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Brief
History of Joe Canady's The following dates are from my AF form 11 of dates in Southeast Asia : TDY 3 May 65 - 10 Jul 65 As attested by Larry Becker on the page concerning
initial deployment My form 5 shows that I flew my first combat mission on 4 May 1965. It might have been the 1st RB-66C mission over the north. I can't really recall. I believe Larry Becker (EW), Rube Autery(P), Joe Sapere(N), and Ken Sexton (EW) were on this mission also. I can't remember the 4th EWO but it might have been Curt Nelson. We were given very detailed instructions by a Capt Taylor who was a staff EWO for the detachment to "provide ECM for the fighter strikes". A few asked how we were supposed to do that. He just repeated himself, "provide ECM for the fighter strikes". Upon being asked a couple more times he repeated his detailed instructions verbatim each time. He had apparently memorized them pretty well. After about the 4 request, I told the questioner not to worry that I would figure it out. I got the route of the fighter strike and layed out our route to be same except that I did a zig zag pattern back and forth across his path up to the target then we did a 180 turn and zig zagged outbound. We planned to do this route serveral times, and to arrive about 20 minutes ahead of the fighters. So we made a zigzag pattern at about 25,000 to 30,000 feet seeding in some chaff about every 3 miles. We also jammed all fire control freguencies as we laid this chaff corridor. This was our plan and it proved to be highly successful as the day unfolded. One problem as chief raven (EWO) that I had to contend with, was the newly installed jammers. I had never seen them before this day. The check list called for leaving ECM equipment off until after take off. I cheated here and turned it on during taxi out. I was warmed up and operating by the time we were airborne. I then started reading dials on the jammers and trying them out while watching the jammer output on my receivers. They were labeled pretty well and I had them figured out by the time we reached North Viet Nam. I promptly set the jammers to the frequencies I had figured out enroute and took out all the fire control bands as we ingressed and did our chaff corridor. The mission went smooth as glass and it was the first time the fighter pilots had not seen lots of anti-aircraft fire as they were inbound at higher altitudes with their bombs. They were really impressed that all the AAA radar controlled stuff had suddenly left town. We were an instant hit with these fighter pilots. Upon returning to base, taxing in, and deplaning some guys gave some sighs of relief and expressed a real surprise that we were still alive and unfired upon. This was actually the first time that it occurred to me that anyone had been scared. I had previously jammed all the fire control stuff while on recon missions of a communist country and I had no doubt that we would have a milk run against the North Viet Nam defenses. We continued with this routine of figuring out our own support plan for each mission flown, as to where to place the B-66s and how to employ them. With several B-66s we could really knock out a large sector of their radar coverage making them totally blind. I flew 13 missions in May, 10 in June, and 4 in July for a total of 27 missions on my first TDY. I went back to Shaw in July for several weeks. I don't remember why. I was back in SEA by 18 Aug for my second TDY. At some point we lost Capt Taylor with his very explict mission instructions, but it did not seem to hamper us any. Also at some point we moved to Takhli. It must have been at this time that we lost Capt Taylor and had to do without being told "provide ECM for fighter strikes". I say this because our new setup at Takhli had Major Estes as the ranking pilot although I can't remember if he was ops officer or commander. I do remember though at an initial briefing he announced that his chief raven would be squadron EWO. Capt Tarn was his chief EWO. Tarn did not have near the experience that I did, and I also outranked him. So I stood up and said, "I outrank Capt Tarn". With a slightly embarrassed look, he said, "OK, you're squadron EWO". So, I got to be the main planner the ECM portion of the missions, for the rest of my time at Takhli. On my second TDY, I flew 18 missions in August (45 total). On the 27th, my birthday, they let me fly two times. On the 30th I got 3 missions. The beer was particularly good that evening, I imagine. I flew 12 missions in September, 50 total now. October proved to be busy month with 27 missions, 73 total. November the pace slowed to 16 missions, for a total of 89. In December I did 11 and completed my 100th on Christmas eve. Some time early in November I believe I volunteered to go PCS in place so that my missions would count. Also going PCS in place with me was Neal Justice, Bob Rein, Wayne Fisher, and Dick Moore. There was a rumor that the missions might not count if you were TDY. I'm sure the rumor was wrong but I believed it at the time so volunteered for PCS, in place. By the time it became effective (Dec 15) I was within 6 missions of the 100. Going PCS at that point, headquarters did not have time to get me an assignment by the time I was done. So I had to hang around until my assignment came in on 11 Feb 1966. I recounted my missions in Jan 66 and found that I was missing some, so got put on the schedule twice. In Feb I still hadn't left so again found I was missing one and got scheduled again. These last 3 missions were not really missing, but I figured they might not let me fly if I didn't find missing missions. No one bothered to recount them and verify that I could do them. At any rate I enjoyed the missions and I wanted the combat pay even though it was a paltry sum. Several other guys were right on my heels with lots of missions done by Dec of 65 also. I'm sure Larry Becker was right there close and probably Ken Sexton too. There was at least 1 other crew with us at TSN also, as mentioned by Larry Becker. Some personnel there at the time included pilots Jim Estes, Ralph Lashbrook, Bob Long, and EWOs Bill Tarn, Larry Middleton, Charles Pybus, Jim Wolpert, George Hughey, Curt Nelson and Navigators Terry Meade, Derrel Adams. Some of these guys were probably close behind me in the 100 missions also. So there you have the story of how I became the 1st B-66 guy to fly 100 missions over North Viet Nam. The story does not stop there either. I actually became to 1st guy to PCS back from SEA with 100 missions over the North of all the flyers in SEA. They told me this as they processed me PCS at Don Moung AB when I left SEA. When I was done I had accumulated 1293:55 hours of time in the RB-66C. 320:05 was combat. I went on to B-52s, then B-58s, back to B-52s and ended my career with 5302 hours, 1075 of it combat according to my Form 5. Funny but I never did consider my B-52 missions over South Viet Nam as combat, but there it is in my form 5. Also while going through my Air Force records I found that I had 2 Air Medals from the B-52 era. That really surprised me. I never remembered them at all. Probably same reason I never considered the missions as combat. I do remember the 6 air medals and DFC from the B-66 era. That was fun. An after thought here about crew training. In the RB-66C we were trained in recon ECM and had no jamming training in the aircraft. So when we went to combat, the first crews were literally self trained, and in my case I never even saw the jammers before my first mission. The tactics that I came up with served me very well. When I left SEA, I went to B-52 training and for the first time was trained in active ECM, that is, defending the aircraft. The tactics taught to me by SAC were pretty much a crock. I never did use those tactics except when I was evaluated by stan-eval each year. My tactics were much better, that I had come up with on my own. At one point in my SAC career, my crew was awarded "Master Crew Award", being selected as the best crew in SAC. At that point I had occasion to find that I had the highest reliabilty rating of any EWO in SAC, for the scores on my jamming defense during our RCBS training runs. I used my techniques and my scores clearly stood out above the others especially on missile defense runs, which tried to simulate tracking by an SA-2 system. On another occasion, I participated in a large SAC/ADC exercise where a very large number of B-52s tried a penetration into the US air defenses while jamming. The Air Defense teams rated each aircrew on their effectiveness according to how well they tracked each aircraft. Only one EWO of all the B-52s that took place was awarded an excellent rating by the air defense personnel. That EWO was me. Many EWOs were rated as very poor. Again in this situation, I used proceedures and techniques developed on my own, and not the ones taught by SAC. Whenever I tried to advance my techniques, no one ever listened even though they had the facts of my performance right there to back up my case. Later on when the B-52s finally made bombing runs over Hanoi we lost a good many B-52s in those raids. I really believe I could have planned those missions without a loss. But, that's life in an autocratic society such as SAC was. Picture of Eldon (Joe) Canady taken Dec 5, 1968
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