as my very first idea in this thread was that the F-35 will not fight for THK while it might perform creditably for ,say RN , ı feel discussion of Vietnam isn't that much off . While ı am by now somewhat famous for straying , it makes some sense when one considers the politicians and their military/intelligence advisors' propensity for chest thumping in support of their grand ideas .
vietnam has its roots in the American Administration's belief that the opposition could be cowed , scared , forced into submission by mere shows of force or defeated by the undisputed American might . And the Vietnamese have had the misfortune of defeating the French in Dien Bien Phu . Just like Afghanistan had the stigma of defeating the Soviet Union and Americans had to make it a priority to knock out the "unconquerable" Mucahedeen to make an impression , which incidentally worked and thousands of Muslims out of Afghanistan are alive because of the fall of the Taleban , Hanoi was destined to get a beating .American morale ,shall we say , was sky high ;unfortunately this was after the American "victory" in Cuba . An event not properly defined ; it is actually a show of force against Chinese who at that particular day were attacking the Indians in the Himalayas , with all the B-52s loaded . The Russians were on the defensive for the most of the Cold War , at least according to them , and their missiles on Cuba were simply a ploy to get American missiles out of their periphery . They would have won that hand ,with diplomacy behind closed doors but the Kennedy Administration made it sound like the end of the world so Moscow still won though Khruschev lost .
there was no way United States could wage an unrestricted war against North Vietnam as it would have meant they were really serious about being anti-Communists , which would have implied equally serious measures taken by the Communists . And it was only because Hanoi could not "surrender" that the war escalated . One of the problems with being a bully is that if somebody gets away with resisting you , your reputation will suffer and you won't be able to bully others . And it is the tragedy of Johnson and McNamara that they had to micromanage the war for , if left to the military , it would have become a really serious thing . Curtis Lemay was thrown out for a reason as he had actually desired a nuclear war when he had the B-47s and Russians had ,let me see , Yaks . It is one thing to quarrel over the carcasses of European colonial empires , it is another to face each other in battlefield in a fight to the bitter end , which might have come in the form of a mushroom . ı say tragedy because they actually didn't want it and could hardly talk about it as the avalanche of memoirs would drown them . Especially military tend to be ruthless even when they are equally in it . Jack Broughton might rail against mismanagement , ı don't know , ı haven't read his book , but the strafing of the Russian freighter and the subsequent disciplining of pilots not for the attack but destroying evidence shows to me that it was an act ordered by Washington to discourage Moscow from supporting Hanoi . If not , the penalty would have been dishonourable discharge and jail . ı think .
the restrictions were meant to keep the thing under control . It is might be hard for American pilots to wait for the Migs to come up , but is it the reason for failure in the war ? If so , how are we going to explain Korea , where they waited for the Migs to come down ? But then , penetrating Manchuria to get the Migs over their airfields was the norm after ' 52 or so . And the first air to air engagement of the Vietnam war was against the Chinese . As for SAM sites ı remember reading the SA-2 was somewhat mobile as it could move from one prepared site to an other , but the Vietnamese had probably a thousand of these sites for -as General Momyer relates- 80 to 180 ready to fire missiles .Taking out construction crews might have been a military target , maybe . Unfortunately for the Americans they were also involved in bombing transport nodes and mountain passes , causing a bomb shortage . These attacks are generally regarded as "gravel production" but ı would say they were suggested by air minded officers . ı don't think the Vietnamese had to opportunity to adequately defend or observe the Thud Ridge or face the Americans over the Tonkin Gulf and as the priority targets were concentrated in Route Pack 6 there was no need or place to fly diversions .Israelis did superlatively well with tactical feints in a similarly restricted area against similar Russian equipment and they did fight actual Russians . American aerial phalanxes could and did defend themselves even where they were as regular as train timetables .
debateable and checking my files at home , ı discover ı have been mistaken in claiming a wingman for Toon on the 10th. As the North Vietnamese never actually claimed him or a 13 kill ace , it appears to me that he is actually an American invention and not a mistaken assumption that combined two or more pilots and their names . A colonel comparable in experience to General Olds might only mean a Russian with a solid WW2 story , which was definitely not the case .My general mood in this post seems to suggest there were people in American services desiring to "enlarge" the conflicts and they would twist the reality , a claim unsupported by anybody else. From ACIG.org an illustration but no kind of support for what ı am saying :
Mysterious MiG: this is a reconstruction of the MiG-21 #2, clearly seen by Maj. Roger Locher from a range of barely 300ft when it almost collided with Oyster 1 during the engagement on the morning of 10 May 1972. In the following moments, Maj. Lodge turned behind this MiG in an attempt to shot it down, in turn exposing the tail of his aircraft to four J-6s that were approaching from the other side. Maj. Lodge did not survive the mission to tell the story, but in an interview for the Red Baron report, Maj. Locher recalled that this MiG wore a blue serial 53 and had its cockpit trimmed in blue. While the last detail is exceptionally unusual - then, there is no pictorial evidence of any MiG-21s of any air force being ever painted this way - the serial was probably applied in this manner, clearly indicating the origin of the aircraft: the USSR. If the pilot was Soviet remains unclear. Surely enough, a closer research about the Vietnamese reports about air battles over North Vietnam usually do not mention any kind of operations flown by foreign pilots. For many observers, this indicated that no foreign pilots have ever flown missions for the North Vietnamese air force, except perhaps one or two. In fact, however, in 2002 the North Koreans openly admitted their pilots to have flown for the SRVAF in the 1960s. A similar confirmation from the USSR-archieves is still not appearing.
