All the foregoing might not have mattered had Vietnam been a cause for which the administration could rally the American people and lead them to victory. Without “victory pure and sweet” as the guide star, the unanswerable conundrum was: What in hell are we fighting for? The corrupt, incompetent South Vietnamese government? Stopping the spread of world Communism? If your son was facing the prospect of getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam, none of that washed.
In 1968 the Air Force had 58,500 personnel in South Vietnam and 47,600 in Thailand, both figures slightly more than the previous year. They supported 1,768 aircraft throughout Southeast Asia, including 218 F-4 Phantoms and 108 F-105 Thunderchiefs.4
Meanwhile the North Vietnam defenders were industriously improving their air defenses with guns, ammo, and SAMs donated by the Soviet Union and China and brought into the country through the port of Haiphong and the Northeast Railway. When Rolling Thunder kicked off in early 1965 North Vietnam was thought to possess seven hundred antiaircraft guns of all types, twenty-two early-warning radars, and just four fire-control radars.
In late March 1968 US intelligence reported nearly 5,800 AAA guns throughout the country, including 609 in Route Pack IV, where Thanh Hoa was situated. The guns were largely mobile, capable of using 1,158 prepared sites. The large majority of weapons were 37- to 57-millimeter, while nearly a thousand were 85- and 100-millimeter monsters.
Just prior to the 1968 US presidential election the air defense net had blossomed to more than eight thousand AAA guns, four hundred radar stations, and forty SAM sites.5
The Navy and Air Force fought a long, bitterly contested conflict in Southeast Asia with each other—the infamous “sortie war”—as service chiefs sought to impress Secretary of Defense McNamara with the number of aircraft launched bearing ordnance. The generals and admirals resorted to numerical subterfuge to run up the count. Air Force personnel at Tan Son Nhut Airbase near Saigon and elsewhere watched F-100s take off with one five-hundred-pounder beneath each wing. Meanwhile carrier sailors saw A-4s launch off the pointy end of the boat with similar load-outs. “It was absurd,” recalled one aviator. “We exposed six airplanes and pilots to a threat when the same amount of ordnance could have been delivered by one airplane.”
No doubt flag officers angling for another star caused some of this nonsense, but the generals and admirals also had their eyes firmly fixed on the future. This shitty little war would end someday, one way or another, and once again the services would be locked in political combat for defense dollars. The American military has shrunk after every war it ever fought, including the American Revolution. The tide comes in, the tide goes out: this is life in a democracy. Airplanes and ships were wearing out and becoming obsolete. The uniformed services were starving for investment. Nothing less than the future of these services would be the stake in the coming political death scrum.
At the operator level some efforts at cooperation did occur. A rare example came near the end of January 1968, when the gods of weather, politics, and tactics briefly touched hands.
Analysts in the Pentagon knew that previous bombing halts had allowed the Communists to restore their transportation network. Intelligence and recon flights confirmed that lucrative targets were accumulating around Thanh Hoa. Hoping, again without reason, that a heavy blow might bring Hanoi to the bargaining table, Washington approved a joint operation and laid it on. It would be the largest effort since the first strikes in April 1965.
Rarely had the Air Force and Navy coordinated their efforts against a single target. This time Seventh Air Force did the planning—a situation that raised hackles in the Air Force squadrons and wings because officers in Saigon had no skin in the game and sometimes lacked current operational knowledge; it was almost akin to Johnson and McNamara sticking pins in maps at the White House. Yet the “blue suits” were still doing remote mission planning four years later at the end of the war when the Strategic Air Command in Omaha ordained details for B-52 strikes.6
Recognizing Thanh Hoa’s increasing defenses, Seventh Air Force assigned heavy electronic countermeasures to the mission. The command had three ECM squadrons in the Far East, including two at Takhli. They flew Douglas EB-66 Destroyers—close cousins to the Navy’s A-3 Skywarriors that performed tanking and ECM duty from Tonkin Gulf carriers.
Four Destroyers orbited fifty nautical miles (fifty-seven statute miles) off shore with another quartet sixty-five miles west of the target over the Laotian border. The two-phase jamming was successful; the Vietnamese radar system was overloaded, preventing or at least limiting its ability to track strikers inbound or on egress.7
As usual, five carriers were deployed in WestPac, including USS Coral Sea, the “Coral Maru,” with Air Wing Fifteen on its third Tonkin Gulf cruise.
Coral Sea aviator Pete Purvis explained, “Based on our recent success in Haiphong, Air Wing Fifteen had a reputation as ‘bridge busters.’ Our air wing commander, Jim Linder, wanted to burnish that image by going after ‘the big one’ and dropping it into the Song Ma, once and for all—yet again.”8
The Navy’s end of the operation involved eight A-4E Skyhawks as strikers and eight F-4B Phantoms as flak suppressors and MiG CAP. Tankers, early-warning sentinels, and jamming aircraft rounded out the cast.
The Skyhawks rolled in at noon, beginning three and a half hours of bombing. Last over the bridge to assess bomb damage was the RF-8G flown by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Jay Miller, escorted by VF-151’s Lieutenant Commander Pete Purvis and his RIO, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Barrie Cooper.
The typical “photo Joe” profile was flown between four and six thousand feet, the choice usually dictated by clouds, pushing six hundred knots—nearly supersonic.
Purvis recalled,
We orbited just offshore about twenty miles south of Thanh Hoa at fifteen thousand feet and waited for our strike group to clear out and the smoke over the target to blow away. It was Chamber of Commerce weather. Only a few white, puffy clouds blocked the view of a clear horizon—unusually nice weather for this neighborhood. Our plan was to go inland south of Thanh Hoa and clear of the AAA envelope, do a right-hand U-turn, and fly over the bridge heading southeast toward the Tonkin Gulf.
We watched our strike group rain bombs on the bridge through a hail of AAA and then race toward the gulf, “feet wet” and safety. It looked as if someone had hit the whole southern span. The pictures, however, would tell the whole story. Now it was our turn.
As smoke slowly drifted away, Jay pushed over and I followed, sliding into position on his right. I lit minimum afterburner to keep up and to erase my F-4s signature smoke trail. Jay’s F-8 had cleaner lines and less drag than my warty F-4.
After our U-turn we rolled out over the river about eight miles upstream and headed southeast downriver toward the bridge. There wasn’t any AAA in that neck of the woods, so Jay had a good straight setup.
The usual heavy AAA greeted us as we neared the bridge, but no radar-guided stuff. The gray and black smoke that followed bomb explosions had cleared from the bridge’s south side. It was still intact. As we neared it, an increasing volume of black, white, and gray flak bursts and the telltale red-orange tracers coming up.… It didn’t let up until we were a mile from the bridge. Our job finished, we bobbed and weaved our way to the coast ten miles away. Our aircraft didn’t seem to be damaged.
Purvis and Cooper anticipated a quick return to the Coral Maru when Miller’s voice crackled on frequency. “Switchbox 110, Corktip 710.”
Purvis feared the Crusader had taken a hit, but it had gotten away clean. That was the good news.
The bad news: Jay Miller had forgotten to flip his camera switch on. Without awaiting comment he added, “Got to go back in.”
As Purvis explained, “All three of us had that awful sinking feeling.” No sane aviator wanted to make a repeat pass at an alerted target. But there was no way around it if the mission was to be accomplished. If they didn’t do it, someone else would have to. Every guy in a flight suit
had to pull his weight.
The two pilots exchanged information on remaining fuel and arrived at the conclusion that they would need a tanker upon returning to the Gulf—if they made it back to the Gulf. Coral Sea’s strike control confirmed that a KA-3 would be anchored over the southern SAR ship.
They decided to go back up the egress track. Jay Miller shoved up the power and aimed his Crusader at the span, making six hundred knots with the camera running this time. He had to fly straight and level for fifteen to twenty seconds over the bridge to get his pictures. All three aviators anticipated a sky full of flak, as before.
And yet… “We chewed up the next few miles to the target,” Purvis said, “and then over the bridge, and then a hard left turn to return to the southeast and the safety of the Gulf. Not one flak burst!”
“Coop, did you see any Triple-A?”
“Not a bit. Guess the gomers secured for chow once the photo bird went by, and they stood down until our next strike.”
CAG Linder’s daily memo summarized, “Today’s first large-scale gaggle went against the infamous Thanh Hoa Bridge. The Scooters had direct hits on the left span… but it just wouldn’t tumble.”
The coordinated mission plan called for Korat’s 388th Wing to launch the first Thunderchief strike, followed by the 355th from Takhli. In addition to electronic support and flak suppressors, a diversion would precede the actual strikers, drawing Vietnamese attention farther downstream.
Among the Korat Thud pilots was Major Kenney W. Mays, nearing the end of his combat tour. He planned his portion of the mission with a fellow Texas Aggie, Captain Steven W. Long Jr. of the 469th Squadron. Because weather scrubbed the morning launch, leadership defaulted to the 34th Squadron, which had taken the contingency lead.
The straight-line distance from Korat to Thanh Hoa was 415 statute miles, but those who would fly the mission preferred deception over simplicity. Mays recalled that Seventh Air Force planners had put the Thuds on a straight-in run from the refueling track to the bridge. That seemed a far too predictable flight path, so the Korat pilots took it upon themselves to amend the plan. Therefore, the two squadron commanders and the wing deputy of operations decided to ignore the ingress route provided by Saigon. As Mays explained, “We planned the mission like we were headed for a target near Hanoi. When we hit the river that runs under the Thanh Hoa Bridge, we turned down the river and headed for it.”
Mays took the lead with Scuba Flight. All four pilots in his flight were seasoned, experienced professionals. All were majors. Major Donald W. Rever led Gator Flight, while Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dye Jr., on his thirty-sixth mission, led the second section.9
While the Thuds were inbound to Thanh Hoa, airborne MiGs were vectored northwest by their ground control intercept (GCI) controller. The revised ingress route achieved its purpose, as the Communist ground controller apparently believed that the target was Hanoi.
The Korat flights entered enemy airspace at the “Fish’s Mouth” bend of the Mekong River, about 120 miles west-southwest of Thanh Hoa.
When Mays called “Go hot” on the radio, Scuba Flight pilots began flipping switches to arm their weapons. As Mays later recalled, “Jim Daniel was the deputy mission commander… he accidentally hit his jettison button and dropped his stores before we got to the target. I told him he could go back, but he said he was coming along for the ride. He did not want to miss the fun and continued on to the target… clean.”10
Although Mays’ pilots scored “good hits” on the bridge, he considered the most important target to be secondary. As he rolled into his dive he spotted train cars in a railyard, apparently waiting to cross on a ferry. He keyed his mike, alerting those behind him and the 355th’s strike, still inbound.
Mays summarized, “Takhli also hit the rail cars. With the diversion down the river we had no MiG threat and very little flak. One reason was undoubtedly because the four defense-suppressor fighters concentrated on the 37 and 57mm sites on both ends of the bridge, covering them with CBUs and 500-pounders. As the 105s pulled off, four of the gun positions apparently stopped firing.”
Korat’s bombers slathered the Dragon’s Jaw with M117 750-pounders and nearly twenty tons of M118 three-thousand-pounders. The bombs appeared well aimed, erupting on and around the bridge.
The second wave from Thailand, the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing’s strike, was composed of sixteen F-105s. Takhli’s aerial armada consisted of Wolf, Bear, Wildcat, and Bison flights armed with 750-pounders and twenty-six three-thousand-pounders, basically duplicating the Korat strikers’ load-out. Wolf Two was unable to plug during the prestrike refueling and returned to Takhli. The other fifteen fighter-bombers flew the mission as briefed and attacked in midafternoon, diving through light-caliber AAA at eight thousand feet. Considering that flak suppressors had worked over the gun sites twice already that day, it was a wonder that the North Vietnamese managed to get any flak at all into the air to greet the third wave of attackers.
The pilots estimated that all their ordnance hit in the target area, with extensive impacts on the road immediately east of the bridge. Some egressing pilots counted sixty or more railcars combined on both sides of the bridge but had no time to assess damage.11
Nonetheless, the weight of the ordnance delivered was exceptional—about three bombs every four-and-a-half minutes for three and a half hours.
Every jet over Thanh Hoa got away clean. The only American plane lost that day throughout Indochina was a prop-driven Air Force T-28 trainer on a noncombat mission.12
As usual, the last American over the target was a photo-recon pilot, flying “unarmed and unafraid.” The F-101 Voodoo got its pictures and scorched out of the area as fast as its Pratt & Whitneys would propel it.
Initial estimates were optimistic: “All ordnance reported on target and doing extensive structural damage.”
During debriefing at Korat and Takhli the Thud pilots awaited BDA from the photo interpreters. At length the official verdict arrived: “The eastern approach was interdicted, rendering the rail line unserviceable to rolling stock.”13
Closer inspection of the pictures revealed “only superficial damage to the superstructure of the bridge, although girders were twisted and bent. The southern approach to the bridge was severely damaged. Rail tracks, twisted and torn, lay beside the rail bed, which was no longer recognizable because of large bomb craters. The harsh truth was a bridge temporarily unusable, but one that would be operational again in the future.”14 Actually, given the North Vietnamese’s abilities at bridge repair, the very near future.
The following day, January 29, 1968, the Americans stood down on a thirty-six-hour bombing pause during the Vietnamese Tet holiday, one called by the ever-optimistic Lyndon Johnson. The weather swept away any thoughts of a restrike on the bridge as the monsoon moved in, bringing low clouds and reduced visibility through the April 1 bombing halt in most of North Vietnam. Not that it mattered: on January 30 the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong launched their offensive in South Vietnam during the holiday to which Lyndon Johnson thought he should make obeisance.
More than 150,000 Viet Cong, backed by 130,000 NVA regulars who poured out of Laos and Cambodia, attacked five major cities in South Vietnam, including Saigon and the American embassy, along with more than a hundred other towns and cities across South Vietnam in what came to be called the Tet Offensive.15
A key component of the Communist offensive was terror. Defense analyst William J. Luti said, “Thousands of government officials, schoolteachers, doctors and missionaries were rounded up and executed.”16 Throughout history dedicated fanatics have seemed to have little trouble murdering the defenseless.
Without the aid of the US Army and Marine Corps, South Vietnam would have collapsed. US and South Vietnamese forces held fast and fought back and, by late March, had achieved a decisive military victory. The three-phase campaign, lasting until September 1968, cost the United States and South Vietnamese some 10,500 killed or missing as well as killed
unknown thousands of South Vietnamese civilians. Although the US press didn’t know or report it, Tet was a military disaster for the Communists. The prolonged siege of Khe Sanh provided the US Army with an opportunity to do what it did best in Vietnam—deliver massive firepower on a concentrated enemy. Combined North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong losses for the entire campaign are unknown but probably approached fifty thousand dead or missing, plus sixty thousand wounded. The Viet Cong never fully recovered.
Yet it wasn’t reported that way. Luti continued, “Journalists wrongly portrayed the Tet Offensive as a military defeat and never corrected the record.”17
But then, in the age of television, with its constant stream of pictures and commentary, how does one correct the record? Arguably television’s portrayal of events becomes reality, regardless of the truth. It would be two generations before the American public began to realize that television and newspapers fighting for advertising dollars slanted their reporting to reflect the prejudices of the producers and editors and the perceived tastes of their audience. Only then did the public lose faith in the media.
Although the Tet Offensive was a tactical American victory, the contrast between the Johnson administration’s happy talk and the severe military bloodletting that came to pass made both the press, however biased and incompetent, and the public treat it as a strategic defeat, which is precisely what it was. Under the press pummeling, Johnson’s low popularity plummeted even farther. His ambivalence, lies, and “no victory” strategy had come home to roost. The Tet Offensive was the final nail in the coffin of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.
Yet the North Vietnamese Communists had made their first serious mistake. By committing the Viet Cong and the bulk of the North Vietnamese Army to open combat with the Americans, they were playing a game they couldn’t win. American air power and overwhelming firepower could finally be brought to bear, not on roving bands of guerillas but on massed enemy combatants in the open: the result was a slaughter. Never again would the Viet Cong be a powerful military force. Within two months, by the end of March, they were essentially wiped out.
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