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 ...
And I hate these maggots who were my contemporaries as much today as I did then. They have raised children just as sorry as they are.
How did so many of the Greatest Generation raise so many damn sorry children?
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