Book Description
Riveting stories of aerial combat over Vietnam and candid commentary on the doomed Rolling Thunder campaign Ed Rasimus straps the reader into the cockpit of an F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber, hurtling through the MiG-filled skies over North Vietnam, and then fast and low into the teeth of the enemy's ferocious air defenses—with less than a 50-50 chance of surviving. The most engaging writing ever published about the Rolling Thunder campaign and the war in the North, When Thunder Rolled balances fist-gnawing action with the horror and sorrow of modern aerial combat.
More than 300 F-105s were lost in the campaign because the Air Force brought the wrong strategy, disastrous tactics, and an ill-suited aircraft. A Cold War nuke sled, the Thunderchief was as much the pilots' enemy as the North Vietnamese and LBJ's war planners. Rasimus spares none of the outrage he experienced 35 years ago in this astute, surgical strike on Washington's deadly arrogance and inflexibility.
The first account by a junior officer serving at the height of the campaign, the book breaks the unspoken vow of secrecy surrounding a new pilot's psychological gauntlet of fear. It's a moving testament to those who survived and those who paid the price of honor.
Customer Reviews:
Simply the Best!.......2007-07-24
What a great book! I agree that this is the best of the F-105 books about combat during Rolling Thunder. Such detail! Ras explains everything so well and puts it in words that non-pilots can understand. He even takes you on R&R to a Bangkok niteclub to get a "massage" ;-) The difference between a fighter-pilot and a pilot of fighters is explained. I was at Takhli, the other F-105 base in Thailand, and I remember the Wild Weasel/Iron Hand "F" models. The initial group was sent in and shot down. Then another batch was sent in and shot down. I believe there were five or six airplanes in each group. During that initial period, the crewmembers of F-105F (Weasels)were virtually assured of death or capture. What a slaughter.
I loved the noise of that beautiful bird when afterburner with water injection kicked in. Not to mention the noise when a pilot returned after his 100th mission and went "supersonic" right on the deck. Awesome!!!! Also described in the book was the practice of burning off fuel with the speed brakes open and the afterburner on. I saw this on another 100 mission bird going low and slow with the "finger" extended in a pass just above the runway. This book brings back memories of that. In the meantime, back in the "world" (US)Hippies were coming on the scene. It was a shock to me and many others returning. And, by the way, so much for the "domino theory" - Thailand is still there.
GREAT STORY OF COURAGE, VIOLENCE AND INTELLECTUALLY CORRUPT LEADERSHIP.......2007-02-18
As a story of courage and combat flying this book sits near the top of the list. Daily missions into the heart of a well defended N Vietnam, flying against targets selected in DC by those with no combat flying experience, training in tactics of successful air campaigns, appreciation for those who did and with the even greater corruption of a lack of commitment.
Somehow Rasimus and his fellow pilots keep getting up after sleepless nights, getting the brief and launching missions into North Vietnam. It is sad to hear of the lives lost dumping bombs on "suspected truck parks" and other secondary targets.
The author was one of those for whom successful completion of 100 missions over N Vietnam was improbable. One wonders how our nation produces those with the skill and courage to fly these missions day after day. Add to the burden the knowledge that far too often the missions were flown against insignificant targets while truly valuable targets were off limits.
The author was blessed with the skills of a fighter pilot and the writing skills normally associated with those sedentary pursuits of a writing career.
Highly recommended.
Gut Gripping.......2007-02-08
I experienced what it was like to be a pilot flying over Vietnam, not sure if I would return after todays sortie. Courage comes in many forms.
Brilliant Thud memoire.......2006-11-15
The F-105 is a most fascinating aircraft. A superb cold-war design; it was meant to be a sort of man-guided supersonic cruise missile for delivery of nuclear weapons to tactical targets in the european theater. It was, of course, never used for this purpose, but was instead put to a use in the air war over Vietnam. The Thud was never meant to be a precision dive bomber, or to pass through heavily defended areas at subsonic speeds. All the same, politicians dictated this use (and of course went looking for someone besides themselves to blame when their "top fighter-bomber" started getting shot down in heroic quantity; so many were shot down, there weren't enough seasoned men to continue to fly them. They were shot down in so many myriads, fresh out of pilot school fighter-bomber jocks, or long grounded middle-aged desk jockies would be put directly into combat (where they would often be shot down).
The men who flew this jet were, as the cliche goes, a special breed of heroes. Unlike, say, fighter pilots or B-52 pilots, they faced almost certain death, or horrible imprisonment. Their survival rate was comparable to that of the B-17 tailgunner over Germany in WW-2; very low indeed. Oftentimes their missions were secret in nature, so the government couldn't even acknowledge that the Thud had been shot down and work for the release of the pilot.
Major Rasimus' memoire takes place at a crucial escalation in the war; in 1966. The Johnson administration decided to escalate the war by "sending messages" to the North Vietnamese via the use of bombing as a psychological and diplomatic tool. The hare-brained scheme was that, by bombing one thing, and not another, the NVA would be trained, like a pet dog is trained with a rolled up newspaper. The idea was ridiculous, and of course didn't work.
Rasimus was one of those unsung heroes who, fresh out of pilot school, grew enormous handlebar moustaches to protect them from evil on their impossible missions. He tells the tales of the base dog, Roscoe, and of various of his team, and those who came after. You can practically smell the oil on the tarmac, and the blackpowder charges which combat-started the '105's engines. While americans would rather forget the war in Vietnam, I can't forget the courage of these men who fought in these insane supersonic contraptions. May their spirit inspire a new generation of warriors. Thanks Ed; for your service and your great book!
The single seat F-105 was a DIVE BOMBER, not a fighter plane.......2006-10-25
This is a fairly interesting read, and describes in excellent detail what it was like to be an F-105 pilot during the early stages of the Vietnam War.
As a kid growing up during the later years of the Vietnam War, I remember coming across mention of the use of F-105s earlier in the war. I was always fascinated by the sleek, sinister, and powerful look of the F-105, and wondered why it had been withdrawn from combat in Vietnam. The reasons that were given usually implied that the F-105s were somehow deficient, and that the F-4 Phantoms and A-7 Corsairs that replaced them were better. How the heck the fat, stubby, and subsonic A-7 Corsair could be an improvement on the evil-looking, supersonic F-105 was just beyond my comprehension at the time.
And so the great revelation in Ed Rasimus's book is that the problem with the single seat F-105s in Vietnam was that they were used as simple dive bombers (for the purposes of this review, I am ignoring the fact that the two-seat F-105s were used in the Wild Weasle role).
That's right - the single seat F-105 in Vietnam was not a fighter plane - it was a dive bomber.
For all of its multi-million dollar cost, advanced technology, and supersonic speed, the only bombing technique that could be used by the F-105s in Vietnam was the exact same as the dive bombers of World War II - e.g. the German Stuka, the Japanese Val, and the American SBD Dauntless.
This method required the pilot to dive close in to the target and visually line up the target in a dive bombing sight before releasing the bombs. This meant of course, that the aircraft would have to fly through a wall of anti-aircraft fire in order to deliver the bombs.
Thus the heavy losses. A total of only 833 F-105s of all types were produced. 610 were the single seat F-105D version that was used for Operation Rolling Thunder. 283 of the F-105Ds were shot down in combat, with another 52 lost to other causes.
And so the F-105 was withdrawn simply because over half of the available aircraft had been destroyed and there were not enough left to continue fighting the war with them.
The F-105 was expensive because it was supersonic. It was supersonic because its original mission was to be a nuclear bomber against the Soviets. It was designed to fly in low and fast under the radar deep into Soviet territory and deliver a nuclear bomb. Nuclear bombing did not require precision bombing guidance or targeting equipment, and so the F-105 had none, hence the reversion to the old dive bombing techniques of WWII in order for it to deliver conventional bombs.
The dive bombers of WWII were also shot down in great numbers, but they were dirt cheap by comparison, and thousands were manufactured - they were truly expendable. And at the time, dive bombing was really the only method to accomplish precision bombing of difficult-to-hit high value targets.
The F-105s, and the lives of the pilots, should not have been expended so casually in a role for which the plane was poorly suited, but such was the mindless brute force thinking of the US military at the time of the Vietnam War.
And this is why the A-7 Corsair was considered an improvement - it was specifically designed to address the deficiencies of the F-105 as a ground attack aircraft. The Corsair was built to be cheap (some 1,569 were built) and have a long range while carrying large bomb loads, which meant that it would be subsonic (flying over Vietnam did not require supersonic speed and bombing runs were always done at subsonic speeds). Most importantly, the Corsair was built with an advanced bomb targeting system that allowed it to release its bombs at a considerably greater stand-off distance than the F-105, thus avoiding having to fly throught the walls of flak. Far fewer Corsairs were shot down in Vietnam as a result.
Ultimately, the development of the laser and TV guided and GPS guided bombs and missiles, would allow for precision bombing at even greater stand-off distances.
Anyway, I came to most of these insights only with the help of some additional reading outside of this book. Rasimus unfortunately never steps back to ask how and why the F-105 came to be used in Vietnam, nor does he explain in detail why the F-105 had to revert back to dive bombing. And so I took off one star for what is otherwise a very good book.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Air & Space Power Journal, published by U.S. Air Force on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 788 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: When Thunder Rolled: an F-105 Pilot over North Vietnam.(Book Review)
Author: David R. Mets
Publication:
Air & Space Power Journal (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2004
Publisher: U.S. Air Force
Volume: 18
Issue: 1
Page: 124(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
Synonymous with such infamous battleships as the Bismarck, Scharnhorst and Tirpitz, the German Navy (or Reichsmarine) was renamed the Kriegsmarine in 1935, shortly after the emergence of the Nazi State, and went through a major re-organization in 1939. During World War II, it became a much-feared adversary both on and beneath the high seas, with its marauding U-boat wolf packs coming close to defeating Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic. The author of this text examines the different roles of the Fleet, and its organization and training activities during the war years. Incidents and operations are described, together with technical data for ships, U-boats and their weaponry. A guide to German Navy uniforms and insignia is included, together with full details of rank structure and specialist trades.
Customer Reviews:
German Navy - Great!.......2001-02-15
This is the best account thus far in my reading experiences on the Germany Navy. This book not only describes how the German navy evolved throughout the course of World War II but how it evolved in the post-World War I world leading up and into WWII. This is a great buy even though the amount of money is a little steep.
Book Description
Now in its Sixth Edition, Constitutional Law and Politics is the authoritative casebook for the study of the Supreme Court and its role in politics past and present. This comprehensive text presents a wide range of excerpts and opinions from the most significant Supreme Court cases and provides the contextual material students need to interpret their historical significance. The Sixth Edition adds material on dozens of important recent cases, current through June 2004, and features carefully updated and refined pedagogy.
Customer Reviews:
NICE WORK IF YOU CAN SEE IT.......2007-02-23
Professor O'Brien must surely be making valuable contributions with his numerous works, and this one should have been most helpful to me. But he or his publisher have opted for pretty, pale grey print -- almost impossible for middle-aged eyes to read without strain. I had ordered five of his books from Amazon and reluctantly returned them all.
Book Description
"The fate of humanity, like the fate of the earth, is tied to the fires that have made the world as we know it--the fires whose history is told as well in this book as it has ever been told before. If one wants to understand just how completely the story of the human past is also the story of fire on earth, there is no better place to start than this small book."--from the Foreword
Here, in one concise book, is the essential story of fire. To provide readers with a way of understanding fire's variable role in human endeavors, Stephen Pyne has fashioned a chronological structure for this book. Natural fire existed before human habitation, when lightning put flame on land. Anthropogenic fire occurred when hominids seized that spark and began recasting Earth to meet their needs and expectations. Industrial combustion arrived when humans began to burn fossil biomass from the geologic past.
Pyne describes the evolution of fire through prehistoric and historic times down to the present, examining contemporary attitudes from a long-range, informed perspective. Fire: A Brief History also surveys the principles behind aboriginal and agricultural fire practices, the characteristics of urban fire, and the relationship between controlled combustion and technology, particularly those tools and techniques that affect landscapes.
Fire's role in cities, suburbs, exurbs, and wildlands as shaped by the industrialized, Europeanized, urban way of thinking that prevails in most of the world is a subject the author covers brilliantly. "Questions of what kind of fires should exist," he writes, "are increasingly decided in urban centers based on urban values. The modern city's fire reach extends far beyond the range of its municipal fire department."
Fire: A Brief History will be of value to readers interested in the environment, whether from the standpoint of anthropology, geography, forestry, general science and technology, history, or the humanities.
Customer Reviews:
Unreadable.......2005-05-11
This book might contain some interesting information, but if it does it's hidden beneath an impenetrable layer of literary and poetic pretension. Every second sentence contains a simile or metaphor.... seriously! It gave me a headache trying to read it.
To communicate effectively, writing should be clear and direct. This book is anything but. Perhaps the author should read someone like Jarred Diamond to see how to bring an interesting topic to life.
It's a shame, because the list of chapters looks interesting. Perhaps someone else will write / has written a book covering similar territory.
Style overpowers substance.......2003-08-25
Pyne has won a deserved reputation as the leading cultural historian and philosopher of fire. This book should have been an opportunity to summarize his findings in a clearly written, easily read way for people who are unlikely to read his more detailed studies. Pyne does offer us many interesting observations and perspectives on the history of fire. Unfortunately, he imposes a pretentious "writerly" style on his material, making his book laborious to read. His self-conscious literary artistry obscures as much as it reveals. Many of his poetic statements are not explained with supporting facts. A more straightforward telling of this story would be welcome.
Use this book for kindling!!!.......2001-12-26
Ugh! May the lord have mercy on Weyerhaeuser for their misguided economic support of this book, which should stand forever as an object lesson in what happens when corporations start actually acting on their own airy-fairy mission statements. This book ought more accurately be titled `a brief AND UNBEARABLE history of fire' -- Pyne apparently fashions himself to be the dylan thomas of fire history, inundating us page after page with rompous and ridiculous artistic alliterations, with ceaseless inversions poetic, and anthropomorphisms that would be hilarious if not so awful. Can we possibly believe that fire is `unique to earth' (p. xv), where the `biotic broth broiled over' (p.3) and `humanity's restless hand and roving mind' (p. 7) is `the keeper of the vital flame'? Can we speak sensibly of fire when it appears like a ludicrous singles advert, `fickle if powerful', ignited by lightening... excuse me, I meant to say ignited by a force `relentlessly restoring electrical equilibrium'? Pyne, are you losing your mind? Fire deserves much better treatment than this goofiness. Use this book for kindling!!!
Average customer rating:
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Checking in with fire protection. (includes brief illustrated history of hotel fires): An article from: Security Management
Philip Sunstrom
Manufacturer: American Society for Industrial Security
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ASIN: B00091W9OK
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Security Management, published by American Society for Industrial Security on October 1, 1990. The length of the article is 4701 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Checking in with fire protection. (includes brief illustrated history of hotel fires)
Author: Philip Sunstrom
Publication:
Security Management (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 1990
Publisher: American Society for Industrial Security
Volume: v34
Issue: n10
Page: p26(7)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
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A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American Religious History.(Brief Article): An article from: Journal of Church and State
Walter T. Howard
Manufacturer: J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State
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ASIN: B00097QIIC
Release Date: 2005-06-01 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Church and State, published by J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State on June 22, 1997. The length of the article is 404 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American Religious History.(Brief Article)
Author: Walter T. Howard
Publication:
Journal of Church and State (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1997
Publisher: J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State
Volume: 39
Issue: n3
Page: 600(1)
Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on July 3, 1997. The length of the article is 1496 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: La noble tarea del bombero. (breve historia sobre el Cuerpo de Bomberos de la Ciudad de México)(TT: The noble work of a fireman) (TA: brief history of Mexico's City Fire Department)
Author: Eduardo Oropeza Villavicencio
Publication:
Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: July 3, 1997
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: v44
Issue: n2298
Page: p102(2)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Nursing Law's Regan Report, published by Thomson Gale on March 1, 2006. The length of the article is 578 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: PA: failure to disclose history of prior injuries: denial of workers' compensation benefits upheld.(Legal Case Briefs for Nurses)
Author: A. David Tammelleo
Publication:
Nursing Law's Regan Report (Newsletter)
Date: March 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 46
Issue: 10
Page: 3(2)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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