Thud Ridge
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Thud Ridge
Jacksel Markham Broughton
This is the story of a special breed of warrior, the fighter-bomber pilot; the story of valiant men who flew the F-105 Thunderchief ‘Thud’ Fighter-Bomber over the hostile skies of North Vietnam.
The book is based on Broughton’s tour of duty between September 1966 and June 1967 as Vice Commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. The narrative is anecdotal in nature, a commentary of his observations of persons, aircraft, and events during his tour, more or less chronologically, but without dated references. Few individuals are identified by other than first or nicknames, but Broughton develops most as characters through descriptions of their career backgrounds. Broughton’s accounts of missions “up north” were enhanced in both accuracy and verisimilitude by verbatim transcriptions of radio transmissions he recorded using a small tape recorder mounted in the cockpit of his aircraft.
In Thud Ridge Broughton is highly critical of the U.S. command structure directing air operations against North Vietnam. He blames micromanagement by the highest levels in Washington down to the Thirteenth Air Force, a command echelon based in the Philippines, for losses of men and aircraft that he characterizes as “astronomical” and “worthless”. He is particularly critical, however, of the “bomber mentality” management by generals who came up through the Strategic Air Command and then occupied key command slots in the war, which was being fought by pilots of the Tactical Air Command.
The book came about when, at the completion of his tour of duty, Broughton and two of his pilots were court martialed by the USAF for allegedly conspiring to violate the rules of engagement regarding U.S. air operations. Although acquitted of the most serious charges, Broughton, who had been personally relieved of duty by Pacific Air Forcescommander Gen. John D. Ryan, was subsequently transferred to an obscure post in the Pentagon, allegedly as a vendetta because his punishment was so slight. Required by office protocol to work only two or three days a month, he used both his extra time and his bitterness at the Air Force to compose Thud Ridge while he awaited approval of an application to appeal of his conviction to the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records.
After his conviction was overturned and expunged from his record because of “undue command influence”, Broughton retired from the Air Force in August 1968 and had the memoir published by J.B. Lippincott. The book appeared soon after as a Bantam paperback, with reprint editions in 1985, 2002, and 2006.
THUD RIDGE
By Colonel Jacksel “Jack” M. Broughton, USAF (Ret.)
With an Introduction by Hanson W. Baldwin
“To Our Comrades Up North.”
— F-105 pilots’ toast to the prisoners of Hanoi
Author’s Note
This is a book about the fighting in the air over North Vietnam, and it is written in the language of the fighter pilots of the Air Force. There was no other way. Some of these words are not going to make much sense if you haven’t had the experience, and where that seemed to be the case I have tried to explain; others will, I hope, be clear enough from the context, from the people and places and events that I have described. I have attempted to combine a definition of some of the words we used and a general description of how we worked into an appendix “A Bit About Words.” Take a look at it if you’re puzzled about some of the aspects of fighter pilot chatter. That’s what it’s for.
Introduction by Hanson W. Baldwin
The fighter pilot is a breed apart; to him, loyalty down is all important, and the men who flew against North Vietnam in aircraft designed for far different missions felt they were always under the gun of official disapproval in Washington and Hawaii. They risked their lives to the enemy, their car-reers to the politicians. Infractions of any one of the tremendous numbers of restrictions which governed every flying hour of their lives subjected them to inquiry and perhaps to censure and punishment. Yet far from being just irresponsible Gung-Ho pilots out to kill women and children—a Communist-sponsored caricature that has been sold to too many of the American people—they were quiet heroes who tried their best to deliver their bombs on military targets only, and who often paid with their lives for their humanity and their restraint.
The story of these people, and, particularly, of the men who flew the Air Force workhorse—the F-105 “Thud”—over North Vietnam, is scarcely known to the public. Colonel Broughton, a football tackle at West Point in the class of 1945, tells it here.
He is not concerned with the big picture; his story concerns one wing of F-105’s based on Takhli in Thailand, and the men who flew with it and lived or died. It is told in the language of the fighter pilot and with all its verve, authenticity, and drama.
Colonel Broughton flies and writes the way he played football, in a tough, moving, fluent, and veracious style. His is a unique story. He tells it as it was, with all the mistakes and frustrations, the tragedies and heartaches, the high drama and the flaming terror. It is rare to find in any book the combination of precise professional and technical knowledge with narrative power that this one possesses.
But Thud Ridge has another original quality. It is history-in-the-making. It is the first battle narrative I know of that was, in large part, actually recorded during battle. Most battle accounts are warmed over. After-action reports and after-action interviews usually represent the raw stuff of history. Thud Ridge utilizes in-action records for this purpose; in his flight over the north, Colonel Broughton carried with him in his cockpit a miniature tape recorder, which preserved the pilot talk, the orders, the high excitement, and the tragedy.
There is, thus, about this book the realism, the honesty, the frankness, and the dedication that is the best memorial to those Americans who died in North Vietnam for a country that did not seem to “long remember.”
This bitter war in the jungles far away is probably the most misunderstood war—one of the most unpopular wars—in our history. Though it has been mismanaged and overcontrolled at high levels, it has never been the “big bully” war its opponents have charged. Its fundamental purpose—to enable South Vietnam to direct its own political destinies without outside interference and to prevent Communism from conquering another area by terrorism and force—was, and is, sound and in our own interest. But, as in Korea, our fundamental objective in Vietnam has been essentially a defensive one, a negative one, a limited one, and Americans have not yet demonstrated the patience, the wisdom, or the understanding necessary for the support of such a war.
We have allowed the term “limited war” to become a shibboleth. Strategy is the science of alternatives; we have, by our own actions or lack of actions, reduced too greatly the options available to us. Limited war should mean first and primarily the definition of aims and objectives and of the limited political end to be achieved. But in practice in two limited wars—Korea and Vietnam—we have used American manpower and spent American blood while limiting weapons and hobbling strategy and tactics. We have practiced manpower escalation while limiting technological escalation; the result has been frustration, both military and political. The problem of the future is not simply how to limit wars, but how to limit them without frustrating our basic political objectives.
The accomplishment of even the negative purpose of defense would, in any case, have been difficult in Vietnam. The Vietcong were deeply ensconced in the country’s social fabric when we first committed our military strength in 1965, and they had the support—voluntary or enforced by terror—of a sizable minority of the South Vietnamese population. They had access to supplies and replacements and had secure sanctuaries, long prepared, not only in the jungle and mountain fastnesses of South Vietnam, but also in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And as th
e war continued, they enlisted the active support of the world’s two greatest Communist powers—the USSR and Red China.
Any guerrilla war is certain to be a long-drawn-out war of attrition; the British and their allies fought for twelve years to eliminate a far smaller Communist guerrilla movement in Malaysia. Neither the Administration nor the public understood, when we first committed our strength, that any war in Vietnam, no matter what we did, was bound to be a long war requiring major effort. (Some of our key military leaders had greater foresight. Before a single U.S. combat soldier was committed to Vietnam in 1965, the Army Chief of Staff and the Marine Commandant estimated that a total of 600,000 to 1,000,000 American troops might be required.) But the Administration compounded its failure to understand the difficulties of Vietnam by the policy of gradualism it followed. President Johnson described this policy as the gradual application of increased power to the enemy to force him to cease and desist. This form of escalation sacrificed the great initial U.S. advantage in power. Escalation always works to the advantage of the stronger power if the ante is raised to a degree the opponent cannot quickly match. But the United States sacrificed this advantage; it increased U.S. power and U.S. pressure slowly and gradually—so slowly and so gradually that it permitted the enemy, with major help from its great Communist allies, to match us relatively. The policy of gradualism meant that what was bound in any case to be a long war was now certain to become even more protracted.
Nowhere was this mistake more obvious, nowhere were the results so tragic, as in the air war against North Vietnam. In Vietnam, air power—in large part through no fault of its own—has suffered in the public mind; it has been wrongly blamed for failures that were not its doing; it has failed to win recognition for its real accomplishments.
Never in the history of human conflict have so many hampered, limited, and miscontrolled so few as in the air campaign against North Vietnam. Never has frustration been more compounded. Never have brave men died to less purpose than in some of the bombing forays over the North. Never, in American experience, have the lessons of air warfare, of all warfare, been so pointedly ignored. And never before has an air campaign been controlled, in detail, from thousands of miles away.
The objectives of the air campaign against North Vietnam were defined by Washington as retaliation and punishment of the North for its attacks upon the South and upon U.S. units; a psychological boost to the hard-pressed South Vietnamese peoples; and the imposition of a limitation on the supplies provided by North Vietnam to the enemy in the South.
The air campaign undoubtedly improved the morale of South Vietnam, but it failed to depress the morale of the North in any vital manner, failed to persuade Hanoi to cease and desist, and hampered but never halted the large-scale flow of supplies and replacements to the South from North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
U.S. memories are short; air power should never have been expected to accomplish all of these objectives, particularly when the restrictions and limitations placed upon the air campaign doomed it a-borning.
There was undoubtedly initial overenthusiasm, among some professionals as well as the Administration and the public, about what air power might accomplish. Americans like to think in terms of an immaculate war won in the wild blue yonder, and some Air Force publicists have encouraged this Madison Avenue fantasy. The Air Force is a young service led by enthusiasts who had had to fight hard to establish its validity against the military traditionalists, and from time to time it has oversold its capabilities. The lessons of World War II, when air power proved to be a vital part—but still only a part—of the military team, and of Korea, when the air interdiction campaign—Operation Strangle—failed to strangle, were quickly forgotten, and some in Washington, including many laymen and a few professionals, anticipated quick results when the bombs began to fall on North Vietnam.
But oversell was not primarily responsible for the disa-pointing results in North Vietnam. In 1965 when the bombing campaign started the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that some ninety-four key military targets be destroyed within two to three weeks in an overwhelming blitz. The campaign was planned in accordance with the military principles of mass, momentum, and concentration to maximize the shock effects of air power to the full. North Vietnam’s air defenses then were weak; her gasoline and petroleum storage, electric power, transportation, and other vital targets were concentrated and vulnerable; and the cumulative .effect of destroying all these targets rapidly would, at the very least, have materially impeded Hanoi’s aid to the Viet-cong and might have shaken the North Vietnamese hierarchy.
The recommendation for a planned bombing campaign was ignored, but the bombing was started, hedged around with so many restrictions and limited so severely by the policy of gradualism that it was, except for brief periods, largely ineffective. Instead of striking ninety-four targets in three weeks, the power of the United States Air Force and Navy was applied in driblets over three years; some of the ninety-four targets have not yet been hit. Initially, even the Russian-provided and Russian-directed SAM (surface-to-air missile) sites could not be bombed at all; later, only if the SAMs endangered our aircraft. The tank farms at Haiphong were on the forbidden list for months; the enemy had ample time to disperse and conceal his fuel supplies before we bombed them. Power plants were similarly spared until it was too late. Airfields were prohibited targets until late in the war. Migs could and did take off and land directly beneath the bomb sights of our aircraft, and the rule forbade their destruction until they were airborne. Key communication bottlenecks, like the Paul Doumer bridge across the Red River at Hanoi, and the Haiphong docks, through which funneled most of the food, fuel oil, trucks, bulk materials, weapons, ammunition, and heavy equipment essential to Hanoi’s survival were forbidden targets.
In short, the United States pulled its punches in North Vietnam; Hanoi fought a total war, and Russia and Red China provided the massive aid without which Hanoi could not have survived. The result was inevitable: military and psychological stultification, and an increasing pilot and aircraft loss rate as Moscow helped Hanoi to establish the most sophisticated air defense system ever tested in war—a far-flung complex of missiles, ground guns, interceptors, radar, and communications and control centers.
Targeting restrictions formed only one part of the remote-control limitations that nullified the efforts of our finest fliers. The permissible targets, except for a brief period of intensified bombing in 1967, formed no part of a coherent pattern. The target list was controlled tightly by the White House, with the civilian chiefs of the Pentagon and State Departments as the chief advisers to the President, and with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the only body with military experience) the low men on the totem pole.
First Washington and then Hawaii—the latter the headquarters of the Conimander-in-Chief Pacific and of the Commander of Pacific Air Forces—controlled such details as flight profiles, armament loads, flak suppression missions, and reconnaissance. Prohibited areas abounded; there was a 30-mile “neutral” strip along the Chinese frontier, a 10-mile prohibited zone around Haiphong, a 30- and a 20-mile circle—each with its prohibitions—around Hanoi, and so on. Our pilots had to approach their targets by paths in the sky that were so well defined for the enemy (by our own actions) that his defense problem was simplified and our loss rate was increased.
There is no doubt whatsoever that all these political restrictions needlessly cost American lives, nullified the positive results the bombing campaign might have achieved, and notified the enemy that Washington was overcautious, uncertain, and hesitant. It is not adequate to reiterate the old shibboleth that Vietnam, or any guerilla war (and Vietnam became far more than a guerilla war), was a political war. Of course it was, but any war must have, first and foremost, a political objective or it is senseless slaughter. The problem of any war is to utilize military means effectively to achieve the political objective; in Vietnam senseless political restrictions hampered our military technology to such a degree tha
t it became almost impossible to accomplish our political objectives.
Not that the military did not make mistakes; not that they are without some blame for the frustration and the unnecessary casualties. The Air Force wings in Thailand were controlled by a multiplicity of overlapping and unnecessary headquarters, cluttered with administrative red tape. The air war against the North was handicapped by our lack of technical preparation for h. The same weaknesses had been evident in Korea: the lack of a really effective all-weather fighter (the Navy’s A-6 attack plane, which appeared midway in the war, was an exception); the inability to pinpoint gun or SAM sites and radar control stations; the lack of appreciation, at high levels, of what a sustained bombing campaign required. There had been too much dependence on nuclear weapons, and the “bomber generals” in the Air Force had long down-graded the tactical air arm.
Indeed, the Air Force has been unfortunate in much of its top-level leadership since World War II. Some of its leaders have been either “parochial” or political (in the narrow milltary sense), or both, and virtually all of them have come from the ranks of the bomber generals. Long before World War n, General C. L. Chennault, then a less senior officer, charripi-oned the role of the fighter in the achievement of air superiorly at the Air Corps Tactical School. But he lost the argument, and tactical air power still found itself in Vietnam subordinated to the experiences and the prejudices of the SAC (Strategic Air Command) pilots and the bomber generals.
For the Navy, which had long emphasized tactical air power and which contributed so greatly to the air campaign against the North from heaving carrier decks in the Tonkin Gulf, this was not a problem. But what hurt many of the fighter-pilot “tigers” of the Air Force, flying from their bases in Thailand, was the feeling that their own service did not always understand their requirements and their problems and did not champion the men who were doing the fighting and dying.