g Unit Award for the period May 1961 to May 1962. Although the Farm Gate operations were not specifically cited in the award, they had no doubt been taken into consideration during the selection work.
The US military involvement in Vietnam had continued to grow at a modest pace, but there were still formal plans for a phasing out of the troops in the not too distant future. The total collapse of the Diem regime during the last part of 1963, culminating in the murder of President Diem himself in early November, plus the successful Viet Cong offensive towards the end of the year, finally led to all such plans for a US withdrawal being shelved in early 1964.
Many members of the US government were convinced that the Viet Cong was wholly dependent on aid and control from Hanoi, despite intelligence analyses to the contrary. A programme of covert operations against North Vietnam was therefore put into action in February 1964, in an effort to put pressure on the North Vietnamese. However, these operations were unlikely to have any decisive effect, and on 17 March President Johnson ordered that detailed planning for more direct action was to be carried out. These plans included bombing raids against military and possibly also industrial targets in North Vietnam, to be carried out by the VNAF and by Farm Gate, the latter reinforced for this purpose by three squadrons of B 57s to be flown in from Japan. The plans were never carried out and it was not until a year later that the first USAF bombing of targets in North Vietnam took place.
But even if the plans had been implemented immediately, it would have made little difference to Farm Gate: time had finally caught up with their B 26s. The heavy underwing loads used by Farm Gate imposed high negative G forces on the wings when taxiing the aircraft on the bumpy airfields in Vietnam, and the structures were becoming increasingly fatigued. The fact that the aircraft were used as dive bombers did not help either, especially as the aircraft initially had no G meter to tell the crew how many Gs they were pulling. (G meters may have been fitted after 1962, however.) After a B 26 had lost a wing during a mission on 16 August 1963, strict limitations were imposed on the stressing allowed during missions. But when Captains Herman S. Moore and Lawrence L. Lively were killed in B 26B number 44 35665 on 11 February 1964, the decision was taken to withdraw the B 26 from combat altogether. Moore and Lively had been flying in a fire power demonstration at Eglin AFB range 52 when the left wing of their aircraft separated during pull out from a strafing run.
When news of this second accident reached Vietnam, one B 26 was airborne on a strike mission. The crew were given orders by radio to return immediately to Bien Hoa, making sure not to put any undue stress on the aircraft on their way back. From this day on, the Farm Gate B 26s were, for all practical purposes, grounded.
The conversion of B-26Bs into B 26Ks had commenced in November 1963, with the intention of replacing the Farm Gate B 26s during the second half of 1964, but there was no way the old, unconverted B 26s could be kept in service until then. The remaining thirteen aircraft were flown to Clark Field during the first week of April, where they were officially taken on charge by the Super Sabre-equipped 405th Tactical Fighter Wing. Four of them were to become involved in the Congo operations, and two RB 26s made it back to the USA to be reclaimed at Hill AFB, but the majority were scrapped in the Philippines in late 1964 or early 1965.
The T 28s of Farm Gate had also started suffering losses from structural failures by the spring of 1964, and as a consequence they, too, were withdrawn, temporarily putting the unit 'out of business.' Beginning in May 1964, an initial twenty-five Skyraiders were received as replacements for the B 26s and T 28s, and this type became the standard equipment of all the Air Commando squadrons in Vietnam for the next few years.
The training squadron at Hurlburt Field, by now known as the 602nd Fighter Squadron (