Who was the best American fighter pilot of the Vietnam War?
I completely agree that Robin Olds was the best US pilot in the Vietnam War. But there is so much more to him. Robin Olds was a warrior, an old school hero that stood out from a crop of heroes.
I’ve read him being described as big, tough, smart and swaggering. Attributes that he felt a fighter pilot needed:
Born 14 July 1922 he was the son of an air force officer and first flew at the age of 8 with his father. Apparently when the war started in 1939 he tried to join the Canadian Air Force, but his father wouldn’t sign the papers. Olds wanted to fly and fight. He enrolled at West Point Military Academy and graduated in June 1943. Posted to the 479th Fighter Group, flying P-38’s, which arrived in England in May 1944. By now Olds had some 650 hours, 250 of them in P-38’s.
He flew his first sortie on 26 May and scored his first victories on 14 August: two FW190’s. In September the group transitioned to P-51’s, by which time Olds was an ace with 5 victories.
In November he completed his first tour and returned to the US for a rest, but returned for a second tour in January with the 434th Fighter Squadron. In March 1945 he was promoted to squadron commander at the age of 22. By war's end he had scored 12 aerial victories and 11.5 ground ones, the latter in the closing weeks of the war.
Towards the end of the war many German pilots operating on the Eastern front flew to airfields in the west. Because of this some airfields were crowded with German aircraft. They made tempting targets for allied pilots but they were not soft targets. In an interview Olds mentioned that on 13 April they attacked an airfield at Tarnewitz; he led five P-51’s in and he was the only one to return to base. His P-51 was badly shot up.
Post war he stayed in service being appointed to increasingly important positions. When the Korean war broke out he tried to return to combat flying but was denied his many requests. Post Korea Olds developed a reputation as a troublemaker. At a time when the USAF saw the delivery of nuclear warheads as its main role, Olds kept calling for training in close air support and air combat. Better aircraft and better pilot training. With the new air to air missiles coming into service USAF command saw air fighting skills as no longer required. Guns on a fighter…no need as the missiles will do it all.
I suspect that Olds was seen as yesterday’s man clinging to the past. In the early sixties, while commanding the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing in England, Olds was sacked for performing an unauthorized low-level demonstration and his promotion to Brigadier General scrapped. He found himself back in the US with no real role but a war hotting up on the other side of the world, Vietnam. Luck and well-placed friends smiled on him and he was given exactly what he wanted, command of a unit during a time of war.
On 30 September 1966 he took command of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing based in Ubon, Thailand, flying F-4’s. It wasn’t a choice command, in fact it was demoralized and operating poorly. When he arrived the unit pilots were less than enthused. He had a few hours in the F-4, just enough to qualify, and was almost twice the age of most of them. Their previous commander had flown 12 missions in a year and their operations officer 3; Olds was seen as a continuation of the same. An old man content on flying a desk until retirement.
How wrong they were. When he arrived he picked another pilot at random as wingman, telling him he’ll do. He also warned him that in a few weeks he’ll be flying the F-4 better than him. And he did. The men found they had a commander that had little interest in sitting at a desk, he wanted to fly and he wanted to fight.
Soon after he arrived the wing received orders to target NVA supply trucks that were flooding into South Vietnam. Olds put a squadron onto doing this full time; they flew at night and as low as 500 feet. Within a few months the NVA truck convoys went from having dozens of trucks in them to just 2 or 3. Their efforts had an effect.
At the same time Olds flew daylight missions with the other squadrons; their main job being escorting F-105’s flying bombing missions over the North. Dangerous work as the North had a well-developed air defense system. While he couldn’t fly every mission, he flew all the hard ones. If they were going to Hanoi he’d be there, leading them and taking the same risks as his pilots.
North Vietnam had a small air force; its pilots and ground controllers were well trained (in the Soviet Union) and capable. They were few in numbers so a stand-up fight with the larger US forces, which they would lose, was avoided. Instead their ground controllers would carefully guide them towards the F-105’s, while avoiding the escorts, to launch hit and run gun and missile attacks. At times this would cause the bombers to jettison their bomb loads to avoid the attack; sometimes a US aircraft would be lost. While the US was losing aircraft, few MIGS were shot down.
A few months after he arrived one of his officers (Captain John Stone) suggested a plan to hurt the North Vietnamese air force. Olds like what he heard, it matched his own thinking, and he set them to planning a mission that would become Operation Bolo. In brief a mission would be flown over Hanoi where the escorts would pretend to be bombers to lure the Northern pilots into attacking them; when they did the escorts would attack them.
To look like bombers to the ground controllers the fighters would follow the same route that bombers usually took, flying the same type of formations and using similar call signs. They would also be equipped with radar jamming pods that fighters did not carry. It was hoped that this would be enough to bring them up.
After a great deal of planning the mission was flown on 2nd January 1967. There was bad weather over the North and it looked like the mission would be a bust, but then MIGs started appearing above the clouds approaching the F-4’s. In the fight that followed seven MIG 21’s were shot down for no loss with Olds claiming one. On 6th January two more MIGs were downed; in a week nine out of the estimated sixteen MIG-21’s North Vietnam had been lost. For the next few months there was very little air opposition over North Vietnam.
On 4th May 1967 Olds downed another MIG then shot down two more on 20th May. On that day Olds wingman was shot down in a dog fight and a furious Olds chased these two down. He had no further MIG kills after this, but he had plenty of opportunity to do so. He estimated he could have claimed another ten, but if he became an ace he would be immediately grounded and returned to the US. He was where he wanted to be and did everything he could to stay. Olds stated that after he returned from a mission, he would scrub his details from the mission board to keep the number of flights he was doing down.
Eventually though in September 1967 his tour expired and he had to lay down command and return to the US. In his time at the 8th TFW he had flown 152 missions, 105 of them over North Vietnam. While at Ubon Olds had grown a handlebar mustache, an act of defiance to senior commanders. When he reached the US he was ordered to shave his mustache, which he did. Apparently, he didn’t really like having one.
On his return to the US he was appointed as commander of the Air Force Academy. He held other positions then in late 1971 returned to Thailand to assess the readiness of US pilots. While there he flew a number of unauthorized missions. For the last few years the air force has not flown operations over North Vietnam but it was looking increasingly likely that they would be returning. His assessment on returning to the US was damning, in his words “the pilots couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag”. The USAF was still not training pilots for air combat. The US Navy had adopted the Top Gun program to teach their pilots air combat. As in the past, Olds warnings were ignored.
Operations did resume over the North in 1972 and, as Olds predicted, the USAF struggled against the North Vietnamese Air Force. The SUN took the fight to them with great success. Olds offered to return to South East Asia to train the pilots in aerial combat but this was turned down. In frustration Robin Olds retired after 30 years of service.
Post service Olds became a public speaker and continued to talk about the deficiencies he saw in USAF training. In time technology did get to the point where old school dogfighting was no longer needed, something he acknowledged.
In his private life Olds was married twice, had two daughters and had a reputation as a drinker. He died on 14 June 2007 due to a combination of prostate cancer and heart failure. He was 85.
Robin Olds was the only US pilot to become an ace on both WW2 and Vietnam with a total score of sixteen aerial victories. Twelve in WW2 and four over Vietnam. Robin Olds was an extraordinary man. Like us he knew fear but he was able to channel it into something else:
He was a fighter but also a thinker and his assessment on the abilities of the USAF, or lack of, were borne out. He was a great man.
Thanks for reading the article.Thanks to:------Mowdud Ahmed Modhu,@Mr Modhu (NEWS BLOG)
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