Angry Planet - UNLOCKED: The Drones of the Vietnam War

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

A special production of Angry Planet and David Axe explores how a group of scruffy contractors pioneered the use of drones during the Vietnam War.Axe’s book, Drone War Vietnam, is out now.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew. What you are about to hear is a three-part series about the drones of the Vietnam War that I'm cutting together as one long commercial-free episode here for our substack subscribers. You guys really make the show work. Jason and Kevin and I love you and appreciate all you're doing for us. Here it is. It's about 45 minutes long. It's a really fascinating story that was researched and kind of written and then cut together by David Axe. Of War is Boring Fame now at Forbes and The Daily Beast, possibly soon Rolling Stone.

We'll see. Without further ado, here it is. On October 7, 2001, a U.S. Air Force MQ1 Predator drone flying over Afghanistan fired a missile at a building CIA analyst suspected of housing Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Predator missed and instead struck a vehicle, killing several of the Mullah's bodyguards. The botched predator strike was not, contrary to popular opinion, the first time U.S. military and intelligence agencies had sent aerial robots into battle. As early as the Second World War, the military had tinkered with remote-controlled bombers. Drones also played an important, and today largely unheralded, role in the bloody two-decade U.S. Air War over Vietnam and surrounding countries in the 1960s and 70s.

Dron aircraft spotted targets from manned U.S. bombers, jammed North Vietnamese radars, and scattered propaganda leaflets, among other missions. The Vietnam drone war was waged by a misfit crew of contractors and airmen led by some of the era's most ingenious engineers and managers. And for much of the conflict, they answered to one person. Bob Schwanhouser, the secret of chief of a secret war with their own secrets to keep. This is Dron, an audio adaptation of Drone War Vietnam, a non-fiction book about the world's first robot war. By me, David Axe, a filmmaker and reporter for Forbes. And I'm your co-host, Matthew Galt, a reporter for Vice, and host of the podcast Angry Planet.

Part 1 On May 1st, 1960, CIA pilot Gary Francis Powers took off from a base in Pakistan and winged toward Ukraine, a center of Soviet weapons production. Soviet radars tracked Powers U-2 spy plane the whole way. A dozen Soviet fighters climbed to intercept but couldn't reach the high-flying U-2. Powers' luck ran out near Sferlovsk. Two S-75 surface-to-air missile batteries launched missiles at the U2. one V-750 missile exploded behind the spy plane at an altitude of 67,000 feet. The damaged U-2 spiraled out of control.

Powers bailed out right before a second V-750 struck his plane. Powers, now a prisoner of the Soviets, was a living, and for the Americans, embarrassing, reminder of the U-2's vulnerability to modern air defenses. On May 5, 1960, four days after Powers shootdown, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly announced that Soviet forces had downed and a American plane. The administration of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, initially believing that Powers had died in his plane's destruction at first tried to obfuscate the true nature of the fateful U-2 mission. American officials claimed an unarmed weather research plane belonging to the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration had been conducting a routine weather reconnaissance flight in Turkish airspace when it had suffered a malfunction in its onboard oxygen system. Powers had blacked out, the Americans explained, with its pilot incapacitated the weather plane had veered into Soviet airspace by accident. The United States government requests the Soviet government to provide it with full facts of the Soviet investigation of this incident, the U.S. State Department stated, in a diplomatic cable. Two days later, Khrushchev revealed that Powers was alive. What's more, Soviet inspectors had examined the U-2's wreckage and confirmed that it was indeed a spy plane carrying powerful cameras and other sensitive equipment. The American aircraft

intruded across the borders of the Soviet Union for aggressive reconnaissance purposes, Soviet officials explained in a diplomatic cable. The Eisenhower administration panicked. But the White House had been warned if this might happen. Exactly. Someone had better be giving some thought to the problem we're going to have if and when a U-2 pilot comes down in unfriendly territory. Colonel Harold Wood, the Air Force's head of reconnaissance, said at a meeting with his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Ryan, in the Pentagon basement in September 1959. That someone turned out to be Ray Balweg, vice president of Pasadena-based high-con manufacturing, which produced the U-2's powerful cameras. A few weeks after Wood

uttered his ominous warning, Balweg met the colonel and his deputy at the Pentagon. Ryan echoed Wood's concern about the seeming inevitability of a U-2 pilot winding up in enemy hands. Hell, Lloyd, why don't you have us install a camera in a jet target drone, Balweg said? No reason it can't be programmed to do the recon job for you and bring back pictures. No pilot, no risk of a pilot getting captured. However, Wood and Ryan knew nothing about unmanned aircraft. What drone, Ryan recalled saying? Balweg mentioned Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego.

Founded in 1934 by Airline Pioneer T.C. Ryan, Ryan Aeronautical built training planes during the Second World War. Post-war, the firm turned its attention to missiles and rockets. In 1948, the company won the Air Force's first ever contract to build pilotless aircraft. Just shy of nine feet long with a span of 12.5 feet, the original Q2 FireB drone, with its continental J69 engine, could reach 521 knots at a maximum altitude of 40,000 feet. The American and Canadian militaries bought more than 4,000 Q2s for use as aerial targets. Launch them, steer them via radio remote control, shoot them down. Yet the reliable little drone could do so much more than that, Ballweg believed.

That bird's proven to be a pretty stable aerial platform, just what you need when flying a camera, Ballweg said of the Firebee. It just so happened that a Ryan representative was scheduled in a few weeks' time to brief Pentagon officials on the Q2. Ballweg urged Wood and Ryan to attend the briefing. The briefing by Ryan Aeronautical's Bill Orr detailed the capabilities of the company's new Q2C, a bigger and more powerful version of the 1948 vintage firebee. However, Orr only discussed the drone's potential as a better performing target for air defense training. Ryan Aeronautical had promoted the firebee as a potential recon vehicle as far back as 1955,

but gaining no traction, the company had abandoned the idea. Colonel Ryan placed a telephone call to Ryan Aeronautical in an effort to stimulate interest at the company in transforming the QTC into a recon aircraft. but the Air Force's requirement for a new reconnaissance capability was classified. In his call, the colonel could only hint at the real reasons for his sudden interest in the QTC. Somehow, nothing came of that call either, Ryan recalled. Ballweg ran interference on Lloyd Ryan's behalf. He negotiated a deal between Hycon and Ryan Aeronautical to cooperate on a reconversion of the QTC,

combining Ryan's airframe with Hycon's camera. Add an autonomous navigation system to the line-of-site radio, control and voila, spy drone. Meanwhile, Colonel Ryan finally succeeded in getting on the phone to the right person at Ryan Aeronautical. Edward Ewell, a Ryan Aeronautical vice president who had recently worked for Martin on that company's RB-57 manned recon plane. Yule understood reconnaissance and grasped what the frustrated Colonel Ryan was hinting at in his phone calls. Around Christmas 1959, Colonel Ryan told Ryan Aeronautical to get to work on a recon drone. This wasn't the same as the Air Force cutting an actual contract, there was no guarantee that the flying

branch actually would buy the drone. But Ryan Aeronautical took a chance. The firm tapped Robert Schwanhouser to head the effort. Schwanhouser was a complex and sometimes troubled character. Born in 1930 to a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York, Schwanhouser developed a childhood fascination with two things, airplanes and girls. Inspired by his older brother, a U.S. Air Force pilot during the Second World War, Schwanhouser studied aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then joined the Air Force. Schwanhouser was tall and ruggedly handsome. He liked women and women liked him.

What few people realized was that Schwanhouser secretly identified as a woman, and sometimes wore women's clothes while in the privacy of his, her own home. For the purposes of this podcast, we're going to refer to Schwanhouser by the same pronoun they used at the time. That would be he, him, for most of his life. life and she her for the last few years. In 1959, Schwannhouser was skeptical that the Air Force would follow through on its verbal commitment to Ryan Aeronautical's drones. I don't see much future in this reconnaissance drone stuff, Schwannhouser told Yule. Suffering no surfeit of optimism, Schwannhouser got to work. In early 1960, he met with top Air Force intelligence officials,

the so-called reconnaissance panel. After walking the officials through the 12-year history of target drones and U.S. military service, Schwanhouser offered. offered an idea that, in fits and starts over the next 50 years, would transform warfare. Versions of the same drones that the Air Force routinely shot down over its training ranges could also function as front-line warplanes, Schwannhouser explained. Fitted with cameras, a modified firebee could fly as far as 1,400 miles to photograph enemy installations. It could be launched from the ground or from under the wing of a mothership plane. Mission complete, the drone would parachute itself to the ground or sea for retrieval

by helicopter or boat. An operational firebee could do the same job as the U2-Manned spy plane and without risking a pilot and a diplomatic crisis. The use of U2-manned vehicles for overflights of the territory of nations unfriendly to the United States creates, we believe, risks which are unnecessary to take, Schwanhouser said. We feel there is a solution to this in the logical evolution of the unmanned firebee drone system. A modest study contract over the summer of 1960 had kept Ryan in the spy drone business for a critical period, during which all those fraught predictions about U-2s getting shot down and their pilots being captured or killed, tragically came true. After powers shoot down, the CIA quickly recalled all of its overseas U-2 detachments.

The military and the CIA added new layers of approvals for any dangerous aerial spying missions, and Eisenhower imposed a moratorium on spy missions over the Soviet Union. Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, extended the moratorium. It was becoming U.S. policy that it was too risky to send manned spy planes into the most heavily defended and politically sensitive airspace. That policy held even when, in February 1962, the Powers' debacle finally came to an end. The Americans and Soviets agreed to an exchange. Gary Powers for Rudolph Abel, a Soviet spy, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had nabbed back in 1957. In February 1962, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office paid Ryan Aeronautical. $1 million to modify

four QTCs into what the NRO called the Ryan Model 147A Firefly. The Cuban missile crisis at late 1962 gave the drone program a kick in the pants. The NRO wanted to deploy Model 147s over Cuba, but the Air Force

wasn't ready to reveal the drones. In the meantime, someone had leaked the name Firefly, so the military and intelligence community gave the latest Riki Model 147s and new name. From 1963 three on, they were lightning bugs. With its 27-foot wingspan, the Ryan Model 147b could climb to an altitude of 62,500 feet, a full 10,000 feet higher than the Model 147A, aka QTC, could achieve.

The Model 147B also boasted a new navigation system and a contrail suppressor. Additional models of the lightning bug followed, but lacking a worthwhile war to fight, they all went straight into storage. Until the next crisis. On August 2nd, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, an arm of the South China Sea bordering Vietnam and China. The administration of President Lyndon Johnson claimed there was a second attack on August 4th. On the basis of that reported aggression by communist North Vietnam, the White House ordered

retaliatory air raids, and Congress authorized a wider U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War ultimately would involve half a million American troops, fighting not only in North and South Vietnam, but also in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. It ended an American retreat in April 1975 after some 58,220 Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese had died. At the time, Congress signed off on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the American War in Vietnam,

U.S. Strategic Air Command's 48th Strategic Recognisance Wing possessed around a dozen operational model 147s plus their DC 130 launch planes. The wing, which in 1963 was based at Davis-Montan Air Force Base in Arizona, also operated U-2s. President Johnson, in December 63, ordered the 4080th to deploy to Southeast Asia. Over the next 12 years, some 1,106 Ryan aeronautical drones would fly 3,435 operational missions over North Vietnam. and surrounding countries. Almost all of the drones flew until they were shot down or crashed. A few dozen survived to return to the United States. Historian Bill Wagner estimated that in substituting for manned reconnaissance planes, the drones saved the lives of scores of pirates.

They also proved what was at the time of French theory. That robots could wage war. In part two of drones, Schwanhouser and his crew battle the weather, unreliable hardware, a labyrinth-themed bureaucracy, oh, and communist troops, as they struggle to make a new technology work in some of the most brutal conditions on Earth. Part 2. After tinkering for years with reconnaissance drones as a risk-free alternative to manned spy planes, the U.S. Air Force in August 1964 finally ordered its very first drone unit, the 4080th Strategic Reconnocence Wing, into actions supporting the Vietnam War. The drone detachment, a mix of Ryan Aeronautical contractors and Air Force airmen set up shop at Kedina Air Force Base in Okinawa.

In the evening, Cruz would hang two Model 147 Lightning Bug drones on their DC130 mothership. The next workday started at 4 a.m. Cruise conducted a pre-flight check on the drones and their mothership. If a launch order came, it should come between 6 and 8 in the morning. During the pre-flight check, the Ryan Aeronautical employees and their Air Force counterparts would load the mission course into the drones programmer. The Air Force's Strategic Air Command provided the course weeks ahead of a planned mission in order to give the detachment time to translate a map plot into a series of timed flight

events. The programming involved one team patching into the drone, flipping switches and pressing buttons to program the vehicle circuits, while a second team checked the work of the first. This two-team method helped to ensure no one input any bad data and doomed the mission. If no order arrived, the crew would stand down the ready drones and begin preparing for the next day and the next window for a first launch. Preparations included painting over the U.S. Air Force markings on the Lightning Bug's wings with the insignia of the Taiwanese Air Force. The recovery team in Taiwan, in turn, would paint over the Taiwanese markings with American ones. Taiwan and China were already

at odds, no? It was less destabilizing for Taiwanese aircraft to overfly China than for American planes to do the same, hence the attempted ruse. However, it was all for naught, as the airmen who were responsible for the paint jobs never sanded down the markings they were about to replace. You can see the shape of it pretty well, reported Bob Schwannhouser, the secretly transgender Ryan aeronautical manager in charge of the drone detachment. Not that the markings would help, even if the painters were thorough. Correct. If a drone crashed, it wouldn't take long for any half-informed analyst to determine that it was a fully American-made vehicle. The problem of eliminating all identification was not as simple as you think, explained Lieutenant

Colonel Lloyd Ryan, the Pentagon official who was Schwanhouser's counterpart. Sure, the team at Operating Location 8, that is, Okinawa, could pry the manufacturer's plates off the Model 147's fuselage and engine. However, markings would still be on electronic components, cameras, and every kind of equipment, Colonel Ryan pointed out. It was counterproductive to remove those markings during the manufacturing process. After all, the drone's builder and maintainers needed markings to help with assembly and repair. not that the markings were really the point.

Any reputable engineer here or abroad can take a piece of equipment and tell you its origins, Colonel Ryan said. It's for that reason that the Air Force didn't require Ryan Aeronautical to install a self-destruct system on the Model 147. An exploded drone would still be, obviously, an American exploded drone. As the 4080th SRW team at OL8 waited for the word go, they did so knowing that the enemy and the general public eventually would wise up to their activities. Colonel Ryan was sanguine.

If they shoot down one and announce it publicly, don't deny it. But don't acknowledge it, he said. Just reply, no comment, and sweat it out. The order finally came on August 20th, 1964. DC-134996 took off with B-8 and B-9 on its pylons. B-9 was the primary mission drone. B-8 was the backup in case B-9 malfunctioned. After years of starts and stops, controversy and missed opportunities,

America's first truly effective drones were finally going to war. The DC-130 winged toward the Chinese coast. Aboard were Blue Suit Air Force drone operators. The Ryan Aeronautical contractors stayed back at Cadena, where they remotely helped to monitor the mission. A few weeks later, the line would blur between the military and civilian members of the drone operation when Ryan Aeronautical employees began flying on the DC-130 motherships themselves. But that first mission quickly ran into a problem.

The launch crew aboard the DC-130 counted down to the release point and flipped the switches to launch Lightning Bug B-9. Nothing happened. The drone remained firmly attached to the DC-130. The crew hit the emergency release switch. Still nothing. B-9 refused to budge. The DC-130 looped around for a fresh approach. This time the crew triggered B-8.

There surely were size of relief aboard the mothership as the drone obediently separated from its pylon. The lightning bug motored. way toward China, eventually disappearing from American radar scopes. As the DC-130 angle back toward Okinawa, stubborn drone B-9 suddenly changed its mind. It detached from its wing pylon. Since no one aboard the mother's ship had ordered the drone to fire its engine, it simply glided 24,000 feet down into the Pacific Ocean. A die packet marked its final resting place. Now, everyone waited for B8 to come home. A few hours later, a blip appeared on the scope of the drone detachments' radar in time.

Taiwan. It was B-8, dutifully navigating back to its pre-programmed recovery site. The drone's high-tech Doppler navigation system obviously worked as advertised. After autonomously flying hundreds of miles at high altitude and near supersonic speed, B8 was just a few miles off course. The drone popped its parachute. The Model 147 included an impact sensor that was supposed to register impact with the ground and release the shoot. But on that first mission, the drone landed in a soggy rice. Patty. The parachute failed to disconnect. Wind picked up the shoot, flipped B8 upside down, and dragged it across the wet ground, inflicting major damage. Curious civilians were gathering as an army helicopter speeded in to pick up the drone. A Ryan aeronautical employee hopped

aboard DC-130-497 at Kedina and flew to Taiwan to recover B-8. It took several hours of work to pack up and ship off the undeveloped mission film and then load the damaged drone onto the DC 130, crates containing more drones arrived at OL8. Nine days after B8's successful first mission and B-9's tragicomic dive into the sea, SAC ordered the 48th SRW drone detachment to launch its second mission. The first few weeks of drone ops were a mixed bag. After a successful Riki mission, Lightning Bug B-11 ignored its signal to land and flew off into the vast expanse over the Pacific Ocean.

B-10 went out and came home without a hitch, but, B-13 disappeared while on descent toward its landing zone. The lightning bugs too often drifted off their planned courses. It was possible to fix the error, but only with good data. Ryan Aeronautical needed to compare the Air Force's official flight plans against the courses the drones actually followed. That data were classified. One of the things most needed is for us to have more access to information on actual tracks flown versus the intended routes which were programmed, Schwanhouser explained. If SAC at Omaha will let us come in, with some security requirements relaxed, and plot actuals versus the intended, we can do the necessary calibrating.

The lightning bug's high-con camera still wasn't working perfectly. It didn't matter if a lightning bug performed a flawless mission if its camera couldn't take good pictures. Schwanhauser reported that the film from the mission on September 29th was over-exposed. Perhaps the biggest risks, however, were at recovery. Drones were flying reasonably good tracks and taking acceptable pictures, then crashing at the recovery range in Taiwan. We were having as much trouble with recovery as with anything else, Schwannhouser recalled.

The birds were flying pretty well and coming home, but then we'd have problems. The lightning bug had a switch that cut the cable to the parachute when it detected water, but the switch was programmed for saltwater. So if a drone came down in a freshwater rice paddy, it wouldn't disconnect its shoot. The high wind that was common at the Taiwan recovery range would drag the drone across the rough terrain, damaging it.

Clearly, we had problems. Schwanhouser wrote, the system had not yet been debugged. We knew, of course, that unless literally hundreds of events in a complex series occurred at precisely the correct instant, the missions would fail. But for all their faults, the intelligence the lightning bugs gathered was increasingly useful. They were also proving effective at avoiding enemy defenses. I feel their small radar cross-section is effective against some of the surface-to-air missile site radars, and I doubt if they have the capability to fuse such a weapon against us, Schwanhouser wrote. Similarly, the lightning

bugs high cruising altitude appeared to prevent enemy fighter aircraft from intercepting the drones, even if the fighter pilots were capable of spotting the tiny drones. Also, no one had died while supporting or operating the unmanned aircraft. It was touch and go in late 1964 as Schwanhouser

struggled to make the lightning bugs work and the Air Force mold canceling the program. Slowly and steadily, the drone's reliability improved. The Air Force, growing increasingly confident in the Model 147, ordered Schwanhouser Hounhouser's team to pack up and move to South Vietnam in order to be closer to the action. They settled in on the afternoon of October 8, 1964.

Three and a half hours later, the Lightning Bug Detachment had loaded two drones on a DC-130 and was ready for any mission SAC might assign. However, the command signaled there would be no missions through the weekend. So on October 10th, the drone detachment threw itself, what Schwanhouser described as a little party. Hard drinking was a theme in the Ryan Aeronautical Drone Program, and few of the drank harder than Schwanhauser. It wasn't just the stress of waging America's first robot war that drove Schwanhouser to the bottle. The lightning bug manager, who secretly identified

as a woman, hid a stash of women's clothing that he, she, sometimes wore in private. Schwanhouser's stressful life nearly killed him years before he came out as her. He suffered a heart attack in 1968, and nine years later nearly died of an overdose of alcohol and lithium. Schwanhouser married and divorced three times before finally transitioning in 2003. During the Vietnam War, Schwanhouser still called himself he and drank and apparently took mood stabilizers to get by. On October 10th, 1964, he and his team probably were still drunk when the order to fly the following day came unexpectedly that night. We rousted everyone out, Schwanhouser reported. The detachment struggled through and flew three good missions over the

course of a week. Then the usual gremlins got into the system. On October 11th, Model 147B14, flew a perfect mission all the way up to recovery. The drone was 30,000 feet over Danang when it received the radio signal from the recovery team. The lightning bug cut its engine and popped its parachute. However, it was raining over the recovery zone. The drones shoot accumulated water and blew right off. Now there's a big muddy hole in the middle of a rice paddy,

Schwanhouser informed corporate headquarters. The detachment sent three airmen in an H-37 heavy lift helicopter to recover what they could from the rice paddy. They quickly discovered that Danang was, of Taiwan. Viet Cong guerrillas opened fire on the helicopter. The crew deposited the three airmen into the impact crater, then flew away. Two, HU1 Hueys arrived, at least one of them carrying an Army Special Forces officer. The Viet Cong shot up one of the Hueys and injured the

crew chief. The door gunner returned fire. The three Ryan contractors manning the recovery van expected to have to fight their way to the crash site. The fellows then felt they had a fight on their hands for possession of the bird, Schwanhuser reported. Military personnel armed the contractors, among them Dale Weaver. We had been given our AR-15s and instructions on how to use them, and were just getting ready to climb into the chopper. When the word came back that the VC had shot up the H-37 pretty badly, and that both H-U-1s had engaged in a hot firefight, Weaver wrote, the base commander decided to send in an army group instead of some crazy civilians. A helicopter pulled everyone out of the recovery zone. A helicopter pulled

everyone out of the recovery zone, temporarily leaving the site to the Viet Cong. The next day, army coppers strafed the site, reportedly killing several BC. The drone detachment returned to the rice paddy and started digging. In part three of drone, the lightning bug program expands. Hundreds of robots flying thousands of missions and saving dozens of American lives, but the cost to the operators, the secretive, hard-drinking Schwanhouser in particular, is devastating. Part three. After tinkering for years with reconnaissance drones as a risk-free alternative to manned spy planes, the U.S. Air Force in August 1964 finally ordered its very first drone unit, the 48th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, into action supporting the Vietnam War. The drone detachment, a mix of Ryan

aeronautical contractors and Air Force airmen, set up shop at Cadena Air Base in Okinawa, before redeploying to Bianhoa Air Base in South Vietnam in late 1964. The unit moved again in mid-1970 to Uta-Pao Air Base in southern Thailand. In 11 years of operations in Southeast Asia, 1,106 Model 147 lightning bug drones flew 3,435 sorties. Almost all of the Model 147s flew until they were shot down or crashed. A few dozen survived to return to the United States. Over the course of the war, the Model 147 evolved from a 27-foot-long vehicle with a 13-foot-span wing and a 1700-pound thrust engine to a 30-foot-long vehicle with a 32-foot wing and an engine producing and an engine producing 2,800 pounds of thrust. There were different models for different

purposes. Some had small wings and cameras for low-level reconnaissance. Others swapped in a bigger wing for missions at high altitude. Night reconnaissance models added a powerful jungle illuminating strobe light. Special models hauled sensitive electronic receivers for capturing data on North Vietnamese air defense systems. A few were straight up decoys of the Air Force flew straight into communist defenses in order to force them to reveal their locations. Still others carried pods, stuffed full of propaganda leaflets, and rained the leaflets on the North Vietnamese. The lightning bugs flew most of their missions from South Vietnam to North Vietnam. There was a special version for flights over North Korea and another version that was compatible with the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers.

As the war was ending, Ryan Aeronautical added weapons to create the world's first first jet-powered killer drones. These Model 234 lightning bugs were ready too late to take part in the fighting over Vietnam, but they did prove the concept of an armed drone. Thirty years later, the Air Force ran with the idea. Today's Predator-style killer drones are the result. The Model 147s could fly where no human pilot dared. Being expendable, the drones helped extend U.S. air power over even the most dangerous corners of North Vietnam. Few Americans appreciated this more than Edward Martin, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot. On July 9th, 1967, Martin was in the cockpit of his A4C attack plane speeding

toward Hanoi. Some 15 miles from the city center, the S-75 batteries opened fire. A V-750 missile exploded just 250 feet in front of the compact single-engine fighter. Martin flew directly into the blast. That was the start of my five and a half years as an unwilling guest of the North Vietnamese, Martin said later. A week later, he was in his cell at Hoa Loh prison in Hanoi. In his own words, crumbling heap of humanity, tied up in ropes and lying near unconsciousness on the floor. An air raid siren wailed. Any aircraft gunners opened up. Prison guards and interrogators raced for cover. After 20 minutes, calm returned. The prison staff resumed their work. Martin's own guards were more than a little angry when they returned. That's when Martin heard the distinctive whine of a Model 147

recon drone. He knew the sound because he'd shot at Q2s, the basis for the model 147, in training in 1959, during a mission over the Gulf of Tonkin prior to his shoot-down and capture, he'd seen, although obviously not heard, lightning bugs going about their business. The North Vietnamese gunners opened fire again. Martin's interrogator later claimed, without proof, that the gunners had shot down the drone. Martin wasn't convinced. Over the following years, Martin had many encounters with the lightning bugs as they flew ahead of manned bombers in order to spot targets, or followed behind the bombers to assess the effectiveness of a raid. One thing that impressed me the most about the pilotless Riki aircraft was the relative degree of impunity with which they intruded upon

North Vietnamese airspace, Martin recalled. When a strike force of bombers and attack planes came in, there was always an alert, but when a single 147 firebee came in fast and low, they wouldn't draw an alert. More than once, Martin and his fellow prisoners were outside bathing and washing their clothes when a lightning bug appeared overhead. The guards excitedly would usher the prisoners inside, then open fire with their small arms, never hitting the speedy little drones. In the spring of 1968, after the North Vietnamese had moved Martin to a different prison, one known as the zoo, and Model 147 approached to the prison complex at high speed. Radar-aimed anti-aircraft guns opened fire and scored multiple hits on the drone, but failed to destroy it.

Martin said his guard was absolutely horrified. The guard tried to shoe Martin inside, but he and his fellow prisoners refused to go. I remember we were all elated, so much so that they dragged me out for special treatment as I was the senior officer at the zoo. remanded me from my bad attitude because I had smiled when one of the spy planes, as they called them, intruded upon the Vietnam people, Martin said. By then, the lightning bug was a grizzled veteran of the Vietnam Air War. In July 1970, the Air Force redeployed the drone detachment to Utapeo Air Base in Thailand. Utapeo would also soon host a massive contingent of B-52 bombers, whose apocalyptic missions in late 1972 signaled the end of America's long, bloody involvement in Vietnam. Model 147 surveyed the damage

from the bomber's fiery raids. In January 1973, the administration of President Richard Nixon cajoled the South Vietnamese government into joining the United States and North Vietnam and signing the Paris Peace Accords. The ceasefire ended America's nine-year war in Vietnam. As many as 3.6 million people died, including more than 58,000 Americans. In nearly a decade of air operations, US forces lost 3,744 airplanes, 5,607 helicopters, and 578 drones. North Vietnam claimed its S-75 battery shot down more than 1,000 enemy aircraft. The United States confirmed just 200 of those shootdowns. The fighting didn't actually end in 1973, of course.

Following months of steady advances against South Vietnamese forces, in late April 1975, the North Vietnamese Army launched its final assault on Saigon. Tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese working with and for the South Vietnamese government fled in boats and helicopters. On the morning of April 30th, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gate of Saigon's Independence Palace, the seat of President Duong Van Minn's crumbling government. Min and his advisors sat and waited for communist troops to accept their surrender. The war was over.

Lightning bugs continued to launch from Utepeo in Thailand and Osang in South Korea for a few weeks, but an era of intervention was ending. Americans were coming home. The last drone mission from Utapayo took place on April 30, 1975. The last flight out of Osan was on June 3, 1975. A few dozen Model 147 survived. The Air Force shipped the war-weary drones home and stored them at bases across the United States,

in particular at Warner-Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia and Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Aiming to shift drone operations to Europe, Tactical Air Command briefly tinkered with an improved version of the armed lightning bug, but the command cooled to the idea following several studies and experiments. One 1973 study estimated that during wartime, NATO would need 18 drone flights per day to meet reconnaissance and defense suppression requirements. That in turn would require eight DC-130 motherships and 25 recovery helicopters.

Maintaining a single wing to undertake these flights would cost $35 million annually, the study found, by comparison, a wing of F-4 fighter bombers cost just $25 million, and daily could generate hundreds of sorties. Tactical Air Command also worried that Soviet fighters would gobble up lightning bugs at a rate that North Vietnam's meager air force never could achieve. It would be nearly two decades before the low-intensity wars in the Balkans, and later Iraq and Afghanistan, helped to create the conditions for a drone resurgence. Two decades of hard work, selling, developing, and deploying drones had a profound and tragic impact on one of the central figures in the lightning bug story.

Ryan aeronautical drone manager Bob Schwanhouser's high stress levels may have contributed to his heavy drinking and drug use. He suffered a heart attack in 1968 and, nine years later, nearly died of an overdose of alcohol and lithium. Schwanhouser married and divorced three times. Yet even that tragedy had a happy ending. In 2003, at the age of 72, Schwanhouser traveled to Thailand for gender reassignment. surgery. She returned home to Michigan as Bobby Swan and launched a second career as an advocate

for trans Americans. She died 15 years later. When a newspaper reporter asked Swan why she hadn't changed sex earlier, she was blunt. Priorities, she said. My priorities were airplanes and getting established in the airplane business. Obviously, that was a man's business. Dron comes to you from Defiant Productions in Columbia, South Carolina. Follow David Axe on Twitter at Dax. Matthew Gould is on Twitter at M.J. Galt. Drone War Vietnam from Pen and Sword Books is available wherever you buy books.