Mission 07 takes us on the Yankee Air Pirate version of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The actual incident is well documented to not be all that it appeared to be…including the total fabrication of the follow up August 4 attack. The Johnson administration never disclosed that during the August 2 attack the USS Maddox actually opened fire first…President Johnson insisted that the Vietnamese patrol boats fired first. The Wiki about the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a fascinating read and no doubt the books and articles about it that have morphed into a closer accounting of the truth would be interesting reading too.
Of interest in the historical accounting of the Gulf of Tonkin incident - the USS Maddox only suffered a single bullet hole from the exchange with the Vietnamese patrol boats.
Arriving on station…time to get to work with rockets and guns. I actually found it pretty difficult to hit the swerving patrol boats and had to resort to directing my wingman onto the target after I only succeeded in destroying one PT boat.
Back to the ship…
The mission would eventually lead to a widening of the Vietnamese Conflict with the launching of retaliatory strikes in Operation Pierce Arrow:
The operation consisted of 64 strike sorties of aircraft from the aircraft carriers USS Ticonderoga and USS Constellation against North Vietnamese naval vessels (mostly Swatow gunboats—only two were torpedo boats) and the oil storage depot at Vinh. The U.S. lost two aircraft to anti-aircraft fire, with one pilot killed, Lieutenant Richard Sather, piloting an A-1 Skyraider. Another, Lt. (jg) Everett Alvarez Jr. an A-4 Skyhawk pilot, became the first U.S. Navy prisoner of war in Vietnam. The Soviet-made 14.5mm gun used to shoot down the A4 is now on display in Hanoi at the Air Defence Museum. North Vietnam claimed to have shot down eight U.S. aircraft.
