Twenty years before the United States made Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport famous as its main point of entry to Viet Nam, the Royal Air Force’s No.273 Squadron found itself temporarily based there as an involuntary but active part of France’s attempt to reestablish its colonial control.
The 13th Air Force did not fight the most glamorous of wars, theirs’ was a war of ground attack, relentlessly destroying Japanese ground forces and infrastructure. They fought, not from centralized bases closely tied together, but from island bases, spread hundreds of miles apart.
Making-History 