First Lieutenant James “J. D.” Franks was a twenty-five-year-old Texan with an aerospace engineering degree from A&M. He graduated from Weapon Systems Operator School in 1971—commanded by Colonel Carl Miller—and that May became one of the Eighth Wing’s few WSOs—instead of backseat pilots—qualified on laser weapons.
The Nellis Fighter Weapons School provided a two-week LGB course, forming crews that would proceed to Southeast Asia. Franks and his front-seater, Captain Pete Bracci, were ticketed for the 433rd with Major Vaughn Wells and Captain Rick Mugg.
Once in theater the selected crews flew several training missions “prior to being turned loose in combat with Paveway Zot or Pave Knife,” Franks recalled,
I worked in the squadron weapons office as an additional duty, and we tracked the number of LGBs delivered, who delivered them, and the CEP of the bombs. Records were informal and probably not retained in official USAF histories, but we were dropping quite a few LGBs after I arrived in May 1971.
The majority of the targets were road cuts, bulldozers, occasionally a bridge, and trucks along the trail. Of course AAA guns were a big favorite, especially if they were shooting at you during a delivery. There was one period when we were fragged with five-hundred-pound Mark 82 LGBs. They were more erratic because of their lighter weight, and that caused the CEP to increase to about thirty feet from the zero feet that was our standard. The Mark 82s did not destroy guns if they didn’t get a direct hit. Sometimes they just flipped the gun over. Once I remember someone got tasked on a North Vietnamese tank. The film was memorable in that the tank turret came flying out of the smoke. We kept a “greatest hits” video that was shown in “new guy” school.9
Morale was seldom a problem at Ubon. In fact, some troops from South Vietnam opted for R&R in Ubon rather than the fabled fleshpots of Bangkok. Each squadron assigned to the Eighth Wing maintained a “party hootch.” Custom beer mugs plus “Sierra Hotel” party suits and hats in squadron colors were de rigeur, and woe betide the new guy who forgot to remove his hat upon entering: the miscreant was forced to stand on the bar and “drink his hat.” As one backseater described it, “This entailed filling it with everything behind the bar, including mustard, ketchup, bitters, etc., and serenading the new guy while he stood on a pedestal drinking the concoction. After he finished everyone stomped on the hat to make it look as bad as possible. He then wore it for a year, dropping it over enemy territory from the speed brakes of his Phantom on his last mission.”10
One of the new backseaters at Ubon was Captain Bill Thaler, who experienced a giddy transition from stateside to combat. He had joined the 523rd Tactical Fighter Squadron at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines but was sent back to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina for more training, arriving there on April 1, 1972. Meanwhile in Vietnam the Easter Offensive had begun. At Seymour Johnson Thaler flew one training mission and wryly noted, “My second ride at SJ [Seymour Johnson] was a couple of days later and was a 10.5-hour flight to Hickam AFB, Hawaii. I didn’t know the guy I was flying with (Larry Shane) and, in fact, didn’t even meet him until we got to the airplane. We launched eighteen F-4Es and arrived at Ubon, Thailand, three days later. I still didn’t know the names of half the guys in the squadron.”11
The 523rd lived a gypsy existence that month, with detachments at Ubon, Udorn, and DaNang. However, on April 21—three weeks after alighting in North Carolina—Bill Thaler was flying over North Vietnam on his way to the Dragon’s Jaw, the Thanh Hoa Bridge. It was his seventh combat sortie and his first Up North.
The April 21 mission was ambitious in content and scope. It was planned as a dual-axis attack, with the Thailand aircraft attacking from the west after the first wave from South Vietnam had hit the bridge. The briefing noted that upward of one hundred aircraft were involved, including tankers, escorts, and flak suppressors. As Thaler recalled, “I don’t know for sure how many participated, but I do know there were tons of us up there.”12
Lieutenant Colonel Crawford “Sock” Shockley, an early F-100 pilot, led Utah Flight with Captain Larry Henry behind him. Captains Doug P. Brown and WSO Larry W. Peters were the Number Two.
Leading the second section as Utah Three was Captain Larry Shane with Bill Thaler. Utah Four was Captain Bob Harcrow and First Lieutenant Rich Sroka.
One of the problems with a large, complex plan is that early glitches can unravel the whole thing. That began to happen on April 21. The KC-135s were late, requiring some fighters to divert to other tanker tracks. By the time the strike force approached the target area the schedule had turned to hash. Utah flight, carrying unguided bombs, was slated to be among the last to attack from the west, but owing to the tanker screw-up, they were among the first inbound.
Thaler takes up the story:
Intel briefed us on the location of SAMS and the extent of the SAM rings. I never paid any attention to another Intel briefing the whole time we were over there! We were about fifty miles outside of the supposed western extent of the SAM ring when SAMS started coming up, apparently aimed at the eastern wave of attackers since they were not coming close to us at all. We found out later that the eastern wave commander aborted their mission due to target area weather.
I had never seen a SAM before. While the ground was obscured due to a scud layer, above the layer was crystal clear. I was mesmerized by missiles streaking to sixty thousand feet or so at Mach 3. It’s an impressive sight. My front-seater, Captain Larry Shane, who had a hundred north, gently reminded me that those weren’t the ones that were going to hurt us. So I returned to my main job at that time, which was visual lookout.
We were Number Three in a four-ship flying “pod” formation because no one trusted the ECM pods to begin with. We were stepped up and down on Utah One. So we were about twelve to fifteen hundred feet off each other as we turned inbound.…
As we got closer to the target area the SAMs in front started coming our way. They weren’t getting too close, though the radar homing and warning [RHAW] gear was going nuts, as it did anytime we had the pods on. I had no signals indicating tracking.
I did not see Utah Two get hit. I was checking to the outside of our formation, and as I turned my attention back to the inside I saw a hole open up in the top of his number-two engine. He had fire coming from under the engine, out the top of the engine, and out the burner can.
We were still twenty or so miles outside the briefed extent of the SAM ring, and it came up from behind us. Almost immediately after seeing the hole appear in Two’s engine bay, I caught a glimpse of the second missile just before it exploded. It went off probably fifty to a hundred feet below us and almost directly between us and Doug and Larry.
The brain tends to capture every detail of certain events, particularly those that are potentially life threatening. I can still picture the intact missile, followed by the conical fire and black smoke after it exploded. How neither we nor Two were hit, I will never know.
After a couple of exclamations from both cockpits and we realized we had not been hit, we turned our attention to Utah Two. The four-ship formation stayed together to make sure they got to feet wet, where Doug and Larry ejected.
According to Bob Harcrow, Utah Three and Four got vectored toward MiGs. It must have been a short vector because I have no recollection of it. Apparently after not finding any MiGs and being low on fuel, we headed south for home. The search-and-rescue was already underway since the Navy responded very quickly.
No one from our flight expended ordnance. I think we jettisoned the ordnance over water, but I can’t remember for sure. Fortunately most of the missions over North Vietnam were not nearly so eventful.13
The efficient rescue service that retrieved the crew of Utah Two was an HC-7 Sea Devil HH-3 helicopter, call-sign Big Mother. Two HH-3 Sea Kings had launched from USS Midway that morning, motoring forward to operate from USS Denver (LPD-9).
Denver launched the two helos at 9:20, standing by while Air Force strikes went in—about twenty minutes later
the helos heard a Mayday call. Aboard Big Mother Six-One was Lieutenant Franklin Pinegar, who recalled, “We then heard a call of ‘two chutes,’ and a position with latitude and longitude was given. My copilot was flying so I plotted the position on our ‘flak charts’ and determined that we were in a good position for a recovery.”14
A few minutes later the shipboard controller cleared Big Mother Six-One to proceed.
The Air Force fliers were down about three miles northeast of Hon Me Island, five miles off the coast and twenty-five miles southeast of Thanh Hoa. Heading inbound at 120 knots and forty feet, Pinegar veered left and right off course to confound enemy radar tracking, as the Viets had antiaircraft sites on Hon Me.
Only fifteen minutes after leaving Denver copilot Lieutenant John Kennedy sighted a survivor in an orange raft roughly a mile ahead, just as the helo received a radio call on Guard from the other survivor, who reported the pair were about three hundred yards apart.
The helo’s swimmer went into the water and swam up to the first survivor. As the aviator was going up in the hoist collar, the swimmer saw that the raft was still attached to the flier’s vest. The weight of the raft dragged the man out of the hoist collar, and he fell back into the ocean. The chopper went over to the other survivor and hauled him aboard, then returned for the first guy and the swimmer, who were now ready to be winched up.
Aboard Denver Doug Brown and Larry Peters were treated to a survivor’s red carpet examination, complete with refreshments.
Peters and Brown were delivered to DaNang the next day, then airlifted back to Ubon in a T-39 Saberliner. Upon arrival they were greeted by a raucous Wolfpack crowd, including Colonel Carl Miller, the wing commander. As Bill Thaler explained, “There were a few free drinks that night.”15
CHAPTER 19
POUNDING THE NORTH
After their salt-water baptism, the Air Force Phantom crew of Doug Brown and Larry Peters went back to Thanh Hoa for another round with the Dragon on April 27, 1972, as part of a three-flight mission carrying Paveway LGBs and two HOBOS electro-optical weapons. Four chaff F-4s were scheduled but failed to arrive on time, and coastal fog defeated any effort to employ the LGBs, as the mist diffused the laser beams. Several HOBOS one-ton Mark 84s hit the bridge but failed to drop it.
Meanwhile the Wolfpack went against other bridges in North Vietnam. In May Carl Miller’s Phantoms struck the Kien An, Cao Nunh, and Lang Bun Bridges, dropping them entirely or partially.
In South Vietnam the Easter Offensive attack had been stopped and NVA units were retreating. Richard Nixon’s trip to China was still on for July, and Washington believed the Chinese were ready to improve relations. Still, President Nixon would have been at a disadvantage in negotiations if the United States and its ally, South Vietnam, were militarily defeated in the northern province of South Vietnam, Quang Tri, before he went to Beijing.
Even though 85 percent of North Vietnam’s imports came through the port of Haiphong, the Johnson administration had always rejected the option of mining the harbor and cutting off the flow of fuel, weapons, and ammunition for fear of provoking intervention by China or the Soviets. But the Easter Offensive and Nixon’s overtures to China changed the political calculus. The order to mine the harbor—Operation Pocket Money—was given in Washington and passed down the chain of command until it arrived at USS Coral Sea. CAG Roger “Blinky” Sheets planned the mission with Lieutenant Commander Harvey Ickle, the VA-22 operations officer, and Marine Captain William D. “Charlie” Carr. Coral Sea’s A-6 squadron was VMA-242, and Charlie Carr was its most experienced BN. Sheets would lead the strike with Charlie Carr in the right seat.
The multiservice operation began the morning of May 9. The Air Force sent a Lockheed EC-121 early-warning aircraft flying up the Gulf from DaNang. At dawn four destroyers—USS Richard S. Edwards, Myles C. Fox, Buchanan, and Berkeley—steamed in and shelled the Haiphong Harbor air defense batteries with a thirty-minute bombardment from their five-inch guns.
The guided missile cruisers USS Long Beach and USS Chicago were stationed forty miles from Haiphong to protect the mining planes from enemy fighters. To avoid exposing US Phantoms to Haiphong AAA, the cruisers were given a fire-free zone to engage approaching MiGs with Talos missiles.
USS Kitty Hawk launched seventeen planes for a diversionary attack on the Nam Dinh railyard, but bad weather forced them to hit secondary targets.
Three Marine A-6s from Coral Sea, each carrying four of the thousand-pound Mark 52 mines made runs into the harbor below five hundred feet and laid the mines in the positions the planners said would do the most good. Six VA-22 A-7s, carrying four five-hundred-pound Mark 36 acoustic mines, placed them in the outer portion of the channel. The mines were all retarded by parachutes, slowing them greatly and allowing them to splash into the water without damage. While the mining aircraft were chugging into the harbor with their heavy, high-drag loads, an EA-3 provided electronic-countermeasures support overhead.
The North Vietnamese launched MiGs from the sanctuary airfields around Hanoi. They were in a holding pattern awaiting vectors toward the incoming bombers when Chicago launched two Talos missiles at them. One of the MiGs was destroyed.
The mines were all in the water by 9:01 local time, when CAG Sheets radioed “mission complete” back to the ship. Coral Sea sent the message on to Washington, where President Nixon was delivering a speech to the nation. It was the evening of May 8 in America. The timing of the speech and the mining operation were not coincidental.
Handed a note that said the mines were in place, the president then said, “I have ordered the following measures, which are being implemented as I am speaking to you. All entrances to North Vietnamese ports will be mined to prevent access to these ports and North Vietnamese naval operations from these ports. United States forces have been directed to take appropriate measures within the international and claimed territorial waters of North Vietnam to interdict the delivery of supplies. Rail and all communications will be cut off to the maximum extent possible. Air and naval strikes against North Vietnam will continue.”1
The Navy and Marine bombers dropped more mines on May 11 and kept reseeding them as they randomly exploded or safetied themselves after 180 days in the water. Over eight thousand mines were put in coastal waters and three thousand in inland waterways.
There were thirty-six foreign-flagged vessels in Haiphong harbor the morning the mines were laid: sixteen Soviet, five Chinese, five Somalian, four British, three Polish, two Cuban, and one East German. The mines had a time delay of seventy-two hours before they would become active to give these ships time to leave the harbor. One British and four Soviet ships put to sea. The rest sat in the silting-up harbor for three hundred days until the war was over and the Americans had swept the harbor.2
The next day, Wednesday, May 10, the Air Force attacked the fabled Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, better known as the “Paul Doumer” for an early French governor. The structure was huge. It spanned the mile-wide Red River flowing through northern Hanoi and was a vital link on the Northeast Railway logistics route from China. F-105s had first attacked the Doumer in 1967, inflicting damage that was soon repaired. Subsequent missions frequently attacked the span, damaging it yet again. Because the bridge was so vital, the North Vietnamese quickly repaired the damage. Now, with the port of Haiphong mined, the railroad was one of the last ways for Hanoi to get war supplies into the country.
The Eighth Wing flew a complex, multifaceted mission against the Doumer and executed almost flawlessly. The bridge attack was combined with a strike against a nearby railyard. The Air Force committed 120 aircraft, including twenty KC-135 tankers, plus radar jammers protecting thirty-two bombers and flak suppressors.
Sixteen F-4Ds hit the Paul Doumer Bridge with dumb bombs and two dozen one-ton LGBs. A four-plane chaff flight led the way into North Vietnam, scattering metal foil that clogged Vietnamese radar screens with useless returns. The only flaw in the mission was the lead flight’s HOBOS bombs that ma
lfunctioned or missed their targets; the other elements came together. For their part, the North Vietnamese knew the stakes and pulled out all the stops. They launched some 160 SAMs at the strike force. Still, Phantoms armed with Paveway laser weapons and dumb bombs hammered the bridge and got away clean.
Photo analysis showed one span dropped into the river and four damaged. The downed span stopped rail traffic across the Red River. The Wolfpack returned the next day with more LGBs, dropping three more spans into the Red River. Restrikes foiled repair attempts and kept the Doumer unusable through the ceasefire in January 1973.
Elsewhere in North Vietnam, May 10 was a landmark day in air-to-air action. The Communist leadership ordered a maximum effort with their fighters against the Yankee air pirates.*
On that day a Navy Alpha strike from USS Constellation against the Hai Duong Railyard, southeast of Hanoi, ran into a swarm of MiGs.
Navy Lieutenant Randall W. “Duke” Cunningham and his RIO, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) William P. “Willy” Driscoll, were flying as flak suppressors carrying Rockeye cluster bombs.3 Their squadron’s call-sign was Showtime, and the F-4J they were flying carried side-number 100, so they were Showtime 100, or, as the Navy flight-crews used it, “Showtime One Double-nuts.” Duke and Willy were on a roll—they had previously shot down two MiGs, tying the Navy record.
After delivering their ordnance, Cunningham and his wingman, Lieutenant Brian Grant, with RIO Jerry Sullivan, were bounced by a gaggle of MiGs. Jumped by two MiG-17s, Cunningham turned sharply into one shooting at him and forced an overshoot. He reversed and launched a Sidewinder, which connected.
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