Dragon's Jaw Page 6

  Hayes’ partners included Captain Keith B. Connolly, who selected guns and tackled the MiGs mano a mano. He got a quick front-quarter shot at a second MiG, but the Vietnamese pilot evaded into the haze.

  The rescue CAP flight also tangled with Vietnamese fighters. Led by Captain Wayne Lanphear, the four Huns faced two MiGs nose to nose at nineteen thousand feet. The F-100s tried to jettison their auxiliary drop tanks to decrease weight and drag, yet only Lanphear’s and Captain Donald Kilgus’ tanks were successfully jettisoned.

  The MiG-17’s superior maneuverability showed immediately. The bandits gained a firing position after one circuit, and each of them targeted a two-plane Super Sabre flight. The third and fourth Huns, although still burdened by drop tanks, were able to evade the assailants, although barely. Robin Three, Captain Ronald R. Green, resorted to an unusual technique. With 23- and 37-millimeter cannon shells zipping by inches from his wing, “I decided the best thing to do was to deliberately depart the aircraft to the right and enter a spin. I slammed in full aileron and opposite rudder, and as advertised, the Hun departed to the right and entered a right spin.”6

  The violent maneuver cleaned off Green’s stuck drop tanks, but one smashed into a rocket pod, twisting his right wing’s leading-edge slat nearly upright. Nonetheless, he coolly reduced throttle to idle, placed his hands in his lap—and waited. Watching the ocean getting closer as he spun through ten thousand feet, Green still waited. In seconds it was all-or-nothing time. Green jammed in rudder to stop the spin and fed in forward stick. Out of the spin and flying again, he pulled back on the stick and crammed on full power. “Looking at a windscreen full of ocean,” he recalled, “I prayed that the airplane would pull out in time. Miraculously, it did—at an altitude I estimated to be fifty feet.”7 One wonders how many G’s Green pulled.

  Meanwhile the dogfight swirled onward. With the lead MiG still a threat to the Huns who had shed tanks, Lanphear called for a split, which would force the Communist pilot to pursue one F-100 or the other and thereby become vulnerable to the one he didn’t pursue.

  Don Kilgus was a twenty-seven-year-old ROTC product from Detroit with three years of experience flying the Hun. He related, “We saw something coming up from the haze, and one thousandth of a second later… it’s a MiG. I turned into him, jettisoned my aux fuel tanks, and in that instant he turned ninety degrees to me.”8

  The lead MiG overshot Kilgus, leaving his wingman to attack. But Kilgus outmaneuvered the enemy wingman and concentrated on the leader, hosing a short burst from his four 20-millimeter cannon. “Knowing I was in an advantageous position because I was above him, I allowed him to get a little separation from me. I went on afterburner and saw 450 knots on my airspeed indicator.”

  When the MiG dropped its blunt nose into a near-vertical dive, Kilgus hung on. He knew the Vietnamese fighter could pull out of his dive more steeply than his fighter could, so he intended to destroy it before reaching critical altitude: “I fired a burst. Now training came into play. I tried to remember everything I’d learned, and began shooting seriously at him at [an altitude of] 7,100 feet.” Kilgus was not worried about expending his thousand rounds of ammunition: a MiG in a fighter pilot’s gunsight was an absolute gift.

  “I saw puffs and sparks on the vertical tail of the MiG, and very shortly thereafter I didn’t see anything. I could have been at 580 knots. I won’t embroider the story by saying I got spray from the Gulf of Tonkin on my windshield, but I pulled out at the last minute.”9

  When Kilgus got his last glimpse of the MiG, it was shedding parts at extremely low altitude. He rejoined some of his friends and returned to DaNang.

  Although the Air Force credited Don Kilgus with only a “probable,” years later the North Vietnamese acknowledged losing three planes and pilots that day. Two were probably shot down by friendly fire, flak from North Vietnamese batteries, but the third almost certainly was Kilgus’ victim, Senior Lieutenant Pham Giay. Don Kilgus scored the F-100’s only air-to-air kill of the war and was the first American pilot to down a Vietnamese MiG.

  The air combat was over, but the action was not.

  Two A-1H Skyraiders of South Vietnam’s 516th Fighter Squadron were assigned to the Rescue CAP, call sign “Sandy,” orbiting offshore as top cover in case a pickup was needed.10

  When Jim Magnusson’s Thud splashed seven miles offshore, the A-1s were first to respond. However, the leader, Captain Vu Khac Hue of the South Vietnamese Air Force, was shot down by shore-based batteries. His American adviser, flying as a wingman, was thirty-two-year-old Captain Walter Draeger of Wisconsin, who saw Sandy Lead parachute into the water perilously close to land.

  Walt Draeger had an unusual career path. Winged in 1957, he was originally an interceptor pilot who transitioned to transports in Panama. Subsequently he was accepted for A-1 training with a Navy squadron at Corpus Christi, Texas, and joined the Vietnamese program in November 1964.

  The Douglas A-1 Skyraider was an anomaly, a World War II design from Edward H. Heinemann, the aeronautical engineering genius who produced the war-winning SBD Dauntless dive bomber, two record-setting experimental airplanes, and two Navy attack aircraft—the twin-engine A-3 Skywarrior and the indispensable A-4 Skyhawk. Originally designated the AD-1 (Attack by Douglas, first model), it became the A-1 in Robert McNamara’s 1962 redesignation scheme for military aircraft but was popularly called the “Spad,” allegedly for single place AD or, because in the jet age it was an anachronism, a throwback to a French World War I ancestor. It was flown by the US Navy and Air Force as well as the South Vietnamese Air Force. Big, potent, and long legged, with a huge turbo-charged eighteen-cylinder radial piston engine developing twenty-two hundred horsepower—and even more in later models of the engine—the Skyraider carried lots of ordnance on wing stations and was ideal for close air support and interdiction. The main problem with the airplane was that it was just too damn slow.

  After Vu went down, Walt Draeger spent about an hour scouring the area looking for his partner in the water. It was a gutsy move, as the splash site was only a mile and a half offshore, and Draeger’s Spad was a slow target. Yet airmen lived by a tacit pact: we take care of our own. They expected it not only of each other but of themselves as well.

  While circling the area, Draeger coached in the rescue team, a Grumman HU-16 amphibian and two Hiller HH-43 Husky helicopters from Quang Tri.

  Working around an oil slick at the crash site, the Albatross and Huskies searched back and forth at low level, often drawing gunfire from shore batteries. Draeger was the only one armed, and his efforts to suppress some of the AAA drew a heavy response. Rescue pilots saw his Skyraider streaming smoke, veering erratically, then diving into the water from five hundred feet. No parachute was found.

  After two days of intense air strikes against the Dragon’s Jaw, the results were disappointing. The Air Force had expended 384 bombs and missiles, cratering both approaches, blowing out slabs of concrete, and causing one of the two spans to sag visibly. Traffic was interrupted briefly, and in the interim the industrious Vietnamese forged crossings at shallow fords up and downstream and set up pontoon bridges. Seeing how quickly the Vietnamese could recover from the loss of use of the bridge should have been a wake-up call for American military planners, but it was not. One reason was because targeting was being done in Washington by McNamara’s staff—all civilians.

  During the two days of combat over the Dragon’s Jaw the North Vietnamese claimed forty-seven Yankee air pirates shot down by AAA guns and MiGs. Because they could undoubtedly count wrecks, the North Vietnamese must have known that figure absurd but lied to bolster national morale and international propaganda. In fact, American losses in the two days of strikes were three F-105s, an F-100, an F-101, and an A-1 Skyraider, plus a South Vietnamese A-1. Regardless of the real totals, the gun crews of the 228th Air Defense Artillery Regiment were decorated for their actions in “the Great Spring Victory.” They received the Victory Order (one of four gongs established in 1965) a
nd the Military Exploit Order.

  Fifty-plus years after these April attacks on the Dragon’s Jaw one may reasonably ask: What the hell happened there? Ignoring the political reasons the United States was in Vietnam, why did all these aircraft achieve so little in their attacks on an admittedly difficult target? Two aircraft had been lost the first day, with one pilot dead and another captured by the North Vietnamese. Several more aircraft were damaged. On the second day five aircraft were lost, with four pilots killed and one captured. What was wrong?

  In the years after the Korean War America prepared to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Little money or thought had been devoted to improving conventional ordnance, which this day proved was not up to the job of dropping an overbuilt steel and concrete bridge. That fact had been obvious to the professionals charged with planning the strike. Yet the attackers were sent anyway.

  Civilians may not appreciate how different a military organization is from a civilian enterprise. In the military everyone obeys orders. There are no boards of directors, no committees, no searches for consensus. The president is the constitutionally appointed commander-in-chief, and he gives orders to the generals and admirals, who are expected to salute and carry them out. They give orders to their subordinates, and the orders go down the line through the various chains of command to the actual war fighters, in this case the men in the cockpits, who also salute and do as they are told, even if it costs them their lives. The system works because of the valor of the war fighters, who have only each other and their individual concepts of duty, honor, and manhood to sustain them. Military organizations have always worked this way, from the Roman legions to the present day.

  And yet it is the duty of the senior commanders on the scene, those who directly supervise the war fighters, to ensure they have the weapons and tactics suited to the job at hand. Failure accomplishes nothing and squanders expensive military assets and human lives. Perhaps it is inevitable that in this system senior officers are under intense pressure to do as they are told even if, in their professional judgment, the war fighters are being sent on fool’s errands. There were a great many fool’s errands in Vietnam—arguably the entire war was one—and the pressure from the top was excruciating.

  Part of the problem was that in much of the military, peacetime bureaucratic routine prevailed. Giant bureaucracies, which the American armed forces certainly are, are not ships whose course can be changed by turning the helm. In a bureaucracy inertia is the dominant force. Throughout the war the Air Force often ordered pilots into combat who had minimal training and were not combat ready—getting a body into a slot was the priority. The Colonel Blimps who demanded that the old bomb fuses be expended before issuing new ones were merely symptoms of larger problems.11

  Another piece of the equation was that the strategy and tactics being used in Vietnam were not intended to win the war but to force a recalcitrant opponent to the bargaining table. That being the case, those who made waves and defied their superiors did so at the cost of their careers.12

  Finally, the politicians, with their rules of engagement and obsessive, paranoid fear of Chinese intervention, forced the Air Force and Navy to ignore rule number one of aerial warfare: First win aerial supremacy over the battlefield. Throughout much of the war the North Vietnamese had safe-haven airfields in the Hanoi area from which to operate their MiGs. Some of McNamara’s bright young men thought the Air Force and Navy’s obsession with MiG bases was ridiculous, since Vietnam could base MiGs across the border in China if their own bases were knocked out. That would have been a major political move by Hanoi, one it didn’t want to make, and the greater distances involved would have put the short-ranged MiGs at a serious tactical disadvantage.

  Failure to win aerial supremacy would cost American airmen their lives and contribute to the POW population, which Hanoi used for propaganda and political advantage, until the very end of the conflict. Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert S. McNamara, and the ineffectual Secretary of State Dean Rusk were directly responsible for those lost lives and the suffering of the POWs, who were forced to endure more than any human should be required to bear.

  Captain Smitty Harris, the lone survivor of the first Thanh Hoa shootdowns, continued fighting his war from a prison cell in the Hanoi Hilton. With three others—Lieutenant Phillip Butler, Lieutenant Robert Peel, and Lieutenant Commander Robert Shumaker—he implemented the tap code that POWs used to communicate with each other. Morse code, which needed two sounds, dit and dah, wouldn’t work. But tapping would. The code was a five-by-five grid containing every letter of the alphabet except K, which doubled for C. Thus, A was signified by one-one; M by three-two; Z by five-five, and so on. Aggressive communicators could tap, cough, or sweep with a broom at remarkable speeds. They developed their own shorthand, such as GBU for “God bless you.”

  Captain Walt Draeger received a posthumous Air Force Cross for his effort to protect rescue aircraft from gun batteries ashore.

  The victorious F-100 pilot, Captain Don Kilgus, never received acknowledgment for downing the first MiG of the war. He returned to combat repeatedly throughout the Southeast Asian “conflict.” Although four other nations flew the Hun, Kilgus was the only F-100 pilot to ever score an air-to-air kill.

  An Air Force historian described a political element to this MiG encounter: “One PACAF pilot believed he scored a hit. As the air-to-air incident appeared to be unduly inflammatory, President Johnson informed the service chiefs that he did not want any more MiGs shot down, although circumstances would soon dictate otherwise.”13

  LBJ’s priority was his Great Society program, which he hoped would be his political monument. In order to win the 1964 election, he dragged the nation into a direct conflict with North Vietnam that would cost fifty-eight thousand American lives, at least a million Vietnamese lives, and untold billions of dollars, a conflict he had no intention of fighting hard enough to win, a conflict that would poisonously influence American politics for at least two generations and ultimately help shatter the base that had supported the Democratic Party since the Great Depression. Lyndon B. Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil.

  As a harbinger of things to come, on April 5, the day after the second strike on the Dragon’s Jaw bridge, a reconnaissance flight over North Vietnam returned with photos of a SAM site. The air war was entering a chilling new dimension, and the Dragon’s Jaw defenders were about to get a powerful new weapon.

  CHAPTER 5

  A GRIM BUSINESS

  Facing increased pressure by US airpower, the Communist regime in Hanoi asked Moscow for surface-to-air missiles—SAMs. After some initial reluctance, the Soviets began sending SA-2s, launchers, radars, and the necessary control gear to Vietnam along with the technical experts to make the system work and teach the North Vietnamese how to use it.

  The SA-2 was a two-stage radar-guided missile. After radar found an airborne target within range, the missile would be fired from its launcher. The solid-fuel first stage would burn for six seconds, boosting the missile past Mach 1, then drop off. Only then would the receivers on the back of the missile be exposed to the firing radar, which began to send guidance signals to the missile as the second stage rocket engines accelerated it to terminal velocity, about Mach 2 in the early versions of the missile, or twice the speed of sound. Later versions of the missiles had a terminal velocity of as much as Mach 3.5. With the missile now under his control, the technician in the radar van manually steered it toward its target. Later the control mechanisms would be automated to some degree, but in the early stages of the war control was manual.

  US Air Force and Navy commanders sought permission to destroy SAM sites under construction, but the politicians intervened again. Self-assured, condescending Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara denied permission to attack launch sites because he thought killing Russian technicians would lead to a wider war.

  John T. McNaughton, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, also dismissed the request to b
omb SAM sites. The former Harvard Law professor sniffed, “You don’t think the North Vietnamese are going to use them? Putting them in is just a political ploy by the Russians to appease Hanoi.”1 How the United States ended up with smug, arrogant college professors and automobile company executives running a war is one of the conundrums of our age. In an amazing twist of fate, Professor McNaughton died in a plane crash in 1967, depriving McNamara of his preferred choice as a compliant secretary of the Navy.

  The pragmatic Vietnamese Communists harbored no such delusions. They began building more launch sites, easily identifiable by the characteristic star configuration for the six launchers with the radar dish on a van in the middle.

  And they began shooting their new toys. On July 24, 1965, an SA-2 battery shot down an Air Force F-4. Washington then finally took note and authorized strikes against missile sites outside the Hanoi-Haiphong sanctuary zones. However, the Vietnamese foxed the Yankee air pirates by placing dummy SAMs on the sixth and seventh sites identified. When the raiders rolled in on July 27, concentrated AAA guns opened fire. Four Thuds went down, with three pilots killed and one captured.

  Meanwhile fighter-bomber pilots were left to their own devices. Missions seldom went north if there was cloud cover above eight thousand feet because pilots needed vertical separation to evade airborne SAMs. The hard reality was that pilots who were targeted by one or more SAMs had to see them—the missiles were making Mach 2, and if they were in front of you, the closure rate was the total of your airspeed and the missile’s—and maneuver to avoid them. The missiles were relatively easy to see at night, a little less so in daylight, because of the exhaust plume, which appeared as bright as a spot of the sun. Except, of course, in thick haze. Or if the missile were obscured by a cloud. The evasive maneuver had to be exquisitely timed: if the pilot of the target aircraft tried to evade too soon, the missile would track him; if he tried too late, he was meat on the table. Every maneuver bled off energy, which was airspeed and altitude. If the enemy launched enough missiles, inevitably one would catch the low, slow, writhing victim in its blast envelope.