C-130 Hercules

by Martin W Bowman

  ‘Even though we were flying out of Thailand, we were not safe from enemy attack. One evening while my crew was out on a mission, an enemy team tried to probe the base - right outside the ‘Blind Bat’ enlisted men’s quarters! A Chinese Nùng guard managed to sound the alarm.5 He got off one shot with his shotgun as an NVA special ops soldier was cutting his throat. But the one shot was enough. A few shots were fired but the enemy soldier disappeared into the night.

  ‘One evening our crew had an unusual experience. We were called out of Laos to drop flares between Ubon and the Mekong River which constituted the border between Thailand and Laos. We were told to look for helicopters on the ground. It turned out that North Việtnamese aircraft had penetrated the area, evidently to deliver supplies to insurgents in the area or an enemy team. We did not see anything. Later we learned that an F-4 had been scrambled off of Ubon and had picked up the target on his radar, but in the rush to get him off the ground, the ordinance team had failed to pull the pins on his Sidewinders. The missiles failed to fire and the unidentified airplane - probably a helicopter - got away.

  KC-130F of VMGR-152 landing at Đông Hà in 1967.

  A 2nd Battalion, 503rd Regiment, 173rd Airborne Division paratrooper leaving a C-130 during Operation ‘Junction City’.

  Dropping supplies during Operation ‘Junction City’.

  ‘Sometime in late 1966 a ‘Blind Bat’ crew from my squadron, the 35th TCS, tangled with a North Việtnamese MiG and managed to live to tell about. They were working in northern Laos when ‘Moonbeam’ diverted them to a point just inside the Laotian border about 120 miles west of Hànôi to provide flare support for friendlies on the ground who were under attack. The crew was busy dropping flares when they were alerted by ‘College Eye’, an EC-121 radar ship orbiting over Thailand that a pair of MiGs had just taken off from Giá Lam Airport and were headed their way. It takes a MiG about ten minutes to cover 120 miles and it was not long before the crew had company. No American fighters were anywhere close to their position and the ‘Blind Bat’ flareship was not armed. The crew had only one weapon at their disposal and that was the manoeuvrability of their airplane, combined with rugged terrain beneath them. They dived toward the ground, knowing they were over mountains and had no maps of the terrain on board the airplane. But they had radar and a sharp navigator. Using the radar to keep from hitting a ridge, the C-130 crew wove their way through the valleys while the MiGs searched for them with their own radar. The enemy fighters were so close that the energy from their search radar caused waves on the C-130 crew’s set. When they got back to Ubon later that evening, the fighter pilots in the officers club were disappointed that they had missed a chance at a MiG. The C-130 crew was just glad to be alive!

  ‘Another crew that was glad to be alive was also from the 35th TCS. Major Frank’s crew was working near the Communist stronghold of Tchepone in Laos when they took a hit from a large calibre anti-aircraft gun. This particular gun was a legend. The bad guys had it mounted on a railroad car and kept it hidden inside the mouth of either a tunnel or a large cave near the city. They would roll it inside where it was impervious to air strikes and then bring back out again to take a pot-shot at a ‘Yankee Air Pirate.’ The ‘Blind Bat’ crew thought their number was up. The round set fire to their left wing and was burning brightly fed by the hydraulic fluid in the primary system. Major Frank had rung the ‘prepare to bailout’ bell and was just about to sound the ‘bailout’ signal when the loadmasters called that the fire had gone out. After consuming all the hydraulic fluid in the system, the fire burned itself out before reaching the fuel tanks that were on either side of the dry bay in which it was burning. Still, they had problems. The airplane would still fly, but all hydraulic pressure to the ailerons had been lost. Staff Sergeant Kenney, the engineer, went in back to help the loadmasters, Airmen Benstead, Taylor, Harris and Delaney, to put the fire out. Frank and the co-pilot, Lieutenant Nelson, used all of their strength on the controls while Kenney and the loadmasters provided additional muscle pulling on tie-down straps that they had attached to the aileron bell crank. (Kenney now says they didn’t use a strap, but that was the story the crew told when they got back to Naha.) They managed to bring the airplane to a safe landing at Nakon Pha’m, Thailand where each of the crewmembers kissed the ground when they jumped out of the airplane.

  ‘Getting hit on a ‘Blind Bat’ mission was almost a regular occurrence, but surprisingly, casualties were fairly low. Two ‘Blind Bat’ flare ships were lost during the course of the war, along with their crews. Some crewmembers were wounded by flak on other missions. There was some bitter humour with the mission as well. McNorton, a loadmaster in the 21st TCS, was called ‘Combat McNorton’ because of his thirst for adventure. Before Seventh Air Force put a stop to it, C-130 crews frequently fired their M-16s at the ground during strikes and sometimes used flares as bombs. I set up one bombing mission myself. We dropped a load of six after setting the fuses for a long interval over the Mu Giá Pass. McNorton threw out a flare and hit a B-57 with it. As I remember, it was McNorton who came up with the ‘Blind Bat’ black beret and patch that flare ship crewmembers wore at Ubon.

  C-130 56-0471 ‘Surprise Package’ ‘Blind Bat’.

  C-130 performing a LAPES drop to the US Army 1st Cavalry Division ‘The Air Mobile Division’ at An Khê in Gia Lai Province in the Central Highlands region of Viêtnam in 1965

  ‘A navigator had an experience of rather mixed blessing sometime in 1969. By this time ‘Blind Bat’ had received some new equipment, including the ‘Black Crow’ ignition detector and other equipment, including a system that required a navigator/operator to sit in a seat mounted on the outside of one of the paratroop doors. This particular navigator was coming inside the airplane when he accidentally caught the rip cord of his parachute and extracted himself from the airplane! He made it to the ground safely where he spent an uneasy night until the helicopters came for him at dawn. He was picked up and returned to Ubon - where there was a message waiting for him that he had been passed over for promotion and was being RIF’ed out of the service!

  ‘Bob Bartunek reminded me of an incident that happened one night when we were - literally! upside down in a C-130! The navigator had drifted off and let us get a little bit too close to a flak trap. When the guns opened up, the pilots saw the tracers coming right at us. For years I thought Steve Taylor was flying, but Bartunek says that on this particular evening he was flying from the right seat and Taylor was in the left seat calling fighters. I know where I was - sitting on the door holding the flares in the chute with my feet. All of a sudden our A-model Herky bird was rolling all the way over onto its back! This is no shit, Sherlock! Bartunek rolled the airplane upside down and pulled through in a split-S - which probably kept us from getting shot out of the sky. And the whole thing was so smooth that not a single one of the flares came out the tray. The navigator, who was still half asleep when we went through the aerobatic manoeuvre, said there was no way we could have gone upside down - because his coffee had not even spilled!

  USAF C-130 taxiing at Đông Hà.

  ‘There is an amazing footnote to the story of our crew’s time at Ubon on the ‘Blind Bat’ mission. Although I never connected the dots, our crew played a role in one of the most amazing events of the Việtnam War, although we had no idea that we were a part at the time. In February 1966 US Navy Lieutenant (jg) Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos in an A-1 Skyraider. After evading the enemy for several hours, he was finally captured by Pathet Lao troops and because he was captured by them, he remained in Pathet Lao custody. Dengler was kept in a decrepit Laotian camp along with two other Americans, an Air Force lieutenant who had been shot down in a helicopter the year before and a kicker from an Air America C-46 that was shot down in 1963 and four Asian Air America employees who were on the same airplane. Although no one at Ubon had an inkling of the role we were playing, our nightly missions passed over the camp where the PoWs were being held and our presence was a key
element in the escape plans they made. In late June a few weeks before our crew finished our tour, the seven men escaped. Dengler and Air Force Lieutenant Duane Martin went off together while the others went in different groups. The rainy season had begun and they were unable to signal the nightly C-130 as they had planned. Finally, after they had been in the jungle for about five days, Dengler and Martin managed to signal a C-130, but no rescue mission came to save them. Apparently, it was our crew.

  ‘After almost a week in the jungle, the two airmen were weak from fatigue and illness and were starving. Martin, who was already near death from malaria, convinced Dengler to go with him to try to steal some food from a nearby village. They were spotted by a young boy and a villager rushed out and attacked them with a machete. Martin was killed by the blow and Dengler, who was kneeling beside him, jumped up and rushed the village then fled into the forest and eventually returned to the abandoned guerrilla camp where they had been hiding. Demoralized and to the point he was ready to die, Dengler determined that he make a signal that the damned C-130 crew couldn’t miss! He revived the small fire he had built a few days before and put torches aside to be ready to set the flimsy huts on fire. Later that night the C-130 did come over and he burned the village to the ground! The crew did, in fact, spot his fires - it was us - and when we got back to Ubon the debriefing officers were very excited about the account. Yet, for some reason, no rescue mission was sent out. Apparently the higher-ups in intelligence decided it must not be an American.

  ‘When no rescue force appeared, Dengler was still demoralized and he wasn’t sure if he had actually seen the C-130 or was hallucinating. He woke in another tropical thunderstorm but decided to try go find one of the parachutes from one of the flares. Just before daylight he found it and reading his account of how much that piece of cloth meant to him brought tears to my eyes when I read his account. He took the parachute and put it in his knapsack and used it a few days later to signal Air Force A-1 pilot Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Dietrich when he was finally spotted and rescued. ‘None of us had an inkling that the fires we had seen that night had been set by an escaped PoW and it wasn’t until Bob Bartunek and Dieter Dengler got in contact through the Skyraider Association that the pieces were put together. (Bartunek commanded an Air Force A-1 squadron later in the war.) Although I knew about Dieter’s book, I had never read it until after the movie about his ordeal was released in the summer of 2007. Had I read it sooner I would have known that Dengler owed his life to the parachute from the flare we dropped over him that night.’

  In the period from February 1958 until 1965 about a dozen C-130s were lost worldwide. Then from 1965 to 1972 sixty-five Hercules (including gunships) were lost in South-East Asia alone. Moreover the airlift crewmen killed or MIA numbered 269. In 1966 seven Hercules were lost in South Việtnam. In 1967 thirteen were lost. In 1968 operations intensified and the heaviest losses among Hercules in South Việtnam were recorded, with a total of sixteen C-130s being lost.

  At first the US Army and the USAF held opposite views on how best to deploy troops to the combat zones. The Army considered that air mobile operations using helicopters to deploy troops was a more efficient method than the paratroop landing method initially favoured by the Air Force; moreover the USAF were convinced that fixed-wing air-landed operations would deploy more troops to a given area than a paradrop ever would. From then on, airlift aircraft were used to deposit troops, cargo, equipment and supplies, except of course on a larger scale than the Army’s air mobile helicopter force, which it complemented. In the assault role the Hercules was almost as versatile as the air mobile, since the one hundred rudimentary landing strips capable of accommodating C-l 30s rarely proved an obstacle to the aircraft’s excellent short field performance.

  PACAF was not designed for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and so at the outset, the first aircraft to deploy to Việtnam were mostly provided by Tactical Air Command on a rotational basis. After April 1965 four Tactical Air Command squadrons, deployed from the US on ninety-day tours of temporary duty (TDY) backed up PACAF’s own four C-130 squadrons; by the end of 1965 there were thirty-two Hercules operating incountry, positioned at four bases. All came under the unified control of the Common Service Airlift System (CSAS) and its Airlift Control Center (ALCC) which were subordinate to 834th Air Division, organized on 25 October 1966 at Tân Sơn Nhứt AB in the suburbs of Saïgon and responsible to the Seventh Air Force for tactical airlift within South Việtnam. ALCC functioned countrywide through local airlift control elements, liaison officers, field mission commanders and mobile combat control teams. ALCC also controlled the C-130s that were rotated into South Việtnam on one- and two-week cycles from the 315th Air Division in Japan.

  C-130B 60-0301 turns at the end of the short runway at Bam Bleh, Việtnam on 23 November 1966. The transport was one of several taking troops of the First Cavalry Division back to their base camp at Ăn Khê after an operation. Air Force aircraft made daily flights to fields like this one carrying troops and supplies to front line units. This aircraft was delivered to TAC in May 1961 and ended its days in 3 Squadron, Royal Jordanian Air Force from December 1973 to June 1979.

  Supplies being dropped to ground troops during Operation ‘Junction City’ in Tây Ninh Province in February 1967.

  In 1965 two US Army paratroop brigades were held in Việtnam as a central reserve force quickly available for offensive or reaction operations. In August the 173rd Airborne Brigade was airlifted from Biên Hòa to Pleiku in central Việtnam in 150 Hercules flights. During ‘Operation New Life-65’, which began on 21 November the 173rd made a helicopter assault into an improvised airstrip forty miles east of Biên Hòa; seventy-one C-130s arrived over the next thirty-six hours to resupply them, the first landing within an hour of the initial assault. Meanwhile, for twenty-nine days beginning on 29 October the C-130s kept the 1st Cavalry Division supplied during operations against Piel Me, a small Special Forces camp about halfway between Buôn Ma Thuột (Ban Me Thout) and Pleiku.6 The Việt Công had laid siege to the camp and the US, South Việtnamese and Montagnard native allies fought them in daily firefights with air support by helicopters and fighter bombers. Using a rough airstrip at Catecka Tea Plantation near the battle area the C-130s delivered on average 180 tons of supplies and munitions per day.7

  On 20 November Captain John Dunn’s crew in the 774th TAS, 463rd Tactical Airlift Wing made another in their series of flights, to Pleiku, Đà Nẵng and then Tân Sơn Nhứt. First Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Colonel) Bill Barry, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania and a fully fledged Tactical Airlift navigator on his second tour8 recalled:

  ‘We were making our last airlift stop of the day. As we pulled into the cargo area at Đà Nẵng. ALCE (Airlift Control Element) told us we’d be going from there to Tan Son Nhut (Tân Sơn Nhứt) but there would be a longer than usual delay to reload because some higher priority missions were coming in just behind us.

  ‘Captain John Dunn was an ex-fighter pilot (F-100s), new to airlift and having to look after a crew rather than just himself for the first time; but he was a good pilot and a nice guy. Married, he was in his thirties and had a wife and two boys. Hal Thorson, an ex-farm boy and college wrestler, was the co-pilot. Like me, he was a totally new trainee. Quiet and good natured, Hal was married and had a son. Hal was my age, mid-twenties. John, Hal and I were commissioned officers. Then there were the enlisted men (also known comically as the ‘enlisted swine’). Ed Frame was our flight engineer. A sergeant with several years of experience as an aircraft mechanic, he was new to flying and being a crew member. His job was to monitor the cockpit instruments and watch for and correct, when possible, any mechanical problems, instrument errors, or engine fluxes which took place in flight. Finally, our loadmaster was a young airman, Carl Gross. He was about 20, big and lively and a novice like Hal, Ed and me. His job was to move the cargo, tie it down so it wouldn’t move in flight, or roll on takeoff or landing. He also monitored the rear of the airplan
e in the air and threw the switches and locks that held the palletized cargo in place during airdrops. Most crews were a mix of new guys and veterans. Ours was less experienced than most of the others. Dunn’s hands were going to be fuller than most. Though he was a good, experienced pilot, he had no experience in TAC airlift and that was a big factor. The other four of us on the crew were all inexperienced in numerous ways, as we were soon to find out. There were a lot of young aviators mixed in with veteran flyers to make up the 24 crews the squadron had. Usually, all 24 were never present at any one time, someone always being TDY. The crews, together with a small number of personnel from Wing, flew all our assigned missions in the twelve aircraft the squadron had. The crews also performed all the planning, alert and administrative functions of the squadron. Everyone had one or more other tasks in addition to flying the line.

  ‘Now we sat in the cockpit of our plane and watched another of our Wing’s C-130s pull into the Đà Nẵng cargo area next to us. We recognized the call sign and even the co-pilot’s voice as he asked the ALCE for offload instructions as the plane taxied in after landing. They parked off to our left and slightly behind us. From our cockpit windows we could see the unusual number of fire trucks and ambulances which were following them as they shut down their engines and prepared to offload. We weren’t paying too much attention until Carl Gross came over our rear interphone system and said, ‘Look at the crew scatter from that plane!’ As soon as their propellers had stopped spinning and they were clear to come out of the cockpit, the entire crew ran from the stopped aircraft as if they were evading a cockpit fire. They then stood away from the plane at a distance of thirty yards. Now our interest was up.