Cape Girardeau veteran honored for his role in Vietnam War
by Jason Welch | info@ruralmissouri.coop
It was a hug 50 years in the making. Lt. Col. Wayne Wallingford of Cape Girardeau had just been inducted into the Missouri Veteran’s Hall of Fame for his role in Operation Linebacker II during the Vietnam War. The valor he and his fellow pilots flew with in their B-52s helped free 591 prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. During his induction ceremony, one of those POWs approached Wayne and gave him heartfelt thanks and a hug.
At “78 years young,” Wayne is the Missouri Department of Revenue director. He remained in the Air Force until the 1990s serving home and abroad while also working as an aerospace professor at Southeast Missouri State University. After retiring from service, he worked for Pepsi and McDonald’s corporate offices and represented southeast Missouri in the Missouri House of Representatives and Senate.
Wayne began his military career in college and never intended to join the Air Force. “I went to the University of Nebraska, majored in business administration and wanted to hit the business world,” he says. “But they had the Air Force ROTC training classes there, and I thought it might be fun. The deeper you get into it, they start dangling the wings in front of you. ‘How would you like to fly, see the world?’ ”
After flight school, Wayne was sent to Asia, where he took part in Operation Linebacker II, an 11-day air raid against the North Vietnamese Army in December 1972.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 13, 1972, the North Vietnamese walked out of negotiations at the Paris Peace Accords. “When Henry Kissinger told President Nixon about that, he was very upset, he was looking to end the war,” Wayne says. “It was not a popular war; he was looking to get our POWs back. So, he gave the North Vietnamese an ultimatum to come back to the bargaining table within 72 hours. The mistake they made was saying they were not going to come back and probably not going to release the POWs. President Nixon says, ‘OK, be that way, we’re going to send in the big guns, our strategic bomber, the B-52.’ ”
Wayne flew out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield in Thailand. The American commanders didn’t want the bomber in South Vietnam because the North Vietnamese would travel south and sabotage the planes. “They would have loved to have blown up our B-52s — a $29 million aircraft — and it would be easy for them to throw a grenade.”
Wayne explains targets were concentrated in and near two cities. “Haiphong, which was the port where they would have supplies come in, and of course Hanoi, which was the most heavily defended area in the history of aerial warfare, even more than Moscow was,” he says. “They had more than 200 surface-to-air missile sites defending Hanoi, which was the capital and where the POW camps were.”
Their goal was to destroy infrastructure such as railcars, railroads, radio stations and missile and petroleum storage areas.
Wayne later learned from them what it was like to be on the ground when the bombs struck. They told him the ground just shook violently and rolled and went on forever and Wayne says they looked at each other and said ‘Pack your bags boys, were goin’ home, the B-52s are here!’ ”
B-52s faced threats from antiaircraft guns, North Vietnamese MiGs and surface-to-air missiles. The main threat Wayne faced was surface-to-air missiles because B-52s flew so high. The Vietnamese preferred a specific type of missile, the 35-foot-long, 2-1/2-ton SA-2.
Throughout Linebacker II, the North Vietnamese fired almost 1,300 SA-2s. “It felt like you could walk on the tips of those missiles because there were so many up there,” Wayne says. “We lost 15 B-52s to surface-to-air missiles, nine more were damaged. You would try your evasive maneuvers. Hopefully, you could outmaneuver them; but if you didn’t, they were deadly, they would blow a wing off and your plane would crack open like an egg.”