Following her arrival in Yokosuka on 24 July, Oriskany underwent a two-week refit before getting under way on 5 August to return to the war zone. Aircraft had flown off to various air bases throughout Japan to have inspections and repair work done—items that could not be accomplished during the hectic line periods. The NIPPI Repair Facility in Japan proved its worth as the war grew. The facility began performing depot-level repair work on naval aircraft in the 1950s, and as losses mounted, the ability to repair badly damaged aircraft without having to return them stateside helped immensely.
As the ship left Japanese waters, Oriskany’s airplanes flew out to meet her. While sailing past Taiwan, aircraft from the Oriskany took part in mock raids against Taiwan. With Cold War tensions still simmering from the first and second Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s, these raids were a chance to help train Chinese Nationalist forces against the Communists. This period proved to be the calm before the storm. As Oriskany arrived on Yankee Station, it entered a virtual hornet’s nest. From this point forward, all flights over North Vietnam noted a marked increase not only in the amount of AAA but in its accuracy. AAA sites surrounded any area of importance, and flak traps began appearing. While Oriskany had been in port, the North Vietnamese had successfully shot down their first aircraft with a SAM. The air war had changed.
Oriskany’s line period started roughly. On 11 August, as the Watts riots erupted in Los Angeles, VA-152 lost a Skyraider. Lt. (junior grade) Lawrence Mailhes disappeared during a nighttime RESCAP mission. Later that morning, the air wing launched raids against army barracks at Son La and Thau Chau. CAG Stockdale was hit over the target. AAA blew a large hole in the wing of his Skyhawk, though he managed to nurse the crippled aircraft back to the carrier. Oriskany spent the next two days down south on Dixie Station and missed what became known as Black Friday. The night Oriskany sailed south, Midway lost the navy’s first aircraft to a SAM. After frequently asking Washington for permission to strike the SAMs before they became operational, the go-ahead was finally granted. The problem now became trying to find the sites. The North Vietnamese and their Soviet advisors had plenty of lead time to build multiple prepared sites, allowing SAMs to shoot and immediately move. Under the code name of Iron Hand, the cat-and-mouse game of destroying SAM sites began. On Friday, 13 August, Midway and Coral Sea launched seventy-six sorties, with disastrous results. Airplanes from each ship flew around North Vietnam looking for SAM sites to bomb. In forty-five minutes, five aircraft and three pilots were lost to AAA. Another seven aircraft were severely damaged, but no SAMs were discovered. Through November, both the air force and navy attempted twelve more large-scale Iron Hand strikes, with four or five smaller scale strikes per week. All failed, though none suffered the disastrous outcome of that first mission.1
The repercussions were significant. Without an overarching strategy, other than graduated pressure, the American effort was doomed. Policy makers found themselves being inexorably sucked into greater involvement. Instead of destroying the SAMs before they became a threat, aircraft were being lost, with their pilots killed or captured, to something they knew was in the offing. Dealing with the SAM threat now meant even more forces for the war. It also meant untold sums of money, as extra sorties were allocated and technologies developed to deal with the threat.
Oriskany rejoined the other two carriers on Yankee Station on 14 August, taking the midnight to noon schedule. Several strikes against barracks were attempted, but weather interfered. The morning of 17 August was a rare clear day, and the air wing made their first strike against the famed Thanh Hoa bridge. Certain targets developed a mythical status, and the famed Thanh Hoa, or Dragon’s Jaw, bridge, spanning the Song Ma River south of Hanoi, was perhaps the best known. Originally built by the French, it had been destroyed and eventually rebuilt by the Communists. In fact, it had been overbuilt, with massive concrete abutments and a single span resting on a large concrete pier. It was ringed by several SAM sites and hundreds of AAA positions. The bridge quickly became symbolic of the Americans’ frustrations with the air war. Almost nine hundred sorties were eventually flown against the bridge to no effect. In time, aviators on Yankee Station developed a running joke: the world was composed of two spring-loaded hemispheres, hinged somewhere under the Atlantic and held together by the Thanh Hoa bridge. If the bridge was severed, the world would fly apart, flinging humanity into space.2
Many strikes had already tried and failed to bring down the bridge, and this strike was no different. Weather continued to deteriorate throughout the gulf, and flight operations ceased due to Tropical Storm Nadine. During this lull, Lt. Col. Ed Rutty, the executive officer of VMF(AW)-212, approached CAG Stockdale with an innovative idea. Instead of losing an American airplane a week trying to drop the bridge with relatively small bombs, Rutty proposed using F-8 Crusaders to drop 2,000-pound Mk 84 bombs. Rutty had already figured out how to load, arm, and drop the ordnance from an aircraft that was not designed to carry it. Rutty asked Stockdale for permission to fly test missions with the large bombs.3
What Stockdale in turn proposed to Captain Connolly had never been attempted. The Crusaders were too heavy to catapult with such a heavy bomb load and a full load of fuel. The unorthodox answer was to launch them with one-third of their fuel, then refuel the Crusaders once they were airborne. Getting approval through official navy channels would have taken months and ran the risk of being turned down outright. Stockdale recalled, “In other words, what I wanted would stick the captain’s neck out a mile. What actually happened was that I kept him abreast of the ‘test project’ we ran as we tried these procedures out on a series of hops off the ship. Once we agreed it was practical, he said to go with it. Without mentioning it, we both agreed to let Washington go to hell.”4 Not many carrier captains would have been willing to give their ship’s air wing the latitude to attempt such a risky procedure. But on Oriskany, Captain Connolly realized that this new tactic might help save the lives of pilots and was willing to let CAG Stockdale and his pilots try. As the weather lifted, two more days of strikes against the Dragon’s Jaw followed before the tactics were finalized. The next air wing strike against the bridge would be the test. Unfortunately, SAM hunting remained the priority, and Stockdale never got to see the results when the Thanh Hoa bridge reappeared on the target list.
Photo reconnaissance missions discovered a suspected SAM site under construction near Kep, a MiG base nearly 30 miles northeast of Hanoi. The air wing received permission to bomb if they found the target and then only if it was indeed a SAM site being built. Because of the bombing restrictions, it was the closest any strike had come to Hanoi, and the mission came with plenty of restrictions. The air wing planned a strike for 23 August, a task made herculean because planning was based on limited intelligence data, as well as the fact that pilots were using French survey charts from 1950.5 Large portions of North Vietnam at that point were still uncharted, which made meeting the restrictions imposed nearly impossible. The strike consisted of twenty-four Skyhawks in three waves of eight. Cdr. Harry Jenkins led the first wave, with Cdr. Jack Shaw following to hit whatever they found, if anything. Cdr. Wynn Foster led the third and final wave, which was to be held in reserve until the site was found. For reasons unknown, Foster’s wave of eight Skyhawks plus four Crusader escorts launched, even though the first two waves found nothing significant. They proceeded on their hair-raising ingress, flying 360 knots at less than 100 feet in uncharted territory. Navigation at that altitude proved difficult, and Foster, with help from junior wingmen, eventually found the target: construction equipment atop a small hillock in dense jungle.
The North Vietnamese defenses had been alerted by the previous two waves, and by the time Foster’s group arrived they were ready. The ground fire was so intense that pilots could hear the gunfire and explosions in their cockpits, despite the roar of their jet engines. Of the eight Skyhawks, five received significant damage. Lt. (junior grade) Charlie Stender took the worst hit. His plane was hit by a 57 mm round that went through his intake. It knocked off the generator, went through the engine, and came out the other side. Because they were so low, the shell didn’t have time to arm and thus didn’t explode. By retarding his throttles to limit the strain on his vibrating engine, Stender flew his burning plane all the way back to the Oriskany. When he landed, his plane was so hot that nobody could touch it.6 The plane had been so badly damaged that it needed to be craned off in Cubi Point for repairs. Lt. (junior grade) Ken Kreutzman was unlucky enough to be the last man over the target and was also hit badly. Streaming fuel through multiple holes, he would not have made it back to the ship had the pilot of an A-3 tanker not saved him by flying over Haiphong Harbor for a very timely rendezvous. The tanker pilot flew back to the Oriskany, transferring life-saving fuel in small increments. Kreutzman unplugged from the tanker astern the ship and made a rather anticlimactic landing. Though sieved, his aircraft would be repaired on the ship. Lt. (junior grade) John Shore was plain lucky. A 57 mm round hit on the edge of his right intake and traveled through the fuselage just inches behind the cockpit. Again due to the extreme low altitude, the round didn’t have time to arm.7
The Kep mission was a watershed moment for Oriskany aviators. Just like the pilots of Midway and Coral Sea on Black Friday, Oriskany’s pilots were finding out just how deadly the skies over North Vietnam had become. The combination of SAMs and concentrated AAA had changed the air war, with shock waves rippling all the way up the chain of command to the JCS and the president’s advisors. Conspicuously absent were the MiGs. Since July, VPAF MiGs had retreated to bases in China to regroup and refine their GCI tactics after the losses over the summer. It would take time and even more losses before American pilots began to change their tactics. For now, however, the SAM threat was still new and so terrifying that all flights continued to fly at low altitudes, despite growing losses to AAA. Meanwhile, life in the United States continued as if nothing had changed. Ever the politician, Johnson continued to downplay the growing commitment in Vietnam to ensure his domestic agenda succeeded. Along with his Great Society, the space race was on, and the country was captivated. In a crucial step toward putting men on the moon, Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad had just launched America’s longest space flight in Gemini V. Even the new manned space program had a strategy to achieve defined goals, but there continued to be no strategy in Vietnam.
Strikes continued unabated through the rest of August. AAA continued to grow more concentrated with each passing day. The air wing lost three planes to AAA in three days, with two pilots killed and one captured. Tropical Storm Polly granted them a reprieve, and the ship sailed south to support in-country operations. Oriskany was back on Yankee Station by 4 September, when two senior aviators relearned a very valuable, albeit costly, lesson concerning attacking AAA sites. Lt. Col. Charles Ludden, the commanding officer of VMF(AW)-212, spotted a gun emplacement on Cape Falaise while returning from a BARCAP flight. As Ludden rolled in to strafe the site, he encountered heavy fire and took hits in the nose, wing, and cockpit area. Ludden received serious shrapnel wounds in his face, arms, and leg that rendered him momentarily unconscious. Small fragments penetrated the visor of his helmet and lodged in his left eyeball and the orbital area of his right eye. That Ludden actually had his visor down probably saved both him and his aircraft. He regained consciousness with the airplane streaking toward the ground and pulled the airplane out of its uncontrolled dive at extreme low altitude. Ludden was able to fly back to the Oriskany, though his plane had to be craned off at Cubi Point: he had pulled so many Gs to keep from crashing that he had actually overstressed the Crusader and bent the airframe.8 Because of his injuries, Ludden was grounded throughout the remainder of that line period.
Two days later, Cdr. Harry Jenkins had a similar experience. He had just led a strike against the barracks at Ha Tinh. He recalled the mission for Jeffery Levinson’s Alpha Strike Vietnam:
The plan worked well, a good mission, and I was assessing the damage in the air and noticed there were a couple of flak sites sitting up on a hill, not doing anything. So I called my wingman and said let’s make a strafing pass at those flak sites; we’ll see if those guys have any hair on their balls.
The wingman went in, laying it on one site, and all of a sudden a guy at another site opened up on me. I hadn’t seen him, and a shell blew the canopy off, went in forward of the instrument panel, exploded and blew out all my instruments.
I limped back to the ship and had to tell the squadron Wynn was right—don’t duel with a flak site. It was a hard lesson and expensive. The airplane was ruined; the shell hit right on the reinforced area of the canopy, which deflected the round forward of the instrument panel. I went down and laid a broom handle up the hole the crease had made, and had it [the shell] not deflected, it would have gone right through my headrest. I wasn’t hurt, but the next day I was putting on my G-suit and noticed there was a hole in the pocket. I reached inside and found shrapnel had penetrated my G-suit, but hadn’t reached the inner lining.9
Some lessons come slowly during wartime, and others must be relearned from constant training using lessons learned from previous wars. That two experienced senior aviators in the air wing were hit doing the same thing was a good lesson for the rest of the pilots. While both were lucky, their near misses served to demonstrate just how capable the North Vietnamese defenses had become.
Normal armed reconnaissance missions usually offered little hope of hitting meaningful targets. Aircraft would fly low, trying to avoid AAA while looking for supplies moving south. As the air campaign grew, so too did the number of sorties attempting to interdict supplies. But instead of stemming the flow of supplies before they reached Haiphong, pilots had to wait until the supplies had been received and unloaded for transshipment south before attempting to stop the flow, hence the oft-quoted phrase of bombing “a suspected truck park.” On 8 September VA-163’s Lt. Cdr. Bill Smith and Lt. (junior grade) Charlie Stender actually found an eighteen-truck convoy. The North Vietnamese had gambled on being able to move the trucks under the cover of the poor weather. It was the kind of target that every aviator dreamed of as they launched on these missions: undefended trucks sitting in the open during the daytime. Smith broadcast to everyone airborne in the vicinity, “We’ve got a real turkey shoot here,” and they were quickly joined by four other aircraft to help finish off the hapless convoy.10 The mission was a huge success but in reality did very little to stem the flow of supplies. When compared to the efforts required, the real benefit was the morale boost for pilots risking their lives in the vain effort of armed reconnaissance, especially those missions flown at night under the light of parachute flares.
On 9 September the air wing received a crushing blow. On their last day on the line, they were to strike the Thanh Hoa bridge. It would be a maximum effort, with thirty-two bomb-laden Skyhawks and Corsairs. Cdr. Harry Jenkins would lead twelve planes, followed by Lt. Cdr. Jack Shaw with another twelve. Lt. Col. Ed Rutty would lead eight Crusaders in what was to be the true test of the plan he had pitched to CAG Stockdale in August. Weather did not cooperate, however, and all planes were held on deck awaiting a weather report. They eventually got the go-ahead and launched. As the strike formed up, the pilot of the weather reconnaissance amended his original report, noting the deteriorating weather. Stockdale split up the strike, directing all planes toward their secondary targets. He and Cdr. Wynn Foster then proceeded to a railway siding along the coast, attempting to sneak in under the weather. Stockdale was hit as he came off target. The 57 mm guns were so close that he could hear them firing.
In an instant, Jim Stockdale went from flying and being the master of his own destiny to ejecting from his crippled Skyhawk and into captivity. He came down in the middle of the village of Tin Gia and was immediately captured. Foster didn’t even have time to complete a turn overhead before a crowd of villagers set upon Stockdale and dragged him out of sight. It all happened so quickly that Foster didn’t know if Stockdale was alive or dead. In fact, Jim Stockdale was taken into captivity and spent the next seven and a half years as a POW. However, at this stage of the war, little was known about the fate of men held captive by the North Vietnamese, and even less was made public. It was a conscious decision by the Johnson administration in an attempt to quell dissent.
Jim Stockdale’s loss profoundly affected the air wing, and a deep pall settled over the Oriskany. Cdr. Wynn Foster described the mood felt throughout the ship upon his return: “We all lost a lot on the ninth of September, a grim day for Air Wing 16, and a terrible one for me.”11 Concerning the effect Stockdale’s loss had on the air wing, Foster continued, “The loss of CAG shook the air wing emotionally; it just shattered us all. The man was dearly loved.”12 Stockdale’s absence was immediately felt throughout the ship and air wing, though their loss ultimately became the POW’s gain. Despite his absence, Jim Stockdale’s legacy continued to influence Oriskany and her air wing for the rest of Rolling Thunder. Air wing commanders who followed him were often unfairly judged against the standard that Stockdale had set. As the air war grew in intensity, it became a standard that grew increasingly hard to meet.
By prior agreement, Lieutenant Colonel Ludden became the CAG. Stockdale had discussed this at length with Captain Connolly. Even though Ludden was a marine, they both decided on him, as he was the most senior following Stockdale. For the first time since World War II, a marine commanded a navy carrier air wing. It was a momentous decision, and it would be over forty years until another marine commanded a carrier air wing.13
Oriskany departed Yankee Station for Subic Bay in the Philippines the next day. It was a changed ship from the one that had arrived on the line a month prior. The losses of the last two weeks, capped off with CAG Stockdale’s loss, made for a somber mood. En route to the Philippines and eventually Hong Kong, ordnance had to be off-loaded so that it could be transferred to the next carrier arriving on station. In order to fly over one hundred sorties every day, the Oriskany and every other carrier in the Tonkin Gulf required tremendous logistical support. The transfer of supplies to aircraft carriers at sea was accomplished via underway replenishment (UNREP). The navy’s ability to replenish at sea, pioneered during World War II, was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the war in Vietnam. The navy honed its skills to an art form during Vietnam. Virtually all of the products transferred, from fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts to toiletries, came directly from the United States. There was virtually no transshipment through ports in the Far East. Although carriers went into Subic Bay after almost every line period, this was mainly for ship repairs, the off-loading of battle-damaged aircraft, and crew rest and relaxation. Over 99 percent of all other logistical support was delivered to the carriers from logistical support ships during UNREPs at sea.14
The supply ships responsible for providing Seventh Fleet carriers with stores were loaded out in U.S. ports. Ammunition ships would take on ammunition at the ammunition depot in Concord, California, and then set sail for the Tonkin Gulf. They would transfer ammunition to the carriers several times a day for up to a month. Once their stores were getting low, it would join up with another ammunition ship in the gulf whose ammunition stocks were also depleted. The two ships would then consolidate. The ship that had been in the Seventh Fleet the longest would transfer its remaining cargo to the other ammunition ship and then return to the United States to repeat the cycle. Oil tankers and general cargo ships conducted similar product consolidations as they rotated in and out of the Seventh Fleet. The oilers carried both aviation fuel and ship’s fuel. Although most of the fuel came from the United States, fuel was also available from U.S. stocks at storage sites across the Pacific. Singapore was one such example: fuel would be delivered by commercial tankers and then downloaded by oilers for quick delivery to the Tonkin Gulf. A prime example of the efficiency of this system is that throughout the war, general cargo ships delivered fresh fruits and vegetables to the carriers directly out of the port of Oakland from California farms.15
Despite the apparent cost, there were many added benefits to this supply system. Efficiency was significantly improved. Instead of having to move these supplies through a port in the Philippines to a depot, then move them from the depot to a port again, having the carrier spend three or four days of premium in-port time loading ammunition or fuel, the ships never left the line. Each carrier replenished every twenty-four hours from at least one of the various supply ships. By continually replenishing, carriers did not wait for their fuel bunkers or magazines to become low. Carriers were kept topped off so that they always had enough fuel and ammunition for ten days’ worth of flight operations. That way, if logistical support was interrupted or another crisis emerged, such as the 1968 USS Pueblo incident, carriers could be sent immediately without taking time to load out.16 However, the carriers still needed a port call in Cubi Point at the end of every line period in order to off-load combat-damaged aircraft so they could be repaired at depot-level maintenance facilities. Such repairs were extremely vital to the overall logistics of the air war, and without that ability, a carrier’s hangar deck would have been crammed full of unflyable airplanes.
While the carrier was transferring fuel, ammunition, or other supplies aboard, work throughout the ship continued unabated. The maintenance and movement of aircraft around the flight deck and hangar deck was a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation. The aircraft were continuously spotted for launch and recovery as the cycles repeated. After flight operations ceased for the day, the aircraft would be moved to various locations for repairs and maintenance. Combat-damaged aircraft were usually stored in the forward end of the hangar deck. Flight operations lasted twelve hours, then sailors used the balance of the day to maintain, repair, and get aircraft ready for the next day’s missions and at the same time move ammunition out of the magazines to the flight deck and load the weapons on the aircraft. This in itself was no easy task, considering the number of bombs that required assembly, fuzing, loading, and then a complete check to ensure that they would go off only when and where they were supposed to.17 For the aircraft carriers operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, this tempo of operations—twelve hours of flying, six to eight hours to replenish, and six hours getting ready for the next day—continued without letup for the entire thirty days the ship remained on the line.
Throughout naval aviation, there exists a good-natured rivalry between commands. It exists at all levels, from squadrons up through ships and embarked air wings. Thus, with UNREPs occurring daily to meet sortie counts, this same rivalry extended down to which ship replenished the fastest. Because everything needed to be quantified in McNamara’s number-driven Defense Department, even transfer rates were tracked. As Oriskany departed the line in September, her crew set a new Seventh Fleet record while transferring ammo to USS Pyro (AE-24). Obviously, the crew had become quite proficient: Oriskany would eventually do 216 underway replenishments during the 1965 cruise, an often-overlooked but vital aspect to the war.18