Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  For the past century air power has exercised a potent and often illusory charm for governments seeking to leverage might. It appears less messy, ugly, politically costly to dispatch planes to deliver ordnance from virgin skies, than to send soldiers to wade through a figurative and sometimes actual mangrove swamp. Most aircrew take for granted the spurious moral absolution conferred upon those who escape eye contact with the people whom they kill.

  Sceptics who have studied a little history know the limitations of bombing. It invariably hurts bystanders. It can be effective, indeed decisive, against moving troops and vehicles, and against unhardened installations. It often fails, however, against dug-in troops and complex industrial and communications targets. Between 1950 and 1953 the USAF expended enormous effort on severing the supply routes between China and North Korea, but Operation Strangle was never more than a limited success. In 1965 the bomber barons said: ‘Air power has moved on; technology enables us to land a bomb on a dime.’ Lyndon Johnson invited the US Navy and USAF to inflict measured punishment upon the North Vietnamese. Operation Rolling Thunder was intended to unleash American might in a restricted and thus humane fashion, forswearing any intent to enforce regime change.

  This exasperated some airmen, LeMay prominent among them, who argued for general devastation, and especially for closure of the port of Haiphong. In their eyes, striking softly was anathema, even un-American: they believed that the Allies did it right against Germany and Japan in 1944–45. Yet though USAF and navy chiefs fulminated against 1965–68 political restrictions on bombing, none stipulated that these rendered their forces incapable of delivering a result. They deemed the enemy’s society, a thing of bamboo and cotton, so frail that even a moderate dose of air-dropped explosives would destroy both his will and his means. Only much later, when communist resilience had become apparent, did commanders vociferously attribute blame for failure to their political masters. They remained blind to the fact that in a war of choice, the US could sustain the acquiescence of its own people and allies, never mind of its Russian and Chinese foes, only if there was some proportionality between force employed, civilian casualties incurred, and the objective at stake.

  In February 1965 the White House ordered bombing as a mere token of US resolve, rather than to fulfil defined military objectives. William Bundy said later, somewhat nonsensically: ‘Really, the policy was making itself and, in effect, declaring itself through our actions. And this was what the President wanted.’ On 8 March Maxwell Taylor cabled Johnson from Saigon, demanding a heavier punch: ‘I fear to date that Rolling Thunder in [North Vietnamese] eyes has merely been a few isolated thunder claps.’ A pilot wrote sourly: ‘It seemed as if we were trying to see how much ordnance we could drop, without disturbing the country’s way of life.’ The CIA’s John McCone warned that American scruple was interpreted by Hanoi as weakness. Thereafter more and more explosives were heaped upon an ever wider range of targets, so that by 1968, 643,000 tons had struck North Vietnam.

  Yet during the same period 2.2 million tons of bombs fell on the South: America’s leaders worried much more about killing civilians in the hostile North than in its supposedly friendly neighbour. ‘Hell-jelly’ – napalm – used promiscuously on Saigon’s territory, was never authorised on Hanoi’s. Arguments about the legitimacy of hitting specified installations and activities became arcane and ill-tempered. In May 1965 a wing commander expressed bewilderment: ‘What’s a military convoy? When a specified number of vehicles covers what length of road is it a convoy? Is a single vehicle travelling by itself an authorized target? … How far off a specified route are we authorized to follow a truckable ancillary road?’

  Early targets for Rolling Thunder were decided during Lyndon Johnson’s Tuesday luncheons with McNamara and Rusk. As they ate, the defense secretary produced a non-gastronomic menu, already agreed with the secretary of state. The president approved some objectives, rejected others, chiefly influenced by their presumed political sensitivity and proximity to Hanoi, where in 1965–66 he wanted no unpleasantness. He decreed a thirty-mile buffer zone along the Chinese border and around cities, wherein targets were safe from attack unless explicit consent was given. Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer asserted that ‘for most of his presidency he remained the target officer’. The intimacy of those White House discussions allowed the three principals to speak frankly to each other – until late 1967 no military representatives attended – but since decisions were unrecorded, there was quibbling afterwards about what had been agreed. In the early days, bridges accounted for four-fifths of authorised targets, yet Hanoi’s massive Paul Doumer was spared for two years. The best chance of achieving a hit on a narrow span was to drop a stick of bombs at a diagonal to it, but such tactics were deemed too hazardous to civilians, and thus ordnance was instead released in alignment, causing a high proportion of misses.

  Fliers shifting at five hundred knots were invited to distinguish civilian from military trucks from a height of three thousand feet. The Hanoi bicycle plant, an important component of North Vietnam’s transport system, was kept out of bounds until late in the war. To appease the squeamish, in 1967–68 the State Department sometimes decreed specific bombloads. A staffer observed wearily as he watched Rusk, his chief, dash to a White House meeting: ‘If you told him of a sure-fire way to defeat the Vietcong and get out of Vietnam, he would groan that he was too busy to worry about it now; he had to discuss next week’s bombing targets.’

  Fighter-bombers were used rather than B-52 Stratofortresses, which flew only 141 Rolling Thunder missions, just north of the DMZ. Yet, like most of the navy’s planes, the USAF’s six hundred F-4 Phantoms and matching force of F-105 Thunderchiefs lacked an all-weather capability. During the late-spring monsoon months when the cloudbase over North Vietnam seldom lifted, half the airmen’s designated objectives were unreachable. Moreover, an energetic defence exacted a rising toll. In 1965 the Americans lost 171 aircraft over the North; in the following year 280; in 1967, 326. The communists deployed massive numbers of anti-aircraft guns, and successive models of MiG fighter: the Russians supplied ground-controlled radar-intercept systems. Within a few months of Khrushchev’s fall, in November 1964 his successor Leonid Brezhnev began to dispatch SAM-2 missiles to North Vietnam; two years later, there were two hundred launch sites. Col. Jack Broughton, deputy commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, dubbed enemy territory ‘the center of hell with Hanoi as its hub’. Finally, while accuracy of aim was fair by contemporary standards, ‘iron bombs’, as distinct from the precision-guided munitions which came only later, were clumsy tools.

  Between March 1965 and July of the following year, Washington extended the Rules of Engagement to permit US planes to attack ever-larger expanses of the North, though city centres remained off-limits. SAM sites under construction were spared: an F-4 squadron commander from Midway repeatedly overflew a missile launcher that eventually became operational, and shot him down. Only when the first Phantom was lost on 24 July 1965 did the president reluctantly authorise strikes on a few sites: three days later fifty-four F-105s bombed two alleged launcher clusters. Pre-war tactical doctrine decreed that missiles, not guns or fighters, represented the key threat. Thus the planes approached at five hundred feet, below the missiles’ ‘envelope’ – and met a storm of anti-aircraft fire. The targets proved to be heavily-protected decoys: the ground defences had prepared an ambush, and downed four ‘Thuds’ – Thunderchiefs: that range of hills became known to aircrew as ‘Thud Ridge’, because it witnessed the downfall of so many. Two more F-105s collided on the way home, making this the most costly raid of the conflict thus far. Thereafter the air force adopted more sophisticated tactics, dispatching ‘Wild Weasel’ aircraft with naval Shrike radar-seeking missiles, their warheads laced with phosphorus so that further waves of attackers could aim at the smoke.

  Yet between one-third and half of all enemy missile launchers remained immune, because of their proximity to population centres. The North Vietnamese placed SAMs
in Hanoi’s football stadium, knowing that no harm would befall them. Not infrequently their own spent munitions and flak debris fell in civilian areas, where damage and casualties were of course blamed on the Americans. Ships in Haiphong harbour, some of them Chinese and Russian, fired on passing aircraft with impunity. Although Haiphong’s lighthouse was a forbidden target, pilots occasionally shot at it to relieve their feelings.

  Throughout the campaign, a fierce and debilitating rivalry about target selection persisted between the Joint Chiefs, C-in-C Pacific, the navy and Seventh Air Force. Mark Clodfelter, authoritative historian of the bombing, has written: ‘The absence of a single air commander produced chaos.’ Seventh’s chief Gen. William Momyer, based in Saigon, nurtured a list of some four thousand possibilities, while the Defense Intelligence Agency’s rival catalogue ran to five thousand. C-in-C Pacific controlled the B-52s from Honolulu. Momyer was eager to destroy the Red River dykes, wrecking the rice production of the delta, but the White House would not hear of attacks that might precipitate mass starvation.

  The first phase of the air war was among its most costly for the Americans: in March 1965 the navy lost fifteen to thirty planes per thousand sorties, whereas by autumn and through 1966 this fell to seven, later to four. Fifty-eight per cent of navy combat losses were attributed to ground fire, compared with 73 per cent of the USAF’s, and 64 per cent of the Marines’: in all, flak accounted for sixteen hundred of the 2,300 US planes downed. Pre-war theoreticians had been correct that guns could not track low-level attackers, but they underrated the potency of saturating ‘boxes’ of sky with fire.

  The US air effort intensified in the latter part of 1965, rising from 2,879 sorties in August to 3,553 in September. By the year’s end the Joint Chiefs were realistic enough to acknowledge that the enemy’s war-making capability was scarcely impaired. They now fixed on oil as a key objective, though the Defense Intelligence Agency believed that North Vietnam could sustain essential activity using just thirty-two thousand metric tonnes a year, while having a storage capacity of 179,000 tonnes. The oil-target enthusiasts might also have noticed that Hanoi’s trains ran on coal or wood.

  Authorisation to attack oil was secured by new national security adviser Walt Rostow, who in April 1966 replaced an exhausted and dispirited McGeorge Bundy. To colleagues Rostow extolled Johnson’s guts and compared him to Lincoln, asserting that ‘If LBJ only kept up the military momentum, he would be in the clear in another few months.’ On 29 June, navy planes hit Haiphong POL (Petrol, Oil, Lubricant) complex. A post-strike reconnaissance pilot said: ‘It looked as if we had wiped out the entire world’s supply of oil.’ By that date, however, the Vietnamese had dispersed their reserves in drums and underground tanks. Later in the summer Washington allowed B-52s to bomb military targets within the DMZ, and some ten miles north into communist territory. Each aircraft could deliver ten times the bombload of a fighter: the Stratofortresses transformed the area into a cratered moonscape. Enemy supply movements, however, seemed almost undiminished, as they were also down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Weather restricted US bombing in late 1966, so that targets around the Red River delta could only have been hit by using B-52s, with the prospect of increased civilian casualties, an option rejected by the White House. Between 2 and 5 December, however, fighter-bombers attacked railyards, truck depots and fuel dumps close to Hanoi.

  At year’s end the Defense Intelligence Agency calculated that a total of 4,600 North Vietnamese trucks had been destroyed, the same number damaged, together with 4,700 supply boats sunk and 8,700 damaged, eight hundred railroad cars and sixteen locomotives wrecked. Seventh Air Force had so many target photos that it lacked interpreters to examine them all, and to make sense of the findings. In April 1967, when attacks on the North’s electricity grid began, intelligence calculated how much power plant was being destroyed, but offered no plausible estimate of how much remained – which was what mattered.

  Almost all the uniformed decision-makers favoured bombing and mining Haiphong, through which flowed most of Hanoi’s military imports. The president, however, flinched from a confrontation with Moscow about the Soviet freighters that offloaded there. Hanoi’s government communications remained inviolate, because key switchboards were located close to the Soviet embassy. In December 1966 the president advanced through the Poles on the ICC an absurd proposal to restrict bombing within ten miles of Hanoi, if the communists would abstain from attacks within ten miles of Saigon. This offer having failed to elicit a response, the US imposed a unilateral ten-mile prohibition on targets around Ho’s capital.

  By one of the larger in the war’s feast of ironies, Rolling Thunder did incomparably more harm to the government of Lyndon Johnson than to that of Le Duan. International and some US domestic opinion recoiled from the mere fact of the bombing, and was unimpressed by its moderation. Contrarily, Johnson faced fierce criticism from congressional hawks who wanted him to hit the enemy harder – to go for the jugular. When he sought credit for his humanity by staging a seasonal bombing pause between 24 December 1965 and 31 January 1966, this was greeted by a familiar stony silence from Hanoi; scorn from the airmen; worldwide indifference. The graduated escalation of air attacks provided the communists with a gentle learning curve, which enabled them progressively to improve their defences, to develop counter-measures amid an ongoing drizzle of explosives rather than the monsoon the USAF and USN wished to unleash.

  By 1967 the Vietnamese deployed twenty-five SAM battalions with six launchers each, around a thousand AA guns, together with 125 MiG fighters. While there was no large-scale industrial manufacturing in Ho Chi Minh’s dominions, war created a more technologically sophisticated local activity than any Vietnamese could earlier have envisaged: air defence. American losses rose as more targets were attacked around Haiphong and Hanoi – ‘Downtown’, as American pilots knew the capital. Until late 1966, air operations across South-East Asia cost the US an average of less than one plane per thousand sorties. Over North Vietnam, however, air force losses approached twenty-five times that rate. Planes began to bomb from higher altitudes, often releasing ordnance at seven rather than four thousand feet. This cut gunfire losses, at the cost of further reducing accuracy. Attackers began to employ anti-personnel cluster bombs, some of them filled with delayed-detonation bomblets, to force defending gun and missile crews to hug their shelters.

  Although communist MiGs shot down relatively few US planes, they sometimes forced attackers to jettison bombs and even ECM pods, in order to evade them. At a conference in the Philippines about the MiG problem, Gen. Momyer conferred with Col. Robin Olds, the big, boisterous commander of an F-4 wing. The two men, alike World War II fighter aces, devised an ingenious plan, Operation Bolo, which was executed on 2 January 1967. Communist fighters avoided F-4s, tangling only with bomb-laden Thunderchiefs. Thus some F-4s were disguised as F-105s by the addition of radar pods, and headed towards an apparent big bombing raid on the MiG base at Phuc Yen. Early in the afternoon, above a thick cloudbase, Olds was poised overhead with more than forty fighters. The MiGs were slow to respond, but when they took off the F-4s’ Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles downed at least five enemy aircraft in fifteen minutes, for no loss to themselves: Olds himself achieved the first of four ‘kills’. A few days later, a similar ruse was employed: two F-4s entered enemy airspace so close together that ground radar identified them as a single plane: when MiG-21s engaged the Phantoms, two were shot down.

  In March almost three hundred sorties were directed against the Thai Nguyen ironworks, which eventually fell silent. From above the persistent spring overcast the air force conducted night bombing by radar, with indifferent results: ordnance landed an average of a thousand yards from aiming points, not much of an improvement on World War II accuracy. The navy meanwhile mounted almost a hundred sorties against Haiphong’s power plants, which were obliged to suspend generation at the end of May.

  The USAF mounted up to two hundred sorties daily when weather permitted: two w
aves in the morning, two in the afternoon. Though the enemy did not fall for any further stunts such as that pulled by Col. Olds, in May 1967 the Americans claimed destruction of twenty-three MiGs, for the loss of just three of their own planes in combat – half North Vietnam’s fighter-pilot strength was wiped out. On the 19th the navy began to employ Walleye TV-guided bombs against Hanoi’s power installations, having persuaded the president that these were accurate enough to do minimal civilian damage. This proved so, but the North Vietnamese had sufficient generators to sustain vital electricity supplies. By July eight thousand sorties a month were being flown against the North Vietnamese panhandle, south of the 20th Parallel, bringing rail traffic to a standstill. Further north, however, the communists held open the vital lines between China and Hanoi.