Chuck Yeager

When I was assigned to the 405^th Fighter Wing at Clark AB, Philippines, of course I knew that it was commanded by the famous Chuck Yeager who had been the first to break the speed of sound. However I did not get to know him until about 18 months later when I found myself to be the most experienced B-57 pilot in his wing and was designated as his “seeing eye dog”. Air Force regulations required every Wing Commander to have an experienced instructor pilot fly with him every time he flew. The 405^th Fighter Wing at that time had F-102, F-100 and B-57 aircraft assigned. Col. Yeager was current in all three types. Every time he flew in a B-57 I was assigned to fly with him in the back seat. He had his own B-57 which was not painted and had a ferry tank installed on the bomb door and the tip tank fuel tanks removed. I’ll swear his crew chief kept it waxed because it was the fastest B-57 I ever flew. He used this to visit his units sitting SIOP alert on Taiwan and the F-102s sitting alert in Saigon and his B-57 squadron in Vietnam. He did not use it to go to the Clark bomb range and practice to get combat qualified so he could go over to Vietnam and fly some combat missions in the B-57.  I flew as his instructor a few times and there was nothing I could teach him. He could make the aircraft be where he wanted it to be at any time. His scores were unbelievable for someone who had just checked out in the aircraft. Giving him a range test was a waste of time. I do not know if he ever found time to go to Vietnam and fly any combat missions but if he did I am sure he did a credible job.

Chuck was a great guy to fly with. He would share the stick time with me and we talked about flying techniques and I learned a lot from him. For instance, one day after coming off the range, I mentioned to him that I had made a minimum run landing on my last trip to Phan Rang and the tower was amazed that I could turn of at the approach end of the runway. We were making some practice landings at Clark and as he made the next landing he slowed to below normal approach speed on final and rounded out several feet above the runway. I was getting nervous and had my hands hovering over the controls ready to take over as I was supposed to. Just as I was about to have to take over from the most famous pilot in the world, he suddenly pushed the controls full forward and then immediately full back. The result was a sudden drop of about 6 feet followed immediately by a leveling off but not before the gear had impacted the runway rather firmly. He then lowered the nose and got on the brakes and stopped us in about 1000 feet, beating my best minimum run landing by about 500 feet. He then explained that he used the vertical drop and the slamming of the gear onto the runway to kill off the forward inertia.

He was not above practical jokes. One day we were going to Taiwan and escorting 3 F-100s that were to replace the ones on SIOP alert. They flew on our wing up to the island and we refueled and Chuck briefed the pilots who we would be escorting back to Clark. One of the pilots, a very inexperienced one, had a question and asked how slow they would have to go to stay on the wing of the bomber. Chuck, with a twinkle in his eye, said don’t worry about it. We took off first and the fighters were to take off at 10 second intervals. As we climbed out, at a pretty high angle, the fighters caught up with us by using their afterburners. When they came out of afterburner, they dropped back rapidly. The Yeager Racer had no external fuel tanks, was waxed, and had lots of power. The fighters had two 350 gallon external tanks and could not keep up with us without afterburner. They used their burners a couple of times to catch up with us and then realized that if they kept doing that they would not have enough fuel to reach Clark. They were not about to call for Col. Yeager to slow his bomber down so the fighters could stay with him. After Chuck and I landed at Clark, he waited outside his office until he saw the 3 fighters come in to land. He had an evil grin on his face.

Chuck was not perfect and I was a witness one time when he did something stupid. It was Christmas of 1967 and the Bob Hope Show had been in Vietnam entertaining the troops. They were on their way back to the States and were to stop at Clark AB and put on a last show. They were coming from Vietnam on a C-130 and Chuck Yeager put on a mission to go out over the South China Sea and escort him in to Clark. Chuck briefed our mission, which consisted of 2 F-100s, 2 F-4s, 2 F-102s, and 2 B-57s. Chuck was leading in the F-100 flight. The briefing was very brief as Chuck respected our professionalism and did not think he had to spell out every detail. I was lead in the B-57 flight which was number 7 and 8. My wingman was a new guy who did not know how to make a formation takeoff so I let him lead on the takeoff and then I took the lead.

We got joined up as two flights of four and proceeded out over the South China Sea at about 20,000 feet. Radar was giving us vectors to intercept the C-130 and at about 60 miles Chuck said “I have a tally. I don’t need any more vectors.” I strained my eyes and even though I prided myself on my exceptional eyesight, I did not spot the C-130 until about 40 miles. And he was at least10 years older than me! We joined up on the C-130 as briefed, the F-100s and the F-4s on the left wing and the F-102s and B-57s on the right. We were in four ship echelon which is a nervous formation because every small move of the ones closest to the lead is magnified as it reaches the end. After we got into reasonably stable flight, Bob Hope got on the radio and said “Hey guys, my camera man wants you all to line up on the right side and slowly pass so he can get a good pan shoot.” Chuck said “OK. We are going to echelon right.” My flight started moving out to make room for the other flight and Chuck’s flight started moving from the left wing to the right wing of the C-130 while changing from a left echelon to a right echelon. This complicated move was made with no problems as we were all fighter pilots. When we were established in a long and very snaky echelon, we accelerated and made a slow pass of the C-130. After we were past Bob Hope came back on the radio and said “That was great, guys, and my cameraman wants you to do it one more time”. I expected Chuck to call for speed brakes to slow us down to drop back behind the C-130. Instead, for some reason he elected for an S turn to do that. He said “OK. Coming 30 degrees right” and rolled into a 30 degree bank right. Mass panic!! It is a great risk to roll into a two ship echelon in close formation. It is an almost calamity to roll into a four ship echelon. It is a disaster to roll into an eight ship echelon. There is no way to slow an aircraft fast enough to stay inside the turn on a sharp turn into an echelon. My first instinct was to break right but I remembered the green guy on my wing and was afraid he would not get out of my way. I saw the F-102s next to me go straight up and decided to go down. I pushed over to about minus 3 Gs and ended up going straight down. I saw the F-4s had done the same. When it was all over, we had 8 aircraft scattered all over the sky. Chuck realized he had made a big boo-boo and said “If you find somebody, join up and go home.” That was the only stupid thing I ever saw Col. Chuck Yeager do.

I had refused to take credit for my missions over North Vietnam so as to shorten my tour so I stayed for the full two years of an accompanied tour. At the end of two years, I volunteered to extend for another year. That decision was delegated to the Deputy Wing Commander and he refused my request. He said he had heard stories that I was getting “Combat Happy”. I asked his permission to see the Wing Commander and he could not refuse me. Before my appointment with Col. Yeager, I prepared myself. Col. Yeager was not the best person when it came to paperwork. He had rather be flying and left most of the details of his command to his subordinates. I talked to some of them and discovered that he was unaware that the 8 T-33s on the base that currently was under the Base Flight Section was to be transferred to the 405^th Fighter Wing in 10 days. In addition, the Major, a friend of mine, who was running the T-33 section was rotating to the States in 4 days and he was the only qualified Instructor Pilot and Functional Test Pilot. With this information I went into my meeting with Col. Yeager confident that I held all the cards. I was right. I proposed that I get checked out in two days in the T-33 as an IP and FCF pilot and would run the T-33 section as well as functioning as an Instructor in the B-57. He had no other options and agreed to my proposal. In addition he agreed that after I had the T-33 Section running smoothly with enough staff pilots checked out to fill its mission, I could go over to Vietnam and fly combat missions at my will. I worked directly for the Deputy Wing Commander and Col. Yeager was the endorser on my Efficiency Report.

Chuck Yeager was a true “pilot’s pilot” and commanded the respect of everyone who came in contact with him. He respected the people who worked for him and they would have followed him anywhere. As an example of how he respected professional pilots, one day there was an accident on the runway at Clark and an F-102 was off the runway and on fire about 3000 feet from the approach end. I was airborne in a T-33 and just returning from a target mission. When I requested landing instructions, the tower told me the runway was closed. I told them if I could not land in the next 15 minutes I would have to divert to Subic Bay Naval Base. Col. Yeager, who was at the scene, had a radio in his staff car and said “Is that you, Ed?” When I said yes he said “Tower, he can land. Ed, land it short.” I made a short field landing on the first 50 ft. of the runway, using my secret trim trick, where I trimmed full nose down just before touchdown so I got more lift from the horizontal tail and could land about 6 knots slower than normal. The last time I saw him was at an air show at Nellis when he was flying his P-51 Glorious Glennis.

B-57 Tactics

The American Martin B-57 was adapted from the English Canberra. It was an elegant design with state of the art aerodynamics. However the first model was not a success and it segued into the B model which was more successful. It was designed to be a tactical bomber capable of delivering a large weapons load at high speed to the area far behind the line of battle. The guns in the wings were depressed to fire 3.5 degrees down so that convoys of trucks could be strafed without having to dive to aim the guns. It could carry a wide selection of armaments consisting of bombs, rockets, napalm and flares. There were 8 wing weapons stations and 21 bomb door stations. The bomb door was a rotating platform upon which bombs could be loaded while the door was separated from the aircraft. The loaded bomb door could be rolled under the aircraft and hoisted fully loaded up into the bomb bay. Of the 8 wing stations, 4 could carry bombs or napalm up to 1000 pounds. The other four stations could carry rocket pods of seven 2.75 rockets or two 5 inch HIVAR (high velocity antitank rockets) or flare tubes of two each.. The bomb door could carry four 1000/750 GPs (general purpose) bombs or nine 500 pound GPs or four 250 pound GPs or twenty one 260 fragment bombs or twenty one 100 GPs or twenty one 100 pound white phosphorous. In the latter stages of the Vietnam war, the new Snake eye high drag munitions were introduced and were assigned to be carried by B-57s by people who had never seen of heard of a B-57. They did not fit. Instead of four 750s on our bomb door, we could only carry two high drag. Instead of nine 500 # on the bomb door, we could only carry three. I made a trip to Saigon and had a conference with the scheduling people and at the same time searched the depots all over the world for weapons that were out of date for modern aircraft but were perfect for the B-57. This search turned up thousands of the fire bombs that General LeMay used to incinerate the cities of Japan during the Second World War. These were the MK-35 and MK-36 munitions that were so successful in destroying the trucks that were funneling supplies down the Ho Chi Mein trail through Laos to South Vietnam.

When a suitable nuclear weapon was developed, it was adapted to the B-57. At that time I was a sergeant and an electronics technician working on the B-57. I had to go through a nuclear familiarization course in Colorado in order to be able to be around the weapon. The aircrews had to qualify in delivering the weapon and we were deployed from Blytheville, Arkansas to Wendover AB, Utah for training on a desert range. The target was about ten miles from our base and we could see the aircraft making their runs on the target. The method of delivery was a low altitude approach at high speed to cross the target at 50 feet or lower and then pull up into a vertical climb. The LABS computer would release the bomb just past the vertical and the bomb would go thousands of feet higher before returning to earth. In the meantime the aircraft would come over the top and head for the ground, roll 180 degrees upright, and get as far away as possible before the bomb exploded, preferably behind a hill. This was called “over the shoulder” delivery. I remember standing on the ramp at Wendover and watching the aircraft make their runs when one of them did not make it over the top and went into a spin and drifted down to the desert like a falling leaf and exploded into fire and smoke. We lost two young crewmen.

This delivery system was called LABS, or Low Altitude Bombing System, and was one of two systems designed to deliver nuclear weapons to an enemy. The other variant of this system was the “toss” mode. In this mode, an IP (Initial Point) was selected that was readily recognized and a measured distance and azimuth from the target. This information would be entered into the LABS computer and as you crossed the IP the pickle button would be depressed and the computer would tell you when to pull 4 Gs and the bomb would release at the right angle and travel many miles to hit the target.

The other system to deliver nuclear weapons was SHORAN. This was short range navigation, a system using two transmitting stations with coordinated pulses that could be superimposed by equipment on the aircraft to determine its exact position and guide it to the release point. The navigators had a hard time learning this system and wrote it up so often I was put on flying status so I could check it out in the air as it could not be checked on the ground. As far as I know it was never used to deliver weapons but the long range version, LORAN, was a mainstay of oceanic navigation for years.

As far as I know, the only time that LABS was actually used to deliver a weapon was in Vietnam. Although I was not there to witness it, I heard the story from many sources. There was a target that was dreaded above all by everyone in the squadron. That was Mugia Pass. We had lost several aircraft there because when you went down to bomb targets in the pass, the guns on the mountains on both sides would be shooting down at you. Also, several aircraft had attacked there at night and ran into mountains on the pull off. So one day when the order came down for an attack on the pass to cut the road, some of the more imaginative navigators suggested a LABS attack.

The best maps were brought out and the navigators found IPs and measured azimuth and distance in minute detail. The electronic technicians were detailed to check out the LABS equipment. At that time we were still sitting SIOP alert on Taiwan with targets in China so the LABS equipment was pretty well maintained. (My target when I was on SIOP alert required a toss delivery and I had almost enough fuel to reach the sea after.) The navs were in charge of the mission and the mission launched with a good plan. It was a four ship mission and all were loaded with eight 1000 pound bombs. One bomb in eight was a delay fuse of 24 or 36 hours. We did this often to disrupt the repairs on the roads. The four ship approached the IP at 450 knots and the pickle buttons were pressed as they crossed the IP. When the time was up, the LABS computer signaled a pull up at 4 Gs. At the proper angle, thirty two 1000 pound bombs flew in formation for several miles before descending out of the sky to surprise the gunners protecting the road.

The only other time I know of that the LABS maneuver was used in Vietnam was the occasion when I encountered a target in North Vietnam that was so well protected that I could not attack it directly. This was in early 1966 when I, with my navigator Capt. Norbert (Nobby) Belanger, was assigned to an area about 100 NM north of the DMZ to look for trucks using the ferries to cross rivers on the route that brought supplies south. My navigator and I stayed at altitude, about 30,000 ft., until we were in the area of the most critical ferry crossings. As we approached the Trai Binh area, my nav, using some excellent binoculars from Japan, spotted a line of trucks with battle lights on, lined up for the ferry. I could hardly believe it. We were carrying eight MK-35 fire bombs and I started down to get into position for an attack. As we got to about 15,000 ft. big white explosions started going off all around us. I immediately recognized it as radar directed fire and started jinking and changing altitude and heading constantly. I thought I could outfox the gun but realized very soon that more than one gun was tracking me. There was no way I could get in position to attack without risking almost sure hits. I could tell by the size of the explosions that these were large caliber guns. I had encountered them before and knew they were 85mm. We beat a hasty retreat seaward and got out of their range. As I was dodging around I looked at the source of the red hot beer cans (more like Skippy peanut butter jars) coming up and saw two active guns shooting, one from each end of the line of trucks. I could tell from the rate of fire that each gun had its own radar. One was located at the ferry and the other was located about 3-4 miles NW at the end of the line of trucks. I figured they were track mounted 85s that intel had briefed us on.

I knew there was no way I could get above the target and do a normal dive bomb attack without getting shot down. I was not about to leave all those trucks just sitting there without doing something. Then I remembered the toss bomb option. I placed myself in line with the line of trucks about 6-8 miles away and over the water at about 15,000 and armed my eight M-35 fire bombs. I dove for the water and descended as close to the water as I dared in the dark, using the line of truck lights as a reference, and attained maximum speed. As I approached the line of trucks, I told Nobby to open the bomb door and pulled up with about 4 Gs and started pickling at about 20 degrees and finished at about 45 degrees. I continued pulling over the top and down to about 60 degrees dive. As I came down inverted I looked back over my head and saw both guns firing at us. Fortunately, I was changing altitude so fast they could not track me and the rounds went past and exploded out in front. But the most spectacular sight was the 8 M-35s opening at altitude and raining fire on the convoy. I then rolled upright and continued to as low as I dared to the water. None of the rounds got close enough for us to hear them. That really gets scary.

After I recovered from the dive to the water, I climbed up to about 20,000 and hung around over the coast to see results. The results were spectacular. The fire bombs were set to go off at about 3000 feet when dropped in a normal dive bomb attack. By tossing them at a high angle the fuses opened the canisters at a much higher altitude than normal and created a fire fall much like a water fall. There were fire streams coming from the sky from 4000 feet to 8000 feet over a 4 to 5 mile line. As the bomblets hit the ground they spewed white and red phosphorus and thermite like roman candles in all directions. It was the most awesome sight I have seen except for the time we dropped 32 of the MK-35s on a MISQUE mission one night (another tactic). We descended over the target very gingerly in case the guns were still in action but there was not a peep out of them. I briefly considered going down to strafe the trucks but decided that would be too much risk for little gain. We had enough fuel to stick around for a while and called the control ship (Hillsborough) to ask for a photo mission for pictures. After about 30 minutes things began to get active and the explosions got more intense and we counted 27 trucks burning and blowing up. We could not tell if the 85mm guns were burning but there were lots of munitions cooking off. In spite of all our efforts to get pictures of this action, none were ever made. We did not ever get credit for this attack which likely would have resulted in at least a silver star by the standards prevailing at the time.

Other than the nuclear delivery tactics, the normal tactics were pretty standard fighter tactics. The B-57-34 manual recommended a 30 degree dive angle from 6000 feet with release at 3000 feet and recovery by 1500 feet. Release airspeed was 350 knots. This is well and good for the bomb range but not recommended in a high threat area. The bomb sight is adjustable but has no radar or other assistance. In other words, it is a judgment delivery system. If you think that you can hit the target with 6.8 degrees depression with release at 3000 feet and 30 degrees dive at 350 knots, you keep practicing that until you can do it. However, when you get in combat and you are being shot at by large caliber weapons, you would be crazy to use those parameters as you would be an easy target for the guns on the ground. When the B-57 first went to Vietnam, most targets were not defended by large caliber weapons and those bomb range tactics were OK. The pilots of the 8^th and 13^th TBS were experts at that type of delivery. But when they started going up north and encountered more and larger caliber defenses their tactics evolved to survive in that environment. Thus, the roll in altitude became higher, the dive angle steeper, and the air speed and the release altitude higher. Every pilot had his own favorite parameters and these were usually changed depending upon the threat level. Of course, the experience of the pilot was a large factor in how successful he was in his attacks since accuracy depended on judgment only.

I developed my own tactics for night attacks as we ended up very quickly as singles ship missions as two aircraft were too hard to keep separated with no lights. I assumed there would be ground fire at every target so I used very steep dive angles, 45 to 60 degrees, with release altitudes of 4000 to 5000 feet. If I encountered very heavy ground fire I would pull up in a turning climb to position myself directly over the target, often inverted so I could start another pass just by pulling my nose down to the target.  It required a very good spatial orientation and you had to be an excellent instrument pilot. Many times in the wet monsoon season the visibility was so poor that it was hard to see the ground under the flares. It was much like flying in a bowl of milk. You could not use the flares as a reference to determine if you were upright or upside down because some times you were above them and sometimes below. During the pull up after each drop you had to be careful not to get so slow as to stall. A stall or spin at that altitude and in those conditions would be fatal. I am sure that some of our unexplained losses were because of this. One of the exciting things that happened was when you passed a flare close off you tail. The flare projected your shadow out in front of you and you had a momentary impression that you were about to collide with another aircraft. It made your heart jump right out of your flight suit.

The early models of the B-57 were equipped with eight 50 Cal. guns with four in each wing outboard of the engines. They were replaced on later models by four 20 mm M-39 cannon. The 50s fired at 750 rounds per minute and the 20s fired at 1500 rounds per minute giving both models a total of 6000 rounds per minute. The 50s each had a belt holding 300 rounds for a 2400 round total, and the 20s each had a belt holding 290 rounds for a total of 1160. The 50s had a retract switch that would retract the breech and recharge the guns when it was allowed to go forward. During heavy firing it could be left retracted after pulling off the target and released as you rolled in for another pass. This served two purposes: it cooled the barrels and ensured that all guns were recharged in case some had misfired. When we sat on five minute alert I made sure we only used 50 Cal birds because we did not have to pause at the end of the runway to get our guns armed. The 20s were electrically fired and had to be charged at the end of the runway before takeoff.

The recommended gun sight setting for strafing was 3.5 degrees depression. This was predicated on a firing speed of 350 knots and one G. At higher speeds the depression had to be less as the angle of attack of the wing was less, however longer ranges required more depression. The guns were bore sighted to hit one point at a range of 3200 feet and at ranges beyond that the streams of projectiles would cross and start to diverge. When I went after a gun with guns I approached from directly over it and hung in my straps at 0 G. The large caliber guns cannot shoot much above 45 degrees so directly above them is safe. In that case, I had to depress the sight more to make up for the lack of Gs and the lower angle of attack. In the daytime I would only go after a gun with guns if there was only one. At night it did not make any difference unless they had radar. There was never any assurance that you had knocked out a gun because if it stopped firing you could only assume you had killed the gunners. 20mm and 50 Cal would not destroy a gun without a very lucky hit on a sensitive part. However I have attacked guns at night with M-35s which have no high explosive content to destroy a gun and have gotten positive results. The results were not immediately evident but after a time with the bomblets spewing fire in all directions, a blue-white light would emerge and shine brightly as if from a searchlight. It mystified me at first but I finally figured out what it was. Every gun position had a bunker under ground to store its ammo. If one of my bomblets got lucky and went down the entrance to that bunker, it would set the ammo on fire and the first explosions would create so much heat that the rest of the ammo would burn, creating the blue-white light that shone out of the entrance of the bunker.

I saw this twice in one night when I was looking for targets one dark night in PAC 1. It was very dark but I could not find any truck lights so I flew up Highway One with my lights on until I got fired on. I then tried to pinpoint the guns so I could attack them but by the time I pulled up into attack altitude, they had quit firing. About that time, two Marine RA-5s contacted me and asked what I was doing as they had been assigned to take pictures of the highway. When I explained, they offered to troll for me to get the guns to fire so I could hit them. After I got into position one of them flew down the highway popping flash cartridges and drawing fire. I rolled in on the nearest gun and dropped a M-35 on it. Then the other one made a pass dropping carts and I hit another gun. They made several more passes popping carts but there was no more firing. After about 15-20 minutes the blue-white spotlight emerged from the fires of my M-35s. So I could not claim to have destroyed the guns but I sure did deplete their ammo supply. (By the way, I think the RA-5 was one of the most beautiful air machines ever built).

I mentioned the MISQUE mission. If I ever knew, I have forgotten what that acronym stands for. It was a precision radar located somewhere in Vietnam or Thailand that could direct aircraft to a point in the sky to release their bombs so as to hit a designated target. It came into use in the wet monsoon when many of the targets we wanted to hit were obscured by clouds. It was a very boring mission because you dropped you bombs from about 20,000 ft. and then went home. The MISQUE sites had the ballistics for all our bombs so they knew when we should pickle. When I called and asked them if they had ballistics for the M-35, they said no. I asked them to try to get them and a few days later they called me and said they had them. I contacted the targeting office in Saigon and asked them to find us a suitable target and explained what I wanted. A couple of nights later we got the frag order for a MISQUE drop on a storage area along a river in Laos. I led a flight of four loaded with 8 MK-35s each. The MISQUE site had given us the fuse settings to have our canisters open at about 5000 feet. The target was about six miles long so I briefed my flight on how to release the weapons. The aircraft has an intervelometer that can be set to release bombs at a specific interval but most of us did not trust it. Besides, it was located in a dark and hardly accessible corner of the cockpit. When we got to the target, by a miracle it was clear. When the radar told us to start pickling, I counted over the radio to eight about one second apart and then #2 did the same, and so on. After #4 finished releasing we broke formation and each went to a pre briefed altitude so we could roll over and watch the show. And it was spectacular.  By the time we rolled over my first canisters were opening. You could see the flash of the primer cord exploding that separated the canisters into two halves and then the hundreds of bomblets started separating and as they fell they leaked white and yellow phosphorous. This created a waterfall of fire that just kept getting longer and more spectacular. And then the bomblets started hitting the ground and spewing fire in all directions like roman candles. We held overhead for about 30 minutes and the fires just got more and more fierce. I have never seen anything more awesome.

The other bad weather delivery method involved an EB-66. This was a B-66 equipped as an electronics warfare aircraft. They had ground radar mapping and all the warning equipment for operations in hostile radar environments. On the only mission I was on, I led a flight of eight, each loaded with 4 750# GPs and 9 500# GPs. The 500# GPs were all delay fuses set from 12 to 48 hours. I have no idea what the target was. We found the B-66 in Thailand and finally got joined up after I convinced him that we could not catch him unless he slowed down to our speed of about 420 knots. We had four aircraft on each wing of the B-66. We had a very long approach to our target and I have no idea where it was but it was in North Vietnam. He gave us a 30 second warning and I ordered bomb doors open and bombs armed. We had set our intervelometers before takeoff so all we had to do was pickle one time. As he started his countdown from 10 he got to 7 and then yelled “Sam Launch, Sam Launch” and broke up and away. That left us setting there quivering, fat and heavy. I took up the count at 3 and said “3,2,1,pickle and break from the ends”. As the bombs were released 4 and 8 broke followed by 3 and 7, etc. We never did see a missile. I had some bad things to say about the B-66 crew in the debriefing.

As I have said, the B-57 as a weapons delivery platform was only as good as the pilots flying it. After all the old heads from Japan rotated out we got mostly fighter pilots or experienced instructors from Training Command and they easily mastered the skills necessary to deliver weapons accurately. However, after about two years the Air Force was scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots and we started getting some who had been flying a desk for years, and if they flew at all, it was transports or bombers. Since the 57 had a B in front of it, the weenies at Personnel figured they would be able to fill the slot. Some of them could not even fly a pitch out landing pattern. To them anything over 30 degrees of bank was an unusual attitude. We were supposed to teach them to roll upside down and pull the nose down to 45 degrees dive and hurl their bodies at the earth. It was a near disaster and the effectiveness went down and the casualties went up. One Lt. Col. was to be the new Squadron Commander but he just could not learn to dive bomb on the range at Clark. When his training was supposed to be over he was not ready and I recommended to my boss, Col. Chuck Yeager, that he be given a Flying Evaluation Board and grounded. He told me to give him a few more rides and then to pass him. He then told me I would have to go over to Vietnam with him and fly him on my wing until he improved. He did not improve much and came back from missions with fragment damage from his own bombs because he would press too low trying to hit the target. I would not let him drop near friendly troops. He did survive but I do not think he ever flew night missions.

The 21 Club

When the B-57s were moved from Japan to Clark AB, Philippines, the personnel’s families could not immediately accompany them so they were temporarily class B bachelors. The bachelor quarters on base were awful so they all moved off base. Initially most lived in a motel. They needed a place near their quarters to party so they rented one of the rooms as a bar. It was room 21 and the 21 Club was born. Every officer of both squadrons was members. A manager was appointed and he bought supplies and billed the members every month for their share of the expense. There was no cash involved as everything was free.

Every member painted his name on the ceiling with the smoke from a candle. When a member was shot down or crashed and was killed, his name was circled. After several months there were lots of circled names.

When the B-57s were moved from Danang to Phan Rang, we did not receive a warm welcome. Phan Rang had a fighter wing with four fighter squadrons flying F-100s. To the Hun (F-100) pilots, we were Multi Engine Bomber Pilots (MEBPs). We were treated with contempt and were the subject of insults as to our piloting ability. Needless to say, this did not go over well with us. We had been flying in North Vietnam and Laos day and night against defenses these Hun pilots had never seen. The biggest thing that had ever fired at them was maybe a 50 Cal. We were regularly fired at by 37mm, 57mm, and even 85mm. They flew only in the day time and mostly bombed trees. We flew mostly at night and bombed and strafed trucks and guns.

Several confrontations occurred at the bar in the O’Club and eventually the bar, by mutual consent, was divided in half to the Hun end and the MEBP end. There were still insults that could be heard all over the Club, some from both ends of the bar. What seemed to irritate the Hun drivers most was that many of us would show up for breakfast obviously inebriated. This was because we flew at night and did our drinking after we returned from our mission. The club was the only place to eat and after a long night we were starved. After a while, we found a sergeant who worked in the club who had previously been assigned to the B-57 outfit in Japan.

He started keeping aside some steaks and baked potatoes for the night crews. After a flight we would go to the club, which was closed at night, and he would have a charcoal fire going outside and the steaks ready to cook and we would grill our own.

Things came to a head after two serious incidents happened. The first involved the Club’s latrine facilities. This consisted of a small shack with four doors perched on the edge of the hill in the parking lot about 50 meters from the Club. Inside the doors were four cubicles with 55 gallon barrels underneath. These were burned out with diesel fuel every morning. By evening they were rather smelly. One evening one of our intrepid airmen arrived in the parking lot in a pickup truck just as two Hun pilots entered the Facilities. An evil idea lit up his brain and he eased the truck’s bumper up against the doors of the Facility and gently pushed it over the side.

A few minutes later two very angry and very smelly Hun pilots burst into the Club looking for the culprit. The MEBPs at the far end of the bar were practically rolling on the floor laughing. The dining room manager evicted the two smelly specimens as this was the dining room and they were unsanitary. The incident was soon known all over the base and everyone was laughing about it except the Hun pilots. An investigation was launched but even the investigators had a hard time keeping a straight face and the culprit was never found. As the MEBP end of the bar was at the far end against the wall, we had to walk past the Hun end every time we entered. We started holding our nose as we walked past their end and every time we passed a Hun pilot anywhere on the base. This did nothing to help the relations between the two warring parties.

The second incident occurred a short time later. The same intrepid airman, he of the diabolical mind, came into the Club one evening with a saw and proceeded to saw the bar in half. He said he did not want our end attached to the Hun end. He was promptly stopped and evicted but that was the last straw for the Officer’s Club Officer and the Wing Commander, who was also a Hun pilot. We were banned from the bar and could only go to the Club to eat.

We needed a place to relax and party and the hootches we lived in were dark and dismal dungeons with no windows. So our architects and engineers went to work and designed a suitable place. We had lots of talent, some trained at West Point. We called our sister squadron, the 13^th TBS (Redbirds), back at Clark and put in an emergency order for supplies and equipment we would need. The first thing to arrive was a rotating B-57 with a cargo box attached to the bomb door containing about 100 cases of San Miguel beer. We loaded a truck with beer and went to the supply depot and returned with a truck load of supplies. Every body pitched in and in short order we had a suitable building finished except for the vital air conditioners and refrigerators. A day later a C-54 arrived from Clark with those items plus a generator to run them. Our craftsmen fashioned a bar, shelves, tables, chairs, and lamps. They even built a seven sided poker table with a green felt top. Much use was made of Playboy centerfolds as lamp shades and decoration. A sink with running water was installed, the bar was stocked and we were in business. It was called, of course, 21 West and ran just like the original with every thing free.

It did not take long for the officers of the Aussie squadron and the 101^st Airborne to discover us and they were frequent guests. (We did not have any Hun pilots as guests.) We were also invited to visit their clubs but that was soon stopped by our Ops Officer after some pilots returned from the 101^st with sprained ankles. They had been doing parachute jumps from the rafters of the 101^st club. The Aussies were equally crazy and it was dangerous to party with them. The first time I encountered that breed, I had diverted into Ben Hoi for some reason and was going to have to spend the night. I went to the O’Club for a beer an as I walked in the bar four guys with funny accents attacked me and took my flight suit off me. They informed my that the new Base Commander, (a navigator) had decreed that no flight suits would be allowed in the Club. This on a base where almost every officer was a pilot and lived in his flight suit! Anyway, they sat me at the bar in my skivvies and gave me a beer. I noticed they all had blood running out of their hair and down their face which was why I was so panicked when they had attacked me. I asked about it and they told me that they had been betting on who could stop the over head fans above the bar with the least number of blade hits.

Not long after we had our club up and running, a Congressional delegation came over on a junket to see how the war was going. On the way they stopped at Clark and while there its leader, Senator John Tower, TX, Chairman Senate Armed Forces Committee, was captured by the 13^th TBS (The Redbirds) and entertained at the 21 Club. He evidently really enjoyed himself playing poker and drinking bourbon with his hosts. They told him about 21 West at Phan Rang. When he arrived at Phan Rang, the brass made a big deal of it and had all the pilots who had decorations that had not been awarded lined up on the ramp. Senator John dutifully went down the line pinning medals on us. He pinned on one of my three DFCs. After the award ceremony was over, the Wing Commander told Senator John that he wanted to show him some hangers and airman’s barracks. Senator John, who was short, but had a surprisingly deep and loud voice, reportedly said “Hell, I have seen enough goddamn hangers and barracks. Just take me to the 21 Club. I want to play poker and drink bourbon”. The Wing CO turned to an aide and asked what the 21 Club was and was told that a new building that just went up had a sign that said 21 West.

The Yellowbirds that were in the 21 Club were surprised when a convoy of vehicles pulled up outside and all the brass on the base followed Senator John into the club. The CO was incredulous to find such a well build and equipped building on his base that he did not know about. Senator John was given a glass of bourbon and shook hands with everyone. Soon he was seated at the poker table and the game was on. The brass stood around for a while and finally left except for one aide who stayed to take Senator John to dinner with the Wing CO. After dinner he returned to the poker game.

The next day we had a visit from some of the Wing Staff wanting to know where all the supplies came from to build and furnish the 21 Club. We pointed out that we had regular supply support from Clark AB. The air conditioners, refrigerators, and generator were of special interest and we explained that they all belonged to the 405^th Wing at Clark AB. One staff wienie said he was going to cut off our fuel supply for the generator but a few cases of San Miguel delivered to the right place worked wonders and that never happened. The O’Club Officer said we were in competition with the Club and would have to charge for drinks. We put a cigar box on the bar with some change in it in case someone came to check.

A couple of years later the Yellowbirds (8^th TBS) had a reunion in Las Vegas and Senator John Tower was our guest speaker. I was sitting in the front row and as he finished his speech he pointed to me and said: “The game starts in my room right after this. Ed you be there. You still have some of my money from 21 West.”

The Cutter Incident

During one period in the summer of 1966 we were sent as single ship on missions to Pac One and Two at night to locate Targets of Opportunity and strike them. One night as I was returning from one of those missions, I noted a half moon rising above the South China Sea making a brilliant swath of light on the water. It occurred to me that a boat would really stand out in that brilliant path. I let down to about 2000 feet and proceed south just off the beach. We spotted lots of fishing sampans with a light to attract fish and did not bother them. Sure enough, before long a large cargo junk appeared. I had sails but was likely also under power and was headed south at a brisk pace. I had seen and strafed many of these cargo junks in the day time. They were usually 40-50 feet long and very broad and made of teak. They very hard to sink with guns only and the best you could usually do was to  set them on fire. I had complained to the armament folks in Saigon several times about our inability to get API (armor piercing incendiary) to mix with the HEI (high explosive incendiary). The HEI would blow off surface pieces and start fires but would not penetrate to the vitals of the boat and hit machinery and fuel tanks. The same went for strafing trucks. Some of our aircraft were armed with 8 50Cal guns and they only had API and I liked them better for trucks and junks. They fired at the same rate as the 20MM, 100 rounds per second and carried twice as much ammo, 2400 versus 1160.

The shining path of the moon was only about 30 degrees left of my heading along the beach so I just made a quick turn to put the junk on my nose, turned on the guns, adjusted the gun sight to 3.5 depression, and gave her a 4 second burst of 20MM. The HEI rounds made blue-white flashes on the junk and started some small fires. I came back around and got her in the shining path again and gave her another 4 seconds. This time she was burning visibly and I did not have to put her in the shining path for the third pass. After I had fired out I hung around a while and watched her burn and she eventually had some large secondary explosions and then blew up. I found out later that a higher strafe angle worked better as it allowed me to fire down at an angle into the deck openings and start fires and explosions in the hold.

I did not report this in my intel debrief as I was sure it was not allowed by the ROE. I swore my navigator to secrecy and we continued to strafe the junks. The scheduling officer could not figure out why I was requesting specific mission times. It was because of the moon rise times.

Unknown to me, another pilot in the squadron, Bob, had discovered the same thing I had and was having as much fun as I. However, this fun came to a sad end. One night Bob carried his fun too far south and found a large vessel that obviously was not a junk. It was a steel ship that looked like a war ship of some kind. Bob did not fire on it at first and tried to contact it on UHF Guard (243.0 MHZ). Most ships only have VHF and HF so he got no answer. He flew over the ship and flashed his lights. The response from a friendly was to be a green light. He got none. The ship started high speed maneuvers so he figured it was a NVN gun boat and started strafing it. When he ran out of ammo he called for help and a flight of F-4s showed up. They did not have guns but did have bombs. They dropped bombs all over the South China Sea and did not hit anything.

Bob had to report the incident during intel debriefing as did the F-4 pilots. The reports went to 7^th AF Headquarters in Saigon. Later that morning, the Coast Guard Cutter “Point Welcome” showed up at a friendly port south of the DMZ all shot up. The skipper, LTJG David Brostrom, and crewman EN2 Jerry Phillips, was dead. Two other crewmen, a Vietnamese liaison officer, and a freelance journalist from Australia were wounded. Chief Richard Patterson took command of the ship during the attack and was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” device. His citation read:

 "The first attack caused a blazing gasoline fire on the fantail of the cutter that threatened to engulf the entire after section of the vessel. Chief Patterson, displaying the finest qualities of bravery and leadership, took charge of the situation and using a fire hose, forced the flaming liquid over the side, thus extinguishing the fire. Even as he was accomplishing this task, he saw the second aircraft attack rip through the pilot house killing the cutter's commanding officer and seriously wounding the executive officer and the helmsman. Unhesitatingly, and with complete disregard for his personal safety, Chief Patterson climbed to the bridge and took command. He ordered the crew to carry the wounded to the comparative safety of the below decks area. Alone on the bridge, he then maneuvered the cutter at high speed to avoid subsequent attacks. When it became apparent that he could not successfully evade the attacking aircraft, he ran the cutter close ashore, and directed the crew to abandon ship. Under his composed leadership, the wounded were wrapped in life jackets and paired with the able bodied before going over the side. Chief Patterson kept his crew calm and organized while they were in the water and until they were picked up by rescue craft."

A T-39 was dispatched to Danang and Ubon to pick up the pilots involved and deliver them to stand in front of General Momyer to explain their actions. After he heard all their stories, he reportedly said “What kind of a goddam Air Force have I got that can’t even sink a tiny little boat?’ And that was the last of it. It was also the last of our fun in the moonlight. I never did report my “fun” and the incident did not evidently harm Bob’s career as I heard he got an assignment as a White House Fellow.

More info:

http://www.uscg.mil/history/webcutters/Point_Welcome.asp

WAR STORIES

By Ed Rider

After graduating from flying school in 1960 at the top of my class, I could have had any fighter assignment I wanted. But I knew that the current fighter pilots were not getting more than 16-18 hours of flying time per month. So I elected to stay in the Training Command as an instructor. I flew every flight I could, volunteering for weekend flights, parts delivery flights, etc. Some months I logged 125 hours which included hundreds of landings and instrument approaches. After five years I had over 3300 hours, mostly of flights of 1:30 or less. I could do aerobatics under the hood and shoot instrument approaches on needle-ball-airspeed and whiskey compass. I won a  bet with my fellow instructors by finding my way back to the home field, making a penetration, approach to 200 foot minimums that could have resulted in a landing. All without benefit of any instruments except needle-ball-and airspeed. However I cheated. When I was a sergeant, I had gone through electronics school and knew all there was to know about the radios in the T-33. I knew that the ADF needle would only point at the station if there was AC power. I also knew that when the AC power was turned off, the direction finding loop would not move. When we were taxiing out on the flight for the bet, I was in the back seat with the hood down. But before the inverters were turned off, I checked out all the radios, as per the check list. The Outer Marker Locater was directly on the nose as we taxied toward the take off end of the runway. After the check, I told the front seat to turn off the inverters. He made the takeoff and, according to the rules of the game, flew to at least 100 NM from the field rolling and turning so that I would have no idea in which direction we were going. When he turned it over to me, I first recovered from the unusual attitude he had put me in and then started a slow one needle width turn to find the null. The idiot up front was not listening to the ADF and had no idea what I was doing. I found the null and then did a needle width timed turn for 90 degrees. I held the heading for 10 minutes after the null faded and did a needle width turn to the right. If the null appeared before I turned 90 degrees it was behind me. If it appeared after 90 degrees it was on my nose. Once I had it on my nose, I tracked in to the cone of silence and then did a timed turn to the penetration heading and started down. At the published altitude I turned toward the approach heading and as I rolled out I acquired the null and adjusted my track by steering toward track and then turning back to get the null. I crossed the OML at 800 feet and was over the over run at 200 feet and only about 50 feet from the centerline. Needless to say, I was charged with cheating, even though the front seater checked constantly to make sure the hood was securely sealed. I never did tell them how I did it and I am sure some of them are still talking about it.

I was really tired of Training Command after five years and tried to get an assignment to Vietnam. I finally did and was assigned to B-57s. It was a quirk of fate as when I was a sergeant I was in a B-57 squadron as an Airborne Electronics technician. The navigators in the squadron kept writing up the Shoran system and I could not duplicate the problem on the ground so I applied to be put on flying status so I could check the system in the air. One of the captains in the squadron was the test pilot and he would take me with him when he flew test hops. In the dual models, he let me do aerobatics from the back seat. He encouraged me to go to OCS and flight school, which I did. Years later, they were pulling pilots out from behind desks to fly in Vietnam, and he showed up and I was his instructor.

Anyway, I got a transition checkout with the Kansas Guard and was off to Clark. I was assigned to the 8th TacBombSq. When I got to Clark, they were at Danang and the 13th TacBombSq was at Clark. The two squadrons changed places every two months. They were supposed to check me out on the bomb range but they had just gotten back from Danang and were too busy catching up and having fun. After several days of me asking when I was going to get trained and being ignored, one Friday someone came through the squadron room saying "We need a volunteer to go fly courier in Saigon". People started disappearing magically. I was so bored I stood up and said "I'll go". They said "Who are you'. I explained and they said Oh, you can't go because you don't know what’s going on. About 15 minutes later I had orders and left the next day. I arrived in Saigon late in the day and went to the hotel they told me to and went to the desk and said I'm here with the B-57s and there is a room for me. The desk clerk said "No room" at least 25 times in reply to my questions. It was getting near curfew and there was no place to go so I went to the bar. I was drinking my third or fourth Bomi-bom and cursing the idiots who sent me here when the guy next to me said "What is bothering you?" I told him and he said “Hey, I'm with the B-57s and we have a cot for you in our room."

It turns out that the courier was a B-57 that took off in the middle of the night and delivered target photos to all the fighter bases in Thailand. A couple of nights later I went out to Saigon airport with one of the navigators who had flown these missions before. He had a 21A with the route information on it and filed an ICAO flight plan. I had never seen one. I signed for a knee high stack of top secret files and they were put in the tail end of the airplane. It was raining so hard I could only see about 50 yards. After I cranked up I asked the tower for taxi instructions and told him I had no idea where I was or how to get to the runway. He knew by my call sign I was the B-57 courier and GCAed me to the end of the runway and cleared me for a VFR flight. That flight was as far as I had ever seen from VFR. The first base I was to land at had no radar on duty at 2AM and the tower estimated the ceiling at 500 feet. I made a Tacan approach to 300 feet and didn’t even see a glow. I asked the tower to turn the runway lights to full bright and made another approach to 200 feet and saw a glow but not much. On the downwind I managed to trim up and study the letdown plate closely and see how far off the centerline the Tacan was. This time I was determined and put the tacan at my 2 o’clock at one mile and spotted the runway at less than 100 feet. I touched down a little long and discovered the runway was low in the middle and I was hydroplaning in 6-8 inches of water. I ruddered it up to one side and had it almost stopped when I went into the muddy over run. Afraid I would sink in, I added power to one engine and pivoted 180 degrees, blowing mud everywhere. I made it back to the runway and a group of people ran out and removed some files from the tail and gave me some well soaked receipts. I took off again in less than 100 yards visibility and proceeded to the next base, all VFR.

That was my introduction to flying in Vietnam. After landing at 4-5 fighter bases in Thailand, I crossed over to Danang and then on to Saigon, getting back there about 10 AM. After 5-6 flights like this, one day when I landed in Danang I was met by the commander of the 8TBS who informed me that since I belonged to him, I was getting off there. Another pilot took my place and I was finally with my squadron. The following day I was on the schedule to fly a mission up north to Pac One to attack a ferry crossing. That night I found the pilot who was to lead our eight ship formation and discretely informed him that I had never fired a gun or dropped a bomb, even in practice. After he got through laughing his ass off, he gave me a dash 34 and told me to go study the switches and knobs required to shoot the guns and drop the bombs and then come find him at the bar and he would explain a little of what I would be expected to do. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night. I was number 4 in the second flight and we were going to split and attack the ferry crossing from north and south at the same time. I was in the north flight and by the time we got into position at about 10,000 the flak was reaching up for us. I had an experienced navigator and he talked me through the switches and opened the bomb bay for me. I was right behind #3 as he rolled in and slightly off to the side. We were carrying 8 1000 pounders each. We dove at about 45-50 degrees and my nav told me to pickle at about 6000.  By then I was flying through the black balloons and as I stated pulling I ran into a cloud of red hot beer cans and they were exploding all around me and I could feel the percussions with my feet on the rudder. I could imagine my rudder being shredded and pieces falling off my aircraft. I pulled way too many Gs but was too pumped up to black out. When I looked back at the target, 64 1000 pounders had obliterated both sides of the ferry landings.

That was my first combat mission. Luckily, he pilots in the squadron were the most experienced pilots in the B-57. Many had flown the airplane from the day it came from the factory. The 8th and 13th had been stationed in Japan for years and competed on the bomb range, often for money. Those guys were so good that there was no such thing as a correction after the first bomb. I learned this as I flew with them. A FAC would mark a target and lead would roll in and drop. Then the FAC would have to mark another target because that one was gone. Several times, my lead would drop all his bombs before I had a chance to embarrass myself. I have seen a guy drop a 1000 lb on a gun position and the bomb was a dud but landed in the gun pit. These were the guys who took me under their wing and taught me how to bomb and strafe. One guy who was my biggest help was a big man with a huge right bicep. I was on a mission with him and we were strafing after dropping all our bombs. He made the first strafe pass and I made the second. He made the third and fourth and I made the fifth. He made the sixth and seventh and I made the eighth. You get the picture. I was pulling as hard as I could pull and he was inside me on every pass. It took at least 70-80 pounds of pull to get 5 Gs. When he called last pass, I took a big cut off angle on him to make a quick join up, at least. I was huffing and puffing and had my nose out in front of him and was pulling hard. However, I had forgotten one thing: my aircraft had 8 fifties and the barrels were pretty hot. I should have retracted the breech so they could cool off. I didn't and when I was about 200 yards out several rounds cooked off and sent tracers just in front of his nose. When I pulled up on his wing, he was smoking a cigarette and said "Ed, are you pissed off at me?"

A short time later I got my night check out, also in N. Vietnam. It really helped that I was very good at instruments and night dive bombing and strafing did not present any problem. We soon discovered that keeping track of the other airplanes made formation night attacks impractical so we were assigned an area and had it to ourselves. It was up to us to find our targets. I was assigned a good gung ho navigator and he carried an excellent pair of binoculars he got in Japan and we had pretty good luck finding trucks running with battle lights. We carried a fire bomb, the same LeMay used to burn down Tokyo, and it was great for trucks as most were loaded with things that burn and blow up. After a few two month tours I was quite proficient and my nav and I racked up lots of trucks. One method we used I never shared with the other pilots. In fact, a lot of the tactics I used I did not share. The pilots who replaced the old pros were not as good and I did not want to be responsible for getting some of them killed. Jim Coffey and I came up with a method to strafe trucks on the road if there was a half a moon or more. In the daytime I experimented to find out at what altitude and airspeed my guns would harmonize on one point. The guns were supposed to harmonize at 3200 feet. We found that 300 feet and 230 knots was the secret. A lot of the roads in Pac One near the coast were white sand. I would turn out all my cockpit lights and Jim would unplug all his except his altimeter. I would let down away from the roads and set my power for 230 kts and Jim would talk me down until I established myself at 300 feet. When I got comfortable there he would turn out his altimeter light. The idiot would unstrap and get out of his parachute and crawl up to get his head as close to mine as he could so he could see out the front windscreen. We would drive down the roads looking for dark places in the white sand roads. We often got shot at from the guns off to the side of the road but they were firing at sound and the engines were at such a low setting, they always fired above us. When I saw a dark spot, I waited until it was just short of where I knew my pipper would be and closed my eyes to avoid losing my night vision from the muzzle flash and fired a 3 second burst. Then I opened my eyes and made a hard break to the right because the guns would shoot at where they thought I would be. We sometimes shot at tree shadows but were very often rewarded by seeing a truck go up in flames and then get multiple explosions. The best one was a fuel tanker which lit up the whole country side.

One night we were assigned the area that included a major ferry crossing very near the coast. We went north at about FL30 and starting letting down as we neared the target. Jim got very excited because he could see a long line of trucks lined up on the road NW of the ferry. They all had their battle lights on and were visible even to me. We were over the coast and started spiraling down and planning how we would attack when very large explosions started going off around us. I jinked and changed altitude constantly and tried to get into position to roll in but they were really about to hammer us. I beat a hasty retreat and surveyed the situation from over the water about 10 miles away. We had both seen the guns firing from both the front end and rear end of the line of trucks. We figured they were radar controlled 85s mounted on tracks. I was not about to leave all those trucks undamaged and came up with a plan. We had 8 of the fire bombs and the fuses were set to go off at about 5000 feet. The clamshells opened and lots of small bomblets came out and spread and leaked fire as they fell. When the bomblets hit they spewed thermite and phosphorus in all directions. I got lined up with the line of trucks about 10 miles out and 15k feet and dived for the water and got up to max speed as close to the water as I dared. When I was 2-3 miles from the trucks I pulled up and started pickling at about 20 degrees and continued up to about 45, pulling sort of slow so the bombs would travel far. When all eight were gone at about 45 degrees, I pulled like hell and came over the top and dove back at the water. As we came over the top and looked back, we could see the line of explosions that had been trying to track us but we had been changing altitude and speed so fast they could not track us. In a 45 degree dive, I rolled upright and dove as close as I dared to the water. When we had plenty of separation we climbed to 20k or so and turned to look at the results. It looked like the biggest Fourth of July celebration you have ever seen. Hundreds of the little fire bomblets had left streams of fire falling from the sky and the bomblets hit among the 2-3 mile line of trucks and spewed fire like roman candles. We had lots of fuel and hung around to watch the show. As the show progressed, new points of fire began and soon the explosions began. It got better and better and I got on the channel for the C-130 that had control of the Pac One assignments and asked for a recce bird to get pictures. They said none was available and I requested they send one as soon as one was available. We descended over the fireworks looking for the radar controlled guns to fire on us. They never did. We counted 27 trucks burning and blowing up. Of course the Intel debriefers did not believe us and the pictures were never taken.

The normal tour of duty was 2 years with family accompanying but we were given extra credit for missions up North so most people left after about 18 months. I elected not to take credit for my missions north and at the end of two years I requested a one year extension. The Wing DCO had to approve it and he turned it down. I went to see him and he told me I had a reputation of being "Combat Happy". I asked him what that meant and he said I enjoyed it too much. I requested to see the Wing CO. That was Chuck Yeager. Chuck and I had flown together numerous times because the Air Force required Wing Commanders to fly with an IP if in a dual aircraft. Evidently no one in the Pentagon realized how superfluous an IP was flying with Chuck. At the time I was trying to extend, the T-33 section belonging to Base Flight was being transferred to the wing. I knew the T-33 IP and knew he was leaving in three days. Chuck was not a paperwork kind of guy and he had overlooked the fact that he was getting 8 T-33s with no IP and no one to supervise them. I informed him of this and said I would get checked out in the T-33 in one day as IP and FCF pilot and run the operation if he would approve my extension and let me go over and fly combat when I had the operation going and could find the time. As a result of my horse trading, I ran the T-33 as IP and was also IP in the B-57 checking out new guys on the range and still managed to spend about half my time in VN flying fun missions. Toward the end of my three years, the quality of the replacements went down as their rank went up. Most navigators in both squadrons had heard enough about my unorthodox tactics that they did not want to fly with me. I told them to compare the number of hits I had taken (0) with the number of hits the "Heroes" got. These were the people who managed to get back home with large portions of sheet metal missing. Many did not get back because they did stupid things.

When we moved from Danang to Phan Rang, we were supposed to be replaced as truck killers on the Ho Chi Mien trail by F-4s and we were to revert back to close ground support in the South. That didn't turn out so good because the F-4s sometimes hit the wrong country. Phan Rang had 4 F-100 squadrons so naturally we were multi-engine bomber pilots. The fraggers in Saigon knew nothing about our capabilities and the fragged loads were ridiculous. By this time I was the Weapons Officer and I went down to Saigon and got them straightened out. We could only carry three of the new Snake Eye 500# bombs in our bomb bay but could carry 9 of the old 500# GPs. We could carry 5 of the 250# snake eye but 21 of the old 250 frag bombs. I checked the depots all over the world and found lots of things we could use, like 5 inch HIVARs and seven pod 2.75 rockets. We had 4 hard points outboard of the bomb pylons on the wings that were seldom used and we could load them with these things. The first mission I flew down in the Delta I had a flight of 4. The FAC had never seen a B-57 and had no clue. I told him to erase a large place on his canopy. (The FAC copied the ordinance on his canopy with a grease pencil so he could keep track of what was left to expend.)
I told him I had 84 250# frag bombs, 16 750# napalm, 2400 rounds of 20MM and 5000 rounds of 50 Cal. and I could give him 2 hours on station. He just about jumped out of his skin. When he calmed down a little, he said there were not enough targets in his whole area for our load.

On another occasion shortly after our arrival at Phan Rang, I led a flight of 2 on a tree killing mission NW of Saigon. I had a new guy on my wing and someone had told me he was a pretty good stick. We still had our guns so I yelled for a FAC for a gun target as we headed home. I finally found one about 50 miles north of home. As I checked in with the FAC, a flight of 3 F-100s also checked in. I asked if they would let me go first as I was short on fuel. They had full wing tanks and were too heavy to strafe and said they would hold overhead at 4000 ft. I told them to make it a little higher and they said you are only going to strafe so why so high. I said watch out for us. The FAC marked and I was right behind his rocket. I thought I would test my new wingman and pulled off straight up.  At about 5000 I pulled down to inverted and held it until I had passed over the target. I looked out to the right and left for my wingman, figuring he would have pulled off right or left as in a normal pattern. I didn't see him and pulled down to split S for the next strafe pass. This time as I hung inverted, I looked in my rear view mirrors and there he was, inverted right behind me streaming fuel. When we had debriefed and made it to the bar, we were standing at the Multi Engine Bomber end of the bar when the three F-100 pilots came in. One of them said to the other 100 pilots at the bar "You wouldn't believe what I saw those MEB pilots doing. They were flying a rectangular gun pattern." Somebody said "They will get shot down." The first one said "No, you don't understand. It was a vertical rectangular pattern."

As I mentioned before, the F-4s just were not cutting it as truck killers at night so they started sending us back up on the trail. It made it much more difficult because the distances were so much greater than from Danang. Sometimes we could not make it home and stopped at Nakon Phanom, Thailand or at a Navy base on the coast of SVN for fuel. We were doing the same mission as we did from Danang. But the Intel debriefers at Phan Rang had never heard such reports of trucks destroyed or of large caliber (37-57MM) and heavy ground fire. We found out that the F-100 wing commander had ordered his Intel to only report about 25% of the BDA we reported. When our squadron commander found out he raised hell. As a consequence, the wing CO went with me on a day mission and a night mission. On the day mission, we were going to support ground troops who reported 50 cal weapons shooting at them. At the briefing, the wing CO had his G suit and I pointed out that there was no place to plug it in the B-57. He said it had all his maps and stuff in it and he did not expect to need it in a bomber. We made 8 bomb passes and I pulled off with only 4-5 Gs. When we started to strafe, my wingman had a gun malfunction and his guns would not fire so I told him to hold overhead and look for ground fire while I strafed. When we got home and debriefed, I reported the bomb passes and said I had made 8 gun passes. The CO spoke up and said "You only made one gun pass." I said "Sir, since you couldn't plug in your G suit in a bomber, you slept through 7 gun passes." I had made sure that I never got below 5 Gs. I have had FACs time my gun patterns and the tight ones averaged about 18 seconds so there was 16 seconds between firings. When the old guys from Japan were still there, we determined that a three ship was the best for strafing. We could have guns on target about every 5 seconds. In a four ship we tended to get in each others way.

I became good friends with the weapons officer of the wing and we swapped rides. I would go in his back seat in a dual F-100 on in country day missions and he would go in the back seat with me on night missions up on the Trail. He saw first hand the clouds of red hot beer cans that came up after us and heard the popcorn popping. He also saw the results of our fire bombs lighting up a line of trucks. The most serious ground fire he had seen in SVN was maybe a single 50 cal. He finally convinced the wing CO to fly a night mission with me. At the briefing, I told him I would fly the mission as I would fly any other mission and that I might bend the rules sometimes. He did not bring his G suit this time. We took off about 2000 hrs. so he would not be out too late. The departure procedure called for a turn to the south after takeoff to the coast to clear the outgoing artillery and then follow the coast until passing 20K. This used about 4000# of fuel so I did not follow it. We were taking off east and as soon as I got my gear up I turned off my lights and made a right turn to the NW that would take me up across the west end of the runway heading NW up a valley toward Dalot. It took a while before I was high enough to clear the sides of the valley but I knew the heading was safe. We climbed to 35K and went way up into Laos. I checked in with a FAC and he had a line of trucks heading south. He had a starlight scope and could see them. Rather than drop flares, which would ruin his starlight scope vision, he dropped what are called log flares. These are long burning flares that ignite when they hit the ground and burn for a long time. He had dropped one on either side of the road and using the distance between the flares as a ruler, he directed me to where I should drop my bombs. I had 8 of the fire bombs (the FACs called them funny bombs and used their pattern as a measuring stick.) I spent about 30 minutes working with the FAC and dropped all my bombs. We hit several trucks, but as usual, it took a while before the explosions began. While I was making the bomb runs, the Col. became disoriented because he had no instruments in the rear seat and yelled "Jesus, they are shooting at us from the sky!" That is because I was inverted between passes. We had about 8 37MM guns shooting at us and 3-4 12.5 ZSU. None got close enough for us to hear the pops. After we were expended the FAC had an A-26 coming in to work with him and said he would forward our BDA later. I told him that I had my boss with me and wanted my BDA now so he said take two trucks destroyed and 10 secondary explosions. We still had lots of fuel so I orbited the target for about 20 minutes. Things started cooking off and soon we had 7 trucks burning and many, many explosions. When we went to debriefing I told the Intel guy we had two trucks destroyed and 10 secondary explosions and the ground fire was light and inaccurate. The Col. jumped up and demanded I change my report. I reminded him I could only report what the FAC gave me. He kept yelling about the heavy flak and the many trucks destroyed and the multiple explosions. After that, we were HIS B-57s and he bragged about us at briefings in Saigon.

This is getting a little long and so to make an end, I flew about 450 combat missions in the B-57 and enjoyed every minute. I did lose a lot of my friends, some from stupidity and some from bad luck. I think I was a very effective combat pilot and either because I was better than the gunners or very lucky; I never took a hit and killed more trucks and tanks than any other pilot during that war. Of course I am a fighter pilot so you can expect me to exaggerate.

The Entirely Marvelous Adventures

of Bill and Ed

by Ed Rider

(Disclaimer: This tale was written from the viewpoint of a pilot. The events described actually happened. However, for the sake of humor, I have “somewhat” emphasized Bill’s discomfort in some situations. There is no intention to disparage the honored profession of Air Navigation.)

Adventure One

It was June of 1967. The 8th TAC Bomb Sq. (the “Yellowbirds”) was at Clark AB, Philippines, partying at the 21 Club and flying on the largest practice bomb range in the Pacific. The 13th TAC Bomb Sq. (the “Redbirds”) was at Phan Rang AB, South Vietnam, partying at the 21 West Club and flying on the largest unrestricted bomb range in the world. I was a Yellowbird. The two squadrons flip flopped every two months. While at Clark, we had occasional trips to Japan for various reasons, one being the delivery and pick up of aircraft undergoing IRAN (inspect, repair as necessary) at the Mitsubishi factory at Gifu near Nagoya. These were highly sought after missions because they allowed a chance for shopping where the dollar was almighty. The only problem was that you were required by custom and courtesy to take along myriad shopping lists from people not so fortunate.

It finally was my turn to go and I was crewed with a navigator that I had never flown with before. I will only identify him as “Bill” since I have no contact with him and he may not want to be identified in this article. We were to deliver a B-57 to Gifu and pick up one that had been IRANed (Inspect Repair As Necessary). To avoid the hassle of a refueling stop on Okinawa, we decided to go non-stop. I had a secret fuel management system that let me get more range from the B-57 than most could. I ignored the instructions in the Dash 1 concerning the sequence that fuel tanks should be consumed and flew with an aft center of gravity (CG) during much of the mission.

We flew on the Oceanic Airways used by airliners and navigated using Low Frequency Radio Direction Finding (LFRDF). Bypassing Okinawa, all was smooth and quiet. Very quiet. The airlines communicate using High Frequency radio (HF) or Very High Frequency radio (VHF). We had only Ultra High Frequency radio (UHF) which is line of sight and so we could not talk to nor hear anyone after we left the Philippines until we got within range of Kagoshima, Japan. When we were about 100 miles out from Kagoshima, from 45,000 feet we could see the thunderstorms that were building over the islands. This caused us some concern because the factory runway at Gifu was Visual Flight Rules (VFR) only.

A weather check was in order and Bill was just about to contact Kagoshima Radio and check the weather at the Nagoya airport, which is near Gifu, when I saw a red warning light in the cockpit. The main inverter had failed. It supplied AC power to all the important instruments, such as the attitude indicator, the gyro compass, and the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF). It also supplied power to the TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation), the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), and the Instrument Landing System (ILS). I switched to the standby inverter and it failed immediately.  We were not in immediate trouble because we were in clear air with visibility 93 million miles. But it would be a little tense if we had to make a radar ground controlled approach (GCA) in bad weather using only the information available from the turn needle, side slip ball, vertical velocity indicator, and altitude and airspeed. For heading we had the standby compass, commonly called the whiskey compass because it floats in alcohol. It swings wildly in any kind of turbulence and is generally useless for precision approaches.  I had practiced hundreds of such approaches and successfully completed a few for real and was not overly worried. It just meant that we would not land at Gifu if the weather there was not VFR but at a U.S. military base with American GCA controllers.

When Bill attempted to contact Kagoshima Radio we discovered why it had been so quiet for the past two hours. You guessed it! No UHF radio. This made the situation a little more interesting. Now we had to find a runway to land on without the help of anything other than our eyeballs and wits. If we could not find one clear of clouds we would just have to find a way to get under the clouds and hope they were not sitting on the ground. We were getting closer to the Japanese Islands now and from 45,000 feet I could see that the clouds extended past the north shore. A narrow strip of the south shore was visible. It looked much worse in the direction of Gifu with thunderstorms building. I knew that Itizuki Air Base was somewhere near the west end of the island and near the north shore because I had read stories about the F-80s flying out of there on combat sorties during the Korean war. Just the name brought back memories of my pilot training days when we aspiring fighter pilots would drink beer at happy hour and sing “Itizuki Tower, This is Air Force 801” and “Throw a Nickel on The Grass, Save a Fighter Pilots’ Ass”. So I asked Bill to pull out his topographical map and locate it. He pulled out a map about the size of a sheet of typewriter paper that had all of East Asia on it. You could cover all the islands of Japan with the end of your thumb! What is a navigator for? At that point I would have traded him for 200 pounds of fuel.

And speaking of fuel, we did not have many options left. If we continued on toward Gifu and it was socked in we would not have enough to make it back to Itizuki. So we had to find Itizuki. I started a screaming decent to the portion of the south shore that was visible.  My plan was to get under the clouds, find a valley that crossed the island, and emerge on the north shore. Then we would look for Itizuki while staying under the clouds. This worked out quite well but a lot of farmers probably spent the rest of the day trying to catch their water buffalo. The clouds were almost on the ground and I maintained enough airspeed to pull up through the clouds if my valley came to a dead end. Bill was somewhat unhappy. We found the north shoreline in due course and I was about to ask Bill to flip a coin to see if we turned left or right. Then it occurred to me that the west end of the island was much closer and it made sense to try that way first. If we did not find Itizuki we would not have to return so far to search in the other direction. Two hundred feet put us in the clouds and visibility was about a mile. I stayed just within sight of the shoreline to keep my orientation. After a while, to our sorrow, we came to the end of the island without having sighted anything that resembled an Air Base. We turned back to retrace our steps and I realized we had not timed our sojourn to the west and would not know when we were back where we started. Not that it would make much difference. The fuel gauge was unwinding like one of those crazy clocks you see in bars that run backwards to Happy Hour. When the needle reached its resting place it would not signify a happy hour. Bill was somewhat unhappy.

About this time, I started paying closer attention to the terrain under us. It consisted almost entirely of small (and I mean SMALL) farm plots with many rock fences and canals. The roads were one lane crooked mud trails. The beach was out of the question. It was craggy rocks. I told Bill to start looking for any level piece of ground 1500-2000 feet long. Again, Bill was somewhat unhappy. Once I spotted an old WWII runway and my heart leapt with joy. But a closer inspection revealed 8 or 10 canals cut through its 3,000 foot length.

The situation was now beginning to get a little dicey. One must start thinking about the unthinkable. We just might have to get out and walk. I asked Bill to help me look for some smoke to indicate which way the wind was blowing. His comment was that it made no difference because there was no place to land. I patiently explained that it did make a difference because before we punched out I would have to aim the aircraft out to sea to avoid casualties on the land. I wanted us to drift back over land so we would not have to swim.  Again, Bill was somewhat unhappy.

At this point our fate was almost decided for us because we almost crashed into some radio towers. I snatched the control stick back and we cleared them by a few feet. While I was gently easing us back down out of the clouds using the few instruments I had available, a light went off in my head. I had seen towers arranged like that thousands of times while making instrument approaches. Four fifty foot towers in a square with another in the center. In the old days when pilots “flew the beam”, these range stations were the primary means of navigation. If you were on the “beam” you heard a constant tone. If you strayed left or right, you heard “dot dash” or “dash dot”, A or N, I forget which was which, but even before I became a pilot they were made obsolete by ADF equipment. They were now used as Outer Marker Locators (OML). This is a LF radio beacon located at the point where an aircraft begins its final decent to the runway. While I was gingerly trying to find it again without running into it, I told Bill to get out the ILS approach sheet for Itizuki and tune in the OML. When I was a young Staff Sergeant, I was an Airborne Electronics Technician working on, would you believe it, the B-57. I knew that the ADF receiver still worked without AC power; only the ADF did not work. In other words, we could hear the identifiers but the ADF needle would not point to the station. The approach sheet also gave the final heading and distance to the runway. With this information in hand, I found the towers again, aligned myself as best I could onto the final approach heading, and eased up enough to get over the top of them. We got a strong increase in volume as we approached the towers and a very brief cone of silence as we passed over the top. That told me that we had the right set of towers. I started my clock and figured it would take 2 minutes at 180 knots. I averaged out the swings from side to side of the whiskey compass. Just before 2 minutes were up, I saw a concrete ramp under my nose with aircraft parked on it. Hooray!  I could barely see the runway off to my left. The visibility was really bad now. I raised up a little so I could drop a wing without hitting the parked aircraft and then THERE IS THE TOWER! I banked and yanked and missed it by several feet. The control tower people were somewhat disturbed. I flew across the runway far enough so that I could make a 270 degree turn back to line up with it. I hated to lose sight of it and was afraid there were hills off to the side of it but it was necessary. I lowered gear and flaps and made my turn with my left wing practically dragging in the trees. Just as I estimated that I had made about 270 degrees of turn, I saw lights. The brave tower people had picked them selves up off the floor and turned the runway lights full bright. I do not know if they gave me a green light or not because the tower was only visible from a few hundred feet. I was not worried about other traffic because I knew no sane person would be flying in this weather. We were half way down the runway before I got lined up and put it down. We waited at the end until a Follow Me found us and led us to the ramp. We were followed by several fire trucks (a waste of time; there was not enough fuel left to start a Boy Scout campfire) and were met on the ramp by the Base Commander and various and sundry Flying Safety types. Many others came out who were curious to see the idiots who flew in this kind of weather. Bill was somewhat happy.

Adventure Two

After answering a million questions, we retired to the bar to get some medicine to counteract all the adrenaline that was coursing through our blood system. A call was made to Yokota Air Base requesting parts and they sent them down by T-39 next morning after the weather improved. We got a UHF radio and a main inverter but no standby. But it was only a short trip to Gifu and we would be going VFR under the clouds. The Weather Guesser assured me that the bottoms of the clouds would be no lower than 8,000 feet. So away we go on a VFR flight plan along the Inland Sea. This time Bill had a briefcase full of topographical charts and was religiously doing dead reckoning (DR). We started out at 7,000 feet but soon had to descend to stay out of the clouds. We kept descending until we were at 1,000 feet and could see that the clouds met the water up ahead. I had a few choice words to say about the Weather Guesser. There were some high hills at the east end of the Inland Sea so we had no option but to climb up through it or turn back. I was not about to go back so I told Bill to try to contact Traffic Control and get us an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) clearance. Naturally he was unable to because the UHF radio had gone Tango Uniform (TITS UP: A description of a dead female pig on her back). I was well committed to my climb before the new main inverter also went TU. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN! Bill was somewhat unhappy.  I managed to keep us upright through all those bumpy clouds until we broke out on top at 25,000 feet.

I told Bill to let me know when our DR position was well past the last hills and then I would let down through the clouds and hope to break out over the flat land around Gifu. He was not too happy with that idea and it turned out not to be necessary. Shortly after we passed the last hills the clouds ended. It was clear and sunny and Bill was able, with his newly acquired stack of topographical charts, to actually find Gifu using surface features.  We buzzed the tower rocking our wings and got a green light and landed without incident. Altogether a rather boring day.

The aircraft we were to pick up, a B-57E, SN 55-4265, had to be test hopped and would not be ready for that until the following day. Bill was a bachelor and had something waiting for him in Tokyo so I told him to get on the bullet train and go. Just check the Visiting Officers Quarters (VOQ) at Yakota every day to see if I was there. The next day I inspected the aircraft thoroughly and flew it. It failed the test because of a badly rigged rudder. When I turned off the hydraulic rudder boost, it yawed sharply to the left. They worked on it some more and I tested it again next day. Failed again, same reason. The same on the next day. This was on Friday and I said “To hell with it, I’ll take it home and let them fix it there.” No problem as long as I had hydraulic pressure, which was always available. After all, I had a long shopping list and would need all of Saturday to complete it. So Friday afternoon I flew 265 to Yakota without incident, except that the weather was miserable there and I had to break IFR minimums to get on the ground.

Adventure Three

Bill contacted me that night in the VOQ and we spent Saturday in taxis running here and there to shop, mostly for someone else. Funny that they never reimbursed me for all the taxi fares. Our list included two Honda 90 motorcycles ($90 each delivered to the flight line by the dealer and tied onto the bomb door by the crew chiefs), several sets of Naritake China and myriad Hi-Fi components. Everything except the Hondas was loaded into the aft compartment. This was not intended to carry cargo because it is so far aft. It would increase the already aft CG normally present at takeoff. After everything was loaded on Sunday morning, we discovered we could not remove the tail stand that is placed under the tail to keep the aircraft from tipping back during refueling or in strong winds. There was too much weight on the stand. The aircraft would have tipped back if we removed it.. Not to worry. I told the crew chief to wait until I had the engines running before removing the stand. I could run up the engines and hold the brakes, relieving the weight on the stand. This was done and I taxied riding the brakes and using higher than normal thrust. This worked OK until I released brakes for takeoff. The aircraft tried to sit on its tail and I had to keep applying brakes to keep the nose down until the elevator became effective. This extended the take off roll somewhat. We made it airborne with several hundred feet of runway to spare, raised the gear and disappeared into the clouds. The weather was below ferry takeoff minimums but it was Sunday and no big wheels were around to tell us we could not go.

We had filed for a refueling stop at Kadina on Okinawa and since it was a relatively short flight we decided to go Super Cruise. This meant cruising at the limiting Mach number of .84 at the lowest altitude that would get us to the destination without running out of fuel. In our case that was 18,000 feet. This put us at about the freezing level. Since true airspeed is directly proportional to Mach number and temperature, the warmer the temperature the faster we could go. At .84 Mach and 0 degree C we would do about 540 knots True Airspeed (TAS) or 620 MPH. About a hundred miles out we broke out of the weather and it was beautiful and sunny. As we crossed Nagoya I could see the factory runway at the Mitsubishi factory about 25 miles off my right wing. 265 was a dual model and had controls in the back seat for an instructor pilot. As we were in clear air I was letting Bill drive from the back seat while I examined the inside of my eyelids. Shortly after passing Nagoya, I was rudely awakened from my lethargy by a severe yaw to the left, accompanied by much shuddering and buffeting. The aircraft showed every intention of doing a snap roll. At 540 Knots, I did not think that even a tough old bird like the B-57 could survive that in one piece. Simultaneously, I jerked power to idle, extended speed brakes, pulled 4-5 Gs to get the nose up, and stood on the right rudder. I said something like “What the hell are you doing back there?” as Bill was saying “What the hell are you doing up there?”. With the nose pointed straight up, airspeed decreased rapidly and I could control the rudder without giving myself a hernia. I then pulled the nose down to the horizon and was inverted headed back the way we had come from. I rolled upright, stuffed my heart back into my flight suit and made a quick assessment of the situation. I first noticed that there was no noise and buffeting from the speed brakes and spoilers. A quick look at the hydraulic gauge told me why. Zero pressure. Then I remembered; “no problem with the badly rigged rudder as long as I had hydraulic pressure”. Well, so much for optimism on this trip. After I had slowed considerably it was possible to use the electric trim to neutralize the rudder. After we both had gotten our breathing under control, I suggested that Bill contact Traffic Control and tell them we had an emergency situation. I had in mind a landing at the Mitsubishi factory and presenting them with this piece of junk they had pawned off on us. But, (have you guessed it yet? I’ll bet you have.) the UHF was Tango Uniform (TU). Bill was somewhat unhappy.

But not to despair. We had lots of things going for us. The weather was beautiful, the runway at Gifu was only about 100 miles away, and we had all our instruments and lots of fuel. I switched my IFF to the emergency squawk of Mode 3 Code 77 and turned toward Gifu. I buzzed the factory runway repeatedly but got no sign of life. There were no cars in the parking lots. Sunday. So, I figured we would just have to land uninvited. I pulled the emergency landing gear lowering handle and operated the hand pump to lower the landing gear. I pumped and pumped. Then I pumped some more. Then I banked so that the sun was casting a shadow of the underside of the aircraft onto a wing tip tank to see if the landing gear was coming down. It was not. All this time, I could hear Bill mumbling on the intercom comments like; “I don’t believe this. This can’t be happening again!” I really did not want to make a gear up landing on an unattended runway. After all, there could be a fire and we might need help getting out. Then I saw the commercial jets taking off from Nagoya Airport and that gave me an idea. I flew over there and positioned myself to join up on the next jet to take off. I intended to fly up alongside and use hand signals to tell him what my problem was. The next one took off and I set up an intercept. I pulled out of my dive and was perfectly positioned off his right wing. He never saw me and climbed away from me like I was sitting still. Those 727s really had lots of power. Embarrassed? Chagrined? All of that. The option of belly flopping uninvited and unannounced onto a busy commercial airport runway was barely considered.

It boiled down to the fact that we were going to have to plunge back into that terrible weather that we had just left at Yakota. We still had all our radio aids such as TACAN, ADF, and ILS. We also had, as far as I knew, an operable IFF. I knew that the controllers at Yakota would receive our emergency squawk and respond appropriately to it. So we turned toward Yakota and climbed to a high altitude to get above civilian traffic. I told Bill to tune in the OML and select it on the intercom so we could hear it in case Yakota tried to contact us on that radio. They did and asked us to respond by changing the code on the IFF. By asking us questions that could be answered Yes or No that we could respond to by changing the squawk on the IFF, they determined what our problem was, our altitude, our fuel state, and how many thousands of feet of foam we wanted on the runway. I thought the last request was a little funny because we really did not have any experience in this. At any rate, my guess of 2,000 feet turned out to be a good estimate. While things seemed to be proceeding in good order, both Bill and I kept a very suspicious eye on the main inverter failure light. It occurred to me that it would be extremely difficult to fly an instrument approach if we lost an engine because we had no rudder boost. I didn’t mention this to Bill.

After we let down through the weather and was under GCA control, with the instructions relayed to us over the low frequency OML, we were told that there would be a delay because they did not have enough foam and was having some trucked in from a nearby base. In the meantime, I was to do some practice approaches. I discovered during the practice approaches that I could not get slowed down enough on a normal glide path. The B-57 with no landing gear, no speed brakes, and no flaps will gain speed on a normal glide path of 3 degrees with the engines at idle. We were not able to transmit this to the GCA controllers because we had no radio to transmit on. Bill and I prepared for the landing by getting out of our parachutes and locking our shoulder harness. I told Bill that just before touchdown he should lean forward against the shoulder harness and put his chin on his chest so he would not get whip lash. I intended to do the same.

When all was ready, I descended from 1,000 feet to 500 feet on the downwind leg. On the base leg I lowered my altitude even more. I had to flatten out my glide path so I could get slowed down. I could not tell the GCA controller why I was doing this and he got pretty anxious. As I turned final 5 miles out I was in idle and side slipping to lose more altitude and airspeed.  The final controller really got excited when he saw me descending toward the ground about 4 miles out. I felt sorry for him but had no way to communicate with him. At 3 miles I was dodging smoke stacks and the controller was getting very shrill. Bill was somewhat unhappy. At one mile I saw the runway and knew I would be long unless I did something so I shut off both engines and cross controlled to kill airspeed. Forgot to tell Bill I was shutting down the engines. He quit breathing. I had judged it just right and touched down very nose high about 100 feet past the start of the foam. Of course I had my neck stretched to the limit to see over the nose and when the tail touched the nose slammed down and snapped my head forward. Bill was in the perfect chin down position.

The grinding and shrieking seemed to go on forever but we finally stopped before we ran out of foam. I asked Bill if he was OK and got a strangled reply but he looked OK. Lots of people were running up to the aircraft and it looked funny because I was looking up at them. I was afraid someone was going to be a hero and jettison the canopy to rescue us. I knew that it would fall back onto the rear fuselage and the tail causing lots of damage. There was very little damage so far and I did not want a major accident on my record. I screamed and waved my arms until I got them to agree not to blow it. A Sergeant opened a small door and activated the hand pump to raise the canopy and I was surprised when it started up. When it was open about two feet at the front it stopped. It is hinged at the back so the opening got progressively smaller toward the rear. The Sergeant said I should crawl out through the opening. I said “No way”. I was not about to stick my tender body under that 700 pound monster and have it do to me what an alligator does to a hound dog. While they were trying to locate something to keep the canopy from falling, I noticed a guy in a flight suit jittering back and forth from foot to foot and ruining the shine on his jungle boots in the ankle deep foam. He looked really familiar, almost like....IT WAS BILL! A quick glance to the back seat confirmed it. I never did figure out how he squeezed through that narrow crack back there without getting greased up.

After I extricated myself from the wreckage there was another Base Commander waiting to greet me. If these honors kept up I might get conceited. We were whisked away to the Flight Surgeon so he could assess the damage to our bodies. At least that is what I thought. It turns out there was a more sinister motive. He used his rubber hammer on my knees, shined bright lights into my eyes, and peered into most of my orifices. I told him I thought I may have some whiplash injuries. Not interested. What he was interested in was draining an inordinate amount of liquid from my veins so he could determine the alcohol/blood ratio in my alcohol system. After that we had to suffer through an inquisition by Flying Safety types, fill out multiple forms, and sign many statements. They particularly wanted to know why I did not follow the published emergency procedures and blow the canopy and use the fire extinguishers on the engines. That would have required two engine changes and the canopy would have done lots of damage to the aircraft besides ruining the canopy.  I pointed out that the first sentence in the emergency procedures said “These procedures do not preclude the use of good judgment”. Finally finished, I suggested to Bill that we go to the O’Club bar for some mood lifters. He looked at me as if I were a disgusting species of snake and said ”Ed Rider, I’ll never get into an airplane with you again”. He stalked off so I had to drink alone.

           

While gazing into my martini and rubbing my stiffening neck, I suddenly remembered that wonderful establishment outside the Main Gate at Yakoto called Kay’s Bath House. Thence I did repair to get myself repaired. I was put into the custody of a tiny doll-woman who barely came above my belt buckle. She took me into a tiled room with a steam cabinet, a sunken tub and a massage table. After she hung up my clothes, she stuffed me into the steam cabinet and cranked up the steam. My cries of pain got no sympathy and I discovered I could not open it from inside. When the steam started coming out my eyes and ears and I was the color of a steamed lobster, she finally let me out. She made me sit on a small six inch high wooden stool; a most undignified position for a grown naked man. She then scrubbed me with a rough sponge like she was scrubbing a greased up car engine. When she had removed eight of my ten layers of skin, she threw buckets of boiling water from the sunken tub on me. The place must have been soundproof because my cries for help went unanswered. She then threw me into that tub of boiling water. When I complained that it was too hot, she just put her foot on my head and held it under until I quit yelling. After a while it really didn’t feel all that bad. When I was well done, she hauled me out and placed me on my back on the table. She kept removing my hands and finally placed a towel there. She proceeded to find every muscle in my body, and if it was taut, she would twang it like Willie Nelson plucking a guitar string until it relaxed and would not twang any more. Then, with me on my stomach, she walked around on my back and, with her toes and heels, proceeded to disjoint my backbone like you disjoint a boiled chicken. There were lots of sickening liquid snaps and crunches. I would wiggle my toes now and then to see if I was paralyzed yet. She then worked on my neck and somewhere along there I either passed out or went to sleep. I was having warm fuzzy dreams when some vigorous shaking awakened me. She was saying “You go home now, GI”. She helped me dress and pointed me at the Main Gate. I fell into bed and awoke refreshed and with nary a sign of whiplash.

We arranged for the safe storage of all the merchandise that was on the airplane until another airplane from Clark could come and pick it up. Some of it looked a little worse for the wear. I had touched down on the tail compartment and the skin had worn through and scooped up hundreds of gallons of foam into the compartment. Oh well, none of it belonged to me. But some did belong to my Wing Commander, Colonel Chuck Yeager. We were put on a Japan Air contract flight to Clark. I tried to get some sleep but Bill kept waking me up. He was asleep and jerking and thrashing around in his seat. He was muttering things like “The main inverter failed again” and “Oh no! The radio is Tango Uniform!” and “Ed Rider, I’ll never get into another airplane with you again!”.

Adventure Four

Some months later The Yellowbirds were back at Phan Rang, South Vietnam, and flying night interdiction missions in the southern part of North Vietnam and on the supply routes down through Laos. I had a patch on my party suit that said “Laotian Highway Patrol”. There were two navigators in the squadron who would willingly fly with me. The others did not like my highly unorthodox tactics. I tried to point out to them that other pilots were getting shot up (or shot down) while I never took hits and killed more trucks than most. Those idiots were coming back with their airplanes full of holes and getting medals for it. Anyway, my navigator came down with a bad case of Hos’ Revenge and the other navigator was already flying so someone had to be volunteered. The hand of fate laid its clammy finger on ....Bill!  We had to drag him scratching and spitting, so to speak, to the airplane. We were taking off about midnight to hit a truck park way up in Laos. I asked the Crew Chief if his plane was ready and when he said yes I gave him four beers to put into the rear compartment and told him to button it up (close all inspection doors). I didn’t insult him by inspecting it. The crew chiefs liked for me to fly their airplane and I never had one let me down. I went around with the Armorer and checked the fuses on the bombs for proper settings and the arming wires for proper routing. Then I spread my maps on the ramp and showed the Crew Chief and Armorer where we were going and what we were supposed to hit.

We were in the Northeast Monsoon and had forty knots of wind down the runway. The standard night departure called for a right turn to South after takeoff until reaching the coast, Then a turn to East and then follow the coast to Cam Rhan Bay and turn on course. This was supposed to keep you out of the out going artillery but it wasted about 3,000 pounds of fuel. So naturally I didn’t follow it. After I raised the gear I turned off external lights (so the Tower could not see me). When I was high enough to drop a wing, I turned right 270 degrees so as to cross the west end of the runway headed northwest. I roared across the 101st Airborne encampment and shook all the grunts out of bed and headed up the valley that led to Dalat in the mountains. The hills on either side were invisible as there were no lights on the ground but if I maintained the proper heading I would not run into any rocks before I got high enough to clear them. Bill was somewhat unhappy with this exercise. In due course we climbed out of the valley and turned north to Pleiku and points north.

We checked in with Blindbat, our C-130 flare ship, and from over 50 miles out we could see his flares and the anti-aircraft fire he was attracting. The gunners must have just gotten a fresh supply of ammo because they were even shooting at his flares. We let down and coordinated altitudes so that we would not run into each other. We made eight vertical dive bomb passes dropping our “funny bombs”. This is the name that Forward Air Controllers (FACs) gave to the Mk-35 fire bomb. It was the same bomb used to start the fire storms in Tokyo in World War II. It is a large cluster bomb that opens up a few thousand feet above the ground. The falling bomblets make a fiery waterfall until they hit the ground. Then they spew out burning white and yellow phosphorus like roman candles. Really something to see at night. We stirred up a hornets’ nest and the flak was thick and when it got close you could hear it popping like popcorn. We left the flare ship to count the burning trucks and started home. Just another routine mission. But we still had our 20 mm ammo left and I hated to take it home. I called the airborne command post and asked if they had any gun targets. They told me to contact a FAC at Tchepone. He had spotted trucks on a ferry crossing the river there.

We contacted the FAC to coordinate altitudes before we got into his area. We used a secret “base” altitude which changed every 12 hours so that the enemy could not listen in and find out our altitudes and set the fuses on his shells for that altitude. That night base altitude was 8000 feet. He said he was at base plus 4 or 12000 feet. I said you must mean minus 4. He said no. I asked what the hell he was doing way up there and he said his Cessna O-2 wouldn’t climb any higher. His flares were floating so high that they did not illuminate the ground and I had to circle until I got their reflection on the river before I could see it. Bill kept saying something about Bingo fuel. (The minimum required to get back home with 2000 pounds remaining). A few guns were shooting at our sound but not coming close. I knew there were no radar controlled guns because otherwise we would have been tracked and fired on accurately while we were circling. I finally got it worked out and caught the ferry in the flare reflection on the river and rolled in. I fired about a 3 second burst in a 30 degree dive from about 1500 feet. The muzzle flashes lit us up like a Christmas tree and said “Here I am! Shoot me!” And did they ever!  Now I knew why that FAC was so high. I pulled about 5 Gs to get pointed straight up. A small part of my mind registered a red light flash somewhere in the cockpit but I was too busy to look at it. When I ran out of airspeed at the top and had figured out up from down and was upright again the light was out. The FAC was encouraging; said he had seen lots of hits on the ferry with his night scope. So I got set up to go in again. Bill didn’t think it was a good idea. Indeed, there were lots of guns protecting the ferry. Most of them were twin barrel 37mm. I could tell because the strings of red hot beer cans came in strings of eight. The 37mm fired clips of four so eight meant twin barrels. I was worried about radar controlled 57mm twin barrel units mounted on tracked vehicles that often accompanied large truck convoys. But no evidence of them. The most spectacular show was provided by the many 23mm ZSU units. These were four barrels mounted on a tracked vehicle and they put out a string of tracers that waved around the sky like a kid playing with a high pressure water hose.

My normal tactic at night over a well defended target was to get directly over the target at about 8,000 feet, roll inverted and pull the nose down to the target, drop my bomb at about 5,000 feet, and pull up into a vertical climb. Just before I ran out of airspeed, I would pull the nose down to level and roll upright. This faked out the gunners because they expected me to be off to the side of the target. I was only vulnerable in the first part of my pull-up. Under very heavy fire I sometimes varied this by not pulling up immediately but by turning 90 degrees and continuing down to low altitude with low power and coasting a few miles away from the target (and the guns).  When using my guns, I would dive slightly off to the side, go lower, and pull up to a 30 degree dive before firing.

Bill kept bothering me with this Bingo fuel business but I didn’t have time to discuss it with him. On my second pass, I had to use the same heading as the first pass in order to see the target. Not a very smart thing to do. When our muzzle flashes lit us up again, I had the feeling that if I pulled up as usual every gun would be aimed at our recovery path. So I didn’t pull up; I used my alternate tactic. The sky behind and above us was filled with a spectacular display of fireworks. The FAC was figuratively jumping up and down because we had torched off some of the trucks on the ferry and on the south shore of the river, where the ferry was now resting. Now we did not have to circle around to catch the reflection of the flares to locate the target. We still had about 600 rounds left; about 6 seconds of firing. We could approach from any direction since we could see the burning target. Bill was getting a little shrill now and yelling something about Bingo minus two. I told him I would wind it up with two more passes and we would go home. After each pass when I was pulling 5-6 Gs to fake out the gunners, there was this pesky red light in the cockpit. I was so busy trying not to join up with those strings of red hot beer cans that I never found out what it was.  We left the FAC to add up the damage and headed home.

Relieved of all ordinance and most of its fuel, the B-57 climbs like a homesick angel. In short order we were passing 35,000 feet and I had Bill tighten his oxygen mask and check his system for pressure breathing. As we passed 45,000 feet, we had to forcefully breath out and just relax and let the pressure blow up our lungs to breath in. At 53,000 feet we were above over 95% of the atmosphere. At that altitude, the engines used very little fuel. When we arrived over Pleiku we were 150 NM from home and had 800 pounds of fuel. Normally when you land with 2000 pounds, that is considered an emergency. But I had been through this many times before and was only concerned with having enough fuel to taxi to the ramp. At that altitude, when you reduce power to idle, the power only reduces slightly because the engines cannot reduce fuel consumption very much without flaming out. So, in order to reduce power and expedite our decent, I had to shut off one engine. I shut down the right engine because we would be flying a left hand traffic pattern. Bill was somewhat unhappy. 

I made a .84 Mach decent which meant that it got progressively steeper as you got into the dense air at low altitude. This let us down inside the hole of the artillery doughnut  at 12,000 feet. We were approaching from the north and had to land to the east. Once inside the hole, I extended speed brakes and pushed the nose over to maintain speed. Extending speed brakes at 500 knots is like running into a brick wall and we were thrown forward hard enough to lock our automatic shoulder harness. That is when that pesky red light in the cockpit came on again. This time I determined what it was. It was the low fuel pressure light. This was confirmed by the unwinding of the left engine. I was at a critical point in my traffic pattern and had no time to deal with a double engine flameout. So I shut off the left throttle, banked 90 degrees right, and pulled the nose around to a heading 180 degrees from the landing heading. Then I rolled inverted and with about 5 Gs pulled the nose down the line of approach lights to the end of the runway and then up the center of the runway lights, varying the Gs to complete my split S at about 1500 feet and at about 400-450 knots. While I was busy doing this I asked Bill to inform the tower that we had a double engine flameout and might need a tug to tow us in. Bill had lost his voice and never did make the call. When I leveled off from my split S I hit both airstart ignition switches and advanced both throttles to idle. After a 4 G break to downwind, I lowered gear and flaps and both engines were making the low moaning sound they make when running at idle. After touchdown I raised the flaps and added power so I could hold the nose up. With 40 knots of headwind it was a long taxi to the far end of the runway. I tried to get Bill interested in betting on whether I could make it all the way into the de-arming area without lowering the nose wheel to the ground. For some reason he was not interested. Anyway, I did and scared the bejesus out of the de-arming troops.

While they were de-arming my guns I figured it out. It had to be an inoperative forward boost pump in the main fuel tank. When I went to full power and pulled lots of Gs at Tchepone, one fuel pump could not handle the load and the pressure dropped. Not enough, thank God, to flame out the engines. When I extended speed brakes in my decent to Phan Rang, what little fuel we had left splashed against the forward wall of the tank, uncovering the rear fuel pump and resulting in a flameout. There is an old saying; “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots”. Not so. But us bold pilots need more luck than most.

We had enough fuel to make it back to the ramp. After we had parked and deplaned, I made an inspection tour with the Crew Chief, armed with powerful electric torches. Not a scratch on her! Again skill and cunning wins over ignorance and stupidity. The Crew Chief brought out the four beers from the tail compartment, ice cold from their sojourn at 50,000 feet, and I spread my maps on the ramp. I gave a blow by blow description of the mission for my Crew Chief and Armorer and had an additional audience of most of the crew chiefs and armorers on the ramp who were not otherwise busy. Bill did not want his beer so I drank it too.

 Needless to say, Bill never got into an airplane with me again.