Linebacker II fifty years ago
 

Just seen various posts on FB such as Minot AFB talking about 50 years ago this week, President Richard Nixon ordered Linebacker II air strikes on North Vietnam.


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Sure SASless and Pontius Navigator and ICM recall events there..

15 x B-52 lost with 59 aircrew from the Buff community …

Salute!

Remember it well. Was on CSAR alert duty as a Sandy in the A-7D at Korat. Walked into Ft Apache to get threat briefing and there were 5 or 6 losses and then we noticed the types and coordinates. Wow! Downtown. About time, and maybe we'll get a buncha my friends outta prison.

I didn't get on a raid for another two days, but on 23 December I got my "counter" across the Red River and due to great weather got to bomb visually right downtown. Pic is attached. We came in from east and rolled in heading south. I could see the chaff corridor that an F-4 flight had laid down ahead of us, and until we rolled in below the cloud not much ack, but then..... The AAA was everything they talked about and there were cloud layers according to the caliber, so 23mm, 37mm, 57mm 85mm up at 20K where we rolled in from.

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The blitz worked and we got our buddies back two months later.

Gums recalls...

You may recognise the name gums, visited four years ago and treated right royally by the natives, ex Mig 21 drivers (not wartime) who ran the helicopter operation on the airport. Boarded the train to Sapa about 200 metres south of your aim point.


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gums,

Thanks for your interesting post. Your picture brought back some memories - I've driven down Le Duan Street past your aim point!

The Hoa Lo Prison (Hanoi Hilton) is about half a kilometre to the east of your aim point - just off the right of your picture on Hai Ba Trung Street. Was there a restricted area around the prison?


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Salute!

Yes, the prisons were marked on our tgt area maps. On the sky puke drops above the undercast with a LORAN pathfinder we couldn't see anything anyway, but run in headings avoided the camps.

As far as "seeing" the chaff, our ground map radar was real good for that, and we only used the tight pencil beam for the computer "VISUAL ATTACK" mode to get range. The LORAN drops were like WW2, and we turned off the computer mode and pickled when the F-4 did.

Lastly, when the war was over, the Vee were very amenable and several of my friends have been back there and sat down for a beer or two with those old gunners..."if you weren't so lucky....", and " if you were a better shot I wouldn't be here" and so forth. One guy actually visited a small village that he bombed on a CSAR mission. There was a gun in the village and he was escorting a Jolly. He sat down at the kitchen table with one of the elders 30 years later. The Misty FAC's were also treated well when they re-visited The Trail's origin in RP1/2 years later. See "Bury Us Upside Down" by Don Shepperd.

He has a paragraph that echoes what 99% of us identify with....
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Sorry not in text....
Gums sends...

Anyone interested in personal accounts of Linebacker and Arclight operations; as well as other SAC B52 activities; might wish to visit the Crewdogs website. The individual volumes of the series are also available for .

The whole series covers all aspects of B52 operations from the early days of airborne alert through the Vietnam years and into the anti-shipping role with targeting by RAF Nimrod aircraft.

YS

Your comment above rekindled some old memories. In the mid-80s I wrote the EXTAC for B52 in Support of Maritime Operations. With the NFTC we did a run into Loring which just happened to coincide with their Mid Winter Festival - human curling was interesting :)
Worked with both the 42nd Bomb Wing (Loring) and the 2nd Bomb Wing (Barksdale) and got about 40 hours as Flight Test Director culminating in a live Harpoon launch.

Chopper2004: Very kind of you to invite me in here - but my time at Travis ended in early December 1972, so Linebacker II was something I heard about on TV and in the press back in the UK. Insofar as the operation led to the signing of an agreement that saw US POWs released shortly afterwards, it's still a regret that I wasn't there to do my bit in Op Homecoming. I believe it generated quite a number of C-141 sorties.

I do recall doing at least one trip earlier in 72 when the VC offensive in the south got very worrying and all our airdrop training etc went out the window as support flights multiplied. (It was probably the one where I still remember a box of Lino tiles destined for some O Club lashed to the floor under what looked like a WW2 era 25 lb artillery gun! Routine continuing amongst the immediate priority stuff!)

When I was in college (mid 1970's), one of my friend's dad had been a B-52 pilot during Linebacker. One night he talked to us about it - including playing a cassette tape he'd secretly made of the cockpit conversations during one of the first Linebacker missions. Sobering stuff - including seeing one of his buddies B-52s get hit and go down. According to him, the planners had done something really stupid - they'd sent multiple decoy chaff runs over the target area, but foolishly they all intersected over the target - so the anti-aircraft types simply saturated that area with missiles.:eek:
Much of my memory of that evening has disappeared into the mists of time, but one thing I clearly remember was - after they'd cleared the danger area - one pilot said to the other 'God, I hope we never have to do that again'...
BTW, legit question - did the BUFFs have ejection seats? Or if they were hit, did the crew need to somehow make it to an escape hatch to bail out?

Salute!

The Buffs had ejection seats and we picked up an entire crew that bailed one day in Laos. The tail gunner may have manually bailed by blowing the canopy doofer and then pulling the chute handle himself, but he made it!. The Commander would not let them bail until well away from Hanoi. Finally punched out when they got down to two engines and still burning a bit. As I said in another post, the EWO was KIA and the main Navigator reached over and ejected his body.

Problem with the buff routes was they were too much alike/predictable for both ingress and egress and altitude. There was a "come to Jesus" conference at 7/13 HQ over Christmas ( we stood down on the 25th) and the Buffs took advice from we lights and varied run in headings, timing and egress tactics and losses went way down.

Our unit lost a plane on Christmas Eve, but pilot was captured and came out three months later.

Gums recalls...

All B-52 forward crew had ejection seats, with the upper deck crew ejecting upward through individual hatches above their crew stations (pilot, co-pilot, EWO), and those on the lower deck ejected downwards (nav, bomb/nav). The tail gunner on the A-F models, egressed by jettisoning the entire tail cone where the guns were and "stepping out" the opening where the guns were. G & H gunners were moved from the tail to the upper flight deck, before gunners were eliminated (the seat was retained for instructors etc.) Any extra crew members (relief pilots, instructor pilots, instructor nav/EWO, VIP's etc could manually bail out one of the lower hatches once the nav or bomb/nav had ejected downwards.

The seats were not zero/zero and especially obviously for the lower deck and rear gunner positions, sufficient height and speed was required for ejection.

Thanks sandiego - that's what I'd wondered about - how do the guys get out the belly of the beast. Pilots would be relatively easy, but ejecting the lower deck downwards has obvious limitations if you're not 'up and away'...

IIRC, early Zipper variants had downward ejection seats. Weird, or what?

A good friend (I was the OG while he was the MA in the early 2000s) was a B-52 copilot during Linebacker. Badly hit, the AC was hit in the chest. Charlie tried to help the old Major AC, but with crew gone, the AC looked at him and pointed up. EJECT, save yourself was the unspoken message. Charlie left, held POW for a couple of months before Op Homecoming. Charlie was, I think, the last serving POW when he retired in 2003.

Ed Mechenbier
 

Salute!

Sorry, but a classmate of mine was most likely the last USAF aviator to retire from the military - June of 2004. Maybe a nasal radiator went later, but I'll go with Ed. His bio counts the 4 years at the Academy and those do not count for retirement years of service or pay. So he had to go when her reached 62, eighteen years ago. On the PBS TV special "Return With Honor" from the 90's, he gives a great war story. His backseater was another classmate and calmly "advised" him the plane wouild not recover and they punched out. As I posted on another thread about "callsigns", our class had the most POW's from USAFA, so we are familiar with the count.

Ed's claim to fame and what we are most proud of is his last flight when he flew some "remains" back from Hanoi years just a week or two before retiring.

https://www.deseret.com/2004/7/1/198...am-pow-retires

Gums sends...

Gums,

Salute returned. Thanks for the bigger picture. Merry Christmas

My first BUFF crew the Pilot had a 100 mission SEA patch, the Radar Nav had a 1 1/2 mission SEA patch, he became a POW during Linebacker

early 80s night flight we got hit by lightning (in the nose out the right wing ) Mike the RN keyed up the mike and said last time he heard that noise he ended up in a parachute over Hanoi

Gums might know this fellow.....and of Roger Locher who spent 23 Days evading capture after being shot down not all that far from Hanoi.

Salute!

I definitely knew Bob Lodge, Locher's front seater.

Bob was on the path to be the first ace along with Steve Ritchie, another classmate. He was of the few to use Combat Tree for some Sparrow launches, which allowed a face shot with the existing ROE and help from GCI and TeaBall. Steve was actually in Bob's flight as #3 the day of the shoot down. I would prefer him to describe the battle.

Locher was one the case studies we went thru to become a Sandy, you know the CSAR escorts and on-scene commander. I didn't upgrade until November of '72 and only covered Kansas01 Bravo attempt when Sandy 1 had to go and my wingie and I led a burning Jolly outta the zone to safety. Hector Acosta was Bravo and came out of the Hilton three months or so later. He describes the rescue effort someplace if you look hard enough for it.

https://www.vietnamairlosses.com/loss.php?id=3064

one link: Veteran Tributes

Gums recalls...

The most prized possession I own....is a hand drawn drawing of this that was done by a Jolly Green Flight Engineer as a going away gift to Jerry Crupper who was a Jolly Green Pilot.

Sadly, very good friends, Jerry and his Wife were killed in an automobile accident and his daughters gave the drawing to me.

Some careful study of the drawing proves the wit and humor that attends to those who fly helicopters during interesting times.


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