Broughton Jack - Rupert red two : a fighter pilots life from Thunderbolts to Thunderchiefs

A Fighter Pilots Life
from Thunderbolts to Thunderchiefs

JACK BROUGHTON

A FIGHTER PILOTS FIGHTERS

P-47 Thunderbolt

Germany. I thought the Jug was as large as a fighter could be, but after nine hundred hours flying time, it was like sitting in an easy chair.

P-51 Mustang

Germany, Nellis AFB, and Luke AFB. Truly a classic, no matter what the mission.

F-80C Shooting Star

Nellis AFB, Korea, and Luke AFB. Our first combat jet was highly maneuverable and an excellent weapons platform.

F-84E Thunderjet

Nellis AFB, Korea, and Luke AFB. The E got its combat baptism testing the Oerlikon rocket in Korea, and the G gained fame with the Thunderbirds.

F-84F Thunderjet

Luke AFB. We won the Bendix trans-continental race with this fighter, then put it to work as the Thunderbirds first swept-wing aircraft.

F-86A Saber

Nellis AFB. The A was the first in a highly successful series of swept-wing fighters.

F-86D Saber

Vincent AFB. This air defense version (D and L) flew sort of like an 86 should, but it was often tough to get its rockets on target.

F-100C Super Saber

Nellis AFB. The 100C took the Thunderbirds supersonic.

F-101B Voodoo

Tyndall AFB. It felt like trying to balance on the point of a pencil, wondering if I was going to pitch up or the canopy was going to fly off

F-102 Delta Dagger

Tyndall AFB. The dependable deuce did its air defense mission well, but you could also rack it around the sky in style.

F-104 Starfighter

Tyndall AFB. The sleek, futuristic Starfighter was a ball to fly, and you could go from takeoff to way up there in nothing flatbut then you had to head for home before you ran out of fuel.

F-105D Thunderchief

Southeast Asia. The Thud shed its mantle of a low-level, high-speed nuclear fighter-bomber to become the conventional-weapons workhorse striking Hanoi and North Vietnam.

F-106A Delta Dart

Minot AFB. The six shined as a fighter-interceptor, claimed all sorts of records, and she is the one I would like to have parked in my garage.

FOREWORD

Dr. Richard P. Hallion
United States Air Force Historian, 19912002

History records that the name Jack Broughton is a proud one, associated with two great and legendary fighters. One was an eighteenth-century boxer, the first to give rules to pugilism, a profound and gifted student of the ring who was determined to impart as much expertise as he could to those who would follow. The other was a twentieth-century fighter pilot who, with equal skill, courage, and dedication, fought in a far more lethal arena, one of four dimensions: height, reach, breadth, and speed. Likewise known for his bare-knuckles approach to combat, he was at least equally committed to his men and their welfare. This book is about him, is by him. But before discussing it, some introductory words are in order.

Flying in a jet fighter is difficult to describe. To those who have experienced it, no explanation is necessary. To those who have not, no explanation can really suffice. Describing the piloting experience is more challenging yet. No one has ever done it better than Jack Broughton, who has that airmans rarest combination of talents: a record of uncommon aerial skill and valor crossed with proven skills of insight and narration, and thus the ability to impart the experience of seeing the world through the cockpit of some F-numbered brute.

One of the very best to have ever strapped into a fighter and taken off into harms way, Col. Jacksel Jack Broughton first burst upon the public scene in 1969 with publication of Thud Ridge, a remarkable memoir that, nearly forty years after its publication, is still the best Vietnam combat memoir ever written. Of him another legendary airman, Leo ThorsnessMedal of Honor recipient, MiG and SAM killer, and unconquered prisoner of warsaid, Jack Broughton expected a lot from every pilot in the gaggle, but no more than he gave. As the spare, blunt language of Thud Ridge revealed, he gave a lot. A personal chronicle presenting the staggeringly frustrating, costly, and challenging air war that Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara forced upon the American military, it had, and still has, no equal. Written from a fighter pilots perspective, it viewed the war through the cockpit glass of the massive Republic F-105D Thunderchief, the Thud of the title, as flak, surface-to-air missiles, and MiGs did their worst. (The Ridge was self-explanatory: a spiny range of jagged, brutal terrain over which too many of Jack Broughtons comrades were shot down.) It was an angry book; as its reviewer in the Air Forces own Air University Review noted somewhat uncomfortably in 1970, Detachment is not Colonel Broughtons forte. Of course not! Nor did it need to be: his book was an angry challenge to Americas political and military leaders to do better by their air warriors, for they had already done their worst.

I first read Thud Ridge (and first became aware of Jack Broughton) as a college student in 1969. At the time Jane Fonda was railing against the war, and good men betrayed by Washington politicians were languishing in the Hanoi Hilton. Pseudointellectuals on American campuses were preaching that Stalinist totalitarians represented the wave of the future. Furthermore, largely self-styled military thinkers, most of whom had never been closer to a cockpit than their first-class seat in an airliner, enunciated the limits of air power with that easy veneer of authoritativeness possessed by all too many among the university, think-tank, and war-college set. It is one of only two books I read every year (the other is Herman Wouks