by Max Hastings
Back on the ground after that first operation of the campaign, almost all aircraft were alleged to have hit their targets: three B-52s had been lost, two more severely damaged. There was dismay among crews when they discovered that many would be required to operate again the following night, and that they would be obliged once more to follow a single track, decreed by commanders back at SAC headquarters in Omaha. Maj. Gen. Pete Sianis, deputy chief of staff for operations, had heard his officers’ proposals for the attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong, using multiple approach routes. Then he said decisively, ‘That’s not the way we do it!’ He moved the coloured tapes from the map, and mandated: ‘One way in and one way out!’ His tactics appeared to be vindicated on the night of 19 December, when though two of ninety-three B-52s that attacked were damaged, none was shot down.
As bombers approached Hanoi on the following night, the 20th, most of the city’s defending SAM batteries were ordered to reduce salvoes from three to two, because missiles were running short and American strikes were impeding deliveries; SAMs were also now reserved exclusively for B-52s. Despite these handicaps, as the attacks developed the missile crews found their task made much easier by the rigour of SAC’s flight planning. In the 20 December raids, six B-52s were shot down out of ninety-nine that bombed. In the words of a North Vietnamese officer, ‘The US Air Force had fully exposed their pattern of operations [and] … flight paths from the west-northeast … the enemy’s approach sector, timing and flight formation still had not changed.’ John Filmore Graham was among the angry fliers, saying: ‘We were like ducks in a carnival.’ On 26 December, SAC belatedly and reluctantly agreed to change tactics: 120 B-52s approached Hanoi and Haiphong on ten different axes, and all bombed within a fifteen-minute span. Two aircraft were lost.
Lt. Col. Bill Conlee, an electronic-warfare officer aboard one of them that night, described his path to captivity after ten SAMs exploded around his cell in the last seconds before it reached release point. His plane was bracketed by two missiles, which started a fire in the left wing and wounded five crewmen. Cabin pressurisation collapsed, and electrical power was lost. The alarm light went on, the crew ejected. As Conlee descended on his parachute, he had the unnerving experience of seeing two SAMs whoosh past. He was bleeding profusely from multiple abrasions as he hit the ground, where a rattle of small-arms fire was directed at him. A crowd of Vietnamese closed in, seized the American and stripped him to his underwear. Local people struck him repeatedly with farm implements and staves as he was marched towards a road, breaking several ribs and injuring his right knee. He was bundled face down onto the floor of a truck for the hour-long ride to Hanoi, then thrown out onto the tarmac, dislocating his shoulder. Two soldiers dragged him into the courtyard of what he found to be the Hanoi Hilton, where he was placed in solitary confinement.
Back at base between missions, frustration, exhaustion and stress were vented in familiar ways. By the second day of Linebacker, said Robert Clark, when a man walked into the Andersen officers’ club ‘you could smell the fear. Guys were hanging onto each other and just revalidating the fact they’re still alive.’ There was heavy drinking and some fights; Christmas trees and sea-marker dye were tossed into the pool; flares were fired on the golf course; a liferaft exploded into inflation on the dance floor. Jon Bisher said: ‘If you’re a prisoner on Death Row, you’re pretty free to do what you want … The attitude was they can’t do anything to you, they’re not going to send you home.’ Mark Clodfelter has written that a key factor in plummeting morale was ‘the failure of US political and military leadership to articulate exactly what the crews needed to do to achieve success … they could see no end to the missions that they flew’.
Casualty reporting was not always handled sensitively. Katie Turner was at the Andersen officers’ club pool when she was told that her husband would not be coming home. Some wives of aircrew posted as ‘Missing’ went years without learning more, and commanders were probably wrong to have kept alive hope of their survival. ‘Cruise widows’ back at the Californian naval air stations also found themselves in a state of prolonged, agonising uncertainty. There was bitterness in both the USAF and USN that the Nixon administration did not take a tougher line with Hanoi over demanding answers about missing men, though most likely the communists themselves knew nothing about the identities of some charred or even vaporised corpses.
As Linebacker II continued, it proved necessary to waive crew rest periods. More than a dozen men reported sick after the first couple of missions, rather than endure another. Towards the end this figure crept nearer to forty – around one-tenth of the aircrew flying each operation. Two friends and comrades of Paul Munninghoff ‘went on strike, and [I] heard second-hand of several others’. Likewise pilot Ted Hanchett ‘[could] attest to crew desertions … We kept putting our lives at risk when we could end this quickly if our leaders wanted to.’ Wing commanders handled refuseniks gently: they were spared disciplinary action. Both fliers and defenders became ever more stressed and weary. Some B-52 pilots flouted the order to approach targets straight and level, instead adopting drastic evasive manoeuvres. In all, during those eleven nights around a thousand SAMs were fired, sometimes in barrages that proved notably effective.
Before Washington ordered a halt to Linebacker II on 29 December, fifteen B-52s had been lost, and the airmen had no means of knowing that they would not be asked to bomb again. On 3 January 1973, SAC’s commander Gen. John Meyer, a distinguished former World War II fighter pilot, staged a morale-boosting trip to Andersen, which proved disastrous. Meyer had previously visited Guam accompanied by his family, which galled men pained by their own separations. Now, there was unease when he pinned an Air Force Cross on Col. McCarthy, the wing commander, who had flown only two Linebacker II missions, as a passenger. During a subsequent Q&A with crews, a flier complained about the strain that intensive operations imposed on relationships. This caused the general to chortle, ‘Some marriages weren’t meant to last.’ Then Meyer harangued crews about the need for cell discipline on bomb runs, adding a threat of courts-martial for those who strayed. This prompted astonishing, unprecedented scenes between aircrew and a USAF general: some men walked out in disgust, others booed and catcalled; chairs, Coke cans, briefing books were hurled at the stage, hitting Meyer several times. A cluster of senior officers closed in and hustled the visitor out. As he drove away, his car was pelted with gravel by enraged pilots. Here was one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of Strategic Air Command.
Some aircrew were embarrassed by such behaviour, but many believed that Meyer brought his humiliation upon himself. In the words of James Rash, ‘most of these crews had spent too many hours in the air in a hostile environment … And a good many of us had friends who were living in close comradeship a few days ago and now were dead.’
As for the world’s response to the Christmas bombing, both at home in the US and internationally, it was overwhelmingly unfavourable. Hanoi handled its propaganda activities with cold brilliance, showcasing film footage of dead and screaming children, a wrecked hospital. The USAF’s targets were mostly rail centres and electricity plants: capacity fell from 115,000 kilowatts to twenty-nine thousand, and a quarter of all the country’s fuel stocks were destroyed. But the mayor of Hanoi announced that the raids had killed 1,318 civilians, and a further 305 were reported dead in Haiphong. The Washington Post denounced the attacks as ‘the most savage and senseless act of war ever visited … by one sovereign people upon another’. Tom Wicker’s New York Times comment was headed ‘Shame on Earth’. In London The Times said the bombing was ‘not the conduct of a man who wants peace very badly’, while the Daily Mirror headlined: ‘Nixon’s Christmas Deluge of Death’. Hamburg’s Die Zeit wrote: ‘Even allies must call this a crime against humanity.’ Sen. Edward Kennedy said the attacks ‘should outrage the conscience of all Americans’. In Canberra Gough Whitlam’s newly installed Australian Labor government dissociated itself from the US, and denounced Linebacker I
I. One minister, Tom Uren, condemned Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘mentality of thuggery’. Another called the air campaign ‘the most monstrous act in human history, the policy of maniacs’.
Such intemperate language reflected a melding of wild passions generated over a decade with a tide of liberal loathing for Nixon, rising almost daily under the influence of Watergate revelations. Many American conservatives kept faith both with the president and his policies: they accepted his claim that the bombing was necessary to pressure the communists to release PoWs. Globally, however, Linebacker II strengthened an image of the North Vietnamese as hapless victims of unbridled US violence. The language used to denounce the bombing was hyperbolic, but almost half a century later the evidence suggests that Linebacker II was unjustified politically or militarily, save to serve the partisan purposes of the US president.
Hanoi newspapers claimed that, since the campaign began, its forces had downed 3,500 aircraft, though in reality since 1964 the US had lost over the North 944 planes and ten helicopters. Seventh Air Force’s Gen. William Momyer wrote long afterwards to a fellow-airman: ‘My regret is that we didn’t win the war. We had the force, skill and intelligence, but our civilian betters wouldn’t turn us loose. Surely our air force has lived up to all expectations … If there is one lesson to come out of this, it must be a reaffirmation of the axiom – don’t get in a fight unless you are prepared to do whatever is necessary to win.’ In the post-World War II universe, his remark constituted strategic illiteracy. There is no reason to suppose that air power could have changed the outcome of the Vietnam conflict unless Momyer and his kin had been permitted to unleash nuclear weapons – as indeed some wished.
The Christmas bombing altered the diplomatic landscape by scarcely a jot or tittle from what it had been in October. A deal would come whenever the Saigon regime could be persuaded to swallow it. Hanoi was already confident of securing at the conference table most of what it wanted, with the balance to follow as a final payment.
26
A Kiss Before Dying
1 THE PRISONER
Few men cared more about the outcome of the Paris negotiations than almost six hundred American prisoners of the communists. Most were aircrew, held in or around Hanoi. However, some twenty or thirty captured in the South – the number varied between 1965 and 1973 – were dispersed in jungle camps around the Cambodian border. Foremost among these was foreign service officer Doug Ramsey, in the hands of the Vietcong since January 1966. For much of his early captivity he occupied a bamboo cage shorter than his own ill-nourished frame, infested with ants, scorpions, termites and mosquitoes. He was allowed to shave, painfully, only monthly. He received letters from home twice in seven years, and once went seven weeks without an opportunity to wash. For a time he shared his quarters with a six-foot black-and-yellow banded krait, which he found in his bed. Eventually it slithered away, to be spotted and killed by guards.
At the outset, Ramsey sought to convince his captors that he was an unimportant civilian. They asked, not unreasonably: why, then, your AR-15 carbine? What about the grenades in your truck cab? As for his supposed insignificance, the communists discovered that the Washington Post had described him as ‘the most important prisoner taken to date’, ranking as a lieutenant-colonel. Associated Press said that he was ‘one of the most knowledgeable officers in the civilian ranks of the US mission’. He was a highly cultured man, whose view of war was formed by Thucydides and Sun Tzu. His father was a retired US government official, a New Dealer who saw much of the hardship of the Depression, and Doug was infected by his parent’s cynicism about political appointees in public service, comparing them unfavourably with the integrity of career professionals. Following Harvard Graduate School, where ‘Mac’ Bundy was among his teachers, he spent two years with US Air Force intelligence in Japan and Okinawa. After a spell on the State Department’s Lebanon desk, he rejected an offer to transfer to the CIA, because he had always thought poorly of James Bond. Yet his captors took it for granted that he was an intelligence officer.
Ramsey and other prisoners intermittently held with him were spared the tortures to which those in Hanoi were subjected until 1969, but suffered worse privations. They never knew when or whether they might be killed, the fate of some other Americans who had fallen into VC hands. Ramsey heard that US military prisoners Sgt. Ken Roraback and Capt. Humbert Versace had been executed shortly before his own capture, by being led to a table as if for a feast, then shot in the head from behind. He begged that, if he himself was to go the same way, he should be granted fifteen minutes in which to write a letter to his parents. For the first two years, maintained by his captors in a contrived state of terror, he suffered insomnia and nightmares about his own execution: ‘I don’t know how I held up psychologically.’
He was obliged to seek guards’ permission to sit up, lie down, brush his teeth: orders were emphasised by whistle blasts. The VC shot Americans who absolutely declined to communicate. Assisted by his command of Vietnamese, Ramsey engaged in frequent exchanges, telling his captors – truthfully – that he favoured village socialism for their country. When he eventually signed a propaganda statement to this effect, there was much argument among the cadres about whether its wording was sufficiently humble. Ramsey was repeatedly quizzed about – for instance – how many troops the US might commit to an invasion of the North. He guessed 400,000–700,000, which prompted a cadre to say approvingly, ‘Now you are on the road to life.’ Yet near-starvation remained the norm. Some prisoners died because they could not endure the diet – a lethal squeamishness that had been known to earlier US prisoners in North Korea as ‘give-upitis’. Marine Major Don Cook, by contrast, forced himself to eat his own vomit.
Ramsey suffered an impressive range of diseases – hookworm, typhoid, scurvy, hepatitis, beri-beri. Malaria attacked both sides indiscriminately, and his deputy camp commandant was among those who died of it; he himself suffered 123 attacks. There were also, naturally, dysentery and its amoebic variation. The slightest cut became infected. Ramsey wrote later of the condition of himself and his fellow-prisoners: ‘Each of us had been reduced to a shrunken, embarrassed parody of his former physical self … so weak at one time or another that he had to be carried to the latrine – frequently, too late. Until one becomes conditioned to prison camp life, few things are apt to be more humiliating to grown men – especially in a group containing gung-ho Marines and macho special forces officers. Worse yet, however, is the humiliation of waking up after lying in your own filth for hours or even days because you are shackled down and/or are in solitary confinement.’ A prisoner once defecated eighty-four times in a single day.
Ramsey described a malaria attack, accompanied by cramps, violent shivering and loss of bowel control. Under a rainstorm, ‘I managed to slosh my way in slow motion to the end of my chain, dig a tiny cathole, squirt out a diarrhetic flood, and stagger back – all without passing out, but only by dint of a number of trees and posts which I was able to hold onto.’ Then he missed his hammock and collapsed into six inches of muddy water, where he sat for ten minutes, ‘too weak even to swear’. For four days with a high fever he was unable to eat; the acute phase persisted for a fortnight. A fellow-prisoner, Pte. Charlie Crafts from Maine, described the sensations: ‘You feel like someone has shoved the hose from a vacuum up your ass and sucked out all your insides.’ At one point in his own bout, Ramsey lapsed into convulsions, causing his fellow-prisoners to believe that he was doomed.
They wore the same black pyjamas as the guards, and spent long periods harnessed to trees, ‘a heavy chain rubbing your ankle and a big lock banging away on your anklebone’. Physical labour came hard to these enfeebled men, so that Ramsey suffered dizziness when ordered to chop wood. In the winter of 1969 the prisoners were obliged to construct their own new camp, a task that took five weeks. Tensions mounted as the PoWs argued about who was and was not doing their share of work. As they could not shout at the Vietcong, instead they abused each other for snorin
g or farting. Yet Ramsey bore no lasting ill-will towards fellow-prisoners who behaved badly, including two civilian contractors. ‘Most PoWs who have themselves suffered extreme hardship tend not to be too judgemental towards others, even if they have cracked under duress.’
At one point COSVN decreed that Charlie Crafts should be released. The guards argued against this, proposing that instead Don Cook should be let go, because he had done two years. Cook, however, urged successfully that Crafts should be the supremely fortunate man, because the soldier’s entire body system was collapsing. After a couple of years, a senior cadre who visited the camp told Ramsey that it had been decided he should be kept alive, provided he made no attempt to escape. When Cook told this coldly impressive Vietnamese that he himself was a Catholic, the cadre promptly responded: ‘Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis’ – ‘Peace towards men of goodwill.’ When Ramsey and Cook were allowed to converse, they held long debates on Catholic doctrine.
In the course of seven years, Ramsey gained passing access to just five books – Tom Sawyer, Three Men in a Boat, David Copperfield and two works by Australian communist Wilfred Burchett. The Bible was explicitly forbidden, a source of deep distress to some prisoners. Once Ramsey and Cook caught a snatch of a BBC broadcast of a Bach concert: ‘We both cried like babies.’ In his fifth year of imprisonment Ramsey got a deck of cards, with which he played serial solitaire. As for his dreams, ‘I would sometimes visualise myself in a $600 Brooks Brothers custom sharkskin suit and a pair of Florsheim Imperials, posing casually with a well-built showgirl draped over the hood of a Mercedes 600 outside the Las Vegas Strip’s largest resort hotel – then sending a framed, wish-you-were-here 16˝ by 20˝ colour photograph to one VC guard whose tastes I strongly suspected ran to such things. But these images didn’t seem nearly as important to me as the Van Gogh sun shining on a Van Gogh field, or a hot bath, Coke, conversation and heavy classical music at 90 decibels.’