a lightweight discussion of WW2 aerial ops and the like

their God and Nation wanted a election instead of a Coalition Goverment ! Their Nation was long a different one , wonder if their God is also "different" , with their never ending propaganda they are either the best or the only one . Are we not Muslims now ? Or is it just that we never were ? But then it must rather widespread that there is this cult of leadership in the country and all it will take to crash down in a million pieces is a single lapse . And despite the rhetoric the lapses are a thousand a year , but never mind . Well known that the New Turkey will not lose an election , any election . Or else ... Or it will be a mess ... It's almost agreed by everyone that the fighting started over "securing" the polling stations of the next elections ; with daily clashes making people to be tough on seperatist talking points . Now that they are sugar sweet when laced with liberal phrases and the layout of the political scene making it obvious that like the only one that can offer improved individual rights is the seperatists . And America and the rest of West warning repeatedly that election fraud would be noticed this time . As such the Army will fight the seperatists by all means necessary in the name of God and the Country . So that there will be centralized polling stations where the seperatists will not be able to "secure" entire villages . Indeed seen that 400 eligible voters and 400 votes for that party . That's the elective power of the AK-47 after all . This side's losses may be 70 , may be 80 . That side's losses now may be 150 . By November probably 150 this side , probably 300 that side ; but Democracy is like important , man .

and this is like the sole reason the marshall's aide has this thunderful message for the Armed Forces Day or something . The guy calls himself the commander in chief of the Armed Forces . Yeah , right . But let's play his game and mention the newspaper ı buy to collect coupons . That's some victory of the A-K-P whereby they declared that a four star general to be the commander in chief of the Armed Forces is so undemocratic , archaic and coup plotting , besides treasonous and traitorous and also treachorous . So , they took the title for the Presidential aims . Only in war , the chief of staff can act as the commander and am reading that from the newspaper , considering as if ı care one bit ... Only reason the heroic aide (of the heroic chief of goverment generals now cashiered by the US) calls himself the commander in chief is that the PM doesn't like bad press and wouldn't like newspapers to opionate he was doing a bad job if the martyrs double and A-K-P once again gets a mere 40% of the vote . Mind you , the PM was still "heading" the ceremonies -according to this Party TV .

and the newspaper makes a mark of marshall's aide . Where he calls the country as the "Turk" Republic . Now , an explanation about the constraits of the language . The name of the state is the Republic of Turkey . In that the state promises to serve every single person within its borders even if they are not ethnically Turks . And the Turkish Republic is what people are accustomed to hear in English , a state functioning at times and not functioning at other times and speaks Turkish and staffed mostly by people who call themselves Turks but not a race specific entity . Only in 2015 , when Nationalist feelings are ravin' good for the elections , you hear bemedalled heros marking it as Turk . Could have "served" the country more by remaining silent , right ?

but then silence is not a virtue that gets respect anymore . This year's parade had "firsts" , as everything by the New Turkey is a "first" . In my almost 37 years of parade watching on TV , it's the first time that ı see defence companies taking part . Mostly trailer trucks with company logos . Possibly even a global "first", with claims that everything is made by Turks even if that plane buzzing on the TV just looks like a Pilatus ... Koç Holding's MBT proposal coming at the rear end , possibly proving even old industrialists who are blood enemies of the Party now follow the enlightened leadership of the Party .

37 years of parade watching on TV ?!! Didn't ı tell you ı was a loser ?

had a spike of sorts about the acceptance of that idea recently . Now that ı don't like where the country is going , it's axiomatic that ı should be some guy who hates the country , nation , race , Islam , Party , democracy , human rights , basic rights , gentlemanly conduct and even ungentlemanly conduct and tons of stuff ı can't remember right now ... This possibly stems from a glorious move of the Party that can go a long way to break the almost racist party . It was like clockwork , with MHP refusing a coalition with the A-K-P with the knowledge that the laws required an "Election" Goverment that would require members from every party and the almost racists would avoid it like the plague and presto the Party would have made a coalition with the seperatists . Hence the Party agreed with a guy from the MHP , the son of the founder , who was actually called the Führer , with the Tukish word used matching what Adolf was . The son declares it was his patriotic duty and nobody can sack him , even if Marine le Pen just sacked her father ... And that's supposed to be another slap on my face , as ı guess . Don't know what they are reading and how much they are keeping but ı just chanced upon an April's Fools Day , 2014 post of mine where ı parroted that the almost racists love the fascist order that's given to the country and will do nothing to change the route , that they are merely attempting to trick the Islamists out and capture the reins . And that's why America will not put them in a Coalition ...

talking of coalitions , let's mark it for history that the glorious Turkish Air Force was like unleashed on ISIL , after the Thais were compelled to arrest a guy , assisting (if not mentoring) this Asian who was responsible for the bombing of a temple in Bangkok . With Western media just getting a knack for covering a foot thick layer of crap whenever something happenz in relation to Turkey ... And just a coincidence that the outgoing Foreign Minister had a fire on his Mercedes Benz . Still possible that he will be on the newspapers , diminishing Ankara's "hostility" to our sunnier Sunni Brothers . It seems America pre-emptive then ...

and even that's not end of the post . As pointed a few times before ı write these posts at home and it's always possible to see something new after turning off the computer . It turns out the AirForce had its orders , one of the demonstration jets flew so low over the podium where the notables sat to watch the parade . You know those jets have smoke generators and if the camera is low enough , you could see the smoke touching that building . Don't the goverment generals have better things than reading me , like following American approved plans for the destruction of the country ? As for the jets , it is really a shame to remind that there is this Shania Twain song that goes like "So you are Brad Pitt." now those pilots -by the definition of their jobs- have to carry out orders . It's not an insult just on us . Trying that act and the apparent chewing on TV will supposedly convince the veracity of the patriotism of goverment generals and the like , but also on the US ... Asking this or that to be done , but then America is also the country that had Dabya as President ...

it turns out once again that r16 doesn't know jack about nothing about anything apart from something about turbolazer turrets . Had opinioned that the gloriously inventive New Turkey's groundbreakin' earthshatterin' car project would be a Tesla , with engineering stuff acquired free from Elon Musk's lot and all they needed was a hood known not here but proven in some other neighbourhood . It turns out they have bought an wholly made car from SAAB or rather GM , despite all the bombastic talk of how they would save the Europeans from a Chinese invasion with buying the whole SAAB . Chrysler something and they will be done when they change the headlights , from two small circles into a rectangle or maybe three small circles . Still , autobusiness is risky business and they have to find a courageous guy to put money into it . Which is odd , considering the New Turkey is the land of the brave . And free ; unless a critic of the country . Now that they also need a guy or two , to be on guard . Considering carmakers are like evil people ; no test lab on the Euroasian landmass or even them evil Gringos should dare to fail the Muslimcar in some test that will give it a bad name ... Which is doubly odd , now our sunnier Sunni brothers are like the owners of the universe . With every Qatari wiping himself with 100 dollar bills and Barack Hussein hisself wiping Middle East clean at the bidding of his masters . Unless of course inconvienced by the dastardly Abdülemir ; with stupid Russians unable to pronounce his name and making do with Vladimir .

such little stuff has burdened the Goverment Minister on duty with this inevitable thing . This spectacle must be greatly hurting all the smarties ; with the Minister impliying the evil forces that scuttled Devrim , the car , are still at work and must be countered . With wholesale Nationalistic fervour . To protect Chrysler something so that yet another Muslim businessman can hit the jackpot . Like the one who was awarded with the ownership of the factory which makes armoured personnel carriying trucks , with Goverment and stuff not paying the previous owners in time or something . They are a cool thing too , one was recently split open into two and all 17 inside survived . That's probably why there's not a single Muslim coming forward to tackle the Zionist hold on the autobahns of the world . Lest there be groans of "Who, that one?"

hard to understand the why in this country of miracles . The number of people out of work fell from 3 millions odd to 2 millions in a month . Turns out the people who have found work over the years were kept in the records due to an oversight and were deleted . And the GNP per capita rose from 9 000 to 19 000 $ in a night . With the application of a new calculating method , no doubt more accurate than the last . Even if it assumes one USD equals 1,27 TL . And not around 2,80 , which today's newspapers claim . And not because of the rapid increase in the value of dollar that eroded the GNP of the previous calculations to a point that Turkey is no longer in the top 20 economies of the world . Exactly in a month there's this G-20 summit in Antalya , with the show-off Barrack Hussein preferring to stay in an aircraft carrier . And then some election in the end of the month .

have been so used to bombast when it came to the tech savviness of the New Turkey ... It's as such considerably weird to notice that the entirely Turkish airliner is just a Dornier 328 which was like on offer when ı was 16 and a high school student , buying the monthly publication of the Türk Hava Kurumu , to a general derision of classmates who knew ı would never make an aircraft engineer . The percentage of Turkish content in the entirely Turkish project , achievable over an undefined period of time , is now declared to be 70% and not exactly clear in which criteria either . Nor you can hear the good news of how a Turkish company managed to sell 250 metro/light rail carriages to Munich on a national level . Considering it would imply that the company might have been a subsidiary of Siemens in some sort of arrangement . Germans are bad , these days , those jealous people who envy the third airport of Istanbul which is three times the size of CDG in Paris and hence the biggest in the world ...



edit : anyone reading this thread might have noticed ı write my walls of text at home , to proof read them 10 times now that ı still miss stuff . So , ı fell asleep last night waiting for Prometheus of Alien franchise to start on TV and had to wrap this up in 03.22 in the morning . So , the morning's new info from newspapers suggest they wanted to buy SAAB 9.5 , GM didn't sell and they bought SAAB 9.3 from the Chinese . Counters any argument that they are supposedly opposing American interests with buying a car from American interests . Commie Chinese are good for PR against them Lefties and they saved 5 year of R&D hence the valuable money of this country . Oh-kay ...

you know am so cheap , ı read newspaper pages rolling in the wind in the streets . The increasing standarts of municipality service of course makes it rarer by the day of course . Double use of "of course" ... Leading one to the "inevitable" r16 conclusion that it's targeted . Once ı had a full copy of Zaman , the Congregation's flagship , not a single page yet opened lying right on the pavement . Right at the time America saw the Party and Congregation together were defying belief and patience and decided the Congregation was to be the scapegoat . You wouldn't believe how popular Lord Vader becomes when America decides to play a gambit in chess terms . Yesterday ı had a page from a newspaper published by a guy who refers the PM as "Reis"; which is so close to Führer that he has been put away for a while during the trial period of putting the Turkish Left under seperatist control . The lack of state ads for announcing purchasing contracts and court decisions hurt newspapers pretty bad , too ... Anyhow , the editorial by Ertuğrul Fındık once again repeats the similar Counter-revolutionary refrain that getting the most votes means the winning party has the right to do anything , which in practical terms has meant the erosion of the checks and balances , an ever increasing description of Turkey as a one man state and this 1984 which goes on and on . Fındık , benefitting from writing in a vanguard of sorts , has no need to mince words . Up to a point ; İlber Ortaylı , some professor of History , had an interview on Sunday , mentioning Germany and Austria and the disasters that befell them , you know , after the 1930s . Ortaylı called for tolerance and stuff ; Fındık declares he does not respect , he doesn't have to respect a guy for his knowledge of history . You see , it's so against the narrative that one guy can talk positive about the positive aspects of the Ottomans and declare that all those Ottoman wannabes would miss the Republic if there was no more Republic . Then a ton of talking on the elections which revolves around that 49.5% voted for the Party , and that trumps 50.5% who did not and this should lead to a proper state where the newspaper owner can hail his Reis and perhaps become Goebbels ...

this is the first time ever ı have read anything by Fındık , and he obviously has not heard the latest speech by the Little Imperialist calling for a cooling period . They have won Nationalist vote by killing seperatists , disregarding the notion that they started the fight only after it looked likely that their power was at risk . Now they have to change the Constitution to make it a Federal one ; because it's the American roadmap . They have won vote of the workers by the promise of a 30% increase in minimum wage . Despite a pledge of 40% from the almost Racists and one of 50% from the Main Opposition ... Now all the bosses are talking of how hard that 30% is , they need incentives like the removal of social security so that the workers can get a 30% and the bosses can get a 20% after paying that 30% and the whole Social Security can grind into bankruptcy in due course . They have won the votes of the workers by pledges that all "Subcontractors" will be henceforth employed by the State . To a tune of 600 000 , which is of course too a big a number , when Capitalism demands all Nation States to disappear or at least conform by abolishing all possible services so that some Gringo can buy a whole country or something for a thin wad of dollars . Only 137 000 now . Whether they won any votes by offers of finding wives for those dudes who are single is not known . In the South it's disconcertingly easily to get hitched by joining ISIL anyhow .

fındık certainly does not mention that his hero , the PM , had to appear in a bar , with people smoking cigarettes and taking alchohol , after the spectacle of last year where some guy from the CHP kept smoking in the street while the PM was passing and practically getting arrested for it . Some 20 years after when all those newspapers lauded him for asking for votes in bars . This is what Barack spineless jerk Hussein does ; it was only after "this" that the US congrulated Ankara for the election . Simply because Barack spineless jerk Hussein needs Uncle Sam's little project about the extermination of the Turks if not the Turkish race approved by the said Turks . Or maybe not , it was only in one newspaper ı saw as ı walked by and ı hardly have to bother to buy all Opposition newspapers . Maybe a rehash of that campaign of 20 years ago ? It takes a web search a day after finishing the main part of this particular post to see that the bar visit really happened . And a newspaper picture showing the PM taking revenge for a 2012 or so affair when Barack spineless jerk Hussein was pictured with a baseball bat in hand , while on the phone talking with the PM . The revenge centers around a statue of the Muslim Brotherhood's handsign .

nor Fındık is a lone voice . Some guy the State has assigned to a taken-over newspaper just declared the tyranny in Turkey ended 77 years ago ; incredible that there are so many canditates to be the Goebbels .

though it's real hard to be a pokemon in Turkey , even as ethnic Turks . Some sort of political use to the narrative and to be taken away from the game to make room . The latest Minister responsible for EU Affairs being a case in point . She's of light hair colour and European lines . And it seems she's still on the Qatari vetted lists of those who will be shot after period of use . She contributed nothing to the relations with EU , apart from the delaying of the annual report on how Turkey sucks , strategically before the elections , as if European charges of future risks could assume any relevancy in voter preferences . The "future risks" phrase is easily translated as coming dictatorship by people of ill will .

nor her conspiracy theorizing has won any votes . She was taken out of the debates as soon as all her colleaugues were on the news with cries of "You, too?" Her final act is a rebuttal against the EU report , calling on the Europeans to take note of the fact that the fight of the Party against the Congregation can not be undertaken by any other means .

there's this 1984 ... All the sins of the Congregation are no longer the heroic struggle for Democracy , but sins . There's this footage of an university student in her early teens , sounding horrified as the Police finds hidden caches ... And as am writing this at home on Tuesday evening , the newspaper owner of above , of the tweet that tyranny ended 77 years ago , has declared his social media account has been hacked , some 50 minutes after named . Voice Of Russia has this hour of Opposition daily , with some nitpicking . Moscow has the hour deleted if the events of days force the Lefties (doing that newsprogramme) to be some more nitpicking . Good work , though ... This is the new Islamist thing ; all the country might be boiling over one single tweet throughout the day , but if them Russkies have noticed . Horrors , oh horrors ... Ah , the university student , she is apparently too dumbstruck by the computer hard drives and vials of blood that come out of the cache ... Until this blue pill arrives in front of the Police camera . V_agra ; she feels that she should start protesting , the Youth invariably talk of marital bliss and stuff , she now knows where this will lead . Yeah , right there , to her incarceration for 27 months as a pr_stitude leading a ring of officers including a 3 star Admiral , spying against the country . Her rather secular looking father , a State official in provincial administration , readily welcomes Hell for those who plotted all that . This Police footage is only discovered by an Opposition newspaper only because Party claims that Congregation plots against the Secular Order is a bit funny but nothing new ... The Lefties has been saying that since 2008 . Barack Hussein , oh Barack Hussein ...

mind you ı had a cold over the weekend , my mind regularly stops ... Actually had to walk back 30 meters to re-read the newspaper page . Some guy at the train station sat next to me and starting writing on a pad with letters that ı could not decipher . There was Lord of the Rings on TV , though , ı watch the fight at Moria like for the 15th time and ı can merely think whether those letters were Elvish ... Only after the fight sequence is over , this is r16 ...

the pokemon reference is from my own post .

this was the world ...



and it's the fault of Turks that it ended . Maybe 1914 was an unavoidable mistake but the efforts to make peace upto 1916 failed to reach fruitation solely due to the lack of loot to share . Germany offered liberated Arab lands as an open door , equal opportunity colony . To general contempt of Britain and France which had their own Arab Rebellion by then . In 1917, Russia could take it no more and its failure simply added a vociferously carnivorous US to the balance of power , forcing the Colonial European Powers to seek far higher compensation for the losses they had suffered so far . Which inevitably revolved around the oilfields of the Ottoman Empire ... Germany , despite the entirely novel decision of seeking a military victory against Britain reached only in November 1917 after the frightening success of tanks in the initial Cambrai offensive , still tried a last gambit in the talks in Switzerland , repeatedly . Offering the entire Arabian parts of the Ottoman Empire to the West , in return for a free hand in Ukraine to Bakü and creating a wider Armenia and the 'stan as a buffer zone and ruling over the pacification of whereever Turks were left ... Yet , still handing over Istanbul to an international commission of control .

when you read the memories of British pilots over Palestine of 1917 , you won't be surprised to read that despite all the talk of the Fokker Scourge or the Bloody April over the West Front , their German enemies in the Orient would not press too much . Not anymore , after grasping the idea that they didn't want to discover Allenby's preparations that would net Jerusalem for Christendom .

of course it's our fault . We refused extermination at the hands of friend and foe . We could , despite the centuries of Orientalist teaching that we couldn't -perhaps only because we shouldn't . We even convinced some Germans that we should be kept as partners , as equals . Liman von Sanders was one , not least because he had won a few battles with the poor Turks . von der Goltz was almost one of us , not least because he had built up all those schools that trained that bunch of officers that could or die fighting .

war ended and new wars started . Hate against us grew even more . The war had bled the Colonial Powers white , forcing proxy use in Turkey without the stiffening presence of "White" officers . Time and space favoured us , it was rather a long way for Greeks to reach Ankara . And every day that passed without a resolution , a conclusion to the Eastern Question was a day that benefitted the Communists and every moment a full scale assault on them by the entire might of the Colonialist West was delayed was a relief to us . Yet other memories of English pilots flying in support of the Whites report Turkish aces flying in support of the Reds . A bit far fetched now that there's not a single Turkish ace ever ... But then narratives rarely depend on facts . Bolsheviks were the evil of the day , even Crusades needed the PR benefits of fighting the scum that rose from the gutter to replace an entire system of nobles ruling over the world simply because they were born as nobles . The work of the Capitalists are indeed tougher with the ever present task of convincing the poor that they too might succeed if they work hard enough .

and the Capitalists responded , they created the Nazis to stop a possible fall of Germany to the Bolshies . Mind you , Versailles had specifically arranged that no German General from the West Front would be left in "Power" . von Seeckt , the Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Armies in 1918 and of Germany later on ... And the Putch fizzled and Adolf went to jail . Of course , our fault ... Clearly siding with the Bolshies and getting von Seeckt to act otherwise to his instincts as some Prussian - of the qualities that made those Prussians . Which would readily see the National Socialists as the same sort rubble and street trash as the Bolshies . von Seeckt even went into a little Military Alliance with the Bolshies . And as you know by now that's our fault , too . Then the WW II came , with us skirting every single pressure to join the war despite our hate for Adolf , who was extremely deferential to Kemal in case the Eternal Chief of the Turkish Nation could be induced to fire the 1930's version of Lord Vader and stuff . And then refusing to see the light and joining Adolf in the destruction of the Soviets in return for Crimea and a period of grace as the Nazi mass murder machine got rid of the Jews and Slavs , so that our turn at destruction could be done without much "hass" . It's always spectacular fun for me to say Winston Churchill in 1942 promised two battleships he had confiscated in 1914 . The straw that broke the camel's back and almost ensured the Ottoman entry into WW I . Those two ships , some decades later that they were scrapped due to the Washington treaties . Yeah , our fault ...

our faults never end . We had pay for our sins of prolonging the WW II for we wanted revenge at the near anhilation of ours and gave hints and tips to anybody who hated the Anglosaxons , also to anybody the Anglosaxons hated . It seems there is indeed one single Lancaster ... That went to Germany 107 times and had 244 crewmen assigned to it over her obviously long career , because you know 103 of those people were killed on it . 10 more Lancasters like that and the Allies would have lost the WW II , or something ... ı have been known to imply that MacArthur willfully ignored the Chinese buildup in Korea until the moment the Turkish Brigade could be encircled and destroyed by the Reds . That Brigade was sent to Korea because the Right Wing Goverment thought military glory would make them credible ; even if the generally accepted reason is paying the Butcher's Bill for entry to NATO ; Greece entering the same with a couple of medical teams and a few C-47 cargo planes .

and of course the thing happened ... The USMC broke Chinese encirclement by advancing on a different direction in the true American way but the Turkish Brigade could have done it only after the Chinese Reds were ordered to stand down as those yellow skinned cowards of Turks ran . Later narratives gloss this by the "fact" that there were only Kurds there , them being a hardy warrior race . Hell , Turkey became a NATO member and its planes carried a red square as the National sign ! Hell , Turkey has still a monument in Istanbul that depicts Soviet Commissars next to Kemal !

all of which were said , probably in that order and no doubt forcefully by Jack Broughton , a true Cold warrior . Have so far failed to find a copy of Thud Ridge , which is readily billed as an American classic and ı won't challenge that by any means . Seen his other memoir though and it's quite nice as well ...

oh yeah , Broughton the Cold warrior . Who missed the WW II as a P-47 pilot just by an inch , though led by example in loading two Russian spies officers attending a ball at an American airfield with alcohol so hard that the two car-crashed into a tree on the way out , hopefully dead . America has won the war , America can even kill God if He ever Shows Up on Earth , who are Russians to bicker ? His first meeting with the Turks is then such a culture shock in 1952 when he's delivering a P-47 to be adorned with the red square . Uhm , the godless Kemalists have taken the precaution of sacrifising a few sheep by the runway as the squadron worth of planes land ... The P-47 is immensely strong , true , but plane crashes kill , right ?

his career in USAF means he is supposed to go where he's sent . So , the assignment to Eskişehir to advise on F-84s is such a groan . Might be 1954 . An accident happens and the Turkish officers do not let him to be around too much ; proves Turks are savages who lack the scientific mind to understand fact and they also refuse to respect their betters .

then there are the Gypsies ... He and his family are quartered right on the city limits and his beautiful American trash cans are carefully searched for uneaten bits of chocolate . Though not mentioned in the book , am positive that the US Embassy would forcefully emphasize that trespassers are not shot in Turkey . So ? Turks are liars , the biggest sugar factory of the country is nearby and the waste product of that industrial output is consumed by ... PIGS ! False Moslems ! So he gets two heads of the said animals and uses his American ingenuity to spring load them so that the next morning the Gypsies arrive and then run ... And run , screaming all the way ... If this had really happened in 1954-56 or 1960 or whatever , making the forage party of women and kids scream and run , the State pressure on Gypsy men would have surely stopped them from opening 50 holes on Broughton with kitchen knives but surely they would rob his house so throughly that not even the doors would be left . Anyone free to ask this to any Roma when in Turkey ... And this happens to be the reason the American A-10 is called a Warthog , because it's such a cool story when Broughton tells it ...

and because the timing seems off , considering Broughton had a stressful tour in Vietnam and never bothered to hide his feelings , meaning any influence of him would be rather limited on USAF bigwigs he makes the startling revelation that the A-10 was on the drawing boards by the end of his tenure as the commander of the USAF Acrobatic Team , which ı calculate to be around 1958 .

no , his travails in Turkey are not over yet , because here comes the best part , the Sacrilage ... His secondborn is delivered in an hospital of which he describes of indescribable filthiness . And his kid earns a right to Turkish Citizenship by the virtue of being born in Turkey ! Actually the hospital staff even bring a pen for him to sign , not knowing Reds are menacing the world only because of us ... Yet , it's still not over yet ... His thirdborn will be delivered in the civilized world aka America and he will almost lose him/her to an hospital infection ...


those who haven't been bored off this page by now will probably be those who already know Jack Broughton attacked a Russian ship in a Vietnamese harbour , the very Turkestan ... His classic writing make an impressive explanation of the grief and the pain of fighting a war with such restrictive Rules of Engagement , ı hear , and the only rebuke at might have been the opening shot of WW III is a mere slap on the wrist with all of his commanders understanding him so well ... Uhm , no . It's merely a stern warning from Washington that Turkey must accept the ENOSIS of the island of Cyprus to Greece , now that Washington is afraid of neither us nor our masters in Moscow . This great American victory over the Turkish evil was of course lauded throughout NATO , with some Italian assuring Lord Vader years later that he laughed the loudest . ı happen to be the guy who claims Johnson was more interested in impressing us to surrender Cyprus than anything when he fully committed the US into Vietnam . See , Commies are all the same , when you whack some Asians , the Commies will all fall into line . You see , there's a thing about USAF B-52s kept fully loaded to accidentally bomb Turkey and Turkish F-102s kept semi ready to accidentally shoot them down .

the story depends on who's telling the story but it seems that either Someone was in the corporate headquarters of Rockwell to buy some spares for the F-100s . Or it was Somebody asking for some sort of pylon mounted system for expendables ( chaff + flares ) or Lord Vader for both . Anyhow , Broughton barges in ... So this must be the period where he was a test pilot in the B-1 programme . With a veritable explosion of facts about those commie dogs called Turks . With disbelief in the company officials . Taking confidence from the schtick of one of the guys of "Hello, I am Red Spook. Take me to your secret vault" which was well known by the time , it was certainly Lord Vader who wrote a letter to Rockwell asking the price for 200 B-1Bs , payable in Roubles ...

this is the run of the mill , ordinary American officer , with so few of the later trappings of the yet newer interpretation of Religious Beliefs . Who has "known" and fretted over the fact for years , almost starting the WW III for it . As for the newer kind that has created ISIL , because fighting us in the open is like so hard or something or whatever ? Somebody assures me that despite the years of expert tutelage ı have been given ı can never be sarcastic enough for them ...

it seems the post above is thought to be "loaded" against Broughton . ı dug out my electronic copy of Rupert Red Two .


but Lancaster first . The one in post #244 is my mistake in misreading a web description of a book . Those 240 are indeed people who have at least once flown on her , but they were transferred to other airframes in which they were shot down .


the delivery flight to Turkey is after St.Moritz Olympic games where a friend


stole the Olympic flag. That genuinely enraged the Swiss authorities, and as the searching and questioning began, I discovered that I could pull the driver’s front seat out of my 1946 Plymouth and hide the flag between the stuffed seat and the seat springs. I then went on red alert, waiting to scramble with the first snow plows that felt brave enough to attack the pass and the road back to Munich. When the first plow moved out, I tucked into close trail and barely escaped back across the border with the flag under the front seat of my Plymouth and the Swiss police in chase. The Olympic flag became a wall ornament

fighter business is dangerous in the extreme but also of high importance . People are needed for , people who are smart enough to see the risks . People who are smart enough to find less demanding jobs . The ego , the adrenaline rush , a slap on the wrist if caught are some of the things that drive all those to the colours and stuff . As "the Swiss were still making noises about their Olympic flag" his unit commander

figured it was a good idea for me to volunteer fora month of temporary duty (TDY). He needed someone to set up and run a stopover facility in Athens, Greece, for Jugs that our group was to ferry to Turkey to give to the Turkish Air Force... Even though Greece was in the midst of a civil war, Athens in the spring was business as usual, and the State Department social complex came alive at five each evening. The flowers and food were exotic, companionship and music were excellent, and food poisoning was readily available.

a Turkish airman cut the throat of a sacrificial lamb on the end of the runway. That was but the first of a series of Turkish culture shocks, but it got your attention as you were lining up to land.

it's just one lamb , allright ...


Jimmy was usually the happy Irishman, but he was serious on that trip. He was vice president for manufacturing at Republic, and he told me that he needed help in the form of an assistant. In addition to the F-84s rolling off the production line, they were involved in exploring the potential of further development of Kartveli’s far-out F-103. The new F-105, which was supposed to be in production, was encountering serious contract problems with the air force, and the A-10, dubbed the Warthog due to its ugly appearance, was on the drawing board.

will ask on aviation sites to see what sort of plane that A-10 might have been .


Following a commercial hop to Istanbul, we had our first disgusting encounter with Turkish bureaucracy in the form of customs agents. I still smoked then, but I thought I had never smelled anything as foul as those guys blowing Turkish cigarette smoke in my face and demanding that I prove why we were there. I was wrong. It smelled much worse when they closed the door on the Turkish Airlines C-47 relic that took us to Ankara. We were met by a rotund lieutenant colonel, my “sponsor,” who had drawn the duty of making us feel at home. After introductions, his first statement was, “You’re going to hate this assignment.” During the ride to town, he enlarged on why we were going to hate it, and advised us that the only things safe to eat were boiled eggs, borscht, cooked fish, jam, and bread. He helped check us in at the Bulvar Palas, on Ataturk Bulvari, took a twenty dollar bill from me in exchange for a handful of Turkish lire,

and not a wheel barrow full of currency as befitting a hellhole Turkey was .

After a particularly boring few weeks in the office, I reminded my boss that I, as an operational “advisor,” had not yet been allowed to fly a single hour in a Turkish F-100. I hit a nerve, since he, as the number-one advisor, had not been airborne under his own control in anything operational in a long time. He arranged for me to go to Eskisehir for an F-100 flight. Having flown the A model and having led the Thunderbirds in the C model, I looked forward to a cockpit check in the D and a few days of fun flying. It was not to be. They scheduled me for one single backseat ride in a two-place D model trainer, flown by their most brash squadron commander. He was well aware that I had been Thunderbird Lead, and he made no attempt to hide the fact that he was determined to wring my_ss out, big time. Putting the wringee in the back seat makes that a piece of cake for the wringor. The mission of the day was simulated low-altitude nuclear weapons delivery. That means you go in on the deck as fast as you can go, pull up hard, and at vertical you toss the nuke straight up and get out of there as best you can. I do not think I had ever been as frightened as I was as a prisoner of that _sshole Turk. When we landed, I asked him if I could have a flight in one of his F-100s, alone, that would allow him and me to practice some one-on one air combat maneuvers. He felt that such an arrangement would be impossible. Chicken, chicken, chicken.

fair enough . The pilot knows what's he's about to do , he tones himself up for that . The backseater has to react - only after he senses what's going on . If the pilot simply adds a move in the "opposite" , all the reaction by the backseater merely increases his trouble . The _ss word includes an " a" in front .

One of the problems with our apartment came from the gypsies. The crudely paved road ended as it passed our place, and it became a dirt trail from there up to the top of the hills that formed the lip of the Ankara bowl. The gypsies lived in a crude camp on the top of the hills, and each morning about a hundred of them would come down the hill on their way to downtown Ankara to beg, steal, or scrounge whatever they could. In the evening they reversed course. There was nothing between our place and the top of the hills, so when the unkempt and unwashed gypsies started downhill in the morning, their first opportunity to mess things up came at our place. Our building was neat, smartly painted, with well-kept grass, bright flowers, and garbage cans. They would hit us like a swarm of fire ants, gibbering loudly in their unknown dialect, taking obvious glee in urinating and defecating all over the property, and without fail dumping the garbage cans and pawing through and scattering the garbage.

ankara and not Eskişehir , my bad ...

Turkey was a significant producer of sugar beets, and the city of Eskisehir had a large sugar beet processing plant. The plant had something quite uncommon in that part of the world: lots of pigs. Pigs were abhorrent symbols of evil not to be touched, and certainly not to be eaten. But the sugar plant had an economic as well as physical problem as regards getting rid of the massive slop and juice they squeezed out of tons of sugar beets.They had the happiest possible pig farm, as huge pigs wallowed in the waste and kept the place somewhat clean. The pigs also had little pigs, and the Turks capitalized on the fact that Americans and Europeans did not share their fear of pigs and would actually pay good money for them. Thus, by ordering a few days in advance, you could buy a gutted and cleaned suckling pig, head and all, for fifty cents. The next time I went to Eskisehir, I ordered two pigs and picked them up Friday before returning to Ankara. I got out my big butcher knife, separated the head and front legs from them, and then tried cooking the rest of them on the barbecue. I didn’t think the culinary result was worth the effort, but that was not why I had bought the pigs in the first place. After dark I went out to our two large garbage cans, which were quite full, and packed one pig’s head and feet into each can. I had their front legs draped over the rim of the cans, with their heads pressed down by the lids of the cans. The next morning the gypsies arrived on schedule, and as some proceeded to pollute the yard, others headed for the garbage cans. As they removed the pressure by lifting the lids, the piglet heads rose up, eyes wide open, and stared at them. The gypsies near the cans screamed, and kept screaming as they ran for the front gate. Others, who were in various stages of desecrating the property, clutched the skirts of their filthy robes and joined in the exodus. For the entire remainder of our stay in Turkey, those gypsies passed our house on the other side of the road, looking straight ahead, and never again set foot on the property.

says Broughton ...

Supposedly we were in Turkey to oversee the transfer of modern equipment to the Turkish Air Force and to assist them in mastering flying techniques and procedures that would make them compatible allies in any conflict arising out of the Cold War. We had approximately zero control of any U.S. equipment that was shipped to Turkey. Abuse of the system was rampant, and lots of Turks became very wealthy on a scandalous black market. On the flying scene, the Turks accepted what technical inputs they thought they needed, but basically, they flew our equipment the way they wanted to fly it. The most succinct illustration was in the missile field. We gave missiles to the Turks and to the Greeks. The Turks aimed their missiles at the Greeks, while the Greeks aimed theirs at the Turks.

I got a one-on-one look at the prevalent Turkish mindset following an F-100 accident at Eskisehir, when I was sent there to assist as U.S. advisor to their accident investigation board. A young Turkish lieutenant had attempted takeoff with a normal training fuel load. They had a NATO standard runway, which provided plenty of length for even a fully combat loaded F-100 on a hot day. The lieutenant came up to full power, lit his afterburner and rolled down the runway, but he never got airborne. His nose wheel never came up off the runway despite the fact that his speed when he ran off the far end of the runway was in excess of 250 miles an hour. Engineering calculations are that you can not force a normally configured F-100 to remain on the ground at that high speed. The Turks had a small Toonerville Trolley–type train that ran between the town and the base to transport civilian workers, and its route took it past the departure end of the main runway. It was fully loaded and passing the end of the runway when the lieutenant’s F-100 left the runway, afterburner still blazing, and collided with the train and exploded. The lieutenant and some 260 train passengers were killed. It seemed to me that, in order to prevent similar catastrophies, it was urgent to investigate if the cause of the accident was some gross problem such as flight controls being rigged backwards or an extreme FOD situation.

never heard an accident like this . Not that am particularly well informed in train accidents . So you are saying it wasn't a standing order to stop trains during actual take-offs ? And this is not taken off from the Belenko book , where this MiG-25 slices off the top of a bus with the steel wing leading edge decapitating some 30 people ? Will we get to discuss the Belenko book , written by the Russian pilot that defected in 1976 ?



When I arrived on base, I checked in with the Turkish general in charge, and we went through the approved routine of a salute, a handshake, and the sharing of a small cup of hot, sweet tea along with a cigarette. That done, I said, “General, I’m here to assist you in any way possible in the investigation of the recent F-100 accident.”

He looked at me and, showing no apparent emotion, coldly replied, “Major, there will be no accident investigation.”

I must have registered my surprise, because as soon as I said, “But, general,” he raised his hands, signaling shut up.

“You see, major, you Americans do not seem to understand that the recent misfortune was clearly Allah’s will, and it is not for us to question Allah’s will. No, I repeat, there will be no accident investigation.”

I could not resist one more, “But sir,” and that was as far as I got. He said, “Now, if you will excuse me.”


now that we are supposed to be evidential , the general in question would most probably be Muhsin Batur . ı sincerely doubt he would mention Allah's Will as a cause for anything : He figures rather prominently in the coup stuff that always prove Muslims suffer at the hands of godless Communists and Zionists .

When I got back to Ankara with my report, my bosses just shrugged and didn’t seem too surprised or concerned. They were more interested in the fact that they had just solved a dispute between the Turkish and U.S. Air Forces. The United States was giving the Turks seventy-five F-84Fs to equip three fighter squadrons at Balikesir, where I had delivered a P-47 years ago. The aircraft had been shipped to Spain by boat, where U.S. maintenance personnel were preparing them for flight to Turkey. The United States had planned to provide ferry pilots to deliver the aircraft to Turkey, per terms of the country to country agreement. The Turks wanted to waive that portion of the agreement so Turkish pilots could deliver the aircraft. Our MAG had sided with the Turks, citing national pride, so the United States said OK. The lieutenant colonel in command of the first squadron scheduled to receive the new F-84s went to Spain with his pilots and accepted the aircraft that were ready to fly out. Despite warnings of severe thunderstorms, the first flight of four headed for Balikesir. The commander of the flight got lost in the thunderstorms, but they spit him out the other side, and he made it to Balikesir. But the other three pilots bailed out, so they wound up delivering only one of the first four aircraft. As soon as they had four aircraft delivered and flyable, the commander scheduled a four-ship air-to-ground gunnery mission to show off the F-84’s strafing ability. That kind of mission is usually accomplished against four targets spaced along a straight line, with the targets being numbered one to four, from left to right. The flight takes spacing, in trail, behind the leader, and he rolls into a left turn to fire on target one, with each flight member firing on the next target down the line. In this case, the leader rolled in on target one, but the number two man also rolled in on target one. As the leader approached the proper range from the target to start firing, the number two man started firing and shot down his commander. Before they delivered the seventy-fifth F-84, the Turks had already destroyed twenty-five of them; thus, they started with only two squadrons rather than three. Yes, the Turks flew like the Turks wanted to fly, but Allah’s will was sort of tough on their aircraft and people inventories.

for a fact ı have read during the Cyprus fighting an unit leader attacked a target , maybe a tank with Napalm . Training is supposed to make it a reflex action . As the training had always involved one target and everyone attacking the same , the 2nd pilot , the unit leader's wingman , also struck the already burning target . The leader had to issue a hurried warning to all , about attacking different targets .

Turkey was a hotbed of political unrest during our stay. The regime of Prime Minister Adnan Menderez was a cruel dictatorship, with only a thin façade of representative government. Corruption and atrocities were accepted facts of Turkish life. Dissenters usually shared the fate of the two hundred protesting university students whose bodies were found in a shallow, common grave a few miles outside Istanbul.

no , they were not . It was pro-coup propaganda , was it not ? Anyhow , the owner of the house one day

walked by and casually said, “You might want to get up about four in the morning and go out on your back deck. It should be a spectacular sunrise.” I understood his short statement,

so that he and his wife

were in position with deck chairs, coffee, and binoculars to watch the Turkish Army swing into action and overthrow the Menderes government. The tanks, guns, and troops were in position, there was some well-placed gunfire, and the required butchery apparently was accomplished quickly. Menderes was already in Switzerland with untold fortunes and spoils, and most everyone other than his immediate cohorts seemed to be ready for the takeover.

2007 is in the age of Wikipedia . ı might well fallen for evil coup plotting hagiography of May 27, 1960 as a bloodless operation but Menderes in Switzerland ?

The MAG sent out phone messages to U.S. personnel and dependents to stay home, and the city was locked down as the troops swiftly deployed to all key buildings and intersections. I was not proud to learn that the marine guards at our embassy had surrendered their weapons when the Turks arrived at the door, but who knows what instructions they had received from our American ambassador, who had bravely locked himself in the basement of the embassy. By four in the afternoon, all indications were that things had stabilized under martial law of the new regime.


this MAG should be Military Assistance Group ... And odd thing for the US Embasy invaded , but whatever ...


One of the grossest atrocities exposed by the revolution was the Ataturk Farm disclosure. The state farm sold flowers, livestock products, fruits and vegetables, chickens, and eggs. I did not trust the Turks enough to partake of their products, but we had a lieutenant colonel in the MAG who swore by the fresh eggs. He said they were the largest and best-tasting fresh eggs he had ever had. A couple of days after the takeover, the front page of the local paper broke the story, with pictures, of the raid on Ataturk’s farm. The worst of the discoveries centered on the hen house, where the storage bays turned out to be refrigerator storage space filled with stacked, frozen remains of a large number of Menderes’ enemies. It got worse. The area included a flat table and a large grinding machine that could have come from a commercial ground-meat processing plant. The Turk in charge of that facility had readily admitted that one of his duties was to grind up the frozen remains of the enemies of Menderes to feed to the chickens. He stated that he had felt a bit bad about it at first, but had become used to it. We labeled the lieutenant colonel a secondhand cannibal.

oh ... an equivalent rumour was the burial of the dissidents with asphalt during road construction . By now the Broughton family has 4 members , AJ his wife, son Mark and Sheila who's the reason for a different kind of joy as the first female born to the Broughtons in 64 years .


We had our last rub with the Turkish bureaucracy after we rode the same smelly Turkish DC-3 from Ankara to Istanbul on the way out of Turkey. I was in uniform as we went through what seemed to be the same two customs police we had faced on entry to Turkey. After examining all our many U.S. and Turkish documents, they completely surprised us by snatching newborn Sheila in her tiny straw traveling basket and passing her over a counter to an unseen person. AJ went ballistic and, with young Mark in trail, charged around the right side of the counter. I lowered my shoulders and split the two guards, going around the left side. Behind the wall a fat Turk sat with our infant child on a desk in front of him, muttering that children born in Turkey, male or female, have dual citizenship and are subject to the Turkish draft. Though the dual-nation documents I had given them were well prepared and clear, he was not sure if he should release her or if he should detain her in Turkey. There was no hesitation on our part. I grabbed the ream of documents from the fat Turk, AJ picked up Sheila and her basket, Mark stepped between his mother and the fat Turk, and we just strode out of there, past their uniformed guards and into the commercial terminal area. The Turks just stood there. Before long we were back over the Atlantic, in what looked and felt like the same tired C-54 from the inbound trip, with our six-week-old daughter snoozing happily in the luxury of a cardboard box and a GI blanket.

oh-kay , isn't the r16 yarn better ? Conscription for girls became law only in 1999 or so ; nobody has ever heard a girl drafted before or then . ı can understand the theft of an American about 8 or 9 years old as a sex-slave ; what are they going to do with a baby in diapers ? Cook her perhaps ? Or maybe sell her to Gypsies ?

or maybe the thing is the first baby girl Broughton in 6 decades would be good copy after the US Embassy asked for a dual citizenship and a few journalists ?


We had great luck with Mark’s eye treatments, as we got him involved with the best programs University of California hospitals and their associates had to offer. Skilled surgeons and therapists got the job done and avoided the bad things that another year in Turkey would have done to him. It seemed like no time until AJ was back in the hospital at Hamilton for the birth of Maureen. AJ had delivered Sheila in one of the worst hospital environments, and Sheila came through fine. She had Maureen in one of the supposed first-class air force hospitals, but Maureen and many others in the hospital at that time almost didn’t make it due to staph infection. Fortunately, we had her home in good shape before too long.

anyway ... Is this really the best way to serve the Broughton legacy , the foreword by

Dr. Richard P. Hallion
United States Air Force Historian, 1991–2002

who writes of Thud Ridge as the "remarkable memoir that, nearly forty years after its publication, is still the best Vietnam combat memoir ever written." ? "It was an angry book; as its reviewer in the Air Force’s own Air University Review noted somewhat uncomfortably in 1970," as ı can attest myself somewhat “Detachment is not Colonel Broughton’s forte.” So impressive that Dr. Hallion reads it again every year ... With 500 000 or so overall sales of that previous heavy hitter , did Rupert Red Two really need to jump on the Lawrence of Arabia bandwagon ? Which oddly has these desert ruffians under the leadership of a few smart guys humble an imperial power and stuff . A manuscript for starting a guerrilla war , not ending one for the glory of Uncle Sam . So , you have all read your books . You have seen how dumb Turks are . You have your Kurds , though you lack your desert . With that patch in Karapınar , Konya too far away from lands of glory . What's keeping you ? And all these clippings awash with Orientalism ? Oh , am so familiar with a need to blame the Turks and stuff ; expending like 95% of my ranting allowance on it lately but Menderes in Switzerland bit ? It kinda proves a weak link ? Or shall we merely say what does USAF know about history , anyhow ?



year end edit :

ı have been able to do only a re-hash of AAT , the Trade Federation's Tank as conjectural engineering , in the year of Episode VII . The WW III didn't start in 2015 either , which is a good thing ı guess .

edit on 29/01/2016

ddd is the thing ı use at home when writing these posts , because my glorious laptop does not recognize ı in Arial font and turns first to Tahoma and then to Calibri . Calibri is the font the entire Ergenekon conspiracy was written and who knows , if ı use Calibri it will be proof and stuff .

oh-kay , another translation day ...

sources not particularly important , but the feeling they kinda convey is . Have been bellyaching for years on how the New has no respect for the Old and their love for the Older is somehow fake . Take this passage -utterly paraphrased :

We are the grandchildren of the Ottomans. They are our ancestors and we can not accept lies propagated by traitors. Have you ever wondered why the Ottomans have so many internal and external enemies? This is the reality and perhaps the rule of the World. We owe our lives and deaths to the Ottomans. Without them we wouldn't be alive and we wouldn't have these lands. We owe even our religion to them.

a most striking part of the Kemalist narrative has been the "fact" that without the War of Liberation skillfully conducted by Mustafa Kemal , this country would no longer belong to the Muslims , there would be this Cross on Aya Sofya and all those mosques would have been defiled and brought down by all means imagineable . "Muslims" can never oppose this ; with the narrative that Christians are out to get Muslims . So a clever move ... Kemal might have saved Muslims but without the Ottomans we wouldn't even be Muslims . We wouldn't even exist ...

owing the Religion thing might be further delved into . The New loves to tell how the Ottomans saved the true form of Islam , from evil Iran and heinous Shia . Never minding The Ottoman Sunnism was forced upon by the Safevi choices . The Safavid guys were Sunnis first , their lands being massively Shia , they changed direction . The 1500s were still the era of horsemanship , in which all those nomadic Turkomans excelled and those nomadic Turkomans still leaned more to the Shia . The Ottoman founding fathers and the lot would have remained loyal to that same roots , had the Safevi dynasty not stolen a march on them ...

the same source has another gem of this kind ... It says it's well known that different people have joined forces to create empires over the course of history . The most perfect realization of that , the biggest example , the most beautiful sample was encountered during the Middle Ages . The text being in Turkish , it's kinda obvious that this must refer to the Ottomans ...

and indeed Ottomans are referred to , with Islam taking them from the shores of the Sakarya River to the gates of Vienna . If the Turanian Huns under Atilla had been honoured with Islam as they were on their way to invade France under the Western Romans they could have achieved the same result Ömer , the second of Caliphs , realised with taking Damascus and entire Syria . Long opressed by the Church , all those Arabic Christians converted and added a significant backbone to the State founded by Muhammed . Do not expect them to be willing to make additions and substractions between the years of circa 450s and 670s . Or the basic tenet of Islam that Muhammed came to the establish the complete form of Allah's Religion and with Huns being Muslims , there would be no need for Muhammed ...

wait , that thing then turns into a discussion of how the Iberian Umeyyads taught all those sciences and the lot to the Europeans and simultaneously lost Faith . Even that article of sorts begins with the claim that "Those nations which save the Humanity from disaster are not the likes of Fatimi or Resuli states which were corrupt in faith and act, but the likes of Umeyyads, Ottomans and Timurids which were Sunnis." Saudi money is already buying history . You know , ı actually had to re-check a printed encyclopedia to see the Middle Age is dated from the fall of Western Rome , something around 476 AD . Timur definately defeated the Ottomans and the alcohol loving Sultan of the time ...

ottomans still serve the Narrative though . The New is still not ready to teach us the truth . That's why there are biting words on the end of the Ottoman State . With depictions of the refugees who were unjustly thrown out , with a declaration that they could never be traitors because they owned the state and the lot . A basic tenet which is much in vogue . If you are yet not fully in control , it's democracy when you oppose . If you are fully in control , it's treason when they oppose . And a lush description of the Ottoman greatness once again and how the enemies still keep on attacking . Then the obligatory qoute . Some Israeli President , too ... Who declares that they , the Zionists , have destroyed the Ottomans who were indestructable in the Middle East . You know , the Zionists who control the world and yet do not know anything about the extremely parlous state of the Ottomans . Who would be facing a wholesale Arabian revolt by 1920 at the latest if the WW I had not happened . And this Israeli President somehow declares to the public that they have established two states ... You know one in Tel Aviv and one in Ankara and stupid Turks will be insulting the Sultans for 200 years more .

the New always discovers such statements . My favourite is the speech of the Italian Foreign Minister Gianni in 1989 in the European Parliament or whatever where he declares the Muslims are the biggest danger and to combat that , the Plan requires a 14 Billion € budget . To establish discoteks , drug rings and prostitution to misdirect the Muslim Youth ...

there's no end to gems which are priceless and so educating . ı saw this newspaper on the pavement and from that ı learned there is a word in French ... Entrisme ; meaning infiltration . The New of course fights within , the loot is so big , yet finite . The newspaper article sides with the expert who shames all experts and is an advisor to the PM , hence the PM . Heaping dirt on this Armenian journo who advises the Little Imperialist .

anyhow Entrisme was invented by the Leninist Commies . But it was turned into an art form by the followers of Troitsky . Will have to call them Troçkists as ı don't think ı can spell the English version ... Now this Troçki guy infiltrated the Commies to destroy Russia on behalf of American capitalism and he personally was son-in-law of the owner of American Western Union Bank . After the death of Lenin in 1924 , Stalin took the helm and developed the country into a great power and he had to establish a cruel dictatorship to achieve all that . Awesome , Stalin has always been the bane of the Turkish Right but you can almost smell the current context . There was this recent disaster of calling Adolf Hitler a positive example , viciously denied by the Party media . The current plans call for increased Presidential powers , always described as dictatorship . Which must work splendidly to increase the power of the Nation .

the Troçkist conspiracy fails in Russia but is kept alive in places like France . And BANG ! It turns out the Troçkists have infiltrated the Democrat Party in the US . Primarily within the Jews . And BANG ! The Troçkists have infiltrated the Pentagon . All those Neo-cons were like all Troçkists . Things you learn but anyhow .

the context ? Biden has been in Turkey and has met journos who have lost their jobs after failing to match the newest form of New Turkey . You would never know how much Biden has hurt the newest form . Who know what's the real source of power for the New Turkey . Take Mehmet Barlas , who has been always a "Liberal" by his own acount and always called a turncoat by others . As long as ı have ever read newspapers and grasped a bit or two of Politics . ı think he was an ideologue of the attempted Baathist coup 1971 , which was pre-empted by the Military only after America decided against the Baathist version . Barlas calls on the Turkish Foreign Ministry to make all American institutions including Biden , the #2 denizen of the Whitey Home , to shut up . Priceless . It's only two or three years that Barlas and all those journos were on the same frequency . But actually they can not . So , the local scene must be "corrected" . Hence all those Democrats in power are Troçkists so they protect Lefties like them . It's only three or four years that the entire "accessible" media were blaring that Barack Hussein won the Whitey Home only because the New Turkey defied the Zionists and people found heart to challenge 'em in the US . It's even more incredible to see how we are to forget the New Turkey rose during the Neo-con era . ı can't say they can convince the entire range of their readers . Which doesn't amount to much anyhow , considering official numbers of newspaper sales . Which simply amounts to securing patronage .

but then this the New Turkey ; it's seriously astonishing to see one Newspaper Foreign News editor to keep his head down when referring to actual news . In obvious shame . It seems this is the fifth anniversary of Mübarek's fall and the glorious liberation and stuff of Egypt . They defend themselves with the thing that all the Westerners said Esad would fall in 3 months . The guy even mumbles that the new stop for the Arab Awakening will be Russia , while the female journo who is the freshest face of the smarties expects Syrian refugee brothers in Eygpt start the next glorious chapter . As noted elsewhere , Joe Biden , Barack Hussein's sidekick has ordered the Goverment to re-start the talks with the seperatists and after its acceptance the American Colonial Governor in Ankara has decreed the seperatists should stop their valoruos fighting . Despite all the glorious news that the Army and the Police were like killing hundreds of them and making the country safe and glorious onward march inevitable .


so how do ı feel ? ı just saw Resident Evil : Retribution on TV . OK , lemme see , before the Starfleet invasion we are to go and break Will Smith's leg . Hard to explain if you haven't seen the last movie or something but ı think we should book Milla Jovovich . Say , for a calender shoot .

After having been gone for eighteen months, I just want to say that I love that this thread is still a thing.

oh them Russians ... ı chanced upon one those book lists where those guys are listing stuff and there they were , Broughton's Thud Ridge . 1969 and 1985 Editions . On the same page . The '85 edition is illustrated and has this rather more serious drawing as the cover . Good read as well .

in this point , it's almost pointless to remark that his favourite priest on the base (Takhli) was of Armenian extraction . No , ı will not claim he's so anti Turkish because he was misled by some scum ; he was strong willed enough to challenge the USAF Command and a major US Aerospace company over the ejection seats on the F-106 which had killed the occupants in every single ejection up to then . It's merely that Jack Broughton was mixing History into straight and rabid "Anti-Communist" conspiracy . Because he was rubbed sore in Ankara to see 3rd , 4th , even 5th rate people like the Turks were not paying the respect Broughton thought he was owed . As the American Defender of Liberty for Little People . Who were to return this great service to Mankind with exploitation of their country by major US Companies . Broughton brought massive spice into the game ; Turks were hated for being Turks and are still are and are still hated , Broughton took out kis notebook and wrote up every single person he had disliked in Turkey into the service of Russians .
mixed that up with the case of the Russki off Antung , the MiG airbase right on the Yalu River . Named after a train driver noted for going fast : The most famous of all railroad songs tells the story of John Luther Jones who, one night in April 1900 at Memphis Tennessee, "mounted to the cabin with his orders in his hand, on his farewell trip to the Promised Land." Casey Jones was well known for his Cannonball Express at a time of far fewer rules and security measures on the railroads where everybody was "fast" . 50 years on and it was "rumoured" the best Russian pilots were masquarading as North Koreans or Chinese and exacting an heavy toll on the Americans who were saving Freedom , Liberty and Democracy in the wildly blue skies of Korea . Only in the 1990s that it was announced that it was entirely Russian units that clashed with the Americans but that didn't suit the propaganda machine of the time . Hence when big formations of MiGs were likened to trains and this being still a period of time when trains were important "Casey Jones was the code name for a hell of a good MiG-15 combat leader, probably a Russian. He knew his aircraft and he knew the fighter game."

that's a time when the Russians are supersmart villains . To justify the Capitalist Police State for which there were many people yearning in the US . This thing naturally calls for dumb hordes of fools , which were readily found in the masses of North Koreans and the Chinese ; hence American propaganda machine had no need to out the Russian regulars . Which might have led to WW III anyhow ... Seeing Russian was for the "experts" . Who were set aside to polish their reputations as they were set up for bigger things . Captain Harold Fischer once shot down a pilot who used Luftwaffe WW II type parachute ; that's part of the way of his explanation of why he fired on the Commie while he was swinging in his 'chute . A big "no" in the world of fighter pilots , but the parachute had to be put on the gun camera film for Intelligence people to study . Fischer's "special status" for grooming led him getting shot down on the wrong side of the border as he was adding to his kills . His view on the subject was that the better of the enemy were actual American veterans of WW II , as paid mercenaries of the Reds .
major Marshall Wescott thinks he once saw a dead or seriously injured Russian blonde in the controls of a damaged MiG . Captain Bill Lilley clearly saw a blond (guy) ejecting . Harold Fischer again . He was just about to down a MiG , when his wingman was damaged badly . It became the first "confirmed" case of Warsaw Pact satellites sending combat squadrons to Korea . Which didn't happen but anyhow . Propaganda calls for demonization of the enemy , mocking the prowess of the hostiles , which then requires explanation of the cool stuff the enemy can somehow do . Hence the Czechs make regular appearances in Korea . After a fine reputation in the RAF of WW II , it is not that far fetching for a run of the mill American pilot to consider a fine old Czech officer has to fight because the evil Reds are not above of taking entire Czech families hostage . Major "Bones" Marshall , who is not the Wescott referred in the beginning , once had to fly in formation with 30 MiGs to check whether they were flown by Caucasians ; turned out they were North Korean rookies who had yet to learn that they were supposed to attack American planes . All the names and cases taken from a well read print book .

this is the context Broughton plays upon . In 1967-68 he is barely hanging on , if you are to believe him . And the Thud Ridge of course ends with a promise to write a new book ...

Two of my majors were accused of strafing a Russian ship near Haiphong as they fought for their lives. I fought for them with all my might and instead of my getting my second Air Force Cross all three of us received a general court-martial. That is quite a story in itself and one of these days I may tell that story too. I haven't decided
if I will call it "The Turkestan Incident" or "Hanoi and Back—Six Dollars a Round Trip."


which became Going Downtown ... ı don't know about that but the thing ı must say ı was surprised that the Thud Ridge was not biting enough . ı have been accustomed to real angry commentary on Rolling Thunder , the series of US aerial attacks on North Vietnam . Perhaps the reputation of the book stems from its timing , 1969 was not exactly a ripe year to see well known achievers of USAF to go public on the failings of the system .
[In Korea and Vietnam] we have used American manpower and spent American blood while limiting weapons and hobbling strategy and tactics. We have practiced manpower escalation while limiting technological escalation; the result has been frustration, both military and political. The problem of the future is not simply how to limit wars, but how to limit them without frustrating our basic political objectives...


Any guerrilla war is certain to be a long-drawn-out war of attrition; the British and their allies fought for twelve years to eliminate a far smaller Communist guerrilla movement in Malaysia. Neither the Administration nor the public understood, when we first committed our strength, that any war in Vietnam, no matter what we did, was bound to be a long war requiring major effort. (Some of our key military leaders had greater foresight. Before a single U. S. combat soldier was committed to Vietnam in 1965, the Army Chief of Staff and the Marine Commandant estimated that a total of 600,000 to 1,000,000 American troops might be required.) But the Administration compounded its failure to understand the difficulties of Vietnam by the policy of gradualism it followed. President Johnson described this policy as the gradual application of increased power to the enemy to force him to cease and desist. This form of escalation sacrificed the great initial U. S. advantage in power. Escalation always works to the advantage of the stronger power if the ante is raised to a degree the opponent cannot quickly match. But the United States sacrificed this advantage; it increased U. S. power and U. S. pressure slowly and gradually—so slowly and so gradually that it permitted the enemy, with major help from its great Communist allies, to match us relatively. The policy of gradualism meant that what was bound in any case to be a long war was now certain to become even more protracted...


U. S. memories are short; air power should never have been expected to accomplish all of these objectives, particularly when the restrictions and limitations placed upon the air campaign doomed it a-borning...


There was undoubtedly initial overenthusiasm, among some professionals as well as the Administration and the public, about what air power might accomplish. Americans like to think in terms of an immaculate war won in the wild blue yonder, and some Air Force publicists have encouraged this Madison Avenue fantasy. The Air Force is a young service led by enthusiasts who had had to fight hard to establish its validity against the military traditionalists, and from time to time it has oversold its capabilities. The lessons of World War II, when air power proved to be a vital part—but still only a part—of the military team, and of Korea, when the air interdiction campaign—Operation Strangle—failed to strangle, were quickly forgotten, and some in Washington, including many laymen and a few professionals, anticipated quick results when the bombs began to fall on North Vietnam.


But oversell was not primarily responsible for the disappointing results in North Vietnam. In 1965 when the bombing campaign started the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that some ninety-four key military targets be destroyed within two to three weeks in an overwhelming blitz. The campaign was planned in accordance with the military principles of mass, momentum, and concentration to maximize the shock effects of air power to the full. North Vietnam's air defenses then were weak; her gasoline and petroleum storage, electric power, transportation, and other vital targets were concentrated and vulnerable; and the cumulative effect of destroying all these targets rapidly would, at the very least, have materially impeded Hanoi's aid to the Vietcong and might have shaken the North Vietnamese hierarchy...

is as good as any description of the narrative on Rolling Thunder . Have read it multiple of times in multiple books , that's the sole reason ı didn't find them fresh in 2016 . Have been capable of reading military books in English since 1990s ; two decades of exposure have coloured the impact of the very original somewhat . The same experience of 20 to 30 years also allows me to follow the story without any particular problems while the editor warns that this is a book written in fighter pilot language and still Broughton does a great job in explaining why they do things in a certain way . Sure one can find places to be "off" when encountering stuff like

Thuds have knocked down more Migs than any other aircraft in Southeast Asia but only a few Thuds have fallen before Mig attack. The Thud has made an impression on even those flying for North Vietnam — whoever they may be.

who knows ? In 1967 the F-105 had many air to air successes while the Phantom crews were just getting into their stride . In fact if only gun kills are counted the Thunderchief ought to be the most successful aircraft of the entire Vietnam war . Shortly there will be a discussion of the superfighter MiG-21 . All the anectodes to that end will immediately cease in 1972 where the US pilots were better trained and slightly better armed .

And the [Rolling Thunder] was the big league. The true air war in the North. The desperate assault and parry over the frighteningly beautiful, green-carpeted mountains leading down into the flat delta of the Red River. The center of hell with Hanoi as its hub. The area that was defended with three times the force and vigor that protected Berlin during World War II.

which has been pared down to "more powerful" than the defences of Berlin over the years .

Yen Bai was one of the Thud drivers' pet dislikes. It has the reputation of being Ho Chi Minn's hometown and the way shot from there you'd think it was manned by the Turkish brigade protecting Ataturk's tomb. Maybe they had a statue of Ho down there—they sure seemed to be protecting something. I have been there many times and from the air it seemed that all you were battling was the guns.

we have been there already , don't we ? He doesn't like us Turks .

contentedly as they awaited their turn to unload in the harbor. It was amazing how familiar some of those flags looked. That must have been a lucrative shipping business.

all in all , the book is a primer about the Turkestan incident , a mere entry . We are now getting a glimpse of frustation on the Freedom of Navigation on the seas , a most cherished American institution . ı have read only once that a British ship was lying offshore to unload cargo at Haiphong . And that the capital of Cambodia required river travel on the Mekong through South Vietnam and USN riverine patrol forces paid special attention to tail French cargo ships .


1969 is too early a time to use full names ; he might be out of USAF but many of his colleagues are still serving and may yet face the North Vietnamese from too close a distance . So , it's first name basis , with not even dates given . So , Broughton is leading an attack on the environs of Hanoi . His immediate flight of 4 has the Kingpin callsign . Kingpin 1 is Broughton , Rob flies Kingpin 2 . Don at Kingpin 3 is a squadron commander and a Ph.D and definitely a smart guy . Broughton needs to prepare the background a bit by describing how Don might have issues . "Anyone who is not completely terrified doesn't understand the problem." is what Kingpin 1 has to report on 3 right before the mission in question . Finally Bing is Kingpin 4 . Don avoids talking on the radio and surprisingly jettisons his pylons to go faster ...

Even as I was trying to figure out what was going on with Don, I instinctively rechecked my left side. You learn early in this game that you can't afford to keep your head still in the cockpit and you can't depend on even the best wingman in the world to do all of your looking for you. Almost without brain command, the head moves constantly, the eyes searching. As mine swung left, I saw the prettiest aircraft I have ever seen, and I have never seen another one like it. It was a Mig-21 in about a 40-degree dive approaching me from above in my eight o'clock position. He looked like he had rolled over from far above me, perhaps 25,000 or 30,000 feet, and pointed his charge earthward in a graceful screaming dive, and he was really moving. He went by me so fast I could have imagined that my engine had quit and that it was time to eject. As he streaked past, just off my wing tip and in complete control of this beautiful piece of machinery, I saw the most unusual paint job I have ever seen. The craft was painted several shades of gray in a scalloped pattern with the peaks of the scallops pointing upward toward the top of the aircraft. The paint blended beautifully with the sky and clouds, and was one of the most effective camouflage jobs I have ever seen. I know of nobody who paints their machines like this, but it would be an excellent idea. This guy was different; he was no run-of-the-mill North Vietnamese trainee. I couldn't see his eyeballs, but I'm willing to bet that they were both round and blue. It was a bit reminiscent of Korea many years before when you could pick out the master attempting to herd his charges through their combat upgrading. When they failed to respond properly, you could almost hear him scream "Idiots!' and launch into a masterful pass of his own. I certainly hope that our management of statistics and stories does not delude us into believing that we have met and conquered the best of the world's airmen. It just is not so and the 10 to 1 kill ratio racked up by the Mig-21's a bit later ought to make somebody do a bit of thinking. I am not talking about a bunch of clods in old beat-up Mig-17s and Mig-15s; I'm talking about good pilots in good machines. We have many very competent adversaries, lying in the weeds, but that is another one of those unpleasant things that as an Air Force and as a Department of Defense we have cultivated a deaf ear for. We don't like to hear anything that does not please us.






the odd painted MiG ... Surprisingly common in Vietnam . The death of Captain Lodge later in '72 has a Fishbed with a blue painted canopy , never encountered elsewhere . Korea had only a MiG-15 with a large dragon on its side , duly shot down by the Americans . And the Russkis seemingly loved advertising their presence . Take Hoser , a "gonzo maniac" that bubbled to the surface in the microcosm of 400 or so Tomcat pilots in the 1980s . Hoser must be the perfect advertisement for the American way of flying fighters ; getting away from any disciplinary action on the ground due to undeniable flying skills . He was flying recce Crusaders in 'Nam and he was well informed enough to have heard a Russian thought so highly of himself that he had his plane specially painted . When he bought the farm , every crew on the carriers knew it within 24 hours .

He never batted an eye at me and I had already instinctively plugged in my burner and started a swing toward his tail as he passed me. He was so far ahead, it was hopeless, but you try anyway. My head swung back to the right, and what I saw
horrified me. In just the few seconds since I had last looked at him, Don had fired up his burner and accelerated to a position several thousand feet below and in front of me. Our mutual protection was gone, and what was worse, I could tell that he was still accelerating and pulling further away. Bing was fighting madly to stay on his wing, but Don was pulling away from him. What was he thinking? He was heading for a break in the lower layer of the undercast, but it was only a small hole and there were only a few feet of clear sky between those clouds and the ground. Suddenly I knew what that pretty Mig was after. He had Don and Bing spotted and with his speed and maneuverability, he was gracefully floating into a position to blast them.


"OK, Kingpin three and four, you got one on your tail!' I got no acknowledgment. The interval between them and the Mig shortened. "Keep going to the left, Kingpins." ...They were almost to the edge of the hole now, and he wouldn't talk and he wouldn't change course. "Kingpin three and four, go full burner, he's closing on your tail."


...Probably the most confused man of all was Bing, and as they ducked under the cloud ledge, he knew things were very wrong. He was obliged to stay on his element leader's wing, and his job was to protect his boss, but his boss was taking him down into an almost certain trap, and his boss was eluding the protection Bing was offering. Bing had long since gone to full burner and had gone through the speed of sound in his chase. He was now at Mach 1.1 and still not closing when he thought that perhaps Don had lost the continuity of events and thought that he, Bing, was a Mig in pursuit.

why , you wouldn't believe a MiG driving Russkie would have the heart to look a West Point football player in the eye , would you ? Otherwise it makes perfect sense ... Don , a smart guy , shuts down every possible electronic emission ; home-on-jamming is a very nasty thing even in 2016 . He cleans up his plane as much as possible , goes down to get to lower altitudes where the F-105 is the fastest plane in 1967 and no MiG can possibly catch him . Great guns defence . Clutter will stop any possible guidance of radar homers by the puny radar that might fit the Fishbed's nose cone and the IR homers can not be any better than the Sidewinders on the American planes . When just feets off the deck . Don does not care for mutual defence by Bing or the entire Kingpin flight - speed is life !


"Kingpin three, this is four back here on your wing—"

The thought flashed through my mind that perhaps Don had somehow become confused on his call sign, hut that just doesn't happen very often. "OK, the pair of Thuds that just went under the clouds—Mig on your tail—get back up here."


If the call sign had been a problem, there was no answer to prove it.

Our fancy Mig was still visible as he approached the cloud deck, and I was after him in hopes that he would maneuver enough to allow me to get on him before he got three and four. I rolled a little left and dropped my nose to let my beast pick up all the speed I could get. I was sure glad I didn't have to worry about Rod, he was right there. "OK, Kingpin two. there's our Mig right down there. Let's go twenty degrees to the left—he's right at the base of the clouds—full burner now." ...


Our Mig blended with the clouds like he was invisible and then he disappeared under them. I knew I couldn't catch him or get on him underneath that deck if I didn't have him when he dropped through that hole. I had to bet that he would not find it to his liking down there in the haze and among his own gunners and would pop right back up through the layer and allow me to tap him as he emerged.


"OK, Kingpin, out of burner. Let's stay on top and see if we can pick him up."


We had picked up some altitude and then had let our birds fall off on a wing and drop back toward the clouds. This way we could keep our speed up and cover the entire area where I expected our Mig to pop back on top. "Let's go back up
again, Kingpin. He's still down underneath it."


"Say again?"

"He's right down here underneath us, but he won't come back up again." Then up he came, right where we wanted him. We had plenty of speed, and we had a couple of
thousand feet altitude on him. It was only about a 20-degree turn for me, and I was on him and closing fast from his eight o'clock. He didn't see me at first and I don't know if his ground controllers gave him the word or if he saw me when he made a little 20-degree check turn to the left. Regardless, he was plenty smart and realized that a pair of Thuds hurtling down on him was less than desirable. It was time for him to disengage and get out of there, and he wrapped his little beauty into a vertical 180-degree turn to the left and was gone. Just like that. I couldn't come close to staying with him, and he was gone. It must be great to call the shots like that.


As Bing had passed the top of the clouds, he had been doing Mach 1.2 and he caught a glimpse of Don through the wispy cloud and knew that he was finally closing on him. When you get one of these bombs going that speed, the process of slowing down could be as painful as the process of accelerating to that speed, and he yanked the power back to avoid overshooting his mysterious leader. He needed to get close to him and herd him out of there before they both bought a piece of the local real estate. As he raced through the bottom of the layer, he was blinded. The sun was down low in the west and it was ricocheting off the flooded rice paddies like an orange and yellow searchlight focused on a mirror. It was worse than Bing had expected. They were low, dangerously low, and down in the range of even hand-held
guns. The nose was still pointed down toward the paddies, and they were much too fast to he in a nose-down attitude and still pointed toward the ground. Collision with the ground was imminent and he couldn't see where he was going. Bing did a great job in maintaining control of his craft, and anyone with lesser skill and determination could well have been finished right then and there. Where was Don?

ı don't know . It's possible Broughton didn't know , either ... Ospreys are great and a lapse of 40 or 50 years allow the authors to make comparisions between the archives of the antagonists . Will search for a title that might discuss it .

For Ben Fuller "the worst mission was on April 30, 1967 when I was leading inbound to the target and MiGs popped up from below us and shot down my No 3 man, Leo Thorsness, and his EWO Harry Johnson, and also the No 4, Bob Abbott in an F-105D."

leo Thorsness is a Medal of Honor winner . On the 19th of that month , with a long hard fought battle against everything Hanoi could throw at a Wild Weasel crew . Broughton has a long and striking passage on the action , which the Osprey title fully supports . Using the Osprey account for brevity :

Leo Thorsness and Harry Johnson were flying [an] F-105F as Carbine 3.

... as our Weasel leader, Leo scheduled who flew and in what positions. He had already flown a mission that morning and when the regular pilot was not well he put himself into the No 3 slot. At the time Carbine was attacked, there were no SA-2 launches and no SAM radars were even “up.” Before that it had just been random “looks” [by enemy radars]. We weren’t even in range of any potential SA-2 sites. We all had a feeling that some missions were SAM days and some were MiG days, based on the number of SAM sites that would be “up.”

April 30 was to be a MiG day. Carbine flight was up to 20 miles ahead of the strike force [of other '105s] and its F-4 MiGCAP escorts, one of which may have detected two “Atoll” missiles heading for Carbine but mistaken them for SA-2s. Another pilot probably misidentified a flight of aircraft behind Carbine as American jets. The weight of radio traffic and the stuck beeper made it hard to tell. In retrospect, it became clear that a flight of MiG-21s, including two piloted by top VPAF aces Nguyen Ngoc Do and Nguyen Van Coc, with a third flown by Le Trong Huyen, was orbiting at low level, out of radar, beneath the F-105s’ approach path.

the beeper is a survival radio that starts broadcasting when a pilot has to eject . One of them is fixed on the ejection seat , the pilot also has one on his body . In any case , such a device is malfunctioning and provides a noisy background noise that will play a major part in what will transpire . Weasels fly first , so that they can destroy or deter SAM batteries to enable the strikers to attack the target . The distance mentioned requires them to have their own escorts and one of those pilots reports the missiles on 9 o'clock and stuff . Which leads the Carbine flight to look at their Left , while the missiles are coming from behind , possibly with a "healthy addition of Right" so that the Carbines will not see them . There's confusion of course and the Phantoms report the "MiGs" as Thrush flight . Which gives a relief to the 105 drivers as there's no Thrush flight within tens of miles ... There's no danger for them . Carbine 4 is hit first , as the crew of Carbine 3 look the other way . Just like Carbine 1 and 2 do ... Missile impacts' effect change to due lots of factors , Carbine 3 finds time to declare that they are hit and are ejecting with the entire tail of theirs on fire . It will be maybe 30 minutes before the entire fleet will discover Carbine 4 is also missing .

in 1967 many aircrew are taking tape recorders aloft to assist debriefs and Carbine 1 has a set . Broughton has parts of it ... as this is the road to Turkestan ...


"How in hell did anybody get shot down over a mountain anyway?"
"I don't even know what they were in range of."
"Well, fifty-seven millimeter—"
"I know that—"
"Thirty-seven millimeter—"
"He was really on fire."
"Hmmm?"
"He was really on fire."


translation of that ? Mountains can not support the SA-2 which requires a massive "footprint" on the ground with radar vans and specially prepared launching sites . And 57 and 37 mm rounds do not have the HE content to set a F-105 on a fire that big that quick ; Broughton reports a black tail of 2 miles for Carbine 3 .

on the 93rd mission for Maj Thorsness and his second that day, things went very wrong for his “Carbine” flight. With communications drowned out by a malfunctioning emergency beeper in an F-105’s ejection seat, his element was jumped from below by a 921st Fighter Regiment MiG-21 flight led by VPAF ace Nguyen Van Coc. Thorsness’ wingman, 1Lt Robert Abbott, was shot down in F-105D 59-1726 and Thorsness’ F-105F (62-4447) took an “Atoll” missile, fired by Le Trong Huyen, in its tailpipe. Badly injured in an ejection at almost 600 knots, and filled with a sense of failure, Thorsness landed hard with a damaged parachute. He and Johnson were soon captured. Thus began an agonizing, but heroic, six year prison sentence in Hanoi.

oh my ... ı don't think the Osprey authors have the full story nor ı have read any memoirs to have what the cover version might be but the sense of failure for Thorsness is got to be that he was shot down "in error" by a Sparrow from either Chicago or Dallas flights . Do not know which one had the escort duty for the Weasels , but it was more likely to be Dallas . And the failure stems from the thing that such things were likely to happen and Thorsness had refused the necessary blackboxes added for early warning . They were heavy , never minding the extreme stupidity of the suggestion . Which emanated from the Navy . The Navy had lost a capable flyer in A-4s in a similar situation of sorts ... And Prisoners of War do not serve prison sentences in Turkish , they are "captives" . The prison sentence phrase is the first time ever that ı have encountered in English in that way , too . As if suggesting Thorsness was indeed a Yankee air pirate that bombed schools and hospitals for fun .

the beeper comes to its own as Broughton orders a full scale rescue effort . Whenever something solid is about to be agreed on , the beeper screams . The Rescue command fails to understand that there are dozens of American planes in the air and keeps the helicopters back . It appears the code Sandy has not fully come into general acceptance and it's either a Spad or Nomad . the A-1 to provide close coverage and command the rescue on the spot is piloted by a clod as Broughton calls people . And for good measure the Vietnamese shoot down a third F-105 as the American ranks are thinned by the need for aerial refuelling . A second set of Nomads arrive and these are flown by people who bring pride to USAF . Though it's late in the day and the net result is 4 people not returning ... Not on the day at least .

robin Olds of 8th TFW was sacked on the 8th of May . He might have survived ; would possibly do so , but he chose to defend himself with the claims that they were shooting down Russians in droves and a guy in his flight had killed one hanging on the 'chute with 20mm fire from the gunpod . The bigwigs investigating had a better clue on how many Commie pilots were getting killed , the empty boast didn't help at all . Looking for a printed book to check the date of Turkestan incident ı somehow knocked my mouse out of commission for a while , too ...

people hear when they gotta hear . Olds became the commandant of the US Air Force Academy and there was an overflight of F-105s at some parade . Figuring out what would happen , #3 and #4 either deployed airbrakes or climbed away . #1 had a job waiting for him at an airline (maybe United , perhaps Eastern) and hence #2 was the bravest of the lot as the Thunderchief element went through the sound barrier and broke all sorts of window panes at Olds' command . Broughton had many friends but he would never make general . His story of Turks fighting in MiGs , neverminding super accurate flak rounds that almost got him once , rapidly resulted in one guy out of uniform given a tour in Vietnam where he was most visible to Christians , where he could poke his bloody nose in the affairs of White Man with sight seeing in Saigon or some obscure hamlet in the Delta or a Marine firing pit in the DMZ . Nixon was the man and he would have none of this nonsense when he became the President . Unfortunately that coincided with Watergate and the great plan for the Cypriotic defeat of the Turkish Army , and by Turkish Army ı do not mean the current Army of Petrol , just coughed and sputtered ...

russians do survive to fit the narrative . With the debacles taking place in the fight for Halep ı hear Muslim heroes have surprised a secret meeting . ı don't know why Russian generals have to travel to battlefields to have secret meetings but Yuri , a 3 star general has been killed . In addition 3 Russian generals of one stars , 5 high ranking Syrians , for a total death toll of 15 . Yeah , 1-3-5-7 . Almost ... Don't know whether this will be the fourth death of the Ukranian , a celebrated pilot who whizzed by in a L-39 in the early parts of the fighting when all Regime thugs had to be uncapable idiots so that every single Sunni would be assured of victory and join the Irresuction . Has been shot down twice , burned alive by ISIL in one of them , hacked to death by the Nusra in the other and killed at the hotel room as well . Ukranian because Putin loved Turkey so much before that Su-24 was shot down , it was a bonus for Sunni propaganda that all the Russian vetoes in the UN didn't matter in any possible way . We even had a team of Serbian snipers recently in Turkey . Turns out the official State News Agency had this reporter who knew that it was a lie but he tested the knowledge level of the public by using the photo of some blond Hollywood star as the mug shot of the dead or captured sniper . Not as good as what has happened to Ben Affleck . Some clips and stills from some movie keep playing on DVD channels which suggest Gwyneth Palthrow will be much happier if Affleck buys some pills , some cheaper form of V_agra , ı believe ...


edit : after writing this wall of text by the end of the evening ı arrive at the city to see the repeated attempts to control what ı download has led to some sort of brushing . With Russians on the run , people somehow do not want me irritated ? So citing bandwidth limitations am outta another web cafe . While all those newspapers suggest the dead Russian ands Syrian generals amount to 8 , with 20 or so of other ranks . To cover the Serbian snipers blunder we now have American generals commanding the street fighting of the seperatists who are now equipped with American weaponry as well . Including a sniper rifle that fires enriched Uranium , not depleted as DU . You see , the Turks come even stronger under new management , they would spit out any lesser round . And so far no joy in locating the Osprey title which would mention the loss of Don . Pity , ı would guess that pilot would turn out to be a guy with non-round and non-blue eyes with a name ı could never pronounce anyhow .

edit Feb 8th : Here's the Osprey account :

The unreliability of the ‘Atoll’ missile, or lack of VPAF expertise, probably saved F-105 casualties on 8 December [1966] when three were fired from a group of eight MiG-21s closing behind two Thunderchief flights, led by Col Broughton. The mission was another re-attack on target JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff ) 19.00 – the POL and railway yard facilities near Phuc Yen (in the MiGs’ backyard) – but heavy overcast prevented the strike on both primary and secondary targets. Two MiG-21s were vectored up through the cloud-base for coordinated attacks on mission commander Col Broughton’s ‘Kingpin’ flight, while two more went for the second flight. All three missiles either exploded short or missed.

Both flights jettisoned their tanks but hung onto their bombs as long as possible as the MiGs continually tried for further attacks, but the ordnance eventually had to go and the enemy fighters then gave up the chase. However, a single grey-camouflaged MiG-21, allegedly flown by one of the VPAF’s Soviet advisors, Snr Lt Vadim Shchbakov, passed ‘Kingpin 1’ at high speed in pursuit of ‘Kingpin 3’, who had flown ahead of Col Broughton and had a ‘hung’ wing tank. Whether the MiG, or possibly the heavy 37 mm AAA, shot down ‘Kingpin 3’ at low altitude or whether he hit the ground in the effort to avoid the MiG was never clear, but the lost pilot was the popular and highly capable Lt Col Don Asire, commander of the 354th TFS. His F-105D (59-1725) may have been the first to be shot down by a MiG-21.

broughton's own words clearly suggest it was Hot Dog 2 with the tank problem . Actually ı deleted the radio traffic relating to it . Had a place in the book to show the Kingpins were not "isolated" but part and parcel of a bigger formation , would clutter the post here .

and doing the obligatory Wikipedia search :

Colonel Shchbakov had been named as a pilot/instructor during a Task Force Russia report in 1992/93 (TFR 18 report) Col Shchbakov was credited with 3 possible aerial victories; two US (RB/EB)B-66s and one F-105 Thunderchief (tail #59-1725) flown by US pilot LTC Donald Henry Asire. No RB/EB-66s were downed in the time period claimed, and Asire's F-105 had been chased into the ground by pursuing North Vietnamese MiG-17s. Although official North Vietnamese Air Force (NVAF) records indictate that two F-105s were shot down by NVAF MiG-21s on 8 December 1966 from the NVAF's 921st Regiment. Two RB/EB-66s were shot down in 1966 however, but not by MiGs; they were shot down by North Vietnamese SAMs on 25 Feb and 20 July 1966 by Soviet manned surface to air missiles, which from 1965 thru nearly all of 1966 were strictly manned by Soviet personnel.

wiki naturally claims 6 kills and pours water on it . Usual Americana on the move .

edit Feb 10th : Sacked is indeed an odd choice of a word when Olds remained in theatre until September 1967 . Getting all the choicy positions to score to become an ace . And like heroically declining to engage a fourship with his fourship because they would have cross a SAM / Flak defended area to engage . The wellbeing of his personnel being more important then him becoming an ace . He like even declined all the China missions , am ı right ?

you wouldn't believe how "surprised" we are at the news that the Federal Goverment will not start the court case against Lockmart in 2016 . Due to the unescapable fact that this is Barack Hussein's last year and such an undertaking must perforce be left to the President elect . And of course when it came out of the blue like a thunderbolt or something back in the day , Barack Hussein had such highly pressing issues like solving Syria and saving the world . But one of these days it would like totally 100% surely happen . At every single turn , the wrong would be righted and Lockmart went to the extent of declaring the biggest computer hacking or something with the claims that the Chinese had stolen everything and it was like hinted all the backdoors were left by the Chicoms who couldn't fight America like a man . At every single turn , the cancellation of the Turkish part of the contract was such a disaster for NATO that it had to be averted by all means in the common interests of Mankind . And we saw in the last month's Popular Science magazine that there are now hundreds examples of the thing and Americans keep them in ultra secure hangars where the walls are painted in psychodelic colours and loud rock music constantly played so that the evil scum will not be able to re-spot the lovely ways of dealing with the Turkish scum . There is this massive fear of the janitors in the US , ı see ... There are a bunch of Australians who plotted to take commissions from the "inevitable" F-22 sale to Australia and you will know them if you are remotely interested in the mighty travails of the F-35 ; who are world famous for the most disciplined opposition and had the wickedest trick , comparing the Footpad to the 105 . Hence as good , so should serve where it won't . What Broughton would want you to believe is above somewhere .

should have been above my rant scale . As reported and stuff last Friday . It was obviously super in the beginning . The Web is available in phones , kids convince their families to buy some monster game machines and cafes go down . November to December two closed shop . And the first week was spent with the owner talking in the background of how he was selling , too . ı will not buy a web-cafe ; if ı had that kind of money ı would have connection at home . You will remember the one at the city center , the haunt of the undercover police guys . Two or three weeks went by cultivation , of hints of how they knew everything or were using flash drives like me or wood burning stoves were passe . There was this petition to stop operations against the seperatist control of the neighbourhoods in Southeastern cities and some poet from the Right implies he will satisfy the mothers of those who signed in some song . ı heard it the first time it was played with Speakers 100% , no need for the second and the third . Last weeks were competitive . Cbr and Cbz formats require Winrar and you can not like unzip them if the only option becomes Adobe pdf reader , after nearly a month of perfect availability . Didn't help for some reason , hence finally Explorer started to fail saving them . Also denied .rar files ; with the inevitable conclusion that no more unit downloads of Civ III for yours idiotly . Never mind , if Explorer fails there's always Google Chrome . Voila , no more of that web cafe anymore ...

financial burden to begin with . With ransomware around , ı can't stick flash drives to the laptop and stuff . The place being the haunt and stuff there was a bit of safety and you would just ignore the talking on how the thieves have now calling centers and conduct massive fraud . One police guy with personal experience on the very same day with a call about a bank account in a bank in which he has no account . No word on whether he contacted the responsible police section either ; but he does wonder on how the fraudsters have all the access to the equivalent of the Social Security number . The proper answer to that is the Ministry of Health sold the databank to anyone asking but that will only lead to a question of whether you want a share .

ı don't want anything . What ı want is and end to play spy thing . There's no need for people to discuss what ı want . There is no need for a female student to be once alarmed about the daily BS and the storm of commentary that follows my posting . Alarmed enough to ask her teacher on how many Turks there were in the world and deducing a number of victims from an aggregate total of 266 millions . What's the point of a fear of concentration camps with better crematoriums ? Everybody dies one day . She will be most likely dead in 70 years anyhow , with possible improvement in statistics in mind .

americans are once again shirking away from their God given duty . They have toiled hard to start a war that involves Turkey one one side and a mildly wild concoction of enemies , now including Russia . So that we can be dead in war or be dead by the follow-up general revolt of the seperatists or we can be dead by pesticide in the camps . But no , America now fears we will be very quickly defeated by the Russians , say after they launch a couple of balistic missiles that will take out a couple of bunkers in the heart of Ankara . Just check a couple of dead Arab Princes . And there will be such disgrace for the Smarties that they will be run out of the country and we will be all Commies and Turkey will live for another century . As such every single day one incredibly brave Arab country takes the plunge and declares that they will fight on the ground in Syria . Jihadi brothers must be hurting . All aimed to convince people in Ankara to think the organized state versions of the sunny Sunni Brothers will not melt away the moment Russians arrive so that we will be all dead . Let me see ... The Saudis will be shut down . Jakku can still be filmed for Episode IX under new management . Let me first spot Bahrain on the map and ı promise ı will think of something ...

by the way , am kinda happy that ı have managed to be like foreseen the coming of stuff . It first started with a "reader's letter to the editor" in a modelling magazine , for which even the magazine offered some sort of apology . From this we learn the Serbians have shot down that F-117 by Air-to-Air . Actually , no big thing ... the Air Forces Monthly of the era had readily claimed an AAM . And not a miracolous Serbian ingenuity with TV cameras and longwave Meteological cloud watching radars . And of course , ı have been on "public record" long ago that the Turkish treachery involved was giving away a hint that those planes had to fly at a certain altitude band to avoid side-on examination by radars in Hungary . For corroboration on that you will need some issues of Jane's Defence Review where the Slovakians accuse the Hungarians of bad stuff . Unnamed and unclear , of course . If you are clueless now and askin' what Turkish treachery , this is obviously first time that you are reading yours idiotly : There is always Turkish treachery . Without it how can American Christians bring on the Armageddon ? The letter than goes on that there was also a lock-on by a Serbian MiG-29 on an F-15 . Lock-ons do not constitute victories ; there must have been tens of thousands of lock-ons over the Aegean and the casualties must be less than 10 since 1974 . So you are to call the claim BS and turn the page .

ignoring the revelation that the celebrated Serbian SAM battery commander does not actually exist . Now that he was credited for the USAF F-16 shoot down as well . See , the first "official" kill on the F-16 in USAF colours ... ı readily concur this got be pre-release blitz about a new plastic scale model of the Fulcrum with Serbian markings .

claims of Serbian snipers in the Southeast ? The Fulcrum model was always on my mind ...

then , "so far" unrelated stuff . As far as ı remember that was a fanzine of sorts from the 1970s on armour . With yet another reader's letter . The guy meets a German WW II veteran in a modelling event and the German says he was in the anti-tank guns and in 1945 they equipped their battery with British 3 tonner trucks . From a park in Prague where there were 3 000 of them and brand new . You might remember me pontificating on Adolf Eichmann and the final offer of 250 000 Hungarians for 10 000 trucks . Which works out as 25 Jews for one , with the choice of family name , age , gender and stuff left to the provider . Odd ... Possibly they are owned in print by the whole series ; guess it's the truth and not some MI6 stuff from 2015 .

and then , Turkish newspaper yesterday . Says the Swiss have passed a new law that calls for the possession of unclaimed accounts . Turns out a beneficiary of Darüşşefaka , an orphans' house and school dating back to the Ottoman era , has a safe there . Ömer Lütfi Tozan is the name and ı happen to remember a series of articles in a monthly popular history magazine . 1980s and interesting , too . Say , the guy hears a drunk German officer mumbling that Belgrade will be bombed as the opening piece of the German offensive in the Balkans . The newspaper mentions he was from Bosnia (explains the aptitude for success abroad) , his political activities in the Ottoman era was against the Ittihad (gotta be cool) , married a German (fits the bill ?) and became a rich trader of oil and arms (nice to add) . Newspaper forgets , just naturally , that he was asked by some German visitors in 1941 of whether he would become a Goverment Minister after the Nazi invasion of Turkey . He politely declines , wife's relatives must be in Germany ... Then , he is asked to give some door number in Istanbul , so that the visitors can repeat the offer to others . Rather more helpful if Tozan takes the Germans personally . Tozan says there will be consequences , though if the Germans are homosexuals they might like the outcome . He is not and must decline . Von Papen surprasses a guffaw and firmly protests : not even Germans love Nazis but due must be where it is due . And the drunk German would not be drunk actually , he was probing to learn whether Inönü would go to war for Serbia . The history monthly had the barest mention of Tozan saving some undefined number of Jews ; the magazine being chock-a-block with Sultans and Ottomans it might have hurt sales .

a land connection through Bulgaria before the Red Army arrives ? Most unlikely for the RN to land in Danemark but free ports and stuff across the Dardanelles ? Tozan known and trusted somewhat while the others would surely catalogue all the SS for listing ? October or November when Himmler orders an end to the official industrial effort , with no orders to that end being recovered ?

ugh , ı have made actual history and it hurts !

usual precaution , never use any r16 claim as proof for anything .

so , what is this all for ? Ending the H word would make the word Turkish utterly unpopular among our sunnier Sunni Brothers , but then there's no need for that . When Barack Hussein orders , they will follow suit . Making us cool for the rest of world ? Are you kidding ?!!!? Maybe for the talks in Cyprus where the Turkish dude reports sick and the Greek Cypriot guys declares everything is agreed upon and it will be like no 1974 ever happened , everything they might done with success in the 1960s will be there in the 21st Century . Only because people should have their oil companies in Turkey and others can be given 5 minutes of glory and fame . Hey wait , a possibility that allows me to return to my usual paranoia , immediately erasing my pain on actual history ... You gonna claim Tozan was what Lord Vader was later on ? So that with the typical Turkish foresight , he would have seen a promising youth in the 1960s and note Barack Hussein was a name to watch ? So that losers who have done nothing in life should stop calling him a spineless jerk in some game forum ? Will treaties and jail-free cards flow out that safe ? Wouldn't stop you but anyhow ...

there are no agreements . There will be no agreements .

as if Lord Vader is not himself telling the best about the 1940s edition . Lord Vader telling horror stories ; of him sitting at attention if ordered to sit while standing at attention . Of never speaking if not asked and keeping to Yes and No as much as possible if asked . Broughton took the 50s and 60s version and made him into Casey Jones so that Turkish b_stards could kill American boys in cold blood and escape from tigers . Like Broughton , you know . Whenever asked of how the guy could get all that combat experience , let alone a jet , Broughton marked a box in his mental notebook , having successfully identified yet another American traitor in pay of them Reds .

and if you can actually get the Serbians to talk of how evil Turks somehow acquired stuff and stabbed good Americans in the back - in defence of Sacred Serbia , ı will do my utmost in this thread for you to get a Medal of Honor , because it will be some feat .

you should rather work in more satisfying stuff like establishing the true founding father of the Turkey you should have established long ago . You know , was moving out old newspapers saved for their puzzles when ı found this scrap of paper . With a draft about this most august person . No date on it , but might be from 2013 ... You will just love him and that not because he was Kurdish , rather his achievements will prove we Turks are doomed because of our heresies and stuff . Now this guy appears to have been imprisoned during the reign of Abdülhamid . ı see myself rather surprised to see the guests talking against the Ulu Hakan . My actual note is "ı don't know why 'Hamid is getting a bad rep these days , he has been downgraded to human being lately ..." Apparently because the guy attempted to open a madrasa of his own and the 21st century Turkey needed all possible sorts of votes for sinking deeper into the country to become unrootable by elections , hence Kurdish schools were most acceptable . At least as election pledges .

wrongly imprisoned by the last of Ottoman sultans , because Abdülhamit II is counted as the last Ottoman Sultan since the two following were under the control of Ittihad , the glorious gets 19 000 pieces of gold from the next sultan . Presumably to open schools . Will not happen because you see there's WW I ... One or two of that must have been spent by writing letters to the chieftains of 50 tribes , calling on them to recognize the then New Turkey .

though can not say ı have all the details , he wasn't much of a lesson material when ı was at school and ı have clearly noted back in the day that ı watch the TV debate during commercial breaks in Madagascar I ... ı adore the penguins ; Skipper and Kowalski , the Junior and the inventive one whatever the names of that last two might be ...

hence fast forward to war service . Sure enough godless secular army fails in Sarıkamış and because of the godless failure he has to retreat . Make sure to find a rearguard action when his contingent blows up 10 T-34s and 20 KV-1s . They are crossing a stream and the horse slips or he slips or whatever . He breaks a leg . Remember he has tons of disciples and they will carry him , right ? May those disciples burn in hell , because he is such a good guy that he lets them go and the disciples let him to sit in that stream for 38 hours straight . With snow on the banks of the stream . Honest to God , ı must have taken the number from the TV debaters . Alas , the Russian cavalry arrives . Being such a Muslim he impresses the infidels and they take the glorious straight to their general . The Disciples are captured , too . There is talk between the general and the Righteousness of the Believer allows the glorious to kick the living daylight out of the godless Muscovite general in a shouting match . The disciples take turns in entering the room to cool the glorious and that's why the godless General does not order the martyrdom of the glorious . Russian sentries are there for decoration in case you don't believe in Islam or something . And the fact is the Russian trains are so busy they can't take the heroic prisoners away . For a week . Have no fear , the smarties are smart . If some heathen in Turkey comes up and accuses the glorious for offering tribes to Russians in a scheme for a defeat of the Ottomans in return for a Kurdish kingdom , he will be quickly declared a zındık .

sad days of captivity where he doesn't eat pork and cooks his own meals to make sure that nobody will put pork into the pot . Always scheming to escape and some Presence always stops him at the last moment . We hear a solemn discussion of whom that Presence might be . Could have been Hızır , a person or an angel , a long standing topic for Islamic discussion . Finally the Presence orders him go and the glorious treks over a land which he doesn't know , doesn't have single coin and he of course doesn't speak a single of word of the language . And he makes over the dreary wastes of the Caucaus mountains ? What are you , a zındık ? He goes West and to keep the allure of the story he won't get on a single train until he makes in halfway across to Vienna . Only then he gets on a train to Rumenia to sail to Istanbul . How many times need ı tell you that you are some zındık ? Of course , it's NOT 1917 and the Russian Revolution and Brest Litovsk . With German victory hence the break-up of Ottoman Empire in sight . The Presence saved him and guided him . On one condition . People to rule an Islamic country must pray 5 times a day . The only reason why you are wondering why the Presence did not say that directly to Kemal can only be that you are an infidel . The draft stops there , before he gets into a shouting match with Kemal and then starts a rebellion to save Islam . ı guess the movie ended , the penguins saved the day or something and ı went to bed ...

presumably ı could have heard how he was wrongly imprisoned by the Republic and when he died his body was stolen by the disciples and the disciples' disciples wanted his dead body from the State in the 21st century . There's no end to Muslims' suffering in the godless Turkey ; when are you saving them ? Or maybe not . As said , never studied the gorious at school .

edit : Broughton's Russian found and named in post # 255 .

edit February 10th : Turns out the Anti-Defamation League has been in Ankara , meeting high ranking people . Who then have dug up dusty archives to show they are such nice people . Everybody wants the natural gas being pipelined from Turkey , makes them feel that they have world shatterring influence . Which is by the way a huge surprise , One would have expected the father of the Voice of the Counter-Revolution burning all such papers to clear the great expansion of Santa Turgut in 1980s . For proof that Kemal's Republic was no good but Santa Turgut's state would be like descended from the Ottomans of 1492 .

naturally the Islamist newspaper that insults everybody in sight declares the Infidel order of the world will be brought down by Islam , presumably represented by this all conquering New Turkey .

For Phantom II pilots, this first combat proved the theories propounded in the Air Force’s 1965 Feather Duster programme. The latter had matched USAF fighters against Air National Guard F-86H Sabres (as fair MiG-17 substitutes) and showed the folly of getting ‘low and slow’ in a turning fight. It also proved that most US fighters fought better at lower altitudes (although their missiles were less effective in the denser air), and helped to define the areas of their performance envelopes in which they would have the best chance against the MiG-17 and MiG-21.

first , that fight thing needs a mention .

On 10 July [1965] the VPAF pilots were deceived into thinking that a section of 45th TFS F-4Cs was the final flight in an F-105 formation. MiG pilots tended to pick on the last elements in a strike, as they knew the escort fighters would be low on fuel. On this occasion the four F-4Cs of ‘Mink’ flight had taken off 20 minutes later than usual and flown to the Yen Bai target area at 20,000 ft and 0.85 Mach, simulating a delayed F-105 flight.

we know Yen Bai . Already ... Anyone familiar with the narrative will know Operation Bolo of January 1967 was a massive USAF success which was possible only due to the genius of Col. Olds . To save you from checking Wikipedia , the WW II ace feeling so constrained by the stupid rules dreamed by McNamara thousands of miles away from combat brings about a scheme for an ambush of the North Vietnamese fighter arm . Phantoms are given jamming pods from the F-105s and a hasty preparation to resemble vulnerable Thunderchief flights . Amazes one in a way , to read it was not original .

and if you are brought up with the failures of Sparrow the story gets even more shocking . In those days maximum range of Sparrow is generally given as 13 miles . Presumably nautical and it probably involves an head-on shot where you and your target are flying to each other . The maximum range of 28 miles then presumably relates to a scenario where you are flying at Mach 2 against a very big Russian bomber ; considering its high subsonic cruise speed you are approaching each other at almost Mach 3 . Your missile goes a lot more before it loses energy . While a tail chase would be exact opposite with your missile having to pursue and catch an enemy that runs away . Your missile has finite amount of fuel on board and being a missile has to travel at massive speed , naturally with massive drag . Without thrust it will quickly slow down and loose the ability to engage the enemy . When the enemy is going away instead of coming on your missile will not perform as good and will become a waste of taxpayer's money much sooner . Just as an example take this passage from a book on Top Gun , the NFWS , the thing that actually wrought havoc with the MiGs in 1972 .


The maximum and minimum parameters in which a Sparrow could be fired effectively changed constantly during a swirling dogfight. They were different at lower altitudes than higher altitudes, and different depending on whether you were behind, in front of, or pointed at the side of the bogey.

For instance, in a dogfight at 5000 feet, you had to be within one-half mile to two miles for a good tailshot with the Sparrow. You also had to be within a certain "lethal cone" projected from the target's tail. The cone was a fluctuating, irregularly shaped pattern emanating from the bogey's front, back or side...

please remember that the Sparrow is a radar guided missile and the radar cross section of the targeted plane will change massively according to the angle the radars on your plane and at the tip of the Sparrow you have just fired . In a dogfight the view will naturally change instantly as the "tussling" goes on . . In the first kill by an F-4J everything was proceding nicely until the the MiGs changed their direction , unaware that they were under attack . Possibly they offered a larger RCS to the missile , the warhead fused earlier . Some 100 yards away instead of destroying the Fishbed in a ball of fire ... And of course the denser atmosphere provides a far larger amount of resistance to the missile as it slices through the air to the target .

It was a mile to three miles if you were abeam of him and was two to four miles for a good head shot. Your missile had to be within the parameters of the invisible cone in order to work properly. In some cases, the latitude between minimum and maximum ranges was only 500 feet.

since all AAM designers kinda accept that it's seriously tough to hit a target their wares come with sensors to check whether their quarry is within lethal radius of the missile warhead . If affirmative the explosion will at least damage the enemy , easing your job somewhat as you fire a second missile to finish the job . Naturally such fuses would need a delay ; an immediate action would simply shoot you down as the missile came alive and got a reflection from your own plane in the fraction of the second after it left its pylon or station . Such a malfunction , barring equally possible problems with the rocket engine or warhead , must be the reason for the harrowing sentence :

At least one Sidewinder had exploded on launch, killing the pilot.

returning to Sparrows and their unsuitability for close combat . Which led to massive heartsearching in Pentagon . If you have read even the minimum possible amount of books on the Air war in Vietnam you would have possibly read about the Ault Report . Which was given all kinds of clearances and access to discover why the wonder missile that led the abolishing of guns for air combat in the USN was not performing as advertised ...


Ignorance about missile performance was so widespread, said Ault, that "we had a case or two, you know, in practice out there in the Philippines, where we did shoot our own airplanes out of the sky. Therefore, it had to have happened a few times in combat [in fact, it did]. In the melee up there, you simply don't know who you are shooting at.



a few posts above ı assert the destruction of Thuds . Debateable and no one would expect Ault to mention it . As such the brackets here , the "In fact, it did." is Ault's own words . And refers to accidents , actual accidents . One of which happened as late as July 17, 1968 . Which might be the immediate reason for the establishment of the Top Gun itself . Even in 2001 , as the relevant Osprey title was published :

... two F-4s from VF-142, embarked on the Constellation, were fighting it out with a pair of MiG-21s. The lead Phantom II crew settled into a firing position, only to discover that their missile would not launch. The MiG then lit its afterburner and soared off, but another ‘MiG’ appeared in the distance, head-on.

The second ‘MiG’ fired a missile, hitting the F-4B (BuNo 151404/NK206) flown by Lt(jg) Mark Gartley and Lt Bill Mayhew. The Phantom II went down and its crew were delivered into North Vietnamese hands for the remainder of the war. It is believed that the other ‘MiG’ was in fact an F-4, and possibly Gartley and Mayhew’s wingman. If this was indeed the case, then the missile that downed them was an AIM-9D.

one would have assumed the POWs would have been really ready to debrief all the intelligence types after their release in 1973 . On the MiG that could hit a target head-on . Russians love having all sorts of seeker options for their missiles but ı have never ever read that the Vietnamese deploying a radar Atoll or any Sidewinder had the catchy "all-aspect" qualities until the '9L , the famed Lima deployed after 1977 . The Vietnamese had a few radar equipped MiG-17PFs and maybe one of those chunky clunkers of radar missiles the Russians deployed . Indeed Alkali missiles are reported to have been delivered . But accident is more likely ; with Ault's mention of shootdowns in training in the Philippinnes ...

which is actually a good thing in a way . Due to failures in production and maintenance , there were many cases of Sparrows failing the crews' command to fire . In that one or two cases in Philipinnes the Phantoms could at least fire their weapons . And let's just say it was all over the place . The USAF , suffering from the same exact problems , carried out the Charging Sparrow program between November 1966 and February 1967 . That required every F-4C in the Air Force inventory to fire a Sparrow against a drone . One third of the planes couldn't to begin with and one in five of all Sparrows failed in any case . Even when missiles worked there were the problems . Ault was ordered to correct everything as far as it was humanly possible .

Shortly after Ault had started work, he was summoned back to Washington: "In the first twenty days that I was assigned to the job [June and July 1968], the Navy fired something like two dozen Sparrows and hit nothing. I found myself standing on the carpet in front of Admiral Moorer [the CNO himself]."

...Moorer started grilling Ault on the failure of the Sparrows. "I thought I told you to solve this problem, Ault. You've been working on it for three weeks," Ault remembers him saying. "I guess that was another turning point in my career," said Ault, "because without even thinking I said, 'Admiral, you and your contemporaries have taken about twenty years to screw this up and I've only been working on it twenty days. I think I deserve a little more time.'


the CNO must be the overall commander of the US Navy . Because the problem was massive and WW III always loomed over the horizon and the Israeli victory in 1967 had caused the hawks to be more hawkish , dreaming all sorts of fantasies about the WW III . While the Summer of Love and all that was causing people to seriously doubt the "manhood" of the then current American youth . Ault contacted a number of people he trusted on a personal basis .

"It was a pretty serious indictment of the state of naval aviation," recalls Ronald "Mugs" McKeown, [future commander of the NFWS and a combat pilot with 2 MiG kills in 1972]... "It was nice to have this Sparrow and be able to shoot from thirteen miles out, except that we had to visually identify the enemy. So we trumped our own ace. By the time we could see him visually, we're inside the minimum range of the missile. . . . We had a lot of those dilemmas. ... No guns on the F-4. Little money to practice ... or teach tactics. ..."


spend some time reading such stuff and you come to believe that Americans were certifiably dumb , undeniably certifiably dumb in the 1960s . Especially if you are lucky enough to be a kid in the late 1980s as your high school classmate wins entry to an university in Istanbul and sees Bill Gunston - Mike Spick authored Modern Air Combat on a shop window and calls your attention to it . And you say "Yes" without knowing anything about it and your friend buys it for you and you immediately go to his house after dinner as he phones and it's so mind blowing that you walk home in the dark of the night and this damned dog starts barking so close and you run . Paying extreme extra care that you don't drop the damned book . Well , do not take shortcuts in the woods after dark . But as ı said it's mind blowing ... In a week or so , you have learned the answer . You fly , you notice some specks on your radar , you accelarate and soon enough spot the enemy planes with your eagle eyes . You have been eating all those carrots for this day , right ? You turn away and your wingman , who has kept behind for this very purpose fires his Sparrow . After his downing one of the enemy , you simply enter the fray against the dispersed planes . And 'winder or gun down one or two as your wingman joins the fun of the dogfight . So simple , and Americans are so dumb for their failure to discover this !

‘Mink’ orbited the target several times before the MiGs rose, but on the final pass the F-4 element leaders (‘Mink 01’ and ‘03&#8217 made radar contact with VPAF fighters at a range of 33 miles. One F-4 had radar-searched ‘high’ and the other ‘low’, while the wingmen flew a weaving pattern behind them, making a visual search. As the Phantom IIs turned towards the MiGs, the element leaders, already low on fuel, made a visual identification (VID) of the MiG-17s and turned aside to allow ‘Mink 02’ and ‘04’ to drop back and fire AIM-7D missiles at the correct minimum range. In fact, this manoeuvre did not allow enough safe separation to fire without hitting the lead F-4s, and the MiGs passed them head-on.

whaaat ? Certifiably dumb Americans are doing the thing you would be proud to scheme . And with so many surprises . The Phantom radars of the day are not much loved by the veterans and it's like 3 years to the fielding of the F-4D which had a radar range of 20 miles ... One looks down , and you wonder how ... in the age of no digital filters to delete ground clutter ... While the even numbers are doing their job as wingmen , checking for the Broughton's Master Mig Driver diving down from the Sun .

Drawn into a turning fight rather than the intended ‘textbook’ head-on AIM-7D interception, flight leader Maj Richard Hall and ‘GIB’ 1Lt George Larson, with Capts Harold Anderson and Wilbur Anderson in ‘Mink 02’, moved into an orbit outside the fight to watch for further hostile aircraft. The other two F-4s were soon under heavy gunfire, and ‘Mink 03’ (Capts Kenneth Holcombe and Arthur Clarke) used afterburner to gain separation from the MiGs, while ‘Mink 04’ (Capt Tom Roberts and Ronald Anderson) split the enemy jets up so that one followed each Phantom II.

Holcombe dived away, losing his MiG, then climbed vertically over it, with his opponent attempting to follow. As the VPAF fighter ran out of energy, Holcombe reversed into it. He fired an AIM-9B Sidewinder (since his radar had malfunctioned) which failed, followed by three more, two without the correct launch ‘tone’. Nevertheless, both Sidewinders detonated sufficiently close enough to the MiG to turn it into a fireball. Holcombe and Clarke’s grey F-4C had scored the first USAF kill for the Phantom II.

our dumb Americans now expect the North Vietnamese trick , which the North Vietnamese didn't invent yet . Namely following the customary two ship or the quartet with a single . As the Americans are so busy fighting the planes they see , the 3rd or 5th (depending on the numbers of Migs in the air) would arrive unnoticed and gun down an American and all MiGs would then run ... We have Phantoms going vertical , the Top Gun tactic yet uninvented , because it's four years to the establishment of that training course . We have the MiG fever which drives the American fighter pilot crazy to kill some Russian made machine for bragging rights in the Officers Club . With the Sidewinder shooting taking the whole length of 10 seconds from the first to the last . Mink 04 will match the feat with 4 missiles as well ; firing 3 after the first one had been fired at a range of one mile


and it exploded close to the MiG’s left wing tip, starting a fire in the rear fuselage.



for a big nice explosion in the gun camera ... Have no sorrow for the vietnamese , because no vietnamese planes were actually lost on the day . The Navy had killed MiGs on 17 June and those crews were awarded Silver Stars . The USAF naturally has to match , not just pride at stake but also defence dollars , which might be turned to other competing services if they prove themselves to be more efficient . Combat is the unkindest judge , it's said . 4 more Silver Stars , this time to USAF , with no doubt equal media coverage .

am always ready to "grant" that they did it over China ...