Posted on 03/02/2005 8:09:38 PM PST by SAMWolf
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are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Linebacker II Air Operations The Linebacker II air operations over North Vietnam were truly spectacular. Making it happen were the maintenance crews back on the ground. With the wide assortment of literature and movies portraying the "typical" Vietnam-era GI, one might be led to believe that most Americans involved in that war were either bloodthirsty warmongers or soldiers tripped out on drugs. For the majority of the personnel who served their country in Southeast Asia (SEA), the truth was exactly the opposite. This was certainly the case with the F-4 maintenance troops of the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW) at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, during the 1972 Linebacker II air offensive. Most of the maintenance personnel assigned to the F-4 section were young airmen in their late teens or early 20s. Considering the fact that F-4E Phantoms were designed to be maintained by an experienced crew chief with a "technical sergeant" skill rating, it was quite a responsibility for a young airman to be assigned as a crew chief on this multimillion-dollar weapon system. The reason for the shortage of experienced personnel was that, in late October 1972, President Nixon had halted all bombings north of the 20th parallel in North Vietnam in anticipation of a negotiated cease-fire. For the next several weeks, most of the Americans stationed in SEA felt that an end to the war was imminent. Apparently, the manpower planning staffs also felt that way because the flow of replacement personnel was reduced to a trickle. The B-52 Strato fortress was the largest bomber in the US command, measuring 185 feet from wingtip to wingtip. The aircraft in question was carrying 114 500-lb bombs when it began its approach into Hanoi late on the night of December 22, 1972.Sixteen B-52s were lost during operation Linebacker ll. Throughout the months of October and November, maintenance and other support organizations lost experienced personnel at a far higher rate than normal due to a large number of expired DEROS (dates of expected return from overseas) for completed one-year tours, as well as the end of many TDY (temporary duty) cycles. Since many U.S. Air Force personnel had deployed directly to SEA during the April-May period following the North Vietnamese (NVA) Eastertide invasion into the South, they had finished their 180-day TDY cycles and were therefore due for a return to their home stations. In light of the bombing halt situation, there appeared to be no reason to retain the TDY people. But by the end of November, the realization finally struck a number of commanders that unless the personnel pipeline was reopened, the flying units would be in a situation of trying to maintain an in-place force without adequate manpower to do so. Finally, during the first part of December, relief in the form of new TDY personnel arrived from a number of Stateside bases and from areas in the Pacific. Some of the more experienced men who were due to rotate just before Christmas were also involuntarily extended to January or February 1973 dates. This was a highly unpopular action as most of the extended troops had families expecting them home for the holidays, but as things later turned out, it proved to be a very fortuitous decision. Since many of the new TDY people were somewhat unfamiliar with working on F-4 aircraft, it was up to those extended crew chiefs to provide them with quick on-the-job training. During the Vietnam War, MiG-21s were often used against U.S. aircraft. Between April 26, 1965, and January 8, 1973, USAF F-4s and B-52s downed 68 MiG-21s. Although most units were still sitting far short of their normal manning requirements, the maintenance officers were reasonably confident they could handle the kind of flying schedule that the squadron wing had supported during Linebacker I operations from March to October 1972 in response to the NVA Eastertide Offensive. That effort had been characterized as a "standard" schedule whereby missions were flown by day, and night shift was used as a time for the maintenance system to correct all discovered major discrepancies to get the aircraft ready for the next day's schedule. The demands of concurrent aircraft launch and recovery operations required greater manpower loadings during the day shift. The men on night shift could usually perform their jobs with a less than full complement since their main role was to act as a coordinator for specialists doing the actual troubleshooting or repair actions on the aircraft. Under these kinds of conditions, the maintenance officers and senior NCOs felt that even with shortages the troops could "hack the program." In the meantime, the North Vietnamese were using the respite from the post-Linebacker I bombing halt to rebuild their military strength. On December 13, 1972, the North Vietnamese delegates walked out of the Paris peace talks, and two days later, the president ordered the execution of Linebacker II--the resumption of airstrikes against North Vietnam. The majority of U.S. Air Force people stationed in Thailand were completely surprised by the new air offensive. F-4 (FG-786) loaded with munitions & ready for its mission The first hint that something unusual was going on was on December 16, when the author, then the most junior F-4E maintenance officer, was told by his flight line maintenance supervisor to go to his quarters to get some rest in preparation for a return to the night shift beginning the next evening. A new second lieutenant with only four months of experience, the author was in temporary command of the wing's fighter section because all of the more senior maintenance officers had departed for Christmas leave. But before he left for his quarters, he was tasked to supervise a quick detail to transport dozens of empty, center-line fuel tanks from the tank storage area to the aircraft revetments. The men on night shift were given the duty of loading the tanks and to begin putting together all friendly aircraft undergoing routine, scheduled maintenance. The flight-line personnel were also informed by the supervisor of the Thai work crews, who were assembling new fuel tanks, that they would be working overtime to build up a large reserve of operational tanks (which arrived in kit form from the Stateside stocks). This activity seemed to point toward an expected large expenditure of external tanks and spawned numerous rumors that U.S. forces were possibly going to be involved in a new bombing effort above the 20th parallel. During Linebacker I, it had been standard procedure for F-4 aircrews to punch off their external fuel tanks prior to entering North Vietnamese airspace, thereby lessening drag. These rumors became fact when the maintenance officer in charge reported back to work on the evening of December 17. He was told to report directly to the Wing Maintenance Control Room for an important briefing prior to his shift-change muster and roll call. He noted immediately that every single aircraft status board was covered over by curtains. The F-4 board controller, an experienced master sergeant, lifted up the curtain covering the status board for the F-4 section and, amazingly, almost all of the aircraft appeared as either operationally ready (OR) or well on the way to being so. Loaded F-4 (FO-733) - 500 Lb bombs with fuse extensions On a normal basis, the section maintained an OR rate of about 80 to 85 percent, but the board was showing an OR status of 92 percent, with 23 out of 25 F-4s available for service. Every aircraft was loaded for either an air-to-air configuration (AIM-7 Sparrow and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles) or a hunter-killer configuration (cluster bomb units, or CBUs) with fully fueled center-line and wing tanks. This had to mean only one thing--the 388th aircrews were definitely headed back to North Vietnam!
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In the meantime, the F-4 section was informed that it would be tasked to support a schedule to sustain both a day and a night effort until further notice. The successful outcome for such a flying schedule usually relied upon a maximum effort even when units were manned at full strength--and the 388th's section was still suffering from a shortage in manpower.
The real shock of having to support a 24-hour flying schedule was based upon the previous Linebacker I experience when everyone knew that it routinely required an entire 12-hour night shift to generate enough F-4 airframes to support each day's flying commitments. That was the situation when the unit had the luxury of having a permanent crew chief assigned to almost every aircraft. Now the troops were being told that they would launch and recover twice as many missions with half as many crew chiefs and without any appreciable maintenance stand-down time. It seemed impossible.
On the afternoon of December 18, the unit commanders finally got the straight word on what the preparations were all about. Very few believed it when it was finally disclosed that B-52 bombers would be attacking targets within the dense Hanoi-Haiphong defense zones. There were a lot of discussions taking place throughout the base over whether or not the huge Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers would be sitting ducks against the expected concentrated enemy defenses. As of yet, it had not been revealed as to how many B-52 bombers were involved in the new offensive, nor the tactics they would be using during their night attacks.
It was also meant to show America's serious "get-tough" attitude to convince the North Vietnamese that it would be in their own best interests to return to the negotiating table. In earlier air offensives against North Vietnam, our fighterbombers had limited capability in attacking pinpoint targets during night or poor-visibility periods. Thus, the Communists had been able to adjust to American bombing schedules by hiding and storing their valuable supplies during U.S. daylight attack periods and moving them at night when U.S. air operations were not nearly as effective.
www.vectorsite.net
www.danshistory.com
www.sacpatches.com
www.cr.nps.gov
www.aviation-art.net
www.centennialofflight.gov
www.altus.af.mil
us-mil-thai.tripod.com
www.afapo.hq.af.mil
www.brooksart.com
Additionally, many airmen and NCOs assigned to other areas of maintenance, such as the Phase Docks, the Nonpowered Aerospace Ground Equipment Sections or the Specialist Maintenance Squadrons, aided in the effort by volunteering to work as crew-chief assistants. Although inexperienced in performing crew-chief functions, these volunteers quickly learned to accomplish tasks such as conducting end-of-runway quick-check inspections, depaneling aircraft to remove and replace defective equipment, towing, fuel servicing, uploading fuel tanks, and assisting with aircraft launches and recoveries. F-105 Thunderchief carrying 750 lb. bombs As it turned out, the inexperienced volunteers did quite well because they learned their new roles fast and, more important, because they wanted to. Everyone sensed that they were involved in a historic event, and they all wanted to have an active part in it. Most of these volunteers performed the flight-line functions in addition to their normal shift duties within their own respective primary work areas. Toward the end of the first week of the offensive, the aircraft systems were already straining local supply-support capabilities due to the compressed requirements of a day-and-night flying schedule. This was especially true for the F-4 Phantoms, since so many F-4 units were assigned in Thailand, and each was competing for many of the essential parts that were in short supply worldwide. F-105G "PATIENCE" of the 17th WWS, Korat RTAFB during Operation Linebacker II, December, 1972 fires a Standard ARM at an NVA SAM site in North Vietnam As it was, the entire Tactical Air Command was sacrificing mission readiness in other parts of the world to keep the flow of critical parts maximized to the SEA theater of operations. These part shortages caused some of the aircraft to be ineffective for a number of missions. A number of the on-board F-4 avionics used for performing important functions in the areas of radar, fire control, navigation and communications were quite vulnerable to the extreme climatic conditions of Southeast Asia. Very rare was the aircraft that returned from a mission without a problem in a least one of its avionic areas. In the initial days of Linebacker II, U.S. forces had to make do with what was already on hand within the American local supply warehouses. This meant that, in some cases, certain individual aircraft awaiting parts on order could not fly specific missions due to inoperative subsystems with deficiencies in either air-to-air or air-to-ground modes. These problems led to restricted flexibility in assigning primary or spare airframes for specific mission configurations. Throughout the offensive, units had to continuously tailor individual aircraft for specific mission blocks by cannibalizing parts during the turnaround periods. The B-52D, shown dropping bombs in this photo, was used extensively in Southeast Asia beginning in the mid-1960s. Operating from Andersen AFB, Guam, and later U-Tapao Royal Thai Air Base, the B-52 was a major component of many operations including Arc Light, Iron Hand, Rolling Thunder, Linebacker and Linebacker II. As aircraft returned from completing a mission and were being reserviced, the maintenance troops would have to "borrow" the aircrafts' parts or avionics equipment and put them on F-4s getting ready to launch out on the next immediate sortie blocks. This was not a preferred approach since it required double the effort to turn an aircraft in preparation for subsequent missions. But it was necessary where there were only a limited number of reliably calibrated or fully operational avionic units, and the aircrews simply could not afford to fly up North with anything less than fully operable weapon systems. The stakes were just too high. At first the wing tried to support a planned, formalized flying schedule as worked up by the Plans and Scheduling Staff. They had printed up a series of "frag sheets," or flight schedules, where specific tail-numbered aircraft were assigned to time blocks for specific types of missions. But, because of the "real-time" turnaround problems and constant changes in aircraft readiness factors, it became difficult for schedulers to assess which tail numbers would possess some reasonable capability to perform specific functions for the next day's missions. Aerial photo of bomb damage to a Hanoi airfield. Changes to the published schedules became too numerous after Day 2, and the flight-line section chiefs were finally just given blank schedule forms with printed mission times which were filled in with tail numbers as airframes became available. Often, this would happen just minutes prior to the scheduled launch times, and aircrews patiently waited in the revetments for the word to climb aboard in a last-minute assignment. More times than not, they had very little time to conduct a proper preflight of their aircraft, since the other aircraft within their mission block had already started engines. The aircrew's trust in their maintenance troop's judgments strengthened the resolve to provide the aircrew with the best possible airframes within the abilities to do so. Any mistakes on a crew chief's part could very well mean the loss of another aircrew over North Vietnam. This could occur either by a failure of a critical aircraft system or by enemy defensive actions if the weapon systems weren't operating at optimum performance with equipment such as the ECM, which was needed to counter the enemy SAM radars. Led by The Lone Star Lady, B-52 Stratofortresses based at Anderson AFB on the island of Guam, head for Hanoi, North Vietnam, during the Strategic Air Command's Operation Linebacker II during the Winter of 1972. The pilots and backseaters paid back the efforts by continually keeping their support folks informed on the progress of the offensive. The troops were invited to intelligence briefings and combat film shows which gave them an idea as to what effect Linebacker was having on the North Vietnamese. The value these informative briefings had on morale cannot be emphasized enough. They continued to spark the efforts of the tired and weary maintenance personnel to press on. The real break came when President Richard Nixon halted the bombing during Christmas. This happened just at a point when it seemed that the U.S. forces would run out of enough mission-capable aircraft to fully support the next day's missions. The stand-down period gave the tired support personnel a breathing spell and allowed them to perform some catch-up maintenance on the also tired birds. In many cases, replacement parts had arrived for some of the more critical discrepancies, but the crew chiefs were forced to leave the problems open as temporary "hold-fly" write-ups, due to the lack of available time to correct them. Each hold-fly write-up on its own was not sufficient to ground an aircraft, but a combination of several of them could easily cause a degradation of weapon-system performance. During the bombing break, however, the maintenance personnel were able to work on some of the more serious discrepancies and again bring the F-4s up to some measure of their full capabilities. Although it was a sure thing that the North Vietnamese were using the temporary halt as a means to rebuild some of their damaged areas and defensive sites as well, the break was far more beneficial to the American side since the effectiveness and ability to restrike the North in force was largely restored. Trailer with 2000 Lb bombs ready for Linebacker II After the 24-hour halt on Christmas Day, the bombing resumed with a vengeance. As the official history relates: "By 28 December, American airmen had swept away virtually all the enemy's defenses, and the B-52s were free to roam the skies of North Vietnam.... On 30 December Hanoi agreed to resume the peace talks which culminated in the 27 January [1973] agreement." The "can-do" spirit of the ground maintenance personnel had paid enormous dividends. During Linebacker II, the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing flew several hundred sorties over North Vietnam with only two countable aborts. The F-4E Phantoms at Korat did not suffer a single loss during this 11-day campaign due to either accidents or enemy action. |
That was quick! First in. I'm whooped. We were up early and had a blast reading to the kids this morning. Tomorrow the Oregonian is coming to interview us and take some pictures. LOL. This ought to be fun but I'm sooooo tired. Hitting the hay early tonight. I need my beauty sleep. ;-)
Goodnight.
Good night, snippy!!
Time sure flies here, hehe.
Always an enjoyable and learning read.
Thanks
Teaser
Born on this day
1747 Kasamir Pulaski US general (Revolutionary War)
/teaser
The main purpose of the hunter-killer team mission was to "troll" the enemy skies looking for ground-launched defensive threats. The Weasel F-105G crew would be alert for any signals indicating a tracking radar for SAMs, and then would fire one or more of their anti-radiation missiles into the radiated signal. The missile would then home onto the signal source and ride right down into the radar antenna site.
"You ever ride the beam, fly ironhand?"
"Not me, I don't let em shoot missiles at me."
Hitting the hay early tonight. I need my beauty sleep. ;-)
Carlos (my evil twin) REALLY wants to make a comment. But I'm fighting him down.
DOWN DOWN! BAD CARLOS! No soup for you.
Ah Yes Back then being a Navy AO You could go from a Navy E-4 to Air Force E-6 Become a crew chief loading B-52s And put 20k in you pocket. By Re-upping as AF.
And what does this teach us? How long did it take before NV went back on its word!
Never trust the lefty Reds! Here or there.
>>> With the wide assortment of literature and movies portraying the "typical" Vietnam-era GI, one might be led to believe that most Americans involved in that war were either bloodthirsty warmongers or soldiers tripped out on drugs. <<<
We hear about how all the US Nam Vets were Baby Killers and War criminals committing war atrocities.
But you never hear why or the real atrocities committed by the NVA, VC.
Like why some GIs had to be baby killers They forget to tell you about how the VC would strap a claymore to a 5 year olds back. And the send them running out to get candy
from the GIs.
They demons Lt. Calley for loosing it at My Lai and shooting some people he shouldnt have. But you never here of an example he gave in his book. About the village chief who found a vessel on his door step with chunks of meat floating in it. It was his son chopped to bits. His reward for opposing the local NVA VC.
I have read many books & accounts. And have talked to many vets. Getting first hand stories from them.
You here stories about chopping off ears or head from the dead. But nothing approaching the level of what the other side did.
How VC would Christmas tree (do you really want to know) a GI they would capture. Or hang them upside-down and skin them alive. Plus many other stories that I have never heard or read about US GIs doing.
Isnt it funny how the press, Jane & John never tell you these things.
Hi Feather! You even beat Snippy in today. :-)
Morning Snippy.
You ready for our interview? I'm not, too nervous to sleep. Can I call in sick?
We have the local Portland paper coming to do an interview with us tomorrow first thing in the morning. I'm not good at that type of thing. :-(
Morning KDD.
Thanks for falling in to the Foxhole this morning.
Growing up in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago, I'm very familiar with Pulaski.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem entitled "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem" was inspired by the fact that General Pulaski's Legion did in fact march into battle with a silk banner embroidered by sisters at a convent in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem
When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,
Far the glimmering tapers shed
Faint light on the cowled head;
And the censer burning swung,
Where nere before the altar, hung
The crimson banner, that with prayer
Had been consecrated there.
And the nun's sweet hymn was heard while,
Sung low, in the dim, mysterious aisle.
"Take thy banner, May it wave
Proudly oer the good and brave;
Wnen the battle's distant wail
Breaks the Sabbath of our vale,
When the clarion's music thrills
To the hearts of these lone hills,
When the spear in conflict shakes,
And the strong lance shivering breaks.
"Take thy banner! and, beneath
The battle-cloud's encircling wreath,
Guard it, till our homes are free!
Guard it! God will prosper thee!
In the dark and trying hour,
In the breaking forth of power,
In the rush of steeds and men,
His right hand will shield thee then.
"Take thy banner! But when night
Closes round the ghastly flight, If the vanquished warrior
bow, Spare him! as thou wouldst be
spared! By our prayers and many tears, By the
mercy that endears, Spare him! he our love hath
shared! Spare him! as thou wouldst be spared
"Take thy banner! and if e'er
Thou shouldst press the soldier's bier,
And the muffled drum should beat
To the tread of mournfulfeet,
Then this crimson flag shall be
Martial cloak and shroud for thee."
The warrior took that banner proud,
And it was his mattial cloak and shroud!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sounds like a job Darksheare might like. ;-)
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