The Wings of Destruction

In the bloody fighting around Chu Pong last week, tactical air support often made the difference between victory and sheer annihilation for the hard fighting men of the 1st Air Cav. Time after time, U.S. fighter-bombers swept down in the nick of time to break up human-wave assaults by the North Vietnamese. In four days of fighting, the Air Force flew 260 sorties over the torn battleground. That was just part of a week's work for the 550 South Viet Nam-based planes that dropped more than 1,500 bombs and sprayed some 500,000 rounds of 20-mm. cannon shells on the enemy in dozens of places throughout the country.

Such statistics will soon seem modest, for more planes are on the way: last week two squadrons of sleek, barracuda-like F-4C Phantom fighter-bombers swooped down onto the new 10,000-ft. jet strip at Cam Ranh. A third squadron of the 1,500-m.p.h. fighter-bombers is now en route to South Viet Nam, as is an F-100 squadron, and by the end of next March Washington plans to double--to 1,200 planes--the strike force available to U.S. field commanders in the South.

Cutting the Lines. Though primarily for use in the South, there is nothing to prevent the spreading southern-based armada from joining on occasion its sister fleet of U.S. planes based on carriers and in Thailand in the daily, relentless pounding of North Viet Nam. Indeed, as Hanoi increasingly steps up the tempo of fighting in the South, there is likely to be increased argument for U.S. bombing of the industrial complex around Hanoi and the port of Haiphong.

Already allied planes--U.S. Navy, Marine and Air Force fighter-bombers, plus those of the South Vietnamese--are tightening the noose around the factory-rich region. In the last month, U.S. planes have attacked 13 SAM missile sites, mostly in the complex, one of them only 22 miles from Hanoi, the closest strike yet to the Red capital. For the first time, American aircraft last week lashed out at the vital communications link between Hanoi and Haiphong, loosing 49 tons of bombs on a rail and highway bridge. In two other missions, they blasted the main railway and the main highway running northeast from Hanoi to China.

On their bomb runs, U.S. pilots have little fear of the skies. North Vietnamese MIGs have been all but invisible, only occasionally venturing close enough to tangle with the American marauders. And only when the odds are with them.

Dodge City. The real threat is on the ground, and missions near Hanoi and Haiphong are predictably the most hazardous of the air war, for it is there that the North Vietnamese have concentrated the bulk of their antiaircraft guns and SAM sites. More often than not, a key target must be cleared all the way through the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon before the pilots take off. The pilots call the JCS strikes "doomsday missions" because, as Air Force Captain Glenn R. Magathan of Chicago explains, "there's no way in and no way out without flak, and when you get there, they are all stirred up and mad as hornets." "As a matter of fact," he adds, "on our base we call the guy who wakes us up before a JCS strike 'the Grim Reaper'--and it isn't funny either." Hardly. On one attack east of Hanoi last week, four Navy planes were shot down in 35 minutes by a particularly accurate cluster of guns tucked into a river bend.

Flak bothers the pilots more than the SAM missiles, because the U.S. has developed fairly effective electronic and evasive countermeasures to the SAMs. But vital spots in the North are sometimes blanketed with flak barrages that rise like a layer cake: from riflemen and machine guns rises a cone of fire starting a few hundred feet up, and above that are successive layers from 37-mm., 57-mm., 85-mm., and 100-mm. antiaircraft cannon that squirt steel thousands of feet high.

"You see the small stuff best at dusk," says Magathan. "Whole sections of the countryside just ablinking. During the day, often the only way to identify an automatic-weapons site is by the dust the guns kick up on recoil." The larger ack-ack sites, report the pilots, who are now averaging 20 missions a month over the North, generally have six to eight radar-controlled guns. But around Hanoi an emplacement may contain as many as 14 guns. Since "that's where the big shoot-out is," the Communist capital is known to U.S. pilots as "Dodge City."

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