by Max Hastings
Within the president’s intimate circle, by early 1967 Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk, together with Johnson intimates Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas, remained committed to the struggle. In May Averell Harriman told the Russian ambassador that Rostow was the most dangerous hawk in the White House. Other members of the administration, however – even those whose faith in the war remained unshaken – now doubted that the military utility of bombing the North justified its high political cost. McNamara had emerged as a born-again sceptic, as were most members of an influential discussion group that met each Thursday afternoon in the office of under-secretary of state Nicholas Katzenbach. They included Cyrus Vance, William Bundy, sometimes Rusk and the CIA’s Richard Helms, occasionally the defense secretary himself. They called themselves the ‘No Committee’, because their existence was denied. They advocated focusing air power on the communists’ direct supply routes into South Vietnam.
Some were frankly distressed by the White House’s behaviour when peace proposals were advanced: through the United Nations; via British premier Harold Wilson, who dallied with the Russians in February 1967; using French intellectual admirers of Ho Chi Minh and the good offices of Harvard professor Henry Kissinger. Johnson made public noises in support of negotiations with Hanoi, and occasionally advanced grandstand proposals of his own. But his oft-repeated gambit of accompanying these with intensified bombing showed that he was bent upon achieving a military advantage before talking in earnest. Since Hanoi had the same idea, none of 1967’s ‘peace initiatives’ had much prospect of success.
The US military resisted the defeatism that privately beset some politicians, and especially McNamara. They were weary of their tiptoe, gradualist approach: they were in this thing now, and wanted a result. At the sharp end, pilots especially resented restrictions on attacking elements of the communist air defences. Colonel Jack Broughton was a West Pointer from New York who since 1945 had flown almost every type of combat aircraft. He served two fighter tours in Korea, then won a string of decorations, headed by the Air Force Cross, flying 102 F-105 missions over North Vietnam. By the summer of 1967 Broughton had become exasperated by the manner in which his chiefs ran the air war: ‘I was looking for a fight,’ he wrote in a later memoir.
He found it on 2 June, while serving as an acting wing commander. Two of his pilots returned from a mission on which one reported that he might have fired on a Russian ship in Haiphong harbour, as indeed he had. Next day, Moscow delivered a formal complaint about hits on its merchantman Turkestan, which had killed a seaman. Adm. Sharp, C-in-C Pacific, at first assured Washington that the Soviet charge was unfounded. Then the USAF launched an inquiry, in which Broughton intervened: he personally destroyed his pilots’ camera-gun film, to save them from blame. This cost him a court-martial conviction and a $40 fine. Though later overturned by the secretary of the air force, the episode effectively ended the tough New Yorker’s career. He stayed angry for the rest of his days, a professional warrior cast in a familiar mould: of priceless value when tangling with his country’s enemies, but incapable of reconciling himself to limited war. Meanwhile, on 29 June 1967 navy fighters strafed another Soviet ship, causing the administration to impose even more restrictive Rules of Engagement around Haiphong.
And still a faction among the military, which included Adm. Sharp and Gen. Wheeler, continued to press for intensification of the air war. Sen. Richard Russell, for decades a supporter of the president’s career, argued that the US should either start fighting to win, or quit Vietnam. At the end of August 1967 the Stennis sub-committee of the Senate published a report demanding air escalation, to ‘take the risks that have to be taken, and apply the force that is necessary to see the job through’. The Stennis hearings exposed the depth of the divide that had opened between McNamara, the president and the JCS. As far back as eighteen months earlier, the defense secretary had told correspondents at a private briefing that ‘no amount of bombing can end the war’. By late 1967 his intimates were puzzled and dismayed that he did not submit a principled resignation, rather than instead await the eviction order that belatedly came in November, when he discovered that he would be moving to the presidency of the World Bank, an appointment fixed by the president without consultation with the nominee.
Meanwhile the air hawks, led by Rostow, retained the ascendancy: Johnson authorised an ever-longer list of targets in North Vietnam. On the morning of 11 August 1967 bombers for the first time broke Hanoi’s Doumer bridge. There were intensive new attacks on the Yen Vien railyards, but at a significant cost in casualties: five F-4s were lost to AA guns and MiGs, which suddenly reappeared in force, for the first time attacking from the rear. Pilots were always warned to ‘check six’ – to watch for enemy behind at six o’clock – but they were so accustomed to seeing MiGs ahead that these unexpected new tactics hurt. Robin Olds, who led an attack in which two F-4 pilots were lost, wrote bitterly later: ‘I heard them scream. I turned, and all I saw were two burning objects.’
The ‘Kissinger peace initiative’ was an autumn 1967 piece of brokerage between Hanoi and Washington, using French intermediaries, which the Harvard academic attempted in a private capacity, though exploiting his influential government connections. Following its collapse, in mid-October Johnson approved the first direct attacks on the Phuc Yen MiG base. American losses nonetheless persisted. During a 17 November raid on an air defence facility outside Hanoi, Maj. Charles Cappelli’s F-105 was destroyed by a missile. A comrade remembered ruefully afterwards that ‘Cappy’ had breached a powerful taboo among pilots, by saying before he took off that he would handle some paperwork when he got back. His friend said, ‘It’s not done. You don’t talk about coming back.’
During the last phase of Rolling Thunder, which began in November 1967, American airmen faced the worst weather they had yet encountered. In December, enemy fighters, displaying growing proficiency, forced more than 10 per cent of attackers to jettison their bombloads before reaching targets. On the 17th, airmen reported seeing twenty MiGs in the sky simultaneously; two days later, fourteen. On 2 December five air force and three navy planes were shot down, all but three by SAMs. Radar bombing remained chronically inaccurate. In 1968, a hundred thousand sorties were flown against North Vietnam, but after Lyndon Johnson in March decreed an end of all strikes north of the 19th Parallel, these took place in a limited area where the communists were able to concentrate 2,600 AA guns.
The air campaign sometimes seemed cursed: attempts to interdict river traffic were frustrated when air-dropped magnetic mines detonated too far from passing ships. In March 1968 the ‘swing-wing’ F-111 entered the war accompanied by high hopes, but technical failures caused a series of crashes, and on its early sorties the aircraft performed poorly. On 11 March the communists mounted a devastatingly successful commando operation: NVA sappers of the 41st Battalion stormed the USAF’s mountaintop Station 85 on Pha Thi mountain in Laos, from which many Rolling Thunder missions were controlled. Twelve of its eighteen American personnel were killed, and the air force was obliged to bomb the captured installations, to destroy sensitive equipment. For the remainder of the Johnson presidency the fliers’ principal business was to restrict communist truck traffic southwards.
The tentative bombing policy initiated by the White House in February 1965 could have succeeded only against a weak-willed foe, such as the Hanoi politburo was not; or against a population that was offered choices, such as North Vietnam’s people were denied. Most of what went wrong with the 1965–68 campaign reflected the inability of air power to overcome a primitive society that was contradictorily strongly defended, through erratic and unhelpful weather patterns, using imperfect aiming technologies. Lyndon Johnson became merely one among a long procession of national leaders over the past century to discover the limitations of aerial bombardment.
2 ‘UP NORTH’
When the air campaign began, morale was high among the fliers of the USAF, navy and Marine Corps. Only a few flinched when their wives deliver
ed an ultimatum, ‘Me or the war: take your pick!’ Most young men – and some veterans, knocking forty – having devoted their careers to training for combat, were thrilled to be granted the opportunity to do it for real, to test themselves and their fabulous flying machines at the outer edge of danger, without need for the munificent $2.16 that a grateful nation awarded them in daily combat pay. After a spell of operations, USAF men headed for Bangkok, while an offshore carrier rotated to the Philippines for rest and maintenance. Ashore in the Cubi Point officers’ club at Subic Bay there was frenzied partying: karaoke, food fights, fist fights. Cmdr. John Nichols wrote: ‘They got knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk the first couple of days, then recuperated with golf, swimming, or deep breathing.’ And soon sailed back across the South China Sea, towards the enemy.
For targeting purposes the USAF, navy and MACV were apportioned responsibility for different sectors of North Vietnam. The carrier fliers attacked ‘Route Packages 2, 3, 4 and 6B’, which extended from the 18th Parallel north to China; the air force owned ‘RPs’ 5 and 6A, which included Hanoi and the North-West railroad; MACV borrowed from the USAF ‘RP’ 1. Most of the USAF’s tactical aircraft, together with some B-52s, were deployed at bases in Thailand, where by 1966 the US had thirty-four thousand servicemen, more than two-thirds wearing air force blue, and almost all working for the war, though also contriving to play a little: dispensaries at each of the airbases ministered to a thousand VD sufferers a year. The Bangkok government, uneasy about complicity in bombing, initially insisted that aircraft taking off from Thailand should not attack targets in Saigon’s territory, and that planes heading north should pretend to have taken off from the South, a fiction abandoned only in 1967.
None of the available Cold War aircraft was well-suited to ground attack. The USAF’s big F-105 ‘Thud’ could take punishment, but lacked manoeuvrability and demanded intensive maintenance: more than three hundred F-105s were eventually lost. The F-4 Phantom, designed as an interceptor, was magnificent for anything save low-altitude operations over North Vietnam, where thick black smoke from its engines showed off its position to every MiG within miles, and it was vulnerable to ground fire. When operations against North Vietnam began, the USAF owned six hundred F-105s, and about the same number of Phantoms. But while two hundred a year of the latter were still rolling off production lines, the former was no longer manufactured. Thuds were thus sent on the most dangerous missions, partly because their loss took down only one pilot, while F-4s carried crews of two – there was a sour joke that the back-seat man was needed to read the Rules of Engagement over enemy territory.
The navy’s best aircraft was the A-4 Skyhawk, much smaller than the Phantom. Designed by Ed Heinemann, it was simple, rugged and easily maintained – which mattered as combat operations intensified. Many A-4 squadrons maintained 100 per cent availability, which was seldom the case with more fickle types such as the photo-reconnaissance Vigilante: Skyhawks eventually flew more combat missions than any other navy warplane. The older F-8 Crusader was strangely configured, with the pilot sitting six feet ahead of the nose-wheel. It was a fine interceptor with gun main armament, handicapped by poor radar and a high accident rate. Robust old prop-driven Douglas Skyraiders flew many early missions – they scored two of the navy’s first ten MiG kills – but their sluggishness caused them to be relegated to ECM and rescue cover duties. Pilots said: ‘Speed is life.’
Aircraft over North Vietnam were directed from Station 85 in Laos, or from a control centre on Monkey Mountain – call-sign ‘Motel’ – located at Danang, midway between Saigon and Hanoi; Udorn in Thailand provided back-up. However, none of these sites could see what was happening over the Red River with sufficient precision to guide strikes effectively. Attackers were pretty much on their own, or rather dependent on airborne leaders, a colonel or commander according to service. Weather was an important factor in both operational effectiveness, which declined steeply in the monsoon months, and losses, which rose sharply in the same season. Again and again, pilots endured the terrors of forging far over enemy territory, only to find themselves obliged to divert or abort, jettisoning bombs, amid low cloud at the target.
The navy attacked the North from platforms ploughing hither and thither on ‘Yankee Station’ in the Tonkin Gulf, between sixty and 150 miles offshore. The US owned more aircraft-carriers than the rest of the world put together – sixteen strike and ten anti-submarine variants. The seventy-five-thousand-ton Forrestal class were much safer than the older Essexes: their size sustained stability even in heavy seas. Both carried around seventy aircraft – two fighter squadrons apiece, two or three ground-attack units, together with early-warning, photo-reconnaissance and helicopter detachments. In June 1965 Independence arrived, with a complement of aircraft that included A-6A Intruders, variously said to resemble frying pans or tadpoles, and equipped with DIANE – Digital Integrated Attack and Navigational Equipment – that conferred an all-weather capability. In November Kittyhawk brought a second A-6A squadron.
At full stretch, the carriers could make a lot of war: one December day, Enterprise handled 165 sorties. In the first full year of the campaign the navy mounted fifty-seven thousand sorties, lost over a hundred planes and eighty crewmen. The communists wisely abstained from launching their own air attacks on US warships, which would have incurred heavy losses at the hands of the CAP standing defensive patrols. Aboard each of the giant ‘flattops’, five thousand sailors and technicians sustained the activities of a-hundred-and-some fliers. While on offshore naval escorts and bombardment vessels men worked a comfortable and almost hazard-free routine, the pressure and peril of flight operations were very great, even before the enemy entered the story. Medical stress measurement showed that pilots found a night deck-landing more alarming than a daylight pass over Hanoi. Russian surveillance trawlers, seeking to make mayhem, regularly crossed the bows of carriers during launches. Chinese MiGs from Hainan island buzzed outgoing sorties.
Intense activity seldom flagged on flight and hangar decks. Personnel were identified by different jersey colours: yellow for plane directors, blue for elevator-operators and handlers, green for catapult and arrester-gear men, brown for plane captains, red for ordnance crews and firefighters. It was a constant struggle to make space for a full complement of planes: the operations room carried a scale template chart showing the position of all parked aircraft, shifted in accordance with orders phoned to the handlers. Tractor-drivers, mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, bore a heavy responsibility. So did duty pilots, obliged to sit for two or three hours in their ejector seats under the fiercely hot sky, ready to roll forward at a moment’s notice to the steam-wisping catapults.
Accidents, some of them grievous, were inseparable from carrier operations. In October 1966, after two skylarking crewmen ignited a parachute flare below decks, Oriskany suffered a fire in which forty-four men died. Forrestal mounted 150 sorties in four days without losing an aircraft, then an F-4 on the after end of the flight deck released a Zuni rocket into the park, with dire consequences: another Phantom’s fuel tank caught fire, and wind fanned the flames. Within minutes ordnance was exploding, and living quarters beneath the conflagration became a death trap. Escorts closed alongside and played their hoses, but secondary fires burned below for another twelve hours. A bomb already licked by flames exploded as a petty officer approached it, killing him and several other men. This did not deter similar acts of courage: a slightly-built young lieutenant somehow rolled another bomb over the side. When the conflagration was finally suppressed 134 men were dead, twenty-one aircraft had been destroyed and another forty-three damaged; Forrestal’s repairs cost $72 million.
Carriers customarily launched three strikes a day, with perhaps an hour’s interval between. Division staffs assigned targets; operations offices passed orders to wings; air groups and intelligence officers plotted routes. The first fliers were eating breakfast at 0430, then ‘suiting up’ and being briefed for an 0600 launch. When possible, new pi
lots were assigned targets close to the coast, so that if hit they had a better chance of ejecting into the sea. Fliers are superstitious, and many stroked rabbits’ feet or palmed silver dollars as they waddled to cockpits in G-suits and harnesses. Once aboard, ordnance safety-pins were extracted, ejection seats armed, canopies locked, wings extended. Handlers guided out the planes, engines screaming gently: an A-4 weighed a mere twenty thousand pounds with fuel and bombload, but a KA-3 tanker nudged seventy-three thousand. On the catapults, in three seconds they rocketed from standstill to 160 knots. Noise was relentless; the skill demanded from all involved, fliers and sailors alike, was very great.
A typical strike force might be composed of twenty bombers – perhaps sixteen A-4s and four F-8s, supported by two ‘Iron Hand’ flak-suppression aircraft. Crusader TarCAP escorts took up positions outside the formation, choosing the flank most likely to meet MiGs. An ECM aircraft stayed offshore, likewise a pair of airborne tankers. Two helicopters flew patterns, poised to pick up any flier downed in the sea or within reach on shore. Once airborne, the formation passed over an armada of small craft, most of them fishing junks and sampans: they crossed the coast knowing that the enemy was ready and waiting. In 1944 an average Pacific navy combat mission had lasted four hours: twenty years later, that was foreshortened to ninety minutes. Nonetheless, flying over North Vietnam was far more perilous than had been missions over North Korea.
As they approached the coast at twenty thousand feet, engine whine muted by helmets and headsets, pilots flicked switches to arm guns, bombs, rockets. They began a slow descent, its rate determined by the distance to the day’s target: Skyhawks might be making 350 knots, while the faster Crusaders held back. They heard the high-pitched tone of the enemy’s Fansong radar, warning SAMs en route. Thereafter radio silence could be broken, but they chatted as little as possible. Pilots were told, ‘If you’re hit, get off strike freq.!’ Commanders did not want the operational channel cluttered by desperate men proclaiming their plight. MiGs might start to flirt around formations, so that they would hear the immortal combat radio warning: ‘Bogies at nine o’clock’ – or four o’clock, or whatever. The enemy often sought to lure escorts towards SAM batteries; the fighter jocks, however, were briefed to stick close to their charges. Ground-attack pilots tried to dive onto targets with wing-tanks already emptied, because nobody wanted to carry external fuel into the dice game with flak. They approached from several angles simultaneously, to divide the enemy’s fire.