RIPPLE SALVO… #179… with ED RASIMUS in his F105D…. but first…
Good Morning: Day ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-NINE of reflections on the air war in North Vietnam–one day at a time..
27 AUGUST 1966… FRONT PAGE NEWS ON THE HOME FRONT… NYT… A fair and seasonable Saturday…
Page 1: “President Asks Moscow To Join In Peace Effort”…”President Johnson issued today an unusually strong and eloquent appeal to the Soviet Union to ‘abandon the dogmas and vocabularies of the ‘cold war’ and join the United States in rational acts of common endeavor’ despite the war in Vietnam. The President suggested he had no doubt that if both sides acknowledged their common interests they could make significant progress toward world peace, including an agreement to a treaty to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The President accompanied by his wife and several Democratic and Republican members of Congress, spoke to a large crowd gathered at the National Reactor Testing Station 45-miles west of Idaho Falls as he started a one-day swing through Idaho, Colorado and Oklahoma. He also spoke at the University of Denver where he said: the defense of political freedom everywhere was the guiding principle of his foreign policy. ‘Our safest guide is– what we do abroad is always what we do at home.’ In Idaho Falls, speaking quietly and forcefully, and following his prepared text, Mr. Johnson said the most important step the United States and the Soviet Union could take would be to recognize ‘that while differing principles and differing values divide us they must not deter us from the rational acts of common endeavor. The dogmas and vocabularies of the cold war were enough for one generation. The world must not now flounder in the back waters of old and stagnant passions.’… ‘The conflict in Vietnam does not stop us from finding new ways of dealing with one another. Our objective there is local and limited: we are trying to protect the independence of South Vietnam and we are trying to provide the people with a chance to decide for themselves where they are going and what they want to become. These objectives can be attained within the borders of South Vietnam.’…”…
Page 1: “Hanoi Leaders Confer In Soviet”…”Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders apparently met for a secret policy conference last week at a Black Sea resort….The meeting was considered particularly significant in the context of a rivalry between the Soviet Union and Communist China for North Vietnam loyalty at a time when Moscow and Peking are adopting more openly hostile stances… Diplomatic sources said they had obtained guarded confirmation that North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and the Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap had paid an unannounced visit to the Soviet Union. Both Leonid I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Union and Premier Aleksie n. Kosygin were reported to be on vacation at the government villas on the Black Sea coast.”… Page 2:”Nixon Says the War Can Be Shortened”…”Former Vice President Richard Nixon who recently toured the Vietnam battlefront said today that the Johnson Administration had unnecessarily resigned itself to a long war there. Declaring this was the greatest danger facing the United States in Southeast Asia. Mr. Nixon said: ‘We need new tactics, new leadership, and new methods to shorten the war and bring it to a conclusion without appeasement of the enemy.’ Mr. Nixon was interviewed on the NBC ‘Today Show.’…”
Page 1: “Housing Pact Set: Dr. King Calls Off Chicago Marches”...”Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., announced today a halt in street demonstrations against housing bias in the Chicago area. Dr. King made the announcement after his team of civil rights workers had reached a unanimous agreement with civic officials and real estate interests on a ten point program designed to end discrimination in residential renting and sales…The rights leader hailed the accord as ‘the most significant program ever conceived to make open housing a reality in metropolitan areas.’ He said that as a sign of good faith the Chicago Freedom Movement would defer its plans to send 3,000 marchers into the all-white suburbs of Cicero. However, trouble loomed again as opposition to the accord was announced by several groups. The executive director of the West Side Organization said his group and six others were going into Cicero. ‘We will march in Cicero come hell or high water. We feel the poor Negro has been sold out by this agreement.”…
FOLLOW-UP ON GEN WESTMORELAND AND FRIENDLY FIRE INCIDENTS… NYT Page 1: “General Absolves Pilots In Napalm Raid On GIs”…”The Commander of the United States First Infantry division took pains to absolve the Seventh Air Force of any blame in the accidental dropping of napalm on his troops…Major General William E. Dupuy, the First Division commander, said the engagement was ‘not a happy battle. We will find more bodies later, but we would always prefer to take fewer casualties ourselves and inflict more on the enemy. The closer to one-on-one, the unhappier we get. I want to make it clear that the First Division called in the air strikes close because this was close combat. Accidents like this have happened every war and will happen in every future war.’…The targets had been marked with smoke rockets fired by a Forward Air Controller and friendly lines had been marked by 500 colored smoke grenades to outline the 1st Infantry division location…”…(Note: the original report that 20 GIs had been killed in this incident was corrected to two.)
THE PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF… Note: this Top Secret multi-pager, usually five or six pages, is generated daily by the CIA and only three copies are produced: (1) SecState, (2) SecDef, and (3) the President. These documents are typed on plain paper with no markings other than a cover sheet and an end sheet, both of which are stamped simply “Top Secret.” Cumulatively they constitute a one-of-a-kind running history of our relations with other nations. I cite this to inform as many readers as possible how easily it would be to declassify these pages of extremely sensitive state secrets. Simply delete the cover and end pages, burn a copy, and stash it for later reference when you write your memoirs for a cool $25 Million… so easy, and nobody has to sneak these unique TOP SECRET source documents out of the National Archives in their jockey shorts either… Nah, probably not… see for yourself at: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom ….
THE ALTERNATIVE: WAIT 50 YEARS FOR cia TO DECLASS SOME OF THE MATERIAL IN THE PDBs…
27 August 1966… The President’s Daily Brief…CIA (TS sanitized)… North Vietnam: A Soviet tanker, the first to depart from the Black Sea since the late June air strikes, is now in Vietnamese waters and will probably remain in the Haiphong area for some time unloading its 10,000 ton cargo into barges…we see no signs as yet that the loss of petroleum storage facilities has had much effect on the North Vietnamese economy. No shortages of petroleum or dislocations attributable to the loss of petroleum facilities have been observed. Oil imports have probably been maintained at necessary levels by transshipment of some 25,000 tons diverted from North Vietnamese ports to Chinese ports since June.
27 August 1966…OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… No coverage by NYT…”Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson)… Three aircraft lost in SEAsia on 27 August 1966…
(1) LCDR JOHN HEAPHY FELLOWES and LTJG GEORGE THOMAS COKER were flying an A-6A of the VA-65 Tigers embarked in USS Constellation and were hit by AAA en route to a bridge target northwest of Vinh. The enemy ground fire parted the right wing and the aircraft immediately rolled. LCDR FELLOWES and LTJG COKER ejected and were captured. Their lives as POWs were torturous and noteworthy. In October of 1967 LTJG COKER and Air Force CAPTAIN GEORGE McKNIGHT escaped but were recaptured after a 15 mile walk in the woods. More torture. LCDR FELLOWES life was saved in prison by his cell mate Air Force 1LT RON BLISS’s caring attention while LCDR FELLOWES recovered from ejection and torture injuries and other health problems. All four of these valiant POWs were released in February or March 1973…
(2) MAJOR J.E. BARNES and 1LT T.H. WALSH were flying an F-4C of the 497th TFS and 8th TFW out of Ubon on a night armed reconnaissance mission north of the DMZ and near Dog Hoi when engaged by enemy ground fire. They immediately struck back and in the ensuing exchange were hit by AAA. The burning aircraft was kept airborne long enough for the crew to reach the Gulf of Tonkin, eject and be rescued by a Navy helicopter…
(3) An A-4E of the VA-163 Saints embarked in USS Oriskany was on an armed reconnaissance mission and suffered a total electrical failure and was unable to make it back to the ship. The pilot ejected and was rescued by Navy helicopter. A VA-164 A-4E off Oriskany had the same fate a day before…???
RIPPLE SALVO… #179… LET’S GO FLYING WITH F-105D DRIVER ED RASIMUS… I have some great escape hatches from the real world and great flying stories by born storytellers is a favorite. Here are few paragraphs from: “When Thunder Rolled: An F-105 Pilot over North Vietnam”….
“I moved the throttle outboard and waited patiently for the afterburner to light. When the reassuring push came to the small of my back, I eased back on the stick and started a four-G pull to bring the nose up to thirty degrees. We were doing six hundred knots already, but airspeed would bleed off quickly in the pop-up, and I wanted to have better than four hundred left as I got to the top. The target was a complex of buildings off to my left and the bombs from the lead were already offering an aim point. The pacing was almost automatic. I didn’t need a stop watch, and I didn’t need to look at the altimeter tape winding up to a 45-degree dive. Then another six seconds or so to track the target, offset for the wind, and hopefully get the bomb off without getting hit. Make it thirty seconds from pop to pickle to descent back in to the weeds. My internal clock was running smoothly.
“Lazy red tracks of tracers arched gracefully up from the area just to the east of the target, apparently not shooting at anyone in particular. A few black puffs of 85s detonated well above the attack, again not seeming very coordinated. The radar warning receiver continued its howling, and the center of the vector scope was an angry spider indicating a mass of electronic confusion about how many radars were looking at us, but there were no SAMs airborne yet.
“When I checked the altimeter, it was passing ninety-five hundred feet. I rolled and pulled down, watching the altitude continue to increase until the tape reversed direction at just over twelve-thousand feet. I kept pulling, wings level inverted until the glowing red circle of the sight reticle rested below the dark brown roof of the largest building. Easing the back pressure off, I rolled around the point of the pipper and checked the dive angle. I was a bit under forty-five degrees, so I would need to press a few hundred feet lower before releasing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw flashes and another aircraft tracking level across the horizon. There’s four thousand feet, pickle, pull, jink, comeback the other way. Find my flight.
“Sweat rolled down from under my helmet and occasionally dripped a salty fog into my eyes that I simply blinked away. Thirty seconds or possibly the remainder of a lifetime. It didn’t much matter. I was on the target and now off and sprinting to regain a position on my leader. I was alive again. Another hash mark on the trek of one hundred missions.
“How I got where I could do the job is the story here. No one could have anticipated the losses that the F-105 forces would suffer during the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam. We couldn’t know then where we fit into the big picture. We simply went because when we signed on we had held up our right hands and agreed to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.’ It turned out that there was a direct correlation between flying the most sorties and taking the most losses, and the Republic F-105 Thunderchief was the weapon of choice for the Rolling Thunder campaign. It was our job, so we did it.”
Thanks, Ed Rasimus… iron men, in iron airplanes with iron sights for dumb bombs… those were the days!… I needed that…
Lest we forget…. Bear ……… –30– ……….