Thud Ridge F-105 Guns Kill

Here's another F-105 Thunderchief guns kill. For how big and non-nimble they were, in the right hands they sure got a lot of air-to-air action in!

If you haven't read this book, you need to. If you don't own a copy, you need to.

Thud Ridge
Col. Jack Broughton (ret.)
pp. 108 - 110

I spotted two MiG-17's [sic] in a very sloppy echelon that put them almost one behind the other. They were under me in a lazy turn to the west and south away from Phuc Yen. I still had a bag of speed and I had my cannon and a heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, which requires multiple switch actions to set up- it's not difficult, it's just time consuming and at the instant I did not have the time. The four separate switch options that you have to take to go from bombing mode to missile mode did not lend themselves to this situation. With one more hand I could have utliized the missile but I just could not fumble fast enough on this particular pass to get it set up. I closed on the two MiGs like mad and they stayed in and did not appear to see me. I thought, I'll go through my switching missile and set up my missile- but if I do, I'll have to wiggle around a bit and delay, and they may see me in the interim and initiate a break. If they do, I can't touch them as they can turn so much tighter than I Can. Or if I get the missile set up, the chances of it guiding are less than a hundred percent, and if it goes streaking across the sky,that will alert them and they will be off and running and I'll never get a crack at both of them. I thought I might get one of them with a missile, but I was greedy, I wanted them both. So I jammed the throttle forward and got inside their turn and was closing beautifully. It was an ideal gunnery pass, just as pretty as it could be.

I started to fire as I Pressed to within a thousand feet of the second MiG and I was doing pretty well on him and he started rolling over and to the right like a sick fish.  I figured, OK, I've got this guy, now I'll just keep pressing in and get the one up in front of him. About that time, the importance of the fact that I had no wingman to look around and protect me became painfully apparent. My element was now in pretty good position and John, my seeing-eye major flying number three, called me to break right immediately. It seems that another MiG had entered the scene from above and was about to have at me. I stayed as long asI figured I could, and ten rolled down and under to the right as I pulled through the maneuver, threw the third MiG off me and over the top of me.

While this was going on, all my other flights were active and Carl and Phil both managed to get a confirmed MiG out of their head-on hassles coming off target. My wingman pulled up off the deck after shaking the Sams and got himself a probable to go with my probable. Things then turned into a three-ring aerial circus as the Phantoms, who were in the area with us, wanted into the act and had come down to our altitude. They had managed to get two MiGs who had been on our tails on the way into the target and they wanted more.

About this time I spotted another MiG spinning down to earth that one of our guys had hammered. Rob got one with a missile, and it was a beautiful hit. The entire read end of the MiG was burning, and you could see the skeleton of the aircraft as it burned and went straight line all the way across the valley in a descent, never wiggling, and hitting at the base of the Ridge. (I have never seen any chutes from any of the MiGs we have hit.) Here we had Phantoms going round and round, MiGs going round and round, and Thuds going round and round. Our total bag for the effort, which took only a few minutes, was six MiGs destroyed and two MiGs damaged and probably destroyed.

The Phantom troops got a little concerned when our guys started hosing off those Sidewinders because form some angles the MiG and the Phantom look quite similar, and in a fast-moving fray, it is easy to ge a silhouette where they look very much alike. Once you fire that missile, it has no sense and just tries to do what it is supposed to do, look for a hot tail pipe. Once our Sidewinders started flailing through the airand MiGs started falling out of the sky and guns rattles all over the area, one of the Phantom drivers said, "Hey Chief, they're shooting Sidewinders. Let's get the hell outa here." whereupon they lit the burners and went back up to altitude and allowed us to finish up our work. We got a call from the Phantom wing boss that evening congratulating us  on the fine work but protesting that MiG-killing was supposed to be their business.

...That was quite a wild melee and I think, perhaps more than any other day, taught those MiG drivers some respect for the combined forces that were lined up against them.