President Johnson opted for a wider war and ordered more American troops to South Vietnam.
The Department of Defense, with McNamara at the helm, ordered unit reports to omit the phrase “shot down” in favor of “lost in combat.” Connoisseurs of bureaucratic obfuscation will appreciate this effort: “shot down” sounds violent and final, like the slamming of a coffin lid, whereas “lost in combat” seems much less final, as if someone made a wrong turn somewhere and the errant soul might, in the fullness of time, come wandering back. About the time this nonsense was flying around, headquarters of the Naval Air Forces, Pacific, advised squadron skippers to meet their unit quotas for United Fund donations.11
During a Tonkin Gulf visitation McNamara told USS Oriskany aviators that they should expect to endure “unlimited losses in pursuit of limited goals.” McNamara’s declaration had a predictable effect on O-Boat morale, but the air wing commander, Commander James B. Stockdale, had other ideas. A tough-minded intellectual Naval Academy grad, he recognized that with real flak in the air, politics became irrelevant. Two decades later he told a Tailhook Convention audience, “Even in a limited war there’s nothing limited about your efforts over the target.”12
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