Thud Ridge (2 page)

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 that 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.

1. The Thud

To the men who fought there, the string of small mountains that stretches like a long bony ringer to the north and west of Hanoi is known as Thud Ridge. From Hanoi's view the ridge must have been a geographical indicator that pointed out the direction from which the attacking fighter-bombers would approach the heartland of North Vietnam. For me, as an attacking fighter pilot, Thud Ridge was one of the few easily identifiable landmarks in the hostile North, marking the route to the modern fighter pilot's private corner of hell—the fierce defenses and the targets of downtown Hanoi.

Thud Ridge sometimes poked its scrubby peaks through the mist and clouds that hung almost incessantly over the area to tell me the weather would never let me get to my target that day. Sometimes Thud Ridge provided shelter from some of the piercing radar eyes of the enemy as I streaked past its sides, leading my companions as low and as fast as I dared to go. To those of us engaged in this most demanding facet of this most peculiar of all wars, Thud Ridge, once we saw it, always served as a reminder that we were among the privileged few to take part in the grimmest contest yet conceived between sophisticated air and ground machinery and people. This singular piece of real estate is the locale of the statistics that have appeared in many a newspaper, and its slopes and peaks now hold the carcasses of the majority of our aircraft classified as "missing in action." The F-105, affectionately known to her pilots as the "Thud," carried the bulk of the load against Hanoi from the very start, and these machines and their pilots daily rechristened Thud Ridge.

Someone must tell the story of Thud Ridge and as there are so few of us who have had the opportunity to tell it from the firsthand vantage point of the seat of a Thud over Hanoi, I feel something resembling a duty to set the story down as I see it. It is more than a duty. It is a desire to give permanence to some of the briefing room jazz that flows so wonderfully from pilot to pilot, never to be registered again except over a cool one in the stag bar or through the medium of a less vivid conversation when two comrades in arms meet again after months or years. It is never quite the same the second or third time around. Those of us who were in this thing all went different ways within a short time after our most personal involvement in fighting and surviving. The rapid changes in surroundings and people either dim or brighten the remembrance of the events. And, oh so often, there is just no time to spend in re-creating the feelings when you meet that old wingman again years later. He is rushing past your life, you are rushing past his, and the chance meeting is never satisfactory. It is sure good to see old so-and-so but—got to run—see you again soon—if you are ever in town, give me a call and the wife and I will have you out to dinner; it just isn't the same.

I have lived this story day and night for what now seems like most of my conscious life. I entered West Point shortly after I turned seventeen, and after an accelerated course that crammed the normal curriculum plus flying training into an unbelievably compact three years, I pinned my wings and bars on my runic and found myself in the middle of the fascinating world of fighting aircraft and fighter people. I have flown every operational fighter plane the Air Corps, and later the Air Force, has owned, from the P-47 to the F-106—with one exception: I never got to fly the F-94, and by the time I recognized that fact, it was a museum piece. (I understand I did not miss too much.) I have about as many fighter hours as anyone, and as I was fortunate enough to break into the jet set early in 1949, my jet fighter time and experience puts me right on top of that heap too. It all adds up to 216 fighter combat missions, but the sense of accomplishment is tempered by the humility you learn from leading your people and equipment into the caldron of aerial combat.

I have also had a part in helping develop the skills and techniques that have made the jet fighter a formidable weapons system. We started the process in Nevada with the Lockheed F-80 "Shooting Star," when we reopened the desert gunnery school in 1948. I learned a great deal about precision and about extracting the maximum from man and machine as I led the Air Force acrobatic team, the Thunderbirds, from 1954 through 1957. Every time I was due to move on from that job I managed to wangle a new and faster aircraft from the inventory and accept new challenges that culminated in 1956 with the world's first supersonic precision acrobatic unit. I reveled in the challenges of making the electronically complex F-106 and her pilots perform with distinction through three windswept, subzero winters in Minot, North Dakota, and I wept when I lost superior people because I had not yet fought hard enough to rid the Air Force of the F-106's bugaboos, among them the killer ejection seat. (My Air Force career almost terminated during a few emotional shouting matches about this ejection seat hi 1964, but we did clean up the F-106 and for the moment reliability and pilot survival triumphed over sterile and unduly complicated engineering and manufacturing techniques.) I even found minuscule areas of satisfaction in the professional education programs that have led me to a master's degree in the various military and civilian halls of knowledge, but when I completed the National War College in 1965, I knew that the thing I wanted most was to get back with my fighter guys in the real big league of the air war over North Vietnam.

Surprisingly, this was not the easiest thing to accomplish. There always seems to be someone around who wants to manage your career for you, and while I had been relatively successful in the past in dodging the snares of the personnel specialists intent on saddling me with innocuous jobs, I found it much harder to do as a colonel. There are many, many positions, especially in the Washington area, that are filled by virtue of the colonel rank and with little attention to experience. If you engage in a few casual conversations around Washington, you will find that the productive output from these positions is quite often inversely proportional to the amount of assembled rank and the length of the job title. The Air Force has established a section known as the Colonels' Assignments Branch and their unrewarding task is to select round colonels to fit all the square boxes on all the organizational charts hung throughout the world. The high-level service schools, such as the National War College, are most lucrative hunting grounds for these personnel specialists, and while many prospective selectees succumb to the headquarters pressure, there are some who fight it. There is, however, no guarantee that the fighter will avoid the assignment that he considers less than an honor, and the career implications demand that the fighter use deftness in the attack lest he offend the one he may wind up being assigned to.

The rationale behind the decision to fight or not is quite simple. Once you have a few years under your belt
as
a colonel you have to make a basic decision. If your prime goal in life is to become a general officer, your best odds, by far, come from going the big staff route. If you fight to stay with operational command in the action areas of the world you will find yourself less liable for promotion, and recent selections give credence to the thought that the farther you are removed from the battle, the better off you are, at least hi terms of your career. Even in an organization designed around airplanes and people, the support expert and the politician regularly outdistance the combat leader in striding toward the highest-level positions. In my case, while I was still at the National War College, I was interviewed for two positions that were clearly oriented toward the easy, nonopera-tional route to promotion. Early in the school year I managed to wriggle out of an assignment to an administrative position in charge of the General Officers' Assignment Section. (The incumbent was promoted to brigadier general a few months later.) Two months after that it looked like I was hooked for sure on the second interview, and I received a set of printed orders that told me I was designated as Chief of Plans, Office of Legislative Liaison, Headquarters, United States Air Force. It just did not seem to me that the assignment was the best place for a forty-year-old colonel with a wealth of jet fighter experience and'a burning desire to go and fight another war. My maneuver in personnel banditry took some discreet handling and still almost blew up in my face. But although I came close enough to the new and unwanted assignment to attend a welcoming cocktail party, I managed to pull off a last-minute switch and the day I graduated from the National War College I headed for Southeast Asia.

I spent my first year there assigned to a fighter wing whose home base was in Japan. Normally a fighter wing can best be described as a unit of up to five thousand people who are all responsive to some need of the three fighter squadrons assigned within that wing. The squadrons are the small, semi-independent units—each owning about twenty fighter aircraft —which actually accomplish the job involving the pilot and the aircraft. With the complexities of current equipment, the squadrons would not survive very long without the direct support of all the specialists within the wing structure. Usually the wing commander, his assistant or vice-commander, and selected members of
the
wing staff are seasoned fighter pilots who inherit an administrative command by virtue of their position, and who sometimes earn an operational responsibility and respect through their airborne accomplishments.