Dreadful Lady Over the Mekong Delta: An Analysis of RAAF Canberra Operations in the Vietnam War
Dreadful Lady Over the Mekong Delta: An Analysis of RAAF Canberra Operations in the Vietnam War
Air Power Development Centre | 2016 | ISBN: 1925062198 | English | 284 pages | PDF (e-book) | 3 MB
Dreadful Lady over the Mekong Delta looks at the men of No 2 Squadron and the operations they flew in the Vietnam War in their Canberra bombers. From April 1967, the squadron spent four years attacking enemy targets, many of them in the Mekong Delta region, and contending with the politics, weather and ‘fog’ of war. The riverine operations supported by No 2 Squadron were but a small part of an Allied effort to disrupt the enemy’s movement of troops and supplies to locations in South Vietnam. It was, according to one commentator, ‘a kind of guerrilla warfare conducted in a navy environment’. Bob Howe arrived in Vietnam in 1969 as a youthful Canberra navigator/bomb-aimer, but much of his time there was spent as a specialist in bombing techniques. His time there provided him with the first-hand experience and detailed information to write this book. Dreadful Lady over the Mekong Delta not only fills a gap in the recording of the RAAF’s operations in Vietnam, but also describes how crews overcame the difficulties of operating in an intense Asian war in an aircraft that was designed for a completely different environment.