Super Sabre
and Thuds
This is the original member from which I cropped
out the two F-105s for more of a close up of the Thunderchiefs.
The following information was on the back:
For Immediate Release
Aug 66-003G
RADAR RUN
Saigon (7AF) – RADAR RUN – Air Force F-105
Thunderchief pilots on a mission to bomb communist military targets in North
Viet Nam are led by an Air Force F-100 Supersabre. Radar monitoring equipment aboard the Supersabre can pinpoint
targets for the Thunderchiefs in any kind of weather and at night.
Numerous missions of this type were flown when the inclement weather
obscured targets in the North during July. (AIR FORCE PHOTO).
F-100s operated out of Bien Hoa
and Tuy Hoa and perhaps another base or two in South Vietnam.
They were considered one of the better jet aircraft for
close-air-support (CAS).
During one of my O-2 checkout
missions at Binh Thuy AB, down in the South Vietnamese Delta (IV Corps), we
heard of beeper and a rescue attempt for an F-100 pilot that had been shot
down over on the west side of the delta.
Early that afternoon, I was in the club at Binh Thuy and the recovered
F-100 pilot was having a drink at the bar.
In the discussion, he revealed that he had been sitting alert at Bien
Hoa, near Saigon, when a call for help had come down in IV Corps.
His shoot down hadn’t been particularly remarkable except that that
was the third straight time that his flight leader had been scrambled off
alert—and had his wingman shot down. I’m
not particularly superstitious, but if I’d been the squadron scheduler, I
don’t think I’d have ever put that flight leader on alert again.
The F-100Fs were later assigned
to the Misty FAC role up in the southern panhandle of North Vietnam (Tally Ho),
and Colonel Bud Day (MOH) was flying an F-100F when he was shot down and
captured in 1967. Future USAF
Chief of Staff, Captain Ronald Fogleman was shot down in an F-100. He barely
evaded capture by being hauled out partially in an external weapons bay of an
Army helicopter that didn’t have any internal space for passengers.
We seldom saw the F-100s in
Steel Tiger North. I did brief 3
flights of F-100s on 18 July 1967 for the attack on the reported Central
Pathet Lao Headquarters, which had been pinpointed around 1 July by a Pathet
Lao defector. In my opinion
Seventh Air Force bungled the operation by waiting for two weeks during the
height of the Summer Monsoon to get ceilings high enough for jet aircraft to
attack the target. Colonel
Aderholt sat ready with his force of A-26s and T-28s about 50 miles west at
NKP. A report of partially
clearing weather with ceilings up to three or four thousand feet in the target
area would have allowed a strike by the 56th Air Commando Wing to
take out the target long before it had disappeared by 18 July. My roommate, Captain Chic Randow, flew a dawn patrol/weather
recce (along with Captain Jim Wilhelm, I think) for fourteen straight mornings
along Route 23, passing within a few hundred yards of the target and confirmed
each morning that the ceilings were too low to operate jets against the
target. The cave area was decimated on the afternoon of 18 July when blue
skies returned temporarily to the Steel Tiger, but we were convinced that by
then, the headquarters had been move. In
my opinion, a valuable target was lost because of the parochialism at 7th
Air Force that didn’t want to permit any demonstrations of the flexibility
that the Air Commando aircraft offered.
