The aircraft were desert pink as that was reckoned to be the best cammo colour to protect against visial pick up by fighters at low level, which was how the RAF had intended to fight WWIII and had trained (the biggest threat being SAM's and Fighters, plus it allowed the delivery of dumb (i.e. Cheap) iron bombs to be done quite accurately and allowed less reliance on ECM). The problems were however that unlike Europe, the growbags did not have the terrain to hide behind, the Iraqi's relied heavily in Anti Aircraft Artillery and short range SAM's, plus the USAF gave the Iraqi Air force's fighters and long range SAM force a good kicking on the first night that they never recovered from. Yanks mostly went in at medium level with the exception of the F-111F and F-15E force, who changed their minds and went higher after the first few nights. RAF couldn’t with the Tonka’s as the JP233 anti runway bomb dispenser required the aircraft carrying it to fly over the target at low-level to get the bombs on target. The BL755 cluster bomb at the time had the same problem, had to be dropped at low level to work correctly. Jags started at medium level and stayed there, thanks to two new weapons being added to the aircraft which worked at medium level (Canadian CV7 Rocket and the US Rockeye CBU). The Tonka’s suffered quite heavy losses (much higher that any other type in the war for the numbers in theatre and the number of sorties flown). They lost 8 if memory serves, one due to a control restriction, 6 at low level (only one of those was carrying JP233 and it is reckoned to have flown into the ground after attacking the target, the rest were shot down while doing loft attacks with dumb 1,000 lbs. Bombs (one story is that one of them was taken out by one of its own bombs going off close to the aircraft just after it left the pylon). The one shot down at medium level was at the back end of a large package of Buccs and Tonka’s attacking HAS sites on an airfield (4 Buccs and 8 Tonka’s) one of the Tonka’s at the back of the package was taken out by an SA-2 missile, the size of the package giving the Iraqi’s time to pick a target, before and after this attack, the normal package size was two buccs and four Tonka’s. Bucc’s deployed after the start of the war to support the Tonka’s by marking targets for laser guided bombs carried by the Tonka’s. Before the Bucc’s got there, the Tonka’s had gone to medium level with dumb bombs and couldn’t hit Sh!t with them.
DT_Xtremez_28:
