an A-26 flies somewhere in Southeast Asia. U.S. Air Force photos
Posted on 05/24/2016 10:59:57 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
More than four decades after the fall of Saigon, Washington is still holding on to various classified details about its fight in Southeast Asia. Among the Pentagon media arm’s still-secret records are photos and video of updated World War II-era bombers the U.S. Air Force sent to hit Laos.
In May 1966, pilots and crews from the 603rd Air Commando Squadron brought eight B-26K Invaders from their base in Louisiana to Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand. Desperate to stem the flow of troops and supplies flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam, the flying branch had sent the modified planes to help hunt down enemy convoys.
“It was a fantastic improvement over the old aircraft,” Air Force colonel Joseph Kittinger, a veteran of the deployment, said in an official interview in 1974. “[But] the aircraft wasn’t designed for what we were using it for.”
War Is Boring obtained this and other previously secret internal oral histories through the Freedom of Information Act. As of April 2016, the Defense Media Activity said it had at least two classified items relating to these sometimes hair-raising missions in their archive.
Well before the United States became embroiled in its war in Vietnam, the Douglas B-26 Invader had a storied history in the American military.
Originally called the A-26, the planes had attacked German and Japanese forces during World War II, bombed North Korean and Chinese formations during the Korean War and become a sometimes infamous symbol of small wars and covert actions in the early stages of the Cold War.
For its time, the twin-engine Invader boasted an impressive top speed of over 350 miles per hour combined with a range of 1,400 mile
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
an A-26 flies somewhere in Southeast Asia. U.S. Air Force photos
Air Force Colonel Joseph Kittinger... Another chapter in an amazing life.
Not long ago I was shooting WWII .50 cal ammo in training...
We won the Vietnam war. Our Prisoners were all released. The Communists signed a peace treaty . we came home . Democrats then cut off the money and supplies to South Vietnam. The South had no bullets ,bombs, planes ,tanks ( that ran) and the North invaded in violation of the treaty and we had less that 5000 remaining American, all in Saigon when Vietnam failed because the Democrats did not want that victory and stopped funding the self defense of the South. Absolutely true.
So, we bombed Laos.
Laos was a staging area for the VC.
It needed bombing.
In war you kill enemy and destroy stuff.
The South lost the war. Period.
I saw one of those crash in WWII (1944) when I was a toddler living next to an airport. It killed 17 people.
Also used at the Bay of Pigs (although some of those were B’s and C’s, not the re-engined Ks).
I've seen em
bkmk
My father-in-law (RIP) flew over 150 night missions in them in 1968. Incredible man and pilot. One of the birds he flew is in the air park at Hurlburt.
Obama visited Communist Vietnam this week most likely to thank the Communists for making it possible for him to be elected President of the United states. For you see, without the Vietnam War and the 1968 Tet Offensive, Obama would still be a Community Organizer and hanging out in Chicago bath houses, but the “Butterfly Effect” of the 1968 Tet Offensive made it possible for Barack Hussein Obama, a homosexual Muslim Communist, to be elected to the highest office in the land.
During the Vietnam War, the 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in the annihilation of Viet Cong units throughout South Vietnam and was a disaster for the Communist insurgency; it never recovered from its loses. This Tet Offensive was a coordinated “Do or Die” attack by every Viet Cong unit in South Vietnam on the night of January 30 and the morning of January 31, 1968 that simultaneously struck every South Vietnamese City, village, and military installation in an attempt to win the war in one country wide attack; they failed and they paid the price for their failure; they died.
The war was carried on after Tet 1968 by invading North Vietnamese, and North Vietnam could never move sufficient troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to ever hope to defeat the United States effort in South Vietnam, so they resorted to another Communist tactic; they lied.
1968 was a Presidential Election year in the United States, and the Communist Party USA attempted to use the Tet Offensive to influence the election by claiming it was a Communist victory and the war was lost. This American Communist Party organized an anti-war movement and assembled enough strength through this movement to seize control of the Democrat Party that summer during the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.
These Communists attempted to nominate a Presidential candidate who would end the war and they failed, but the Communist Party USA still retained control of the Democrat Party, and this Party managed to elect enough Leftists to Congress to cut funding for the Vietnam War and the war was then lost, so in this way the 1968 Tet Offensive was indeed a Communist victory.
After using the Tet Offensive to gain control of the Democrat Party, the Communist Party USA never lost control of the Democrat Party, and when a few decades later they managed to elect an avowed Marxist Communist, Barack Hussein Obama, to the Presidency of the United States, it made the 1968 Tet Offensive the greatest Communist victory of all times.
The B-26 had one of the most archaic egress systems in the USAF inventory. First one had to remove the canopy, then crawl out and jump. No ejection seat, No drop out from below and lots of airplane to miss on the way out.
Doo.....Our sqdn in Korean had the RB-26 Invaders. They were painted black. Our sqdn was called the Blackbirds.
Actually, the North invaded South Vietnam with more tanks, more modern tanks, and with tanks almost 4x the size of Germany’s tank army that conquered Belgium, Denmark and France in less time with fewer casualties.
The south had plenty of hardware. They also had an army that wouldn’t fight to defend its homeland. Sort of like what happened with Iraq. And the South Vietnamese air force had enough planes and ordinance to take out the runways at Tan Son Nhut and prevent the base from being used for evacuations.
B-26 was a notoriously difficult plane to fly. Most of the crews trained at MacDill Field in Tampa (now MacDill AFB). The unofficial motto during World War II was “one a day in Tampa Bay,” reflecting the number of crews who crashed leaning to fly the B-26.
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