USS Constellation Aircraft Carrier.

ATTACK ON NORTH VIETNAM

The Constellation was already in Asian waters on a visit to Hong Kong at the time of the Tonkin Incident in August 1964, when an (unconfirmed) attack on US destroyers gave the government in Washington the pretext it had long been hoping for and allowed it to launch airstrikes against North Vietnam. Her F-48 Phantoms, A-4C Skyhawks and A-3B Prowlers were soon in action, and from 5 August, began a campaign of airstrikes against ground targets. Four of her aircraft were downed by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft defences that first day, one of the pilots being taken prisoner and spending the next nine years in captivity. However, the campaign went on, and was to last for almost a decade, the Constellation returning to serve a total of seven tours of duty on Yankee Station, off the North Vietnamese coast and winning a
Presidential Unit Citation in the process. During the course of her penultimate tour two of the ships aviators, Lt. Randall Cunningham and Lt. (jg) Willie Driscoll, flying with VF-96, became the US Navys first aces of the war, having accounted for five enemy MiGs in air-to-air combat.

ALPHA STRIKE TURNED TURKEY SHOOT

One of the prime targets of the US Navys air wings missions against North Vietnam was the port city of Haiphong and its surrounding industrial complex, and they also regularly targeted Hanoi, the capital. Both were very heavily defended indeed, both by anti-aircraft installations on the ground and by the North Vietnamese Air Force, both of which had state-of-the-art equipment supplied by the Soviet Union, and it took both skill and determination to return time after time. The Constellations air wings greatest triumph came during an Alpha Strike attack on the port on 10 May 1972. By that time, Alpha Strikes surprise attacks by relatively small numbers of aircraft, operating independently in pairs and approaching the target from all points of the compass and first concentrating on radar installations, while friendly interceptors flew aggressive patrols overhead to discourage enemy aircraft had become the norm for the Navy flyers. That day, it was to be not the ground attack aircraft but the fighters which did the most damage, destroying 11 North Vietnamese MiGs a score unprecedented in the history of the US Navy during the Vietnam War.