Early U.S. Army armed helos

[redcoat2]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

The US Army formally adopted an armed version of the OH-23 Raven (two 30's) after Korea.
Now, if it was actually fielded is another story! But it was officially adopted.
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Yes. That’s what I meant. The U.S. Army formally adopted armed versions of the two helos with 2x30’s (which is what I meant by the XM-1 system) after the Korean War. Not 1946 or 1951.

Originally Posted by Suhiir

As came up in the discussion in my custom OOB thread there were ad-hoc field mods of the system for years before the "official" version was adopted.

I’m not sure whether these alleged field mods should be in the game. It seems to me that they must have been very rare. When, for example, I quickly flicked through Whirlybirds: U.S. Marine Helicopters in Korea I could not find any reference to armed helicopters at all. Improvised or otherwise. I could have missed them though. Please give me some page references if you have them. I certainly haven’t seen armed helos in any of the books about the Korean War that I have read. Not so much as a photo.

It boils down to this. When people are playing games set during the Korean War I don’t think armed helos should be on the menu. Helos were not used in a ‘gunship’ role at that time and if there were any improvised armed scouts I think they must have been relatively rare.