The recovery went smoothly, and I flew a good pass to a 3-wire. When we all assembled in the ready room we were ricocheting off the walls. Our adrenaline levels were still very high, and we were all regaling one another with details of our flights. The air wing flight surgeon entered the ready room with a tray of “lollypops,” little brandy bottles the size of airline liquor bottles to be passed out to the strike pilots to help settle us down. This exercise and our elation would become a quaint memory later on when we were flying three Alpha strikes a day.
A VFP-63 RF-8 photo pilot had made a supersonic run over the target about five minutes after the strike group retired. His photos showed the main power plant building to be cratered rubble, completely destroyed. One of the steam boilers had been blasted several yards outside the confines of the power plant yard, and huge craters pocked the transformer field. It would be a long time before Thanh Hoa had any electricity.2
The Navy was also taking another step in the precision weapons revolution. Walleye (originally designated AGM-62, later Guided Weapon Mark 1) was a revolutionary television-guided weapon, often mislabeled a missile when in fact it was unpowered. The TV guidance made it an extremely accurate glide bomb, and its shaped-charge, explosive-mixture warhead provided extra punch. The warhead had the explosive power of 825 pounds of TNT.3 The weapon had a glass nose for the camera to look through—hence the name Walleye.
Television guidance had originated in World War II, most notably in war-weary four-engine bombers of little future use. The highly classified program was called Project Aphrodite. A pilot and engineer took off in the bomber, armed the heavy explosive load in flight, then bailed out. A guidance aircraft then steered the flying bomb to its destination, keeping the target in the TV screen until impact. But at the time television technology was in its infancy, and arming the bomb load in flight was downright dangerous. President John F. Kennedy’s older brother Joe died on an Aphrodite mission in 1944 when the plane blew up before the crew could bail out.
Twenty years later, however, Martin Marietta had perfected television for ordnance delivery. Within range of the target—as much as sixteen miles—the pilot used his cockpit TV screen to designate an impact point, actually looking through the camera in the nose cone of the weapon. Unlike other 1960s ordnance such as Bullpup, Walleye was a “fire and forget” weapon that allowed the pilot to take evasive action and leave the area immediately after launch.
The honor of introducing Walleye to combat fell to VA-212 under Commander Homer L. Smith, a forty-year-old West Virginian from the Annapolis class of 1949 who had already flown over 150 combat missions. The Rampant Raiders, named for their lion emblem, received the weapons in late 1966 during predeployment training. Their A-4E Skyhawks were modified to accept the compatible TV system, and they embarked in USS Bon Homme Richard for their third combat cruise.4
The Raiders wasted no time once on Yankee Station. With clearing weather—a requirement for optically guided weapons—a few days after the Thanh Hoa power plant strike, on March 11, 1967, Homer Smith’s VA-212 conducted the first Walleye attack, hitting the Sam Son army barracks located almost on the coast nine miles southeast of Thanh Hoa. The 1,100-pound glide bombs performed according to the owner’s manual and hit their designated aim points. The 850-pound warheads exploding inside buildings proved devastating.
Smith was absolutely determined to drop the Dragon’s Jaw, not only for tactical and strategic purposes but also because, in the words of one of his pilots, the air wing that slew the Dragon would become famous.5
Homer Smith was smart, astute, and motivated. He held an engineering degree from Annapolis and approached the Thanh Hoa Bridge with a clinician’s eye and a tactician’s brain. He even made a model of the structure based on recon photos. He concluded that if three Walleyes struck specific support girders simultaneously, the bridge would collapse of its own weight. He convinced his CAG, Commander Jack Monger, who approved an all-out effort.
Mission planning was meticulous. In addition to Smith’s studies, the briefing included specific points in the structure selected by Army demolition experts as the best prospects for inflicting telling damage to the bridge. The planners even accounted for the optimum sun angle to provide the best contrast for the TV guidance systems in the Walleyes. The optimum time over target was calculated to be 2:12 P.M.6
On March 12, the day after the Sam Son mission, Bonnie Dick launched an Alpha strike of some thirty aircraft against Thanh Hoa, all supporting Smith and his wingmen against the Dragon’s Jaw.
Smith and his Number Two almost got a free ride down the chute, attacking before the defenders could react effectively. But Number Three came under heavy fire: while concentrating on smooth, steady flying in his five-hundred-knot dive, his peripheral vision recorded what seemed to be hundreds of muzzle flashes around the bridge. Still, all three Skyhawks successfully launched their Walleyes, and each pilot pulled and jinked mightily to get out of the target area without being hit.
One of the A-4 pilots on the mission was Stephen Gray, flying as a flak suppressor. Diving ahead of the bombers, his target was a 37-millimeter site southwest of the main span. Today he was carrying new weapons, six cluster bomb units (CBUs). Designed specifically as antipersonnel weapons, each bomb, or canister, contained around 250 hand-grenade-sized aluminum bomblets, each completely covered with steel pellets surrounding an explosive core. The bomblets had a ridge on them that forced them to rotate when the CBU canister broke up in midair at about a thousand feet above the ground. The rotation armed the bomblets, which would explode on impact. They proved devastating on flak sites, shredding human bodies and damaging guns so badly that they couldn’t be fired.
Here again is Stephen Gray:
The flak suppressors broke away from the Walleye group and began our run-in to the pop-up point. We were at 3,500 feet, and I could see the outline of the Thanh Whore Bridge up ahead as we crossed the coast and armed our switches. Heart pounding and mouth dry, I could see the bridge clearly as we arced up and over to the bombing altitude. The lead pilot split off to begin his attack on his flak site, and I frantically scanned the area south of the bridge for my target. There! There it is, I thought as the first muzzle flashes from the guns outlined the site. The target was directly ahead of me at twelve o’clock, so I had to execute a roll-ahead maneuver, rolling upside down with the nose high and pulling the nose down until the target touched the top of the canopy bow, then rolling upright and finding the target in the gun sight.
The site was winking with muzzle flashes as the guns poured out rapid fire. The flak gunners could figure out an attacker’s intent just as soon as the airplane’s nose aimed at them in the dive. At that point it became a them-or-you situation, and they would shift their fire to concentrate on the incoming plane. The easiest moving target to shoot at is a no-deflection shot. All the gunners had to do is aim straight at the diving plane.
The flashes seemed to grow and merged into one continuous flicker as I got closer. White streaks of tracer flashed through the gun sight, and I could hear a staccato pop, pop, pop even through my helmet as the supersonic shock wave from near-misses struck the canopy. On reaching release altitude I punched the bomb pickle and felt the plane jump as the bombs came off the wings. I jammed the stick back and rolled hard left as soon as the nose came above the horizon, then hard right for a few seconds, then hard left again to try to destroy their tracking. Rolling left, I looked back to see my hits. I had missed seeing the bomblets explode, but little puffs of smoke and dust dotted the flak site, and the guns were silent. I never saw a flak site keep shooting after a CBU attack.
I was streaking toward the safety of the Gulf to rejoin the other flak suppressors when an ear-piercing, drawn-out, gurgling scream lanced through my headset. Jesus! I thought. Somebody caught one in the throat and is dying over the air. So chilling was the sound I almost pissed my pants. The memory of the scream and the certainty that someone had died lasted until the debriefing when the screamer was r
evealed to be none other than the skipper, Commander Smith, venting his rage and frustration at the Thanh Whore Bridge.7
The Rampant Raiders had put all three of their Walleyes on precisely the girders that Homer Smith had designated. Despite the unprecedented accuracy of the glide bombs, photo interpreters reported that the bridge appeared “undamaged and serviceable.”8
Commander Homer Smith continued leading the Rampant Raiders for the next two months. Although scheduled to assume command of an East Coast air wing, he wanted to complete two hundred combat missions. On May 20, flying his 197th sortie, he was shot down near Haiphong and disappeared into the North Vietnamese prison system. He died in captivity; some POWs suspected he had been tortured to death, perhaps for knowledge of the new Walleye precision weapon. His remains were returned without explanation in 1974.9
Steve Gray recalled,
Air Wing 21 had a number of 2,000-pound bombs, the largest bomb an A-4 could carry, and we were saving them for an all-out effort to drop the Thanh Whore’s bridge once and forever. It was to be the last combat sortie of the ’67 deployment.
We had an earlier strike on the Phy Li bridge complex on which I was one of the bombers. I was disappointed not to be selected for the Thanh Hoa strike, but the skipper selected his best bombers, and the other junior pilot, Terry Reider, edged me out. Terry was probably a better bomber than I was. We were all in the ready room cheering the guys on the strike, everyone giddy with relief and excitement that this very hard and costly cruise was ending. It was July 29, 1967. Just as the pilots got the command to man airplanes, we got the word that USS Forrestal was on fire, the strike was canceled, and we spent the rest of the day alongside Forrestal taking off her wounded and helping with damage control.10
Forrestal sustained one of the three catastrophic fires aboard carriers during the Vietnam War. First had been Oriskany, a victim of mishandled flares in October 1966, with 44 dead and 156 men injured; then Forrestal in July 1967, with rockets accidentally launched on the flight deck, killing 134 men and wounding 161, and the third incident was aboard Enterprise off Hawaii in January 1969, when a Zuni warhead cooked off and started a conflagration that killed 28 men and injured 314.
The combination of live ordnance, hot jet and huffer exhaust, confined space, and jet fuel was a witches’ brew that needed the most careful handling. During the Enterprise fire at least fourteen major explosions hammered the ship. On all three carriers aggressive, competent fire-fighting efforts saved countless lives and quenched the flames. Nothing speaks more profoundly about the valor and courage of American sailors than the conduct of these crews in these horrific emergencies fighting to save their shipmates… and their ship.
Between January and March 1967 the Dragon’s Jaw was attacked at least twenty-four times by the Navy and six times by the Air Force, without significant result. Nevertheless, Walleyes killed other bridges and soft targets with astonishing regularity. In a seven-month period Navy pilots claimed sixty-five hits by sixty-eight bombs—a 95 percent success ratio. Other operations in less optimal conditions dropped the direct hit figure to about 70 percent—still extremely impressive considering the North Vietnamese defenses and the atrocious weather.11
After mastering the twin challenges of reliability and accuracy, the missing ingredient was a knock-out punch. Consequently, there were no more glide-bomb attacks against the Dragon’s Jaw until 1972, when a punch would finally become available.12
CHAPTER 13
THE BRIDGE CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM
In the United States that summer of 1967 Lyndon Johnson was watching his popularity and political position erode as the American public became more and more disaffected by Vietnam. Johnson tried to continue his policy of waging war to a stalemate and still looking like a peacemaker. On August 24 he ordered a twelve-day pause in bombing around Hanoi; he had already ordered a one-day pause earlier on Buddha’s birthday in the spring.
Speaking in Texas on August 29, Johnson amended his previous approach—linking a bombing halt to “an indication” that Hanoi would reduce its actions in the South. Now he said the bombing could stop “when this would lead promptly to productive discussions.” He added that Washington “would operate on the assumption that Hanoi would not take advantage of a halt to increase infiltration [of South Vietnam].”1
Johnson was an atrocious poker player. He held two deuces, an ace, a trey, and a lousy four, with nothing to add to the pot, and he had no credible bluff.
Ho Chi Minh read Lyndon Johnson like a book he had written himself. All he had to do was wait until the inept Texas gambler inevitably folded.
The Air Force continued to target the Dragon’s Jaw. Their attacks were always bigger than Navy strikes and involved many more airplanes. The base element was usually four flights of four F-105s: twelve planes with iron bombs and four with CBUs to suppress defenses.
Supporting the strikers were two flights of Wild Weasels, four in a flight. The first pairs in each flight were two-seaters with electronics to detect enemy radar, and two were single-seaters with Shrikes to shoot and CBUs to drop.
Rounding out the thirty-two plane gaggles were two flights of Phantoms, eight planes, on MiG CAP.
The Thuds took off at ten-second intervals from their bases in Thailand, quickly joined in flights, and headed for the tanker tracks. Usually tanking was performed “zip-lip,” with no radio calls so as to minimize chances of alerting the enemy, which was a forlorn hope at best. Tanking called for a high degree of professionalism from the fighter-bomber pilots and the noncommissioned boom operators in the tankers who guided their probes into the recipients’ refueling receptacles.
Each mission usually involved three in-flight refuelings for every airplane in the gaggle. The second came shortly before entering North Vietnam, and the third came on the way home. At the time no other air force performed tanking so routinely, and five decades later it was still largely an American trait. However, no other air force sent tactical aircraft laden with ordnance over the distances that were routine for the US Air Force and Navy or ferried them across vast oceans.
After topping off, the strikers reformed and headed for their targets, generally arriving around 7:30 A.M. or 3 P.M. The predictable schedule eased the North Vietnamese task of anticipating when the Yankee air pirates would arrive, yet the attackers needed daylight to bomb and tank, so the Air Force did the best it could.
Over the bridge the Weasels tried to roll in three minutes ahead of the strikers, concentrating on SAM sites, although gun-laying radars were fair game. Within SA-2 range, the Thuds formed into a “SAM box,” or pod formation. At least one plane in each formation was supposed to carry an ECM pod to jam known enemy frequencies. Usually the leader’s wingman stepped up and flew five hundred feet away. The second-section leader was five hundred feet out and down, with Number Four stepping up. The goal was to give each pilot space to maneuver to avoid a missile and prevent a SAM burst from damaging more than one plane.
When MiGs were flying, the strikers usually knew they were airborne via “one of the agencies” that was monitoring North Vietnamese radio frequencies and radar emissions. If enemy fighters got past the F-4s, the supersonic MiG-21s often tried an overhead attack to break up a Thud flight, leaving individuals vulnerable to slower, more agile MiG-17s.2
Approaching the target at fourteen to sixteen thousand feet, the bombers preferred a wagon-wheel-attack pattern, reaching the dive point from a left-hand turn. The left turn was familiar to pilots because they usually fly left-hand patterns around airports and because most humans are right-handed, making the cross-body movement more natural. Unfortunately, the left-turning tendency made the gunners’ job of estimating lead easier.
Trying to ignore bursting flak and the audible warnings of ECM equipment, pilots concentrated on identifying their briefed target and reaching their dive points. Thuds liked to dive at 45 degrees and release at about 550 knots at about 5,500 feet above the target. The pull-out started the instant the weapons were
gone, usually a five-G pull that often induced gray-out as the periphery of the pilots’ vision faded due to blood draining from the head. In any case, they wanted to avoid bottoming below 3,000 feet to avoid flying metal from light-caliber AAA guns.
That clear-air scenario was rarely achieved. Flights lost integrity in the attack and off-target maneuvering, and weather was always a factor. Even without clouds at intermediate levels partially obscuring the target, visibility in the moisture-laden tropical air over North Vietnam was rarely better than five miles.
With their gaggles of attackers and big tankers, the Air Force gave the bridge everything they had.
But the bridge stood as impervious to explosives as if it were made of kryptonite.
Only one American plane was lost on a Dragon’s Jaw strike mission in 1967. That misfortune fell to a Kitty Hawk Phantom crew on May 14. Air Wing Eleven’s original mission was against warehouses in Haiphong, but the mission was scrubbed and the Thanh Hoa Bridge substituted.
As explained by Lieutenant Commander John Holm, a VF-114 pilot who often flew as a flak suppressor for VA-85’s A-6 Intruders:
We carried six LAU-10 rocket pods with twenty-four VT [proximity-]fused Zunis.
On May 14 our new flag decided the way to get the bridge was to wear it down. We launched three cycles back to back with six A-6s and six F-4s in each strike package. I was on the second go. We had excellent recent photos to work with, and we made sure we got someone assigned for each close-in flak site.
We pushed out ahead of the strike and were unloading on the flak sites as the Intruders rolled in. I always fired in pairs, so I got eight Zunis with each pickle push, and I tried to line up the targets so I could cover three sites in one run, beginning with a steep dive angle and flattening out and using a little more lead as I got lower. Point and shoot.
Dragon's Jaw Page 17