The accusation that number nine squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force refused to fly in Vietnam is best answered by a single afternoon in Fjuktui province when a fiveman special air service patrol called for extraction at 1427. They were in contact. They had two wounded. The landing zone was a clearing in the rubber that was smaller than the rotor disc which meant the pilot would have to hover with his blade tips inside the canopy.
Small arms fire was coming from three sides. The SAS team commander had popped smoke, but the canopy was so thick the smoke barely made it above the treetops. A five-man patrol, two of them hit, dragging themselves toward the sound of the turbine. The pilot brought the Irakcoy down through the hole in the trees, held it at a hover 3 ft off the deck while the crewman hauled the first wounded man across the skid, and the door gunner on the left side put suppressive fire into the treeine so close that spent brass was bouncing off the trunks and
ricocheting back toward the aircraft. The co-pilot was reading out rotor RPM because the pilot could not take his eyes off the trees. If the RPM dropped below 294, the rotor would stall and a 4,000lb helicopter would become a coffin for everyone aboard. The RPM held. The second wounded man was pulled in.
The pilot pulled collective, climbed back through the canopy, took three rounds through the belly panel, and flew south toward New with every needle in the green. The man on the controls was Bruce Lane. Before he joined the Royal Australian Air Force, he had driven a bus in Sydney. It is one of the details that never made it into the myth because the myth was never about what these men actually did.
The myth was about what the army said they refused to do. For decades after Vietnam, certain Army officers insisted that nine squadron had refused to fly, that the RAAF helicopter pilots were unreliable, unwilling to put themselves in danger, and had been temporarily grounded in the opening months of the deployment because they would not operate the way the Americans did.
Alan Stevens, writing the official history of the postwar RAAF, went to the squadron records and found continuous operations throughout the entire period of the supposed grounding between June and September of 1966. The myth survived anyway. It takes longer to correct a good story than it takes to create one. And for the men of nine squadron, the correction became a second campaign fought not in the rubber plantations of Fuoku province, but in regimental messes, parliamentary committees, RSL halls, and the margins of published histories. Wing Commander Ray Scott, Bob
Grandinon, Bruce Lane, and others have spent decades setting the record straight. But the record speaks for itself if you let it. And the way you let it speak is to start not with the formation date of the squadron or the specifications of the Bellh 1B Irakcoy, but with what those aircraft did, who flew them, and what was coming through the floor.
Lane had graduated from RAFF flying training in 1960. By 1964, he was posted to nine squadron at RAAF base Fairburn outside Canbor to fly the Irakcoy. The squadron itself had been re-raised on the 11th of June 1962 at Williamtown, New South Wales under the command of Squadron leader Ray Scott. The number nine on the tail was not arbitrary.
Nine squadron had existed before. Formed in January 1939 as a fleet cooperation unit, its original purpose was to provide air crew for Supermarine Walrus sea planes operating off Royal Australian Navy cruisers. Those little amphibians had flown from the catapults of HMAS Australia, Perth, and Sydney through the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the opening years of the Second World War.
The squadron lost 22 killed, many of them going down with the ships they served aboard. It was disbanded at RAAF Wrathmines on the 31st of December, 1944. 18 years later, with rotary wing aviation beginning to reshape every army in the world, the RAAF gave the number back and pointed the squadron at a new kind of war. The reformed nine squadron trained on the Irakcoy and moved to Fairbann.
Its original mandate was search and rescue, but the main role quickly became providing airlift for the Australian army. The men who filled its cockpits were not a single type. They came through a composite recruitment pipeline that drew from civilian transport workers, primary industry and bush backgrounds.
Some had been truck drivers. Some had worked on cattle stations. Some had come out of the suburbs. Lane had been behind the wheel of a bus picking up commuters in Sydney. The RAAF pilot training system did not care what you had done before. It cared whether you could hold an aircraft straight and level, whether you could think in three dimensions.
whether you could process information under pressure. The men who made it through became the only Australian helicopter pilots their country had for the war it was about to join. In March 1966, the government announced that a helicopter squadron would go to Vietnam. Most people assumed it would be a separate detachment as had happened with the caribou transports.
Instead, nine squadron was going whole. The entire unit was reorganized. On the 12th of April, nine squadron was renumbered five squadron. The existing five squadron became a detachment and then nine squadron was reformed on the 13th with eight irkcoy drawn from the pool. It was a bureaucratic shuffle that looked absurd on paper but was deadly serious in intent.
The helicopters and their crews were loaded aboard HMAS Sydney, the troop transport that had already carried thousands of Australian soldiers to the war zone. The rest of the squadron’s personnel flew commercial aboard a Quantas charter on the 12th of June 1966. Nine squadron arrived at Vangao airfield under the command of wing commander Ray Scott.
Scott was the only senior RAAF officer in Vietnam with any real helicopter experience. The squadron’s call sign was Albatross. The slick aircraft were designated Albatross 01 03 and so on. When a large operation required a command ship, the co or a senior executive would fly as albatross Charlie coordinating slicks and gunships with artillery, naval gunfire, and air strikes.
8 uh 1B Irkquoy were deployed initially. Only two had armored seats. None had door gun mounts when they arrived. The crews were not issued flag jackets. They had to scrge them from the Americans. This was the unit that the army would later accuse of cowardice. The problems between nine squadron and the army began almost immediately.
But they were not about courage. They were about command. The RAAF airbor insisted that regulations framed for peace time should apply in a war zone. This limited the scope of what the Irakcoy could do. According to an army historian named Owen Ether, the airbor prevented the helicopters from operating in insecure locations or undertaking roles that were considered offensive.
Either’s assessment was that this exhibited a complete lack of awareness by the RAAF of the requirements of ground forces in South Vietnam. From the Army perspective, the American Huey crews flew into hot landing zones without hesitation. While the Australians appeared to hang back, but the American crews had gunship escorts, armored aircraft, and a culture of operational control that was entirely different.
Nine squadron was based at Vong Tao, roughly 50 km from the task force headquarters at Nuiidat. It was not coll-located with the units it supported. Its pilots answered to the RAAF chain of command, not to the army brigade commander. Every tasking went through a separate process. Eight aircraft, of which six might be serviceable on a good day, could only carry five soldiers each.
A full lift was a platoon minus. The army had expected far more. The frustration was real. The myth grew from that frustration. What killed the myth, or should have killed it, was the 18th of August, 1966. That morning, 29 squadrony were on general standby at Newat. They had flown the entertainers Coldjoy and Little Patty up from Vong Tao for a concert at the task force base.
The crews expected a routine day in helicopter a two20 were flight left tenant Frank Riley as captain and flight left tenant Bob Grandon as co-pilot with door gunners Blue Collins and George Sterling. in at 1022 were flight left tenant Cliff Dole as captain and flight leftenant Bruce Lane as co-pilot with Corporal WR Harrington and leading aircraftman BB Hill on the guns.
While the entertainers rehearsed, 108 men of D Company, six battalion Royal Australian Regiment under Major Harry Smith walked through the base perimeter wire toward a rubber plantation called Long Tan. By late afternoon, D Company was in contact with a force that outnumbered them by more than 10 to1. The 275th Vietkong Main Force Regiment reinforced with a North Vietnamese Army battalion had between 1,400 and500 soldiers in the field.
The Australians were running out of ammunition. A monsoon storm had broken, driving rain so hard that visibility collapsed. The artillery at Nuiidat was firing continuously. a wall of high explosive in front of the Australian positions, but the guns could not give decomplets. Only a helicopter could do that.
At the Newat operation center, the request for an ammunition resupply reached the task force air commander, a rayf officer named group captain Peter Roar. The standing instructions were clear. The weather was below minimums. The landing zone was hot. The directive from the Department of Air did not sanction missions into active contact areas without gunship escort and nine squadron had no gunships. Roar hesitated.
Riley did not. He told the operation staff he was going. Bob Grandin, his co-pilot, thought it was a suicide mission. Years later, Grandin told an interviewer exactly what he felt. It was insanity. He was petrified. He tried to talk Riley out of it, but Riley was the captain, and Riley had decided.
When the American offer to send their own aircraft was raised, and when Riley made it clear he would fly alone if he had to, Roar authorized the mission. They loaded the Irakquoy with boxes of belted ammunition wrapped in blankets. The blankets were not a refinement of doctrine. They were improvisation.
Crates dropped from 30 ft through rubber trees would shatter on impact and scatter the rounds across the plantation floor. Blankets would absorb the shock. Nobody had rehearsed this. Nobody had written a procedure for it. The two aircraft lifted off into the rain. Riley and Grandatu 1020 flew lead. Dole and Lane in Atu 1022 followed.
They navigated at treetop height through the monsoon, flying toward the sound of battle. The rudder canopy below was 60 ft of uniform plantation trees, all identical, all the same height beneath them. D Company was fighting for survival. The pilots could not see the ground. They could hear the radio traffic from the infantry and they could hear the artillery.
They arrived overhead at approximately 6:00 in the evening, brought the aircraft to a hover at about 30 ft, and their crews pushed the blanket wrapped ammunition out of the cabin doors and through the gaps in the rubber canopy directly into the company positions below. The rounds came through the trees and hit the mud, and the soldiers grabbed them and fed them into magazines while the rain hammered down and the Vietkong kept attacking.
It was not a sanctioned mission. An Irakcoy support squadron had never done this before. They had no armored aircraft, no gunship escort, no flack jackets, and no official approval until the last moment. They lifted off regardless. And because they flew, D Company had enough ammunition to hold until the relief force of M13 armored personnel carriers and infantry from Newart fought through to them.
The battle cost 18 Australian dead and 24 wounded. Without the resupply, the number would have been 108. That night, after the Vietkong withdrew, 79 Squadron Irakcoy returned to the battlefield to evacuate the wounded. There were no landing lights because RAAF dust off aircraft were not permitted to use them. The lights illuminated the aircraft and the area it was approaching, making engagement by the enemy far easier.
The RAAF crews had to approach in darkness, guided only by the residual light showing through the open hatches of the armored personnel carriers that had reached D Company’s position. All seven aircraft managed to land. They took away the most seriously wounded, then made repeated trips for the rest. Five critically wounded, 12 lightly wounded, and five dead were evacuated.
Every helicopter completed its mission. By 34 minutes past midnight, all medical evacuations were done. The myth says nine squadron refused to fly. The squadron records from the 18th of August 1966 say otherwise. After long tan, the relationship between the squadron and the army changed, not overnight and not without further friction.
But the trajectory reversed. Nine squadron began developing new operational concepts and procedures. When the RAAF purchased the larger and more powerful UH1 hour model in 1967, the squadron’s strength doubled from 8 to 16 aircraft, the increased capability meant longer range, heavier loads, and the ability to conduct company level lifts with dedicated escort.
The Royal Australian Navy contributed eight fleet airarm pilots to fill the gap while the RAAF expanded its training pipeline. 13 pilots from the Royal New Zealand Air Force also flew with the squadron. The cockpit of a nine squadron Huey became an oddly multinational space. Australian, New Zealander, and Navy, all operating under the albatross call sign.
But the single most significant development came in 1968 and 69 when nine squadron acquired its own gunships. It started with an act of Australian improvisation that belongs more to mythology than to official procurement. On the 2nd of July 1968, flight left tenant Brian Diru loaded an Irakquoy with Victoria bitter beer and Tarak soft drinks and flew from Vanga to three American bases at Vinlong, Dong Tam, and Fuoy.
He traded the beer and the soft drinks for rocket pods and miniguns. The Americans, who had more hardware than they could track and a perpetual thirst for decent Australian beer, made the deal. Diru flew the weapons back to Vanga, and Nine Squadron built its first gunship from Barted Parts. The whole squadron contributed to the project in some way.
Official approval for the purchase of four gunship modification packages came in March 1969, which was 9 months after Daru’s scrging mission had already proven the concept. The converted aircraft were designated bush rangers. Each carried a modified XM2 one armament subsystem consisting of two rocket pods each holding seven 2.
75 in rockets. Two miniguns capable of firing 4,800 rounds per minute and two M60 machine guns operated by door gunners. The armament could be removed in about 3 hours, converting the Bush Ranger back to a slick if additional troop lift was needed. Official Bush Ranger operations commenced on the 11th of April 1969.
The gunships usually worked in pairs called light fire teams with Bush Ranger 71 as flight lead and Bush Ranger 72 as wingman. When more firepower was required, three or all four gunships could operate together as a heavy fire team. Their first missions revealed the usual growing pains of a new capability. Shortly after becoming operational, a bush ranger was flying at low-level 25 km from Vonga when its crew spotted a group of men in a clearing.
The door gunners opened fire immediately. Several of the men on the ground were hit. As the captain maneuvered for a rocket and minigun run, the crew watched in horror as the men below ignited smoke grenades, identifying themselves as friendly forces. The attack was broken off. The soldiers turned out to be troops of sixth battalion Royal Australian Regiment.
Setting up an ambush, it was a lesson that was never forgotten. With the Bush Rangers operational, the relationship between Nine Squadron and the Special Air Service deepened into something approaching a marriage. SAS patrols operated in fiveman teams deep in enemy territory, conducting reconnaissance and ambush missions that depended entirely on insertion and extraction by helicopter.
A typical SAS mission required five aircraft. The patrol rode in one slick. A second slick carried the command element. A third was the spare and a pair of bush rangers provided fire support. The insertion profile was violent. The helicopter would descend at speed to treetop level, sometimes hitting the tops of the trees, flying at maximum velocity just above the canopy until the pilot flared hard at the insertion point and dropped the patrol in a clearing so small it might be measured in feet, not meters.
The extraction was worse because by then the enemy usually knew the patrol was there. SAS veterans have described the relationship in terms that sound like devotion. John Coleman, a patrol commander, said it plainly years later. “When they prayed at night, they prayed to nine squadron first and then to God because they reckoned the pilots did more good for them.
“Everyone was religious,” he said, laughing. Chris Roberts, another SAS trooper, described a patrol in May 1969, southwest of the Court rubber plantation. “His team was surrounded, enemy on three sides, thick country on the fourth. They waited for 3 hours until a lone helicopter came across the top of the trees and dropped four ropes.
Both door gunners were firing and the SAS men were firing and they hooked onto the ropes and came up through the trees with Tracer going everywhere. Robert said his patrol owed its life to that pilot. Nine squadron and Lady Luck, he said, saved many SAS teams from certain death. The pilot vocabulary is specific and it matters. Translational lift is the moment a helicopter moving forward generates enough air flow over the rotor disc to reduce the power required for flight.
It meant the difference between getting out of a hot landing zone and settling back into it. Auto rotation is the procedure a pilot uses when the engine fails. The rotor keeps spinning because of the upward flow of air through the disc as the aircraft descends. If you manage the energy correctly, you can land without power. It is not a controlled crash.
It is a procedure practiced over and over until it is automatic because when the engine quits over the long high hills, there is no time to think about it. The difference between a light fire team and a heavy fire team was the difference between two and four gunships, which was the difference between suppressive fire on one side of a landing zone and complete fire dominance of a small area.
The crews did not lecture each other about these things. They flew with them every day the way a bus driver knows the clutch point without thinking about it. Lane flew through all of it. He was at Long Tan in Atu 1022 with Dolelay. He had been with the squadron since Fairban, since before the deployment, since the days when they were still figuring out what an Irakcoy could do in the hands of Australians who refused to fly someone else’s tactics.
He flew troop insertions, ammunition resupplies, SAS extractions, and dust off evacuations. He became the most experienced UH1 billion pilot in theater. His decorations reflected not a single dramatic act, but the accumulation of years of flying into places where people were shooting at him and bringing everyone home.
He eventually rose to Air Commodore, commanding squadrons and bases, and eventually the maritime patrol group. But in Fuoku province, he was a flight left tenant sitting in the left seat of a Huey with no armor under his backside and small arms fire coming through the floor. The long high hills were the worst of it.
5 mi northwest of Vangao, the Vietkong were entrenched in a complex of caves and bunkers that defied every effort to dislodge them. The terrain created unpredictable air currents that could shove a hovering helicopter sideways into a ridge. The landing pads in the narrow valleys were few and small, and the enemy knew exactly where the helicopters had to go because there were only so many places to land.
1971, the final year of operations, was the deadliest for the squadron’s air crew. As the Americans announced their draw down, the North Vietnamese and Vietkong became more aggressive, particularly against helicopters in Fuoku province. Nearly all of the air crew battle casualties occurred in that last year. On the 31st of March 1971, three aircraft were severely damaged in a single action 8 mi east of Newat.
Atu 767 on a dusttoff mission took ground fire through its main rotor, fuel tanks, and engine combustion chamber. Crewman Alan Bloxom was killed. The aircraft was recovered by an American Chinook heavy lift helicopter from fire support base atu 1110 just 2 days out of a major service had more than half of its left fuselage tail boom attachment beam shot away atu 773 was hit in the tail boom and support structure.
The maintenance flight performed extraordinary work to keep the squadron flying. Then on the 17th of April 1971, ATU 767 went out again. It had been repaired after the March incident and returned to service. That afternoon, it was scrambled for an urgent dust off in the Long High Hills. The captain was pilot officer Mick Castles.
The co-pilot was pilot officer Simon Ford. Corporal Robert Stevens was the crewman. Leading aircraftman Roy Zegare was the door gunner. and Lance Corporal John Gillespie, an army medic, was aboard to treat the casualty. Two Bush Rangers escorted the lightly armed dust off helicopter on its mission. Earlier that same day, Castles and his crew had flown a simulated dust off demonstration for John Kerr, a visiting official from the Kerr Defense Remuneration Committee.
Gillispy, the Army medic, had filmed the morning exercise. He was a young man doing his job documenting the procedures. That footage would be the last thing he ever recorded way. When they reached the contact area in the Long High Hills, there was no clearing. Castles brought the aircraft to a hover so that the winch and jungle penetrator could be used to extract a South Vietnamese soldier who had lost both legs below the knees to a landmine.
The wounded man had just been strapped into the stretcher on the ground when the Vietkong opened fire. Rounds hit the aircraft repeatedly. Steven started the winching operation while Zagere returned fire. More rounds came in, then the engine stopped. The silence that follows engine failure in a helicopter over a confined area in the mountains is the silence of aerodynamics running out of options.
At 767 fell, it crashed and burned. Castles, Ford, Stephens, and Zere survived. John Gillespie was trapped in the wreckage and killed. He was the man who had filmed the demonstration that morning, alive and doing his job, and by late afternoon, he was dead in the long haze. A 2767 was completely destroyed in the subsequent fire.
Its loss strained maintenance resources as the squadron tried to keep 13 aircraft online from a fleet of 15. 6 weeks later on the 7th of June 1971, ATU 723 crashed during Operation Overlord. Flight left tenant Lofty Lance and leading aircraftman Dave Dubber were killed. That was the other death in action.
Two crewmen killed in 5 1/2 years of continuous combat operations. The operational total belongs in the final act because only cumulative evidence carries the weight. From June 1966 to November 1971, nine squadron flew 237,424 missions, rarely numbering more than 16 airframes. The unit maintained an average serviceability rate of 84.05%.
Seven Iraquoy were destroyed. Two crewmen were killed in action. From June 1966 to May 1971, the squadron performed more than 4,300 medical evacuations. None of this is consistent with a unit that refused to fly. The Bush Ranger flight commanders across the deployment tell their own story through their decorations.
Squadron leader Brian Dro, the man who traded beer for miniguns, received the distinguished flying cross. Flight left tenant John Hazelwood, DFC. Flight Lieutenant Rex Bud, DFC. Flight Lieutenant Frank Kloff, DFC. Flight Lieutenant Norm Goodall, DFC. These were the men who built and led the gunship capability from nothing to a force that escorted every major troop movement, covered every hot extraction, and flew into the long high hills, knowing that the caves below were full of men with heavy machine guns.
Beyond the gunship flight, the squadron’s named pilots read like a register of the kind of people the RAAF sent to war. Frank Riley, the man who refused to wait for permission at Long Tan and told the operation staff he would fly alone if necessary. Cliff Dole, the quiet Victorian from a farming family at Tahara, south of Colrain, who had studied industrial chemistry before he became a pilot and who later earned the Distinguished Service Medal for his actions on the 18th of August.
Though the award was not presented to his family until 44 years after the battle by Governor General Quentyn Bryce in 2010, Douly died of heart failure at his home in Lilyale in February 2009, aged 73, never having seen the medal. Bob Grandin, the co-pilot on Atwo 1020 at Long Tan, who completed a doctorate after the war and became the editing author behind the film Danger Close, The Battle of Long Tan, and Laddyy Hindley, who was in a category all his own.
Squadron leader Lee Oxley Hindley, DFC, had been born in Goldburn, New South Wales, in 1923. He had flown Kittyhawk fighters against the Japanese in the southwest Pacific in 1944 and 45. After the war, he flew survey helicopters in the mountain wilds of Papua New Guinea. By 1966, he was a flight left tenant with nine squadron flying Irakcoy in Vietnam at the age of 43. He was present at Long Tan.
He flew in atu 1024 with co-pilot Dave Champion and crewman Williams. His combat experience spanned two wars separated by 22 years. His book, The Joys and Dangers of an Aviation Pilot, published by the Office of Air Force History, won the 2012 RAF Heritage Award. These were not men who refused to fly.
These were bus drivers and farm boys and chemistry students and combat veterans of the Pacific War. and they flew 237,000 missions in 5 1/2 years and lost seven aircraft and buried two of their own and came home to be told they had been cowards. The squadron’s last mission was flown on the 19th of November 1971. On the 8th of December, the Irakcoy and personnel were loaded aboard HMAS Sydney for the voyage home.
On that final day, President Nuen Vanu of South Vietnam came aboard to thank the Australians for their efforts. The squadron returned to RAAF base Ambley in Queensland where it continued to provide airlift for the army and search and rescue for the civilian community. Between 1982 and 86, it contributed aircraft and air crew to the multinational force and observers in the Sinai Peninsula.
In 1988, it converted to S70A Blackhawk helicopters. In 1989, it was disbanded, its airframes and crews absorbed into the army’s fifth aviation regiment. The last commanding officer was winging commander Angus Houston, who would later become chief of the Australian Defense Force. The decision to disband nine squadron and transfer all battlefield helicopter capability to the army was itself partly a consequence of the myth.
The argument that helicopters should be controlled directly by the ground force they supported drew its energy from the perception that the RAAF had failed in Vietnam. The perception was wrong, but it shaped policy for decades. The aircraft from Long Tan survived atu 1 0 2. The helicopter Dole and Lane flew on the 18th of August 1966 was restored to Vietnam era livery after spending years on display at Ningan in New South Wales.
In March 2012, it was mounted on permanent display outside the Colandra Return Services League Club in Queensland. At 210, the aircraft Riley and Grandinflu sits in the museum at RAF Base Williams, Point Cook, Victoria. Both of them are still and quiet now. their turbines cold, their rotor heads fixed.
But if you stand close enough, you can still see the patches in the belly panels where the ground crew at Vanga repaired the battle damage. And if you know what you are looking at, you can read the history of nine squadron in the rivets. Grandon at the launch of his book at the RAAF Amberly Aviation Heritage Center, where one of the squadrons Iquoire is on display, put it as simply as it could be put.
It was a bad time when they returned from Vietnam, he said. But now they had the opportunity to tell these stories so people could understand what they did. He was just happy to be getting the story out that people had overlooked. The rotor disc is the unit of measurement that matters in the story. Everything Nine Squadron did happened inside its diameter.
A rubber plantation clearing smaller than the disc. A monsoon cloud base lower than the treetops. a dust off in the long high hills where the last sound before the crash was the engine stopping. 237,424 times a nine squadron pilot pulled collective and committed to the air and each time the disc turned above him holding the machine and the men inside it against gravity and enemy fire and institutional mythology and each time without exception the bus driver from Sydney and the farm boy from Colrain and the Kittyhawk veteran from Goldburn and
the 25-year-old from Adelaide who thought he was flying a suicide mission did their job. The disc turned. The helicopter flew. They brought everyone they could bring home. And then they came home themselves and spent the next 50 years explaining that they had never, not once, refused to
