F-105 Thunderchiefs and their Pilots in Action - 1966

he got three lieutenants coming in behind this f they're they just finished 100th mission actually they got cycled through to go back up to rest camp one of our other pilots that was shot down earlier so they they've just got 101 missions and we're real proud of them because uh first of all not many lieutenants fly the 105 and secondly they get out of missions and it is outstanding we think so we're going to meet him here at the end of the runway and take him on up to the uh parking space doing bottle of champagne and i imagine that three happy boys when all is said and done you really cannot adequately relate a war war is too potent too personal war is living and laughing and crying and dying it has always been the man who fights who can best report a war if he will true his story may be confused sometimes harsh sometimes boisterously non-committal but it is real this is one segment one small insight into our present war this is the 105 story the story of fighter bomber pilots flying daily over the armed camp of north vietnam during the month of november 1966 these are the men of the 388 tactical fighter wing and in particular the men of the 421st the fighting cavalier squadron well what are they doing well how do i tell if if they come up with their they're over their heads they'll be friendly he says no one of these guys got a gun that guy said well how far are you from standing right here by me and he said well it must be friendly how does it feel to have a hundred i thought i was gonna kill myself on this so you know the truth all right all right that's two and he just lost the radio i'm gonna be instructor pilot t-38 williams air force base arizona i figure i'll arrive there and i'll i'll be real quiet um all that and i'll go in and all the students will nudge each other and when they meet me and i'll be their instructor and they'll fly with me and they'll nudge each other and say whatever tenants do before he came here you know you know it'll be all quiet no one will know until finally it'll be graduation it will show up in there in nest dress and then i'll be with my air metals and my dfcs and my silver star my commendation letter and my vietnam service metal and all this stuff all the way across and i'll walk in with a slight limp and they'll they'll say tell me about it it was nothing it was nothing you know but then for a week after every time i crawl in the airplane as i get in i'll pull my leg in and i'll rinse a little and i'll say what is it i'll say oh it's just an old war injury 45 44 right 45 44 now finally made the board 99 hard ones to go uh before you do this he's been here about six months it averages about six months for the tour great up by the end of this fight they should be home for their families for christmas you think you're going to make home for christmas yeah well 67 this wing even though we are roughly 100 miles from any sort of civilization morale is high here i've noticed that the men know what they're doing and why they're here well if they're we still have to be over here i'll come right back and the way there's me you come right back and do another hitch you bet i will i enjoy some of the things i'm over here for such as the american way of life i served in world war ii in the southwest i started pacific korea but when i leave here i still have some time to do it probably we don't have a morale problem here we sit out here middle of a strange country and away from uh everything that's familiar to us and i'm not speaking upon us now i'm talking to the maintenance people but uh there is no more outcome of course the pilots couldn't have a morale problem there's always something going there's always something going there's never a dull moment that if there is a factor involved with a morale problem it's fatigue yes uh i personally try to discourage it i ain't just put in 100 missions over north vietnam go home get arrested and come back however i have one pilot here that just insisted on taking another hundred and he's here his name is uh lieutenant victor yeah i want to come back down how come you get to stay here hey we're tired you could have stayed here with me yeah mommy wouldn't have any part to do with that yeah okay there's there's a deal you know you're very uh in let's face it you know if you like if you like somebody well enough to be married with them god you don't want to be away from them for a year eight months or anything like that how are you gonna explain to a wife that uh you know put it for a concurrent tour you know you're gonna take flying over here and it wouldn't happen oh wait like dude that's why i'm sticking around that's where i got nothing going for me back in the states and the flying's good you don't have all the little net pecking rules and regulations you have to put up with them two months ago uh it's still a lot better than his back to enough i just you know i enjoy it and uh you know it's the kind of deal like everybody says yeah i'm waving a flag but i'm not but at the same time you know where you're gonna uh what are you gonna stop it at you know where's where's congress are you gonna wiggle her in the philippines or in australia or san francisco or des moines island you know just stop it here or wait till somewhere later on i don't think most of people think about that they like me you know what what happens you know if uh if i get shot down too mean they'll never get me anywhere at least you're pretty mean to shave your mind i couldn't stand that anymore our bombing objectives i believe can be very distinctly divided into two phases our interdiction program conducted in the southern portion of north vietnam in an attempt to deny movement of the enemy into south vietnam and our strategic if you will objectives in the northern portion of north vietnam in terms of attacking principal lines of communications the northeast and the northwest railroads which comprise the two most major railroads in north vietnam also pol installations and other military supply and storage areas located in the delta regions of north vietnam i just spared this right here that's uh getting ready the big angle would take off it's uh we've got over 50 airplanes involved in this strike force and it was uh going to be a big raid up near the hanoi area but the weather's bad now they're going to various other areas a spare job for every four airplanes we launched we launched one spare after the other runway in case while the airplanes that we're having trouble with they can fill in uh in any four position any one of he can be usually a leader so in case the leader aborts he can uh fill in that spot do you see this spike taking off now and then the airplane standing by is despair he'll be uh coming back up like me probably pretty soon there's not a bad job because uh you do launch quite a bit we'd like to try and fight the floor that's why we have a spare out there because if we didn't we'd never get another airplane up in time oh is so two hours and 55 minutes i went at 55 yeah i thought it was about 250 or so got my fanny's tired thanks was carrying about two percent back and when that guy kept calling mix we hadn't caught up with that flight in front of us yet then and i'm killing them going full blowering about 620 degrees yeah uh this is not the answer don't worry i was watching thanks a lot i call your favorite game i was watching it too well that's what when i was on my run that's where i saw the sparking coming from all the fight flashes were coming from right around where you got there was somebody up there saying drop you know along that road to this side or the other some guy was saying there's a single over there they are located up here in the i call a quadrangle the 469th here on your right fighting balls 26 aircraft 148 marks beginning of the 421st tactical fighter squadron area which uh i spend most of my time they have 20 aircraft assigned to the output as you can see they're all painted up in different ways if the primary identification feature is the red gca deflector on the nose gear strut it's a matter of the 105 of my particular acquaintance of the doggone thing first associations i guess uh from a number of years back i care less about the airplane i don't think it was ever made to fly and certainly from a maintenance standpoint wasn't very equipment we have about 300 pieces of it here it's worth 6 million dollars the 105 is a very complicated weapon system it's got radar gun sights electronics all sorts of uh complicated electronic equipment in it this equipment here supports the operation of the 105. this is uh speaking back at the uh complication of this weapon system you'd like to know that it takes 40 million hours of maintenance people to uh support one hour of this airplane in the air that's how complicated average the best uh the fact they're playing in the air force over here today to do the job this flight line at night is a pretty active place there's more work done at night actually than at the daytime because the daytime is uh completely taken off with the launching and recovering airplanes i don't have much time of course there's a turnaround there's a lot of bomb loading uh for the second goal around noon but nothing like at night and put it on airplane it doesn't come from take it off and put on another one pretty frustrating they get it done somehow i don't know how they do they we have a remarkable uh delivery right here i can't remember last time i got a maintenance snow and delivery we're always getting up they do a real backup job inside dc when i come home to you san francisco will shine so so so on the way everybody remembers most that's where the adrenaline starts to pump the airplane working all right you got the tanker and uh it accepted the gas that means you're going that's that's your last chance the first flight goes through the tanker you stay with the table there'll be four flights on the tank and everybody will go through the tank and then fill up and take six to eight thousand pounds and you stay there and stay in a safer area after everybody gets full you extend you head up to your drop-off point and in route from the anchor to the drop-off point you go through and top out and it takes 1500 2500 the point is that you can get quarterbacks through the top of just nothing five ticks a couple minutes per airplane whereas for the original big degree feeling why it takes quite some time so classic equipment you put a full price on the tanker and extend immediately you get to the drop-off point where the tiger has to turn back before you get to strike flight full plus the other added advantage is that everybody leaves full or close to full a lot of our mission is to uh observe what's going on in the ground what they're moving where they're moving into and how it bridges what kind of condition and this sort of thing so we do need a lot of area that the cloud cover where the is environment is heavy you can't operate in a uh say around cumulus buildups where you're going around the clouds because the sun will come right straight through them and hit you incidentally the airplanes we have lost to sands have been on these conditions so we have to avoid them well maybe 150. i still had light speed though i got water right away at all it was about from ten to nine and then from today okay this one two three four one is 25. now this is a cbu flight this is uh what's your second a small high pressure area centered just about over hanoi which should make for fairly good weather except for restricted visibilities and haze the weather on february tomorrow the last five minutes into the target just that uh just to the northwest and west is going to be the real pretty boy yeah if everything works the same way tomorrow we'll get it if the weather breaks you know the way to look first uh sir tomorrow's target is the yen bend railroad it's the largest railroad in all of north vietnam out of the traffic coming in from the north east railroad in the northwest railroad into hanoi then controls all traffic going south it's located five nautical mile north of hanoi its defenses include a heavy concentration of aaa and there are 26 known sam sites in the area roscoe is brought here by a pilot from kadena who was temporarily assigned to the wing when the pilot was shot down up north roscoe sorry became everybody's dog the only dog allowed on base now oscar's a free agent goes everywhere sort of a [ __ ] with a big heart but lots of guys for instance don't feel right unless he's sitting there in a commander's chair during the mission briefing they say if he sleeps it's going to be an easy mission if his ears perk up watch out the winds there from the surface to 5 000 feet along the coast are going to run about 25 knots out of the northeast did have an aircraft report right over the mountain areas this morning just about a mcgear pass at 5 000 feet he had a wind of zero three zero at 40 knots nobody there say anything against one about and then you hear you hear stories and wild tales and so forth and uh well i've learned to love this old bird it uh it really does the job no there's not another airplane that we've got they can do but this is used as much as they can be used and very successfully very successful powers of your lovely uh the speed and the power it will get there and get you out we hear an awful lot about surface-to-air missiles they're called sams or referred to as sa2s this is a picture of an sa-2 site situated in the immediate hanoi area a close-up of this particular target would look something like this very clearly you can observe the presence of sa2 missiles and in this area we find the radar van which controls the firing of the missiles and also tracks the aircraft along with providing guidance to the sa-2 missile our pilots are constantly faced in flying into north vietnam with missile firings along with extremely heavy anti-aircraft i kind of call it the dry throat mission myself usually i come out bound for the target i'm just kind of sucking that water bottle dry side throat by the only thing i can really say about the hanoi area is about the time uh you start coming off the tank or on the way up there you begin getting butterflies in your stomach naturally and then you begin settling down to the task at hand of navigating and finding your way up there and then once you arrive in the area uh you're generally pretty busy and although at times uh you're you're pretty scared when you have to roll in on something up there especially when you look down you see nothing but a black cloud or a white cloud down below yeah it's uh it's about as scary a mission as i've ever been on uh i think it tries you to just about the maximum on the missions if you can get between uh a ridge between you and that radar site they can't kind of misalign it's just when you get down in the dump in the flat right it's like 30 miles the city of annoyance disappearing because it's flat you have no protection and i don't know how true it is it says the most heavily defended place in the history of air warfare i've been there and i believe it everybody wear your black belt today guys all right no way you got those flags you're going to tire between the wings yes now sir of all we have our best is the radio which is the most important item we have our second item i would say is flares the third is your weapon you have a compass and a mirror for singling and yeah who did that how many bombs we got oh yeah but now 20 more for 30 bombs new barns and all right so so so so so is if do uh back come over too wow loud and clear we got babies right under straight under let's go get it right so so is um right at the deck is so so ain't you know you just take that hill on your left right there and hit that one all right so there's another one everybody wants to get a good target that's right but so very well he says well i just got here uh put me on that you know what i've got there six times now i have a chance to hit have that's right we've been very successful in taking our pilots from sac abc training command as long as they go to one of the tactical schools and uh while the 105 schools attack their command back in the states and receive a roughly 70 hours and 105. they do a good job possession and they set their own rate of progress well for the field that's quite a fight yeah well after not playing for a couple months y'all feel good ed we talk about a little bit sure did you understand what we're trying to do when he was doing the wrecking how he was going back and forth on the road and i was saying that yeah well he was leaning out stay away from you okay there's no problem but you see the position that that you want you don't want to get down like this because you're getting the flag you stay up like this and when he disappears just try to go high on him then when he reverses he can look up see every time you look out you look right down there and see your wingman that's what you want to do when you go to the outside you don't want to get too high because if he turns into you that's what happened to me though he turned into me and i was hiding i got no don't get too high and don't get too low when you get too low if they shoot it at him and you're lower they'll probably hit you but at the same time if you get too high if he turns into just like that says you get it blocked out i've told you how complicated the weapon system is so that it only can be effectively uh operated and utilized against the enemies by our profession and our pilots are professional pilot where we do have a few youngsters that are the training school but most of our pilots have been in the air force 10 to 12 years or longer and in fact we have some grandfathers here that are fighting this war at 13 15. right but we'll have enough kill after leaving that tank to make three four runs right right my best day was uh the fifth of july when uh i attacked and destroyed the four sam sites in one 25-minute mission and this came about because uh in uh escorting the strike flights two sam sites came up on our way in we had to uh attack these boys to turn them off the air to get into the target area while in the target area another sam site came up threatening the strike force and of course we attacked and got him and then on the way back out another sam site came up to block our exit out of the target area which was about 15 to 20 miles north of hanoi and we only had one part of rockets and 20 millimeter cannon ammunition remaining but he fired two fans at us and we managed to apply him visually and put the rockets on him and machine gun him out of commission this was the best day i've had and i don't care to go through another one of those a little too much for an old man i've come up with one thing that in my own mind makes the air force a good organization it was one of the reasons i stayed in it after i got into fighters and that's the people that are in it and i think this has been most vividly demonstrated to me over here the uh i don't think you can get more diversified type of an organization people diversified backgrounds we have some old heads from korea some uh young heads from the academy and we got the world's greatest b-52 fighter pilot over there bob loken a few other people from sac adc and 12th air force headquarters and things like that and we made a pretty good organization i think we kind of put the squadron if we could tell it to the world we put it on the map and i'm very happy to have served with each and every one of you troops so if i could if i could swing a deal to get down south with uh working 100s or f5s or any ones or geez i don't care as long as it's uh close air support if i swing that i'm gonna just try to go or maybe back to state's tv wide upgrade down there if not i'll stick around and fly no one or an a1 check y'all right up north as a very nice i've got three children i've got a six-year-old boy and a 11 year old girl and a 17 year old girl so i'm just watching kids grow up so far i don't care if they're not vietnamese i've been very careful not to do this certainly i'm very careful i think most of the palace and squadron are very careful with where we put their bombs so that they don't accidentally uh hit women and children this sort of thing i think bill's right uh i don't know if anyone's just gonna go over and drop a bomb in a village because that's not doing anything for the world get the targets of military on the 13th of importance we were flying a starting mission north vietnam we just discovered a bunch of missiles on transporters just finished dropping ordinance on we're looking for something straight and found a flag and site we've been starting to make a pass and i took a direct hit man 37 to 57 that's how that was hit leading year in they didn't hear my regular transformation because number four man thought it was a missile call me out as a sam and then number three man said no that's two he's on fire i got about a minute and 10 or 20 seconds flying time out of the aircraft got about 40 miles away from where i was hitting i had a minor explosion lost i got expression the aircraft pitched down and uh i ejected you know almost uncontrolled situations about 525 550 knots two negative keys that's when i hurt my ankle caught my foot rejection process getting out everything else was uneventful after the shoot opened down landed in the trees that radio out talked back to the fight know they said the rescue aircraft was on the way it took you about 45 or 50 minutes to get to me in about five or six minutes to pick me up oh that's a good you know you get up in the 90s and you got 10 to go and you say well i'm going to help pretty soon so i got gotta tell these guys something so you go lay in bed at night and you think of things to tell them about it prepared something i'm damn proud to have besides working with all you guys and with your names here i don't really need this picture i'm gonna remember you guys but uh i remember you because those are guys you remember the guys you fought with this has been the story of fighter bomber pilots at karate air base thailand for the flyer living the hell over hanoi facing up to the odds there is the simple yet poignant phrase there ain't no way there ain't no way there ain't no way but they funds the day for most when the job is done i won't even say the rest of you guys know there's no way be down there number one river valley today i'll be bye

Channel: ZenosWarbirds

Views: 217,703

Keywords: Republic F105 Thunderchief

Id: Hun_uUuufOs

Length: 55min 1sec (3301 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2012