The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  A peace treaty was signed at last on January 27, 1973. The North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the South released 591 men in what was called Operation Homecoming. Bands played when the planes carrying them landed. Genuine heroes of a thankless war, they deserved every adulatory note. Time may have been on their side. But how ocay had it been?

  The Christmas Bombing

  STEPHEN E. AMBROSE

  The last significant American military action of the Vietnam War may be, even now, the most controversial. Most people thought of it as the Christmas bombing of 1972, though the man who set it in motion, President Richard M. Nixon, preferred not to emphasize the aspect of holiday uncheer: He called it the December bombing. Nixon was splitting crosshairs, as it were. He did suspend the attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong for the thirty-six hours surrounding December 25. The official designation of the aerial offensive, which (with the intermission) lasted from December 18 to 30, was Linebacker II, a reflection of the nation's —and its president's—fascination with that sporting approximation of war, professional football.

  For the United States, the war was winding down, even if Henry A. Kissinger's negotiations with the North Vietnamese remained stalled. All through 1971, the timetable of troop withdrawals had been speeded up: By the spring of the new year (and the beginning of an election campaign), America's military representation was down from its 1968 peak of 550,000 to 95,000, of whom only 6,000 were combat troops. The war had been increasingly Vietnamesed, though it was the Americans who pursued the search for “peace with honor”—to use one of Nixon's favorite phrases. In February 1972 he became the first president to land in Beijing; a Moscow summit was scheduled for late spring. The North Vietnamese saw that time was running out. In March they launched a powerful offensive out of Cambodia. Equipped with Soviet tanks and rockets, they mounted an uncharacteristically conventional attack, one that nearly worked. This was no mere guerrilla strike but a massed strike by 120,000 troops. Clearly, they wanted to achieve a decision before the presidential election in the fall. They menaced Saigon and took large chunks of the two northernmost provinces of South Vietnam.

  Although Nixon knew that he could not return ground troops to South Vietnam—that would have been political suicide—he could depend on one immediate resource: airpower. On May 8 he announced that U.S. fighter-bombers would seal off the entrance to the harbor of Haiphong with two thousand–pound mines and institute a naval blockade of North Vietnam. Nixon gambled that the Soviets would not retaliate by calling off the late-May summit. They did make pro forma protests, but the summit went forward as planned. At this point, they did not want the Vietnam War to interfere with détente. “The Soviet Union,” writes the historian George C. Herring, “continued to send economic assistance to North Vietnam, but it also sent a top-level diplomat to urge Hanoi to make peace. The Chinese issued perfunctory protests against Nixon's escalation of the war, but behind the scenes they also exerted pressure on Hanoi to settle with the United States.” The two Communist giants “had apparently come to regard Vietnam as a sideshow which must not be allowed to jeopardize the major realignment of power then taking place in the world.”

  Meanwhile, the air campaign known as Linebacker I had begun. It was, true to its name, a defensive action (as its misnamed successor would not be). In the words of one military writer, Linebacker I was “arguably the most effective use of airpower in the Vietnam War.” Few air campaigns in the twentieth century equaled its success. Linebacker I interdicted the flow of supplies to the south; carpet bombing by the lumbering B-52 giants out of Guam or Thailand broke the advance of the fourteen divisions of the People's Army of North Vietnam. Fighterbombers destroyed railroad bridges and tunnels leading from Hanoi to the Chinese border; they were not easily repaired. The historian of airpower Mark Clodfelter registers some of the results of Linebacker I: Mining “decreased seaborne imports from more than 250,000 tons a month to near zero.” Perhaps because they wanted to let the North Vietnamese know who was boss in the Communist world, the Chinese refused to ship any goods south for a number of weeks. “They denied the transport of Soviet goods across their territory for three months.” By destroying stores of fuel and ammunition, Linebacker I robbed the North Vietnamese of the capacity to wage conventional warfare. As one British military authority has observed, “You cannot refuel T-54 tanks with gasoline out of water bottles carried on bicycles.”

  The North's Easter offensive continued through the summer and into the fall; it suffered a costly defeat. Early in October the North Vietnamese returned to the bargaining table. In just over two weeks, the two sides reached a draft agreement. Days before the election (Nixon triumphed in one of the great landslides of American history), Kissinger could declare with virtual certainty, “We believe that peace is at hand.” It was not to be. The South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, balked at the terms. In December talks broke off. The stage was set for the Christmas bombing—Linebacker II.

  Peace did come at the end of January 1973. Though both sides made concessions, the eventual agreement was very much like the one Thieu had blocked in the fall. Still, as Stephen Ambrose notes, many questions surrounding the Christmas bombing remain unresolved. Did Linebacker II reinforce the success of Linebacker I? Did the bombings force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table, where they finally accepted an armistice and set the POWs free? Did Linebacker II truly bring “peace with honor”? Or did we, as one of Kissinger's aides wrote, bomb North Vietnam “into accepting our concession”? Were the Christmas bombings directed more at Saigon than at Hanoi? Were they, to use the phrase of the New York Times columnist James Reston, “war by tantrum”? Were the losses of fifteen B-52s and the sixty-two crewmen who died a price too high to pay? Did Linebacker II vindicate the supremacy of airpower? Or did it merely show its limits? Was the peace treaty a blunder that would doom South Vietnam three years later? Or, if there had been no Watergate—then just a mote in the public eye—would Nixon have felt emboldened to save South Vietnam in 1975, as his successor Gerald Ford did not?

  If history is enjoying a resurgence of popularity, one of those chiefly responsible is the late STEPHEN E. AMBROSE. By the time of his death in 2002, Professor Ambrose had written more than thirty books, including multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon (from which this article was excerpted), as well as such bestsellers as Undaunted Courage, the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition; Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869; and his accounts of the end of World War II in Europe, D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, The Victors, Wild Blue, and Band of Brothers (which was made into a hit television miniseries). Ambrose was founder of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

  OF THE MANY CONTROVERSIES that swirl around the American role in the Vietnam War, one of the most contentious centers on the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December 1972. This event followed Henry A. Kissinger's October news conference in which he said, “Peace is at hand,” and President Richard Nixon's triumphant reelection in November. It preceded the signing of the armistice in January 1973 and the release of the American POWs.

  According to Nixon and his supporters, the Christmas bombing forced the North Vietnamese to make concessions, accept an armistice, and release American POWs. It was a great U.S. victory that brought peace with honor.

  According to Nixon's critics, the armistice agreement signed in January 1973 was identical to the one reached in October 1972. The bombing brought no concessions from the enemy, nor was it intended to; its purpose was to persuade the South Vietnamese to go along with an armistice to which they were violently opposed. The bombing ended not because the enemy cried “enough” but because American losses of B-52s were becoming intolerable. In addition, conservative critics called the bombing an American defeat that brought a temporary cease-fire at the cost of a free and independent South Vietnam.

  Like so much else in the Vietnam War, the issue of the Christmas
bombing was divisive and remains so. To the prowar hawks, it was done with surgical precision, sparing civilian lives; to the antiwar doves, it was terror bombing, pure and simple. These differences in view cannot be reconciled or settled, but they can be examined.

  For three years, Kissinger, as national security adviser, had been engaged in secret talks with Le Duc Tho in Paris, seeking a negotiated peace. In the spring of 1972 the Communists had launched their largest offensive ever and had almost overrun South Vietnam. Nixon had responded by bombing Hanoi and mining Haiphong Harbor. The offensive was stopped. In October, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally reached an agreement. Its basic terms were a cease-fire in place; the return of POWs; total American withdrawal from South Vietnam; and a National Council of Concord and Reconciliation in South Vietnam to arrange elections, its membership to be one third neutral, one third from the current government in Saigon, one third Communist. Nixon was satisfied that this agreement met his conditions for peace with honor.

  President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam, however, felt betrayed. He perceived the agreement as a surrender: It gave the Communists a legitimate role in the political life of his nation; it allowed the Vietcong to hold on to the territory it controlled in South Vietnam; worst of all, it permitted the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to continue to occupy the two northern provinces and retain more than 150,000 troops in his country. Thieu absolutely refused to agree to the cease-fire. In early December, Kissinger went to Paris to persuade Le Duc Tho to remove the NVA from South Vietnam; Le Duc Tho adamantly insisted on going through with the October agreement.

  On December 13, 1972, Kissinger flew back to Washington to meet with Nixon and an aide, General Alexander Haig, to discuss the options. The doves urged them to make a separate deal with Hanoi for the release of the POWs in return for a total American withdrawal, leaving Thieu to sink or swim on his own. This proposal had no appeal to Nixon and his aides. To abandon South Vietnam now, after all the blood that had been shed, all the money that had been spent, all the uproar that had overwhelmed the American political scene, would be wrong, cowardly, a betrayal. To abandon Thieu would amount to surrendering the fundamental American goal in the war: the maintenance in power of an anti-Communist government in Saigon.

  To get Thieu to sign the agreement, and to force Le Duc Tho to give just a bit more, some dramatic action by the United States was necessary. With fewer than 25,000 U.S. troops remaining in South Vietnam, down from a high of 550,000 when Nixon took office, there was no possibility of escalating on the ground. The only real option discussed was to expand the bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

  There were, however, powerful arguments against that course. Sending B-52s over Hanoi meant risking those expensive weapons and their highly trained crews, because the Soviets had been rushing SA-2 SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) to North Vietnam. The SAMs fired a ten-meter-long missile that U.S. airmen ruefully called “the flying telephone pole.” Each missile carried a 286pound warhead with fuses that could be set to detonate close to a target, on impact, or on command. Guided by a radar tracking beam that honed in on its target, they traveled at a speed of Mach 1.5. The range was thirty horizontal miles and about eleven miles up. Fighter-bombers could evade the missiles by diving toward them and then veering off sharply, but that technique was not possible for B-52 pilots.

  There were other technological problems for the big bombers. Built in the 1950s, they had been designed to drop nuclear weapons over the Soviet Union. They had only four 4.5mm tail guns—and, in any case, the SAMs came on too fast to be shot down. The B-52s' best defense was altitude: They usually dropped their bombs from 30,000 feet. But the SAMs were able to reach almost 60,000 feet.

  And there were political as well as technological problems. Because of the strength of the antiwar movement in the United States, the government— under both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon—had imposed many restrictions on targets in the air war, which, naturally, infuriated the airmen. This policy had little effect on public opinion—the doves and foreign critics still charged that the U.S. Air Force was carrying out a barbaric, terrorist campaign—but it was a great help to the North Vietnamese. They knew what was off-limits and could concentrate their SAMs around such predictable targets as railroad yards and radar sites.

  The technological advantage was with the enemy; for this reason, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, his deputy, Kenneth Rush, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, were opposed to using B-52s over Hanoi, and they so advised the president. Many of Nixon's political advisers were also opposed, because to escalate the bombing after Kissinger's “peace is at hand” statement would drive the Nixon-haters in Congress, in the media, on the campuses, and among the general public into a frenzy.

  But something had to be done to convince Thieu that, whatever the formal wording of the cease-fire agreement, he could count on Nixon to come to the defense of South Vietnam if the NVA broke the cease-fire. And Le Duc Tho had to be convinced that, despite the doves in Congress, Nixon could still punish North Vietnam.

  That made the bombing option tempting. Although the B-52s were relatively slow and cumbersome, they packed a terrific punch. They carried eightyfour 500-pound bombs in their bomb bays and twelve 500-pound bombs on their wings. They could drop those bombs with relative accuracy, much better than World War II bombers. (The Seventh Air Force commander, General John Vogt, complained that the internal radar systems of the B-52s were “notoriously bad” and that “misses of a thousand feet or more were common.” However, in World War II, misses of a thousand meters—three times as much—had been common.) They flew from secure bases in Guam and Thailand. They had been used with devastating effect in the Battle of Khe Sanh in 1968 and again to stop the NVA spring offensive of 1972. The temptation to use them against Hanoi was great, and growing.

  Kissinger tried to resist it. He recommended more bombing south of the 20th Parallel, against NVA units that were not as well protected by SAMs as Hanoi was, and reseeding the mines in Haiphong Harbor. On the other hand, Haig, always a hard-liner, argued forcefully for an all-out bombing campaign by the B-52s against Hanoi itself.

  Nixon later said that ordering the bombing was “the most difficult decision” he had to make in the entire war. But, he added, “it was also one of the most clear-cut and necessary ones.” He issued an order on December 14 to reseed the mines, from the air—and also to send the B-52s against Hanoi. He told Kissinger he was prepared “for new losses and casualties and POWs,” and explained, “We'll take the same heat for big blows as for little blows.”

  To Kissinger, the president seemed “sullen” and “withdrawn.” Nixon “resented” having to do what he did, because “deep down he was ready to give up by going back to the October draft” of the armistice agreement. His bombing order, according to Kissinger, was “his last roll of the dice … helpful if it worked; a demonstration to the right wing if it failed that he had done all he could.”

  Once Nixon set the policy, public relations became his obsession. John Scali, White House adviser on foreign affairs information policy, put the problem succinctly to Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, in a telephone conversation: “We look incompetent—bombing for no good reason and because we don't know what else to do.” On May 8, 1972, Nixon had gone on television to explain his reason for bombing Hanoi and mining Haiphong: It was in response to the Communists' spring offensive. Scali had thought the television appearance unnecessary in May, as the justification for Nixon's strong action was obvious then. But in December, when his critics and even some of his supporters could not figure out his reasons, Nixon refused to go on television to explain his actions.

  Kissinger badly wanted Nixon to make a broadcast; he had been urging it for days. But Nixon, according to Kissinger, “was determined to take himself out of the line of fire.” Nixon feared that any attempt to rally the people to support more bombing after “peace is at hand” would fall flat.

  On the evening of December
14, four days before the bombing was set to begin, Nixon told Kissinger to hold a news conference to explain the status of the negotiations. The president followed up with a five-page, single-spaced memo on December 15 and another of two pages on December 16, instructing Kissinger on what to say. He told the national security adviser to “hit hard on the point that, while we want peace just as soon as we can get it, that we want a peace that is honorable and a peace that will last.” Kissinger should admit the U.S. goals had been reached “in principle” in the October agreement, but add that some “strengthening of the language” was needed “so that there will be no doubt on either side in the event that [the agreement] is broken.” He should accuse Le Duc Tho of having “backed off” on some of the October understandings.

  Kissinger should emphasize that with the Christmas season coming on, the president had a “very strong personal desire to get the war settled.” But he should also point out that the president “insists that the United States is not going to be pushed around, black-mailed or stampeded into making the wrong kind of a peace agreement.” Finally, he should say that “the president will continue to order whatever actions he considers necessary by air and sea”—the only reference to the bombing order, which had already gone out.

  In his memos, Nixon was repetitious to a degree unusual even for him, an indication of the strain he was under, due perhaps to the difficulty of his position. As an example of his dilemma, it was the Americans—in response to demands from Thieu—who had backed off the October agreements, not the North Vietnamese. But Nixon could not have Kissinger straightforwardly tell the American people his administration was bombing Hanoi to convince Thieu to sign. Thieu was seen increasingly in the United States as the sole obstacle to peace and thus was increasingly unpopular. On December 15, Senator Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican and one of the toughest hawks, said that if Thieu “bucks much more,” the United States should proceed with its withdrawal and “to hell with him.”