The Awesome Power of USAF Gunships

[old Grump]

April 1999

By Walter J. Boyne

The big guns pouring it on from a pylon turn can ruin an enemy's whole day.
In warfare, timing is critical, and few weapons have had better timing than the gunship, the epitome of on-scene firepower in the Vietnam War. History, requirements, resources, and-most of all-personalities, all came together at a critical moment to create a piece of side-firing airborne artillery, a weapon North Vietnam considered one of the most important of the war.



Whether they were Puffs, Spookys, Spectres, Shadows, or Stingers, the gunships brought intense, lethally accurate fire to the enemy's doorstep, busting trucks and saving the lives of countless friendly personnel.


Putting a fixed side-firing weapon on an aircraft was first proposed in 1926, when 1st Lt. Fred Nelson experimented with a de Havilland DH-4 at Brooks Field, Texas. Nelson mounted a .30-caliber Lewis machine gun on the wing and flew "pylon turns" to keep the gun on target, thus demonstrating the very essence of the concept almost 40 years before it appeared on the battlefield.


The United States did not have a monopoly on the idea. In 1932, French military designers installed a fixed side-firing Schneider P.D. 12 75 mm cannon in a four-engine Bordelaise A.B. 22 bomber. The A.B. 22 was intended for use in France's colonial possessions, one of which, ironically enough, would become the venue for US gunships-Indochina.


In April 1942, 1st Lt. Gilmour C. MacDonald of the 95th Coast Artillery proposed fitting a Piper Cub with a side-firing machine gun for anti-submarine operations. MacDonald's gunship idea was passed over, but he resurrected it in 1961 when, as a lieutenant colonel, he advocated transverse firing of rockets and machine guns by liaison aircraft. This time, he was backed by Ralph E. Flexman, an assistant chief engineer at Bell Aerosystems, who was intrigued by the challenge of limited war and counterinsurgency actions and was drawing inspiration from an unusual source.


http://www.airforce-magazine.com/Pages/HomePage.aspx

Never say any in action from my position aboard ship but my cousin the marine had a lot of nice things to say about them and their pilots.

[1 Patriot-of-many]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73SciCMf9Rw

Gotta love it unless you're on the recieving end.