The Vengeance is one of the clearest examples in aviation history of an aircraft built to someone else's requirement. In 1940 the United States Army Air Corps had no serious interest in a single-engine dive bomber — that was a US Navy speciality, embodied by carrier aircraft like the Douglas SBD Dauntless. Vultee's Model V-72 was therefore aimed entirely at export customers who had watched the Ju 87 Stuka smash through Poland and France and wanted an equivalent of their own.

France moved first, ordering roughly 300 aircraft for delivery from late 1940. The collapse of France in June 1940 killed that contract before any aircraft were delivered, and the British Purchasing Commission — which had ordered 200 on 3 July 1940 and added a further hundred that December — absorbed much of the programme. When the United States entered the war and Lend-Lease came into force, the American government took nominal charge of production and issued the type its own designations, A-31 and A-35. But the customer the aircraft had been designed for was always across the Atlantic.

It is worth stating this plainly because it is often lost: the Vengeance was not an American aircraft that Britain happened to buy. It was, in effect, a British (and originally French) aircraft that America happened to build. That origin explains almost everything odd about its later career.

It also explains the aircraft's split personality in the record books, where the same machine appears under a British mark number in one document and a US Army designation in another. Historians untangling the Vengeance's story have to hold both identities in mind at once — the British Vengeance I–IV and the American A-31 and A-35 are, for the most part, the same aircraft wearing different paperwork.

The dedicated dive bomber had a very short golden age. In 1939–40 the Stuka looked like a war-winning weapon. But it had succeeded in conditions of German air superiority, where enemy fighters were swept aside first. The moment the Luftwaffe met determined fighter opposition — over southern England in 1940 — the Ju 87 suffered so badly it had to be pulled from the battle. The lesson was noted in every Allied air staff.

By the time large numbers of Vengeances were arriving in 1942–43, the Western Allies had concluded that a slow two-seat dive bomber was too vulnerable to risk over a contested front. The future belonged to the fighter-bomber: a Typhoon, Thunderbolt or Mustang that could carry bombs or rockets, hit a target and then defend itself or run. A Vengeance could do none of that. It needed an escort, needed local air superiority, and spent long, exposed seconds in its dive.

So the RAF declined to use the Vengeance over Western Europe or the Mediterranean at all, and confined it to Burma, where Japanese fighters were few. Even there its career was brief. This is the honest context for the type: not a failure exactly, but an aircraft whose founding idea was already obsolete when it reached the squadrons.

It is easy, with hindsight, to call the whole programme a mistake. That would be unfair. In 1940, when the orders were placed, no one could be certain the fighter-bomber would render the dive bomber redundant so quickly, and a nation facing invasion could not afford to gamble against a weapon that had just worked so spectacularly for the enemy. The Vengeance was a reasonable bet in 1940 that a fast-moving war had turned into a poor one by 1943 — which is a very different thing from a bad design.

The single most distinctive feature of the Vengeance is invisible in most photographs but obvious the moment you understand it. On a conventional aircraft the wing is bolted on at a small positive angle — the angle of incidence — so that when the fuselage is level, the wing is already meeting the air at an angle that generates lift. Put such an aircraft into a vertical dive and the lift pulls it off the vertical, so the pilot is really diving at 70 or 80 degrees, aiming through a canted sight-picture.

Vultee's engineers set the Vengeance's wing at essentially zero, or very slightly negative, incidence. In a genuine 90-degree dive the fuselage hangs straight down, nose pointed directly at the ground, and the wing is not fighting to pull it off line. The pilot sights along the nose at the target as if aiming a rifle. The result, widely praised by crews, was exceptional dive-bombing accuracy. A side effect was an unusual wing planform — sometimes described as W-shaped when viewed in plan — because the centre section and outer panels were arranged to make that geometry work.

The zero-incidence idea was not unique to Vultee — other dive-bomber designers wrestled with the same trade-off between diving accuracy and everyday handling — but the Vengeance committed to it more wholeheartedly than most, which is exactly why the later A-35 felt the need to walk it partly back. That single design decision, and the argument over it between the British and American versions, sums up the whole aircraft: everything bent toward the dive.

To picture it, imagine the difference between a diver who enters the water at a slight angle and one who goes in perfectly vertical. The Vengeance was built to be the second kind — nose down, wings not fighting the plunge, the pilot's eye running straight down the fuselage to the target. Every crew account of the type comes back to this sensation of a genuinely vertical dive, and to the accuracy it made possible. It was the one thing the aircraft did better than almost anything else in the sky, and the whole airframe was shaped around delivering it.

The price was paid in every other phase of flight. Because the wing made little lift at a level attitude, the Vengeance flew and especially landed in a marked nose-up attitude, which hurt the pilot's forward view. The redesigned USAAF A-35 gave the wing about 4 degrees of incidence to improve the cruising and landing attitude — at the cost, purists noted, of some of the very dive accuracy the whole design existed to deliver.

Power came from the Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone, a 14-cylinder twin-row radial of around 1,600 horsepower in the early marks and about 1,700 in the A-35. It was a thoroughly conventional, widely used American engine — the same family that powered the B-25 Mitchell and the Avenger — and in most respects it was reliable.

In Vengeance service, though, engine cooling caused real trouble, particularly in the heat of India and the tropics and during the long climb to bombing altitude. Early aircraft suffered overheating that grounded machines and, in the worst cases, contributed to accidents. The RAF worked through a series of modifications to cure it; unmodified aircraft handed to the Free French were judged uneconomical and unreliable and were largely grounded.

There were also handling traps unrelated to the engine. Flown with the rear cockpit open and no rear gunner aboard — a common ferry or training configuration — the centre of gravity shifted enough to cause fatal accidents if dive procedures were not followed exactly. The Vengeance was a demanding aircraft that rewarded discipline and punished carelessness.

None of this made the R-2600 a bad engine — it was one of the great American radials of the war — but it does illustrate a recurring theme with the Vengeance: a fundamentally sound aircraft whose real-world service was dogged by teething troubles, tropical conditions and the demands of a difficult flight regime, all of which took time and modification to master.

The Vengeance's offensive punch was its bombs, not its guns. It could carry up to roughly 680 kg (1,500 lb) of ordnance — typically a pair of 500 lb bombs housed in an internal bay together with lighter bombs on external wing racks, the exact fit varying by mark and mission. Delivered from a near-vertical dive, that load could be placed with an accuracy that level bombers of the period could only dream of.

Defensive and strafing armament evolved through the marks. Early British-contract aircraft carried four fixed .30-calibre Browning machine guns in the wings for strafing on the way down, plus a single flexible .30-calibre gun in the rear cockpit for the observer/gunner to fend off pursuing fighters. The redesigned USAAF A-35 marks upgraded the wing battery to six heavier .50-calibre guns and added bomb racks — a reflection of American practice and of the growing realisation that a dive bomber needed to be able to hurt targets on the way in as well as at the bottom of the dive.

The rear crewman's role was more than manning a gun. He navigated the aircraft to and from the target — no small task over featureless jungle — watched the sky behind during the vulnerable dive and pull-out, and in some configurations helped manage the aircraft's systems. In the close air support role over Burma, getting to exactly the right patch of jungle at exactly the right moment was as important as the bombing itself, and that was the back-seater's work.

In this the Vengeance was typical of its generation of two-seat attack aircraft: the aeroplane was a system operated by a crew, and its effectiveness depended as much on the coordination between the two men as on any specification. Strip out the gunner-navigator — as the target-tug conversions later did — and much of what made the Vengeance a weapon disappeared, leaving only the airframe and the engine.

A vertical dive is easy to start and dangerous to finish. Without some way of limiting speed, a dive bomber would accelerate to the point where the pull-out either tore the wings off or drove the aircraft into the ground before it could recover. The Vengeance solved this the way most dive bombers of the era did — with hydraulically operated, perforated dive brakes that deployed to add drag and hold the aircraft to a controllable terminal velocity in the plunge.

Holding a steady, controlled dive is what made accuracy possible. With the brakes out and the fuselage pointed straight down the zero-incidence wing's nose, the pilot had a stable platform from which to aim, correct and release. Then came the hard part: a firm, high-g pull-out at low altitude, hauling the aircraft from vertical back to level flight in a few hundred metres while the airframe and the crew's bodies absorbed the loads. The Vengeance was stressed heavily for exactly this, which is part of why it was never light or fast.

It is this whole choreography — roll into the dive, brakes out, sight down the nose, release, pull — that the type existed to perform. Everything the Vengeance did badly (cruise, visibility, speed, self-defence) was the price of doing that one thing well. When air forces stopped valuing that one thing, there was nothing left to justify the compromises.

The dive brakes themselves were a small engineering triumph of the era, common to the Ju 87, the Dauntless and the Vengeance alike. That three separate nations' dive bombers converged on the same solution — deploy drag surfaces, hold a steady dive, aim, release, pull hard — is a reminder that the type was a coherent, well-understood class of aircraft, not an experiment. It simply had a short life as a class.

The Vengeance family runs through a confusing mix of British mark numbers and US Army designations, reflecting its split identity. The direct British-purchase and Lend-Lease aircraft were the Vengeance I, IA, II, III and IV; the equivalent US designations were the A-31 series and the redesigned A-35 series.

Broadly: the Vengeance I and II were early British-contract machines from Northrop and Vultee. The Vengeance IA and III corresponded to Lend-Lease A-31 aircraft with updated R-2600 engines. The A-35A was a redesigned USAAF version with the 4-degree wing incidence and a heavier gun fit, and the A-35B — the most numerous single model, with six .50-calibre wing guns and additional bomb racks — supplied the RAF and RAAF as the Vengeance IV. Total production across all factories and marks is usually given as around 1,931 aircraft, though as with much wartime accounting the exact figure varies between sources.

A great many A-35B / Mk IV airframes never saw combat at all: built as the dive-bomber era ended, they went straight into second-line and target-tug duties.

For collectors and historians the mark numbers matter, but for understanding the type the key point is simpler: the Vengeance family was numerous, broadly similar across its variants, and produced in quantity even after the mission it was designed for had lost its rationale. That surplus of late-build airframes is the direct reason so many ended up towing targets, and why the type's production total looks impressive for an aircraft with so short a combat career.

Unlike modern aircraft, the Vengeance has no reliably documented cost-per-flight-hour, unit price or programme cost in the terms a comparison tool would use. Wartime production accounting, Lend-Lease transfers and multi-national ownership make any single figure meaningless, so this page records the cost row honestly as “not reliably recorded (WWII)”.

What can be said qualitatively is that the Vengeance was a relatively cheap, conventional aircraft to build — a single radial engine, a two-man crew, no exotic materials — which is part of why so many were completed even after the type's front-line usefulness had passed. The real cost of the Vengeance was not financial but strategic: production capacity and aircrew training were committed to a dive-bomber concept that the Western Allies had already decided to abandon, and hundreds of finished airframes ended their days towing targets rather than carrying bombs.

For MiGFlug's forthcoming comparison tools this page therefore records the cost fields honestly as unavailable rather than inventing a number. It is better to say plainly that wartime cost accounting for a multi-national, Lend-Lease dive bomber cannot be reduced to a single credible cost-per-hour figure than to publish a false precision. Where a figure genuinely is not known, this museum says so.

The Vengeance is best understood alongside the two dive bombers it is most often measured against. The Junkers Ju 87 Stuka was its inspiration — the aircraft whose success in 1939–40 created the demand the Vengeance was built to fill. But the Stuka's story is a warning as much as a model: once it met determined fighter opposition over Britain, it proved so vulnerable that it had to be withdrawn from the battle. The Vengeance, arriving later, inherited that vulnerability without ever quite inheriting the conditions of air superiority in which the Stuka had shone.

The Douglas SBD Dauntless makes an even sharper contrast. The Dauntless was a US Navy carrier dive bomber that fought in exactly the environment the doctrine promised — it helped sink four Japanese carriers at Midway — and it earned a permanent place in history. The difference was not so much the aircraft as the mission: the Dauntless dived on ships, where a dedicated naval dive bomber remained genuinely valuable for years, while the Vengeance dived on land targets in a European doctrine that had already moved on. Two similar aircraft, two very different reputations, largely because of where and against what they were used.

There is a lesson in that comparison for anyone tempted to rank aircraft by raw specification. The Vengeance, the Stuka and the Dauntless were technically similar answers to the same problem; their wildly different reputations were decided less by engineering than by doctrine, theatre and timing. The Vengeance drew the worst hand of the three, and its obscurity today is the result.

Set against both, the Vengeance was competitive as a diving machine — arguably more accurate than either in a pure vertical plunge, thanks to its zero-incidence wing — but it lacked a theatre in which that advantage translated into fame. It did its best work quietly, over the jungle, for an army the newsreels forgot.

Australia operated the largest Vengeance fleet of any nation — commonly given as around 342 aircraft — and the RAAF's experience is in many ways the fullest account of what the type could and could not do. Australian squadrons, beginning with No. 12 Squadron, took the Vengeance into action in the South-West Pacific from 1943, flying strikes from bases in the Northern Territory against Japanese-held targets such as Selaru and the Tanimbar Islands in the Dutch East Indies.

The RAAF found the Vengeance accurate and effective as a dive bomber, but ran squarely into the same strategic problem the RAF had: by 1943–44 the specialised dive bomber no longer fitted the way the war was being fought. Australian planners wanted aircraft that could range further, carry more, and defend themselves. The Vengeance could do none of these especially well, and its front-line career with the RAAF was correspondingly short — the last operational Australian sorties came in early March 1944, after which squadrons re-equipped with fighter-bombers and, in the heavy-bomber role, Consolidated B-24 Liberators.

Because Australia flew so many and kept such good records, a large share of the surviving Vengeance airframes and relics are Australian, and the restoration and museum efforts that keep the type's memory alive today are concentrated there.

Australian records also give us some of the most reliable numbers we have for the type. Where global production figures vary between sources, the RAAF's careful accounting of its own fleet — roughly 342 aircraft, tracked serial by serial — provides a firm anchor for anyone trying to understand how many Vengeances there were and what became of them.

Burma was the making of the Vengeance, such as it was. The campaign against the Japanese in 1943–44 was fought over some of the most difficult country in the world — dense jungle, steep ridges, few roads, monsoon weather — and it placed a premium on hitting small, well-camouflaged targets close to friendly troops. That was precisely the task a steep, accurate dive bomber could do better than a level bomber or a fast fighter-bomber making a shallow pass.

RAF squadrons Nos. 82 and 110 led the way from the first sorties in March 1943, joined by Nos. 84 and 45 and by Indian Air Force / Royal Indian Air Force units including Nos. 7 and 8 Squadrons. Together they hammered Japanese supply dumps, bridges, river craft, bunkers and troop concentrations across the Arakan and along the central front. During the pivotal battles of Imphal and Kohima in the first half of 1944 — where the Japanese invasion of India was fought to a standstill and then broken — Vengeance close support helped Allied troops hold and then advance in terrain that gave the defenders every advantage.

The type's Achilles' heel was ever-present: it needed the sky more or less to itself. As long as Allied fighters kept the Japanese air force away, the Vengeance could work in peace and do real damage. The moment enemy fighters appeared, the slow dive bombers were in serious trouble. That the Burma theatre allowed the former condition more often than not is the main reason the Vengeance has any combat reputation at all — and even there, it was withdrawn by mid-1944 as newer aircraft and changing doctrine caught up with it.

For a great many Vengeances, the war meant towing, not bombing. As the dive-bomber concept was abandoned in the West, the aircraft rolling out of the factories — especially the numerous Mk IV / A-35B machines — were surplus to any combat need almost from birth. Rather than waste them, the Allies put them to a humble but genuinely useful task: target towing for gunnery training.

Armament was stripped out and cable winches were fitted, often in the rear fuselage, to stream a fabric target sleeve behind the aircraft. Fighter pilots and air gunners then practised deflection shooting against the towed sleeve. From April 1944 a batch of Vengeance Mk IV aircraft supplied to the US Eighth Air Force in Britain took up exactly this role at combat crew replacement centres and fighter bases; some retained their British markings and serials. By the middle of 1944 numerous RAF stations held A-35B airframes as tugs.

It is a strangely fitting end for the type. An aircraft built to a doctrine that had passed found its longest-lasting employment not in delivering ordnance but in helping other pilots learn to shoot — and it stayed on that duty, in USAAF hands, right up to its final retirement in April 1948, years after the guns of the war it was designed for had fallen silent.

Seen from the gunnery ranges of 1946 or 1947, the Vengeance had become something almost poignant: a dive bomber that no longer dived on anything, earning its keep by flying straight and level so that others could practise. It is not the ending anyone imagined for it in the anxious summer of 1940, but it is the one the type actually got.

Very few Vengeances survive, which is unsurprising for a type built in modest numbers, used in secondary theatres, and scrapped in bulk once the war ended. The best-known survivor is a complete Vengeance IA, serial A27-99 (RAF serial EZ999), preserved and displayed at the Camden Museum of Aviation in Narellan, New South Wales — a rare chance to see the type's distinctive zero-incidence wing and deep fuselage in the metal.

In addition, the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) in Australia holds components of another airframe, generally identified as A24-247, with a view to long-term restoration. Reports occasionally circulate that a Vengeance is being returned to airworthy condition; these should be treated with caution. Restoring any rare warbird to flight is a project measured in decades and often never completed, and as of now no Vultee Vengeance anywhere in the world is airworthy. The honest position is that survivors exist as static museum and restoration pieces, and that seeing one on the ground is the closest anyone can currently get to the aircraft.

This is exactly why the Vengeance cannot be offered as a flying experience. Where MiGFlug can put you in the cockpit of aircraft that survive in flyable numbers — jet trainers, Cold War fighters and a handful of piston warbirds — the Vengeance belongs to the other category: types that exist today only as museum exhibits and long-term projects. To experience the era it came from, the closest realistic option is a flight in a genuine, airworthy warbird of the period, which is a real and bookable thing even though a Vengeance ride is not.

Beyond complete airframes, fragments, instruments and relics — many recovered from Australian and Burmese crash sites — are held in museum collections and by enthusiasts, and photographic archives such as those of the Australian War Memorial and the San Diego Air & Space Museum preserve a rich visual record of the type in service.

The Vengeance was a Commonwealth aircraft in practice, and the units that flew it in anger reflect that. On the RAF side, Nos. 82, 110, 84 and 45 Squadrons carried the type through the Burma campaign, converting from other aircraft and learning the exacting discipline of accurate dive-bombing in tropical conditions. Alongside them flew Indian squadrons — including Nos. 7 and 8 of the Indian Air Force / Royal Indian Air Force — whose crews were fighting, in many cases, to defend their own country's frontier at Imphal and Kohima.

In the South-West Pacific the Royal Australian Air Force fielded the largest force of all, its squadrons beginning with No. 12 and striking Japanese island positions from the Northern Territory. The men who crewed these aircraft — a pilot up front managing the dive, an observer/gunner behind navigating and watching the sky — worked in a machine that demanded precision and offered little forgiveness. Their war was fought far from the headlines, in a theatre the British public later called the “forgotten front,” and their aircraft has been forgotten along with it.

For Indian aircrew in particular there is an added significance. Flying Vengeances in the defence of Imphal and Kohima, they were among the airmen helping to stop a Japanese invasion of the Indian subcontinent itself — a chapter of the war in which the type, obscure as it is elsewhere, played a genuinely meaningful part.

It is worth remembering that for these crews the Vengeance's obsolescence in Western doctrine was an abstraction. What mattered to them was whether the aircraft could put a bomb where the army needed it, and by most Commonwealth accounts it could — which is why, for all its faults, the men who flew it in Burma tended to speak of it with a certain respect.

That respect is a useful corrective to the type's obscurity. History has largely forgotten the Vengeance, but the people who actually depended on it — the aircrew who flew it and the soldiers whose advances it covered — did not regard it as a joke or a failure. They regarded it as a tool that, used correctly and in the right place, did a hard job well.

Plenty of Second World War aircraft were built in larger numbers and did less; yet the Vengeance has slipped almost entirely out of popular memory. Several things conspired to make it so. First, its theatre: Burma and the South-West Pacific were the war's least-reported fronts, and an aircraft that fought there almost exclusively had little chance of entering the public imagination the way the Spitfire, Lancaster or Mustang did.

Second, its timing: the Vengeance arrived just as the dedicated dive bomber was being written off, so it never got a signature victory to be remembered by. There was no Vengeance equivalent of the Dauntless at Midway — no single day on which the type visibly changed the course of a battle in a way history would record. Its contribution was cumulative, distributed across hundreds of unglamorous close-support sorties.

Third, its fate: a large share of the production run never saw combat at all, going straight to target-towing, and the survivors were scrapped quickly after 1945. With few airframes preserved and those mostly in Australia, there has been little physical presence to keep the type in view. The result is an aircraft that is historically interesting precisely because it is forgotten — a case study in how doctrine, geography and luck decide which machines become legends and which vanish.

The Vengeance's career is, in miniature, the story of how the dedicated land-based dive bomber lived and died within about five years. In 1939 the concept looked like the future of tactical air power. By 1944 it was finished, at least in the West, and the Vengeance's relegation to target-towing is one of the clearest markers of that shift.

What replaced it was the fighter-bomber — and the logic was overwhelming. A single aircraft that could carry bombs or rockets, hit a target with reasonable accuracy in a shallow dive, and then either fight or run gave commanders far more flexibility than a specialist that could only dive-bomb and could not survive without an escort. As Allied fighters gained the power to carry meaningful ordnance, the case for a separate dive bomber collapsed. The dive-bombing mission did not disappear; it was simply absorbed into aircraft that could do other things too.

Naval dive bombers lingered a little longer, because attacking ships remained a specialised task, but even there the writing was on the wall. Seen in that light, the Vengeance was not so much a failure as a casualty of progress — a competent aircraft built to a template that the war rendered obsolete faster than anyone in 1940 could have guessed. That is why it repays study: it marks, almost to the year, the end of an entire class of combat aircraft.

How should the Vengeance be judged? Not as a war-winner, and not as a failure either. The fairest verdict is that it was a competent, even excellent, execution of an idea that the war made obsolete. As a pure dive-bombing machine it was accurate and effective; the crews who used it in Burma valued it, and the ground troops it supported had good reason to be grateful for its precision in country where precision was everything.

Its weaknesses were real and are worth stating plainly: it was slow, poorly suited to self-defence, hampered early on by cooling troubles, awkward to see out of on the approach, and dependent on friendly air superiority to operate at all. But most of these were not defects of workmanship — they were the inevitable price of building a specialist dive bomber, and they would have been forgiven had the mission itself remained central. It did not.

That distinction — between an aircraft that is badly made and one that is well made for a job nobody needs any more — is the single most important thing to understand about the Vengeance, and it is why the type rewards a closer look than its reputation would suggest.

So the Vengeance's true significance is as a marker. It shows, more clearly than almost any other aircraft, the exact moment when the dedicated land-based dive bomber ceased to make sense — ordered in the concept's heyday, delivered as it collapsed, and retired towing targets. For the historian and the enthusiast alike, that makes it far more interesting than its modest fame suggests: a well-made answer to a question the war had already stopped asking, and a small, honest window onto how fast the air war changed.

Few aircraft illustrate so neatly that a machine can be both good and obsolete at once. The Vengeance was not beaten by a better dive bomber; it was beaten by a better idea — the multi-role fighter-bomber — that made its entire specialty redundant. Understanding that is worth more than any single performance figure, and it is why the type still earns its place in a serious aircraft museum despite never becoming a household name.

People discovering the Vengeance for the first time often ask a natural question: can I fly in one? The honest answer, given in full elsewhere on this page, is no — there is no airworthy Vengeance anywhere, and MiGFlug does not and cannot offer flights in the type. It survives only as museum airframes and long-term restoration projects, chiefly in Australia.

That is not the end of the story for anyone drawn to the era, though. The whole point of the MiGFlug Aircraft Museum is to tell the stories of aircraft you cannot fly — and then to point you toward the ones you can. Where a rare type like the Vengeance has vanished from the skies, other genuine military aircraft of the propeller and early-jet age remain airworthy and bookable, flown by professional display and warbird operators. A flight in one of those is the closest a modern enthusiast can get to the sensations the Vengeance’s crews knew: the weight of a real combat aircraft, the noise, the g of a hard manoeuvre.

So this page ends where the museum always does — with the truth about the exhibit, and a door to a real experience. You can read the Vengeance’s story here; and when you want to actually get airborne in a piece of aviation history, the current, verified options are gathered at migflug.com/flights-prices. No false promises about the Vengeance itself — just the honest history, and a real way to fly.