VULTEE VENGANCE IN BATTLE

This book chronicles the remarkable combat career of the American-built Vultee Vengeance dive-bomber in Royal Air Force and Indian Air Force service during the Burma Campaigns of 1942–45. Ordered by the Ministry of Supply during the darkest phase of the war—when the devastating combination of the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and German armoured forces had overrun much of Europe and invasion seemed imminent—the all-metal, single-engine Vengeance emerged from a long and ambivalent British engagement with the dive-bomber concept. Although pioneered by the RAF in 1917, dive-bombing had been repeatedly sidelined during the inter-war years in favour of an almost exclusive focus on heavy bombing.
By the time the Vengeance entered service, the RAF—still reluctant to embrace the type—sought a precision strike capability to avert a repeat of Japanese naval attacks in the Indian Ocean, leading to the formation of six squadrons. As Japanese forces approached the Burma–India frontier, the Vengeance, no longer required for its original tasking, proved the most accurate bomber then operated by the British. Allied ground formations, including Orde Wingate’s Chindits, strongly advocated its continued employment and regarded it as indispensable. Nonetheless, by 1945 the aircraft had been withdrawn from service. Long overlooked, misrepresented, or dismissed, the Vengeance’s operational record is here reconstructed in full from eyewitness testimony and official documentation..