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00:01Next on Secrets of War, American pilots battle the enemy and their own political leaders in the skies over Vietnam.
00:09Exclusive interviews with North Vietnamese veterans, secret American operations in Laos and Cambodia,
00:15and the Navy's classified program to counter heavy losses against Vietnamese pilots.
00:20Or were these pilots from other communist countries?
00:24Alpha Strike is next on Secrets of War.
00:59Secrets of War
01:28Secrets of War
01:41The American War in Vietnam.
01:44There were no front lines drawn on the map, no neatly marked positions defining enemy territory or safe territory.
01:55American tactics produced numerous battlefield victories and inflicted heavy military losses on the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.
02:03But these opportunities were often wasted by the absence of strategic vision.
02:11The U.S. air war in Vietnam cost more than half of the hundreds of millions of dollars America spent
02:17on the hostilities.
02:18Despite this investment, air power, while influential, was never decisive.
02:26We had gotten into the war without understanding what the game plan was.
02:32We had no strategy.
02:33We had no objective.
02:34We had no strategy.
02:35We thought it was going to be another quick and easy fight, rush in, fill the sky with airplanes, and
02:41we'd walk away the big winner, as we always have had in the past.
02:45And it didn't work.
02:47Vietnam has a 2000 year history of resisting foreign invasions.
02:53They'd been fighting for over a century against the French, the Japanese, and then the French again.
03:00For the Vietnamese, time and cost meant little.
03:03Their war against the Americans would last as long as it took to win.
03:09If they did not succeed, then their children would, or their grandchildren.
03:15Our slogan at that time was to fight.
03:20We know that as long as the Americans decided to stay and get involved with the Vietnam War, it would
03:27be impossible, you know, to reunify the country.
03:33Like their French predecessors in the first Indochina War, American leaders and the government of South Vietnam never understood that
03:42the communists were willing to lose longer than the Americans were willing to win.
03:51We accept the death of millions of people.
03:55We justify this huge loss because of the belief that the independence for our country will justify the sacrifice.
04:03We don't put a limit on the number of human lives lost. Independence is the most precious thing we must
04:10have.
04:13So we would do everything to fight and discourage the Americans from getting involved and make life really difficult for
04:25them so that they would withdraw from Vietnam and leaving the internal affairs of the Vietnamese to the Vietnamese.
04:37Most historians date the U.S. Air War from 1962 to 1973.
04:43In fact, the U.S. Air Force had been quietly sending advisers to South Vietnam as early as 1950 to
04:50support the French in the first Indochina War.
04:56This assistance continued after Ho Chi Minh led the communist Viet Minh to victory over the French at Dien Bien
05:03Phu and the partitioning of Vietnam into the North and the South in 1955.
05:10Essentially, the air war in Vietnam can be broken down into three parts.
05:15There was rolling thunder from 65 to 68.
05:18There was the interdiction in Laos from 68 through 72, and then the linebacker campaigns in 72.
05:25With the South Vietnamese government on the verge of collapse, on the 2nd of March, 1965, the United States began
05:33an aerial bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
05:36From the beginning, Operation Rolling Thunder was characterized by a sharp conflict, pitting the military against President Lyndon Johnson and
05:47his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
05:51At issue were the rules of engagement.
05:53American pilots were not allowed to go downtown, their term for bombing military targets in Hanoi.
06:02In the first three or four years of the war, there's no doubt that the White House controlling the air
06:08battle, the rules of engagement, and saying that some targets could and could not be hit, trying to delineate where
06:15the air effort would go in against the advice of the air planners.
06:18I think that that was a major fault.
06:21President Johnson and Secretary McNamara alternated gradual escalation with long bombing haunts in a belief that they could lure the
06:30North Vietnamese led by Ho Chi Minh and General Nguyen Giap to the negotiating table.
06:37Against the advice of his senior military commanders, Johnson personally approved and picked each military target.
06:47Johnson's idea was that people would get more and more fearful as the bombs got closer and closer.
06:54But what it really did is it gave the Vietnamese an opportunity to fine tune their air defense system so
07:02that by the time the bombs did get to Hanoi, they had the most sophisticated air defense system in the
07:09world.
07:11Johnson feared that a full-scale bombing campaign might trigger a Chinese or Russian military response, never suspecting the depth
07:20of both countries' involvement in North Vietnam's air defenses.
07:25The American politicians were very concerned that we'd have a rerun of the Korean War, where once the North Koreans
07:32had been started to be pushed back, the Chinese started to get involved in a big way and almost tipped
07:36the balance.
07:37The thought of having Mao's guerrilla army of five million men suddenly available to General Giap I think was something
07:44which the Americans were very concerned about.
07:48Johnson believed in the carrot and stick approach, hit your opponent over the head with a stick and then offer
07:54him a little piece of carrot.
07:58He was convinced that limited bombing raids would persuade Hanoi to negotiate rather than face an all-out offensive.
08:07But Johnson and McNamara were making a critical miscalculation. They failed to understand their enemy.
08:16They did not understand communism. They certainly did not understand that Ho Chi Minh was an international communist and that
08:26was his primary mission in life, was to advance communism.
08:32Johnson was a Texas politician. His problem is that he didn't understand the Vietnamese world view, that this carrot and
08:43stick approach was not something that they understood and that's not how they operated. The only thing the Vietnamese understood
08:51was force.
08:59The majority of missions for Operation Rolling Thunder were carried out by U.S. Air Force planes based in Thailand
09:06and by Navy squadrons flying from Yankee Station, the code name for carriers based in the South China Sea.
09:14A line just below Vin, North Vietnam, formed the northern boundary above which air attacks were initially forbidden.
09:23Most North Vietnamese fighter bases and surface-to-air missiles fell within these restricted areas.
09:30When the SAM sites were first brought in, we could see them being calibrated by the Russians and the Chinese
09:38and being readied for action against us, yet we were specifically forbidden to hit a SAM site until that site
09:50had been verified as operational.
09:52And, of course, it became operational once it started shooting at us and knocking our people down.
10:03A newly uncovered classified Soviet document, encoded telegram number 13987, verifies that it was in fact Soviet soldiers who shot
10:15down five American planes in the first SAM missile attack of the Vietnam War in July 1965.
10:24Encoded telegram 13987 goes on to describe deep, often bitter, Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese political differences.
10:34The so-called international brotherhood that Johnson and McNamara feared was actually strained by cultural tensions and political disagreements.
10:45The China card was a big farce.
10:48Internally, China was going through great, great problems.
10:52They were very unstable.
10:55They were frightened about the Russian attitude.
10:58The Russians and the Chinese were at each other's throat.
11:02The relationship between Russia and Vietnam during the war was awful.
11:05It was very belligerent and the Vietnamese actually were quite adept at working the lines between China and Russia in
11:15order to continue their efforts.
11:18The other thing you have to remember is the historical antipathy between the Vietnamese and the Chinese people.
11:24They hate each other and they have fought three wars over the sovereignty of areas in the north of the
11:31country in the last hundred years alone.
11:35These are not people who are natural allies.
11:38US air crews complained that they had to fly with one eye reading the rule book and one eye looking
11:44for the enemy.
11:44The frustration pilots felt with Johnson's approach to the air war, its rules of engagement and political legacy of micromanaged
11:53control exploded on the 2nd of June, 1967.
11:59A Soviet freighter named the Turkestan was strafed in a harbor 40 miles south of Haifa.
12:06Technically, the Soviet Union was neutral, but American air crews had long suspected that Soviet freighters were carrying military supplies
12:14to the north.
12:15The Soviet Union demanded an apology.
12:18To protect his men from investigation, Colonel Jack Broughton immediately destroyed the gun camera film without seeing it.
12:26But within a week, the US apologized and Broughton and his two pilots were court-martialed.
12:34I was charged with four counts of conspiracy against the United States government, as were my two pilots.
12:40But I got them off and I got the case against me thrown out as the grossest miscarriage of military
12:46justice in history.
12:49This war was unlike anything the American military had ever experienced.
12:53The failure of US air power to incapacitate North Vietnam's overall war effort in the south remains one of the
13:01most controversial aspects of a failed American strategy.
13:05At the end of the day, you have to blame the politicians for the air war in the north, the
13:10bombing not being successful.
13:11They did not give the Air Force planners and the intelligence people the free hand to hit the key targets
13:17because of the risk of collateral damage.
13:20And that, I think, was a major failure.
13:23Bowing to military pressure, Johnson eventually ordered attacks on critical petroleum storage, electrical power generation, and transportation targets in Hanoi
13:34and Haiphong.
13:34But every air crew knew that flying conditions for going downtown were getting worse, not better.
13:46By early spring of 1968, the Johnson administration was facing several harsh realities concerning the air war over North Vietnam.
13:54The first was that the bombing zones around Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor had become wall-to-wall zones, the heaviest
14:03anti-aircraft defenses ever designed.
14:06The highest number of losses took place here, in an area known as Route Package 6, won six bombing sectors
14:14in Vietnam.
14:23In fighting to defend Haiphong, I'm proud to say that I was the one who shot down the first American
14:30airplane there.
14:31In total, I shot down 17 American planes, nine of them right in Haiphong City.
14:38Once, I shot down two planes, and we captured both pilots.
14:43I was overjoyed.
14:48The North used high-altitude surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs, to compel American aircraft to fly low, thereby bringing
14:56them in range of their anti-aircraft guns.
14:59Most of the planes shot down were lost to anti-aircraft artillery, or AAA.
15:04The mathematical odds against a pilot successfully finishing his tour were becoming greater day by day.
15:15The scariest thing was a surface-to-air missile, which you knew once one was launched.
15:20You basically watched it, made a couple maneuvers with your airplane, and if it was following your airplane, it was
15:25real obvious.
15:28There was usually a puff of smoke in a trail, and we had ECM gear that would point.
15:35It would give a tone, doodle, doodle, doodle.
15:38And if it locked onto you, it would go, doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle.
15:42And then it was a matter between you personally and that missile.
15:45And that was much scarier, even though it was statistically much less dangerous than AAA.
15:50It was much scarier because it was a lot more personal.
15:54It was brutal.
15:55It was brutal.
15:56It was brutal.
15:57It was layered.
15:58It had high-altitude, radar-controlled, big guns.
16:02Big stuff.
16:06The top layer of AAA contained 80-millimeter and 100-millimeter cannons that could reach up to 25,000 feet.
16:16Next came the 57-millimeter guns with ranges in the mid-altitudes.
16:21Below 5,000 feet was everything else but the kitchen sink.
16:26You could actually see the people on the ground in the rice paddy just laying on their backs,
16:30firing rifles and AK-47s at you.
16:34We figured even the kids were using slingshots against us.
16:38This multi-layered environment improved very much as the war advanced.
16:47There was always somebody on.
16:52We used all means necessary to cripple the American aircraft.
16:55For us to win the air war against the Americans, we turned Hanoi into one gigantic gun, ready to shoot
17:02the American aircraft at high or low altitude.
17:10Johnson had other problems.
17:12Numerous secret CIA briefings, now declassified, reported that the bombing in the North was not effective.
17:18Their conclusion, bitterly resisted by senior military chiefs, was that in spite of an estimated $600 million worth of damage
17:27to North Vietnam,
17:29the North retained the initiative, adjusting the level of combat in the South to their available manpower and munitions.
17:38There's no doubt at all that key targets in North Vietnam were destroyed by bombing missions by the U.S.
17:44Navy and the U.S. Air Force,
17:45and that there were some key successes there.
17:47The problem is that when you have a vast mobilized manpower, you may destroy a bridge during the day,
17:52but it gets put back up again overnight.
17:56North Vietnamese air defenses brought down over 900 American aircraft.
18:01Of the 801 POWs eventually accounted for by North Vietnam, over half were aviators shot down during rolling thunder.
18:11Scenes of wounded POWs were becoming propaganda trophies for the North and a domestic nightmare for Johnson.
18:20I'd get up and I'd basically just sort of address the possibilities of the day, one of which is I'd
18:24get killed,
18:25another one of which was that I'd make it back okay, and the third one was I'd end up as
18:28a prisoner of war in Hanoi.
18:30A SAM missile came out of nowhere.
18:32Fortunately, it didn't explode until just after the cockpit and actually took out the rear end of the airplane.
18:45The ejection is a rather abrupt event.
18:50I was in fact injured.
18:51I broke an arm, shoulder coming out of there, and then ultimately broke a leg flying through a tree,
18:56the only tree within probably 20 miles as well.
19:00But it's not one of those things you say, oh my goodness, yes, I better check my instruments.
19:06It's one of those things that, hey, this is going to be a long walk home.
19:11Conditions weren't much better for the Navy pilots on Yankee Station,
19:15the northern area for carrier operations in the South China Sea.
19:20Navy pilots flew 20% of all missions in Southeast Asia,
19:24but more than half of those missions were over North Vietnam.
19:28As bad as the anti-aircraft fire was, the North Vietnamese air defenses were not their main problem.
19:36Landing on the ship at night, most people dreaded that worse than getting shot at.
19:42The ship was bad enough in the daytime, but at night you were always low on fuel.
19:47The primary flight instrument in the Navy was the fuel gauge.
19:51The F-4 would burn 1,500 pounds a minute in full burner.
19:56We were always looking for a tanker or short on fuel.
20:03A series of dogfights between the F-4 Phantom jets and North Vietnamese MiGs
20:08drew attention to an alarming fact.
20:11The Phantom, part of America's air war against North Vietnam,
20:15was losing dogfights to MiG fighters at an alarming rate.
20:25The MiG-17 that we used was provided by the Russians.
20:31Compared to the American F-4 and F-105, it is inferior.
20:36The speed is much slower.
20:40But the Vietnamese people were good in finding the best avenues to combat the Americans.
20:47They took advantage of the weapons they had, and at the same time, compensated for the weaknesses.
20:57Navy and Air Force Phantom air crews were barely holding a two-to-one victory margin.
21:03This meant that for every two MiGs shot down in air-to-air combat,
21:07the supposed peasant North Vietnamese Air Force downed one Phantom and its two-man crew.
21:12Compared to American kill ratios of 10, 12, even 20 to 1 in World War II in Korea, this was
21:20a critical problem.
21:22When it came to combat, the North Vietnamese pilots often had a fighting spirit and a tactical knowledge
21:30which outweighed that of the Americans.
21:32Their aircraft didn't perform on paper as well as the F-4s or the F-105s that they were fighting
21:37against.
21:38And yet in combat, in gun-to-gun combat, for example, once the missiles had been disposed of,
21:43and in large formations, there was actually a very interesting advantage
21:48which the North Vietnamese seemed to press home.
21:52The MiG-17 and MiG-21 were menacing when flown by skilled pilots.
21:58Small and hard to see, even if the U.S. pilots did manage to detect them inbound,
22:03the MiGs could usually hit and run before the F-4s could respond.
22:12The strong point of the U.S. Air Force was that they had a great number of modern jet fighters,
22:16far more advanced compared to ours.
22:19But somehow the Americans could never figure out the strategy we used during this war.
22:25The majority of techniques we used we called guerrilla war.
22:32Even if Phantom crews could get a tail shot, their missiles didn't work most of the time.
22:37The Sparrow missile, for example, needed a 3,000-foot range to arm itself.
22:42Otherwise, the missile became an expensive, dumb flying stick.
22:48The failure rate of missiles over there was astronomical.
22:53Hanging up, not firing, not leaving the aircraft, not guiding, not detonating properly and so forth.
23:00The Air Force was real reluctant to do anything about it.
23:05The Navy got some fixes and their missiles were far more effective.
23:08Frankly, they came out looking real good compared to the Air Force on weapons and tactics.
23:15The bottom line was that Navy and Air Force Phantom crews had fired over 600 air-to-air missiles in
23:21some 360 engagements,
23:24but didn't know how to dogfight their fandoms against the quicker and more maneuverable MiGs.
23:33The MiG-17 we used was much smaller and less powerful compared to the American F-4 and F-105,
23:41but the maneuverability was better, particularly in tight turns.
23:46This made it easier to engage in hit-and-run attacks on the American aircraft.
23:54Rolling Thunder came to an end on the 31st of March, 1968,
23:59and a four-year bombing lull over Hanoi began.
24:03It was during this lull that one of the most classified operations of the entire war was undertaken.
24:09No one knew if it would succeed.
24:11The answer would come four years later in the skies over Hanoi.
24:21The air attack on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the largest bombing effort outside Vietnam during the war.
24:40Located in eastern Laos and Cambodia, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a series of North Vietnamese Army supply routes
24:48that the American Air Force had been bombing since 1964.
24:53The CIA and U.S. Special Forces had also been running small ground and air operations in eastern Laos and
25:00Cambodia for years,
25:01in a secret war that remains mostly classified.
25:13Laos was a killing ground,
25:14but stopping the NVA movement of men and material to the south had become an American exercise in futility.
25:27The thing that one has to realize about the Ho Chi Minh Trail is that it wasn't a single road.
25:33It was a road system and a path system.
25:37And in many cases, equipment was hand carried.
25:44The Ho Chi Minh Trail, had it been cut apart in the early part of the war,
25:48it wouldn't have won the war force, but it would have really crippled the enemy.
25:52And they wouldn't have been able to logistically sustain the number of large units they had in Vietnam.
25:57They would have had to go back to a basic guerrilla war rather than fighting in formations the size of
26:05regiments and divisions.
26:08North Vietnam had made a virtual colony out of eastern Laos and Cambodia.
26:13These regions were major staging areas to rest and re-equip their troops.
26:18The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the umbilical cord that fed into South Vietnam,
26:24providing replacements needed by the VC and NVA to sustain the war.
26:35If American ground troops had ever attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
26:39they could have destroyed our entire supply infrastructures,
26:43which were set up along the entire trail.
26:47When I met Dong Si Win, the overall commander for the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
26:52he shared these same concerns.
26:55If American ground troops attacked,
26:58our effort in moving supplies and troops to the south would have suffered greatly.
27:04However, for some reason, America chose not to attack on the ground.
27:18One difficulty for American air power was the terrain.
27:22Huge mountains, dense jungles and narrow valleys made targets difficult to locate.
27:28And despite an improvement in bombing effectiveness,
27:30North Vietnamese supplies to the south were increasing.
27:41It was very well camouflaged.
27:43In some places, it was no bigger than a bicycle could be pushed through,
27:49and they could put 400 to 500 pounds on a bicycle,
27:51and one man could push it, one woman could push it.
27:56These never-before-seen NVA films demonstrate that the journey to the south
28:01was an extremely long and dangerous one.
28:09Despite their success in keeping reinforcements moving south,
28:13the NVA endured harsh conditions.
28:19Their commitment was undeniable.
28:23You tried to survive the malaria, hangers, and bombardments and other things,
28:32but the thing that keeps you going on is something in here.
28:39Without that, I think it would be impossible to endure the whole
28:46Vietnam War.
28:49The flow of people carrying supplies on their backs was so constant
28:54and so well-concealed that it remained an insurmountable problem.
28:59Troop replacements traveled in small groups of 40 or less to avoid detection.
29:04Most movement happened at night.
29:09Our trucks were repeatedly attacked and bombed by U.S. C-130 aircraft,
29:14equipped with rockets or 20-millimeter artillery.
29:18No matter how many times we were attacked,
29:20we didn't let the enemy keep us from reaching our destination,
29:24even if some of us were killed.
29:30Circling the skies above Laos and Cambodia,
29:33reconnaissance aircraft scanned the ground using high-resolution photographs
29:37and radar for evidence of enemy movement.
29:44I remember, many times, the U.S. B-52s chased us and bombed us.
29:51They also tried to attack our stored-up equipment and supplies.
29:56B-52s chased us everywhere we went.
30:01Every time the convoy went out,
30:04the U.S. airplanes followed us.
30:10The B-52s were used extensively throughout the war
30:14to carpet bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail over widespread areas.
30:19The B-52 was one of the weapons the NVA and VC feared most.
30:26I don't think people can use words to describe the B-52 raid.
30:32It's the most horrible thing in the world.
30:36With a B-52, you never know when it would come.
30:41Sometimes it's during the night, and you just bang!
30:49And smoke and fires and, you know, dust and everything,
30:54and then you just wouldn't see anything.
31:03And when the smoke cleared, you got up, you shouted,
31:07you couldn't hear your own voice.
31:10And then you grop around for your friends
31:13and fight, you know, who survived and who had gone.
31:19And we were under B-52 many, many times,
31:23and I lost many friends in Laos because of the B-52.
31:32In addition to reconnaissance,
31:34planes dropped special sensors along suspected infiltration routes.
31:39These devices transmitted their data
31:41to airborne relay teams flying in the area.
31:44The secret devices would impale themselves on tree branches
31:48or sink into ground cover.
31:51They could pick up voices, detect seismic vibrations,
31:54sense heat, and identify electrochemical residue.
31:58This electronic surveillance was called Operation Igloo White.
32:05The Vietnamese knew very well about it.
32:08The Vietnamese knew very well about it.
32:09So our engineers remove all these kind of what we call tropical trees
32:15and plant them in certain places.
32:19And they ignite the battery every night, you know.
32:23And they hang trees and, you know, so that they bang in the wind.
32:31And I guess the American lost hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, you know,
32:37in a place where they shouldn't be.
32:44Although the trail was vital for bringing troop reinforcements and weapons to the south,
32:49the NVA and BC enjoyed more popular support in the southern countryside
32:54than many Americans suspected.
32:56The Ho Chi Minh Trail is now estimated to have provided only 10% or less
33:02of the supplies needed by the communist forces in the south.
33:08They didn't need a lot to come down the trail.
33:11They needed the men and they needed the sophisticated technology
33:14that the Russians and the Chinese were supplying.
33:16That they couldn't get in South Vietnam.
33:18They could get the rest.
33:20While American bombing definitely disrupted the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
33:26the NVA increased its efforts to maintain the net flow of material to South Vietnam.
33:33Air power alone could not stop the communists from reinforcing the south.
33:44In May 1972, American planes were again flying over Hanoi.
33:51The U.S. military was hoping its success in aerial dogfights with MiGs would vastly improve from four years earlier,
33:58when the Phantom had struggled against a smaller but well-trained North Vietnamese Air Force.
34:06I know that the American aircraft were very strong and that their technology was very advanced,
34:12but we still learned to cope with it and we figured out a better way to fight them.
34:18As early as 1968, the North Vietnamese Air Force had become a serious threat.
34:26The U.S. Air Force, for whatever reason, never changed its fighter training.
34:32But the Navy was concerned.
34:34The threat of the rising air-to-air MiG capability exposed the U.S. fleet to a possible air attack.
34:42We all thought in the 50s that the day of the manned gun fighter was over,
34:47that there would be long-range missile engagements,
34:49and there wouldn't be fighter aircraft involved in combats.
34:53The Vietnamese didn't have the luxury of that technology.
34:55They had to have aircraft with limited air-to-air missiles,
34:58but they relied upon cannon armament.
35:01That was anyway the Russian and Chinese philosophy.
35:05Something had to be done.
35:07The solution was the creation of Top Gun,
35:09a highly classified Navy fighter weapons school which continues in operation today.
35:15Top Gun had one sole purpose,
35:18to give Navy F-4 pilots advanced training on how to fight and destroy Soviet-made aircraft.
35:25The idea behind Top Gun is that you would take pilots such as F-8 pilots and A-4 pilots,
35:32and you'd have them fly these more maneuverable aircraft against the F-4s.
35:38And you would teach the F-4 pilots how to dogfight.
35:43And it worked.
35:45On the 10th of May, 1972,
35:47Naval aviators Randy Cunningham and Willie Driscoll proved the value of Top Gun.
35:53Their battlefield this day was 20,000 feet over Hanoi,
35:57and MiGs were out in force,
35:59outnumbering the Phantoms almost three to one.
36:04Cunningham and Driscoll found themselves in the largest air-to-air battle of the war.
36:10As I reversed like this,
36:12a MiG-17 tracers were coming by my cockpit.
36:15I went ahead and broke into him, he overshot.
36:18His wingman went pure vertical like this.
36:20And the exact thought that went through my mind,
36:23his nose is high, he can't get to me before I get to him.
36:26So I just rolled underneath like this as he's overshooting,
36:30reverse, squeeze the trigger, he blew up that quick.
36:34In a matter of seconds,
36:36Cunningham and Driscoll had scored their first MiG kill of the day,
36:40and their third of the war.
36:42In the next 15 minutes, they would live a lifetime.
36:47We ended up in combat spread again.
36:50We had all kinds of gas, all kinds of weapons.
36:52We did a cross turn, went back up in the vertical,
36:55and looked back behind us toward the target.
36:57There were eight MiG-17s in the defensive wheel.
37:00Commander Dwight Tim had a MiG-17 here,
37:03he had a MiG-21 here, and a MiG-17 here.
37:06Well, as I came through that circle,
37:08trying to knock the MiGs off of his tail,
37:11the other MiGs came around behind me.
37:13So I had four MiG-17s behind me.
37:17So I finally got the XO to reverse,
37:20the MiG turned after him.
37:22If you look like this, as he goes underneath like this,
37:24the MiG reverses his tail, and I'm right here.
37:27I blew up this MiG.
37:30With two MiGs shot down in less than 15 minutes,
37:34Cunningham and Driscoll turned back
37:35toward their aircraft carrier and safety.
37:39They now had four MiG kills to their credit,
37:41more than any other Navy crew.
37:44We decided just to get out of Dodge at that time,
37:48hauling toward the Gulf of Tonkin.
37:49You can see the water up ahead of us heading east,
37:52and that's where I saw a single MiG coming at me.
37:55My exact comment to Willie,
37:57Watch this, Willie.
37:58I'm going to scare the blank out of this Gomer.
38:02I pressed him right down the snot locker like this,
38:04and all of a sudden his wing roots lit up.
38:07And it surprised me.
38:09So I went pure vertical, totally expecting the Gomer
38:12to keep running.
38:14As I came back over the side like this
38:17and looked in the vertical over my ejection seat,
38:19straining to look behind me,
38:21I looked up and I saw a little set of Gomer goggles.
38:24Little Gomer scarf.
38:26And we were going canopy to canopy.
38:30Willie came up one time and says,
38:32Duke, maybe we better let this guy go.
38:34And I said, Willie, no.
38:37And I remember the anger.
38:39I remember just gritting my teeth and going,
38:42and thinking, pulling.
38:43And I would have rammed him if I had to.
38:46Your emotions go from fear when a guy is shooting at you
38:49to fangs out anger where you will kill anything that moves.
38:54The American pilots were in a fight to the death
38:57with an enemy as skilled as they were.
38:59Later, the North Vietnamese pilot
39:01was tentatively identified as a mythological Colonel Toom,
39:06nicknamed by respectful American pilots
39:09for his alleged 13 American kills.
39:11But neither Colonel Toom's identity or, indeed,
39:15his actual existence has ever been confirmed.
39:24Whoever he was, he was matching Cunningham's every move.
39:37He came over the top like this, and he shot out here ahead of me.
39:41I broke to get out of his tracers, unloaded, went down,
39:45and trapped him at my 6 o'clock, which is the wrong place to be.
39:49Unloaded the airplane, got 500 knots, working back to the horizon,
39:52and then went pure vertical, but four 5Gs, forced the overshoot here,
39:56with him down below me.
39:59Stood on full rudder, full right stick,
40:02which causes the airplane to kind of flow around like this and come around.
40:06And I remember thinking at this position,
40:08Gomer, you just died.
40:10So I'm starting to bring my weapon system on to bear.
40:12He waits till my nose is committed, and then he put out his Benson & Hedges,
40:16broke into me, forced the overshoot, left rudder, left stick, rolled.
40:22And this is called a rolling scissors.
40:25As they fought for their lives, Cunningham and Driscoll
40:28were using the tactics developed and perfected at the Top Gun School.
40:33Going vertical, as it was called, was one of the essential tactics taught at Top Gun.
40:38It avoided a turning contest with a smaller and quicker MIG
40:42while maximizing the F-4's speed and power.
40:47Each time the Phantom went vertical, the MIG would match it, move for move.
40:51Three times they went into a vertical rolling scissors,
40:54but neither could gain an advantage.
40:56Running low on gas, Cunningham knew that if they lost altitude and speed,
41:00the MIG would gain the advantage.
41:04This time, for some reason, I think every time I'd out-zoomed him
41:08in this vertical pull, he pulled his nose up first,
41:12nice and easy, trying to save the G in energy.
41:15Well, when he pulled his nose and looked at a place like this,
41:17I came back to idle, put out the speed brakes, and dropped my flaps.
41:22And I just really put on the G here to end up sliding behind him.
41:26But now I'd misjudged, and I ended up about 600, 700 feet behind him.
41:30I mean, I'm looking right up from here to the wall at him.
41:32I can't shoot him with a Sidewinder missile. It's in mid-range.
41:35At those air speeds, he has got the advantage even though he's out in front.
41:40So I tried to disengage once I saw my mistake,
41:43stood on the rudder like this, trying to keep the F-4 from departing.
41:46And as I rolled this direction, his airplane went like this and departed.
41:50By expecting him to really totally pull back in and try and shoot me.
41:53But instead, he started running.
41:56An average dogfight is over in less than 120 seconds.
42:01A pilot's lucky if he gets two, maybe three chances to destroy the enemy.
42:06Why the MiGs suddenly broke away is unknown.
42:09But it was the opening Cunningham needed.
42:14So I reversed, used this rudder, unloaded the airplane, got a Sidewinder tone, shot, and a little piece came off
42:21the airplane.
42:22When I pulled off of him, the relief that came from it, it's almost like being reborn.
42:32Any doubts about the value of Top Gun training had been answered.
42:36But in that instant when the Vietnamese plane was destroyed and its mystery pilot killed, a new question arose.
42:45The key question, though, about the air war has always been whether or not these were just Vietnamese pilots,
42:52whether they'd been trained in China or North Korea or in Russia,
42:56whether in combat other people flew with them.
42:58And there have been accusations that Russian pilots, that Chinese pilots, that North Korean pilots flew.
43:06And Cuban, you left Cuban.
43:07There were a lot of brown, blue-eyed individuals involved in the defense of North Vietnam.
43:15To think that there was nobody but North Vietnamese up there is a fallacy.
43:25The Vietnamese people have a lot of respect and deep appreciation for those comrades who tried to help us prepare
43:34for this war.
43:36Yet the Vietnamese people did not borrow blood from any communist countries.
43:51There was a Korean team of pilots that volunteered.
43:54But there was no Chinese, Russian, no Cuban troops or pilots flying for us during that time.
44:01There were no Chinese, Russian or Cuban pilots in this war.
44:12But questions linger and the debate continues.
44:16Like the questions surrounding the existence of Colonel Toom, the truth remains a secret of war.
44:36After a four-year hiatus, the bombing of North Vietnam resumed.
44:41The North invaded South Vietnam with tanks and conventional forces in the Easter invasion of 1972.
44:49President Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, ordered new bombing raids, codenamed Linebacker.
45:00Linebacker was the final air campaign against North Vietnam.
45:04Its goal was to stop the invasion of South Vietnam by destroying the North Vietnamese Army's supply lines and by
45:11bombing Hanoi.
45:15There is no doubt in my mind that the American rhetoric that came out of the White House at the
45:20time from President Nixon's office,
45:23that they managed to bomb the Vietnamese back to the table in Paris for peace talks, actually has some merit.
45:31Linebacker 2, the famous Christmas bombing lasted approximately 11 days in December 1972 and was the first time in the
45:40war that B-52s were used to attack targets in Hanoi and Haiphong.
45:45It was President Nixon's response to the diplomatic intransigence of the North Vietnamese, whom he suspected of dragging their feet
45:53at the Paris peace conference.
45:59During the first three nights the bombers attacked, they flew in formations of three, using the same altitudes and ground
46:06tracks in evenly spaced intervals.
46:14On the first night, three B-52s were lost, and on the third night, a staggering six planes went down
46:21in a nine-hour period.
46:29At one o'clock in the morning, there was a huge fire in the sky, fire and missiles in the
46:37sky.
46:40Many people evacuated. My parents hid inside a tunnel.
46:46The sky was burning. People were running. Everything was in chaos and bang!
46:53The earth was shaking back and forth.
47:01Then the earth was transformed.
47:04The water was splashing. The whole sky was fire.
47:16The Americans had a tactic of maneuvering their aircraft in order to avoid or dodge direct hits from our firepower
47:24and flak.
47:25So when this happened, right away we figured out a new way to use the SAM-2, and we shot
47:30the pilots down.
47:31On the night of December 18, 1972, in the city of Hanoi, we shot down three B-52 airplanes in
47:40the same spot.
47:44A story never widely publicized before reveals that frustration with the war was reaching deep into the American Air Force.
47:55Returning air crews from the raids staged a protest at their base at Guam over the serious losses and predictable
48:02tactics.
48:04The Air Force leadership quietly ordered a Christmas Day stand-down.
48:11The Vietnamese immediately boasted that their air defenses had killed nine bombers and that the Americans couldn't endure the losses.
48:21Some historians claim that there was a mutiny or mutinous behavior, an unwillingness to fly any more missions under these
48:32conditions, under these strategies.
48:34I wouldn't define it as a mutiny. I would define it as a great amount of frustration expressed.
48:42On a single day, the 26th of December 1972, the air war over North Vietnam was decided.
48:50120 B-52s and an additional hundred other bombers hit a variety of targets in Hanoi, all within 15 minutes.
48:59Two B-52s went down that day, but the North Vietnamese air defense system was shattered.
49:08The effects of the B-52 strikes, combined attacks of the fighters and the bombers, when President Nixon turned everybody
49:16loose in 1972, were very, very effective.
49:19And they accomplished, in a matter of days and weeks, what was not accomplished in a seven-year time period.
49:30North Vietnam was virtually defenseless against further B-52 attacks, and Hanoi quickly proposed a resumption of peace talks in
49:38Paris on the 8th of January.
49:41The Americans finally understood that the North reacted only to overwhelming force.
49:49This was a demonstration of the capabilities of long-range air attacks that the United States could put in, and
49:56it could have put them in to any target in that area.
50:00And there's no doubt that there was not a stomach for the massive aerial blitz of North Vietnam by the
50:06North Vietnamese themselves, so Hanoi didn't want that to happen.
50:10The linebacker strikes were effective, but they came too late to offset the rising tide of American public opposition to
50:18the war.
50:20The North ultimately understood that the Americans could not sustain the political will necessary to win.
50:27In the end, although American air power played a decisive role in the resumption of the Paris peace talks, it
50:34could not overcome a 2,000-year Vietnamese history of resistance to one foreign enemy or another.
50:51We'll see you soon.
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