1
WILD WEASELS
When Colonel Leo Thorsness, who then held the rank of major, began his mission in Vietnam in the fall of 1966, he was undertaking a dangerous new form of aerial warfare. He was one of the Wild Weasels, a recently developed U.S. Air Force operation that had been code-named after the small but ferocious predator that will go to any length to attack its prey. Wild Weasels put themselves in extreme danger on every one of their missions to seek and destroy surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam. Provided to the North Vietnamese Army by the Soviet Union, SAMs were becoming increasingly destructive to American aircraft.
Uniform patch worn by the Wild Weasels
Leading American strike forces into heavily defended airspace, the Weasels would troll around and entice the enemy to shoot at them. When the SAM operators took the bait and fired, the Weasels’ own missiles would home in on the enemy radar and take out the site. The Weasels then had to avoid any incoming SAMs, which traveled at four thousand feet per second. As Thorsness remembered it, Weasel pilots would dive at top speed toward the ground, “and then at the last second … you’d haul back on the airplane as hard as you could,” turning it skyward. “The missile couldn’t make the corner with you. It would go under you and explode.” It was the ultimate game of cat and mouse, and many Wild Weasel planes were shot down before they could achieve their objective.
As the “first in, last out,” the Wild Weasels cleared a path for American bombers flying a few minutes behind to get in and get out, dropping their loads in relative safety. In Thorsness’s words, “We would go in high enough to let somebody shoot at us and low enough to go down and get them; then we went in and got them.”
An American F-105 trailing smoke after being intercepted by a surface-to-air missile. The missile was designed to detonate when it neared the target, scattering deadly fragments over a wide area.
In the early 1950s, jet fighters and bombers in the Korean War ushered in a new age of aircraft design and function. Ten years later, as American involvement in Vietnam intensified, the jet was commonplace and used in a variety of combat operations.
World War II had firmly established the importance of air support and controlling the sky in military conflicts. In the skies over North Vietnam, the United States sought to establish air superiority with jets, bombers, helicopters, and other aircraft. Jets were faster, more maneuverable, and able to carry far more ammunition and bombs than aircraft in earlier wars. Yet they were not invulnerable. Antiaircraft fire from tanks and other guns on the ground was still a danger, but the war in Vietnam brought the new threat of surface-to-air missiles. With their radar-guided targeting systems and camouflaged launch sites, SAMs could appear out of nowhere and knock even the highest-flying jets out of the sky.
The Messerschmitt Me 262 became the world’s first jet airplane used in combat when it attacked a British reconnaissance plane over Munich on July 25, 1944.
THE FIRST JET FIGHTERS
Leo Thorsness joined the U.S. Air Force only a dozen years after the first jet-powered airplane flew in Nazi Germany. Germans later flew the first jet fighters in combat, in 1944. The Messerschmitt Me 262 outperformed every other fighter plane in World War II, flying 120 mph faster than the American P-51 Mustang, but by that time, Germany was a year away from surrendering, and the new jet had little impact on the outcome. Allied attacks on factories, fuel depots, surface transportation, and airfields prevented the Germans from ever flying more than three hundred of the planes. Still, the German jet fighters shot down more than five hundred Allied aircraft, and Americans brought a few captured jets back to the States, where they influenced the design of the Sabre jets that flew in Korea.
This prototype of America’s first jet-powered aircraft underwent test flights in California in 1942. The Bell P-59 Airacomet had a top speed of 450 mph and a range of 440 miles.
In 1966, to seek and destroy this new threat, Leo Thorsness and the Wild Weasels relied on the F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber. Pilots called it the Thud. “It was unwieldy and lumbering, but reliable with a strong heart,” Thorsness said.
Bomb-laden F-105 Thunderchiefs heading toward enemy targets during the Vietnam War
THE THUD
The F-105 weighed over fifty thousand pounds, making it the heaviest combat fighter in history at the time. It could carry up to fourteen thousand pounds of bombs and missiles. Despite the weight, it was fast, cruising at 778 mph. With the afterburners, it could zip by at 1,390 mph. It also wielded a 20mm cannon. Its speed and complement of arms made it a lethal predator in Vietnam.
Thorsness had logged many hours in the Thunderchief by the time he reached Vietnam. He and other pilots loved it. The jet was tough and durable and—when the afterburners were lit—faster than enemy fighter planes.
The Thunderchief aircraft was initially designed in the 1950s to carry nuclear warheads very fast over great distances, as a defense against possible Soviet nuclear attack. But its use evolved over time. In Vietnam, the Thunderchief primarily dropped conventional bombs on North Vietnamese targets in Operation Rolling Thunder. As a bomber, the plane’s main threats were antiaircraft weapons on the ground. But a dangerous enemy also lurked in the air. The North Vietnamese guarded the skies with Soviet-supplied MiG fighter jets. Not designed for aerial dogfights, the Thunderchiefs would have to outrun the MiGs until pilots developed tactics to use the Thud’s speed and 20mm cannon effectively against the more nimble fighters.
Nearly all Wild Weasel missions were flown around Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. Thousands of antiaircraft guns and about 150 SAM launchers protected the region, along with a hundred MiGs on alert. General John P. McConnell, the air force chief of staff, called it “the greatest concentration of antiaircraft weapons that has ever been known in the history of defense in any town or any area in the world.”
It was dangerous territory for Wild Weasels on the hunt.
2
THE UNITED STATES’ WAR IN VIETNAM
In 1857, France invaded the country of Vietnam in southeast Asia. French missionaries had been in Vietnam for centuries, trying to spread Catholicism among the Vietnamese. Like many other European nations, the French were eager to establish colonies around the world in areas that could produce raw materials for French industries and be a captive market for their products. It took many years for the French to subjugate the country. Vietnam eventually became part of the colony known as French Indochina, which also included the two kingdoms to the west, Laos and Cambodia.
With the end of World War II, citizens of countries around the world began rebelling against their colonial rulers. This desire to rid themselves of European control of their governments and daily lives took root in India, Southeast Asia, and numerous countries in Africa. Vietnam was among the first. After living under French control for nearly seventy years and suffering a brutal Japanese occupation during the war, the people of Vietnam turned to communist Ho Chi Minh to fight for their independence.
A depiction at Hoa Lo Prison Museum showing inhumane treatment by French colonialists of Vietnamese prisoners at the prison that would later be used by the North Vietnamese to hold American prisoners of war, who called it the Hanoi Hilton.
Ho Chi Minh declared independence for Vietnam immediately after the Japanese surrender ended World War II in 1945, but world powers refused to recognize the country. They didn’t want to anger their French ally, who was determined to keep its colony. War broke out. Ho Chi Minh’s communist-led independence movement was popular, and its forces waged a guerrilla campaign against the French. By 1950, they were receiving aid in their quest for independence from the communists who had just taken control of neighboring China.
Fearing another communist takeover in Asia, the United States began sending military advisers to Vietnam in 1950 to assist the French in their fight against Ho Chi Minh.
THE DOMINO THEORY
Under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the United States saw Vietnam and its communist-led independence movement as an example of the domino theory in action. Policy makers believed that once the first country in an area fell under the influence of communists, other countries would fall like a line of dominoes. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, the strongly anticommunist government of the United States wished to prevent any further expansion of the ideology in Asia.
Victorious Viet Minh troops loyal to Ho Chi Minh march into Hanoi in 1954.
In 1954, Vietnam and France, along with the United States, Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain, negotiated an end to the fighting. The Geneva Accords called for a cease-fire and temporarily divided the nation along the seventeenth parallel. France withdrew its military from communist-controlled North Vietnam and transferred its authority to a noncommunist regime in the South’s capital of Saigon. The accords called for nationwide elections in two years to determine the future of Vietnam as a whole.
The elections were never held. Immediately, the United States sent covert military operatives and economic aid to prop up the regime in Saigon. In October 1955, the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dihn Diem declared himself president of the new, independent Republic of Vietnam. The United States endorsed this noncommunist ally and committed more economic and military aid to the new country.
U.S. military advisor (center) observing South Vietnamese troops, 1962
Under President Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew slowly, with about seven hundred military advisers in the country by 1961. Under the next president, John F. Kennedy, it increased quickly. Diem’s corrupt regime was unpopular, and the communist Viet Cong had risen up in opposition. Kennedy began sending advisers to help Diem’s army fight this threat, and by October 1963, there were sixteen thousand U.S. troops in the country. Yet no matter how many soldiers and advisers were sent, the South Vietnamese army remained ill-equipped to handle the Viet Cong.
On November 1, 1963, Diem was overthrown by his own army and executed a day later. This plunged South Vietnam into chaos. Three weeks later Kennedy was assassinated. Sensing an opportunity, communist leaders moved units of the North Vietnamese army into the South through Laos. Both China and the Soviet Union sent aid to support the offensive. Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, committed even more military resources to Vietnam. By 1965, a full-scale war was under way.
In the fall of 1966, Major Leo Thorsness arrived in Asia, attached to the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force. He was stationed at the Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, an ally of the United States. Like all combat pilots in Vietnam, he was required to fly one hundred missions to complete his tour of duty and go home for good.
Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, April 1967. Several Republic F-105 Thunderchief aircraft can be seen on the ground.
About halfway through his tour, Thorsness was able to travel back to his home base in Nevada on a short leave. As he remembered it in a 2002 interview, “When I went to Vietnam in 1966, it wasn’t a big deal yet … The country didn’t really know about that war, for a long time, so they didn’t care.”
Although antiwar protests had started on university campuses in the spring of 1965, the general public was slow to realize the scale of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.
“I went downtown and my wife went shopping, and I noticed people had no idea where Vietnam was. There was no more concern that we had people over there getting shot down every day than nothing, and people sat in prison camps.”
Spring of 1965 antiwar protest in Philadelphia
North Vietnamese tanks crashing the gate of the presidential palace in South Vietnam, 1974, marking the end of the war
In the coming years the war would take up more and more of the daily newspaper headlines and nightly television news. It would become a very controversial war that would last for the United States until 1973. Supporters believed the war was necessary to stop the spread of communism. Opponents felt the war was a pointless waste of American money and lives.
By its end, over 58,000 U.S. military personnel would die. Up to 3.5 million more North and South Vietnamese civilians and military personnel would perish, as well as roughly 450,000 soldiers and citizens in Laos and Cambodia, the neighboring countries that were caught up in the long and tortured conflict. The war would finally end when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on April 30, 1975.
Text copyright © 2019 by Michael P. Spradlin
Map copyright © 2019 by Gene Thorpe, Cartographic Concepts, Inc.
