How 8 Australian Bombers Did Triple the Damage of American Squadrons Their Size in Vietnam

Somewhere at Fan Rang Air Base on a hot afternoon in the middle of the war, a United States Air Force staff officer is checking a page of numbers. He is not checking it because it is wrong. He is checking it because it is right. The page is the monthly bomb damage assessment for the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing.

 It lists every squadron on the base. It lists the missions each squadron flew. It lists the enemy structures destroyed, the bunkers collapsed, the sampans sunk, the bridges dropped into the rivers. And at the top of the effectiveness column, above every American fighter squadron on the field, there sits one small foreign unit, eight aircraft, not eight squadrons, eight airplanes.

 An Australian outfit called number two squadron flying an English airplane the United States Air Force had stopped taking seriously years ago. Their pilots insisted on doing the one thing every modern manual forbid. They flew straight at the target. They flew low and they looked at it with their eyes. The staff officer runs a pencil down the column again.

 He does the arithmetic himself. He does not believe it, so he does it a third time. And the third time it says the same thing the first time said 5% of the wings sorties 16% of the wings damage on eight jets built to a British specification from just after the Second World War. On eight jets his own service had politely retired from any conversation about the future of tactical air power.

 The Americans called it obsolete. That is the statistic. Place it on the table like a piece of evidence. Turn it over. Look at it from every angle because a number like that has to mean something and the meaning is not obvious and the meaning is uncomfortable when you finally reach it. Do the arithmetic once slowly so nobody can call it a trick.

 If the wing as a whole is flying let us say 100 sorties on a given day then number two squadron is flying five of them only five. The other 95 belong to American squadrons with faster jets, computer bomb sites, and dive attack profiles. When the assessors on the ground count up the damage those 100 sorties produced, they hand out the credit in shares. And the shares go like this.

 The 95 American sorties earn 84 shares of the damage. The five Australian sorties earn 16 shares, which means one Australian sorty is doing on average roughly 3.6s six times as much damage as one American sorty flown by the same wing on the same day against similar targets. That is not a rounding trick. That is not a favorable comparison against a bad squadron that is against the whole rest of the wing. All of it.

Everyone. And it holds up month after month for years until the Australians go home. So the investigation begins. Take the number apart. Test it. Ask the ugly questions and answer them one by one. First question, was the number generated by counting easier targets? Were the Australians simply given softer work? No.

 The tasking authority was the same for every squadron in the wing. Headquarters 7th Air Force in Saigon assigned the sorties. Number two squadron did not choose its own missions. It did not cherrypick trucks over trenches or bridges over bunkers. It went where the air force sent it. It went to the demilitarized zone in the north.

 It went to the Meong Delta in the south. It went to the coast, to the plateau, to the border. It went to the siege at Kan. It went to the A Shao Valley over and over again. It went to Hugh during the Tet offensive. It bombed enemy troop concentrations for the American Army, for the American Marines, for the Republic of Vietnam Army, and once memorably for a small group of American special forces pinned down across a border they were not supposed to be crossing.

 The targets were not easier. The targets were the war. Second question, was the aircraft better? Was the Canbor some hidden thorbred that everyone else had missed? No. This is the point where the investigation stops being a story about hardware and becomes a story about people because the camber was by every reasonable measure of the year 1967 a poor choice for the job.

 It had been designed in the last years of the 1940s by a British firm called English Electric. Its role on paper was high alitude nuclear delivery over Europe. Its official job was to fly above the reach of Soviet fighters and drop a single large weapon on a fixed target in a war that never came. It was a bomber built for a different war.

 When the Americans looked at their own version, the B-57, they had already largely moved on from it. It was, in their view, a museum piece pressed into a job it was never meant to do. The Americans called it obsolete. They said this openly. They said it in briefings. They said it in the officers club.

 They said it to the Australians. And the Australians did not argue because in a certain literal sense, the Americans were right. The Canborer was old. It was slower than the fighters on the ramp beside it. It could not dive. It could not carry the fanciest ordinance. Its cockpit had round dials and levers where American cockpits had computers.

 Its bomb site was optical, worked by human eyes and human patients. and it dated from the age of the propeller. On paper in the year 1967, it was a fossil, but numbers do not care about paper. Third question, was the crew training different? Better selection, better airmanship. This gets closer.

 Number two squadron came to Vietnam by way of Butterworth in Malaya, where the squadron had been sitting for 9 years as part of the Far East Strategic Reserve. Nine years of low-level bombing practice over Southeast Asian terrain. Nine years of training that had drifted quietly and without much fanfare away from the high alitude nuclear war it had originally been meant for and toward the kind of visual low-level conventional strike that would be asked of it if the region ever went hot.

 When the region went hot, the squadron was ready in a way that no other unit in Southeast Asia was ready. Its crews had spent the best part of a decade doing exactly what Vietnam was about to demand of them. But that alone still does not explain the number. Training helps. Experience helps. Neither triples your damage per sorty against your own coalition partners.

 So the investigation walks on. Strip away the easy answers until only the hard one remains. The hard answer is the fourth answer. It is a story about method. It is a story about a decision a small group of Australian officers made quietly without asking anyone’s permission about how they were going to fight this war.

 They decided to bomb low, straight and level visually with their eyes on the target. To understand what that means and what it costs, it helps to sit inside one of those camaras on a morning that could be almost any morning during the tour. The details in this braided passage are drawn from the way the squadron actually flew.

 Told in the present tense because that is the tense the men who flew them remembered them in and told in the second person here and there because it is the only way to make the geometry of the thing feel real. It is dawn at fan rang. The air is already thick. The pilots and navigators have been up since long before first light.

 They have eaten a breakfast they will not remember an hour from now. They have been to the intelligence brief where a young officer with a pointer has drawn a circle on a map and told them what is in the circle. He has told them who is on the ground calling for the strike. He has told them what the weather is doing between the coast and the target.

 He has told them what the ceiling is in feet and where the cloud tops are in feet and what the wind is doing at those altitudes. He has told them if the intelligence has been generous, what enemy weapons are likely to be pointed up at them when they arrive. Pilots write these numbers down. The navigators fold them into their charts.

 The Canbor sits on the pan under a rising sun painted in dark green and brown camouflage. The black magpie of the squadron badge on its nose. It is not a beautiful aircraft in the fighter sense. Its nose is bulbous glassed in like a bee’s eye because that is where the navigator lies flat on his stomach when it is time to work.

 Its wings are long and slender. Its two Rolls-Royce Avon engines are slung close to the fuselage. On the ground, empty, it looks a little tired. A ground crewman in dust stained fatigues gives the pilot a thumbs up. The pilot climbs the ladder into the top hatch. The navigator waves. The engines wind up with a rising note that is not quite the scream of a fighter.

 Not quite the drone of a heavy something in the middle. A working note that belongs to a working aeroplane. Taxi lineup full power against the brakes. The airframe trembles like something that has been waiting all night to move. The brakes come off and the canbor begins to roll, gaining speed with an insistence that feels less like acceleration and more like patience running out. Nose up, gear up.

 The runway falls away. The base falls away. The coast slides past the wing tip. Below the sea is the color of old jade. Above the sky is the color of new milk. Between them, the Canbor BS east and then north, climbing to cruise altitude with the two crewmen already thinking about the arithmetic that will begin the moment the target comes into view.

 Set that mission aside for a moment. The transit will take a while. Come back to the investigation. Number two squadron arrived at Fan Rang Air Base on the 19th of April 1967. The base sits in Ninuan Province on the coastal plane about 260 km northeast of Saigon and about 35 km south of the enormous American installation at Cam Bay.

 The base was new. It had recently been carved out of the coastal scrub by American engineers and in the Australian part of it by number five airfield construction squadron which had gone in ahead and built the buildings the Australians would live in. The Australians would eventually be pleasantly surprised to find their pre-fabricated quarters had flushing toilets which was more than most of their American neighbors had and which is the kind of small triumph that gets remembered longer than any of the tactical debates. The squadron they were

part of was the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing. The Americans on the field flew F-100 Super Sabers. They flew F4 Phantoms in and out. They flew a rotating cast of other machines whose crews took a certain pride in the modernity of what they were sitting in. When the Australians arrived with their eight canborers, the Americans were polite.

 The Americans, in a low voice among themselves in the briefing rooms, were skeptical. The Australian airplane, they said, was a museum piece. They meant it kindly. Some of them meant it halfkindly. Some of them, in the quiet way of professionals watching an outfit they respect on paper being sent into a war they know is going to eat airplanes meant it as a warning.

 The Australian airplane could not dive. It could not run. It had to fly slow and it had to fly close. The Americans called it obsolete. The first mission flew on the 23rd of April, 4 days after the aircraft touched down. From that day on, for the next 4 years and 2 months, the squadron flew eight sorties a day, 7 days a week.

 That is the number to hold in your head as the investigation continues. Eight airplanes, eight sorties every day. every single day. Weekdays, weekends, Christmas, Tet, the wet season, the dry season, the days after Australians were killed, the days after Americans were killed. Eight sorties. Now come back to the transit. Come back to the airplane.

The Canbor is at altitude now. Two figures inside it. The pilot on the left in a hard seat, a hand on the stick, an eye on the horizon, and an eye on the fuel. The navigator lying flat on his stomach in the nose, chin propped on padded rests, looking out through the big curved glass at a landscape sliding past below him like a slow map.

 The bomb aims compartment is a strange place. It is the front row of a cinema in which the film is the war itself and the film cannot be stopped and cannot be paused and if you look away for a moment, the whole afternoon can go wrong. The navigator has a bomb site in front of him. It is optical. Two sets of graticules, crosshairs, a series of small handles and dials, a stopwatch, a slide rule.

 It does not compute the release. It does not decide anything for him. It shows him the world. He has to do the thinking. Now consider the choice. Every other tactical aircraft in South Vietnam solves the visual bombing problem by turning it into a mathematical one. The American fighter comes in high, rolls into a dive, points its nose at the target, watches a computed marker slide onto the aim point, releases at the right moment, and pulls out. The pilot is doing the work.

The computer is doing the sums. The height gives them protection against ground fire. The angle gives them accuracy. It is a good system on paper when the sky above the target is clear and the ceiling is high. But in the summer over South Vietnam, the sky above the target is often not clear and the ceiling is often not high.

 The dry season is dry only in patches. The wet season closes the country like a lid on a jar. Great sheets of stratacumulus sit at 4,000 ft, at 3,000 ft, at 2,000 ft. And when the ceiling is at 2,000 ft, the American fighter cannot dive. It cannot see the ground. Its computer has nothing to compute against the aircraft cabinet at the target area.

 The ground troops calling for support. The forward air controller circling in his small propeller airplane low over the trees. They all watch the fast movers overhead go home because there is nothing else the fast movers can do. The Canbor can go under it. That and one other thing, the Canbor flew at 350 knots, which is by jet standards a leisurely cruise.

 and its crew was willing to do something almost no other tactical crew in country was willing to do. They were willing to hold the aeroplane straight, level, and low and let the navigator lie in the nose and put his own eyes on the target and talk the pilot on degree by degree, foot by foot, until the crosshairs sat on the thing that had to die and then release the bombs from level flight from an altitude at which a rifle round could reach them. That is the method.

 That is the whole thing. Everything else in this story is built on that one sentence. Straight and level at altitudes where dive attack fighters do not go because the exposure is intolerable. Straight and level at speeds where dive attack fighters do not go because they are already off the target. Straight and level under cloud that would have grounded any other squadron in the wing.

straight and level with a human being lying flat in a glass nose watching the war come toward him at 350 knots adjusting a bomb site with his hands telling the pilot in a calm voice left five hold that hold that steady steady and then at the moment his stopwatch and his eyes and his instinct all agreed with each other saying the single word bombs and the bombs would go and they would go where he had put them because the entire airplane had been an instrument aimed by a man.

 Come back to the mission. The airplane is leveling out over the coast now. Turning north. The coast a thin brown thread on the right. The mountains a green wall on the left. The sun already climbing off the horizon and warming the greenhouse of the nose compartment. The navigator has his charts out. He is muttering to himself the way navigators do.

 Adding up the distance to run, the wind correction, the estimated time on target. He has a small notebook clipped to a board. In the notebook, he has written down the frequency of the forward air controller who will meet them over the target. He has written down the call sign of the ground unit that has asked for the strike.

 He has written down the map coordinates. Somewhere ahead of him, 40 minutes flying away, there is a hill with people on it and other people underneath it and a small propeller airplane circling above it in slow lazy loops. And a voice in the small aeroplane is describing in careful English exactly what he wants done to the base of the hill and to the shoulder of the hill and to the treeine behind the hill.

 And the canborer is coming to do it. Set the mission down again. The investigation is not finished. The most uncomfortable part is still to come. Because the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page does not just tell you that Australians hit their targets. It tells you they hit them at a rate that is impossible unless something structural is being done that nobody else is willing to do.

 And the structural thing once you look at it plainly is the trade the squadron made. They traded height for accuracy. They traded speed for accuracy. They traded protection for accuracy. They took the risk that a properly aimed rifle round or a properly aimed heavy machine gun burst could reach them where they flew.

And they accepted that risk sorty after sorty, day after day, because it was the only way to put the bomb on the target instead of somewhere near the target. In the arithmetic of a war fought against an enemy who lived under the trees and moved by night and dug into the ground, near was not good enough.

 And the second half of that structural thing is on the ground because eight airplanes flying eight sorties every single day 7 days a week for more than four years is arithmetic of its own. Eight airplanes cannot do eight sorties every day if they are not serviceable. And serviceable airplanes do not happen by accident.

 They happened because a group of men in overalls in the coastal heat on a base where the mortar attacks came without warning and the humidity turned everything to rust decided that eight would fly every day and made it so. The ground crew of number two squadron worked in two 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day.

 They serviced eight airframes to a standard that would have flattered a peaceime squadron on the other side of the world. Daily flight servicing, weekly servicing, monthly servicing, deep inspections, engine changes when engine changes were needed, battle damage repairs when battle damage came home. Serviceability over 4 years ran at 97%. On some measures, it ran at 98%.

Consider what that means. 97% serviceability on a fleet of eight airplanes sustained for 4 years in the tropics in a war on old airframes is not a normal thing. It is in fact a rate that most modern squadrons in peace time sitting on their home bases with all the parts they need and all the time in the world would find hard to match.

 And these men were doing it in a wooden hanger under a corrugated roof in South Vietnam. The Americans noticed this too. They mentioned it in reports. They mentioned it in the citation. It was not, they said, only that the Australian pilots put the bombs on the target. It was also that the Australian airplanes were there to put them on the target.

Every morning, every afternoon, every night, without excuse, without lag. Eight up, eight down. Turn them around, eight up again. And here is where the investigation begins to bite. Because if you strip away the easy explanations for the number on the staff officer’s page one by one in order, what you are left with at the bottom is not an aeroplane.

It is a culture. It is a way of working. It is a small group of air crew who decided together how they were going to fly and a larger group of ground crew who decided together how they were going to keep them flying. And a whole squadron of officers and enlisted men and cooks and drivers who arranged their lives around eight sorties a day, 7 days a week and did it for 4 years and 2 months without breaking.

 The Americans called it obsolete. What the Americans meant, though they did not always know they meant it, was that the airplane was obsolete. They did not mean that the men were. And it turned out in the arithmetic of the war that the men were what mattered. Come back to the mission. The forward air controller’s voice comes over the radio.

 Tiny in the pilot’s headphones, clear enough to make out over the engine noise. Magpie, this is CVY. Do you have me visual? And the pilot answers in the flat dry way that pilots have when they are keeping their heart rate down. CVY magpie tally and then the fact gives them the target. He gives them the marker.

 He gives them the friendly locations in meters from a riverbend, in meters from a treeine, in meters from a hut that used to be a hut before something happened to it. And he gives them the wind and he gives them the direction he wants them to run in. and he tells them very calmly that there is AAA on the ridge to the south so please do not overshoot into it.

 The pilot acknowledges the navigator who has been listening on the intercom is already crawling forward into the nose. He is on his stomach again. He has one hand on the bomb site and the other on his stopwatch. He can see the fax airplane, a small speck spiraling above the target like a leaf on a slow river. He can see the smoke of the marker rocket.

 The fak has fired orange going gray at the edges drifting east on the wind. He can see the ground. He calls the runin. The canra descends. Not steeply, not fast. A shallow patient descent that takes them below any cloud that might be in the way. Down to the altitude at which the man in the nose can see individual trees. 350 knots on the airspeed indicator.

 Wings level, nose steady. The country slides toward them like a great green tablecloth being pulled from the far end. And the man in the nose says in that same flat voice, “Lft three.” And the pilot moves the stick left 3° and holds it. And the man in the nose says, “Hold that. Hold that. Right one. Hold that.

” And the smoke of the marker rocket comes into the crosshairs and past the crosshairs. And the bomb site does its patient business. And the navigator says the word and the bombs go. They go from level flight. Not from a dive, not with a computer, not from four miles up, from an altitude at which a man on the ground with a good gun and a good day could reach them.

 And they fall to the earth in a stick one after another, and the fax voice coming back a beat later is not the whoop of a rehearsed radio call. It is the calm satisfaction of an air controller who has seen a lot of ordinance land in a lot of places and has watched this ordinance land where he asked for it. Magpie, that’s right on it.

 Give me another run, please. Pull bank. Come around. Do it again and again and again. That is what one sort looked like on a good day. On a day when the enemy did not shoot back well. On a day when the weather held. That is what the men of number two squadron did in some variation in some place at some time of the day or the night more than 11,900 times over the course of the tour.

11,900 sorties. Turn the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page. Over one more time, 76,389 bombs released. That is not a rounded figure. That is the exact number the squadron kept. It came to about 26,730 tons of explosive delivered onto the enemy of the moment. For the first 15 months, the bombs the Australians dropped were old.

 They were quite literally war stocks left over from the Second World War. 500 lb and 1,000lb bombs made a generation earlier and sitting in depots waiting for another war to want them. In August of 1968, the squadron ran through the last of these old bombs and moved to a new American weapon, the M117, a 750lb bomb of newer design.

 There is a photograph taken in a bomb dump on the base of a bomb marked with a piece of chalk. The chalk reads, “Last of the oldies.” The bomb was the 21,568th bomb the squadron had dropped since arriving. 21,568 bombs of the war before this one dropped on the war of the present from an aeroplane the Americans called obsolete.

The credits given for those bombs by the assessor on the ground and by the intelligence officers who tallied the reports ran to 786 enemy personnel confirmed killed. Another 3,390 estimated killed. 8,637 structures destroyed. 15,568 bunkers destroyed, 1,267 sampans destroyed, and 74 bridges destroyed.

 Read those numbers slowly, and they lose their easiness. Each one of them is a small event on a piece of ground. A place where the war was made worse for one side and better for the other by an Australian airplane holding straight and level under the cloud and letting a man in a glass nose pick his aim. Now come to the cost. Because a story about arithmetic is a story about arithmetic and arithmetic has two sides of the balance.

 The squadron paid a bill for what it did and the bill has names and honesty demands that the names be spoken. Two aircraft were lost in combat over the course of the tour. Two cans out of eight. The first was A84231. It flew on the night of the 3rd of November 1970. Its call sign that night was Magpai 91.

 Its pilot was flying officer Michael Herbert. Its navigator was pilot officer Robert Carver. They were both 24 years old. They had been sent on a night interdiction mission near the border with Laos, striking at the network of supply routes the enemy used to bring men and material south. The aeroplane released its bombs. Then it disappeared.

 No mayday, no wreckage that anyone could find, no sign of parachutes, nothing. Herbert and Carver were listed as missing in action. Their families waited. The war ended and they were still listed as missing in action. The years passed and they were still listed as missing in action. Their names were carved on memorials. Their photographs sat on mantle pieces at home.

 Their bunkmates got older and had children and became grandfathers. and Michael Herbert and Robert Carver remained 24 in every photograph anyone had of them because there were no other photographs and there would not be anymore. In April of 2009, 38 1/2 years after the night they disappeared, a search team found the wreckage of A84231 in the jungle.

 In July of 2009, the remains of Herbert and Carver were positively identified. They came home. They were buried in Australia. Their names were moved on the memorials from missing to killed. Their mothers and fathers in some cases did not live to see it. In some cases, they did. The country stopped for a day and marked the return of two men whose war had ended on a Southeast Asian night in 1970 and whose journey home had taken almost four decades.

 The second airplane was A84-228. It flew on the 14th of March 1971. Its pilot was the squadron commander, wing commander John Downing, and its navigator was flight left tenant Al Pinches. They were in the area near Khei Sun where the mountains meet the border and where the enemy had brought forward heavy anti-aircraft equipment.

 They had not in the earlier years of the war been able to move that far south. Two surfaceto-air missiles came up out of the ground. One of them or both of them cut the right wing off the canra downing and pinches ejected. They spent a hard night in the jungle with the sound of the enemy moving near them. In the morning, a Huey helicopter, the kind the Americans called a dust off, came in and pulled them out. They lived.

 They both went home. Add to the two aircraft losses the other men who did not come home. Two members of the squadron died of disease during the tour. Three more were killed in accidents. That is five funerals in Australia over four years from a squadron that never had more than a few hundred men on the ground at any time. Five families that lost someone.

Five names on the role of honor for a squadron that had gone to Vietnam to fly an airplane the Americans called obsolete and that had by the arithmetic of the war done three and a half times more with it than the fighters flying alongside it. That is the cost. It is not decorative. It is real. It is what the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page was written in.

 Now watch the Americans change their minds because this is the interesting part. The part the outline calls the American conversion. And it is worth reading slowly because it is a rare thing in the story of any war for a professional service to look at a foreign unit under its own command and in effect hand it more work than that unit was originally hired for.

 But that is what the United States Air Force did. Once the arithmetic became too solid to ignore the tasking authority at headquarters, 7th air force stopped treating number two squadron as an eccentric adjunct to the 35th tactical fighter wing and started treating it as a resource to be spent carefully. In the places where the wing most needed accurate ordinance to fall from below a cloud base that would not lift, the Americans stopped joking about the airplane.

 The Americans stopped calling it obsolete, at least where the Australians could hear. The Americans began in the way of professionals recognizing other professionals to save the difficult missions for the magpies. The missions in the weather, the missions where the target was small and inside a friendly perimeter and the fast movers could not risk the release.

 The missions in the mountains where a computed dive attack was, in the honest opinion of most fighter pilots, a bad bet. The Australian Squadron ate those missions. It ate them the way a shift worker eats his lunch quickly and without complaint, and it went back to work. In July of 1969, the United States government presented number two squadron with a United States Presidential Unit Citation.

 The citation was handed over by an American general, a man named George Brown. A presidential unit citation is not a Christmas card. It is an American honor given by an American government to a unit and it is given rarely and it is given for the reasons the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page had made too plain to argue with any longer.

 The Americans called it obsolete. The Americans in the end pinned an American ribbon on it. There is a smaller story about the conversion and it is worth telling because it makes the point in a smaller way. On the 24th of April 1969, a small group of American special forces was in trouble in a border area they were not officially in.

 They were pinned down. They were calling for help. The rules of engagement did not strictly speaking permit an Australian bomber to bomb that particular piece of ground on that particular day. A Canbor crew heard the call, understood what was being asked, weighed the paperwork against the men on the ground, and dropped its bombs where the American radio said the enemy was.

 The special forces walked out alive. The paperwork was sorted out afterwards. The story went around the base in the way that stories go around bases when they involve professionals recognizing other professionals under difficult circumstances. And after that, in the way of professionals, the last quiet resistance among the American fighter pilots to the odd little squadron in the corner of the ramp mostly stopped.

 Now bring the investigation home. By the end of the tour, the eight Cambaras had flown. Together, 11,963 sorties. They had dropped 76,389 bombs. They had flown 5% of the wings missions and had been credited with 16% of the wings bomb damage assessment. They had lost two airplanes. They had lost two men killed in the air and three more in disease and accidents.

 They had held their serviceability at 97% for 4 years. They had, in the arithmetic that all of this made, done three and a half times more with each sorty than the fighters they flew beside on an airplane the Americans had thought retired from serious conversation about the future of tactical air power.

 The last mission flew on the 31st of May 1971. It was tasked, appropriately enough, in support of the American 101st Airborne Division in the Asha Valley, an area the squadron had come to know well over the last 2 years. Nothing dramatic happened on that last mission. The Canborers rolled off the runway before dawn.

 They flew to the valley. They released their bombs. They came home. The forward air controller was pleased. It was, as the ground crew liked to say, another day. On the 4th of June, 1971, the squadron departed fan rang. The eight airplanes lifted off from the runway on which they had lifted off 11,963 times before and turned south for Australia.

 The wing tip tanks that had been off the aircraft for the whole tour, replaced by wing tip bomb pylons, had been refitted for the flight home. The airplanes flew south through Southeast Asia over places the squadron had known before and landed at Ambley and Queensland on the 5th of June. 13 years almost to the month since the squadron had first left Ambley for Butterworth in Malaya in 1958.

 13 years of practice in a way for 4 years of work. The base at Fan Rang went on without them. The 35th Tactical Fighter Wing went on without them. The war went on without them. Two years later, the last of the American combat units left the country, too. 2 years after that, the war ended in the way it ended. But the arithmetic on the staff officers page did not go away.

 It stayed in the files. It stayed in the studies that historians wrote later and in the memoirs the crewman wrote later and in the small books the veteran associations put out for their own members. It stayed as a puzzle for anyone in a modern air force who cared to look at it. Because the puzzle is not solved by any of the easy answers a modern air force likes to give.

 It is not solved by better aeroplanes. It is not solved by better weapons. It is not solved by computers or by height or by speed or by stealth. It is solved by a decision. The decision was to fly low and straight and slow, to look at the target with human eyes, and to accept the exposure that came with it in exchange for a bomb that landed where it was aimed.

 It was a decision made by air crew, backed by ground crew, condoned by squadron officers, and never really made by the air force at any higher level. It was made mostly without permission. It was made because the men who had to do the work looked at the war they had been sent to fight and looked at the aeroplane they had been sent to fight it with and decided in the way small groups of professionals sometimes decide that the way to make the two match was to accept a certain amount of danger in order to be effective.

 The Americans called it obsolete. The Americans later called it exemplary. The airplane did not change between the first sentence and the second. The men did not change either. What changed was the arithmetic. What changed was the willingness to look at the arithmetic. There is a further quieter thing that ought to be said before this story ends.

It is a thing about ground crew because ground crew rarely get the story told about them. And in this story they are in a strict arithmetical sense the reason the story exists at all. Eight airplanes cannot fly eight sorties a day for four years unless someone keeps them flying in the tropics on old airframes under mortar fire with parts arriving from half a world away and battle damage arriving from half a mile away.

 The men who kept them flying did so by working two 12-hour shifts and never letting go of a job until it was done. They did it in oil and grease and salt, sweat, and coastal dust. They did it in the dark when a mission had to go up at first light. They did it in the wet when a mission had come back with a hole in a wing.

 They did it in the hot when the metal on the ramp was too hot to touch and the tires blistered on the concrete. And they did it 97 times out of every hundred. Well enough that the airplane could take off again in the morning. If the air crew got the citations and they did, the ground crew got the same citations because in the citations it is written that the squadron did the thing and the squadron is air crew and ground crew together and neither without the other.

 The presidential unit’s citation that number two squadron carried home from fan rang was pinned on the whole squadron and the whole squadron carried it home together. There is one more thing worth saying and it goes to the heart of why the number on the staff officers page has held its power for so long. It is easy in the retelling of any war to say that a small unit outperformed a large one because the small unit was brave.

 Bravery is part of it. Bravery in this case is the willingness to fly straight and level under the cloud at an altitude a rifle round can reach because that is the only way to put the bomb on the base of the hill instead of on the top of the hill. That is not a small kind of bravery. It is the kind that has to be renewed at the beginning of every sorty for 4 years because a brave decision made yesterday does not fly today’s mission.

 Today’s mission requires a fresh decision. Every man in the crew room had to make it every morning in the quiet way a man makes decisions like that over a cup of coffee in a chair before the intelligence brief begins. And every one of those men made it eight times a day, 7 days a week for 4 years. But bravery alone does not do the arithmetic.

Bravery unpaired with method makes for dead men and unbombed targets. What number two squadron did was pair the bravery with a method that made it worth something. They flew low. They flew straight. They looked at the target. They put a trained navigator flat on his stomach in a glass nose and let him do the work of a machine because a machine would not have done it any better.

 They serviced the airplanes to a standard that let them go up again the next morning. They accepted the cost when the cost came in the two airplanes and the men who were lost with them and beside them. and they went home when the tour was over without much fuss because that is the way small professional units go home. The Americans called it obsolete.

They called the aeroplane obsolete because the airplane was old. It was a fair thing to call it. The airplane had been designed in the last years of the 1940s for a war that never came. And it had been asked 20 years later to fight in a war that had come. It should have been outmatched. It should have been outclassed.

 It should have been quietly retired from any conversation about the future of tactical air power. And it was by the country that had built it. But the airplane was not the story. The airplane. Once you strip away the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page and hold up what is left is only the vehicle. The story is the men in the vehicle.

 The story is the men beside the vehicle. The story is the culture of a small squadron that had been sitting in Malaya for 9 years practicing exactly the thing it would be asked to do and that when it was asked did it and did it and did it and did it for 4 years and 2 months. That is the answer at the bottom of the investigation.

 It is not a clever answer. It is not an answer that flatters modern doctrine or modern hardware or modern methods. It is a plain answer that says the number on the staff officer’s page belonged to men who decided to fly a certain way and to work a certain way and who paid a certain bill for it and who left the war better than they had found it in a strict military sense.

 Because 11,900 sorties over 4 years by a well-run squadron can leave a war better than the squadron found it. One target at a time. The staff officer on that hot afternoon at Fan Rang put his pencil down. He may have shaken his head. He may have laughed once, a short professional laugh. He may have got up and walked down the corridor to tell someone else in the operations building about the number he had just checked three times.

He may have said in the American way, “Well, I’ll be damned.” He may have said nothing. He may have simply filed the page and got back to work because there was a war on and staff officers do not have the time to sit with the page for very long. But the page was true. It went into the files. It stayed there.

 It was true then and it is true now. 5% of the wing’s missions. 16% of the wing’s damage. 3 1/2 times the damage per sorty of every American fighter squadron in the wing. Eight airplanes, 4 years, 76,389 bombs, 97% serviceability, 11,963 sorties, two aircraft lost, five men dead, one presidential unit citation, and an airplane that the Americans called obsolete.

 Say it one more time and hear how it sits. The Americans called it obsolete. The Americans on the ramp at Fan Rang called it obsolete. The Americans in the offices in Saigon called it the Americans in the doctrine schools back in the United States called it obsolete. And the aeroplane in the arithmetic of the actual war on the actual pages of the actual bomb damage assessments did three and a half times the damage of the fighters that were not obsolete.

 It did it because its crews decided to fly it low. It did it because its ground crews decided to keep it flying. It did it because a small squadron of Australians in a small corner of an American base decided in the quiet way small squadrons decide to do the difficult thing the difficult way every day without a lot of fanfare until the four years were up.

 Obsolete machines crews who refuse to be. That is the shape of it. That is what the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page was measuring in the end. Even if the staff officer himself did not put it in those words, the machine had been overtaken by history. The men had not. And the men flying the machine that had been overtaken by history put more bombs on the enemy of the moment than the modern fighters flying beside them.

Because bombs on the enemy of the moment do not care whether the airplane that dropped them was fashionable. The bombs care about where they land. Where they land is decided by the man in the nose. And the man in the nose was Australian. And he was lying on his stomach in a canbor. And he was calm.

 That is the story. That is what the number meant. That is what 4 years and 2 months at Fan Rang added up to on the ledger of a war that added up to a great deal less than any of the people fighting it had hoped it would. Number two squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. arrived on the 19th of April 1967 with eight airplanes the Americans called obsolete.

 It flew the first mission on the 23rd of April 1967. It flew the last mission on the 31st of May 1971. It went home on the 4th of June 1971. It left behind a page of arithmetic that no one has ever quite been able to explain away. The arithmetic on that page is the reason we are still telling this story.

 more than half a century later. It is a story that will still be there in another 50 years and another after that because arithmetic does not fade. The men fade, the airplanes fade. The base at Fan Rang is a different place now in a different country under a different flag. But the numbers on the assessment page are the numbers on the assessment page and they will always say that 5% of the sorties did 16% of the damage.

 The Americans called it obsolete. The Americans were right about the airplane. The Americans were wrong about the men. The men were not obsolete. The men made the arithmetic. The arithmetic is what remains. And if you want a single sentence to carry away from all of this, out of the investigation and out of the mission and out of the funerals, then let it be this.

 When history looks at an airplane and says it is finished, sometimes it is right about the airplane and wrong about the crews. And sometimes the crews quietly without asking permission decide to make history change its mind. They do it by flying low. They do it by flying straight. They do it by paying the bill when the bill comes.

 And they do it every day for as long as it takes until the arithmetic on the staff officer’s page will not go away. Eight airplanes, four years, 16% of the damage on 5% of the sorties, an aeroplane the Americans called obsolete, and a squadron that did not Yeah.