From The Jaws Of Defeat | Part 11

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Go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. ♪ WayFair every style every home ♪ In the Tagalog language used throughout the southern half of the northernmost Philippine island of Luzon, it's known simply as "Ittuck." If you encountered it on the hip of a Filipino, you wouldn't think too much about it. It looks like a long flat stick as if you tucked a wide ruler into a spell. Now if you approached this unknown resident of the thick rainforest in southern Luzon, and this would be a serious mistake on your part, by the way, you might notice that what appeared to be a single stick was in fact composed of two parts, the upper sixth of it carved into a wooden handle. And if for some reason you approached the stranger even closer, you would receive probably the last big surprise of your life. The Filipino's hand would move to that handle, and the last thing you would see is a flash of edge metal in the doppled sunlight under the dense jungle canopy. This is your first and last meeting with the "Ittuck." It's sometimes referred to as the Filipino machete, but that does the long, gracefully curved, wicked looking "Ittuck" blade a disservice. The "Ittuck" looks like a machete that's been put on a low-carb, high-protein diet for 10 years, while training for a mixed martial arts career. It is a fast, deadly weapon, and one of the reasons it is so priced throughout the Philippines is that unless it is unsheathed, the "Ittuck" doesn't look like a weapon at all. Right up until the moment it cuts you to pieces, it's really quite innocuous looking. It just looks like a stick. In Yucano, it's known as "Banenning." In the Sibwano language, it's called "Sun-Dang" and in "Hilliganon," it's known as "Binangong." The English name for this sharp, light, and deadly knife is "Bolo." Today in the world of freedom, the proudest post is "Echpin" I'm dealing with. The "I'm" weapon has defended the cross-the-line. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. Well, it is, of course, the "Ittuck" system of international control, and can form a "You and I" have a rendezvous with their "Never Give It." Never, never, never. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. Sharp, light, and deadly were perhaps the three adjectives least likely to be attached to the aircraft that America had on hand to fight in the skies over Vietnam. The names given to them by their own air crews give you a better feel for them. Among the bombers and transports, you would refer to the lumbering "Ungainly 8-Engine B-52" as the "Buff" for the big ugly fat f***er. The enormous C5 galaxy was known simply as "Fred." That's short for fantastic ridiculous economic disaster. On a good day, the C141 star lifter was called the "Star Lizard" on a bad day. Its crews would call it the "T-tailed Mountain Magnet." The KC-135 aerial refueling tanker was known either as the "Silver Sound" or "Just Glob." That's ground-loving old b***ered. And the ubiquitous C-130 Hercules would be called either the "Bleed Air Blimp" in reference to its turbo prop engines or simply as "fat Albert" according to Taste. In the Navy, the 2-seat Grumman A6 intruder was called the "Dog Ship" as in something you might want to avoid stepping in. Its four-person electronic warfare version was called "Double Ugly." The A7 Corsair Attack aircraft was known as "Slough." Short little ugly fella or sometimes just the "Manager." And the three naval aviators aboard the carrier-based A3D Sky Warrior, Light Bomber, said that the A3D designation stood for "All Three Dead." The large, slow but powerful twin-rooted CH-47 Chinook helicopter was called the "S***" hook as it lumbered into the battle space. But the real winners belonged to the Air Force fighter and fighter bombers aircraft officially called "Fantum" in the Thunder Chief. Predacessors of the upcoming top-notch, top-gun replacement jet, the end product of the TFX program known as the F-111. Pintlets referred to the "inormous, gunless, useless" F-11 as the flying "edzel." The primary fighter bomber of the Vietnam War, the F-105 Thunder Chief was called the "led sled" or more often just the "thud." And if several names reserved for the McDonald Douglas F-4D Phantom 2 the workhorse of the Vietnam War, my favorite by far, was coined as a result of its quirky, sometimes fatal aerodynamic qualities and the two general electric J-79 jet engines, which though powerful, produced long black smoke trails at mid-power settings and which served as unmissable, long black markers pointing enemy pilots directly to the vulnerable tail of the jet. The first Navy pilot to receive these early F-4 Phantoms called the jet, the "great smoking thunderhog." Now look, I love the F-4. I don't know a single pilot who doesn't love the F-4, but America produced the best fighter aircraft World War II, the fast agile and well-armed P-51 Mustang. It produced the best fighter of the Korean War, the fast agile and well-armed F-86 Sabre. It would go on to produce the best fighters of the post Vietnam era, the fast agile and well-armed F-15 Eagle, and the fast agile and well-armed F-22 Raptor. The Phantom was fast, agile, not so much. At higher altitudes, the enemy migs could outturn it, especially the new, highly lethal Soviet MIG-21. The Phantom had originally been designed for the Navy, and not as a fighter, but as an interceptor, it was designed to fly in a straight line, fast as hell, and launch missiles BVR, beyond visual range, at big, fat, slow, Soviet bombers headed inbound to the carriers. But McNamara's coscutters had decreed that the Air Force accept the Navy interceptor as their own air superiority fighter until the new TFX could arrive. And when it did, the massive swing-wing F-111, the flying edgel, was even worse, it was much, much worse. Nor could you call the early F-4's heavily armed. Yes, they could be configured to carry an impressive array of AIM-7 and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles, but the longer range radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow had a kill rate of 8 percent, that's 8 percent of the missiles launched actually hit their target and worse than that. President Johnson's rules of engagement declared that US pilots had to visually identify their targets before firing, rendering those missiles nearly useless. The shorter range, heat-seeking AIM-9's side-winder was marginally better with a PK of about 15 percent, but the combination of unreliable missiles and rules of engagement that took away their one advantage that the Americans had, namely range. Well, that forced the phantoms into close-in dogfights with the North Vietnamese, MIG-19s, and MIG-21s, and both of those swift, agile enemy aircraft had the one thing that American pilots badly needed and simply did not have, because McNamara's Defense Department had to create them a thing of the past. The MIGs had guns. There were a few other things American pilots were missing as 1966 came to a close. One of those was training. Wing commanders, veteran gunslingers who'd learned their deadly trade against the German Luftwaffe pilots over Europe and then shredding the North Korean MIG-15s over Korea were shocked to discover that the young fighter pilots being sent to them in Southeast Asia had essentially no air-to-air combat training at all, none, zero. They'd been trained on how to locate and track distant targets on radar and and then pass that targeting data to their missiles in order to acquire the target, then they'd pull the trigger and that was about it. Air combat maneuvering like guns were declared obsolete by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, but the single greatest defect the Americans had to face was lack of leadership. When Johnson and McNamara had launched Operation Rolling Thunder in 1966, they had ordered the heavily-laden F-105 thunder chiefs, the lead sleds, the thuds, to fly the same routes to the same targets at the same time of day and at the same altitudes, using the same call signs and radio frequencies day after day mission after mission. The North Vietnamese to their astonishment and delight massed their surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery along these routes and swatted down the F-105s by the scores in July of 1966, communist Sam's anti-aircraft artillery and make fighter patrol shut down 43 American aircraft in a single month. Now the technicians managing the war effort because clearly no one was actually leading it, then began equipping the thuds with the brand new QRC-160 jamming pod. The purge powerful radar jammers on these electronic countermeasure devices blinded the Soviet Sam's employed by the North Vietnamese virtually ending them as a threat at least for the time being. But there were not enough of these pods to go around, not enough for both the F-105 bombers and their F-4 fighter Escort so. They mounted the ECM devices on the thuds and pulled the escorting phantoms back out of harm's way. Now the Mi-19s that the Americans had faced so far in the Vietnam War were deadly enough, they were the direct descendant of the Mi-15s that shocked the living hell out of some of these same pilots a decade and a half earlier over Korea. But it was the new agile and deadly Mi-21 that was eating the thuds alive. These sleek supersonic arrowheads that appeared in the skies of the Vietnam that same year fresh from the holds of Soviet freighters. And the Mi-21 not only had a gun, that was a 23mm cannon actually, it also carried heat seeking missiles similar to the American sidewinders. True, the North Vietnamese didn't have many of these latest Soviet fighters that were 16 of them to be precise, but by the end of 1966, the ongoing seemingly insane U.S. policy of sending in F-105s at the same heading at the same altitude on the same radio frequencies and all at the same time of day, day after day, made the endless stream of sluggish, vulnerable and unescorted thuds, a target that was simply irresistible. They put nearly all of their precious new Mi-21s along that route and day after day simply knocked the American fighter bombers out of the sky. An America that fought a war like this would not be able to liberate the world from the threat of communism, an America that fought like this would not be able to defend South Vietnam. An America that fought like this, confused, naive, hesitant, and insecure, was going to lose the Cold War. The suck had taken hold of Western thought and was well entrenched in both the air and on the ground by the end of 1966, before America would be able to liberate anyone, as it had in World War II when its heart was fully in it, would require the appearance of men who would be able to liberate America from itself. American pilots needed real leadership, and they were about to get it. You know why I'm so proud to talk to you about Venturo watches? Well, because Venturo is a high quality, good looking, and precise timepiece, and I am a high quality, good looking, and precise internet celebrity. If you're listening to this, it's because you're a history buff, and how can you be a history buff if you don't know what time it is. 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When you walk down to the flight line on the morning of January 2, 1967, Robin O'olves was so quintessentially alpha that John Wayne and Tom Selec would have fainted dead away if he so much is glanced in their general direction. Olds was the icon, the "err" fighter pilot, lantern jaw, piercing eyes, squared shoulders, and a thick mustache with just enough handlebar curl at the ends to be non-regulation. Two years earlier, he'd call this his bulletproof mustache. He later referred to it as a middle finger to the Pentagon brass that were sending American pilots out to die on course and on schedule day after day. The men under his command loved it. After two years of the handlebar middle finger, however, Air Force Chief of Staff General John McConnell decided that he did not love it, sticking his finger under the nose of the fighter pilot and barking to him, take it off! But in 1968, as a newly promoted Brigadier General and new Commodant of the Air Force Academy, this American liberator stepped into Mitchell Hall for the first time and looked out at the rows and rows of cadets standing at attention. They were all wearing fake moustaches. I stared fiercely into the eyes of several cadets he wrote in his posthumously published memoir called "Fighter Pilot." These guys were already my kids. He'd been a kid himself back in World War II, just a kid with a goofy grin and baby fat still on his face. But on August 23rd, 1944, then Captain Robin Olts was flying an escort mission over Germany. He was commanding a flight of four P-38 lightings, which like the Phantom were fast but not especially nimble. On the left side of the formation, Olts saw a flight of light, agile, BF-109, Miseschermit fighters, 50 of them. He immediately turned into them and climbed to engage. Now the second element, two of his four aircraft, were not able to keep up with Olts in the climb, but that didn't seem to slow him down any. He and his wingman dropped their external fuel tanks as the two American P-38 dove into the gaggle of 50 German fighters from above and behind. Olts had selected his first target and just as he was about to open fire, both engines on his P-38 called the Fortail Devil by the German and the Japanese pilots that had to face it. Suddenly quit. He went out that in the excitement Olts had forgotten to switch from the now-gettisent external tanks to the internal ones. Feathered the props, continued his pass, shot a German fighter to pieces, then continued to dive through the now-matis hornets enemy fighters long enough, from to switches fuel tanks selected to internal and restart his engines. And then he climbed back into the fight. He got a second one on nine before the German flight scattered into Surrey and a third one on the way back home to base. The two victories already to his credit, the 22-year-old Captain Olts landed as the first ace of the 479th Fighter Group. His P-38, which was named SCAT-2, had picked up some bullet holes and lost a side panel of his canopy, Olts claimed to be the only man in history to shoot down an enemy fighter plane while flying a glider. A month later, the 479th got brand new P-51 Mustangs, arguably the best fighter of the war. October 6, 1944, Olts managed to shoot down a fuck Wolf 190, the only other serious claimant to that title, in an epic dogfight with his new Mustang named SCAT-4, a fight that very nearly cost him his life when his own wingman nearly shot him down by accident. He had six kills when he went home at the end of his first combat tour in November and returned to the United States. But two months later, he was back over Germany. He got three more. On April 7, Olts was escorting a flight of B-24 liberators in his current Mustang, which he'd called SCAT-6. When the encounter at the Sonderkommando Elba, a Luftwaffe squadron that in the final weeks of the war had become so desperate that their pilot strategy was to simply ram the American bombers in midair. A pair of jet-powered ME-262s appeared out of nowhere, Olts turned on them and severely damaged one of them before returning to the bomber stream. When a BF-109 Sonderkommando aircraft started to dive toward the lumbering B-24s, Olts followed it down and shot at the pieces before it was able to ram the liberators each one of which carried a crew of 11 men. On April 16, he let a raid against a German airfield and destroyed six enemy fighters on the ground. Hit by a flag on the way out, Olts discovered that one of his flaps had been shot clean away. Now the Mustang liked to land at around 110 miles an hour, but with the wing damage he had sustained, Olts discovered that anything below 175 and SCAT-6 would just roll hard right and go inford it. Now he would later write, "What to do?" We all out seemed the logical response, but here's where sentiment got in the way of reason. That airplane had taken me through a lot and I was damned if I was just going to give up on her. Why the bird and I survived the corining, bouncing, and juttering ride down the length of the field, I guess I'll never know. When the war in Europe ended two weeks later, Robin Olts had achieved field grade rank and been given command of his own squadron. He'd been awarded the Silver Star, he shot 13 German planes out of the sky and destroyed 11 more on the ground. He was the only pilot in history to make ace that'd get at least five kills in both the P-38 and the P-51. He was 22 years old. Promotion and a series of desk jobs had kept him out of Korea, so we'll never know what the superb F-86 saber would have accomplished in the hands of Robin Olts. This heartbreak had nearly forced him out of the United States Air Force completely. A few years before the fighting in Korea had broken out, Olts had gotten married to a movie star and pin up knockout needless to say, his wife Ella Reigns had appeared in several films co-starring with relative man babies like Bert Lancaster and John Wayne. Growing ever more tired of working in the Pentagon, Olts seemed destined for a career as a defense industry consultant. on September 1st. 30th 1966, Colonel Olds was given command of the 8th tactical fighter wing in Vietnam, a demoralized, downhearted group of fighter pilots whose previous commander had flown a total of 12 missions in the previous 10 months of combat. Olds immediately placed himself on the flight roster, scheduling himself as a rookie, and following the lead of pilots who were far, far less experienced than he was. He challenged them to train him properly because they were about to get down to serious business. For three months, Olds took his under trained and under motivated men out on mission after mission. The objectives never changed. There were two absolutely irreplaceable qualities that he needed to instill, aggressiveness and teamwork. But Olds didn't do all of the teaching. The old dog was capable of learning some new tricks himself. One of his young pilots pulled a stunt that left Olds' jaw on the floor of the F-Force cockpit. Everyone knew that unless they were right down on the deck, the F-Force could never outturn the big 21, but what else could you do? On one of Olds' training missions, Captain Everett Raspberry pulled out a trick he had learned back at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. One of the few Vietnam-era pilots with any training in air-to-air combat, Razz, have been told how to do the exact opposite of what instinct and physics burns into every fighter pilot. He kicked an opposite rudder and then did a barrel roll away from the enemy jet. As he came out of the roll, he found himself below and behind his opponent the perfect missile shot. Olds immediately worked the Raspberry roll into their daily training. By the first day of 1967, his men were ready, but the weather wasn't, but the next morning. January 2, 1967, as Robin Olds walked out to a battered F-Forcey Phantom named SCAT-27. He turned to the formerly depressed and humiliated pilots that he had honed into a deadly, supersonic killing machine and said, "All right, you wolf pack, let's go get 'em." So how long are we going to be here? Let me think here. 30 days, half September, April June and November. All the rest have 31, except for this month, which has 8,000. Look, if you're going to be stuck at home and you're going to get something once a month, you might as well get something that's awesome. Don't you think? 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So if you want something to keep your spirits up during this troubling time, which will be over soon enough, go right ahead and get going, you can get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code cold at checkout. That's boxofawesome.com code cold for 20% off your first box. Now it seems pretty obvious that the key to any ambush is to remain undetected until the trap is sprung. This is a problem when the side staging the ambush is flying massive jet fighters in a line that might be 100 miles long, but an ambush, specifically an ambush of the new and deadly North Vietnamese MiG-21s, was exactly what Robin Old's had in mind. There'd be no hiding the fact that the North Vietnamese radar would show American jets in the air and the absolute genius of the Old's plan was that he was 100% counting on this to happen. The North Vietnamese aces, like their political leadership, were savvy enough to never go toe-to-toe with American fighters. Their fleet of 16 MiG-21s were far too precious for that kind of attrition warfare. But given the Johnson administration's rules of engagement, Robin Old's wolf pack was not allowed to go after them where they were most vulnerable at their air bases. That meant they would have to lure them up in the air and that meant deception. Old's knew that by now the communists were expecting to see the aerial equivalent of nothing but a bunch of old, slow, fat men carrying perhaps a short stick as their only defense. But once they were up there, once it was too late, the MiG-21s would discover not slow, fat F-105-thud bombers armed with sticks waiting for them would be a wolf pack of F-4 phantoms and what they were carrying only looked like sticks from a distance. Up close once it was too late, they'd reach for the handles and draw a long, curved, wicked, and deadly blade, and that is how Operation Bolo would work. It would be an ambush lying in plain sight. Bolo would either succeed or fail on two counts. The obvious one would be the performance of this new wolf pack if they could indeed manage to get the enemy migs to come up and fight in the first place. Getting them to take the bait was the second and far harder part of the operation, Bolo would require brains and imagination as much as guts and skill. It was actually a beautiful and elegantly simple plan. The North Vietnamese radar operators would see what they'd seen so many times before, seven flights of F-105-thud's ingressing at five-minute intervals. They'd see them come in at the same time and at the same altitude and on the same bearing as they had so many times before. They would see the radar blips fly in the same low air speed and make the same sluggish turns. They would hear the Americans making the same calls on the same radio frequencies and most of all. They would easily detect the scarce QRC-160 jamming pods that had protected the thuds from surface-to-air missiles. It would look like just another day of shooting fish in a barrel. But it wasn't. Operation Bolo was a masterpiece of deception. Olds had assigned four juniors officers who'd hammered out the details, but shortly after ticking over command of the eighth, olds recruited an old friend from his days in the Pentagon as his new operations officer. That man was Daniel James Jr. But everybody called him Chappy and Chappy James would go on to become the first black American in history to wear the four stars of a full general in the US Armed Forces. Robin Olds and Chappy James got so much done so quickly that people started referring to them as black man and Robin, working long into the night they decided that the only way to skin the elusive MIG-21 was to use the Bolo. And so on that morning of January 2, 1967, seven flights of four jets each took off from the airfields that housed the long-suffering thuds. They climbed slowly. They turned sluggishly as appalling their enormous bomb loads down the same rolling thunder alleyway that was littered with the wreckage of the scores of the thuds that had flown this exact same route before. They activated their jamming pods and spaced at five minute intervals, the radar blips on the North Vietnamese screens proceeded on course, on time, and at altitude just as they always had. Now, it turns out that day there was a solid cloud deck overhead as the grinning North Vietnamese aces walked out to their shiny new MIG-21s. They lit their afterburners and followed the radar vectors to the line of incoming thuds and as they erupted out of the thick cloud deck, most of them didn't even have time to be surprised because the first wave of four American jets were not heavily laden-led sleds at all. They were F-4 phantoms, every one of them, and they were not hauling heavy steel bombs but rather bristling with every air-to-air missile that the jets could carry. They also carried the jamming pods to complete the deception. These weren't flying sticks at all, these were deadly steel blades of the unsheathed bullows wielded by a determined, well-trained, brilliantly-led and bloody-minded wolfpack, hungry for a great deal of payback. Oh, and one other thing, on old insistence, there were no other American planes in the sky at this time, and so once, just once, this liberator had managed to convince Johnson, McNamara, the Pentagon and all the rest of them to let him use the missiles he carried without the restrictions of the normal rules of engagement. Today, at least, the missiles would be used as originally intended to kill migs. Each of the seven flights of four phantoms, wolves in sheep's clothing, had been given the standard call sign based on American automobiles, olds, forward, rambler, Lincoln, tempest, plymouth, and uh, bespuh. Olds flight, conveniently led by Robin Olds, was the first on the scene. Three MIG-21s had been skillfully vectored to emerge from the clouds right behind what the North Vietnamese had assumed were F-105 fighter bombers. The wolfpack immediately dropped their external fuel tanks, and I'm fairly sure that Colonel Olds remembered to do what Captain Olds had not done 21 years earlier and switched to his internal tanks before he let them go. Then they lit their afterburners and turned toward the MIG-21s. Olds 2 piloted by Lieutenant Ralph Wetterhan, one of the four junior officers that had helped plan the mission, coolly rolled in behind one of the communist spiders in a moment later, a notoriously unreliable radar guided AI I am seven sparrow missiles slid off the rail and flew right into the MIG-21. Splash one. SCAT-27 meanwhile was hot on the tail of a second enemy jet. Olds fired three missiles at the bandit, two of them immediately lost lock and the third one never even came off the rail. This was turning into a real fur ball now. Every jet was engaged and every pilot was fighting for his life. Olds caught sight of a MIG-21 at his 11 o'clock. The enemy jet was pulling hard to the left and trying to get back down into the clouds. Olds knew he couldn't outturn the agile MIG so instead of trying to follow him, Olds immediately executed a raspberry roll up and to the right. Halfway through the roll he was inverted above and behind the enemy jet. He continued to time his roll, waiting for the enemy pilot to come out of his hard left break and as he came out of his barrel roll. The 27 was below and behind the MIG-1500 yards in trail and dead in his blind spot. Olds could see the MIG-21 up above him, silhouetted against the sun. He fired two short range side-winder missiles and blew the brand new jet's right wing right off the fuselage. Splash two. Meanwhile, Captain Scott Radiker saw the third MIG-21 going after Olds' three his element lead. He was in decent firing position but couldn't get a solid tone on the heat-seeking AIM-9 indicating a good lock. He took the shot anyway and the side-winder flew right at the MIG like it was on a rail and impacted just forward of the tail. Splash three. Starting to run low on fuel, Olds' flight returned for home with three kills for zero losses but the show was far from over. Just as the first wave turned for home, Ford flight, led by Chappy James, entered the target area, just as three more MIG-21s erupted from the cloud deck below. For one frozen moment, Chappy could clearly see the red stars on the wing of the enemy jet as it emerged just off to his left. He could see the expression on the North Vietnamese pilot's face. Chappy then perfectly executed the same raspberry roll that he and Olds and the Wolfpack had practiced so many times. Rolling right and ending up in a perfect firing position. He let fly a side-winder but the MIG broke hard left and evaded the missile. Chappy ordered his wingman after the first band had then launched two more side-winders at the other two MIGs which had now merged and were turning back into the fight, both missed. But Chappy's wingman happened to be Captain Everett Raspberry, the man who'd been taught the Raspberry Roll years before in the skies over Nevada. Chappy watched as Raspberry performed a third. Interation of the opposing barrel roll, he saw his wingman's side-winder come off the rail and blow the tail off of the jet that had just avoided his own missile shot. That would be Splash 4, also short on fuel after the furious afterburned driven fight, Ford flight turned for home and now it was Rambler's turn. Captain John B. Stone, one of the key architects of Operation Bolo, let his flight into airspace above the MIG-21 home airfield. The surprise of Bolo had been so great and the Wolfpack response had been so fast and so lethal that more MIG-21s continued to emerge still unaware of the Bolo blade that was flashing in the sky above the Cloud Deck. Four more of them popped up from a small hole in the Cloud Deck, Stone immediately dove on them and pulled the trigger on his AIM-7 Sparrow. The missile just never ignited it just simply hung there on the rail. The missiles may have been unreliable as hell, but a fully armed F4 could carry a bunch of them. The second Sparrow dropped, lit, flew right into the tailpipe of the same MIG-21 and exploded in a ball of fire. Splash 5. But by now, a MIG-21 was right on Stone's tail. The aggressiveness had gotten them five kills so far now. It was time for the teamwork to pay off. Major Phil Combees in Rambler 4 talked Stone into dragging the pursuing MIG directly in front of him. He later said he took the advice he'd heard from Navy pilots regarding close-in use of the unreliable AIM-7 Sparrow. He didn't wait for the radar to acquire the target. He just looked right down the board site and sent two of them on their way at what was point blank range for the Sparrow missile. One of them missed, but one of them didn't. Splash 6. Just an instant later, Combees saw yet another MIG-21 flash directly in front of Rambler 2. Before he could say a word, Lieutenant Larry Glinn had another Sparrow in the air and a 7th MIG-21 disappeared in a blinding orange flash. Rambler flight then turned for home, but they turned for home with three kills. Lincoln flight was now arriving on the scene with Tempest, Plymouth and Vespa incoming behind them at five minute intervals, but the fight was over. The MIGs had had enough, and the remaining American flights reluctantly turned for home. Robin Olds, Chappy James, John Stone, and the others who'd planned an executed operation below had assigned a total of 56 F-4 Phantoms each with the maximum air-to-air loadouts to execute this ambush. Of that 56, 26 American fighters actually made it to the target before the fight was over 12 of those had engaged the enemy, seven of them, Olds, Wetterhahn, Raydecker, Raspberry, Combees, Stone, and Glinn each got a MIG-21, not a single American jet at so much as a scratch on the paint. On January 2, 1967, the men of the 8th tech will fight away now and forever known as the Wolfpack destroyed half of the North Vietnamese MIG-21 fleet, half, and they'd done it in 12 minutes. Well gang, let's face it, things are a little rough out there, we're doing great, we're getting through it, we're not out of the woods yet, but this won't last forever. Now this kind of social isolation is not a problem for an internet geek like me, I haven't been outside since 1978, but other people are having some real problems and that's why we really want to tell you about something that could really make a difference in your life right now. Better help matches you with your own licensed professional therapist out of a broad range of expertise in Better Helps counselor network, which is the kind of counseling that may not have been available to you locally at all. You can start communicating in under 24 hours, now BetterHelp is not a crisis line and it's not a self-help line. It's professional counseling done securely online. You can log into your account anytime, anywhere worldwide and send a message to your counselor and God knows if there was ever a time when people need to talk about things, this is it. You get timely and thoughtful responses plus you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions so that you won't ever have to sit in an awkward waiting room that may not be a problem for you right now, but every single house is an awkward waiting room, it seems to me. So definitely take advantage of this offer while you can. So visit BetterHelp.com/saw that's [email protected]/saw and join the over 800,000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. There's a special offer for the Cold War listeners, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/saw. Robin Olds was just one of many leaders who were emerging to save us from ourselves. He would go on to achieve three more air to air victories in Vietnam. He'd been told that if he'd gotten five and become an ace in three different aircraft types, the P38, the P51 and then the F4, he would be immediately retired from combat duty for propaganda purposes. So officially at least, Robin Olds ended his Vietnam career with four air to air kills. But most of the men who flew with him later said that he got more than that, but that he'd rather stay flying with his wolf pack than achieve yet another level of fighter pilot, Valhalla. He was ordered to retire from combat after flying 100 missions as well. He ended up flying 152 of them. Not too long after the success of Operation Bolo, Olds was called back to Washington for a briefing with President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Olds, as usual, wasted no time on pleasantries. He immediately turned to the commander in chief and said, "Sir, get us out of this gullium war." Now, President Johnson didn't need much convincing. This had been Johnson's personal nightmare for the last four years at least. How LBJ asked plaintively? It's simple, sir, replied the fighter pilot. When it, Olds didn't know it, but just down the hall, another liberator. And as it turns out, a fellow fighter pilot. A man as obscure as Olds was famous and as obnoxious and uncouth as Olds was charismatic and elegant was working on doing exactly that. He, like Olds, would markedly improve the situation in Vietnam, but his real contributions would come too late for Southeast Asia. Because unlike Robin Olds, whose career had just been crowned with a mortal fame and glory, the unsung work of the ghetto colonel and his fighter Mafia was just beginning. It's beyond any shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of the Russian people believed deeply in the Soviet Union for the first two thirds of its existence. Lenin had proclaimed a dictatorship of the proletariat and created a state that most Russians not only believed in, but were extraordinarily proud of. A worker's paradise, free of the condescending, uncaring, parasitic rule of the Russian aristocracy and free also, of the rapacious cruelty of industrial age capitalism. At an enormous cost in human suffering, uncounted, peasant villages utterly deserted by enforced famine of the Kulaks and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of prisoners used as slave labor on projects like the White Sea Canal. Nevertheless, the Russian people had seen their backward, agrarian nation catapulted into the industrial era. They paid an even greater price by enduring decades of fear and a state powerful enough to enforce these wrenching changes, a state run by utterly ruthless true believers who put political theory above any and all human suffering, and run by perhaps the most ruthless, ambitious, and paranoid dictator ever to walk the earth. Comrade Stalin had delivered a modern industrial state, Comrade Stalin, had taken the worst that Hitler could throw against Russia and hurled the Germans back into a bunker below the rubble of Berlin. Comrade Khrushchev had given them Sputnik the wonder of the world, followed by Gagarin a few years later, the first human being to leave planet Earth was a communist, and written proudly across his home at where the Cyrillic letters CCCP. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Russian people had paid an unimaginably high price for all of this, but nevertheless there it was. But by the late 1960s, things were changing in both the Soviet Union and the United States, softening the cold, hard edge of the Cold War by delving each sides pride and belief in the superiority of their own system. On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese took an enormous all or nothing gamble during the annual law in the fighting that traditionally occurred during the Vietnamese festival called TET. Pre-positioned elements of the North Vietnamese army, operating in cooperation with the communist insurgency in the South known as the "Viet Cong" launched an unprecedented all-out attack against South Vietnamese and American forces which later became known as the "TET" offensive. The order to begin the attack had come from Hanoi, and it was on the radio and it was short and simple. Cracked the sky, shaped the Earth. So that's what the communist forces did. The shock and ferocity of the initial attack knocked both Arvin and US military forces on their heels. But far from launching the popular uprising in the South, which was the entire reason for this total full-scale face-to-face engagement with the full might of American firepower. The communist revolution that would spread throughout the South and in the war simply never happened. Hanoi had catastrophically misread the mood of the people whom they were invading. It was, in fact, precisely the same mistake that had led to the American-backed Bay of Pigs disaster. But while the Bay of Pigs was a public relations catastrophe and a severe blow to American prestige and influence, the TET offensive was not just a PR setback for the North Vietnamese, it was an unmitigated military apocalypse for the North. As US forces dug in, the shadowy and elusive enemy whose hit and run tactics had been so effective against America's colossal conventional strength and the fossilized doctrine that it operated under was suddenly out in the open. In fierce fighting throughout the South, most especially around the Vietnamese city of Hawaii and the Ford US base at Kasson, 4124 Americans would be killed. But during the three phases of the TET offensive which would last through September of '68, the NVA and the Viet Cong would lose 45,000 killed and another 60,000 wounded. TET had cost the North the cream of their NVA regular units and the Viet Cong were hit so hard that they nearly ceased to exist for the rest of the war. It would be the NVA, the North Vietnamese army, that would be the major threat to US and Arvin troops. The offensive that had been designed to create a communist uprising in the South had been an unmitigated military disaster. With US and South Vietnamese counterattacks inflicting crippling losses on the communist North. For the first few days, the shock of it, the sheer dismay at the scale and intensity of the fighting, stunned the American audience watching it all on TV back home. At 245 in the morning of the first day, the team of 19 North Vietnamese sappers had blown a hole in the wall surrounding the US Embassy in Saigon and charged into the compound. With their officers killed in the initial attack, the survivors were never able to gain access to the Embassy proper and the prompt arrival of American reinforcements had killed them all to a man, declaring the Embassy secure just six hours after the attack began. But American television did not show the scale of the eventual North Vietnamese defeat all it showed were communist soldiers inside the walls of the US Embassy. On the night of February 27, 1968, news anchor band Walter Cronkite stood on a map of Vietnam on the floor of the CBS evening new studio in New York and said, "To say that we're closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we're on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism, to say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic yet unsatisfactory conclusion." Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, may not have said that the Vietnam War was lost, but he did say it appeared unwinnable. President Lyndon Johnson, watching the report with this May, turned to his staff and is reported to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Now, whether Johnson actually said those words is in dispute, but one thing was beyond dispute, LBJ had lost Middle America. The half-in, half-out, sometimes on, sometimes off war of attrition, fought by Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland had been the product of a defense secretary who had once said, "There is no such thing as strategy, only crisis management," and a president, more concerned with the lives of illicit and covert Soviet advisors than he was of his own aircrews. The Ted Offensive was without question, the greatest military disaster of the Vietnam War. It catastrophically weakened the military power of North Vietnam and showed what American courage, resilience, and firepower could accomplish when fully unleashed. But in the America of 1968, the family TV was just a small wooden box, and when it was all said and done, that box had been too tiny to show the entire picture of what the Ted Offensive had really been. If Communist military power had been irrevocably shattered, so too, at the morale and self-confidence of the American public. American movie stars were photographed atop anti-aircraft batteries surrounding the northern capital of Hanoi and American students waved the flag of the Vietcong on American college campuses. For America, this was the darkest night of the Cold War. But for the Soviets, that darkness was only beginning to fall. There is no culture on this earth that's as gifted as Russian culture is when it comes to dark humor, the ability to turn what one fears into a sad but nevertheless genuine smile. There's something wonderful about Russian humor, about the jokes they tell about themselves, something very brave and very tough and sadly, very fundamentally true. An old babushka walks into the Kremlin and demands to see Comrade Brezhnev. She's told he is busy and that she will have to leave. I'm an old woman, she shouts, a lifelong Communist party member and a survivor of the great patriotic war. I will not leave this spot until Comrade Brezhnev answers me my one question. And so she stands there, defiantly, for hour after hour. Finally, long after dark, Brezhnev emerges. Yes, Comrade, he says, I've been told that you've been waiting all day. What do you wish to know? I would like to know if communism was invented by scientists or by politicians asked the woman. Well, by politicians, of course, says Brezhnev. I knew it. Shouts the old babushka. If it had been scientists, they would have tested it on mice first. Here's another. A young girl is in class where they're learning about the science of Marxism. She raises her hand and asks, come, read teacher, will there be a KGB once full communism has come? Of course not, sniffs the teacher. As you already know, it's scientifically proven that when full communism comes, the state and all means of oppression will simply wither away, including the KGB. When total communism finally arrives, the Soviet people will arrest themselves. By the end of the 60s, the attitude of most Russians towards communism was softening. The Soviet Union of the late 60s was slowly becoming a different place almost imperceptibly. The ambient level of terror was falling. Krushchev had been far less feared than Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, the colorless party of Bratia Kud orchestrated the palace coup against Krushchev, and who allowed Nikita to live out the rest of his life even if it was one of isolation and bitterness was less feared than Krushchev had been. And you can hear it in the humor that stepping down of the terror from Stalin to Krushchev to Brezhnev. Comrade Stalin is reading his report to the first party congress, suddenly someone sneezes. Who sneezed, demand Stalin? Silence. Kud's row on your feet, shoot them, so they're shot, and then Stalin asks again. Who sneezed, comrades? No answer. Second row on your feet, shoot them, and they're shot too. We will continue this procedure until I get my answer. Now who sneezed, comrades? And then it lasts a stopping. He's heard in the rear of the Congress Hall in a single, trembling arm is raised. It was me, Comrade Stalin. It was me. I'm no one who sneezed." Stalin says, "Oh, God bless you." And resumes his speech. Cruise-chev makes a state visit to a collective farm. A formal photo of him is taken surrounded by fat, healthy pigs in cruise-chev orders that published on the front page of Provda in order to impress the people with collectivized farming. But the editors at Provda have a problem. A heated discussion is underway about how to caption the picture. Comrade Cruise-chev among pigs. Comrade Cruise-chev and pigs, pigs surround Comrade Cruise-chev, all of these are rejected as politically offensive. The next day, Provda hits the streets with the photo on the front page and the caption reads, "Third from left, Comrade Cruise-chev." Never noted for his exceptional intellect, Brezhnev did however nourish a deep and enduring love of pomp, ceremony, and most especially metals. He was terribly vain and very, very fond of wearing metals. Comrade Brezhnev decides to visit Egypt, and he's so moved by the site of the River Nile that he orders his security men to remain in the car as he gets out and steps towards the shore of the legendary river. Now, back in the car, the younger of his two KGB bodyguards whispers to his partner, "My God, what will happen if Comrade Brezhnev gets eaten by a crocodile?" The older agent, Kool-E, lights a cigarette, stare straight ahead and says, "Well, one thing is for certain, Comrade, that crocodile will be sh*tting metals for a month." Brezhnev walks into the Kremlin for his daily meeting with the Polypura. To their amazement, his chest is not adorned with the endless stars and ribbons and metals he always wore so proudly. Comrade Brezhnev one asks, "What happened to your metals?" "Ga*****" Brezhnev yells, "I forgot to move them back for my pajamas." Now, the fear was definitely subsiding. It was slowly being replaced by ridicule. You could feel it throughout all of the countries east of the Iron Curtain, Lenin and Trotsky with Jyrzinski, Stalin with Yagoda, Yezhyaov and Beria. The Bolshevik intellectuals that began the Soviet Union and the henchmen who had maintained it had openly stated all of them that fear was the glue that had held the communist empire together and that glue was loosening. Three weeks before the explosion of the Tetefensiv, that theory would be put to test in the Czechoslovakian capital of Prague. Like any rebellion against authority, the events of what would become known as the Prague Spring began with a tentative relatively safe nibbling around the edges of that authority. The country of Czechoslovakia was created in the aftermath of World War I. When the region we know today as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, declared their independence from the crumbling Austrian Hungarian Empire as a combined state in October of 1918. At all Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had been officially inducted into the Austrian army when World War I broke out in 1914, but he successfully lobbied to be released from the Austrian army so that he could join the German army as a Bavarian. The north-western end of this bashed together country of Czechoslovakia was and remains, considerably more industrially advanced than present-day Slovakia down to the southeast. Czechoslovakia had emerged from the rebel of World War II relatively unscathed, and this was due to a strange combination of both chance and geography. Certainly, the Czech people had suffered terribly during the war as did all of Europe, but Czechoslovakia was the last country that Hitler had simply absorbed through threats, bluff, and intimidation. It was the loss of Czechoslovakia that finally convinced the British and the French that the line with Hitler had to be drawn somewhere and that somewhere would turn out to be Poland. There was no German bombing of Prague. That part was fortune. The second factor, geography, can best be seen by highlighting Czechoslovakia on a map of Europe. The country lies just south of the main combat vector of World War II, namely the Berlin, to Poland, to Belarus, to Moscow, where so much of the really terrible fighting took place. And Hitler himself thought of the Czechs as Bohemians as the general area had been referred to in his youth before the First War and was therefore in his mind of somewhat higher racial stock than the Slav state of Poland just to the north. The Czechs were spared most of the Nazi atrocities committed in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. South of the main fighting, Czechoslovakia was also north of the fighting in Italy and Greece, and so as the rest of the European continent lay in smoldering ruin, Czechoslovakia emerged in relatively sound shape. All of this would come to a head 20 years after the end of World War II. Russia proper was just the largest and by far the most powerful of the empire of socialist republics held in orbit around it. By the mid-60s, the Czechoslovak Soviet socialist republic, the CSSR, was actually being held back by communism. Its relatively healthy industrial base was chafing under the economic rules laid down by the Kremlin. That first test of Russian authority was modest indeed. In May of 1963, Marxist intellectuals organized a conference celebrating the work of Franz Kafka, who had been heavily criticized during the Stalinist era. Members from all of the SSR's the Soviet socialist republics attended the conference with one notable exception. Signaling its displeasure, Russia did not send any delegates, but Russia didn't stop it either. Even as insignificant a rebellion as this would never have been tolerated under Comrade Stalin, a crack in the wall of state censorship had just appeared. Over the next few years, Czechoslovakian writers continued to test the limits of Kremlin rule by 1967, the previously hard-lying communist newspaper, Literarny Noviny, had the "temarity" to suggest in writing that literature should be free of communist party doctrine. The cracks in that wall grew larger. By this time, the Czechoslovakian people had become thoroughly disgruntled by the stagnant economic growth under their existing president Antonin Novotny. During a meeting of the all-powerful central committee of the Czechoslovak Soviet socialist republic, Novotny was challenged by two men chafing under communist rule. One of them was the economist Otas Zik. The other was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, a mild-looking man named Alexander Dubczyk. Novotny went right to the empire of the empire, Leonid Brezhnev, inviting him to Prague to settle things in Novotny's favor. But Brezhnev was so shocked at how little public support remained for Novotny, and so rather than bolstering Novotny, on January 5, 1968, Brezhnev simply removed him from power and replaced him with Alexander Dubczyk as first secretary. And that, he no doubt hoped and expected, would be the end of that. But Dubczyk would be the man of the hour. Cany enough, to wrap major economic and political reform in the blanket of world socialism. In April, he began his action program, a series of radical liberations, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement within the country. Dubczyk speculated about the division of hybrid Czechoslovakia into Czech and Slovak Soviet socialist republics. He planned to open the economy to consumer goods and raise the possibility of a multi-party Czechoslovakian SSR, one free of the monolithic power of the Communist Party. From April until August, Dubczyk's policies, which he labeled socialism with a human face, achieved previously unimaginable loosening of the restrictions on thought and behavior. This brief flowering of humanity within the faceless totalitarianism of the Communist Party, would become known as the Prague Spring. But from the beginning, Dubczyk had aroused the deep suspicion of Kremlin hardliners who thought correctly as it turned out that any talk of democratization was nothing more than a veiled criticism of the Soviet system. There was a growing sense among the communist leaders in Russia that this might turn into a carbon copy of what they had referred to as the Hungarian counter revolution, a similar attempt to loosen Soviet control which had been smashed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But the reforms in Czechoslovakia went far beyond what had happened 12 years earlier in Hungary, both in scope and duration. That glue of fear had loosened significantly. But the Soviet model was not ready to fall apart not yet anyway. On the night of August 20th, 1968, combined Soviet armies from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary invaded the CSSR. The combination of that invasion force was in itself significant because fellow Warsaw Pact nations Albania, East Germany and Romania declined the invitation with thanks. 200,000 troops supported by 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia that evening. Their first target was Ruzmiy International Airport in Prague so that additional troops and supplies could be airlifted in without delay. Now no doubt recalling how the Hungarian army had sided with the rebels back in 1956 during the night of the invasion, local Czechoslovakian army units, ostensibly good communists all, had been confined to their barracks surrounded by invasion forces. And so by that first morning of 21st August, the country had been occupied militarily at least, by the standards of the many communist invasions that occurred during the Cold War, this one was mild indeed, 72 civilians had been killed with another 250 or so severely wounded. It was by Kremlin standards, a velvet invasion. Alexander Dupcek, the man who had wanted just a little more freedom for his people, immediately saw that the speed and magnitude of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was simply insurmountable, and so he publicly called for his people not to resist. He was placed under a rest and taken to Moscow, where Brezhnev managed to convince him somehow that his Prague spring had not been such a good idea. He was then returned to Prague, ostensibly still in power, but this was merely a face-saving arrangement. Czechoslovakia would firmly remain a puppet of the Soviet Union for the rest of the Soviet Union's existence. Four days after the Russian military had crossed the Czech border, a few Russian citizens who did not approve of the invasion of a fellow socialist nation had the exceptional moral and physical courage to protest the violence in Red Square in the very heart of communism. Seven individuals managed to open crudely hand-painted banners, one of which read in Russian, for your freedom and ours. This defiant banner flew for only a few minutes, however, for all of the protesters were brutally beaten on the spot and then arrested by Russian secret police and then they were sentenced by a secret tribunal. In the days of Comrade Stalin, they and most of their families would have simply been shot outright in the basement of Lubyanka. But Brezhnev was no Stalin. These brave protesters got away with nothing more severe than mere long-term confinement to psychiatric hospitals. Veyn though he was, Brezhnev was no buffoon, well not yet anyone. The Prague Spring had shown that while the Russian bear no longer seem inclined to maim and rampage it will, it most definitely could still bite and bite hard. It had crushed the Prague Spring. That much was undoubtedly true, but it had not crushed it mercilessly. And that would go on to be the final proof of the theory that communism could only survive when ruled by absolute terror. Dubcek's life had been spared. The lives of the Russian protesters had been spared. The leaders of the Prague Spring had been spared as well, including one of them who'd risked outright execution by narrating the entire invasion live on the radio. And 44 years later, Brezhnev International Airport, the initial objective of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia would be renamed in his honor. The time of the liberators was almost at hand. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Koromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020.