“They were within two minutes of picking me up, and all at once the helicopter goes up in a ball of tire. I thought this thing isn’t worth it. I was a 53-year-old lieutenant colonel, and I cried,” Gene Hambleton, Bat 21
After spending many years in the ICBM community, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton finally got the chance to return to the cockpit for a Vietnam tour.
In his book Glory Days: The Untold Story of the Men Who Flew the B-66 Destroyer into the Face of Fear, Colonel Wolfgang W. E. Samuel recounts Gerald Hanner, an EB-66 navigator, describing training at Shaw with Gene. “He was one of three Lieutenant Colonels who were rather long in the tooth, but they all took the assignment because they wanted to retire with thirty years. Gene seemed to glide through training with little effort. He made it look easy. Then we were all off to Korat via one or more survival schools.” Hambleton went to Turkey Point, Florida, for water survival, then on to Clark for jungle survival training. Once at Korat, he quickly became squadron navigator and began flying combat missions.
Compared with missions farther north in and around Route Packs V and VI near Hanoi and Haiphong, the area next to Route Pack 1 was generally regarded throughout the war as an easier, relatively routine assignment.
“Part of the EB-66s’ role was trolling for SAMs at an altitude of seven to eight thousand feet below the B-52 formation, putting themselves between the bombers and the SAM sites. If electronic countermeasures did not defeat a SAM, they would ensure it was locked on their aircraft and not the B-52s. Count to ten after a launch to allow the missile to get up to 25,000 feet, then go into a SAM break. The EB-66 could get into a five-G break in a hurry while the SAM’s gyroscopes tumbled at just over two Gs as it tried to follow. `We’d giggle and laugh and drop down to about 10,000 feet, then come up and let them shoot another one at us’” Hambleton said in an interview after his rescue.
The North Vietnamese air-defense buildup that began in January 1972 had advanced to the point where aircrews said the volume of fire near the DMZ matched what they faced on raids around Hanoi. For Hambleton and his crew, the forward deployment of SAMs was nothing new. “The SAM site that shot us down, we had been plotting for about two months. I kept telling people there’s a missile site there, and nobody would believe us because they never launched. You’d fly one mission and there wouldn’t be any signal there. Somebody else would come back and say, ‘Hey, I plotted this guy right there,’ and that was south of the DMZ.’” The 42nd TEWS had solid intelligence on where the active SAM sites were, but it didn’t connect those sites to the NVA’s spring offensive. Nor did 7th Air Force intelligence in Saigon place much trust in the reported SAM intercepts. After all, the EB-66C’s direction-finding gear wasn’t exactly cutting edge. They just didn’t DF it right. Such is the stuff of tragedies.
As squadron navigator, Hambleton ironically got the chance to assign himself to his final mission as a crew member of Bat 21, an EB-66C that, along with Bat 22, an EB-66E, had to fly support for a B-52 Arc Light strike against NVA units crossing the DMZ into South Vietnam.
On April 2, 1972, the EB-66s were flying east when SAMs rose from south of the DMZ and launched two salvos of at least ten missiles at the B-52s and the EB-66s protecting them. All ten missed, showing how effective the electronic countermeasures were. The usual Fansong radar signal never appeared, and the APR-25/26 radar warning receiver showed no low- or high-power warning. The SAM site was likely using a Spoon Rest or Flatface acquisition radar for target input. The first sign of a launch was when the BGO6 missile guidance signal appeared. By then, Bat 21 and 22 had already received launch lights, but the missile was already in flight.
“The timing count was started for a right-hand break, but the Ravens shouted, ‘Negative, negative,’ believing the SAM was tracking from the south, not the north. The pilot, Major Wayne Bolte, tried to correct the SAM break; the missile got there first, they were hit in mid-break. The crew of Bat 21 had been caught five seconds late, looking in the wrong direction. The North Vietnamese stole a five-second lead on Bat 21 by launching the missile at the EB-66 without the use of the Fansong track-while-scan radar. Hambleton knew the guys in back were lost when the SAM detonated, and he ran through his ejection sequence on the pilot’s signal. He fully expected to see the aircraft commander, Major Boltej, follow. Almost immediately after he ejected, a second explosion rocked the air, disintegrating the aircraft and putting Hambleton in a spin. He opened his parachute manually to stop the spin at somewhere below 28,000 feet. ‘I didn’t realize it was going to take me 16 minutes to hit the ground. But opening the parachute when I did was probably the smartest thing I did. There was a fog bank starting to roll in, and it gave the bank time to move in completely. When I came down, I came right through it. If I’d waited for the barometric opener [to open the chute at 14,000 feet], I’d have been out in the clear with 30,000 enemy troops around me, and I wouldn’t be here today. I got down about halfway, probably at 16 or 17-thousand feet, when I saw this little 0-2 orbiting. So I unzipped the survival vest and took one of the radios out and cranked up Guard Channel. I called, ‘O-2, O-2, do you hear me?’
“He came back. ‘Yes, where are you?’
“‘I’m in a parachute hanging about four or five thousand feet above you.’
“‘You gotta be kidding me.’
“’No, I’m not.’ So he poured the power into that little thing, and he came up and orbited with me all the way down to the ground. While he was orbiting with me, he called in other aircraft—Sandies and F-4s—that ‘sterilized’ the area. When I hit the ground, I had a fairly clear area, and there weren’t too many people too close, if you know what I mean.”
“This all happened about twilight; it was five o’clock in the afternoon. I landed in a rice paddy, so I got up against this mound of dirt and lay there for two or three hours. As soon as it got dark, I took off, got up in the jungle, and dug in for the night. The third day, I went out and got some food, corn, four little ears of corn about as big around as your thumb. It’s not too tasty unless you are very hungry. I didn’t have any water with me. I think it was the third night, it started to rain, and I had one of these rubberized escape and evasion maps that I laid on top of a bush. I got my plastic bottle out and filled it with water.” On the fourth, one of the OV-10 observation aircraft searching for him was shot down, and Hambleton was ready to give up. But a FAC, a first lieutenant, wouldn’t let the colonel even consider it. “He called me every name in the book, and he told me what he was going to do to me if I gave up. He wouldn’t let me quit.” The second low point came about two days later, when the Jolly Green was shot down. “They were within two minutes of picking me up, and all at once that thing goes up in a ball of fire. I thought this thing isn’t worth it. I was a 53-year-old lieutenant colonel, and I cried. The people who shot the chopper down were in this village, and the Air Force decided to neutralize it. The day before I started to walk, they came in with two or three F-4s with smart bombs, and they did a pretty good job on the village. I didn’t think there was anyone left.”
But Hambleton still ran into someone while moving through the village. He was stabbed in the back, then headed for the river, where he was supposed to be picked up. “I got down to the river and got lost in a banana grove. Around four o’clock in the morning, about daylight, I saw the river. I was so damn excited, I stepped off into nothing—and fifteen or twenty feet later I am laying up against a tree. I fractured my arm.’” Hambleton had been told to get across the river as quickly as possible. “I hadn’t been on the other side thirty minutes when twenty or so of these guys walked right up to where I’d been sitting. They beat the bushes for a while, and then they took off, they never came across the river. There were two or three nights early on when patrols walked within 20 feet of my hiding place. They stopped, sat down, lit cigarettes, and talked. Finally, they just put out their cigarettes and walked away. That happened twice. And there’s a little word in the English language—pray. I did. You sit there and pray that everything will work out right.”
Then a sampan came up the river with a Navy SEAL team aboard. Tom Norris, a Navy SEAL, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his part in the rescue. Lieutenant Colonel Hambleton received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the Purple Heart.
According to Samuel, EB-66C 54-466 was one of Shaw’s electronic reconnaissance training aircraft sent to Korat to help relieve the overstretched resources of the 42nd TEWS. When 466 was shot down on that first Sunday in April 1972, five men were killed. A UH-1H Huey helicopter was also shot down during the rescue attempt, costing four more lives. Two OV-10 FACs were brought down by SA-7s—two men died, a third became a prisoner of war, and a fourth escaped. Six additional lives were lost when a Jolly Green rescue helicopter was shot down. “That Others May Live” is the motto of those who risk their lives to rescue airmen in trouble—never were truer words spoken than in the rescue of Gene Hambleton. Nearly 1,000 air strikes were flown in support of Hambleton’s rescue, at the cost of eight aircraft and four badly damaged. Bat 21 was the most extensive and costly rescue effort ever undertaken by the US Air Force. The Marines pride themselves on never leaving their own behind, and the Air Force does too—when it can. Gerald Hanner recalls Hambleton saying after returning to Korat, “It was a hell of a price to pay for one life. I’m very sorry.”
Gene Hambleton’s rescue was later recounted in two books and a film starring Gene Hackman.
Glory Days, the Untold Story of the Men who Flew the B-66 Destroyer onto the Face of Fear, is published by Schiffer Publishing and is available to order here.
Photo by U.S. Air Force
