Salute!
Pontius made a good call.
The commander at Wheeler, Oahu made the same call due to limited ground security resources. So the neat rows of closely spaced planes made for easy pickings, as the Russians found out.
By the time I got to Bien Hoa in 1967, we had all our planes in revetments. We also had limits on how many munitions could be in a revertment along with a plane. Nevertheless, we lost one first night of Tet when a 122mm rocket scored a direct hit on a loaded plane. No kidding, it was a smoking hole, but only the next plane over the wall had skin damage due to the shockwave. Lost another a year or two later same way, then we started to build concrete arches over the revetments. They were maybe 18"thick and the concrete was simply poured between two "quonset hut" roof sections. After that, no problems except for shrapnel damage if the mortar or Rx hit right in front of the plane.
I always had doubts about our buffs at Grand Forks, as their alert pad was about a half mile from the main highway. About a dozen armed buffs maybe 100 feet apart. A well-timed mortar attack from the highway just as their missile launched would have been nasty. Just for a few minutes, tho, as the 2 megaton airburst 20 minutes later would have made all else moot.
Gums sends...
Last edited by gums; 4th Jan 2018 at 19:10.
Reason: typos