by Orr Kelly
In Laos, in the spring of 1961, the Pathet Lao was making significant headway against forces trying to defend the capital of Vientiane. The Mill Pond pilots—by now sporting commissions in the Royal Lao Air Force—were ordered in early April to prepare for a four-pronged strike against Pathet Lao forces in the Plaine des Jarres in mid-Laos.
The attack was called off, but the crews remained on alert and began flying reconnaissance missions over Laos, many of them along the road and trail network through eastern Laos that later became famous as the Ho Chi Minh Trail used by the North Vietnamese to supply their forces in South Vietnam.
On several occasions, planes were hit by antiaircraft fire, but none of them was shot down.
In May, the reconnaissance flights were called off after President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reached agreement to avoid a confrontation between the two powers in remote Laos.
Several months later, in August, U. Alexis Johnson, the United States ambassador to Thailand, learned belatedly about Mill Pond and the fact that American-piloted planes were standing by in “his” country to carry out attacks on neighboring Laos. He was not happy.
“When the ambassador found out we had all those munitions, he ran us out of there,” Aderholt says. By the end of August, the planes and pilots were gone and Mill Pond had reached the end of its shadowy existence.
Although Aderholt dates his tour of duty as commander of Det 2 in Asia from 1960 to 1962, he was back in the States for a while in early 1961, working with the CIA to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
One of his major assignments was to find a remote landing field on the Nicaraguan coast and obtain permission from the Nicaraguan government to use it as a base for B-26 bombers flying in support of the invasion force. The base chosen was at Puerto Cabezas—a field code-named Happy Valley. It was the closest they could get, but it was still a long flight—590 miles—from the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s south coast.
Following the same pattern as in Mill Pond, about twenty B-26 bombers were taken from the aircraft graveyard near Tucson and spruced up as the “air force” for the invasion. One reason for choosing the B-26 for the mission was that the twin-engine plane had the range to make the long flight to Cuba, spend some time in bombing and strafing attacks, and then make it back to Nicaragua. Another reason for the choice of the B-26s was that Fidel Castro had several of the same kind of planes in his air force—although fewer than the number available to the invaders. The invaders’ planes were painted so they appeared to be part of Castro’s air force.
Aderholt also was instrumental in recruiting a team of volunteers from the Alabama Air National Guard, who had until shortly before been equipped with B-26s. They set up shop to train the Cubans and maintain the planes at a secret CIA field—code named Rayo Base—at Retalhuleu, Guatemala.
The goal of the CIA-planned operation was to land a force of Cuban refugees who, with help from a popular uprising, hoped to overthrow Castro. The whole operation was carefully—but, as it turned out, unsuccessfully—planned to appear to be carried out spontaneously by anti-Castro Cubans without links to the United States.
In truth, the CIA was heavily involved, and, on the day of the invasion, the landing parties had limited support from the United States Navy.
The first phase of the actual operation was an air attack on 15 April 1961 against three Cuban airfields by B-26s flown by Cubans out of the Happy Valley airstrip in Nicaragua. The goal was to knock out Castro’s ability to respond to the landing two days later. One of the invaders’ B-26s was shot down that day.
That first phase of the operation had been curtailed to keep it from appearing too much like an overt United States attack. The result was that, when the day of the invasion came, Castro still had an air force capable of causing plenty of trouble. Several landing craft were destroyed or badly damaged, and three more B-26s were shot down over the invasion beaches.
Before the operation, the National Guard pilots serving as advisers to the Cubans were specifically ordered, by name, not to become involved in the conflict. However, on 19 April, the third day of the invasion, with the force on the beach in serious trouble and Castro’s reinforcements on the way, that order was rescinded. Before the day was over, two more B-26s were shot down and four Americans were dead. They were Riley Shamburger and his navigator, Wade Gray, and Thomas W. Ray and his navigator, Leo Baker.
While the National Guardsmen were permitted to fly, United States Navy fighters flying high over the beachhead were under strict orders not to become involved in the fighting. They had to watch helplessly as the B-26s were shot down.
By coincidence, the Jungle Jim squadron in Florida had been created on 14 April, just one day before the initial air strike that paved the way for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Thus, when the aircrews received their mysterious orders to report to Eglin auxiliary field No. 9, several of them assumed, from the strange questions they had been asked, that they were being prepared to go back to Cuba and do it right the next time.
Actually, the charter for Jungle Jim was much broader. Its job was to provide planes and crews to go anywhere in the world they were needed to provide close air support for American and allied forces fighting behind enemy lines and to help friendly developing nations deal with guerrilla uprisings.
The creation of Jungle Jim was part of the major expansion in the nation’s counterinsurgency or irregular warfare forces that resulted from prodding by President Kennedy, who had taken office in January. In that same period, the Navy organized its first two SEAL teams, and the Army’s Special Forces, the Green Berets, embarked on a major expansion program.
It was only after the Army proposed that it set up its own little air force to support the Green Berets that the United States Air Force decided it had better get into this new game in a serious way—much as it would rather have focused its time, money, and attention on fast fighters, high-flying bombers, and the new intercontinental missiles.
The force assembled in Florida was just the opposite of the way the Air Force liked to think of itself. The planes were old. Not only were they based on 1930s technology, but they all had many hours in their log books. And they all had big fans out in front. There wasn’t a jet engine to be seen or heard.
One leader of the unit described himself as the “commander of the only flying museum in the free world.”
The planes were all capable of flying from short, rough fields. They were all relatively easy to maintain. And, with their gray paint and lack of markings, they could slip in and out of many strange places in the world without attracting much attention.
As bombers, there were eight B-26s—from the same graveyard that had supplied the planes for Mill Pond and the Bay of Pigs.
For cargo, there were sixteen C-47s—the same twin-engine plane that had first flown as the DC-3 airliner in the mid-1930s and served on every front in World War II.
And as all-purpose fighters, there were eight T-6 Trojan trainers that could be used as light bombers or in close air support of troops on the ground. The T-6 was a beefed-up version of the plane that had served the Mosquitos of the Korean War a decade before. With the modifications, it had a bigger engine and could carry two .50-caliber machine guns, two five-hundred-pound bombs, and two rocket launchers. But its maximum weapon load was only fifteen hundred pounds.
The initial cadre of Jungle Jim consisted of 352 officers and men.
For the next six months, they did a lot of things that no one else in the Air Force did—at least not without being quickly court-martialed.
One of the C-47 pilots, Wade Everett, later recalled: “No one controlled the 4400th. We literally flew treetop level, cross-country flights all over the United States. We flew through ADIZs [air defense identification zones], control areas, restricted spaces, anywhere; and every time an agency tried to write up a violation, Ben King [Col. Benjamin H. King, the squadron commander] would laugh and tell them to call someone in the Pentagon, and that was the last
heard of any violations.”
Much of their training was at night. They practiced landing on short fields, guided only by men on the ground holding flashlights. Occasionally, one of those on the ground, fearing a plane was about to run him down in the dark, would flee—and forget to drop his flashlight. The pilot, of course, would follow the flashlight right across the field.
Only five months after their training began, the Jungle Jim crews were declared operationally ready. In September, the 4400th Squadron sent its first unit, Detachment 1, overseas. The destination wasn’t, as some still suspected, Cuba. And it wasn’t Vietnam either. Instead, two C-47s and their crews flew to the West African nation of Mali to provide peacetime training to the country’s paratroops. The Americans found it a little strange to be sharing the field with Russian and Czech crews flying Russian planes for the national airline.
On 5 November 1961, Detachment 2 departed for its own overseas deployment. This time, the crews were embarked on a mission that would begin the longest and most demanding era in air commando history. Their destination: Vietnam.
CHAPTER 15
Leading the Way
As the crews of four C-47s approached the South Vietnamese air base at Bien Hoa in mid-February 1962, they received an unusual warning: “Tanks on the runway.” It was a revealing indication of the kind of strange little war they were about to become involved in.
The C-47s left Florida early in February and hopscotched halfway around the world: to California, on to Honolulu, to Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, and finally, after two weeks and nearly seventy-five hours of flying, to Bien Hoa.
As the first C-47 landed, it was, indeed, greeted by a tank. The tank crew kept its cannon aimed at the cockpit until the nervous fliers established who they were and what they were doing there.
The day of their arrival, as it turned out, was the same day a group of rebellious South Vietnamese pilots picked to attack the presidential palace in Saigon.
The first members of Detachment 2 of the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron—the Jungle Jim outfit—had arrived at Bien Hoa in November of 1961 and started to learn their way around. The Vietnam detachment received a new code name: Farmgate. Over the next three months, the Farmgate force grew to include four C-47s, four B-26s, and eight AT-28s.
Accommodations at Bien Hoa in those early days were spartan. The crews slept in tents set up on planks. “Air-conditioning” in the steamy weather was provided by a screen between the waist-high wall of the tent and the canvas roof. When the crews were sent to stand alert at other bases, such as Da Nang or Soc Trang, they often slept under the wings of their planes.
The Farmgate crews were, when they weren’t flying, largely confined to Bien Hoa. One man would be assigned to drive into Saigon to pick up groceries and replenish the unit’s liquor supply.
This was all part of the pretense that the Americans weren’t there—or, if they were there, that they were simply there to advise the South Vietnamese. The Geneva accords of 1954, which had divided Vietnam into a Communist north and a south aligned with the United States, limited the foreign military advisers on each side to 585. The North Vietnamese in the country certainly exceeded that figure, and, by 1962, the number of Americans in country was also several times the limit—a fact apparent to, and reported by, the growing contingent of reporters attracted by the buildup in Southeast Asia.
Despite the fiction that they were “advisers,” the Farm-gate fliers almost immediately began flying combat missions. It was hard, dangerous work. They flew old planes with minimal navigation aids at night and in bad weather against increasingly sophisticated and deadly enemy air defenses, making up tactics on the wing.
One of the hazards was the requirement that the Americans always had to carry a Vietnamese along—to maintain the fiction that they were training the Vietnamese. Any unfortunate Vietnamese who happened to be nearby when a mission was scheduled found himself strapped into an airplane—often the first time he had ever been off the ground.
Richard Secord, then the junior captain among the Farm-gate AT-28 pilots and later a major general, thought he was going to die one day because of his Vietnamese passenger.
As he rolled in and started down toward his target, he felt a sudden jolt on the controls. He thought the plane had been hit. Breaking off the attack, he pulled up, decided everything was okay, and rolled in again. Once more, he felt the strange pressure on the controls. His terrified passenger was pulling back on the stick as hard as he could.
Secord ordered him over the intercom to keep his hands off the controls.
Again, he pulled up, rolled in, and headed for the target. This time, he felt the stick jam forward. The dive steepened and the plane headed directly toward the ground. Secord inched the stick back with all his strength, overpowering the terrified Vietnamese. They pulled out just above the trees.
Frightened and furious, Secord pulled his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol as soon as he leveled off and twisted around to point it at his backseater, ready to kill him. Just then, his passenger lost his lunch all over the cockpit and collapsed into a small bundle of miserable humanity. Secord couldn’t bring himself to shoot such a pathetic creature.
In the early days, there was a very steep learning curve as the crews, coming from an Air Force attuned to high-tech warfare against a sophisticated foe, learned to fight a low-tech war with aging equipment against a foe that was poorly armed but clever and elusive.
At first, B-26 crews made the mistake of meeting with the Vietnamese forward air controller (FAC) in his little plane and circling the target area once or twice before attacking. By that time, it finally occurred to them, the Vietcong had had time to hear the planes and disperse. The new rule was to rendezvous some distance from the target. The FAC would then drop his smoke to mark the target, and the B-26 would roll in almost immediately.
It also took several months to realize how dangerous it was to load bombs and napalm canisters on the wings of the plane. Since all the wing mounts on the B-26 used the same release system, it was possible for a harried pilot to drop a bomb rather than napalm, or vice versa. Napalm was often dropped from as low as fifty feet—so low that pilots sometimes came home with mud and branches hanging from their planes. But a pilot who dropped a five-hundred-pound—or even a one-hundred-pound—bomb below about a thousand feet would probably be hit by the fragments and wouldn’t come home at all.
The solution was to carry the napalm on the wings and the bombs in the double bomb bay. One technique that worked well was to start the attack with a strafing run at fifty to two hundred feet off the ground to make the enemy pull their heads down. That was followed by napalm, also dropped down low. Then came bombs, followed by rockets and more strafing.
The B-26 crews faced a special hazard. Unlike the T-28s, which flew in pairs, the B-26s flew singly. If one was lost, it might be hours before anyone knew.
“With only a few aircraft over there, we flew them single ship, and, consequently, when we lost a 26, we didn’t know he was lost,” Colonel Roy C. Dalton, one of the early Farm-gate B-26 pilots, recalled. “If he was out on a photo mission, for example, he wasn’t in contact with anybody? … I know that we were never able to confirm that we lost a B-26 until his fuel ran out and he became overdue. We had no radio contact with him, nobody else had any radio contact with him, except the fort that he was trying to defend.
Farmgate lost its first B-26 on the night of 4-5 November 1962 in one of the nighttime missions that had become almost routine—but were still extremely dangerous.
When reports of an outpost under attack came in that night, a B-26 and a C-47 flare ship were dispatched. A short time later, another 26 was sent to help out. The first 26 returned safely. But then came word from the crew of the C-47 that they had lost contact with the other B-26 and had seen a large fire on the ground.
When daylight came, the wreckage was found. The crew—two Americans and a Vietnamese—were dead. The Vietcong had already
stripped the wreckage of anything valuable, but the bodies were recovered.
Just what happened was never determined. The plane may have been shot down. A single rifle bullet in the wrong place was enough to knock a plane out of the sky, although that is unlikely to have happened to a twin-engine B-26. As the air threat increased, the Vietcong kept pace, introducing 12mm and 14.5mm Soviet antiaircraft guns and, later, 23mm ZPU-23s capable of hurling an explosive shell as high as twenty thousand feet.
More likely in this case is that the plane simply flew into the ground. Every Farmgate pilot had stories to tell of times when he became disoriented in the dark and avoided crashing only by luck.
Flying night attack missions was so difficult and dangerous that the Vietnamese couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it. This left these missions to the American B-26 and AT-28 pilots.
During most of the war, tiny outposts were scattered throughout South Vietnam. Almost every night, a number of these outposts came under attack.
In the early days of the war, they were often quickly overrun. Then the Vietnamese and Americans began flying C-47s equipped with flares. One group of pilots—the “Dirty Dozen”—flew with the Vietnamese. The Farmgate pilots flew their own planes, with at least one Vietnamese aboard. At first, a few flares were all it took to light up the battlefield and chase away the attackers. But the Vietcong knew the flares themselves couldn’t hurt them and quickly adapted their tactics to take advantage of shadows and moments of darkness to penetrate the defenses.
The next step in this constantly escalating warfare was to add attack planes to bomb and strafe the troops exposed by the flares.
As soon as the first plane arrived, the defenders would ignite a “fire arrow” pointing in the direction of the attack. The fire arrows were sometimes made of electric lights. More often, they were flares or even little bonfires.