Robin Olds; General Was Flying Ace In Two Wars

Robin Olds, 84, an Air Force brigadier general who was a flamboyant legend of military aviation as a fighter pilot in World War II and Vietnam, died June 14 at his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo. He had congestive heart failure after recent bouts with prostate and lung cancer.

Gen. Olds, whose father was a World War I fighter pilot and a key planner of early bombing tactics, aimed for the air from youth. After graduating in 1943 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he was an All-American football player, he immediately earned his wings as a fighter pilot in World War II.

Flying P-38 Lightnings and later P-51 Mustangs, he shot down 13 German aircraft, making him a double ace. (A pilot becomes an ace by downing five enemy aircraft.) He had to wait 22 years to return to combat.

Gen. Olds, who often bucked the military system and ignored rules that he considered silly, grew a rakish handlebar mustache in Vietnam in disregard of Air Force standards. He also planned and executed Operation Bolo, a daring strike against North Vietnamese MiGs on Jan. 2, 1967, that was the most decisive U.S. air victory at that point in the war.

As commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon, Thailand, Gen. Olds, then a colonel, devised the deceptive maneuver using the flight path and radio signals of a bomber squadron. North Vietnamese troops, expecting to attack a lumbering group of bombers, instead encountered swarms of nimble F-4 Phantom II fighters, with Gen. Olds in the cockpit of the lead airplane. In the ensuing dogfight, Gen. Olds shot down a MiG-21, and the pilots under his command downed six other Vietnamese aircraft without losing a single U.S. plane.

In May 1967, Gen. Olds shot down three more MiGs, including two in one day. In all, his total was 17 in two wars, making him a triple ace. (He also destroyed 11 German airplanes on the ground during World War II.)

Describing his aerial heroics to the New York Times in 1967, Gen. Olds said: "It's very difficult once the battle is joined for a fighter pilot to see what's going on in every piece of that immense blue sky. What's important to know is what's going [on] in front of you and immediately behind you."

When he returned to the United States after his Vietnam tour, Gen. Olds, still sporting his waxed mustache, was ushered into the office of the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. John P. McConnell.

"I walked briskly through the door, stopped and snapped a salute," Gen. Olds later recalled. "He walked up to me, stuck a finger under my nose and said, 'Take it off!' And I said, 'Yes, sir!' And that was the end of that."

Gen. Olds was born in Honolulu on July 14, 1922. His mother died when he was 4, and he was raised by his father, Army Air Corps Maj. Gen. Robert Olds, a World War I pilot who helped develop the concept of strategic bombing in the 1930s. He died in 1943, not long after marrying his third wife, Nina Gore Auchincloss, the mother of author Gore Vidal.

The younger Olds attended high school in Hampton, Va., and spent a year at the old Millard Preparatory School in Washington before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. At 6-feet-2 and 205 pounds, he was a stalwart tackle on the Army football team and was named an All-American in 1942. He was a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.

In 1946, a year before the Air Force was officially formed, he joined the country's first military jet squadron and was wingman on the Air Force's first jet acrobatic team. In 1948, he was the first foreigner to command an elite fighter unit of Britain's Royal Air Force.