Dragon's Jaw Page 8

  On July 28 Teak Flight blasted off Korat’s active runway bound for Thanh Hoa. Leading four bombers was the CO, Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Reed, with a major and two captains. Teak Five was armed with camera pods to record the M118’s debut in North Vietnam.

  As ever, the gunners were ready. Traversing and elevating their weapons toward the now-familiar screech of inbound jets, they put up a barrage of 37- and 57-millimeter flak that the Americans considered moderate to heavy. The bridge took some damage from the M118s that hit it, yet it remained intact.

  Undeterred, the 18th Fighter Wing crews returned five days later, on August 2, 1965. Colonel Reed led Oak Flight with three captains as wingmen, packing M118s.

  Conditions were adequate for an attack: ceiling ten thousand feet with five miles of visibility. As the Thuds plunged through five thousand feet on their pullout, Captain Robert N. Daughtrey’s plane took some flak, probably 37-millimeter. Whatever the caliber, it started a fire in the fuselage. Recognizing he had had the stroke, Daughtrey fired his ejection seat and was hurled into the sky over North Vietnam.

  Daughtrey was a thirty-one-year-old pilot from Del Rio, Texas, with a wife and three children aged four to seven years. He had left Texas A&M in his sophomore year for an Air Force commission and silver wings. His post-Vietnam plans included a mathematics degree. All that work and hope for the future vanished in a twinkling as his crippled F-105 plunged toward Thanh Hoa province.

  The force of the ejection broke both of Daughtrey’s arms. When he hit the ground he was scooped up almost immediately. Less than two months later he appeared in propaganda photos released by the North Vietnamese to the international press.16

  Nearly six months after the first bridge strike, Robbie Risner was still at it. His leadership of the first two missions had earned him the first Air Force Cross of the Vietnam War. He was undeterred after being shot down in late March and landing a shot-up Thud in early April. He continued flying and leading the 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron from the cockpit.

  Increasingly sophisticated anti-SAM tactics had evolved over the previous months. By late summer the Thailand-based Thuds were operating in hunter-killer teams: a four-plane flight to locate a site and mark it with napalm and cluster bombs, which could destroy the radar van, with the killer flight following with heavy bombs.

  On September 16 Risner found the SAM site at Tuong Loc—the fifth identified in Vietnam, Site NV-05—five miles north of the Dragon’s Jaw. He took his leading Pepper Flight inbound to the target at treetop level, making five hundred knots, when he barely cleared a rise. The gunners were waiting. “As I topped it, the first thing I saw were tracers,” he recalled. “I was hit immediately.”

  As the cockpit filled with smoke, Risner’s wingman called, “Get out, Lead! You’re burning! You’re burning all over.”*

  The three-war warrior was not giving up yet. Selecting afterburner, he accelerated straight ahead and punched the jettison button that cleaned the external stores off his plane in the small hope of doing some damage to the site and, incidentally, making his plane fly faster. Merely three miles from the coast, Risner turned east, hoping to reach the sanctuary of the ocean. At 550 knots, he thought he could make it.

  Then his Thud died: the airplane no longer responded to control inputs. The nose dropped, leaving him no choice. He blew off the canopy and squeezed the handles on the ejection seat, ending his fifty-fifth Vietnam mission. As he wrote in 1973, “I made my reservation for seven and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton.” He was well known there—the North Vietnamese read Time magazine too.17

  Oak Flight was also targeted against Site VN-05. Major Raymond J. Merritt was flying with Oak Flight. Born in Oregon and raised in California, he enlisted in the Navy but wrangled a transfer to the Air Force. Upon completing flight training in 1953 he went to Korea, where he flew one hundred missions in Republic F-84 Thunderjets, the predecessor to the F-105.

  Afterward he spent a glorious three years of uninterrupted flying as a gunnery instructor at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Texas Tech in 1961 and did a tour at the ballistic missile division of the Air Research and Development Command.

  Merritt transitioned to F-105s, joining the 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron on Okinawa in 1964. At age thirty-five, he was a seasoned professional fighter pilot and career officer.

  Attacking Site NV-05, Merritt shunned evasive maneuvers to concentrate on accurate bombing. His decision to “press” rather than jink gave the gunners a good shot. They hit him hard. With his bird on fire, Merritt ejected fourteen miles northwest of the Thanh Hoa Bridge. Armed peasants seized him immediately.

  The site, which may have been a decoy, cost the US Air Force a superb squadron commander and a highly experienced flight leader, plus two irreplaceable aircraft, each valued at $2.1 million. There would be no more F-105s—the production line was now closed, with the last one delivered to the Air Force in January.

  So it went. The 67th Squadron lost eight planes and six pilots in three weeks of August and September. Nor was that all. Throughout 1965 the two Thailand wings lost sixty-eight planes to all causes, well over one a week, with eleven in September alone. The odds of escaping death or capture if you were shot down were less than fifty-fifty. Thirty-one F-105 pilots were rescued, fifteen killed or missing, and twenty-two captured. It was a grim business.

  By July 1965 US air operations against Communist North Vietnam had been underway for eleven months. The JCS in Washington formed a study group to assess the overall effect of the campaign, with a dolorous conclusion.

  The data miners in the Pentagon gave Secretary McNamara what he favored—numerical quantification of results. After all, number crunching had pulled him up the ladder at Ford.

  By July 1 some 10,000 sorties had been launched against 122 North Vietnamese targets, an increase beyond the original 94 that McNamara approved, with 240 on the tentative list as of July.

  Although the combined air effort in June 1965 was one-third more than May’s, results remained disappointing. There had been eighty-six strikes “up north,” eight of which included South Vietnamese aircraft, while nearly seventy US armed reconnaissance missions trolled enemy lines of communication and targets of opportunity, including coastal traffic.

  The best the Joint Chiefs’ analysts could claim was that bombing increased the transit time for supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam and complicated logistics for the Pathet Lao. Still, the monsoon season, with drenching rains and swollen rivers and streams, likely contributed more to Communist problems than aerial action.

  The air campaign’s effects on North Vietnam’s economy were marginal, affecting the GDP of North Vietnam by “only a few percentage points.” Although some air power strategists still clung to World War I Italian general Giulio Douhet’s theory that aerial bombing could break the enemy’s will to resist, the JCS working group concluded, “From analysis of available evidence there is nothing to indicate definitely that the bombings have caused either physical damage or lowered morale to the extent that would compel the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] to negotiate.”

  The document, signed by the chairman of the JCS, Army General Earl Wheeler, ended, “In summary, the DRV still seems ready to endure further air strikes… the strikes have not yet reduced DRV overall military capabilities to train and support covert infiltration to South Vietnam.”18

  In short, American air efforts to the end of June were a flat failure.

  At least two of the service chiefs were very pessimistic and vocal. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, who had fire-bombed most of the major Japanese cities and launched both atomic bombings during World War II, and Marine Corps Commandant Wallace M. Greene felt that if a war was worth fighting, it was worth winning. They urged Johnson “to get in or get out”—advice Johnson didn’t want to hear.

  Despite this assessment from the military professionals, Johnson and McNamara continued with the same policy as before. Because th
ey weren’t clinically insane, it is doubtful they really expected different results. One would think that any normal man reading every week the totals of American youth killed, wounded, maimed, missing, and captured in desperate combat in Vietnam and of the increasingly strident protests against the war that were sweeping American college campuses would have swallowed hard and chosen between one of two options: win the war or get out. But Johnson didn’t. Both options were too dangerous. He damned the torpedoes, kept steaming as before, and vowed to fight this war to a stalemate. In public he continued to lie to the American people and insist that the nation was on the road to victory.

  On the other side of the world the Dragon’s Jaw had weathered its first year of the war rather well. Repeatedly damaged and repaired, the structure seemed sound. Guns and gun crewmen that had succumbed under American bombs had been replaced. The Dragon was very much alive.

  * In his memoir Risner identified himself as “Oak Lead,” but there is no doubt he was leading Pepper Flight.

  CHAPTER 6

  ENTER THE NAVY

  By the time the Dragon’s Jaw bridge was dedicated in May 1964, the US Navy had more than four decades of experience operating aircraft from ships and nearly twenty years with jets. The transition to jets immediately after the glory days of World War II, which had been fought with piston-engine carrier planes, meant the Navy had to start almost from scratch learning how to take these new-fangled aircraft to sea. The problem was multidimensional: jet engines rev up slowly, whereas piston engines give power almost as soon as the throttle is advanced, and the wings of jets were designed to allow the planes to go faster to take advantage of the new power source, which meant that takeoff and landing speeds were much higher than their predecessors. Borrowing heavily from the Royal Navy, the Americans incorporated three critical developments in their existing aircraft carriers and the new ones under construction: the angled flight deck, the mirror landing system, and steam catapults.

  In the straight-deck era the portion of a flight deck forward of the arresting wires was guarded by woven-steel barriers raised and lowered as needed. Usually a landing aircraft snagged one of several wires with its lowered tailhook and was dragged to a stop. But not always. In the event of a botched landing or a “hook skip,” the errant aircraft crunched into the barrier, usually sustaining serious damage. In the worst case, the plane went over the barrier and smashed down on planes parked in front of it. Postwar aviator Wally Schirra, later a three-flight astronaut, summarized, “In those days you either had an arrested landing or a major accident.”1

  The axial deck solved the landing problem. By canting the landing area 8 to 11 degrees to port and realigning the arresting wires, the parking and taxiing area forward was safe from planes that failed to catch a wire. In every landing, whether he was arrested or not, the pilot upon touchdown retracted his speed brakes and went to full power on his engine or engines. The arresting gear was strong enough to catch the aircraft despite it being at maximum power. And if the tailhook failed to snag a wire, the aircraft “boltered,” a British term meaning that it continued straight ahead and ran off the angled deck, rotated to the proper angle of attack, and climbed away to rejoin the landing pattern. Never once during a landing did the plane surrender its flying speed unless it was arrested. The days of the full-stall landing aboard ship were over—the angled deck saved naval aviation.

  Almost concurrent with the angled deck was introduction of the mirror landing system. Ironically, the Japanese Navy had used a similar arrangement on its carriers, employing two lights that, when properly aligned, gave the landing pilot the optimum glide path. Today the concept is used at most American civilian airports: the visual approach slope indicator (VASI).

  However, until the late 1950s the British and Americans used landing signal officers—“batsmen” in the Royal Navy and LSOs in the American—wielding handheld paddles to tell a landing aviator if he was properly aligned, on speed, and on glide slope. The manual system worked well for slower piston-engined aircraft, but jets required faster response time because they approached faster, and with speed came the need for greater precision. The window to catch the third wire was only eighteen inches thick when the landing aircraft came across the ramp, the aft end of the flight deck. The pilot needed a direct visual cue to fly his airplane this precisely, especially when the deck was moving in response to waves and swells.

  A British aviator and engineer devised the mirror landing aid, allegedly using his secretary’s compact and lipstick as an example. With it, a strong light was shown onto a concave mirror and reflected up the glide slope. Mounted almost halfway up the deck, portside, the mirror showed a landing pilot a “meatball,” which he compared with green datum lights mounted on each side. If the ball was centered between the datum lights, the pilot was on glideslope. If it was high, above the datum lights, he was high, and if it was below the datum lights, he was low too. The feedback was automatic and instant. LSOs remained a vital part of the equation, however, monitoring each approach with the ability to issue terse radio comments, such as “Keep it coming… little power… watch your line-up,” or to initiate a wave-off vocally or by flashing the datum lights.

  Between these two improvements, the angled deck and the mirror landing system, carrier accident rates were cut in half, and refinements in equipment and technique resulted in further savings.

  Still, an arrested carrier landing remained the ultimate aviation challenge, requiring more precision than any other aspect of the aviator’s art. It was especially so at night or in foul weather. During the Vietnam War a Navy physiological survey found that pilots often experienced more stress attempting a night landing than they felt in combat. One F-4 pilot wired his intercom system to his tape recorder and played back the tape that night after he trapped. He found that he had stopped breathing during the last thirty seconds of the approach.

  LSOs graded every approach, whether a trap or not, and grades were assessed regardless of rank or seniority. It is instructive of the carrier culture that an excellent pass merely received a grade of “OK.” For instance, “OK-3” meant a good approach and landing that caught the target wire, which was the third of the four stretched across the deck. Pilots sought to make a “rails pass,” smack-on lineup and glide-slope with perfect airspeed control and no deviations. A nocturnal underlined “OK-3” was the non plus ultra and could not be topped.

  A carrier pilot’s skill at landing was on display for all to see with every approach, but it was also recorded on posters in his ready room. An OK pass was colored green, fair or “fleet average” could be orange or yellow, and a substandard pass could be blue for a bolter or red for a wave-off due to pilot error rather than deck conditions. Thus, anyone familiar with the system could read a greenie board with a glance and instantly determine who were the best “sticks” in the squadron.

  Finally, steam catapults permitted progressively bigger and heavier aircraft. World War II catapults were hydraulically powered, with physical limits and a harsh kick in the back. The kick occurred because hydraulics imparted their full impetus immediately, whereas the British innovation of steam catapults not only had greater kinetic energy but also continued to accelerate uniformly through the entire length of the stroke. One aviator noted, “Hydraulic was Boom, steam was Varoom.”

  The acceleration the catapult delivered could also be immediately tailored to the launch weight of the aircraft, from a nine-ton loaded A-4 to a thirty-ton A-3 full of fuel. The goal was to give each aircraft—taking type, weight, wind over the deck, and ambient air temperature into consideration—stall speed plus fifteen knots. Too much oomph would overstress the airframe; not enough would put the plane into the drink.

  Daytime steam catapult launches of fully loaded aircraft were the ultimate aviation thrill. Even veteran naval aviators were known to emit an orgiastic whoop when riding the cat… during the day—nighttime shots were a wholly different animal. The catapult would throw a fully loaded aircraft—for example, a f
ifty-four-thousand-pound A-6—from a standing start to fifteen knots above the stall in about two and a half to three seconds. At the end of the catapult stroke the pilot would find himself in total darkness, on instruments, sixty feet over the ocean in an airplane that was barely flying. Any emergency at that moment, such as an engine flaming out on the shot, dumping a generator, or any one of more than a hundred things, could instantly overload the pilot. For most carrier aviators night shots, especially in filthy weather, were exercises in terror, a ride on the rabid pig. If a pilot were ever going to accidentally fly into the ocean, this was probably when it would happen.

  In addition, on rare occasions a steam catapult would malfunction, resulting in a “cold” catapult shot that left the launching aircraft sixty feet over the water without enough airspeed to fly. If a pilot got a cold shot, immediate ejection was the only way to save his own life. The possibility of ejecting right in front of a large ship churning through the dark ocean was the stuff of pilot nightmares on hot, sweaty nights in his bunk. Or as he taxied to the cat for a night shot.

  Unlike the Air Force, the Navy had divided up the fighter and attack missions in the 1950s and optimized airframes for each, with the exception of the F-4 Phantom. In 1964 the US Navy carrier air wing organization was well established. In fact, it varied little from the Korean War formula more than a decade before, with obvious technological differences due to operating more advanced aircraft. The Navy operated two types of air wings from carriers: attack wings and antisubmarine wings. The antisubmarine warfare (ASW) platforms were converted World War II Essex-class carriers; although they deployed to the Tonkin Gulf, the water there was too shallow for effective submarine operations.

  An attack carrier air wing (designated CVW, for carrier, fixed-wing) was a small, fully integrated air force whose airport could travel the oceans of the earth at speeds of up to thirty-five knots. At the heart of the wing was its attack component, usually two A-4 Skyhawk squadrons, although some carriers embarked a third. In the coming years large carriers exchanged an A-4 squadron for an A-6 Intruder squadron, which provided a dedicated night and all-weather strike capability.