On an overcast afternoon in 1967, 1st Lt. David Waldrop was within the cockpit of an F-105D—call sign “Crossbow 3”—as a part of a mixed force of 36 F-105s and F-4 Phantoms aiming to strike Yen Vien, the most important rail yard in North Vietnam. It was Waldrop’s 53rd combat mission within the Thunderchief, a nuclear strike aircraft unsuited for dogfighting. As Waldrop’s flight of 4 thirty fourth Tactical Fighter Squadron F-105s got here off the goal after dropping 750-pound M117 bombs on Yen Vien, the young lieutenant and his flight leader saw three North Vietnamese MiG-17s diving on one other flight of Thunderchiefs.
“As I rolled to the suitable, I looked down and saw two MIG-17s. One was on the tail of an F-105 on the time,” Waldrop recalled. He yelled for the 105 to “break right!” as he dove toward the MiG. “I plugged in my afterburner, picked up just a little airspeed, and closed in.”
Together with his throttle full-forward, Waldrop’s massive, powerful F-105 closed in on the smaller MiG at Mach 1.2 (913 mph). Ignoring his marginally useful bombing gunsight, Waldrop simply filled Crossbow 3’s windscreen with the MiG-17. Firing at close range, he saw debris fly off the MiG as he overtook it, going supersonic.
“I shot by them [the MiG and 105] so fast it’d make your head spin,” Waldrop said.
Faced with shattering MiG pieces, Waldrop pulled up hard to avoid them, flying into the overcast sky and rolling inverted. As he dropped the fighter’s nose back out of the clouds, still inverted, he saw one other MiG-17 passing below, its afterburner glowing. Waldrop throttled back, rolling upright within the dive, and again filled his sights with the MiG.
“I began hosing off my cannon at him. Shortly afterwards, some fire shot out from his wingtips and about midway across the wing and he began a slow roll over to the suitable. I backed off and fired again. He continued rolling right on in and blew up when he hit the bottom.”
What’s In a Name
The Republic F-105 Thunderchief had a tough life. A scarcity of reliability and in-flight systems failures plagued its early profession. However it admirably took on certainly one of the hardest air combat assignments in history—bombing targets and suppressing surface-to-air missiles in Vietnam.
Of the 833 F-105s produced, 334 were lost in combat together with over 150 aircrew. Despite its depressing 40 percent attrition rate, the F-105 was a professional success and would grow to be an icon. For that, we will thank those that designed and adapted it, and people who flew and fought in it. Men like Waldrop.
The 388th Fighter Wing at Korat Royal Thai Air Base in Thailand, from which Waldrop flew, gave him credit for two kills, however the Air Force later confirmed only the second. That kill had additional confirmation from famed F-4 pilot, Col. Robin Olds, who was lining up the identical MiG with a Sidewinder when Waldrop blew through his shot, chasing the 17.
From Nuclear Striker to Triple Threat
The F-105 Thunderchief was designed by a team led by a Georgian emigre named Alexander Kartveli, who had previously designed Republic’s legendary P-47 Thunderbolt, F-84 Thunderjet, and F-84F Thunderstreak. The F-105 was intended to be a substitute for the F-84F and owed a few of its design elements to its predecessor. However the Thunderchief was conceived from the outset with one purpose: to be a supersonic, low-altitude penetrator able to delivering a nuclear weapon to a goal deep inside the Soviet Union.
Designed with a 45-degree swept wing that deliberately cut corners on maneuverability, the 50,000-pound Thunderchief—the most important single-seat, single-engine combat aircraft ever fielded when it entered service in 1958—relied on speed for survival and an internal bomb bay to carry a nuke. Key to its speed was its single Pratt & Whitney J75 turbojet, which produced a maximum 24,500 kilos of thrust in afterburner, not removed from the newest GE F110 turbojets that provide the brand new F-15EX with 29,000 kilos of thrust each.
Retired Col. Vic Vizcarra, a former F-105 pilot and creator of Thud Pilot: A Pilot’s Account of Early F-105 Combat in Vietnam, called the J75 a “rough tough” engine able to taking flak damage, ingesting the 105’s own gun panels and “keeping on ticking.”
Turned out in shiny natural metal, the F-105Bs that entered the Air Force fleet within the late Nineteen Fifties and early 60s stood alert at U.S. bases, able to deploy to Europe with their nuclear bombs. Additionally they performed in airshows. The USAF Thunderbirds demonstration team introduced F-105s as replacements for his or her F-100 Super Sabres in 1964.
Modified for the Thunderbirds’ aerobatics, the Thunderchiefs were awe-inspiring to look at … for six performances. A catastrophic structural failure of Thunderbird No. 2 in a landing pitch-up maneuver during a show at Hamilton Air Force Base in California killed the 105’s pilot, Capt. Eugene J. Devlin, because the Thud broke up around him just 50 feet off the bottom. The Thunderbirds returned to flying the Super Sabre through 1969.
As they did so, an all-weather attack version, the F-105D, was reaching squadron service. It was the definitive version of the 105, able to delivering a spread of conventional bombs and rockets, as well defending itself with Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.
By that point, the massive fighter-bomber had acquired a slate of nicknames including “Ultra Hog,” “Lead Sled,” and “Thud.” The primary derived from its F-84 lineage, the second from its high speed, low-turn-rate character, and the third from its early tendency to fail in-flight.
The F-105’s advanced systems were partly guilty. The fifth aircraft within the famed Century Series, it was more of a whole “weapons system” than its predecessors, featuring the primary integrated Doppler radar, inertial navigation, and fire control systems. Despite such technologies, it was also designed for a brief nuclear campaign. Prolonged use in a lengthy conventional war exposed problems from a poor hydraulics layout to fuel tanks that weren’t self-sealing.
The mix of those shortcomings, with the F-105D’s conventional weapons capability, led early Sixties pilots to sarcastically check with the Thud as a “Triple Threat”—it could bomb you, strafe you, or fall on you. The issues were addressed via successive upgrades to the D and the later two-seat F-105F. By the point F-105s began flying and fighting in Vietnam, “Thud” became a term of respect.
War Horse, Work Horse
In the primary five years of the Vietnam War, the F-105 conducted 75 percent of Air Force bombing missions over North Vietnam. They were incredibly dangerous, yet Thud pilots were expected to finish 100 of them during their combat tours. It was a reality reflected in a 1966 documentary on the 421st TFS “Fighting Cavaliers” who flew from Korat. The movie title, There Is A Way, riffed on the Thud pilots’ standard quip that “there ain’t no way” they were making it home alive after 100 sorties.
The movie shows, with admitted corniness, who the Thud pilots were—generally older, more experienced pilots, including grandfathers from diverse flying backgrounds, even bomber pilots. With few exceptions, they loved the Thud and trusted their lives to it. As such, they remember every detail of the airplane.
Vizcarra liked the 105’s relatively spacious cockpit, with its vertical-tape instrument panel displays and detail touches like a built-in thermos bottle with a drinking tube situated behind the ejection seat headrest. “If you were coming off a goal with adrenaline pumping,” Vizcarra recalled, “you’d find yourself getting cotton-mouth, very dry. sip of water was just the suitable thing.”
The bomb bay that held the TX-43 nuclear weapon in early F-105s became the hold for an additional 390-gallon fuel tank, easing among the short fuel-range concerns that got here with the Thud. The 105’s 4 “flower petal” speed brakes were engine-nozzle doors that prolonged in pairs when the pilot needed to slow the airplane. They’d even be open when taxiing to scale back thrust, keeping the aircraft’s ground speed manageable while the engine maintained sufficiently high rpm to run accessories.
Stealth and Speed
Retired Thud pilot Col. Marty Case identified that the Thunderchief’s sleek design even lent it a measure of stealth, making it tough for even U.S. controllers to see the 105. “The [ground control approach] radars would lose the airplane. Not only was it smooth shaped, the engine is what we call ‘buried.’ The radar can’t look down the intake and see the engine … it’s buried inside the fuselage.”
But for surviving bombing campaigns on bridges, railroads, and other dangerous targets in North Vietnam, nothing beat the F-105’s blistering speed. “It was a really solid, stable airplane,” Vizcarra said. “That baby loved to go fast. The faster it went, the faster it desired to go. Since it was so fast, it also desired to go in a straight line.” In a straight line, the F-105’s low-altitude speed was limited to 810 knots (930 mph) resulting from the tendency of its canopy-sealer to melt. But with lives at stake, they did go faster in Vietnam, as much as 870 knots (1,001 mph) right on the deck, Vizacarra remembered.
Speed was life for probably the most dangerous Thud sorties: the surface-to-air missile (SAM) hunter-killer “Wild Weasel” missions that two-man crews within the F-105F flew near Hanoi. The 2-seat trainer variant F-105F was 31 inches longer than the single-seaters to accommodate a rear cockpit. The 143 Fs built principally flew just like the F-105D, but for Wild Weasel duty were modified with special radars and jamming systems. As an alternative of bombs, they carried Shrike missiles, which homed in on SA-2 SAM’s radar signals.
Taking out the 100 Soviet and Chinese SAM sites operating around Hanoi by 1966 was vital but costly. Eleven F-105Fs arrived at Korat in May 1966, and one other seven deployed to Takhli Air Base, also in Thailand, in July. All seven of the Takhli F-105Fs were shot down inside six weeks.
Of their F-105Fs and later F-105Gs, the Weasels weren’t only first in, but additionally last out on a strike. Nevertheless, their presence was often enough to intimidate the SAM operators and make them turn off their radars, allowing American strike packages to succeed in their targets and get out alive. Former Thud pilot and creator, Col. Jack Broughton, called the Wild Weasel missions “the grimmest contest yet conceived between sophisticated air and ground machinery and folks.”
The sentiment might be applied to most F-105 missions, explaining why so many were lost and why the Thud was pulled from service in Vietnam by 1970. What’s harder to elucidate, but easy to admire, is the dedication of the lads that flew them. Lt. Karl Richter was certainly one of many examples.
The soft-spoken Richter was the youngest pilot to shoot down an MiG in Vietnam on the age of 23. He accomplished 100 missions within the F-105D with the 421st TFS at Korat, then asked to be allowed to fly one other 100 on a second tour. Richter is seen in There Is A Way, explaining his motivation to remain in combat and quipping, “I’m too mean, they’ll never get me.” He had already won the Silver Star and the Air Force Cross for leading a flight into the teeth of North Vietnamese air defenses in April 1967.
On his 198th mission on July 28, Richter was taking a brand new pilot within the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing north as his wingman on a checkout mission to the relatively protected Route Pack 1 area. Spotting a bridge, he instructed his wingman to circle as he rolled in on the goal. Within the dive, Richter’s 105 was hit by anti-aircraft fire. He pulled up and turned toward Korat, however the Thud wouldn’t hold together. Richter ejected. His wingman had already alerted air rescue and a Sikorsky HH-3E “Jolly Green” was en path to a rough limestone ridge where his chute landed.
When the Jolly Green crew found him via his emergency beacon, he was dying. Whether his parachute had collapsed or a wind gust had thrown him into the limestone wasn’t clear, however the dedicated pilot perished.
There isn’t a confusion about Karl Richter and his fellow airmen who flew the F-105. They were badass and so was the Thud.