“Stick The Aussies At The Bottom” — How 8 Obsolete Bombers Out-Hit A Whole US Jet Wing

The Canberra ran in over the Mekong Delta at about 3,000 ft holding straight and level at roughly 350 knots. In the nose, the navigator lay flat on his stomach behind a bomb site watching a smudge of white smoke drift up out of the paddy where an American spotter aircraft had marked the target. The pilot held the wings level and the speed steady the whole way in because the site only worked from stable flight.

That handed every gun below a predictable target for the length of the run at a height where a heavy machine gun could reach them without trying hard. The bomber carried nothing to shoot back with. The aircraft was a Canberra, a design that first flew in 1949 and was built under license in Australia. By 1967, it was subsonic, unarmed, and worked by a crew of two in a war being fought with supersonic fighter-bombers and ground radar computers.

 Eight of them sat on the line at Phan Rang in the markings of number two squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, parked among American jets that could go through the sound barrier while the Canberra was still climbing away from the strip. On paper, the Australians had brought a museum piece to a jet war and every man on that base could see it from the flight line.

 Phan Rang sat on the coast of South Vietnam 35 km south of the American base at Cam Ranh Bay and about 250 km northeast of Saigon. The Australians weren’t there as an independent force. Number two squadron came under the United States Air Force 35th Tactical Fighter Wing and the Americans owned the base, set the targets, ran the airspace, and provided the rescue helicopters.

Every mission the squadron flew for the next four years came out of an American tasking order against an American target list in support of American and South Vietnamese troops. The Australians were tenants with eight airplanes. For the first months, the wing used them the way it used its heavy bombing assets.

 Night work, 20,000 ft, underground radar control in a system called combat sky spot. A radar station on the ground tracked the aircraft, computed the release point from its height and speed, and counted the crew down to the second the bombs went. The bombing was accurate enough against a map reference, and the crew never saw what they hit or what happened afterwards.

The Australians flew at night after night, one more set of engines in a stream of aircraft dropping on a radio call from a man in a hut 100 km away. In September 1967, that changed. The squadron began flying in daylight, down low, bombing by eye against targets marked with smoke by American forward air controllers.

It put the crews inside the reach of every weapon on the ground in an aircraft that couldn’t outrun anything and couldn’t fire back at anybody. Four years later, when the wing’s assessors added up what each of its squadrons had destroyed, the Australian column carried a number that nobody at Phan Rang had expected when those eight Canberras taxied in.

 Australia’s air commitment had moved north in April 1967. Number two Squadron had been sitting at Butterworth in Malaysia with the same eight Canberras when the order came to deploy into the war. The ground party and the aircraft arrived at Phan Rang on the 19th of April, and the first bombing strikes went in four days later, on the 23rd.

About 200 Australians ran the operation at any one time, with tradesmen and air crew rotating through for the next four years, and the squadron was still learning the base while it was already flying combat. On the radio, it was Magpie. They weren’t the only Australians in the air over Vietnam. Number nine Squadron flew Iroquois helicopters out of Vung Tau for the task force at Nui Dat.

 And number 35 Squadron ran Caribou transports into dirt strips the bigger American aircraft wouldn’t touch. Number 2 Squadron was the only Australian bombing unit in the war, and it was the only one that spent its entire deployment working for a foreign headquarters. Nothing it dropped was aimed by an Australian plan.

 The targets came down the American chain, and the Australians flew them. The air war they had joined was built around speed. American fighter bombers at Phan Rang flew the F-100 Super Sabre, coming in fast and steep, releasing in a dive, and pulling out before the ground fire had time to settle on them. Higher up, heavy bombers laid strings of bombs into grid squares of jungle by radar from above 30,000 ft, and the ground crews measured that work in tonnage rather than targets.

Protection came from being quick or from being high, and the whole American inventory in theater had been built around one or the other. The Canberra had neither of them. What it had was stability. Two Rolls-Royce Avon engines on a broad straight wing, a bomb load carried inside the fuselage, and an airframe that would sit dead steady on a heading for as long as the pilot asked it to.

In the nose, there was a flat Perspex panel, a bomb sight, and a navigator lying on his stomach looking through it at the ground going past. That was equipment from the era of the propeller bomber, kept alive in a squadron that had gone on training with it long after everybody else had moved to radar computers and dive attacks.

In 1967, that looked like a squadron that had missed the last decade. Radar bombing had a hard limit, and everyone in the wing understood it. Combat Sky Spot could put a load of bombs into a square of jungle at night with reasonable confidence. It couldn’t tell the difference between a bunker line and the village 300 m beyond it because the ground station was working from a plot on a screen rather than from the dirt itself.

Targets sitting close to friendly troops or close to civilians were the ones nobody wanted to hand to a radar operator and a countdown. Those targets needed a crew who could see what they were bombing. So, the method changed. A light American spotter aircraft would find the target and put a white phosphorus rocket into it and the smoke gave the bomber crew their aiming point.

The Canberra ran in at about 3,000 ft above the ground wings level at around 350 kn with the navigator working the site in the nose while the pilot flew the aircraft as though it were on rails. The bombs went down in a stick along the run. Average error worked out at about 45 m, which in that war and against that kind of target was close to surgery.

There were two men aboard to do all of it. The pilot flew the aircraft, worked the radios, held the height and the heading through the run, and got them out afterwards. The navigator did the map work on the way in, then went forward and down onto his stomach in the nose to find the smoke, set the sight, and call the release, and then climbed back to his seat to navigate them home.

No gunner, no electronic warfare operator, nobody watching behind them. A Canberra crew over the Delta was two men and a bomb sight working an airplane that had been designed when the enemy was expected to be German. The ground helped them. Most of the Mekong Delta is flat and sits at sea level cut into squares by canals and paddy buns with almost nothing standing above the height of a tree line.

 For a bomb aimer, that removed one of the biggest sources of error because his height above the sea and his height above the target came out as nearly the same number. The Delta also gave clean sight lines to the smoke on a decent day and the targets down there were bunker systems and storage sites rather than moving formations. It was the one corner of Vietnam where a 1949 bombing technique worked better than anything newer.

 That made the Canberras the only tactical aircraft in South Vietnam able to bomb visually from straight and level flight at around 350 knots. Every other type in theater attacked from a dive, releasing at high speed with the airframe already coming out of the maneuver, and the pilot flying the airplane rather than aiming it.

The Australians were slow enough to aim and steady enough to hold the line while the navigator did the arithmetic. The 35th Tactical Fighter Wing had picked up a precision instrument without meaning to, and it had come attached to the oldest aircraft on the base. The price was paid on the run-in.

 A straight and level bombing pass is the easiest thing in the world for a gunner to lead, and at 3,000 ft the aircraft sat inside the reach of heavy machine guns and light anti-aircraft artillery firing straight up at it. There was no evasion available once the navigator called the run, and no gun in the aircraft to make the men on the ground keep their heads down.

20 or 30 seconds of straight flight was the whole transaction, with the pilot watching the instruments and the navigator watching the sight. The crews flew that several times a day. The method came with its own weather. Visual bombing needed a cloud base high enough to run in underneath, and a target the navigator could actually see from the nose.

 So, when the monsoon shut the delta down, the wing put the squadron back onto radar direction and night work. Eight airframes had to be kept serviceable through four wet seasons by Australian tradesmen running their own spares chain on a base where nothing else on the flight line looked like their aircraft or used their parts. Bombs were loaded by hand in the heat between sorties.

 The squadron never handed back a tasking for want of a serviceable airplane. Over 4 years and 2 months, the squadron flew 11,963 bombing sorties. It dropped 76,389 bombs. That averages about six bombs a sortie and roughly eight sorties a day, every day, out of eight aircraft in a climate that eats metal and men in equal measure.

The Canberras worked the Delta first and then further north as the wing’s tasking shifted toward the mountains and the border country. The tempo didn’t let up for the whole deployment. The move north made the job harder. Up in the mountains of the central provinces and along the Laotian border, the ground came up to meet the aircraft, so the height above the target stopped matching the altimeter and the navigator had to work the difference into every run.

 Smoke drifted off a hillside faster than it drifted off paddy. Clouds sat in the valleys through the middle of the day. And the ridges gave the gunners a shorter shot at an aircraft that still had to fly straight. The squadron kept the same technique and accepted the smaller margins. Then came the accounting, and this is the part the Americans wrote down themselves.

Across the deployment, number two squadron flew roughly 6% of the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing’s operational sorties. It was credited with 16% of the damage that the wing assessed over the same period. Eight obsolete bombers, sitting at the bottom of an American wing’s roster, produced close to a sixth of the results while flying about one sortie in 17.

The men doing that counting had no reason to flatter the Australians and every reason to favor their own squadrons. The physics behind it were simple enough. A fighter-bomber releasing in a dive at high speed throws its bombs in a pattern that spreads with every knot and every degree of error in the pullout, and the pilot is flying the aircraft while he does it.

A level run at 350 knots puts the load down in a line along the axis of the run, aimed by a man whose only job at that moment is the sight. Against a bunker system in open paddy, that difference showed up in the assessment photographs sortie after sortie for 4 years. Nothing exotic produced that number. The squadron had an aircraft that would hold a straight line and a man lying in the nose with a sight, and it used daylight.

The Americans had spent the decade moving toward speed and electronics, and the job the Canberra did was one their own inventory had left behind somewhere around the Korean War. The Australians had kept training in visual level bombing because that was the airplane they had, and there was no money for another one.

The war handed them the one theater where the old answer beat the new one. None of it read like that in the squadron’s own paperwork. The Australian reporting out of Phan Rang was flat and administrative, a monthly count of sorties flown, bombs expended, and aircraft serviceable, with the interesting parts left out entirely.

Nobody in that squadron wrote home about precision or about beating the Americans at their own tasking, and the men who flew the runs described them afterwards as steady flying with a lot of waiting either side of it. The claim was made for them in another Air Force’s files by people who had no interest in making it.

 Most of that work was close support for troops already in contact, which meant putting bombs down within a few hundred meters of men lying in the open with their faces in the dirt. Forward air controllers marked the target with smoke, passed the run-in heading, and cleared the drop. The margin for error belonged to the infantry on the ground rather than to the crew in the aircraft, and that was the whole reason the wing kept sending the Canberras to those jobs instead of the fast jets.

It was on one of those missions in November 1970 that the squadron lost an aircraft and never found out why. On the 3rd of November 1970, Canberra A8-4231 lifted off from Phan Rang with the call sign Magpie 91. The pilot was Flying Officer Michael Herbert, who had flown 198 operational sorties in 9 months, which is close to a sortie every day and a half.

The navigator was Pilot Officer Robert Carver, 8 weeks in the country with 33 sorties behind him. Their target was a North Vietnamese army position in Quang Nam province in the mountains near the border with Laos in support of American ground forces in contact below. The bombing run went in as briefed.

 The American controllers on the ground came up on the radio afterwards and told the crew it had been an excellent run. And that was the last thing anyone ever heard from Magpie 91. The aircraft didn’t come back to Phan Rang and didn’t answer a call. Nothing in the record explains what happened in the minutes after that transmission and no distress signal was ever logged by anyone on that frequency.

2 hours later, the operations room was working through the fuel figures and getting the same answer every time. Number 2 Squadron and the United States Air Force searched the area for 3 days, flying the route the aircraft should have taken and working the ridges either side of it. They found nothing at all and the two men were listed as missing in action.

The cause was never established and the file stayed open with no wreckage, no witness on the ground, and no explanation to give the families at home. Both crews on the next day’s tasking flew the same kind of mission over the same kind of country. An aircraft had gone into the mountains of Quang Nam and taken two Australians with it and the war didn’t stop to work out how.

 The wreck was found in April 2009 in thick jungle in Quang Nam province, 39 years after the aircraft went down. An Australian recovery team worked the site through the middle of that year, and the remains of both men were brought home on the 31st of August. The cause of the loss stayed unknown even with the wreckage in hand.

 The one part of it the record had always been clear about was the bombing run, which the Americans watching from the ground had called excellent about a minute before the aircraft went quiet. The squadron’s other loss came 4 months later, and that crew walked away from it. On the 14th of March, 1971, at about quarter to 3:00 in the afternoon, Canberra A8-4228 was running toward a target 80 km west of Hue at 14,000 ft.

On board were Wing Commander John Downing, the squadron’s commanding officer, and Flight Lieutenant Alan Pinches. Two surface-to-air missiles came up at them out of the hills, which was a weapon the crews had been briefed about and had never had fired at them over that ground before. Both missiles struck.

 The aircraft took critical damage and began breaking up around the two men, and they went out through the ejection seats with the airframe already coming apart. They came down by parachute onto a steep mountain ridge in country that wasn’t friendly, a long way from anything held by Allied troops in the dark. They spent the night on the ridge listening to the valley below them with an enemy that had just watched two parachutes come down in daylight.

The search aircraft found them the following day and started working a helicopter in through the high ground. An American helicopter got in late that afternoon and lifted both men off the ridge, which is the kind of death that gets settled quietly between air forces and never written down. That was the second and last aircraft number two squadron lost in the war.

Two Canberras gone from nearly 12,000 sorties, most of them flown low and straight over ground fire in a design that had been written off as out of date before the deployment even began. Two men lost from the flying and one crew home off a ridgeline with a helicopter crew’s name they didn’t catch.

 The squadron kept flying to the end of May. The last Australian Canberra combat mission in Southeast Asia went in on the 31st of May, 1971. And it was the 11,963rd of the war. In June, the squadron packed up at Phan Rang and left the country. Four years and two months after those first strikes in April 1967. The Americans stayed on at the base with their Super Sabres and their radar bombing.

The Australian dispersal area went quiet. The last bomb trolleys were handed over. And the tasking orders that had run the squadron’s war for four years were made out to somebody else. Two foreign unit citations came out of those four years. The Republic of Vietnam gave the squadron its Cross of Gallantry with palm.

 The United States Air Force gave it an Outstanding Unit Award, an American decoration written for American formations, handed instead to a foreign squadron flying a bomber designed the year before the Korean War started. That paperwork went through an American headquarters which had spent four years watching what those eight aircraft did with a bomb site and a straight line.

And it was signed by officers who had started the deployment expecting very little from them. The figure the crews cared about was the one sitting in the wing’s own files. Two numbers side by side, counted and signed off by the same Americans who had tasked every one of those missions and parked the Australians at the bottom of the roster on arrival.

 It didn’t come from a squadron history written years afterwards and no Australian had any hand in the arithmetic. It came from the people who had watched eight obsolete bombers fly straight and level through the ground fire, and then gone looking through their own assessment sheets to work out where the results were coming from.