The year is 1965 and “Rolling Thunder” has already begun bombing North Vietnam harbor and oil refineries! There’s just one problem. China and Russia are fighting a proxy war against the US and supplying the North Vietnamese with radar guided anti-aircraft artillery and Russian SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles. It is the most heavily defended airspace Americans have faced since WWII over industrialized Germany! No matter how sophisticated American technology is, a multi-million-dollar fighter bomber cannot dodge a curtain of flak and radar guided missiles. Losses are inevitable!

With the aging F-100 Super Sabre relegated to ground attacks and the first “Wild Weasel” missions the USAF seeks to suppress enemy ground fire by homing in on enemy radar in a deadly cat and mouse game that the Vietcong generally lose when a radar homing missile finds their Surface to Air Missile (SAM) launch facility. Many times the Communist personnel shut off their radar or simply run before getting hit by a “Bull Pup” or other ground attack rocket! But, the F-100’s are aging. They’ve been around since being tested during the Korean War but were never used then. F-4 Phantoms begin taking over that role.

The very worse for the Americans who are attacking precise targets with the A-4 Skyhawks and the A-7 US Navy LTV Corsair II They are fast and nimble but still dedicated to ground attack and are taking losses as well. However not all this occurs from Flak or SA2 Missiles. The Russians have supplied the Vietnamese with MIG 17’s and MIG 21’s which prove to be very difficult to dogfight with! American technology had anticipated stand off air to air engagements using Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles! These prove nearly useless in close air to air dogfights as the missiles lock on is broken once enemy aircraft jink and make evasive maneuvers. The MIG'S have internal cannons and take a toll on the F-105 Thunder Chiefs, heavily laden with bombs and drop tanks on their wings for added distance to target, this hinders their maneuverability requiring escort by the F-4 Phantoms with their defective Sparrow and Sidewinder air to air missiles! The situation is becoming critical!

The MIG Killer

However, the US Navy has an answer! The F-8 Crusader manufactured by LTV (Ling Tempco & Vought). This Mach 2.2 fighter interceptor known as “The last of the gunfighters: for a reason. This aircraft designed in the mid 1950’s is a speedster, but more importantly, it has an internal Vulcan cannon with rapid rounds that shred enemy aircraft! Although having aging avionics, limited air to air missile capability, the F-8 has such fury that MIG-21 pilots are told to stand down if the Crusaders are known to be flying in the area! In rapid succession 2 MIG-17’s fall to F-8 Crusader pilots! 19 MIG-21’s are soon to follow, shot to burning pieces of scrap metal over the North Vietnamese jungle! For the loss of only 3 Crusaders! For the rest of the war the F-8 Crusader will effectively escort bombing missions, conduct reconnaissance, and punish North Vietnamese ground targets with air to ground rockets! The Soviets have known all along about the F8’s capabilities but they saw it as an obsolete airframe with an outdated design and had no idea it could outclass the MIG’s, but once North Vietnamese pilots found out about the F-8 Crusader they were in a panic as they could neither outrun or outfly the formidable F-8 Crusader and the US pilots driving them!

Although the F-105’s and F-4’s were fast, designed for multi-roles, and had the best electronics of the time, asking them to bomb, intercept, or dogfight all at once put them at a disadvantage over the hotly contested air space across the 17^th Parallel! Yet, quite ironically, it was an F-105 that made the first MIG kill of the war until the “Thuds” as they were nicknamed, began taking losses! It was not until later that the F-4 Phantom was finally fitted with a Vulcan cannon strapped beneath the underside of the fuselage making it a much more effective dog fighter! The Phantom F-4E variant equipped with the 20mm M61A1 Vulcan six-barrel Gatling-style cannon with a 4,000 to 6,000 round per minute capacity would begin evening the score on top of US pilots going in for Top Gun air to air combat school training to improve their dogfighting skills.

However, it was the all-mighty F-8 Crusader that the enemy feared the most and had the best kill ratio of any US combat aircraft in the American inventor with an over 6 to 1 kill ratio! We hear though as far back as the Korean War that the US military was hampered by political indecision as and general Douglas MacArthur once stated, “Our military is forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back.” The same was true in Vietnam!

It was the F-8 Crusader that was used for deadly reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly brought the Soviet Union and America into a WWIII conflict under JFK, and so a supposedly obsolete fighter with an outdated weapon system gained paramount importance in a war that the American public grew to hate! It became  a very nasty surprise for Soviet military planners once they found out what the F-8 was doing to their MIGs!