The Bad Boy Commander of Operation Bolo
A month before the fall of Nazi Germany, Maj. Robin Olds of the 479th Fighter Group, U.S. Army Air Forces, scored his final aerial victory of World War II, chasing a Messerschmitt 109 through a formation of B-24 Liberator bombers and shooting it down. More than two decades later, on Sept. 30, 1966, a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules dropped Olds, a colonel by then, and the rest of the passengers on the wrong end of a runway at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, home of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. “We stood on a piece of hot concrete a mile away from base ops, the sun beating on us from a brassy sky,” Olds wrote in his memoir. “A fine greeting for their new commander.”
The pilots of the 8th TFW, who called themselves the “Wolfpack,” had bigger worries than catering to a new commanding officer. In January 1966 the North Vietnamese air force fielded new Soviet-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 “Fishbed” interceptors. Deploying heat-seeking missiles in ground-controlled hit-and-run tail attacks, the MiG-21s were exacting a toll on the Air Force’s F-105 Thunderchief bombers, adding to the losses already being inflicted from antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. Anti-aircraft fire, SAMs and MiGs were also inflicting losses on the Wolfpack, which flew F-4 Phantom II fighter-bombers. In six months from April to September 1966, the unit had lost 18 Phantoms—eight of them in September alone—and 21 pilots were dead or missing, remembered 1st Lt. Ralph Wetterhahn in the fighter wing’s 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the “Triple Nickel.”
The Cold War Air Force was all about intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. Fighter planes and fighter pilots engaging in aerial dogfights were considered “old hat.” Double-ace Olds, with his foul mouth, hard drinking and movie-star wife, Ella Raines, rubbed the bomber generals the wrong way. One told him, “You’re not going to put on your leather jacket, your scarf, your“but it was obvious where my task lay.”
