Despite his accomplishment, the concept was rejected as being too radical.Īmerica’s involvement in WWII and the battle to win supremacy in the North Atlantic brought new life to the notion of side-firing aircraft. 30-caliber machine gun on the left wing of a DH-4 biplane and, while sighting through a crude aiming device on a strut, successfully engaged a target. In 1927, to prove his point he mounted a. Nelson argued that from such a banked turn, a pilot could keep his target in sight while directing near-continuous fire onto it. Fred Nelson, a pilot stationed at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Texas, proposed engaging ground targets with automatic weapons mounted perpendicular to the axis of an aircraft while the pilot flew a pylon turn around an imaginary center-point. This decision ended decades of debate on side- and lateral-firing aircraft and heralded the development of an entire family of even more sophisticated interdiction and ground-support aircraft.Īlthough we tend to associate side-firing gunships with Vietnam, the concept was born more than a decade before World War II. By the end of 1964, the modified C-47s undergoing combat tests in Vietnam had flown 16 night combat missions, firing nearly 180,000 rounds to defend RVN outposts in and around the delta.Ĭombat tests continued throughout the spring of 1965 and, in May, the Air Force adopted the C-47 gunship variant as its first fixed-wing gunship. These were the first night combat missions flown by a modified twin-engine cargo plane whose predecessor, the C41, first took flight on December 18, 1935, and became the backbone of the air cargo and transportation fleet in World War II. Later that night, the scenario was repeated farther south at Trung Hung to relieve another besieged garrison. Faced by a devastating new weapon, the VC withdrew. Every few seconds the roar stopped, only to return from another direction, but still directed at the guerrillas below. and RVN Air Force C-47 (the venerable Douglas DC-3) flareships.Īs the VC went to ground, a roar, as if from some unseen dragon, filled the night as streams of fire and death licked the earth from above.

The guerrillas had used this tactic many times before to frustrate the brief advantage given the entrenched government forces by the powerful flares dropped by U.S. As flares dropped from the aircraft, the VC interrupted its assault to wait for the plane and its flares to leave the area. Defenders at one such government stronghold radioed for fire support, and soon the sound of two radial engines were heard in the dark sky. On the night of December 23, 1964, Communist Viet Cong guerrillas pressed night attacks against several Republic of Vietnam (RVN) outposts in the Mekong River delta.

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