Thousands of Hueys were deployed during the war, and while many were shot down, the helicopter proved invaluable to the war effort. The Bell AH-1 cobra attack helicopter would make its first flight in , and would enter service in Around 1, would serve in Vietnam and would continue service with the Army until being replaced by the Apache attack helicopter, while variants of the Cobra still serve with the Marine Corps.
The two-seat, twin-engine supersonic Phantom played a large role in the war as both an interceptor and a fighter-bomber. A big, ugly, flying fortress, the Boeing B Stratofortress was designed and introduced in the early s. Powered by eight turbojet engines, during the war Bs were capable of massive aerial bombardment, frequently carrying payloads in the tens of thousands of pounds. Airstrikes by B bombers during Vietnam remain some of the most ferocious aerial bombardments in the history of warfare.
The plane itself remains active in the U. Air Force today, one of the longest serving aircraft in the U. The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG was a supersonic fighter designed and produced in the Soviet Union that entered into service by the start of the s.
The MiG was the most modern fighter utilized by the North Vietnamese during the war, and its agility made it a threat to heavier American fighter-bombers. Developed during the Second World War and used in attacks on Japan, napalm is a jellied gasoline mixture that is extremely effective as an incendiary weapon.
Napalm burns at an extremely high temperature, and can kill through this burning or through asphyxiation. The U. Napalm proved an effective physical and psychological weapon during the war, though it was and remains controversial. Cluster bombs are a type of explosive that contain smaller bombs within, and saturate an area with these smaller munitions for increased effect.
This type of explosive was heavily used by the U. In total, the United States flew over , bombing missions over Laos during the war, dropping over 2. Many of these smaller bombs did not explode immediately, and many remain a lethal threat within Laos today.
Efforts to clear these explosives are still ongoing. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made IEDs part of our common terminology, but improvised explosive devices were just as common in Vietnam. While the Vietnamese did make use of punji spikes and other primitive yet effective traps, rigged explosives were incredibly common and were frequent killers of American troops.
Grenades, mines, artillery rounds — all could be adapted for use as a trap through simple tripwires or pressure plates. Frequently, unexploded American ordinance was used to build these traps. Booby traps were a serious danger for many U.
The three Kitty Hawks plus the John F. Kennedy , itself a variant of the Forrestal -class were commissioned between and and were the most modern carriers in the world.
The three Kitty Hawk carriers, Kitty Hawk , Constellation , and America were conventionally powered, producing , shaft horsepower. At over 1, feet long and displacing over 80, tons of water when fully loaded, each could carry up to 90 planes. Navy operated a number of small craft on the rivers and waterways of the Mekong Delta. These small boats served in Vietnam from around until the end of when U.
Patrolling the vast delta, PBR crews were involved in security and patrol operations in addition to broader coordination with land units including the insertion and extraction of special forces. PBRs typically carried twin forward mounted. This demoralised soldiers, who realised they were being used as bait to draw out the enemy.
Search and Destory. This often meant soldiers were easy targets for Vietcong guerrilla attacks as the Vietcong were far more at home in the jungle than the American soldiers. They used jets to dump napalm, a chemical that burnt skin down to the bone, on suspected Vietcong strongholds, and Agent Orange, an ultra-strong defoliant, was used to destroy the jungle cover.
Helicopters were used to deploy search for and destroy guerrilla combatants. The Vietcong treated the peasants in the villages with respect, sometimes even helping them with their workloads in the fields. They needed the peasants to give them food, shelter and hiding places.
The gas-powered M could fire up to bullets in quick succession at a range of almost 2, yards, or at short range when fired from the shoulder. One drawback of the M was the heavy weight of its cartridge belts, which limited the ammunition that soldiers could carry. Standard issue for infantrymen in Vietnam was the M, a gas-operated, magazine-fed rifle that could fire 5.
Its ammunition came in magazines of rounds, making it relatively easy to reload. Most of the weapons, uniforms and equipment used by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were manufactured by the Soviet Union and China. The portable, shoulder-fired SA-7 Grail missile was one of many anti-aircraft weapons extensively against American aircraft conducting bombing raids in North Vietnam.
On the ground, the DP 7. It was extraordinarily durable, however, and was able to fire 7. In addition to Soviet- or Chinese-supplied arms, Communist forces also carried weapons captured from the French and the Japanese in earlier Indochina wars or used weapons made by hand in Vietnam.
In addition to rifles and machine guns, U. Mines were used to guard the perimeter around campsites; they could be triggered by trip wires or exploded manually. In terms of chemical weapons, U. Air Force planes sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4. The most commonly used defoliant, a mixture of herbicides containing the toxic dioxin and known as Agent Orange , was later revealed to cause serious health issues—including tumors, birth defects, rashes, psychological symptoms and cancer—among returning U.
For their part, North Vietnamese and particularly Viet Cong forces often used explosives captured from U. They also employed booby traps, including hidden bamboo maces or crossbows that could be triggered when soldiers stepped on a tripwire. One particularly common menace was the punji stake trap, a bed of sharpened bamboo stakes that was concealed in a pit for enemy soldiers to stumble across.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.
Vietnamization was a strategy that aimed to reduce American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam.
0コメント