My grandfather kept a journal, or perhaps it was a diary, during his final of three wars in which he saw combat.
The first war was the Pacific War. He was at sea when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he served until VJ Day. For a while, he kept a journal in which he wrote a bit about the first few months of the war as he participated in it, but then wrote nothing more. For example, although he wrote about his first encounter with Japanese warplanes in 1942, he wrote nothing about his ship being sunk or being shot down at sea and not rescued for 37 days. Nor did he write about anything else that happened to him during the rest of the war.
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| A WW2 Essex-class carrier that had been hit by multiple kamikazes. |
He flew combat missions over North Korea in 1951, but wrote nothing about the experience. From reading his logbook and the history of his ship, I learned that his airplane was badly damaged by flak on one mission and he barely made it back, but there is not a word from him about that experience.
However, when he began flying missions against North Viet Nam in 1965, he began keeping a journal, the goal seems to have been, initially, to document some serious problems being encountered, as well as very bad procedures imposed on the Navy fliers by their civilian overseers in the Defense Dept. But over time, the journal evolved into a diary containing his thoughts and experiences of a very personal nature. I didn't know of the existence of this journal until recently, when my mother brought it out and suggested I might find it interesting. I certainly have. In fact, some parts of it have truly shaken me while at the same time making me incredibly angry and sad. The mix of emotions has been overwhelming.
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| Loading Zuni rockets on an F8U. |
I don't even know how to start writing about this subject, there are so many aspects to it, and every one so disturbing. But I'll try.
One of the first things my grandfather noted was that naval aviation at the start of the Viet Nam War was based on peacetime needs and procedures, and the war that was anticipated was nuclear with the Soviet Union, so they were trained to attack strategic targets in the USSR using nuclear weapons in what were considered to be one-way, essentially suicide, missions. So they weren't training to attack bridges or oil depots or river barges. All of that knowledge had been shoved onto a back shelf. It had to be relearned for Viet Nam.
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| Three of the F8Us in this photo were shot down in the spring of 1966. |
All their flight suits were bright orange, since, during peacetime, if they had to eject, they would want to be easily spotted by rescuers. But during wartime, if they were shot down over enemy territory, they needed to hide, evade and escape, until, hopefully, they could be rescued. Trying to explain that to Navy brass stateside seems to have been an impossible task. They just didn't get it, and when aircrew bought green dye and dyed their flight suits a dirty greenish brown they were reprimanded. It was well over a year before they began to get khaki flight suits.
In the meantime, 20 of the ship's aircrew were shot down and listed as either KIA or MIA and another seven were known to be POWs. Each one of these individuals shot down was personally known to my grandfather, often for years. Many he had trained. He knew their families and had spent time with them as part of the close-knit peacetime naval aviation community. For each man lost he had to write to, visit and console a wife, parents, children. It really got to him. He noted that they were losing more pilots over North Viet Nam than they had during the Guadalcanal campaign.
They were also losing a lot of airplanes, more loses than could be sustained. For example, total production of the A4D, a dedicated attack plane, was 10 a month. This number supplied not only the entire Navy, but also the Marines. But my grandfather's carrier was losing on average four A4Ds every month. F8U loses were equally severe. In fact, the large number of loses of F8Us led to one of the most harrowing episodes recounted in the journal. At a pre-mission briefing, the flight leader told the pilots that Washington had insinuated that pilots were needlessly ejecting from planes that were only lightly damaged and he urged each pilot to make every effort to bring back his airplane if it were damaged by enemy action because they were just losing too many. As luck would have it, his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and severely damaged on that very strike, but instead of ejecting after getting back over the water, where he would have been
rescued, he chose to try to land aboard the carrier and in so doing crashed, his plane careening off the deck and into the sea and he was killed. Seeing this, his wingman, his good friend and the best man at his wedding, began literally screaming in his microphone, swearing in rage and crying in grief. When he landed, he declared he would never fly another mission and he didn't. He said he had become a conscientious objector. The Navy brass wanted to court martial him, but finally they just let him resign his commission.
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And what was the mission objective that led to the death of this man? You guessed it. A suspected truck park.
On a liberty at Hong Kong, my grandfather had taken the ferry to Macao and visited an access point to Red China. There he had seen trucks coming in from the mainland. They were old Studebakers, probably lend-lease from World War II days, given to the KMT, or perhaps even to the Soviet Union. He noted in his journal that the trucks they were attacking were probably ones like these with a Blue Book value of $25 or something. That ties in with an item I read in The Pentagon Papers, leaked CIA documents regarding the war. The CIA had determined that for every dollar of damage our bombing raids did to North Viet Nam in 1965, it cost us $6, and in 1966 $10.
My grandfather noted that after the first two months of bombing the north, there were no more worthwhile targets. Not that there had ever been very many. He wrote that North Viet Nam was a bicycle and water buffalo economy with a veneer of modernity that was obliterated within weeks. Instead of standing down, however, Robert McNamara's Defense Department ordered that the attacks continue, but that each A4D, which was capable of carrying six 500-pound bombs, only carry one bomb on each sortie, McNamara thus being able to report to President Johnson the large number of sorties the Navy was carrying out daily. In addition, given the number of targets assigned, pilots had to fly two missions a day. This raised the ire of McNamara, who insisted the pilots fly 1.5 missions a day.
My grandfather recorded in his diary actual results of strike missions compared to the results he was ordered to supply as official reports that would be forwarded to Washington. A typical attack might be against what appeared to be 10 trucks moving along a road. The fighter-bombers, forced by terrain and cloud levels to make their approach from an obvious and easily anticipated altitude and direction, faced accurate, concentrated anti-aircraft fire. They could only afford to make one high-speed pass. So the pilots could never really be sure what, if anything, they hit. After-mission debriefing and later bomb-damage assessment from photo reconnaissance might lead them to conclude the greatest likelihood was that they had destroyed three trucks and damaged two more. But if that report were submitted, it would be rejected, so a completely bogus report that would be accepted had to be fabricated -- a 20-truck convoy bombed, 12 trucks destroyed and six damaged.
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The aircraft carrier he was serving on was a World War II veteran that had been struck by kamikazes, killing hundreds of sailors, starting huge fires and inflicting major damage. The ship had been repaired, but the fires had burned out all the grease in the expansion joints and as a result the old ship creaked and groaned in large seas and an odor of burnt residue would permeate the lower passageways. Many of the ship's crew swore the old boat was haunted and could recount tales of encounters with ghosts, my grandfather, too. In his diary, he writes of one time having an overwhelming foreboding that he would be shot down and killed on his next mission. He sat down at the little desk in his quarters to write a farewell letter to his wife and children. But as he was trying to compose his thoughts, staring at the blank paper, a hand firmly gripped his shoulder and someone, speaking very clearly, told him not to worry; he would not only survive the next mission, but complete the cruise and return home safely. My grandfather didn't recognize the voice and turned to see who it was. But there was no one there. He got up and looked out at the passageway. It was empty.
Looking at the list of combat missions he flew, I note that the least he flew in a month was 16 and the most was 28. He repeatedly writes how tired everyone is, not only the air crews but all the personnel who serviced the planes. Most of these missions were flown in very bad weather. During the northeast monsoon, which started in November and
lasted until mid-May, the weather over North Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin was miserable, nothing but day after day of heavy clouds and rain. Conditions were especially
challenging when a weather phenomenon my grandfather referred to as “le crachin” occurred. That's French for "drizzle," but apparently it was much more than that -- thick clouds and ceilings as low as 100 feet, in combination with fog and
the persistent drizzle.
Cloud cover was usually broken with some holes at about 6,000 feet with
solid overcast above and scattered clouds at 4,000 feet. As my grandfather noted, to acquire the target in such weather, he had to
descend through the cloud layers and fly between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, where he became
vulnerable to ground fire. North Vietnamese gunners knew the
altitude of the cloud ceilings, so he and his pilots were forced to fly even lower, into the effective
range of small arms, to avoid being at a known altitude. The low ceilings also required
the use of horizontal or low angle glide delivery bombing, which brought aircraft even
closer to AAA. The low ceilings also restricted the directions from which
aircraft could attack, making North Vietnamese barrage fire more effective -- the North Vietnamese didn't usually aim their anti-aircraft fire at individual planes but, knowing the altitude and direction the aircraft would have to fly to attack the target, filled the sky along that path with a storm of shrapnel. It was sheer luck whether a plane was hit and there was nothing that could be done to avoid the flak. And under these
weather conditions, it should not be forgot, the difficult and dangerous task of landing aboard the carrier after the mission could mean disaster for the stressed-out and exhausted pilots, all too often flying damaged planes.
In addition to strikes against North Vietnamese targets, pilots had to fly what were called Barrier Combat Air Patrols. These were needed to intercept Chinese Air Force sorties against the carrier that simulated attack profiles. There was no way to know if these were feints or would actually be carried out if not intercepted. So they had to be intercepted.
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Well, I am tired. I will continue this another time. There is a lot more to cover. It gets worse.
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