Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (60 page)

The Russian colonel shook his head. “They don’t use Ground-Controlled Intercepts the way we do. They use their own onboard radars.”

That astounded them, and they chattered among themselves. Their own fighters were controlled from takeoff to landing.

“So we have several targets,” the FCO continued, “and the speed with which range and aspect are changing means they’re obviously fighter aircraft.” The Russian colonel had been the guidance officer at the Cuban site that shot down Maj. Rudolf Anderson in October 1962. Because of his experience with the SNR-75 system and his assignment teaching Cubans, Lubinitsky had been sent here earlier in the year. After a lot of shit, that is. Months of delays to ship the equipment through China, then more shit once they were finally here. The Viets, he’d learned, were terrified of angering the Chinese and thought Beijing wanted to absorb their new country as another province.

He wiped his streaming face and wrinkled his nose slightly. As if anyone would want the fucking place. The colonel sighed. Cuba was so much better, with its sunshine, rum, and dark-haired, willing women. Personally, he thought the Americans were just posturing; after all, what would they do with this stinking shithole?

“How close did they approach this time?” he asked the range operator.

“About twenty-five kilometers, sir.”

Nodding, Colonel Lubinitsky turned to the last station, the small one facing the door. “Status?”

“Ready, sir.” The man was a captain and a highly experienced guidance officer. He’d been watching all three displays intently. The commander picked up a heavy black phone and repeated his question.

“As they begin the turn back northeast we will fire.” The Viets understood that and perked up noticeably. “A salvo of three missiles.”

“But the range, sir.” One NVA (North Vietnamese Army) officer had been doing the math in his head. “Isn’t it too far?” He’d been studying for months and was well aware that the tactical engagement zone for the system was twenty-eight kilometers.

“If they were receding, yes. Or beam on to us.” That earned lots of blank stares, so the colonel held up his left hand perpendicular to his other. “Sideways.” They understood that and bobbed their heads. “But if the target is flying at you, then his airspeed is helping to close the distance.”

“Aspect shifting, sir,” the first console operator reported. “They’re turning in.”

Glancing at the guidance officer, the commander got a nod, yet he hesitated a moment. There had been combat here before now with Russians involved, and after all, this was Vietnam.
Their
country, not his . . . and this equipment had been legally purchased for their use. It wasn’t as if he was attacking the Americans. The Russian looked at the senior NVA officer and smiled.

“When you are ready, Colonel.”

ONE MORE TIME
.

The pilot tightened his grip on the canopy rail as the Phantom started a left turn. One more mission. He stared off the wing at North Vietnam, blanketed under a smooth carpet of clouds, and couldn’t quite believe he’d done this fifty-four times before. For Ross Fobair, an F-4 Phantom pilot from the 45th Tactical Fighter Squadron, it was now almost routine. A newly arrived pilot, Capt. Richard “Pops” Keirn, was flying in the front seat and finishing his local checkout. No one in the 45th had been here that long, but you could get experienced real quick in combat and ninety days was a long time here.

They’d flown into Thailand from MacDill AFB in Florida on April 4, 1965, just three and a half months ago. With the first Phantoms in-country, the 45th Tactical Fighter Squadron was responsible for protecting striker aircraft and killing MiGs. Two weeks ago Tom Roberts and Ken Holcombe had bagged a pair of MiG-17s, chalking up the very first USAF air-to-air kills in this war. Maybe they’d come up and fight today.
Now
that
would be something to go out on,
Fobair thought, and grinned under his mask.

“Leopard Two . . . tighten it up.” The flight lead, Lt. Colonel Bill Alden, didn’t bark, but his voice was terse.
Second time he’s said that.
Fobair watched the back of the other man’s head as he fidgeted in the front cockpit, staring left.
He’s trying too hard . . . gotta loosen up when you fly formation. This must’ve been how the RAF guys thought when they flew over Britain at first with their silly air-show formations. Combat isn’t the place for it, but that’s what was briefed this morning. Probably because the flight lead was hoping for a commit against some MiGs and wanted his guys close together.
The Vietnamese fighters didn’t stay up very long, so there was never much time.

The Phantom bobbled as Keirn corrected his formation. Overcorrected, actually, but flying loose route at 23,000 feet in an F-4 wasn’t that easy.
Wasn’t that hard, either
, he thought, and closed his eyes. Keirn was a retread; he’d been a bomber pilot during World War II before being shot down and spending nine months as a prisoner in Stalag Luft 1. This was his fifth mission in Vietnam, and he’d be a fully checked-out wingman if all went well today.

The whole notion of using bomber pilots to fly fighters was absurd, Fobair thought. A few of them had come through before and never really gotten it. Something about all those years of non-maneuvering flying with a crew riding along got to a guy. Fobair sighed.
Damn, I hate the pit.
He wiped his face
.
No pilot liked riding in the backseat and letting someone else fly. He sighed again. It didn’t matter . . . not today of all days.

The twenty-nine-year-old captain was packed up to leave as soon as they got back to Ubon. It was July 24, 1965, and later that night the “Freedom Bird,” a transport aircraft to the States, was heading home. So was he—back to California and a well-deserved rest with his wife, Anita. His sister was there, too, and his young nephew, Bruce. The 45th would be returning to MacDill later in the summer to teach other pilots on their way to Southeast Asia, and Fobair was leaving early to set it up.

Squirming down into the seat, he tried to get comfortable, but that wasn’t really possible in a Martin-Baker ejection seat.
Ah,
he thought with a yawn,
the life of a fighter pilot.
They’d taken off from Ubon, hit a refueling track over Laos, and were now 40 miles west of Hanoi in Route Pack V—and he’d be back in California in seventy-two hours. Weird world. That made him smile, so he shut his eyes again. At least it was quiet. The flight lead had told them all to switch off the noisy safety frequency, called “guard,” used for emergencies, a SAM launch, or a downed pilot. If Leopard had to get into action quick, the last thing they needed to hear was a bunch of Navy pukes trying to find their carrier. Those guys used guard like a private telephone and completely garbaged it up.

Ross yawned.

Today was pretty straightforward, Fobair thought, so none of that should be needed. Leopard was a four-ship combat air patrol, called a MiGCAP, covering a strike of F-105 Thunderchiefs. The Thuds were whacking a factory near Hanoi, so a sweep was necessary this close to the capital, and that was the good part. They got to roam around and look for trouble, forcing enemy fighters to fight
them
and let the Thuds drop their bombs.

It didn’t work out that way this time, though.

West of Hanoi three SAMs shot up through a soggy cloud deck, and one hit Leopard Two. The orbiting EB-66 had seen the launch electronically and called out on the guard frequency, but the Phantoms couldn’t hear it. No one in the flight had seen the missile, and even if they had, there wasn’t time to react. They also didn’t carry the threat detection gear that would become standard equipment on later jets. Unfortunately for Keirn and Fobair, the previous SA-2 shoot-downs had involved spy planes, so the CIA and Air Force hadn’t released much useful information. Nothing was really known about this new SAM, and the pilots hadn’t been trained yet to defeat it. The missile was the same radar-guided SA-2 that had knocked down Gary Powers and killed Major Anderson—it left little margin for error.

Following a spine-jarring impact the Phantom immediately went out of control. In the front seat Pops Keirn struggled to assess the flashing lights and aural warnings as acrid smoke filled the cockpit, making his eyes water. Getting no response from the pit, he twisted around against the mounting g-forces and saw the other pilot slumped over, blood streaming from his nose. As the F-4 spun into the clouds, Keirn ejected and would spend the next seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

But Ross Fobair disappeared.

“
POWER COMES FROM
the barrel of a gun.”

Mao Zedong of China said it, and Nguyen Sinh Cung—better known as Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens”—believed it. Though he had lived in France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, Ho first and foremost saw himself as a Vietnamese patriot.
^*
He was an ardent Communist, but more as a pure revolutionary rather than an adherent to an economic system. His concern was an independent Vietnam, not Communist regional or global domination, so he returned home in 1941 to fight the Japanese and Vichy French.

With Ho’s leadership and the generalship of Vo Nguyen Giap, they formed the Viet Minh (VM), a coalition of all Vietnamese Communists. Operating from the forests of Tonkin and Annam, they carried out a small-scale guerilla war until the Japanese surrendered in 1945. The very next day, on September 2, Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Unknown to Ho and Giap, however, Vietnam’s fate had already been decided by the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. This stipulated, in part, that all Japanese troops north of the 16th parallel would be disarmed by the Nationalist Chinese and those to the south, in the area known as Cochinchina, would be disarmed by the British.

Despite initial U.S. support for Ho Chi Minh, when World War II ended, Washington chose ideology over practicality and refused to deal with a Communist leader. In all fairness, China was in the middle of her revolution, the Soviet Union was emerging as
the
threat to America, and the situation on the Korean Peninsula was unstable. Following the war, decolonization had become a global momentum and was occurring in Egypt, Italian North Africa, British India, and Malaysia. Exhausted by the past five years, most former colonial powers accepted the inevitable and did what they could to somewhat peacefully transfer power.

France did not.

Conservative leaders in Paris decided that one way to erase her wartime humiliation was to reassert French power (whatever that was) and regain control of the colonies that had constituted her prewar empire. Indochina, composed of Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, was the cornerstone of France’s Far Eastern possessions. The first French soldiers were brought in by C-47 transport on September 12, 1945, and with Chiang Kai-shek’s approval, French troops landed in the Red River Delta during March 1946. Later that year, following the withdrawal of Nationalist Chinese forces, the French Expeditionary Force increased to 30,000 men. By now, confrontation was a foregone conclusion, and in November 1946, war erupted between the Viet Minh and France.

Most of the French soldiers were colonials from North and West Africa, but there were also paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires, the latter a group of soldiers of every nationality who agreed to fight under French officers in return for eventual citizenship. They were essentially government-sponsored mercenaries and were very tough, very ruthless men. Those who did come from Europe were all volunteers; France never sent conscripts to fight in Indochina.

For several years there were no major operations, just insurgent attacks and counterinsurgency ripostes. The French aircraft carrier
Dixmude,
a former merchant ship built in Pennsylvania, arrived on station in 1947 to conduct limited operations using Dauntless dive-bombers. Originally commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS
Biter,
the ship had a 400-foot deck with a single catapult. Loaned to the French Navy in 1945, she carried about twenty aircraft.
^*
After the Chinese Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in September 1949, Beijing began supplying the Viet Minh.

In the fall of 1950, as Americans advanced into North Korea, the French were pulling in their Tonkin garrisons. Gen. Marcel Carpentier, commander in chief of French Indochina, had decided that the forts were too vulnerable in the face of a Chinese-reinforced Viet Minh. The subsequent withdrawal down Route Coloniale 4 northeast of Hanoi was a disaster, as the French had no helicopters and were repeatedly ambushed all along the miserable little road. Of the 6,000 soldiers involved, fewer than 700 finally reached safety. Citizens in Hanoi panicked as the backwoods threat of Ho Chi Minh suddenly materialized on their doorstep. As a result, everything north of Hanoi in the Tonkin Highlands became undisputed Viet Minh territory. The French arsenal in Lang Son was also captured and contained enough weapons to equip an entire VM division.

A defeat of a modern, European-trained army by a ragged peasant militia, as they were seen, shocked the world. Of all the interested powers, the United States should’ve been the least surprised. The whole scenario was strikingly similar to the Revolutionary War: irregulars fighting a guerilla war against a technically superior, infinitely better organized modern army. The parallel didn’t escape everyone, and there were those in both the French and American military who recognized the fight for what it was. Unfortunately, they were not the policy makers, and the war continued.

Giap became overconfident with his victories and made the mistake of fighting in open country against the French. Through June 1951 he attacked around the Red River Delta and was handily defeated, losing more than 20,000 of his soldiers. But he
learned.
More significant, he didn’t repeat his mistakes. This ability to adapt was missed by French and American politicians and was one of the greatest strengths the VM possessed. Following these victories, the French formed mobile brigades and committed armor with additional paratroops. Despite this, without real airlift and helicopters, their mobility was still tied to the vulnerable road network and therefore under constant attack.