North Vietnamese Fiddlers

Spinners · September 3, 2016

Tupolev Tu-128 Fiddler-B - 921st Fighter Regiment, Vietnamese People's Air Force, 1972

Towards the end of 1972, the North Vietnamese air defences had almost exhausted their supply of surface-to-air missiles. Soviet intelligence agents duly reported this back to the Kremlin along with their secret report that President Richard Nixon was about to launch Operation Linebacker II - a planned massive bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong scheduled for late December 1972 in an attempt to drive North Vietnam back to the negotiating table. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev informed North Vietnam leader Ton Duc Thang of this plan but Thang confessed that apart from a shortage of missiles the North Vietnamese Air Defence Network was already severely degraded by electronic countermeasures and other suppression measures and that the proposed US plan would almost certainly work.

Reluctantly, on November 30th, 1972, Brezhnev agreed to the transfer of more surface-to-air missiles to North Vietnam and also to the emergency transfer of 30 Tu-128 'Fiddler' interceptors in an attempt to counter the B-52's. With no hope of training North Vietnam personnel to fly and maintain this large, sophisticated interceptor Brezhnev agreed to send Soviet air and ground crews but naturally insisted that all Tu-128's flew in North Vietnamese colours. Arriving at the newly refurbished Thanh Hoá Air Base on December 8th, 1972 the aircraft flew just one mission on December 19th when four Tu-128's were effectively out-ranged and shot down by US Navy F-4J's firing AIM-7E-2 missiles forcing Brezhnev to reconsider and eventually withdraw the Tu-128's.