“Rusty” Rust, the pilot who had delivered 3-4290 only a couple of days earlier, was up in the Yokota control tower making his expertise available in case Matt needed advice. Rusty had been stationed at Yokota for four years earlier in his career, and he knew the area’s peculiarities well: “Matt was coming in from the south, heading north to make his first landing attempt. From that direction visibility was half a mile in haze. I wanted to tell him to come in from the north, heading south. Visibility in that direction was three miles. Although I could see him coming in, I had no way of reaching Matt. He was talking on the radio, first to the SAC command post and then to GCA radar. All I could do was watch. The B-47 was built like an automobile, with one UHF radio. There were no backups.”
On approach to Yokota, Raven Red Winters manually lowered the landing gear. “One gear stuck and didn’t want to lock up positively,” Hank recalled. “Red Winters was afraid he was going to break off the handle. ‘Do it, Red,’ I told him. We had no other choice. Finally, the recalcitrant gear gave, and we got a positive lock indication.” The Ravens in their web slings in the aisle below the pilots simply waited. Red, positioned in the aisle, could observe Matt and watched anxiously as the pilot wrestled with the unwieldy aircraft. Matt and Hank determined that they could use one-third flaps for the landing without getting the aircraft in an unrecoverable nose-down position. Matt said a final few words before he initiated his landing attempt. He knew the aircraft was going to porpoise, bouncing back into the air after a hard landing on the forward gear, a situation that frequently led to loss of directional control. “The landing will be rough. We will come down hard on the forward main gear due to our nose-down attitude. Henry, you deploy the [brake] chute and stand on the brakes after the second bounce. I will keep the wings level and maintain directional control.” Colonel Gunn cleared the runway for them. Everything was as ready down below as it could be—fire trucks, fire-fighting helicopters, medical teams. The crew did its prelanding checklist.
“Crew discipline and training were important in how we handled the situation,” Hank observed. “Crews have scenarios come up in a flying career, and by good fortune the majority make it through. In some cases, they don’t. Maybe more discipline and training would have made a difference in those other cases. It probably did for us. On our first landing attempt, we tried to follow standard procedures of descending four thousand feet per minute and keeping the airspeed below 290 knots. As we slowed, the nose of the aircraft began to dip because of our forward center of gravity. We reduced our rate of descent as we approached the runway and continued to experiment with the airspeed and the flaps. We didn’t want the nose to drop on us, because we had no idea if we could get it back up. As we continued to bleed off airspeed, approaching the runway, the aircraft’s nose continued to drop. We couldn’t get low enough in time and had to opt for a go-around. Matt put the power to the engines as we crossed the runway threshold, and slowly the nose began to rise again.”
Rusty Rust watched through high-powered binoculars from his perch in the Yokota control tower. “On his first attempt, I saw his nose begin to drop on his landing approach. He was still too high, and then he applied power and initiated a go-around. I hoped he would do a 180 and make his second attempt from the north to give himself the benefit of better visibility, but he opted to go around.”
“On our second attempt we got her down to five hundred feet,” Hank Dubuy reflected pensively, “then three hundred, then two hundred, and as soon as Matt pulled the power off, the aircraft nose came down and the forward gear slammed into the runway.” Said Rust, “When I saw him next he had a good landing attitude. Then suddenly, the nose of the aircraft dropped down and went straight into the ground. He took a tremendous first bounce, nearly up to the level of the rescue chopper, and then he hippity-hopped down the runway until he came to a stop. Recovery from this unusual attitude took great skill and coordination by Matt and Hank.”
George Back sat helplessly in his sling in the aisle below the pilots. “The landing was as rough as Matt said it would be. We porpoised about eighty feet into the air, where we nearly hit the fire-suppression helicopter hovering above us. I thought the fuselage was going to break right behind the copilot, but it held together. Matt brought the aircraft to a stop, and we exited, heading for the edge of the runway. I squatted down next to Red Winters, watching the pandemonium around the damaged, smoking craft. Red turned to me and said, ‘You know, George, we are now living on borrowed time.’ I wondered what Red meant by that. Then I saw Red, our ever-conscientious back-end crew leader, disregard the potential threat of fire, sprint back to the aircraft, climb up the aluminum ladder into the forward crew compartment, and scuttle as fast as he could through the access tunnel into the Raven compartment to retrieve the classified mission logs and other classified materials we had left behind.”
Two pictures of 3-4290 after landing at Yokota Air Base, 1965. MiG-17 cannon-shell hole is clearly visible in the American star. M. Mixson.
Copilot Hank Dubuy remarked, “During the final landing attempt, I watched the airspeed throughout our descent. We were below 160 knots when we touched down. I pulled the brake chute at the top of the bounce. The chute wasn’t damaged, thank God. It blossomed and slammed us to the ground and kept us there. I stood on the brakes as Matt had ordered me to do. If the chute had failed? I don’t even want to think about that.”
Navigator Bob Rogers recalled, “After the brake chute deployed, we hit like a ton of bricks. Everything loose came flying forward, toward my position in the nose of the aircraft. Once the aircraft came to a stop, something else was uppermost in my mind. Get out, of course, but not before I secured the O-15 radar camera film. I held onto it for dear life because I knew there would be a lot of questions regarding our position.”
When the aircraft was inspected, it was found that a cannon shell had knocked one of the 20mm tail guns off its mount. Still, Hank Dubuy had fired more than three hundred rounds, nearly half the ammunition the plane carried, and his skillful handling of the guns probably ruined the day for one MiG-17 pilot. Shortly after the crew evacuated the wrecked aircraft, they were summoned to Colonel Gunn’s office and debriefed. Were they on course? Yes, the 0-15 camera film confirmed that. Who shot first? The MiGs did. The usual questions were thrown at the flyers. Then they were off to the flight surgeon. He wanted to see all of them and to examine their fitness to fly. All were fine, were served the customary glass of Old Methuselah combat-ration whiskey, and released. That evening, after long, hot showers, the crew met in the bar at the Yokota Officers’ Club. They decided that the North Koreans must have sent up their two worst pilots that day. None of the flyers could understand why the MiG pilots failed to shoot 3-4290 down. It was a sitting duck.
It did not make economic sense to repair RB-47H 3-4290. “I remember counting the holes in the airplane. I forget the exact number, but it was in the hundreds,” Colonel Rust recalled. The aircraft was used for parts and then cut up. Its loss was not significant, since the advent of a new airborne reconnaissance system was only two years in the future. The new RC-135 aircraft, which would relieve the combattested RB-47Hs, did not carry guns. In spite of Vietnam, the Cold War was getting a little less frigid between the two nuclear superpowers. Two days after the North Korean attack on 3-4290, crew E-96 flew again, this time in aircraft 3-4305, taking radarscope photography in the Gulf of Tonkin from the Chinese–North Vietnamese border to the demilitarized zone. The two fighters with them belonged to the U.S. Navy.
Crew E-96 returned to the United States on May 17, 1965. The following month they reported to SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. It was standard procedure for crews to receive a debriefing from the Intelligence people on the quality of their take during their TDY. General Richard O. Hunziker met with crew E-96. Lieutenant Dubuy recalled that during the meeting, the general looked at several pictures Dubuy had taken of the attacking MiGs after the guns quit firing. “How did you have time to take
these pictures, Lieutenant?” the general inquired. Hank responded, “I had to shoot at them with something, General, and the camera was all I had left.” Crew E-96 was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for extraordinary achievement during aerial flight.
Matt Mattison, the competent and courageous pilot with nerves to match his flying skills, died in the early 1990s. George Back was right when he said, “I had the utmost confidence in Matt and somehow knew that God didn’t get us that far just so we would end up splattered all over the runway.” Military flyers may see the hand of God more often than other mortals, but without the consummate flying skills and self-discipline of a Colonel Mattison, the flight would have ended in tragedy. In a twenty-six-year career, Matt served in World War II with the Eighth Air Force; flew C-54 transports in the Berlin Airlift; tested RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft at Eglin AFB, Florida; and then survived a midair collision at Eglin while testing an F-86D fighter. After his retirement, Matt settled in Florida and worked for another twenty years for the Federal Aviation Administration. Copilot Hank Dubuy left the air force in 1969 to fly for Continental Airlines. He settled in the greater Los Angeles area. Bob Rogers, the navigator, continued to fly for years with the 55th Wing and after his retirement settled in the greater Boston area. In 1967 Joel Lutkenhouse and this author flew together on another RB-47H crew out of Yokota Air Base, at times retracing the fateful route Joel had flown earlier in 1965. Joel lives in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and is pursuing a successful career as a realtor. Red Winters died young. George Back settled in the greater Cleveland, Ohio, area after retiring from the air force.
Flight and maintenance crews posing in front of the last two operational RB-47H aircraft at Yokota Air Base, Japan, March 1967, two years after the North Korean attack on an RB-47H over the Sea of Japan. Captain Lutkenhouse is right front; Captain Samuel (author) is second from right front. W. Samuel.
In contrast to the descriptive citations issued to World War II heroes, the citations accompanying Crew E-96’s award of the Distinguished Flying Cross contain not a word about their unit or what happened. Such factually sparse citations were the norm for awards presented to SAC flyers involved in secretive reconnaissance missions after the Korean War.
Part 4
Vietnam, 1965
In reforming the Pentagon, [Robert McNamara’s] talents had served him well, but in the prosecution of the war, they had sometimes failed him. Vietnam was not a management problem, it was a war, and war is about life and death, filled with intangibles that defy analysis. He had never been in a war, and perhaps he did not fully appreciate at first its stupid waste and its irrational emotions, and the elusiveness of facts and truth when men are dying.
Clark Clifford
SAC and TAC pilots, I believe, thought about death in combat. When I went to Southeast Asia, I said to myself, “I am going to assume that I am dead. I am not going to get out of here alive. And I am not going to worry about it one more time.” When I came out of it alive, and I arrived back in the United States, I couldn’t believe I was alive. I was standing on a street corner saying, “Holy smokes! Yesterday there was flak all over the place, and today I am standing here on the street corner watching the traffic go by, and nobody even realizes there is a war on.” I couldn’t believe I was still alive, because I really believed I was dead. I didn’t think there was any way to get out of that, although I tried hard.
Ralph Kuster, F-105 pilot
In contrast to the Soviet-initiated Berlin blockade of 1948 and the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950, North Vietnam did not present an immediate military threat to U.S. interests, thereby forcing prompt military action. It is beyond the scope of this brief introduction to deal with the political complexities that led to a national crisis over Vietnam and a political and military quagmire. However, it should be understood that the politicians and military leaders of the time made decisions based on their own backgrounds and experiences—to these decision makers the terms Munich and appeasement were still meaningful. The chosen strategy of containment of communist expansionism clearly reflected an attempt to avoid repeating the history of the 1930s, when a lack of Western cohesion, resolve, and strategy allowed Hitler to rise to eminence in Germany and threaten the world order. Therefore, containment dictated the nature of the American response once communist expansion was deemed to have occurred. Leaders believed that there was little the economically and militarily powerful United States could not tackle successfully if it set its mind to it. Furthermore, the domino theory of national collapse held that should one small nation be allowed to fall to communist intrigue or aggression, many others would follow. But this theory, although widely touted by politicians, oversimplified the complex process of national orientation and interaction. Finally, personalities, chance, and even outright deceit became factors on the road to Vietnam. William Manchester said in The Glory and the Dream, “Soldiers and statesmen misjudged the character of the war and its probable course” (1123).
Vietnam emerged as two political entities, north and south, after the 1950s breakup of the French colonial empire in Indochina. Vietnam, seven thousand miles due west of California, was an uninviting place, a hot and humid land of jungles, mountains, and river deltas. The country possessed neither a critical geographic position nor natural resources the West desired, making American involvement even less understandable. A brief chronology of the Vietnam experience will provide a framework for the stories that follow.
In 1956 the United States established a MAAG in Saigon, supporting Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, and the first uniformed Americans entered South Vietnam. On July 10, 1959, Vietnamese terrorists killed two American military advisers at Bien Hoa Air Base, the first casualties of the war. And in December 1960, with the active support of the Hanoi government, the National Liberation Front (NLF) was officially formed in opposition to President Diem’s regime in the South. Diem’s people labeled the NLF “Viet Cong” or Vietnamese communists (VC). In 1962 President John F. Kennedy approved the expansion of the two thousand–man MAAG contingent to sixteen thousand men and upgraded the MAAG to a military assistance command (MACV), headed by a two-star U.S. Army general.
In October 1962 the Kennedy administration faced down a Soviet attempt to introduce offensive missiles in Cuba. The nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union led to the withdrawal of Russian missiles from the island and was considered a major U.S. military and political victory. This heady victory reinforced some senior politicians’ and military officers’ belief in U.S. military superiority and in the validity of the concept of gradual escalation of military force to achieve results. In the same month, the United States activated the 2nd Air Division in Saigon to control in-country air support to the South Vietnamese army, which was beginning to be pressed hard by the Viet Cong. (As the American airpower buildup increased, the 2nd Air Division was replaced by the 7th Air Force in April 1966.)
During the first week of August 1964, the U.S. Navy, in coordination with South Vietnamese naval vessels, conducted operations off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy were involved in two controversial naval engagements with North Vietnamese naval vessels. In retaliation, President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered U.S. carrier-based aircraft to attack North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and a fuel depot. The president asked Congress for a resolution in support of his actions, which was passed by both the House and the Senate. The United States was at war. American helicopters, first introduced in 1962, were augmented by rotational squadrons of B-57 bombers, and in November 1964 Viet Cong guerrillas again attacked Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon, destroying five B-57s, damaging many more, and killing five American military advisers. The American buildup continued unabated, and more than twenty-three thousand Americans, mostly from the army and air force, were deployed in various capacities in Vietnam by the end of 1964.
On February 7, 1965, the Viet Cong attacked a U.S. base near Pleiku in the central hig
hlands, destroying or damaging sixteen army helicopters and killing eight American soldiers. Attacks against American military personnel increased. President Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam, “a continuing, systematic air campaign,” as General William Momyer described it in Air Power in Three Wars (18). And on March 8, 1965, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Force landed on the beaches near Da Nang to protect Da Nang air base. By October 1965 the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) engaged North Vietnamese regulars in the Ia Drang Valley in the central highlands. The battle set the political parameters within which America’s soldiers and airmen subsequently had to operate, allowing sanctuaries for the enemy. In the case of the Ia Drang Valley battle, Cambodia was the sanctuary for the North Vietnamese survivors of the 33rd, 66th, and 320th People’s Army Regiments.
For the air force and the navy, which implemented the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the problem was not only how to persuade a country with few strategic targets to desist from its goal of unification but also how to succeed under severe restrictions. President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara insisted on personally directing the campaign from the Pentagon, selecting targets that they thought suited their strategy of gradual and controlled escalation. According to General Momyer, the air campaign’s objectives in North Vietnam were defined as:
(1) to reduce the flow and/or increase the cost of infiltration of men and supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam;
(2) to make it clear to the North Vietnamese leadership that as long as they continued their aggression against the South, they would have to pay a price in the North;
(3) to raise the morale of the South Vietnamese people. (173)
Only the first of the three objectives was military. The objectives were to be achieved by gradually increasing pressure against small targets moving south through mountain and jungle terrain. The first air attacks under Rolling Thunder launched on March 2, 1965, against targets in Route Packs 1 and 2 and were halted between May 12 and May 17, 1965. The North Vietnamese showed no interest in coming to the negotiating table. The flow of weapons from China and Russia increased, offsetting losses. When the air campaign resumed on May 18, targets north of twenty degrees latitude were included. Targets were released incrementally in line with the concept of gradual escalation. American planes could not enter a thirty-mile buffer zone along the Chinese border and around Hanoi, as well as a ten-mile buffer around Haiphong, the principal port.
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