igon. This was a former French base, taken over by the VNAF on formation in 1955. It also housed the 1st Fighter Squadron of the VNAF. The Farm Gate aircraft were initially maintained and serviced by Detachment 9 of the 13th Air Force. The personnel of this unit were mainly drafted from the 6009th Tactical Support Group at Tachikawa, Japan, and had arrived in Vietnam in late October. Later on, the maintenance personnel were seconded from Hurlburt Field.
The initial main mission of Farm Gate was to provide training for the VNAF. There was considerable confusion as to whether or not the US crews could participate in actual combat missions, and Farm Gate received several conflicting directives from different sources. Although a few T 28 missions were flown in support of VNAF Skyraider attacks, the main employment of the unit during the last weeks of 1961 was to reconnoiter the junk traffic along the Vietnamese coast, using SC 47s and T 28s.
When deployed to Vietnam, the detachment had not brought any of its own B 26 aircraft. But, in anticipation of the arrival of the first Invaders a few weeks later, PACAF immediately set about securing spare parts for the aircraft. During the middle of November 1961, instructions were sent to bases in the 5th Air Force area to urgently ship all B 26 spares and engines to Clark Field in the Philippines. All boxes were to be marked 'Project Farm Gate' and no formal shipping documents were required. After having arrived at Clark, the materiel was simply listed as 'found on base,' thereby neatly avoiding a lot of red tape and time- consuming paper work. The total weight of the spares collected in this way was 64,404 lbs.
Farm Gate was initially allocated four B 26Bs already in Southeast Asia. All four were almost certainly aircraft formerly used by Project Mill Pond. They were picked up at the Air Asia facility on Taiwan by Farm Gate crews and arrived at Bien Hoa around Christmas 1961.
It should be noted that the USAF initially tended to refer to all Farm Gate Invaders as 'RB 26s' in their official releases, to imply that they were just harmless reconnaissance aircraft and therefore did not constitute a breach of the Geneva Accords. In reality, however, the B 26Bs were mainly used as strike aircraft, although equipped with one or two K 17C cameras for bomb damage assessment. A strike camera pod could also be carried externally, usually under the left wing.
In January the personnel of 4400th CCTS officially adopted the title of Air Commandos, thus taking up a tradition dating back to the Second World War. During the first quarter of 1962, Farm Gate began gradually to increase the number of combat sorties flown, although activity was still fairly low. Some night missions were also flown from January onwards, but at this early stage the 'flaming arrow' technique mentioned below had not yet been introduced, and the effect of these strikes was rather marginal.
During February, an air operations center was set up in South Vietnam and staffed with a mix of US and Vietnamese personnel, but there were a lot of problems before it was finally made to function properly. Several night incursions over South Vietnamese territory by unidentified aircraft took place during March and on at least two occasions B 26s were scrambled to intercept, but no contact was made with the intruders. These incidents resulted in the deployment of radar-equipped USAF and USN fighters to South Vietnam in late March 1962, as none of the Farm Gate aircraft were suited to air defence missions.
An organizational change took place during March 1962, when the 4400th CCTS became the 4400th Combat Crew Training Group. The following month it was reformed as the 1st Air Commando Group, and Farm Gate now became Detachment 2A of the 1st ACG. At this point there had already been a number of press reports in the USA of US pilots flying combat missions in Vietnam, and the training cover of the unit was wearing thin. After much debate between various high ranking officers and politicians, the following classified Concept of Operations had bee