Blowing up a landing zone

[44minimum]

Here's a question for the Vietnam veterans(by the way, thank you for your service gentleman), or any of you other guys that might know. When you drop a 500 pound bomb into the jungle, won't it pretty much create its own landing zone big enough for a helicopter to at least hover to let the guys get on board? This Vietnam book I'm reading talks about these guys chainsaw Ing down trees and blowing down trees to create a landing zone. Why not just drop a 500 pounder a few hundred metres away and presto, instant landing zone.

[Hip's Ax]

How about 15,000 pounds? Here's a link to "The Daisy Cutter".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-82

[Larry Gibson]

The 500/1000 poumders generally left a pretty good crater that provided obstacals of it's own. If set to ground burst then there was still a lot of trees (they grew some pretty big ones over there) and tree debri to deal with. Biggest problem was the VC, PAVN and NVA were well aware of "blowing" LZs. Creating an LZ where you were relatively secure in perimeter defense was a lot safer than picking up, including carrying the wounded and dead, and moving 500 meters or so through the jungle. Much to easy for the enemy to attack you enroute when you've not got a defensive position and much of your combat power is tied up carrying and protecting the wounded making maneuver very difficult.

Besides the types of LZs you're talking about were for medivac extraction and/or resupply only. Once casualties are exfilled and the troops resupplied it is easier and more mission essential to continue the mission or move to a suitable LZ. Besides, you might get to kill more of the the enemy on the way. That was most often the reason we were out there; search and destroy. That meant "find, fix an kill the enemy". Once you've found the enemy and he's willing to play why take the football and go home.......

Larry Gibson

[10-x]

IIRC late in the war we had what was similar to the current day "Daisy Cutter"it, was called a PHAE Bomb. Basically a propane? gas bomb that went off a few feet off the ground, cleared a big area, big enough for a "Slick" to land. See Shelby Stanton's, "Vietnam Order of Battle".

[twotrees]

10,00 lbs of Very high explosive, parachute dropped from a "Herc". It had a 15 ft pole on the bottom that was the trigger stick.

It blew (Pulverzed) a 40 Meter area and killed any living thing with in 400 meters, including in tunnels below ground.

In Desert Storm, I saw them using what they call a MOAB and told anyone that would listen that it was nothing but a re-packaged Jungle Buster .

At the time they called it the second most powerful bomb, behind a Nuke !!!

The Fuel-Air bomb is the one that is now used that sprays Propane out then lights it's back trail. That Makes one heck of a blast.


R.Brown USAF (65-73)

[URL="http://www.aviationexplorer.com/mini_daisy_cutter_bomb.htm"] Daisy cutter/Jungle Buster

[montana_charlie]

A 500 pounder, dropped into rain forest or rubber plantation, didn't make a very wide hole for a Huey to slip down into. And once you were in the bottom, some of the trees may be damaged but standing. With that 'horizontal fan' blowing the vegetation around, it wasn't a tough trick to topple a 'leaner' right on top of yourself.
CM

[Bret4207]

I was told by a guy who used to make a living dropping bombs out of airplanes that those fuel-air bombs worked really well, except for the mushroom shaped cloud they produced. Not very PC old boy!

[twotrees]

That showed the pallet packed drop I was talking about. It must have been clips from a movie as it caught the huge shock wave going through the jungle and the "Mushroom cloud" as they flew away.

Maybe not PC but Danged effective !!!!!

"Charlie" would break off an attack if an Arc Light mission was within ear shot of them. Those were Iron bombs, Lot's of them!!!!!!! After a "Cross Hatch pattern you could build a city, where they had been. Nothing left but powder and a few stumps.

My Dad and I were watching TV when I was on leave and he rocked back in his chair after hearing what 1 BUFF dropped. He said to me"Rick, that"s more bombs than my whole squadron dropped out of our B-17's." For him to be that impressed, really got to me.

Good Hunting,

[rhead]

Politically Correct is a modification of the word correct. Any time you modify correct you wind up with some version of the concept WRONG.

[Kraschenbirn]

...When you drop a 500 pound bomb into the jungle, won't it pretty much create its own landing zone big enough for a helicopter to at least hover to let the guys get on board?...

Nope...or only very rarely under ideal conditions. "Jungle" in SE Asia is mostly triple-canopy...like in three distinctive layers of foliage...which may extend 60'-80' above the ground. A contact-fused HE would detonate among the upper layers and still leave the the lower-most canopy and undergrowth standing. Delayed fusing doesn't help anything 'cause it leaves the upper canopy intact. (Trust me...I did half my first tour flying crewchief/doorgunner on a Huey gunship and we had essentially the same problem with our 2.75 AS rockets. Contact fuses would detonate on anything...leaves, raindrops, etc...and wouldn't penetrate while with delayed fuses, even our 13-lb "improved" warheads were pretty well smothered by the dense foliage below.)

Besides which, the Huey "slicks" (UH-1D or UH-1H) most often used for insertion/extraction have a 48-foot main rotor...which means, even for a vertical hover descent and departure (very, very, difficult!), you're gonna need a clear opening, at least, 25M wide by 50-60M long. Even a ground-contact 1000-pounder ain't gonna do the job. And, it would take a helluva fine pilot to get in and out without bending something.

Dealing with that kind of terrain, 'specially in the highlands, 'bout only options you've got are either Combat Engineer Teams (chainsaws, det cord, and C-4) or a "Daisy Cutter" from a C-130....and, in either case, as soon as the area is half-way secured, you're gonna need a small bulldozer (don't remember the M#) airlifted in by a Skycrane (CH-54) or a Chinook (CH-47) to finish clearing the area. I did two tours in 'Nam as a Huey crewchief; the second of which was "detached duty" with the 8th Combat Engineers (1st Cav-Airmobile) flying "recon, survey, and resupply" missions and saw, I believe, every LZ, the Cav opened between mid '67 and late '68.

Bill

[Echo]

Re the B-52 Arc Lite's - maximum load was 108 bombs - 24 750 pounders on pylons under the wings and 84 500 pounders in bomb bay. 3 B-52's could create a large disturbance. I saw the first one land @ U-Tapao RTAFB in late '66. As usual, the Navy let us down. LeMay wrote about it in his book 'Mission With LeMay'. The Navy said 'Don't worry, the Navy will keep you supplied with bombs.', and they were out of bombs in a few weeks. Same @ U-Tapao. Seldom could we send full loads. Bombs were lightered in from supply ships off the caost, used LARC's for the job (U-Tapao is on the coast).

[mooman76]

The majority of bombs just arent designed to do what the Blu-82 does. Most of your bombs are 1/3 explosive by weight and the rest metal to create a schrapnel effect. The Blu-82 only has a thin layer of metal, enought basically to contain the explosive safely so it can be moved and dropped from the aircraft. When put on the aircraft palletized they install a series of razor sharp knives onto the aircraft that way when the open the cargo bay the bomb pallet and all rools out the back. The knives cut the cargo net designed for this bomb/pallet unit and a parachute opens up. The parachute is just to stablize the bomb and keep the fuse pointed down so it detonates.

[44minimum]

kraschnbirn, that was exactly the kind of answer I hoped I would get. For some reason I find myself rather fascinated with the Vietnam war and am forever reading books about it and coming up with lots of questions.

[Pathfinder1cav]

44Min
Krashinburn has it about right.. I was there in '65-'66.. Generally there were areas that needed little or no prep to use them as LZ's & you did not want to make a big production of fixing one up- except as a forward base LZ (Turkey Farm, Rubber Plantation etc.). If we had to, we would rapell in with a couple of engineers with chain saws. I had a fellow Black Hat get drug through the trees on rapell when Charlie opened up on us- ripped off all his gear & most of his clothes. Beat him near to death!
One ship LZ's are bad- still need an approach & depart corridor that is fairly clear- choppers do not do vertical take off & landings very well! Generally you wanted to land 4 ships at a time with 8-12 more cued up behind them in order to get some boots on the ground fast- or to get them out fast! Many times it was first in & last out.. got very lonely sometimes. I was the first man in on operation Crazy Horse (2-ship LZ) & first wounded- got the bad wounded out first though & finally myself 24 hrs. later- dang near died in the MASH unit in Ahn Khe.

[Ricochet]

A good friend of mine (he lived with us for a couple of years) did two tours as a Huey door gunner. He told me about them pushing huge pallets full of high explosive blocks (I think he said 4 or 5,000 lbs) out the back door of CH-47s to clear a landing zone. They'd fly in some grunts who'd walk around the nearby area a bit and then get flown back out. There wouldn't be any nearby folks still wanting to fight.

I seem to recall that a lot of the injuries to our guys in the Mayaguez rescue were from blast injuries from a similar bomb.

[kfarm]

In '68 and '69 I was in an Engineering Unit (photographer) outside Sigon, never saw the bomb droped but rode in just after with bull dozers and other equipment and made fire bases. Those LPG bombs sure did level quite a large area. Took the dozers made a trench and pushed trees on top, instant OP then we left as quickly ass we could back to the safety of the Air Base.

[mtnman31]

http://www.naspensacola.navy.mil/

Second article down has a little of what you are asking about (pictures also). Last operational BLU-82 Daisy Cutter bomb dropped...

[PatMarlin]

I watched a large Russian 4x4 flatbed loaded with equipment (Including mine) nearly dissappear in a Viet Nam war movie style bomb hole left by our brave serviceman overthere, hidden by mud and covered with muddy water right before my eyes. ..:groner:

THem holes are big and DEEP. Probably B-52?

Say hello to Homeland security on this thread.. :mrgreen: Hi Guys ...[smilie=s::

[Ricochet]

This would have cleared some trees:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiyUSv2Z07A&feature=related

[44minimum]

That Vietnam book I'm reading also mentions that when one of the patrols was stopped for the night, their team leader was snatched and drug off into the bushes and killed by a tiger. I wonder how often that happened? I've heard of it happening before during the Vietnam War, this is the first probably verifiable account that I have seen. But I would imagine it happened more than once. Lots and lots of things you had to watch out for over there, seems like.

[MtGun44]

Ricochet,

Here is a pic of me standing in front of the Czar's bomb in the Rooskie nuke museum in
Sarov.

Bill10463

[leftiye]

Rick, That brushbuster would have made NVN into a seaport (reads crater). (notta bad idea) Didn't the russians later make a 100 megaton bomb?

[cinderdick]

what the hell has this got to do with CAST BULLETS ????

[waksupi]

what the hell has this got to do with CAST BULLETS ????


Welcome aboard, Cinderdick. You will find it is an old, and respected custom on this board, for topics to wander far and wide. You can find topics on John Deere tractors, cooking, medical advise, and lonely hearts club here. Once you get used to it, I imagine you will get involved just as much as the rest of us do!

[smilie=s:

[Lloyd Smale]

ive got a custom mold to cast those big 500 pound nukes!
what the hell has this got to do with CAST BULLETS ????

[Ricochet]

Big Ivan was a big bomb, the biggest ever made. It was planned to be 100 megatons. Various reports say they decided to scale it back because of practical problems getting something that big ignited, or that it partially fizzled and "only" yielded between 50-62 MT according to various reports I've seen, the most commonly quoted figure being 57 MT. Dropped from a Tu-95 "Bear," it was popped 6 kilometers above ground and still made a HUGE crater. That was on October 30, 1961, when I was in kindergarten.

Another interesting nuke to look up is Starfish Prime. The Americans wanted to find out what happened when an H-bomb was fired in space, as when intercepting an incoming ICBM, also to determine the susceptibility of our missiles to interception with an ABM nuke, and to study the effects on radio communications. A Thor IRBM was launched with a 1.45 MT H-bomb in the warhead, reaching a peak altitude of 1100 km and bursting over the South Pacific some 700 miles southwest of Hawaii at an altitude of 400 km. Space shuttle altitude. Made a big flare for a few seconds visible over much of the Pacific. Knocked out radio communications for hours. Produced a really gorgeous "fishbowl effect" with a white hot central ball of plasma surrounded by a rapidly expanding colorful spherical glow with symmetrical "tentacles" reminiscent of a jellyfish. The Thor carried capsules that separated before the explosion, containing materials and devices representative of those in ICBM reentry vehicles that they wanted to test near the burst, later recovered from the ocean. Many test rockets were also launched, timed to be in specified locations near the burst. High energy electrons from this blast and others are said to be still creating practically off-limits Earth orbital zones nearly 50 years later. Not much to absorb them as they reverberate in Earth's magnetic field.

Just found an article on the Tsar Bomba on Wikipedia with a lot of interesting information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Says they scaled it down with lead substituted for the U-238 third stage fissionable tamper to reduce fallout and to ensure that the drop plane could escape safely. Thus it was an exceptionally "clean" H-bomb with most of its energy from fusion.

[cinderdick]

ive got a custom mold to cast those big 500 pound nukes!

do you use lee 6 cavity handles on it ????

[mooman76]

do you use lee 6 cavity handles on it ????

Only on the 6 cavity mould![smilie=w:

[mugsie]

44minimum,

You asked about tigers. I served in Nam in 68 / 69. I was with the 5th Special Forces, serving on an A-team in the delta. On one patrol, I was following a contact and a chopper pilot radioed me that he went into a cave. I asked if he was VC or NVA when the pilot replied "neither, it was a tiger. Get me the skin". Needless to say the tiger is still there. There was no way I was going into a cave after a tiger! Yeah, they were over there, so the other story could have been true. A lot of strange things happened.

Oh, and to keep this guns related - 44 magnum. .357, AR-15
(how's that for staying on topic?):mrgreen:

[Southern Son]

44, Mugsie, on the subject of animals killing grunts, up untill the "War on Terror", more Australian SAS soldiers were killed by elephants than as a direct result of ENEMY fire. One had died of infection that set into a minor bullet wound, many had died (indeed most) of "freindly fire" (either in warzones or in training), but none had died after being hit by enemy fire. One poor bloke in (I think) Burma got trampled by an elephant, the rest of his section opened up and shot the elephant several times, but there is only so much that 7.26 NATO can do to something that big.

Since the "War on Terror" we have lost several.