RAAF A5 bombing missions in Vietnam?

I had always thought that the postwar RAAF biggest task was the anti-shipping Maritime strike missions. What and where were the possible land based targets that the Australians were concerned about?

And the OTL Canberra to F-111 transition doesn't seem to be a bad move to me.

Anti-shipping was a secondary duty at best until the mid 80s, dealing with ships was the RAN's job and until 1982 was to be done with HMAS Melbourne's Skyhawks.

From the 50s to the 70s the RAAF was tasked with fighting limited wars in South East Asia and preparing for WW3, so deployed multiple sqns in Butterworth Malaysia in order to fight various SEATO WW3 scenarios. For example 79 sqn went to Thailand from 1962-68, 2 sqn to Vietnam 1967-71 while 2 sqns of Mirages were in Butterworth the whole time.

In late 1963 it seemed like a reasonable idea to not replace the Canberra until 1969, but in 1964 the Indonesian Confrontation kicked off with amphibious and airborne raids on Malaysia and the Gulf of Tonkin incident kick-started escalation in Vietnam. I wonder if the timing was a bit different, by a matter of months even, would the decision be to replace the Canberra by 1966 due to strategic deterioration.

Jakarta? Or north to support the CW?

Pretty much.
 
The best write up I've found so far was by Paul C. Scotti in "Coast Guard in Vietnam: Stories of those who served", the Cutter was the Point Welcome.

EDIT: There are a shit ton more stories that never made it into the book. I served or knew a lot of the guys from over there.
 
HMAS Hobart was attacked repeatedly by USAF F4s in the early hours of June 17th 1968; 1 sparrow hit in the first pass, 2 sparrows hit in the 2nd pass but Hobart fired 5 x 5" rounds as the plane came round for a 3rd pass and drove it off. Several USN ships were attacked by the USAF that night, including the cruiser USS Boston.

For all the shit the sparrow gets for not killing aircraft in Vietnam, they seemed to find Aussie warships easily enough.
 
For all the shit the sparrow gets for not killing aircraft in Vietnam, they seemed to find Aussie warships easily enough.

Steve Ritchie scored all five of his kills with the AIM-7.
 
Most of the shit the sparrow gets is from a Navy-centric view of the story.

The USAF indeed did get better results than the USN with the sparrow in Vietnam, and the single shot kill probability figure likely isn't the best measure of a weapon that can be ripple fired and fired out of envelope to get a better solution for a second shot.

Anyway, what about those RAAF Vigilantes!
 
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