Bear Taylor 
RIPPLE SALVO… #774… THE ROLLING THUNDER OPS ANALYSIS GURUS HAD IT FIGURED OUT. The odds of getting bagged were 20 in a 1000 on the strikes going into the Red River Valley. The probability of getting shot down improved to 2 in 1000 for the Rolling Thunder missions in the panhandle of North Vietnam, which is where the 31 March 1968 Presidential order drew the line. SHAZAM!!! In that instant, Rolling Thunder weapons delivery pilots improved ten-fold their chances of surviving the incomparable and exhilarating experience of being shot at and missed about 200 times… but first…
GOOD MORNING: Day SEVEN HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR of a daily dose of an air war fought by bold, brave Americans fifty-years ago in a place called Vietnam…
HEAD LINES from the OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER on Thursday, 18 APRIL 1968…
THE WAR: Page 1: “BOMBERS POUND ENEMY TROOPS AND SUPPLIES IN A SHAU VALLEY–B-52s RAKE 25-MILE BASE AREA”…”Waves of B-52s hit South Vietnam’s A Shau Valley with more than 1,500 tons of bombs Wednesday and today in the war’s heaviest aerial blows for a 24-hour period. At least 60 of the eight-engine Stratofortresses streaked over the valley from bases in Thailand and Guam to bomb North Vietnam truck parks, storage areas and troop concentrations. PRIME TARGET… The 25 mile long valley has become the No. 1 target for the B-52s. Senior U.S. officers believe the North Vietnamese may be using the valley as a staging area for another major attack on Hue, 25 miles to the northeast….Since April 1, the B-52s have flown 55 separate missions over the area, with each mission averaging about six planes. An estimated 8,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on targets in the area…. In the biggest battle, U.S. Infantrymen from the 9th Division reported killing 78 Vietcong in day-long fighting in the Mekong Delta and along the northern frontier. Four Americans were killed and 15 wounded… In four other clashes in the delta, South Vietnamese troops claimed killing 80 Viet Cong. Government casualties were put at nine dead and 20 wounded… At the other end of the country, five scattered fights were reported near the eastern end of the DMZ. U.S. Marines and paratroopers reported 16 killed and 73 wounded but they said they killed at least 23 of the enemy….. Marine units fought two battles near the big Dong Ha base in Quang Tri Province, with 10 Marines and nine enemy killed….”… FROM PDB: “Increased Communist pressure against Khe Sanh continued yesterday. Elsewhere in South Vietnam there was little significant contact with Communist forces.”
Page 1: “REDS ADAMANT ON PEACE TALK SITES–CAMBODIA OR POLAND, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT”… “North Vietnam demanded today that the United States ‘agree without delay’ to Phnom Penh or Warsaw as the site for preliminary peace talks and also stop all attacks on North Vietnamese territory. The demand, in the official Communist party newspaper Nhan Dan, repeated the charge that the United States is insincere in its talk of peace efforts. ‘Once again,’ it said, ‘we demand that the U.S. government give up its attitude that shows a lack of good will and agrees without delay to either Phnom Penh of Warsaw for the site of contacts.”… READ STATE DEPARTMENT HISTORICAL DOCUMENT THAT COUNTERS …U.S. submits list of 14 possible sites, neither Poland or Cambodia is included…
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v06/d200
Page 1: “JOHNSON RETURNS TO MAINLAND FROM HAWAII–BRIEFS IKE ON WAR AND PEACE”… “President Johnson stopping en route to his Texas ranch after two days of Pacific policy talks in Honolulu, conferred today with former President Eisenhower about war and peace in the Pacific.”… Page 1: “FBI CHARGES SUSPECT IN SLAYING OF KING”… “The mysterious Eric Starve Galt has been charged with conspiracy and murder in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”…Page 3: “SALE OF HANDGUNS INCREASES IN THREE RIOT TORN AREAS”…”Gun sales have soared in predominately white suburbs of Washington, Baltimore and Kansas since looting and violence erupted in the Negro neighborhoods of those cities this month. Rioting that followed the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4 marked the first major racial disorders in any of the three cities in recent years.”… Page 4: “SURVEY PEGS ROCKY AS COAST VICTOR”… “Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York would carry California if the 1968 presidential election were held today…The latest poll described Senator Eugene McCarthy as the strongest Democrat in a simulated general election and said both McCarthy and President Johnson could defeat former Vice President Richard Nixon in a general election today but would lose to Gov. Rockefeller.”…. Page 4: “McCARTHY ASKS RUSK’s REMOVAL”… “Senator Eugene McCarthy has called for the removal of Dean Rusk as Secretary of State as a sign of U.S. willingness to change course on the Vietnam war.”…
18 APRIL 1968…THE PRESIDENT’s DAILY BRIEF (CIA TS-SI) LATE ITEM; SIERRA LEONE: One Sergeant-Major Amadu Rogers speaking over the national radio this morning, announced that all senior army and police officers were under arrest and that Sierra Leone was now being run by the ‘Anti-Correction Revolutionary Movement.’… SOUTH VIETNAM: The South Vietnamese apparently have been thinking out loud for several days about proposing an allied summit conference before bilateral talks between Washington and Hanoi get too far along. In the past ten days, Foreign Minister Do has tried th idea on the ambassadors from most of the countries with troops in South Vietnam… CAMBODIA: Phonom Penh, having just barely gotten dissidence in western Cambodia under control, now faces a determined rebellion by tribal guerrillas in the northeast near the South Vietnamese border. The tribesmen are using relatively sophisticated tactics and automatic weapons… this leads us to believe they are getting some help from the Vietnamese Communists…. YUGOSLAVIA: …a plot is afoot to remove Tito from power–a group of party and government officials want to kick Tito upstairs…Behind it lies a great deal of unhappiness over Tito’s economic and foreign policies… CHILE: Leftists in President Frei’s own party are thinking of ding themselves to the many parties in the legislature currently wooing the Communists. NORTH VIETNAM: NOTES ON THE SITUATION: The North Vietnam are hinting broadly that they intend to insist on Warsaw as a site for initial contacts with the United States. They have not specifically ruled out acceptance of another city, but Hanoi’s most recent propaganda carries an implicit threat to forgo the contact if the United States continues to reject the North Vietnamese proposals….OBSERVATIONS IN HANOI: morale seems high in the North Vietnamese capital, but there is an undercurrent of war weariness and fear in the authorities…Many North Vietnamese are afraid to be seen talking with foreigners… HANOI APPLAUDS ANTIWAR ACTIVITY IN U.S….In a 15 April message… The Vietnam Federation of Trade Unions hailed those in the U.S. who were opposing the draft, the dispatch of American troops to Vietnam, and those who are demanding that the US end immediately and unconditionally the bombings and the war acts. The message also thank the “progressive Americans” for their precious support of the Vietnamese people.”….
18 APRIL 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… OGDEN, STANDARD-EXAMINER (AP/UPI) (19 Apr reporting 18 Apr ops) Page 1: “JETS RAKE NORTH, BOOST ATTACKS ON RED TARGETS”… “U.S. war planes made their heaviest raids of the year on North Vietnam Thursday, flying the largest number of missions in nearly four months, military spokesmen announced today. Hitting targets in the southern panhandle in accordance with President Johnson’s curtailment order, U.S. pilots took advantage of clearing weather to fly 145 missions, one more than the year’s previous record on January 6. It was the largest number since December 26 when 150 were flown. The total was nearly triple the average number of missions the Americans flew against enemy supply routes, convoys and gun positions in the northern part of North Vietnam before President Johnson ordered them to stay south of the 20th parallel of latitude. Ten days later the President in a move never announced publicly, put the northern limit for bombing raids at the 19th parallel, 170 miles north of the DMZ The curtailment was aimed at inducing North Vietnam to open peace negotiations.
“The deepest reported penetration Thursday was a raid by Navy A-4 Skyhawks from the carrier Enterprise on a railroad bridge one mile below the 19th parallel and 169 miles above the DMZ. Some U.S. sources say that despite Johnson’s curtailment order allowing the North Vietnamese to move war supplies with impunity down to the 19th parallel, a distance of 140 miles from Hanoi, there has been very little change in enemy truck traffic in the southern panhandle.
“The U.S. Command said a limited damage assessment showed the raiders Thursday destroyed or damaged 14 bridges, 13 trucks and 16 boats, barges or sampans, cut bridges and rods in many places, and touched off several secondary explosions and fires, indicating the attacking aircraft hit fuel or ammunition dumps. The pilots report opposing fire to be light to moderate.”
Humble Host led one of the 145 missions. Flew #145. Battlecry flight of four to drop 6 Mk-82s each on POL storage–stacks of 55 gallon drums about two miles southwest of Vinh, then recce with 2 pods of 2.75 rockets on Highway 15, Happy Valley. Good hits on POL and lots of black smoke to a couple thousand feet. No opposition apparent. No targets for rockets so returned to coast line to look for and find two barges south of Cape Mui Ron…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were no fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 18 April 1968…
Reviewing the April 18 date for the four years of Operation Rolling Thunder there were no aircraft lost in the North on this date. However, the downing of CAPTAIN JAMES ATLEE WHEELER, USAF, on 18 April 1965 is remembered here. CAPTAIN WHEELER was flying an A-1E of the 1st ACS out of Bien Hoa and was killed in action striking a target in the Mugia Pass area when one of his bombs explode prematurely destroying his aircraft. This loss was the first of many in the Mugia Pass target area. CAPTAIN WHEELER’s remains were recovered on 28 April 1998 and positively identified on 30 October 2001, to the credit of the Joint Recovery troops… “No man left behind” is the operative objective.. In this case, CAPTAIN WHEELER rested on the battlefield where he fell for 33 years and finally came home 36 years after his final flight in the service of our country.
RIPPLE SALVO… #774… RISK DIVIDED BY TEN: INTERDICTION CAMPAIGN IN THE PANHANDLE versus STRATEGIC STRIKES IN THE HEARTLAND… From Wayne Thompson’s TO HANOI AND BACK: The USAF and North Vietnam, 1966-73… Page 143-44… I quote…
“Left with a smaller field of action, Seventh Air Force tried to make the best of it. Chasing trucks in Route Package One was at least less dangerous than bombing targets in the Red River Delta, and the North Vietnamese did less than expected to change tht situation in the summer of 1968. They did nearly double their antiaircraft guns in the panhandle to perhaps twenty-six hundred, but most of the surface-to-air missile batteries remained near Hanoi and Haiphong–with only four or five active sites near the nineteenth parallel. There was no effort in 1968 (as there had been in 1967) to install missiles near the Demilitarized Zone. Hence the Navy bore the brunt of the remaining SAM threat as well as the MiG threat.
“The Air Force had only to worry about antiaircraft artillery, which was less deady when divorced from SAMs and MiGs Nevertheless, Route Package One boasted more guns than Route Packages Two and Three, but much less severe than the two services losses in Route Package Six (the Hanoi-Haiphong region). In some months, Route Package Six losses had exceeded twenty per one thousand sorties, while the rate stayed below two per thousand in Route Package One.
“The North Vietnamese panhandle was nevertheless, a much more deadly place for pilots than the Laotian panhandle. In Laos the Air Force was beginning to have some success finding and strafing trucks with guns mounted on a relatively slow, propellor-driven transport aircraft (a Lockheed C-130 Hercules), but such a fixed-wing gunship could not survive in the North Vietnam panhandle. Nor could forward air controllers (FACs) use their customary light propeller-driven aircraft to look for targets and call in fighter-bombers. Instead the FACs flew in two-seat F-100F jets. They were fortunate indeed to see a truck in daylight from forty-five hundred feet at four hundred knots, and most North Vietnamese trucks did not take to the road until after dark.”…
“Meanwhile, many F-4 crews were introduced to night interdiction. Only the F-4s of the 497th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Ubon Air Base, Thailand has specialized in night work over the North Vietnamese panhandle. In the spring of 1968, the Night Owls began to teach night flying to the other squadrons of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. Truck traffic on the roads in Route Package One was plentiful enough so that aircrews claimed about three thousand trucks per month in May, June and July; of those sighted, they claimed to have destroyed or damaged about 20 percent. Of course, the same trucks were no doubt sighted repeatedly. No American knew how many were using the roads, let alone how many had actually been destroyed…
“Many of the trucks moving south through Route Package One in the summer of 1968 were carrying ammunition and supplies for North Vietnamese units located in and just north of the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had never had much trouble infiltrating forces through the demilitarized zone, and perhaps thirty-thousand of their soldiers operated in the I Corps region of South Vietnam. Supplying these forces through the zone was much more difficult than infiltrating them. Most trucks with supplies for communist forces in South Vietnam went around the demilitarized zone by driving west through the mountain passes into Laos.” End quote…
And here is an interesting footnote… In late June after the peace parley was underway in Paris– to the consternation of the Red Chinese– the Chinese let the North Vietnamese know that the agreement to meet in exchange for the reduction to bombing in the panhandle was not a wise move. The message: “In reality, recently, the bombing (by the Rolling Thunder pilots) has become fiercer, concentrate in a smaller area, thus causing you more obstacles for your assistance to the South. That you accepted their partial bombing, and agreed to talk with them has bettered their present position compared with the one they were in 1966 or 1967. Though you still maintain your principles in negotiation, you have reduced the amount of their difficulties in this election year. It is the fault of the Soviets.”…
RTR Quote for 18 April: PRESIDENT IKE EISENHOWER: “If a political party does not have in its foundation the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”
Lest we forget… Bear
