29 April 1975..Operation Frequent Wind

Neutral Zone said:

Just looking at the pics of the Air America choppers and the ex Southern ones being pushed over the sides of the carriers, I remember reading somewhere that the North Vietnamese captured a huge number of Hueys and F-5's at the end of the war and most of them were put into Vietnamese service, kept going by cannibalising others for parts and that for many years after the end of the war, the Vietnamese military was one of the largest Huey operators in the world. Was this true?

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Well now the Hanna was loaded up with HMH-463 CH-53's and their squadron of 300 airdale Marines to suppourt them and was heading to da' "PI"(Subic Bay, Philippines). The Marines had no problem adapting to Navy life. Most had been on a "float"{cruise/deployment}as they called it. They all said the Hanna was the cleanest ship they were ever on. They said gator freightors were POS(peices of s**t). The Hannna being a CVA affored the Marines more room than they ever had on a LPH. They were a couple of old, rusty crusty, dusty type SSgt/GySgt types that had been on an old straight deck 27c{Essex class carrier}...All in all the Marines adapted well
to the Hancock.

One of the things that HMH-463 hadda do on the way to Subic was repaint their birds with a non reflective paint. They did this on the fantail of the flight deck. The scooter{A-4 Skyhawk) types on board were afraid at first that overspray would get on their aircarft. And it did at first, But after a good respot the overspray problem was solved.

Rumors abounded on the way to Subic. The big one was no liberty in da' "PI" because we were on a 24 hour notice to get underway. Another was that we were really going to Okinawa to onload Marines.

Fact was Hanna was heading to the Philippines. And traveling at a reduced speed because of engineering woes the Hancock would not arrive in Subic until the 6th of April. So we had
plenty of time to ponder the rumor mill and what MDI was saying.

The trip to da' "PI" was not uneventful ..as we shall see...

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--- In [email protected], "Gerry Hamm" <gghbbhm53@y...>
wrote:

Actually the word steaming is a misnomer. It was more like
chugging. We could only make about 19 knots because of our engineering
problems.

As we "chugged" past Guam some yardworkers from Subic Bay in da' "PI" were flown out to old CVA-19 to start working on the engineering problems. But those boys were more interested in buys smokes(cigarettes) and such(Candy & food items) in the ships stores than fixing the Hanna.

Many of you guys made MED cruises back in the 60's and
70's..Right? And have seen the Russian Bears over fly the ship. Well as the Hanna steamed accross the Pacific we were over flown by a Russian
Bear. I don't remember the date or the ships position. Well I think the
Hancock was in an alert 30 status. We could NOT launch the alert thirty
because of the condition of the flight deck. It was fouled with CH-53's
blocking the A-4's. Remember that our F-8 were off loaded in
Hawaii.

I don't know why the deck was in such bad shape. But after we were
over flown by the Bear a major respot was in order...more too come...

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ahho said:

just wondering, did you guys basically push heli offboard once everyone got out, or did you guys drain any fuel left from the planes??

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fishhead said:

I have a 10 episode video collection of Chinese documentary of Vietname war(20 hrs), starting from WW2, very objective.

It has a lot of footage about the last evacuation. I even saw the chopper tried to land at sea, since the decks were all full.

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bd popeye said:

I have one VHS tape about the Veitnam war. It has a good section on the evacuation but not much actual footage. A lot of interviews...If you see any video of sailors & Marines puching CH-47 Chinooks over the side..I'm probally in it...Yep I wuz there!

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fishhead said:

I'll try to find anything related to Hancock and post it on line, the video is still in my hard drive.

The Chinese documentary says that NV halted their troop's advance in the final days to give American the evacuation time, they didn't want to conflict with Americans. Did you guys konw that? Probably you could save some equipments if you had known Vietcong didn't want to fight US at that time.

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bd popeye said:

In the Picture below a VF-111 Phantom is ready for launch off the port waist catapult on CVA-43..Great pic. Note that old school USN Paint job..

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