The defeat of the French colonial forces in Vietnam at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu opened the way for the adoption of a peace plan that could lead to an end to the war on Vietnamese lands. According to this plan, the warring parties (the Vietnamese People's Army, subordinate to the government in Hanoi, and the French forces) were to be divorced, the country was to be demilitarized, and in 1956, both in the north and in the south, elections were to be held, which determined would be the future of Vietnam.
All this was recorded in the decisions of the 1954 Geneva Conference, the purpose of which was to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula and in Indochina.
But in 1955 in the south, in violation of these decisions, the Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed, with the capital in Saigon, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. The latter, having at first a serious credit of trust from the population, very quickly transformed the political power in the country into a regime of unlimited personal dictatorship. Naturally, no elections took place in 1956.
The United States, which had long-standing plans to gain a foothold in Indochina and sought to stifle the local liberation movements of the leftist persuasion, did not sign the Geneva agreements (although they were a participant in the conference), and supported the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. Thus, the South Vietnamese regime lost its legitimacy practically from the very beginning. In the future, the South Vietnamese rulers managed to stay in power only on American bayonets. It was an openly ugly regime that carried out massive forced relocations of citizens, striving to implant Catholicism among Vietnamese Buddhists, very cruel on the one hand, but extremely ineffective and helpless in governing the state, on the other, dependent in the external and defense spheres and extremely corrupt.
From the very beginning, Ngo Dinh Diem had to fight against political opponents who sought to seize power, and with the communists who resumed their armed struggle for the unification of Vietnam after Ngo Dinh Diem's usurpation of power in the south. In response, quite serious repressions fell on the population of southern Vietnam - in a matter of years, the number of killed political opponents of the president approached twenty thousand people, of which more than half were communists. Two coup attempts against the dictator were unsuccessful, but during the third, in 1963, he was still killed. I must say that the Americans, who knew about the planned coup and did not try to prevent it, also had a hand in his murder. Most likely, the matter was that the methods of Ngo Dinh Diem were so cruel that even Americans who were not suffering from humanism were turned away from them.
Long before that, in January 1959, under pressure from the activists of the future Viet Cong, who suffered huge losses at the hands of the secret police of South Vietnam, the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Vietnam in Hanoi decided to dramatically increase aid to the South Vietnamese communists and move to unite the country into a single state with the help of strength. Of course, Hanoi had supported the leftist rebels before, but now it had to be done on a completely different scale.
Vietnam is a narrow strip of land stretching along the sea coast, and only north of Hanoi, its territory expands, occupying a vast mountain range bordering China. During the years of separation, the demilitarized zone reliably cut the country in half, and there was no question of delivering any supplies for the partisans through it.
There were, however, two workarounds. The first is smuggling by sea. It was immediately clear that in the course of a major war he would be cut - and with the arrival of the Americans, this happened. The second - through the territory of Laos, where then there was a civil war between the monarchical pro-American government on the one hand, and the left movements, acting together as the forces of the Pathet Lao. Pathet Lao, fought in close cooperation with the Vietnamese People's Army and the Vietnamese government had a serious influence on them. Eastern Laos, being a sparsely populated and hardly passable territory, seemed to be an ideal place for transferring resources to wage war from the north of Vietnam to the south.
Caravans with weapons, supplies and even people traveled through this territory for many years, even under the French, but this was of a sluggish nature - people carried loads on their hands, carried on boats and pack animals, extremely rarely in single cars (part of the route), their number was small. The Americans also conducted rather sluggish operations against this route, mainly by their mercenaries from the Hmong people, sluggishly supported (in terms of actions against Vietnamese communications) by the royal troops of Laos and American mercenary pilots from Air America. All this was not serious, but after January 1959, the situation began to change.
At first, a sharp intensification of supplies was provided on the sea route - it was by sea that the main flow of weapons, ammunition and various kinds of special equipment for the rebels in the south went. It was a very efficient route. But it was impossible to hide a lot of people on various boats and junks, and after the January decision it was necessary to transfer additional soldiers to the south. And that's why the Vietnamese decided to re-"activate" and expand the Lao route.
Soon after the decision of the PTV Central Committee to expand the guerrilla war in the south, a new transport unit was formed as part of the Vietnamese People's Army - the 559th transport group under the command of Colonel Vo Bam. At first, this group was literally a couple of battalions in size, and was armed with a small number of trucks, and its main transport means were bicycles. But already in the same 1959, it already included two transport regiments - the 70th and 71st, and the number of cars in it began to grow. In Bam, he soon received the rank of general, and the command of the group began to coordinate not only transportation, but also construction work to improve the road network on the Lao route. By the end of the year, there were already 6,000 soldiers in its two regiments, not counting the civilian builders and security units recruited to work.
By the time the Americans openly entered the war, the 559th group, which by that time was commanded by General Fan Tron Tu, had almost 24,000 people in its composition, it consisted of six automobile battalions, two transport bicycle battalions, a boat transport battalion, eight engineering engineer battalions and 45 logistical support detachments serving the transshipment bases on the routes.
By that time, along with paths along the mountain slopes and river routes, the transport group provided the construction of several hundred kilometers of highways, some of them covered with gravel or made in the form of gates. The group also built bridges, transshipment bases and warehouses, rest points for personnel of transport units, repair shops, hospitals, caches and bunkers, and carried out not only the delivery of people and goods to the south, but also the delivery of construction materials to further expand communications. By mid-1965, it was no longer a route - it was a huge logistic system of many routes, delivering hundreds of tons of cargo a day to the Viet Cong units fighting in the south - every day. And thousands of fighters every year. And that was just the beginning.
The Vietnamese acted in an extremely original way. So, part of the supplies was delivered by packing them in sealed barrels and simply dumping these barrels into rivers. Downstream, at the transshipment base, the rivers were blocked by nets, and improvised cranes with long booms and ropes were built on the banks to get the barrels out of the water. In 1969, the Americans found out that the Vietnamese built a fuel pipeline through the territory of Laos, through which gasoline, diesel fuel and kerosene were pumped through the same pipe at different times. A little later, the presence of the 592nd pipeline regiment of the Vietnamese People's Army was discovered on the "path", and already in 1970 there were six such pipelines.
Over time, the Vietnamese, continuously expanding the "path", were able to cover a significant part of the roads with asphalt and make their functioning independent of the season and rains. Vietnamese military builders built bridges below the surface of the water on rivers to hide these crossings from US aerial reconnaissance. Already in 1965, the number of trucks continuously in motion on the "trail" was about 90 vehicles, and then it only grew.
By that time, the Vietnamese had given this transport corridor its traditional name since then "Truong Son Strategic Supply Route", after the name of the mountain range.
But in world history this route has remained under its American name: "Ho Chi Minh Trail".
The Americans carefully tried to carry out targeted sabotage of the "Trail" for many years, but after the US open intervention in the Vietnam War, it became senseless to hide and the US began a series of military operations aimed at destroying this route.
On September 14, 1964, the US launched an air offensive operation "Barrel Roll" against the Trail. Thus began the most violent bombing campaign in human history. For the next nearly nine years, the US will bomb the Trail every seven minutes. Every hour, every day, until the spring of 1973. This will lead to the mass death of not only the military of the Vietnamese People's Army, but also civilians. So many bombs will be dropped on the "Path", especially on its part in Vietnamese territory, that they will change the terrain in some places. And even forty years later, the jungle around the Trail is still filled with unexploded bombs and dropped outboard fuel tanks.
But it all began modestly.
Laos, on whose territory the Americans were to strike, was formally neutral in relation to the Vietnam conflict. And in order not to create political complications, the United States had to bomb the objects of the "Trail" secretly. On the other hand, the elongated shape of the territory of Vietnam made combat flights to the northern part of the trail from Vietnamese territory quite difficult.
Therefore, the United States deployed its air forces from the Nahom Pan airbase in Thailand, from where it was most convenient for them to achieve targets in Laos and where a safe base was ensured. It took some time to settle the formalities with the old king of Laos, and soon the Skyraders of the next Air Commandos began their attacks. As usual, unmarked.
A-1 "Skyrader" based in Thailand
The first American units to strike the "trail" were the 602nd and 606th Special Operations Squadrons, armed with A-1 Skyraider, AT-28 Trojan and C-47 transports. The operation was intended to be unlimited. In fact, it lasted until the end of the war and covered the territory in the northeast of Laos. It was there that everything was carried out in secret, without identification marks, on old aircraft.
But this was not the only operation. The diagram below shows the areas in Laos where others have taken place. And if the operation "Barrel Roll" for the purpose of secrecy was entrusted to the squadrons of special operations, then the "Steel Tiger" and "Tiger Hound" were entrusted to the linear units of the Air Force. This was partly due to the fact that the zones of operations "Steel Tiger" and "Tiger Hound" did not border on North Vietnam, and there it was possible to operate more freely. One way or another, but over the southern regions of the "trail" the American aviation behaved in a businesslike manner, and only in the north was it cautious, hiding behind "anonymous" airstrikes inflicted by planes without identification marks.
At first, the bombing was somewhat haphazard. The Americans bombed everything that in their opinion belonged to the "Trope" - indiscriminately. This also applied to the settlements located nearby. River crossings, sections of roads that could be blocked by debris caused by a bomb attack, and, of course, trucks were subjected to massive attacks.
The division of labor came very soon. The Air Force and the Navy with their jet aircraft began to work on the principle of "bombing everything that moves" and destroying the identified infrastructure facilities of the "Trails" were already the main delivery vehicle for everything the Viet Cong needed.
The latter, of course, were attacked by other aircraft, upon detection, but the principled hunt for trucks became the task of special units of the Air Force. They also specialized in night attacks - forward guidance aircraft, light "Cessna" usually dropped a signal flare to the ground, and from it the pilot-aircraft pilot gave direction to the target and the range to it. Attack aircraft crews, using a signal flare as a reference point, attacked targets in the dark - and usually successfully.
The year 1965 became a milestone in the struggle to cut off supplies from the north. It was in this year that the US Navy stopped sea traffic, after which the "trail" became the only artery of the guerrillas in the south. And it was in this year that the American military intelligence - MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group, literally "Military Assistance Command for Vietnam - research and observation group") appeared on the "trail". Well-trained special forces, relying on the participation of the Vietnamese and national minorities in their reconnaissance missions, provided the American troops with a mass of intelligence information about what was really happening on the "Trail" and made it possible for aviation to work more accurately and inflict greater losses on Vietnam than before. Subsequently, these units conducted not only reconnaissance, but also the capture of prisoners, and quite successfully.
The number of sorties along the "trail" also grew continuously. It started at twenty a day, by the end of 1965 it was already a thousand a month, and after a few years it stably fluctuated around 10-13 thousand flights a month. Sometimes it could look like a raid of 10-12 B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which at once dumped more than 1000 bombs on the supposedly important places of the "Trail". Often it was continuous bombing for many hours by aircraft from different air bases. It got to the point that the pilots bombing the "trail" were afraid to collide with their own planes in the air - there could be a lot of them. But this will be a little later.
In 1966, the A-26K Counter Invader, a deeply redesigned and modernized B-26 Invader piston bomber from WWII and the Korean War, appeared over the trail. These aircraft were radically rebuilt from the conventional B-26, the operation of which was banned in the Air Force after a series of destruction of the wings of aircraft in flight (including one with the death of the crew). Since Thailand banned the basing of bombers on its territory, they were reclassified into attack aircraft, replacing the letter B in the name (from the English. Bomber) to A, derived from the word Attack and traditional for all attack aircraft of the US Air Force and Navy after World War II.
The planes were refurbished by On Mark Engineering:
After analyzing the requirements of the Air Force, On Mark engineers proposed the following main modifications of the B-26 airframe: a complete re-manufacture of the fuselage and tail, an increased area rudder to improve the aircraft controllability when flying on one engine, reinforcement from the wing root to the tip of the original aluminum wing spars with steel linings, installation of 18-cylinder two-row radial air-cooled engines with a Pratt & Whitney R-2800-103W water-methanol injection system with a takeoff power of 2500 hp. The engines rotated fully reversible, automatic, feathered, larger diameter three-blade propellers. The aircraft was equipped with dual controls with a bombardier station installed on the right side, an anti-icing system for the wings and engine carburetors, an anti-icing system and a cockpit windshield wiper, reinforced brakes with an anti-lock system, a heating system with a capacity of 100,000 BTU (BTU - British Thermal Unit). The design of the dashboard underwent some changes, and the instruments themselves were replaced with more advanced ones. New hardware was installed in the panel on the right side of the cockpit. The aircraft was equipped with a fire extinguishing system, eight underwing suspension points (specially designed for the first prototype YB-26K), fuel tanks at the wingtips with a capacity of 165 US gallons with a quick emergency fuel drain system.
A quick-change glass bow and bow with eight 12.7 mm machine guns were specially developed. The dorsal and ventral turrets were removed. In addition to the above, the aircraft was equipped with a full set of on-board electronics (HF (high frequency), VHF (very high frequenc), UHF (ultrahigh frequency), intercom communications, VOR navigation system, low-frequency automatic direction finder LF / ADF, system of "blind" landing ILS (instrument landing system), radio navigation system TACAN, IFF system (Identification Friend or Foe - radar system for identifying planes and ships "friend or foe"), coder and radio marker), two 300-ampere generators direct current and two inverters with a capacity of 2500 volt-amperes. It was possible to install sophisticated photographic equipment for reconnaissance flights.
A-26K proved to be the best "Truck Hunters" in the first half of the war. By the end of 1966, these aircraft, which also flew from the Nahom Pan base, had 99 destroyed trucks with supplies or soldiers. It must be understood that other American aircraft also had their own statistics.
By the end of 1966, the "roles" of aviation were completely divided. Jet fighter-bombers destroyed infrastructure on the "trail", attacking trucks if possible. Slow piston attack aircraft mainly hunted cars. Reconnaissance was provided by special forces and aircraft of advanced air guidance, light-engine "Cessna".
However, despite the continuous increase in American forces operating against the "trail", it only grew. The CIA has continuously reported an increase in the number of trucks involved, and most importantly, paved roads. The latter was the most important - during the rainy season, transporting by trucks became extremely difficult and often impossible, as a result of which the flow of materials to the south decreased. The Vietnamese construction of paved roads eliminated this problem.
In 1967, at the end of March, the former commander of the American troops in Vietnam, and at that time already the chairman of the JCS, General William Westmoreland, sent to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a request to increase the number of American troops in Vietnam by 200,000 soldiers and officers, with an increase in the total number of the group up to 672,000 people. A little later, on April 29, the general sent McNamara a memorandum in which he indicated that the new troops (it was supposed to mobilize reservists) would be used for military expansion in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Also in the memorandum was the requirement to start mining the North Vietnamese ports.
In fact, Westmoreland wanted to use new troops to destroy the Vietnamese logistics network in Laos.
But that did not happen. Then, of course, the number of troops had to be increased, albeit not to such a size (but almost to the one that Westmoreland considered the minimum for that war) and had to be mined, but the most important thing - the invasion of neighboring countries in order to destroy the "path" was not done …
Now the Americans had no choice but to continue the air war. But the old recipes didn’t work - the losses didn’t force the Vietnamese to stop transportation along the "trail." It was not possible to stop road construction either. Moreover, the "trail" expanded into Cambodia.
In 1968, in parallel with the bombing of the US Air Force, they began to implement the Popeye Project - the scattering of reagents from aircraft, which led to the additional formation of rain clouds. The Americans planned to increase the duration of the rainy season and disrupt transportation along the "trail". The first 65 reagent sprinkling operations yielded real results - there really was more rain. Subsequently, the Americans were scattering reagents almost until the end of the war.
The second unusual project was the project of chemical flushing of trails and paths along which there was a stream of volunteers and weapons.
For this, a special reagent was also intended, which resembles soap after mixing with water - and decomposes the compacted soil of roads and paths in the same way as soap dissolves dirt. On August 17, 1968, a trio of C-130 aircraft from the 41st Air Force Transport Wing began flights from air bases in Thailand and spread the powder composition. The initial effect was promising - the train was able to wash out the roads and turn them into rivers from mud. But, only after rain, which seriously limited the use of "chemistry". The Vietnamese quickly adapted to the new tactics - they sent a lot of soldiers or volunteers to clean up the tool, before the last rain activated it and the road was washed away. However, after the loss of one of the aircraft with a crew from ground fire, the operation was terminated.
In 1966, the first AC-47 Spooky Hanships from the 4th Special Operations Squadron appeared over the trail. Low-speed aircraft armed with a machine-gun battery could not prove themselves - by that time the air defense of the "trail" already had a lot of automatic cannons. In a short time, the Vietnamese knocked down six "gunships", after which they were no longer involved in the hunt for trucks.
But the Americans were able to understand that it was not about the idea, but about the performance - an old plane from the Second World War with a machine-gun battery simply “couldn’t pull”, but if there was a more powerful car …
In 1967, its future "Beach" - "Ganship" AC-130, at that time armed with two multi-barreled Minigun machine guns, caliber 7, 62 mm, and a pair of 20-mm automatic cannons, appeared over the trail.
The aircraft, in its ideology, "ascended" to the AC-47 Spooky, based on the C-47 aircraft armed with several Minigun machine guns firing sideways. But unlike the AC-47, the new machines were equipped not only with more powerful weapons, but also with automated search and sighting systems that included night vision devices. In general, it was simply not worth comparing them.
On November 9th, during its first experimental combat mission, the AC-130 destroyed six trucks. The actual creator of this class of aircraft in the US Air Force, Major Ronald Terry, commanded the first sorties of the new Hanship. Unlike the old AS-47, the new AS-130 looked very promising, and the results of combat use over the "trail" confirmed this.
Now it was necessary to start the formation of a new aviation unit for these aircraft and their production.
