Northwest of Hanoi runs a long spine of mountains called the Tam Dao range. The men who flew the Republic F-105 Thunderchief against North Vietnam never called it that. They named it after their airplane — and after what happened to so many of them beside it. They called it Thud Ridge.

The ridge was a highway sign pointing at the most heavily defended airspace on the planet. Strike pilots coming up from Thailand used its karst wall to hide from radar on the run-in, popped over the top, and dropped into a valley stuffed with anti-aircraft guns, SA-2 missiles and MiG bases. Then they did it again the next day. And the day after that. A tour was 100 missions over the North — if you lived that long.

The Thud flew the great bulk of the US Air Force's strike missions in Operation Rolling Thunder, and it paid a bill unmatched by any American jet before or since. Close to half of all F-105s ever built were lost in Southeast Asia. This is the strike pilots' story — the men who hauled the bombs downtown.

Le mauvais jet, piloté magnifiquement

The F-105 was never meant to do any of this. Republic designed it in the 1950s as a nuclear sprinter: one pilot, one enormous engine, an internal bomb bay sized for a tactical nuke, and the ability to run at the ground at just under the speed of sound until it was time to toss the weapon and go home. It was one of the biggest single-engine fighters ever built — so big and so heavy that pilots joked the Thud could outrun anything in a straight line and be out-turned by everything, including the runway.

Vietnam handed it a different job: hauling up to around 6,400 kg (14,000 lb) of conventional bombs — a heavier load than a World War II B-17 carried — against bridges, rail yards and depots, week after week, against defenses that grew thicker with every raid.

L'avion s'est avéré fiable, rapide au sol et réputé pour sa robustesse. En revanche, il n'a pas permis de mener à bien la mission. Le constat était sans appel : l'issue était tragique.

Aller au centre-ville

The targets that mattered sat in Route Package Six, the zone around Hanoi and Haiphong that pilots called “downtown.” A strike day started before dawn in Thailand, ran through a tanker rendezvous over Laos, and funnelled the force toward the ridge. Terrain masking bought a few minutes of radar shadow; after that the Thuds belonged to the guns.

North Vietnam's defences were a layered machine: thousands of anti-aircraft artillery pieces from 37 mm up, SA-2 surface-to-air missiles that forced the Americans down into the flak, and MiG-17 et MiG-21 rising off airfields the strike pilots could see beneath their wings. The overwhelming majority of F-105 losses went to plain, unglamorous anti-aircraft fire.

Même la géographie était hostile. Hanoï se situait à quelque 1 100 km des bases thaïlandaises où se déroulaient les missions, et un Thud endommagé au combat devait entreprendre un long et pénible voyage de retour à travers le Laos. Les pilotes atteignaient les 100 missions ou non : durant les périodes les plus difficiles de l’opération Rolling Thunder, les chances de terminer une mission sans encombre étaient extrêmement faibles.

Et ils ont continué. Selon les propres estimations de l'US Air Force, le F-105 est responsable d'environ trois quarts des frappes aériennes menées contre le Nord lors de l'exercice Rolling Thunder.

Des règles écrites à 12 000 kilomètres de distance

Ce qui exaspérait les pilotes de Thud, ce n'était pas l'ennemi, mais le règlement. Le président Johnson et le secrétaire à la Défense McNamara, terrifiés à l'idée d'entraîner la Chine ou l'Union soviétique dans le conflit, avaient confié le choix des cibles à Washington et avaient encadré la campagne par des règles d'engagement aussi complexes qu'un document juridique. Le colonel Jack Broughton, commandant en second de la 355e escadre de chasse tactique de Takhli, décrivait ce document avec la précision d'un pilote de chasse.

The rules produced situations that would be comic if they hadn't been lethal. For much of the campaign, the MiG base at Phuc Yen — sitting in plain sight beside the ridge — was off limits. Broughton watched it happen from the cockpit, mission after mission.

The MiGs he couldn't touch on the ground would be airborne minutes later, cutting into the rear flights of his strike force. The Thud drivers fought back well enough — F-105s were credited with 27.5 MiG kills, most of them MiG-17s gunned down with the internal 20 mm cannon, against 17 Thuds lost to MiGs. But every dogfight was a distraction from the real job, and every bomb jettisoned to fight was a mission wasted.

L'arithmétique de la survie

The totals are stark in any version. Of 833 Thunderchiefs built, official tallies put losses in Southeast Asia at roughly 380 to 395 aircraft depending on what gets counted — close to half of all F-105s ever made. Around 330 fell to enemy action, the great majority to anti-aircraft guns, with SAMs and MiGs claiming most of the rest.

The type is often described as the only American aircraft withdrawn from combat because its loss rate was unsustainable — by 1968–69 the Air Force was simply running out of Thuds. Production had ended in 1964; there were no replacements. The F-4 Phantom took over the strike role, while the two-seat F-105F and G Wild Weasels soldiered on hunting SAM radars to the war's end.

Numbers, though, don't carry what this campaign asked of individual human beings. The same pilot, flying the same route, past the same guns that had killed his friends the day before — a hundred times. Two F-105 airmen received the Medal of Honor, both from the Wild Weasel force; the strike pilots' heroism was distributed instead in small, unrecorded increments, one run through the flak at a time.

Their SAM-hunting brethren have their own story — we've told it in our piece on the Belettes sauvages. Ce message s'adresse aux hommes qui se trouvaient à l'origine de ces modèles D chargés de bombes.

L'homme qui l'a écrit

Les pilotes d'attaque trouvèrent leur voix en Broughton. Ancien élève de West Point et vétéran de la guerre de Corée, il effectuait lui-même les missions les plus difficiles, emportait un petit magnétophone dans son cockpit et retranscrivait les échanges radio au mot près. Crête de Thud, Publié en 1969, alors que la guerre faisait encore rage, cet ouvrage n'a jamais cessé d'être réédité. John McCain l'a qualifié de meilleur récit au jour le jour des combats aériens au Vietnam, et il a par la suite figuré sur la liste de lecture professionnelle du chef d'état-major de l'armée de l'air.

Broughton's career ended the way his book said it would. In 1967 he destroyed gun-camera film to protect two of his pilots accused of strafing a Soviet freighter, took a court-martial for it, and saw the conviction overturned — too late to save his stars. His pilots never forgot which way he had chosen. War artist Maxine McCaffrey, who spent time at the Thud bases, recorded how they spoke of him.

Rolling Thunder ended in November 1968 having failed to break Hanoi, and the argument about why — gradualism, the ROE, targets chosen at Tuesday lunches in Washington — has never really stopped. The men who flew the missions rendered their verdict earlier and more economically, in the name they gave a mountain range.

Les derniers Thuds ont quitté le combat dans le cadre de l'opération Wild Weasel et ont été retirés de la réserve de l'armée de l'air en 1984. La crête est toujours là, bien sûr. Le nom aussi. Sur les cartes aéronautiques, c'est la chaîne de Tam Dao ; dans tous les bars d'escadrille qui se respectent, ce sera à jamais la crête des Thuds.

Sources : Wikipédia, Air & Space Forces Magazine (John T. Correll), Musée national de l’US Air Force, The Aviation Geek Club