They figure if the Americans want to keep coming back here again and again, they might as well move in all the guns they can and get as many of us as possible. This is not a new approach to the battle between aircraft and ground defenses, and it usually resolves in favor of the defenses. The big advantage of fighter aircraft involved in an air-to-ground struggle is the element of surprise, and the ability of the aircraft to be flexible in the attack. When you take these factors away from the airman, you put him in a position of dueling a fixed and stable platform from a rapidly moving and unstable platform, and most of the odds go to the guns. A good gun defense is made up of several mutually supporting guns or groups of guns. It is not like being able to roll in and pick one specific, well-defined spot on the ground and saying, “If I can hit that: spot, I can silence the guns.” You have to look for the optimum spot to cover all the guns in the complex and hope that your ordnance will get maximum coverage for you, or else you have to pick the most formidable single gun or group of guns and go after them while their buddies have at you. Even if you are able to cover a fair number of guns, all the guns for miles around can rapidly identify your intended routes of attack and they are quick to respond to cover your ingress and egress.
The ideal way to beat these forces is to hit each defense only once, get the job done and get out. If we were perfect all the way, as regards ordnance available, fuzing utilized, intelligence, weather, tactics, targeting and delivery, this would be possible. It does not happen too often, and when we get a strike that works out like that, the joy level is high. If you do not put all the bombs exactly where they belong—and there are many who have never been there who do not accept the fact that there are reasons why this can happen—you have to go back. If the bomb damage assessment by one of the many reconnaissance vehicles available does not satisfy all concerned as to what you saw or claimed, back you go. Perhaps the greatest source of irritation along this line is the interpretation of the photos the reconnaissance aircraft bring back. You can have as many assessments of damage as you have viewers of the pictures. Unfortunately, the groups known as photo interpreters are not always of the highest level of skill or experience, and their evaluation quite often does not agree with that of the men doing the work. I have bombed, and seen my troops bomb, on specific targets where I have watched the bombs pour in and seen the target blow up, with walls of structures flying across the area, only to be fragged right back into the same place because the film didn’t look like that to the lieutenant who read it way back up the line. I have gone back on these targets and lost good people and machines while doing so, and found them just as I expected, smashed. But who listens to a stupid fighter pilot?
But the photo guys are sometimes quite correct. If the complex is large enough, they can sometimes tell what percentage of the structures are still standing and how effective the complex may still be. The problem then is with those overzealous to the point that they want each and every outhouse flattened. This you can do, eventually, but what is it worth, if the complex is already broken, to get that last little 20-foot by 20-foot outhouse? I don’t think it’s worth an aircraft or a guy, yet how many of each have the outhouses cost us? This is where the defenses take us apart little by little. They know where we can bomb and where we can’t. Thus, the forbidden areas can be less heavily defended, as long as the enemy can recall their deployed defenses at will. When they look at the areas we hit, their problem then becomes only one of where to put the most emphasis. Their answer is quite simple. Put them where the Americans struck yesterday. They know we will be back, and they know we will be back again, probably from the same direction at the same time of day and with the same number of aircraft. They move the guns in, and we oblige by providing more gunnery practice and the game compounds while we assume they must be protecting something very valuable, yet our pilots return and say there is nothing there but guns. We back ourselves right into the corner we abhor and wind up dueling fixed gun positions, and then we wonder how we lost so many people and machines on little targets or little pieces of larger targets.
We started this game around Pyongyang in Korea and were amazed at how rough that little rail yard became. Of course, we went the same route everyday and even had canned routes where we would hook around the tracks to the north and come thundering down the tracks like the Kimpo express, at the exact same time each day. We lost our fanny regularly. It would even have been fun to go around the course backward, or at least an hour earlier or later. In North Vietnam we fell into the same trap in a much rougher league, and on a larger scale. The flexibility is just not being utilized and it is costing us.
And what of fuzing on our bombs? This, plus the size of bombs used, is worthy of some consideration. Fuzes accomplish one of three basic things. They set a bomb off just before it hits the ground and the resultant fragmentation and blast destroys targets such as guns sitting on the ground. Another type sets the bombs off the instant they touch the ground and this is effective against personnel or against something relatively light that you want to blow over or collapse. The third type will delay the detonation of the bombs until they have penetrated the surface of the targets and this approach is most effective for blowing up or cratering hard surfaces. The size of the bomb is another factor that weighs heavily on the outcome of a particular mission. In the simplest of terms you can carry several small bombs or a few large bombs. If you are trying to hit a big target hard, the big blast is the answer. If you want coverage, take more of the smaller bombs. Even from this most basic armament discussion, it should be clear that several small bombs that go off the instant they touch a big strong bridge are going to do little more than scar the surface. By the same token, if you drop an instant load on a dirt road, for example, you will sure dust off the area, but there are no pestholes afterward. By the time the dust settles, it is apparent that you might as well have stayed home. Our command mismatching in this segment of our operation has been gross. We have not done our homework properly, and this makes for useless return trips and needless exposure of our resources.
The weatherman can force you to go back to a target several times. The most obvious way is a bum area forecast. When you get one of these and are sent North, only to get within a few miles of the target and then have to return, the frustration index is immense. Perhaps one of the most damaging aspects of this is that you have telegraphed your punch, and the enemy knows what you are after. We get so full of pressure on getting some crumb that might have been released to us that we don’t quit once we get lined up on a course. Needless to say, the enemy is well prepared when we break through those last few miles of marginal weather after we have had him going through dry runs for days ahead of time. But a more subtle weather factor is the prediction of wind direction and velocity in the target area. In a closed-circuit operation like Vietnam, the pilot is not overly concerned with winds en route to the target or winds at 30,000 feet. These winds play a part in the game, but we know where we have to go and about how much of everything it will take to do it. The wind we need is the wind from the point in our dive-bomb run where we punch the release button to the point where the bombs hit the ground. This is the payoff for the whole effort. If you tell that stupid bomb that the wind is going to be 10 knots at his back and that is why you are releasing him pointed toward a place short of his target, the bomb can’t do doodle-doo about it. He falls the same way each time that you release him at a specific speed and in a specific dive angle. Now, if that wind is correct and if the pilot has set his bombsight properly, that bomb has no choice but to crash directly into the target, to be triggered by his fuze. If you dispatch him into a wind that is not what you told him—if it is 10 knots in his face—he can’t possibly do the job for you. Imagine the effect this can have when you are aiming at a 20-foot square building. Wind errors like this are not uncommon, nor are they due to a lack of desire to do the job right on the part of the weathermen. They simply are not prepared to give accurate winds over a strange spot on the ground. Each hill produces its own eddies and under our present degree of understanding our bombing winds are just not good enough.