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. Defenders at one such government stronghold radioed for fire support, and soon the sound of two radial engines were heard in the dark sky. As flares dropped from the aircraft, the VC interrupted its assault to wait for the plane and its flares to leave the area. 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. and RVN Air Force C-47 (the venerable Douglas DC-3) flareships.

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As 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. Every few seconds the roar stopped, only to return from another direction, but still directed at the guerrillas below. Faced by a devastating new weapon, the VC withdrew. Later that night, the scenario was repeated farther south at Trung Hung to relieve another besieged garrison.

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. 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.

Combat 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. 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.

Although we tend to associate side-firing gunships with Vietnam, the concept was born more than a decade before World War II. In late 1926, Army 1st Lt. 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. Nelson argued that from such a banked turn, a pilot could keep his target in sight while directing near-continuous fire onto it. In 1927, to prove his point he mounted a .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. Despite his accomplishment, the concept was rejected as being too radical.

America’s involvement in WWII and the battle to win supremacy in the North Atlantic brought new life to the notion of side-firing aircraft. First Lieutenant Gilmour C. MacDonald submitted a proposal on April 27, 1942, to use lateral-firing .50 calibers against submarines. In this manner, MacDonald contended, a sub could be kept under constant surveillance and continuous fire while the attacking plane maintained a pylon turn. The Air Corps had already begun to modify fighter-bombers and light and medium bombers to interdict enemy logistic lines by increasing their payload of heavy machine guns, and MacDonald’s suggestion was disregarded.

In the summer of 1945, MacDonald tried once again to find a sponsor for his side-firing gunship, this time for use against ground targets instead of submarines. On May 2, he wrote the Research and Development Service Sub-Office at Dover Army Air Base suggesting the installation of a T-59 Superbazooka on liaison-type aircraft to pin soldiers in trenches and to attack tanks. However, the war was closing and no one was interested. Still undaunted, in 1947 MacDonald again tried to gain an audience by adding a side-firing machine gun to his previous bazooka-firing observation aircraft, but once again the idea was rejected.

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