{"product_id":"hammer-from-above-isbn-9780891418719","title":"Hammer from Above","description":"In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Marine Corps’ ground campaign up the Tigris and Euphrates was notable for speed and aggressiveness unparalleled in military history. Little has been written, however, of the air support that guaranteed the drive’s success. Paving the way for the rush to Baghdad was “the hammer from above”–in the form of attack helicopters, jet fighters, transport, and other support aircraft. Now a former Marine fighter pilot shares the gripping never-before-told stories of the Marines who helped bring to an end the regime of Saddam Hussein.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Jay Stout reveals, the air war had actually been in the planning stages ever since the victory of Operation Desert Storm, twelve years earlier. But when Operation Iraqi Freedom officially commenced on March 20, 2003, the Marine Corps entered the fight with an aviation arm at its smallest since before World War II. Still, with the motto “Speed Equals Success,” the separate air and ground units acted as a team to get the job done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrawing on exclusive interviews with the men and women who flew the harrowing missions, Hammer from Above reveals how pilots and their machines were tested to the limits of endurance, venturing well beyond what they were trained and designed to do. Stout takes us into the cockpits, revealing what it was like to fly these intense combat operations for up to eighteen hours at a time and to face incredible volumes of fire that literally shredded aircraft in midair during battles like that over An Nasiriyah .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith its dynamic descriptions of perilous flights and bombing runs, Hammer from Above is a worthy tribute to the men and women who flew and maintained the aircraft that so inspired their brothers in arms and terrified the enemy.Advance praise for Hammer from Above\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Powerful–a gritty insider’s tale as only a fighter pilot could tell it.”\u003cbr\u003e–W.E.B. Griffin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is the real thing, a solid and readable account of the role Marine air support played in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jay Stout is a veteran Marine pilot who knows how to write, especially about Marine aviation. He understands–as only someone who has been there can–the hundreds of decisions a flier makes on a difficult mission, and he describes them memorably. If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to fly in combat, read this book.”\u003cbr\u003e–Thomas E. Ricks, author of Making the Corps and A Soldier’s Duty\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The 2003 ground war in Iraq has been thoroughly reported by embedded correspondents and those who fought it. Hammer from Above now brings an entirely new perspective to the conflict. Jay Stout unflinchingly portrays the battle through the lens of the Marines who fought in the skies above Iraq. He has skillfully woven the first-person stories of these men and women into a compelling tale of bravery and chance in the crucible of combat that will become an enduring part of the history of the Iraq War.”\u003cbr\u003e–Jon Hoffman, author of Chesty: The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, USMC\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A brilliant and exciting battle account of the ‘Flying Leathernecks’ who bravely supported their brother grunts in Iraq. It truly captures the emotions, actions, and feel of that battlefield unlike any other writing.”\u003cbr\u003e–Gen. Tony Zinni, USMC (Retired)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A veteran aviator’s superb account of a short, sharp war. A revealing portrait of airpower at its finest–supporting the riflemen on the ground–Jay Stout’s book does a great service not only for the Marine Corps and our country, but for readers everywhere.”\u003cbr\u003e–Ralph Peters, author of Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and PeaceJay A. Stout is a retired Marine fighter pilot whose twenty-year career included thirty-seven missions in Operation Desert Storm. He is the co-author of The First Hellcat Ace and the author of Hornets Over Kuwait, Fortress Ploesti: The Campaign to Destroy Hitler’s Oil, and articles for journals and newspapers nationwide. He currently works in the aviation industry for a major defense contractor.Marine Aviation Primer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Marine Corps sent many brave men into the skies over Iraq during   the spring campaign of 2003. This book will describe their actions and   perhaps bring more awareness to a public that for the most part is   barely aware the air arm of the Marine Corps even exists. That this is   so is remarkable considering the many legends who have flown in our   country’s service while wearing a Marine uniform.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ted Williams twice interrupted one of the most fantastic careers in   baseball to fly and fight in both World War II and Korea. Likewise,   Marine Corps pilot John Glenn flew in the same two wars and went on to   become the first American to orbit the planet. Ed McMahon started   adulthood as a pilot with the Marines during World War II and years   later sat beside Tonight Show host Johnny Carson and entertained   millions. Joe Foss, the great sportsman, governor of South Dakota, and   chairman of the NRA, won the Medal of Honor while flying in World War   II as a Marine Corps fighter pilot. And Gregory “Pappy” Boyington   fought and drank himself into one of aviation’s most colorful and   enduring legends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Regardless of public awareness, Marine Corps aviation has been   producing these types of men since 1912. It was in May of that year   that First Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham was directed to report to   the Naval Aviation Camp in Annapolis, Maryland. A few months later, on   August 20, he soloed after two hours and forty minutes of flight time   and became Marine Aviator Number 1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aviation in the Marine Corps grew slowly until the United States   entered World War I in April 1917. At the time the entire aviation   complement of the Marine Corps numbered only fifty-two officers and   enlisted men. Just more than a year later, 758 men staffing three   squadrons arrived in France on July 30, 1918. They came without their   own flying machines; it wasn’t until the end of September that they   received their first aircraft. Still, during the short time before the   war ended in mid-November, the Marines managed to make their mark by   shooting down several German aircraft. Indeed, their ferocity was such   that Second Lieutenant Ralph Talbot and Gunnery Sergeant Robert Guy   Robinson each earned the Medal of Honor while flying together for   actions that are described in part by the following excerpt from   Robinson’s citation:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    . . . on October 14th, 1918, while on a raid over Pittman, Belgium, his   plane and one other became detached from the formation on account of   motor trouble, and were attacked by twelve enemy scouts. In the fight   which ensued he behaved with conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity.   After shooting down one of the enemy planes he was struck by a bullet   which carried away much of his elbow and his gun jammed at the same   time. He cleared the jam with one hand while his pilot maneuvered for   position. With the gun cleared, he returned to the fight though his   left arm was useless, and fought off the enemy scouts until he   collapsed after receiving two more bullet wounds, one in the stomach   and one in the thigh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Robinson survived despite suffering multiple bullet wounds and having   his arm very nearly shot off. Talbot received his medal posthumously;   he was killed only a few days later in a plane crash.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Immediately following the war Marine aviation underwent a period of   massive reductions, as did the air branches of all the services. By   1921 the Corps carried only forty-three pilots on its rolls. Despite   the huge cutbacks that most of the world’s militaries underwent, the   interwar years were a time of rapid technological development in   aeronautics that saw a gradual buildup of capabilities within the   Corps’s air arm. During this time the Marine Corps was the only U.S.   service to put its fliers into combat. Flying and fighting throughout   various Caribbean and Central American insurrections, Marine aviators   experimented with tactics and techniques that would be refined and used   years later. Some of these were exceedingly dangerous. During fighting   in Nicaragua from January 6 to January 8, 1928, First Lieutenant   Christian Schilt made ten separate sorties under enemy fire into a   makeshift landing strip in Quilali to evacuate eighteen Marines who had   been seriously wounded in an ambush. For his efforts, Schilt was   rewarded with the Medal of Honor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Schilt’s extraordinary mission marked the unbreakable relationship   between the infantryman and the aviator that has become a pillar of the   Marine Corps ethos. Simply put, the primary reason the service keeps   aircraft and the men and women to fly and maintain them is to support   the Marine on the ground. This is an indissoluble tenet that every   Marine aviator learns from the first day he puts on a uniform. Parallel   to this is the dictum that every flier is a rifleman first; he receives   basic infantry skills and training before he ever approaches an   aircraft. This fosters empathy and understanding between the ground and   air communities and also serves a more practical purpose: It enables   the aviator to more readily understand the ground commander’s   intentions and requirements.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Through the 1930s the Marine air arm continued to develop and grow. It   was during this time that a close relationship with the Navy became   even more so. Marine squadrons saw service on aircraft carriers, and   the Marine Corps became wholly and fully committed to developing a   navalized air arm in terms of operations and equipment. And as   doctrines and strategies were matured to address Japanese aspirations   in the Pacific and Asia, more emphasis was placed on joint operations   with the Navy; these joint operations were oriented toward the seizure   of advance bases in the event of war. The execution of this strategy   would be the centerpiece of naval operations during World War II.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By the late 1930s the U.S. military still lagged behind the other great   nations in preparing for the coming cataclysm that was World War II.   The situation was so abysmal that second-tier countries such as   Portugal fielded larger armies than America. The Marine Corps was a   reflection of this lack of readiness, particularly where its air arm   was concerned. In June 1940, while France was being overrun by the   Nazis, Marine aviation numbered less than nineteen hundred personnel.   More than a year later the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caught the   Corps as much by surprise as anyone else: Every airplane at the Marine   airfield at Ewa was destroyed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Farther out in the Pacific, Marine fliers made the Japanese pay more   dearly for the tiny speck that was Wake Island. Although seven of its   twelve aircraft were destroyed on the ground at nearly the same time as   the attack on Pearl Harbor, VMF-211 continued to fight for the next   several weeks. The squadron’s pilots sent the destroyer Kirasagi to the   bottom and shot down seven enemy aircraft. When their last F4F Wildcat   was destroyed, the twenty pilots and mechanics from the unit who hadn’t   been killed or wounded climbed out of their flight gear and dropped   their wrenches to fight as infantry. Those who survived the final   Japanese assault spent the rest of the war as POWs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But it was at Guadalcanal where the Marine Corps’s fliers and “wrench   turners” earned a permanent place in history. When the Navy’s aircraft   carriers were forced to retreat under the threat of superior Japanese   forces, the aerial defense of the beleaguered Marines on the ground was   left to the handful of their brothers who piloted a pitifully small and   hard-worn collection of F4Fs against a seemingly unceasing stream of   Japanese fighters and bombers. Living in the rot and wet and filth of   the jungle, they fought alongside a hodgepodge collection of airplanes   from both the Navy and the Army for several months until the island was   declared secure. It was here that the Marine Corps showed the world   that the Japanese Zero was far from invincible. And it was at   Guadalcanal where Joe Foss equaled the twenty-six aerial victories   scored by America’s greatest ace of World War I, Captain Eddie   Rickenbacker.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By the end of the war the Marine Corps counted more than 125,000 men in   its air arm alone—more than a sixtyfold increase in five years. These   officers and enlisted men had slugged their way across the Pacific and   had seen action over such legendary battlefields as Bougainville,   Rabaul, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and even Japan itself. In doing so they shot   down more than twenty-three hundred enemy aircraft and produced 121   aces. Aside from killing other aircraft, perhaps their most important   contribution to the war was the hard-hitting support they provided to   the infantrymen on the ground. As airborne “artillery” they provided   such a volume, range, and flexibility of fire that no Marine commander   would ever again seriously consider a major operation without Marine   airpower overhead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Less than five years after the end of the greatest conflict in history,   the Corps’s fliers were at war again. Korea saw more refinement of   cooperative operations between the “ground pounder” and the pilot. When   Red China surprised the world by launching a million men over the   border and into the fight during October 1950, Marine aircrews   surprised those same Chinese by chopping them down by the thousands. It   was this sort of closely coordinated support that enabled the First   Marine Division to “attack in the opposite direction” and execute an   orderly withdrawal in the face of overwhelming numbers. Had these men   not been supported from the air, the outcome of the conflict may very   well have been different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Korea also marked the first really large-scale use of helicopters in a   major conflict, and the Marines were at the forefront. Having   recognized the obvious utility of the relatively new machines, the   Corps had invested heavily in equipment and training between the wars.   When the opportunity came they were ready, and on September 13, 1951,   HMR-161 executed the first ever mass combat resupply. Later operations   included lifting combat troops into the thick of the fighting. The   helicopter added a vertical dimension to the Corps’s playbook and   remains a cornerstone of Marine assault capabilities today. But perhaps   the chief advantage the rotary-wing aircraft gave in Korea was its   ability to replenish units in rough terrain while bringing back the   dead and the wounded. There were ten thousand casualties evacuated by   Marine helicopters during the Korean conflict. Many of the injured   would have died were they not speedily delivered to field hospitals by   the novel aircraft.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marine Corps aviation operations will likely never again be as broad or   extensive as they were during Vietnam. Flying several different types   of jets, Marine fliers punished enemy forces throughout Southeast Asia.   Along with CAS (Close Air Support), their operations ran the gamut from   electronic warfare to all-weather attack. Marine pilots even claimed   three air-to-air kills against an enemy that fielded very few aircraft.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But it was the helicopters that did most of the flying. During one year   alone—1968—the Marine Corps flew nearly 750,000 sorties in Vietnam. The   bulk of them were rotary-wing missions—the war was, at least on the   American side, largely a helicopter conflict. There was only one good   highway in the country, and the rugged nature of the terrain was such   that surface transport was difficult. Most Marines got to where they   were going via the venerable CH-34s that were replaced in the war’s   later years by newer UH-1s, CH-46s, and CH-53s. As we shall see, these   more modern aircraft evolved through time to become the aged warriors   that eventually served in Iraq and still fly with today’s Marine units.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The ferocity of the Marines in combat was one aspect of the Vietnam   conflict that did not differ from earlier wars. Major Stephen Pless was   escorting a MEDEVAC (Medical Evacuation) mission on August 19, 1967,   when he learned of four American soldiers who had been stranded on a   beach near the My Lai village area. The men were part of an Army   helicopter crew that had been left behind when their ship came under   fire and the pilots fled. Pless raced his UH-1E Huey gunship toward   where the soldiers were engaged in a life-or-death, close-quarters   firefight. The following excerpt from his Medal of Honor citation   describes his heroism:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Maj. Pless flew to the scene and found 30 to 50 enemy soldiers in the   open. Some of the enemy were bayoneting and beating the downed   Americans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Maj. Pless displayed exceptional airmanship as he launched a   devastating attack against the enemy force, killing or wounding many of   the enemy and driving the remainder back into a tree line. His rocket   and machine-gun attacks were made at such low levels that the aircraft   flew through debris created by explosions from its rockets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Seeing 1 of the wounded soldiers gesture for assistance, he maneuvered   his helicopter into a position between the wounded men and the enemy,   providing a shield which permitted his crew to retrieve the wounded.   During the rescue the enemy directed intense fire at the helicopter and   rushed the aircraft again and again, closing to within a few feet   before being beaten back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the wounded men were aboard, Maj. Pless maneuvered the helicopter   out to sea. Before it became safely airborne, the overloaded aircraft   settled 4 times into the water. Displaying superb airmanship, he   finally got the helicopter aloft.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The other three members of the crew received the Navy Cross for their   bravery. In total Pless flew 780 combat sorties before leaving Vietnam.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Following the exit from Vietnam during 1973, Marine aviation elements   did not see major combat operations again until the Gulf War of 1991.   Whereas Marine aircraft had cooperated side by side with the other   services in other conflicts, this was the first time that the service’s   aviation elements were fully integrated under a Joint Forces Air   Component Commander (JFACC)—in this instance a U.S. Air Force general.   This fact caused a great deal of consternation among Corps   traditionalists, who were fearful that the infantryman on the ground   would not get the support he needed when he needed it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ultimately, however, the nation’s military professionals were just   that; they worked to ensure that the JFACC had the assets—including   Marine aircraft—he needed to fight the deep strategic fight, as well as   the wherewithal to shape and prepare the battlefield. In layman’s   terms, this meant killing as many Iraqi tanks, artillery guns, and   soldiers as possible before committing men to the fight on the ground.   Marine F\/A-18s and A-6s flew a gamut of missions supported by KC-130   tankers and EA-6B electronic warfare jets; these strikes ranged deep   into Iraq, even as far as Baghdad. The shorter-legged AV-8B Harriers   and slow-flying OV-10 Broncos concentrated on targets in Kuwait.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As the date of the ground attack into Kuwait neared, most Marine   aircraft were shifted away from the deep fight and dedicated almost   entirely to obliterating everything within the Marine Corps’s projected   ground scheme of maneuver. Elsewhere the Air Force, Navy, and other   Coalition forces also blasted away at the entrenched Iraqis. The   efficacy of their efforts was such that the ground campaign lasted only   one hundred hours. The support the Marine infantryman received from his   winged brothers had never been better. The numbers bore this out. Aside   from the United States Air Force, a service that exists solely to   project the nation’s airpower, no other service or nation flew more   combat sorties than the Marine Corps.[quote]--W.E.B. 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