As my fifth and last flight pulled off target, the area was pretty well saturated. The count at this stage of the game showed numerous fires burning throughout the area with two large secondary explosions—Earl’s ammuniton hit, and a fuel hit that lofted black smoke and debris as high as 4,000 feet into the air. The gun positions were silent, and eight large buildings were completely destroyed while twenty-three others were damaged or burning. Eight trucks had been destroyed and left as hulks, and the suspected radar site had been well massaged. As I looked at the valley, I was pleased with the way my guys had worked, but there was one more job that needed to be done. One of the pilots had hit right on the corner of a good-sized complex and cleaned out several buildings, but there were still about a half dozen buildings in that cluster that needed to be hit. As I moved away from the cloud cover to the north I decided to attack these buildings in a high angle strafing pass with my cannon, and I lit the burner and pulled up and over onto a steep strafing run with my flight behind me.
As my nose dropped down toward the complex I was after, I was in trouble. The course I had selected placed at my two o’clock position the hills at the northern end of the valley that led up to the suspected radar site. In all of our attacks of the day before and of that day, there had been no fire from that area, but now the air between the green hills and my aircraft was alive with the piercing red balls of tracer ammunition from the ground. There were a lot of them, and they were curling my way. It only takes a few experiences to know when they are on you, and I was afraid that these gunners were on me. I wondered instantaneously where in hell they had come from and then I was in real trouble. My bird lurched to the left with the sickening click of another big hit and before I could even react she lurched and clicked again. Instantaneously the fire light on the instrument panel went to red and the reflexes built up from combat in the Thud threw my eyes to the hydraulic pressure gauges that indicated the number of pounds of pressure per square inch available to move the flight controls. If they went I was done, and there would be no controlling my diving steed. It was the too-familiar pattern that had cost us most of our Thud losses, and my eyes arrived there in fractions of a second only to find the primary system at zero and the indicator needle of the secondary system settling on zero.
I had already lost many of the systems necessary for normal flight and the only thing keeping me under control was the third and weaker utility hydraulic system. The little white needle on that system was already wavering. I was entering my strafing run and I was on fire, and it looked like I was about to become an unguided missile. I thought, What the hell, those lousy bastards may have me but I’m going to get them before I go, and I pressed on, mad and scared. Earl called, “Lead you’re hit and on fire with smoke and pieces coming out the back end.” I knew it, but I squeezed that trigger for all I was worth and sprayed a stream of lead into the guns and the buildings. If this was going to be it I wanted to get the job done first, and I did. I got about five hundred rounds right in the middle of them, and then it was time to start worrying about the old behind. Very gradually, I started back on the stick with an eye on the utility system. This was it, and if she didn’t take now, the only alternative was a highspeed ejection attempt and that was not too promising a prospect. The pressure needle bucked and shuddered even with slight control pressures but she did not fall to zero and the nose started slowly up. I could use all the speed I could get to displace myself from any guns that might still be active, so an easy pullout that just cleared the ground was all I wanted, and that’s just what I got.
My gradual pullout had carried me a fair distance to the north of the target area, but in my delicate condition north was not the place I wanted to go. I didn’t want to use any greater control pressures than I needed to, as every activation of my one remaining emergency hydraulic system was tempting fate. I had at least one eye on that gauge all the time, and it set up a strange pattern that fascinated yet terrified me. It would hold relatively steady around three thousand pounds for about ninety seconds, then stagger a couple of times and drop down to zero, bounce off the bottom peg and shudder back toward three thousand pounds. If it stayed on the bottom I was out of flight controls, and each time it went through its cycle, my hands dropped involuntarily to the ejection handles at the base of my seat. I never knew if it was going to come back up again and it was most important that I get south while I was still able. I had to ease her around to the south and fly right back over the valley that I had been beating up for two days. Earl had stroked the burner as soon as he saw my tail light up and he pulled up close to me as I approached the valley from the north and said, “Chief, you better get ready to get out of that thing. I think the rear end is coming unglued and you have lots of fire back there.” Just as he said that the hydraulic needle took one of its nose dives and for some reason I looked at my clock at that instant. It was quarter of twelve and I had a very clear thought, If I have to jump out of this thing right on top of these bastards I’ll never make it even as far as the Hanoi Hilton. They’ll eat me for lunch. The pressure came back up but I couldn’t get the fire out and I was most concerned about: what the fire was eating up in the rear end of my bird.
Earl was a pretty cool type and although I never did figure out whether he did it on purpose or not, he managed to relax me a bit. He carried a miniature camera with him and as we crossed the valley he called, “Hey, Chief, how about holding still for a minute. I want to get a color shot of that mother bear before it lets go.” Fighter pilot humor. He later promised to send me a print of his picture but I got a letter from him recently indicating he may not have been as calm as he thought. It seems that all he got were lots of pictures of sky and ground as I struggled for altitude and displacement to the south. His description of the egress is interesting. “For about sixty seconds that day I wouldn’t have given two cents for your chances of making it at all, to say nothing of making it back to a forward emergency strip. Here’s the, incident as I remember it. You called, ‘I’m rolling in on a strafe pass,’ and I followed on the right side. I saw about twenty goof balls come up in your vicinity—they seemed to come from several places but were all focused around your aircraft. They all let loose at the same instant, which was surprising—zap, zap, zap—and it was over. I pulled up hard, rolled over and spotted you about a thousand feet below me and a little to my right and forward. Your aircraft was trailing dark black smoke for about two thousand feet behind you and there was a bright orange glow along the right rear side. The smoke lasted about sixty seconds and the glow remained until you had turned southwest and leveled off. The transmissions are hazy, but I remember discussing whether to go direct to the emergency strip or to head for one of the safer bailout areas. I was extremely impressed with the holes in your aircraft and • remember thinking it odd that the orange fire from the large hole didn’t trail from the forward motion of the aircraft. It sort of licked all around the area like a good fireplace fire. When it would die down momentarily I could see into the tail pipe. Every so often it would flash inside the tail pipe and leave the area a bright red, like a good hot farm stove.”
I knew there was nothing I could do to improve the hydraulic situation but that I had better do what I could to get that fire out. Violent control action was out of the question and since the burner had been knocked out with the hit, all I could do was ease up to whatever altitude I could get with normal power and hope that the rarefied air might discourage the fire. I am not sure I would have wanted to pour all that raw burner fuel into the aft section even if it had been working. I felt like I was sitting on a time bomb but I was not about to terminate by jumping out as long as I was still flying. Twenty-three thousand was the maximum altitude I could get out of her, and as I leveled there, Ken pulled up alongside and took over his role as deputy flight lead. I told him I was going to try for the emergency strip and he moved in on my wing as he sent two and four on to a tanker and home. I had enough fuel to get to the emergency strip, if she would keep flying, which was very fortunate as our friendly airborne gas station operators would have been nuts to let a burning aircraft hook up to them. Earl, in two, called the rescue people as he herded four toward their tanker. They scrambled a Spad in no time and headed north to cut me off should I have to step out. The Spad came up on our frequency and talked to me all the way and it was something of a reassurance to know that at least he was ready for what I “hoped wouldn’t happen.