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Hughes YAH-64 firing Hellfire laser-guided missile
The Armed Helo In The Land Battle
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The first use of armed helicopters on a significant scale is attributable to the French, in their counter-insurgency operations in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prior to this, military helicopters had been used only for rescue, liaison and transporting small numbers of troops, due to limitations on payload. However, US Army employment of helicopters for casualty-evacuation in Korea and in the early 1950s caused the French to buy Sikorsky S-55s for use in Indochina and later in Algeria, where they were joined by Bell 47s, the Piasecki H-21 “Flying Banana”, and later by France’s own Djinn and Alouettes. Machine guns were installed on some of the helicopters for self-protection, and reports speak of SS. 10 wire-guided missiles being fired from Alouette lls against insurgent bunkers and vehicles.
It was natural that France, having pioneered the development of wire-guided, lightweight anti-tank missiles (a category rejected in the 1950s by Britain and the US as being too crude and unreliable to warrant attention), should have led in the application of such weapons to helicopters, another field of technology in which that country has played an important role.
However, the first operational use of missile-armed helicopters against tanks was not by the French but by the Americans. It happened in Vietnam in 1972, when the Communists attacked with 14 divisions, using large numbers of tanks for the first time, some 600 in all. The US Army had some SS. 11 missiles in storage in Vietnam to deal with just such a contingency, but they produced no noteworthy results, partly because the helicopters lacked the sights that were needed to make effective use of these weapons.
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