“Nah, I wouldn’t even mess with it.”
“OK, is this Bob?”
“No, this is Jack.” At least the Avis wing knew who the leaders were in our wing.
“Rog.”
“Kingpin—this is four back on. No contact with three.” “Rog.”
4. People
If Don could have lasted a couple more weeks he could have been there when we started getting through on those targets that we had been sweating for so long. It was not that the weather turned good, it just got a little less horrible and allowed us to sneak in and do the job. We played the same old game and fought our way down Thud Ridge and found just enough room to work, and we did good work. We did good work under some grim conditions and we worked right on the edges of the sanctuaries that gave our adversaries all the breaks possible in working against us. We knew we were doing good work, not only from pur own assessment of the raids but from the fact that Hanoi screamed like a bunch of wounded eagles every time we got a good lick in. The teamwork and dedication displayed by the pilots on that particular series of raids was truly marvelous. I had the privilege of being the big leader on a majority of these and I could not have dragged a lesser bunch of men through some of the things I dragged them through.
One of the first times we got through must have been one of the most challenging rides down Thud Ridge anyone has ever had. As we turned the northern corner we knew that the Migs were up and nipping at our heels. There was a solid layer of cloud underneath us but something of the Irish intuition my mother, Elizabeth McGinley Broughton, passed on to me from her ancestors led me to believe that it was not too thick and that there might be enough of a hole down by the river to let us work. I was hungry for the larger military and commercial transshipment targets on the edges of Hanoi and if there was a chance I was determined to get my guys in after we had come this far.
As I headed south, the Migs moved into view and it appeared that the time was ripe both to confuse the Migs and to see what it looked like under the cloud. I started us all down through the murk with the target only minutes ahead. As I broke out underneath the clouds, I found Thud Ridge on my left covered with rain clouds that boiled under the main cloud blanket and went right down to the valley floor. The cloud deck and the rain sloped downhill away from me toward the river where it looked downright ominous. Maybe that hole wouldn’t be there after all, but I had committed the forces and we were going to give it a try. I also found what an excellent job the gunners had done in estimating the height of the clouds as everything north and west of Phuc Yen let fly at once. It was obvious that I could not hold the troops down at this level, so I eased my twenty charges back up into the rain. We were bouncing along close to 600 in the slop when my trusty Doppler navigational gear, as usual, decided that things were too rough and it went ape. I knew pretty well how I had to steer from here for the next few minutes, but I obviously had nothing in the aircraft to check my progress and I could not see the ground to look for landmarks. My buddy Geeno had the element and I gave him a quick call, “Lost my Doppler. Steer me, Geeno.”
The Migs, already in the air, had elected to stay on top of the cloud layer when I descended and were pacing us and waiting for us to reemerge. They climbed on board immediately and the show was now in a precarious spot. Because of the Migs, I couldn’t stay up here either, and at the speeds we were moving, I hoped that we had passed the heavy area of ground fire that I had encountered several seconds ago, so I took us back down. This time I broke out in heavy rain just north of the Mig sanctuary at Phuc Yen and the traffic pattern was full of Migs taking off to go after my trailing flights and after the next wing due to follow me into the area. I flew almost down the runway itself and made what amounted to a head-on pass at several pairs of Migs turning out of traffic and preparing to attack. If I had not had that bombload on board and had not been herding my troops into the target I could have had a couple of them about the time they reached for the handle to pull their landing gear up. I could also have glide-bombed their airfield and torn it all to hell, but that was forbidden as were the Migs unless their wheels were off the ground.
I knew that the Migs I was now passing would only have to turn on their armament switches and make another 180-degree turn to be on the attack but there was not too much I could do about it except wonder why we had not cleaned their clock about a year ago. I ducked down another couple of hundred feet to avoid a heavy rainstorm, but this one held some of the promise I was looking for. The entire valley was a nasty shade of gray approaching black in spots, but this storm was a dirty brown color and as I sped toward it the brown got lighter and blended into an almost amber tone. That meant that there was good light on the other side and perhaps sunshine and the clearing we needed. It had to be, or we were out of business because the seconds were ticking away and the target had to be right there. Geeno called a few quick steers and we broke through the wall of rain and the river was under us. I had broken out on the right side of the target rather than the left as we had planned, but the hole was there and the target was there and we worked it. As I arched up into the long pull and turn to get in bombing position, one of the Migs we thought we had left in the murk behind us arched right along with me and the heat-seeking rocket he fired at me went streaking underneath my nose to detonate in my face and convince me of two things. First, that particular Mig-21 driver was either determined or stupid to press right into the mass of flak that now nipped at us from the target itself; and second, that I had better pull a little harder if I intended to complete this run. I completed the run and the egress across the delta was exceptionally noisy that day and involved a series of vertical gyrations, as every time I dropped down, the ground gunners reached up, and every time I went up a SAM burst at or close to my altitude and course, but I got out.
The number three man in the last of our flights was not quite so fortunate, since the Migs I had been forced to pass up as they took off from Phuc Yen had now settled on my last flight as their prime target. They waited for them until they came up off their run in the clear air to the south. They picked their target wisely, they maneuvered properly, they tracked and fired properly and they hit.
The first time Spade knew he had been hit was when he wound up crammed up against what was left of the front windscreen, with nothing left but the throttle grip, which he clutched in his left hand, and the seat on which he was sitting. His flight had been fighting the Migs off all the way down the Ridge but had made it to the target, bombed and were on the way out, but still in trouble. His wingman, number four, had been fragged to carry a cumbersome camera pod that takes nice color pictures for the documentary program but increases the drag on the machine considerably and thus slows you down. The number four man just could not keep up as the bombs came off and the Thuds headed out of the area. As a result of this incident, we were finally able to convince our headquarters that while the documentary program was nice, we could not afford to lug external camera pods to Hanoi. The fact that number four was dragging did not go unnoticed by one of the previously thwarted Migs, and he pushed in between and under the two separated Thuds and let fly with his air-to-air missiles, which had Spade’s name all over them. Spade never saw them coming and when he found nothing under him or around him but air, he dropped the 6-inch-long throttle which represented all that was left of his multimillion-dollar steed and pulled the handles. His chute worked, though unknown to him at that instant his back was already broken, and he hit the ground 30 miles south of Hanoi.