Second of Three Parts
Without any delay, Captain “Boot” Hill and Commander Hoskins got very busy. Rear Admiral Ramage—who became just the sixth man in Pacific Command to be informed about the POW rescue and was given the task to conduct the diversion—needed a lot of help. He had less than nine hours left before launching the first aircraft. Because electronic transmissions of the OPORD were not permitted, they had to fly by helicopter from one carrier to another to brief hurriedly assembled skippers and deliver them paper copies of the OPORD they were to conduct that night. Someone had to deliver the OPORD to the land-based carrier tankers at Da Nang and then deliver a copy of it to Brigadier General Manor. As retired Rear Admiral Hill related to me more than 30 years later, they were all surprised by the short notice to respond and had the same unanswerable questions about what was happening. Was this the end of the long-standing bombing pause? Why no ordnance and only flares? He would say the same thing to all.
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1. RADM Bruce Boland, USN (Ret.), email to author, 2 April 2001.
2. RADM Lawrence C. Chambers, USN (Ret.), email message to author, 15 December 2020.
3. BGEN LeRoy J. Manor, USAF, “Commander, JCS Joint Contingency Task Group Report on the Son Tay Prisoner of War Rescue Operation, Part I,” 70.
4. Manor, “Report,” iv.
5. VADM William H. McRaven, USN (Ret.), Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Random House, 2009), 311.
6. McRaven, Spec Ops, 317.
7. McRaven, 327.
