On 26 September 1966 the Enterprise was moored at the carrier pier on Ford Island by 1000. Immediately a stream of VIP visitors commenced a procession on board, even though the local command had announced that there would be no visiting, except for official business, because the ship would be involved in loading critical supplies. That did not slow down the local mayor and members of the city council, and a number of senior retired admirals living in the area whose curiosity could only be served by a trip onboard the world’s only nuclear carrier.
The following day the ship was opened for general visiting from 1000 until 1500, and that information was published in the local newspaper. By 1000 the police estimated that there were ten thousand people on the pier patiently waiting to get on board. Throughout the day the crowds did not diminish, and at 1600, when visiting hours finally were closed down, twenty thousand people, according to the local newspaper, had visited the Enterprise.
The next morning, 28 November, the Enterprise was underway at 0800, bound for the western Pacific, Task Force 77, and Point Yankee. The Enterprise arrived at Subic Bay on 5 December 1966 for a stop of two days to load guided air munitions, which were in such short supply throughout the fleet that they were being retained in the combat theater for battle use only — no training. These were the latest versions of the Sidewinder, Sparrow III, the antiradiation missile (ARM), and Walleye, a television-guided air-to-ground missile that was in limited production. Also, the Enterprise embarked a small group of intelligence specialists, including Vietnamese and Chinese linguists. These teams were in high demand and were also in critically short supply, so they were shuffled from departing carriers to new arrivals. They turned out to be invaluable in providing real-time information and intelligence on enemy aircraft and missile deployments and movements.
13
The Enterprise
Shortly before daylight on 10 December 1966, the Enterprise joined up with the carriers Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ticonderoga, Kitty Hawk, and Constellation in Task Force 77 at Yankee Station, and by 0700 that morning it was launching the first sorties into North Vietnam in five months. Not much had changed since the previous July, when the Enterprise had departed Yankee Station. For both ship’s crew and the air wing it was déjà vu. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Marine Corps land-based tactical air and the carriers were still engaged in the Rolling Thunder campaign. The target selection was still coming mainly from the White House, with some Pentagon input and a pro forma CinCPac screening.
The positive aspects of this “sameness” was that the operations and the procedures were familiar to the 70 percent of the ship’s people and air wing aviators, who were on their second tour in the Tonkin Gulf. For the air wing pilots, this was useful. They would still be familiar with the order of battle of the Vietnamese aircraft and antiaircraft systems, the terrain over both South and North Vietnam, and the operational in-flight procedures.
For the flight crews, the downside was the apparent lack of progress. After two years of combat, the same targets were being attacked — the same bridges, airfields, car parks, missile sites, and power plants — and under the same rules of engagement (ROE) from a White House that severely limited the pilots’ tactics. These were ROE designed to avoid “collateral damage”—unintended damage to adjacent nonmilitary targets. Most of these Washington-mandated rules imposed restrictions in the selection of directions for attack- and flak-suppression runs that very much disadvantaged the pilots’ tactics and increased the aircrafts’ vulnerability to enemy defenses.
By this time, there was growing concern over the evident limited effectiveness of Rolling Thunder because of the restrictions placed upon target selection and the limited options available to the attacking pilots. An official U.S. Air Force military analysis of the campaign published in 2004 had this to say:
Operation Rolling Thunder was a frequently interrupted bombing campaign that began on 24 February 1965 and lasted until the end of October 1968. During this period, U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft engaged in a bombing campaign designed to force Ho Chi Minh to abandon his ambition to take over South Vietnam. The operation began primarily as a diplomatic signal to impress Hanoi with the United States’ determination, essentially a warning that the violence would escalate until Ho Chi Minh “blinked,” and secondly, it was intended to bolster the sagging morale of the South Vietnamese.
The Johnson administration also imposed strict limits on the targets that could be attacked, for China and the Soviet Union were seen as the defenders of Communism who might intervene if the North Vietnamese faced defeat. Consequently the administration tried to punish the North without provoking the two nations believed to be its protectors.
According to the U.S. Air Force’s leadership, the campaign had no clear-cut objective. Nor did its authors have any real estimate of the cost of lives and aircraft. General LeMay and others argued that military targets, rather than the enemy’s resolve, should be attacked, and that blows should be rapid and sharp, with the impact felt immediately on the battlefield as well as by the political leadership in Hanoi.
The principal change in this second cruise for the Enterprise was the new air wing composition. In 1965, the unique feature of the wing had been the four squadrons of A-4 Skyhawk light attack planes. For the 1966 deployment, two of these Skyhawk squadrons had been replaced by a nine-plane squadron of Grumman Intruders, designated the A-6E. The Intruder was the most advanced all-weather tactical aircraft in the free world and possessed an enormous load-carrying capability, enabling the plane to launch from a carrier with fifteen thousand pounds of bombs. With its modern radar and electronics navigation system operated by the bombardier/navigator sitting to the right of the pilot in a tandem cockpit, the A-6 was capable of penetrating hostile radar-defended territory at very low altitudes at night or in bad weather and limiting the effectiveness of surface-to-air missiles. The Intruder attacked specific objectives either using its mapping radar or by locking onto a radar-significant target, such as a power plant, bridge or steel mill, with its fire-control radar.
Because of the great load-carrying capacity and its tactical versatility, the Intruder also became the centerpiece of most of the major daylight strikes on well-defended targets. Carrying seven to eight tons of bombs, and delivering them in a glide- or dive-bombing run, the A-6 markedly increased the tonnage of TNT that could be accurately laid on a target over what had previously been possible using the A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantom IIs. For this second deployment to Vietnam, the Enterprise air wing included the most advanced aircraft in the free world and well over half of the flight crews had at least one combat tour in Vietnam under their belts, yet that did not mean that there would be smooth sailing.
In 1967, the carriers continued to be involved in the two well-defined and separate air wars in Vietnam. The “in-country” war was that in which the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine tactical aircraft operated in close support of U.S. and allied ground forces engaged in the fighting in South Vietnam. The Air Force and Marine tactical air operated from bases in both Vietnam and Thailand. The other air war, known as “special operations,” involved strikes into the sovereign territory of the invading enemy, North Vietnam. These operations, conducted under the campaign code name Rolling Thunder, mainly utilized aircraft from the Seventh Fleet carriers and U.S. Air Force tactical air wings in Thailand. Marine A-6s from bases in South Vietnam also participated in Rolling Thunder.