One of Johnson’s problems, although he probably didn’t know it, was that there was a serious possibility that the North Vietnamese leadership thought they were doing much better against the Americans than they actually were. Having integrated their air defenses over the previous two years, they had succeeded in achieving a layered air defense system that was increasingly lethal to Yankee air pirates. At the end of 1965 the Hanoi Politburo reckoned and announced that Military Region Four covering the southern two-thirds of the country had shot down 834 American aircraft. The actual number of American planes lost throughout all of Indochina since 1962 was barely 300.15
One possible explanation is that the North Vietnamese leaders were lying for domestic and international political reasons. Although we assume they could count wrecks, it is also possible that the cadres manning the guns and missiles were reporting inflated numbers up the line. Bureaucracies are like that: give the boss the numbers he wants. Report a shoot-down and get a medal, some extra food, maybe even a promotion and your picture in a newspaper. There was bound to be a crash somewhere that could plausibly be attributed to the claimant, and everyone knew some of the damaged Yankee planes crashed into the sea.
The AAA gunners and SAM operators were taking serious casualties throughout North Vietnam outside the sanctuary areas—a lot of them, although the actual numbers will probably never be known. US flak suppressors attacked AAA batteries and SAM sites, now valid targets. Navy Iron Hand and Air Force Wild Weasel shooters fired missiles, and scattered bombs, aimed or not, were hitting gun emplacements near important targets. The carnage was real. Reportedly the casualty rate among gunners around the Thanh Hoa Bridge was so high that the North Vietnamese converted a hollow cavern in the limestone formation on the west side of the bridge into a military hospital. Perhaps the fictional victory statistics were part of what it took to keep the defenders shooting.
One suspects that we will never learn the real reason for Hanoi’s inflated shoot-down numbers. Victors of a war write its history, and the North Vietnamese won theirs. In Vietnam the victory totals are now historical “fact.”
Meanwhile the religious aspect of the Christmas peace initiative was pure propaganda for American and international consumption. South Vietnam was about 80 percent Buddhist, while North Vietnam was not more than 8 percent Christian. Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were 100 percent Communist: they ignored Lyndon B. Johnson and used the bombing pause to resupply and reload.
And re-arm the Dragon.
CHAPTER 9
PAYING THE PRICE
The aviator who flew the most missions against the legendary Dragon’s Jaw was probably then-Lieutenant Commander Samuel L. Sayers, who logged three Alpha strikes, four single-plane night-attack missions, and four other day missions, for a total of eleven against the bridge.
Sam grew up in West Texas and attended the University of Missouri in 1952 on a baseball scholarship. He was on the 1954 NCAA Championship baseball team and somehow wound up in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. During the summer he did midshipmen cruises and “learned to cuss like a sailor.” He graduated in 1956 with a major in statistics, turned down a pro baseball contract offered by the Detroit Tigers, and went to Pensacola to learn how to fly.
After some years in the fleet Sam was selected for the Navy’s Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, where his mathematics background was fine preparation for a crash course in aeronautic engineering. Upon graduation he was ordered to A-6 Intruders, which were the newest birds in the fleet. In November 1965 he was in VA-85, the Black Falcons, aboard USS Kitty Hawk on her way to Vietnam, the second A-6 squadron to deploy. “The aircraft was not ready,” Sam recalled. “The airplane had not completed Op Eval [operational evaluation] and still had some bugs to be worked out. We went anyway.”1
The electronic countermeasures gear in the A-6s in 1965 was primitive by later standards and only provided an audible warning when a Fansong radar illuminated it. It also flashed red warning lights on the pilot’s glare shield and sounded a high warble when it picked up the high PRF signals that indicated a missile was in the air and being guided by the Fansong. What the bombers lacked in 1965 and 1966 was a device that indicated the direction of the threat. The A-6B missile shooters did have this gear, and the squadron had three of those birds.
Kitty Hawk’s air wing became heavily involved in the air war over North Vietnam upon its arrival on Yankee Station. On December 22, 1965, Sam and his BN, Charles D. Hawkins Jr., were number three in a four-plane night strike against the Hai Duong Bridge between Hanoi and Haiphong. The A-6s went in low, a few hundred feet above the deck, in trail, each pilot using the terrain avoidance feature of the A-6 navigation system. There was a lot of flak. Tracers arced upward: the gunners shot at the sound of jets running low and fast, and some merely shot upward in the hope that an American plane would run into the steel shell stream. There were SAMs in the air that night, and the squadron skipper, Commander B. J. Cartwright, may have flown into the ground trying to avoid one. He and his BN, Lieutenant Ed Gold, were never heard from again. They were listed as MIA, missing in action, presumed dead, until their remains were identified in November 1994.
On February 18, 1966, VA-85 lost an A-6 during the day over North Vietnam, killing Lieutenant (Junior Grade) J. V. Murray and Lieutenant (Junior Grade) T. A. Schroeffel, who were flying as a wingman in a flight of two. A truck was spotted. No flak was noted, so Murray dove on the target from six thousand feet and dropped two bombs. Lead cautioned him about the target elevation, which was unknown. Buckeye 812 hit the ground in a nose-high attitude. The evaluation was that “target fixation combined with inexperience prevented recognition of an extreme set of circumstances.”2
Sam flew his first strike against the Dragon’s Jaw on March 13, 1966. The target was the Thanh Hoa Barracks. It was a daytime Alpha strike, which meant the Hawk launched at least four A-6s and perhaps eight other A-4 bombers, plus F-4s that were usually used as flak suppressors and combat air patrol to defend the strikers, MiG CAP. KA-3 Skywarriors provided aerial tanking, and an RA-5C Vigilante did photo recon.
Navy doctrine was for the bombers to roll into their dives within a second or two of each other, with each flying a slightly different path to their individual release point while the flak suppressors’ ordnance exploded upon the guns. Each AAA crew on the ground could pick a plane to shoot at, but the volume of fire aimed at each plane was less. That was the theory, anyway. The goal was to get the bombers to deliver their ordnance within one minute and then exit the area as quickly as possible. But it only worked that way at bombing ranges in the States. In Vietnam, with its typical limited visibility due to haze and clouds, plus flak, SAMs, and MiGs, every Alpha strike was a unique fire drill. The wingmen tried to hang onto their leader no matter what and rolled in when he did, hoping the target would then be visible in the bombsight.
As Sam recalled, no bomb damage assessment (BDA) trickled down to the squadron level from that strike.
On April 17, 1966, Sam and Charlie Hawkins were flying an A-6B Shrike mission southwest of Vinh when a 37-millimeter shell went through a wing, starting a fire. Sam jettisoned his ordnance and headed for the coast as the wing burned fiercely.
As you sit in your easy chair reading this account, try to imagine the emotions of the pilot and BN, who had been sitting in a familiar cockpit, adrenaline pumping, when the airplane shook from the impact of an AAA shell and began to burn. The crew was instantly shoved to the naked edge, staring at death or imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam. They knew intellectually that it might come to this, but they hoped and prayed it wouldn’t. Now it was here—death or capture. Their airplane was on fire and wouldn’t last long. Perhaps mere seconds.
Navy doctrine dictated that the crew eject at the first visible sign of fire for a very cogent reason—the airplane could explode at any moment. But Sam and Charlie didn’t eject. No doubt they had talked about it, as every A-6 crew did. They had made up their minds to stick with the
plane for as long as it was flyable, even if it was ablaze.
Sam steered for the water. The beach passed under the plane, so perhaps they were delivered. Fear turned instantly to elation. Yes, yes, yes. Then, seconds later, no more than a mile from the coast, Sam found the flight controls no longer worked. He and Charlie Hawkins had to get out. They pulled their face curtains and ejected through the canopy, which was the preferred method for A-6 crewmen to abandon their airplane—the Grumman designers didn’t want to risk the possibility that the canopy would not leave the airplane upon command, so they designed the ejection seats to blast upward through the glass. Hawkins’ hand was severely cut by the Plexiglas. When they hit the ocean and got rid of their chutes, both men managed to get into the tiny life rafts contained in the seat pan of their ejection seats.
They floated in the ocean, Hawkins bleeding, looking around for North Vietnamese fishing or patrol boats. Hoping. Praying. Were they delivered or doomed? They sat in their little rafts remembering the shoot-down and the burning plane and the fear, wondering…
Between forty-five minutes and an hour later an HU-16 Albatross amphibious plane from DaNang appeared out of the sea haze, landed in the ocean beside Hawkins, and pulled him aboard. Then the plane taxied a few hundred yards to where Sam was huddled in his raft. To the pilot’s amazement, a man rose from the water with a knife and began slashing. It was the rescue crewman from the Albatross, slashing at the raft to sink it,* but it gave Sam another big shot of adrenaline.
When the Albatross landed at DaNang, Charlie Hawkins was soon sent off to USS Repose, a hospital ship anchored in the bay, to have surgery on his hand. At DaNang the Air Force doctor who examined Sam found only minor scratches. “What can I do for you,” he asked Sam, “while you wait on a COD [carrier on-board delivery plane] to take you back to your ship?”
“I can think of three things that would be mighty nice right now,” the mellow naval officer replied. “My cigarettes got soaked in my raft, so I’d like a fresh pack. Second, I’d like a bottle of Jack Daniels, and third, I’d like to pick up a phone and find my wife on the other end.”
The doctor nodded and said, “I’ll see what I can do. You wait here.”
Twenty minutes later the doctor returned with a pack of Lucky Strikes and a bottle of Jack Daniels. As Sam flicked his Zippo a few times to see if it still worked, then lit up, the doctor picked up the telephone on his desk and held it out to Sam. Sam’s wife, Janet, was on the line.
When the COD finally arrived to take him back to the ship, Sam had finished the bottle of Jack Daniels.
On April 21 the squadron’s new skipper, Commander J. E. Keller, and his BN, Lieutenant Commander Ellis Austin, were hit by AAA and killed in action over North Vietnam.
The next day Lieutenant Commander Robert F. Weimorts and Lieutenant (Junior Grade) William B. Nickerson were hit on a bombing run near Vinh. Following the pullout Weimorts headed for the ocean, yet his wingman observed Weimorts’ aircraft impact the water about five miles offshore. No chutes were seen, and there were no survivors.
On April 27 Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Brian Westin saved his wounded pilot, Lieutenant William R. Westerman, who had been hit in the lung by a bullet that came through the canopy during a day strike over North Vietnam. Leaning across the side-by-side cockpit, Westin flew the plane out to sea. The BN’s side of the airplane had no flight controls, nor was the BN a trained pilot; he was a naval flight officer (NFO). Westin put the plane on autopilot and took the laces from his G-suit to rig a line to the alternate ejection handle between the pilot’s legs. Unlike the F-4, the A-6 did not have command ejection. Going by the ship, Westin pulled hard on his jury-rigged cord, ejecting Westerman, then he ejected. The rescue helicopter picked up Westin first, and he directed the chopper crew to the approximate location of the pilot. When the chopper crew found the wounded Westerman, who had been bleeding into the water, they spotted a shark.
The pilot was unable to get into the horse-collar rescue sling. So Westin jumped back into the ocean to save him. After Westerman was aboard the helicopter, the hoist mechanism malfunctioned. Westin pointed toward the carrier, so the chopper departed to get medical treatment for the now-unconscious Westerman. Five minutes later a second rescue chopper plucked Westin from the sea. Both men survived the adventure, and Brian Westin was awarded a well-deserved Navy Cross.
Sam was back flying two weeks after his shoot-down with a new BN, Mike Anderson. On May 15 he and Mike flew a single-plane night strike against the Dragon’s Jaw. On May 20 the two-man crew was part of another Alpha strike on the bridge.
Soon thereafter Kitty Hawk headed back to the States. The squadron had lost four crews in combat. Two other planes had been lost due to combat damage, but both crews survived. One plane was lost in an accident, and that crew also survived.
For the air wing aboard Kitty Hawk the toll was equally grim. Twenty-two airplanes had been lost, one of which was an A-3 Skywarrior shot down by a MiG over the South China Sea. All three men aboard were killed. In total at least thirteen airmen had been killed in action, and the North Vietnamese had taken five prisoner. Three of the POWs would die in captivity: Lieutenant Robert Taft Hanson Jr., Lieutenant (Junior Grade) W. L. Tromp, and Commander Greg Abbott.
The Hawk had pounded North Vietnam, and the Dragon’s Jaw still stood.
Sam Sayers returned to Vietnam with VA-85 on the Hawk after a turnaround in the States. He flew another Alpha strike and seven more single-plane strikes against the Dragon’s Jaw.
The A-6 Intruder was designed for all-weather attack, the only Navy airplane capable of this mission. At night the crew would go in low, under five hundred feet and, if terrain would permit, as low as two hundred feet, trying to stay under enemy radar surveillance. The BN had to find the target with radar, then the crew would attack it, hopefully carrying bombs that had been modified with “Snake-eye” retarding fins. When dropped from an airplane, a bomb travels in a parabola that steepens as the weapon loses speed. Dropped from a low altitude in level flight, a “slick” bomb impacts the target just a few hundred feet behind the bomber, and the shrapnel from the blast can catch up with and severely damage the delivery airplane. With snake-eyes, however, four clam-shell fins replaced the general-purpose bomb’s tail fins. The clam-shells opened when the weapon was released from the rack and retarded it, slowing it rapidly, and causing it to fall on a much steeper trajectory that allowed the delivery airplane to be farther away when the bombs detonated. Unfortunately the snake-eye fins were not available in the quantity needed, so A-6s often took to the night skies with “slick” bombs that forced the plane to climb to a safe altitude, at least fifteen hundred feet, when on the bomb run. This pop-up maneuver made the plane visible on radar and put it precisely into the heart of the AAA envelope surrounding the target.
The coastal plain of North Vietnam was remarkably flat, with few hills rising above a few hundred feet except in the northern part of the country. The terrain avoidance presentation on the pilot’s multifunction display required fierce concentration. The A-6 didn’t have an autopilot that could be coupled to the terrain avoidance feature, so at night the pilot flew the plane manually while watching vigilantly for rising flak that had to be avoided while keeping a wary eye on his radar altimeter.
The North Vietnamese used tracers, about one for every six or seven shells, so vivid streaks marked the rising flak columns. The guns were usually fired when the first sound of the plane’s engines reached the gun crews. Hiding in the darkness, the bombers were invisible to the gunners. Old-pro pilots tried to fly at 420 knots true airspeed so they would have more control of the airplane, but inevitably when the flak started to rise, the throttles went forward until they were against the stops and the two engines were giving everything they had, which worked out to about 480 knots with a typical bomb load. Speed was life. The North Viets often sited guns in rows along a road, the only dry surface in a country cut up by rice paddies, and the guns put up a steel curtain. The pilot had to
pick his way through, praying that the gap he selected was not about to be filled by a gun that had delayed its barrage for just that purpose. It was the guns ahead of him the pilot had to worry about. The ones to either side were usually fired late, and the tracers appeared to curve and go behind the plane.
A pilot had to concentrate so as to not get distracted and accidently fly into the ground, a collision that would instantly send both men into eternity. Over the course of the war many A-6s were lost on night low-level missions for unknown causes. They crossed the coast inbound and never returned. The most experienced crews in A-6 squadrons usually were assigned the toughest night missions, yet inevitably, as junior crews gained experience and a squadron absorbed casualties, junior crews found themselves over North Vietnam at night flying as low as they dared and dodging flak as they sought out their assigned targets.
The low-altitude approach at night made targets with a low radar signature extremely difficult for the BN to find. The all-steel Thanh Hoa Bridge, however, was easy to pick out of return on the search radar screen, even at very low grazing angles. Still, to give the system the best chance of hitting it, the BN would try to get the track radar to lock on the bridge and feed gimbal angles to the computer. Unfortunately, keeping the delicate track radar functioning despite repeated catapult shots and arrested landings was almost impossible for most A-6 avionics shops, so A-6 crews routinely launched on night missions with a “down” track radar.
The navigation-attack system in the A-6A was primitive in relation to the giant strides then being made in solid-state radars and computers. The crew’s ability to actually make an accurate system weapons delivery depended almost solely on the skill of the BN, who had to ensure the delicate computer was getting accurate velocities from the Doppler radar and from the plane’s inertial navigation system (INS) and that the cursor on the radar scope was indeed tracking the target. It took steel nerves and an iron stomach for a BN to ride through the flak, turbulence, and maneuvers of the pilot while concentrating on managing a recalcitrant system.
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