Vietnam

The Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association has spent decades matching tail numbers to fates. Its 2018 tally lists 11,846 helicopters known to have served and 5,607 losses — combat and accident together. The Bell UH-1 dominates every column: it was the troop carrier (‘slick’), the gunship and the ambulance (‘Dust Off’). Army Hueys alone logged more than 10.7 million flight hours between October 1966 and 1975, probably more combat flying than any other aircraft type in history.

Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam from March 1965 to November 1968, cost 922 American aircraft. Most fell to anti-aircraft guns; the SA-2 missile forced bombers down into the guns’ range, and the MiGs picked their moments. The Phantom had been designed to kill bombers with radar-guided missiles at long range, and early F-4s carried no gun. Against small, agile MiG-17s and MiG-21s flown by pilots under close ground control, the results were sobering. The US Navy studied why — the Ault report — and in March 1969 founded the Fighter Weapons School, Top Gun. The Air Force already had a Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, but did not overhaul its air-combat training until after the war, with Red Flag in 1975.

The first B-52 strike of the war, on 18 June 1965, went badly: two bombers collided on the way in and eight men died. Arc Light went on for eight years. Flying from Guam, Okinawa and U-Tapao in Thailand, B-52s flew 126,615 sorties, most of them against jungle bases in the South and supply routes in Laos and Cambodia, unheard until the bombs landed. In December 1972 they were finally sent against Hanoi and Haiphong. Linebacker II lasted eleven nights, and fifteen B-52s were shot down — all by SA-2 missiles.

Australia sent three RAAF squadrons to Vietnam. No. 35 Squadron’s Caribous — ‘Wallaby Airlines’ — arrived first, in August 1964, and flew into strips too short for anything bigger. No. 9 Squadron’s Iroquois carried the Australian Task Force at Nui Dat, and from 1969 flew its own ‘Bushranger’ gunships. No. 2 Squadron, the ‘Magpies’, flew Canberra B.20 bombers from Phan Rang as part of a USAF wing; it flew only about 5 per cent of the wing’s missions but was credited with 16 per cent of its bomb damage, bombing at low level with great accuracy. Its two lost Canberras were the only Australian jet losses of the war.