Gradualism on Trial

To Hanoi and Back

The United States Air Force and North Vietnam

1966–1973

Wayne Thompson

Air Force History and Museums Program

United States Air Force

Washington, D.C. 2000
ii

To Hanoi and Back

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thompson, Wayne, 1945-

To Hanoi and back : the United States Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-

1973/Wayne Thompson

p. 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975--Aerial operations, American.

2. United States. Air Force--History--Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975. 

I. Title

DS558.8 .T47 2000

959.704'348--dc21 00-057606
Foreword

No experience etched itself more deeply into Air Force thinking than the air

campaigns over North Vietnam. Two decades later in the deserts of Southwest

Asia, American airmen were able to avoid the gradualism that cost so many lives

and planes in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Readers should come away from this

book with a sympathetic understanding of the men who bombed North Vietnam.

Those airmen handled tough problems in ways that ultimately reshaped the Air

Force into the effective instrument on display in the Gulf War.

This book is a sequel to Jacob Van Staaveren’s Gradual Failure: The Air

War over North Vietnam, 1965–1966, which we have also declassified and are

publishing. Wayne Thompson tells how the Air Force used that failure to build a

more capable service—a service which got a better opportunity to demonstrate

the potential of air power in 1972.

Dr. Thompson began to learn about his subject when he was an Army

draftee assigned to an Air Force intelligence station in Taiwan during the

Vietnam War. He took time out from writing To Hanoi and Back to serve in the

Checkmate group that helped plan the Operation Desert Storm air campaign

against Iraq. Later he visited Air Force pilots and commanders in Italy immediately after the Operation Deliberate Force air strikes in Bosnia. During

Operation Allied Force over Serbia and its Kosovo province, he returned to

Checkmate. Consequently, he is keenly aware of how much the Air Force has

changed in some respects—how little in others. Although he pays ample attention to context, his book is about the Air Force. He has written a well-informed

account that is both lively and thoughtful.

The bibliography at the end of the volume lists several other Air Force

books about the Vietnam War. Our history program is engaged in a constant

effort to reevaluate the service’s past in light of new research and new perspectives. We welcome criticism of our published work and suggestions for future

publications.

RICHARD P. HALLION

Air Force Historian 

iii

Preface
The Author

Wayne Thompson is Chief of Analysis at the Air Force History Support Office in Washington. During the Vietnam War, he served as an Army draftee at an

Air Force intelligence station on Taiwan. He did his undergraduate work at

Union College in Schenectady, New York, and the University of St.

Andrews, Scotland. He earned his doctorate in history at the University of

California, San Diego, under Armin Rappaport. In August 1990, Dr.

Thompson joined the Checkmate air campaign planning group in the

Pentagon. Subsequently he was Senior Historical Advisor for the Gulf War

Air Power Survey. In 1995 the Air Force sent him to study bombing operations launched from Italy against Bosnian targets, and in 1999 the crisis in

Kosovo turned his attention to air operations over Serbia.

iv
Preface

When I began to study these events, I thought I would write about one of the

saddest portions of the Air Force’s history. I may well have done so, but gradually (about as gradually as the Rolling Thunder air campaign of 1965–68 went

about its business in North Vietnam) I came to take a more positive view of the

Air Force’s experience in Southeast Asia. Certainly the pain and death we normally associate with warfare caused many to suffer. Certainly the constraints

under which the Air Force had to operate were extraordinarily restrictive and

self-defeating. Certainly a reputation for ineffectiveness attached itself to bombing in North Vietnam and made air power seem a much less promising instrument than it was. But after years of seeking a more effective use of limited air

power, the Linebacker campaigns over North Vietnam in 1972 joined with aerial mining of the ports there and simultaneous air operations in South Vietnam to

make a dramatic difference—albeit a tardy and temporary one.

This rebound of American air power began well before the North

Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam in 1972 and continued long after the end

of the war in 1975. The struggle for Southeast Asia helped to transform the Air

Force from an almost total focus on potential nuclear warfare against the Soviet

Union into a more varied and flexible force wielding increasingly sophisticated

conventional weapons. But thinking about air power and about Southeast Asia

lagged behind advances in technology. When the ultimate defeat finally came to

South Vietnam and its American ally, persuasive victories for the new precision

of American air power still lay far in the future.

Although the air campaigns against North Vietnam delivered a smaller tonnage of bombs than parallel efforts in South Vietnam and Laos, the Air Force’s

intellectual and emotional investment in North Vietnam was greater. There a

heavier concentration of air defenses combined with the distance of targets from

bases in Thailand and South Vietnam to make air operations more dangerous

and more difficult. From its beginnings, the Air Force had defined itself as the

service best able to attack targets far from the ground battle or the sea battle.

Where troops fought as in South Vietnam, the Air Force provided only a portion

of the firepower and a portion of the airlift. But a combination of heavy bombers

and air refueling tankers permitted the Air Force to strike hard at great range—a

capability not exploited in North Vietnam until the war was nearly over. While

the bomber’s advantage in long-range striking power had come to be shared not

only with Air Force intercontinental nuclear missiles but also with the Navy’s

v
submarine-launched nuclear missiles, for long-range conventional attacks Air

Force bombers remained the strongest option. When bombers were subtracted

from the equation, however, the Air Force contribution lost its uniqueness. Little

of North Vietnam was far from the Gulf of Tonkin, where Navy fighters could

launch from carriers and reach much of the country without air refueling.

Navy and Marine aircraft joined fully in the bombing of North Vietnam, all

the more so because American fears of Chinese intervention restricted the Air

Force’s heavy B–52 bombers to a very limited role in North Vietnam for much of

the war. Partly because the Air Force had concentrated on nuclear warfare preparations, it even found itself using some fighter planes and munitions developed

by the Navy.

The B–52s with their radar and large bombload could have dealt a far more

severe blow to many North Vietnamese targets from the outset of the war not

only in daylight and clear weather but also at night or in the bad weather prevalent over North Vietnam much of the year. The political prohibition against making full use of the B–52’s area bombing capability was an ingredient in the stimulation the war gave to the Air Force’s search for a precision, all-weather,

around-the-clock bombing capability for fighter aircraft. By the end of the war,

laser-guided bombs had made true precision a reality, but darkness and foul

weather continued to limit the effectiveness of air power.

The closing phase of American participation in the war brought a political

situation and a military situation (as well as a technological situation) more

favorable to American air power. The Air Force’s story in Southeast Asia consequently carried a sense of upward movement even though the service shared

responsibility for losing the war.

The defeat of South Vietnam by communist North Vietnam in 1975 was certainly a defeat for American military power (air as well as ground), despite the

fact that it was withdrawn from the struggle before the North’s successful invasion. Laos and Cambodia also fell under communist control, and over a million

Cambodians died as a result. The passage of time and the ultimately favorable

conclusion of the Cold War (in which the Vietnam War was embedded) have

eased the ache of defeat, as has the growing prosperity of Thailand and other

noncommunist countries in Southeast Asia. But a mere mention of the bombing

of North Vietnam can still arouse passionate debate among older Americans,

many of whom condemn it for being much too harsh or much too weak or simply irrelevant.

For those who debated air power’s role in the war at the time and since, the

level of passion as well as abstraction was often very high. Readers of these

pages should come away with a more concrete sense of air operations and the

Americans involved—from the aircrews who risked their lives to the generals

who led them and the politicians who sent them. The portrait drawn of the North

Vietnamese is necessarily much less sharply defined, and therefore observations

on the impact of the bombing are cautious. 

vi

To Hanoi and Back
Jacob Van Staaveren’s Gradual Failure: The Air War over North Vietnam,

1965–1966 took our story through the belated attempt to destroy North

Vietnam’s oil storage facilities in the summer of 1966. By then the North

Vietnamese had dispersed gasoline and other oil products from tank farms to

barrels scattered around the country. It was another lesson in the weakness of a

gradual bombing campaign like Rolling Thunder. After eighteen months of

bombing, even North Vietnam’s airfields were still largely unscathed, not to

mention its principal port at Haiphong and its capital city of Hanoi. The Air

Force had proposed bombing targets in all those areas at the outset with B–52s,

but President Lyndon Johnson kept all air attacks well away from the major

cities for months and eventually permitted only fighter aircraft to attack targets

near them. No earlier president had so involved himself in the details of target

selection and tactics. 

Not until 1972, when President Richard Nixon was pulling American forces

out of Southeast Asia, did B–52s drop bombs close to Hanoi and Haiphong.

While those cities were still largely spared, the Linebacker campaigns contrasted

sharply with Rolling Thunder. Not only was there a bigger role for B–52s, but

the new technology of laser-guided bombing permitted fighter aircraft to destroy

bridges and other targets quickly with a few bombs instead of risking many

fighters in repeated raids. This relatively encouraging experience came after

years of deadly frustration for the Air Force and years of rebuilding for North

Vietnam. Between President Johnson’s termination of Rolling Thunder in 1968

and North Vietnam’s invasion of South Vietnam in 1972, North Vietnam suffered little bombing. Indeed, Gen. John Lavelle was fired as commander of

Seventh Air Force after an airman charged that false reporting hid a few small

raids on North Vietnamese preparations for invasion.

General Lavelle is but one of the memorable people readers will encounter

here. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I am acquainted with many of

the men who figure in these pages. They have been generous with their time and

knowledge; I am especially grateful to the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots

Association for including me not only in their stateside reunions but also in their

first return to the Thailand bases in 1987. I prize as well the advantage of knowing many of the historians cited in the notes. All of them deserve to be thanked

individually, but their names would constitute too long a list and inevitably I

would omit people who should be included. Nevertheless, I do want to give

some idea of how this book came to be written.

Armin Rappaport at the University of California, San Diego, guided my

early study of American involvement in Asia and proved a friend when the

Vietnam War interrupted my doctoral work with a tour as an Army draftee at an

Air Force intelligence station in Taiwan. After finishing a dissertation on

American military control of the Moro Province in the Philippines, I went to

work for the Air Force. My first boss in the Air Force history program was

Warren Trest—who had been one of the Air Force’s most productive historians

vii

Preface
in Vietnam during the war. When Jacob Van Staaveren retired, I followed

Warren to Washington and joined Col. John Schlight’s group of Vietnam historians just before they disbanded—leaving Bernard Nalty and me. Bernie and I

both had Vietnam books in progress, but for the most part we worked on other

projects. Prospects for declassification of my manuscript appeared bleak.

In August 1990 I joined Col. John Warden’s Checkmate air campaign planning group in the Pentagon. Subsequently I became Senior Historical Advisor

for the Secretary of the Air Force’s Gulf War Air Power Survey directed by Eliot

Cohen. Several of my colleagues in the survey were Vietnam veterans (including

Richard Blanchfield, Paul Bloch, Alexander Cochran, John “Joe” Guilmartin,

Richard Gunkel, Thomas Keaney, Col. Emmett “Mike” Kiraly, Col. David

Tretler and Barry Watts) and our conversation often shifted to that earlier war.

When I returned to my normal office after a three year absence, declassification

of my Vietnam manuscript looked feasible. The end of the Cold War had made it

possible even to produce an unclassified version of the multi-volume Gulf War

survey. Little about the Vietnam War seemed likely to remain classified, and I

finished writing the first draft of this book in a year.

To Hanoi and Back does not pretend to be the last word on its subject or

even my last word on it. Eventually I hope to cap the Air Force’s multi-volume

series on the Vietnam War with a one-volume treatment. For this book on operations over North Vietnam, I depended mostly on Air Force records. Although I

made considerable use of documents at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in

Austin, Texas, I had not yet used the papers of Richard Nixon, Melvin Laird, or

Henry Kissinger. My view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pacific Command headquarters, and the headquarters of Military Assistance Command Vietnam

(MACV) came primarily from older official histories.

While my manuscript was still classified, I was fortunate to get helpful comments on it by historians of the other services: Graham Cosmas (who was writing the Army’s MACV history), Mark Jacobsen (a professor at the Marine Corps

Command and Staff College who was writing the Navy’s volume on Rolling

Thunder), and Jack Shulimson (author of three volumes in the Marine series on

the war). I also got a careful reading from David Humphrey, who had guided me

through the extensive Vietnam materials at the Johnson Library before he joined

the State Department to edit Vietnam volumes of the Foreign Relations of the

United States. After declassification, the manuscript gained several knowledgeable readers, including David Mets, Marshall Michel, John Sherwood, Warren

Trest, Barry Watts, Kenneth Werrell and Darrel Whitcomb. 

When conducting research for this book, I often called upon individuals in

the other services and agencies. In addition to those already mentioned, Edward

Marolda and Bernard Cavalcante of the Navy shared their extensive knowledge

of the war, as did Dale Andrade, Jeffrey Clarke, Vincent Demma and William

Hammond of the Army. W. Hays Parks of the Army Staff’s international law

division provided many insights over the years. At the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

viii

To Hanoi and Back
Walter Poole and Willard Webb were always ready to help. Thomas Johnson,

Gary Keeley and Henry Schorreck at the National Security Agency; Deane

Allen and Carrie Thompson at the Defense Intelligence Agency; Robert Destatte

at the Defense Intelligence Agency and later the Defense POW/MIA Office; and

J. Kenneth McDonald at the Central Intelligence Agency provided invaluable

assistance. Merle Pribbenow, a retired American expert on Vietnam, generously

shared his translation of Hanoi’s official history.

Writing history in the Air Force is a cumulative process that begins with

field historians gathering documents, conducting interviews, and writing reports.

Hundreds of these reports and thousands of attached documents underlay this

volume. I am indebted to all the field historians who did their much tougher job

and made it possible for me to write this book. I am also a beneficiary of the Air

Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The

agency not only preserves and indexes documents but has conducted hundreds

of interviews related to the Vietnam War. Much of the interviewing was done by

Hugh Ahman and James Hasdorff; after retiring, Dr. Hasdorff went on to conduct for the Air Force Academy interviews with former prisoners of war, and I

am indebted to Duane Reed of the Academy library for providing me with

copies of those transcripts as well as many other kindnesses. There is probably

not a person at the Historical Research Agency who has not assisted me on some

project. For this one, I should thank at least Thomas Dean, Archie Difante, Judy

Endicott, Lynn Gamma, Richard Gamma, Robert Johnson, James Kitchens,

MSgt. Barry Spink and Warren Trest; also Robert Young, who was at the agency

before he moved to become historian of the National Air Intelligence Center at

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

I frequently exploited my colleagues in the Washington office of the Air

Force history program—in this case especially Vicky Crone, Sheldon Goldberg,

William Heimdahl, Yvonne Kinkaid, Marcelle Knaack, Maj. John Kreis, Eduard

Mark, Karen Fleming Michael, Lt. Col. Vance Mitchell, Walton Moody, Bernard

Nalty, Jack Neufeld, Diane Putney, Col. John F. Shiner, George Watson, Col.

George Williams and Richard Wolf. During two summers I had the assistance of

talented interns: Cadet Robert Cummings of the Air Force Academy studied the

North Vietnamese rail system, and Janis Gibbs of William and Mary surveyed

the American press’s treatment of air operations in North Vietnam.

My principal mentor was Herman Wolk. I could not have written the volume without his support and the support of three chiefs of the Air Force history

program: Maj. Gen. John Huston, Richard Kohn, and Richard Hallion. The

demanding task of declassifying my manuscript was undertaken by a team of Air

Force declassifiers under Maj. William Coburn. I was very fortunate to have my

manuscript put into the competent hands of David Chenoweth, the Air Force’s

most experienced editor of books on the Vietnam War. 

Finally, I want to honor my most formative influences. Clarence and Elaine

Thompson brought me into the world when he was a navigator in a B–24

ix

Preface
Liberator bombing Germany. Lillian Hurlburt Thompson married me before I

was drafted, joined me in Taiwan, became an international businesswoman, and

helped to build a humane context for my study of war. 

x

To Hanoi and Back
Contents

page

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

1 Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 New Tactics, Old Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

3 Gradualism on Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 

4 Season of Discontent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

5 Rolling Thunder Subsides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

6 Protective Reaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

7 Prisoners and Other Survivors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

8 The Lavelle Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

9 Linebacker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

10 B-52s At Last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

11 Reverberations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Appendices

Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

xi
Illustrations

Maps

Southeast Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

North Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

Hanoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

Photographs

Lt. Gen. William W. Momyer and Gen. John D. Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Nguyen Cao Ky, Lt. Gen. William W. Momyer, and Gen.

John P. McConnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Lt. Gen. William W. Momyer, Col. Robin Olds, and Capt.

John B. Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

F–105 fighters at Korat Air Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Thai Nguyen ironworks under attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Raid on Phuc Yen airfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Canal des Rapides bridge under attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Bypass bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Damaged F–105 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

North Vietnamese SA–2 missile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

North Vietnamese MiG–21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Lt. Gen. Gerald W. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Melvin Laird, Gen. George S. Brown, and Ellsworth Bunker . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Gen. John D. Lavelle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Gen. John W. Vogt and F–111 pilot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Gen. J.C. Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

F–4 landing at Udorn Air Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Col. Scott G. Smith, Capt. Richard S. (Steve) Richie, and 

Capt. Charles B. DeBellvue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Jane Fonda and North Vietnamese gun crew in Hanoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

RF–4 reconnaissance aircraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Air Force photo interpreters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Reconnaissance drones and DC–130 launch aircraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

EC–121 radar surveillance aircraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Aerial refueling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Laser-guided bomb attached to F–4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Than Hoa Bridge downed by laser-guided bombs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Hanoi powerplant before and after laser-guided bomb attack . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Loading bombs into B–52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

xii

To Hanoi and Back
B–52s at Andersen Air Force Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

B–52s at U-Tapao Air Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

B–52 landing at U-Tapao Air Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

Gia Lam and Lang Dang railyards after attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Kham Thien Street, Hanoi, and Bac Mai Hospital after unintentional

bombing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

North Vietnamese POW prison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

Prisoner release formalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

U.S. prisoners in Hanoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

Former POW on C–141 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

Former POW and wife renew wedding vows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

xiii

Contents
xiv

To Hanoi and Back
1

Gradualism on Trial

To Hanoi and Back

The United States Air Force and North Vietnam

1966–1973
2

To Hanoi and Back
Chapter One

Puzzle

At the end of the twentieth century, after communism collapsed in Europe

and lost momentum in Asia, Americans still could not agree what course their

country should have taken in Vietnam. Without American intervention, communists were poised to wrest control of all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia

from the French in the decade following the Second World War. The postponement of communist victory until 1975 came at a high price for those Southeast

Asian countries and for the United States. But on the periphery of carnage grew

a prosperous, noncommunist Southeast Asia. In the long rivalry between Vietnam and Thailand, the Vietnam War helped Thailand move ahead economically with an infusion of dollars from U.S. Air Force wings based there. Thailand’s

communist insurgency sputtered, while Vietnamese communism struggled first

against American firepower; later against Chinese communist invaders and

their Cambodian communist allies (who had exterminated hundreds of thousands of Cambodians); and finally against the inertia of an aging leadership

more adept at fighting a war than building an economy.

Whatever the merits of waging the Vietnam War, the Air Force and its sister services could not avoid the puzzle of how best to fight the war within constraints imposed by technical capabilities, by the physical geography of Southeast Asia, and by the changing complexity of the world’s political geography—

as it was filtered through the perceptions of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and

Richard Nixon. Johnson’s rejection of the Air Force’s original proposal to send

the big Boeing B–52 Stratofortress bombers against targets throughout communist North Vietnam left Air Force and Navy fighter aircraft to nibble at targets

gradually doled out by the President. During the long Rolling Thunder air campaign over North Vietnam from March 1965 to November 1968, Johnson confined B–52 targets in North Vietnam to supply depots and transportation routes

near the border with South Vietnam and Laos. Even these marginal B–52 raids

on the North did not begin until April 1966. Meanwhile, B–52s had been

pounding the jungles of South Vietnam in hope of hitting communist insurgents

and regular North Vietnamese units trying to overthrow a government closely

tied to the United States.1

3

Preface
After failing to give the French enough support to suppress the communist

rebellion led by Ho Chi Minh in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government

wanted to contain communism in North Vietnam—the half of the country that

lay north of the seventeenth parallel. In the south the United States tried to

establish a new country under Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist who had buried a

brother killed by the communists. Unfortunately, Diem was a Roman Catholic

in a predominantly Buddhist country.* Unrest among Buddhists led in 1963 to

a military coup that cost Diem his life and left Vietnamese veterans of the former French colonial army in charge. Eventually, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu

pushed ahead of the more flamboyant Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky.

The association of Thieu and Ky with French colonialism tarred their

administration from the outset. Their claims to national leadership were also

undercut by an increasing American presence in South Vietnam and by the public American guarantee that the existence of communist North Vietnam would

not be threatened. Thieu and Ky were unable to offer the prospect of a reunified

Vietnam—only the communist regime of North Vietnam offered that. While the

United States proved all too willing to Americanize the war in South Vietnam

with half a million American troops, as well as planes, those troops were forbidden to invade North Vietnam. President Johnson did not want to risk a massive communist Chinese intervention of the kind that had pushed U.S. forces

out of North Korea in 1950. But North Vietnam could move beyond supporting

insurgency to full-scale invasion of South Vietnam. Although such invasions

did not occur until 1972 and 1975, the South Vietnamese government and its

American ally acted under the assumption that an invasion might come much

sooner. In the meantime, at least fifty thousand North Vietnamese regulars were

operating inside South Vietnam by 1967. It was a great strength of the communist position that its opponents could not focus on the insurgency in South

Vietnam at the expense of preparing to meet the conventional threat from North

Vietnam (and vice versa).

In contrast to communist exploitation of their opponents’ weaknesses, the

Johnson administration even felt constrained to forbid an American invasion of

the Laotian panhandle, down which the North Vietnamese were sending troops

and supplies into South Vietnam. The “Ho Chi Minh Trail” became an increasingly elaborate network of dirt roads carrying trucks at night through a gauntlet

of American bombing, punctuated in later years by gunfire from AC–130s

(converted air transports called “gunships”).2 North of the panhandle, American

air power helped Laotian government forces defend themselves from communist attack. The Geneva Agreement of 1962 had supposedly guaranteed Laotian

neutrality, and the country’s beleaguered government preferred to maintain the

fiction that Laos was not being used as a conduit for communist supplies.

4

To Hanoi and Back

* For most Vietnamese, religion was a mixture of Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist

elements with folk traditions.
Hence, the Laotian government did not want the unavoidably overt introduction

of large American ground forces to cut the Trail—but did agree to air operations

for the same purpose. U.S. air forces (like North Vietnamese ground forces)

pretended in public that they were not operating in Laos. America’s transparent

pretense also suited the Soviet Union, which thereby found it easier to avoid

confronting the United States over Laos. This situation was one of the Vietnam

War’s open secrets helping to persuade many Americans that their government

was dishonest.

* * *

The government of Thailand also tried to keep its own role in the war

quiet. U.S. Air Force planes taking off from bases in Thailand were not permitted to bomb in South Vietnam, and the Air Force was required to pretend

that missions into North Vietnam and Laos had actually launched from bases

in South Vietnam. Not until 1967, long after air operations from Thailand

became common knowledge, would the Thai government relinquish this fiction to permit B–52 missions from Thailand against targets in South Vietnam.

Until then, Air Force pilots in Thailand got no publicity, except on those rare

occasions when they were sent to give a press briefing in Saigon under the pretense that their missions over North Vietnam had been launched from South

Vietnam. Some pilots relished this publicity, but others considered it a jinx

after the commander of the 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Lt. Col. Robinson

Risner, followed his appearance on the cover of Time magazine with a long

stay in North Vietnam’s prison system; he was shot down on September 16,

1965.

The Air Force was not entirely unhappy with Thailand’s reluctance to have

planes based there bomb in South Vietnam, since that policy had the effect of

fencing off substantial air power that could be used only against North Vietnam

and Laos. Not until 1968 would Thailand permit fighter aircraft based there to

strike targets in South Vietnam and then only in the northern area called I

Corps. Except for the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing at Da Nang Air Base in I

Corps, Air Force fighters based in South Vietnam rarely ventured deep into

North Vietnam. Army and Marine demands for air power in South Vietnam surpassed anything ever seen. Of the eight million tons of ordnance that would fall

from the sky on Southeast Asia, more than half would fall on South Vietnam;

less than a million tons would fall on North Vietnam and little more than two

million on Laos. Although these figures were impressive when compared with

the less than four million tons dropped by the United States and the United

Kingdom in all theaters during World War II, most of the bombs in World War

II fell in and around cities—unlike Southeast Asia, where most of the bombs

5

Puzzle
fell in the jungle, along with the bulk of the eight million tons of rounds fired by

American artillery.

The American air war over North Vietnam and Laos was waged mostly

from Air Force bases in Thailand and Navy carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Where Thailand’s Korat plateau bulged north of Cambodia to the Mekong

River and the Laotian panhandle, as little as seventy miles separated Thailand

and Vietnam. The Air Force used three bases in eastern Thailand near the

Mekong, and four nearer the capital at Bangkok, about three hundred miles

west on the Gulf of Thailand. Five hundred miles lay between the western

Thailand bases and the North Vietnamese capital at Hanoi. Depending on the

location of bases and targets, bombing missions from Thailand to North

Vietnam could last from one to three hours.

At the beginning of the war, there were only three bases in Thailand with

runways long enough to handle fully loaded jet fighters comfortably: Don

Muang, just north of Bangkok; Takhli, a hundred miles north up the Chao

Phraya River from Bangkok; Korat, on the southwestern edge of the Korat

Plateau, about a hundred miles northeast of Bangkok. Facilities were best at

Don Muang, but since it also served as the Bangkok airport, the Thai government was reluctant to permit obvious Air Force operations there. Except for a

few air defense interceptors, transports, and refueling tankers, the Thais

reserved Don Muang’s military ramp for their own air force of old American

F–86 fighters.

At Takhli and Korat, however, the Thais were soon submerged by about ten

thousand American airmen with more than a hundred Republic F–105

Thunderchief fighters. This force had to be constantly replenished, because the

F–105 was the Air Force’s principal fighter-bomber used in the Rolling

Thunder campaign, and more than three hundred F–105s were shot down over

North Vietnam and Laos.* Attrition would have been even worse had it not

been for the protection provided by supporting aircraft. Two dozen EB–66 electronic warfare aircraft, for example, shared the Takhli facilities with the F–105s

and attempted to jam enemy radars from a distance; the EB–66s were too slow

to survive over the better defended areas in North Vietnam.

During the 1950s, the Air Force had concentrated on building its capability

to wage nuclear war. The Strategic Air Command then absorbed most of the service’s resources, and Tactical Air Command spent much of the remainder developing its own capacity to drop nuclear bombs. The F–105 was designed for that,

but instead of carrying a nuclear bomb in its bomb bay, the F–105 carried conventional bombs on its wings. Those relatively small wings had been intended to

help the F–105 penetrate at high speed close to the ground; at higher altitude they

limited the F–105’s maneuverability. Pilots gave the F–105 unflattering nicknames like “Lead Sled” or more commonly “Thud”—a nickname that in

Southeast Asia would become more affectionate than derogatory. The Air

6

To Hanoi and Back

* For aircraft loss figures, see the statistics appendix.
Force’s awkward attempt in 1964 to use Thuds for its air-show demonstration

team, the Thunderbirds, came to a quick and inglorious end. But combat forged

a proud bond between pilots and their Thuds. While it could not maneuver agilely in a dogfight, the Thud could carry more bombs further than any other Air

Force fighter in 1966 and could outrun enemy fighters at low altitude.

The only Air Force fighter that could better handle North Vietnamese air

defenses was the newer, more maneuverable McDonnell F–4 Phantom II (a

descendant of the Navy’s first carrier jet fighter, the McDonnell FH–1 Phantom

of the late 1940s). “Phantom” was a most unsuitable name for this big twoengine fighter known for leaving a highly visible trail of black smoke. Only by

using its afterburners could the F–4 avoid the smoke that in daylight continually gave the plane’s position away. Nevertheless, “Phantom” was one of the few

official names that aircrews actually used. The Phantom did get most of the

night bombing missions, for which its two-man crew was better suited than a

lone Thud pilot. Someone caught the humor in the name “Phantom” by drawing a cartoon of a funny little man (with the delta shape of the fighter) wearing

a cape, broad-brimmed hat, and tennis shoes. In their daytime air-to-air combat

with enemy fighters, Phantom aircrews had to resign themselves to the fact that

there was nothing stealthy about their plane.

Although nearly as heavy as the single-engine Thud, the Phantom’s two

engines and bigger wings permitted it to climb faster—a virtue that came at the

price of higher fuel consumption and shorter range. In one respect, the Phantom

was less well prepared for air-to-air combat than the Thud, for early in the war

the Phantom had no gun. The Navy had developed the Phantom to protect the

fleet with radar-guided Sparrow missiles that could down attacking aircraft at

long range—usually more than a mile—if the radar could be kept “locked on”

the target during a missile’s entire flight. Over North Vietnam, however, ground

clutter could interfere with the radar guidance system; in any case, the presence

of so many Navy and Air Force planes obliged aircrews to identify an enemy

aircraft visually before attacking—often putting the Phantom too close to use a

Sparrow effectively. Despite the ability of the Phantom’s heat-seeking

Sidewinder missiles to find an enemy plane’s tailpipe at fairly close range,

Phantom crews sometimes found themselves too close for anything but the gun

they did not have. Not until 1967 would Air Force F–4s begin to use a gun

mounted in a pod under the fuselage, and only as Rolling Thunder ended in

1968 would new F–4s with a built-in gun deploy to Southeast Asia.3

While most Thuds had only one seat, each Phantom had two on the theory

that a second crew member was required to operate the plane’s radar; he would

try to lock his radar on an enemy fighter so that the Phantom’s pilot could fire a

Sparrow missile. The Navy gave this backseat job to a navigator called a “radar

intercept operator.” During Rolling Thunder, the Air Force gave the radar job to

a second pilot, but no pilot liked to ride in the back seat and the Air Force ultimately followed the Navy’s example. The Air Force’s backseat navigator

7

Puzzle
would be called officially a “weapon system officer” (WSO, pronounced

“wizzo”), because he often handled not only air-to-air missile radar but also the

new precision bombing systems that were developed late in the war.

Unofficially, he would assume the nicknames of the backseat pilot who preceded him: “guy in back (GIB)” or simply “backseater.”

The fact that the Air Force’s Phantom backseaters were originally pilots

may have made other fighter pilots somewhat less hostile to giving backseaters

equal credit with the frontseat pilot for any enemy aircraft shot down. Shooting

down at least five enemy aircraft had long been a milestone in a fighter pilot’s

career, for then he was called an “ace.” When the war finally produced its first

American aces in 1972, all Phantom backseaters were navigators and three of

them (two Air Force, one Navy) became aces.4

At the beginning of Rolling Thunder, the Air Force had about six hundred

Thuds and six hundred Phantoms. The production line for the single-seat Thud

had closed, but the Air Force received more than two hundred new two-seat

Phantoms every year. While a portion of the growing Phantom force was used

for less risky bombing in South Vietnam, Thuds were reserved for the more

dangerous missions in North Vietnam and Laos. Not only were most Thuds

older than most Phantoms, but the loss of a single-seat Thud cost at most one

crew member rather than two. Air Force Phantoms operating in North Vietnam

were expected to protect Thuds from North Vietnamese fighter aircraft; this

less expensive mission absorbed much of the Phantom effort there during

Rolling Thunder. When Rolling Thunder ended in 1968, more than half the

Thuds were gone, and most of the remainder were soon replaced by Phantoms.

When the Air Force Phantoms were first deployed to Southeast Asia in

1965, runways had to be lengthened at two bases in northeast Thailand near the

Mekong. At first, the Phantom’s reconnaissance version (the RF–4) shared

Udorn with RF–101s and F–104s, but these older aircraft were entirely replaced

by more RF–4s and F–4s in 1967. Two hundred miles down the Mekong from

Udorn, Ubon became the principal Phantom base in Thailand. Another two

hundred miles east of Ubon across the Laotian panhandle in South Vietnam, Da

Nang’s Phantoms could be used in North Vietnam and Laos as well as South

Vietnam. Altogether, the three bases had about ninety F–4s and twenty RF–4s

in 1966; in subsequent years the Phantom presence in Thailand would grow. Of

the more than five hundred Air Force F–4s and RF–4s lost in Southeast Asia,

two-thirds were shot down over North Vietnam and Laos.

Many of the Phantom and Thud losses could be attributed to two poor

design features they shared. At the beginning of Rolling Thunder, neither type

of fighter had self-sealing fuel tanks and both had hydraulic control systems

with backup lines close enough together that a single hit could render the aircraft uncontrollable or cause the fuel tank to explode. Self-sealing fuel tanks

were heavier, and aircraft designers tried to save weight in these already heavy

aircraft by using lighter tanks. While some Thuds eventually got self-sealing

8

To Hanoi and Back
fuel tanks and a more survivable arrangement of their control systems, the

Phantoms kept the maneuverability afforded by their lighter, more vulnerable

fuel tanks. Late-model Phantoms did benefit from the addition of a backup electrical system for pitch control.5

Men shot down had a better than even chance of surviving. About a third

were rescued in North Vietnam, and almost as many survived years of captivity

there. More were rescued in Laos, where lighter air defenses threatened rescue

aircraft less, and friendly as well as enemy forces were on the ground. But during the prisoner exchange in 1973, only thirteen Americans captured in Laos

would come home. Of the more than five hundred Air Force men shot down

there, about a third met a fate unknown; some may have been killed by Laotian

communist troops, for whom prisoners were too much trouble, or by North

Vietnamese communist troops who were pretending not to be in Laos.

Before rescue helicopters at Udorn would venture into Laos or North

Vietnam, downed aircrew would be located and protected by small propellerdriven Douglas A–1 Skyraiders (or “Spads” as pilots dubbed them after the

famous French fighters flown by Americans in World War I). In addition to the

squadron of A–1s at Udorn, a squadron at Nakhon Phanom lay just across the

Mekong from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laotian panhandle. The Air Force

opened “NKP” (as Americans called the new base) with a runway made of

pierced steel planking that corrosion soon necessitated replacing with aluminum matting. Only propeller aircraft like the Spads could use NKP regularly,

but jet aircraft could land there in an emergency and many fighters shot up over

North Vietnam were able to make it back to NKP to land or at least permit their

crews to bail out where they could be easily rescued.6

When F–105s and F–4s made their longer three-hour raids into North

Vietnam, they required refueling in the air from Boeing KC–135 tankers soon

after takeoff and again after leaving North Vietnam. Routine use of air refueling

for combat missions was an innovation. Before the Vietnam War, air refueling

had usually facilitated the deployment of aircraft rather than their employment.

By the end of 1966, there were about thirty KC–135s in Thailand: ten at Takhli

and twenty at U-Tapao, a new base seventy miles south of Bangkok on the Gulf

of Thailand. Fuel could be brought in by ship to U-Tapao, an arrangement much

preferable to trucking fuel to bases further north.

Each KC–135 could transfer about fifty thousand pounds of fuel per sortie,

enough to top off four fighters in less than half an hour and have plenty left;

after a morning mission, a KC–135 could land, reload, and come up again for

an afternoon mission. Getting the most out of the tanker force drove mission

scheduling. Every morning and afternoon the tankers flew over northern

Thailand in oblong orbits called “tracks,” topping off fighters on their way

north and later meeting them over Laos with enough fuel to get them home.7

Other KC–135s took off from the Japanese island of Okinawa to refuel

B–52s on ten-hour missions from Guam, two thousand miles east of Vietnam

9

Puzzle
and Laos; each of the big bombers soaked up an entire tanker load. Even with

aerial refueling, a B–52 could not carry its maximum thirty tons of bombs so

long a distance, and bomb loads were cut to twenty tons or less. This was still

ten times the load carried by an F–105 or F–4 on missions to North Vietnam.

The Air Force worked to persuade the Thais to permit B–52 operations from

the new base at U-Tapao, since from there the big bombers could reach targets

with full bomb loads without air refueling.

The B–52s and KC–135s belonged to the Strategic Air Command, which

tried to keep conventional warfare from crippling the command’s ability to perform its nuclear bombing mission. Since B–52s flew sorties above twenty thousand feet over Southeast Asia (above thirty thousand feet over North Vietnam),

Strategic Air Command feared that its crews would lose their skill at flying

low-level missions of the kind envisioned for a nuclear war with the Soviet

Union. Consequently, B–52 crews rotated back to the United States after sixmonth tours of temporary duty in the Pacific. Although this policy made less

sense for KC–135 crews, they too came to the Vietnam War on temporary duty.

While fighter squadrons also began the war on temporary duty, their pilots, like

the ground personnel at all the bases (including U-Tapao), eventually found

themselves “permanently” assigned—but in Southeast Asia, “permanently”

turned out to mean twelve months or less.

Through much of 1965, fighter squadrons arrived for four months of temporary duty in Thailand from Japan and the United States. Toward the end of

that year, squadrons began to stay for the duration of the war. Each of the fighter bases in Thailand had a single fighter wing with up to four fighter squadrons

(more than seventy fighters sharing a crowded field with an assortment of other

aircraft). By late 1966 the fighter wings had acquired the numerical designations that they would keep through the end of Rolling Thunder: the 355th

Tactical Fighter Wing at Takhli (F–105s), the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing at

Korat (F–105s), the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon (F–4s), and the 366th

Tactical Fighter Wing at Da Nang, South Vietnam (F–4s). The mixture of

reconnaissance aircraft (RF–101s and RF–4s) and fighters (F–104s and later

F–4s) at Udorn composed the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing.

Most nonflying personnel cycled through on one-year tours. Every year on

the anniversary of a squadron’s arrival, many of its people would leave to be

replaced by new people usually without any experience in Southeast Asia.

Aircrew were on a different schedule, since they could go home after completing one hundred missions over North Vietnam—just as F–86 pilots in the

Korean War had gone home after a hundred missions over North Korea.

Commonly, meeting this standard took seven or eight months, but that depended on how the tour meshed with seasonal and political variations in the intensity of the American effort over North Vietnam. When not flying there, aircrew

operated over Laos where they might get shot at, but would not receive mission

credit toward the necessary one hundred “counters.”

10

To Hanoi and Back
While some aircrew volunteered to come back for a second or even a third

tour, most did not want to push their luck flying against North Vietnamese air

defenses. Not until much later did the Air Force require many who had completed a “permanent” tour in Southeast Asia to serve there again, but backseat

F–4 pilots sometimes returned voluntarily to get into the front seat. The prevalence of one tour in Southeast Asia for most Air Force personel contrasted not

only with the repeated stints of temporary duty allotted to aircrews of the

Strategic Air Command, but also with repeated cruises in the theater for Navy

carrier personnel. Nevertheless, the one-tour policy spread the risks as well as

the career advantages of combat service through much of the force. All the

good it did for morale, however, came at a considerable cost in the depth of

Southeast Asian experience available in the theater. Nor was that the only price

to be paid. Early in the war most Air Force fighter pilots went into combat after

years of flying fighters elsewhere, but replacement training units in the United

States sent an increasing proportion of new pilots and those who were crosstraining into fighters from bombers and transports.

For nonflying personnel, the one-year tour seemed less equitable. A year in

Southeast Asia could be spent far more pleasantly in Thailand than in South

Vietnam. The South Vietnamese bases were subject to frequent rocket, mortar

and sapper attacks. The Thai bases were attacked only a few times (all by sappers) and the first attack did not come until 1968. Indeed, Bangkok was a

favorite choice for the rest and recuperation week available to those serving in

South Vietnam. Yet it was a grievance among ground personnel in Thailand that

they could not participate in the rest and recuperation program; nor did they get

an income tax break available to all personnel in South Vietnam. Aircrew in

Thailand eventually did get these benefits, but of course, Thailand was then a

more dangerous assignment for aircrew than South Vietnam.8

The practice of assigning Air Force ground personnel for one-year tours in

Thailand made less and less sense as the years passed. When the Thai bases

were undergoing expansion in 1965 and 1966, living conditions were primitive

in comparison with the relative luxury of later years. Some early expedients did

not work: inflatable shelters collapsed when the glue in the seams melted in the

tropical heat, and the herd of goats acquired to keep the grass short at Takhli

became a smelly nuisance until replaced by lawnmowers. In 1967, a visitor

from the Pentagon to Takhli and other Thailand bases could report that “wing

commanders are focusing their attention and diverting energy to base development and upkeep (green grass etc.) to a much greater extent than one would reasonably expect in a combat zone.”9

Swimming pools made a successful early appearance at the Thailand

bases—all the more popular in the tropical heat because getting air conditioners

for sleeping quarters proved difficult even for aircrew. Club bars provided a

ready release from the tension of combat or the boredom of desk duty. Just off

base, Thai prostitutes did not want for customers, and the dispensary at each

11

Puzzle
base was handling about a thousand venereal disease cases a year. American

men and Thai women also developed more enduring relationships. There was

something intoxicating about the gracious culture of Thailand. Even for the

men who had to fly north where survivors were bound to lose friends, Thailand

would provide fond memories.10

However much their country might seem like a paradise for young

American men, Thailand’s leaders managed to exploit their relationship with

the United States without being swallowed by it. During the nineteenth century,

the kings of Siam (as Thailand was then known) had succeeded in maintaining

their country’s independence as a buffer between British Burma and French

Indochina. A tilt toward the British in those years was more than counterbalanced by collaboration with the Japanese in World War II, when Thailand

declared war on the United Kingdom and the United States. Together with land

reform, Thailand’s independence of the western colonial powers had inoculated

the country against the appeal of communism. Even after losing authority to

military dictators in the 1930s, the Buddhist king remained a potent symbol of

Thai nationalism.

The poorest and most vulnerable part of Thailand was the Korat plateau,

where American air bases began to inject some much needed money. On the

other hand, communists naturally scented opportunity in the conjunction of

American bases with a population not only poor but closely tied to Laos. More

Lao (a Thai people) lived in Thailand than in Laos, and the communist movement seemed to have excellent prospects for spreading across the Mekong. But

this insurgency never made much progress except among Vietnamese refugees.

Sappers caught in the handful of attacks on American bases in Thailand turned

out to be Vietnamese.11

Since Thailand was a bulwark against communism, the United States was

not inclined to be very critical of its dictatorial form of government. Indeed, the

military aid supplied by the United States since the 1950s had strengthened the

hold of the Thai army on the government. When Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat

died in 1963 (leaving a wife and more than fifty mistresses), he was succeeded

as prime minister by his less colorful deputy, Gen. Thanom Kittikachorn.

Thanom continued Sarit’s policy of working with the U.S. Army to prepare

ground defenses against Chinese invasion. The small Thai air force lacked

influence and did not much figure in Thanom’s plans.12

The U.S. Air Force presence in Thailand grew up largely outside the established American military apparatus for doing business there. Of the thirty-four

thousand American military personnel in Thailand by the end of 1966, twentysix thousand were Air Force. Yet the commander of the U.S. Military

Assistance Command, Thailand, was still an Army officer: Maj. Gen. Richard

G. Stilwell (who was not, as many thought, a son or nephew of Gen. Joseph W.

Stilwell, commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II). While the U.S. Air Force sought to bring more men and

12

To Hanoi and Back
planes into Thailand, Stilwell tried to be the Air Force’s sole channel to the

American ambassador, Graham A. Martin, who was supposed to conduct all

negotiations with General Thanom and his government. But Martin had served

in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and the Air Force had ready

access to him through the air attaché, Col. Roland K. McCoskrie.13

Despite Colonel McCoskrie’s best efforts with Ambassador Martin, the

Army-managed approval process in Thailand often proved frustrating for the

Air Force. In January 1966, the Air Force sought to strengthen its position by

sending a major general to Udorn to oversee Air Force assets in Thailand. The

new commander, Maj. Gen. Charles R. Bond, Jr., had been one of Maj. Gen.

Claire L. Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China during World War II, when he shot

down nine Japanese aircraft. Bond would take his orders on operations over

North Vietnam from the Air Force commander in South Vietnam, Lt. Gen.

Joseph H. Moore. Moore’s command was called Second Air Division until the

spring of 1966, when it became Seventh Air Force. To make this arrangement

more palatable to the Thai government (which wanted to disguise Thailand’s

connection with the war in Vietnam), the Air Force made Bond subordinate to

Thirteenth Air Force in the Philippines for all nonoperational matters.

Therefore, Bond was said to be deputy commander of Seventh/Thirteenth Air

Force.14

Since the Seventh Air Force commander and his staff dealt directly with

the wings at each base in Thailand, Bond could not be said to command anything. He had one of the oddest jobs in the history of the Air Force. When he

tried to mediate between his two Air Force bosses, the ambassadors in Thailand

and Laos, and General Stilwell, Bond often encountered more discord than harmony. Stilwell took a very dim view of Bond’s role and complained that neither

Stilwell himself nor the ambassador nor General Thanom had been consulted

about Bond’s assignment. In fact, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. John

P. McConnell, had obtained Ambassador Martin’s approval during a visit to

Washington. When confronted by Stilwell, Martin could only slap the Air

Force’s wrist for not providing a formal request through channels.15

* * *

A few months after sending General Bond to Thailand, the Air Force Chief

of Staff sent Lt. Gen. William W. Momyer from Air Training Command to

replace General Moore as commander of Seventh Air Force in South Vietnam.

General McConnell decided to make this change on the advice of a retired Air

Force general, Elwood R. “Pete” Quesada, a famous fighter commander in

World War II and the first commander of Tactical Air Command after the war.

In retirement, Quesada had continued to be an influential defender of fighter

13

Puzzle
aircraft during an era when the Air Force was dominated by Strategic Air

Command’s bombers and missiles. Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat,

Missouri), who had been the first Secretary of the Air Force, asked Quesada to

visit Southeast Asia and determine whether anything could be done to improve

the Air Force’s performance there. Quesada concluded that Moore was too subservient to the joint commander in South Vietnam, Army Gen. William C.

Westmoreland. Moore and Westmoreland grew up together in Spartanburg,

South Carolina, and had remained close over the years—too close, as far as

Quesada was concerned.16

Moore had come to South Vietnam in 1964 with Westmoreland and took

command of the Second Air Division (subsequently Seventh Air Force) at Tan

Son Nhut Air Base on the edge of the capital, Saigon. Although Westmoreland’s U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, (MACV) was headquartered in downtown Saigon at that time, he would eventually move it to a large

new building informally dubbed “Pentagon East” at Tan Son Nhut. Westmoreland’s joint headquarters consisted mostly of Army officers, and many in the

Air Force complained that air matters were not getting sufficient attention.

Quesada wanted to replace Moore with a far less agreeable general, one well

known for his convictions about the best way to employ fighter aircraft.

“Spike” Momyer was already a fighter group commander in North Africa during World War II, when the Army Air Forces developed enduring doctrine

under fire. No Army commander was apt to get the best of an argument with

Momyer over air power. He had a disciplined and practical intellect befitting

the son of a lawyer who had once taught at the University of Chicago.

The death of his father when Momyer was fourteen both liberated the boy

from becoming a lawyer and forced an early end to playing sports, as he had to

take a job after school. By then he had already seen Charles A. Lindbergh and

his Spirit of St. Louis land at an Army Air Corps base near the Momyer home in

Muskogee, Oklahoma. After his mother moved the family to Seattle, Momyer

worked his way through the University of Washington and straight into the

Army Air Corps. He never stopped working hard, and five years out of college,

he was commanding a fighter group in combat. The weight of early responsibility made him far less fun-loving than most fighter pilots.17

The staff at Seventh Air Force headquarters soon found that their new commander was all business and that he made their business his business. His quick

mind and appetite for work permitted him to avoid delegating much of his

authority, and he acted as virtually his own deputy for operations. Some were

intimidated by his intellect and by his unusual austerity, symbolized by a smoking ban during staff meetings. He did not like the laid-back style common in a

combat theater. He expected proper uniforms and clean quarters and flower

beds—this last idiosyncrasy a subject of humor.18

By the time Momyer took command of Seventh Air Force, many airmen

suspected that the U.S. was in for a much longer war and possible defeat in

14

To Hanoi and Back
Southeast Asia. He bent his efforts to helping the Air Force come through the

experience in the best shape possible, and for him that meant an Air Force with

the most versatile technology available. He was, at most, lukewarm about the

extensive use of old propeller aircraft in South Vietnam and Laos; no matter

how well suited they were to fighting insurgents, propeller aircraft could not

survive in Europe against Soviet air defenses. On the other hand, he opposed

the development of technology designed to meet too specific a threat. Since the

U.S. could never predict exactly what situation its armed forces would

encounter, he favored multirole jet aircraft. Of the aircraft already in the inventory, the F–4 was his clear favorite, since it could be used against enemy fighters in the air or targets on the ground.19

Momyer was an especially able exponent of the need for unity in the command of air power. But unity of command was not to be found in Southeast

Asia anywhere above a wing commander. His efforts to change that were

unavailing. He doubted that Thai sensitivities were really behind denying him

command of the wings in Thailand and giving him only operational control. His

repeated interrogations of Ambassador Martin on this point gave Momyer the

impression that the admiral who ran the Pacific theater from Hawaii (Adm.

Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Commander in Chief of Pacific Command) and his Air

Force component commander (Gen. Hunter Harris, Commander in Chief of

Pacific Air Forces) wanted to deny Momyer command of the Thailand wings

because he was Westmoreland’s air deputy—by denying Momyer command,

they were really denying Westmoreland and keeping air operations against

North Vietnam under their control.20

From Momyer’s point of view, there should have been a separate Southeast

Asia theater with Westmoreland in charge and with all air operations (including

those of the Navy and Marine Corps) under Momyer. As it was, Momyer’s

authority did not even extend to the Strategic Air Command B–52s that were

dropping more than a third of the bombs in South Vietnam. Since the same aircraft also had a nuclear mission in case of a wider war, Strategic Air Command

refused to give them to Momyer. Nor did Westmoreland consult Seventh Air

Force about targets for the B–52s, and Momyer was not mollified by the presence of an Air Force colonel in Westmoreland’s targeting shop. Westmoreland

decided what he wanted the B–52s to hit and passed the list to Strategic Air

Command. Momyer was appalled by the enormous tonnage of bombs the

B–52s were dropping on the South Vietnamese jungle with little evidence of

much physical effect on the enemy, however psychologically upsetting to

enemy troops in the vicinity. Strategic Air Command’s ownership of tankers

was less onerous for Momyer, since Westmoreland did not get involved.

Momyer’s main gripe about tankers was Strategic Air Command’s unwillingness to let them fly far enough north in Laos to save returning fighters especially low on fuel. In practice, however, tanker pilots often broke Strategic Air

Command rules to save fighters.

15

Puzzle
The fact that Seventh Air Force worked for General Westmoreland in

Saigon on operations in South Vietnam and for General Harris in Hawaii on

operations in North Vietnam contributed to handling those operations separately

by establishing “in-country” and “out-country” control centers. This way of

dividing the work preceded Momyer and might well have occurred even if

Westmoreland had controlled the whole war, since the two regions made different demands. Indeed, Westmoreland did control air operations over a portion of

North Vietnam adjacent to South Vietnam (not to mention sharing control of

operations in Laos with the U.S. ambassador there), but those operations were

handled by the out-country control center. The in-country “tactical air control

center” answered ground unit requests for air support in South Vietnam. This

tactical air control center included South Vietnamese personnel and (only to

maintain political appearances) its director was a South Vietnamese colonel; the

real director was an American brigadier general who reported to Momyer’s

deputy for operations.*

The out-country U.S.-only “command center” (with the radio call sign

“Blue Chip”) developed daily orders to send a few large formations against

major targets in North Vietnam and many smaller formations, including twoplane patrols on armed reconnaissance of transportation routes there and in

Laos. These daily orders were called fragmentary orders or “frags,” because

each wing received only a fragment of the order and because information that

did not change on a daily basis (like rules of engagement) was not sent on a

daily basis. Fragmentary orders permitted Seventh Air Force to send the necessary information in electronic messages without overwhelming the telecommunications network. The in-country tactical air control center also issued fragmentary orders, but they provided a more routine framework through which the

control center could react to changing circumstances on the battlefield in South

Vietnam. Fragmentary orders were prepared and executed on a three-day cycle;

while part of the staff planned operations for the day after next, another group

drafted the next day’s orders, and a third group monitored the current day’s

operations. Teams of operations and intelligence personnel specialized in

preparing fragmentary orders for daylight or nighttime operations.21

Momyer’s headquarters was near Westmoreland’s at Tan Son Nhut Air

Base just north of Saigon. South of the city lay the fertile rice paddies of the

Mekong Delta. North for seven hundred miles, most of the way to China,

stretched a narrow coastal plain pressed against the sea by rugged hills, until the

Red River provided another delta, smaller and less fertile. There lay the North

Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, the principal North Vietnamese port of Haiphong,

and many of the targets of greatest interest to Momyer. When he sent planes to

16

To Hanoi and Back

* B–52 missions, in-country and out-country, were controlled by the Strategic Air

Command and scheduled by the SAC Advanced Echelon (SACADVON) at Seventh Air

Force headquarters.
the Red River, they were too far from his command center at Tan Son Nhut to

communicate easily. In the summer of 1966, a control center for operations over

North Vietnam began functioning (with radio call sign “Motel”) on Monkey

Mountain, which dominated a peninsula jutting into the South China Sea at Da

Nang, about half way between Saigon and Hanoi.

The progress of strike forces over North Vietnam was also monitored by

the control center at Udorn Air Base, Thailand. If Monkey Mountain went off

the air, Udorn was in control. Both sites had long-range radar, but they could

not see the Red River Delta. That far north only a Navy radar ship and Air

Force Lockheed EC–121 radar planes could offer some radar coverage while

keeping their distance from enemy fighters and missiles. Unlike the Boeing E–3

Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes produced after the

Vietnam War, the EC–121’s radar could not “look down” successfully and aircraft would be lost in ground clutter on the EC–121’s radar screens. In truth,

neither the EC–121s nor the ground stations at Monkey Mountain and Udorn

could do much to control air operations over the Red River.

Over the less defended Laotian panhandle, other even more vulnerable converted transports could survive. Lockheed EC–130s each carried an Airborne

Battlefield Command and Control Center (ABCCC) without radar, but with the

communications equipment and battle staff necessary to control interdiction

strikes against trucks in the Laotian and North Vietnamese panhandles. An

ABCCC aircraft often coordinated interdiction strikes through forward air controllers (FACs) surveying the panhandles in either light propeller planes or jet

fighters (beginning in 1967 over North Vietnam where enemy air defenses made

the slower propeller planes too vulnerable). Each FAC patrolled the same stretch

of road and jungle every day, so that in daylight he had the best chance of seeing

elusive enemy trucks and directing strike aircraft sent his way by an ABCCC.

While ABCCC aircraft and Motel were closer to the bombing, Blue Chip

was closer to the boss. On his out-country staff as well as his in-country staff,

Momyer found somewhat more harmony among operations planners and intelligence analysts than had once been the case. The creation of teams combining

operations and intelligence personnel in the spring of 1966 had broken down

some of the bureaucratic walls, but a barrier remained between photographic

intelligence and electronic signals intelligence, especially radio communications intercepts. Security procedures meant to protect signals intelligence also

made integration with other intelligence sources difficult. In any case, photographic intelligence could not always meet demands for up-to-date imagery of

targets. Weather often interfered with photographic reconnaissance, and among

the hundreds of targets, many were new or altered. Even when good imagery

was acquired, getting it reproduced and filed in the target folders at each wing

was another matter. Like air commanders before and after him, Momyer was

rarely completely satisfied with the speed or comprehensiveness of bomb damage assessment. Like other air commanders, he wanted to avoid unnecessarily

17

Puzzle
repeating strikes on a target since the enemy usually responded by increasing

air defenses.22

Seventh Air Force’s reliance on photographic and signals intelligence was

even heavier because American efforts to maintain South Vietnamese reconnaissance teams in North Vietnam had failed. Although the Military Assistance

Command Studies and Observations Group continued to insert teams and supply them, those that still sent radio reports were correctly suspected of having

fallen under enemy control. Nothing so vividly illustrated the plight of South

Vietnam as its inability to sustain agents in North Vietnam while communist

agents held positions in the Saigon government.23

* * *

As the new commander of Seventh Air Force, General Momyer’s ability to

shape the Rolling Thunder air campaign against North Vietnam was sharply

limited by men in the complex chain of command above him, from Saigon to

Hawaii to Washington. At Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Admiral

Sharp simplified the problem of allocating targets by dividing North Vietnam

into seven geographical areas or “route packages.”* The Pacific Fleet conducted most of the bombing in four route packages along the coast (from south to

north, Route Packages Two, Three, Four, and Six B) that aircraft launched from

carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin could reach without air refueling. Pacific Air

Forces was responsible for bombing in northwestern Vietnam (Route Packages

Five and Six A), while General Westmoreland gained responsibility for Route

Package One just across the “Provisional Military Demarcation Line” from

South Vietnam; this boundary ran down the middle of the Ben Hai River flowing into the South China Sea, and a “Demilitarized Zone” about six miles wide

buffered the line for its entire length of about forty miles from the coast to the

Laotian border. In the summer of 1966, after months of watching the North

Vietnamese use the Demilitarized Zone as a sanctuary for their forces, the

United States at last began to bomb it. General Momyer took his orders from

Westmoreland for Route Package One (and the Demilitarized Zone) and from

General Harris at Pacific Air Forces headquarters in Hawaii for Route Packages

Five and Six A.

The rigidity and fragmentation built into the route package arrangement

grated on both Momyer and Harris, who had tried to talk Sharp out of it. But

neither Harris nor the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General McConnell, could

persuade the Navy to integrate air operations over North Vietnam under the Air

Force. Sharp did permit the Seventh Air Force commander to chair a coordinat18

To Hanoi and Back

* See North Vietnam map, page 297.
ing committee with representatives from Seventh Fleet’s Task Force 77, whose

carriers bombed North Vietnam. But any disagreement had to be referred to

Sharp, and for the most part the two services conducted separate operations in

their own route packages.24

Sharp’s position on route packages did not surprise Harris, nor did it embitter him. The two men got on well and shared a belief that air power had been

used far too timidly over North Vietnam. Like Momyer, Harris was deeply concerned about what the Vietnam War was doing to the reputation of air power.

Limited strikes against North Vietnam had been portrayed in the press as an allout effort. “It troubles me and many others, of course,” Harris wrote McConnell

in March 1966, “that for all our military superiority we have been out-maneuvered by a third-class power. I can’t help but believe that a defeat . . . will tend

to relegate the military instrument to an essentially defensive role aimed primarily at forestalling a direct attack on the U.S. with all that this means for our

future military capability vis-a-vis our world interests.”25

Given Admiral Sharp’s decision to allocate targets by route package and

Washington’s domination of target selection, the principal role of Pacific

Command headquarters in Rolling Thunder became one of lobbying for better

targets. Sharp did not take “no” for a final answer and repeatedly requested targets that had been denied time and time again. This persistence paved the way

for a longer target list, but did not endear him to his civilian bosses.

No President had ever taken the interest in target selection that Lyndon

Johnson did. Through the long years of Rolling Thunder, he personally scrutinized lists of proposed targets and weighed their potential for civilian casualties, bad press, or Soviet and Chinese involvement. During his first term in the

Senate, China had intervened powerfully in the Korean War when American

troops had moved into North Korea. Johnson had supported President Harry

Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who shared the administration’s

underestimation of the danger of Chinese intervention and then publicly challenged Truman’s decision not to bomb China. In Vietnam, President Johnson

was taking no chances with his generals. Not only did he forbid an invasion of

North Vietnam, he would not even permit the kind of urban bombing there that

Truman had permitted in North Korea from the early weeks of the Korean War.

Johnson’s fears of massive Chinese intervention were clothed in the all too

sophisticated “signalling” analysis proffered by advisers. According to this line

of thought, threatening destruction was a more influential signal of American

determination than destruction itself—it was better to hold important targets

“hostage” by bombing trivial targets.26

On August 4, 1964, after North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked an

American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on one occasion if not twice,*

19

Puzzle

* There has been much controversy about whether North Vietnamese boats made a

second attack on two U.S. destroyers at night in bad weather. For evidence supporting the
President Johnson authorized the first air raid into North Vietnam; on August 5,

U.S. Navy planes hit North Vietnamese navy boats, bases and a fuel depot. This

“tit for tat” raid seemed appropriate to the Congress, which passed a resolution

authorizing Johnson to “take all necessary measures” to prevent further communist aggression in Southeast Asia. Rather than make immediate use of this

broad charter, Johnson won a landslide election in November by assuring the

American public that American boys would not fight a war for Asian boys. He

sought successfully to contrast his views with the hawkish reputation of his

Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater (Arizona), who was a major

general in the Air Force Reserve. Johnson made no military response when, a

few days before the election, communist forces attacked Bien Hoa Air Base

near Saigon, killing five Americans and destroying six American B–57s.

Even after the election, Johnson did not retaliate when, on Christmas eve, a

car bomb killed two American officers and wounded more than fifty in Saigon’s

Brinks Hotel. By then, however, he had already told his advisers that if he did

decide to bomb North Vietnam, he would not follow the Air Force’s recommendation to send intensive air raids including B–52s against ninety-four targets throughout North Vietnam. His gradual Rolling Thunder campaign was

finally triggered in early February 1965, when more than thirty American military personnel died in communist attacks on installations at Pleiku and Qui

Nhon, South Vietnam.27

The weak bombing operations of Rolling Thunder did not dissuade the

North Vietnamese regime from continuing intervention in South Vietnam, but

they did serve as a prelude to sending American ground combat units to fight

there. No longer would the American presence be limited to twenty thousand

military “advisors” (including Air Force “advisors” who flew combat missions

in South Vietnam). Beginning with two battalions of Marines to protect the

American air base at Da Nang, Johnson increased American military strength in

20

To Hanoi and Back

reality of a second attack, see Edward Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, The United States

Navy and the Vietnam Conflict, Vol II: From Military Assistance to Combat, 1959–1965

(Washington, 1986). For a contrary view by a carrier pilot who could not find the enemy

that night, see Jim and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War (New York, 1984). Stockdale’s

view has received support from Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the

Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). In 1997, former Secretary of Defense Robert

McNamara asked Gen. Nguyen Dinh Uoc in Hanoi whether the second attack had

occurred and was told that according to Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, it had not occurred. But

McNamara was also told that even the first attack was executed on the orders of a local

commander. See Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, with

Thomas J. Biersteker and Col. Herbert Y. Schandler, Argument Without End: In Search of

Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York, 1999), pp 202–5. Long before this affair, the

U.S. response to the communist insurgency in South Vietnam had included sending South

Vietnamese sapper teams into North Vietnam to blow up targets, and at the end of July

1964, gunboats (supplied by the U.S. but with South Vietnamese crews) began to fire on

North Vietnamese installations.
South Vietnam to seventy-five thousand by July 1965, when he announced that

he would send another fifty thousand and decided on fifty thousand more. In

three years he would have half a million troops in Vietnam, where they joined a

South Vietnamese army that grew to more than half a million.

A few days before the beginning of Rolling Thunder, the most ardent advocate of a more forceful air campaign retired from the Air Force. Although Gen.

Curtis E. LeMay had served as a four-star general for a record thirteen years and

worn stars for more than twenty, he was still a vigorous fifty-eight. Already a

major figure in the Second World War, when he led B–17 bombers over

Germany and commanded the B–29 fire-bombing of Japanese cities, LeMay

became best known for building the Strategic Air Command after the war. He

was far less successful as Air Force Chief of Staff in Washington, where his

views seemed simple-minded to the youthful professors surrounding President

John F. Kennedy.28

Ten years younger than LeMay, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara

brought to the Pentagon a team of still younger “whiz kids”—a term once

applied to McNamara when, after World War II, he and a few other statisticians

got out of the Army Air Forces and sold their services to the Ford Motor

Company. During his wartime tour in the China-Burma-India theater and in the

Pacific, McNamara, a lieutenant colonel, had admired General LeMay’s tactical

brilliance. But as Secretary of Defense, McNamara treated LeMay with the

same disdain most generals received from the new secretary and his whiz kids.

McNamara’s condescending opinions seemed bloodless abstractions rather

than perceptive responses to the realities of warfare. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, LeMay’s hope for better treatment from the Johnson

administration evaporated when President Johnson chose to keep McNamara

and other Kennedy advisers.29

LeMay’s prestige with influential legislators like Senator Symington made

both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson fearful of replacing this forceful Chief of

Staff. But when LeMay’s first two-year term expired in June 1963, Kennedy

extended him only for a single year. Johnson chose to extend him again rather

than deal with the wrath of LeMay’s friends during an election year. Instead of

granting him a full fourth year, Johnson prescribed that LeMay would retire

February 1, 1965, upon completing thirty-five years of service. He did not go

quietly. When a reporter asked him what he thought of Washington, LeMay

growled that it made him sick.30 He went on to elaborate in a memoir that

included a memorable passage about North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and

stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”31

His critics would never let him forget a phrase that he would come to regret:

“That sort of gave me the reputation of being somebody whose solution to

every problem was bombing hell out of them. That’s not my idea of the solution

to every problem.”32

21

Puzzle
LeMay was a man of few words. The stories of his intimidating taciturnity

were legion, but when he did remove his cigar to speak, he often nailed down

the essence of a situation from his point of view. He admonished Washington to

quit just “swatting flies” in South Vietnam and go after the “manure pile” in

North Vietnam.33 The general who had fire-bombed Tokyo did not yet propose

to level the North Vietnamese capital at Hanoi. He was ready to try using B–52s

against ninety-four targets that had garnered the approval of the Joint Chiefs,

but not yet ready to make full use of area bombing in populated areas. If bombing the initial targets proved inadequate, more should be added. LeMay

opposed publicly ruling out the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.

It was a principle with him that the nuclear threat was too valuable to discard,

even if the United States had no intention of actually using nuclear weapons. As

early as 1954, when American support was proving insufficient to keep the

French from losing their empire in Indochina to communist take-over, LeMay

had suggested to a group of American officers: “In those ‘poker games’ such as

Korea and Indo-China, we have never raised the ante—we have always just

called the bet. We ought to try raising the ante sometime.”34 But he also told the

same group that he opposed going to war in Indochina.35

In the 1950s, LeMay’s anticommunism was focused on the Soviet Union.

He was not much concerned about Chinese communism, let alone Vietnamese

communism. During the Second World War, when he was commanding B–29s

in China, LeMay had persuaded Mao Tse-tung and his Chinese communists to

supply weather data and help with rescuing downed American pilots. Further

south the American fighter commander in China, General Chennault, got the

same kind of cooperation from the Vietnamese communist leader, Ho Chi

Minh. Only in the 1960s would LeMay come to favor a bigger American role in

Vietnam (and then only in the air and only if the United States was willing to do

what was necessary to end the war quickly).

LeMay argued that a vigorous prosecution of the war could save friendly

and enemy lives by ending the war sooner. Gradualism might lose the war while

costing more lives. But President Johnson feared that LeMay’s way of going to

war might mean a wider war with China or perhaps even the Soviet Union, not

to mention a very bad press for Lyndon Johnson. The President hoped to keep

the war in Southeast Asia as much out of the press as possible. His years as

Senate majority leader had equipped him to pass the biggest domestic spending

program since the “New Deal” of Franklin Roosevelt, and Johnson was determined to keep the Vietnam War from derailing his “Great Society.” On the other

hand, he did not want to be charged with losing Vietnam to communism as

President Truman had been blamed for losing China. In this frame of mind,

Johnson replaced LeMay with a general much more to his liking.36

Seven years before selecting “J. P.” McConnell to be Air Force Chief of

Staff, Johnson had invited the general to stay at the senator’s LBJ Ranch in the

Texas hill country west of Austin. McConnell was then LeMay’s director of

22

To Hanoi and Back
plans at Strategic Air Command and had testified before Johnson several times.

The majority leader spent the weekend showing McConnell his ranch, introducing him to neighboring ranchers, even personally serving him breakfast in

bed—all the while learning about Strategic Air Command. It was a quintessential Johnson performance, which would give McConnell the impression that

they had a personal relationship, even though they would not have another private meeting until 1964 when McConnell was commanding the U.S. Air Forces

in Europe and the President wanted him to replace LeMay. That summer

McConnell became Vice Chief of Staff with the understanding that he would

become Chief of Staff in six months.37

Born the same year as the President (1908) in a small town in Arkansas,

McConnell had no trouble getting along with Johnson. Both men combined

southern earthiness with quick, practical minds. Graduating magna cum laude

from a little college in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, when he was only nineteen,

McConnell then attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and joined

the Army Air Corps. After serving on the staff of South East Asia Command

under Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten (Royal Navy) during the Second World

War, McConnell went to China where he was Chiang Kai-shek’s American air

adviser after the war. Throughout his career he was an agreeable staff officer

with a persuasive smile.

Although not LeMay’s choice for Chief of Staff, McConnell did advocate

LeMay’s plan to use B–52s based on Guam against North Vietnam. But

McConnell did not put up much of a fuss when he was overruled, and in any

case he was hardly consulted. President Johnson received his military advice

mostly from Secretary of Defense McNamara, who relied more on his assistant

for international security affairs, John T. McNaughton (formerly a law professor at Harvard), than on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even the Chairman of the

Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, was often excluded from important

meetings. Wheeler did form a committee in the Joint Staff to recommend

bombing targets, and two months after the beginning of the Rolling Thunder

campaign, McConnell was finally able to have Col. Henry H. Edelen from his

target intelligence staff serve on the committee.38

Early in Rolling Thunder, Johnson liked to have a weekly Tuesday luncheon meeting with McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. On these

occasions and at other times when the three got together, McNamara often presented a list of proposed targets that had already been coordinated with the State

Department. He gave the President estimates of possible civilian casualties and

any other risks associated with the prospective targets. Johnson would approve

perhaps a dozen targets, usually fewer, and these would have to be hit within the

week or Johnson’s approval would have to be sought again. Since only fighter

aircraft were used and they lacked much capability to bomb in bad weather, the

clouds prevalent in March 1965 over North Vietnam assured that some or all of

the few targets authorized might not be attacked in the assigned week. Not until

23

Puzzle
September 1965 were any targets approved indefinitely. In 1966, weekly bombing programs were replaced by five multiweek programs (Rolling Thunder

Forty-eight, Forty-nine, Fifty, Fifty-one, and Fifty-two) each lasting from one to

four months. By the end of 1966, the President had personally approved more

than two hundred targets, but he had also steadfastly disapproved many on the

original list of ninety-four.39

* * *

The Joint Chiefs of Staff target list for North Vietnam included, at the outset, a dozen route segments. For example, the railroad and highway running

south about 150 miles from Hanoi to Vinh were each divided into two segments

by the major bridge at Thanh Hoa. Although the Thanh Hoa bridge was a separate target, smaller bridges were part of a route segment that could be approved

as a whole for “armed reconnaissance”—fighter aircraft patrolling the route

could attack targets of opportunity like trucks or trains as well as fixed targets

like bridges whose destruction would interfere with the movement of supplies.

As President Johnson approved targets gradually from the southern panhandle

northward, route segments were abandoned in favor of a bomb line south of

which armed reconnaissance was permitted unless a particular target was

specifically exempted or unless the President’s rules of engagement prohibited

a strike (e.g., in a heavily populated area).40

The armed reconnaissance line crept north through the spring and summer

of 1965. After reaching 20 degrees north at the beginning of April, the armed

reconnaissance line did not reach 20 degrees 30 minutes until September. This

east-west bomb line was joined by a north-south line at 105 degrees 20 minutes

east that permitted armed reconnaissance in northwestern North Vietnam (so

long as the bombs stayed at least thirty nautical miles south of the Chinese border). The two lines fenced off Route Package Six (the “northeast quadrant”

containing the major cities of Hanoi and Haiphong) from armed reconnaissance

until the spring of 1966, when rail and road segments were targeted there.

Finally in July 1966, all of North Vietnam was opened to armed reconnaissance

except three restricted areas: (1) along the Chinese border, a buffer zone thirty

nautical miles deep west of 106 degrees and twenty-five nautical miles deep

east of there; (2) around the port of Haiphong, a circle with a radius of ten nautical miles; (3) around the capital at Hanoi, a circle with a radius of thirty nautical miles. Armed reconnaissance was permitted on some route segments within

the Hanoi circle, including one segment only twelve miles from the city center.*41

24

To Hanoi and Back

* Areas restricted in the rules of engagement were measured in nautical miles—each

about 15 percent longer than a statute mile.
In fact, air defenses around Hanoi were so formidable that armed reconnaissance patrols were deemed too risky. Consequently, armed reconnaissance

in Route Package Six was really just a matter of hitting fixed targets and any

associated targets of opportunity that might appear. Although a lot of air patrolling was done along transportation routes in the panhandle of North Vietnam,

even there armed reconnaissance sorties went after a rapidly growing lists of

fixed targets.

Through separate target lists, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pacific commander in chief, and the Seventh Air Force commander each tried to gain control

over what was being bombed and what was not being bombed. At the beginning

of the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency had a list of about five thousand

possible targets in North Vietnam. Very little was known about most of these

facilities, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff selected only eighty-two of them together with a dozen route segments for their original North Vietnam target list. As

the joint list grew to more than double its original length, it was as much a “nofire” list as a target list. These were the targets the Johnson administration was

most reluctant to approve for fear of Chinese and Soviet reaction or a bad press

at home.42

Meanwhile, Pacific Command and Seventh Air Force developed their own

lists of targets with their own numbering systems. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also

departed from Defense Intelligence Agency target identification numbers,

which were deemed too long and cumbersome for wartime use. The problem

with this proliferation of simplified numbering systems was the confusion

caused by each target having as many as four identification numbers—more

when area targets were divided into smaller precision targets (each of which

might have four different numbers). Eventually, Seventh Air Force’s list of targets would include over six thousand in North Vietnam and Laos.43

The Seventh Air Force commander, General Momyer, believed that the

most important of those targets were in the Red River Delta, homeland of the

Vietnamese for perhaps four thousand years. Here the Vietnamese had built a

network of dikes and canals to produce the rice that sustained their economy.

Here they persistently sought to free themselves from Chinese domination.

From here, some moved south, settling along the banks of the next river and the

next, until their descendants took control of the Mekong’s much bigger delta

from the Cambodians. The southern Vietnamese grew powerful enough to

break away from the north for the two hundred years before 1802, when a

southern emperor reunited the country with its capital at Hue on the central

coast. The stature of the old northern capital at Hanoi was revived by the

French, who made it the capital of French Indochina (including Laos and

Cambodia as well as Vietnam).44

When Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces took control of North Vietnam

after the Second World War, they inherited an economic infrastructure built

under French auspices. In addition to administrative buildings, residences and

25

Puzzle
churches, the French had directed the construction of harbor facilities at

Haiphong and a railroad that not only linked the port with Hanoi, but also ran

south to Saigon and its French rubber plantations as well as north to China.

While the southern line ran along the coast and competed with ships, the French

hoped that the route from Haiphong west through Hanoi and splitting there into

northeast and northwest lines to China might make Haiphong the principal port

for all of southern China—might even make France the dominant power in

southern China.45

The result of disappointed French ambitions was the curious fact that

North Vietnam’s railroad became an essential link between China’s interior

Yunnan Province and coastal Kwangsi Province. Copper, tin, and lead from

Yunnan rode North Vietnamese rails to coastal China, while equipment, food,

and consumer goods made the return trip. Early in Rolling Thunder, more than

a hundred thousand Chinese laborers and air defense artillery troops came south

to maintain and defend North Vietnam’s railroads. In preparation for war with

the United States, Mao Tse-tung embarked upon an expensive program to move

vulnerable industries from along the Chinese coast to the remote interior, while

laying an east-west rail link in southern China. Completion of this railroad in

the summer of 1966 freed North Vietnamese rails of Chinese domestic traffic,

making way for more supplies to move into North Vietnam. The longer northwest railroad link between Yunnan and Hanoi became much less important than

the seventy-five mile northeastern rail link between Hanoi and Kwangsi.46

About a third of North Vietnam’s imports came down the northeast railroad

from China, and most of the rest came by sea through Haiphong. Since North

Vietnam imported almost all its military supplies, including gasoline, General

Momyer deemed it essential to close the port of Haiphong and the rail connection with China. But Soviet ships at Haiphong caused President Johnson to

worry that an international incident might lead to a wider war. The President

refused to approve Navy bombing or mining of Haiphong harbor, and the Air

Force was left to bomb the northeast railroad without much hope of making a

critical difference. In any case, bridges along the route were hard to hit with

unguided bombs in the teeth of heavy enemy air defenses. Johnson had not even

approved striking the biggest bridges across the Red River at Hanoi and across

the parallel Canal des Rapides for fear of civilian casualties. Nor were railyards

promising targets without the heavy bomb loads only forbidden B–52s could

carry. Trains could make a quick run from the Chinese border to Hanoi at night,

skipping the intervening yards, and the downtown yard was, of course, off limits.47

Not only did the North Vietnamese struggle to keep their railroad open

under Rolling Thunder, they even built new track. The Chinese helped them

complete a line from the northwest railroad through Thai Nguyen and its ironworks to the Gulf of Tonkin at Hon Gai, a smaller port north of Haiphong near

the country’s major coal deposits. The new line crossed the northeast line at

26

To Hanoi and Back
Kep, and when the Kep-Thai Nguyen section opened in the fall of 1966, the

North Vietnamese could bypass the southern portion of the northeast line.

Meanwhile, far to the south in the panhandle, the North Vietnamese had pushed

the railhead past Vinh toward Dong Hoi and South Vietnam. They had

destroyed much of this line during their war with the French and had not completed rebuilding the portion south of Vinh when Rolling Thunder began. North

of Vinh at Thanh Hoa, they had rebuilt over the Song Ma a bridge that they had

destroyed by arranging a collision between two locomotives filled with explosives. The North Vietnamese took seven years to rebuild it so that it would be

very hard to destroy again. They called it Ham Rong or “The Dragon’s Jaw,”

and wedged powerfully between two hills, it withstood repeated air attacks by

the Air Force and the Navy throughout Rolling Thunder.48

Navy air did manage to keep the lighter bridges on the route south of

Thanh Hoa in sufficiently bad shape that the North Vietnamese rarely used normal trains, but resorted to trucks with rail wheels pulling small two-axle cars.

Below Vinh it was necessary to shuttle freight with trucks between interdicted

sections of track until the railroad gave out fifty miles north of South Vietnam.

Supplies might be moved along the coast by boat, or trucked through the mountain passes to Laos, or carried on backs and bicycles directly across the

Demilitarized Zone, or stored for a future invasion force in caves, tunnels, and

bunkers just north of the zone. Late in the summer of 1966, B–52s began to

bomb the Demilitarized Zone and a narrow strip along it reaching about ten

miles into Route Package One. This area just north of the Ben Hai River would

become the primary focus of the more than two thousand B–52 sorties that

struck North Vietnam during Rolling Thunder; while less than 1 percent as

many as the fighter sorties that bombed North Vietnam in the same years, each

B–52 carried at least ten times the bombs carried by a fighter, and they were all

directed at a relatively tiny portion of the country. In some places B–52 bombing would produce hundreds of craters clustered so close together that pilots

would compare them to a moonscape. Yet in those tunnels that did not collapse

from the pounding, North Vietnamese men, women, and children continued to

live and maintain a flow of supplies to communist forces there and in South

Vietnam.49

While fighter aircraft could hit trucks and trains moving south in daylight,

the night gave good protection. Truck drivers each learned a short segment of

the route so that they could drive without headlights. Fighter pilots tried to dispel the darkness with flares and managed to destroy trucks that way, but too

many other trucks ran the gauntlet successfully. A bridge might be out or a road

badly cratered, but there was usually a ferry or a pontoon bridge or another

route that could be used until repair teams could complete their work. American

radar sites in South Vietnam and Thailand did permit ground controllers to give

fairly precise bomb release instructions to B–52s and fighter aircraft for fixed

targets in the panhandle of North Vietnam—such targets could be hit at any

27

Puzzle
hour in any weather. Moving targets, however, proved too difficult a problem at

night and in bad weather. Across the mountains in Laos, the roads were

patrolled with propeller-driven attack aircraft or even lumbering cargo planes

fitted with guns and night sensors. But only B–52s and jet fighter aircraft

proved survivable strike vehicles in North Vietnam, and they were not well suited to finding trucks or destroying them.

The Annamite Mountains separated not only countries but also weather

systems. While the clouds of the northeast monsoon masked much of North

Vietnam from November to April, the sky was often clear over the Laotian panhandle. As dirt roads dried, thousands of imported trucks rolled down the Ho

Chi Minh Trail road network in Laos toward South Vietnam. During the peak of

the northeast monsoon, more than half the monthly total of about twenty thousand fighter sorties attacking North Vietnam and Laos would strike the Laotian

panhandle. The share hitting targets in the Red River Delta would drop to much

less than a twentieth. This share would not exceed a fifth even during the southwest monsoon from May to October. The delta got most of its heavy rainfall

during the southwest monsoon, but at least the storms were interspersed with

periods of clear weather. During the dry northeast monsoon, in contrast, the pervasive cloud cover over the delta rarely broke. Consequently, sorties were often

diverted to the North Vietnamese and Laotian panhandles, which were much

more heavily bombed than the Red River Delta.50

Superimposed on the natural division between delta and panhandle were

Admiral Sharp’s route packages. The Air Force sent many more sorties against

Route Package One than scheduled, because the service usually had nowhere

else in the panhandle to send them when bad weather forced diversions from the

Red River Delta; the other panhandle route packages were under Navy control.

During the southwest monsoon, the Air Force diverted as many as a thousand

sorties a month to Route Package One. Even after Sharp’s decision in August

1966 to permit Air Force sorties in the western portion of the Navy’s panhandle

route packages, General Momyer in South Vietnam and the Air Staff in

Washington continued to push for more. Except for the roads leading to Laos,

most of targets in the North Vietnamese panhandle were near the coast, and

Momyer wanted his forces to be authorized to attack them.51

The squabble over panhandle route packages came to a head in early

November 1966. The Air Staff in Washington prepared a script that General

Moore, vice commander of Pacific Air Forces and former commander of

Seventh Air Force, used to brief Sharp. The Air Staff’s rationale for Air Force

bombing in the coastal area of Navy route packages was built upon the old concept of interdiction belts. Employed in the Italian campaign of 1944, this concept emphasized the importance of blocking parallel lines of communication at

choke points so that a blocked route could not be bypassed easily. The concept

had already been resurrected by Moore a few months earlier under the name

“Gate Guard” for use in Route Package One and Laos, but so far as Sharp could

28

To Hanoi and Back
see, North Vietnamese repair efforts had been able to stay ahead of the bombing. Sharp had developed such an aversion to the words “Gate Guard” that

Moore deleted them from the briefing. He did argue for establishing interdiction belts in Navy route packages with Air Force planes.52

As Moore informed the Air Staff afterward, his session with Admiral Sharp

grew “rather tense.”53 Adm. Roy L. Johnson, commander of the Pacific Fleet,

accused the Air Force of trying to take control of Navy route packages. Sharp

rebuked both sides, declared that he was fed up with excuses, and emphasized

his expectation that the route package system would be made to work. The Air

Force would not be permitted to control Navy route packages, but Sharp

expected his Air Force and Navy subordinates to negotiate arrangements for

sending sorties into all parts of each other’s areas.54

The resulting arrangements did not permit Air Force interdiction belts in

the Navy portion of the North Vietnamese panhandle, and the Air Force ceased

to push that idea. General Momyer in Saigon was more interested in bombing

the Red River Delta, as was Admiral Sharp. Momyer tended to express his preference for bombing the delta in terms of the greater concentration of enemy

supplies there. Nor did Sharp argue in terms of cutting off the flow of supplies

to South Vietnam (he did not believe this was possible), but in terms of hurting

the North Vietnamese economy as a whole. Both men thought that bombing in

the delta was apt to have more impact on the enemy leadership located there

than bombing in the panhandle.55

In any case, interdiction belts in the panhandle became tainted by their similarity to Secretary of Defense McNamara’s barrier concept, which sought to

replace the bombing of North Vietnam with a physical barrier to infiltration

along the northern edge of South Vietnam and across the Ho Chi Minh Trail in

Laos. The South Vietnamese portion of this “McNamara Line” was to consist

of fortifications manned by American troops, but President Johnson’s refusal to

send regular ground forces into Laos meant that there the McNamara Line

would have to depend upon air power, albeit air power aided by electronic sensors and a few ground reconnaissance teams.56

Secretary McNamara’s disillusionment with the bombing of North

Vietnam moved in a direction opposite from that of most of his military subordinates. They had strongly disapproved of Rolling Thunder’s gradualism from

the outset, but continued to argue for gradually increasing the campaign’s intensity as the best approach they could get from the President. McNamara had

argued for gradualism until late 1966 when he wanted to end Rolling Thunder,

but he was not yet ready to propose its elimination to a President who was likely to feel betrayed by this about-face.57

The Secretary of Defense was confirmed in his pessimism by the failure of

Rolling Thunder’s operations against North Vietnamese oil storage facilities in

the summer of 1966. The Air Force and the Navy had sought permission to go

after oil from the beginning of the war. Without gasoline, North Vietnamese

29

Puzzle
trucks would be useless. But the big tank farms were in the cities of Haiphong

and Hanoi, where President Johnson hesitated to do any bombing. By the time

he gave the go-ahead, the enemy had dispersed gasoline around the country in

drums and small underground tanks. When bombing caused the tank farms to

go up in billowing flames and smoke, their significance had already been

reduced to a minimum. Planes spent the rest of the summer chasing gasoline

drums, while the trucks kept moving.

The chief civilian proponent of bombing oil was a man of sufficiently optimistic temperament that these less than encouraging results did not dissuade

him from recommending more bombing. Walt Whitman Rostow had been a

close student of bombing since the Second World War, when as a young major

in the Office of Strategic Services he belonged to a targeting team in London.

He was an economic historian, and economics seemed fundamental to targeting. In the 1960s, as in the 1940s, he was partial to bombing oil and bridges; he

had argued in 1944 against the insistence of the British analyst Solly

Zuckerman that allied bombing focus on railyards rather than oil and bridges in

the months before the invasion of France. Since then, Rostow’s academic career

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been cut short when President

Kennedy brought him to Washington. In the spring of 1966, he replaced

McGeorge Bundy as President Johnson’s National Security Adviser. In the fall,

Rostow’s older brother Eugene became Under Secretary of State for Political

Affairs; Bundy’s older brother William was already Assistant Secretary of State

for Far Eastern Affairs. All four had attended Yale in the 1930s and all four had

a hand in the bombing of North Vietnam, but the Rostow brothers maintained

their enthusiasm for it longer.58

Walt Rostow provided a warmer welcome for men in uniform than had his

predecessor. Although much military analysis seemed a little crude to Rostow,

he had found an officer with whom he could work closely. Col. Robert N.

Ginsburgh’s doctorate from Harvard, his lack of flying experience, and his

Second World War service in Army artillery set him apart from most Air Force

generals, but thanks in great measure to Rostow he would join their ranks.

Ginsburgh’s career also benefited from associations gained through his father, a

brigadier general who left the Army to join the new Air Force in 1948 as deputy

director of public relations; after developing a warm relationship with Secretary

of the Air Force Symington, the elder Ginsburgh went on to serve four secretaries of defense before his retirement in 1953 and death in 1958. The younger

Ginsburgh first worked with Rostow on the State Department’s policy planning

staff, and Rostow arranged for him to come to the White House as the Joint

Chiefs of Staff liaison in Rostow’s office. Since General Wheeler was not in the

inner circle of the President’s advisers, the Chairman often had to rely on

Ginsburgh for information about decision making in the White House. For

more than a year, Ginsburgh made little progress in getting invitations for

Wheeler to Tuesday lunches and other meetings when President Johnson,

30

To Hanoi and Back
Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Rusk, and Rostow discussed target selection.59

Ginsburgh’s compatibility with Rostow did not mean that the two men saw

eye to eye on the bombing of North Vietnam. Like most Air Force officers,

Ginsburgh believed in at least ratcheting up the bombing dramatically, if not

bombing massively from the outset. Rostow, on the other hand, wanted a very

gradual increase in pressure under which he hoped the enemy would break at

some point. As a student of economic development, Rostow did favor bombing

North Vietnam’s powerplants and its few examples of modern industry in the

Red River Delta, but he did not favor focusing the air effort on the delta. Rather,

the National Security Adviser wanted just enough bombing in the delta to keep

North Vietnamese air defenses and repair capabilities concentrated there as a

way of assisting interdiction bombing further south.60

Ginsburgh was more interested in the Red River Delta. It seemed to him

that the best way to hurt North Vietnam’s rice economy was to bomb the dike

system. He was influenced by Robert F. Futrell’s history of the Air Force in the

Korean War; Futrell indicated that the bombing of irrigation dams near the end

of the war had helped to bring a cease-fire. Neither Rostow nor President

Johnson would countenance so controversial a move, and even General

McConnell, the Air Force Chief of Staff, doubted the feasibility of breaching

the big earthen dikes.61

* * *

In Rolling Thunder the Johnson administration devised an air campaign

that did a lot of bombing in a way calculated not to threaten the enemy regime’s

survival. President Johnson repeatedly assured the communist rulers of North

Vietnam that his forces would not hurt them, and he clearly meant it.

Government buildings in downtown Hanoi were never targeted. Even the government’s ability to communicate was left almost untouched. The location of

the principal telephone switches next to the Soviet Embassy and the Hanoi

offices of the International Control Commission guaranteed the switches’

immunity to bombing. Created by the Geneva Accords of 1954 ending the

Vietnamese communist war of independence from the French, the International

Control Commission was composed of representatives from India, Canada, and

Poland; their peace-monitoring mission had long been superfluous.

The North Vietnamese leaders were too formidable a group not to make the

most of the advantages Johnson gave them. Ho Chi Minh was looking more

frail than ever in his seventies, but he was still at least the symbolic “Uncle Ho”

around whom the Vietnamese communist party coalesced. His assumed name

meant “Bringer Of Light” and was the last of a series of aliases used for propa31

Puzzle
ganda or disguise. His real name was Nguyen, the most common family name

in Vietnam. Like most of his younger colleagues, he had been raised on the central coast of Vietnam. His father was an educated man with just enough money

to send his son to the National Academy at Hue, where Ngo Dinh Diem and

many other Vietnamese nationalists also got their start. After working as a cook

on ship and in London, he helped to found the French communist party. Ho

spent most of the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, China, and Thailand as an agent

of the Communist International.62

In 1966, Americans could not be sure which of the men in Ho’s inner circle

wielded the most power. When Ho died three years later, Le Duan, already very

influential, would emerge as the dominant leader. Since much of his career as a

communist organizer had been spent in the Mekong Delta, he could be expected to insist on pursuing victory there. Truong Chinh was thought to be less dedicated to the struggle in South Vietnam, and he had taken the blame for the

severity of North Vietnamese land reform—a bloody process that may have

killed fifty thousand of the former owners. He was also thought to be much too

enthralled with the Chinese; even his name was an alias meaning “Long

March” in honor of Mao. Pham Van Dong, the prime minister who appeared to

mediate between Le Duan and Truong Chinh, had enjoyed a comfortable childhood and suffered a long imprisonment under the French.

Since Pham Van Dong was one of the Vietnamese communists who had

attended Chiang Kai-Shek’s Whampoa Military Academy, he might have been

Ho’s general. But Ho chose a history teacher, Vo Nguyen Giap, to lead the

troops. It was an inspired choice. General Giap’s victory in 1954 at Dien Bien

Phu, a heavily defended French outpost near the Laotian border two hundred

miles west of Hanoi, made him more famous than any of the American generals

opposing him a dozen years later. Still in his fifties, he was the youngest of the

men in Ho’s inner circle. Apparently more cautious and less influential than Le

Duan, Giap’s prestige inside his army and beyond assured him at least an

important role in the implementation of strategy (if not always in its formulation).63

During Rolling Thunder, Giap commanded a large army. In a North

Vietnam of eighteen million, he had half a million under arms, including a quarter of a million regulars. Fifty thousand of those regulars were in South

Vietnam, where they supported four times that many armed insurgents in a population of about sixteen million. Outnumbered in South Vietnam, Giap relied

upon the jungle and the villages to give him the initiative; his forces could hide

until they were ready to fight. In the north, however, American air power presented him with some new problems. His old enemies the French had controlled

the cities, and Giap’s forces had been able to hide in the jungle. But now Giap

had his own cities, his own railroads, and his own harbors to protect.

When this new war’s bombs first fell on North Vietnam in August 1964,

Giap was not well prepared. Since 1956 his little air force had been slowly tak32

To Hanoi and Back
ing shape at airfields in China and the Soviet Union, while his own airfields were

under construction. The Soviets provided Mikoyan-Guryevich MiG–17s—

faster offspring of the Soviet MiG–15s the Chinese had used against Americans

in the Korean War. The Vietnamese learned to fly and maintain the MiGs in

China until Giap’s principal airfield at Phuc Yen near the village of Noi Bai, fifteen miles north of Hanoi, was finally ready for jet fighters in the summer of

1964. The day after the first American air strikes on North Vietnam, Giap’s three

dozen MiGs flew from China to Phuc Yen. But American bombing did not

resume for another six months.64

Communism, for a time, overcame some of the ancient hostility between

China and Vietnam. For several years the Chinese had been more helpful than

the Soviets, but that changed with the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet

leader in the fall of 1964. The new Soviet leaders, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei

Kosygin, competed with the Chinese for influence in Vietnam. While the

Chinese provided manpower, the Soviets could offer more in the way of technology. Hanoi was eager to embrace Soviet technology in preference to too many

Chinese troops. When bombs again fell on the panhandle of North Vietnam in

February 1965, Kosygin was in Hanoi with the Soviet minister of aviation and

the commander of the Soviet air force.

Using aid to reap prestige in Hanoi and elsewhere in the communist world,

the Soviets also expected concrete returns. North Vietnam was a laboratory for

Soviet equipment and doctrine pitted against American equipment and doctrine. The Soviets secured samples of downed American aircraft and other

American hardware that they could use to develop defenses or imitations. But

the North Vietnamese were not always as cooperative as the Soviets thought

appropriate, and the Soviets complained that the Chinese received preferential

treatment. One irritant was the slow unloading of Soviet ships at Haiphong

where their mere presence protected nearby antiaircraft artillery against

American air attack. Also irritating were incessant requests for more equipment

while earlier shipments sat in the open unused and corroding. None of these

frustrations stopped the Soviets from competing ardently with the Chinese for

North Vietnam’s allegiance.65

The North Vietnamese proved adept at exploiting Sino-Soviet rivalry,

though it made delivery of Soviet equipment somewhat challenging. While the

Chinese agreed to let the Soviets transport goods across China by train, each

cargo plane overflight had to be approved. Rail transport became risky during

Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” of 1966–68, when student mobs attacked Mao’s

critics (including Soviets). Americans, on the other hand, eased Giap’s problem

by leaving North Vietnam’s principal port of Haiphong wide open to Soviet and

other ships. The fact that the Chinese were keeping larger forces on the Soviet

border than on the Vietnamese border did little to ease President Johnson’s concern that China might wage full-scale war in Southeast Asia. Nor was the

Johnson administration willing to risk making much use of North Vietnam’s

33

Puzzle
fear of dependence on massive Chinese intervention; had the United States

forced the North Vietnamese to rely more heavily on China by threatening the

survival of their regime, it was at least conceivable that the North Vietnamese

might have looked for ways to avoid bringing in an overwhelming Chinese

presence—even if avoidance meant postponing their take-over of South

Vietnam.66

By the fall of 1966, Giap had more than forty MiGs at Phuc Yen, plus ten at

Hanoi’s Gia Lam airport and five at Kep airfield thirty miles northeast of Hanoi.

He also had two useable airfields at Haiphong, and he was building new airfields at Yen Bai (fifty miles northwest of Hanoi) and Hoa Lac (only ten miles

west of Hanoi). Meanwhile, the Chinese had been building their own new airfields close to North Vietnam. Thus far the Americans had ignored their own

doctrine (that called for striking airfields at the beginning of a campaign) and

left all the major airfields in the Red River Delta untouched; the Johnson

administration feared not only that Soviet and Chinese advisers might be killed

in airfield attacks, but also that the North Vietnamese air force would move to

China and generate pressure from the U.S. Air Force and its friends to bomb the

Chinese bases. Further south, the old airfields at Vinh and Dong Hoi as well as

the one under construction at Bai Thuong near Thanh Hoa were bombed out of

commission so that North Vietnamese aircraft could not attack South Vietnam

or interfere with American planes bombing the North Vietnamese and Laotian

panhandles.

Giap’s air force included fourteen MiG–21s that were newer and faster

than MiG–17s; the latter usually relied on their guns against opposing fighters,

while MiG–21s depended mostly on their heat-seeking air-to-air missiles.*

Giap also had six old Soviet light jet bombers, Ilyushin Il–28s. Getting the

planes was easier than training the pilots. Most flight training had to be done in

China and the Soviet Union. By the spring of 1965, MiG–17s were engaging

American aircraft, and less than a year later MiG–21s joined the fray.

Although inferior to the F–4 in speed and range, the smaller single-seat

MiGs did not leave a smoke trail and were harder to see at a distance—an

advantage multiplied by the American reluctance to risk hitting their own aircraft by using radar-guided missiles beyond visual range. A MiG–17’s tighter

turns could also make it a formidable opponent in a dogfight. A MiG–21, on the

other hand, had difficulty turning inside an F–4, and poor cockpit visibility to

the rear was a handicap against an F–4’s second pair of eyes. The greatest

American advantage at the outset was superior training. But since the air-to-air

battle took place over North Vietnam, that country’s pilots had a better chance

of returning to action after being shot down. As the months and years went by,

34

To Hanoi and Back

* American pilots observed MiG–21s firing only five radar-guided missiles during

the entire Vietnam War. See the June 1974 report of the USAF Tactical Fighter Weapons

Center, Project Red Baron III, Vol III, Part 1, p 25.
North Vietnamese pilots became more experienced while the American rotation

policy emphasized inexperience. In any case, MiGs did not need to shoot down

American aircraft to help defend North Vietnam—every time an American

fighter jettisoned its bombs to confront an attacking MiG, the MiG had already

won a victory.67

In the Soviet tradition, MiG activity was kept on a tight rein by Senior Col.

Dang Tinh, who used a radar network to command both the air force and the

hundreds of antiaircraft guns that ringed Hanoi. He also had a newer weapon at

his disposal, if not under his command. In the spring of 1965, the Soviets began

to construct SA–2 surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, and on July 24 a Soviet

missile crew shot down an Air Force F–4.68

The U.S. response to SAMs was almost as inadequate as its failure to

attack North Vietnamese airfields. In April 1965 when American reconnaissance began to observe the construction of SAM launch sites within twenty

miles of Hanoi, Secretary of Defense McNamara took Assistant Secretary

McNaughton’s advice and forbade attacks on the sites. In May when President

Johnson raised the possibility of taking them out, McNamara argued that the

SAM sites could not be attacked until B–52s had bombed the airfields—a suggestion which promptly diminished Johnson’s interest in attacking the SAM

sites.69 Thanks to the gradualism of American bombing, Hanoi was not under

attack, and consequently a ring of launch sites there seemed to pose little immediate threat to American aircraft. For a while it was even possible for some to

speculate that the sites were intended only as a signal not to bomb Hanoi. But

the F–4 shot down forty miles west of Hanoi in July alerted the Johnson administration that the North Vietnamese had built at least two launch sites further

from the city than the original five. Sites six and seven were thirty miles west of

Hanoi.

The first SAM shoot-down caught the Johnson administration in the middle of deliberations over whether to Americanize the ground war in South

Vietnam. General McConnell and the other chiefs had already been called to the

White House, where the President had polled them on this major change of policy for South Vietnam. McConnell supplied the expected affirmative, but he

would promise only that American forces in the south plus more bombing in the

north would permit the United States to “do better than we’re doing.”70 Harold

Brown, the young physicist recently chosen by McNamara to be the next

Secretary of the Air Force, was no more enthusiastic: “It seems that all of our

alternatives are dark.”71 Neither man had much real say in Johnson’s ground

force decision. Nor were they called back to advise Johnson on what to do

about the SAMs.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, at least participated in

the White House SAM discussions on July 26. He presented the recommendation of the chiefs that all SAM sites be attacked at once—failing that, at least

sites six and seven. None of the civilians present favored going after the sites

35

Puzzle
closer to Hanoi, but even Under Secretary of State George Ball (a World War II

Strategic Bombing Survey veteran who opposed his country’s deepening

involvement in Vietnam) agreed that if sites six and seven were the beginning

of an outer SAM perimeter they would have to be eliminated. Secretary of State

Rusk noted that while killing Soviets at the sites would be risky, it would also

be a useful warning. Secretary of Defense McNamara told the President that

bombing targets within range of the SAM sites would no longer be wise unless

the sites were attacked first. McNamara recommended bombing sites six and

seven using fighters at low level where they would not be vulnerable to

SAMs.72

President Johnson decided to take out SAM sites six and seven, but this

proved easier said than done. On July 27, 1965, the Air Force sent fifty-four

F–105s against the two sites and nearby barracks where SAM personnel were

thought to be living. Per Washington’s instructions the F–105s went in below

five hundred feet—only to encounter a flak trap with a dummy missile and

enough guns to shoot down four F–105s. Two more were lost in a collision on

the way home when one attempted to inspect the other’s flak damage. It was by

far the most costly air strike of the war so far.73

Subsequently the Air Force and the Navy tried to avoid turning SAM sites

into flak traps and limited the force attacking a site to four planes or less. The

number of sites rapidly increased, much more rapidly than the number of SAM

launch battalions—each of which could move up to six launchers from one site

to another in a few hours. Instead of waiting for the SAMs to kill and move

before sending a retaliatory strike, the Air Force sent “Iron Hand” hunter-killer

flights ahead of the big strike packages to threaten the SAM launch teams. For

several months, each F–105 Iron Hand flight was led by a two-seat F–100F

“Wild Weasel” hunter that had detection equipment to find a site’s radar; the

F–100F could then use its rockets to mark the site for the F–105s to bomb. By

the summer of 1966, two improvements had been made to Iron Hand. The

slower F–100Fs were replaced by two-seat F–105F Wild Weasels (like the twoseat F–100Fs, originally trainer aircraft with the space necessary for detection

equipment plus an electronic warfare officer* to use it), and the target-marking

rockets were replaced by the Navy’s radar-seeking Shrike missiles. The Shrike

warhead’s thousands of small steel cubes did not appear to have much success

destroying revetted radar equipment but did threaten launch personnel sufficiently for them to shut down radar operations temporarily. After the addition of

white phosphorus to the Shrike warhead, detonation could at least reveal a

SAM site’s location so that it could be bombed.74

Although Wild Weasel crews could rarely be certain a Shrike had hit

enemy radar, they could detect the radar going off the air—often in response to

the mere presence of Wild Weasels. As much as possible, the SAM crews

36

To Hanoi and Back

* Unlike the F–4 backseater, the F–105F electronic warfare officer was a navigator

(rather than a pilot) from the outset. He was often called a “bear.”
(increasingly North Vietnamese rather than Soviet) began to use off-site surveillance radar for tracking and turned on the site tracking radar only at the last

minute. Meanwhile, aircraft had considerable success outmaneuvering the lumbering SAMs, often likened to flying telephone poles, but were driven down

within reach of the guns. Although the Wild Weasels also attacked radar controlling the biggest antiaircraft guns and tried to stay above the effective range

of the smaller guns most of the time, North Vietnamese air defenses continued

to make Iron Hand an especially dangerous mission. Of the eleven F–105F

Wild Weasels that deployed to Thailand in the spring of 1966, only four were

left by mid-August. Replacements soon arrived, but it was not always possible

to send a pair in each Iron Hand flight of four; sometimes the older practice of

one Wild Weasel per mission was all that could be managed.

Since SAMs proved too mobile and antiaircraft artillery too numerous and

most of the MiG fields were off limits, all three arms of North Vietnam’s air

defense remained deadly. They worked increasingly well together through

practice and through a growing radar-communications network. By putting

SAMs and guns on or near dikes, hospitals and schools, the North Vietnamese

found they could put American pilots in a no-win situation—either permit these

units to fire unhampered or give the North Vietnamese the kind of publicity that

could win friends in the United States and threaten a pilot’s career. There was

plenty of time to move some of the machinery in Hanoi to underground locations outside Hanoi in case the Americans eventually did decide to bomb the

city. The citizenry could be engaged in digging bomb shelters, including tens of

thousands of relatively small holes (each big enough to hold one person) as well

as larger shelters. In areas already subject to bombing, some of the more trustworthy citizens were issued rifles; instead of diving into shelters, they fired at

American aircraft with an enthusiasm that seemed at least psychologically beneficial.75

In such ways did North Vietnam’s rulers seek to persuade their own people,

as well as Americans, that American high technology could be beaten. The U.S.

government cooperated to a remarkable degree by giving Rolling Thunder a

gradual, even tentative character of self-imposed sanctuaries and bombing

pauses. Since the North Vietnamese took the position that they would not negotiate while they were being bombed, the Johnson administration found itself

under pressure to stop bombing to prove its interest in a negotiated peace. As

early as April 1965, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York visited Johnson to

argue for a bombing pause. The slain President’s brother was Johnson’s principal rival in the Democratic Party, and Johnson sought to keep his own grip on

President Kennedy’s political legacy.76

Johnson’s first bombing pause in May 1965 lasted six days. He had intended a five-day pause, but before it was over, Secretary of Defense McNamara

argued that the New York Times expected a full week of seven days and Johnson

split the difference.77 Any hope Johnson had that the pause would quiet his crit37

Puzzle
ics was disappointed. They protested that the pause was too brief for North

Vietnam and its communist allies to make a positive response. McNamara

became the principal voice within the administration for a longer pause. In July

1965 he began to talk about a pause lasting six to eight weeks (beginning in

December). Secretary of State Rusk could see little point in stopping the bombing when there was no indication that the North Vietnamese were ready to talk,

but Johnson agreed to a five-week pause from December 24, 1965 to January

31, 1966. The North Vietnamese could only have been encouraged by the spectacle of dozens of their enemy’s emissaries scrambling around the world in a

“peace offensive.”78

Secretary McNamara and Assistant Secretary McNaughton prepared for

the long pause’s failure by presenting it as only a step toward another long

pause proposed for the end of 1966. But President Johnson lost patience with

long pauses, and although he would agree to short pauses and revived sanctuaries from time to time, not until after the communist Tet offensive of 1968 would

he agree to another major cutback. Meanwhile, he tried to fine tune the bombing so that it complemented more than forty “peace initiatives” or “peace feelers” as these diplomatic exercises were called. Not privy to the “peace feelers,”

the Air Force became all the more puzzled by the President’s bombing policy.79

38

To Hanoi and Back
Chapter Two

New Tactics, Old Strategy

The northeast monsoon arrived a little early in 1966. By the middle of

October, it hid Hanoi and Haiphong under dense clouds often reaching below a

thousand feet. Although violent storms were common from May to September,

the October overcast rarely broke into a downpour. For six months the low ceiling would cover the Red River Delta. This fact of nature exerted a greater influence on American bombing operations in late 1966 than it had a year earlier. At

that time, the gradually escalating campaign had rarely touched the heart of

North Vietnam. Not until June 1966, sixteen months after the campaign had

begun, did Rolling Thunder’s bombs begin to explode frequently near Hanoi

and Haiphong. Pressure on the Red River Delta could not be sustained through

the northeast monsoon, however, without using B–52s or without a better allweather fighter bombing capability than the United States possessed. The

clouds of October guaranteed respite for the delta unless the United States conducted area bombing and multiplied civilian casualties. This the United States

would not do.

Even during the northeast monsoon, some raids struck the delta. Cracks in

the weather permitted strikes on a railyard just north of Hanoi, on a truck depot

just south of the city, and on an ironworks thirty-five miles away. None of these

targets had been hit before, and the strikes foreshadowed heavier bombing. The

Air Force emerged from the northeast monsoon more able to cope with North

Vietnam’s air defenses. By April 1967, Air Force fighter-bombers carried electronic countermeasures pods to jam radars guiding surface-to-air missiles and

antiaircraft guns. The pods permitted fighter-bombers to fly over the delta at a

higher altitude where SAMs had formerly held sway; no longer were F–105s

and F–4s exposed to low-altitude flak before diving toward a target; no longer

did they have to pop up before diving. By April, fighter-bombers pulled out of

their dives above the worst flak, and most formations over the delta included a

flak suppression flight whose cluster bombs could kill or intimidate gun crews.

When better bombing weather at last arrived, Seventh Air Force finally began

to bomb MiG bases and then exact a toll in the air on increasingly aggressive

MiGs. Thenceforth, F–4s escorted most F–105s bound for the delta so that

39

Preface
F–105 pilots could focus on bombing and not have to jettison bombs or switch

the plane’s attack control system to its air-to-air mode.

Despite important changes, bombing tactics remained routine and predictable. On a day when the weather looked at all promising, as many as two

hundred combat aircraft flew to the delta from Thailand and the Gulf of Tonkin.

The Air Force scheduled up to four formations a day—two in the morning and

two in the afternoon, each with from eight to twenty-four strike aircraft surrounded by escorts and sometimes outnumbered by them. The need to refuel

fighter-bombers en route to the delta from Thailand tied them to the tanker

schedule. There were not enough tankers to refuel large formations both morning and afternoon without giving the tankers several hours at midday to land for

more fuel. Since carriers were closer than Thailand bases to North Vietnam,

Navy aircraft were less dependent on refueling.* The Navy’s somewhat greater

flexibility in the timing of strikes also stemmed from Task Force 77’s preference for smaller formations. In any case, North Vietnamese radar picked up

attackers more than a hundred miles out, leaving very little possibility of surprise. The most that electronic countermeasures could do was to hide the exact

location of individual aircraft; they made the strike force’s presence as a whole

even more obvious.1

Gradual escalation had given the North Vietnamese time to protect the Red

River Delta with air defenses very difficult to destroy. An estimated twenty-five

SAM battalions (with six missile launchers each) rotated among approximately

150 sites. The practice of sending strike teams to kill SAMs was falling into

disuse, because SAM sites recently active often turned out to be nothing more

than flak traps. The North Vietnamese were at least as quick to move their antiaircraft guns as to move their SAMs; not requiring elaborate site preparation or

good roads, the guns could be moved more easily. Their movement and the display of dummies created an exaggerated impression of the scope of North

Vietnamese air defenses. As American intelligence agencies saw through this

illusion, they reduced their estimate of the number of North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns with a caliber of at least thirty-seven millimeters (ranging up to a

hundred millimeters) from more than seven thousand in early 1967 to less than

a thousand in 1972. However many guns there were, they were most numerous

in the Red River Delta, where they were coordinated with about 150 SAM

launchers and over a hundred MiGs. The most important components of the air

40

To Hanoi and Back

* Although the carriers had their own KA–3 tankers aboard, Navy aircraft did sometimes require refueling from the Air Force’s bigger and more numerous KC–135s. On May

31, 1967, a KC–135 refueled a Navy KA–3 while it was refueling a Navy F–8—said to be

the first tri-level air refueling. Two Navy KA–3s and four Air Force fighters were refueled

before that KC–135 landed. Its crew (Maj. John J. Casteel, Capt. Dean L. Hoar, Capt.

Richard L. Trail, and MSgt. Nathan C. Campbell) received the National Aeronautic

Association’s Mackay Trophy for the most meritorious Air Force flight of 1967. See

Charles K. Hopkins, SAC Tanker Operations in the Southeast Asia War (Offutt AFB,

1979), pp 68–69.
defense system were the more than two hundred radar facilities that provided

warning and guidance for MiGs, SAMs, and guns.2

Since the attacks could not achieve surprise, sustained pressure was all the

more desirable. But limited capability to make accurate strikes at night and in

bad weather robbed Rolling Thunder of sustained pressure and frustrated

attempts to take advantage of poor visibility by flying under enemy radar coverage. In the densely populated, strongly defended Red River Delta, American

aircraft had great difficulty striking at night or in bad weather while avoiding

civilian casualties. The Johnson administration’s caution did not deter North

Vietnamese propagandists from making the most of relatively light casualties

during the northeast monsoon of 1966–1967. Notwithstanding attempts to

achieve accuracy necessary for extending the delta campaign into darkness and

bad weather, American bombing there usually occurred in daylight and fair

weather.

* * *

On November 10, 1966, President Johnson approved a bombing program

that featured several new targets in the Red River Delta. They included the Thai

Nguyen ironworks; the cement plant and two powerplants in Haiphong; the Yen

Vien railyard and the Van Dien truck depot, both near Hanoi; and fuel dumps at

Ha Gia and Can Thon. Though he had taken three months to approve this target

list, Johnson soon deferred four of its major targets: the ironworks, the cement

plant, and the two powerplants. Three more months would pass before the

President would begin to release these targets. Meanwhile, he waited for another peace initiative to run its course.3

The target list approved and partly deferred in November was the product

of several proposals made in August. At that time the campaign to destroy

North Vietnam’s oil supplies had passed from dramatic destruction of tank

farms to the frustrating search for gasoline drums buried underground, hidden

in the jungle, or stored along village streets outside bounds set for the campaign

by the Johnson administration. Pacific Air Forces had recommended progressing to more substantial targets like the Thai Nguyen ironworks, the Yen Vien

railyard, and the Van Dien truck depot. Although Sharp advocated these targets

by November, in early August he had still favored pursuing the oil campaign.

At the top of his list had been the Ha Gia and Can Thon tank farms, which had

not been authorized earlier because of their nearness to airfields at Phuc Yen

and Kep. The Johnson administration feared that attacking MiG bases might

provoke a Soviet or Chinese reaction. When the two target lists from Hawaii

reached Washington, the joint staff combined them and added Haiphong’s powerplants and cement plant.4

41

New Tactics, Old Strategy
The Haiphong cement plant was North Vietnam’s only one. Its importance

had been affirmed by the Central Intelligence Agency in March 1966, when the

agency counted itself among those calling for an oil campaign coupled with

closing the port of Haiphong and bombing the northeast railroad to China; even

if the railroad could not be severed for an extended period, the agency had

hoped to overload it with fuel and cement as well as other goods that had been

entering by sea. The CIA recommendation had been implemented only partially. In addition to oil strikes, the northeast railroad had been bombed regularly

enough to became a leading flak trap, but the trains continued to roll.

Haiphong’s cement plant, like its port, remained unstruck and busy.5

The target recommendations of all military organizations from the Joint

Chiefs of Staff (JCS) down sometimes hinged as much on their judgment of

what the President might approve as on what was most needed. Though closure

of the port of Haiphong was widely considered to be a key objective, General

Wheeler avoided tiresome repetition of that recommendation. Sharp and others

down the line were less restrained, but even they did not push for Haiphong

every time. Despite Wheeler’s restraint, the Johnson administration frequently

balked at JCS recommendations. The President was slow to approve the August

1966 target list, which in November at last became the fifty-second bombing

program ordered since the beginning of Rolling Thunder. Early in the campaign, bombing programs had lasted a week, but the fifty-first had lasted four

months. Now that gradualism had brought bombing to the outskirts of Hanoi

and Haiphong, the administration hesitated to go farther.6

When, on November 11, President Johnson deferred four targets he had

just approved, his military advisers believed that the deferment would be short

lived. Wheeler explained to Sharp that the targets would be deferred only until

after the Moscow visit of George Brown, British foreign secretary. Brown was

scheduled to leave Moscow on November 25, and Wheeler had been assured

that the deferred targets could then be struck. As it turned out, the deferment

held through Tet in February 1967. While Sharp and Momyer could only stew

about this delay in ignorance of its cause, the Johnson administration was once

again exploring the doubtful possibility that leaders might be willing to talk

seriously about a settlement acceptable to the United States. This round of

diplomacy began with Brown’s visit to Moscow in November and ended with a

visit to London in February by a Soviet leader, Alexei Kosygin. The centerpiece was an aborted Polish attempt to arrange a meeting between North

Vietnamese and American officials in Warsaw.7

The State Department, which named each peace feeler after a flower,

called Poland’s initiative “Marigold.” Since the summer of 1966, the Polish

representative on the International Control Commission in Vietnam had tried to

find common ground in the American and North Vietnamese positions. On

November 30, he gave Ambassador Lodge in Saigon a list of ten points that the

North Vietnamese government was said to have approved as a basis for conver42

To Hanoi and Back
sation with American officials in Warsaw. Despite State Department reservations, the American ambassador in Warsaw was told early in December to

inquire whether conversations with the North Vietnamese could be arranged

through the Polish foreign minister. At this point, Marigold died. According to

the Polish foreign minister, American bombing near Hanoi killed North

Vietnamese interest in making contact.8

So it was that the care taken in November to defer targets which might

endanger negotiations did not save the Johnson administration from incurring

accusations of doing just that. Two of the targets not deferred were close to

Hanoi: the Yen Vien railyard (five miles northeast of Hanoi’s center) and the

Van Dien truck depot (four miles southeast of Hanoi’s center). Not since the Air

Force strike against the Hanoi tank farm on June 29 had bombs fallen that close

to downtown Hanoi. For three weeks after Johnson’s approval of these targets,

weather prevented an attack. On December 2 the clouds cleared enough for the

Navy to strike the truck depot. Two days later the Air Force hit the railyard.

When told that the timing of the raids was the result of weather and not of

Marigold, the Polish foreign minister objected that policy was more important

than weather. The State Department, nevertheless, informed its ambassador in

Warsaw that no change would be made in the current bombing program. On the

other hand, the President gave an equally negative response to General

Wheeler’s request that the deferred targets be attacked. Wheeler let Sharp know

that the delay was due to “certain political problems.”9

When weather over the delta improved again on December 13 and 14, Air

Force and Navy aircraft returned to the same targets they had hit two weeks earlier. After these strikes, the Polish foreign minister told the American ambassador that the North Vietnamese were no longer interested in talking to the

American government. President Johnson attempted to salvage the Warsaw

connection by offering to prohibit strikes within ten nautical miles of the center

of Hanoi, if the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong would refrain from attacking

within ten miles of the center of Saigon. In the absence of any North Vietnamese response, Johnson unilaterally established a prohibited zone with a

radius of ten nautical miles for Hanoi; strike aircraft were not even to fly over

the prohibited zone, let alone expend ordnance there. Over the course of the

next year, however, the President would permit a number of attacks on targets

within the prohibited zone.10

The Hanoi prohibited zone added one more limitation to those already confining American pilots and encouraging North Vietnamese air defenses to concentrate near authorized targets. Around the prohibited zone, the thirty-mile

restricted zone remained in place. There pilots had gradually gained some freedom of operation: SAM sites and fuel storage could be struck as well as any

previously authorized target that had not been specifically withdrawn; in addition, armed reconnaissance was permitted along railroads. Haiphong was also

protected by a restricted zone (ten nautical miles from the center) and would

43

New Tactics, Old Strategy
later be given a prohibited zone (four nautical miles from the center). The

buffer zone along the Chinese border remained off limits as did all targets on

the JCS list that had not been authorized.11

* * *

President Johnson’s prohibition on bombing near Hanoi came at the

beginning of the most important North Vietnamese propaganda initiative

before the Tet Offensive of 1968. TASS, the Soviet news agency, issued

reports that the December 1966 bombing attacks had killed civilians in downtown Hanoi, capturing headlines in the United States and Europe. That was

only the beginning. For the first time under Rolling Thunder, North Vietnam

permitted a visit by an American reporter. From the many who had requested a

visa, North Vietnam chose Harrison Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of

the New York Times.

12

After Salisbury’s articles began to appear, the British government called for

immediate talks on a cessation of hostilities. The Chairman of the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright (Democrat, Arkansas), held

hearings. Senator Vance Hartke (Democrat, Indiana) called for an end to bombing and an independent evaluation of the entire war effort by former Under

Secretary of State George Ball and former Ambassador to India John Kenneth

Galbraith. On the other side of the question, the Chairman of the House Armed

Services Committee, L. Mendel Rivers (Democrat, South Carolina), suggested

that the United States “annihilate” Hanoi if necessary: “Give them two weeks to

get out and then level the city.”13 While Defense Department public affairs specialists tried to calm public controversy, their boss contributed to it. Arthur

Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, openly attacked

“Harrison Appallsbury” of the “New Hanoi Times.”14 Years later, author Tom

Wolfe would skewer Salisbury as the “ocarina” that the North Vietnamese had

used “as if they were blowing smoke up the pipe and the finger work was just

right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves.”15

The North Vietnamese had done a good job of choosing a reporter.

Salisbury represented America’s most prestigious newspaper, and he opposed

bombing North Vietnam. For months he had been trying to get North Vietnam’s

permission to enter that country. In June he had talked to the North Vietnamese

consul in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and had filed his visa application there. A

letter to Hanoi was written in his behalf by Anne Morrison, a Quaker whose

husband was said to have become a hero in North Vietnam after burning himself to death in front of the Pentagon. On December 15 the North Vietnamese

government cabled Salisbury that his visa was waiting in Paris. He arrived in

44

To Hanoi and Back
Hanoi on December 23 and remained for two weeks. His front-page articles

began appearing on Christmas day.16

Salisbury stayed in Hanoi’s old Metropole Hotel, which had been renamed

the Thongnhat (Reunification), illustrating North Vietnam’s plans for South

Vietnam. While he was there, the hotel hosted the deputy director of TASS; four

American women on a visit arranged by David Dellinger, a prominent pacifist;

and a seven-member delegation seeking evidence for British philosopher

Bertrand Russell, who was preparing a mock trial of President Johnson and

other American “war criminals.” Each of the groups and Salisbury were taken

on separate, but similar, tours of North Vietnamese bomb damage.17

Salisbury first saw sites in Hanoi, where about three hundred homes were

said to have been destroyed and ten people killed. This downtown destruction

was about five miles from either the Yen Vien railyard or the Van Dien truck

depot. He described the truck depot (North Vietnam’s largest truck repair facility with 180 buildings) as a “large, open area with light buildings and compounds that may or may not have been a truck park.”18 Salisbury was more

interested in the destruction of the Vietnam-Polish Friendship high school

“probably three-quarters of a mile from the presumed United States target.”19

He made no mention of casualties in this case. As to the Yen Vien railyard, he

was told that buildings destroyed and damaged near the tracks were apartments.

Air Force bomb damage reports described extensive damage to a warehouse

complex associated with the country’s largest railyard. Salisbury’s account

made no mention of warehouses.20

On Christmas day Salisbury was driven sixty miles southeast to Nam Dinh.

Here was the principal exhibit in North Vietnam’s case against American

bombing. According to Salisbury’s guides, the city had been struck fifty-two

times in a year, eighty-nine people had been killed, and 13 percent of the city’s

housing had been destroyed. Salisbury concluded that U.S. aircraft were “dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets.”21

Johnson administration attempts to refute Salisbury’s articles seemed awkward, mostly because it was Salisbury’s interpretation that was objectionable

rather than his data. True, his statistics were supplied by the North Vietnamese

government, but for the most part they did not conflict with American estimates. Indeed, Secretary McNamara was upset to learn from the CIA that

bombing deaths in North Vietnam might already total as many as twenty-nine

thousand, including more than two thousand civilians who were not war workers. It did not follow, however, that civilians were being targeted. Had they

been, the number of casualties would have been radically higher.22

The Johnson administration had taken extraordinary measures to minimize

the number of civilian casualties, yet had difficulty countering Salisbury’s

charge that it had done the opposite. The problem was that the administration

had not educated the public about the limitations of bombing. Even if a pilot

correctly identified a target, most of his bombs were apt to miss. When bomb45

New Tactics, Old Strategy
ing through heavy flak, only about half the bombs dropped by F–105s (which

usually carried six 750-pound bombs apiece) were likely to hit within five hundred feet of the aiming point. Americans who did not know that bombing precision was unlikely in the face of a determined defense could hardly be blamed

for accepting Salisbury’s conclusions.23

Salisbury saw little of North Vietnam’s formidable air defenses. Nam Dinh

was well known to Navy pilots for a concentration of antiaircraft artillery and

SAMs that greeted them when they entered the Red River Delta by the most

direct route from the south. According to the Defense Intelligence Agency,

Nam Dinh’s normal complement was about a hundred guns with a caliber of at

least eighty-five millimeters and about fifty smaller caliber guns of at least thirty-seven millimeters, not to mention a battalion of six SAM launchers. Yet

Salisbury did not report seeing any antiaircraft weapons in Nam Dinh. Since he

visited during the Christmas cease-fire, no attacks occurred to provoke shooting. Nam Dinh ran three alerts anyway, presumably in response to reconnaissance aircraft.24

Salisbury misled his countrymen by telling them that the only targets in

Nam Dinh other than people were dikes and a cotton textile mill. Though the

largest in North Vietnam, the textile mill had not been targeted. An adjacent

powerplant had been bombed several times, and stray bombs had damaged the

mill; its twenty thousand workers had dispersed to smaller factories.

Throughout the war, the North Vietnamese claimed that the United States was

bombing the dike system essential to rice cultivation. If bombed after heavy

rain, during the southwest monsoon, breached dikes might cause extensive

flooding. While antiaircraft guns firing from dikes were sometimes attacked,

pilots were never authorized to attack the dikes. Because Nam Dinh was only

twenty miles from the coast, most strikes there were flown by the Navy, and the

Navy had bombed a river transshipment facility with dikes nearby. Be that as it

may, no extensive flooding was caused by bombing anywhere in North

Vietnam. Major targets in Nam Dinh were the tank farm, the powerplant, the

railyard, the transshipment facility, and the air defense sites. None of these were

described in Salisbury’s articles.25

Though Salisbury reported much greater damage for Nam Dinh than for

Hanoi, the latter was harder to explain, since the nearest authorized targets were

about five miles away. Part of the mystery was solved when a reconnaissance

photo indicated that some Air Force pilots had mistaken the Gia Lam railyard

for the Yen Vien railyard. Gia Lam was half way between Yen Vien and downtown Hanoi. The two yards were easy to confuse through scattered clouds

because Yen Vien was east of the Canal des Rapides Bridge and Gia Lam was

east of the Paul Doumer Bridge over the Red River. South of the latter bridge

lay the heart of Hanoi. The exact nature of the mistake was not made public,

however. The administration would only say that some kind of accident may

have occurred.26

46

To Hanoi and Back
Nor did the Johnson administration comment publicly on speculation about

damage caused by aircraft jettisoning bombs, air-to-ground missiles, or fuel

tanks when jumped by MiGs. The danger of explosion was sufficient to discourage pilots from landing with bombs on board. For this reason and to conserve

fuel, unexpended bombs were dropped at sea or in mountainous areas on the way

home. Though bombs could be jettisoned without arming them, a 750-pound

bomb jettisoned from several thousand feet could cause considerable damage

even without exploding. The failure of the administration to talk freely about the

obvious question of jettisoning reduced the credibility of explanations that were

made. The administration stressed that one consequence of heavy antiaircraft fire

was damage caused when disintegrating projectiles fell back to earth. This was a

plausible explanation for light damage of the kind Salisbury reported for the

Chinese and Rumanian embassies. American pilots had seen SAMs go haywire

and detonate on the ground; this could explain more extensive destruction.27

North Vietnam sent a fairly complex message to the American people

through Harrison Salisbury. The message was not simply one of American

transgression, but also one of North Vietnamese resistance. North Vietnamese

officials were careful not to exaggerate bomb damage in a way that might suggest any potential for bombing to reduce their effort in South Vietnam. They

told Salisbury that they expected Hanoi to be destroyed and that they had prepared blueprints for a complete new capital city. He was told that much of the

urban population and their work had already been moved to the countryside. In

Nam Dinh, only twenty thousand were said to remain of the ninety thousand

who had made that city the third largest in North Vietnam. With this information, low casualty figures could be reconciled with extensive damage, and perhaps Americans could be persuaded that any attempt to bomb industry or population would be futile. Salisbury could see for himself that many who stayed in

the cities could hide in shelters. Though he did not witness an attack, numerous

air raid alerts featured civilians with rifles ready to fire at American aircraft.

North Vietnamese officials bragged that South Vietnam would not dare arm its

civilians. But the grim determination evident in Hanoi was not the whole story.

Since bombing attacks were confined largely to daylight, shops and streets bustled during the evening.28

Salisbury saw thousands of fifty-five gallon fuel drums lining village

streets and scattered through rice paddies. Bombing had destroyed the large

tank farms, but it could not combat dispersion. Similarly, repair materials were

piled along railroads and highways. Damage could be quickly repaired by road

crews, and a steady stream of traffic flowed through the night. In a book published three months after his return, Salisbury expanded on this theme. Why, he

asked, were so many trivial targets bombed while obviously important targets

like the Doumer Bridge and the Hanoi powerplant were left unscathed? It was

the very question Admiral Sharp and General Momyer had been asking. Within

four months of the book’s publication, both targets would be bombed.29

47

New Tactics, Old Strategy
Escalation of the air war followed a February 1967 opinion survey conducted by Lou Harris, who found that 67 percent of Americans favored bombing North Vietnam. An equally interesting finding was that 85 percent of

Americans agreed that the bombing was killing innocent civilians. Henceforth,

the debate over bombing veered from humanitarian considerations and centered

on its cost and effectiveness.30

* * *

The cost of Rolling Thunder received a great deal of official attention in

late 1966 and early 1967. The onset of frequent raids into the Red River Delta

had sharply raised the price Americans were paying. From the beginning of

July 1966 to the end of September, fifty-one American aircraft fell in Route

Package Six, which encompassed most of the delta; forty-four of them

belonged to the Air Force, which suffered a loss rate there exceeding twentyfive attack aircraft per thousand attack sorties. Before the delta raids, American

losses had rarely exceeded three per thousand anywhere in Southeast Asia and

averaged less than one per thousand. An especially painful aspect of losses in

the delta was the near impossibility of rescuing downed airmen in a region so

densely populated and well defended.31

The Air Force’s heavy losses in Route Package Six contrasted vividly

with the comparatively light losses of the Navy—seven Navy aircraft lost from

July through September (compared with the Air Force’s forty-four) for a loss

rate of less than three attack aircraft per thousand attack sorties. During this

period, the Navy had sent more attack sorties into Route Package Six than had

the Air Force (1,695 compared with the Air Force’s 1,557). Before the delta

raids of mid-1966, the loss rates over North Vietnam of the two services had

been about the same, with the Navy’s only a little lighter. The extreme variation experienced during the mid-1966 campaign did not persist into the next

year, though the Navy’s loss record remained slightly better throughout. One

explanation sometimes offered for the overall superiority of the Navy’s loss

record was the nearness of Navy targets to the coast, which meant shorter

routes over defended territory; Route Package Six remained divided into a

Navy B section along the coast and an Air Force A section inland. But since

most losses occurred near targets, the location of Navy targets could not alone

explain the pronounced variation in losses that occurred in 1966. The Navy’s

major technical advantage was that most of its attack aircraft carried electronic countermeasures devices which transmitted false positions when triggered

by North Vietnamese radar.32

During 1967, Air Force losses in Route Package Six declined to less than

ten attack aircraft per thousand attack sorties. This improvement owed primari48

To Hanoi and Back
ly to three changes: increasing altitude of bomb release, growing use of cluster

bombs to suppress flak, and introduction of electronic jamming pods.33

The higher a dive bomber released its bombs and pulled off the target, the

higher was the probability of its surviving and the lower the probability of its

bombs hitting the target. As the Air Force undertook heavier bombing of the

Red River Delta in 1966 and 1967, the concentration of antiaircraft guns there

forced the wings to raise recommended bomb release altitude from less than six

thousand feet to as much as nine thousand feet, which raised pullout altitude

from less than four thousand feet to as much as seven thousand feet.

Unfortunately, the increase in bomb release altitude also increased probable circular error (the radius within which half the bombs were apt to fall) from less

than three hundred feet to more than five hundred feet.34

Although both Air Force and Navy bomb release altitudes were rising over

the Red River Delta in 1966 and 1967, Navy pilots reported release and pullout

altitudes about a thousand feet lower than those reported by Air Force pilots.

This surprising fact did not seem to fit with the Navy’s comparatively low loss

rate—not only for Route Package Six in general, but for dive and pullout in particular. Some pilots may have reported releasing bombs at recommended altitude when in fact they had released them at a higher or lower altitude. But it can

not be shown that inaccurate reporting was more common in one service than

the other. Part of the explanation may have been the Navy practice of tailoring

recommended release altitude for each target rather than making a blanket recommendation for Route Package Six. In dealing with more heavily defended

targets, Navy pilots were told to release their bombs at higher altitude.35

Higher bomb release altitude seemed to be responsible for a significant

reduction in aircraft losses over Route Package Six. During August 1966, six

F–105s had been lost to ground fire while diving toward or pulling off targets in

Route Package Six. During May 1967 (when the Air Force flew about a thousand sorties there, or more than twice as many as in August 1966) only three

F–105s were lost in that way. Four of the F–105s lost in August 1966 were

reportedly hit below four thousand feet. Only one of the F–105s lost in May

1967 was reported to have been hit that low. Although antiaircraft gunners

raised their sights, they were foiled not only by altitude, but also by cluster

bombs bursting around them.36

The cluster bomb, a modern version of shrapnel, was a canister designed to

release hundreds of spinning bomblets whose detonation sent thousands of steel

pellets flying in all directions. Though a cluster bomb had little effect on guns,

it could force gun crews to take cover or suffer severe wounds. Early models of

cluster bombs could not be used in the strongly defended Red River Delta,

because they required delivery at about three hundred feet. In 1966 the Air

Force introduced a cluster bomb that could be dropped in a dive above three

thousand feet. With increasing availability of the new model, a flight of four aircraft could use cluster bombs to suppress flak while the rest of a formation

49

New Tactics, Old Strategy
struck a target. To discourage gun crews from promptly resuming their posts,

later models were modified so that bomblets would detonate randomly for two

hours; eventually the period of detonation was reduced to twenty minutes—few

attacks lasted longer. A big shortcoming of dive cluster bombs when first introduced was their scarcity. Not until early 1967 was the production rate adequate

to make a significant difference. Even then, the monthly rate of about five hundred was only an eighth of Seventh Air Force’s stated requirement, and the

Navy also wanted them.37

The cluster bomb reduced losses during dive bombing runs, but it did less

for a strike force en route. Before fighter-bombers rolled in toward their target,

they had most to fear from SAMs, which had a range of about twenty miles.

The dispersal of launch sites meant that pilots had to begin watching for missiles at least sixty miles from Hanoi. Until December 2, 1966, the American

response to SAMs had seemed adequate. Only thirty-four aircraft had been lost

to the approximately eleven hundred missiles thought to have been launched.

On December 2, however, a record eight American aircraft went down, including five hit by SAMs. None of these was part of the Navy’s strike that day

against the Van Dien truck depot on the outskirts of Hanoi. All but one went

down attempting to attack oil tank farms, with the Air Force losing four (including three to SAMs) during a strike on the Ha Gia tank farm near Phuc Yen airfield (twenty-five miles northwest of Hanoi). However, SAMs would have few

days as successful as that—over the next year, American estimates of the North

Vietnamese SAM success rate would continue to decline from an already dismal one kill for thirty launches to less than one kill for fifty launches.38

The major new factor in combating SAMs after December 2, 1966 was the

growing number of jamming pods. None of the aircraft shot down by SAMs on

December 2 was carrying a jamming pod. A few weeks later, enough pods had

arrived so that most F–105s on missions in the delta were carrying one. By mid1967, F–105s and F–4s would be carrying two pods apiece.39

Pod jamming supplemented jamming already provided by EB–66 electronic warfare aircraft, converted bombers with room in their bomb bays to carry

large transmitters. These slow jammers were vulnerable to missiles: two

EB–66s had been shot down by SAMs in 1966, and a third would fall in

February 1967. When out of SAM range, EB–66 jamming was not powerful

enough to hide F–105s and F–4s as they neared Hanoi. With jamming pods,

F–105s and F–4s supplied their own electronic fog. The location of an aircraft

with one or two pods, however, was not disguised adequately unless that aircraft flew in formation with other pod-equipped aircraft. This weakness was the

result of the relatively small transmitters that could be carried in pods on the

wings of a fighter, but a bonus accruing from the fighters’ adjustment to space

limitations was an ability to move pods easily from aircraft to aircraft.40

In late 1966 and early 1967, the F–105 wings in Thailand experimented

with various formations to see which offered better electronic protection.

50

To Hanoi and Back
Eventually they chose formations which put each flight of four aircraft within a

box about a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, so that their jamming created

as large an area of uncertainty as possible for North Vietnamese radar; if a flight

spread much farther, each aircraft appeared separately on enemy radar scopes.

Flight boxes drew together in a larger box so that the whole formation gave the

illusion of a single undifferentiated mass on radar screens—a more difficult set

of targets for SAMs but, unfortunately, a more predictable target set for MiGs.

Before pods, there had been wide separations within a long string of loosely

formed flights giving aircraft room for jinking thought necessary to evade

SAMs. The Navy was able to avoid the rigidity of Air Force pod formations,

because electronic countermeasures devices on board Navy aircraft gave false

locations rather than attempting to cloud radar screens with jamming; the drawback was that amid the false targets thus produced, Navy aircraft also appeared

on enemy radar screens. The Navy adjusted its formations to make the best use

of the deception device and kept them loose enough to facilitate evasive maneuvers.41

Air Force ingress tactics were not uniform, and F–105 wings in Thailand

differed markedly in their employment of jamming pods. The 388th at Korat

was quicker to develop a new approach, while the 355th at Takhli was far more

distrustful of the pods and held longer to old tactics. The 355th continued to

enter the delta at about five thousand feet and pop up above twelve thousand

before diving on a target.

The 355th’s old ingress procedure offered some terrain protection from

radar, especially northwest of Hanoi. Here a small range of mountains rising

about four thousand feet reached to within thirty miles of the city. F–105 pilots

transferred the ironic nickname of their aircraft to “Thud Ridge” in rueful

acknowledgement that as much as the ridge helped them, it was also a grave

stone for many friends. The ridge was not the only reality that kept the 355th at

five thousand feet. At that altitude an aircraft was apt to be under the clouds

where its pilot could see SAMs launch and dodge them before they gained full

speed. Since pod jamming interfered with the F–105’s SAM radar warning

device, 355th pilots often turned off their pods.42

Despite such justifications for conservatism, the 388th embraced pods and

the freedom offered by them to use higher altitude. Instead of approaching a target at five thousand feet and popping up above twelve thousand, the 388th came

in above twelve thousand and avoided the necessity to pop up. This technique

gave pilots more time to look for targets and lessened the effectiveness of antiaircraft fire during ingress before diving. Replacing a loose string of flights

with a tighter box formation brought the entire formation over the target much

more quickly, so that gunners had to choose among them. But there was then

the problem of bunching if each flight did not roll in fast enough. Rolling

toward the target from a pod formation proved less than satisfactory with

respect to accuracy also, because only the lead aircraft in each flight could eas51

New Tactics, Old Strategy
ily attain the preferred forty-five degree dive; the other three were likely to have

a more shallow dive (both less accurate and more dangerous) since they started

farther from the target.43

For reasons just discussed, the 355th persisted in dissolving pod formation

before a dive. But at the end of March 1967, the 355th began ingressing above

twelve thousand feet in good weather and climbing out of pod formation to fifteen thousand before diving. The 355th retained a preference for ingressing

under a low ceiling so as not to be surprised by SAMs breaking through

clouds.44

Differences in wing attitudes toward ECM pods grew out of differences in

combat experience. Since Korat was close enough to the North Vietnamese

panhandle for unrefueled missions, the 388th had drawn more sorties in the

“easy packs” than had the 355th at Takhli a hundred miles farther west.

Economical use of tankers meant that Takhli F–105s, which required refueling

anyway, had been sent more often to the Red River Delta. Takhli’s losses had

been much greater, but its leadership believed that the wing had learned to take

care of itself the hard way. Though the 355th had been the first wing to receive

jamming pods, it was the least impressed with them. Most impressed was the

8th Tactical Fighter Wing, the F–4 wing at Ubon. Pod protection from SAMs

permitted F–4s to fly at higher altitudes from which MiGs could be spotted

more easily. Higher altitude also increased the F–105’s need for F–4 protection.

At low altitude, F–105s could outrun MiGs, but at higher altitude an F–105’s

small wing made it less maneuverable than a MiG or an F–4.*45

* * *

When F–105 use of jamming pods increased in December 1966, North

Vietnamese MiGs became more aggressive as if they were attempting to substitute for SAMs and take advantage of the more rigid pod formations. There may

52

To Hanoi and Back

* The 355th Tactical Fighter Wing did not fully convert to the ECM pod formation

employed by the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing until August 1967, when Col. John C.

Giraudo took command. Before assuming command at Takhli, Giraudo stopped at Korat to

visit a former boss, Brig. Gen. William S. Chairsell, who was about to leave after a year

commanding the 388th. Giraudo was all the more interested in tactics that might lower

losses, because he had already been shot down and taken prisoner during both World War

II and the Korean War. Unlike Chairsell, however, Giraudo himself flew many missions

into North Vietnam. See Lt. Col. Charles M. Heltsley’s interview with Maj. Gen. John C.

Giraudo, Treasure Island, Florida, 8–12 January 1985, AFHRA 1105191. For a view of the

388th under Chairsell, see the USAF film There Is a Way (i.e., a way to survive a hundred

missions over North Vietnam). For a view from the 355th before Giraudo, see the well

known books by the wing vice commander in 1966–67, Col. Jack Broughton (Thud Ridge

and Going Downtown). 
not have been a direct relationship between pods and MiGs, since the MiGs

may simply have been reacting to attacks unusually close to Hanoi, Haiphong,

and Phuc Yen. Another possible explanation was the training cycle of MiG

pilots, whose confidence had appeared to be growing for several months.

Whatever its cause, MiG activity worried officers in Southeast Asia and

Washington. In December, MiGs shot down two F–105s at a cost of one MiG.

On the three days of heaviest activity, MiGs persuaded nineteen out of seventyfour strike aircraft to jettison bombs and, in several cases, jamming pods.46

The MiG problem came under discussion at a Pacific Air Forces commanders conference held in the Philippines. General Momyer and Col. Robin Olds,

new commander of the F–4 wing at Ubon, exchanged views over cocktails.

Both men had been fighter aces in World War II, and Olds’ father had risen to

the rank of major general in the Army Air Forces before succumbing to a heart

attack. Aside from their shared experience, Momyer and Olds were very different—the short general’s cerebral asceticism contrasting with the tall colonel’s

fun-loving boisterousness. Like many of his men, Olds sported a regulationbreaking mustache, and his marriage to a film actress added a certain luster to

his reputation.

Olds’ conversation with Momyer led to an imaginative operation codenamed Bolo (a Philippine knife), which cost the North Vietnamese perhaps 7 of

their 115 MiGs. Because the Air Force and Navy were not permitted to attack

MiG bases, the MiGs could be destroyed only by drawing them into air-to-air

combat. Colonel Olds succeeded in doing so by attempting to persuade the

North Vietnamese that F–4s trimmed for air-to-air engagement were F–105s

loaded with bombs, and that these “F–105s” intended to bomb the country’s

major MiG base at Phuc Yen.47

Jamming pods played an important part in the ruse, because thus far they

had been used only by F–105s. The pods would help to disguise F–4s as

F–105s, and if the North Vietnamese chose to send up SAMs rather than MiGs,

F–4s would benefit from pod protection. The number of available pods determined the size of the MiG sweep: at one pod per aircraft, fifty-seven pods permitted twelve flights of four F–4s with plenty of backup. Olds planned to use

seven flights from his 8th Tactical Fighter Wing and five from the 366th at Da

Nang. These would be supplemented by an EC–121 radar plane, an EB–66

electronic intelligence and jamming plane, eight F–104s to guard the EB–66

and assist the F–4s if necessary, twenty-four F–105s to threaten SAMs, and

twenty-five KC–135 tankers to refuel aircraft on the way to North Vietnam and

again on the way home. The force was designed to look like an unusually big

strike, with formations heading for the MiG bases from west and east simultaneously. The Navy and Air Force sometimes achieved this pincer effect

through parallel operations. In this case, the Navy agreed to stand down while

the Air Force sent Ubon F–4s in from the west and Da Nang F–4s in from the

east.48

53

New Tactics, Old Strategy
The New Year’s cease-fire allowed enough time to transfer pods from

F–105s to F–4s without causing a suspicious change in F–105 bombing routine.

C–130s carried the pods from Takhli and Korat to Ubon and Da Nang—much

to the displeasure of F–105 pilots, who could not be told what was afoot.

Throughout New Year’s night, maintenance crews worked to attach pods to F–4

wing pylons. Adapter kits had been rushed from the United States, but the kits

had to be supplemented with parts welded in Thailand.49

Most of the men who took off in the early afternoon of January 2 had never

even seen an enemy aircraft, let alone fired at one. Olds had shot down thirteen

German aircraft during the Second World War, and his operations deputy, Col.

Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr. (later the Air Force’s first black four-star general),

had seen action during the Korean War, but even they had yet to encounter

North Vietnamese MiGs. Though F–4s often patrolled a target area looking for

MiGs, they had been jumping F–105s and avoiding F–4s.*50

Bolo’s execution varied considerably from its plan. The Da Nang force

judged the weather inadequate and only one flight penetrated the delta. Olds

decided to risk taking his force over solid cloud cover. He had planned to make

a traditional run down Thud Ridge at five thousand feet, partly so that he could

see any SAMs. But with cloud tops at seventy-five hundred, he guessed that he

might not get under the ceiling, and so proceeded at twelve thousand. A high

ingress would soon be standard, but his reliance on pods was then considered

daring. Four SAMs came up and missed the attackers by a wide margin. Olds

had expected MiGs to challenge him as soon as he started his run down Thud

Ridge. When his lead flight made its first pass over Phuc Yen at about three in

the afternoon, the MiGs had still not taken off. Then perhaps a dozen MiG–21s

came up; according to American intelligence, there were only thirteen

MiG–21s in North Vietnam. Some of North Vietnam’s nearly one hundred

MiG–17s and MiG–15s took off from airfields east of Hanoi. These older,

slower, more maneuverable fighters did not enter the battle northwest of

Hanoi.51

The battle above Phuc Yen lasted less than fifteen minutes, only time

enough for Olds’ first wave of three flights to enter at five minute intervals.

Without a loss, the F–4s claimed to down at least seven MiGs.† When Olds’

second wave arrived ten minutes later, the surviving MiGs had already ducked

below the clouds and landed. If all had gone according to plan, the spacing

between F–4 flights would have made it difficult for MiGs to land, forcing them

54

To Hanoi and Back

* During World War II, Olds served in the 479th Fighter Group under Lt. Col. Hubert

“Hub” Zemke, who had become famous as commander of the 56th Fighter Group,

“Zemke’s Wolfpack.” In Southeast Asia, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing would come to be

known as “Olds’ Wolfpack.”

† Istvan Toperczer found that the North Vietnamese lost only five MiG–21s that day.

See his Air War Over North Vietnam: The Vietnamese People’s Air Force (Carrollton,

Texas, 1998), p 17.
to engage or run out of fuel. A MiG could fight over its own field for about an

hour; F–4s, even with refueling during ingress and egress, could stay over Phuc

Yen for at most twenty minutes and only five minutes using afterburner—hence

the five-minute intervals between flights. But the clouds, which had helped to

disguise the F–4s as F–105s until the last minute, also permitted surviving

MiGs to escape.52

On this occasion, North Vietnam’s radar proved a mixed blessing at best. It

encouraged an inflexible dependence on ground control, and the controllers

failed to distinguish between F–4s and F–105s. Then too, American missiles

had a far better day than the enemy’s guns and rockets. If the MiGs were carrying any missiles, they were not fired. On the other hand, F–4s had no guns at

this time. The Americans had taken extra care to make sure their missiles were

properly adjusted. Four kills were attributed to Sparrow radar-guided missiles

and three to heat-seeking Sidewinders. Olds and his backseat radar officer, 1st

Lt. Charles C. Clifton, downed one MiG with a Sidewinder. Three more victories in May would make Olds the leading MiG killer of the war until 1972,

when the Air Force and Navy would finally produce five aces (with at least five

kills each).53

Less than a week after Bolo, two F–4s pretended to be a single reconnaissance aircraft by flying so close together that they gave a single radar return.

This ruse also worked, and two more MiG–21s went down without loss of an

F–4. But the MiGs did not cooperate with an attempt to repeat Bolo on January

23. Olds argued against repeating Bolo, and he did not lead the mission. The

MiGs stayed on the ground and SAMs came up; one F–4 did not make it back.54

MiG pilots would not again be so badly fooled. As their self-confidence

returned, MiGs would once more become a dangerous nuisance. For a time

F–4s would accompany F–105 formations. When a formation was jumped by

MiGs, the F–4s would jettison bombs and go after the MiGs. Later, F–4s would

be stripped of bombs and left to the more free-wheeling combat patrol duty they

had performed since the first year of the war. The most effective response to

MiGs would come when the Johnson administration at last permitted the bombing of MiG bases.55

* * *

Early in 1967, the Johnson administration had yet even to release targets

deferred in November, let alone authorize bombing MiG bases. On February

22, the President approved one of the deferred targets, the Thai Nguyen ironworks. General Wheeler thought he saw a major change in Johnson’s attitude

that promised release of more targets in the Red River Delta when the weather

improved.56

55

New Tactics, Old Strategy
Wheeler told Admiral Sharp that this “new sense of urgency” was due in

part to the heavy flow of supplies from the Red River Delta southward during

the recent Tet cease-fire (February 8–13).57 Intelligence estimates exceeded

twenty thousand tons. Since the cease-fire did not apply to Laos, little of the

supply surge moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most came by boat along

the coast toward the Demilitarized Zone, north of which the North Vietnamese

had two divisions, with a third on the way. According to the Defense

Intelligence Agency, twenty thousand tons of supplies could support at least

one North Vietnamese division for six months. Seventh Air Force estimated

that twenty thousand tons could support eight North Vietnamese divisions or

thirty Viet Cong divisions for a year, if each division experienced only one day

of combat per month. In any case, the Tet supply surge was a substantial contribution to the North Vietnamese troop buildup along the Demilitarized

Zone.58

Despite intelligence reports about the North Vietnamese supply effort,

the Tet pause in bombing North Vietnam had been extended from four days to

six days while Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister, discussed peace

prospects with Alexei Kosygin, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers.

Midway through the talks, Wilson learned about a hardened American negotiating position prompted by fears that the North Vietnamese would send

three divisions across the Demilitarized Zone if bombing stopped. President

Johnson now demanded that North Vietnam’s infiltration into South Vietnam

end before a bombing halt; the American position had been that bombing

would stop if the North Vietnamese gave private assurance that infiltration

would then cease (perhaps days or weeks later). Johnson sweetened his proposal with an offer to quit augmenting American forces in South Vietnam in

addition to halting the bombing of North Vietnam after infiltration stopped.

He sent his proposal by letter to Ho Chi Minh as well as through Wilson and

Kosygin.59

During the night before Kosygin’s departure from London, Johnson agreed

to extend the bombing pause if North Vietnam would give assurance that it

would immediately cease sending soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam.

Otherwise bombing would resume soon after Kosygin left London. Though

time for getting North Vietnamese agreement was extremely short, Kosygin

supported the proposal. According to an intelligence translation of his telephone conversation with Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Kosygin

said that there was “a great possibility of achieving the aim, if the Vietnamese

will understand the present situation. All they need to do is give a confidential

declaration.”60

Before bombing began again that day, February 13, Hanoi radio broadcast

a letter to Pope Paul VI from Ho Chi Minh, who demanded an unconditional

halt to bombing. Two days later, Ho sent a rejection to Johnson. The fruitless

Wilson-Kosygin talks in London closed an especially intense period of diplo56

To Hanoi and Back
matic maneuvering that had begun with British Foreign Secretary Brown’s visit

to Moscow in November.*61

At long last, the Air Force could proceed with bombing the Thai Nguyen

ironworks. This showpiece of North Vietnamese industrialization was located

thirty-five miles due north of Hanoi and about three miles south of the small

city of Thai Nguyen. The Chinese began construction of the plant in 1958 to

take advantage of iron ore deposits on the northern edge of the delta. Pig iron

production began in 1963, and by 1967 the plant made barges and fuel drums

out of imported steel. The plant’s own steel mill was nearly ready to begin operation. There were only two other ironworks in the country, both of them much

smaller. While they produced perhaps fifteen thousand metric tons a year, the

Thai Nguyen works were designed to produce three hundred thousand of pig

iron and two hundred thousand of steel. The complex, including its powerplant,

occupied two square miles along the railroad that connected it with Hanoi.

About ten thousand people worked at this, the largest industrial facility in North

Vietnam.62

By March when the Air Force began to strike the ironworks, Thai Nguyen

bristled with exceptionally strong antiaircraft defenses. On eight days in

January and February, the Air Force had struck the city’s railyard and supply

depot with about a hundred attack sorties. While only one aircraft was lost on

these early missions, the defenders took a heavy toll when the Air Force

returned to attack the ironworks.63

More than two weeks after President Johnson approved that target, the

weather cleared enough for a strike on March 10. Korat F–105s led the way

over the target without loss, but the Takhli formation behind them ran into trouble. A flight of four Iron Hand F–105s (including two Wild Weasel F–105Fs)

preceded the rest of the Takhli formation. Antiaircraft artillery knocked down

the lead aircraft and damaged the second as they dove toward a SAM site.

While the Takhli strike force dropped its bombs on the ironworks, the other two

Iron Hand aircraft attacked the SAM site. Capt. Merlyn H. Dethlefsen, pilot of

the third aircraft (an F–105F), was later awarded the Medal of Honor for making five runs on the site. Despite opposition from MiG–21s and flak damage to

his aircraft, he ran the gauntlet repeatedly—first expending his Shrikes and

57

New Tactics, Old Strategy

* While the North Vietnamese refused to stop sending soldiers and supplies into South

Vietnam, they did begin to advertise that peace talks might follow a cessation of the bombing. On January 28, 1967, Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh said as much to the

Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett, and soon thereafter, Senator Robert

Kennedy learned in Paris that the North Vietnamese considered Trinh’s remark an important policy statement. For recent American and Vietnamese views on the significance of

this initiative, see Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, with

Thomas J. Biersteker and Col. Herbert Y. Schandler, Argument Without End: In Search of

Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York, 1999), pp 278–83.
cluster bombs, then strafing. His backseat electronic warfare officer, Capt.

Kevin A. Gilroy, received the Air Force Cross. *64

A flight of bomb-laden F–4s from Ubon followed the Takhli F–105s.

Twenty-five miles from the target, one of the F–4s was hit by antiaircraft fire

and began to leak fuel. While diving on the target, a second F–4 was hit. Unable

to get all the way back to the tankers, both crews bailed out over Laos and were

rescued.†65

When fighter-bombers returned to Thai Nguyen on the following day,

March 11, the wings switched places so that the 355th from Takhli hit the target

first. Korat’s 388th once again bombed without loss, while three F–105s from

Takhli went down—two hit by flak and one by a SAM. The Takhli wing persisted with its low-level ingress, but all its losses occurred over the target, while

either diving or pulling up. Six American aircraft having been lost attempting to

destroy it, the ironworks still operated. It remained the Air Force’s primary target for the next month and a half. But thanks to effective flak suppression, the

Air Force lost no more aircraft there during that time. In addition to continuing

use of cluster bombs, an effort was made to destroy guns with general purpose

bombs. Aircraft losses on the first day caused the second day’s strike force to

make gun sites principal targets. At least one gun (eighty-five millimeters) was

thought to be destroyed. A discouraging development was the appearance for

the first time of hardened sites whose crews could function while protected

from cluster bombs by concrete revetments.66

The necessity of returning again and again for a total of nearly three hundred attack sorties (or about 750 tons of bombs) was the result of both target

size and bombing inaccuracy. To obtain greater accuracy, three F–105s from

Korat made a bold, low-level run against the complex’s powerplant. The success of this mission on March 16 led to a similar mission on March 30, when

three F–4s from Ubon attempted to hit the blast furnaces; subsequent intelligence estimates were skeptical of claims that the strike had done significant

damage. Nevertheless, by the end of April the ironworks no longer functioned,

and occasional raids would keep it shut down.67

* * *

The new commander of Pacific Air Forces, Gen. John D. Ryan, was unhappy about taking more than two months to close the Thai Nguyen ironworks.

58

To Hanoi and Back

* A month later another Takhli Wild Weasel team earned the same pair of medals.

Like Dethlefsen and Gilroy, Maj. Leo K. Thorsness and Capt. Harold E. Johnson returned

safely from their medal-earning performance, but Thorsness was shot down eleven days

afterward and spent the rest of the war in North Vietnamese prisons.

† For the remarkable story of how the two damaged aircraft made it to Laos, see chapter 11, page 290.
Bad weather caused his wings to cancel or divert more than sixty strikes against

that facility. “The largest problem we faced there in the air war was weather,”

Ryan would say later, “and we didn’t have an all-weather capability.”68

When he took command from General Harris in Hawaii at the beginning of

February 1967, Ryan had just stepped down from the top position in Strategic

Air Command. The unusual measure of sending the SAC commander to

PACAF sparked gossip about an Air Force plot to take Pacific Command away

from the Navy. But his move to Washington in 1968 as Vice Chief of Staff of

the Air Force would indicate that he was being groomed for Chief of Staff.

Throughout his stay in Hawaii, Ryan was a strong voice for developing a capability to bomb in bad weather and at night.69

Ryan had been in Hawaii less than a month when he asked the Air Staff in

Washington for comparative data on the radar bombing capability of available

aircraft. After the Air Force conducted an extensive series of tests on the F–105,

the F–4, and the new General Dynamics F–111, the Air Staff concluded that the

F–111 was the best hope for sufficient accuracy in times of low visibility. The

accuracy of the F–105 and F–4 was inadequate for effective use against point

targets. But no F–111s could be sent to Southeast Asia before 1968.70

Meanwhile, Ryan tried to use the F–105 for night and all-weather bombing.

The original impetus for putting the F–105 in this role had come from the 388th

Tactical Fighter Wing at Korat. As early as September 1966, the 388th had

depended on aircraft radar to bomb the Mu Gia Pass at the top of the Ho Chi

Minh Trail; the steep slopes offered a good return for aircraft radar, and accuracy could be checked using ground radar in Thailand. Encouraged by results in

the pass, the 388th asked Seventh Air Force for permission to try radar bombing

in the Red River Delta. When Ryan took command of Pacific Air Forces, the

Korat proposal was waiting for him.71

Ryan wanted a radar bombing aircraft as successful as the Navy’s Grumman

A–6 Intruder. The A–6, however, boasted far greater accuracy than the F–105

could possibly achieve at night or in bad weather. Ryan was sensitive about

Navy help with night raids against Thai Nguyen and other Air Force targets.

“The Navy could have made us look very immature and not very capable at that

time if they had taken advantage of it,” he would recall, “because they had the

A–6 and the A–6 is a damned fine all-weather bomber.”72 Like Ryan, Admiral

Sharp thought that Task Force 77 ought to send more A–6s against the delta and

fewer against the panhandle. Sharp was able to alleviate this situation somewhat

by persuading General Westmoreland to permit the twenty-four Marine A–6s

based in South Vietnam to fly raids into the panhandle, freeing the eighteen carrier A–6s to make more raids in the delta. But the aircraft’s complex electronic

systems were plagued by maintenance problems, and there was little likelihood

of increasing the number of A–6s in Southeast Asia before late 1967.73

For his night and all-weather bomber, Ryan chose the F–105F Wild

Weasel. Like the A–6, the F–105F carried a crew of two and had a terrain avoid59

New Tactics, Old Strategy
ance radar (though one not nearly as good as the A–6’s). During March and

April, twelve crews trained for the new mission in Japan, where their aircraft

were undergoing modification. In addition to making improvements in the radar

presentation, maintenance technicians at Yokota Air Base put a bomb release

switch in the rear cockpit. Though the Korat wing had been planning penetration and bombing runs at about twelve thousand feet, Ryan insisted on gaining

surprise with as low an altitude as possible, preferably below a thousand feet.

This was the technique used by the A–6, and the F–105 had itself been designed

for low–level bombing. But the inadequacy of the F–105F radar’s terrain avoidance mode meant that a crew flying below a thousand feet was risking collision

with the ground, to say nothing of ground fire.74

Ryan’s emphasis on low-level bombing was an expression of established

doctrine in the tactical air commands as well as the Strategic Air Command.

During the Korean War, the Air Force had developed a toss-bombing computer

enabling a fighter-bomber to make a low-level nuclear bombing run.* Before

release, the aircraft would begin to climb rapidly. After tossing the bomb, the

aircraft would reverse direction with an Immelman flip. Since the bomb had

been tossed upward, the aircraft had time to move away before detonation.

Designed for delivering a nuclear bomb, the F–105 had a toss-bombing computer. There was no need to toss 750-pound conventional bombs, but the computer could be used to improve the accuracy of a night drop. Once the target

appeared on the radar screen, the aircraft held a steady course and the computer

released the bombs automatically. Achieving significant damage with conventional bombs, however, required much greater accuracy than with a nuclear

bomb. Even if an aircraft radar operator could correctly identify a target, the

computer was unlikely to provide the accuracy necessary.75

Four crews of Ryan’s Raiders, as they called themselves, reached Korat in

late April 1967. All eight men were pilots. However, after the first twelve

crews, navigators already serving as electronic warfare officers would be

trained to use the radar, and the same crews could fly F–105Fs either as Wild

Weasels or as Ryan’s Raiders. As far as the original all-pilot crews could tell,

they had been picked at random. The usual unhappiness of pilots told to sit in

the back seat was exacerbated by suspicion that their dangerous mission was

more a matter of competing with the Navy’s superior A–6 than doing significant damage to North Vietnam. At any rate, Ryan had made much of Navy success when he talked to his raiders in Japan before they flew to Thailand. The

crews caught the grim humor of their situation by adopting a patch that featured

an F–105F with a gold screw through the back seat.76

Ryan’s Raiders flew their first missions on the night of April 24. One aircraft was sent against the ferry at Ron in the panhandle and another against the

60

To Hanoi and Back

* The inventor of the Low Altitude Bombing System was Maj. John A. Ryan, Jr., no

relation to General John D. Ryan.
railyard at Yen Bai on the Red River about seventy-five miles northwest of

Hanoi. The tracks provided a good radar return, but darkness inhibited bomb

damage assessment, as did craters left by earlier bombing. Impressive results

were not produced by these raids or those that followed against Thai Nguyen

and other targets in the delta. Then on the night of May 12, an F–105 was lost

on a raid against the Ron ferry. The cause of the loss was unknown, and it was

feared that the aircraft had flown into a hill. Three days later, another F–105F

was downed by gunfire on a night raid against the Kep railyard northeast of

Hanoi. The North Vietnamese hit the raiders with searchlights and barrage fire,

forcing the F–105Fs to quit flying missions in the delta.77

While F–105F night activity was restricted to Route Package Five and the

panhandle, some F–4D night missions were flown in the delta. The F–4D,

whose bombing computer made better use of radar returns, began replacing

F–4Cs in Southeast Asia before the end of May. Unlike F–105Fs, F–4Ds bombing at night in the delta penetrated and dropped their bombs at about twelve

thousand feet. Using jamming pods, the F–4Ds flew in flights of four. As with

F–105s, however, radar bombing was not very accurate. Bombs dropped at

night with radar by either F–4Ds or F–105Fs landed an average of three thousand feet from the aiming point, or twice the distance normal for the A–6. The

Air Force hoped that the F–111 would be able to drop most of its bombs within

two hundred feet of the aiming point. Meanwhile, F–4Ds and F–105Fs harassed

the enemy as best they could. General Ryan readily admitted the limitations of

his raiders. “But that,” he asserted, “was a hell of a lot better than just sitting on

our duffs waiting for the weather to clear.”78

* * *

In mid-April 1967, a week before Ryan’s Raiders flew their first mission,

the weather over the Red River Delta began to clear. The monsoonal shift in

wind pattern from northeast to southwest broke up the cloud cover. Clearing

skies gave the Navy an opportunity to bomb the Haiphong powerplants, targets

that had been deferred in November and authorized again by President Johnson

toward the end of March. Weather had combined with a second deferment

(while Johnson visited Latin America) to protect the powerplants for another

month. On April 20, the Navy sent fifty-three attack sorties against the powerplants. Another forty-two would finish the job before the end of May.79

One of the powerplants was little more than a mile from the center of

Haiphong. (The oil tank farm hit the previous summer was two miles from the

center.) At a Pentagon press conference, the new Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Public Affairs, Phil Goulding, dodged a question as to whether bombing the

powerplants was escalatory: “We do not characterize it in any fashion whatso61

New Tactics, Old Strategy
ever.”80 Others were less cautious. Senator Richard Russell (Democrat,

Georgia), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he hoped the

strikes were the first step toward closing the port of Haiphong.81 Even that step

would not be escalatory, Secretary of State Rusk told a group of Illinois

Republicans, since the communists had already mined Saigon harbor.82

On April 22, in the wake of the powerplant strikes, President Johnson

approved a new target list. The Haiphong cement plant, the only target yet to be

struck of those deferred the previous November, could now be bombed. Since it

was the primary customer of one of the bombed powerplants, the cement plant

was already in trouble. Navy aircraft promptly put it out of operation, and North

Vietnam had to begin importing cement. The prohibition imposed in December

on striking within ten nautical miles of the center of Hanoi was lifted enough to

permit attacks on three targets: an electrical switching station, a railyard, and a

bridge.83

The central link in North Vietnam’s major electrical power system was the

switching station and transformer at Dong Anh, seven miles northwest of

downtown Hanoi. This switch could transfer power from an area with an operational powerplant to one with a plant closed down by bombing. The switch

connected Hanoi’s 32,500-kilowatt coal-burning powerplant to smaller coalburning plants at Viet Tri (on the Red River thirty miles northwest of Hanoi),

Thai Nguyen, Bac Giang (twenty-five miles northeast of Hanoi), Haiphong,

Uong Bi (ten miles north of Haiphong), and Hon Gai (on the coast twenty miles

east of Uong Bi). The network also reached south through the Hanoi plant to

Nam Dinh.84

By April 22, all powerplants in the delta network had been bombed except

the largest one at Hanoi. Outside the network, there were several other fixed

plants and a growing number of mobile generators. The largest of the latter

were three 1,500-kilowatt coal-burning plants from Czechoslovakia; these

could be joined into an installation as large as the smaller fixed plants. The

Soviet Union furnished hundreds of 200-kilowatt diesel generators. The North

Vietnamese also were thought to have about seventy-five small hydroelectric

generators, most of them less than 50-kilowatts. As the North Vietnamese

decentralized electrical power in deference to American bombing, construction

was stopped on the 112,500-kilowatt Lang Chi hydroelectric project sixty miles

up the Red River from Hanoi. Thanks to the gradualism of the campaign

against electrical power, the North Vietnamese had been able to adjust through

decentralization just as they had in the case of motor fuel. Though the Dong

Anh switch should logically have been struck early, it was not authorized until

after most of the fixed powerplants had been hit. The Dong Anh switch proved

a difficult target, and not until November 1967 would Seventh Air Force succeed in knocking it out.85

Seventh Air Force had better luck with other Hanoi targets. F–105s could

now bomb legitimately the Gia Lam railyard, which had been bombed acciden62

To Hanoi and Back
tally in December. The yard was less than two miles northeast of the center of

Hanoi. Seventh Air Force was also told to bomb the rail and highway bridge

that crossed the Canal des Rapides a mile northeast of Gia Lam. On April 29,

sixteen F–105s each attempted to hit the bridge with a 3,000-pound bomb and

three 750-pound bombs; two of the six spans collapsed, cutting Hanoi’s link

with both railroads to China. The railroad to Haiphong, however, lay south of

the canal; it could best be separated from Hanoi and routes south at the Doumer

Bridge over the Red River west of Gia Lam. Because destroying the Doumer

Bridge would also cut the railroads to China, from a military point of view the

attack on the canal bridge might better have been directed at the Doumer

Bridge. But the Johnson administration was not quite ready to make a strike so

close to the center of the city. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese began to repair

the canal bridge and build a bypass bridge.86

President Johnson’s target selections of April 22 not only sent the fighterbombers back to Hanoi, but for the first time permitted them to strike MiGs on

the ground. The key jet airfields at Phuc Yen and Gia Lam remained out of

bounds, together with two others near Haiphong, but Johnson authorized limited attacks on Kep (thirty-seven miles northeast of Hanoi) and Hoa Lac (nineteen miles west of Hanoi). The runways at both fields had recently been lengthened, and Hoa Lac was able to take jets for the first time. Admiral Sharp had

recommended light strikes on two of the five MiG bases in the hope of overcoming administration fears that airfield strikes would cause the North Vietnamese to move all their MiGs to China. Perhaps a fourth of about 120 North

Vietnamese MiGs could already be found near Mengtzu, fifty miles north of the

border. Forcing the North Vietnamese MiGs to operate out of China put them at

a disadvantage, since fuel limitations would permit them much less time over

the delta. But the Johnson administration was nervous about increasing China’s

involvement in the war.87

Ever since May 1966, when an F–105 had shot down a MiG inside China,

the administration had gone to great lengths to keep combat aircraft from invading Chinese airspace. Fighters coming close to the Chinese border were warned

by Air Force EC–121s, comparable Navy radar aircraft, or radar ships. With

limited ability to pick out aircraft from ground clutter, an EC–121 tracked

friendly aircraft primarily by sending a signal that triggered their identification

transponders. When escaping or chasing MiGs near the border, pilots had been

known to turn off their transponders. The Air Force consequently found it difficult to refute China’s repeated claims that American fighters had violated its

airspace.88

Nevertheless, the Johnson administration finally opened some of the North

Vietnamese airfields to attack. Seventh Air Force directed the 8th Tactical

Fighter Wing commander, Colonel Olds, to hit MiGs on the ground at Hoa Lac.

On April 24, he led eight F–4s against the new target. Their cluster bombs

caught about a dozen MiGs on the ground. The attackers lost an aircraft, but

63

New Tactics, Old Strategy
Maj. Thomas M. Hirsch, pilot of the first F–4 to bomb the MiGs, claimed

destruction of five; his comrades claimed at least two more. These were the first

of fifty aircraft reportedly destroyed on the ground before the end of May. None

of these claims could be verified, and MiGs which suffered even numerous hits

from cluster bomb pellets could be repaired. Nevertheless, Air Force raids on

Hoa Lac and Navy raids on Kep may well have helped to spur unusually

aggressive MiG behavior that permitted destruction of many in air battles.89

Air Force F–4s and F–105s shot down twenty-one MiGs in May at a cost of

two F–4s, while Navy fighters got three MiGs without a loss. A third of the Air

Force’s victories were attributed to gunfire, including the first three won by F–4

guns. While F–4s did not yet have built-in guns, a twenty-millimeter gun could

be carried in a pod mounted under the fuselage. But the gun’s rate of fire had

been thought too slow for success in air-to-air engagements. The new operations officer at Da Nang’s 366th Tactical Fighter Wing, Col. Frederick C.

“Boots” Blesse, persuaded General Momyer to permit the wing to experiment

with gun pods. Persuasion was required, because Momyer had long opposed

putting a gun on the F–4. Blesse was a Korean War fighter ace well known in

the Air Force as the author of “No Guts—No Glory,” a vivid guide to air-to-air

tactics first published in the Fighter Weapons Newsletter of January 1954. He

took a dim view of the F–4’s lack of a built-in gun. MiGs could get too close for

an F–4 to fire its missiles successfully, and ground clutter could interfere with

missile guidance systems at low altitude. Blesse’s analysis was reinforced by

the success F–105 pilots had with their guns under those circumstances.90

The gun pods helped the 366th to get one more victory than Ubon’s 8th

Tactical Fighter Wing in May 1967 (the month with the most air-to-air engagements during Rolling Thunder). This was especially noteworthy because the

366th had not participated in the air-to-air mission for several months and could

never give it as much attention as the 8th. Despite the 366th’s success, however, the 8th got more publicity. Colonel Blesse blamed the disparity not only on

the glamour surrounding the 8th’s commander, Colonel Olds, but also on the

8th’s nickname: “The Wolfpack.” The press naturally preferred to write about

“the Wolfpack” rather than “the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing.” Blesse’s men

soon came up with their own sobriquet—“The Gunfighters”—and painted what

they claimed was the biggest wing insignia in the world on the roof of a hangar.

From miles away pilots could see the huge comic phantom carrying his gun and

proclaiming not only new unit pride but also an old confidence that no enemy

aircraft could ever get near Da Nang. Indeed, after the spring airfield raids and

air-to-air victories in North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese air force would

make few appearances anywhere for the next two months.

American political reaction to the airfield raids followed familiar patterns.

Congressman Rivers said that they were “one of the most gratifying developments of the war.”91 Former Vice President Richard Nixon assured the press

that there was no danger of a war with China, which would “not dare have a

64

To Hanoi and Back
confrontation with the United States.”92 Senator Fulbright thought it “very likely” that the war would expand to “include the Chinese and probably the

Russians.”93 Senator George McGovern (Democrat, South Dakota) agreed with

Fulbright about the risk the administration was taking: “They are really going

for broke.”94 Senator Robert Kennedy (Democrat, New York) praised the

courage of McGovern’s speech calling for a total bombing halt throughout

Vietnam.95

The Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Admiral Sharp that the airfield attacks

had been too vigorous. A few days later, however, President Johnson demonstrated his readiness to increase pressure on North Vietnam by adding another

MiG base (Kien An, near Haiphong) to the approved target list, as well as several targets near Hanoi. Returning to the list were the Yen Vien railyard and the

Van Dien truck depot—targets that had aroused so much controversy in

December.96

At last on May 16, after months of discussion within his administration,

Johnson authorized bombing Hanoi’s powerplant. He had been very reluctant to

approve a target in downtown Hanoi. The powerplant was less than a mile from

the Ministry of National Defense and not much farther from the President’s

Palace. But Johnson was persuaded that the Navy’s new Walleye televisionguided bomb was so accurate that there would be little chance of civilian casualties except for workers at the plant.97

The Walleye was the first of a family of guided bombs that would provide

the accuracy needed to strike urban targets with minimal civilian casualties.

Most of that family would not be ready before the United States stopped bombing the Red River Delta in 1968. An Air Force project to develop laser-guided

bombs was over a year away from production when Navy Walleyes reached the

Gulf of Tonkin in early 1967. By May the Navy had dropped several Walleyes

with great accuracy. Aircraft survivability also improved, because a pilot could

drop a Walleye more than three miles from a target and leave immediately—

before the bomb had hit its target. Once the bomb’s television guidance system

had locked onto a picture with sharp contrast (part of the outline of a building,

for instance) the bomb was supposed to proceed straight to the origin of the

image. In time, pilots would learn that the bomb could be fooled. For instance,

the television camera’s focus might jump from one bridge support to the next

(their outlines were so similar) until the bomb hit a river bank. The major disappointment so far had been the inability of direct hits by the 1,100-pound

bomb to bring down the steel bridge at Thanh Hoa (seventy miles south of

Hanoi), but that bridge had long since proved itself the most durable target in

North Vietnam. The Hanoi powerplant was much more vulnerable.98

After scrutinizing detailed maps and photographs, the President approved a

strike on the plant by two aircraft each carrying one Walleye. If possible, the

raid was to be accomplished before May 22, Buddha’s birthday and the beginning of a visit by British Foreign Secretary Brown to Moscow. Since the televi65

New Tactics, Old Strategy
sion guidance system required clear weather, a long wait would probably have

been necessary during the northeast monsoon. But the southwest monsoon had

brought reasonably good bombing weather, permitting the Navy to strike the

powerplant on May 19—Ho Chi Minh’s seventy-seventh birthday. Though two

escort fighters were shot down, a Walleye hit the target. The Navy struck again

two days later, losing an escort fighter but hitting the target. The Hanoi plant

appeared to be out of commission, leaving only one small plant fifty miles

south of Hanoi to supply power for the network.99

The powerplant raids made headlines as the first against downtown Hanoi.

Since Walleye’s existence was classified, the special accuracy of this new

weapon could not be disclosed and the Johnson administration could not take

public credit for its careful restraint. In a more visible exercise of restraint, the

President called a halt to bombing near Hanoi. On May 22, only a month into

the southwest monsoon with its relatively favorable bombing weather, Johnson

put his foot on the brake. Bombing within ten nautical miles of Hanoi’s center

again required his approval for each strike. Johnson withheld approval for several weeks while his divided administration reconsidered the future of Rolling

Thunder.100

66

To Hanoi and Back
Chapter Three

Gradualism on Trial

The gradual intensification of the American air war against North Vietnam

paralleled a gradual buildup of American ground forces in South Vietnam.

Although these two forms of gradualism were related, they were shaped by different constraints. The buildup of ground forces in South Vietnam pressed

against the weakness of the local economy, the capacity of America’s logistical

apparatus, and the unwillingness of the Johnson administration to risk alienating American voters by calling up reserves. President Johnson sought to wage a

war in Southeast Asia within fiscal and political parameters that would not

interfere with his domestic programs. From the outset, however, B–52 bombers

could have struck targets throughout North Vietnam in any weather at any hour.

Instead Johnson doled out targets one at a time to fighter-bombers poorly

equipped for striking in bad weather or at night. Fears of a wider war restrained

the air campaign, while hopes for a war on the cheap restrained the ground

buildup. Despite Johnson’s gradualism, or because of it, critical voices grew

louder and more numerous inside as well as outside the administration.

Little by little, the number of authorized targets in North Vietnam

increased, as did the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam—until a

decision for a major addition could require fairly dramatic action, such as a

reserve callup or mining North Vietnam’s ports. In this context a little more

bombing with fighter aircraft could seem the safest form of escalation, the last

chance for gradualism. When, in March 1967, General Westmoreland asked

that his troop ceiling of 470,000 be increased by at least 80,000 and as much as

200,000, he began a long debate that would first cool the air war in May and

then heat it up in August.1

General McConnell, the Air Force Chief of Staff, injected the bombing

issue. He doubted that sending more troops would be enough to achieve victory, but he agreed to 100,000 if the Joint Chiefs of Staff would also recommend

expanding the air and naval campaign against North Vietnam. The other chiefs

agreed and once more linked troops in South Vietnam and bombs in North

Vietnam. In a memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara, they supported sending 100,000 more troops to South Vietnam, calling up the reserves, and

67

Preface
expanding the air and naval campaign to include mining North Vietnam’s

ports.2

In late April 1967, President Johnson had Westmoreland come home to

make a speech in New York and another to Congress. Westmoreland also joined

the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, in meetings at the White

House, where they argued that the recommended buildup would permit shallow

invasions into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Only the President’s

National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, showed any interest in sending ground

forces across South Vietnam’s borders. Dramatic ground action of that kind

could make the air war look tame by comparison, and Wheeler raised the possibility of mining North Vietnam’s ports. While this proposal made no more

headway than did the invasion plans, his remark that the bombing campaign

was running out of targets provided grist for those who were seeking to cut back

the bombing.3

Secretary of Defense McNamara and his assistant for international security

affairs, John McNaughton, used Wheeler’s remark in a draft presidential memorandum arguing for a bombing cutback. They quoted Wheeler as saying that

“the bombing campaign is reaching the point when we will have struck all

worthwhile fixed targets except the ports.”4 The memorandum concluded that

all bombing should be concentrated south of the twentieth parallel—i.e., south

of the Red River Delta. McNamara had first raised this possibility in the fall of

1966, when it became obvious that North Vietnam had dispersed oil storage to

cope with American bombing. He seemed to prefer an unconditional bombing

halt as more likely to lead to negotiations, but he knew that even a cutback to

the twentieth parallel would face strong opposition from men in uniform and

their allies in Congress.5

During the winter of 1967, McNamara had been quietly winning adherents

to his view within the administration. His effort was facilitated by a small discussion group that met every Thursday afternoon in the office of Under

Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach. These meetings had gained President

Johnson’s approval in November 1966 to consider quietly the administration’s

major problems in Vietnam. In January 1967, when the President asked Rostow

to look into setting up a committee to examine the bombing of North Vietnam,

Rostow steered the job to Katzenbach’s committee. Rostow did consult with

Clark Clifford, an influential Washington lawyer who had served in the Truman

administration and had known Johnson for many years. Clifford urged a small,

secret group whose existence the President could deny by saying there was “no

committee” or that the President talks to “a great many people on a great many

subjects.”6

Rostow recommended that while the President might later want to call

upon Clifford and other outsiders to undertake a study of the bombing, the time

was not yet ripe. So Rostow, Under Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance,

McNaughton, and William Bundy (Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern

68

To Hanoi and Back
Affairs) focused on that problem during their weekly cocktail meetings in

Katzenbach’s office. McNamara often came, as did Richard Helms, Director of

Central Intelligence; Rusk sometimes joined them. They called themselves the

“No Committee” or the “Non Group.” Although not even told about their meetings at the outset, General Wheeler was eventually informed and may have participated occasionally.7

By May the No Committee was leaning toward a bombing cutback. Walt

Rostow told the President that the group unanimously rejected both mining

Haiphong and systematically bombing the rail lines to China. Rusk’s worries

about possible Chinese and Soviet reactions bolstered McNamara’s arguments

against the cost-effectiveness of bombing the Red River Delta. Even Rostow

doubted air power’s ability to close the “top of the funnel” by mining Haiphong

and striking the railroads. Since his days as a target planner in England during

World War II, Rostow had believed oil and electricity to be vital targets, but he

had always been skeptical about bombing railroads. He was especially

impressed by an estimate that North Vietnam’s import capacity of seventeen

thousand tons per day exceeded actual imports by more than eleven thousand

tons. Rostow and the No Committee were ready to cut back bombing north of

the twentieth parallel as soon as the Hanoi powerplant had been destroyed.8

McNamara hoped that hitting the Hanoi powerplant would also make the

Joint Chiefs amenable to a bombing cutback. But that hope only illustrated how

far he and the No Committee had moved from the military point of view. Walt

Rostow grew fearful of a public breach. “The question,” he told President

Johnson, “is what kind of scenario can hold our family together in ways that

look after the nation’s interests and make military sense.”9 Rostow suggested

withdrawing approval to bomb targets in Hanoi and Haiphong until after

McNamara and Wheeler could visit South Vietnam. Then the manpower and

bombing recommendations could be considered together. Johnson took

Rostow’s advice, and when the Navy had made its second strike against the

Hanoi powerplant on May 21, 1967, the President reinstated the prohibition

against attacks within ten nautical miles of the center of the city.

For the next month, much of the administration’s energies were absorbed

by the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In the wake of the

Arab defeat, Alexei Kosygin, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, met

with President Johnson at Glassboro, New Jersey. Kosygin brought a message

from Hanoi that the North Vietnamese were ready to begin talks a day or two

after the bombing stopped. Johnson agreed to stop bombing North Vietnam if

he was assured that talks would begin immediately and that the five army divisions in North Vietnam near the Demilitarized Zone would not attack South

Vietnam. There was no response from Hanoi.10

Meanwhile, opposition had begun to build against ending the bombing of

North Vietnam’s Red River Delta. Director Helms of Central Intelligence supported further concentration of strikes in the southern route packages, but

69

Gradualism on Trial
warned Johnson that a total cessation of bombing in the Hanoi-Haiphong region

would be seen as a victory in Hanoi. Air Force Secretary Brown argued for the

status quo; he considered mining Haiphong too risky, but did not want to reduce

bombing in the Red River Delta without getting something in return.11

Since becoming Secretary of the Air Force in 1965, Brown had been confronted with an increasing divergence between Chief of Staff McConnell and

Secretary of Defense McNamara. By the end of 1966, the crux of Brown’s

problem was McNamara’s plan to build an infiltration barrier near the demilitarized zone: ground forces, minefields, and fences would reach across the northern edge of South Vietnam, while air forces would attempt to interdict the Ho

Chi Minh Trail area of Laos with the help of electronic sensors. McNamara

brought together a group of academic scientists in the summer of 1966 to study

the feasibility of a barrier, and as soon as they had recommended it, he ordered

a joint task force under Army Lt. Gen. Alfred D. Starbird to have the barrier

ready by September 15, 1967.12

It was obvious to the Joint Chiefs that the barrier could profoundly change

the character of the war in ways that they believed would reduce the chance for

a satisfactory outcome. General Westmoreland would have to transfer ground

forces from search and destroy missions to defending McNamara’s wall;

McNamara talked in terms of 20,000, but the Chiefs feared that the number of

soldiers required would be many times higher. Westmoreland’s own preferred

method of interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail was to send his ground forces into

Laos. Instead, the Air Force and Navy would be expected to focus their efforts

there, while McNamara might succeed in persuading the President to end the

bombing of North Vietnam.13

Secretary Brown labored to convince Chief of Staff McConnell and the Air

Force that the barrier was a good idea which would supplement rather than

replace bombing North Vietnam. Indeed, the Air Force ultimately invested

more heavily in the barrier than did the other services. Most of the ground portion was never built, but the effort to use electronic sensors for air interdiction

in Laos would become a major preoccupation of the Air Force for the next four

years. In the short run, Brown also helped to keep the bombing campaign alive

over North Vietnam. More influential advocacy of bombing, however, would

come from senators on the Armed Services Committee and airmen in Southeast

Asia.14

* * *

South of the twentieth parallel in North Vietnam’s panhandle, where

Secretary of Defense McNamara proposed to concentrate bombing, Air Force

and Navy aircrew were already flying eight thousand attack sorties a month—

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To Hanoi and Back
more than two-thirds the total sent against North Vietnam. The railroad south of

Vinh had long since ceased to function and few trucks moved on the roads in

daylight. Even at night the Air Force was sending more than fifteen hundred

sorties a month, usually F–4s armed with flares as well as bombs. Whatever

gains in effectiveness were to be had by increasing the already abundant air

power directed at the panhandle seemed slight in comparison with opportunities

thereby lost in the Red River Delta.15

Much of North Vietnam’s military and economic strength was concentrated in the delta. Here were gathered the essential supplies provided by the Soviet

Union and China. Through the port of Haiphong came perhaps forty-three hundred tons of imports a day, and possibly another fifteen hundred tons came

down the northeast railroad from China. Most weapons arrived by rail, while

trucks and oil came through Haiphong. According to one American estimate,

communist forces in South Vietnam required only fifteen tons of supplies a day

from North Vietnam—less than six thousand tons a year. To undertake an offensive, however, the communists required far more; during the northeast monsoon

of 1967–1968 they would (by Hanoi’s own count) employ about five thousand

trucks attempting to move sixty thousand tons of supplies through Laos. Even

that large an effort proved difficult to bomb when hidden by night and jungle.

Trucks destroyed in the North Vietnamese panhandle or on the Ho Chi Minh

Trail in Laos could have a more immediate effect on the communist supply situation in South Vietnam than could the destruction of railyards and warehouses

in the Red River Delta, but strikes on those more vulnerable delta targets could

have far greater impact on North Vietnam’s military and economic strength as a

whole.16

While the Air Force and the Navy continued to seek wider authority to

mine the ports and bomb the railroads in the Red River Delta, McNamara’s proposal to quit bombing there put a premium on showing some progress within

the authority already granted. Since mining Haiphong was prohibited, the Navy

went to work on the ground transportation routes radiating from the port—especially Haiphong’s only rail line, which, as it passed west through Hanoi, intersected with the only line running south. Armed reconnaissance was prohibited

within either Haiphong or Hanoi, so the Navy paid special attention to Hai

Duong, where the railroad crossed a bridge about midway on the sixty-mile

journey to Hanoi. At the end of June, Walt Rostow informed the President that

the Navy had found a bottleneck. A week later, Rostow could report that the

raid of July 2, 1967, on Hai Duong caused a serious disruption in the rail traffic

headed for Hanoi.17

Meanwhile, the Air Force had strengthened its effort to interdict the northeast railroad from Hanoi to China. More than a third of the ninety-mile route lay

within zones that President Johnson had forbidden American aircraft to attack.

A buffer zone twenty-five nautical miles deep along the Chinese border was

intended to ensure that American aircraft would not cross into China. Here

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Gradualism on Trial
Soviet and Chinese arms arriving on standard-gauge railroad cars could be

stored or loaded onto meter-gauge cars for the night run to the Hanoi sanctuary.

Chinese laborers were adding a third rail to the northeast line, so that by the

end of 1967 it would no longer be necessary to transfer supplies from China’s

standard-gauge cars to North Vietnam’s meter-gauge cars. Chinese rail construction in China, as well as in Vietnam, had already made the North

Vietnamese rail system more valuable to North Vietnam and less vulnerable to

American bombing. Before the summer of 1966, the Chinese had depended on

North Vietnam’s northeast and northwest railways as coastal China’s only rail

connection with the mineral-rich interior of southwest China. The completion

of a direct Chinese rail line to Kunming freed North Vietnam’s rails to carry

more supplies required by its war effort. At the same time, Chinese workers in

North Vietnam completed a dual-gauge line from Hanoi running north to the

ironworks at Thai Nguyen and then east to join the old northeast line at Kep on

the edge of the delta. American aircrews became very familiar with the rail triangle thus formed; they called it the Iron Triangle.18

The targets that could contribute most to backing up traffic on the northeast

line (together with its Thai Nguyen branch) lay within the ten-mile prohibited

zone which President Johnson had reinstated around Hanoi on May 21, 1967.

Before that, he had permitted some attacks on the rail system within the zone.

Unfortunately, the timing and sequence of these attacks limited their impact.

North Vietnam’s largest railyard, the one at Yen Vien five miles northeast of

downtown Hanoi, was struck in December 1966. Thanks to the subsequent outcry in the American press, this yard was not struck again until May. Three miles

closer to downtown Hanoi, the Gia Lam yard, with North Vietnam’s principal

railroad car repair shops, had also been struck in December—by accident.19

Johnson authorized another strike on it in April and, at the same time, authorized a strike on the railroad and highway bridge over the Canal des Rapides

(Song Duong). Since the canal bridge was north of Gia Lam and south of Yen

Vien, closure of the bridge stalled rail traffic from China in Yen Vien (which

also remained off limits until May) rather than in Gia Lam.20

While the North Vietnamese repaired the canal bridge and built alternates,

enough rail traffic backed up on the northeast railroad and its Thai Nguyen

branch to give the F–105s and F–4s more rolling stock to bomb than usual.

Seventh Air Force tried to prolong this state of affairs by repeatedly striking the

bridges and railyards that lay between the Hanoi prohibited zone and the China

buffer zone. Though many of these bridges and yards had been struck during

the past year, the pounding reached a crescendo in the summer of 1967.

The principal bridges on the main line crossed the Song Cau at Dap Cau

near Bac Ninh, about fifteen miles from Hanoi, and the Song Thuong at Bac

Giang, another ten miles north. Even when the main line could be broken, there

was the alternate that ran from Yen Vien through Thai Nguyen and rejoined the

main line at Kep a little less than halfway to China. None of the bridges on the

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To Hanoi and Back
alternate line were nearly as long as those at Dap Cau or Bac Giang. Even with

the longer bridges, the North Vietnamese and their Chinese allies had become

adept at making repairs and providing parallel bridges or ferries. A bridge that

appeared down might require only a prefabricated span that lay in wait nearby.21

Since nearly all bombing of the northeast railroad occurred in daylight and

most trains ran between sanctuaries at night, it was remarkable that any rolling

stock was ever caught by the fighter-bombers. Yet aircrews reported seeing

more than twenty-five hundred cars on the northeast railroad and its Thai

Nguyen branch from the middle of May to the end of June. Of these, they

claimed to have destroyed or damaged about one thousand. The number

destroyed was probably far smaller, and the Chinese apparently replaced many

of the losses. At any rate, U.S. intelligence estimates would place the North

Vietnamese rolling stock inventory at about two thousand at the end of the summer—only six hundred less than at the beginning of the year.22

In the short run, however, it was possible to be more optimistic about the

progress being made. This was especially true in Washington. At the end of

June, the Air Force’s Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. B. K. Holloway, wrote the

Pacific Air Forces commander, General Ryan, that it was time to focus on North

Vietnamese locomotives. Holloway believed that North Vietnamese rolling

stock had been reduced from twenty-six hundred to six hundred, while the locomotive count had come down only 15 from 120 to 105. However exaggerated

Holloway’s picture of the rolling stock situation, it was certainly true that the

North Vietnamese rarely left their locomotives in the open during daylight. A

locomotive campaign would have to be a night campaign, and General Ryan’s

attempts to increase night sorties in the Hanoi region had met with little success

so far.23

Ryan’s Raiders* at Korat, with their two-seat F–105Fs, ceased to fly night

missions into the delta in mid-May less than a month after they began them.

Their last mission in the delta was, as before, only a single sortie that penetrated at low level, perhaps a thousand feet. It was shot down over the target, the

Kep railyard. The F–4Cs of the 497th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Ubon then

tried their hand at low-level missions in the delta. The aircrews of the 497th

were known as the Night Owls, thanks to their nightly visits to Laos and the

panhandle of North Vietnam. In less well defended areas they could use flares,

but they did not much care to do this even in the panhandle. Certainly in the

delta they would not use flares, and their luck proved little better than that of

Ryan’s Raiders.24

On the evening of 22 May, 1967, the Night Owls sent four F–4Cs to attack

railyards near Kep. They penetrated at an altitude of five hundred feet or less,

and two of the aircraft were hit by antiaircraft fire near the railroad. One

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Gradualism on Trial

* See above, chapter two. 
crashed immediately, killing both crew members. The other aircraft almost

made it to the coast north of Haiphong before the crew had to bail out. Maj.

Richard D. Vogel, the pilot, injured his back during ejection and was captured.

The backseater, 1st Lt. David L. Baldwin, was rescued by a Navy helicopter.

So ended the last in a series of Night Owl attempts to penetrate the delta at low

level. A few days later F–4D aircraft arrived at Ubon from Florida, and the

Night Owls used their improved radar for occasional night raids at more than

ten thousand feet above the delta. But the accuracy of the night missions had

always been questionable, and the increase in altitude did nothing to enhance

it. In any case, such meager night raids could be no more than harassment at

best.25

If most of the air assault on the northeast railroad was limited to daylight,

at least the weather in June 1967 cooperated with a string of unusually clear

days. Of the six thousand attack sorties Seventh Air Force sent into North

Vietnam that month, about fifteen hundred went into Route Package Six with

more than three thousand tons of bombs; as usual the bulk of Air Force sorties

struck Route Package One in the panhandle just north of the Demilitarized

Zone. Nevertheless, the effort against the delta was among the strongest of the

war and was concentrated on the railroad. Only two aircraft fell to enemy air

defenses. On June 2, an F–105 was hit by ground fire at sixteen thousand feet

just before diving on a railyard near Kep. The North Vietnamese or Chinese

gunners scored another victory on June 14 when they downed an F–4 that was

attempting to penetrate the delta below eight thousand feet. Usually ingressing

aircraft tried to stay well above that altitude even if it meant a cloud layer might

block their view of surface-to-air missiles. Using jamming pods to deceive the

missiles, pilots were able to stay above accurate flak.26

As for MiGs, they were rarely seen in June. On only a couple of occasions

did fighter-bomber pilots jettison bombs to deal with attacking MiGs; in

September 1966 this had occurred more than sixty times. The spring 1967

strikes on airfields and consequent air-to-air battles had nearly eliminated the

MiG problem for the time being. On June 11, however, two F–4s collided while

guarding an F–105 strike force against the possibility of MiG attack. Aside

from this accident, escort fighters had an easy month.27

The success with which fighter-bombers were now penetrating the Red

River Delta, as well as the destruction of more box cars than usual, encouraged

airmen to believe that they might be able not only to head off Secretary of

Defense McNamara’s proposed cutback in bombing north of the twentieth parallel, but even to increase the bombing there. They hoped to eliminate (or at

least reduce) the sanctuaries established by President Johnson along the

Chinese border and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Johnson did permit the Navy

to return to Hanoi in June to hit the powerplant again and to hit the Van Dien

supply depot with its support facility for surface-to-air missiles. But all other

targets within the sanctuaries remained off limits, and authority to attack in the

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To Hanoi and Back
Haiphong area was reduced further after two Soviet ships were strafed in North

Vietnamese harbors.28

The first incident involving a Soviet ship took place on June 2, 1967, in the

port of Cam Pha, forty miles up the coast from Haiphong. A flight of four

F–105s were leaving North Vietnam, when the pilot of the third aircraft decided to pay a visit to a well known antiaircraft site on the coast; his wingman followed. As the element leader dove on the site, he thought he saw a ship in the

roadstead firing at him, and he strafed it. When the pair returned to Takhli Air

Base that evening, the element leader tried to retrieve his gun camera film, but

the young airman unloading the camera would not break the rules. Before long

the problem was put into the hands of the acting wing commander, Col. Jacksel

M. Broughton, who destroyed the evidence by exposing the film.29

Unfortunately for Colonel Broughton, this incident was not to be closed so

easily. The Soviet Union immediately complained that its ship Turkestan had

been fired upon by an American aircraft, killing one of the crew. The

Commander in Chief, Pacific, Admiral Sharp, assured Washington that there

was little to the Soviet claim; possibly the ship had been hit by debris from antiaircraft fire. Walt Rostow told President Johnson that Secretary McNamara and

General Wheeler were convinced that the United States bore no responsibility.

The State Department informed the Soviets that aircraft attacking targets in the

area had been investigated and that none had attacked a ship.30

Two weeks later Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin told Secretary of State Rusk

that the Turkestan had docked at Vladivostok with an unexploded round from

an F–105; Foreign Secretary Gromyko was considering bringing it to the

United Nations when he and Kosygin visited in a few days. That was more than

enough to reopen the investigation, and within a week the United States had to

apologize. From Colonel Broughton’s perspective, his court martial for destroying evidence was just the final frustration of many that he subsequently

described in his books Thud Ridge and Going Downtown.* From the perspective of more cautious men in Washington, the Turkestan incident was proof that

enemy sanctuaries needed more emphasis from the President.31

Washington was still very sensitive about the incident when on June 29, the

Soviet ship Mikhail Frunze was apparently strafed in Haiphong harbor by two

Navy fighters. This led immediately to the declaration of a prohibited zone with

a radius of four nautical miles from the center of Haiphong. Like the ten-mile

Hanoi prohibited zone that had been declared in December 1966, no strike was

to be made within the new zone without special authorization from the

President. In the prohibited zones, U.S. aircraft were not even to react to antiaircraft fire. Such reaction was permitted in the restricted zones, which ran out

75

Gradualism on Trial

* Colonel Broughton’s court martial conviction was set aside by the Office of the

Secretary of the Air Force. Instead, Broughton was fined six hundred dollars and retired.
to thirty nautical miles from the center of Hanoi and ten nautical miles from the

center of Haiphong.32

The establishment of the Haiphong prohibited zone seemed less foreboding to airmen than it might have, because only a day earlier the Preparedness

Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee had

announced that it was going to hold hearings on the conduct of the air war over

North Vietnam. Since most subcommittee members were known to be sympathetic to a more decisive use of air power, air leaders in the Pacific had reason to

feel more confident about Secretary of Defense McNamara’s forthcoming visit

to Vietnam and chances for defeating his proposal to eliminate bombing north

of the twentieth parallel.33

McNamara came to Saigon in early July with the troop issue largely

resolved. He announced that there would be no reserve call-up, so that the

biggest troop increase Westmoreland could get would be 42,000, or a total force

of 525,000. But the Secretary was clearly in no position to announce a bombing

cutback, and he was subjected to a series of briefings carefully prepared to talk

him out of pursuing one. A couple of weeks before McNamara’s arrival,

Admiral Sharp had sent the text of his own briefing to General Westmoreland,

General Momyer, and Vice Adm. John J. Hyland, the Seventh Fleet commander; then Sharp had watched Momyer and Hyland rehearse their briefings. But

it turned out to be Sharp’s briefing that rubbed the Secretary of Defense the

wrong way. After hearing Sharp’s call for mining Haiphong and lifting most

restrictions on bombing, McNamara showed his irritation by thanking

Westmoreland for the briefings while ignoring the theater commander.34

Momyer’s presentation, however, was more persuasive. He emphasized

Seventh Air Force’s recent success attacking the northeast railroad with relatively few aircraft losses. Though suggesting that it was time to “broaden and

increase our effort,” he left specific recommendations to Sharp.35 Momyer’s

cerebral style and his impressive marshalling of data found favor with his audience. After McNamara’s return to Washington, there was speculation in the

press that he had been converted to bombing in the delta. But, in fact,

McNamara told Johnson that the air leaders were much too optimistic about

bombing results.36 General Wheeler was able to dilute McNamara’s influence

by giving Momyer’s briefing transcript to the President, who was so impressed

with it that he read passages to the cabinet.37 Johnson also sent it to former

President Eisenhower, who liked Momyer’s argument that the reduction in antiaircraft fire, including surface-to-air missiles, might be a result of railroad interdiction.38

While Momyer’s briefing may have contributed to Johnson’s willingness

to continue bombing in the Red River Delta, the President was not yet ready to

authorize a major expansion of the bombing. When, on July 20, 1967, Johnson

approved a list of fifteen new targets, none of these lay within the ten-mile

Hanoi prohibited zone, the four-mile Haiphong prohibited zone, or the China

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To Hanoi and Back
buffer zone. Indeed, Johnson specifically disapproved any attack on Hanoi’s

Doumer Bridge across the Red River. He also vetoed three Hanoi targets that

had been struck at least once during the preceding year: the powerplant, the Yen

Vien railyard, and the Van Dien truck depot. Nor would the President approve

hitting the major MiG base at Phuc Yen, about fifteen miles northwest of

Hanoi.39

The most significant increase in bombing authority granted by President

Johnson on July 20 opened to armed reconnaissance all major transportation

routes (road, rail, and water) radiating from the Hanoi prohibited zone. Between

the circumference of the prohibited zone (with a radius of ten nautical miles)

and the circumference of the restricted zone (with a radius of thirty nautical

miles) lay a region whose shape inspired airmen to call it the Hanoi “donut.”

Hanoi’s entire restricted zone had often been called a donut before creation of

the prohibited zone. Henceforth, the term “donut” sometimes included the prohibited zone and sometimes excluded it as merely the donut hole. The new

expansion of bombing authority concerned lines of communication in the donut

ring. When fighter aircraft began to bomb north of the twentieth parallel in the

summer of 1965, Johnson had established the restricted zone to keep them away

from Hanoi. Subsequently, he had permitted some armed reconnaissance on

certain routes within the zone. In the case of the northeast railroad, for example,

the thirty-mile circle crossed just north of Bac Giang, but armed reconnaissance

was permitted from there to Bac Ninh, less than twenty nautical miles from the

center of Hanoi. The new rule permitted armed reconnaissance all the way to

the ten-mile circle, not only on the northeast railroad, but for other routes coming into Hanoi.40

Since June 30, the Haiphong donut also had a hole. On that day, President

Johnson had declared a prohibited zone (with a radius of four nautical miles)

inside Haiphong’s previously established restricted zone (with a radius of ten

nautical miles). The Haiphong donut ring differed from its Hanoi counterpart in

that no armed reconnaissance was authorized. Hence, the Navy might be permitted to bomb a bridge in the donut ring, but traffic that backed up between the

bridge and the port could not be struck. Although Haiphong was principally a

Navy responsibility, the Air Force was very concerned about it. Interdicting the

northeast railroad could not have a major impact so long as imports could flow

freely through Haiphong. General McConnell proposed that the Haiphong

donut ring become the focus of an intensive interdiction campaign, with armed

reconnaissance permitted on all the major routes carrying traffic inland from the

port. In addition, McConnell wanted to shrink the donut hole, the prohibited

zone, from a radius of four nautical miles to a radius of one and a half nautical

miles.41

In the fall of 1966, when the Air Force had proposed to establish interdiction belts across Navy route packages in the panhandle of North Vietnam,

Admiral Sharp had rejected the proposal on the ground that it was an Air

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Gradualism on Trial
Force attempt to control part of Navy territory. This time the Air Force did

not make the mistake of trying to launch a campaign of its own against the

Haiphong donut. By lobbying for the Navy, the Air Force irritated Sharp only

slightly. He pointed out that Navy airmen had been attempting to isolate

Haiphong for some time, but he welcomed any increase in their authority to

do that job.42

McConnell’s Haiphong donut plan also met a favorable reception from

Walt Rostow, who saw that it offered a way around President Johnson’s usual

objections. Johnson was firmly opposed to mining the port or bombing the

docks. Nor did he like General Wheeler’s proposal in the spring of 1967 to

“shoulder out” shipping from the harbor by bombing targets that were progressively closer to the docks. McConnell’s plan promised to reduce the flow of

imports through Haiphong without risking further incidents involving Soviet

ships. On the last day of July, Rostow sent the plan into Johnson with the advice

that this was a “quite serious and interesting proposal.”43

A little more than a week later, President Johnson authorized armed reconnaissance in the Haiphong donut ring. At the same time, he approved several

railroad targets within the Hanoi prohibited zone and within the China buffer

zone. To a degree, this expansion in bombing authority reflected the growing

optimism of some of Johnson’s advisers. Rostow told him that the No

Committee now believed they were on the “winning track” and favored more

bombing of transportation and electric power targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong

region. Support inside the administration probably had far less to do with

Johnson’s decision, however, than political pressure from outside. The morning

after Johnson expanded Air Force and Navy bombing authority, the

Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services

Committee opened its investigation into the bombing of North Vietnam.44

* * *

During his years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson had chaired the

Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee.

The current Chairman, John Stennis (Democrat, Mississippi), had often acted

in that capacity even when Johnson was in the Senate, since Johnson was

absorbed by his more important duties as majority leader. Though Johnson’s

increasingly liberal stance on civil rights had disturbed Stennis, he had supported Johnson for the presidency in 1960. Even after Johnson entered the White

House and pushed for civil rights legislation, Stennis had continued his support

on most other matters, including the war in Vietnam. But he was becoming very

uncomfortable with Johnson’s preference for increasing pressure on North

Vietnam only gradually.45

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To Hanoi and Back
Fearful that Americans might continue to die in South Vietnam for years to

come, some of the military’s strongest supporters in the Senate began to think that

a pullout would be preferable to gradualism. On August 1, 1967, Senator Ernest F.

Hollings (Democrat, South Carolina) warned Walt Rostow that the President’s

policies were troubling some of his key backers, like Stennis and Senator Richard

Russell (Democrat, Georgia), the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

During his Senate years, Johnson had been considered a Russell protege. Now,

according to Hollings, Russell was so fed up with gradualism that he wanted to

declare war or get out of Vietnam. Stennis too felt that the U.S. was overcommitted and that it had surrendered the initiative to the enemy.46

On matters relating to air power, the most influential and outspoken member of the Stennis subcommittee was Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat,

Missouri). Since serving as the first Secretary of the Air Force in the late 1940s,

he had been a persistent advocate for the service during more than a dozen years

in the Senate. He had been appointed to the Armed Services Committee by

Lyndon Johnson, then majority leader. Their friendship had cooled in the period before the 1960 presidential campaign, when they both sought the nomination of their party. Since then, they had continued to be political allies, but

Symington had grown increasingly disenchanted with the war in Vietnam.47

Symington visited Southeast Asia several times in an attempt to understand

the war. As he talked to pilots and generals about the restrictions under which

they were operating, he grew especially hostile toward the President’s ban

against striking North Vietnam’s airfields. Even after some of these were at last

added to the authorized target list in the spring of 1967, he continued to push for

attacking the others, including the principal MiG base at Phuc Yen. When he

learned that Secretary of Defense McNamara was attempting to cut back bombing, Symington called for an investigation.48

Symington’s colleagues on the Stennis subcommittee shared his dissatisfaction with the way the war was going. In addition to Stennis, the other Democrats

were Henry M. Jackson of Washington, Howard W. Cannon of Nevada, and

Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia; the Republicans were Margaret Chase Smith of

Maine, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Jack Miller of Iowa. In closed

session August 9–29, 1967, the subcommittee questioned seven generals, three

admirals, and the Secretary of Defense. From the subcommittee’s point of view,

the score was ten to one, with McNamara alone on the losing side.49

The first to testify was the Pacific commander, Admiral Sharp, who was

accompanied by his two principal subordinates in Hawaii, the commanders of

the Pacific Fleet (Adm. Roy Johnson) and Pacific Air Forces (General Ryan).

They and their questioners could congratulate themselves that their hearings

had already produced an expanded target list even before their proceedings had

begun. On the morning of the opening session, President Johnson had approved

railroad targets within ten nautical miles of Hanoi (including the Red River

bridge) and within twenty-five nautical miles of the Chinese border, not to men79

Gradualism on Trial
tion permitting armed reconnaissance within ten miles of Haiphong. Sharp

stressed at the outset, however, that he would be asking for more targets: “It is

important that we continue to take these good targets and get in there and strike

where it hurts.”50

President Johnson’s attempt to take the wind out of the senators’ sails

served chiefly to redirect their energies away from investigating moves toward

a bombing cutback. Only Senator Smith showed much interest in the origins of

McNamara’s barrier concept and any connection it might have with cutback

proposals. Sharp assured her that the barrier could never be “a substitute for the

bombing.”51 Since the possibility of a cutback appeared to have faded, the subcommittee focused on the need to mine Haiphong harbor and bomb Phuc Yen

airfield.

Senator Symington explained that he had called for the hearings because he

feared that “the way our air power over North Vietnam has been handled, it was

being denigrated before the people to a point where one of the great arms of

both our services, Navy and Air Force, would eventually be eliminated.”52 The

tactical air forces had been made to look weak. Pilots in Southeast Asia had

pleaded with him to be allowed to hit Phuc Yen airfield. Why had Sharp been

refused authorization to hit Phuc Yen? “I have not been given a reason,” the

admiral replied.53

Walt Rostow thought at first that Symington wanted to bomb Fukien

Province in China. The National Security Adviser solemnly warned the

President that such an attack would mean war with China. But one point

Symington was trying to make was that Phuc Yen airfield should not have been

an especially sensitive target. It was a military installation more than ten miles

from Hanoi. If the Pacific commander had not even been told why Phuc Yen

should not be bombed, a reasonable inference was that the military leadership

was not fully involved in the target selection process.54

On the question of military consultation, the President could be put in a bad

light since he rarely included admirals or generals in meetings with his principal

advisers. Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wheeler, had

not been present during most of the critical discussions in 1965, and he had participated only occasionally since then. With Wheeler’s testimony scheduled to

follow Sharp’s, Rostow suggested to Johnson a “roundup session” for Wheeler

which would enable him to say that he had been consulted on all targets.55 But

when Wheeler testified, he took a somewhat more open approach. He claimed

only to have been “frequently” present, particularly for “major” bombing programs. Senator Thurmond wanted to know if targets had ever been turned down

in Wheeler’s absence. Wheeler answered in the affirmative, while noting that

targets were also turned down when he was present.56

Though Wheeler tried to mute his criticism of the administration as much

as possible, he could not duck direct questions about his views on Haiphong. He

favored mining Haiphong; the other chiefs favored it; the President and the

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To Hanoi and Back
Secretary of Defense opposed it. Symington asked Wheeler whether he thought

it was fair to criticize generals for the alleged failure of a gradual bombing policy which they had not recommended. Wheeler agreed that such criticism was

unfair. On the matter of Phuc Yen airfield, however, he confined himself to saying that the Joint Chiefs had for two years recommended bombing it, but that

they had not been permitted to because of its nearness to Hanoi, the probable

cost in terms of American pilots and aircraft, and the weakness of the MiG

threat.57

Symington’s advocacy of bombing Phuc Yen was then quietly undermined

by the Seventh Air force commander, General Momyer. As in his briefing for

McNamara in Saigon, Momyer argued persuasively for the increasing effectiveness of American aircraft against North Vietnam’s air defenses, especially

MiGs. The airfield attacks and air-to-air battles of the spring had broken MiG

resistance. “We have driven the MiGs out of the sky for all practical purposes.”58 MiG pilots would soon give Momyer reason to regret that sentence, but

for the moment it took the steam out of Symington’s criticism.

When President Johnson met with his principal advisers, Secretary of

Defense McNamara was full of praise for Wheeler and Momyer. Wheeler was

present on this occasion and noted that while Symington had been the roughest

questioner, he was “on Phuc Yen like a broken record.”59 McNamara predicted

that the subcommittee would fail in its attempt to find a chasm between himself

and Wheeler or between them and the President: “sure there are small differences but these are worked out.”60

Wheeler’s testimony had tried to paint a picture of growing harmony

between the civilian and military leadership. After all, many targets once forbidden had since been approved, and he was confident that more approvals lay

just ahead. Indeed, during the hearings, President Johnson approved thirteen

targets (in addition to the sixteen he approved just before the opening session).

When Senator Smith asked the Air Force Chief of Staff about this, General

McConnell offered the opinion that McNamara’s recent trip to Vietnam may

have caused him to appreciate for the first time the value of the air war in the

north. But, McConnell added, “I haven’t talked to him about it at all.”61

Whatever success the Joint Chiefs had in portraying McNamara’s conversion to their point of view evaporated when McNamara testified. The Secretary

of Defense dismissed enthusiasm about the release of so many new targets. The

new targets were of no great importance, and he had not changed his mind

about the air war. In McNamara’s view, there never had been a significant disagreement between himself and the Joint Chiefs over bombing—just a difference of opinion about the allocation of only 5 percent of the sorties sent against

North Vietnam. Symington interjected that attacking an octopus in the head

seemed “pretty fundamental” even though the head was only 5 percent of the

octopus. “But if you were attacking 95 percent of the octopus simultaneously,”

McNamara replied, “the analogy doesn’t hold . . . .”62

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Gradualism on Trial
The subcommittee did not accept McNamara’s contention that attacking

new targets would make little difference. They sided with the witnesses in uniform, who had stressed the critical importance of closing North Vietnam’s

ports, especially Haiphong. McNamara attempted to disparage the value of

Haiphong by arguing that communist operations in South Vietnam needed only

a small quantity of supplies: if less than 1 percent of North Vietnam’s imports

were required by communist forces in South Vietnam, surely enough supplies

could be brought ashore in lighters at countless points along hundreds of miles

of North Vietnamese coastline or carried overland from China. During the year

since American bombers had destroyed oil off-loading facilities, North

Vietnamese lighters had been delivering fuel in barrels.63

The subcommittee’s frustration with McNamara’s testimony was evident.

Senator Howard W. Cannon (Democrat, Nevada), a major general in the Air

Force Reserve, noted that imports coming through Haiphong supported the

communist war effort whether or not those supplies crossed the border into

South Vietnam. As to McNamara’s argument that the North Vietnamese would

simply find other ways to import necessary supplies, Cannon protested that if

Americans were going to throw their hands in the air over such difficulties, they

might just as well say, “Let us get out then because we cannot handle this problem.” Symington seconded this view.64

At the end of August 1967, the Stennis subcommittee published its report.

“What is needed now,” the subcommittee stated, “is the hard decision to do

whatever is necessary, take the risks that have to be taken, and apply the force

that is required to see the job through.”65 But the substance of the subcommittee’s recommendation was somewhat less bold than this rhetorical flourish.

According to the subcommittee, it was necessary to close the port of Haiphong,

but it was not necessary to subject North Vietnam’s cities to area bombing or

even to use B–52s against targets near those cities.

None of the witnesses had called for using B–52s against the densely populated Red River Delta. Admiral Sharp expressed concern about the possibility

that a surface-to-air missile might bring down a B–52.66 General McConnell

noted that North Vietnam’s air defenses were much stronger in 1967 than in

1965, when he had supported using the B–52s against targets in the delta.67

General Wheeler declared that “no responsible military commander that I know

of has ever yet advocated the attack of population as a target.”68 Wheeler left little doubt that his category of responsible military commanders did not include

General LeMay, whose famous proposal to bomb the North Vietnamese back to

the Stone Age was interpreted by Wheeler to mean attacking the population.

While Wheeler was anxious to demonstrate that the bombing he favored would

spare most civilians, McNamara used this claim as an argument against new

targets. “There is no basis to believe,” McNamara asserted, “that any bombing

campaign, short of one which had population as its target, would by itself force

Ho Chi Minh’s regime into submission.”69 But no one at the hearings suggested

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To Hanoi and Back
that bombing in North Vietnam should be anything more than a partner of the

ground war in South Vietnam.

After more than two years of gradualism, there seemed little room for dramatic action. Generals and senators might regret the failure to use B–52s

against the Red River Delta in 1965, but the North Vietnamese had been permitted to grow accustomed to bombing gradually and build their defenses

against it. In any case, no one at the 1967 hearings quarreled with the Johnson

administration’s decision not to threaten the existence of the communist government of North Vietnam. As much as the senators on the subcommittee disliked gradualism, following most of their recommendations could yield little

more than another gradual escalation in the bombing campaign. Only their call

for closing the port of Haiphong promised action of a relatively dramatic character.

The Stennis subcommittee report revealed the chasm between Secretary of

Defense McNamara and the Joint Chiefs. At a press conference on the following day, President Johnson insisted that while there might be differences of

opinion, there was “no deep division.”70 In any case, the Joint Chiefs could

come directly to him anytime they chose. Differences of opinion were natural in

the American system of government, and Johnson recalled that in the late

1940s, Secretary of the Air Force Symington had asked a congressional committee for an opportunity to testify on behalf of a bigger Air Force than the

Truman administration thought feasible. As to McNamara, Johnson insisted

that there was no truth to the rumor that the Secretary of Defense had threatened

to resign if the bombing program expanded: “He doesn’t go around threatening

anything or anyone.”71

Only three months later, Johnson would announce McNamara’s departure

from the Defense Department to become president of the World Bank.

McNamara’s defense of administration policy at the Stennis hearings had not

endeared him to the President. Although Johnson continued to oppose mining

Haiphong, he was ready to conciliate proponents of bombing by authorizing

less risky targets. McNamara’s bleak assessment of the bombing’s effectiveness

at the hearings and his backstage search for a way out of Vietnam both served to

weaken his influence. His testimony was frequently praised by critics of the

bombing, including the North Vietnamese representative in Paris.72

In late November, when he raised the possibility of McNamara’s departure

at a National Security Council meeting, President Johnson felt obliged to

emphasize that no member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had talked to him about

resignation. General Wheeler immediately affirmed that no member of the Joint

Chiefs had threatened to resign: “As far as I am concerned any report like that is

a lie.”73 Nevertheless, gossip about resignation threats continued to circulate.

According to one version, some or all of the Chiefs had threatened to resign in

May. According to another version, Wheeler had called a meeting of the Chiefs

on the evening after McNamara’s testimony to the Stennis committee in late

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August; all had agreed to resign, but by the next morning Wheeler had changed

his mind and they all kept quiet. When the latter version was published in 1989,

the only surviving Chiefs from 1967, Adm. Thomas Moorer (Chief of Naval

Operations) and Gen. Wallace M. Greene, Jr. (Commandant of the Marine

Corps), both flatly denied that the Joint Chiefs had ever agreed to resign.74

While withdrawing support from McNamara, President Johnson developed

a warm relationship with Wheeler. The President’s top general was a consummate staff man without combat experience. Less than a week after the Stennis

hearings, a heart ailment sent Wheeler to the hospital. Having had a heart attack

of his own, Johnson was inclined to be sympathetic. When Wheeler offered to

resign as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Johnson put his arm around him and

told him that the President could not afford to lose him. Wheeler would remember proudly that on this occasion Johnson also praised him for never giving a

bad piece of advice. Henceforth, Wheeler would be a more regular participant

at Johnson’s meetings on bombing North Vietnam.75

* * *

As a result of the Stennis hearings, the list of targets authorized by

President Johnson grew somewhat longer. A few hours before the hearings

began on August 9, 1967, the President approved new targets on the northeast

railroad. For the first time, American aircraft would be permitted to strike railyards and bridges in the buffer zone along the Chinese border—i.e., within

twenty-five nautical miles of China. At the other end of the northeast railroad in

Hanoi, the Doumer Bridge over the Red River at last became a target.

In communist Hanoi, the Red River bridge was called the Longbien Bridge.

Its French name, the Paul Doumer Bridge, was still used by American airmen,

though few knew who Doumer was. More than four decades had passed since

the assassination of President Doumer of France, and the bridge was a product of

his service in Vietnam at the turn of the century. As governor general of French

Indochina, Doumer had tried to centralize the administration of French colonies

in the region and make them profitable for France. He pushed for the construction of railroads that would link northern Vietnam with southern Vietnam and

with China. Though the railroads were built, they did not spur the rapid economic development Doumer had expected. But when the communists began to

develop North Vietnam in the 1950s, Doumer’s railroad system played an

important role in their plans.76

The linchpin of Doumer’s railroad system was his Red River bridge at

Hanoi. Rail traffic carrying goods from China or from the port of Haiphong had

to pass over the Doumer Bridge to reach Hanoi and points south all the way to

Saigon. This bridge was one of the most obvious targets in North Vietnam, and

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To Hanoi and Back
it had been spared so long only because its southern end projected into downtown Hanoi. Though well defended by antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air

missiles, the bridge’s great length made it vulnerable. This, the longest bridge

in Vietnam, stretched for more than a mile, ten times the length of the hard-tohit bridge at Thanh Hoa.77

The long, frustrating, and still unsuccessful campaign to destroy the Thanh

Hoa bridge weighed heavily on planning for the Doumer strike. While the precision television guidance system of the new Walleye bombs would have been

very desirable for hitting the Doumer Bridge and avoiding the population, the

1,100-pound Walleye with its 825-pound warhead had proved too weak for the

Thanh Hoa despite direct hits. Therefore, the Air Force decided to use 3,000-

pound unguided bombs. On August 9, President Johnson directed that the

Hanoi powerplant be struck again with Walleyes and that only after a week had

passed could the Doumer Bridge be attacked. The next day, however, the

President agreed to reverse the order of attack in deference to a temporary problem with the Walleyes.78

On the morning of August 11, 1967, Seventh Air Force told the F–105

wings at Takhli and Korat, together with the F–4 wing at Ubon, to bomb the

Doumer Bridge that very afternoon. Aircraft already loaded with 750-pound

bombs had to be reconfigured with a pair of 3,000-pound bombs. The strike

force of thirty-six fighters penetrated North Vietnam at ten thousand feet and

flew down Thud Ridge before popping up to thirteen thousand and diving on

the target. Though the unguided bombs were released more than a mile above

the bridge, it was hit several times—destroying one of the nineteen rail spans

and portions of the highway that ran along both sides of the track. As Walt

Rostow commented to President Johnson, “dropping a span of that bridge the

first time around was a quite extraordinary feat.”79 Not everyone was so

impressed, however. Two weeks after the raid, Secretary of Defense McNamara

told the Stennis subcommittee that the target had been just another bridge: “We

have struck tens if not hundreds of bridges of a similar kind.”80

Since the North Vietnamese could no longer send trains across the Doumer

Bridge, they had to transfer cargo to trucks and ferry them across the river,

delaying cargo moving west from Haiphong as well as south from China.

Southbound traffic soon experienced additional delay after the Air Force

bombed two bridges over the Canal des Rapides about four miles northeast of

the Doumer Bridge. In response to the first strike on the original Canal bridge in

May, the North Vietnamese had built a bypass bridge and repaired the old one;

in August both ceased to function. The efficiency of the northeast railroad was

further reduced by attacks on railyards and bridges in the buffer zone along the

Chinese border.81

So much interference with traffic on the northeast railroad had the desired

consequence of increasing the number of box cars stalled in railyards. The

largest yard in North Vietnam at Yen Vien just north of the Canal des Rapides

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Gradualism on Trial
had been struck in December and May, but since then it had been off limits

along with most other targets within ten nautical miles of Hanoi. On August 21,

1967, about 150 box cars sat open to attack in the Yen Vien yard. Twenty

F–105s and eight F–4s damaged more than half the box cars and trapped the

remainder in the yard, where they were struck again two days later. These

strikes, however, cost the Air Force men and planes. On the 21st, two F–105s

were lost to antiaircraft artillery, as was an F–4 on the 23d. But more surprising

and dismaying was the loss of a pair of F–4s to MiG–21s on the 23d.82

After suffering heavy losses in the air-to-air battles of May 1967, the MiGs

had stood down. When they attacked on August 23, they employed new hitand-run tactics. Having passed low under a strike force on its way down Thud

Ridge, two MiG–21s climbed quickly and fell upon the force from the rear—a

single pass and two heat-seeking Atoll missiles destroyed two F–4s. The most

remarkable aspect of this incident was that nothing like it had occurred before

over North Vietnam. American airmen on their way to strike a target had grown

used to looking for a MiG ahead, though they had all been taught to “check

six”—i.e., watch their “six o’clock” (or rear). The old admonition at once

seemed more relevant. North Vietnam’s ground radar control system had

demonstrated that it could guide MiGs into the deadly six o’clock position.83

F–4 and F–105 strike aircraft on the Yen Vien raid that day were escorted

by a flight of F–4s armed only for air-to-air combat and led by the commander

of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, Col. Robin Olds. A World War II ace, Olds’

four victories in North Vietnam made him the top MiG-killer of the war so far.

His flight was just behind the F–105s and just ahead of the strike F–4s. “I heard

them scream,” he would recall, “I turned, and all I saw were two burning

objects . . . .”84 His compassion turned to anger when he learned that Seventh

Air Force intelligence officers had known for several days that the MiGs were

practicing this new tactic. He declared that had he been told, he would have

split his escort flight of four into two elements and sent both elements ahead of

the strike force—one element low and the other high, with the latter swooping

back over the strike force as they came down Thud Ridge. Olds thought that

this maneuver would have caused the North Vietnamese ground controller to

call off the attack.85

Unfortunately, the MiG–21s on August 23 took their toll and were only

part of the Air Force’s problems that day. Another F–4 was shot down by antiaircraft artillery at the Yen Vien railyard; a fourth ran out of fuel and flamed out

over Thailand. Adding an F–105 hit by ground fire in Route Package Six and an

F–4 in Route Package One, losses totalled six Air Force jets and one Navy jet

over North Vietnam for the 23d and caused pilots to call it “Black Wednesday.”

It was the worst day in the air over North Vietnam since “Black Friday,”

December 2, 1966, when five Air Force jets and three Navy jets were lost.86

Black Wednesday made relatively little impression in Washington, where

American aircraft losses usually received less attention than enemy civilian

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To Hanoi and Back
casualties. A major exception to this general rule, however, had occurred only

two days earlier, when two Navy A–6s strayed into China and were shot down

by Chinese MiG–19s. That got Washington’s attention, but in the end disappointed those who expected this incident to bolster their argument against

bombing targets near the Chinese border. The A–6s had bombed a railyard near

Hanoi far from the border and were trying to return to the carrier Constellation

when a thunderstorm caused them to fly north of their intended route. The carrier and its radar aircraft attempted to warn the A–6s of their impending border

violation, but the warnings were apparently not received. The Chinese limited

their response to shooting down the A–6s and blaming the border violation on a

conspiracy between President Johnson and Soviet Premier Kosygin. Far from

discouraging strikes near the border, this relatively restrained Chinese reaction

raised administration confidence that the Chinese would not increase their

involvement in the war.87

While continuing to permit bombing near the Chinese border, President

Johnson renewed his prohibition on bombing within ten nautical miles of the

center of Hanoi—beginning August 24, only two weeks after he had authorized

targets there. No one in the Pacific was told the reason for this about-face,

which had to do with the activities of Henry A. Kissinger, then director of the

defense studies program at Harvard. Kissinger was acquainted with a microbiologist in Paris, Herbert Marcovich, whose friend Raymond Aubrac had been

close to Ho Chi Minh. During Ho’s negotiations with the French at Versailles in

1946, he had stayed in Aubrac’s villa. Now Aubrac was working for the United

Nations in Rome and offered his services as an intermediary. With the encouragement of the State Department (conveyed informally through Kissinger),

Aubrac and Marcovich visited Hanoi in July 1967. They proposed a variation

on the two-phase formula that had become the American negotiating position.88

Since late 1966, the Johnson administration had expressed a willingness to

stop bombing (phase A) before North Vietnam reciprocated by ceasing to infiltrate troops and supplies into South Vietnam (phase B). Since the two phases

would not be connected overtly, North Vietnam would be able to claim that the

United States had stopped bombing unconditionally. After consulting with

Kissinger, Aubrac and Marcovich altered phase B, so that the North Vietnamese

would only commit themselves not to increase their infiltration; the question of

reducing that infiltration would be considered during negotiations that would

promptly follow a bombing halt. Hence, the United States would trade a bombing halt merely for negotiations. After the North Vietnamese expressed interest,

President Johnson approved the new two-phase formula on August 18; the next

day he agreed to suspend bombing near Hanoi from August 24 to September 4

so that Aubrac and Marcovich would have plenty of time for a bomb-free second visit there.89

North Vietnam used the mid-August air strikes in the Hanoi area to justify

denying Aubrac and Marcovich permission for a second visit. They had to con87

Gradualism on Trial
duct their business through the North Vietnamese representative in Paris, Mai

Van Bo. For two months, the North Vietnamese let the new two-phase proposal

dangle, while President Johnson extended the prohibition on bombing within ten

nautical miles of the center of Hanoi. Johnson made the American offer public in

a speech at San Antonio, Texas, on September 29, 1967, and henceforth this proposal was called the San Antonio formula. But on October 20th, Mai Van Bo

refused to see Aubrac and Marcovich; on the same day Wilfred Burchett, an

Australian communist journalist, reported from Hanoi that the North Vietnamese

were “in no mood for concessions or bargaining.”90

The coincidence of the Kissinger initiative and the Stennis hearings was

very awkward for President Johnson. As usual, he tried to balance the conflicting demands of those who sought negotiations and those who wanted to

increase the pressure on North Vietnam. After giving airmen two weeks to

destroy the bridges over the Red River and the Canal des Rapides, he gave the

North Vietnamese two months to rebuild them. As a sop to the Stennis committee, he authorized new targets further from Hanoi, including one opposed during the hearings by Secretary McNamara—the coal exporting port of Cam Pha,

but only when no ships were present. Since there were always ships at

Haiphong and usually Soviet ones, Johnson rejected the Stennis committee

demand that North Vietnam’s major port be closed by mining or bombing.91

As the Kissinger initiative dragged on, the President grew impatient. At a

Tuesday lunch meeting with his advisers on September 12, he wanted to know

whether Kissinger was a dove. Secretary of State Rusk assured him that

Kissinger was basically on the administration’s side, though Rusk doubted productive talks would really follow a bombing halt; in Rusk’s view, a bombing

halt would thus prove to be only temporary. Walt Rostow worried that

Kissinger might go soft in a crunch. But Rostow was himself becoming more

amenable to a bombing halt, because he believed that the communists were losing the war in South Vietnam and therefore that bombing North Vietnam was no

longer essential. So Rostow’s optimism, Rusk’s skepticism, and McNamara’s

pessimism all pointed toward a bombing cutback. In the fall of 1967, however,

President Johnson paid more heed to calls for harsher bombing from the Joint

Chiefs of Staff and their allies in the Senate.92

* * *

While waiting for the Kissinger initiative to die and thus release targets

near Hanoi, the Joint Chiefs sought Johnson’s approval for striking North

Vietnam’s major MiG base at Phuc Yen—more than ten miles from the center

of Hanoi. During the Stennis hearings, Senator Symington’s repeated demands

that Phuc Yen be hit were undercut by General Momyer’s claim that the MiGs

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had been driven from the sky in May. Even before the hearings were over, however, the MiGs began to display new aggressiveness and effectiveness. In

September, bad bombing weather and the prohibition against bombing near

Hanoi cooled the air-to-air battle and the MiGs got only one kill, but forty-eight

American aircraft jettisoned bombs while fending off the MiGs.93

In mid-September, Richard Helms at the Central Intelligence Agency

called Walt Rostow to report that Senator Symington was in a very black

mood as he prepared to leave Washington for another trip to Southeast Asia.

Symington was worried about the economic burden imposed by America’s

gradual escalation of the war. Rostow cabled Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker

in Saigon that he would need to do a lot of missionary work on Symington.

But no amount of missionary work could dissuade the senator from his growing conviction that the United States must either hit North Vietnam hard or

quit.94

Upon returning to Washington, Symington proposed that the United States

cease all military action in both North Vietnam and South Vietnam—but that if

productive negotiations did not follow, American airmen should be free to conduct a much harsher bombing campaign. This proposal immediately ran into

opposition at both the Defense Department and the State Department. Under

Secretary of State Katzenbach protested that the “only purpose of formulating

cessation of military actions in this way would be to justify major escalation.”95

General Wheeler, on the other hand, deemed it “improbable that any feasible

post-pause increase in the scope and intensity of our combat operations could

offset rapidly the advantages which the enemy would acquire during the proposed cessation of hostilities.”96

Before Symington circulated his new cease-fire proposal, President

Johnson had already moved to satisfy the senator’s longstanding demand that

the Air Force be permitted to bomb the MiG base at Phuc Yen. But Johnson had

no more than approved the target on September 26, 1967, when he was persuaded to withdraw it the very next day. The White House belatedly discovered

that the Rumanian Prime Minister, Ion Gheorghe Maurer, was due to land at

Phuc Yen within hours of the planned strike. The State Department was grooming Maurer as the vehicle for its latest peace initiative and had promised him a

bomb-free visit to Hanoi. The Central Intelligence Agency took this opportunity further to delay a strike on Phuc Yen by pointing out that there were perhaps

two hundred Soviet advisers there.97

The Central Intelligence Agency got support from a surprising ally when

Col. Robin Olds visited the White House on October 2. Olds had given up command of the F–4 wing at Ubon to become commandant of cadets at the Air

Force Academy. He confirmed that the change in MiG tactics was causing

problems, but he was opposed to striking Phuc Yen: “I’d rather knock them out

of the skies . . . . I would rather have them coming from Phuc Yen, because I

know where they are.”98

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The Air Force Chief of Staff, General McConnell, would have been

appalled to hear Olds’ advice to the President on Phuc Yen. After the postponement of the Phuc Yen strike, North Vietnamese MiGs knocked down three more

American aircraft. When McConnell stood in for Wheeler at a meeting with

Johnson and his principal advisers on October 11, McConnell pushed for an

attack on Phuc Yen. He hoped to destroy at least eight of the sixteen MiGs there

even if it cost as many as three American aircraft. Secretary of Defense

McNamara dismissed Phuc Yen as militarily marginal, and Secretary of State

Rusk agreed. But Rusk also said that he was not too concerned that any unfortunate consequences would result from bombing Phuc Yen—he only wanted

the strike postponed for a few more days. With the collapse of the Kissinger

peace initiative a week later, President Johnson approved a strike on Phuc Yen

together with restrikes against the Hanoi bridges and powerplant.99

Phuc Yen airfield was located in Route Package Six’s western half, where

the Air Force usually did any bombing that was permitted. But other services

wanted a share in attacking the principal MiG base. Both of the Navy’s carriers

then serving in the Gulf of Tonkin participated in the Phuc Yen strikes of

October 24 and 25, as did a Marine A–6 from South Vietnam. The Air Force, of

course, was also well represented. In addition to providing F–4 escorts for the

F–105s from Takhli and Korat, Ubon sent F–4s loaded with bombs.

Although the target was ringed with especially heavy defenses, this was a

mission that many aircrew were eager to fly. When three out of four aircraft in

one Ubon flight were not loaded in time for the first strike on the 24th, the flight

leader borrowed an F–4 from another squadron for his wingman and they took

off as an element of two—deprived of the mutual protection (especially in

terms of electronic jamming) provided by a flight of four. Yet no losses were

suffered either by this foolhardy flight or by any of the other Air Force flights

attacking Phuc Yen on October 24. The Navy was not so fortunate, losing two

F–4s on the 24th and an A–4 on the 25th—when the Air Force also lost a plane,

an F–105 diving to bomb the guns that hit it.100

These initial attacks cratered Phuc Yen’s runway and damaged its tower,

thanks to a direct hit on the latter by a Navy Walleye guided bomb. Most of the

eighteen MiGs then based at Phuc Yen were caught on the ground; reconnaissance photography indicated that perhaps a dozen of them suffered severe damage. On October 24, two MiG–21s had taken off against the first wave of

attackers—Air Force F–105s and F–4s from Thailand. As the MiGs were

attempting to get behind the attacking force, an F–4 escort used a twenty-millimeter cannon to shoot down one.101

With its gun still carried in a pod rather than built into the aircraft, the F–4

relied on its missiles during most air-to-air engagements. Indeed, that would

continue to be the case even after the built-in gun arrived in 1967. The most

effective air-to-air weapon during the first two and a half years of the war was

the heat-seeking Sidewinder missile. When chasing an enemy aircraft, the

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To Hanoi and Back
Sidewinder could be fired several hundred feet closer than the F–4’s other missile in those years, the radar-guided Sparrow. Beginning in the fall of 1967, nevertheless, the Sparrow supplanted the Sidewinder as the Air Force’s preeminent

air-to-air weapon in Southeast Asia. This turnabout was a consequence of the

introduction of a new aircraft model, the F–4D, which did not carry the

Sidewinder. Instead the F–4D’s Sparrows were paired with a heat-seeking version of the Falcon, which had been developed as a radar-guided missile.

Unfortunately, the heat-seeking Falcon proved less effective than the

Sidewinder in Southeast Asia.

The dismal record of the Falcon was especially disappointing to the Air

Force, because this missile had been developed under Air Force auspices. The

Sidewinder and Sparrow, on the other hand, were (like the F–4) products of

Navy development. Unfortunately, the Air Force pursued its own cheaper

Falcon rather than adopt the improved Sidewinder that the Navy introduced in

1966. All three missiles shared the drawback of having been designed for

defense against relatively slow-moving bombers. On paper at least, the supersonic Falcon appeared to have an advantage over subsonic Sidewinders and

Sparrows. With a capability for hitting a target being chased at a range of less

than two thousand feet, the Falcon might have been expected to be more useful

in a dogfight than either the Sidewinder or the Sparrow. But the Falcon was

fatally handicapped by a very small warhead that lacked a proximity fuse.

Unlike the Sidewinder and the Sparrow, the Falcon had to make a direct hit to

destroy an aircraft. The Falcon was also more cumbersome to fire, because the

Falcon’s infrared seeker required cooling (unlike the Sidewinder’s), and the

cooling mechanism (which had to be turned on before firing) would literally

run out of gas in two minutes.102

Col. Robin Olds was finishing his tour as commander of the 8th Tactical

Fighter Wing at Ubon in the summer of 1967, when F–4Ds began to replace his

wing’s F–4Cs. He liked the radar bombing capability of the F–4Ds and their

toss-bombing computer, which permitted better accuracy with a higher pull-out

(above seven thousand feet rather than below five thousand feet); even the

F–4D’s Walleye television-guided glide bombs showed promise, despite the

fact that half malfunctioned. But Olds reviled the F–4D’s substitution of the

Falcon for the Sidewinder. Indeed, he blamed the Falcon for robbing him of a

fifth kill in Vietnam.*103

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Gradualism on Trial

* Colonel Olds often resisted changes imposed from Washington. In the case of the

Falcons, he had F–4Ds rewired to carry Sidewinders. This makeshift arrangement did not

produce any MiG kills, but eventually the Air Force did again equip all its F–4s with

Sidewinders. Early in his stay at Ubon, Olds had objected strongly to “Rapid Roger,” a test

designed to answer a question from the Secretary of the Air Force. Secretary Brown asked

whether sortie rates could be increased; instead of going to the expense of deploying more

aircraft, he wanted to increase the number of sorties flown by aircraft already deployed.

The sortie rate for bases in Thailand was about .8 or less than one sortie per day per aircraft
An F–4D did not down a MiG with a Falcon missile until October 26,

1967, after the departure of Olds and all F–4Cs from Ubon. In the wake of the

initial strikes on the MiG base at Phuc Yen, a flight of four F–4Ds returned as

escorts for a reconnaissance mission. During ingress they were warned by an

EC–121 radar surveillance aircraft that MiGs were heading in their direction.

As the F–4s headed southeast down Thud Ridge at eighteen thousand feet, they

spotted six MiG–17s at ten thousand feet. Instead of waiting for the F–4s to

come down where the slower, more maneuverable MiG–17s could fight to best

advantage, the MiG pilots made the fatal mistake of climbing to sixteen thousand feet. Here they went into a wagon wheel formation, which could be effective in a dogfight since the MiGs were well positioned to cover each other’s tail.

But the F–4s sped through the wheel repeatedly with their own version of hit

and run. While one element of two F–4s was breaking through the MiGs, the

other element was gaining distance to fire its missiles. Two of six Sparrows

launched found their mark, as did one of three Falcons, while the F–4s all

emerged unscathed. More than four years would pass before the Air Force

could boast another day with three air-to-air victories. During the remaining

months of Rolling Thunder, MiG pilots would be more careful to engage only

when the odds were heavily in their favor.104

North Vietnamese MiGs continued to harass American aircraft despite

repeated attacks on most airfields in North Vietnam—most, but not all. Hanoi’s

Gia Lam airport remained out of bounds, and MiGs could always be assured of

sanctuary there, as well as across the border in China. The Bac Mai airfield on

the southern edge of Hanoi did not have a runway long enough to handle MiGs,

but a bunker there housed an air defense command post. President Johnson

would not countenance an attack on Gia Lam, which was used regularly by

diplomats (including those working for the International Control Commission

established by the Geneva Accords of 1954). In the case of Bac Mai, however,

he proved amenable, despite the presence of American prisoners at a camp near

the airfield.105

Bac Mai was believed to play an important role in controlling not only

MiGs, but also surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery. As they had

throughout the war, artillery and missiles continued to down more American

aircraft than did the MiGs. On October 27, there occurred an especially severe

reminder of this fact during a strike on the bridges over the Canal des Rapides.

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possessed. In South Vietnam and on the Navy’s carriers, sortie rates could exceed 1.2

because the distance to targets was much shorter. The only way Ubon could hope to

achieve that high a sortie rate over an extended period was to use the same aircraft for day

and night missions. Maintenance crews were not able to keep up with the demands of this

situation, and some aircrews took off without wingmen. When Rapid Roger finally came to

an end, Olds’ men buried a black casket in its name and urinated on the grave. See Ralph F.

Wetterhahn, “Change of Command,” Air and Space, Aug/Sep 1997, pp 62–69; hist, USAF

Tactical Air Warfare Center, Jan–Jun 1967; hist, 8 TFW, Jul–Dec 1966.
Two F–105s crashed after being hit by surface-to-air missiles, while artillery

took a third. Later in the day, another F–105 was downed by artillery fire while

attacking a missile site. Missiles, artillery, and MiGs worked together in a close

coordination that the Air Force hoped to disrupt by striking Bac Mai. The raid

of November 17, however, failed to make a noticeable difference in North

Vietnam’s air defense network, even though one bomb exploded on a mound

believed to cover the command bunker.106

The impact of an air raid like that on Bac Mai can be measured in many

ways, some of them very personal. For Capt. Gene I. Basel, Bac Mai was the

raid that took his close friend and element leader, Maj. Charles E. “Cappy”

Cappelli, whose F–105 encountered a surface-to-air missile. Basel would

remember that before the raid “Cappy” had breached an unwritten rule by

promising to do some paperwork when he got back: “It’s not done. You don’t

talk about coming back.”107 The death that caught the eye of the press, however, was that of an Indian staff sergeant at the International Control Commission

office in downtown Hanoi, more than two miles from Bac Mai. Whether he

died from stray munitions of the attackers or the defenders, his death underlined

once more the political cost of bombing near cities.108

* * *

In November 1967, the northeast monsoon ended Rolling Thunder’s last

stretch of good bombing weather over the Red River Delta. At that time the

drizzle appeared to represent no more than a repetition of the five-month hiatus experienced during each of the previous two years. Few expected that

before another five months had passed, President Johnson would call off

bombing in the delta. The Stennis hearings had shaken down targets long withheld: the Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, the rail targets close to China, the principal

MiG base at Phuc Yen, and the air defense control center at Bac Mai. But

President Johnson had few major targets left to grant without authorizing those

he considered so sensitive that they might break the bounds of gradualism and

threaten a wider war. He continued to draw the line on escalation at Haiphong

harbor, and not even the Joint Chiefs were recommending strikes against the

Red River flood control dikes, the population of North Vietnam, or Chinese

airfields.

The concept of gradualism had lost most of its adherents. Secretary of

Defense McNamara and other early advocates now wanted a bombing cutback.

Those like Generals LeMay and McConnell who had favored a more vigorous

bombing campaign in 1965 found that much of their original target list had been

gradually bombed or mined—with the major exception of Haiphong harbor.

Having once lost the opportunity for a surprisingly sharp blow, there seemed lit93

Gradualism on Trial
tle chance of retrieving it. Even had President Johnson authorized mining

Haiphong harbor, that action could no longer have quite the impact it might

have had at the outset as part of a rapid campaign against most major targets.

All that the proponents of a sharp blow had been able to achieve was an occasional quickening in the pace of gradualism.

Despite its faults, gradualism finally reached after two years an intensity

that seemed to cause the North Vietnamese real difficulty. In September 1967,

when John Colvin left his post as British consul general in Hanoi, he judged

North Vietnam “no longer capable of maintaining itself as an economic unit nor

of mounting aggressive war against its neighbor.”109 He attributed the subsequent communist offensive to forces and supplies already gathered before the

summer bombing, which he believed capable of causing a collapse of the North

Vietnamese government—if the bombing had continued and if the North

Vietnamese ports had been closed. Moreover, in Colvin’s view, such a state of

affairs could have been achieved in 1965 with a more serious air campaign.

Whatever might have been, American intelligence was far less sanguine

about the progress of Rolling Thunder. While finding that North Vietnam’s rail

system was in the worst shape ever, the Central Intelligence Agency and the

Defense Intelligence Agency reported that essential military and economic traffic continued to move on highways and waterways; communist allies supplied

necessities no longer available from North Vietnam’s devastated industries. As

to the impact of Rolling Thunder on the ground war in South Vietnam, the intelligence agencies repeated their old view that the North Vietnamese retained

their ability to support operations in South Vietnam and Laos “at present or

increased combat levels.” The intelligence agencies did concede that the air

strikes had “degraded” North Vietnam’s capability to sustain large-scale conventional operations.110

American airmen in Southeast Asia paid a high price for gradualism. It

gave North Vietnam ample opportunity to build formidable defenses against

them. As with all attrition campaigns, the question seemed to be which side

would wear down first. But that question was not to be answered in the air over

North Vietnam, for the communists were to end bombing there by attacking

cities in South Vietnam. In the two months remaining before the Tet offensive,

Rolling Thunder once again failed to maintain its power through the persistent

clouds of the northeast monsoon.

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Chapter Four

Season of Discontent

The fourth and last northeast monsoon of Rolling Thunder brought all the

usual frustrations in greater measure. From November 1967 to March 1968,

American airmen had to deal with the worst bombing weather over North

Vietnam that they had encountered. Their attempts to bomb accurately through

clouds achieved few demonstrable successes; nor did seeding transportation

routes with mines that were too easy to sweep in water and too easy to see on

land. The previous northeast monsoon had at least offered the compensation of

major progress in coping with North Vietnam’s air defenses. This time the

MiGs were fewer, but they were flown with greater skill. Despite radar jammers

now carried in a pair of wing pods on each American fighter, North Vietnamese

guns and surface-to-air missiles could still be deadly—especially when an aircraft left a formation and the protection of jamming pods carried by other aircraft, or when the North Vietnamese fired a barrage at a large formation, or

when they used optical tracking instead of radar tracking.

After a year of considerable progress in the air war, a nearly total loss of

momentum weighed heavily on airmen. General Momyer, the Seventh Air

Force commander in Saigon, and General Ryan, the Pacific Air Forces commander in Hawaii, began to get on each other’s nerves. They had different

views of what Seventh Air Force should be doing during the bad weather

months. Ryan’s years in the Strategic Air Command predisposed him to place

special emphasis on the all-weather bombing problem. During his first winter in

Hawaii, he had sponsored an attempt to use two-seat F–105Fs for low-level

raids in bad weather. Despite the inability of Ryan’s Raiders to overcome inadequate radar (inadequate both for flying at low level and for dropping bombs

accurately), he continued to support their ineffective high-level strikes.

Momyer, on the other hand, saw little merit in Ryan’s preference for using

F–105Fs as bombers rather than as Wild Weasels combatting enemy SAMs.1

Momyer had spent his career in the tactical air forces. Gen. Gabriel P.

Disosway, then in charge of the Tactical Air Command (TAC), would later say

that “Spike knew more about TAC, I guess, than anybody” except perhaps Gen.

Otto P. Weyland, who had commanded Far East Air Forces during the Korean

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War. According to Disosway, Momyer was a hard man to deal with because he

was “so much smarter than most people” that he was very impatient—he

already knew the answer before other people had even started to think about the

question.2 In the case of all-weather bombing, Momyer was convinced that,

given the available equipment and the prohibitions on area bombing of urban

targets, little could be done.3

During bad weather, Momyer preferred to concentrate on enemy air

defenses—especially MiGs. Although airfield attacks and air-to-air battles had

reduced the number of MiGs based in North Vietnam from more than a hundred

at the beginning of 1967 to about twenty at the end of the year, the pilots of the

remaining MiGs demonstrated increasing ability and aggressiveness. In

December they forced more than 10 percent of the sorties bombing Route

Package Six to jettison bombs before reaching the target. Having reduced the

jettison rate to less than 1 percent earlier, Momyer did what he could to regain

control of the situation. He increased the ratio of escort and patrol sorties to

strike sorties from less than one-to-five to more than two-to-one. That brought

the jettison rate down to about 3 percent but did not increase the rate of MiG

shoot-downs, which continued to limp along at four or five a month.4

While MiGs destroyed in North Vietnam could always be replaced by

those stationed in China, air-to-air victories might take a toll on North

Vietnam’s best pilots. Momyer had reason to be proud of his role in planning

Operation Bolo, which had destroyed perhaps seven MiGs in the air on January

2, 1967. But when he tried a similar sweep on January 6, 1968, fewer MiGs

came up and none were destroyed. Instead of F–4s pretending to be F–105s as

in Bolo, Momyer’s new sweep featured thirty-four F–105s stripped of their

bombs and ready to dogfight. Most of them crossed Thud Ridge at fourteen

thousand feet and turned east as if intending to strike Kep airfield or the railroad

bridge at Mo Trang, fifteen miles west of Kep on the line to Thai Nguyen. Not

surprisingly, their ruse was soon discovered, when two pairs of MiG–21s

attacked from the rear. Typical of North Vietnamese tactics since August, it was

a hit-and-run attack out of the late afternoon sun. The MiGs and the strike force

traded heat-seeking missiles without doing any damage, and the MiG pilots

escaped to tell their controllers that the F–105s were not carrying bombs. The

best opportunity for destroying an enemy aircraft that afternoon came a few

minutes later, when an F–105 pilot noticed an Il–14 Crate transport several

thousand feet below, headed for Hanoi. While the F–105 pilot was getting his

force commander’s permission to attack this gray cargo plane with a red star, it

dove into the nearest cloud; the F–105 got off one burst of gunfire and missed.5

“In my opinion,” Ryan informed Momyer, “this type of operation is not

very productive . . . . The firing on the Crate . . . appears to be in violation of

rules of engagement.”6 Momyer had to agree that there was a rule prohibiting

attacks on enemy transports, but he protested that it was a “strange rule” in view

of repeated enemy gunfire against American civilian airliners in South Vietnam

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(not to mention military transports). As to the fighter sweep as a whole,

Momyer insisted that while he had no illusions about another Bolo, there was

nothing better to do with his aircraft during the northeast monsoon.7

Ryan combined his short sermon on MiG sweeps with a proposal to make

more use of Walleye television-guided bombs, but Momyer was less than

enthusiastic. Since their introduction in Southeast Asia during 1967, the

Walleyes had been in short supply. But their accumulation in storage at Ubon

Air Base, Thailand, did not convince Momyer that they should be used while

the weather was so unfavorable. Rarely could he count upon the clear sky necessary for F–4s to release Walleyes on a target. Furthermore, the Air Force

Walleye was not yet as good as the Navy original. Momyer complained that the

Air Force version had been “pushed into combat” despite limitations which

constrained him to use it only under optimal conditions at high noon.

“Nevertheless,” he told Ryan, “we will use the Walleye wherever it appears

worthwhile.”8

Momyer also indicated that he had resorted to a fighter sweep only after

trying other means for defeating the MiGs. He had sent F–4 escorts ahead of the

strike force by as much as a quarter of an hour; he had added a flight of them at

forty thousand feet, far above the strike force; he had sent two flights below

enemy radar to pop up and surprise the MiGs; he had combined a close escort

with a roving flight. But the fundamental problem remained that Seventh Air

Force was “operating with less than real time information, while the enemy has

this information available to him.”9

One of Momyer’s major objectives had been to improve Seventh Air

Force’s warning and control system while impairing North Vietnam’s. MiG

effectiveness depended upon ground control, which could be reduced by jamming early warning and intercept radars. The relatively small transmitters carried in pods by American fighters were used to jam SAM and artillery control

radars, leaving early warning and MiG intercept radars to more powerful, but

more distant, jammers carried by Douglas EB–66s. In 1965, EB–66s had

accompanied strike forces to within a few miles of targets in the Red River

Delta, but MiGs and SAMs had forced the EB–66s farther and farther away. By

the summer of 1967, two or three EB–66s were orbiting near the intersection of

the twentieth parallel and the Laotian border, seventy-five miles southwest of

Hanoi, while a like number orbited over the Gulf of Tonkin.10

On November 15, 1967, Seventh Air Force sent two EB–66s north of Thud

Ridge for the first time since 1966. This boldness was encouraged partly by the

movement of SAM launchers away from the ridge southeast into Hanoi and the

panhandle. EB–66s had also been vulnerable to MiG attack, especially because

their jamming transmitters interfered with communications from fighter escorts

and the EC–121 radar warning aircraft. A new radio remedied that problem,

and permitted the experiment of November 15. Two EB–66s flew long-abandoned orbits without difficulty on that day.11

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Five days later, however, an EB–66 orbiting north of Thud Ridge was

attacked from the rear by a pair of MiG–21s, one diving and one climbing. Two

F–4 escorts weaving behind the EB–66 saw the MiGs and warned the EB–66 to

break into a downward spiral—just in time to evade a heat-seeking Atoll air-toair missile fired by the climbing MiG. Although the EB–66 and its escorts

escaped unharmed, the F–4 aircrews from Ubon Air Base, Thailand, were

unhappy with their performance. Weaving behind an EB–66 seemed an unsatisfactory way to accommodate its slower speed, and they were confident that they

could work out better tactics through discussion with the EB–66 aircrews at

Takhli Air Base, Thailand. No such planning had yet taken place, nor would it.

Seventh Air Force decided that one close call was enough and required EB–66s

to stay far south of Hanoi.12

During the next month, Seventh Air Force tried to improve jamming by

increasing the number of EB–66s operating during a strike to as many as fourteen. This augmented force began to drop chaff timed to interfere with North

Vietnamese radar detection of an ingressing strike force and of the EB–66s

themselves. On January 14, 1968, however, only five EB–66s were orbiting in

support of late afternoon strikes on targets in Route Package Five. A pair of

MiG–21s took off from Phuc Yen and flew south toward Thanh Hoa. Before

reaching the twentieth parallel, they turned west and attacked an unescorted

EB–66 orbiting near the Laotian border. An Atoll air-to-air missile struck the

EB–66 in the right wing. All seven crew members managed to get out of the

crippled plane. The pilot, instructor navigator, and an electronic warfare officer

were rescued two days later, together with five members of a helicopter crew

who had crashed while trying to pick up the EB–66 crew in bad weather. The

EB–66’s remaining three electronic warfare officers and the navigator spent the

rest of the war in captivity. Theirs was the last EB–66 permitted to fly over

North Vietnam. Henceforth, EB–66 orbits were limited to Laos, the Gulf of

Tonkin, and South Vietnam; a barrier patrol of fighters began to protect the

EB–66s in Laos, just as Navy fighters had long provided protection for Air

Force EB–66s operating over the gulf.13

The EB–66’s failure to provide effective jamming of MiG ground control

radars was partially offset by an improvement in Seventh Air Force’s ability to

guide its own fighters. Since much of the airspace over North Vietnam could

not be surveyed by American ship radar, let alone more distant ground radar,

Seventh Air Force used airborne radar carried by propeller-driven Lockheed

EC–121s from the Air Defense Command. The “Connie” was a variant of the

Super Constellation commercial transport. Its radar had been designed to detect

bombers approaching North America over water. Looking down over land the

Connie’s radar screens were filled with clutter, but a Connie skimming fifty feet

above the Gulf of Tonkin could look up to survey the sky over Hanoi above ten

thousand feet.14

Far more valuable than its radar was the Connie’s ability to interrogate

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radio identification transponders carried by American and North Vietnamese

aircraft. If a transponder was turned on, it could be triggered by a radio signal to

transmit its identity and location. At first, the Connies could only interrogate

friendly aircraft, and they irritated fighter pilots by policing those who flew too

near the Chinese border in pursuit of MiGs; American fighter pilots turned their

transponders off to avoid being interrogated by the Connies. The adversary

relationship between EC–121 crews and fighter pilots had come to a head in

February 1967, when Ubon’s F–4 wing was forced to share its facilities with the

Connies. They moved out of the Seventh Air Force headquarters base at Tan

Son Nhut to make room for other functions. Ubon’s 8th Tactical Fighter Wing

commander, Colonel Olds, was at first unhappy about his new neighbors, but

worked to change their emphasis from border monitoring to MiG warning. In

early 1967, the best the Connies could do was use their radar to announce that

there was a MiG within a sector thirty miles by thirty miles. Olds found this

information to be less than helpful: “Forty-five thousand cubic miles of sky, and

you tell me there’s a bloody MiG in there.”15

After a January 1967 test of the equipment necessary to interrogate enemy

aircraft, the Connies began routine interrogation of MiGs that summer. For a

while, the Connies labored under a National Security Agency restriction intended to prevent the North Vietnamese from discovering the new capability, but by

the fall of 1967, transponder interrogation had replaced radar as the principal

and much more exact way of tracking enemy aircraft.16

Fuller use of the Connie’s capabilities was stimulated by the arrival in

Thailand of “Rivet Top,” an experimental Connie sponsored by the Tactical Air

Command. Rivet Top could not stop pilots from turning off their transponders,

but it did persuade General Momyer that Connies could contribute to shooting

down MiGs.17 The impact of Rivet Top could be attributed partly to its

improved capabilities and partly to its sponsorship. General Disosway at

Tactical Air Command was in a better position to influence Momyer (an obvious choice to succeed Disosway) than was Lt. Gen. Arthur C. Agan, Jr., at Air

Defense Command. The Seventh Air Force commander and his fighter pilots

warmed to Rivet Top in a way they never had to Air Defense Command

Connies, which had been moved from crowded base to crowded base and berated for the slovenly appearance of aircraft and crews. Rivet Top was embraced

as a help against MiGs rather than as a border policeman restraining F–4s and

F–105s. Although this fighter-pilot discrimination aroused resentment among

Air Defense Command controllers, Rivet Top broke down barriers that had

been preventing the other Connies from playing a more significant role.18

Even when Air Defense Command Connies were at last permitted unfettered interrogation of enemy aircraft, however, they were not quite as well

equipped as Rivet Top to track MiGs. While Air Defense Command Connies

could interrogate most of North Vietnam’s Soviet-made transponders, Rivet

Top could interrogate a few more. Rivet Top could also compare SAM radar

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emissions with a computer data base on launch sites; unfortunately, this missile

detection system could only deal with three sites at a time and was often overloaded. A more useful innovation was the inclusion of Air Force Security

Service equipment and personnel, so that Rivet Top could bring together radar

and communications intelligence on MiG activity.19

Faced with competition from Rivet Top, Air Defense Command moved to

upgrade its version of the plane. By the summer of 1968, Air Defense

Command Connies were also carrying Air Force Security Service personnel.

This reinforced General Momyer’s decision of October 1967 to permit direct

communication between Connies and fighters. Other intelligence gatherers

continued to break rules against talking directly to aircrews. Anonymous warnings were often repeated by pilots again and again, contributing to a nervous

babble.20

Since 1966, Seventh Air Force had been trying to insert its Monkey

Mountain control center (near Da Nang, South Vietnam) between intelligence

sources and users. Monkey Mountain was intended to be a “fusion center”

where the intelligence picture was put together and made available to aircrews

flying over North Vietnam. Using equipment developed to help Air Defense

Command protect North America, Seventh Air Force was building a command

post at Monkey Mountain to provide direction for fighter pilots engaged with

MiGs. Control centers at Udorn Air Base, Thailand, and Tan Son Nhut Air Base

near Saigon were to be similarly equipped, but in late 1967, only Monkey

Mountain was beginning to use an automated processing and display system.

Seventh Air Force was far behind Seventh Fleet in automating air control.

Monkey Mountain computers at last permitted Seventh Air Force to tie into the

Navy and Marine tactical data systems in March 1968.21

Meanwhile, MiGs continued to surprise American strike forces. Although

Connie warnings were often more precise and communicated directly to the

appropriate aircrews, sometimes communications were inadequate or MiGs

simply were not detected in time. Even a force designed specifically to destroy

MiGs in the air, like Momyer’s big sweep of January 6, 1968, could be hit by

MiG–21s without warning from a Connie or from Monkey Mountain, let alone

guidance necessary to intercept MiGs. “We are still behind the enemy,”

Momyer explained ruefully to Ryan.22

* * *

While General Momyer was especially disheartened by failure to make

much progress in overcoming North Vietnam’s air defenses, General Ryan’s

principal frustration was a lack of success in bombing during the cloudy weather extending from November to April. The Navy’s Grumman A–6 Intruder, a

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subsonic jet with terrain-following radar, was the most effective bad-weather

bomber available in Southeast Asia. Ryan succeeded in getting some Marine

A–6 sorties allocated to Air Force targets in the Red River Delta, but there were

not enough Marine and Navy A–6s to do much more than harass the North

Vietnamese. He was eager to deploy the Air Force’s new tactical bomber, the

General Dynamics F–111, which promised to be still more accurate than the

A–6.23

Soon after six F–111s reached Takhli in March 1968, however, three of

them crashed. The wreckage of one of these, together with that of another

crash in Nevada, indicated a weak weld in a tail control rod. This was but one

in a series of problems that had plagued the F–111 development program ever

since Secretary of Defense McNamara had attempted to marry Air Force plans

for a tactical bomber with Navy plans for an air superiority fighter. The novel

ability to change configuration in flight using variable sweep wings did not

bridge the gap between these two functions, and while Air Force F–111s were

crashing in Southeast Asia, the Navy was pulling out of the program altogether.24

Few of the Takhli F–111 missions went according to plan—a lone aircraft

weaving through mountains at night and skimming across the coastal plain of

the North Vietnamese panhandle to drop bombs on truck parks and storage

depots. Returning F–111 pilots and weapon systems officers reported little hostile fire, but they had difficulty identifying their target in time to make a satisfactory bomb run. Of seventy-one sorties sent against North Vietnam, only

eighteen had good runs with measurable results. Half their bombs fell within

five hundred feet of the target—equal to daylight dive bombing in clear weather and superior to the A–6 in bad weather, but disappointing in a program that

hoped to put half its bombs within two hundred feet of the target.25

The Air Force received considerable criticism for sending a new weapon

system into battle before it was ready. Chief of Staff McConnell shrugged off

this criticism with the observation that there was much to be gained from testing equipment in combat and that F–111s were also lost in the United States

during testing.26 Secretary Brown doubted that the Soviets would learn a great

deal from F–111 debris in North Vietnam.27 But General Ryan regretted having

lobbied hard for the F–111’s early deployment.28 It was not ready yet and, in

any case, did not reach Southeast Asia in time to make a real difference. Only a

few days after the F–111’s arrival in Thailand, the United States ceased to bomb

targets in the Red River Delta. Not until 1972 would the F–111 have an opportunity to display its capabilities against the most heavily defended targets in

North Vietnam. During the northeast monsoon of 1967–68, the Air Force had to

make do with older aircraft.

A year earlier, General Ryan had sent two-seat F–105Fs on low-level raids

in bad weather. But the plane’s terrain-following radar and bombing computer

had proved inadequate. So Ryan’s Raiders had climbed to altitudes above ten

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thousand feet, where their bombing was even less accurate. There they were

joined by F–4Ds whose newer equipment proved no more effective—strikes

with average bombing errors of three thousand feet were common for both

types of aircraft. Part of the problem was a shortage of targets with good radar

signatures. Usually it was necessary to relate the target to a landmark in the area

and offset the bomb drop accordingly. As aircrews gained experience and the

radar film library grew, bombing accuracy improved.29

Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the Air Force had less difficulty bombing

through clouds. There ground controllers used “Skyspot” bomb-scoring equipment to track B–52s and other aircraft; when the bomber reached the correct

position, the controller signaled the bomber to drop bombs. Control stations

near the demilitarized zone and at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, enabled the Air

Force to employ this system in the panhandle of North Vietnam. But the Red

River Delta remained out of range until a control station could be established

about 125 miles west of Hanoi in Laos.30

As with all other Air Force activity in Laos, the Site 85 control station at

Phou Pha Thi had to be approved by the American Ambassador, William H.

Sullivan. He at first opposed it, because he suspected that the Prime Minister,

Prince Souvanna Phouma, would not want Laos involved in directing offensive

operations against North Vietnam—even though North Vietnamese troops were

engaged in offensive operations in Laos. Indeed, a problem with the proposed

location at Phou Pha Thi was its vulnerability to North Vietnamese attack.

Nevertheless, Souvanna Phouma did permit establishment of the new control

station, provided that it was not manned by American military personnel. The

Air Force worked around this prohibition by having its controllers wear civilian

clothes and sign paperwork temporarily releasing them from the service; fresh

teams of controllers arrived by helicopter from Thailand. In a further effort to

disguise Phou Pha Thi’s role, the controllers there communicated with attacking fighter-bombers via an EC–135 radio relay aircraft.31

The mountain of Phou Pha Thi guarded a major route from Hanoi to central Laos. The Meo forces of Gen. Vang Pao defended it for its own sake, and

the Central Intelligence Agency had established an airstrip at the foot of the

mountain to resupply them. Before putting controllers on top the mountain, the

Air Force had already set up a radio navigation beacon for fighter-bombers on

their way to North Vietnam. The controllers had been at Phou Pha Thi just two

months, when on January 12, 1968, the North Vietnamese made it the target of

their first air attack on ground forces. At least two old Soviet-made Antonov

An–2 biplanes fired rockets and dropped crude bombs (converted from mortar

rounds) before ground fire and an Air America helicopter brought them down.32

Despite a substantial investment in Phou Pha Thi, the Air Force doubted

that Vang Pao could hold it; explosives were attached to all the equipment on

the mountain in preparation for a quick getaway. But when the communists

overran Phou Pha Thi in March 1968, General Momyer and Ambassador

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Sullivan had waited too long to order evacuation. Twelve of eighteen

Americans at the site were dead or missing, and their equipment was not

destroyed.* The Air Force had to bomb the control station, while Momyer and

Sullivan entered into a heated debate about responsibility for the failure either

to defend the site or evacuate in time.33

From November 1967 to March 1968, controllers at Phou Pha Thi directed

nearly a hundred “Commando Club” missions (about five hundred sorties)

against the Red River Delta. But ground controlled bombing proved disappointing in this part of Vietnam. The control site was too far from its targets for anything more accurate than area bombing. Hence, to do much damage, the Air

Force needed to send a big force against a big target. When such a raid was

attempted against Phuc Yen airfield, its heavy defenses destroyed four F–105s

and caused the rest of the strike force to jettison bombs. The 388th Tactical

Fighter Wing at Korat Air Base, Thailand, lost its commander, Col. Edward B.

Burdett, only three weeks after its vice commander, Col. John P. Flynn, was

shot down over Hanoi. Unlike Colonel Flynn, Colonel Burdett and three men

downed with him would not come home at the end of the war.34

The unfortunate ground-controlled raid against Phuc Yen occurred on the

morning of November 18. A dozen F–105s carrying bombs were protected

from MiGs by four F–4s and from SAMs by eight more F–105s. Half the latter

constituted the normal Iron Hand flight with Shrike radar-seeking missiles,

whose presence encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep their SAM guidance

radar turned off as much as possible; the remaining flight of four F–105s carried

radar jamming pods to supplement those carried by strike aircraft. Five EB–66s

nearly a hundred miles south of the target added their jamming power, while

three EC–121 radar surveillance aircraft watched for MiGs.35

The strike force’s troubles began forty miles west of Phuc Yen when the Iron

Hand flight was attacked by two MiG–21s making a single pass from the rear.

Heat-seeking Atoll missiles destroyed a two-seat F–105F and crippled a singleseat F–105D; the rest of the flight escorted the crippled aircraft back to Laos,

where the pilot ejected and was rescued. They had been warned by an EC–121

three times about MiGs, but those warnings were garbled by competing communications between the strike force and the ground controller at Phou Pha Thi.36

Deprived of its weapon for attacking SAM sites, the strike force now had to

depend entirely on electronic jamming. A single aircraft’s pair of jamming pods

could not give it much protection, so each flight flew a formation tight enough

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* One of the twelve was killed on board a helicopter after extraction. In 1990 an Air

Force officer reported that, according to his interview with a Laotian general, Americans

captured at Phou Pha Thi were sent to Hanoi. A year later when MSgt. William Gadoury of

the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center asked Gen. Singkapo Sikhotchounamaly about

this claim, he said that he had been misunderstood. See Timothy N. Castle, At War in the

Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955–1975 (New

York, 1993), pp 96–97, and One Day Too Long: Top Secret Site 85 and the Bombing of

North Vietnam (New York, 1999), pp 196–200.
for the pods of all four aircraft to work together—but loose enough to create for

enemy radar operators as large an area of uncertainty as possible. This pod formation could not be used over the target. Ground-controlled bombing required

that aircraft move closer together for a tighter bombing pattern, since they

would all drop their bombs simultaneously with the lead aircraft. Ninety seconds before reaching the bomb release point, the aircraft in each flight reduced

horizontal spacing from fifteen hundred to five hundred feet.37

Straight and level flying in tight formation at eighteen thousand feet provided a tempting target for SAMs. The North Vietnamese fired a barrage of

about twelve, and destroyed two more F–105s (including Colonel Burdett’s).

This unusually high kill ratio led to speculation that enemy radar operators had

been able to distinguish each flight, because flights had not closed as tightly

together as had aircraft within flights. Hence, missiles could be aimed at the relatively small jamming pattern produced by the pods of each compressed flight.

Despite the possibility that altering the shape of a large formation might produce better results, Seventh Air Force ceased experimenting with ground controlled bombing over the Red River Delta by formations larger than one flight.

Although SAMs did not destroy any aircraft on these smaller Commando Club

raids (as the Air Force had labeled all ground-controlled missions over the Red

River Delta), aircrews remembered the big raid on Phuc Yen and called the

smaller raids Commando Kaze.38

Experimentation with ground control of big formations might have continued if losses on the big Phuc Yen raid had not been perceived as part of a larger

crisis. In just four days, North Vietnamese SAMs brought down ten American

aircraft. Nothing like this had occurred since December 2, 1966, when SAMs

took five Air Force fighter-bombers. But those “Black Friday” missiles had

destroyed aircraft not yet equipped with electronic jamming pods. Such pods

had reduced the SAM average kill ratio from about three aircraft destroyed for

every one hundred missiles launched to less than two. Since most of the aircraft

hit by SAMs in November 1967 were not engaged in ground-controlled bombing, Seventh Air Force might have concluded that once other problems were

solved, large ground-controlled strikes could resume. A sense of crisis, however, was encouraged by the arrival of a team of analysts from the Air Staff and

the Air Force Systems Command. They made several recommendations and

Seventh Air Force tried to implement all of them, including ones calling for the

elimination of large ground-controlled strikes in the Hanoi area.39

While ground-controlled bombing formations may have been part of the

SAM problem, the Air Staff team could see that the problem had other dimensions. Losses to SAMs over Phuc Yen on November 18, 1967, may have been

the result of a departure from jamming pod formation, as F–105s closed to get a

tighter bombing pattern. Similarly, in clear weather a flight usually drew closer

together just before rolling into a dive—a departure from jamming pod formation that may have contributed to two more SAM kills that week. But at least

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one aircraft lost on November 19 was thought to be part of a full flight of four

in correct jamming pod formation. Since the North Vietnamese were now firing

barrages of six to thirty missiles, they may simply have been lucky.40

There were other possible explanations, however, and all of them troubled

the Air Staff team. North Vietnam may have been using radar at frequencies

lower than those being jammed. While jammers could be adjusted accordingly,

there was the more dangerous possibility that the North Vietnamese were interrogating radio transponders carried by American aircraft—just as American

EC–121 radar surveillance aircraft were already interrogating North Vietnamese MiG transponders. Certainly the North Vietnamese had shot down

enough American aircraft to obtain American transponders.41

In addition to possible improvements in North Vietnam’s ability to track

American aircraft electronically, SAM controllers seemed to be using an optical

tracking system on clear days. Turning off a fighter-bomber’s identification

transponder or jamming North Vietnamese radar could not deceive optical

tracking. But a missile’s communications with its ground controller were

always vulnerable to jamming. In December 1967, Air Force fighter-bombers

began to jam the frequency used by the radio beacon in each missile. North

Vietnamese controllers might be able to track an American aircraft, but henceforth they encountered greater difficulty in tracking their own missiles. Of all

the measures taken to reduce the SAM threat in late 1967, this was probably the

most effective.42

Efforts to thwart SAMs electronically grew out of an inability to destroy

them. About 150 launchers were clustered in groups of up to 6 at about 30 of

more than 200 prepared sites. The North Vietnamese and their Soviet advisers

moved the launchers frequently, so that an American attack on a site recently

occupied might encounter only heavy flak. The Air Force’s F–105F Wild

Weasels rarely tried to do more than suppress SAM activity for the duration of

a bombing raid by firing or threatening to fire radar-seeking Shrike missiles at

SAM radars. The North Vietnamese usually turned off their radar transmitters

when threatened. Since the North Vietnamese quickly turned on their radar

again as soon as the Wild Weasels were gone, most major strike forces had both

a vanguard and a rear guard of Wild Weasels; each of these guard positions was

held normally by an Iron Hand flight consisting of two Wild Weasel F–105Fs

leading two F–105Ds.43

During 1967, Seventh Air Force expended 1,322 Shrikes, and by the end of

the year the F–105 wing at Takhli was complaining about a shortage. In early

1968, a new radar-seeking missile (AGM–78) arrived. It flew faster and farther

than the Shrike at ten times the cost—two hundred thousand dollars each. It did

not have time to prove itself in the delta, however, and the Air Force made little

use of it in the panhandle for fear that its long range might permit a misguided

missile to hit one of the Navy’s ships or an Army radar site just south of the

Demilitarized Zone.44

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The radar at a SAM site could stay off the air until just before launch if the

site was connected to radars at other locations. In addition to more than 100

missile and antiaircraft artillery radars, the North Vietnamese had more than

150 early warning and MiG-control radars. American airmen faced a radar network that could easily compensate for a few losses scattered through the system. Admiral Sharp, the Pacific commander in Hawaii, once again began to

think about the possibility of attacking North Vietnam’s entire air defense system within a few days. Proposals to do this had always run aground on the failure of reconnaissance to produce photographs of active missile sites in time to

bomb them before their launchers moved. The addition of a new photo reconnaissance capability in the spring of 1967, however, caused Admiral Sharp to

wonder whether this old hurdle could now be surmounted.45

Admiral Sharp was excited about photographs of North Vietnam sent to

him by the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington. These

had been taken by a Lockheed A–12, an older brother of the SR–71 Blackbird.

Area surveillance photography of North Vietnam was also provided by satellites, but these rarely passed over North Vietnam more than a couple of times a

month. For example, a Corona satellite with KH–4A cameras made two passes

over North Vietnam during a mission (June 17–22, 1967) which orbited over

the Soviet Union and China as well. Cloud cover made nearly half the Corona

imagery worthless. The A–12 could be sent much more often and could take

advantage of breaks in the weather.46

The A–12’s predecessor, the Lockheed U–2, was now considered too vulnerable to risk over the Red River Delta; the MiGs and the SAMs would have

too good a shot at it. The A–12 could fly a little higher (over eighty thousand

feet) and much faster (more than Mach 3). In clear weather it could photograph

all of the Red River Delta on a single mission. When President Johnson authorized the use of A–12s over North Vietnam, he hoped that the new planes would

be able to give the earliest possible warning of the presence of surface-to-surface missiles that would threaten ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The same photographs would also track changes in SAM deployment.47

The great defect of the A–12’s first mission over North Vietnam was that the

film was sent all the way to Washington for processing. This was soon improved

by sending film to the Strategic Air Command’s U–2 processing center at

Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base, headquarters for both the Military Assistance

Command, Vietnam and for Seventh Air Force. Tan Son Nhut was a convenient

location for U–2 photo-processing, not only because the principal consumers

were there, but especially because U–2s flew from nearby Bien Hoa Air Base.

But the A–12s flew from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa. Consequently, in

September 1967, responsibility for processing A–12 photographs was transferred

to Fifth Air Force’s 67th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron at Yokota Air Base,

Japan. This unit could supply Seventh Air Force with the location of SAM sites

one day after an A–12 mission; photographs would follow in another day.48

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To Hanoi and Back
General Momyer underlined for Admiral Sharp the fact that A–12 photographs indicated eight active SAM sites within ten nautical miles of the center of Hanoi—that is, within the prohibited circle which President Johnson had

drawn around Hanoi. There American airmen could attack launch sites only

when fired upon in the course of bombing authorized targets. Unless this rule

was changed, a campaign against missiles was out of the question.49 A change

in the rules, however, could take advantage of a greater concentration of missiles close to Hanoi than in the past; their sites were revetted and launchers

rarely moved. Elsewhere in the Red River Delta, the number of launchers had

decreased, some moving to the Hanoi sites and others south where they could

threaten B–52s striking North Vietnamese supplies and forces just north of the

Demilitarized Zone. The southward migration of launchers had reduced the

number of active sites in Route Package Six from thirty to twenty-one.50

Admiral Sharp wanted a plan to destroy North Vietnam’s SAMs,

MiG–control radar, early warning radar, and air defense control centers. He told

General Ryan to develop such a plan with Admiral Johnson, Commander in

Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Admiral Johnson complained that A–12 photographs

did not provide aircrews the perspective they would need to attack missile and

radar sites successfully, let alone control centers whose locations could not be

ascertained using any aerial photograph. The vertical perspective of high-altitude photography made a different impression than the oblique perspective of

the camera or pilot at lower altitude. Admiral Johnson asked for plenty of up-todate low-altitude photography.51

While low-altitude drones could photograph some missile sites in cloudy

weather, too much good weather and time would usually be required to meet

Admiral Johnson’s requirements. Nevertheless, General Ryan’s plan incorporated Admiral Johnson’s specifications and added that even more good weather

was necessary, since there was no point in going after air defenses unless there

would be ample opportunity to exploit air supremacy by bombing targets whose

defenses had been eliminated. Ryan’s plan assured that there would be no major

campaign against the SAMs at least until better weather returned the following

summer—and probably not then.52

* * *

Although he could sometimes limit the number of aircraft that Momyer

used to combat enemy air defenses, Ryan was less successful in finding enough

productive missions during the northeast monsoon for Air Force aircraft based

in Thailand. As in past years, many sorties were shifted from North Vietnam to

Laos, where good weather prevailed over panhandle roads heavily used at night

by North Vietnamese trucks heading south. Meanwhile, in North Vietnam itself

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most roads could be used in daylight as well, for they were commonly protected from air strikes by overcast. Radar bombing strikes and those under the

direction of ground controllers did not have sufficient accuracy to destroy

bridges, let alone hit trucks and boxcars.

For the first time the Johnson administration permitted river mining north

of the twentieth parallel, and between rare breaks in the weather when bridges

could be bombed, Air Force F–4Ds and Navy A–6s tried to discourage ferrying

and bridge repair by dropping Mk–36 Destructor mines. The weather inhibited

accurate placement and intelligence about the effectiveness of mining, but

results appeared to be at best modest. Three boxcars were believed to have been

destroyed while being ferried across the Red River at Hanoi and a tug and two

barges sank in the Cam River at Haiphong.53

The technological weaknesses of the newly developed Mk–36 limited its

usefulness. It was a five hundred-pound Mk–82 bomb with a magnetic trigger

that would respond to an iron hull or the metal in an engine. Unfortunately, the

trigger was too sensitive, so that the mine often exploded while the target was

too far away, and a wire fishing net or empty oil barrels could be used to detonate the mines. Later versions of the Mk–36 would provide a less sensitive trigger that shut off periodically so that a sweeper could never be sure he had completed his job. Whatever the deficiencies of the original Mk–36 mines, however, they could lay in wait for North Vietnamese traffic during long spells of

cloudy weather when bombing was difficult. The mines were also dropped on

land with even less probability of success, for they were easier to find there.54

While mines frequently landed far from their intended destination, on two

occasions seeding errors were unusually obvious. A few hours before the end of

1967, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon Air Base, Thailand, reported that a

flight of F–4s had dropped forty-eight Mk–36s into international waters about

five miles off the North Vietnamese coast and about forty miles north of the

Demilitarized Zone. Less than a week later, on January 4, an A–6 from the Kitty

Hawk dropped mines directly on a Soviet transport ship, the PereslavlZalesskiy, anchored in Haiphong’s Cam River. The aircrews flying this A–6

and two others had been trying to place Mk–36s near a bridge upriver, but an

error in a map’s margin scale had led to plotting errors. In addition to mines hitting the ship and detonating, others lay armed in the water nearby. This situation caused concern in Washington, where Secretary of State Rusk gave Soviet

Ambassador Dobrynin a map showing the approximate location of the mines as

well as their planned target area.55

As he had so often in the past, President Johnson responded to the latest

incident by establishing a zone where bombing and mining were prohibited.

When Navy fighters had been accused of strafing the Mikhail Frunze in June

1967, Johnson had announced a prohibited zone with a radius of four nautical

miles from the center of Haiphong. This time he extended the radius to five

nautical miles. Only a few days earlier, on January 3, he had established a pro108

To Hanoi and Back
hibited zone reaching five nautical miles from the center of Hanoi. While

Hanoi’s new prohibited zone was much smaller than the old ten-mile zone proclaimed a year earlier, that one had made way during the summer for strikes on

several targets including the Doumer Bridge over the Red River.56

President Johnson’s rationale for the new prohibited zone around Haiphong

seemed obvious enough, but why prohibit further strikes on Hanoi’s Doumer

Bridge—not to mention an end to mining the river there? Airmen had become

accustomed to not being told why these decisions were made. Once again

Hanoi had secured a restriction on bombing by dangling the prospect of negotiations.

In late November 1967, several weeks after Rumanian Prime Minister Ion

Gheorghe Maurer returned from a visit to Hanoi, President Johnson sent his

roving ambassador W. Averell Harriman to Bucharest. Since Maurer had been

in Hanoi when Johnson delivered his September 29 speech at San Antonio,

Harriman wanted to know why the North Vietnamese leadership had turned

down Johnson’s offer to stop bombing North Vietnam in exchange for talks—

so long as the North Vietnamese did not take advantage of the halt to increase

the southward flow of soldiers and supplies. Maurer said that he did not know,

because the text of Johnson’s speech had not reached Pham Van Dong before

the conclusion of their discussions. But Harriman knew that the same offer had

been sent privately to Hanoi as early as August.57

Nevertheless, one of Maurer’s recollections did give some slight cause for

hope. Pham Van Dong indicated that if the bombing ceased, Hanoi “would”

enter into discussions with the United States. “I questioned his use of ‘would,’”

Harriman cabled Secretary of State Rusk. Hanoi usually used “could,” but

Maurer was uncertain which word had been used; he said that it did not matter,

because Pham Van Dong’s French was too poor for such nuances.58 So barren

had been the record of Hanoi’s interest in negotiations that Washington was

ready to grasp at straws. The State Department’s executive secretary, Benjamin

Read, thought that the Rumanian channel might prove to be a “winner” and

dubbed it “Packers” after the championship Green Bay Packers football team.59

In mid-December 1967, Rumania’s First Deputy Foreign Minister,

Gheorghe Macovescu, visited Hanoi. There the North Vietnamese Foreign

Minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, read to Macovescu a new statement of his government’s position: after “unconditional cessation” of the bombing, North

Vietnam “will enter into serious discussions” with the United States.60 Not only

did Trinh use “will,” but he dropped the word “final” from the usual “final and

unconditional cessation.” Macovescu later told Harriman that when asked

about this omission, Trinh said firmly that the shortened phrase was his government’s position. On December 29, a week after Macovescu’s departure, Trinh

made the same statement public at a Mongolian reception. The addition of the

word “will” and the deletion of the word “final” were enough to stop all bombing and mining within five nautical miles of the center of Hanoi.61

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The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wheeler, was sufficiently impressed by Washington’s reaction to the Trinh statement that he alerted Admiral Sharp and General Westmoreland to prepare for a bombing halt.

Wheeler professed to see some merit in this development, since he thought it

might mean that the North Vietnamese would reduce their activity near the

Demilitarized Zone and enable Westmoreland to divert forces from there to the

rest of South Vietnam.62 Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker had already

cautioned Secretary of State Rusk to be wary of North Vietnamese peace initiatives in light of a buildup in North Vietnamese forces just north of the

Demilitarized Zone.63 Sharp immediately fired off a reply to Wheeler: “In summary, I perceive no advantage and see greatest disadvantage from cessation of

bombing . . . .”64

From the airman’s point of view, North Vietnamese concessions could only

be gained by military pressure. Even had airmen been privy to all the diplomatic niceties, it is doubtful that they would have been in sympathy with President

Johnson’s logic. The Trinh-Macovescu meetings had occurred during a break in

the weather lasting five days, the longest period of good bombing conditions

during the northeast monsoon stretching from November 1967 through March

1968. Whether or not Trinh’s word changes were really significant, they came

together with bombs falling on the Doumer Bridge less than a mile away.

* * *

The raids of December 14 and 18, 1967, once again crippled Hanoi’s

Doumer Bridge over the Red River. About fifty F–105 sorties attacked the

bridge with two three thousand-pound bombs apiece. These unguided bombs

proved even more accurate and destructive than their predecessors in August

and October. Seven of nineteen spans fell into the water. The October raid had

kept the bridge closed for only a month, but after the December raids it would

not begin to carry traffic again for six months. Indeed, the North Vietnamese

made no attempt to repair the bridge until bombing ceased in the Hanoi area at

the end of March; nor did they install a bypass pontoon bridge until then.

Meanwhile, they used ferries to link Hanoi with Haiphong and China.65

No aircraft were lost attacking the Doumer Bridge during December’s one

week of good weather, but two F–105s and two F–4s went down during raids on

other targets in the Hanoi area. In one respect, the six Air Force officers on

board these aircraft would turn out to be an unusually fortunate group, for all

would come home at the end of the war.66 All but one were victims of the most

active MiG defense since the spring of 1967. As many as twenty MiGs came up

on December 17 and perhaps fourteen two days later. In addition to MiG–21s

with their usual hit-and-run attacks, MiG–17s tried to draw the Americans into

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To Hanoi and Back
low-altitude dogfights. The resulting melees continued over the target area,

where SAM inactivity made room for MiG activity. While MiG–21s came

away from the American good-weather campaign of December 14–19 with

another two victories and no losses, the MiG–17s did not fare so well. Their

lone victory was won at the price of four losses.67

Although the commander of Pacific Air Forces, General Ryan, objected to

independent fighter sweeps, he had no objection to air-to-air combat arising out

of escort duty. Indeed, he had reason to be especially proud of an F–4 victory

over a MiG–17 on December 17, because his eldest son (1st Lt. John D. Ryan,

Jr.) was in the back seat of the F–4. This victory was also exceptional in two

other respects: the pilot, Capt. Doyle D. Baker, was a Marine on exchange duty,

and the weapon was a heat-seeking Falcon missile. The Falcon’s lack of a proximity fuse would keep its total of kills to a mere five, but on this occasion it

went up the MiG’s tailpipe.68

Under the rules then in effect, Lieutenant Ryan received half a credit for his

part in downing a MiG, and Captain Doyle got the other half. Four years later

(two years after young Ryan’s death in an aircraft accident) when General Ryan

was Chief of Staff and the Air Force was once again bombing North Vietnam,

he would get the rule changed so that a pilot and his backseater each got full

credit for a victory; the revised rule was retroactive to 1965. Until General Ryan

changed the rules governing victory credits, Colonel Olds’ four victories in

F–4s gave him only two credits and tied him for top honors with the pilot of a

single-seat F–105, Capt. Max C. Brestel, who had shot down two MiG–17s on

March 10, 1967. Their nearest competitors were Lt. Col. Robert F. Titus and his

backseater, 1st Lt. Milan Zimer, who shared the credit for three victories.69

Moving into fifth position on December 19 was 1st Lt. George H.

McKinney, Jr., an F–4 backseater from Bessemer, Alabama. Like Lieutenant

Ryan and Lieutenant Zimer, Lieutenant McKinney had been trained as a pilot,

and may well have been less than enthusiastic about having to serve in the back

seat as a radar operator. Later this job would be turned over to men with navigator training. So long as men with pilot wings sat in the back seat, they were

officially designated “pilots” and the actual pilots in the front seat were “aircraft

commanders.” No matter what titles were used, a backseater sometimes found

his situation a little demoralizing—especially when he was a veteran of many

sorties over North Vietnam and a newly assigned pilot sat in the front seat.

Prospects for backseaters improved in November 1967, when they were at last

permitted to move into the front seat without first completing their tour and

returning to the United States for training.70

The equal sharing of victory credits was another attempt to raise the morale

of backseaters. Moreover, their role was often essential in air-to-air combat;

when they did not pick up a MiG on radar, they might be the first to see it

attacking from the rear. Their most important job was to “lock” the radar onto a

MiG within parameters that would permit a missile kill. Whatever the back111

Season of Discontent
seater’s contribution to a particular victory, however, he was awarded as much

credit as the pilot. Lieutenant McKinney had won a full credit on November 6,

when Capt. Darrell D. Simmonds in the front seat shot down two MiG–17s with

the twenty-millimeter gun carried in a pod on their F–4.71

While only two airmen had been granted a pair of victory credits in

Southeast Asia, several had one credit. McKinney got ahead of the latter group

by winning a quarter of a credit on December 19. This time the man in the front

seat was Maj. Joseph D. Moore, son of Lt. Gen. Joseph H. Moore (Westmoreland’s boyhood friend, Momyer’s predecessor as commander of Seventh Air

Force, and Ryan’s second in command at Pacific Air Forces before becoming

Inspector General of the Air Force in August 1967). Once again the pod gun

was used, but it was not working well and its slow rate of fire was not enough to

bring the MiG–17 down. After a two-seat F–105F Wild Weasel finished the job,

the victory credit was split four ways.72

Despite losing two MiGs without downing an American aircraft, the MiG

effort could be counted a success on this last afternoon of a rare week of good

weather. Of forty strike aircraft, twenty-four jettisoned their bombs. “I tried to

find where the MiG–17 had impacted,” Major Moore recalled, “but I couldn’t

tell an airplane crash from all the bomb detonations.”73 Whatever they blew up,

it was not part of the railyards targeted. So ended a brief renewal of the previous

summer’s campaign against rail lines between Hanoi and the Chinese border.74

Five days was simply too short a time to attack a large proportion of the rail

targets. The Doumer Bridge was by far the longest in North Vietnam, but many

others also carried the rails reaching down from China. The old Canal des

Rapides Bridge (three miles northeast of the Doumer Bridge) was struck on

December 15, but it was necessary to strike the canal’s two bypass bridges as

well. All three were short and easily repaired, so the effect was at best temporary. In any case, the weather closed in again before much could be done to

attack rolling stock backed up in railyards and on rail spurs. The big railyard at

Yen Vien was hit, as was the rail car repair shop at Gia Lam, but the North

Vietnamese put over a hundred cars on spurs that had not been authorized for

attack. On the last day of clear weather, Seventh Air Force’s request to hit these

rail spurs was making its way too late through channels to Washington;

approval did not reach Saigon until early the next morning.75

Although no one knew it then, the Doumer Bridge strike of December 18,

1967, was to be the last major bombing success in Hanoi for more than four

years. Most of the damage was done by F–105s from the 388th Tactical Fighter

Wing, Korat Air Base, Thailand. Three days later the wing commander, Col.

Neil J. Graham, learned that President Johnson was about to visit Korat. In the

month since Graham had taken command after Colonel Burdett was shot down

over Phuc Yen, Graham had been visited by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force

(General McConnell), the Commander in Chief of Pacific Air Forces (General

Ryan), and Congressman Joseph Y. Resnick (Democrat of New York), among

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others; entertainer Bob Hope’s visit was to follow the President’s. The combination of bad bombing weather and celebrity visitors provided a brief respite in

the grim toll Rolling Thunder was taking on the Korat wing and its leaders.

Having recently lost a wing commander and vice commander, the wing deputy

for operations, Col. James E. Bean, would be shot down and captured early in

January and Colonel Graham would die from a heart attack later in the month.76

It was not, of course, the wing’s final triumph over the Doumer that drew

President Johnson across the Pacific. On December 21, he attended the funeral

of Prime Minister Harold Holt of Australia—one of the few countries that had

sent any troops to Vietnam. Johnson turned this trip into an around-the-world

Christmas ritual, with visits to American soldiers in Southeast Asia and the

Pope in Rome. Johnson had first visited Vietnam as Vice President, and he had

slipped away from the Manila conference in 1966 to shake hands with Army

soldiers at Cam Ranh Bay. Before returning to Cam Ranh Bay on December 23,

1967, he spent a night at Korat Air Base. There a new and as yet unoccupied

dormitory helped to house the presidential entourage of about three hundred,

including some seventy-five reporters. George Christian, the President’s press

secretary, told reporters that for security reasons they could not file stories until

after the President left early in the morning. But the Thai press broke the story,

and reporters spent all night using telephones and typewriters at wing headquarters.77

The press was barred from Johnson’s evening session at the officers club

with General Momyer and pilots representing wings throughout Thailand.

They described the Doumer Bridge strikes and the air war generally. One of the

briefers was Lieutenant McKinney, who talked about air-to-air combat. No

backseater had ever been given so much limelight. Before dawn the next morning at a flightline ceremony attended by about five thousand, the President presented Distinguished Flying Crosses to McKinney and five frontseat pilots.

McKinney’s medal-earning performance had occurred on September 19 with

Maj. Lloyd W. Boothby in the front seat; Boothby was also on hand to receive a

Distinguished Flying Cross. Their F–4 had been hit by ground fire while

attempting to bomb a rail siding north of Hanoi; despite a damaged control system, they had managed to get back to Thailand before bailing out.78

President Johnson had heard a great deal from Senator Symington and others about pilot frustration with trivial targets and overly restrictive rules of

engagement. In recent months Johnson had given these pilots better targets,

including the Doumer Bridge that they had just struck again. Now he gave them

a pep talk. “Guerrilla combat provides no easy targets,” he explained. But a few

airmen were “pinning down” more than half a million North Vietnamese trying

to keep transportation routes open. He praised the discipline, restraint, and

steadfastness of Americans in uniform. At times he seemed to be giving himself

a pep talk too. “The spirit of America is not to be read on the placards or

posters,” he declared. “No man can come here for even a short period and shake

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your hand or look you in the eye and have the slightest bit of a doubt for a

moment that America is going to hold firm and that America is going to stay

faithful throughout the course until an honorable peace is secured.” 79

Although the base collected a bigger crowd for comedian Bob Hope a few

days later, President Johnson seemed very pleased with his visit to Korat. Back

at the White House, Walt Rostow told his Joint Chiefs liaison officer that

“Momyer made a hell of a good impression at Korat.”80 This praise was passed

on to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General McConnell, who was also told that

the Air Force should get “maximum mileage” out of the President’s speech

there.81 McConnell liked the speech so much that more than a year later (after

Johnson and he had both retired), he would raise it with an interviewer as a

“very well thought-out” statement of Johnson’s appreciation for airmen who

fought under restrictions deemed necessary by the President.82

Indeed, the Korat speech marked the apex of good feeling between

President Johnson and the military. Since the Stennis hearings in August, he had

approved some long-sought targets and shown Secretary of Defense McNamara

the door. Long before McNamara sought to reduce the bombing of North

Vietnam, many senior officers had been uncomfortable with his cerebral style

and his focus on quantitative measures of progress. Few generals or admirals

were displeased by Johnson’s announcement in late November that McNamara

would leave the Defense Department before long to head the World Bank.83

Johnson’s efforts to mollify those who wanted to prosecute the war more

vigorously could only infuriate those protesting American involvement in the

war. Whatever the reservations of the military about his policies, Johnson was

always assured a friendly reception when he visited the young Americans who

were risking their lives to carry out those policies. But elsewhere, less friendly

young Americans booed his speeches and paraded outside the White House

daily. On October 23, more than twenty thousand protesters marched from the

Mall to the Pentagon for an all-night vigil.84

Protesters were a nuisance, but they may have worked to the administration’s advantage; obscene slogans, communist flags, and long-haired young

men grated on the sensibilities of most Americans. Their dislike of demonstrations, however, could not ensure their continued support for a long and distant

war. With presidential elections only a year away, Johnson learned in the fall of

1967 that, according to a Gallup poll, only 38 percent of his countrymen

approved of the way he handled his job.85

Gallup trial heats for the presidency showed Johnson trailing several political rivals: in his own party, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York; in the

Republican Party, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, former Vice

President Richard Nixon, and Governor George Romney of Michigan.86

Rockefeller’s silence on Vietnam may have helped make him the most popular.

After a spring 1967 visit to Vietnam, Nixon had urged a harsher bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would include the mining of Haiphong har114

To Hanoi and Back
bor. Subsequently, Romney had tried to move away from his earlier support of

the war by complaining that the generals and diplomats had “brainwashed”

him—now he wanted a reduction in the bombing.87

Before the summer of 1967, nearly all prominent Republicans had been

supportive of the war effort; their criticism was limited to calls for more decisive prosecution of the war. The Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen of

Illinois, was one of Johnson’s closest friends and one of his warmest supporters

in debates on the war. But Romney’s was not the only Republican defection. In

addition to Senator George Aiken of Vermont (an early critic of the war),

Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Charles Percy, the junior senator from

Illinois, began to attack the extent of American involvement—as did

Congressmen Paul Findley, also of Illinois, and F. Bradford Morse of

Massachusetts. They used arguments already made familiar by the war’s more

numerous Democratic opponents (including Senator Kennedy), who took their

lead from the outspoken Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,

William Fulbright of Arkansas. The most influential of the war’s newly hatched

Republican “doves” was Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, a former

national chairman of the party.88

Like most other vocal opponents of the American role in Vietnam, Senator

Morton wanted to begin reducing that role by stopping the bombing of North

Vietnam. Although Johnson would eventually attempt to appease his critics by

granting their first wish, he had ample reason in the fall of 1967 to think that the

bombing was one of his most popular programs. The same polls that registered

growing dissatisfaction with his presidency and with the war also registered

continued support for bombing North Vietnam. While Americans were getting

tired of the war, they were impatient for at least a semblance of victory. In

October, a Gallup poll found that 65 percent opposed stopping the bombing of

North Vietnam without a promise of something in return; 55 percent favored

continuing to bomb at the current level; and 42 percent were even willing to use

atomic bombs. This poll, however, also found that 60 percent favored abiding

by a United Nations decision on South Vietnam’s future, and 71 percent wanted

to turn the fighting over gradually to South Vietnamese soldiers.89

President Johnson had become seriously concerned about popular support

for the war in August 1967, when his Gallup approval rating dropped steeply

from 47 percent of American voters to 40 percent. The Stennis hearings of that

month aired some of Secretary of Defense McNamara’s differences with the

Joint Chiefs of Staff over the bombing of North Vietnam. More damaging to the

President’s popularity, however, was the proposal he sent to Congress on

August 3 for a 10 percent income tax surcharge. The cost of the war, added to

the cost of Johnson’s social programs, had enlarged the federal debt and more

than doubled the inflation rate (which in the early 1960s had held steady at

about 1 percent a year). To prevent inflation from worsening, Johnson believed

that he had to ask for higher taxes. This was bound to be unpopular and to

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increase pressure on him for measurable progress, so that he could justify the

war’s cost in dollars as well as in lives.90

Ever since he had first sent fighter-bombers against North Vietnam,

President Johnson had tried to avoid arousing the passions of the American

people. He was afraid that they might push him toward a wider war. But as

opposition to his policies swelled in the summer of 1967, he began to talk about

changing the character of his war effort on the home front. At a meeting with

his closest advisers on August 18, he complained that the United States could

not win without parades, songs, and bond drives. He proposed that a colorful

general like Douglas MacArthur be sent to talk to the press in Saigon.91

Apparently no one more colorful than General Westmoreland could be found.

In October, when the President asked for the Air Force general best able to

defend the bombing of North Vietnam, he received a list headed by Lt. Gen.

George Brown, assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. While Brown’s

reputation for competence and cordiality was taking him to the top of his profession, the adjective colorful was rarely, if ever, attached to his name.92

It appeared to many officers that President Johnson had fired the most colorful general of the 1960s, General LeMay. In the case of President Truman and

General MacArthur, there had been no doubt. Colorful generals were inclined

to disagree with their President—an inclination that had contributed to their

scarcity. Johnson himself was a vivid personality in private, but this rarely came

across in his public speeches. When he thought that the American people needed a pep talk, he turned for help to the blander men he had retained or placed in

charge of his military and civilian agencies.93

On October 5, Johnson lectured the Cabinet about their responsibility to

speak on the war. He recalled the vigor with which Franklin Roosevelt had been

defended by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes and Secretary of the

Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. “You have got to come out of your caves and

stop being so modest,” Johnson urged. “Dirksen is the only one standing up for

us now.” After Vice President Humphrey noted that a “massive effort” would be

needed to turn the “tide of discouragement,” the President suggested that perhaps “we should close up our Public Affairs offices and get all new people.”94

President Johnson’s efforts to build a more favorable public image seemed

to work for awhile. His Gallup poll approval rating crept upward from a low of

38 percent at the beginning of November to 48 percent by late January. Bad

weather over the Red River Delta of North Vietnam assisted his public relations

efforts by keeping fighter-bomber raids off the front pages of American newspapers. Johnson had some of the advantages of a bombing pause without having

to incur the wrath of the “hawks.” Meanwhile, he assured the American public

that the war in South Vietnam was being won. To convince them, he brought

General Westmoreland and Ambassador Bunker back to the United States for a

week of upbeat speechmaking. But whatever the short-term benefit of this exercise, it made Hanoi’s subsequent Tet offensive all the more shocking.

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To Hanoi and Back
117

In January 1967, after Operation Bolo destroyed seven MiGs in the air, Lt. Gen.

Momyer brought two of the participants from Ubon Air Base, Thailand, to a

press conference at Tan Son Nhut. Col. Robin Olds, commander of the 8th

Tactical Fighter Wing, (center) tells the press about the operation and his personal success in downing a MiG. Next to Colonel Olds is Capt. John B. Stone,

who also shot down a MiG and was a key planner for the mission.

Leaders

Lt. Gen. William W. Momyer

(right), Seventh Air Force commander, welcomes Gen. John D.

Ryan, Pacific Air Forces commander, to Saigon (right).

South Vietnam’s vice president,

Nguyen Cao Ky, talks with

Lt. Gen. Momyer (center)

and Gen. John P. McConnell,

Air Force Chief of Staff (below).
118

Weapons

Sparrow and Sidewinder air-to-air

missiles on trailers before loading

on F–4 fighter aircraft at Da Nang

Air Base, November 1966 (left). 

Air Force ground crew technicians

prepare F–105 fighter aircraft at

Korat Air Base for a bombing

mission over North Vietnam

(below).
119

Targets

The Thai Nguyen ironworks under attack,

April 1967 (opposite page); first raid on Phuc

Yen airfield, October 1967 (right and below);

and F–105s bomb the Canal des Rapides

Bridge, April 1967 (center). The North

Vietnamese responded to bridge bombing by

building bypass bridges, here three at one

site (bottom).
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Air Defenses

This F–105 demonstrated its durability in November 1967 when it

managed to land after being hit by a

MiG–21’s Atoll missile over North

Vietnam (left). A North Vietnamese

SA–2 surface-to-air missile (below)

and a North Vietnamese MiG–21

(bottom).
Chapter Five

Rolling Thunder Subsides

In 1968 the lunar new year began on January 30. As usual, the South

Vietnamese prepared to celebrate for several days before and after Tet (new

year’s day), but the government bowed to American pressure and announced a

cease-fire lasting only thirty-six hours. Although the communist National

Liberation Front had advertised a cease-fire extending an entire week, General

Westmoreland was persuaded that this time they might break their word with

even greater abandon than in the past. For months, intelligence reports had

warned of an impending offensive. Westmoreland was particularly concerned

about the I Corps area, the northern quarter of South Vietnam, where two North

Vietnamese divisions were besieging a Marine outpost in the hills at Khe Sanh;

he canceled the cease-fire for American forces in I Corps.1

Before the sun rose on the morning of Tet, communist forces attacked government facilities in seven cities, only two of them in I Corps. These premature

beginnings of a much larger offensive gave the Americans and the South

Vietnamese time to cancel the cease-fire throughout the country and recall soldiers before the onslaught of the following night. Then the communists used

perhaps eighty thousand men to attack their enemies in Saigon and more than a

hundred other cities and towns. Despite the surprising number and intensity of

the assaults, which brought large-scale fighting into the cities for the first time,

American and South Vietnamese forces required less than a week to blunt the

offensive. Only in the Citadel at Hue in I Corps did communist attackers manage to hold an important objective until late February. For the first time the

communists had shown themselves in large numbers under conditions that did

not permit them to slip away into the jungle. General Westmoreland thought

that his men were winning the greatest victory of the war.2

Few American reporters saw an American victory in the Tet offensive.

Many of them had long since grown cynical about Westmoreland’s claims of

progress. Now the war had come to Saigon in a way that both shocked them and

confirmed their cynicism. Since most of the reporters assigned to Vietnam were

in Saigon, much of their initial coverage concentrated on that city and the story

of nineteen communists penetrating the wall of the American embassy com121

Preface
pound and remaining on the grounds for several hours before being killed or

captured. The suicidal nature of such attacks won for the communists much

admiration and sympathy, especially when Americans saw on television and on

the front page the image of the Saigon police director, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc

Loan, shooting a captive. Little noted was the fact that communists had just

killed one of Loan’s men as well as the man’s wife and children.3

In the weeks that followed the offensive, military public affairs officers

took Saigon reporters on field trips to other cities where attacks had been

repelled. A casual reading or watching of the resulting stories could give the

mistaken impression that the offensive continued to rage throughout South

Vietnam. Even when American and South Vietnamese forces were given credit

for quickly defeating communist attacks, the heavy use of firepower came in for

severe censure. After one of the early field trips to Ben Tre in the Mekong

Delta, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press quoted an unidentified American

major explaining that it had been “necessary to destroy the town to save it.”4

Perhaps even more damaging to the Johnson administration was the verdict of

CBS’s influential news anchorman, Walter Cronkite, who after a brief visit to

South Vietnam told his television audience that the Vietnam War was a “stalemate” with no end in sight.5

The news from Vietnam inverted a recent upturn in President Johnson’s

Gallup approval rating, which now dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent of

Americans polled (slightly lower than it had been in early November before

Westmoreland’s pep talks in Washington).6 Since 1968 was a presidential election year, Johnson had ample incentive to change his Vietnam policies. But it

was not at all obvious what changes would improve Johnson’s domestic political situation, let alone improve matters in South Vietnam. As so often in the

past, the administration’s debate over Vietnam policy focused on bombing and

troop deployments. In many respects this debate was a rehash of the one that

occurred in May 1967, except that the outcome changed with respect to bombing. This time, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s old proposal to cut back the

bombing of North Vietnam to south of the twentieth parallel was reborn as

Secretary of State Rusk’s proposal. It finally got the President’s approval—

shortly after Johnson had replaced McNamara with Clark Clifford, a

Washington lawyer and presidential adviser since the Truman administration.7

McNamara might well have gotten his proposal approved by Johnson in

the spring of 1967 had it not been for the Senate Armed Services Committee.

When Senator Symington called for hearings under the auspices of Senator

Stennis’s investigating subcommittee, the President dropped consideration of a

bombing cutback and approved new targets, including Hanoi’s Doumer Bridge.

But the committee did not repeat that performance after the Tet offensive.8

The first member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to react publicly to Tet was a Republican, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was

speaking on the floor against a civil rights bill when he was given the news. He

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To Hanoi and Back
put aside his prepared remarks and began to talk darkly of the connection

between events in South Vietnam and the seizure only a week before of the

Navy’s radio intelligence ship Pueblo by North Korean patrol boats. In his view,

the origin of America’s problems in Vietnam was the acceptance of stalemate in

the Korean War; it was high time the United States started using its power. “Use

your power to close the port of Haiphong,” he urged. “Use your power to bomb

them so they cannot take it—the kind of bombing we did in World War II, if

necessary.”9

Subsequently, Thurmond and his fellow committee members had little

more to say in public about expanding the bombing campaign. Nor did they

come forth to dispute the lead editorial in the Sunday New York Times, which

declared that if the “spectacularly successful” Tet offensive proved anything, it

proved that the bombing of North Vietnam had failed to reduce either the

enemy’s will or his capacity to fight.10 Of course, the committee’s own longstanding criticism of the bombing’s inadequacy was well known, but none of

those senators had ever said that the current level of bombing was making no

contribution at all. 

Three days into the Tet offensive, the Senate Armed Services Committee

began previously scheduled closed hearings on the defense authorization bill

for the next fiscal year. The opening witnesses were Secretary of Defense

McNamara, who still had a month to serve in the Pentagon, and General

Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Since Senator Russell was ill,

Senator Stennis was in the chair. He was even more gracious than usual, going

so far as to say that McNamara was the “most effective Secretary of Defense I

have ever seen or known.”11 The same senators who had grilled McNamara on

the air war in August, now barely raised the subject. They did ascertain from

General Wheeler that the Joint Chiefs still favored mining Haiphong.12

Three weeks later, after the initial shock of the Tet offensive had worn off,

the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff appeared before the committee. During the morning session Senator Stennis warned General McConnell

that after lunch he would be expected to discuss the restrictions under which the

bombing had been conducted. Later when reciting the rules of engagement,

McConnell said that he did not want to express disagreement with “policies or

restrictions which are imposed by the President.”13 That statement bothered several members of the committee. While lecturing McConnell and Secretary

Brown on the importance of speaking out, the senators suggested that the public

silence of the Air Force leadership had contributed to a dire situation with implications for the credibility of air power that spread far beyond Southeast Asia.14

This criticism disturbed McConnell so much that he dropped his usual cordiality to confront it. He protested that he had made his position clear to his

superiors and that he had answered the committee’s questions honestly. “When

I have done that,” he concluded, “then I have done everything I should do, and

I should not go out and try to convince the American people what my attitude

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Rolling Thunder Subsides
is.”15 But what would the general do in North Vietnam if he had a free hand?

McConnell’s answer demonstrated the degree to which he had tailored his

speaking and perhaps his thinking to political realities in Washington: “If I were

given a free hand to do everything I wanted to do in North Vietnam, I don’t

have the slightest idea of what I would do, Senator, because that would be a

responsibility which I have never considered having thrust upon me.”16

For all their frustration with the Air Force Chief of Staff’s willingness to go

along with administration bombing policy, the senators on the Armed Services

Committee did not themselves try to arouse the public on behalf of more bombing. While the Senate Armed Services Committee met in closed session, the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee met before the television cameras to interrogate Secretary of State Rusk for two days. Not since 1966 had Rusk agreed to

appear before that committee in open session, and in turn the Foreign Relations

Committee had refused to meet with Rusk in closed session. Now the Chairman

of Foreign Relations, Senator Fulbright, made the most of his opportunity to

attack the administration before a national audience. Although Fulbright’s tie

bore an image of doves and olive branches, they did not symbolize his attitude

toward the Secretary of State.17

The Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee had

only one member in common, and he was the one most closely associated with

the Air Force because he had been the service’s first secretary in 1947.

Increasingly disenchanted with the war, Senator Symington had returned from

each of his trips to Southeast Asia less inclined to support the administration.

By the summer of 1967 he had favored hitting North Vietnam hard or getting

out of the war. After the Tet offensive, he emphasized the latter half of his proposal. He took his turn during the televised hearings to explain the change in his

thinking. The war had become too expensive for the American economy, he

thought, and the American policy of gradualism was a failure partly because

Americans had underestimated the “durability and patriotism of the Vietcong

and the North Vietnamese.”18 Nevertheless, he continued to believe that the

United States could have destroyed “the enemy’s capacity for aggression” if air

and sea power had been used in “normal fashion” during 1965. But he indicated that this was no longer as attractive an approach, because “it is probably true

that the defenses of North Vietnam have been built up to a point where it is now

the most sophisticated defense in world history.”19

* * *

A problem for many bombing advocates was that they no longer wanted to

risk over North Vietnam the one type of aircraft capable of delivering a lot of

bombs in bad weather—the B–52. Even General McConnell had indicated his

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To Hanoi and Back
own reluctance during the Stennis hearings in August, and the Stennis subcommittee’s report had not recommended using the B–52s.20 Without using B–52s,

there was little that could be done over North Vietnam to respond to the Tet

offensive, since the weather would minimize fighter operations at least until the

middle of April. 

Within the administration, B–52s had long been out of the question as one

of those rash moves that might lead to a wider war. The President’s National

Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, did suggest mining Haiphong harbor as something that could be done in bad weather.21 Rostow’s principal source of information on mining was an Air Force officer, Brig. Gen. Robert N. Ginsburgh,

the Joint Chiefs liaison to the White House. Ginsburgh told Rostow that mining

North Vietnam’s harbors might prove to be a good bargaining tactic, since they

might be able to get the North Vietnamese to negotiate merely by offering not to

renew the minefields. Mining was also a lot less risky than other options like

invading North Vietnam, bombing the flood control dikes, or destroying North

Vietnamese cities from the air after warning the inhabitants to evacuate.22 But,

of course, mining Haiphong was a step that the President had often rejected

before, and its impact on the North Vietnamese would be much reduced if the

railroads from China to Hanoi could not be interdicted at the same time. They

could not be, at least until the northeast monsoon abated and permitted the

fighter-bombers to operate more effectively. 

Any interest President Johnson might have had in taking more extreme

action was dampened by speculation in the press that he was contemplating

using nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh. Johnson was upset to learn that his subordinates had, in fact, been looking into this possibility. Recalling that the use of

nuclear weapons had been discussed as a way to break the Vietnamese communist siege of the French position at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Walt Rostow had

raised the matter with General Ginsburgh, who raised it in turn with General

Wheeler, who sent a message to Admiral Sharp and General Westmoreland. The

commanders in Hawaii and Vietnam were already having the option studied, but

they replied that they did not think it would be necessary to use nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, General Eisenhower, who had been urging Johnson to step up the

bombing of North Vietnam ever since the seizure of the Pueblo, now indicated to

the press that nuclear weapons should not be ruled out at Khe Sanh (even though

as President he had not used them at Dien Bien Phu). President Johnson had to

assure a press conference that he had received no recommendations to use

nuclear weapons, and Secretary McNamara had to call several concerned citizens to convince them that there would be no such recommendation.23

Talk of employing nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia reinforced President

Johnson’s determination not to make any dramatic increase in his use of air

power. Although the Joint Chiefs hoped that the Tet offensive would lead to an

enlargement of their bombing authority, they assumed that Johnson would veto

mining Haiphong harbor and did not ask to do it. They could not guarantee that

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Rolling Thunder Subsides
mining Haiphong would not lead to a confrontation with the Soviet Union, but

the Chiefs did hope to persuade Johnson there was now less cause to be as careful of civilian casualties when bombing North Vietnam. After all, many South

Vietnamese civilians were dying at the hands of the communists. The Chiefs

asked Johnson not only to remove the prohibition on bombing fixed targets in

Hanoi and Haiphong, but also to permit armed reconnaissance of water, rail,

and truck traffic nearer to the centers of those cities.24

Since the summer of 1967, the President had permitted armed reconnaissance on the principal routes radiating through his Hanoi and Haiphong “donut

rings,” the portion of each restricted bombing zone lying outside each prohibited bombing zone. The Hanoi restricted zone (within which fixed targets

required Presidential approval) had a radius of thirty nautical miles, while the

Hanoi prohibited zone had a radius of ten nautical miles. In January, the President had established a new prohibited zone with a radius of five nautical miles,

but armed reconnaissance was kept outside the ten nautical mile limit. With

respect to Haiphong, however, January’s new prohibited zone radius of five

nautical miles extended further than the old one of four nautical miles, pushing

the inner edge of the donut ring outward (while the outer edge remained at ten

nautical miles, the radius of Haiphong’s restricted zone). Discussions of this

matter tended to be somewhat confused, and the Joint Chiefs hoped to simplify

it in a way that would give them a freer hand. They wanted to replace all the old

zones with one new one for each city, Hanoi’s having a radius of three nautical

miles and Haiphong’s a radius of one and a half nautical miles.25

General Wheeler proposed the smaller restricted zones to the President at

the first Tuesday Lunch following the onset of the Tet offensive. Secretary of

State Rusk objected that this might lead to large civilian casualties. Secretary of

Defense McNamara added that aircraft losses would go up and the military

effect would be slight. Wheeler protested that the North Vietnamese had a fine

warning system which sent the civilian population into shelters. Any increase in

North Vietnamese casualties would not compare with the “butchery” of South

Vietnamese. Clark Clifford, the Secretary of Defense in waiting, weighed in on

the side of Wheeler with the argument that the Tet offensive was a clear rejection of President Johnson’s offers to negotiate. Rusk then proposed as a compromise that the President remove his recent prohibition on bombing fixed targets within five nautical miles of the center of each city, and authorize again

those fixed targets which he had authorized in the past. Johnson took this

advice, giving the Air Force its old targets in Hanoi (including the Canal Bridge

and the Doumer Bridge) and the Navy its Haiphong targets.26

Since little good bombing weather could be expected until late April, the

Joint Chiefs could only hope that any new target authorizations precipitating

out of the Tet offensive would remain in effect for at least three months.

Meanwhile, the airfields were the only targets in North Vietnam about which

they felt much urgency. Il–28 light jet bombers had returned to Phuc Yen Air

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To Hanoi and Back
Base, where they had not been seen since the spring of 1967. Unlike the newer

and smaller MiG–21 fighters at Phuc Yen, the Il–28s had sufficient range to

reach Da Nang without staging out of a base in the North Vietnamese panhandle. When General Wheeler raised this problem with the President on February

7, Johnson expressed immediate interest in attacking Phuc Yen and Wheeler

assured him that it would be attacked as soon as weather permitted.27

Seventh Air Force did not wait for good weather. General Momyer had

already given the order to destroy the Il–28s, and on the very next day the 8th

Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon Air Base, Thailand, launched a daring low-level

raid. A single flight of four F–4s entered North Vietnam as if on a reconnaissance mission. While half the flight announced their presence at high altitude

by turning on their radio identification transponders (which the North

Vietnamese were thought to be capable of interrogating), the volunteer crews

on board the other two F–4s skimmed across Phuc Yen at 250 feet. The attackers thought that their cluster bombs must have damaged at least one Il–28. The

North Vietnamese were not sufficiently surprised, their flak crippling one

engine of the lead F–4, which still managed to get to Laos where Capt. Tracy K.

Dorsett and Capt. John A. Corder bailed out, evaded enemy search parties, and

scrambled aboard a rescue helicopter. Back at Ubon they were reunited with

fellow volunteers Maj. Larry D. Armstrong and 1st Lt. James H. Hall. All four

received the Air Force Cross.28

Two days later, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing made a second novel attempt

to eliminate the Il–28 presence at Phuc Yen. A large formation of sixteen F–4s

with cluster bombs (escorted by eight other F–4s and eight F–105s) managed to

strike Phuc Yen in bad weather without suffering any losses. This feat was

accomplished by having the strike F–4s pull up five miles from the target and

loft their bombs.29

On February 14, 1968, Ubon launched yet another raid against Phuc Yen.

This time a single flight of F–4s was to use their onboard radar to drop their

bombs, but the clearest weather in a month permitted dive bombing. Neither then

nor subsequently were the Il–28s or MiG–21s caught on the ground. Nor were

they ever sent to attack targets in South Vietnam. Henceforth, the North

Vietnamese kept only two Il–28s at Phuc Yen, and these would fly north and

orbit at the approach of American aircraft. Five other Il–28s were at bases north

of the Chinese border with the bulk of North Vietnam’s MiG force. Since the airfield raids of the previous year, North Vietnam had based more than a hundred

MiGs in China, while fewer than twenty remained at Phuc Yen, Gia Lam, and

Kep airfields (with others thought to be hidden in the nearby countryside and

hauled to the bases by helicopter when needed).30

Although the Valentine’s Day raid on Phuc Yen caught no MiGs on the

ground, several were encountered in the air. As usual a couple of MiG–21s

attempted to hit-and-run from above thirty thousand feet (without success this

time since they were spotted early) while at least five MiG–17s waited below

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Rolling Thunder Subsides
fifteen thousand feet. The MiG–17s did manage to draw each of the F–4 escort

flights into separate skirmishes, but the MiGs won no victories and suffered two

losses (one to gunfire and the other to a Sparrow radar-guided missile). Maj.

Rex D. Howerton and Col. David O. Williams, Jr., shared the credit for these

last Air Force confirmed air-to-air victories of Rolling Thunder with their backseaters, 1st Lt. Ted L. Voight II and 1st Lt. James P. Feighny, Jr.31

In addition to the planned raid on Phuc Yen, Seventh Air Force used the

rare day of clear weather to attack Hanoi’s Canal Bridge, one of the targets

President Johnson had again released only a week earlier. Since the bridge raids

of December, the Canal Bridge had returned to operation, while the Doumer

Bridge over the Red River was still down. Late in the afternoon, strike forces

from Takhli and Korat converged on the bridge from opposite directions.

Sixteen bomb-laden F–105s from the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing at Takhli

came down Thud Ridge from the west, with eight F–105 escorts to threaten the

SAM sites and eight F–4s to guard against the MiGs. A similar force escorted a

like number of F–105s from the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing at Korat as they

penetrated North Vietnam from the Gulf of Tonkin. Although the two wings

dropped forty-eight 2,000-pound and 3,000-pound bombs, only one hit the

bridge, and three days later trains were using it. An escort F–105 from Korat

was lost to a SAM and the pilot, Capt. Robert M. Elliot, was never seen by

Americans again.32

In yet another attempt to make use of clear weather on the 14th, a flight of

four F–4s from Ubon dropped Walleye television-guided bombs on the thermal powerplant associated with the Thai Nguyen ironworks, some thirty miles

north of Hanoi. At least one of the Walleyes made a direct hit. Two were

obscured by dust and smoke that may also have interfered with their guidance

systems. Although the Walleye could be very accurate, its relatively small warhead sometimes failed to do enough damage even when right on target. At any

rate, the powerplant was soon operating and remained on the target list.33

During the weeks of bad weather which followed, there was little more that

Seventh Air Force or the Seventh Fleet could do in the Hanoi-Haiphong region.

Meanwhile, Thailand finally permitted fighter aircraft based there to be used in

South Vietnam, nearly a year after Thailand-based B–52s. Thus, the principal

response of the Thailand-based fighters to the Tet offensive came in the hills

around Khe Sanh, where they joined B–52s and other fighters in delivering an

unprecedented tonnage of bombs on so small an area—a hundred thousand tons

in a few weeks, about as much as the Hanoi-Haiphong region had suffered in

three years.34

Since B–52s were not used near Hanoi and Haiphong, most major targets

in North Vietnam were adequately protected from American air power by the

northeast monsoon. The solo missions of Navy and Marine A–6s and the less

accurate flights of four F–4s or four F–105s (guided by the radar at Phou Pha

Thi in Laos) could do no more than harass the enemy. Some of the Red River

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To Hanoi and Back
port facilities on the south side of Hanoi were attacked for the first time without

much damage. Unfortunately the most prominent target given the bad weather

attackers was one demanding greater accuracy than they could muster. They

were supposed to turn off the voice of Hanoi Hannah by bombing Radio Hanoi.

Not surprisingly they failed, while the White House paid close attention. After

an A–6 attempt, Walt Rostow was informed that Radio Hanoi had kept to its

usual schedule “which would indicate that our plane missed.”35

* * *

Since the beginning of Rolling Thunder in 1965, the Johnson administration

had linked American bombing in North Vietnam to American ground forces in

South Vietnam. Marines had been sent with the immediate purpose of protecting

Da Nang Air Base, where some raids against North Vietnam were launched

(while others launched from Thailand had to pretend that they came from Da

Nang). When Marine and Army ground forces began to take the offensive, the

administration’s rationale turned around so that the bombing of North Vietnam

was then justified as a way of reducing American casualties in South Vietnam.36

Even critics of President Johnson’s handling of the war often reinforced the

linkage between bombs and troops. As early as April 1965, CIA Director John

McCone had warned that sending American ground forces to South Vietnam

would never win the war unless North Vietnam was subjected to much harsher

bombing. Although the CIA stopped calling for more bombing after McCone’s

replacement by Helms, CIA analysts continued to report that the gradual escalation of American bombing was having little effect. Nor were they sanguine

about the value of sending more troops to South Vietnam.37

Parallel increases in troop deployments and bombing came to an end in the

summer of 1967, when the administration said no to Westmoreland’s request

for two hundred thousand more troops and promised him only forty-two thousand. Despite McNamara’s proposal to end bombing of the Red River Delta,

President Johnson went along with some of the demands of the Senate Armed

Services Committee for more targets there. But through diplomatic channels

and in his speech at San Antonio, Johnson offered to quit bombing North

Vietnam if only the North Vietnamese would agree to negotiate seriously while

not increasing their rate of infiltrating troops and supplies into South Vietnam. 

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, looked with greater

equanimity on the possibility of a bombing halt than did his colleagues in the

Air Force and Navy. After the San Antonio speech he formed a study group in

the Joint Staff to examine the question of a bombing halt with particular attention to the question of what North Vietnamese actions should trigger a resumption of bombing. Of eleven officers, seven were Army and only one was Air

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Rolling Thunder Subsides
Force. They predicted that North Vietnamese infiltration would increase during

a bombing halt, but that the increase would be hard to measure and therefore

possibly inadequate to justify resumption.38

While these were predictions with which most military men could agree,

many in the Air Force and Navy were alarmed that the Chairman and his study

group were even considering the possibility of a bombing halt. General

Ginsburgh, the Air Force officer who served as Wheeler’s liaison on the

National Security Council staff, told the Chairman that the study group’s report

should stress the need to mine the ports and bomb the flood control dikes. The

Joint Chiefs finally joined in a memorandum that called for resumption of

bombing after thirty days if the North Vietnamese had not by then consented to

withdraw all their forces from South Vietnam.39

The Tet Offensive revealed the flimsiness of support within the White

House, the Congress, and even the Joint Chiefs for mining Haiphong or for

using B–52s against the Red River Delta—the only two dramatic air actions

that could have been taken in the cloudy weather of February and March 1968.

A major troop increase was another matter, however. General Wheeler thought

that the Tet crisis might produce the same willingness to expand the military

that the Chinese offensive had generated during the Korean War. 

The President’s initial response to Tet encouraged Wheeler, and on

February 3, the Chairman cabled Westmoreland that the President had asked

whether his field commander needed reinforcement. At this point Wheeler’s

principal obstacle seemed to be Westmoreland, who was slow to take the hint.

Westmoreland thought that his men were giving the communists a drubbing,

and while additional forces were always nice to have, he felt no particular need

for them at the moment.40

Meanwhile, the President was eager to send reinforcements immediately,

but still reluctant to call up reserves. Only a few days earlier, he had called up

ten thousand air and naval reservists in response to the Pueblo crisis. Already

complaints were coming from relatives and employers that these men were not

doing useful work. Over the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Johnson

insisted on sending to Westmoreland an Army airborne brigade and a Marine

regimental landing team totalling eleven thousand men—without calling up

reserves. In Wheeler’s view the Army was already drawn much too thin, with

only one deployable division, the 82d Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The President’s new deployment took a third of that division.41

In late February, Wheeler traveled to Saigon, where he and Westmoreland

discussed a troop request that President Johnson could not meet without a

major reserve call-up. Wheeler wanted to use the Tet crisis to rebuild the

American military, but he was also much more nervous about the situation in

Vietnam than was Westmoreland. Tired and gloomy at the outset of his visit,

Wheeler became more uneasy when an enemy rocket exploded near his quarters and he asked to move into the Combat Operations Center with

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Westmoreland. In any case, Westmoreland was happy to comply with

Wheeler’s desire for a big troop request. Having been turned down when he

requested such an increase in 1967, Westmoreland had then followed the

Johnson administrations’s drift toward gradually turning the war over to the

South Vietnamese. But the enormous communist losses of the last month

together with the prospect of a major infusion of American troops now had

him once again thinking of winning the war.42

Echoing his 1967 request, Westmoreland joined Wheeler in asking for

about 200,000 men—this time precisely 206,000. Half these were to go to

Vietnam in the next few months. The rest might go by the end of the year if necessary, but Westmoreland did not think they would be necessary and thus could

be kept in the United States. Even if all 206,000 were deployed (including fifteen fighter squadrons) raising the number of American servicemen in Vietnam

above 700,000, stateside forces would have to grow to provide the necessary

logistical tail. In fact satisfying the 206,000 request would have expanded the

armed forces by about 500,000 (or nearly 15 percent), partly by lengthening

terms of service, partly by increasing draft calls, and partly by calling up more

than 250,000 reservists.43

When Wheeler’s proposal reached Washington on February 27, the

President was at his ranch in Texas. He was due back the following day for the

first of Secretary of Defense McNamara’s two retirement ceremonies. In

Johnson’s absence McNamara and his replacement, Clark Clifford, met to discuss the troop request with a small group of the President’s closest advisers,

including Secretary of State Rusk. Wheeler’s report dramatized the Tet offensive as “a very near thing,” a declaration which preyed upon their fears that the

communists might soon launch an even more powerful offensive.44 After all,

most of the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam had been withheld so

far—not to mention all the enemy’s forces in Laos and North Vietnam itself. 

As McNamara saw it, the President had to make a choice between a big

reserve call-up and higher taxes on the one hand and an end to Westmoreland’s

search and destroy strategy on the other. Westmoreland could be told to withdraw his forces from the hills and use them only to defend the heavily populated coastal areas. In that case a big reserve call-up would not be necessary. If

they went with the reserve call-up, they might combine it with a new peace

offensive. Rusk suggested that they might offer to cut back the bombing of

North Vietnam or end it altogether in exchange for a North Vietnamese withdrawal from Quang Tri Province, the northernmost in South Vietnam. Clifford

said that they should consider sending Westmoreland much more than 206,000

men, perhaps as many as a million, though he also said that he was not pushing

the idea; given the widespread impression that the United States was losing the

war, how could they avoid creating the impression that they were “pounding

troops down a rathole?”45 Clifford thought that they needed to evaluate their

entire posture in South Vietnam before making a decision. 

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Walt Rostow conveyed these sentiments to Johnson and suggested he give

Clifford the job of chairing a task force to evaluate the situation and recommend

a course of action. Johnson had long placed great stock in Clifford’s advice and

was enormously pleased to have him take over from McNamara. Although

Clifford had joined George Ball in the summer of 1965 to oppose a major troop

commitment in South Vietnam, he had subsequently supported the Johnson war

policy. Clifford’s counsels of caution were usually as welcome as his encouragements to stay the course. As recently as December, he had joined McNamara and Rusk in arguing against a Joint Chiefs’ proposal to send B–52s

against targets in Cambodia; rather than underline Rusk’s fears of a Chinese

reaction (always persuasive with Johnson), Clifford had simply questioned the

utility of B–52 bombing in the jungle.46

Johnson had known Clifford since the 1940s, when Clifford had risen from

being President Truman’s assistant naval aide to being one of Truman’s most

influential civilian advisers. Like Clifford’s closest friend, Stuart Symington,

Clifford was part of Truman’s Missouri political family; and like Senator

Symington, Clifford would soon come to believe that the United States was on

the wrong course in Southeast Asia.

After a very difficult month, the President gladly put the Wheeler proposal

in Clifford’s hands and left town again, this time for a weekend at Ramey Air

Force Base, Puerto Rico. Johnson took along a son-in-law, Patrick J. Nugent, an

Air National Guard enlisted man whose unit had been called up as part of

Johnson’s response to the Pueblo crisis. In the family pattern set by Johnson’s

other son-in-law, Marine Captain Charles S. Robb, Nugent expected to go to

Vietnam in the next few weeks. Johnson was proud that his family was contributing in this personal way to the war effort, while most sons of the country’s

government and business leadership had managed to avoid military service. 

The other major participant in the President’s weekend trip was the Chief

of Staff of the Air Force, General McConnell. They went through the motions

of inspecting Ramey, but their days were filled with golf. While they played for

money according to the President’s rules (as McConnell would remember with

amusement), much of the Washington bureaucracy was hard at work preparing

a position paper for the President.47

Since Clifford was in charge of this “A to Z reassessment,” others in the

bureaucracy (JCS, CIA, State, Treasury) sent their inputs to the Office of the

Secretary of Defense, where a team of action officers under the Assistant

Secretary for International Security Affairs, Paul Warnke, drafted a paper for

the President. Some members of this team, including its leader, Leslie Gelb,

were already engaged in a project launched by McNamara to compile a classified documentary history of America’s involvement in Vietnam—a history that

one of the authors (Daniel Ellsberg) would three years later leak to the New

York Times for publication as The Pentagon Papers. Long before the Tet offensive, Warnke, Gelb, and many other civilians working for the Secretary of

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Defense had turned against the war. McNamara had given them a sympathetic

hearing and tried to cut back the bombing of North Vietnam. They were uneasy

about his replacement by Clifford, long a defender of the President’s Vietnam

policies. The “A to Z reassessment” seemed an opportunity to change Clifford’s

thinking and perhaps even the President’s.48

“A to Z” meant that once again the bombing of North Vietnam was considered in conjunction with the troop question. The bombing, however, was not

uppermost in the minds of the drafters. They contented themselves with merely

objecting to any increase, especially mining Haiphong harbor or reducing the

restricted and prohibited zones around Haiphong and Hanoi. General Wheeler

managed to get the discussion of bombing moved to an appendix, where the

Joint Chiefs’ diametrically opposed view was also included.49

With General McConnell out of town, Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, the Vice

Chief, was left to direct the Air Staff’s response to Clifford’s request for alternative strategies. The Air Staff’s preferred alternative was a much harsher

bombing campaign, and they even went so far as to suggest using B–52s over

the Red River Delta, as well as targeting the flood control dikes and mining

Haiphong harbor. Secretary of the Air Force Brown opposed such measures. He

wanted to reduce bombing in the Hanoi-Haiphong region (already very slight

owing to the weather, but due to grow in the spring) and increase bombing in

the North Vietnamese panhandle (which throughout Rolling Thunder had suffered the bulk of the bombing anyway).50

The Under Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes, insisted that the

Air Staff also study the possibility of substituting tactical air power for

Westmoreland’s search and destroy operations in South Vietnam. Until October

1967, Hoopes had worked for Warnke in the Office of the Secretary of Defense

and was thoroughly in tune with McNamara’s desire to cut back the ground war

in the south and the air war in the north. Hoopes had already written Clifford a

personal letter advocating an end to the bombing of North Vietnam. The Air

Force under secretary advised Clifford to heed a study of the bombing completed in 1967 for the JASON division of the Institute for Defense Analyses by a

group of university scientists—for the most part the same group of “Jasons”

who had in the summer of 1966 developed the rationale for McNamara’s proposal to build an electronically monitored barrier against infiltration into South

Vietnam (and thereby render the bombing of North Vietnam unnecessary).

Once again the Jasons stated in the strongest possible terms that the bombing

was a complete failure because the rate of infiltration had increased.51

While Clifford may have been interested to learn that the Air Force civilian

and military leadership was divided on bombing policy, his immediate concern

was Wheeler’s troop request. The drafting team reflected that concern. The primary purpose of the Gelb draft was to implement McNamara’s suggestion that

Westmoreland’s search and destroy strategy should be discarded in favor of

protecting the heavily populated coastal areas of the country. Wheeler fought

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this change by warning that it would ensure continued fighting in the populated

regions. He got the words about a change in ground strategy stricken from the

draft. Though he could not get Clifford to endorse a major troop increase for

Westmoreland, the new Secretary of Defense did agree that 262,000 reserves

should be called up to rebuild the military in readiness for deployment whenever and wherever necessary.52

When the President returned to Washington, he called his principal advisers to the White House for Clifford’s report. Clifford explained that his group

had not yet been able to agree on bombing policy or otherwise complete a thorough reassessment of the administration’s Vietnam posture, but that it should

be done before sending Westmoreland major reinforcements. In the meantime

Clifford recommended sending only 22,000, while calling up 262,000 reserves

to rebuild the active military. Johnson made no immediate decision other than

to approve the continuation of Clifford’s reassessment. At this point Rusk

raised again the possibility of a partial bombing halt during the ongoing northeast monsoon, and the President latched onto Rusk’s suggestion as the bright

spot in the meeting: “Really get your horses on that.”53

It took a month for the partial bombing halt to become a reality. That month

of March proved even more difficult for President Johnson than February had

been, despite the fact that on the ground in South Vietnam the outlook for government and American forces continued to improve. Hue was recaptured at the

beginning of March. Although North Vietnamese troops still surrounded the

Marines at Khe Sanh, the Marines were adequately resupplied by air while their

besiegers suffered the heaviest conventional bombardment of all time. In another month Westmoreland would send a relief column that would arrive after

enemy survivors had once again slipped away into the jungle. But meanwhile,

March brought a series of new blows to Johnson’s presidency, all of them aftershocks of the Tet offensive. 

On March 10, the New York Times published a front page story on

Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 men and on the ensuing debate in

Washington. This story seemed to confirm all the speculation since Tet that

American forces in South Vietnam were in deep trouble. President Johnson was

furious, but he was unable to discover the source of the leak, though he suspected that it came from a Pentagon civilian. Only years afterward did a

reporter reveal that the original tip came from Townsend Hoopes, the Under

Secretary of the Air Force.54

On March 12, Democratic voters in the New Hampshire primary failed to

give President Johnson the overwhelming support expected. Senator Eugene

McCarthy of Minnesota, who was running against the war in Vietnam and

Johnson’s handling of it, got almost as many votes as the President. True,

McCarthy’s name was on the ballot and Johnson’s was not, but a landslide of

write-in ballots for the President was expected. At the time, McCarthy’s votes

in New Hampshire were thought to indicate support for withdrawing from

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Vietnam. Later analysis indicated, however, that most of McCarthy’s supporters

in New Hampshire were disgusted with Johnson for not prosecuting the war

more vigorously.55

On March 16, Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the

presidency. As recently as January 28, he had said that he did not intend to run.

But shortly after McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire, Kennedy presented an ultimatum to Clifford—either Johnson appoint a commission of

prominent Americans, including Kennedy, to reassess the administration’s

Vietnam policy, or Kennedy would enter the race. The President refused.56

“Lady Bird” Johnson had noticed in early March a serenity emerge in her

troubled husband. This new equilibrium was upset by the political tremors of

that month. On the morning of Kennedy’s announcement, the President told a

meeting of the National Alliance of Businessmen that the United States was

going to win in Vietnam: “To meet the needs of these fighting men, we shall do

whatever is required.”57 Two days later he asked the National Farmers Union to

join “a total national effort to win the war.”58 He warned them that this would

require a more austere economy, which should mean at least enactment of the

10 percent income tax surcharge he had proposed a year ago. 

The President’s sudden bellicosity passed quickly away. Political realities

in Washington no longer permitted a truly national war effort. Clifford’s discussions with Senators Russell, Stennis, and Symington (among others) indicated that the administration would have a hard time selling a reserve call-up

of even 100,000, let alone the 262,000 Clifford had originally contemplated.

By the end of March, the President decided to call up only 62,000 reservists

and send to Vietnam nothing beyond those forces already scheduled for

deployment; the troop ceiling in Vietnam would not go above 549,000. Johnson also announced that he would bring Westmoreland home that summer to

be Chief of Staff of the Army. Westmoreland’s replacement in Saigon would

be his deputy commander, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, Jr., who had been giving much of his attention to building the South Vietnamese army.59

Ever since the Tet offensive, President Johnson had been thinking about

making a televised speech on Vietnam. When he met with his advisers on

March 19 to plan the speech, he showed less interest in a new peace initiative

than he had earlier in the month. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a close

friend of Johnson’s, attended the meeting and encouraged his inclination not to

confuse matters by mixing a peace initiative into a speech on troops and war.

Within three days, however, Johnson again changed his mind. He told his advisers on March 22 that he wanted to take advantage of the few remaining weeks

of bad weather over North Vietnam by giving a speech that featured a bombing

cutback—perhaps only a renewed prohibition of bombing near Hanoi and

Haiphong.60

For a month, Secretary of State Rusk had argued in favor of a bombing cutback to the panhandle of North Vietnam, leaving not only Hanoi and Haiphong

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but most of the country free from bombing. When he had first raised this proposal in late February, he had talked about trading a bombing cutback for a

North Vietnamese withdrawal from South Vietnam’s northern province of

Quang Tri. But he soon abandoned the idea of a trade and insisted like

McNamara a year earlier that since the North Vietnamese had always called for

an unconditional halt to the bombing, the administration would be wise to cut

back while not expressing conditions and see what the North Vietnamese would

do. Whenever Rusk would make this argument, however, Secretary of Defense

Clifford would object to cutting back the bombing without a promise of anything in return. Clifford suggested trading a cutback for an end to North

Vietnamese artillery shelling from the Demilitarized Zone and over it.61

Meanwhile, some of Clifford’s civilian subordinates got the impression

that their new boss was waging a one-man battle to persuade the President and

all his other top advisers to cut back the bombing of North Vietnam. During

Clifford’s confirmation hearings in January, his testimony on a possible bombing halt had first given Pentagon doves hope that he was not an irredeemable

hawk. Clifford had been asked about President Johnson’s San Antonio speech,

which had expressed a willingness to stop bombing North Vietnam when a halt

would lead promptly to productive discussions and if the North Vietnamese

would not “take advantage” of the halt. Clifford explained that the North

Vietnamese could continue their normal rate of infiltration of men and materials

into South Vietnam but not exceed it. The doves believed that making this interpretation explicit would inhibit Johnson from taking a harder line.62

The surprising sympathy with which Clifford heard the views of Pentagon

doves, together with their longstanding suspicion of Secretary of State Rusk,

led them to make some unwarranted assumptions about the discussions Clifford

was having with Johnson and his principal advisers. Soon after the end of the

administration, Townsend Hoopes would publish a memoir, The Limits of

Intervention, propounding the view that Clifford had turned the President

around. Clifford’s own account in Foreign Affairs would fail to mention either

his objections to Rusk’s bombing cutback proposal or even the fact that Rusk

had made the proposal which was adopted by Johnson.63

Both the President and his new Secretary of Defense were adjusting their

thinking during that difficult month of March, but they were headed in different

directions. Clifford was becoming convinced that it was time to begin extricating the United States from Vietnam. Johnson, on the other hand, was looking

for a way to salvage the war effort amid a more difficult political environment.

He needed to avoid the additional controversy sure to be caused by a big reserve

call-up and thus encouraged Clifford to propose a smaller one. Meanwhile,

Secretary of State Rusk moved to provide a new peace initiative that might

relieve some of the political pressure already weighing on the President. 

In the legend about Clifford’s conversion of the President, an important

turning point was a March 26 meeting between Johnson and several former

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government officials. From the early days of his administration, Johnson had

sought the advice or at least the support of men who had spent their careers

rotating between important posts in the government and lucrative posts in the

private sector, especially in prestigious law firms and financial institutions. He

was not very comfortable with this “Eastern Establishment,” but he tried to

draw from it as much political support as he could. To begin with, his principal

connection with such men was his first National Security Adviser, McGeorge

Bundy, who would invite the “Wise Men” (as Bundy dubbed them) to meet

Johnson usually one at a time. After Bundy’s departure from the administration,

Johnson relied upon Clifford (the Wise Man with whom Johnson was most

comfortable) to tell him which of the others could still be trusted.64

Prior to the March 26 meeting, Johnson had last met with the Wise Men as

a group on November 2. In preparation for that earlier meeting Clifford had

indicated that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson seemed hostile toward

Johnson and, in any case, could not be trusted to keep secrets. That got Acheson

demoted temporarily to a list of alternates, but not everyone on the November

invitation list accepted. As so often in the past, Robert A. Lovett (Assistant

Secretary of War for Air in World War II and Secretary of Defense during the

Korean War) pleaded ill health. In other respects, the President got exactly what

he wanted at the November meeting. Acheson and nine of his colleagues supported the President’s Vietnam policy; these supporters included two former

Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, Generals Omar Bradley and Maxwell Taylor.

Only former Under Secretary of State George Ball dissented, as he had from the

beginning of the war.65

Even at their November meeting, the Wise Men expressed some discontent

with bombing in the Hanoi-Haiphong region. The President himself indicated

that he might begin to reduce bombing there, and his San Antonio speech had

made clear his willingness to trade the bombing for productive talks. Dean

Acheson suggested trading a bombing halt for an end to communist attacks

across the Demilitarized Zone. General Taylor thought it would be much better

to trade the bombing for a lower level of enemy activity throughout South

Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy warned that weather made it difficult to relate

bombing pauses to “specific military actions” by the enemy.66

Bundy sought a more routine bombardment that would avoid cities and

civilian casualties. In a memo to Johnson after the meeting, Bundy recalled

the advice of Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War during World War II, who

had said that airmen would never pay as much attention to the question of

civilian casualties as they should; he had pointed particularly at Henry H.

“Hap” Arnold, Commander of the Army Air Forces in World War II. “I first

learned this lesson from Colonel Stimson,” Bundy wrote Johnson, “when he

was telling me how he was hornswoggled by Hap Arnold on just this point.”67

Before the Wise Men met in March, the kernel of discontent about the

bombing of North Vietnam had grown into agreement with George Ball that the

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United States should begin disengaging from South Vietnam. Only General

Bradley, General Taylor, and former Ambassador Robert Murphy strongly disagreed. Clifford knew that most of the Wise Men had changed their minds, and

he suggested that Johnson hold the March meeting. The President was also in a

position to know that the Wise Men would express themselves much differently than they had in November. Not only was he familiar with the change in

Clifford’s thinking, but Johnson had been talking to McGeorge Bundy and

Dean Acheson.68

Although Johnson may not have been surprised by the general tenor of the

advice he received on March 26, he was irritated about briefings that the Wise

Men received on the preceding evening from Philip C. Habib of the State

Department, Maj. Gen. William E. DePuy (Army) of the Joint Staff, and

George Carver of the Central Intelligence Agency. Johnson thought that those

briefings had drawn too bleak a picture of communist gains in the South

Vietnamese countryside after government forces had been withdrawn to fight in

the cities. As a counterweight, Johnson began his meeting with the Wise Men

by introducing General Wheeler and General Abrams (who was paying his first

visit to the President after selection as Westmoreland’s replacement). Both

Wheeler and Abrams had just come from a meeting with Westmoreland at

Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Wheeler insisted that everything had turned

around for the better since his February visit. Abrams stressed that South

Vietnamese government forces had performed very well and that in time they

would be able to assume a larger proportion of the fighting.69

While the President had a more positive view of developments in Vietnam

than did most of the Wise Men, he was as depressed as they were about political developments in the United States. He had already expressed interest in a

partial bombing halt as a way to mollify his critics, and he ensured that the

question of a bombing halt would receive plenty of attention by inviting Arthur

Goldberg, Ambassador to the United Nations, to meet with the Wise Men.

Goldberg had been urging a total bombing halt over all of North Vietnam.

George Ball, of course, agreed with him, as did a second new addition to the

roster of Wise Men, Cyrus Vance, former Deputy Secretary of Defense. Ball,

however, thought that the President should not raise the matter of a bombing

halt publicly until it had been suggested by the Pope or the Secretary General of

the United Nations. General Bradley agreed that a bombing halt was a good

idea if the Pope would suggest it. The rest of the group was more wary of stopping the bombing when Westmoreland’s forces near the Demilitarized Zone

were threatened by communist forces on both sides of the border.70

A partial bombing halt would permit Johnson to bomb communist forces

and supply routes north of the border—and still avoid the outcry that accompanied bombing near Hanoi and Haiphong. During the three days immediately

preceding his meeting with the Wise Men, Johnson had been talking to speech

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writer Harry C. McPherson, Jr., and Secretary of State Rusk about stopping the

bombing north of the twentieth parallel (which would free all of North Vietnam

except the panhandle from American attack). The meeting of the Wise Men at

least did not divert Johnson from this important ingredient of his televised

speech on March 31. Johnson told House and Senate leaders afterward that his

meeting with the Wise Men led directly to the speech. In his memoirs, however,

he would be at pains to show that the major points of his speech had taken shape

before his meeting with the Wise Men (and thus, Secretary Clifford’s role in the

speech was less than advertised). Johnson’s memoirs seem nearer the truth than

his effort at the time to associate the Wise Men with his decision. He frequently

called upon influential “advisers” to share the responsibility for a decision he

had in fact already made.71

The President’s announcement of a bombing cutback gained enormously in

its impact (at least on the American public) from its coupling in the March 31

speech with his statement that he would not run for reelection. He had raised

this possibility with his principal advisers as early as October 1967, but he

caught even them by surprise. In less than three days, his surprising speech was

followed by North Vietnam’s surprising agreement to meet with representatives

of the U.S. government. During the summer of 1967, Johnson had offered them

a complete bombing halt over North Vietnam for formal peace negotiations.

Now they accepted a partial halt for informal talks. Only two months after the

Tet offensive had seemed to shut the door on peace initiatives, the North

Vietnamese were at last ready to talk to American government officials.72

The first strong evidence that the North Vietnamese might be changing

their position had come in late February through the Indian ambassador in

Washington. The Central Intelligence Agency also reported on March 1 that the

North Vietnamese were ready to talk while fighting—in the belief that a bombing halt would not only help them rebuild their economy and their forces in

South Vietnam, but also help to discourage and thus destabilize the South

Vietnamese government.*73 

Hopes for peace talks had often been dashed before. Had Johnson been

rebuffed again, the bombing probably would have been resumed when the good

weather arrived in May—and it was at least conceivable that political opposition to Johnson’s policies might then have swollen so dramatically as to force a

rapid withdrawal from Vietnam. But the North Vietnamese chose a talk and

fight strategy which would permit Johnson’s successor a disengagement so

gradual that it could still seem possible for South Vietnam to survive free from

communist control.

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* In the summer of 1967, North Vietnamese planning for the next winter-spring offensive had apparently embraced the possibility that a successful offensive would lead to

negotiations while fighting continued. See Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the

Surprise (London, 1995), especially pp 67-86.
Had the North Vietnamese failed to respond to Johnson’s bombing cutback,

his opponents on Capitol Hill were ready to lay the blame at the President’s

door. During the brief interval between the March 31 speech and North

Vietnam’s positive answer, Senator Fulbright castigated Johnson for misleading

the country by promising to stop the bombing of North Vietnam “except in the

area north of the Demilitarized Zone.” How could the President’s promise be

reconciled with the next day’s naval air attack on a truck park near Thanh Hoa,

more than two hundred miles north of the Demilitarized Zone and less than one

hundred miles south of Hanoi?74

Senators Mike Mansfield, Richard Russell, and John Stennis rose to the

President’s defense on this point. They had been consulted by Johnson about his

speech before he made it, and he had told them that there would be no bombing

north of the twentieth parallel. Thanh Hoa lay just south of the twentieth parallel.

Senator Mansfield of Montana, the Majority Leader, pointed out that the

President was correct in his statement that 90 percent of the North Vietnamese

people lived in the region no longer being bombed. While Thanh Hoa was more

than two hundred miles from South Vietnam, the intervening panhandle was so

narrow that it constituted less than a third of North Vietnam.75

Senator Russell, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made

it very clear that he did not approve of the cutback and that he had advised the

President against it “unless there was some indication of reciprocity on the part

of the North Vietnamese.” But the President “as has often been the case in the

past” did not take the advice of his old friend Senator Russell, who had been

opposed to getting into the war and opposed to the way it had been fought. For

two years he had urged a naval blockade of the coast of North Vietnam. “We

have been about two years behind what we should have been doing in fighting

the war ever since it started.” Russell had “no solution of my own to bring the

war to a successful conclusion without considerable escalation.”76 He predicted

that the President’s speech would not lead to a “fruitful conference” with the

North Vietnamese—a prediction Senator Thurmond modified by warning that

another kind of peace talks might well be in the offing. During the Korean War

negotiations, Thurmond recalled, the United States lost almost as many men in

combat as had been lost before negotiations began.77

The character of President Johnson’s support in the Senate did not embolden him to stand his ground at the twentieth parallel. He may have regretted taking Under Secretary of State Katzenbach’s advice to delete any mention of the

twentieth parallel in the March 31 speech, but once challenged by Fulbright, the

President immediately retreated to the nineteenth parallel. Thanh Hoa and the

top third of the panhandle joined the sanctuary that then protected all North

Vietnam except a narrow strip less than 50 miles wide stretching from Vinh

south 150 miles to the Demilitarized Zone. 

A virtue of retreating to the nineteenth parallel was that it eliminated a possible source of friction between the Air Force and the Navy over bombing

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responsibilities. The eighteenth parallel evenly divided the new target area and

was also near the boundary between long-established route packages. The Air

Force’s Route Package One lay between the eighteenth parallel and the

Demilitarized Zone (at the seventeenth parallel), while to the north, the Navy’s

Route Package Two and part of Route Package Three were between the eighteenth and nineteenth parallels.

Into this relatively small area, the Air Force and Navy poured all the firepower they had formerly spread throughout North Vietnam. Some proponents

of the bombing cutback liked to present this compression as a very dramatic

improvement in the effectiveness of interdiction.* Secretary of Defense

Clifford had become a firm supporter of the cutback, especially once the North

Vietnamese had agreed to talk. His subordinates in the military were presented

with a familiar dilemma: having argued against the cutback, should they now

go along with their boss in looking for its bright side. As usual much of the military leadership decided that the new bombing policy had a lot of merit, especially in comparison with no bombing at all. 

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, told President Johnson

on April 9 that the United States had lost nothing by ceasing to bomb in the

Hanoi-Haiphong region, but that there was a need to bomb Thanh Hoa—that is,

return to the twentieth parallel. Given the cloudy weather that had not yet broken over the Red River Delta, relatively little bombing could be done there for

a few weeks, though conditions over Thanh Hoa were not much better. It was

certainly true that Thanh Hoa was increasing daily in importance as a supply

storage and transportation center. After all, it was the southernmost city in

North Vietnam no longer subject to bombing, and the North Vietnamese were

quick to take advantage of that fact. Wheeler may well have guessed (probably

correctly) that the President would be more likely to return to the twentieth parallel than to bomb the Red River Delta. In the old game of gradualism, the

objective was always the next little bit.78

Secretary of Defense Clifford attempted to stave off efforts to return to the

twentieth at first by downplaying enemy truck traffic through the North

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* This argument was also apparently made by Premier Zhou Enlai of China to censure

North Vietnam’s acceptance of peace talks in exchange for a bombing cutback. On 29 June

1968 in Beijing, Zhou reportedly said to Pham Hung: “In reality, recently, bombing has

become fiercer, concentrated on a smaller area, thus causing you more obstacles for your

assistance to the South. That you accepted their partial bombing, and agreed to talk with

them has bettered their present position compared with the one they were in in 1966 or

1967. Though you still maintain your principles in negotiation, you have reduced the

amount of their difficulties in this election year. It is the fault of the Soviets.” See Odd Arne

Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg, ed., “77

Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-

1977,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cold War International History

Project, Working Paper No. 22, May 1998, p 138. 
Vietnamese and Laotian panhandles. When the New York Times quoted him as

saying that he was “not aware of any increase in infiltration,” Clifford felt obliged

to draft a letter explaining to the President that this “reprehensible” reporting was

a willful misunderstanding of the way the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary

of State had decided to handle this question. Clifford and Rusk were merely saying that there had been an increase starting before Johnson’s March 31 speech and

that the increased flow had continued. “We are not taking the position that there

has been any specific increase since March 31 because that increases the burden

on the President for restricting the bombing as of that date.”79

Wheeler’s argument in favor of bombing Thanh Hoa was strengthened in

May when the communists launched a second offensive in South Vietnam.

Although this offensive was much smaller than the Tet offensive and focused

mostly on Saigon, the Johnson administration worried that something bigger

was coming from the North Vietnamese forces in and near the I Corps region of

northern South Vietnam. At the outset of the second offensive on May 4,

Secretary of State Rusk said that he was willing to bomb Thanh Hoa. Clifford

argued that they should save Thanh Hoa for a major offensive that might come

much later in the negotiating process. The President was not ready to return to

the twentieth parallel, but Clifford’s influence with him was crumbling. When

Clifford asserted that the May offensive was merely a reaction to the administration victory in getting the North Vietnamese to accept Paris as the negotiating

site rather than Warsaw, the President curtly remarked that the North

Vietnamese really preferred Paris.80

Attacks on Saigon prompted Ambassador Bunker to recommend that one of

the conditions for a bombing halt over North Vietnam should be an end to communist assaults on South Vietnamese cities. In Bunker’s view such restraint fell

within the meaning of President Johnson’s San Antonio formula—that the communists not “take advantage” of a bombing halt. When passing along Bunker’s

views to Johnson, Rusk suggested that the time had come to move beyond the

narrow Clifford interpretation of the San Antonio formula, which permitted the

North Vietnamese to do anything but increase their rate of infiltration (a rate that

had tripled since the President’s San Antonio speech in September).81

Toward the end of May the President seemed ready to bomb north of the

nineteenth parallel. He was much affected by Wheeler’s argument that the MiG

base at Bai Thuong (about twenty miles west of Thanh Hoa) posed a danger not

only to Navy pilots operating near Vinh, but also to American forces in South

Vietnam. The Chairman stressed that the North Vietnamese were using their

sanctuary, that MiGs and Il–28s were busy training—possibly for an attack on

the American air base at Da Nang. Wheeler’s proposal to bomb Thanh Hoa and

Bai Thuong gained in attractiveness when contrasted with his other proposal of

late May to send B–52s against communist forces and supplies in Cambodia.

Upon hearing Wheeler’s Cambodian initiative, the President declared that he

was ready to send the fighter-bombers back to the twentieth parallel and

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instructed Rusk and Clifford to figure out how to do it quietly. This quiet bombing escalation apparently eluded the Secretaries of State and Defense, if indeed

they bothered to look for it. Never again would President Johnson order fighterbombers north of the nineteenth parallel.82

* * *

Left with a smaller field of action, Seventh Air Force tried to make the best

of it. Chasing trucks in Route Package One was at least less dangerous than

bombing targets in the Red River Delta, and the North Vietnamese did less than

expected to change that situation in the summer of 1968. They did nearly double their antiaircraft guns in the panhandle to perhaps twenty-six hundred, but

most of their surface-to-air missile batteries remained near Hanoi and

Haiphong—with only four or five active sites near the nineteenth parallel.

There was no effort in 1968 (as there had been in 1967) to install missiles near

the Demilitarized Zone. Hence the Navy bore the brunt of the remaining SAM

threat as well as the MiG threat.83

The Air Force had only to worry about antiaircraft artillery, which was less

deadly when divorced from SAMs and MiGs. Nevertheless, Route Package One

boasted more guns than Route Packages Two and Three, and the Air Force lost

fifty-two aircraft there in the remaining six months of Rolling Thunder; fifty-six

of the men were not rescued, of whom only eleven came home at the end of the

war. These losses were slightly more severe than Navy losses in Route Packages

Two and Three, but much less severe than the two services had experienced in

Route Package Six (the Hanoi-Haiphong region). In some months, Route

Package Six losses had exceeded twenty per thousand sorties, while the rate

stayed below two per thousand in Route Package One.84

The North Vietnamese panhandle was, nevertheless, a much more deadly

place for pilots than the Laotian panhandle. In Laos the Air Force was beginning

to have some success finding and strafing trucks with guns mounted on a relatively slow, propeller-driven transport aircraft (a Lockheed C–130 Hercules), but

such a fixed-wing gunship could not survive in the North Vietnamese panhandle.

Nor could forward air controllers (FACs) use their customary light propeller-driven aircraft to look for targets and call in fighter-bombers. Instead the FACs flew

in two-seat F–100F jets. They were fortunate indeed to see a truck in daylight

from forty-five hundred feet at four hundred knots, and most North Vietnamese

trucks did not take to the road until after dark.85

A FAC could see better from the back seat of an F–100F than he could

from the back seat of an F–4, and the F–100F could loiter over the panhandle

longer. But the old F–100Fs were in short supply as they neared retirement. In

the summer of 1968, the Air Force began to supplement the F–100Fs with Da

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Nang F–4s for FACs working in Route Package One. The Da Nang F–4s did

well enough that subsequently Thailand F–4s would join them in taking the jet

FAC concept to Laos, where communist air defenses were improving.

Meanwhile, many F–4 crews were introduced to night interdiction. Only

the F–4s of the 497th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Ubon Air Base, Thailand,

had specialized in night work over the North Vietnamese panhandle. In the

spring of 1968, the Night Owls began to teach night flying to the other

squadrons in the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. Truck traffic on the roads in Route

Package One was plentiful enough so that aircrews claimed to see about three

thousand trucks a month in May, June, and July; of those sighted, they claimed

to have destroyed or damaged about 20 percent. Of course, the same trucks

were no doubt sighted repeatedly. No American knew how many were using the

roads, let alone how many had actually been destroyed.86

Many of the trucks moving south through Route Package One in the summer of 1968 were carrying ammunition and supplies for North Vietnamese

units located in and just north of the Demilitarized Zone dividing North from

South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had never had much problem infiltrating forces through the Demilitarized Zone, and perhaps thirty thousand of their

soldiers operated in the I Corps region of South Vietnam. Supplying these

forces through the zone was much more difficult than infiltrating them. Most

trucks with supplies for communist forces in South Vietnam went around the

Demilitarized Zone by driving west through the mountain passes into Laos. 

Because the arrival of heavy rain in May made truck travel on dirt and

gravel roads in Laos difficult, the North Vietnamese emphasized resupply of

units in South Vietnam during the dry northeast monsoon of November

through April. The southwest monsoon brought rain to the North Vietnamese

panhandle as well, but the amount was somewhat less on the lee side of the

mountains and the roads were somewhat better. From the North Vietnamese

point of view, the major problem with the seasonal character of their resupply

system was that the seasons favored American air attack in Laos. When the

roads were dry in Laos, there were relatively few clouds overhead to protect

the trucks from the planes. The fighter-bombers, however, rarely got such

good weather in North Vietnam, because the relatively dry northeast monsoon

produced heavy cloud cover along the coast and over the Red River Delta. The

best opportunities to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong had occurred during the

breaks between the heavy rains of the southwest monsoon when the skies did

clear. Hence the American bombing had focused on the Laotian panhandle

during the northeast monsoon, but during previous southwest monsoons the

American effort had necessarily been divided between North Vietnam’s panhandle and the Red River Delta. 

Even in the summer of 1967, at the height of bombing in the Red River

Delta, more than half of the Air Force’s fighter-bombers attacking North

Vietnam had bombed the North Vietnamese panhandle. Whenever clouds over

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the delta did not permit attack, Air Force fighter-bombers had been diverted to

Route Package One. Seventh Air Force had frequently argued that this practice

produced in Route Package One an overabundance of air power which might

better have been used in the Navy route packages farther north. After the bombing cutback in 1968, Seventh Air Force had the resources to double the number

of strike sorties sent into Route Package One to more than six thousand a

month. While absorbing Air Force sorties that had formerly struck the northern

route packages, Route Package One could be bombed without using a high percentage of attacking aircraft for suppression of enemy defenses. Occasionally

Seventh Air Force would send a big formation of strike aircraft with escorts into

Route Package One, but only to practice the technique in case the President

once again permitted them to bomb targets near Hanoi.87

Although Seventh Air Force thought of Route Package One primarily in

terms of interdiction, the Marines holding outposts just south of the Demilitarized Zone wanted close air support as well. North Vietnamese artillery in and

just north of the zone exchanged heavy fire with Marine and South Vietnamese

artillery units on hills south of the zone. As in many similar situations over the

years, the Air Force thought it could best limit North Vietnamese firepower by

interdicting the enemy’s supply of ammunition rather than by attacking the guns

themselves, which were well protected in their earthworks. A steady pounding

from B–52s had not silenced the North Vietnamese guns, and the Air Force

would have moved the target areas for the big bombers farther north had not the

Johnson administration feared to threaten the Paris talks with any change that

might be perceived as escalation of the war. Certainly Seventh Air Force did not

want to expend much of its fighter-bomber force on the border guns.88

Throughout northern I Corps there was a tug of war in progress between

the Air Force and the Marines over control of air power. Seventh Air Force had

long controlled aircraft from the Marine air wing in Route Package One, where

they contributed about a fifth of the interdiction sorties. Early in 1968 during

the massive use of air power to break the siege at Khe Sanh in I Corps, the

Seventh Air Force commander, General Momyer, became “single manager” for

fixed-wing air operations within South Vietnam, thereby gaining some control

over Marine in-country air operations. For the most part, Air Force and Marine

officers managed to cooperate reasonably well within complex control structures and under the pressures of interservice rivalry. Seventh Air Force tried to

coordinate air operations in I Corps, while interfering as little as possible in the

smooth close air support relationships that years of practice had developed

between Marine air and ground forces.89

During the first week in July 1968, Seventh Air Force joined a major effort

to destroy North Vietnamese artillery in and near the Demilitarized Zone, dedicating nearly half its effort in Route Package One to bombing the Cap Mui Lay

Sector on the eastern end of the zone. Encompassing the six-mile wide

Demilitarized Zone and an adjacent strip about the same width in North

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Vietnam, this sector ran from the coast for twenty miles inland. Beneath what

had been agricultural villages in the vicinity of Vinh Linh, underground tunnels

hid important military supply depots, while (above ground) mobile artillery

fired into South Vietnam from more than four hundred prepared positions; these

guns were defended from air attack by their own mobility, by antiaircraft guns

that moved among an even larger number of positions, and by surface-to-air

missiles. For a week the firepower of all four U.S. services made a coordinated

attack on the Vinh Linh area. The Marines and Navy carriers each matched

Seventh Air Force’s tactical air effort, and Strategic Air Command’s B–52s

dropped a greater tonnage than the tactical aircraft of all three services combined. To eight thousand tons of bombs, Marine and Army artillery and Navy

ship guns added more than forty thousand rounds (about two thousand tons).

While a smaller total than expended by a similar operation covering a broader

region along the Demilitarized Zone for six weeks in the fall of 1967, the effort

in 1968 was much more intense.90

The bombardment went on around the clock all week at the rate of a ton of

explosive a minute. Artillery spotters and forward air controllers were even able

to fly their light planes into the sector (without much concern for enemy fire,

but with great concern for friendly fire). While the joint headquarters for the

operation claimed destruction of nearly two hundred field artillery positions

and nearly eight hundred antiaircraft artillery positions, the Air Force estimate

of destruction was much more modest: about a hundred field artillery positions

and three hundred antiaircraft positions. Seventh Air Force doubted that most of

these positions were occupied when they were struck. Photography could confirm the destruction of only two occupied field artillery positions and eleven

occupied antiaircraft positions. The best that could be said with any certainty

was that for several weeks after the operation, North Vietnamese artillery fire

from that sector was much less frequent.91

Although B–52s continued to bomb enemy positions in and near the

Demilitarized Zone, Air Force fighter-bombers returned their focus to interdicting truck traffic. The new Army commander in Vietnam, General Abrams,

favored interdiction because he feared that the communists were preparing a

third offensive that would be bigger than their May offensive and perhaps surpass their Tet offensive. Since their earlier two offensives had depleted their

supplies in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese would have to depart from

their normal seasonal supply cycle if they were going to launch a third offensive

within South Vietnam in 1968.92

As usual during the southwest monsoon, the North Vietnamese had concentrated on sending supplies to units stationed just north of the Demilitarized

Zone. But even if they chose to invade across the Demilitarized Zone and abandon their pretense that there were no North Vietnamese soldiers in South

Vietnam, the communists would still need to prepare their forces within South

Vietnam for the struggle. That meant sending more trucks through Laos in the

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rainy season, and by early July traffic was growing on roads leading to the Mu

Gia and Ban Karai mountain passes along the Laotian border.93

Seventh Air Force attempted to block use of mountain passes by closing

the roads leading to them. The passes themselves, as well as the roads in Laos,

had been heavily bombed by fighter-bombers and B–52s, but were rarely closed

for more than a few hours. Early in the war, bombing sometimes blocked a road

with a rock slide, but repeated bombing of the same points had turned the rock

to gravel, which North Vietnamese road repair crews used to their advantage.

Despite this experience in Laos, Seventh Air Force thought that there were

places on the North Vietnamese side of the passes where bombing might close

roads at least for a few weeks.94

The most ardent supporters of road closing (as opposed to truck destruction) were air intelligence officers. Their capability of analyzing aerial photography had not been very helpful in the truck destruction campaign, since trucks

moved faster than film could be processed. Photo interpreters did sometimes

turn up evidence that a particular area in the jungle was being used as a truck

park, but pilots doubted that they were really bombing a target of value to the

enemy unless bomb detonations were accompanied by secondary explosions. In

the case of an interdiction choke point, the target at least stayed put and (once

chosen by intelligence analysts) was fairly easy for pilots to find—especially

after they had returned to it daily with more and more bombs.95

As trucks moved south from Vinh, they could take either Route 1 through

the coastal lowlands or Route 15 into the mountains toward the Mu Gia Pass and

Laos, a journey of about seventy-five miles. Trucks bound for the Ban Karai

Pass left Route 15 twenty miles north of the Mu Gia Pass and followed Route

101 forty miles south to Route 137, which crossed the mountains into Laos forty

miles from the Demilitarized Zone. Under the direction of Brig. Gen. George J.

Keegan, Jr., Seventh Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, analysts

chose one choke point on each of the three North Vietnamese roads connecting

Vinh with the mountain passes.96

Just north of its intersection with Route 101, Route 15 was a single lane

road winding sharply through steep cliffs. From the middle of July this Xom

Ve choke point was bombed repeatedly as was a less promising point on Route

101. Neither of these efforts was very successful, though the Xom Ve choke

point was thought to be closed almost a third of the time. More satisfactory

was a choke point on Route 137 recommended by Col. Frederick I. Brown, Jr.,

Chief of Intelligence for the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at Udorn Air

Base, Thailand. Route 137 bent around a cliff where a river passed underneath

the road and into a limestone cave. Brown had visions of damming the river

and flooding the road permanently. That did not happen, but whenever it

rained the road was covered with a pool dubbed “Brown’s Lake” by aircrews.

There was enough rain in late July to keep Route 137 closed two-thirds of the

time.97

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In August, Seventh Air Force added three more choke points to the target

list. The six targets were bombed so frequently that they soon looked like former

choke points in Laos that had been worn out by bombing. But interdiction bombing in Laos was performed during the dry northeast monsoon. The rainy southwest monsoon proved more conducive to the choke point method, since rain

turned worn out choke points into mud. Tropical Storm Rose of mid-August was

followed by Tropical Storm Bess and Typhoon Wendy in early September.

General Keegan was delighted with what he took to be the result: “A 90 percent

reduction of the enemy’s net logistic tonnage through-put into Laos was accomplished.”98 Years later Hanoi’s official history of the People’s Army of Vietnam

would acknowledge Seventh Air Force’s success helping the rain to cut roads in

the panhandle of North Vietnam during the summer of 1968.99

General Keegan’s confidence that he could measure the amount of truck

traffic from North Vietnam to the Laotian panhandle had been increased by the

introduction of electronic sensors to detect movement and sound. The sensors

were a legacy from former Secretary of Defense McNamara’s project to build a

barrier against infiltration into South Vietnam. Although “McNamara’s Wall”

had not been built, parts of the project continued to grow. South of the

Demilitarized Zone, Marines strengthened their major positions except for Khe

Sanh, from which they had withdrawn after breaking the communist siege. As

they had for the first time at Khe Sanh, Marines in northern I Corps used electronic sensors to warn of enemy movement. Neither the Americans nor the

South Vietnamese, however, came anywhere near constructing an impenetrable

line of fortified positions from the coast to the mountains.100

The western, mountainous portion of McNamara’s Wall had never been

intended to be more than strings of sensors monitored by the Air Force, which

would send aircraft to attack when enemy trucks and soldiers were detected. In

South Vietnam and Laos, sensors could be planted by ground teams or dropped

from the air. By the summer of 1968, Seventh Air Force was also dropping sensors into Route Package One. EC–121 radar surveillance aircraft from Korat

Air Base, Thailand, picked up sensor signals and transmitted them to a control

center at Nakhon Phanom Air Base on the eastern boundary of Thailand, just

across the Mekong River from Laos.101

Electronic sensors confirmed aircrew observation that there was much less

traffic on the mountain roads between North Vietnam and Laos. This result led

General Keegan to write that Seventh Air Force’s effort against those roads during the southwest monsoon of 1968 was “one of the most successful interdiction campaigns in modern history.”102 Not everyone agreed. Those who favored

truck destruction were embarrassed to find that the Navy claimed to have

destroyed or damaged nearly four thousand trucks from July through October

1968, while the Air Force could claim fewer than twelve hundred. This result,

however, did not flow simply from Seventh Air Force’s dedication of a fifth of

its sorties to bombing choke points. Fewer trucks were seen on the roads even

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in the Navy route packages, and still fewer reached Route Package One.103

General Abrams seemed less impressed with either closing mountain roads

or truck destruction than with the sharp decline in truck traffic throughout the

panhandle. But he may have given airmen more credit for that change than they

deserved. As early as August 23, Abrams informed Walt Rostow that air interdiction had been “the primary agent” in reducing trucks detected in the North

Vietnamese panhandle from more than 1,000 a day to between 150 and 200 a

day.104 This was misleading. In mid-July truck detections had briefly surged to

an unprecedented level, but the daily average for the heavy traffic months of

May, June, and July was only about 200 a day. Thereafter, detections fell below

150 a day for most of the next three months, a somewhat steeper decline than

had been experienced during the typhoon season a year earlier.105

President Johnson was glad to get evidence of an 80-percent decline in the

number of trucks detected in North Vietnam (the misleadingly large drop from

one thousand to two hundred). He released General Abrams’ data to newsmen

and also used it in a letter to McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow’s predecessor as

National Security Adviser and subsequently the youngest Wise Man. Bundy,

like so many others, was now calling for an unconditional bombing halt (that is,

stopping without getting anything in return from the North Vietnamese).

Johnson faced a party platform fight on this very issue at the Democratic

National Convention, which got underway in Chicago the following Monday,

August 26. Although student protesters fought police outside the hall, a badly

divided convention did manage to select Vice President Humphrey as their

nominee for President, with a platform supporting administration policies.106

In August the administration’s reluctance to halt the bombing was based at

least in part on an expectation that the communists would launch a third offensive. Meanwhile, a lull in the fighting throughout South Vietnam had spurred

the New York Times, among others, to ask why the President did not reciprocate

by halting the bombing. On August 19, the new Commander in Chief, Pacific,

Adm. John S. McCain, Jr., warned Washington that while the North Vietnamese

were ready to launch a third offensive, they might hold back in hope of encouraging Americans who were advocating a bombing halt. As the level of violence

increased for a couple of weeks in late August, including renewed rocket

attacks on Saigon, the administration was uncertain whether the third offensive

had at last arrived. If it had, it did not amount to much.107

* * *

Rolling Thunder was a one-term bombing campaign. It had not begun until

after President Johnson’s reelection in 1964. A few days before the 1968 election, Rolling Thunder came to an end, and its timely demise was almost enough

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to return the Democrats to the White House.* But prospects for peace and for

Hubert Humphrey dimmed considerably on the very first day of the bombing

halt, November 1, when President Thieu of South Vietnam told his National

Assembly that he was not yet ready to participate in the Paris talks. 

Thieu had gained the impression that the Republican candidate, Richard

Nixon, was less likely than Humphrey to let South Vietnam come under communist control. During the campaign Humphrey had put enough distance between himself and Johnson to declare that a Humphrey administration would

end the bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon’s position was more difficult to decipher. He had permitted his party to insert a peace plank in their platform, and he

claimed to have a secret plan to end the war. But the President of South Vietnam

did not have to rely solely on vague public statements when assessing Nixon’s

plans.108

For months President Thieu had been hearing about Nixon’s views from

the chairwoman of Republican Women for Nixon, Anna Chennault, China-born

widow of Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault. Her husband had served in China during World War II as commander first of the American Volunteer Group (the

“Flying Tigers”) and subsequently of the Fourteenth Air Force. The Chennaults

had moved to Taiwan with the government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, when

China fell under communist control. After General Chennault’s death in 1958,

Anna Chennault continued to build her connections with anticommunist political leaders not only in Taipei and Washington, but also in Saigon.109

Whatever Anna Chennault told Thieu or his ambassador in Washington,

Bui Diem, Nixon soon disappointed them all. Less than a week after his election, Nixon’s messengers, including Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen,

started to call upon Bui Diem with the message that Nixon wanted the Thieu

government to participate in the Paris peace talks. Anna Chennault refused to

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* The election was complicated by the strong third-party candidacy of Governor

George Wallace of Alabama and his running mate, General Curtis LeMay (USAF, retired).

They pulled nearly ten million votes (out of about seventy million) from the major party

candidates in a close election. Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1968

(New York, 1969) argued that Wallace would have done better had he not chosen LeMay as

a running mate, because Wallace supporters tended to be former enlisted men who disliked

generals like LeMay. To bolster this argument, White recalled meeting LeMay in China

during World War II: “Meeting Curtis LeMay, as I had in Asia, one could not but instantly

respect him then, and later, in retrospect, recognize how great a debt the Republic-in-arms

owed to him. But one could not love him; and the men of his command loathed the harsh,

unsparing, iron discipline by which he made the United States Air Force the supreme

instrument of annihilation it became in the skies over Japan.” There were, of course, many

enlisted men who recalled their service under LeMay with pride, and there were many voters who liked LeMay’s gruff talk about the need at least to threaten harsher bombing of

North Vietnam. LeMay’s friends thought it was a mistake for a man of his stature to run

with a politician known for exploiting racial bigotry. LeMay’s thinking about the election

seemed uncharacteristically muddled. He distrusted Richard Nixon, but preferred him to

Hubert Humphrey. See Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle (New York, 1986), p 445.
carry that message. Thieu held out until the end of November before giving into

the pressure he was getting from both American political parties. Years of talking in Paris then followed the years of bombing in North Vietnam, while fighting continued in South Vietnam with fewer and fewer American soldiers.110

President Johnson and his closest advisers may not have admitted even to

themselves that the Paris talks might be permitted to drag on for months, let

alone years, without a resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam. They

thought that their negotiating posture was based on the President’s speech in

San Antonio a year earlier, when he had offered a bombing halt in exchange for

productive talks. Somehow they accepted, in the end, merely North Vietnam’s

concession that the South Vietnamese government would be permitted to participate in the talks—no matter how unproductive they might be. 

When word of North Vietnam’s concession reached Washington in midOctober, Johnson and his advisers were surprised, delighted, and suspicious.

They knew that Hanoi was trying to encourage Humphrey’s election, and they

doubted that the talks would be productive. Secretary of State Rusk suggested

that they stop bombing and go along with enlarged, formal talks in Paris until

December 1, 1968. If a suitable peace agreement had not begun to emerge by

then, they should resume bombing. But Johnson did not commit himself to any

time limit. After all, the weather was already turning sour over North Vietnam

and would not improve for six months.111

The President tried to use both the promise of resuming the bombing and

the onset of the northeast monsoon to persuade his military leaders to support a

bombing halt. He invited the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff (not just the Chairman

as usual) to come to the White House on the afternoon of October 14. When he

asked for their views about a bombing halt, the Air Force Chief of Staff,

General McConnell, immediately raised the question of a possible resumption

of the bombing. Johnson assured him that if more bombing proved necessary

they would not merely resume—they would move on to unlimited bombing.112

The President and Walt Rostow explained to the Joint Chiefs that unproductive talks were not the only possible reason for resuming the bombing of

North Vietnam. The Paris negotiating team of Averell Harriman and Cyrus

Vance had told the North Vietnamese repeatedly that any bombing halt rested

on two “facts of life”: no attacks or infiltration across the Demilitarized Zone

and no attacks on South Vietnamese cities. The Joint Chiefs expressed considerable skepticism that the administration would resume bombing under any circumstances, particularly if the North Vietnamese merely stalled in Paris. This

sentiment was echoed by Senator Russell, Chairman of the Senate Armed

Services Committee, who participated in Johnson’s October 14 meeting with

the Joint Chiefs. Nevertheless, Russell said that a majority of his committee

would probably go along with a bombing halt.113

When Harriman and Vance returned to Paris, they insisted that the North

Vietnamese agree to meet with South Vietnamese government representatives

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the day after a bombing halt announcement. The North Vietnamese objected

because they wished to avoid public acknowledgement that the bombing halt

was anything other than unconditional; late in October, they at last reduced

from several weeks to a single week their proposed gap between a bombing halt

announcement and a meeting with the South Vietnamese. The whole exchange

was pointless since the South Vietnamese were not ready to meet with the North

Vietnamese anyway. Meanwhile, President Johnson had two weeks to stew

about the criticism he would get from Republicans and other Americans for

halting the bombing of North Vietnam on the eve of an election.114

Before announcing his bombing halt decision, President Johnson consulted

two more generals. General Abrams was summoned all the way from Saigon to

tell Johnson that a bombing halt was the right thing to do. Since General

Momyer had left Seventh Air Force that summer to take charge of the Tactical

Air Command (with headquarters at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia), he did

not have to travel so far to see the President. Like McConnell, Momyer wanted

to make certain that reconnaissance aircraft would keep flying over North

Vietnam. Johnson promised to continue reconnaissance flights and said that the

North Vietnamese understood this would be the case. His instructions to Harriman and Vance were to commit the United States to cease only “acts of force”

against North Vietnam rather than “acts of war.” In the State Department’s

view, reconnaissance was an act of war, but not an act of force.115

The President kept his word to Momyer about reconnaissance, but Johnson

also confirmed the foresight of those who doubted that he would resume the

bombing of North Vietnam. Even after the South Vietnamese government

agreed in late November to join the talks, nearly two months were spent arguing

about the shape of the negotiating table. The communists wanted a four-sided

table to proclaim that North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South

Vietnam were separate negotiating parties. The South Vietnamese government

preferred a two-sided table, with the communists together on one side. Four

days before the inauguration of Richard Nixon, the negotiators agreed on a

round table. Whether to resume the bombing of North Vietnam was a question

that then passed quietly to the man who said he had a secret plan for peace in

Vietnam.

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Chapter Six

Protective Reaction

The American bombing halt in North Vietnam encouraged people in both

countries to believe that the long war was nearly over. Only gradually did they

realize that the war had merely entered a new phase. Having suffered heavy

losses in the Tet offensive of 1968, communist forces in South Vietnam were

much less aggressive for the next three years. They could bide their time and

rebuild their strength while the United States slowly withdrew its forces. In

exchange for disengaging, the United States asked nothing at the negotiating

table in Paris and received nothing.

Meanwhile, the United States tried to build a South Vietnamese army that,

with the assistance of American air power, would be capable of stopping a

communist offensive. Although South Vietnam’s air force was increasingly

able to provide close air support for its army, a resumption of full-scale bombing in North Vietnam could be undertaken only by the United States. Whether

bombs would again fall on North Vietnam was a question to be pondered not

only in Washington, but also, of course, in Hanoi.

When the bombing ceased north of the nineteenth parallel in April 1968,

the North Vietnamese quickly began to restore their battered transportation

system. In three months, the Paul Doumer Bridge over the Red River at Hanoi

was carrying rail traffic once again. Hundreds of smaller bridges were rebuilt,

and locomotives pulled trains in daylight as far south as Thanh Hoa. After

bombing ended throughout North Vietnam in November, the railroad was

reopened between Thanh Hoa and Vinh. Thousands of boats operated free of

harassment along the coast and on the rivers, and thousands of trucks moved

rapidly on sunlit roads free of bomb craters. The road network grew especially

in the southern panhandle, so that trucks could delay crossing into Laos (where

bombs continued to fall) until they were just north of the Demilitarized Zone.

An oil pipeline, which had begun to appear in July 1968 while the bombs were

still falling, extended steadily southwest from Vinh through the Mu Gia Pass

into Laos. A second pipeline was then built from Quang Khe (a port about

ninety miles south of Vinh) passing into Laos just north of the Demilitarized

Zone. If bombing resumed, these oil pipelines would be even harder to hit in

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daylight than trucks had been at night, and trucks would be free to carry other

supplies.1

The rapidity with which the transportation system was rejuvenated contrasted with the leisurely pace of reconstruction elsewhere. Neither the North

Vietnamese nor their allies were eager to provide new targets for American

bombers. In the case of the Chinese, this reluctance was reinforced by a new

coolness in their relations with North Vietnam. China had opposed the Paris

negotiations, and the Central Intelligence Agency received reports that a Chinese

offer of combat troops had been spurned by North Vietnam. Indeed, many of the

more than one hundred thousand Chinese in North Vietnam had gone home. In

the absence of American bombing, they were no longer needed to work on North

Vietnam’s railroads or man its antiaircraft artillery. The Chinese also left behind

the ruins of their major industrial project in North Vietnam, the ironworks at

Thai Nguyen. North Vietnam postponed plans to open a steel mill there indefinitely and did not even attempt to resume production of pig iron.2

That the failure to rebuild Thai Nguyen was not merely the result of worsening relations with China could be seen by looking at other industrial projects

sponsored by the Soviet Union and its East European allies. Before Rolling

Thunder, Hanoi and Haiphong had been served by several coal-burning electric

powerplants tied together in a grid. American bombs destroyed the grid’s control switch and left the plants operating at less than a third of their former capacity. The North Vietnamese had turned to hundreds of small diesel generators

imported during the bombing, and (even in the absence of bombing) the bigger

plants only slowly and partially recovered. The North Vietnamese tried to hide

restoration of productive capacity by replacing bombed smoke stacks with

underground flue systems. Meanwhile, the control switch at Dong Anh was not

repaired, and construction progressed slowly on the Soviet hydroelectric project

on the Red River at Lang Chi, sixty-five miles northwest of Hanoi. Completing

this project would provide more electricity than all the old coal powerplants

combined. American intelligence estimated that the Soviets and North

Vietnamese could rush Lang Chi into production within nine months, but they

took three years.3

The citizens of North Vietnam were considerably less cautious than their

leaders. The government’s preference for dispersed population and industry

could not long keep former residents of Hanoi away from their homes when

bombs no longer fell on the Red River Delta. In any case, throughout the war

very few bombs had fallen on Hanoi itself, one of the safest places in Vietnam.

Although more than half a million people had left the city during the bombing,

within three years Hanoi exceeded its prewar population of about a million. So

quickly did they return, that their number often outran the government’s ability

to feed them, and a black market grew to fill the need. In Hanoi as elsewhere,

the passage of time dissipated euphoric expectations that the bombing halt

would soon be followed by the end of the war.4

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Hanoi’s problems were exacerbated in August and September 1968 by

typhoons that drowned the new rice crop and severely damaged the city. Unlike

American bombers, the typhoons made no effort to avoid Hanoi. On September

9, falling trees brought down power lines and cut off electricity for several days.

The city authorities responded to this emergency with remarkable sluggishness.

Many cranes, tractors, and trucks sat idle while too few rescue workers made

slow progress. One British observer noticed a victim pinned under a tree for six

hours and wondered how well the city would have handled an air raid.5

In Washington, the Johnson administration was pleased to end its management of the war by having nature do work that the political climate no longer

permitted bombers to do. Although not focused on particular targets, typhoon

damage was widespread in North Vietnam. With his usual enthusiasm, Walt

Rostow informed the President that the recent typhoons had probably done

more damage than six months of bombing.6

* * *

For a year and a half after the bombing halt of November 1968, the United

States limited its air attacks on North Vietnam to retaliation against air defense

sites that fired upon American aircraft. At the peak of Rolling Thunder in

1967, the United States had sent more than a hundred thousand attack sorties

to strike North Vietnam (not counting nearly as many escort, reconnaissance,

and refueling sorties). In 1969, there were about five thousand reconnaissance

sorties there, supported by more than fifteen thousand fighter sorties. While

contributing about 60 percent of the reconnaissance sorties, the Air Force provided fewer fighter escorts than did the Navy.7

The first reconnaissance planes to venture over North Vietnam after the

bombing halt flew without escorts. Fourteen sorties in four days penetrated the

panhandle before the North Vietnamese reacted. On the night of November 7,

1968, a Navy RA–3B was fired upon in Route Package Three. Although

President Johnson thereafter permitted fighter escorts, the North Vietnamese

continued to shoot. On the afternoon of November 23, an Air Force RF–4C was

hit by gunfire at about three thousand feet while attempting to photograph a surface-to-air missile site northwest of Dong Hoi. The crew of the escort fighter

could not see parachutes, but Capt. Mark J. Ruhling, the navigator of the

downed plane, soon contacted them on his radio and told them that he was surrounded by enemy forces. Ruhling spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, and

his pilot, Capt. Bradley G. Cuthbert, was presumed dead.8

Only two days later, another pair of Air Force planes ran into antiaircraft

fire near Dong Hoi while photographing a road from a thousand feet. This time

the escort fighter went down. Once again radio contact was made with the crew,

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Maj. Joseph C. Morrison and First Lt. San D. Francisco, but neither would

come home at the end of the war. Although Navy reconnaissance aircraft were

each escorted by two fighters (rather than the single escort at first used by the

Air Force), the Navy lost an RF–4C near Vinh, also on November 25. That

added up to three losses in only two days. In retaliation, American fighter

planes bombed the responsible antiaircraft sites. When Secretary of Defense

Clifford reported these developments at a National Security Council meeting,

he complained that it would be tragic if the reconnaissance problem was

allowed to derail negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris. But the

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, urged that reconnaissance of

North Vietnam was essential to the security of American forces just south of the

Demilitarized Zone in South Vietnam.9

President Johnson kept the reconnaissance program he had established.

American planes could retaliate when fired upon, but he did not choose to make

North Vietnamese attacks on American reconnaissance a reason for resuming

the bombing of North Vietnam. His emissaries did complain to the Soviet

ambassador in Washington and to the North Vietnamese in Paris. Although the

United States lost another plane in December (an Air Force RF–4 whose crew

was rescued), that would be the last loss for more than a year. The North

Vietnamese apparently decided not to press their luck, and thenceforth their

gunners rarely fired at American reconnaissance planes or their escorts.10

Contributing to Hanoi’s caution may have been concern about the new

Republican administration that took charge in Washington at the end of January

1969. President Richard Nixon was reputed to be one of America’s most ardent

foes of communism. He had first achieved national prominence in 1948 when,

as a young congressman from California, he played a leading role in the investigation of Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace and former State Department official. Nixon’s persistent effort to prove

that Hiss was a communist spy was the beginning of an enduring estrangement

from liberals, including many reporters. Their hatred of Nixon grew during his

harsh, successful run for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas.11

Despite his anticommunist rhetoric, Nixon had avoided being too closely

identified with the right wing of the Republican party. In the presidential race of

1952, when the party had to choose between Senator Robert A. Taft (the very

conservative son of former President William Howard Taft) and General

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon cast his lot with the more moderate and more

popular Eisenhower. It was a shrewd decision. Nixon had just turned forty

when he became Vice President.

During his eight years under Eisenhower, Nixon traveled the world. Once

again his anticommunist speeches were better publicized than his increasingly

sophisticated view of the world’s complexities. In the fall of 1953, he spent two

months touring an Asia where the United States and communist China had only

recently agreed to a cease-fire in Korea and were shifting their attention to

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To Hanoi and Back
Indochina. When Nixon’s plane touched down at Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces controlled the hills around the Red River Delta. After spending

the night with the French Commissioner General, Nixon flew on a French transport to a village on the edge of the delta. There he watched an artillery barrage

and dined on boeuf bourguignon served with wine. He was offended by the

haughty attitude of the French toward their Vietnamese soldiers, and he insisted

on visiting the Vietnamese mess and giving them the same pep talk he had

given the French.12

A few months later when the French were losing the decisive battle at Dien

Bien Phu, Nixon told the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in

Washington that he would favor sending American troops to Indochina if that

was the only way to save it from a communist takeover.13 His failure to succeed

Eisenhower in 1961, however, left it to Democrats to send American divisions

to Vietnam. When Nixon became President in 1969, the country clearly expected him to bring the troops home.

Yet Nixon had managed to avoid saying how he would end the war. His

secret plan echoed Eisenhower’s equally vague promise of 1952 to end the

Korean War. In recent years Eisenhower had made no secret of the fact that he

had threatened China with nuclear destruction. He told the press in early 1968

that nuclear weapons should not be ruled out in Vietnam, and he urged

President Johnson to prosecute the conventional air war against North Vietnam

more vigorously. When Nixon took office in January 1969, Eisenhower was in

failing health and died two months later—before he could witness the unfolding

of Nixon’s stratagems for ending the war in Vietnam.14

Far from threatening China with nuclear weapons, Nixon envisioned a normalization of relations with that country. In a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, he

had proposed that in the long run the United States should try to pull China

“back into the world community.”15 He warned that it would be a mistake to

enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union against China, for that would divide

the world by race. During the first year of his presidency, he had a chance to

take his own advice when the Soviet Union secretly proposed that Soviet and

American nuclear forces join in attacking Chinese nuclear plants. Instead of

taking sides, Nixon began to play one side against the other and managed to

improve American relations with both. Ultimately, this change in the international climate would enable the United States to bomb North Vietnam without

any risk of a reaction from China or the Soviet Union.16

Meanwhile, Nixon wanted to find some way to threaten North Vietnam

without stirring up discontent in the United States. After his election, even university students were relatively quiet about the war while they waited to see

what Nixon would do. Liberal journalists were reassured by Nixon’s selection

of Henry Kissinger to be his National Security Adviser. David Kraslow and

Stuart H. Loory of the Los Angeles Times had recently published The Secret

Search for Peace in Vietnam, which included a description of the Harvard pro157

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fessor’s role in negotiating with North Vietnam through French intermediaries

during the summer of 1967.17

Nixon met Kissinger in December 1967 at Claire Boothe Luce’s Christmas

party. Although Kissinger was then serving as foreign policy adviser for New

York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal rival for the Republican nomination, Nixon made a point of recalling that he had sent a letter praising

Kissinger’s first book ten years earlier. Indeed, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign

Policy had apparently persuaded Nixon that he and Kissinger thought alike. It

had also turned an obscure young instructor (denied tenure by the government

department at Harvard) into a celebrated strategist whose wisdom was prized in

Washington as well as Cambridge.18

The book responded to worries about the strategy of massive retaliation,

which sought to deter communist expansion by threatening all-out nuclear

attack on the Soviet Union. Kissinger agreed with those who claimed that such

threats were not credible, but he offered an alternative to the great expense of

matching Soviet strength in conventional forces. Kissinger advocated reliance

on tactical nuclear weapons that he thought would deter or, if necessary, win

wars without escalation to strategic nuclear weapons. In Kissinger’s view, a

limited war might also be a war fought with tactical nuclear weapons.19

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy won Kissinger more friends among

politicians and civilian defense thinkers than among military officers. They

mistrusted the work of civilian strategists in general, and Kissinger tied his

strategic thinking to a proposal for reorganizing the Department of Defense.

He wanted to replace the services with a strategic force (commanded by an air

officer) and a tactical force (commanded by a ground officer). “It may well

be,” Kissinger wrote, “that the separation of the Army and the Air Force in

1948 [sic] occurred two decades too late and at the precise moment when the

distinction between ground and air strategy was becoming obsolescent.”20 It

would have been better, he thought, to “mix the two organizations more thoroughly.”21

A Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Kissinger knew a lot about

European politics and history, but much less about Asia. In 1965 he was invited

to visit South Vietnam by the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge.

During this and subsequent visits, Kissinger grew skeptical about prospects for

an American military triumph. On the other hand, he believed that the United

States had committed too much of its resources and prestige to abandon South

Vietnam. He hoped that a way out might be found through negotiations.22

Kissinger’s role in secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese during

the summer of 1967 strengthened his connections with the Johnson administration. When open negotiations began in Paris the next year, Kissinger maintained his contacts there and at the State Department. The Johnson administration’s negotiating team would have been disturbed to learn that Kissinger was

passing information acquired in this way to the Republican presidential candi158

To Hanoi and Back
date. While not giving Nixon details of the negotiations, Kissinger did warn

him during the campaign that a bombing halt might be near.23

Shortly after President Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam,

Kissinger submitted an article entitled “The Viet Nam Negotiations” to Foreign

Affairs, which published it in the wake of Nixon’s announcement that Kissinger

would be his National Security Adviser. It was, consequently, an article thoroughly and widely scrutinized for clues to the new administration’s policy.

While making no criticism of President Johnson for halting the bombing,

Kissinger stated that Hanoi should have “little doubt that the bombing halt

would not survive if it disregarded the points publically [sic] stated by Secretary

Rusk and President Johnson,” that is, if North Vietnam violated the Demilitarized Zone or attacked South Vietnamese cities.24

Kissinger did criticize the Johnson administration for insisting on

Saigon’s participation in the Paris talks. While he thought that the shape of

South Vietnam’s government should ultimately be a matter for the Vietnamese

to work out on their own, the “mutual withdrawal” of American and North

Vietnamese forces could best be discussed by those two countries independently. The growing hostility in relations between the Soviet Union and China

should somehow impel North Vietnam to seek a settlement with the United

States. However, if the North Vietnamese refused to withdraw, then “we

should seek to achieve as many of our objectives as possible unilaterally” by

avoiding American casualties, strengthening the South Vietnamese army, and

withdrawing at least part of our forces.25 This would prove to be the fatal

weakness of the Nixon administration’s policy: the North Vietnamese had no

incentive to withdraw so long as they thought that the Americans were going

to withdraw unilaterally.

While scattering reassuring words in several directions, the Kissinger article fell far short of delivering a plan for peace in Vietnam, and Nixon’s “secret

plan” remained secret. Indeed, a major attribute of administration plans and

decisions on Vietnam would be extreme secrecy that would permit participation

to spread as little beyond Nixon and Kissinger as possible. Nixon distrusted the

bureaucracy’s ability to keep secrets and its loyalty to him. Even the Secretary

of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence

would often be left in the dark. Director Helms was a holdover from the

Johnson administration retained largely at Kissinger’s insistence. William P.

Rogers, the new Secretary of State, had been Attorney General in the Eisenhower administration and knew little about foreign affairs. His appointment

proclaimed Nixon’s intention to be his own Secretary of State. For Secretary of

Defense, Nixon had wanted Senator Henry M. Jackson (Democrat, Washington), who could be counted on to help win votes in a Democratic Congress.

When Jackson turned the President down, Nixon turned to Congressman

Melvin R. Laird (Republican, Wisconsin), longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee.26

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Laird proved to be the most formidable member of the new cabinet. Nixon

and Kissinger could not entirely exclude Laird from their deliberations, because

he had many allies in the Congress and in the Republican Party at large. He was

a very forceful Secretary of Defense, but better liked by the service chiefs of

staff than his immediate predecessors because he paid more heed to military

advice. The principal purveyor of that advice to Nixon as well as to Laird might

have been the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, had it not been

for his declining health and Laird’s determination that the Secretary of Defense

should be the conduit of such advice to the President. Among the service chiefs

an increasingly influential role was assumed by Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the

Chief of Naval Operations, who replaced Wheeler as Chairman in 1970.27

When General McConnell, the Air Force Chief of Staff, retired in the summer of 1969, he was replaced by his Vice Chief, General Ryan, who had come

from Pacific Air Forces the previous summer. Although McConnell had

groomed Ryan to take the top job, the two men were very different. While subordinates often encountered a crusty McConnell, he had enjoyed warm relations with many Washington politicians, including President Johnson. Neither

Nixon nor Ryan were suited to such cordiality, and Ryan’s aloofness may well

have lost his service some support on Capitol Hill. But the new Air Force Secretary, Robert C. Seamans, Jr. (an aeronautical engineer from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology), definitely liked the change. After a few months of

dealing with a “salty” and inflexible McConnell, Seamans found Ryan to be a

refreshing change of pace: “I guess I’ve never worked with anybody that I respected so much, who was so direct and so open and so pragmatic.”28

Seamans also liked the man who was already expected to succeed Ryan,

Gen. George S. Brown. Formerly General Wheeler’s assistant, Brown had

moved to Saigon as commander of Seventh Air Force in the summer of 1968.

Even before taking over as Chief of Staff, Ryan told Brown that he was next in

line.29 They were both West Point graduates whose careers had got an early

boost from World War II. Brown had led a bomber group on the famous raid

against the oil refineries at Ploesti, Rumania, in August 1943, and after a little

more than a year he became a full colonel when he was only twenty-six. He was

still a colonel thirteen years later when he became executive officer for the

Chief of Staff, Gen. Thomas H. White. Brown’s calm, good-humored diplomacy kept him in the Pentagon as military assistant for two Secretaries of Defense,

first Thomas S. Gates and then McNamara. That Brown was able to remain on

good terms with both McNamara and White’s successor as Chief of Staff,

General LeMay, seemed miraculous and eventually led to Brown’s selection as

Wheeler’s assistant and subsequently command of Seventh Air Force.

The transition from General Momyer to General Brown as commander of

Seventh Air Force was an even more dramatic change than the Air Staff experienced in going from McConnell to Ryan. Momyer was an authority on tactical

air warfare, and he continually involved himself in the details of operations. His

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intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. George Keegan, would later recall that “Momyer

ran every aspect of that war and hardly used his staff.”30 Brown, on the other

hand, delegated authority. He had been too tall to become a fighter pilot, and he

claimed no special expertise in fighter operations. Handsome and athletic,

Brown took time for a daily game of tennis. He told subordinates not to bother

him with their problems unless they wanted him to make a decision they could

not make. A wing commander who called Brown in the middle of the night to

report an enemy rocket attack was quietly told to call back if there was something that Brown could do about the situation.31

When Momyer was in Saigon he had found himself in repeated disagreement with the commander of Pacific Air Forces, General Ryan. Brown was

more fortunate in this regard, not so much because his diplomatic skills were

exceptional or because Ryan had been replaced by Gen. Joseph J. Nazzaro, but

mostly because Rolling Thunder came to an end. Without Rolling Thunder, the

Commander in Chief, Pacific, and his immediate subordinates in Hawaii (the

Commander in Chief, Pacific Air Forces, and the Commander in Chief, Pacific

Fleet) lost much of their influence on the prosecution of the war. During Rolling

Thunder, the Pacific commander, Admiral Sharp, had reluctantly given General

Westmoreland control of air operations in Route Package One of North

Vietnam as well as in Laos—to the extent that the American ambassador in

Laos permitted military control there. From Brown’s point of view, Sharp had

thus written his successor (Adm. John S. McCain, Jr.) out of the war. Since the

manned tactical reconnaissance mission in North Vietnam continued to be conducted along the old service lines (Air Force in Route Package One and Navy in

Route Packages Two and Three), only in the Navy route packages did McCain

have much of a role. Unlike Momyer, Brown had to worry about only one military boss, Westmoreland’s successor in Saigon, General Abrams.32

Brown thought his principal achievement as Seventh Air Force commander

was persuading Abrams that at least half the air effort should be expended in

Laos. When Brown arrived in the summer of 1968, about 60 percent of the Air

Force’s attack sorties were going to South Vietnam. Brown thought that many

of these could be better used in North Vietnam or Laos. After bombing stopped

in North Vietnam, Brown made certain that Laos picked up the extra sorties and

not South Vietnam. As Abrams reduced the exposure of American ground

forces to combat, he was willing to divert more and more sorties to the interdiction campaign in Laos.33

Laos became the sole preoccupation of Air Force crews in Thailand, and

their lives became much safer. Aircraft losses dropped from nearly two hundred

a year to less than fifty (out of about six hundred U.S. Air Force planes based in

Thailand). Thailand crews still ran greater risks, however, than their counterparts in South Vietnam, and there was considerable resentment among the former when it appeared that the Internal Revenue Service might deprive them of

their income tax exemption for combat service. In South Vietnam, the income

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of all American enlisted personnel was exempt from taxation as was the first

five thousand dollars of every officer’s pay. In Thailand, only aircrews flying

over North Vietnam were eligible for this benefit. Since the United States continued to pretend that it had no forces fighting in Laos, the end of bombing in

North Vietnam threatened the tax exemption for aircrews in Thailand.34

General Brown raised the tax exemption question when he visited

President Nixon at the White House in early February 1969. Nixon was concerned that aircrew morale might have been hurt by the bombing halt. Brown

assured him that while there was a morale problem, it could be remedied by

maintaining the tax exemption. Nixon replied that depriving the Thailand aircrews of their tax break was “ridiculous” and told Kissinger to fix it.35

Brown came away from his conversation with Nixon impressed that unlike

every other civilian Brown talked to in Washington, the new President said

nothing about withdrawing forces from Southeast Asia. In fact, it was Brown

who counseled restraint and Nixon who seemed ready to do more. Since the

weather would have permitted little bombing of North Vietnam during the past

three months even without a bombing halt, Brown was able to say truthfully

that the halt had not yet really hurt the American war effort. When the President

wondered whether more could be done in South Vietnam, Brown cautioned him

against the political repercussions of permitting American casualty rates to rise.

Nixon seemed especially eager to curb enemy use of his sanctuary in Cambodia

and even told Brown that if Abrams employed “dirty tricks” in Cambodia, the

President would stand behind him.36

Nixon was perhaps surprised by Brown’s caution, since the new President

had already heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs voice his support for bombing North Vietnam. In his first meeting with the new President on January 30,

Wheeler had argued for bombing and Secretary Laird had argued against. The

rest of the Joint Chiefs soon made plain their agreement with Wheeler that

resuming the bombing of North Vietnam and mining Haiphong harbor could

bring the war to a favorable conclusion. But their opinion reached the President

together with the dissenting views of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and

the Central Intelligence Agency—both of which thought that North Vietnam

would not be intimidated and would be able to import whatever it needed across

the Chinese border under any bombing campaign. The replay of this old argument together with many others was staged by Henry Kissinger, who persuaded

Nixon to send the bureaucracy a long list of questions about the war. Many of

these questions were prepared by Daniel Ellsberg of the RAND Corporation,

who had been working on a history of the war for the Office of the Secretary of

Defense.37

The list of twenty-eight major and fifty subsidiary questions was ready

when Nixon was inaugurated, and on his first full day in office he sent them out

over his signature as National Security Study Memorandum 1. Kissinger, in this

way, made clear at the outset that his potential rivals throughout the government

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not only still disagreed about the war, but disagreed according to a pattern

established during the Johnson administration. The most positive view of the

ability of American military force to gain a favorable outcome in the war came

from the military and Ambassador Bunker. By contrast, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the State Department took

a much more skeptical stance.38

The familiarity of the bureaucracy’s responses could be partly attributed to

the fact that the new administration had yet to fill many appointed positions

with its own people. But those responses did indicate a continuity in thinking

about the war within segments of the two administrations. This continuity was

most striking in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. While the Joint Chiefs

of Staff found the new secretary to be a more congenial boss than McNamara or

Clifford, Laird was determined to get American forces out of Vietnam. He

hoped to do this by turning the fighting over to South Vietnamese forces.39

Before Laird could convince President Nixon to begin a unilateral withdrawal, the communists launched a light offensive in South Vietnam. On

February 23, 1969, just as Nixon was beginning a tour of the Europe, they

began to fire rockets into Saigon and other cities. But those cities were spared

ground attacks, while communist ground forces assaulted targets only in remote

areas. Although sporadic rocket attacks continued through March, this offensive was barely worthy of the name. It did demonstrate, however, that President

Nixon was not going to enforce the understandings upon which President

Johnson’s bombing halt was supposed to have depended.

President Johnson had publicly implied that the United States would

resume bombing North Vietnam if communist forces violated the Demilitarized

Zone or attacked South Vietnam’s cities. The Johnson and Nixon administrations had chosen not to react in that way against North Vietnam’s continued

infiltration of troops and supplies through the Demilitarized Zone. Rocket

attacks on Saigon could not be ignored, however, since they were given ample

coverage in the press. When Nixon was asked by a reporter on March 4 whether

the communists in Vietnam were testing the new administration, Nixon admitted that the rocket attacks might be “technically” a violation of the October

1968 understandings. But he was still considering whether the violation was “so

significant” that it would require a response.40

Another reporter then asked if a resumption of bombing might be an appropriate response? Nixon replied that there were “several contingency plans” but

that he would not threaten North Vietnam with mere words. He did not, of

course, reveal any of those plans, which included mining Haiphong and bombing targets in the vicinity. He told the press that he preferred to let his deeds

speak for themselves: “I will only indicate that we will not tolerate a continuation of this kind of attack without some response that will be appropriate.”41

The President’s only public response was sending Defense Secretary Laird

and General Wheeler to visit South Vietnam. Although General Abrams urged

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a return to bombing up to the nineteenth parallel, Secretary Laird found that the

communist rocket attacks were not sufficiently significant to warrant bombing

North Vietnam. General Wheeler agreed the enemy’s offensive was weak, but

thought an American failure to respond would confirm North Vietnam’s claim

that the bombing halt had been unconditional. The Chairman’s position on this

issue had little or no chance of overcoming administration reluctance to endure

the political uproar sure to follow renewed bombing.42

The Seventh Air Force commander offered a related reason not to bomb.

In General Brown’s view, the North Vietnamese might be trying to spur the

United States to bomb and thereby revive the antiwar movement. Brown sent

General Abrams a memorandum suggesting alternative courses of action said

to be less politically incendiary: “neutralize” enemy base areas near South

Vietnam’s borders in Cambodia and Laos; mine Haiphong harbor; blockade

the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. Brown’s options seemed likely to produce much more domestic furor than he indicated, but (as Brown knew)

Abrams and President Nixon were already strongly interested in eliminating

the border sanctuaries.43

Shortly after Brown had met with Nixon in early February, Abrams had

asked permission to send B–52s against the Cambodian sanctuaries. Of all the

ideas that came to the new President about Vietnam during the early weeks of

his administration, Nixon liked this one the best. Since the beginning of the

year, he had been talking with Kissinger about the enemy buildup in Cambodia.

The B–52 proposal offered a way to retaliate against North Vietnam without

arousing the war’s critics in the United States—if the B–52 strikes could be

kept secret from them. Secrecy seemed possible, because North Vietnam denied

that it had forces in Cambodia and thus would not be apt to complain about their

being bombed; in this respect the situation in Cambodia was very much like the

one that had long been characteristic of Laos. With Nixon’s approval, the

Strategic Air Command’s big B–52 bombers commenced a year of covert

bombing just over the Cambodian border.44

So began a cancer that would destroy the Nixon presidency and eat away at

the integrity of the Air Force. The Cambodian bombing was so secret that the

military’s normal classified reports were not trusted to protect it. Instead, those

reports were filled with false information about B–52 bombing in South Vietnam. Air Force officers began to lie for the President, and the lies did not stop

when, a few weeks into the bombing, the New York Times exposed it.45 Indeed,

that very exposure caused Nixon and Kissinger to authorize wiretaps on their

subordinates in hope of identifying those who were leaking to the press.46

Although the Secretary of Defense had favored bombing in Cambodia, he

was distrusted in the White House—as was his military assistant, Air Force

Colonel Robert E. Pursley, who had served in the same capacity under Secretaries McNamara and Clifford. Consequently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tapped Pursley’s telephones, but the wiretaps turned up nothing damaging

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to Pursley or to his boss, who continued to provide Nixon and Kissinger with

sometimes unwelcome advice for the next three years.47

Nixon’s suspicion of Laird did not inhibit the President from embracing the

Secretary’s efforts to put a better face on the administration’s actions. Some of

Laird’s descriptive phrases were adopted by the administration and the press.

Nixon saw merit in using Laird’s “Vietnamization” in preference to “DeAmericanization” as way of describing and rationalizing withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. Another of Laird’s useful phrases, “protective reaction,” was coined during his first visit to Vietnam. The New York Times reported that a hundred U.S. marines had occupied a few hills in Laos for a week.

When asked whether this was an escalation of the American war effort, Laird

refused to confirm the story, but said that American commanders had long had

authority to take actions necessary to protect their troops. In the months and

years to come, his phrase “protective reaction” would provide an all-purpose

label for a wide range of military activities, including American air strikes retaliating against air defense sites in North Vietnam.48

* * *

Except for the secret bombing of Cambodia, President Nixon had trouble

finding a way to intimidate North Vietnam without arousing American critics of

the war. During his first year in office, his threats remained empty, and most of

his actions revealed the weakness of his position. After his initial decision not to

resume the bombing of North Vietnam, Nixon’s next opportunity to display

greater toughness came in April 1969 when a Navy EC–121 radio intercept

plane was shot down off the coast of North Korea and all thirty-one crew members were lost. Arguing that this incident would be seen as a test of the administration’s resolve not merely in Pyongyang, but also in Moscow, Beijing, and

Hanoi, Kissinger supported a retaliatory strike against a North Korean airfield.

Secretary of Defense Laird urged restraint and, on his own, canceled all

American reconnaissance flights, not only near North Korea, but also near

China, the Soviet Union, the Mediterranean, and Cuba. Although Nixon was

furious with Laird, the President decided not to risk a war with North Korea.

Nixon would later say that he told Kissinger: “They got away with it this time,

but they’ll never get away with it again.”49

Knowing that withdrawal of American forces would undercut any influence he might yet have on North Vietnam, Nixon did not announce removal of

the first twenty-five thousand troops until June 1969. The long-awaited beginning of Vietnamization helped to quiet protests in the United States against

American search and destroy tactics, which had led in May to the bloody battle

of Hamburger Hill. At Ap Bia near the Laotian border, the North Vietnamese

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had not melted away into the jungle as usual but had chosen to stand and fight.

In repeated assaults on the hill, more than fifty Americans were killed. After

taking the hill, American troops then abandoned it, for their objective there and

elsewhere had not been gaining positions, but killing the enemy. Although

enemy losses were thought to be much greater than American and South

Vietnamese losses, American public opinion had turned against expending

American lives in this way.50

Less than a month before his first troop cutback announcement, Nixon had

gone on television to propose a cease-fire followed by withdrawal of most

American and North Vietnamese troops. Since the United States was beginning

to withdraw unilaterally, there was little incentive for North Vietnam to make

such an agreement and withdraw its forces. To give Hanoi the necessary incentive, Nixon decided in early July that he would secretly send an ultimatum.

President Nixon’s first messenger was Jean Sainteny, a Paris businessman

who had served as France’s Delegate-General in Hanoi. Nixon’s letter to Ho

Chi Minh urged peace, but Nixon instructed Sainteny to tell the North Vietnamese that unless there was a negotiating breakthrough by November 1 (the

first anniversary of the bombing halt) Nixon would resort to “measures of great

consequence and force.”51 Nixon’s ultimatum may not actually have accompanied his letter to Ho. North Vietnam denied Sainteny a visa, and he had to give

Nixon’s letter to Mai Van Bo in Paris. Kissinger, who served as translator for

Nixon’s conversation with Sainteny, would claim in his memoirs to have known

nothing about Nixon’s ultimatum for another two weeks. With or without the

ultimatum, a few days later the North Vietnamese proposed a secret meeting in

Paris between Kissinger and Xuan Thuy, their senior representative at the peace

negotiations.52

Kissinger began his covert negotiations in Paris under the guise of reporting to the French government on Nixon’s late July tour of Asia. The image of

weakness conveyed by Nixon’s tour may well have carried more weight in

Hanoi than his secret ultimatum whenever it arrived, but the President intended

his journey to advertise American strength. On July 23, he flew to the carrier

Hornet in the South Pacific, where he greeted astronauts returning from the first

visit to the moon. In an ebullient mood, Nixon told them that “this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation,” a remark he later had to

explain to the evangelist Billy Graham.53

From Hanoi’s point of view, Nixon’s confession of weakness came during

his press conference on Guam. The President proclaimed his determination to

avoid being “dragged” into other conflicts like Vietnam. In the future, allies were

going to have to fight their own battles short of nuclear war—perhaps with

American arms, but not with American soldiers.54 This “Nixon Doctrine” was

warmly received in the United States, but neither that reception nor the doctrine

itself could have done anything other than undercut Nixon’s threat of harsh

action against North Vietnam.

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During his visits in Asian capitals, Nixon told his hosts about his determination to take action if negotiations with North Vietnam did not begin to make

progress by November 1. Kissinger then presented Nixon’s ultimatum directly

to the North Vietnamese in Paris during the first week in August.55 At the end of

the month, a letter arrived from Ho Chi Minh rejecting Nixon’s proposals and

ignoring his ultimatum.56

Three days later Ho died at the age of 79. Since his heart had been troubling

him for several years, he had already delegated much of his authority to associates who had worked together for decades. Nevertheless, in Washington and

Saigon, some thought that a struggle might develop among Ho’s possible successors. Few were as optimistic as President Thieu, who told the press that if

party secretary Le Duan emerged on top, his moderate, pro-Soviet views might

permit a quick negotiated end of the war.57 This was a rather curious assessment, since Le Duan had led communist forces in the south against the French

and was usually said to be a leading proponent of total victory there. Although

Le Duan did appear gradually to gain the most influential position in the government, there was no obvious squabbling in Hanoi, nor any change in policy.

President Nixon wanted to find a way to make the North Vietnamese

believe in his ultimatum and respond to it. Kissinger’s National Security

Council staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been quietly exploring ways to

implement the ultimatum, including mining North Vietnam’s harbors and invasion as well as a resumption of bombing.58 Some attention may also have been

given to the possibility of using nuclear weapons for contaminating transportation routes with radiation.59 Unlike President Eisenhower’s handling of the

Korean War, however, Nixon did not try to end the Vietnam War by explicitly

threatening to use nuclear weapons. He did decide to let North Vietnam know

that he was considering invasion and mining Haiphong. Nixon leaked these

options to the press by briefing several senators.60

Nixon also tried to pressure the Soviet Union into using its leverage with

North Vietnam to end the war. When Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin

asked to see Kissinger in late September, the President and his National

Security Adviser staged a little performance. As they had planned, a call from

Nixon interrupted the meeting, and after putting down the telephone Kissinger

somberly told Dobrynin that in the President’s words the “train had left the station and was heading down the track.”61 Dobrynin replied that he hoped it was

a plane rather than a train, because a plane could still change course.62

In October, Nixon attempted to underline the seriousness of his ultimatum

to Moscow and Hanoi without contributing to the revival of antiwar protest in

the United States. On October 10, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General

Wheeler, ordered the Strategic Air Command and the unified commands to

begin a readiness test that would generate actions “discernible to the Soviets,

but not threatening in themselves.”63 General Bruce K. Holloway, the SAC

commander, nearly doubled the number of B–52s on ground alert to 144.

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Almost two-thirds of the rest of his bombers were loaded with nuclear weapons

on October 25, and two days later B–52s carried nuclear weapons on airborne

alert for the first time since January 1968 (when a B–52 crashed near Thule,

Greenland). But on October 28, the administration ended the readiness test.64

Nixon’s campaign to convince Moscow and Hanoi that he was serious about

his ultimatum had opened persuasively on October 13, the first day of the readiness test, when his press secretary announced that the President would make a

televised address to the nation on November 3. The timing of the speech was

meant to suggest the possibility that Nixon might use the occasion to announce

the dire measures he had been threatening.65 But the communists called his bluff,

and the first week in November passed without escalation of the war.

Nixon blamed the failure of his ultimatum on the antiwar movement, which

rose to new heights after a year’s quiescence. Since the bombing halt, student

unrest had mostly involved racial problems. After black students at Cornell

University got their way in the spring of 1969 by carrying rifles, Nixon was not

alone in fearing what a revival of the antiwar movement might bring. But the

threat of violence at Cornell, following the skirmishing between police and

demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago the preceding August,

caused the development of new tactics within the antiwar movement. During

the summer of 1969, organizers planned a nationwide “moratorium” for October 15, when people were asked to take time out from their normal routine to

protest the war. The idea was to involve as much of the American middle class

as possible—to shed the disreputable “hippie” image of earlier demonstrations

in favor of cleancut respectability. Those in sympathy with the moratorium

were asked to wear black armbands. In addition to marches, there would be a

range of other activities, including lectures and candlelight vigils.

Growing support for the moratorium on the east and west coasts seemed to

indicate that many Americans wanted out of the war immediately, without

regard to the consequences for South Vietnam. A Gallup poll found that more

than half the Americans surveyed favored withdrawing completely by the end

of 1970.66 President Nixon tried to derail the antiwar movement by announcing

a second installment of thirty-five thousand troops to be withdrawn from South

Vietnam. He also removed Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey (U.S. Army) as Director

of the Selective Service System. Ever since the United States had begun to draft

young men into the military during World War II, Hershey had managed the

proceedings, and during the Vietnam War he had become a favorite target of the

antiwar movement. Within a year, continuing withdrawals from Vietnam combined with a new draft lottery (that quickly exempted most young men from the

draft) would deprive the antiwar movement of much of its impetus, but Nixon’s

gestures in the fall of 1969 did less to curb it than to rob his ultimatum of any

weight in Hanoi.

North Vietnam’s leaders took undisguised pleasure in the American antiwar movement’s activities. The day before the moratorium, North Vietnam’s

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delegation in Paris gave the press an open letter from Premier Pham Van Dong

to “American friends” wishing them a “great success” in their “autumn struggle.”67 President Nixon would later recall that when he heard about Pham Van

Dong’s letter, “I knew for sure that my ultimatum had failed.”68

Not only was the moratorium of October 15 the first time the antiwar

movement had succeeded in coordinating major events in several cities simultaneously, but the same groups were already organizing much larger gatherings

for Washington and San Francisco in mid-November. Only two days after the

moratorium, Kissinger advised the President that perhaps it might be best to

postpone plans to act more forcefully against North Vietnam.69 On the same

day, Nixon got similar advice from a British authority on counterinsurgency, Sir

Robert Thompson, who suggested that the United States needed to convince

Hanoi and Saigon of its ability to stay, not escalate.70

The Soviet Union hammered home the final nail in the coffin of Nixon’s

ultimatum. On October 20, Ambassador Dobrynin presented Nixon with his

government’s agreement to enter into strategic arms limitation talks. At the

same time, Dobrynin voiced Soviet unhappiness with Nixon’s overtures to the

Chinese. Left unspoken was the bad time Nixon was bound to have with the

American press if he risked a Soviet arms agreement to escalate the Vietnam

War. Nixon took the opportunity to lecture Dobrynin at length on the Soviet

Union’s failure to help end the war. “If the Soviet Union will not help us get

peace,” Nixon threatened once again, “then we will have to pursue our own

methods for bringing the war to an end.”71 He added that the Soviets should not

expect much progress on other matters until the war was over.72

Having decided not to announce any dramatic new actions in the war,

Nixon was left with the problem of what to say to the American people on

November 3. Fortunately they did not know about his ultimatum, and he used

the occasion to shore up his dwindling support on the war. He reminded his

television audience that when the communists took Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, they had executed about three thousand civilians.73 He repeated

his offer to withdraw American forces from South Vietnam if the North

Vietnamese would do the same, and he read Ho Chi Minh’s letter rejecting that

proposal. But Nixon said that his plan for ending America’s role in the war did

not depend on negotiations with Hanoi. Through Vietnamization, he would

gradually replace American forces with South Vietnamese forces. If North

Vietnam ever tried to take advantage of this situation by introducing greater

force against the remaining American troops, Nixon promised that he would

“not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation.”74

While Hanoi now had plenty of reasons to doubt Nixon’s willingness to

make good on his threats, he appeared forceful and reasonable to much of his

audience that evening. He reached to them past the demonstrators who were

beginning to harry him as they had harried President Johnson. Nixon acknowledged that Vietnamization would take more time than protestors marching in

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the streets seemed inclined to give him, and he called upon “the great silent

majority” of Americans to support him.75

A Gallup telephone poll taken after Nixon’s speech found that more than

three-fourths of those who heard the President did support him.76 For the first

time more than two-thirds of the American people seemed to approve of

Nixon’s performance in the White House.77 His leading critic in the Congress,

Senator Fulbright, decided to postpone new public hearings on the war.

Representative James Wright (Democrat, Texas) and about three hundred other

House members signed his resolution supporting the President’s “efforts to

negotiate a just peace in Vietnam.”78 Nixon thanked his congressional supporters on November 13 by making speeches to the House and the Senate, his first

there as President.

As Nixon spoke on Capitol Hill, protestors were gathering in Washington

for the biggest demonstration ever held there, surpassing even the great civil

rights March on Washington of 1963. At least a quarter of a million people participated in 1969 and perhaps two or three times that many. Meanwhile, more

than a hundred thousand demonstrated in San Francisco, and there were dozens

of smaller demonstrations in the United States and Europe. In Washington the

three-day event began with a “March Against Death” from Arlington Cemetery

to Capitol Hill, where forty-six thousand marchers each deposited a placard

bearing the name of an American killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed into

one of forty black coffins. The bulk of the youthful crowd maintained the discipline sought by organizers, but a rough fringe element broke windows, damaged police cars, and flew a Vietcong flag over the Justice Department before

being scattered by tear gas.79

Although President Nixon had proved the existence of a relatively silent

majority, a large and influential minority was obviously becoming increasingly

vocal. The North Vietnamese government could take comfort in this, as well as

in Nixon’s failure to enforce his ultimatum. In any case, Nixon seemed committed to withdrawal—only the pace of withdrawal remained in question. A few

days before the big demonstration in Washington, there was a “solidarity rally”

in Hanoi addressed by visiting American antiwar activists Richard J. Barnet (codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington) and William Meyers

(director of the Lawyers Committee on American Policy Toward Vietnam in

New York). Urging immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces, Barnet said that he

and the North Vietnamese were fighting the same aggressors.80

* * *

November 1969 would have been a poor time to start an air campaign

against North Vietnam unless the big B–52 bombers were used against area tar170

To Hanoi and Back
gets. As occurred every November, the northeast monsoon began to cover the

Red River Delta with clouds and drizzle. Meanwhile, the sky cleared over the

Laotian panhandle and as the roads dried there, North Vietnamese trucks were

detected in increasing numbers headed south. By the end of the year, more than

six hundred B–52 sorties a month (40 percent of those available for all of

Southeast Asia) were dropping more than ten thousand tons of bombs on the Ho

Chi Minh Trail in Laos.81

Apart from political repercussions, another argument against using B–52s

over the Red River Delta was their vulnerability to surface-to-air missiles.

Earlier in the war, North Vietnamese SAMs had not bothered B–52s over Laos,

but on December 19, 1969, a site on the North Vietnamese side of the Ban Karai

Pass launched two missiles against a cell of three B–52s in Laos. One of the

missiles narrowly missed the third B–52. The Seventh Air Force commander,

General Brown, requested permission to bomb the offending SAM site and any

other SAM sites in North Vietnam threatening his forces in Laos. The

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, decided not to present this

request to Secretary Laird. But Wheeler did pass along another Brown request

to permit F–105G Wild Weasel aircraft to operate in North Vietnam.82

Since the bombing halt over North Vietnam, the two-seat Wild Weasels had

been limited to flying along the Laotian side of the North Vietnamese border, a

restriction that inhibited maximum use of radar detection equipment, radarseeking air-to-ground missiles, and other munitions against missile sites in

North Vietnam. President Nixon did not approve use of Wild Weasels in North

Vietnam until late January 1970. On January 28, a pair of F–105G Wild

Weasels escorted an RF–4C reconnaissance aircraft into North Vietnam. After

evading two SAMs launched from a site near the Mu Gia Pass, the Wild

Weasels dropped a dozen 500-pound bombs on the site. One of the Wild

Weasels then strafed a second site a few miles north of the first and was hit by

ground fire while pulling off the target. The pilot, Capt. Richard J. Mallon, and

the electronic warfare officer, Capt. Robert J. Panek, both ejected.83

An unsuccessful rescue effort came to a sad end less than three hours later

when a rescue helicopter orbiting nearby in Laos was shot down by a MiG–21’s

heat-seeking missile. The helicopter exploded in the air and all six crew members were presumed to have died instantly: Maj. Holly G. Bell, Capt. Leonard

C. Leeser, SMSgt. William D. Pruett, MSgt. William C. Sutton, SSgt. William

C. Shinn, and Sgt. Gregory L. Anderson. Nor would Captains Mallon and

Panek come home at the end of the war.84

Dismayed by these losses and disappointed that he had not been granted

permission to mount a campaign against missile sites near the Laotian border in

North Vietnam, General Brown resolved to make maximum use of the authority he did have. Since the fall of 1968, there had been little change in the basic

rules of engagement for operations in North Vietnam. Brown could send reconnaissance aircraft with escorts as far north as the nineteenth parallel. If fired

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upon by MiGs, SAMs, or antiaircraft artillery, the escorts could return fire—

unless the offending SAM or artillery site lay north of the nineteenth parallel.

Beginning in the summer of 1969, Brown sometimes authorized a flight of four

fighters to orbit in readiness to join a reconnaissance mission when attacked, so

that Seventh Air Force could react with more force than afforded by the pair of

escorts which then normally accompanied a reconnaissance aircraft. Now, early

in 1970, Brown took the advice of his second in command, Maj. Gen. Robert J.

Dixon, and expanded the reaction force to at least a dozen aircraft. An aide

would recall that this was one of the few times he saw Brown display much

emotion: Brown banged the table and declared he wanted “every damned plane

we can get airborne.”85

On February 2, 1970, Seventh Air Force had two RF–4C reconnaissance

aircraft (each with two F–4 escorts) fly over North Vietnamese SAM sites near

the Laotian border. Orbiting in Laos were fifteen other F–4s. Although one of

the reconnaissance flights was fired upon by antiaircraft artillery near the Mu

Gia pass, neither encountered a SAM. After the escorts alone bombed the

offending artillery, Seventh Air Force sent the orbiting force against another

artillery site near the Ban Karai Pass (midway between the Mu Gia Pass and the

Demilitarized Zone). That artillery site had fired on American aircraft in Laos

the day before, and reaction was permitted within twenty-four hours. General

Brown hoped that a SAM site north of Ban Karai would respond to so large a

force and it did. After launching a SAM, the site was bombed by eight F–4s led

by Col. Donald N. Stanfield, commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing

(Ubon, Thailand). This was an unusually effective strike: at least two missiles

were thought to be destroyed on the ground, while launch facilities and associated artillery sites were heavily damaged.86

Just a week after the Ban Karai strike, President Nixon not only extended

the time for reaction against fire in North Vietnam to three days, but permitted

preemptive strikes on SAM and antiaircraft artillery sites near the Laotian border. When bad weather prohibited any attacks on those sites during the first

week after his authorization, Nixon expressed his impatience—only to withdraw the authorization a day later. Early in March, he reinstated the three-day

period for permissible reaction and subsequently permitted reaction as far north

as the twentieth parallel, but he did not again give a blanket authorization for

preemptive strikes. Instead, he began to consider authorizing an air campaign

much broader in scope.87

The occasion for Nixon’s renewed interest in bombing North Vietnam was

the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk’s government in Cambodia by Gen. Lon Nol,

who wanted American forces to drive North Vietnamese forces out of his country. Having tossed aside Sihanouk’s delicate compromise between American

and North Vietnamese interests, Lon Nol was immediately at war with the large

North Vietnamese forces on the Cambodian side of the South Vietnamese border. For a year, B–52s had been secretly bombing those forces, and General

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Abrams had long wanted to send his soldiers against this enemy sanctuary with

its Cambodian port at Sihanoukville. Lon Nol renamed the port Kompong Som

and closed it to communist supplies. If Abrams could destroy supplies stored

along the border before Vietnamization stripped him of most of his own forces,

South Vietnam’s chances for survival would improve—as would those of Lon

Nol and American forces remaining in South Vietnam.88

When President Nixon decided to attack North Vietnamese forces in

Cambodia, he knew that he would face an uproar on Capitol Hill, in the press,

and on college campuses. He suggested to Kissinger that they might as well go

the whole way and resume the bombing of North Vietnam to include mining the

ports. Kissinger did not believe the President was serious, and brushed aside the

suggestion by commenting that they had a full plate already. But after the war,

Kissinger would doubt that he had given good advice on this occasion: “The

bane of our military actions in Vietnam was their hesitancy; we were always

trying to calculate with fine precision the absolute minimum of force or of time,

leaving no margin for error or confusion, encouraging our adversary to hold on

until our doubts overrode our efforts.”89

Although Nixon did not resume a full-scale bombing campaign against

North Vietnam, he did decide to bomb North Vietnamese supply dumps just

north of the Demilitarized Zone and near the mountain passes on the Laotian

border. During the first four days in May, when American troops joined South

Vietnamese troops fighting in Cambodia, Air Force and Navy fighter planes

flew more than seven hundred sorties against North Vietnam. Nothing like this

had occurred since the bombing halt of November 1968. The size of the operation overwhelmed North Vietnam’s defenses, and the Air Force and the Navy

each lost only one aircraft. Fortunately, both crew members of the downed Air

Force F–4D were rescued.90

Pacific Command intelligence officers believed that the May strikes had

been very damaging, but the evidence did not permit their estimates of

destroyed supplies to be more precise than somewhere between ten thousand

and fifty thousand tons.91 At any rate, as President Nixon had guessed, the public relations cost of the raids seem considerably lessened by their occurring in

the midst of the clamor over Cambodia. When National Guard troops killed

four students on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, students at hundreds of universities went on strike, and about one hundred thousand came to

Washington for the last major demonstration of the war.

In this context, the air raids on North Vietnam received relatively little

attention. When the press was informed about the just concluded raids on May

4, 1970, the Defense Department briefer did not know that the Navy had struck

the Mu Gia Pass area and therefore denied that this attack had occurred—an

error that was rectified the next day. But the press was given far more information about the raids than military officers in Hawaii put in their own classified

reports. In the insidious fashion set by Strategic Air Command’s falsified

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reporting about B–52 raids on Cambodia, Pacific Command and Pacific Air

Forces deleted the raids from their Top Secret reports. Pacific Air Forces’ long,

detailed monthly summary of operations in Southeast Asia, for example, stated

that there had been only three strike sorties sent against North Vietnam during

the entire month of May.92

Although the Nixon administration was more honest than that with the

press, there was plenty of deception for reporters as well. The administration

latched onto Secretary of Defense Laird’s “protective reaction” phrase to

defend the raids. There was a certain irony in this, since Laird was again out of

favor in the White House, this time for opposing the invasion of Cambodia.

Nevertheless, he was defending the administration in public and insisting that if

the North Vietnamese retaliated after the Cambodian operation by attacking

across the Demilitarized Zone, he would favor resuming the bombing of North

Vietnam.93

Several months earlier, Laird had applied the phrase “protective reaction”

to retaliation against North Vietnamese air defenses.94 By then, his phrase (originally applied to small Army operations from South Vietnam across the Laotian

border) was already closely associated with the end of search and destroy missions by American troops in South Vietnam—where “protective reaction”

implied that American troops would no longer go looking for trouble, but

would merely react when attacked.

During the first year of the Nixon administration, Vice President Spiro T.

Agnew had often served as the administration’s lightning rod in its battles with

the press. Once again he stepped forward to defend the President’s actions on a

television interview program. When asked about the raids on North Vietnam, he

said that American attacks there had “traditionally been ones that we call protective reaction. As far as I know, these attacks that you are referring to fit into

that category.”95 Secretary of State Rogers also emphasized that American air

attacks were directed at North Vietnamese air defenses, and Defense

Department spokesmen confirmed this view while indicating that the size of the

raids was new by calling them “reinforced protective reaction strikes.”96 No one

in the administration publicly admitted that, although air defense targets were

of course included, the principal targets of the raids were enemy supply dumps.

Despite the drubbing President Nixon took on campus and in the press during the Cambodian operation, he continued to hold the support of a majority of

Americans. A Gallup poll found that more than 80 percent of adults over the

age of twenty-one objected to students going on strike to protest “the way

things are run in this country.”97 President Nixon had finally taken a dramatic

public action which may well have surprised North Vietnam’s leaders. On the

other hand, the vigor of American dissent may also have reassured them that he

would be unlikely to take such action again. If the North Vietnamese came to

that conclusion, Nixon would prove them wrong.

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Chapter Seven

Prisoners and Other Survivors

On May 1, 1970, while American troops pushed into Cambodia and F–4s

bombed the panhandle of North Vietnam, more than a thousand American military wives and parents gathered in Washington to deal with the war’s special

impact on their families. Although some of their husbands and sons had been

imprisoned or missing in Southeast Asia since as long ago as 1964, no such

meeting had occurred before. The Johnson administration had discouraged

these families from organizing; they were told that quiet diplomacy was the best

way to secure the safe return of their men, whose survival might be threatened

by publicity. But the families grew suspicious of quiet diplomacy, especially

after an avalanche of publicity about the USS Pueblo (the Navy intelligence

ship whose crew was captured by North Korea in January 1968 and released at

the end of that year).1

The Nixon administration decided to join in publicly condemning North

Vietnam’s cruelty toward its American prisoners and failure even to reveal

which men it had captured. Secretary of Defense Laird unveiled the administration’s decision to publicize the plight of captured Americans in May 1969.

Three prisoners subsequently released by North Vietnam in August 1969 were

encouraged to tell the press about the grim realities of imprisonment in North

Vietnam—a subject that had been discussed only in classified debriefings by

six prisoners released in 1968. The American member of the United Nations

Commission on Human Rights complained about conditions in North

Vietnam’s prisons to a committee of the General Assembly in November 1969.

Meanwhile, wives of Americans missing in Southeast Asia visited the North

Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks in Paris to inquire whether they were

wives of prisoners or widows. They got no answer, and when Philip Habib

replaced Henry Cabot Lodge as America’s chief negotiator at the talks in

December, he devoted his entire opening statement to the prisoner of war

issue.2

In March 1970, Senator Robert Dole (Republican, Kansas) proposed that

the new National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in

Southeast Asia come together for a meeting at Constitution Hall in Washington

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on International Law Day, May 1. Many family members were flown to

Washington by the Air National Guard. Although Secretary Laird and Vice

President Agnew spoke to the group, much of the expected publicity was submerged in the controversy over Cambodia. But this was to be the first of many

national gatherings, and the League established an office in Washington to promote its interests.3

Senator Dole’s concern reflected Kansas’s military ties in addition to his

own experience as a severely wounded veteran of World War II. Fort Riley had

sent its First Infantry Division to Vietnam, and many of the Army’s field grade

officers had attended Command and General Staff College at Fort

Leavenworth. But it was McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita that had

trained F–105 pilots who attacked targets in North Vietnam.4

While few Americans missing in South Vietnam or Laos were thought to

be still alive, imprisonment seemed much more likely for the aircrews of more

than nine hundred aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. Although fewer than

a hundred of those men had been rescued, evidence of captivity had emerged

for about four hundred, and there was hope that some of the other missing flyers were also in captivity. As the replacement training center for F–105 pilots,

McConnell had not only contributed many of the prisoners and missing, but its

staff included officers who had fought in the skies over North Vietnam.5

A year after President Johnson’s March 1968 bombing halt in the HanoiHaiphong region, veterans of Rolling Thunder had flown to McConnell for

their first stateside “practice reunion.” They called it a “practice reunion”

because they declared that a “real reunion” could not occur until their friends

imprisoned in North Vietnam could join them. About a hundred pilots parked

their military aircraft on the ramp, while several hundred others came to

Wichita by commercial air or automobile. They partied for three days, adopted

a charter, and elected another Johnson, Col. Howard C. “Scrappy” Johnson, as

their president.6

Colonel Johnson had launched the first practice reunion in Thailand. When

he became the operations officer at Korat Air Base in 1966, his chief claim to

fame was that he had set an altitude record in the F–104. But he had also flown

F–51 missions during the Korean War, and he thought that men fought better in

the air if they knew each other on the ground. With the force attacking North

Vietnam scattered among several bases and aircraft carriers, coordination of the

air war was often too impersonal to permit a full sharing of ideas and experience. So Johnson persuaded his wing commander, Brig. Gen. William S.

Chairsell, to invite the other wings to a tactics conference at Korat.7

The Korat conference on May 22, 1967, was the occasion for an exuberant

release from the tensions of war. Visiting dignitaries were hoisted atop elephants and paraded through the base to the music of a marching band. Similar

gatherings were held at Ubon, Takhli, and Udorn before the bombing halt. Thus

was born the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association. They called them176

To Hanoi and Back
selves the River Rats, and they took as members all who had flown into Route

Package Six, plus all who were imprisoned in North Vietnam. Air Force, Navy

and Marine fighter pilots flew to the gatherings, and other participants in the air

war also came—helicopter rescue crews were especially welcome.

To differentiate the many squadrons represented, River Rats took to wearing “party suits,” flight suits in the squadron’s color with the most imaginative

insignia the wearer could create. The tailoring of these flight suits became a

major enterprise outside the gates of the Thailand bases. At Udorn, Maharajah

Clothiers grew into an establishment employing more than eighty seamstresses

who made party suits for officers from throughout Seventh Air Force. The

“Maharajah,” Amarjit Singh Vasir, formerly a civil servant in India, frequently

attended squadron parties wearing the appropriate party suit (bought by the

squadron). His clients (who included several generals) made him an honorary

six-star general, and the shoulders of his party suits bore the stars to prove it.8

Two favorite activities at River Rat parties were “dead bug” and “MiG

sweep.” At the command “dead bug,” the last man to assume the proper position (on his back with legs and arms in the air) bought drinks for the rest. Those

participating in a “MiG sweep” linked arms and attempted to knock down

everyone else in the room. When Navy pilots were present, “carrier landings”

were added—a wet table assuming the role of an aircraft carrier and a pilot

assuming the role of an aircraft.

High jinks and party suits were much in evidence at Wichita in 1969 when

Colonel Johnson became CINCRAT. But as before in Thailand, a more serious

purpose underlay the festivities. After the bombing halt and their own return to

the United States, the River Rats took as their new mission the welfare of the

families of friends killed, missing, or held prisoner in Southeast Asia. Members

were enjoined to check on those families and make sure they were getting as

much financial and moral support as possible. The River Rats raised money to

provide scholarships for the children of their unfortunate comrades; it was a

commitment the Rats would sustain for more than two decades until all those

children were educated.

By the time the River Rats met for their second annual stateside practice

reunion at San Antonio in May 1970, they had acquired in Thailand a “liberty

bell” that would not be rung until the prisoners were released. Like many other

Americans, River Rat families began to wear bracelets bearing the names of the

prisoners and the missing—with promises to wear them until the prisoners

came home.

In this way, the prisoners began to be seen as the most celebrated group of

heroes in a war that some Americans thought lacking in heroism. During earlier wars, fighter pilots had looked to aces as their principal celebrities, but in

1970 no pilot had yet shot down the requisite five aircraft. Although there had

often been a stigma attached to being shot down by another fighter, most of the

pilots lost in North Vietnam were shot down by ground fire. Those who took

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greater risks by diving lower to get better accuracy made themselves more vulnerable. For every prisoner whose lack of skill or experience may have contributed to his fate, there were others whose abilities were widely respected. In

any case, the length and hardship of the prisoners’ ordeal commanded the sympathy and respect of fellow fighter pilots as well as of Americans generally.9

Demands for return of the prisoners reverberated through American society. In June 1970 an exhibit of their living conditions opened in the U.S. Capitol

building. A life-size mockup of a North Vietnamese cell showed a prisoner

whose only companions were a rat and some cockroaches. Nearby, a mockup of

a Viet Cong bamboo cage showed a prisoner whose feet were shackled.

Although this exhibit made no attempt to portray torture, visitors were dismayed at the grimness of what they saw.10

The Capitol exhibit was provided by a young and wealthy Dallas businessman, H. Ross Perot, who, after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1953,

had made a quick fortune in the new computer industry. His interest in the prisoners and the missing had been engaged in 1969 when some of their wives

asked him for funds to visit the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris. Not only

did he provide those funds, but he immediately began to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to advertise the plight of the prisoners. For

Christmas 1969 he gathered tons of Christmas packages (with food, clothing,

and medicine) for the prisoners, but the North Vietnamese authorities did not

permit his cargo planes to land. The North Vietnamese also refused to meet

with him when he flew to Laos or Paris, and they turned down his offer of one

hundred million dollars in exchange for the prisoners.11

One result of Perot’s offer, together with the publicity generated by him

and others, was that the North Vietnamese knew without question that their few

hundred American prisoners were an asset whose value was increasing. By contrast, the North Vietnamese showed nothing but disdain for the thirty-six thousand communist prisoners in South Vietnamese hands and indicated no interest

in getting any of them back. North Vietnam would not even admit that about

seven thousand of those prisoners were North Vietnamese, for North Vietnam

continued to insist that there were no North Vietnamese forces in South

Vietnam. If the Americans wanted the return of American prisoners, the

Americans would have to trade something far more important than the communist prisoners in South Vietnam.12

When the Nixon administration offered to cut back B–52 bombing in

South Vietnam in exchange for the prisoners, the North Vietnamese said they

would take nothing less than the full evacuation of American forces from

South Vietnam—and even that they could expect to get anyway as the end

result of Vietnamization.13 After all, the Nixon administration was already cutting back B–52 sorties and withdrawing troops without any concession by the

North Vietnamese. It was not difficult to discern that, unless there was a sea

change in American politics, the Nixon administration would want to have

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most of its forces out of South Vietnam by the next presidential election in

1972. But the North Vietnamese were willing to trade the prisoners to have

their desires met sooner, for it was the essence of the Nixon administration’s

policy to prolong Vietnamization as long as possible (up to the 1972 election)

so that the South Vietnamese government would have some chance of standing

on its own.

The Nixon administration could not use the prisoner issue either to maintain American support for the war or to improve the situation of the prisoners

without increasing the negotiating value of the prisoners to the North

Vietnamese. But the administration’s negotiating position was already so weak,

it hardly mattered. So long as Vietnamization promised that American forces

would be withdrawn eventually in any case, the North Vietnamese had little

incentive to agree to the withdrawal of their own forces from South Vietnam.

And once American forces had all gone home, what was to stop the North

Vietnamese from simply keeping their American prisoners indefinitely?

In August 1970 President Nixon sought to heighten awareness of North

Vietnam’s mistreatment of American prisoners by sending Col. Frank Borman,

a former astronaut recently retired from the Air Force, as his special emissary to

fourteen countries (including the Soviet Union). Borman had come to Nixon’s

attention on Christmas Eve 1968 when the astronaut read to the world from the

Book of Genesis while orbiting the moon. Later he had made a good impression

speaking to a joint session of Congress and visiting several foreign capitals.

Now Nixon wanted him to perform in a similar way on behalf of the prisoners.14

The Borman tour came on the heels of revelations about harsh conditions

in the South Vietnamese prison on Con Son Island, fifty miles off the coast.

This facility had been built by the French (who called the island Poulo

Condore) nearly forty years before to house the colonial government’s most

recalcitrant prisoners (including Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho). Don Luce

of the World Council of Churches had persuaded two congressmen to tour the

prison. Augustus F. Hawkins (Democrat, California) was an early opponent of

the Vietnam War, which he condemned for soaking up funds needed by his

black constituents in the riot-torn Watts area of Los Angeles. William R.

Anderson (Democrat, Tennessee) was a retired Navy captain who had commanded the Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus. They were

both shocked by what they saw. In one building they looked down through

floor bars into concrete cells they dubbed “tiger cages.” Each cell held as many

as five prisoners (men or women) confined to a space measuring about six feet

by ten feet. One man claimed that his fingers had been cut off as punishment.

Others complained about being shackled so long that they had been paralyzed.15

By the end of July 1970, photographs of the “tiger cages” on Con Son

Island were featured in Life, and Gloria Emerson of the New York Times was

doing her best to spread Don Luce’s version of the story. Luce, who had gone to

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South Vietnam in the 1950s from Cornell University as an expert on sweet potatoes, now became a hero of the antiwar movement. He found an antidote to the

evil reputation the North Vietnamese were earning for their mistreatment of

American prisoners of war.16

When Frank Borman reached Saigon at the end of August, he too asked to

see the prison on Con Son Island. By then the “tiger cages” were no longer in

use and some had been torn down. He came away convinced that the only prisoners of war still on Con Son Island were a few convicted of crimes in the ordinary prison camps like the one he visited at Phu Quoc—camps frequently

inspected by the International Red Cross. In his speech to a joint session of

Congress on September 22, 1970, Borman urged once again that “we continue

to press for the use of the International Red Cross in inspection of the prison

camps in North Vietnam.”17

* * *

The International Committee of the Red Cross had sponsored a conference

in 1949 at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to draft new conventions for

the protection of war victims. One of these conventions governed the treatment

of prisoners of war. By 1958, the Geneva Conventions were accepted by both

North and South Vietnam, as well as the United States. But North Vietnam followed the lead of the Soviet Union in agreeing to the convention on prisoners of

war only with a most important reservation: North Vietnam did not accept article eighty-five, which stated that “prisoners of war prosecuted under the laws of

the Detaining Power for acts committed prior to capture shall retain, even if

convicted, the benefits of the present Convention.”18

Throughout its struggle with the United States, North Vietnam insisted that

the American airmen who fell into its hands were criminals, not prisoners of

war. Since the North Vietnamese called the bombing of their country a crime

rather than an act of war, they refused to comply with the pertinent Geneva convention—inspectors from the International Committee of the Red Cross would

not be welcome in North Vietnam. American complaints that the North

Vietnamese were failing to live up to provisions of the convention on prisoners

could be dismissed simply by noting that North Vietnam rejected the applicability of those provisions.

Even within the terms of its own reservation, North Vietnam’s treatment of

American prisoners was indefensible.19 Although North Vietnam threatened

them with prosecution, war crimes trials never took place in Hanoi. The British

philosopher Bertrand Russell did sponsor mock war-crimes trials in Sweden

and Denmark, but of course, his purpose was to foment international opinion

against the Johnson administration rather than to weigh the criminal liability of

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individual pilots.20 The best justifications North Vietnam could produce for

denying American rights under the prisoner of war convention were the confessions extorted by torturing prisoners in violation of that convention.

Without the protection afforded by the Geneva Conventions, Americans

captured in North Vietnam had reason to doubt that they would survive captivity. Bernard Fall’s widely read Street Without Joy described the deaths of hundreds of French prisoners in communist camps there during the early 1950s;

few of them were killed—most of the dead were victims of infection, disease,

and malnutrition. During their war against the French, the communist forces

often operated as guerrillas, and guerrillas rarely took prisoners or treated well

those taken. Before their war with the United States, the North Vietnamese had

inherited the French prisons and could more easily provide humane treatment if

they so desired.21

Instead the North Vietnamese not only ignored the Geneva Conventions,

but looked to Chinese and North Korean practices in the Korean War for a

model of how to treat American prisoners. The American public had been dismayed in that war when American airmen in Chinese prison camps confessed

to germ warfare. Although those germ warfare allegations had been discredited,

the North Vietnamese were eager to get at least confessions of intentionally

bombing hospitals, schools, homes, and other civilian targets. The North

Vietnamese became adept at using torture to extort such “confessions”—for the

most part without killing and often without permanently disfiguring their valuable American prisoners.22

North Vietnamese torturers commonly used ropes to pull a prisoner’s arms

behind him, squeezing his elbows together and increasing the pressure and the

pain—sometimes until his shoulder joints dislocated. Prisoners were also

forced to torture themselves: great pain could be inflicted simply by kneeling on

a concrete floor for enough hours. Prisoners who were injured when they ejected from their aircraft were tortured and denied medical treatment until they

“confessed.” Yet the prisoners who survived knew of only twelve men who died

in North Vietnam after capture. This at least was a welcome contrast to the

Korean War, when more than a third of seven thousand Americans captured

were known to have died—many because they did not receive adequate protection from sub-zero weather.23

A new prisoner might face the terrible initial weeks or months of his captivity shackled in isolation from other prisoners. When he yielded to torture, he

did not know that most of his fellow prisoners had also relented but had learned

to gather their strength to resist again. Sometimes even before his captors

relieved his isolation by giving him a cellmate, veteran prisoners made contact

with the new prisoner and taught him to communicate by tapping on walls or

writing messages on toilet paper with ink made from cigarette ash. For a few

prisoners who spent years in solitary confinement, secret communications were

especially cherished.

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The tap code was introduced to Hanoi’s Hoa Lo Prison by Capt. Carlyle S.

“Smitty” Harris whose F–105 was shot down in April 1965 while bombing the

Thanh Hoa Bridge. At this early stage the North Vietnamese had not yet begun

to torture their American prisoners, whose rapid increase in number soon led to

Harris being put into a cell with three other Americans. He taught them the tap

code he had learned in survival school at Stead Air Force Base, Nevada.

The code had not been a formal part of Harris’s training, but one sergeant

teaching the course had told a story about prisoners communicating by tapping

on a pipe. Thinking they had used Morse Code, Harris asked the sergeant how

they had differentiated between dots and dashes. The sergeant explained that

each tap indicated a letter’s position in a square matrix of five rows and five

columns. The letter “A” was signaled by one tap for the row and one tap for the

column; the letter “Z” by five taps for the row and five taps for the column; the

letter “K” was dropped from the matrix in favor of “C,” leaving only the twenty-five letters necessary to fill the matrix.24

The increasing number of American prisoners soon led to the separation

and relocation of Harris and his first three cell mates—spreading the tap code to

others. Over time variations of this code would develop. If transmitting hand

and receiving eye were close enough together, sign language could be used.

Capt. Kyle D. Berg, whose F–105 went down along with four others on July 27,

1965, had a deaf stepsister and taught his cellmates how to sign.25

Until September 1965, almost all American prisoners in North Vietnam

were kept in Hoa Lo Prison, which had been built by the French near the center

of Hanoi some seventy years before. Although the “Hanoi Hilton” (as

American prisoners called Hoa Lo) was big enough to hold at least four hundred prisoners, the North Vietnamese decided not to concentrate Americans

there. Instead a large part of Hoa Lo continued to house Vietnamese criminals,

while other facilities in and around Hanoi were converted to prisons for

Americans.

The largest of the improvised prisons was a former film studio at Cu Loc

on the southern edge of Hanoi; about two hundred prisoners could be kept there

in what they called the “Zoo.” A somewhat smaller prison was established in

some sheds on the grounds of a mansion that had been the French mayor’s

home. Here at the “Plantation” (or “Country Club”), foreign journalists and

American antiwar activists came to meet prisoners in the “Big House” (or

“French House”). A few cells were fixed up to show visitors. Prisoners being

considered for early release were sent to the “Plantation,” while some of the

least cooperative prisoners were sent to “Alcatraz,” a small jail behind the

Ministry of National Defense.26

Since it was possible that the United States might eventually bomb Hanoi,

dispersion of the prisoners may have been intended to ensure that some of them

would survive. On the other hand, one group of prisoners was deliberately put

in harm’s way during the summer of 1967, when they were moved onto the

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grounds of the Hanoi thermal powerplant. The plant was one of the few targets

ever bombed within the city. The North Vietnamese may have hoped that casualties among the prisoners might make the United States more reluctant to

bomb Hanoi.27

In any case, scattering the prisoners inhibited their attempts to organize.

Within each facility prisoners still sought to communicate and determine the

identity of their senior ranking officer. This dangerous responsibility soon fell

upon Lt. Col. Robinson Risner, a Korean War ace shot down in September

1965. After a couple of weeks at the Hilton, he was among the first prisoners

sent to the Zoo. Although he continued to be kept in solitary confinement, he

had already learned the tap code and was even able to have whispered conversations with a prisoner in a neighboring cell. Risner’s stay at the Zoo was a

short one of only a few weeks. His efforts to organize the prisoners and present

their demands for decent living conditions brought his early return to the

Hilton, where he spent the next month in stocks and was one of the first prisoners to be tortured.28

The prison authorities were on the lookout for signs of leadership emerging

among the prisoners and would torture and isolate anyone caught assuming a

leadership role. Navy Cmdrs. James B. Stockdale and Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr.,

frequently found themselves in risky leadership positions at the Hilton or the

Zoo or Alcatraz, as did Majors Lawrence N. Guarino and James H. Kasler (a

Korean War ace like Risner) at the Zoo. Such men took turns leading and suffering the consequences. Their fragile communication networks were sometimes disrupted, but rarely did American prisoners lack American leadership for

long. On the other hand, for more than two years the North Vietnamese were

successful in completely isolating from other American prisoners within the

Hilton four colonels captured in 1967 and 1968.29

The leaders among the prisoners were in their forties, while most of the

men were captains about thirty years old. A few of the older men were veterans

of World War II. Major Guarino had even strafed Japanese rolling stock on the

railroads around Hanoi, and Capt. Richard P. “Pop” Keirn had been captured by

the Germans; Keirn had been shot down on his tenth B–17 mission in Europe

and on his fifth F–4 mission in Southeast Asia— his fifteen missions led to

more than eight years in prison.30 Although the younger men had not joined a

military service until after the Korean War, they too looked to America’s recent

wars for examples of how a prisoner of war should behave. Filtered through

movies, novels, and training manuals, those examples contributed to confusion

among the prisoners who needed them.

For several days after arriving at the Hilton, Colonel Risner thought that it

was just a processing center and that he would soon be “moved to a compound

to start the life of a regular prisoner of war.”31 The Zoo was hardly what he had

in mind. Where were the open barracks in which prisoners played cards and

planned escapes? Clearly the relatively mild experience of American prisoners

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in Germany during World War II was not going to be relevant in Hanoi’s prisons. Even the deadly brutality of Japanese prison camps lacked the ideological

and propagandistic thrust of imprisonment in North Vietnam. The most appropriate reservoir of experience for American prisoners in Hanoi was the same

one the prison authorities there were using—the Chinese and North Korean

prison camps in the Korean War.32

Concern about the behavior of American prisoners in the Korean War led

President Eisenhower in 1955 to approve a Code of Conduct for members of

the armed forces.33 From its birth the Code was a compromise among the services. They did not agree on its meaning in 1955, and they continued to teach

their contradictory interpretations of the Code throughout the Vietnam War.

Consequently, Americans shot down in North Vietnam carried these disagreements into prison.

Article V of the Code stated that a prisoner of war was “bound to give only

name, rank, service number, and date of birth”—that he would “evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.” Ever since the Hague

Convention of 1899, international law had required that prisoners of war give

their captors name and rank; in 1929 the first Geneva Convention Relative to

the Treatment of Prisoners of War included service number, and the Geneva

Convention of 1949 added date of birth. These “big four” items of information

enabled countries at war to notify each other of the identity of those captured so

that the family of each prisoner might learn that he was alive.

International law did not require, of course, that prisoners refuse to answer

other questions. Every country interrogated its prisoners of war, and usually

elicited useful intelligence. In the Air Force’s view, Article Five of the Code of

Conduct was merely a restatement of international law with an added injunction

to “evade” giving information detrimental to the United States. While “evade”

seemed to imply that a prisoner was free to do more than simply refuse to talk,

Article Five’s blanket reference to “further questions” might mean that the prisoner should confine his answers to the “big four” or that he should not give

truthful answers to even the most trivial questions beyond the “big four.”34

The Defense Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, which had drafted

the Code of Conduct, also drafted a training guide to go with it. In this document the other services permitted the Air Force to have its way. Recommended

training included “the use of ruses and stratagems to evade and avoid the disclosure of important information.”35 Individuals engaged in special operations

were also to be taught “the use of cover stories.”36 But only the Air Force implemented these training recommendations. The other services maintained that

most of their personnel needed the simplicity of “the big four and no more”—if

they started talking they would not know where to stop.

While the other services were reacting to collaboration by young enlisted

prisoners during the Korean War, the Air Force was trying to deal with germ

warfare “confessions” by officers. During that war, the Strategic Air Command

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had given its aircrews training in answering the questions of enemy interrogators without divulging important information. None of the men who received

this training and subsequently endured imprisonment were among those who

confessed to germ warfare, but it was not clear how evasiveness had stopped

the Chinese from extorting lies.37

Most American prisoners in the Korean War had received an assortment of

conflicting guidance. At the beginning of the war the Joint Chiefs of Staff

authorized prisoners to divulge any information that the enemy already knew.

Even when accurately communicated to those who might need it, this directive

was hard to apply in practice and was soon replaced by an injunction to be

vague when talking to an enemy interrogator. In the wake of the germ warfare

“confessions,” Far East Air Forces ordered its men not to give the enemy any

information beyond name, rank, serial number and date of birth.38

After the Korean War, the Air Force discarded Far East Air Forces’ “big

four” reaction in favor of the Strategic Air Command’s training program in

ruses and stratagems. The Strategic Air Command’s survival school at Stead

Air Force Base, Nevada, was expanded into an Air Force survival school under

Air Training Command. Navy officers who attended the school complained

about its departure from complete reliance on name, rank, serial number, and

date of birth. The Air Force insisted that few men could hold that line against

torture and continued to teach fallback techniques which involved talking without divulging important information.39

But the problem for prisoners in North Vietnam (and earlier in North

Korea) was not so much safeguarding classified information as it was avoiding

exploitation for enemy propaganda. The North Vietnamese had ample opportunity to observe American air tactics and they had acquired American hardware

ranging from undetonated bombs to aircraft. The routine character of American

air operations over North Vietnam meant that as the war went on there was less

and less an American pilot could tell the North Vietnamese that they did not

already know. North Vietnamese interrogators lost interest in gathering intelligence, but they were increasingly interested in getting confessions of war

crimes.

However much or however little a prisoner talked, he might be required to

write a “confession” or tape one or recite one to visiting journalists. Most prisoners could be tortured into confessing, but many learned to sabotage these

confessions. While Navy officers may have been less prepared than Air Force

graduates of Stead for failure to hold the line at name, rank, serial number and

date of birth, some of the Navy prisoners proved especially successful in undermining North Vietnamese propaganda. When Commander Stockdale was

selected for a filmed interview, he pounded his face black and blue with a

mahogany stool. When Commander Denton was giving a filmed interview, he

blinked the word “torture” in Morse Code. When Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton

appeared before a group of visiting journalists, his face assumed a vacant

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expression and he complied with the North Vietnamese requirement that prisoners bow by bowing repeatedly and stiffly like an automaton; thanks to a Life

magazine photographer, the North Vietnamese were soon getting complaints

from around the world that they must be “brainwashing” their American prisoners. When Navy Lts. Charles N. Tanner and Ross R. Terry talked to a

Japanese television interviewer, they told him that Lt. Cmdr. Ben Casey and Lt.

Clark Kent had been court-martialed for refusing to fly missions. Upon learning

that “Ben Casey” was the fictional surgeon on a popular American television

show and “Clark Kent” was better known as Superman, the North Vietnamese

were considerably less amused than the American public.40

North Vietnam’s effort to use its American prisoners for propaganda purposes often seemed to backfire. Sometimes this was because the real target of

the propaganda was not in the United States or Europe but in North Vietnam

itself. The prisoners were trophies whose display could arouse the martial ardor

of the North Vietnamese people. When prisoners were first captured, they usually had to run the gauntlet in several villages whose inhabitants naturally

enjoyed beating a man who had dropped bombs in their vicinity. After bombing

began near Hanoi in the summer of 1966, fifty-two American prisoners were

paraded through a mob in downtown Hanoi and endured countless rocks, bottles, and fists. Film of this event spurred even the antiwar leaders in the Senate

(including Fulbright, McGovern, McCarthy, Morse, and the Kennedys) to warn

Hanoi not to put its American prisoners on trial for war crimes.41

Thereafter, the government of North Vietnam showed more restraint in displaying American prisoners. Often the government was content merely to put

their uniforms in a museum. At the end of 1969, for example, Hanoi opened a

large exhibit in honor of the air defense forces. Model aircraft on wires fought

above a relief map of Hanoi, from which little missiles arose as tape-recorded

antiaircraft fire boomed; a dozen aircraft models bearing American insignia fell

while a narrator described the capture of American “air pirates.” Col. Norman

C. Gaddis’s uniform was displayed together with the uniforms of two of North

Vietnam’s leading aces, Capt. Nguyen Van Coc and Capt. Nguyen Van Bai.*

Colonel Gaddis, the assistant deputy commander for operations of the 12th

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* By most accounts, at the end of the war Nguyen Van Coc was still North Vietnam’s

leading ace with nine victories. Nguyen Van Bai’s seven victories were matched or exceeded by Nguyen Hong Nhi (eight), Mai Van Cuong (eight), Pham Thanh Ngan (eight), and

Dang Ngoc Ngu (seven). There were ten other North Vietnamese aces, for a total of sixteen—all pilots. Only two American pilots and three weapon systems officers would

achieve ace status during the Vietnam War, all in 1972; see Chapter 9. While both an F–4

pilot and his backseater each received full credit for their kills, it was also common for several North Vietnamese MiG pilots to receive credit for the same kill. Indeed, when an

American aircraft went down, credit sometimes may have flowed simultaneously to MiGs

and ground fire. Then too, MiG pilots received credit for shooting down reconnaissance

drones. See especially Istvan Toperczer, Air War Over North Vietnam: The Vietnamese

People’s Air Force (Carrollton, Texas, 1998). 
Tactical Fighter Wing at Cam Ranh Bay, was shot down near Hanoi in his F–4

by a MiG–17 on May 12, 1967; the 12th did not operate in Route Package Six,

but Gaddis was visiting Da Nang and asked to go along.42

Although their propaganda about American prisoners could be clumsy, the

North Vietnamese sometimes used the sophisticated services of Wilfred

Burchett, an Australian communist writer who had disseminated China’s germ

warfare propaganda during the Korean War. After that war, Burchett had come

to live in Hanoi for a couple of years before taking up residence in Moscow.

During the Vietnam War, he returned to live in Phnom Penh and write books

and articles attacking the United States and glorifying North Vietnam. In March

1966 he conducted a filmed interview in Hanoi with Major Guarino, who stoutly defended American policy and conduct in Southeast Asia. When the interview was broadcast on American television, most viewers (including Guarino’s

own family) could not fully appreciate the great courage of the prisoner’s performance. Rather they could only marvel that the North Vietnamese permitted

such freedom of expression.43

By the spring of 1967 the North Vietnamese were preparing to take a bolder step to advertise their “lenient” treatment of American prisoners in a way that

could persuade the American public and divide the prisoners. One day the usual

dose of propaganda broadcast to the prisoners over loudspeakers included the

announcement that repentant prisoners might be permitted to go home early—

before the end of the war. Commander Stockdale dubbed this the “fink release

program” and the senior officers opposed it with the policy that all would go

home together.44

Lacking volunteers, the program’s first candidates for early release may

have been a dozen prisoners at the Zoo who were placed under a Cuban officer

they called “Fidel.” The Cuban’s approach was to torture these men until they

were so compliant that they would do anything—even express gratitude for an

early release and (most unlikely) not divulge their torture afterward. The North

Vietnamese never agreed that this was the sort of prisoner they would be wise to

send home anytime soon. Fidel’s experiment finally ended when he encountered two especially resistant prisoners. Major Kasler (still suffering from infection in a severe leg wound received when he ejected from his aircraft two years

before) and Capt. Earl G. Cobeil endured days of floggings. Cobeil went out of

his mind, stopped eating, and died.45

While Hanoi’s prison authorities sorted through their American prisoners

for suitable candidates to release, the Viet Cong freed three American soldiers

held in South Vietnam. They were sent to Phnom Penh, where they were turned

over to an American antiwar activist, Thomas E. Hayden. A founder of the

major left-wing student organization in the United States, the Students for a

Democratic Society, Hayden had just paid his second visit to Hanoi. On his first

visit in 1965 he had come as a junior partner of two historians, Herbert

Aptheker (a communist) and Staughton Lynd (a Quaker professor at Yale). In

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the fall of 1967, Hayden led a group of young activists, including Rennard C.

Davis (who would join Hayden the following year to organize demonstrations

at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago). Having hosted many such

visitors, the North Vietnamese took Hayden’s group to see the usual attractions—bomb damage, bombs that had not detonated, and American prisoners.

The activists quarreled among themselves about whether to believe a prisoner

who said not only that he was treated well but that he opposed the war. They

had been urging the communists to release some prisoners as a step toward

negotiations, and Hayden agreed to escort from Phnom Penh to New York three

American soldiers captured in South Vietnam.46

Three months later during the communist Tet 1968 offensive, Hanoi freed

three American pilots shot down over North Vietnam. This time the American

peace movement sent Father Daniel Berrigan and Professor Howard Zinn of

Boston University to escort the three. Berrigan and his brother Philip had persuaded many young men to burn their draft cards; these two priests would

themselves go to prison for destroying government records kept by a draft

board. At a press conference in Hanoi, Berrigan condemned American bombing

of North Vietnamese women, children, schools, hospitals and churches. While

all three pilots made obligatory statements thanking the North Vietnamese for

humane treatment and release, the most junior (Ens. David P. Matheny) was

alone designated by the North Vietnamese to talk to the press.47

The only way Americans could enter and depart Hanoi peacefully was by

means of the weekly International Control Commission plane from Vientiane,

Laos. Berrigan took his charges to Vientiane, where he planned to transfer them

to a commercial flight. But Ambassador William H. Sullivan met the

Commission plane when it landed and explained to Air Force Lt. Col. Norris M.

Overly (the senior prisoner released) that the White House preferred they return

by military air, which they agreed to do despite heated objections from Berrigan

and Zinn.

The willingness of Overly, Matheny, and Air Force Capt. Jon D. Black to

accept early release disgusted fellow prisoners, but Washington was eager to

get the intelligence they brought with them. Although the North Vietnamese

had been careful to select pilots recently captured and held under relatively mild

conditions at the Plantation, the three were able to convey useful information.

Thanks to the excellence of prison communications, they could name many

prisoners they had not met and recount examples of torture they had not experienced. Matheny had memorized more than seventy names and said that he himself had been subjected to the rope torture.

Overly spent most of his five months in prison caring for two badly injured

cellmates, Lt. Cmdr. John S. McCain III and Maj. George E. (“Bud”) Day.

McCain was the son of an admiral who would soon become Commander in

Chief, Pacific, and the North Vietnamese may have wanted Overly to convey

the message that McCain (who had broken three limbs and a shoulder ejecting

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from his A–4) was receiving good medical care. Overly did report that McCain

believed his surgeons were respected by other Vietnamese. On the other hand,

McCain had been beaten and denied medical attention until he agreed to talk

and his captors discovered the identity of his father.48

When McCain was put in Overly’s cell, Overly was already attending to

the needs of his other cellmate, Major Day, who despite a broken arm and

wrenched knee had managed to escape from his captors near the Demilitarized

Zone. While he struggled through the jungle for two weeks, Day was wounded

by an American bomb or rocket and by Viet Cong bullets. He made it to South

Vietnam before being recaptured and severely tortured to the point of breaking

his wrist. After the war and more than five years in prison, Day would come

home to receive the Medal of Honor.49

For fear of retarding negotiations and in the hope that more prisoners might

be released, the Johnson administration chose to keep quiet about mounting evidence of torture. That evidence was not limited to the testimony of released

prisoners. Other intelligence illuminated the grim recesses of the prisoners’

predicament. Instead of making public revelations, however, the Johnson

administration sought to protect intelligence sources.50

It did turn out to be the case that Hanoi’s periodic releases of American airmen stopped for three years after the Nixon administration permitted returning

prisoners to talk publicly about torture. By then nine prisoners (three groups of

three) had come home from Hanoi. The second and third groups took commercial flights from Laos to New York for fear of hurting chances for further releases by offending Hanoi and the antiwar activists. The second group included

Maj. James F. Low, one of the three Korean War aces imprisoned in Hanoi. The

other two aces, Colonel Risner and Major Kasler, led fellow prisoners in resisting their captors. Although Low was tortured at first, he was careful to refer to

the experience as “punishment” and to hide the fact that he was an ace. The

North Vietnamese had read about Risner and Kasler in the American press, but

they did not learn about Low’s aerial victories until after he was released in

August 1968.51

The third group of three prisoners was not released by Hanoi until August

1969. Since air operations (and therefore aircraft losses) over North Vietnam

had been curtailed in 1968, this third group had been held in captivity much

longer than its predecessors. They knew a lot about prison life in Hanoi, and

one of them, Seaman Apprentice Douglas B. Hegdahl, came home with the

approval of the prisoner leadership. Hegdahl was a special case in many

respects. He was not aircrew—he had fallen off his ship in the spring of 1967.

With this beginning, the North Vietnamese were inclined to view him as a stupid boy rather than a war criminal like the airmen. Hegdahl was bright enough

to play the role of dunce to the hilt.52

Hegdahl and the two officers in the third group had memorized more than

three hundred names of fellow prisoners. In addition to information of that

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kind, the three also brought a request for official guidance on the propriety of

accepting early release. Through a prearranged signal, the U.S. government

was to tell prisoners which of four policies they were to follow: no early

release; or early release of sick and wounded only; or early release of sick,

wounded and longtime prisoners only; or anyone is free to accept early release.

The bureaucracy wrestled with this question for months. Although against trying to give the prisoners guidance, the Air Force agreed with the Navy that the

fourth alternative was preferable to the others. The Army’s preference for the

third alternative was largely overridden in the ultimate compromise: “The U.S.

approves any honorable release and prefers sick and wounded and longtime

prisoners first.”53

When directed to introduce the new policy into training programs, Lt. Gen.

Sam Maddux, Jr. (Air Training Command) objected that it ran counter to

Article III of the Code of Conduct: “I will accept neither parole nor special

favors from the enemy.”54 This was precisely the view of the prisoner leadership in Hanoi. After the revelations of torture emerging from the 1969 release,

Hanoi did not give its American prisoners a chance to act on the new U.S. policy until 1972. In any case, most of them continued to believe that early release

was a violation of the Code of Conduct.

The prisoners’ stance on early release might have inhibited a gradual

exchange of prisoners had the North Vietnamese been so inclined. Following

North Vietnam’s first release in early 1968 of three American airmen, three captured North Vietnamese sailors had been returned to Hanoi on the International

Control Commission plane. Accompanying them were two American editors,

Harry S. Ashmore of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and William C. Baggs of

the Miami News, who had been asked by the State Department to seek a broader prisoner exchange. The North Vietnamese seemed uninterested, and in any

case this initiative was submerged in the excitement over President Johnson’s

bombing cutback and announcement that he would not seek another term.55

American visitors to North Vietnam tended to have more sympathy for the

North Vietnamese than for their American captives, especially because such

visitors disapproved of the bombing campaign that the prisoners had waged.

Prospective visitors likely to think otherwise were not given visas. During the

Ashmore-Baggs visit, the most famous Americans staying at Hanoi’s Thong

Nhat (Reunification) Hotel were CBS television correspondent Charles

Collingwood and novelist Mary McCarthy. In McCarthy’s case, lack of sympathy for American prisoners hardened into disdain. After talking to Colonel

Risner and another prisoner, she pronounced them “pathetic cases of mental

malnutrition” who must make their charming captors wonder about the quality

of an American college education—“naive, rote-thinking, childish.”56 She did

guess that the prisoners did not entirely trust her, but the suspicion that they

might have been tortured apparently never crossed her mind.57

Although Hanoi consistently rebuffed any proposal that would have

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involved the release of a large number of American prisoners before a ceasefire, the U.S. government continued to seek such an exchange especially after

the Nixon administration took office. Secretary of Defense Laird was sensitive

about having promised the prisoners’ families that the prisoners would not be

left stranded by Vietnamization. When American forces had left South

Vietnam, how much leverage would the United States have to get a prisoner

exchange? Laird sought an exchange as soon as possible, but of course, the

North Vietnamese had little incentive to cooperate other than the return of their

own men—an outcome they seemed in no hurry to achieve.58

In early 1970, Laird enlisted the State Department in his campaign to persuade the South Vietnamese government to release as many as possible of its

seven thousand North Vietnamese prisoners. President Thieu refused to release

any able-bodied prisoners without assurance that the North Vietnamese would

respond in a similar fashion, but he did send sixty-two disabled prisoners of war

and twenty-four fishermen back to North Vietnam in July 1970.59

Although North Vietnam made no gesture in return, Thieu agreed in May

1971 to send more than five hundred sick and wounded prisoners. After the

International Red Cross determined that only thirteen of these men wanted to

return to North Vietnam, however, the North Vietnamese refused to accept any.

It was an episode reminiscent of the Korean War, when the reluctance of

Chinese prisoners to go home was for two years an impediment to a cease-fire.

In both cases, the United States opposed forced repatriation and the communist

governments sought to avoid the bad publicity surrounding the refusal of their

men to return. There was also a superficial resemblance between the attitudes

toward release of North Vietnamese and American prisoners, but the Americans

desperately wanted to go home—all together—and their countrymen were

increasingly desperate to get them back.60

* * *

The same article of the Code of Conduct that enjoined American prisoners

of war to refuse “parole,” also urged them to “make every effort to escape and

aid others to escape.”61 In contrast to the very strict interpretation most prisoners made of the “parole” clause (extending it to almost every kind of early

release), they were inclined to water down the “escape” clause. Colonel Risner

discouraged escape planning in 1966 by insisting that escape would not be feasible without outside help.62 While Americans might be able to break out of jail,

they could not blend into the local population.

The best opportunities for escape occurred soon after capture, especially

near the Demilitarized Zone. In addition to Major Day’s almost successful

attempt, Capt. Lance P. Sijan had evaded capture for six weeks and after capture

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managed to escape briefly. But starvation, injury, and torture took their toll, and

Sijan did not survive to receive the Medal of Honor in person; he was the first

Air Force Academy graduate to earn that medal, and the Academy named a dormitory for him.63

Once a prisoner reached Hanoi, his chances for escape diminished. Only

two escape attempts were mounted there during all the years of American captivity. The first and most promising grew out of the North Vietnamese decision

to open a new prison in old buildings near the city’s powerplant while it was

under air attack in the summer of 1967. The prisoners called the main facility

“Dirty Bird,” because the powerplant’s coal dust covered everything. When

Navy Lt. (j.g.) George T. Coker and Air Force Capt. George G. McKnight were

put into the nearby “Dirty Bird Annex,” they saw opportunity in lax security

procedures and proximity to the Red River. On the night of October 12, they

removed the locks from their makeshift cell doors and stole away to the river.

The current helped them swim perhaps fifteen miles before dawn forced them

to seek cover on the bare, muddy bank. There they were discovered by peasants

and recaptured.64

An encouraging aspect of the Coker-McKnight escape attempt was the lack

of severe punishment afterward either for the recaptured men or their fellow

prisoners. But the next attempt would lead to the worst weeks of torture experienced by prisoners at the large Zoo prison on the south side of Hanoi. There the

abundance of airmen shot down in 1967 had led to the construction of an annex

filled with more than seventy junior officers. Many of them and their fellow

prisoners in the Zoo would suffer from the aborted escape of Air Force Captains

John A. Dramesi and Edwin L. Atterberry.

Although Maj. Conrad W. Trautman, the senior officer in the annex, had

grave doubts about an escape and refused to approve it, he could not bring himself to veto it. On a rainy Saturday night, May 10, 1969, Dramesi and Atterberry

emerged from the roof of their cell, crossed the prison yard, and climbed the

wall. Thanks to Atterberry’s experience as a telephone lineman, he knew how

to short out the exposed electric wires running along the top of the wall. While

the guards tried to get the lights back on by fiddling with the switch box,

Dramesi and Atterberry slipped over the wall and used provisions laboriously

gathered for months to disguise themselves as peasants carrying baskets on a

shoulder pole. They passed through the streets undetected, but fearing daylight

they hid in some bushes hours before dawn. There a few miles from the Zoo

they were found by the soldiers sent to look for them.65

Atterberry died at the hands of North Vietnamese torturers. Dramesi again

proved himself exceptionally tough. This was his second escape attempt—he

had embarked on his first with a bullet wound in the right leg and a sprained left

knee shortly after being shot down near Dong Hoi. Both times he survived his

punishment ready to plan another escape. But Dramesi’s intolerance of those

less able to withstand torture and his persistent advocacy of escape had already

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made him unpopular. Many who endured torture on his account grew fervent in

their opposition to escape attempts.66

The relationship between Dramesi’s second escape attempt and torture was

all the more memorable because this suffering was followed by a dramatic

improvement in prison life. For most prisoners there was little or no torture after

the death of Ho Chi Minh at age seventy-nine on September 3, 1969. Whether

replacement of the prison system’s commander and other positive changes

flowed more from Ho’s death or publicity about North Vietnamese torture, few

prisoners wanted to risk a return to torture for the sake of escape attempts with

little prospect of success.

If outside help would be necessary for a successful escape, as Colonel

Risner argued, then inmates of Hanoi’s prisons could not have much hope of

going home (on terms acceptable to most of them) before the end of the war.

Short of invasion, American forces would have a hard time extracting prisoners

from so well defended a city. Prospects for a rescue improved for prisoners held

outside Hanoi. In the spring of 1970, Air Force intelligence analysts used photography to prove that American prisoners were being held in a compound

about twenty-four miles west of Hanoi near the village of Son Tay.

Construction to expand the facility had drawn attention, and the prisoners signalled their presence by arranging laundry and piles of dirt.67

This was not the first time that a prison camp had been established at Son

Tay. During World War II the Japanese had imprisoned Vietnamese soldiers

there, and at that time Nguyen Cao Ky (the future vice president of South

Vietnam) was a boy in the village. Twenty-five years later in the summer of

1970, an American joint task group rehearsed a Son Tay rescue at Eglin Air

Force Base, Florida, where Air Force special operations training had been conducted throughout the Vietnam War.68

Brig. Gen. Leroy J. Manor commanded both the Air Force’s Special Operations Force and the joint task group for the Son Tay raid. His combat experience

dated back to World War II, when he had flown P–47s in Europe. While commanding the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing at Phu Cat Air Base, South Vietnam, in

1968, Manor had flown missions into Route Package One. His second in command of the Son Tay task group was Col. Arthur D. “Bull” Simons from the

Army’s Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Simons (a colorful veteran of World War II special operations in the Philippines) would lead the

raiders to Son Tay, while Manor oversaw the operation from the communications center on Monkey Mountain, near Da Nang. Night after night the raiders

practiced at Eglin with a Son Tay mock-up that was dismantled during the day

to prevent observation by a Soviet reconnaissance satellite.69

Manor’s task group was ready in October, but President Nixon decided to

postpone the operation until November—after the midterm election and after

Nixon had been able to make an overture to China for better relations. A

November date would also be further removed from Nixon’s October 7 speech

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offering a cease-fire (with all forces left in place) and an exchange of all thirty

thousand communist prisoners in South Vietnamese prisons for the much smaller number of prisoners of war held by the communists. Since Manor wanted a

quarter moon to provide enough but not too much light, the only suitable nights

were November 21–25.70

Manor’s task group arrived at Takhli Air Base, Thailand, on November 18,

1970. After five years of combat operations there, the F–105s of the 355th

Tactical Fighter Wing had just left Southeast Asia as part of Nixon’s drawdown.

Unfortunately Takhli no longer had secure telecommunications with Seventh

Air Force headquarters or the command center on Monkey Mountain. While a

makeshift system was put in place, two T–39s shuttled weather reports from

Saigon to Takhli, where Manor remained until a few hours before the raid. By

the 20th of November, Manor was convinced that Typhoon Patsy would make

the mission doubtful for any of the designated nights (November 21–25), and

he decided to launch it one night early.71

Colonel Simons loaded the fifty-five soldiers in his raiding party aboard a

transport plane, which took them to Udorn Air Base where they were transferred to three of the six Air Force helicopters headed for Son Tay. After aerial

refueling over Laos, the six helicopters and five A–1 propeller-driven attack

aircraft were led into North Vietnam by two C–130E four-engine transports

equipped for special operations. When they reached the prison camp, the

C–130s climbed to fifteen hundred feet and dropped flares over both the prison

and a nearby army training center.72

Fire-fight simulators were also dropped near the training center to decoy

enemy troops there. This measure proved unnecessary, because Simons’ helicopter landed at the training center (possibly staffed by Chinese soldiers)

instead of at the prison as planned—a fortunate error that killed and wounded

scores of enemy soldiers without loss to Simons’ force. The prison itself was

less well defended, for the prisoners had been moved out three months earlier,

even before Manor’s task group had been formed.* The raiders penetrated

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* The Son Tay prison camp was south of the Red River near the Song Con, a river

which flooded in the summer of 1970. The fact that the high water almost reached the camp

was probably why the North Vietnamese decided to move the prisoners. Benjamin F.

Schemmer’s The Raid (New York, 1976) discussed a possible link between the flooding

and American rainmaking operations in Laos. While information about these operations

had been tightly held during the war, Senator Claiborne Pell (Democrat, Rhode Island) succeeded in getting Defense Department personnel to give his Foreign Relations

Subcommittee a top secret briefing on the subject in March 1974; this hearing was declassified and made public in May 1974 under the title Weather Modification. Operation

Popeye (the most well known of its designations) had begun in Laos in late 1966, and over

the next two years RF–4s also seeded clouds in adjacent portions of the North Vietnamese

panhandle. After the end of Rolling Thunder, WC–130s and RF–4s continued to seed

clouds in Laos until July 1972; rainmaking operations in North Vietnam never resumed

after 1968. All told about twenty-six hundred sorties dropped nearly fifty thousand seeding

cartridges (only about eleven hundred of which fell in North Vietnam). It is very doubtful
almost to the heart of North Vietnam and came home with one slight bullet

wound, a broken ankle, and no liberated prisoners.73

Henry Kissinger would blame raiding this empty prison on an “egregious

failure of intelligence,” but a few days before the raid the Defense Intelligence

Agency had concluded that the prisoners had probably been moved.74 Secretary

of Defense Laird and Admiral Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, went

ahead with the raid anyway, probably after talking to Nixon (if not Kissinger)

about the latest intelligence estimate.75 When Laird testified before the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee, he omitted any mention of that estimate and

repeatedly declared that reconnaissance cameras could not see through roofs.76

Senator Fulbright and many of his colleagues on the committee were upset,

not only about the raid, but also about air strikes that had been conducted the

next day against the panhandle of North Vietnam. Indeed, there was considerable confusion between these two operations. The administration initially

announced only the strikes conducted in the panhandle on November 21. But

Hanoi complained to the press about bombing near Hanoi and even claimed

that American prisoners had been wounded when their prison was attacked. In

the wake of these charges, Secretary Laird began to tell the nation about the Son

Tay raid.77

Laird introduced Manor and Simons at a press conference and told how

Navy airmen had drawn enemy attention away from the raiders by dropping

flares near Haiphong (they were not permitted to drop bombs). Unfortunately,

even then Laird held important parts of the story back. Gradually the press

learned that both Navy and Air Force fighters had distracted enemy air defenses by firing Shrike missiles at enemy surface-to-air missile radars near Hanoi

and Haiphong, that one of these fighters (an Air Force F–105 Wild Weasel) had

been hit by a SAM and could only return as far as Laos before the crew had to

eject (they were both rescued), that Air Force A–1s had strafed a bridge near the

prison to cut off enemy troops, and that the Son Tay raiders had attacked another enemy installation near the prison. Poor handling of the Son Tay story left

many Americans with the impression that their government had resumed bombing in the Red River Valley and then lied about it.78

The Nixon administration had displayed a certain wisdom in running two

politically risky operations back to back. As with the Cambodian incursion and

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that rainmaking in Southeast Asia made any significant difference. It did not (and was not

intended to) raise overall rainfall in the region. Success in meeting its objective of inducing

greater rainfall on the Ho Chi Minh Trail could never be measured, because in any specific

location rainfall varied from year to year in any case. Rainfall throughout Southeast Asia

was always heavy. As to the Red River delta of North Vietnam, the most important factors

in abnormal flooding were typhoons spawned at sea. On Operation Popeye, see also Van

Staaveren, Interdiction in Southern Laos, pp 226–28; John F. Fuller, Thor’s Legions:

Weather Support to the U.S. Air Force and Army, 1937–1987 (Boston, 1990), pp 291–94;

Charles C. Bates and John F. Fuller, America’s Weather Warriors (College Station, Tex.,

1986), pp 224–32; and Craig Stevaux, “The Weather War,” Vietnam, Dec. 1997, pp 31–36.
bombing of the North Vietnamese panhandle in the spring, the level of criticism

spurred by two operations did not appear greater than would have accompanied

only one. Indeed, even in failure the Son Tay raid caught the imagination of

many sufficiently to blunt barbs aimed at bombing in the panhandle.

On the other hand, it was difficult to prove that six hours of bombing in the

panhandle had accomplished much. As with the bigger operation in the spring,

the Nixon administration called the strikes of November 21 “protective reaction,” but now anonymous Defense Department officials readily leaked the fact

that fighter-bombers were attacking not only SAM and gun sites but also supplies stored in preparation for the dry season surge down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Soon the network of roads in Laos would dry sufficiently to support the heavier

truck traffic necessary to carry those supplies to South Vietnam.79

As for SAMs and antiaircraft artillery in the North Vietnamese panhandle,

they threatened not only reconnaissance planes in North Vietnam itself, but also

B–52s and fighter-bombers attacking the transportation system in Laos. It was

nonetheless true that the Nixon administration hoped to persuade the North

Vietnamese to quit firing at reconnaissance planes over North Vietnam. After the

May 1970 strikes, reconnaissance planes had encountered little resistance until

an Air Force RF–4C was shot down on Friday, November 13, with the loss of

both crew members.80

The Freedom Bait protective reaction strikes of November 21 lasted only

six hours because Typhoon Patsy was bearing down on the Vietnamese coast.

Seventh Air Force and Seventh Fleet managed to send more than two hundred

strike sorties (mostly Air Force F–4s and Navy A–7s) before weather closed the

operation. Needless to say bomb damage assessment amounted to anybody’s

guess. The crews claimed to have hit perhaps ninety trucks and started fires at

three fuel dumps, but were less certain about SAM sites. As the Commander in

Chief, Pacific, Admiral McCain, informed Admiral Moorer, four SAM sites

may have been hit, but “only two indications of possible SAM associated

equipment were noted.”81

Afterward the wings involved made known their unhappiness with the way

Freedom Bait had been run. On the evening of November 20, Seventh Air

Force had informed the wings at Udorn, Ubon, and Korat, Thailand, as well as

Da Nang and Phu Cat, South Vietnam, that they would soon launch the sorties

for which they had already been sent sealed target materials. Not until after

midnight were they permitted to look at those materials and then only for targets assigned to the particular wing. That restriction was especially irritating to

the 388th at Korat, which was expected to provide Wild Weasel support for the

other wings.82

Scarcity of time to prepare for Freedom Bait was the result of the special

demands for secrecy thought necessary if the Son Tay rescue mission was not to

be endangered. Freedom Bait orders were sent in the most secure and slowest

“back channel” messages. Seventh Air Force started sending the fragmentary

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order specifying the contributions of Udorn’s 432d before 7 p.m. on November

20, but the wing did not receive the order until after midnight.83

Meanwhile, the wings were flying routine night missions as well as supporting the Son Tay rescue and preparing to fly the routine day missions that

they had already been assigned. The latter were not cancelled until 7 a.m., little

more than three hours before the wings launched their biggest operation in six

months. As they scrambled to prepare for Freedom Bait, the wings had trouble

believing that they would actually fly these missions in the face of the oncoming typhoon. But at 4 a.m. on the 21st, as soon as the Son Tay raiders had

returned, the wings were told to execute Freedom Bait.84

Per instruction the wings hit their Freedom Bait targets with waves of a

dozen strike aircraft very much in the fashion of the old Rolling Thunder strikes

in Route Package Six. The aircrews would have preferred breaking the waves

down into flights of four or elements of two in the armed reconnaissance mode

customarily used in Route Package One and on the Trail. Panhandle air defenses and targets did not appear to justify the more cumbersome formation that

permitted many trucks spotted by forward air controllers to escape unscathed.85

As so often in the air war over North Vietnam, Freedom Bait and the Son

Tay raid had less to do with hurting the enemy than with signalling to him. This

time the signal did some good, while costing no American lives and only one

aircraft—the F–105 Wild Weasel lost defending the raiders. The principal beneficiaries of the raid were the American prisoners in North Vietnam. Fearing

another rescue attempt, the North Vietnamese emptied the outlying prison

camps and concentrated their American prisoners in downtown Hanoi at Hoa

Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton.” Even the “Zoo” on the edge of the city was vacated for

a time. At the Hilton, more than three hundred American prisoners had to be

housed in open bay cells, with twenty to fifty men in a cell.86

The sudden privilege of associating openly with many of their fellow prisoners was a great morale boost, and the men dubbed their open bay cells “Camp

Unity.” The senior prisoner, Col. John P. Flynn, took command of the 4th Allied

Prisoner of War Wing—so called because Americans were engaging in their

fourth allied war effort of the twentieth century and a few of their South

Vietnamese and Thai allies were imprisoned with them. The North Vietnamese

were soon sending prisoners deemed troublemakers away from Camp Unity,

some of them to camps outside Hanoi. But for most of North Vietnam’s

American prisoners, prison life had finally come to resemble the German prison

camps in World War II.87

The Nixon administration portrayed the Son Tay raid as an attempt not

only to shorten imprisonment but, more than that, to save American lives. The

North Vietnamese had recently given Cora Weiss, an antiwar activist from New

York City, the names of seventeen Americans who had died in North

Vietnam—including eleven for whom the United States had evidence of capture. In the case of Air Force Capt. Wilmer N. Grubb, the North Vietnamese had

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released photographs of him in apparent good health after his capture in January

1966. In November 1970 they revealed not only that Grubb had died but also

that his death had occurred only nine days after capture—before communist

newspapers published his photograph.88

Although release of the dead men’s names was a positive step in the somewhat more humane policy that North Vietnam had begun to implement a year

earlier, those names conveyed the impression of a situation more desperate than

the prisoners’ ameliorating plight had become. With regard to Son Tay, this

impression was made all the more vivid by reasonable but unfounded speculation that the North Vietnamese might send away from Hanoi the prisoners in

worst shape so that they would not be seen by visitors.

The sense of urgency stirred by the Weiss list helped to blunt qualms of the

prisoners’ families about the risks that the Son Tay raid necessarily took with

the prisoners’ lives. Although the raid’s positive impact on the prisoners could

not then be known by their wives and parents, the League of Families applauded the raid as proof that the Nixon administration really wanted to do something

for the men who had been imprisoned for so long. A few of the families broke

with their leadership, and one wife criticized the rescue attempt as a cynical

ploy that “wiped the bombing raids right out of the headlines.”89 Most of the

families who spoke to the press, however, were enthusiastic.

The wife of Air Force Capt. Howard J. Hill, for example, did not know that

her husband was about to be moved to a better environment at the “Hilton”

from a camp west of Hanoi. But she told the press that she was “screaming with

sheer joy” and that the raid would not lead to worse conditions for her husband:

“If anything, I think Hanoi will afford them better treatment. If the helicopters

had brought out men in terrible condition, some maybe on the verge of death,

how would that have looked for North Vietnam?”90

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Chapter Eight

The Lavelle Affair

Curiosity about the attempt to rescue prisoners at Son Tay was especially

strong among those who knew men imprisoned in North Vietnam. Many within

the Air Force had worked with those men, and occasionally personal relationships ran back further than service together. Lt. Gen. John D. Lavelle had first

met Colonel Flynn, the highest ranking prisoner, when they were boys attending the Catholic schools of Cleveland, Ohio. Lavelle was six years older and

had dated Flynn’s sister. But Lavelle had a still more direct connection with the

raid, and the fragile character of that connection confirmed the depth to which

his own career seemed to have fallen.1

Although Lavelle was Vice Commander in Chief of Pacific Air Forces, he

was told nothing about the raid in advance or even afterward—until he watched

Secretary Laird brief the nation on television. Lavelle’s boss, Gen. Joseph

Nazzaro, had been briefed together with key members of his staff, a group from

which Lavelle was obviously excluded. During the raid, Nazzaro was away

from headquarters on one of his frequent trips to see his farflung units; as usual

he was accompanied by the key members of his staff. When intelligence reported a very high volume of North Vietnamese radio traffic, Lavelle tried to inform

Admiral McCain, Commander in Chief, Pacific, and was finally told by one of

McCain’s subordinates to ignore the whole matter.2

After years of pressure-filled jobs of considerable importance, Lavelle

found himself merely minding the store. An early attempt to make a decision

while his boss was away was quickly quashed when Nazzaro returned. Yet

despite a lack of authority, Lavelle was expected to remain on Hickam Air

Force Base, Hawaii, whenever Nazzaro was off base even for a few hours. This

meant that every time Lavelle wanted to leave the base, he had to ask Nazzaro

for permission.3

Lavelle blamed his predicament on the Air Force Chief of Staff, General

Ryan, with whom Lavelle had some disagreements during his previous assignment. They were very different personalities. Ryan was careful, quiet, almost

taciturn. Lavelle was gregarious and impulsive.

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Preface
Before his encounters with Ryan, Lavelle’s impulsiveness had already

caused him difficulties. As Seventeenth Air Force commander in 1967, Lavelle

nearly sent his alert force at Wheelus Air Base, Libya, to intercept unidentified

Algerian MiGs on their way to land at a nearby airport; any confrontation might

have been explosive, because Libyans were already rioting against American

support of Israel in the Six Day War. Lavelle got in trouble even for having his

men start their engines, but he held them on the ground. Although his next

assignment came sooner than expected, it was an important one.4

For nearly three years, Lavelle directed the Defense Communications

Planning Group, the joint organization that had been set up in Washington to

implement Secretary of Defense McNamara’s plans to build a physical and

electronic barrier against North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam.

Lavelle took over the group just before McNamara’s departure and helped refocus the project on its Air Force component, a sensor field on the Ho Chi Minh

Trail monitored by Task Force Alpha at Nakhon Phanom Air Base, Thailand.5

In pushing the Air Force component of the barrier project, Lavelle got little

opposition from the other services. The Marines had been expected to build a

well-defended fence along the Demilitarized Zone from the coast thirty miles

inland, and they were glad to avoid their participation in what seemed to them a

bad idea. But General Ryan was skeptical about the effectiveness of the sensors

and he did not want to contribute the specially equipped F–4s necessary to drop

them accurately—using Long Range Navigation (loran) electronic ground beacons. At one point Lavelle even offered to resign both from his joint job and the

Air Force. Nevertheless, Ryan did perceive advantages in Lavelle’s project

(including funding for new munitions, plus loran’s utility for all-weather bombing even without sensors), and the Ryan-Lavelle relationship did not run

aground on the barrier.6

Sensing that his career prospects might improve if he returned to the Air

Force, Lavelle made it known that he wanted an Air Force assignment. When

Ryan raised the possibility of Lavelle tackling cost overruns at the Lockheed

plant that manufactured the controversial C–5 giant transport, Lavelle took his

arguments against Air Force management of the plant to Undersecretary John

L. McLucas and Secretary Robert Seamans. Ryan seemed so angry that Lavelle

believed his career was finished, an interpretation which in his view was reinforced regularly by his new boss, General Nazzaro.7

Less than a year after assigning Lavelle to Hawaii, however, General Ryan

gave him a fourth star and sent him to Saigon as Seventh Air Force commander.

When Lavelle took command at the end of July 1971, he looked like a natural

choice, because his predecessor at Seventh Air Force, Gen. Lucius D. Clay, Jr.,

had also preceded him as Vice Commander in Chief of Pacific Air Forces; now

Clay was returning to replace Nazzaro, who was retiring. But Lavelle was not

inclined to give Ryan much credit for the promotion that Lavelle concluded was

the result of a recommendation by his new Army boss, General Abrams.

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To Hanoi and Back
Lavelle had become well acquainted with Abrams while working on the barrier,

and Lavelle had learned that Clay’s predecessor as Seventh Air Force commander, General Brown, had lobbied for either Lavelle or Gen. J. C. Meyer (Ryan’s

Vice Chief of Staff) to become Seventh Air Force commander when Ryan gave

Clay the job.8

While Ryan this time went along with Lavelle’s promotion, there was evidence that the Chief of Staff saw the job of Seventh Air Force commander as

one of diminishing importance. After all, most American armed forces were apt

to be out of South Vietnam well before the 1972 presidential election, and

Thailand was less and less enthusiastic about playing host to large American

forces. Before going to take command in Vietnam, Lavelle spent a week in

Washington trying to see Ryan, but had to settle for a meeting with the Vice

Chief of Staff. Meyer gave no instructions other than to improve relations with

the Army.9

Lavelle found that the trouble which had been brewing between Military

Assistance Command, Vietnam, and Seventh Air Force in Saigon revolved

around the two intelligence chiefs. Since Lavelle’s intelligence chief was about

to rotate anyway, this problem was soon resolved. But Lavelle’s major problems were only just beginning.

As the southwest monsoon spent itself, the North Vietnamese began to prepare for their annual supply surge through the Laotian panhandle from

November to March. It became increasingly apparent that this year’s surge was

going to be much better protected than ever before. In addition to the antiaircraft artillery that had been the mainstay of air defense in the adjacent Laotian

and North Vietnamese panhandles, the North Vietnamese increased the number

of active surface-to-air missile sites in the North Vietnamese panhandle from

two or three to a dozen, and for the first time sites were suspected in Laos itself.

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese had built a new all-weather pierced-steelplank runway at Quan Lang on the Ca River, about fifty miles northwest of

Vinh, and they were repairing the fair-weather airfield at Dong Hoi only thirtyfive miles north of the Demilitarized Zone.10

The air defense environment in the panhandles of North Vietnam and Laos

was beginning to bear a resemblance to the more formidable one near Hanoi

and Haiphong. Fears for the survival of B–52s in such an environment

increased on October 4, when, for the first time, a MiG tried to intercept B–52s

in Laos, and on November 20, when a MiG fired a missile at a B–52 near the

Mu Gia Pass. Although no B–52s were lost to MiGs or SAMs during the

1971–72 supply surge, a SAM did bring down a C–130 gunship in Laos at the

end of March. By then, General Lavelle’s efforts to combat North Vietnam’s

buildup and its air defenses had got him into a lot of trouble.11

On March 23, 1972, General Lavelle was recalled to Washington, where

General Ryan secured his relief as commander of Seventh Air Force for

employing a system of false reporting to cover up unauthorized raids into North

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The Lavelle Affair
Vietnam. General Lavelle insisted that he had been encouraged by his bosses to

conduct such raids and that false reporting was the result of misunderstanding

and overzealousness on the part of subordinates.12

* * *

One of the odd aspects of the Lavelle affair was the relatively inconsequential bombing that he was charged with conducting illegitimately—fewer than

30 missions, about 150 sorties—when on specific occasions he was authorized

to make much larger raids on North Vietnam. But unlike his illegitimate raids,

the timing of those bigger, authorized raids was determined by political factors

over which Lavelle had no control.

Before Lavelle took command, the Nixon administration had preferred to

attack North Vietnamese targets when it was taking heat for some other unpopular action anyway. The first big protective reaction strikes had been associated with the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970 and the second batch

with the Son Tay raid in the fall. When South Vietnamese ground forces

attacked North Vietnamese supply centers in the Laotian panhandle during

February and March of 1971, American air forces were authorized to hit SAM

sites, trucks, and supply depots in the North Vietnamese panhandle with about

three hundred sorties; a few of these were sent on February 20, 21, and 28, but

most went on March 21 and 22, while South Vietnamese troops were retreating

from Laos.13

In September 1971, less than two months after Lavelle took command, he

was given his first legitimate opportunity to send a major strike into North

Vietnam. This time there was no parallel initiative to share the load of criticism

that inevitably accompanied bombing in North Vietnam. Lavelle was not enthusiastic about orders restricting him to targets within twenty miles of the

Demilitarized Zone, and he was even less happy about going in bad weather.

But Washington would agree to no more than a day’s postponement, and on

September 21, Lavelle sent nearly two hundred sorties against three gasoline

tank farms. The weather was so bad that the Navy sent only four sorties, and

Seventh Air Force relied entirely on specially equipped F–4 pathfinders guided

by the loran ground beacons Lavelle had done so much to install as part of

McNamara’s barrier. Without losing an aircraft, he claimed destruction of about

thirty buried gasoline tanks with a total capacity of more than 150,000 gallons.

In Lavelle’s, view this amount of destruction was not worth the effort, but he

was proud of having directed the first big loran fighter strike.14

Lavelle was never told why he was authorized to send that first loran strike,

but he would not have been surprised to learn that it was part of the negotiating

process. Henry Kissinger’s secret talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris had

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come to nothing. Despite President Nixon’s offer in May 1971 of a cease-fire

which would not require North Vietnamese troops to withdraw from South

Vietnam, the North Vietnamese government was demanding that the Thieu

government in South Vietnam be eliminated before a cease-fire. The loran

strike served as Nixon’s response to the collapse of the secret talks.15

Although talks with the North Vietnamese were not going well, Nixon and

Kissinger were emboldened by their progress in getting better relations with

China and the Soviet Union. Nixon was scheduled to make unprecedented presidential visits to Beijing and Moscow in 1972. Indeed, the surprise announcement in July 1971 that the Chinese would play host to Nixon in February 1972

had chilled relations between North Vietnam and China. By the same token,

Nixon had gained enough popular support in the United States to risk some of it

on limited bombing of North Vietnam. Convinced that the North Vietnamese

were preparing an offensive for 1972, Nixon authorized in December 1971 by

far the biggest bombing raids on North Vietnam since the end of Rolling

Thunder.16

Seventh Air Force and the Seventh Fleet sent about a thousand strike sorties against North Vietnam from December 26 through December 30, a period

bounded by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. For the first time since

Rolling Thunder, strikes were permitted as far north as the twentieth parallel—

more than two hundred miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, only seventyfive miles south of Hanoi. Although Christmas day had been clear, the weather

closed down on the morning of December 26 just as two flights of Air Force

F–4s were approaching the Thanh Hoa barracks and truck repair shop. The

attackers got under a fifteen-hundred-foot ceiling and lost an F–4, apparently to

ground fire. The rest of the five-day operation had to be conducted through

clouds. Seventh Air Force F–4s guided by loran pathfinders made two thirds of

the strike sorties, while Navy A–6s used their onboard radar to guide carrierbased F–4s and A–7s to their targets.17

Aside from indicating that the Nixon administration might be willing to

resume full-scale bombing of North Vietnam, the December 1971 raids did not

achieve very impressive results. Effective loran bombing required photography

annotated to show the target’s exact relationship with the navigation beacons;

this painstaking work had not yet been done for most of North Vietnam. In any

case, the greater the distance from the beacons, the lower the accuracy. Only

about a fourth of the bombs hit close enough to their targets to show up on

bomb damage assessment photography.18

The strike on Quan Lang airfield was among the most accurate, with more

than 160 craters appearing in photographs after about two hundred bombs had

been dropped. But even here the pierced-steel-plank runway was broken in only

fourteen places and was quickly repaired. East German television did indicate

that two MiG–21s were blown on their backs. As to the thirteen buried gasoline

tank farms attacked that week, estimates of destruction ranged from a total of

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The Lavelle Affair
194,000 gallons up to 870,000 gallons out of a capacity of about 3,500,000 gallons.19

* * *

General Lavelle was not content with rare opportunities to bomb North

Vietnam in bad weather. He wanted routine authority to hit North Vietnam’s air

defenses and its gathering invasion force at times of his own choosing. But the

Nixon administration would not grant Lavelle this much authority, at least officially. Privately, Nixon groused about what seemed to him the Air Force’s poor

performance and the lack of imagination found among military leaders as a

whole. While he admired the courage of airmen, soldiers, and sailors, Nixon

had a low opinion of generals and admirals. The President liked to quote H.G.

Wells’ comment that military minds were mediocre because bright people

would not subject themselves to a military career.20

From the beginning of Nixon’s term, he had been expecting to end the war

even while withdrawing ground forces from South Vietnam and not resuming a

sustained bombing campaign in North Vietnam. Since the Air Force had proved

unable to work this miracle for him, he blamed air leadership and promised his

aides that he would bomb North Vietnam thoroughly before pulling out entirely. So far, however, Nixon had been careful to keep overt bombing of North

Vietnam within time limits that minimized protest. By sending the biggest raids

while most American college students were home for Christmas, Nixon had

further dampened student opposition already cooled by the draft lottery,

reduced draft calls, and reduced American participation in ground combat. The

situation in Vietnam would have to get worse before the President was ready to

authorize sustained bombing operations over North Vietnam.21

Meanwhile, Lavelle was repeatedly told to make maximum use of the

authority he had. There was nothing new in this dialogue. General Clay and

General Abrams had been requesting expanded authority for months, and

Secretary Laird had repeatedly refused. On July 24, 1971, just before Lavelle

took command, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moorer, conveyed

Laird’s latest refusal to the Commander in Chief, Pacific, Admiral McCain, with

the admonition to “take full advantage” of the current rules.22 Admiral McCain

in turn urged “maximum use,” and General Abrams in one of his first formal

messages to General Lavelle spelled out an interpretation of the current rules:

Interlocking and mutually supporting NVN air defenses constitute unacceptable hazard to air crews attempting to identify

a particular SAM/AAA firing site. Accordingly, on occurrence of any SAM or AAA firing or activation against our air204

To Hanoi and Back
craft, it is considered appropriate for escort forces to direct

immediate protective reaction strikes against any identifiable

element of the firing/activated air defense complex.23

The words “interlocking” and “firing or activation” would provide key

ingredients of General Lavelle’s rationale for his way of making maximum use

of the rules. Before his taking command, F–105 Wild Weasel crews had already

been authorized to fire their radar-seeking missiles at any SAM site whose radar

was tracking an F–105 or the aircraft it was escorting. An F–105 did not have to

wait for a SAM site to fire; activation of its radar was sufficient—as indicated

by radar warning gear carried by the F–105 and the F–4. In General Lavelle’s

view, it was foolish to wait for a signal from the radar warning gear, especially

because that gear would only sound the alarm for SAM radars. In an interlocking system, North Vietnam’s early warning and MiG-control radars could feed

their data to the missile launch sites, which consequently would not have to

come on the air until the last minute. Lavelle argued that Seventh Air Force

should assume the enemy air defense system was activated every time

American aircraft entered North Vietnam. Hence, any aircraft that attacked an

air defense target in North Vietnam necessarily did so after activation of the

North Vietnamese air defense system and therefore was operating within the

rules of engagement as interpreted by Lavelle.24

Lavelle’s interpretation permitted Seventh Air Force to plan attacks on

North Vietnamese air defenses and execute the plans without waiting for the

North Vietnamese to shoot first. While his superiors were encouraging a liberal

interpretation of the rules of engagement, this was probably not what they had in

mind. The customary way of stretching the rules, and one employed to especially good effect by the Navy, was “trolling.” Reconnaissance aircraft were used as

bait; as soon as the North Vietnamese reacted, previously selected targets were

hit by a force waiting nearby. The Navy’s superiority in trolling was their use of

a bigger strike force. While Lavelle approved of that, he did not like using his

men as bait. Trolling seemed to him a silly and unnecessarily dangerous game.

Lavelle claimed that much of his thinking about bending the rules was confirmed by a visit of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to South Vietnam in early

November 1971. At that point Lavelle was concerned about the presence at

Quan Lang airfield of two MiG–21s which were threatening B–52 operations in

Laos. As Lavelle would recall their conversation, Moorer indicated that an Air

Force protective reaction strike could hit the airfield even though it was in an

area normally patrolled by the Navy. Moorer’s recollection, on the other hand,

would be that he and Lavelle discussed only photoreconnaissance, not a protective reaction strike.25

On November 8, an Air Force RF–4 with two F–4 escorts flew over Quan

Lang. They reported being fired upon and attacking the airfield. The MiGs

were nowhere to be seen, but the F–4s did leave some craters near the runway.

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The Lavelle Affair
Lavelle showed Moorer photographs of the empty airfield just before the

Chairman left Vietnam. Soon Lavelle learned from General Clay that General

Ryan was complaining about how little damage this Quan Lang raid had done.

Lavelle concluded that his error had been in sending so small a force armed

mostly with cluster bombs for flak suppression.26

This was not the first time that Washington had seemed to encourage using

routine protective reaction strikes against targets other than air defenses firing

on reconnaissance planes. In the wake of the Son Tay raid, President Nixon had

told a press conference that if American planes were fired upon, he would

“order that the missile site be destroyed and that the military complex around

the site which supports it also be destroyed.”27 By then, of course, Nixon had

already sent special strikes against supply dumps in North Vietnam under the

rubric of protective reaction.

In the spring of 1971, Secretary Laird had even suggested using routine

protective reaction strikes to hit field artillery.28 When Laird came to Saigon in

early December, he talked to Lavelle at Ambassador Bunker’s home. As

Lavelle would recall their conversation, Laird indicated that Lavelle should not

ask the Secretary of Defense to make a more liberal interpretation of the rules,

but that if Lavelle made a more liberal interpretation, Laird would stand behind

him or at least not question him.29

Lavelle thought that a similar message was conveyed by Lt. Gen. John W.

Vogt, an Air Force officer who was Director of the Joint Staff. Vogt represented

Admiral Moorer at a conference held in Hawaii to discuss ways of better protecting B–52s over Laos. Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, the SAC Commander in

Chief, had become so concerned about the MiG threat that he had grounded the

B–52s in Southeast Asia for a couple of days. Lavelle’s vice commander, Maj.

Gen. Winton W. Marshall, returned from Hawaii with a report that Moorer

wanted a liberal interpretation of the rules and that the conference had decided

to increase both the number of reconnaissance missions and the number of

fighters escorting reconnaissance aircraft as well as B–52s.30

In mid-December, Lavelle attended an Air Force commanders conference

at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. While he was there, five Air

Force F–4s were lost over Laos—three of them to MiGs in northern Laos where

the North Vietnamese were engaged in an offensive. It was the worst three days

the Air Force had experienced since the end of Rolling Thunder. Lavelle would

later recall that General Meyer, the Vice Chief of Staff, invited him to the

Pentagon to hear a briefing on how to destroy the Moc Chau radar, which controlled MiGs over northern Laos. But Moc Chau was in North Vietnam far

north of the twentieth parallel and off limits to reconnaissance planes not to

mention their escorts. As Lavelle remembered the meeting, he was not quite

being told to bomb Moc Chau—just how to bomb it.31

Subsequently, a pair of F–105 Wild Weasels struck Moc Chau with

Standard antiradar missiles. The radar stayed on long enough to be hit, because

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To Hanoi and Back
the F–105s disguised themselves as F–4s (not armed with Standards or older

Shrikes) by flashing the appropriate electronic identification code. Tactical

deception was rare in the air war over Southeast Asia, and this instance of it was

designed by Seventh Air Force in preference to the Air Staff plan. When

Seventh Air Force reported this new expansion of protective reaction, Admiral

Moorer informed General Abrams that attacking a MiG control radar was not

authorized—nor were operations of any kind north of the twentieth parallel

except hot pursuit of a MiG. Before the end of January 1972, however, Moorer

got Laird’s approval to authorize protective reaction strikes against MiG-control radars outside Route Package Six whenever MiGs in the air threatened

American aircraft.32

Although the Moc Chau strike was one of Lavelle’s first attempts to stretch

the rules of engagement, it was the last time he reported the details to his bosses. When he sent five F–4s against Dong Hoi airfield on January 23, the aircrews reported that there had been no enemy reaction before they bombed the

airfield. Lavelle was in the Seventh Air Force command post when this early

report arrived, and he complained to his deputy for operations, Maj. Gen. Alton

D. Slay, that the crews could not report “no enemy reaction.”33

The Dong Hoi attack and most of the subsequent illegitimate attacks were

performed by the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at Udorn Air Base,

Thailand, under the command of Col. Charles A. Gabriel. Unlike the other

wings in Thailand, the 432d had reconnaissance aircraft as well as fighter aircraft, and thus it was the natural arm of protective reaction, real or pretended.

Lavelle’s new reporting requirement gave Gabriel problems that Lavelle may

well have known nothing about. There was no honest way of translating into

the prescribed after-action message format General Lavelle’s theory that the

North Vietnamese air defense system was always activated against American

aircraft. The after action message had to state exactly the nature of the enemy

reaction—what gun fired or what SAM radar locked on.34

General Slay and Colonel Gabriel worked out a reporting system that put

false data into the formal after-action messages for Washington and accurate

data into back channel messages that went from Gabriel to Slay only. This procedure resembled one authorized by President Nixon three years earlier to disguise B–52 raids in Cambodia. Since Lavelle apparently never saw the formal

messages (which could be read easily only by those familiar with a fill-in-theblank format designed to build a computer data base), he could assume that they

merely made a vague reference to activation of the enemy air defense system.

In fact they often specified enemy gunfire that had not occurred.35

Slay and Gabriel called their commander’s special strikes “heavies” since

they involved four to twelve “escorts,” rather than the usual two. Crews were

told to drop their bombs whether or not the enemy fired. The targets were usually not enemy guns, SAM sites, or even airfields, but increasingly SAM transporters and trucks. Once the trucks crossed into Laos, they were legitimate tar207

The Lavelle Affair
gets, but while still in North Vietnam the best rationale available was that they

were supplying the air defense sites. In the case of tanks, which were gathering

in the North Vietnamese panhandle to invade South Vietnam, Lavelle could not

find a rationale to attack them even with his interpretation of the rules governing protective reaction; he left the tanks unscathed. Meanwhile, Slay and

Gabriel decided that the formal after-action messages should not claim truck

kills, but merely use the often true formula “results not observed.”36

Lavelle’s illegitimate strikes might well have gone unremarked in

Washington had it not been for a young intelligence debriefer at Udorn, Sgt.

Lonnie D. Franks, who wrote about them to one of his Iowa senators, Harold E.

Hughes, a Democrat and prominent critic of the war effort. General Ryan sent

the Air Force Inspector General, Lt. Gen. Louis L. Wilson, to investigate. Little

investigation was required, because Lavelle, Slay, and Gabriel readily told what

they had been doing. Lavelle explained that he had not kept Ryan and Clay fully

informed because that might put them in an awkward position. General Abrams

was supportive of Lavelle but claimed not to have realized that breaches of the

rules of engagement had occurred.37

* * *

In the formal chain of command, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force had no

authority over the Seventh Air Force commander, who worked for joint commanders wearing Army or Navy uniforms in Saigon and Hawaii. But each service was expected to clean up its own scandals as quietly as possible. While

General Lavelle and his many friends thought that General Ryan should have

defended Lavelle instead of retiring him, Ryan tried to minimize political damage to the Air Force. False reporting (rather than stretching the rules of engagement) seemed to Ryan the major problem.

It was not the first time Ryan had removed an officer who had tried to disguise rule breaking. In the summer of 1967, while commanding Pacific Air

Forces, Ryan had discovered that Col. Jacksel M. Broughton, the wing vice

commander at Takhli, had destroyed evidence that his men had strafed the

Soviet ship Turkestan. Although Broughton was court-martialed, Ryan and

Secretary of the Air Force Seamans agreed that court-martial proceedings for

Lavelle would invite unwelcome publicity. They advised Secretary of Defense

Laird to remove Lavelle from command and have them brief the chairmen of

the Senate and House Committees on Armed Services and Appropriations.38

Laird, however, was even more cautious and kept the Air Force leaders

from talking to congressional leaders on this issue. He told Seamans and Ryan

that publicity about Lavelle’s bombing could provide the North Vietnamese an

excuse for the invasion they were about to launch. Laird himself talked to

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To Hanoi and Back
Senator Symington and a few others, but apparently did not give them the full

story.39

Laird’s quiet removal of Lavelle soon came under a spotlight. Senator

Hughes persisted in his effort not only to increase the severity of General

Lavelle’s punishment, but to punish others as well. The senator did not like the

fact that because Lavelle’s retirement came before his formal relief from command of Seventh Air Force, he would receive the retired pay of a four-star general even though the Senate refused to approve Ryan’s recommendation of

Lavelle’s advancement from permanent major general to lieutenant general (let

alone full general as customary) on the retired list. Four-star pay for Lavelle

was made possible by a rule that applied only to a medical disability retirement—which also sheltered much of his income from taxation. It was not

uncommon for officers to serve a full career and then get a disability retirement,

but in Lavelle’s case this practice aroused suspicion; among his disabilities was

a heart problem that would lead to his death seven years later.40

Senator Hughes was on the Armed Services Committee, which held hearings on Lavelle in connection not only with his advancement on the retired list

but also with the nomination of General Abrams as Army Chief of Staff. These

hearings were the committee’s most dramatic investigation of the bombing of

North Vietnam since 1967, when the committee had supported the Joint Chiefs

in their effort to remove restraints imposed by Secretary of Defense McNamara

and President Johnson. Once again, Senator Stennis was in the chair, but this

time the committee seemed in favor of restraints or at least opposed to any

breach of civilian control over the military.41

General Abrams, Admiral Moorer, and General Ryan all denied they had

told Lavelle to break the rules of engagement. Lavelle claimed only that he

believed his liberal interpretation of the rules was supported by their injunctions

to make full use of the rules. If he had received more explicit instructions, he

said almost nothing about them to the Senate committee—either because he

wanted to protect his superiors or because he believed with some justification

that his interpretation of the rules was winning support in Congress. Earlier

hearings by the House Armed Services Committee had been more friendly, and

that group applauded Lavelle for showing the initiative to do something about

the enemy buildup.42

In the case of Quan Lang airfield, however, Lavelle did tell a story with

potential for getting his superiors in trouble. Admiral Moorer and General Ryan

had some difficulty refuting Lavelle’s contention that they expected his crews

to strike MiGs on the ground. Moorer claimed that he was only interested in

photographs to determine whether the MiGs were there, but Ryan had complained about the quality of the bombing and his testimony did not entirely dispel the impression that the targets missed were more than antiaircraft guns. The

rules of engagement sought to confine attacks on MiGs to those in the air; those

on the ground and their runways were off limits. The only legitimate targets on

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The Lavelle Affair
the ground for routine protective reaction were the guns and SAMs that had

fired on or were at least tracking American aircraft. There was apparently not

much interest among senators on the Armed Services Committee in pursuing

this issue.43

Senator Hughes turned his attention from Lavelle and his superiors to

Lavelle’s subordinates. For two years Hughes monitored promotion lists to stop

the promotion of any officer who had been involved in illegitimate missions or

false reporting. But in 1973 revelations about the false reporting system authorized by President Nixon for the bombing of Cambodia undercut Hughes’ campaign against Lavelle’s subordinates. In any case, most of Hughes’ colleagues

saw merit in General Ryan’s position that General Lavelle’s subordinates had

no way of knowing how high was the source of the orders they were getting

from Lavelle. Three of those subordinates achieved four stars (Slay, Gabriel,

and Gabriel’s vice commander, Jerome F. O’Malley), and one of them became

Air Force Chief of Staff (Gabriel).44

Not only the men directly affected, but all officers had reason to ponder the

actions of General Lavelle. Like him, they might be subject to pressure from

above to bend the rules. Like him, they might want to bend the rules to help

subordinates deal with problems. General Lavelle’s greatest strength as a commander was his concern for the welfare of his men. But in Vietnam his concern

got him into trouble, got them into trouble, got the Air Force into trouble—all

for the sake of bombing too slight to make much difference. A less generous

man might have risked the lives of his men trolling to bend the rules in a more

acceptable way. A wiser man would have avoided the risks to his and their

integrity for so little benefit to the war effort. Even before he could be retired, a

North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam made both the military justification and the military insignificance of his illegitimate bombing obvious.

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To Hanoi and Back
211

Leaders (clockwise from right)

Lt. Gen. Gerald W. Johnson, Eighth

Air Force Commander, speaks to

Linebacker II B–52 crews, Guam,

December 1972; Secretary of Defense

Melvin Laird (left), Gen. George S.

Brown, Seventh Air Force Commander, and Ambassador Ellsworth

Bunker, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base,

February 1970; Gen. John D. Lavelle

took command of Seventh Air Force

in the summer of 1971 but was forced

to resign in April 1972; Gen. John W.

Vogt, Seventh Air Force Commander,

and a F–111 pilot who has just arrived

at Takhli Air Base, September 1972;

and Gen. J.C. Meyer, Commander in

Chief, Strategic Air Command, May

1972–July 1974.
212

Contest for Air Superiority

An F–4 returns to Udorn Air Base, home of the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance

Wing, which led the battle against the MiGs in 1972, below left. Col. Scott G.

Smith (center), 432d commander, with two aces, F–4 pilot Capt. Richard S.

(Steve) Richie (left) and weapon system officer Capt. Charles B. DeBellevue,

below right. A North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun crew, bottom left, and

American actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda with the crew of an North

Vietnamese antiaircraft gun in Hanoi, bottom right.
213

Reconnaissance and

Warning

Technicians remove the film

from the camera bay of an

RF–4 while the crew is leaving the cockpit, right. Photo

interpreters examine reconnaissance film, below left.

Reconnaissance drones and

a DC–130 launch aircraft,

below right. An EC-121

radar surveillance aircraft

that warned friendly aircraft

of potential border violations

and approaching MiGs, 

bottom.
214

Air Refueling

Because of the distances

involved, KC–135 aerial

tankers refueled aircraft

before a mission over North

Vietnam and sometimes after.

Clockwise from below, a

flight of F–4s, a B–52 seen

from over the shoulder of a

boom operator, a B–52 with

the refueling doors open, a

tanker from a fighter’s cockpit, and an F–105 viewed

from a tanker.
215

Guided Bombing

In April 1968, Air Force munitions men load a 2,000-pound bomb with a laser

seeker on an F–4 that will drop it on the test range at Eglin Air Force Base,

Florida, top. The Thanh Hoa Bridge had withstood repeated attacks by unguided

bombs during Rolling Thunder, but did not fall until laser-guided bombs were

used in May 1972, center. The Hanoi powerplant before and after an attack with

laser-guided bombs in December 1972, bottom left and right.
216

B–52s

Ground crew members struggle to move bombs for loading into a B–52, below

left; the tall tails of D model B–52s loom above the shorter G tails at Andersen

AFB, Guam, below right; rows of B–52s wait between missions at U-Tapao

Air Base, Thailand, center; and a D model B–52 with drag chute deployed

lands at U-Tapao, bottom.
217

Linebacker II

The principal targets of B–52

Linebacker II bombing were railyards.

Two were Gia Lam, just across the

Red River from Hanoi, right, and Lang

Dang, near China, that was struck most

heavily, below. A stray load of B–52

bombs hit Kham Thien Street, bottom

right, near the Hanoi railyard. Another

victim of unintentional bombing was

the Bac Mai Hospital, bottom left,

adjacent to the Bac Mai airfield south

of Hanoi.
218

Homecoming

A North Vietnamese prison, left; formalities prior to prisoner release,

below left; prisoners waiting to board

C–141s, below right; and Maj. Joseph

S. Abbott, Jr., enjoying a Time magazine with his family on the cover, bottom left. While not all wives waited

faithfully, many did, and Maj. (later

General) Charles G. Boyd and his wife

Millicent renewed their wedding

vows, bottom right.
Chapter Nine

Linebacker

North Vietnam’s invasion of South Vietnam in the spring of 1972 came too

soon to topple the Thieu government. While nearly all American ground forces

had been evacuated, substantial American air power remained in the theater and

more was quickly added. President Nixon proved willing to use that air power

in a less restrained fashion than his predecessor, and North Vietnamese ground

forces exposed themselves to air power when their tanks moved on the roads

and their artillery fired steadily in support of conventional operations.

Air power’s achievement in stopping the North Vietnamese invaders would

be overshadowed by the collapse of South Vietnam under a similar offensive

only three years later, when the U.S. Congress withheld American air power

from the struggle. But in 1972, President Nixon used air power to better advantage than President Johnson, and the Air Force demonstrated that it had a potent

new weapon in the laser-guided bomb.

Since bringing them to Southeast Asia in 1968, the Air Force had found

few good targets for laser-guided bombs and used thousands of them to cut

roads in Laos before the North Vietnamese offensive of 1972 yielded better targets. To repel that offensive, the Air Force would expend about four thousand in

North Vietnam alone, and by the end of the war, the total dropped in Southeast

Asia exceeded twenty-eight thousand—triple the number used in the short Gulf

War two decades later, but introduced in Southeast Asia against a narrower

range of targets and with much less publicity than subsequent guided bombing

in Southwest Asia.1 The accuracy provided by laser guidance often meant dispensing with the old practice of dropping scores of bombs to get one or two on

target. A single F–4 with two laser-guided bombs could now drop a bridge

span, perhaps two. But these “smart” bombs required good weather, and against

the heavy air defenses of North Vietnam they were dropped only in daylight

(because jet fighters did not yet carry night target identification equipment reliable above ten thousand feet). Fortunately, the North Vietnamese launched their

offensive only a few weeks before the best bombing weather.

By waiting until March 30 to begin their invasion, the North Vietnamese

had made the fullest use of the cloudy but dry northeast monsoon for moving

supplies into stockpiles near jump-off positions. Two divisions attacked across

219

Preface
the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam and a third moved

east from Laos toward Quang Tri. Within a week, more North Vietnamese divisions were in action further south—two of them in the Central Highlands,

where they threatened to cut South Vietnam in half by joining forces with Viet

Cong units already operating along the coast. Saigon lay in the path of another

North Vietnamese division and two Viet Cong divisions descending from Cambodia on An Loc. Altogether, this Easter offensive employed more than one

hundred thousand soldiers and hundreds of tanks in widely separated thrusts.2

* * *

Before the rains of the southwest monsoon periodically washed the clouds

and fog away and permitted American jet fighters to attack, North Vietnamese

soldiers had two weeks relatively free from accurate air strikes. As frustrating

as this was for American airmen, it was even more frustrating for their

President. When he met with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on April 4,

Nixon told Admiral Moorer to convey to the American commander in Saigon,

General Abrams, the need for “maximum aggressiveness” in the use of air

power.3 Nixon was upset that only 136 tactical air sorties had flown against the

invaders near the Demilitarized Zone in the last twenty-four hours. Moorer

explained the weather problem and noted that the B–52s were bombing through

the clouds. Although this appealed to the President’s personal preference for

B–52s, he was not appeased. Nor was his National Security Adviser, Henry

Kissinger. Moorer had been authorized on April 2 to send fighter strikes up to

twenty-five nautical miles north of the Demilitarized Zone. “It seemed to me

that our entire Air Force consisted of delicate machines capable of flying only

in a war in the desert in July,” Kissinger would later recall. “I suggested that if

they could not fly maybe they could taxi north for twenty-five miles.”4

The next day Nixon complained to Attorney General John Mitchell that the

weather was not really the problem: “It isn’t bad. The Air Force isn’t worth a—

I mean, they won’t fly.”5 Despite his impatience, Nixon indicated that he was

ready to play the hand he had been dealt. “The bastards have never been

bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time,” he declared, “but you have

to have weather.”6

In this frame of mind, he met with the new commander of Seventh Air

Force, Gen. John W. Vogt, who had been Director of the Joint Staff. Nixon told

Vogt he had to do the job no matter what the weather was—make maximum use

of the B–52s. If Vogt did not succeed in Vietnam, the President noted, the Air

Force could not expect White House support on major procurements; moreover,

this might well be the last major battle fought by the Air Force and it would be

tragic for the service to end its combat career in disgrace. Recalling the compli220

To Hanoi and Back
cated chain of command and restrictions that had hampered earlier commanders

of Seventh Air Force, Vogt asked for sufficient authority to do the job—he

wanted to be General Abrams’ deputy commander and not merely deputy for

air; Nixon told Kissinger to make it happen, and it did two months later. In any

case, Nixon advised Vogt to go around Abrams and communicate directly with

Washington. Nixon assured Vogt he had all the authority he needed, but Vogt

would later regret that the President did not put this assurance in writing.7

Although Nixon no doubt wanted to give his air commander a free hand,

there were built-in constraints with which Vogt was as familiar as anyone. His

own selection as Seventh Air Force commander underlined the continued intimate involvement of the Pentagon and the White House in the direction of the

air war. He was the consummate staff officer, close to his most recent boss,

Admiral Moorer, and on good terms with Henry Kissinger. Indeed, Kissinger

had recommended Vogt to Nixon as Lavelle’s replacement.8 Vogt’s Ivy League

education (Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, where he first met Kissinger), long

series of key staff assignments, and lack of command experience set him apart

from most Air Force generals. Not since the 1940s, when he was a fighter ace

and squadron commander in Europe, had Vogt commanded a unit in the field.

But he had been heavily involved in developing plans and policy for Southeast

Asia since 1954, when he was sent to Paris after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. At

the beginning of Rolling Thunder, he was in the Office of the Secretary of

Defense, helping McNamara and Paul Nitze massage target lists. For most of

Rolling Thunder, Vogt was the plans and operations deputy at Pacific Air

Forces in Hawaii where he worked for General Ryan (before Ryan became Air

Force Chief of Staff).

In Saigon, Vogt found himself answering frequent telephone calls from

Admiral Moorer. While sometimes burdensome, these calls indicated the increased stature of the Seventh Air Force commander. Since most American

ground forces had already gone home, air was what counted. In any case, Vogt’s

Army boss in Saigon, General Abrams, was out of favor with the Nixon administration. Nixon and Kissinger blamed Abrams for the sad fate of the South

Vietnamese incursion into Laos early in 1971. Abrams seemed to them a tired

and frustrated commander who after three years of routine drawdown was

unable to adjust to the new combat demands.9

Nixon made a lame effort to cure what Kissinger called the “institutionalized schizophrenia” of the route package system dividing responsibility for the

air war over North Vietnam.10 But when Secretary of Defense Laird and Admiral Moorer opposed attempting organizational changes in the midst of crisis,

Nixon backed down. Thanks to a solid base of support in the Congress, Laird

continued to exercise authority essentially independent of the President. The

two men responded very differently to the North Vietnamese invasion. Laird

saw the invasion as a good test of Vietnamization. Consequently, he thought it

best to do nothing special for the South Vietnamese, and he strongly opposed

221

Linebacker
the resumption of bombing in North Vietnam; in this opposition he had the

quiet support of Secretary of the Air Force Seamans. As in earlier crises, Nixon

sought to work around Laird by working directly with Admiral Moorer in

Washington and Ambassador Bunker in Saigon; Bunker conveyed “backchannel” guidance from Kissinger to Generals Abrams and Vogt. Meanwhile, Laird

could put his own pressure on Moorer, and the upshot was that Laird was sometimes able to put restrictions on renewed bombing in North Vietnam.11

Moorer’s situation was especially awkward because his relationship with

Kissinger had recently been buffeted by charges that Moorer’s liaison officers

on Kissinger’s staff, RAdm. Rembrandt C. Robinson and his successor, RAdm.

Robert O. Welander, had used Yeoman Charles Radford to steal sensitive

papers (about China and Pakistan) from Kissinger on behalf of Moorer. The

yeoman, who had also passed some of these secrets to newspaper columnist and

fellow Morman, Jack Anderson, was quickly reassigned, as was Welander, and

Kissinger closed the liaison office. Perhaps because Nixon was himself becoming suspicious of Kissinger’s appetite for diplomatic triumphs well-publicized

in the press, Moorer’s relationship with the President did not suffer.12

Both Nixon and Kissinger continued to need Moorer as a way of getting

around Secretary of Defense Laird’s opposition to their use of military power.

Many of the confrontations between the White House and Laird took the form

of heated telephone conversations between Kissinger’s military assistant, Maj.

Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (Army), and Laird’s military assistant, Maj. Gen.

Robert E. Pursley (Air Force). Haig had graduated from the U.S. Military

Academy at West Point in 1947 two years ahead of Pursley. They had both won

promotion to brigadier and major general thanks to their civilian bosses. After

earning a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard, Pursley had

served as military assistant to three secretaries of defense, beginning with

Robert McNamara in 1966. It was Laird, however, who twice promoted him.

Meanwhile, Haig had served as military assistant to Army secretary Cyrus

Vance before becoming a battalion commander in Vietnam.13

An especially destructive incident in the relationship between Pursley and

Haig (and their civilian bosses) had been North Korea’s shoot-down of an

EC–121 reconnaissance aircraft on April 15, 1969. Nixon ordered a naval task

force into Korean waters, and he became impatient when no movement took

place. Haig’s repeated calls to Pursley left Haig with the impression that

Pursley was being evasive. Finally concluding that Laird had not transmitted

the President’s orders, the White House sent the orders directly to the Navy.14 In

the three years since that bad beginning, the White House had wiretapped

Pursley’s telephone. He was still ignorant of that fact in the spring of 1972,

when he visited Haig to improve relations. Haig’s revelation that the White

House had been keeping a record on Pursley spurred the Air Force general to

announce his retirement, but Laird talked him into accepting an assignment in

Japan.15 As for Haig, he was becoming increasingly influential with the

222

To Hanoi and Back
President. Since Haig did not share Kissinger’s inclination to fine tune the

bombing of North Vietnam in the service of diplomacy, Haig could consistently bolster Nixon’s inclination to make stronger use of air power.

Nixon and Moorer moved quickly to get more air power into Southeast

Asia. While Vietnamization had left considerable American air power in the theater, the remainder was much smaller than the force that had confronted the Tet

offensive in 1968. Then the Air Force alone had more than 1,700 aircraft on

South Vietnamese and Thai bases, not to mention other aircraft within reach, like

the B–52s on Guam and Okinawa. Now there were fewer than 800 Air Force aircraft in Southeast Asia, and the half of these in South Vietnam were slated either

to move to Thailand or return to the United States. Nixon permitted most of the

scheduled moves to take place, but he altered the result by squeezing 350 F–4s

and 50 B–52s into Thailand, with another 150 B–52s on Guam.16

Fighters deploying to Thailand included the new F–4Es that each had a 20-

millimeter gun built into the nose. Seventy-two F–4Es from North Carolina and

Florida crowded onto Udorn and Ubon Air Bases with the more than one hundred F–4s already there. But older F–4Ds also came to Thailand. Indeed, the

entire 49th Tactical Fighter Wing of seventy-two F–4Ds flew from New

Mexico to reintroduce an American presence at Takhli Air Base. Since the

355th Tactical Fighter Wing’s departure in 1970, the American side of the base

had been stripped of electricity, water, bedding, and furniture. Such deficiencies

were ameliorated just in time to handle the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing, which

moved from Da Nang to Takhli in June. The 388th Tactical Fighter Wing at

Korat (home of F–105 Wild Weasels and EB–66 jammers) also absorbed more

F–4s, and these, like the Takhli F–4s, dedicated much of their effort to hitting

North Vietnamese ground forces in South Vietnam. That left the principal

responsibility for fighter operations in North Vietnam to the 8th Tactical Fighter

Wing at Ubon and the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at Udorn.17

While there were 150 fewer Air Force jet fighters than had been available

during the Tet offensive, Navy carriers operating in the Gulf of Tonkin

increased from two to five before dropping back to four, one more than commonly operated on the line in 1968. The Marines sent two squadrons of F–4s

and a squadron of A–6s to a nearly bare base at Nam Phong, fifty miles south of

Udorn; the Marines moved into tents, planted a single rose bush, and dubbed

their new home the “Rose Garden.” With twice as many B–52s as had ever been

used in Southeast Asia and an abundance of the new laser-guided bombs for the

Air Force F–4s, Nixon gathered a more formidable (if less numerous) air armada than the North Vietnamese had yet encountered.18

Nixon repeatedly underlined his demand for more B–52s. As early as

February, he had responded to Abrams’ call for renewed bombing of North

Vietnam by sending 29 B–52s to Guam. U-Tapao Air Base, Thailand, already

carried its maximum of 51 B–52s and nearly as many tankers. Thanks to their

proximity to Vietnam, the U-Tapao B–52s were far more valuable than those

223

Linebacker
that had to be based twenty-four hundred miles away on Guam. But Guam was

as close as newly deployed B–52s could get. Kadena Air Base on Okinawa

could no longer be used as a B–52 base, because Nixon had already agreed that

Okinawa would revert to Japanese control in May. The Japanese would permit

tankers, but not bombers, to operate from Kadena. Guam would have to absorb

some 150 B–52s, far more than Andersen Air Force Base could handle comfortably.19

Nixon’s immediate response to the Easter Offensive was to deploy 54

B–52s to Guam and 36 F–4s to Ubon Air Base, Thailand. That gave him a total

of 134 B–52s to use in the theater, but he soon found that his plans to use them

in North Vietnam were constantly meeting objections from Abrams and Laird

to use every available B–52 in South Vietnam on the invading forces. In exasperation, Nixon called in May for another 100 B–52s. No one in the Pentagon

or the Pacific could figure out how to cram an additional 100 B–52s on Guam.

After failing to talk Nixon out of this new deployment, Moorer told his staff a

story about a farmer who managed to carry four tons of turkeys in a truck with

a capacity of two tons by keeping half the turkeys in the air.20

Eighth Air Force on Guam finally did manage to absorb another 58 B–52s

by closing one of Andersen’s two runways and using it to park them. The old

B–29 hardstands from World War II simply could not handle the bigger B–52s.

The commander of Eighth Air Force, Lt. Gen. Gerald W. Johnson, later recalled

that a B–29 stub “would barely take the main gear and everything else would be

hanging over the sides . . . and after they rolled on the stubs a couple of times,

we’d go out to get the airplanes and find they’d sunk into the pavement about a

foot.”21 For two months while Navy Seabees constructed new hardstands and

enlarged old ones, Johnson had only one runway for takeoffs. He had the weeds

cleared from an old World War II runway for emergency landings, and the

Naval Air Station was also used for this purpose.22

Housing the people who came with the newly deployed B–52s caused

more problems. Andersen Air Force Base, which only a few weeks earlier had

fewer than three thousand people, now had to support more than nine thousand.

For a couple of thousand people, that meant living in tents; for a couple of hundred, it meant living off base in luxury hotels normally populated by Japanese

tourists. Both these new housing options were widely preferred to crowding

into the hot Quonset huts of “tin city.” Most people were working too hard and

long to care much about housing. After years of routine “milk runs,” Andersen

and its sister B–52 base at U-Tapao, Thailand, began to fly missions both more

dangerous and more obviously critical to the survival of South Vietnam.

The new dangers facing the B–52s were posed not only by surface-to-air

missiles near the Demilitarized Zone and even in South Vietnam, but also by

President Nixon’s decision to send the B–52s deep into North Vietnam. At least

since the covert B–52 raids into Cambodia in 1969, Nixon had taken a special

interest in B–52s. During Rolling Thunder, B–52 raids into North Vietnam had

224

To Hanoi and Back
been confined to the southern end of the panhandle and the mountain passes

into Laos. But Nixon did not share Johnson’s fear of triggering a reaction in

Moscow and Beijing, which had both responded favorably to Nixon’s overtures. Nor was he deterred by the possibility that the heavier air defenses surrounding Hanoi and Haiphong might take a toll on the B–52s.

Yet Nixon did not order the immediate bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. It

took more than a week for him to approve a series of shifts in the northern

bombing limit even to nineteen degrees, where it had been during the last six

months of Rolling Thunder. He seemed to want Moorer to propose dramatic

actions for the President’s approval. But Moorer did not yet have in place much

of the abundant air power that would soon descend on Southeast Asia, and

Laird was opposing any bombing in North Vietnam. Nevertheless, on April 8

when Nixon complained again that there had been only “routine” operations so

far, Moorer did promise that at least six B–52s would strike a target deep in

North Vietnam before sunset on April 10.23

Twelve B–52s from U-Tapao hit the Vinh oil tank farm and the Vinh railyard before dawn on April 10. To get these twelve bombers into North

Vietnam, an armada of fifty-three other aircraft played supporting roles. Navy

A–6s and A–7s began the attack by striking surface-to-air missile sites. Air

Force F–105 Wild Weasels then threatened those sites, while twenty F–4s laid

a chaff trail for the B–52s. This was the first major use of chaff since World

War II. The F–4s could not reach the altitude of the B–52s (above thirty-five

thousand feet), and the B–52s wanted to stay as far above most flak as possible. As a result, the B–52s rode along above their chaff trail, which both hid

their exact location from North Vietnamese radar and alerted that radar to their

general flight path.24

The North Vietnamese began firing surface-to-air missiles at the attackers

even before they had passed over the border from Laos to North Vietnam. More

than thirty of the missiles arced through the bomber formation, hitting nothing

but still disrupting plans to fly straight and level. The B–52 pilots did follow

their orders to “press on” despite SAM or MiG interference, and the MiGs did

not come up to challenge this nighttime raid—so far, they were a daytime phenomenon. The twelve B–52s dropped a total of nearly eight hundred bombs,

mostly 750-pound and 500-pound high-explosive bombs, but including some

cluster bombs. The raid, however, was not very effective, probably because the

crews tried to use the skyspot system for ground radar direction of bombing.

Vinh was too far from the radar sites in Thailand and South Vietnam, even if the

B–52s had managed to maintain a straight and level bomb run.25

Moorer ordered another raid for April 13, this one to penetrate farther north

with six additional B–52s (a total of eighteen), all dropping high-explosive

bombs only and all using onboard bombing radar rather than skyspot. Mindful

of the inaccuracy of the Vinh raid, the new target was chosen for its relative isolation from the civilian population as well as for its importance to the war effort.

225

Linebacker
Just south of the twentieth parallel lay Thanh Hoa’s Bai Thuong Airfield, part

of North Vietnam’s expanded airfield complex to support a growing air force of

more than two hundred MiGs (almost double the size it had been during Rolling

Thunder). Once again the B–52s struck just before dawn. They destroyed a

MiG–17 on the ground and none came up to oppose them; they left seventeen

craters in the runway. The North Vietnamese fired their surface-to-air missiles

in as great a profusion as before and with as little result.26

The Joint Chiefs had already triggered planning in Hawaii for a third raid

to strike three days after the second. This time the targets would be Haiphong

and Hanoi. A proposal to increase the size of the raid to forty B–52s, however,

gave way to sending eighteen B–52s against an oil tank farm at Haiphong

before dawn followed by more than a hundred Navy and Air Force fighters

attacking Haiphong and Hanoi targets in daylight. Even the reduced force of

B–52s, however, was too much for Abrams, who objected to diverting any of

them from South Vietnam while An Loc was under so much pressure. When he

got Abrams message, Nixon was upset because he suspected that if the land battle went sour he would be blamed for the diversion. Kissinger, who had supported the raid, now had second thoughts. But Moorer pointed out that the

B–52s had already launched and would have to ditch their bombs in the Gulf of

Tonkin. Nixon decided to let the mission run its course.27

One of the B–52s aborted with mechanical problems, but the remaining

seventeen dropped their bombs before dawn on Sunday, April 16, and destroyed or damaged more than thirty oil tanks at Haiphong. Despite the failure of the

chaff to disperse sufficiently to form a trail, more than a hundred surface-to-air

missiles missed the B–52s and most of their escorts. But a missile did shoot

down an F–105 Wild Weasel that had been protecting F–4s dropping chaff.

After daybreak the Navy lost an A–7 attacking warehouses in Haiphong.28

The Air Force F–4 raid on a tank farm near Hanoi came off without a loss,

and supporting F–4s flying combat air patrol even managed to shoot down three

MiG–21s. Yet General Vogt was not entirely pleased with the day’s work. Some

of his discomfiture may have come from his own peripheral role in the planning,

which had been done mostly in Hawaii by a joint team dominated by an admiral

and a colonel from Strategic Air Command. Since the Hanoi tank farm was considerably smaller than the Haiphong tank farm and since seventeen B–52s could

drop almost ten times as many bombs as thirty-two F–4s, Vogt’s F–4 raid was

necessarily not as spectacular—even though the F–4s were credited with a higher percentage of destruction. At the time, Vogt bragged that this F–4 raid was

“one of the best ever executed” in the Hanoi area.29 But he was bothered by

bombs that missed the target area entirely; they had a potential for exacting civilian casualties and spurring Washington to put important targets off-limits. Vogt

became more and more determined to make maximum use of guided bombs.30

Whatever Vogt’s reservations, for the first time since the beginning of the

Easter offensive the President was not disappointed. “Well,” Nixon told his

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To Hanoi and Back
chief of staff, “we really left our calling card this weekend.”31 In the glow of

this assessment, B–52 raids in North Vietnam were bound to continue for a

while longer. About a week later, a pair of strikes on April 21 and 23 used nearly forty B–52 sorties to hit warehouses near Thanh Hoa. Most of the fighter sorties scheduled to hit other Thanh Hoa targets, like the famous bridge that had

withstood so many attacks during Rolling Thunder, were canceled due to bad

weather. The B–52s did get their usual escort of F–4s and F–105 Wild Weasels,

but for the first time over North Vietnam a B–52 was damaged by a surface-toair missile. The damaged B–52 completed its bomb run and landed at Da Nang

with three of its eight engines shut down. This was only the second B–52 to

sustain combat damage, the first having been hit by a surface-to-air missile

three weeks earlier near Quang Tri city, South Vietnam.32

The Thanh Hoa raids were intended to strengthen Henry Kissinger’s hand

during his visit to Moscow of April 20–24. While advocating strikes south of

the twentieth parallel, Kissinger urged the President not to bomb again near

Hanoi and Haiphong at least until Kissinger had talked to the Soviets in

Moscow and the North Vietnamese in Paris, where he was scheduled to meet Le

Duc Tho on May 2. Kissinger hoped to bring to fruition Nixon’s long-planned

“summit meeting” in Moscow, where in late May the President would sign an

agreement limiting strategic arms. But Nixon thought that threatening to call off

the summit might persuade the Soviets to put pressure on the North Vietnamese. During Kissinger’s April visit in Moscow, he simply ignored Nixon’s

instructions.33

By the time Kissinger met with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese had

overrun the city of Quang Tri and were in no mood to bargain. The National

Security Adviser returned to Washington without a strong diplomatic argument

against the President’s desire to use B–52s against Hanoi. Kissinger turned to a

military alternative he had first considered in 1969—mining the North

Vietnamese ports and interdicting their ground transportation routes by attacking them with fighter aircraft. Rolling Thunder’s attempts to interdict the roads

running from North Vietnam into Laos and South Vietnam had left Haiphong

and North Vietnam’s other harbors free to import goods from the Soviet Union,

China, and elsewhere. The Cambodian port of Sihanoukville had also been a

conduit for supplies to the communist forces in South Vietnam until the new

Lon Nol government had closed it to the communists in 1970. Since North

Vietnam’s conventional invasion of South Vietnam was consuming large quantities of ammunition and other supplies, Kissinger saw great potential in simultaneous land and sea interdiction.34

Nixon’s “detente” had proceeded far enough with the Soviets and the

Chinese for him not to share President Johnson’s old fear of sharply increased

military intervention on their part. Nixon had already had his summit meeting

in Beijing in February 1972. The Soviets might pull out of the May summit, but

they were not apt to do more militarily than try to resupply the North

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Vietnamese—a task that could be made far more difficult by mining the ports.

The Soviets would then be forced to transport those supplies through a less than

friendly China, if the Chinese would permit it. Nixon very much liked the boldness of the proposal, and for a time it did distract him from sending the B–52s

north again. On May 4, he terminated military planning for B–52 and fighter

raids on Hanoi and Haiphong scheduled for May 6 and 7.35

Nixon wanted to make sure that his own actions in Vietnam contrasted

sharply with those of his predecessor. Former President Johnson contributed

directly to White House resolve on this occasion by sending word that his mistakes had been a consequence of following advice against his own instincts.

Nixon told his close aides that he had experienced the same problem. When the

North Koreans shot down the EC–121 in 1969, he should have followed his

instinct to bomb North Korea. When he sent American forces into Cambodia in

1970, he should have followed his instinct to mount a full-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam instead of the few sorties sent then. “If we’d done

that then, the damned war would be over now.”36

Having embraced mining and interdiction as the bold action required,

Nixon made his preparations in the greatest secrecy. By the time Nixon permitted his National Security Council to discuss the proposal on May 8, he had

already decided to go ahead. Nevertheless, he went through the motions of listening to his critics. As expected, Secretary of Defense Laird opposed the plan,

and he was supported in his opposition by the Central Intelligence Agency.

They argued that the North Vietnamese already had sufficient supplies stockpiled for the offensive and in any case that air power would fail to interdict the

roads from China to North Vietnam. Kissinger would later claim in his memoirs

his own agreement at the time that the effects of the campaign would come too

late to affect the North Vietnamese offensive: “I agreed, but I was concerned

with Hanoi’s actions after the offensive.”37

Four days before the National Security Council meeting, Nixon had called

Admiral Moorer into his private office in the Old Executive Office Building to

get the Chairman’s views and get him planning in the quietest way. Moorer

assured the President that Moorer himself had already planned such an operation eight years earlier when he commanded the Seventh Fleet and that the necessary preparations could be made without the press hearing anything about it.

Moorer was as good as his word. When Nixon made his television announcement on the evening of May 8 that the new campaign was already underway, he

caught Americans and North Vietnamese by surprise.38

General Abrams, the U.S. commander in Saigon, was among the

Americans surprised by the mining of Haiphong. Suddenly the Navy withdrew

gunfire support from scheduled ground operations in South Vietnam.

Relations between Abrams and the Commander in Chief, Pacific, in Honolulu,

Adm. John McCain, were already tense. This time Abrams complained bitterly to a visiting assistant secretary of defense about the Navy’s lack of coopera228

To Hanoi and Back
tion only to learn that the Navy ships had been pulled off to support the mining

of Haiphong. That this came as news to him was the clearest sign yet that

Abrams had lost the administration’s confidence. At least he would no longer

have to argue daily against siphoning B–52s from targets in South Vietnam to

strike North Vietnam. For a while that job would be left to fighter and attack

aircraft.39

* * *

When President Nixon went on national television to tell his fellow citizens

about mining North Vietnam’s ports, it was nine o’clock on the evening of May

8, 1972. The time in Haiphong was nine o’clock on the morning of May 9.

While Nixon spoke, A–6 aircraft from the carrier Coral Sea dropped sea mines

into the narrow channel connecting North Vietnam’s principal port with the

Gulf of Tonkin. As Nixon explained, the mines would not activate for three

days, during which the twenty-eight foreign ships in Haiphong harbor would be

free to leave. That they did not leave appeared to result from North Vietnamese

refusal to provide tugboats until the ships had unloaded their cargo. Their stay

would be a long one lasting into the following year. The failure of the North

Vietnamese to send a minesweeper into the channel confirmed Admiral

Moorer’s good judgment in restricting the minefield to simple magnetic mines;

his own Navy would sweep them in the end.40

On the day following the mining of Haiphong, an interdiction campaign

began against land routes from China through North Vietnam. During April,

Air Force and Navy tactical aircraft had flown nearly two thousand attack sorties into North Vietnam, the bulk of them hitting the panhandle in a campaign

called “Freedom Train”; tactical aircraft had also joined B–52s in attacking a

few targets north of the nineteenth parallel. Now the B–52s were withdrawn

from North Vietnam, and when they returned in June, it would be only to the

panhandle. The number of fighter attack sorties in North Vietnam, on the other

hand, tripled to six thousand a month—including about a thousand in Route

Package Six.41

Although the first strikes of May 10, 1972, flew under the old rubric of

“Rolling Thunder,” this new campaign would be called “Linebacker.”

Campaign designations often were drawn randomly from approved lists and

had no other significance, but “Rolling Thunder” and “Linebacker” seemed

more than chance selections. Just as the label “Rolling Thunder” had conveyed

the gradualism of that campaign, “Linebacker” was football terminology suggesting the defensive nature of the new campaign. Perhaps it was no mere coincidence that many air planners were avid football fans as was their president;

Nixon had even been known to compare international politics to his favorite

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Linebacker
sport. Instead of tackling football runners or blocking passes, this bombing

campaign would attempt to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines.42

Yet Rolling Thunder had also been in large measure an interdiction campaign. Why would Linebacker be any more successful? Linebacker’s proponents were encouraged by the fact that large North Vietnamese conventional

forces were for the first time rapidly expending munitions and other supplies in

South Vietnam, while Nixon had moved boldly to close North Vietnam’s ports.

The other hopeful factor in the new equation was the laser-guided bomb.

“Laser” is an acronym for “light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation.” This intense beam of light was produced for the first time at Hughes

Aircraft in 1960. Army researchers at Huntsville, Alabama, began to explore

the laser’s utility for missile guidance. By relying on a pulsed laser beam rather

than a steady one, they reduced the weight of a laser generator enough for aircraft to carry it. The pulsed laser beam could designate (or “illuminate”) a target sufficiently for a missile with a laser sensor to hit it.43

When Army money for laser research dried up in 1965, the Huntsville team

took their idea to the Air Force Systems Command. Col. Joseph Davis at Eglin

Air Force Base steered the effort away from missiles to free-fall bombs. An F–4

could easily carry a laser designator mounted near the weapon system operator

in the back seat, while laser-seeker kits combining sensors and control fins (or

“canards”) could be attached to bombs already in the inventory. Davis encouraged competing proposals for a laser-seeker kit from several companies; Texas

Instruments and North American Aviation entered the competition. Prototype

tests in 1966 favored the cheaper Texas Instruments design.44

Although early work on laser guidance had used 750-pound bombs, testing

in Southeast Asia during the summer of 1968 reinforced a growing conviction

that the 2,000-pound bomb was more suitable. Laser-guided bombs were obviously more expensive than unguided bombs of any weight, and the Air Force

wanted enough punch to take out a bridge span with one bomb. After brief use

in the North Vietnamese panhandle, the end of Rolling Thunder meant that for

three years, laser-guided bombing was done mostly in Laos, where there were

few good targets. Destroying small bridges and penetrating cave entrances were

among the most appropriate tasks there, but breaching dirt roads was more

common.45

Even had the White House authorized raids into the Hanoi-Haiphong area

during the “protective reaction” years, laser-guided bombs probably would not

have been used. The problem was not merely that laser guidance required relatively clear weather to function, but also that the Air Force had not yet developed a way to designate the target without exposing the designating aircraft to

the high risk of being shot down wherever enemy defenses were heavy. Since

the target had to be illuminated throughout the bomb’s glide, the designating

aircraft had to orbit over the target until all the bombs dropped by other F–4s

had struck.

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To Hanoi and Back
Although only the F–4 was certified to drop laser-guided bombs, communist air defenses in Laos and South Vietnam were sufficiently light to permit

AC–130s, C–130s, and OV–10s as well as F–4s to orbit with laser designators.

F–4s could use the same orbiting tactic for laser designation in the panhandle of

North Vietnam, but dropping laser-guided bombs in the heavily defended areas

closer to Hanoi and Haiphong demanded a new designation technology.

Fortunately, by the spring of 1972, Seventh Air Force had a wing pod that hung

the laser designator on a gimbal—permitting it to track the target by swiveling

independently of the F–4’s maneuvers; the designating F–4 no longer had to

orbit and could drop bombs itself. Unfortunately, Seventh Air Force had only

six of these “Pave Knife” pods and had no prospect of getting new ones that

summer.46

General Vogt therefore designed the Air Force’s portion of Linebacker to

make maximum use of his six Pave Knife pods while preserving them. That

meant escorting them with big formations much like those he had developed for

the B–52s in April. At first, eight F–105 Wild Weasels led the way, but later

these were joined by F–4s in hunter-killer teams, since the F–105’s antiradiation missiles only attacked radars and not the surface-to-air missile launchers

themselves; the F–4s carried CBU–52 cluster bombs, which could do more

damage to equipment than the CBU–24 antipersonnel cluster bombs of Rolling

Thunder. Normally the chaff force was considerably smaller than the twenty

F–4s used with the B–52s—usually eight F–4s dropping chaff, but sometimes

as many as sixteen. At first these were unescorted, but as the MiGs became

more active and skillful, up to eight other F–4s were added to escort the chaff

F–4s. The strike force itself rarely exceeded eight F–4s, because the dust and

smoke kicked up by their bombs soon interfered with the laser guidance of

additional attackers. The strike force had a close escort of eight F–4s, not to

mention yet another dozen or more F–4s flying combat air patrol in the vicinity.

At the outset of Linebacker, supporting combat aircraft outnumbered strike aircraft by more than three to one; by early summer, the ratio exceeded five to one,

and that did not count supporting aircraft operating at a distance, like the EB–66

jammers, the EC–121 warning aircraft, and the KC–135 tankers.47

Vogt’s big strike packages did preserve four Pave Knife pods through the

campaign. Only two pods were lost, both in July—the first when the designating F–4 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile and the second when an F–4

caught fire after blowing a tire on take-off.48 Vogt resisted pressure from

Washington and Hawaii to increase the number of aircraft dropping bombs at

the expense of his escorts. Only when the weather began to sour in August and

September, did he permit greater use of unguided bombs in Route Package Six

with smaller escort packages. Even then the total of Air Force, Navy, and

Marine sorties dropping bombs on North Vietnam usually did not much exceed

the two hundred daily with which Linebacker had begun; this was about a third

of the available U.S. attack sorties available for all of Southeast Asia. By the

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Linebacker
end of the summer, the fighters had been rejoined over the panhandle of North

Vietnam by about twenty B–52 sorties daily (a fifth of those available).49

From the beginning of Linebacker, two hundred attack sorties a day for

North Vietnam seemed much too little to President Nixon. “I am concerned by

the military’s plan of allocating 200 sorties for North Vietnam for the dreary

‘milk runs’ which characterized the Johnson administration’s bombing . . . .” he

wrote Kissinger in May. Nixon emphasized that the U.S. had sufficient power

to destroy North Vietnam’s “war-making capacity,” and that the only question

was whether the administration had the will to use that power. “What distinguishes me from Johnson,” he declared, “is that I have the will in spades.”50

But Nixon did not simply order the military to increase the weight of effort

over North Vietnam. Rather he instructed Kissinger to have the military and the

National Security Council staff come up with “some ideas on their own.”51 The

only consequence of this instruction was planning during the summer to send

the B–52s to Hanoi. Meanwhile, the steadily improving situation in South

Vietnam diminished Nixon’s insistence on doing something more drastic in

North Vietnam.

Nevertheless, General Vogt did continue to hear from Admiral McCain in

Hawaii on the subject of increased sorties over North Vietnam, especially Route

Package Six. As a result of Vogt’s emphasis on laser-guided bombing, the Air

Force’s war over North Vietnam in 1972 looked much different than the Navy’s.

The Navy was sending about twice as many attack sorties against North Vietnam

as the Air Force, and the Navy’s sorties were scattered against many more targets. Not only would the Navy plan to attack more fixed targets each day (often

four or five while the Air Force targeted one or two), but Navy armed reconnaissance sorties often hit a dozen or more fixed targets in addition as far north as

Route Package Six.52

Vogt confined Air Force armed reconnaissance in North Vietnam almost

entirely to Route Package One, where few of the targets were fixed and where

laser-guided bombs also played an important role against artillery and tanks

(the same target sets pursued by laser-guided bombs in South Vietnam, where

Seventh Air Force did about half its laser-guided bombing). In Route Package

One and South Vietnam, Vogt could use his older laser-guidance systems with

the designating aircraft orbiting over the target. This emphasis on guided

bombs was not shared by the Navy, which dropped fewer than five hundred

laser-guided and TV-guided bombs on North Vietnam while Seventh Air Force

was dropping about four thousand.53

Vogt persisted with laser-guided bombing because it was yielding remarkable results far superior in accuracy to any previous bombing. He could count

on every mission destroying its target unless cloudy weather got in the way.

Seventh Air Force, however, ceased to use television-guided bombs in Route

Package Six, even though both the Navy and the Air Force had developed a

heavier 2,000-pound version (and thus corrected a major deficiency of the

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To Hanoi and Back
Navy’s Walleye during Rolling Thunder). While F–4 aircrews were effective

dropping laser-guided bombs from medium altitude above ten thousand feet,

getting adequate contrast for a good lock-on with the much more expensive

television-guided bomb required them to fly lower into enemy air defenses.54

Laser guidance was not without its own drawbacks. In high-threat areas it

could not be used at night since the F–4 lacked adequate night sensors and had

to rely on aircrew seeing the target with the naked eye. Not only could clouds

prevent initial designation of the target, but a passing cloud could interfere with

the laser at any time during the bomb’s glide. Dust and smoke could also cause

the bomb not to guide. The North Vietnamese of course tried to exacerbate this

problem with smoke pots, but more often than not a breeze would clear the target long enough for it to be hit. After a couple of hits, however, the resulting

dust and smoke could cause later bombs to miss.

The scarcity of laser-guidance systems led Seventh Air Force to concentrate most of them in the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon Air Base, Thailand.

This one wing did all Air Force laser-guided bombing in Route Packages Five

and Six and most guided bombing in Route Package One and South Vietnam as

well. During Rolling Thunder, the 8th had called themselves the “MiG Killers”

and specialized in air-to-air operations, while the F–105s at Takhli and Korat

dropped most of the bombs. During the “protective reaction” period, the

famous 555th “Triple Nickel” squadron and much of the air-to-air job had

passed to the 432d Tactical Reconnaissance Wing (assisted by the 366th and

388th wings). Under Col. Carl Miller, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing in

Linebacker would earn the new nickname of “Bridge Busters.” Miller had

flown F–84s during the Korean War and F–100s in South Vietnam as recently

as 1967. He would personally lead many of the pioneering laser-guided bombing missions into North Vietnam.

Miller could not focus on guided bombing alone. In April his four F–4

squadrons had made room for two F–4 squadrons from Seymour Johnson Air

Force Base, North Carolina. These two temporary-duty squadrons joined

AC–130s supporting South Vietnamese ground forces, as well as flying missions in Laos and Cambodia. Miller’s four permanent F–4 squadrons also had

other duties besides guided bombing. They dropped chaff for the B–52s and for

their own bomb droppers, and they provided forward air controllers in Route

Package One, both day and night. To perform these many functions, Miller had

a base crowded with about a hundred F–4s and a dozen AC–130s.55

As their nickname “Bridge Busters” testified, it was guided bombing for

which the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing aircrews would be best known in 1972, and

their principal targets were bridges. The development of guided bombs had

been closely associated with bridge bombing ever since World War II. While

bridges like those across the Seine River in France were severed by unguided

bombs, fighter pilots had to take severe risks flying low-level runs to hit those

bridges. By the end of the war, however, the U.S. Army Air Forces had devel233

Linebacker
oped a radio guidance kit that could be attached to 1,000-pound and 2,000-

pound bombs. These early precision bombs could be guided in azimuth only,

not range. Although a B–24 bomber dropping them could stay above eight

thousand feet, it had to remain over the target while the bombardier tried to

guide a bomb all the way. These precision bombs were used only in Burma,

where air defenses were relatively light and where fewer than five hundred

radio-guided bombs succeeded in destroying more than twenty bridges.56

During the Korean War, the Air Force used improved radio-guided bombs.

The addition of range control, however, did little to improve the accuracy of

radio-guided bombs and nothing to reduce the vulnerability of bombers dropping them. While B–29 bombardiers where able to judge the correct azimuth,

they had great difficulty judging range. In Korea, 1,000-pound guided bombs

encountered bridges for which they were inadequate, stimulating the Air Force

to try a 12,000-pound version. When it hit a bridge, the big bomb destroyed it,

but aircrews discovered to their dismay that the bomb could not be jettisoned

without detonating when it hit the ground; a wounded bomber creeping home at

low altitude could be blown up if it tried to get rid of its big guided bomb.57

Again in North Vietnam, the Navy and the Air Force at first used guided

munitions too light for some bridges. The Navy’s Bullpup missiles (also used

by the Air Force) were descended from the Korean War radio-guided bombs

with the addition of a rocket engine, but this did not permit much standoff safety because the aircraft had to remain close enough for the crew to see the target—and the rocket engine smoke helped enemy gunners judge the aircraft’s

position. The 250-pound Bullpup did little damage. In any case, the Bullpup

could not be used against the heavy air defenses prevailing throughout most of

North Vietnam. The Navy’s Walleye television-guided bomb was used against

better defended bridges, because it permitted the aircraft to leave the area after

initial lock-on. But the version of Walleye available during Rolling Thunder

was too light (1,100 pounds with an 825-pound warhead) to down spans in the

stronger bridges.58

The toughest bridge in North Vietnam crossed the Song Ma at Thanh Hoa.

Only two spans meeting on a central concrete abutment, this bridge took seven

years to build and was not completed until 1964. The communists may have

taken special care in its solid construction not only because it carried the only

railroad running south of Hanoi together with the principal highway, but also

because they had themselves blown up its predecessor during their rebellion

against the French. Their technique of arranging a head-on collision between

two locomotives loaded with explosives could not be imitated by Americans.

During three years of Rolling Thunder, hundreds of sorties had suffered eleven

losses while fruitlessly attacking the Thanh Hoa Bridge with Walleyes,

Bullpups, mines and unguided bombs. Transport aircraft even dropped 5,000-

pound mines upriver at night so that they would float into the bridge abutment,

but this attempt also failed—costing a C–130 and its crew. The Thanh Hoa

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To Hanoi and Back
Bridge still stood, no span had ever fallen, and none of the damage done had

made this bridge unusable for very long.59

On April 27, 1972, two weeks before the mining of Haiphong, eight Air

Force fighters returned to the Thanh Hoa Bridge with a new generation of guided bombs. One flight carried 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs and the other

2,000-pound television-guided bombs. Although laser-guided bombs would

prove to be normally a little less sensitive to weather, on this occasion it was the

television-guided bombs that got a good enough lock-on for five of them to be

dropped; the cloud cover was sufficient to make it unlikely that a laser beam

could be kept on the target long enough for bombs to complete their glide, and

so no laser-guided bombs were dropped. The television-guided bombs closed

the bridge to traffic but did not down a span.60

When the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing came back to the Thanh Hoa Bridge

on May 13, 1972, the fourth day of Linebacker, five of the fourteen strike F–4s

carried their heaviest weapons, 3,000-pound laser-guided bombs, while the others had 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs or 500-pound unguided bombs. The

weather cooperated, and for the first time a span of the Thanh Hoa Bridge went

down. Nevertheless that was not to be the last raid on this bridge. While rail

traffic would not cross the bridge for the rest of the year, trucks were soon using

it again. The Air Force revisited the bridge twice more, and the Navy came no

less than eleven times. Nor did the North Vietnamese fail to use pontoon

bridges across the Song Ma. While guided bombs facilitated interdiction, they

did not make it easy.61

Altogether, the Air Force destroyed more than a hundred bridges in

Linebacker, some of them several times. The first to go down, even before the

Thanh Hoa Bridge, was the much longer Doumer Bridge over the Red River at

Hanoi. Because of its location, it had been a forbidden target during Rolling

Thunder until August 1967, when it was attacked by F–105s and F–4s with

unguided bombs. On that 1967 raid, F–105s with 3,000-pound bombs collapsed

one of the nineteen spans. Although they were dropping bombs from seven

thousand feet and pulling out as low as four thousand feet, none of the attacking

aircraft was shot down; an F–105 and an F–4 were damaged, both managing to

land in Thailand. The backseater in the damaged F–4, Lt. Thomas “Mike”

Messett, returned to Southeast Asia as a captain in 1972 and sat in the front seat

of another F–4 during the first two Linebacker raids on the Doumer Bridge.

Most of his fellow pilots were making their initial visits to Hanoi.62

On the morning of May 10, 1972, sixteen F–4s attacked the Doumer

Bridge from twelve thousand feet with guided bombs. Colonel Miller led the

first flight of four over the target and dropped television-guided bombs, none

of which hit the target. The experience soured both Miller and his boss in

Saigon, General Vogt, on television guidance. The other three flights dropped

2,000-pound laser-guided bombs that severely damaged the bridge but failed

to down a span. Vogt sent a single flight of four F–4s back the next day with a

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Linebacker
pair of 3,000-pound laser-guided bombs as well as six more 2,000-pounders.

This time three spans broke away. Not only did the bigger bombs prove as

effective as unguided bombs had in 1967, but keeping the laser designator on

target was easier in the face of the lighter air defenses that confronted the

smaller force.63

* * *

While all the strike aircraft attacking the Doumer Bridge on May 10 and 11

completed their missions unharmed, two escorting F–4s were shot down by

Chinese-made MiG–19s. These MiG–19s (or J–6s as the Chinese versions were

called) were less maneuverable than the older MiG–17s and slower than the

newer MiG–21s. Like the MiG–17s and unlike the MiG–21s, the MiG–19s in

North Vietnam relied primarily on their guns to combat other aircraft.

Altogether the Chinese provided more than thirty MiG–19s after the end of

Rolling Thunder—or about a seventh of North Vietnam’s fighter force in 1972.

While these MiG–19s did not give North Vietnam a major new capability, they

were the first Chinese-made aircraft in the North Vietnamese inventory. As

early as September 1965, a Chinese MiG–19 had downed an Air Force F–104

that had strayed into China, and a pair of Navy A–6s had been lost in the same

way two years later. Now Air Force and Navy aircraft would have to deal with

MiG–19s in North Vietnam, and these first losses were especially costly for the

Air Force.64

The Air Force’s leading contenders in the 1972 race to win five air-to-air

victories and become aces, Maj. Robert A. Lodge and his backseater, Capt.

Roger C. Locher, of the 432 Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at Udorn, were shot

down by a MiG–19 on May 10 just after winning their third victory. Major

Lodge was killed together with Capt. Jeffrey L. Harris and Capt. Dennis E.

Wilkinson, whose F–4 went down in the same skirmish. Preoccupied with

MiG–21s, the F–4s were surprised from the rear by MiG–19s. Captain Locher

not only parachuted to survival, but evaded capture for three weeks and was

rescued only sixty miles northwest of Hanoi in one of the deepest helicopter

penetrations of the war.65

These losses were just part of the most intense day of air-to-air fighting in

the Vietnam War. In exchange for the two Air Force F–4s, eleven MiGs fell; Air

Force F–4s shot down three MiG–21s with Sparrow radar-guided missiles;

Navy F–4s shot down seven MiG–17s and one MiG–21, all with Sidewinder

heat-seeking missiles. The Navy managed this feat without an air-to-air loss,

but did lose an F–4 to ground fire and another to a surface-to-air missile. The

latter plane was the very one whose crew had just succeeded in shooting down

three MiGs in a single afternoon. Having suddenly won their fifth victory and

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To Hanoi and Back
become the first aces of the Vietnam War, Lt. Randy Cunningham and Lt.(j.g.)

William Driscoll were dumped into the Gulf of Tonkin. Fortunately they were

rescued. Driscoll (the backseat radar intercept officer) was the first crew member other than a pilot to get official credit for five victories since World War I;

the Army Air Forces had not recognized the claims of bomber gunners in World

War II because the large number of gunners involved in most engagements had

made conflicting claims difficult to sort out.66

Not until late in the summer would Capt. Richard “Steve” Ritchie and his

weapon system officer, Capt. Charles B. DeBellevue, become the Air Force’s

first aces of the war. They won their initial victory on May 10 in the melee that

killed Lodge, Harris, and Wilkinson. The rarity of such heavy air-to-air engagements meant that the Vietnam War would produce only one more American

ace, Capt. Jeffrey S. “Fang” Feinstein, an Air Force weapon system officer.

Only DeBellevue would get as many as six victories. The Korean War, in contrast, had produced eight times as many American aces, and the leading ace

won sixteen victories in about a hundred sorties (the usual number flown in a

full tour over North Vietnam).67

While another day like May 10, 1972, would not occur in the Vietnam War,

there would be too many occasions when a North Vietnamese MiG picked off

F–4s. This misfortune occurred far more often to Air Force planes than to Navy

planes. During 1972, the Air Force lost twenty-three F–4s and one F–105 Wild

Weasel to MiGs; the Navy lost just two F–4s and one RA–5 reconnaissance

plane in this way. The disparity was partly caused by the distribution of enemy

air assets. The MiG–21s at Phuc Yen dealt mostly with Air Force raids in the

Hanoi area, while the MiG–17s at Kep concentrated on Navy sorties nearer the

coast. The MiG–21s specialized in a single pass from the rear, while the slower

MiG–17s depended on their maneuverability in dogfights. The MiG–21s

attacked more often, exacting a higher cost and suffering greater losses. Air

Force chaff flights had to fly above twenty thousand feet, at an altitude more

favorable to MiG–21s and higher than Navy aircraft in Linebacker or both service’s aircraft in Rolling Thunder. Air Force F–4s in Linebacker faced an

upgraded version of the MiG–21 with longer range and four missiles rather than

the two usually carried in Rolling Thunder. Altogether, Air Force F–4s shot

down forty-seven MiGs in 1972 (including thirty-nine MiG–21s), while Navy

F–4s shot down twenty-four MiGs (fourteen of which were MiG–17s).68

Many of the Air Force air-to-air victories came late in the summer, however. In May and June, Air Force F–4s shot down only twelve MiGs, while MiGs

were shooting down thirteen F–4s. It was the first time the Air Force had been

on the losing end of an air-to-air ratio, and the sting was all the sharper because

Navy F–4s won nineteen victories with no losses during the same two months.

The Seventh Air Force commander was not left to solve this problem entirely

on his own. The Air Force Chief of Staff took a very active interest. General

Ryan paid a visit to Saigon in July, and decided to replace General Vogt’s chief

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of operations, Maj. Gen. Alton D. Slay, with Ryan’s own director of operations,

Maj. Gen. Carlos M. Talbott.69

General Slay had also served as General Lavelle’s chief of operations and

became a focus of some of the controversy surrounding Lavelle’s relief. In the

summer of 1972, much of the Air Force was divided between supporters of

Lavelle and supporters of the man who fired him, Ryan. Lavelle insisted that he

did not know about the false reporting that brought him down, and many of his

friends blamed Slay for the false reporting scheme.* That summer, however,

Slay found himself in trouble not only with Lavelle’s friends, but also with

Ryan. The Chief of Staff did not like the way operations were being run at

Seventh Air Force.70

Slay’s replacement, General Talbott, had already served in Saigon in 1966

as deputy director of the tactical air control center. His reassignment to Saigon

broke the unwritten rule that the Air Force did not send its generals to Southeast

Asia for a second tour. He found a very different headquarters from the one he

had left six years earlier. In a combat environment more demanding than the

one that had prevailed then, the number of headquarters personnel shrank day

by day. The operations center for the out-country war had been combined with

the tactical air control center for the in-country war, and this new combined

center moved across Tan Son Nhut Air Base to become the Military Assistance

Command’s operations center. Like nearly everyone else at Seventh Air Force

headquarters, Talbott “wore a second hat”—that is, he held the same job in the

joint headquarters that he did in Seventh Air Force. The consolidation had

many advantages, not least the elevation of General Vogt to be deputy commander under the Army’s new MACV commander, Gen. Fred C. Weyand.

Slay refused to talk to his replacement and left a few hours after Talbott

arrived. Talbott’s impression was that Slay had been cut out of much of the dayto-day management of operations. The intelligence chief dealt directly with

Vogt on targets, and there were no daily staff meetings to review yesterday’s

results and plan tomorrow’s operations. Talbott attributed this way of doing

business to Slay’s lack of operational experience. In any case, those like Talbott

who believed Slay’s career was over proved mistaken. He would gain two more

stars and eventually take charge of Air Force Systems Command.71

By the time Talbott reached Saigon in August, Vogt had already taken a

number of actions to improve his command’s performance. In response to pressure from Ryan, he called his commanders to Saigon in July and told them to

hold frequent Linebacker after-action meetings at Udorn. From mid-August

through December, flying and control units sent representatives to a daily meeting at Udorn to assess the previous day’s missions. There was no precedent for

this much coordination, and it meant pulling aircrews and controllers away

from their jobs for trips to Udorn. During Rolling Thunder, there had been only

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To Hanoi and Back

* See Chapter 8.
the occasional “practice reunions” that emphasized camaraderie as much as

exchanging information.72

A major objective of the daily Linebacker conferences in late 1972 was to

improve the process by which controllers warned strike forces of impending

MiG attacks. Indeed, General Vogt believed that Seventh Air Force’s principal

problem with the MiGs was a lack of warning. In December 1971, a few F–4Ds

had started to exploit their own new capability to interrogate MiG identification

transponders and not rely on an EC–121 to make such interrogations. Six

months later, only three F–4Ds with the necessary “Combat Tree” equipment

survived at Udorn until twenty more arrived in July. In some situations, this

identification capability permitted F–4s to launch Sparrows from beyond visual

range, but the North Vietnamese caught on to the change and turned their

transponders off much of the time. The Navy radar control ship in the Gulf of

Tonkin received information from several sources about MiG activity in the

coastal portion of North Vietnam where Navy planes were operating. Vogt

wanted something comparable for the Air Force to bring together information

from all available reconnaissance sources (including North Vietnamese radio

communications). During Rolling Thunder, Seventh Air Force had attempted to

perform this “fusion” function at Monkey Mountain near Da Nang.* But in

1972, Seventh Air Force was moving out of South Vietnam, and Vogt established his new fusion center at Nakhon Phanom Air Base, Thailand, with the

call sign “Teaball.” Vogt expected Teaball to provide the earliest possible MiG

warning for his strike packages.73

Vogt’s belief that Teaball turned the air-to-air situation around seemed to be

supported by the obvious correlation between Teaball’s commencement of

operations in early August and Seventh Air Force’s dramatically improved performance against MiGs. During the next three months, the score was twenty

MiGs down at a cost of only four Air Force F–4s. During and after the war,

however, many of the fighter pilots involved questioned the importance of

Teaball. In Vogt’s view, the pilots’ low esteem for Teaball derived from their

lack of sufficient security clearances to know about Teaball’s sources.74

The Air Force’s Tactical Fighter Weapons Center at Nellis Air Force Base,

Nevada, systematically gathered documents on air engagements and interviewed crew members. The Fighter Weapons Center concluded that Teaball’s

contribution was relatively minor and that the Navy radar control ship continued to provide more useful warnings even to Air Force planes. Teaball’s

defenders objected that the Fighter Weapons Center was concerned only with

the utility of warnings that led to shooting down MiGs—Teaball’s real purpose

was preventing the shoot-down of F–4s. But since F–4 escorts and patrols had

borne the brunt of losses to MiGs as well as winning nearly all victories against

them, escorts and patrols were the aircraft that most needed the warnings for

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* See Chapter 4.
defensive as well as offensive purposes. It was true that other aircraft maneuvered in response to MiG warnings. But of the seven Air Force chaff, strike, and

Wild Weasel aircraft lost to MiGs in 1972, three were lost after the introduction

of Teaball.75

A major part of Teaball’s problem was communications, especially communications from Nakhon Phanom to the strike forces. Because of its great distance from Hanoi, Teaball had to use a radio relay aircraft. For some reason this

relay often failed to work well. One theory was that interference from EB–66

jamming aircraft caused the trouble, but this idea surfaced only at the end of the

year—too late for any remedy to be applied.76

How then to account for the dramatic improvement in Seventh Air Force’s

performance against MiGs? The Fighter Weapons Center not surprisingly

emphasized the importance of aircrew experience. Navy pilots did better at the

outset of Linebacker because the Navy had established its Top Gun air-to-air

training program after Rolling Thunder. The Air Force had no such program,

and its pilots required a few months of combat to become skilled enough to

defeat the MiGs. This argument was sufficiently persuasive for the Air Force to

establish its Red Flag exercise program at Nellis, where air-to-air and bombing

skills could be honed together in the face of air defenses—including an “aggressor squadron” of T–38s and F–5s mimicking MiG–21s. One outcome of more

realistic training would be an Air Force decision to abandon its “fluid four”

fighter formation in favor of the Navy’s “loose deuce.” While the “fluid four”

had always been intended to break into two pairs of fighter aircraft, an Air

Force pair had at least theoretically been much tighter and less flexible than a

Navy pair. The loose deuce formation would encourage every wingman to fly at

a greater distance from the lead aircraft and take the lead role in an engagement

with enemy aircraft when feasible.77

During Linebacker, the Air Force did what it could to support its pilots with

better tools. The sad performance of air-to-air missiles received a lot of attention. Despite all attempts to improve them, the probability of a missile destroying its target remained less than 20 percent. The Sparrow’s fundamental problem was that it was designed for a different kind of war—a war in which

American pilots would be permitted to fire Sparrows far beyond visual range.

In Southeast Asia, pilots were usually required to identify the enemy aircraft

visually before they could launch a Sparrow. On at least one occasion, an F–4

was shot down while speeding ahead of its flight to make sure that a targeted

aircraft was in fact a MiG. Allegations that this F–4 was hit by a Sparrow

launched by another F–4 in the flight were discounted by the Air Force, which

concluded that a second MiG–21 had done the job. In any case, the requirement

to visually identify MiGs collided dangerously with the requirement for sufficient range to use the Sparrow.78

In 1972, Seventh Air Force was using a so-called “dogfight Sparrow,” but

it still could not be launched from as close to a MiG as the Sidewinder heat240

To Hanoi and Back
seeking missile could. Aircrews often had difficulty launching either missile

within required parameters of range and direction. Even when those parameters

were satisfied, the fragile Sparrow frequently malfunctioned. An F–4 maintenance officer at Korat discovered that some of the Sparrow’s problems could be

attributed to the shaking the missiles received when a munitions tractor pulled

them across foreign-object-damage (FOD) bumps at the edge of the flight line;

these metal FOD strips were intended to shake out rocks, screws, and other

objects that might be sucked in by jet engines.79

At sea, conditions for the Sparrows were even worse, and the Navy chose

to rely almost entirely on Sidewinders. Their version of the Sidewinder was

reputed to be better in some respects than the Air Force’s. Sidewinders were, in

any case, the most appropriate missiles for close-range, maneuvering dogfights

with MiG–17s. The Sparrows, on the other hand, were more suitable for dealing with the faster MiG–21s and their one-pass tactic. Because of this tactic, in

1972 Air Force crews found less use for their Sidewinders. As Air Force pilots

gained combat experience using the Sparrow, it became more effective in their

hands and continued to be used more than the Sidewinder even after an

improved version of the latter reached Udorn Air Base in August. The Air

Force’s improved Sidewinder did down two MiG–19s on September 9, the fifth

and sixth victories for Captain DeBellevue—and the first two of three for his

pilot on this mission, Capt. John A. Madden, Jr.80

MiG–21 hit-and-run tactics also made the F–4 gun less relevant. Aircrew

complaints about the F–4C’s lack of a gun had led to deployment of F–4Ds with

gun pods in 1967. After Rolling Thunder, F–4Es with a gun built into the nose

reached Southeast Asia. The North Vietnamese invasion spurred the deployment of F–4E squadrons, but F–4Ds still outnumbered F–4Es by two-to-one at

the two bases (Udorn and Ubon) that sent the most sorties into the high-risk

portions of North Vietnam. Thanks to upgrades of the F–4D, it was in most

respects comparable to the F–4E and some F–4Ds could determine the location

of MiGs beyond visual range by triggering their identification transponders.

Indeed, the F–4Ds experienced less than half as many losses as the F–4Es to

MiGs in 1972 while downing more MiGs; all three Air Force aces scored victories in both versions of the F–4. F–4E guns did bring down a MiG–19 and four

MiG–21s; an F–4E gun combined with a Sidewinder to destroy another

MiG–21, and an F–4D gunpod eliminated a sixth MiG–21.81

At least as important as improvements derived from Air Force combat

experience was the degradation in MiG capability during Linebacker. The

North Vietnamese had launched their spring offensive in 1972 with a considerably stronger air force than they had during Rolling Thunder. When American

air power had finally begun to attack North Vietnamese airfields in the spring of

1967, the North Vietnamese had about 150 MiG fighters. Those that were not

destroyed could not remain on their bases near Hanoi and had to use bases in

southern China. But the North Vietnamese air force in late 1967 could take

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comfort from the fact that their 20 MiG–21s were beginning to shoot down U.S.

planes with the new tactic of making a single pass from the rear. After the end

of Rolling Thunder in 1968, the North Vietnamese built a stronger air force.

The number of MiGs increased to nearly 250, including more than 80

MiG–21s. With the exception of about 30 MiG–17s, North Vietnam’s entire air

force was pulled out of China and returned to North Vietnamese bases. Many of

the aircraft were housed in caves or bomb shelters. North Vietnam built new

bases in the panhandle within reach of South Vietnam.82

Soon after the beginning of the spring 1972 offensive, American planes

resumed bombing North Vietnamese airfields. Most of these raids targeted the

panhandle airfields, and the North Vietnamese were not able to move their

planes south during Linebacker. On the other hand, operations never ceased for

more than a few hours at North Vietnam’s four principal airfields: Phuc Yen

(mainly MiG–21s), Yen Bai (mainly MiG–19s), Kep (mainly MiG–17s), and

Hanoi’s airport at Gia Lam. The Air Force did not attempt to bomb aircraft in

shelters or caves. Several raids did attack the air defense command bunker at

Bac Mai airfield on the southern outskirts of Hanoi. General Vogt was convinced that his crews finally penetrated the bunker, but the intelligence agencies

were skeptical that much damage had been done; the bunker was hard to see

from above ten thousand feet.83

North Vietnamese air defenses continued to function throughout Linebacker. The MiGs did not flee to China as they had in 1967. Nevertheless, their

effectiveness diminished. While the skill of American aircrews increased, the

MiG force shrank from nearly 250 to fewer than 200. About half the MiG–21s

were destroyed. These losses probably included some of North Vietnam’s

most aggressive pilots and required difficult adjustments in so small an air

force.84

Although the MiG pilots for a time outshined their Air Force opponents,

they managed to destroy in 1972 only one more American aircraft (twentyeight) than they had in 1967. Indeed, the overall experience of American planes

over North Vietnam in 1972 was much healthier than in 1967. While flying

about 25 percent fewer sorties into North Vietnam, losses there dropped by 50

percent to about a hundred aircraft. The big difference in 1972 was the much

diminished effectiveness of North Vietnamese antiaircraft artillery. In 1967,

artillery had accounted for about two-thirds of Air Force aircraft losses in North

Vietnam; in 1972, artillery accounted for less than a third.85

American estimates of the number of North Vietnamese antiaircraft

artillery pieces with a bore of at least thirty-seven millimeters declined from

nearly eight thousand in 1967 to fewer than a thousand in 1972. Much of this

remarkable decline could not be accounted for by pieces destroyed or moved to

Laos and South Vietnam. American intelligence analysts became more adept at

distinguishing real artillery pieces from dummies. North Vietnam’s antiaircraft

artillery inventory may have been nearly as large as it had ever been, especially

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if guns of somewhat smaller caliber were counted. The North Vietnamese had

perhaps three thousand pieces with a twenty-three millimeter bore.86

It was not so much North Vietnamese antiaircraft artillery that changed, but

rather the Air Force tactics used against it. General Vogt and laser-guided

bombs had moved Air Force strike packages higher in altitude beyond the reach

of most artillery. But Navy planes continued to dive lower, and artillery exacted

about half the Navy’s losses.87

At the medium altitudes favored by Seventh Air Force, the principal foes

were MiGs and surface-to-air missiles. These also bothered Navy planes en

route to their targets and returning to their carriers. Indeed, the Navy was suffering more losses to SAMs than was the Air Force, perhaps because the Air

Force made heavy use of chaff. The ability of F–4s to lay a chaff corridor

improved in July with the introduction of a dispenser that released the chaff

steadily rather than in the widely separated bunches characteristic of the chaff

bombs used earlier in the year.88

The F–4s did not rely solely on chaff. The introduction of jamming pods

during Rolling Thunder had been a great success, and F–4s in 1972 each carried

two jamming pods (rather than the one customary in 1967).* For six weeks F–4s

with laser-guided bombs dropped them from a formation designed to get maximum protection from the jamming pods. Later the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing discovered that it could still get good results using just one laser designation pod in

each flight, if the flight abandoned jamming-pod formation for about a minute to

climb and dive so that all four F–4s could drop their bombs into the laser “basket” formed by the lead F–4’s laser designator.89

While Seventh Air Force continued to depend on jamming pods, it was

noted that no F–4 had been shot down in a chaff corridor. The price the Air

Force paid for protecting its laser-guided bombers with chaff was a series of

MiG attacks on its big formations. General Vogt could take satisfaction, however, in the fact that MiGs rarely got through his F–4 escorts and patrols to hit

either his chaff-dropping F–4s or his strike F–4s. The F–4 escorts and patrols

took losses, but succeeded in their mission of protecting the strike packages.90

Neither chaff nor jamming pods eliminated the game of cat and mouse

played with SAM sites by F–105 Wild Weasels. The Standard antiradiation

missile introduced toward the end of Rolling Thunder now saw heavy use, but

it was in short enough supply and suffered frequent enough malfunctions to

keep the older, slower, shorter-ranged Shrike in business as well. All the

Southeast Asia Wild Weasels were based at Korat, and the F–4Es there joined

them in hunter-killer teams that used new antimateriel CBU–52 cluster bombs

in an attempt to destroy SAM sites and not just suppress them. The CBU–52

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* Improvements in the jamming pods permitted a less rigid formation than during

Rolling Thunder, and in 1972 (while not yet adopting the Navy’s “loose deuce” tactics) the

Air Force F–4 wings developed looser, weaving formations that helped aircrews watch for

MiGs.
was certainly more potent than the CBU–24 of Rolling Thunder, but claims of

success against SAMs were usually hard to prove—whether or not SAM equipment was damaged, it could be moved.91

Although SAMs turned out to be a manageable problem for Seventh Air

Force, they did give officers in Southeast Asia and Washington some worries.

The inventory was thought to have increased since Rolling Thunder from perhaps 180 SA–2 launchers to perhaps 240. As it happened, Americans estimated

that the North Vietnamese launched roughly the same number of SA–2s in 1972

as in 1967—about 4,000. Even if only half that many were actually launched,

fewer than 4 percent brought down an aircraft.* But for several months, aircrews and intelligence analysts feared that SA–4s with mobile launch vehicles

had been introduced into North Vietnam. Aircrews often reported seeing a new

SAM that they called the “Black SAM.” New jamming pods for F–4s were

rushed to Thailand before analysts finally concluded that this “Black SAM”

was a Chinese version of the SA–2 and definitely not an improvement. Not

until early 1973 would the presence of SA–3s (more effective against aircraft

flying at lower altitudes) be confirmed in North Vietnam. The only really new

SAM to plague Seventh Air Force in 1972 was the small, shoulder-launched

SA–7 that threatened slow aircraft flying low in South Vietnam.92

* * *

The most effective North Vietnamese air defense had always been weather.

From May through mid-July, American planes enjoyed the least cloudy weather of the year in the Red River Delta (which meant that about half the planned

sorties could strike their original targets and not have to be canceled or diverted

to the panhandle). With better luck, these relatively clear conditions might have

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* According to American estimates, North Vietnamese SA–2 effectiveness declined

from about thirty missiles required to destroy an aircraft in 1966 to about sixty in 1972. In

1998, however, a retired Russian general published SA–2 expenditure data from 1972 that

cast doubt on the American estimates. See Mark Vorobyov, “Dvina: Guarding Vietnam’s

Skies,” Military Parade, Jul–Aug 1998, pp 101–3. Vorobyov argued that the ratio of SA–2s

expended to aircraft destroyed in 1972 was less than five to one. His ratio, however,

depended on a greatly inflated estimate of US aircraft losses. When Vorobyov’s SA–2

expenditure data are compared with US loss data, the ratio is about thirty SA–2s launched

for each aircraft destroyed in 1972. Unfortunately, Vorobyov did not provide annual SA–2

expenditure data for earlier years, although he did state that total wartime expenditure of

SA–2s plus those “found faulty” was about sixty-eight hundred. He also indicated that

SA–2 effectiveness in 1966 of about four missiles launched for destruction of one aircraft

declined sharply in 1967 to about ten to one and recovered in 1972. It may be that the ratio

of SA–2s launched to aircraft destroyed did reach more than fifty to one in late 1967 before

reversing direction in 1972. I am indebted to Barry Watts for his analysis of Vorobyov’s

article.
continued well into September. In 1972, however, six weeks of unusually

cloudy weather intervened before a few more weeks of good weather in

September. After that, the beginning of the northeast monsoon brought with it

the increasing cloudiness and mists that would rule out most laser-guided

bombing for the next six months.93

The Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ryan, had a long familiarity with the

problems posed by the northeast monsoon. As commander of Pacific Air Forces

in 1967, he had sought to provide at least a limited bad-weather bombing capability by converting the two-seat F–105F Wild Weasel aircraft into a radar

bomber. But while it would have been adequate for nuclear bombing, the

F–105’s radar could not provide enough accuracy for conventional bombing.

“Ryan’s Raiders” were not up to the job; nor were the F–4s. Ryan had to wait

until six of the new General Dynamics swing-wing F–111s could be deployed in

March 1968. Since their arrival came shortly before the Rolling Thunder cutback to the panhandle of North Vietnam, the F–111s did not have many targets

with a good radar return. But their big problem in 1968 seemed to be the terrainavoidance radar that was essential to survival on their low-level missions. Three

quick F–111 losses ended their first combat deployment after only one month.

While a maintenance problem was known to have caused one of the losses,

inability to explain the other two fed speculation that they had flown into a

mountain.94

The F–111’s first visit to Southeast Asia in 1968 further tarnished that aircraft’s already controversial reputation as the product of Secretary of Defense

McNamara’s aborted attempt to develop a multirole fighter for both the Air

Force and the Navy. The Navy managed to get out of the deal, and the Air Force

got a fighter that might be able to bomb but could not fight MiGs. Ryan did not

give up on the F–111, for he saw it as the Air Force’s best hope for an all-weather bomber. Its accuracy was much better than Ryan’s Raiders. Bridge bombing

was not a good choice, because the F–111 did not yet have a laser target designator. But railyards, airfields, and supply dumps were suitable targets for the

F–111’s unguided bombs in bad weather and at night.95

When Ryan visited Saigon in July 1972, he urged Vogt to embrace the return

of F–111s to Southeast Asia. Vogt had been Ryan’s operations deputy in Hawaii

during Rolling Thunder, and both men were keenly aware of the Air Force’s

need for an accurate all-weather bomber. Vogt could see merit in using F–111s

rather than B–52s, not only because the F–111s were more accurate, but also

because the F–111s could penetrate North Vietnam on their own without the big

escort packages required by the B–52s. On the other hand, Vogt was not enthusiastic about Ryan’s proposal to send forty-eight F–111s to Takhli in place of the

ninety-five F–4s already there. Those F–4s, together with more than fifty at

Korat, had been the backbone of Seventh Air Force’s effort in South Vietnam.96

After hearing Vogt’s objections, Ryan proceeded with plans to replace the

Takhli F–4s with F–111s that began arriving near the end of September. A few

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days later, Vought A–7s began replacing the F–4s at Korat. Although the Navy,

which had developed both the F–4 and the A–7, had been using its carrier version of the A–7 in Southeast Asia since the end of 1967, this was the first time

the Air Force version was deployed to the theater. The Korat A–7s, which had

bad-weather capability superior to the F–4s, would attempt to do the work that

the Takhli and Korat F–4s together had been doing in South Vietnam. But with

communist ground forces retreating in South Vietnam, Ryan wanted Vogt to use

most of his resources in North Vietnam. Unfortunately, neither A–7s nor

F–111s could replace Korat and Takhli F–4s in protecting strike packages from

MiGs, and the air-to-air mission now fell entirely on the Udorn F–4s. On the

other hand, since A–7s and F–111s could reach their targets without aerial refueling, Ryan was able to withdraw from Thailand and Taiwan more than a quarter of the 172 tankers that had been operating in Southeast Asia. Indeed,

Thailand’s insistence that tanker operations from the Bangkok airport cease by

mid-October bolstered Ryan’s argument for replacing F–4s with F–111s and

A–7s.97

While the F–111 and the A–7 would both prove valuable additions to

Vogt’s arsenal, he had to put up with a lot of redeployment in the midst of war.

Even at Thailand bases which got to keep the F–4, Ryan made matters difficult

by insisting that they all participate fully in the disruptive service-wide transition from squadron maintenance organizations to consolidated base maintenance organizations. The early F–111 sorties would do little to put a brighter

face on the changes imposed by Washington.

A few hours after the first F–111s arrived at Takhli, five of them took off on

separate missions into Route Package Five. Before it could be spotted by North

Vietnamese radar, each F–111 was to drop to a thousand feet and go as low as

five hundred feet for the bomb run. One of these F–111s did not return and was

presumed to have flown into the ground. Although F–111 combat operations

were called off for a week while the two-man crews practiced in Thailand, three

more F–111s disappeared in the next six weeks. But Takhli’s 474th Tactical

Fighter Wing was sending out at least twenty F–111 sorties a night, and the loss

rate was not bad enough to ground the fighters with the most accurate badweather bombing capability. A squadron bulletin board warned: “Flak effectiveness is 5%—missile effectiveness is 8%—ground effectiveness is 100%—

AVOID GROUND.”98

Meanwhile, General Vogt was pursuing another approach to bad-weather

bombing that proved fairly successful in the panhandle, but did not help much

in the Red River Delta. When dropping sensors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in

Laos, Seventh Air Force had required a precise navigation system. As the operations director at Pacific Air Forces during Rolling Thunder, Vogt encouraged

using a Coast Guard Long Range Navigation (loran) system for this purpose as

well as for bad-weather bombing. An aircraft could determine its location by

measuring the time difference in the reception of signals sent by two loran

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ground stations. Despite its name, loran’s range was insufficiently long to reach

dependably to Hanoi from the ground stations in Thailand.99

Nevertheless, Vogt did what he could to make loran function as well as possible. Even when the ground station signals could be received, loran could not

produce accurate bombing unless the exact location of the target was known.

During good weather in September, Vogt sent the RF–4s of the 432d Tactical

Reconnaissance Wing at Udorn on repeated missions to secure the necessary

grid-annotated photography. The RF–4s also served as loran pathfinders for

F–4s to drop test bombs in good weather as well as bad. By dropping a type of

1,000-pound bomb not used before, distinctive craters could tell photo-analysts

where loran bombs were hitting and permit refinements in the loran signal time

delays associated with each target. These loran sorties were accompanied by

other F–4s engaged in unguided bombing without benefit of loran. Together

they partly answered demands from Washington and Hawaii for more Air Force

attack sorties in the northern route packages. With fewer laser-guided bombing

missions, more F–4s could bomb instead of performing escort or patrol duties.

Loran missions did not get the big escort packages allotted the laser-guided

missions, and F–111s did not get any at all.100

* * *

As the northeast monsoon moved into North Vietnam in October and

brought a natural end to the bridge-busting campaign, American intelligence

agencies remained largely unconvinced that Linebacker had much reduced

North Vietnamese imports or stopped the resupply of North Vietnamese forces

in South Vietnam. When South Vietnamese forces regained Quang Tri city in

September, they captured some North Vietnamese troops who had not eaten in

a few days and were short of ammunition. But such shortages could be attributed to a local distribution problem. In the absence of conclusive evidence, the

campaign’s critics and advocates retreated into shrill assertion. When Secretary

of the Air Force Seamans optimistically told the press that perhaps only a quarter of the supplies the North Vietnamese were sending south reached their destination, he found himself in trouble with the White House for being so pessimistic publicly.101

Laser-guided bombs had limited the railroads to shuttling between downed

bridges, but sometimes aircrews did exaggerate their prowess. On May 22, the

8th Tactical Fighter Wing attacked eight bridges with fifteen laser-guided

bombs and claimed six bridges destroyed; subsequent photo-analysis found

three of the claimed bridges still operational. Quite apart from the difficulty of

assessing bomb damage when inflicted, bridge repair often quickly permitted at

least trucks to cross. For example, on July 30, thirteen bridges were down on

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the northwest railroad from China to Hanoi; a week later only four remained

closed to all traffic. In the case of longer bridges like some of those on the more

important northeast railroad also connecting China and Hanoi, bridge repair

might require a month or more. Few, if any, of the downed bridges could not be

bypassed at least by ferry or pontoon bridge. A moveable bridge could be hidden along shore in daytime and put across a river at night.102

Nevertheless, the Air Force relied almost entirely on the laser-guided

bombing of bridges for interdiction in Route Packages Five and Six. This was a

departure from Rolling Thunder, when a considerable effort had been made to

destroy locomotives and rolling stock. While the Navy in 1972 had some success against such targets in the panhandle, neither service made much of an

attempt along the routes from China to Hanoi. There were a few raids on the

railyards there, but little rolling stock was hit and the North Vietnamese continued to use more than two thousand railcars. As in Rolling Thunder, the yards

close to the Chinese border remained off limits, as did the one in downtown

Hanoi. The much greater success against bridges permitted by laser-guided

bombs encouraged the abandonment of riskier raids against rolling stock.

Indeed, laser-guided bombs seemed to point the way to a new kind of warfare

much less bloody for attackers and attacked.103

The bridge campaign in 1972 was sufficiently successful to force the

North Vietnamese for the first time to rely heavily on trucks to get supplies

from China to Hanoi. South of Hanoi, the North Vietnamese had relied on

trucks during Rolling Thunder as well, but with Chinese help had been able to

keep the rail routes open from China to Hanoi. When laser-guided bombs disrupted rail transport north of Hanoi in 1972, the North Vietnamese turned to

trucks. For this form of transport they were also heavily indebted to the

Chinese.

Since China’s largest truck factory at Chang Chun in Manchuria produced

some sixty-five thousand trucks a year, replacing North Vietnam’s truck losses

of at most four thousand in 1972 was not unmanageable. Throughout the year,

American intelligence estimates put North Vietnam’s truck inventory at more

than twenty thousand or about double its inventory during Rolling Thunder. In

the panhandle of North Vietnam, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing’s “night owl”

squadron pursued the trucks with flares to pull away the cover of darkness.

Most of North Vietnam’s truck losses in the summer of 1972 occurred in the

panhandle. Such armed reconnaissance was deemed too dangerous in Route

Packages Five and Six, where trucks were free to roam night and day.104

Until about June 7, 1972, traffic on the ninety miles of highway paralleling the northeast railroad from China to Hanoi was ten trucks per mile. Then

suddenly the thousands of trucks filling big truck parks along the Chinese border emptied, and traffic density rose to perhaps forty trucks per mile all the

way to Hanoi. The month’s delay after the commencement of Linebacker before the big surge in truck traffic has sometimes been attributed to deliberate

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Chinese stalling in retribution for North Vietnam’s warm relations with the Soviet Union. But the closure of Haiphong may have required a month to reroute

supplies inland. In any case, traffic on the northeast railroad continued to move

until June 7. Only when bombing closed the railroad did truck traffic surge.105

While attacking trucks when they could be found in the panhandle, Seventh

Air Force tried to reduce truck traffic in Route Packages Five and Six by

destroying bridges, maintenance facilities, and supply depots. “We all know we

cannot stop truck traffic,” General Vogt told his commanders in July.106 North

Vietnam had ensured a reliable fuel supply for its trucks by opening a new oil

pipeline from China to join with the one that already connected Haiphong and

South Vietnam. During Rolling Thunder, trucks had to carry barrels of gasoline

south to refuel themselves. Now they were relieved of that load, and the

pipelines gave them a dependable source of fuel. The pipelines were hard to hit

even with laser-guided bombs; if hit, the pipelines were very easy to repair.

Given this durable link with imported oil, attacks on oil tank farms in North

Vietnam could have only fleeting impact.107

The trucks continued to roll, but no one in the American intelligence community could be certain whether they carried enough supplies to replace the

flow that used to come through Haiphong. It was certain that the North

Vietnamese were having to import food. Long-term agricultural problems had

been aggravated by a severe typhoon in the summer of 1971. A year later the

North Vietnamese had yet to complete repair of the earthen dike system that

controlled the Red River and made possible good rice crops. It was typhoon

season again. What if more dikes were breached by bombing?108

Repeated North Vietnamese allegations that the U.S. was targeting the

dikes may well have stemmed from concern that North Vietnam’s food supply

was in real danger. During Rolling Thunder, the Defense Department had studied the possibility of bombing the dikes, but most analysts judged that several

bombs hitting close together would be required for each breach in one of the big

dikes (levees) along the Red River; these were eighty feet across at the highwater line. The smaller dikes were judged too numerous and too easy to repair.

Nevertheless, some analysts could foresee promising results from bombing the

Red River dikes when the water was high during the summer typhoon season—

yielding flood damage not only to the rice crop, but also to many facilities near

the river in Hanoi.109

The belief that flooding would damage targets that were clearly military

bolstered the legal case for bombing the dikes. Toward the end of the Korean

War, the Air Force had justified the bombing of irrigation dams as a way to

flood a railroad—but even then it was the obvious threat to North Korea’s food

supply that seemed to contribute significantly to a cease-fire. Probably the most

influential Air Force officer to take an interest in dike bombing during Rolling

Thunder was General Ginsburgh, Joint Chiefs liaison on the National Security

Council staff. The Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, General McConnell,

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thought that agriculture was a legitimate target but eventually concluded that

bombing the dikes would be “a pretty fruitless operation.”110

The questionable legality of attacking targets so closely linked to agriculture, together with the likelihood of a very bad press, discouraged experimentation with bombing dikes in Rolling Thunder and continued to do so even in

1972—after laser-guided bombs had improved its feasibility. The few bombs

that did hit dikes either strayed from a nearby target or sought to destroy air

defense artillery or missiles mounted on the dikes. In late July, when many

American reporters were disseminating Hanoi’s claims about deliberate

American bombing of dikes, President Nixon declared publicly that if the

United States wanted to breach the dikes, it could do so in a few days. Many

found this argument persuasive, and some suggested that the North Vietnamese

government was simply trying to blame American planes for its own failure to

get typhoon-damaged dikes repaired. In any case, North Vietnam escaped a bad

typhoon and severe flooding in 1972.111

The dikes were not the only potential targets that the U.S. continued to

deny itself during Linebacker operations very much as it had in Rolling

Thunder. Although the rules of engagement were less restrictive in 1972, they

still put three key regions of North Vietnam mostly off limits: Hanoi, Haiphong,

and the northern frontier along the Chinese border. The old restricted circle

around Hanoi was reduced from a radius of thirty nautical miles to ten nautical

miles—within which every target required the approval of Secretary of Defense

Laird. The comparable radius at Haiphong had always been ten nautical miles

and remained so.112

Similarly, the buffer zone along the Chinese border kept its former depth:

twenty-five nautical miles from the Gulf of Tonkin across the northeast railroad

to the 106th parallel; thirty nautical miles from there across the northwest railroad to Laos. As in Rolling Thunder, raids on rail targets were permitted to penetrate the border buffer zone; the depth of penetration was increased from ten

nautical miles to fifteen nautical miles on the northeast railroad (and from fifteen nautical miles to twenty nautical miles on the northwest railroad). This

enabled key bridges in the border buffer zone to be bombed, but left nearby

truck parks unscathed.

Since many potential targets lay within the restricted areas, Secretary

Laird’s veto power could make a considerable difference. During Rolling

Thunder, President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, and Secretary of

State Rusk had winnowed targets over lunch—reinforcing each other’s caution

by cutting targets not already cut by McNamara. In Linebacker, President

Nixon’s advocacy of bolder moves was diluted by his leaving to Laird the

authority to veto targets.

In May and June, Laird approved more than a hundred targets, about twothirds of them in the restricted areas; the rest required his approval because they

also carried a risk of civilian casualties. Laird began to say “no” more often.

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When the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked him to approve forty-four targets on June

6, Laird authorized only twenty-eight. For the most part he stood by his vetoes,

which included Hanoi’s Gia Lam airport (heavily used by MiGs). In a few

cases, like a communications site in Hanoi, he eventually relented. But when

Admiral Moorer asked for twenty-nine targets on August 30, Laird denied them

all.113

One target repeatedly vetoed by Laird was the Hanoi thermal powerplant,

which the Navy had successfully struck with Walleye television-guided bombs

in 1967. After that strike, the North Vietnamese had kept American prisoners at

the site for a several months. This did not eliminate the target from consideration, but Laird opposed hitting any target so close to downtown Hanoi—with the

major exception of the Doumer Bridge. Although Laird did approve bombing

most other powerplants, Moorer had to go to Nixon for approval to bomb the big

new Lang Chi hydroelectric plant about seventy miles northwest of Hanoi.114

Since Lang Chi’s three generators could meet about half of North

Vietnam’s demand for electricity, their destruction was deemed essential.

Unfortunately, the generators sat on top a concrete spillway in the middle of an

earthen dam, a forbidden target like dikes. Seventh Air Force was expected to

destroy the generators without breaching the dam. Even with laser-guided

bombs, this was a tall order. General Vogt personally visited Ubon to make certain that Colonel Miller and his crews understood the importance of not breaching the dam. Vogt joked that if they hit the dam they should just fly on to India,

where he would join them in exile.115 When they managed to destroy all three

generators on June 10 and still leave a solid dam, Vogt was so relieved that he

told a reporter the raid was “the greatest feat in modern bombing history.”116

Except for attacks on electrical production and distribution, Linebacker

remained focused on targets with a more direct connection to interdiction.

During Rolling Thunder, the interdiction rationale had been stretched to cover

targets like the cement plant at Haiphong (road and runway repair) and the ironworks at Thai Nguyen (barge construction), but these targets received less

attention in 1972. The Defense Intelligence Agency even advised the joint targeting committee in the Pentagon to cut the ironworks from the target list. This

was not done and the ironworks were bombed in late June. Other more typical

targets at Thai Nguyen were also hit—including a railroad repair shop, an army

supply dump, and a powerplant.117

Although attacks on transportation and electricity added to the difficulty of

life in North Vietnam, Linebacker otherwise made only feeble attempts to

reduce the ability of the North Vietnamese authorities to govern their people.

The Air Force did drop more than half a billion leaflets on North Vietnam.

C–130s and B–52s dropped the bulk of the leaflets; many were released over

the Gulf of Tonkin in an often vain hope that they would drift against the prevailing wind and reach the Red River Delta. In December 1967, a C–130 had

been lost in Route Package Five after dropping leaflets near Hanoi. F–4s and

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drones were the only leaflet-carriers flying over Hanoi in 1972, and they could

not carry anywhere near as many leaflets.118

Besides warning people to stay away from targets, leaflets talked about the

need for the North Vietnamese government to sign a cease-fire bringing an end

to bombing in the north and troop casualties in the south. Some “inflation”

leaflets counterfeited North Vietnamese currency; captured prisoners reported

that they had been able to spend this fake currency for awhile in the evening,

but its washed-out color did not pass muster in daylight. In another attempt to

provide a propaganda tool more attractive and influential than the usual leaflet,

the Air Force dropped small radios to enable more people to hear broadcasts

from South Vietnam. None of these psychological operations bore much obvious fruit.119

Ever since the beginning of Rolling Thunder, direct attack on North Vietnam’s leadership in Hanoi had been ruled out. The Johnson administration had

committed the U.S. not to threaten the overthrow of the communist government

in Hanoi—while the communists were making every effort to overthrow the noncommunist government in Saigon. Although Nixon sometimes seemed ready to

do more, through the summer of 1972 he kept within the bounds of the old policy. The Air Force asked to bomb the Ministry of National Defense facility in

downtown Hanoi, but the Defense Intelligence Agency raised the possibility that

American prisoners might be held there and questioned whether it was still an

important headquarters. The only leadership facility Secretary Laird permitted

the Air Force to attack was the air defense control bunker at Bac Mai airfield.120

Even within the constraints of a bombing policy that put enemy leadership

off limits, a much stronger effort might have been made to sever the leadership’s telecommunications links with its forces and its people. Unfortunately,

the two principal telephone switching centers in North Vietnam were located

next to facilities in Hanoi that inhibited bombing; one was adjacent to the

International Control Commission and the other to the Soviet embassy. But the

location of a dozen other communications nodes (including Radio Hanoi) was

known, and yet they too were not attacked.121

Linebacker subordinated all else to interdicting supplies coming into North

Vietnam and heading south. Given the volume of truck traffic that continued to

move, the campaign’s effectiveness could be questioned. Air operations in

South Vietnam had a more obvious role in stopping the enemy offensive there.

Certainly the Air Force put the preponderance of its war effort in South

Vietnam. Most of the heavy tonnage of unguided bombs (dropped by B–52s

and fighters) fell in South Vietnam, and much of the remainder in Route

Package One. About half the laser-guided bombs expended in 1972 were used

against targets in South Vietnam and Laos, especially artillery and tanks.122

North Vietnam had gradually built up its stockpiles of invasion supplies

before launching its spring offensive. Rapid expenditure of those supplies in

the spring and summer of 1972 meant that the stockpiles could be maintained

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only by a much more intense supply operation. Linebacker, together with mining, made it difficult for North Vietnam to continue sending supplies south at

the same rate, let alone a much increased rate. To the extent that the Hanoi

regime did try to resupply the invasion forces, it had to reduce the supplies

available to its people in North Vietnam who were having to cope with daily

bombing raids.

By the fall, both the North Vietnamese offensive and the South Vietnamese

counteroffensive had lost momentum. North Vietnamese invaders had been driven away from the cities of South Vietnam but not out of the country. The principal remaining leverage the U.S. had on North Vietnam was the demonstrated

capability to bomb targets there—and that leverage was weakened by the northeast monsoon.

* * *

On October 23, 1972, President Nixon stopped bombing north of the twentieth parallel. Military leaders like General Vogt thought this was a poor move

to make in advance of a cease-fire agreement. Henry Kissinger argued that he

and Le Duc Tho had agreed on all important points in Paris; Le Duc Tho had

finally conceded that the Thieu government would not have to resign before a

cease-fire. But President Thieu did not welcome this news. Although he had for

more than a year seemed ready to accept a cease-fire in place (with North

Vietnamese forces remaining in South Vietnam), he had not expected or wanted

such an agreement. In any case, the spring invasion greatly increased the size of

North Vietnamese forces that would be left in South Vietnam.123

As a reward to the North Vietnamese and a signal to Saigon that it was time

to settle, Kissinger wanted to stop the bombing of North Vietnam entirely. This

Nixon would not do. “I was not going to be taken in by the mere prospect of an

agreement as Johnson had been in 1968,” Nixon later wrote.124 By cutting back

to the panhandle at the beginning of the northeast monsoon, Nixon gave up

mostly what the weather would no longer permit him to do. F–111, A–6, and

F–4 loran bombing could have continued in the Red River Delta, but the weather would make bridge-busting with laser-guided bombs usually impossible.

Only B–52s could make a major difference in the delta during bad weather, and

for months they had been restricted to the panhandle. Since Nixon’s problem

was at the moment more with Saigon than Hanoi, he was not yet ready to send

the B–52s to bomb the Red River Delta.125

Nixon’s disagreement with Kissinger about continuing to bomb North

Vietnam was part of their larger disagreement about how to negotiate a ceasefire. For months Nixon had been uncomfortable with Kissinger’s use of restrictions on bombing to facilitate negotiations. Secretary of Defense Laird, on the

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other hand, was happy to indulge Kissinger in this practice. Consequently, the

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs found himself making changes he did not like.

“Kissinger endeavored to orchestrate the bombing,” Moorer later recalled. “I

personally don’t think the North Vietnamese had any idea whether we sent a

hundred bombers or eighty bombers or whether we sent them up above the

twenty-first parallel or the twentieth parallel.”126

Before going to Moscow in May, Nixon had insisted that there be no reduction in bombing during the summit meeting. But, in fact, bombing was forbidden within ten nautical miles of the center of Hanoi or five nautical miles from

the center of Haiphong during that meeting. Later for a week in mid-June,

strikes were forbidden not only in those normally restricted areas, but also anywhere in Route Packages Five and Six—to avoid an incident while Soviet

President Nikolai Podgorny visited Hanoi (even though Kissinger had only

promised the Soviets not to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong). After Podgorny left

Hanoi, bombing resumed throughout North Vietnam except in the restricted

areas (Hanoi, Haiphong, and the buffer zone along the Chinese border); there

no strikes were permitted until Kissinger completed his own visit to Beijing in

late June. Since Nixon also wanted to use improving relations with the Soviets

and the Chinese to pressure the North Vietnamese, he went along with

Kissinger’s limitations on bombing.127

The most fundamental disagreement between Nixon and Kissinger on

cease-fire negotiations concerned timing. Kissinger believed that the U.S. could

get a better deal by reaching an agreement before the November presidential

elections. But Nixon came to expect a landslide over his Democratic opponent,

Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, without a cease-fire. Although

McGovern had himself bombed Germany During World War II as a B–24 pilot,

he now promised to pull out of Southeast Asia even before making arrangements for the return of the communists’ American prisoners. Public opinion

polls indicated that Nixon’s Vietnam policies, including the bombing of North

Vietnam, were popular. A cease-fire before the election could only raise questions about his political motives, just as he had questioned President Johnson’s

four years earlier.128

Johnson’s failures and fortitude continued to affect Nixon, even inspire

him. When the Democratic candidate for vice president, Sargent Shriver, called

Nixon “the number-one bomber of all time,” Nixon joked with Johnson’s former press secretary that Johnson should be pleased. “I don’t believe so,”

George Christian replied. “LBJ never likes to be number two in anything.”129

But Nixon was already contemplating how he could use B–52s after the election in a more dramatic way than they had ever been used.

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Chapter Ten

B–52s at Last

During eleven of the twelve nights from December 18 to December 29,

1972, B–52s pounded railyards and other area targets from the outskirts of

Hanoi and Haiphong almost to the Chinese border. The big bombers’ airborne

radar permitted them to work regardless of weather. F–111s used their terrainfollowing radar to make low-level attacks on airfields just before the B–52s

arrived over North Vietnam. In daylight, other fighters bombed through the

clouds by using weak signals from distant loran transmitters in Thailand. When

the weather cleared briefly on three occasions, F–4s attacked targets in or near

downtown Hanoi with laser-guided bombs. Only on Christmas day did the

bombing pause. Nevertheless, the press called this campaign the “Christmas

Bombing.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff called it “Linebacker II.”

Linebacker II was by far the heaviest two weeks of bombing in the HanoiHaiphong region. All of the massive air power gathered in and near Southeast

Asia was focused on this one region. The two hundred B–52s based in Thailand

and Guam dropped about fifteen thousand tons of bombs in Route Package Six,

and fighters added more than two thousand tons.1 This was enough tonnage to

have leveled Hanoi and Haiphong, but the Nixon administration wanted B–52s

to bomb only on the periphery of the cities—close enough to scare city dwellers

while not killing many of them. Although a few strings of bombs went astray

and enemy dead numbered perhaps two thousand, that contrasts with the tens of

thousands killed in a single night by bombing raids during World War II.2

While B–52 losses were less than the Air Force’s prediction of 3 percent

for the whole campaign, they were double that on the third night and surface-toair missiles ultimately destroyed fifteen B–52s (less than 3 percent of more than

seven hundred sorties).3 This came as a shock to B–52 crews accustomed to

years of sorties further south without a loss until one in November 1972 during

a raid on Vinh. Now in two wrenching weeks they saw more than thirty of their

comrades killed and more than thirty captured. After six B–52s fell on the third

night, tactical changes reduced B–52 losses to no more than two per night.

Throughout Linebacker II, the B–52s remained above effective artillery fire

and the MiGs seemed able to do little more at night than gauge B–52 altitude

for surface-to-air missiles. MiG–21 pilots did claim to have shot down two

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Preface
B–52s, but the U.S. attributed all B–52 losses to SAMs. Meanwhile, B–52 gunners claimed to have shot down at least two MiGs; two escorting F–4s were also

fired upon by B–52 gunners—fortunately with less accuracy.4

Air Force and Navy F–4 crews destroyed four MiGs at a cost of two F–4s

and a Navy RA–5 reconnaissance aircraft. Meanwhile, North Vietnam’s initial

lavish expenditure of missiles led to American attacks on storage and launch

sites, followed by a decline in the number of launches. Although attacks on

launch sites did not do much damage, the attacks on warehouses where the North

Vietnamese were believed to assemble imported SAMs may have contributed to

a shortage of usable missiles—or expenditure may simply have outrun supply.5

President Nixon chose not to exploit Hanoi’s apparent shortage of missiles

by further bombing, however, when North Vietnam agreed to return to the

negotiating table in Paris. Nixon’s many critics emphasized that the cease-fire

agreement signed in January 1973 was little better than the one North Vietnam

had agreed to in October. There was some new language about respecting the

Demilitarized Zone, but (as Nixon wrote to President Thieu of South Vietnam)

none of the provisions of the agreement meant as much as the ability to enforce

them in the absence of American ground forces. Linebacker II concluded

Nixon’s demonstration of what American air power could do in that regard, and

the campaign may have helped persuade the South Vietnamese government to

acquiesce in a cease-fire agreement. In any case, Nixon left the South

Vietnamese with little choice, and by the time they needed his air power again,

he had been forced out of the White House.6

* * *

Air Force plans to bomb Hanoi with B–52s had been pushed aside ever

since 1964. After North Vietnam acquired surface-to-air missiles in the summer

of 1965, General McConnell became more wary of using B–52s. But his successor as Chief of Staff, General Ryan, thought that B–52 losses over Hanoi

would be acceptably low.7 In President Nixon the Air Force gained a leader far

more willing than President Johnson to send the B–52s north. Nevertheless,

after five raids above the twentieth parallel in April 1972, the B–52s were

pulled south before striking Hanoi. General Abrams’ desire to use all the B–52s

nearer the battlefields of South Vietnam was reinforced by Henry Kissinger’s

preference for avoiding political and diplomatic complications by using only

fighter-bombers against the urban north.

Throughout the summer of 1972, the new Commander in Chief of

Strategic Air Command, Gen. John C. (usually called “J. C.”) Meyer, urged

Admiral McCain in Hawaii to send the B–52s north. While McCain could not

authorize so dramatic an escalation on his own, he did tell Meyer and the com256

To Hanoi and Back
mander of Pacific Air Forces, Gen. Lucius D, Clay, to plan some B–52 raids on

North Vietnamese airfields. Since Meyer and Clay were more interested in

using the B–52s against railyards and supply dumps, McCain agreed to recommend Meyer’s first choice—the Kinh No railyard north of Hanoi. But the Joint

Chiefs turned it down. When McCain retired late that summer, he was replaced

by Adm. Noel Gayler. The focus of B–52 planning for North Vietnam then

shifted back to airfields, and in the fall, newly arrived F–111s were added to

B–52s in the airfield strike plans.8

An unusual feature of Admiral Gayler’s approach to B–52 planning was his

decision to put coordination of the operation under the commander of the

Pacific Fleet, who delegated the responsibility to the commander of Seventh

Fleet, who further delegated the job to the commander of Task Force 77, Adm.

Damon W. Cooper. Meyer had to send his plans to Cooper for integration with

fighter attack and support sorties.9 When Linebacker II was executed in

December, however, the dominant role in coordinating fighter support reverted

to General Vogt at Seventh Air Force. In any case, Linebacker II was mostly

Meyer’s show, and the fighter commanders were often left to throw together

their support packages at the last minute.

The return of the B–52s to the northern route packages came in gradual

increments. Through the summer, they had been restricted to Route Package

One and points south. With the onset of the northeast monsoon in the fall, however, laser-guided bombing was rarely possible—strengthening the argument

for using B–52s in the northern route packages. In October, General Ryan took

advantage of serving as acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to propose sending

B–52s as far north as the nineteenth parallel. Although the Joint Chiefs

approved Ryan’s proposal, they subsequently pulled the B–52s back to Route

Package One when intelligence indicated that the North Vietnamese were getting advance warning of targets and strike times. Secretary of Defense Laird

was so concerned that he launched an investigation into the vulnerability of

American air operations to enemy intelligence. But there had never been much

surprise involved in bombing North Vietnam—due to the smallness of the

country, the limited choice of targets, the dependence on air refueling with all

its regularities, and the ease with which enemy eyes could observe aircraft taking off from bases throughout Southeast Asia. The Soviet trawler lying off

Guam could give especially early warning of B–52s launching there. Even

without communications intercepts and headquarters spies (both of which may

have been abundant), American air operations tended to be big and obvious.10

Whatever the risk to the B–52s and their crews, President Nixon wanted to

use them to show the North Vietnamese that American eagerness to settle had

not yet deprived him of his all-weather air weapon. That eagerness had grown

in October together with public knowledge of the South Vietnamese government’s unwillingness to go along with the tentative cease-fire agreement. Only

two days after Nixon had cut back the bombing of North Vietnam to the twenti257

B–52s at Last
eth parallel, Radio Hanoi broadcast the terms of the tentative cease-fire agreement and accused the United States of reneging on it. When Henry Kissinger

went on national television to explain the need for revising the agreement, he

raised expectations unduly by declaring that “peace is at hand.”11

Under the circumstances, Nixon knew that any overt escalation of the air

war was bound to be unpopular. But he quietly enlarged the scope of the B–52

attacks in early November with an upper limit first set at eighteen degrees fortyfive minutes and then nineteen degrees fifteen minutes. After his reelection on

November 7, Nixon approved B–52 bombing as far north as the twentieth parallel. There the limit stayed while Kissinger returned to Paris with South

Vietnam’s proposed changes in the cease-fire agreement.12

Nixon had been less disappointed than Kissinger when negotiations with

the North Vietnamese stumbled on the eve of the election. Given an overwhelming lead in the polls over the Democratic challenger, Senator McGovern,

Nixon did not need a cease-fire to win the election. Indeed, moves toward a preelection settlement had opened the President to accusations of playing politics

with the issue. Moreover, after the election, Nixon could use the B–52s in controversial ways without worrying about their impact on reelection. Despite his

crushing victory on November 7, however, Nixon found himself with little

room to maneuver on Vietnam. His election strategy of remaining in the White

House above the political battle had cost him support in Congress.13

Even before the election, a majority in the Senate had voted to pull out of

Southeast Asia without even getting a cease-fire; the Senate’s only condition

was the return of the communists’ American prisoners of war. Although supporting the President’s actions against the North Vietnamese invasion, the

American electorate voted for a new Congress still more anxious than its predecessor to end American involvement in the war. Nixon understood that he had

less than two months before the new Congress would arrive to cut off funding

for further air action. He had to act quickly or not at all.14

When Kissinger brought the South Vietnamese demands to Paris, the North

Vietnamese were in no mood for further negotiation; the American congressional election results promised to reward uncompromising communists. There

was no chance that North Vietnam would agree to Thieu’s call for withdrawing

their soldiers from South Vietnam. The Nixon administration had long since

given up really trying to gain that concession. Kissinger did try to get language

affirming respect for the Demilitarized Zone between North and South

Vietnam. In conjunction with North Vietnam’s promise to stay out of Laos and

Cambodia, a truly Demilitarized Zone would in theory seal off South Vietnam

from North Vietnamese infiltration. To give such provisions some meaning,

Kissinger sought to create an international inspection team large enough to

observe violations of the agreement. North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, Le Duc

Tho, stalled progress by refusing to consider protocols for implementing the

basic agreement while it was still in question. From time to time he made a new

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To Hanoi and Back
demand of his own, or he withdrew his approval of a provision previously

agreed upon. Kissinger came to the conclusion that the North Vietnamese had

decided not to settle before the arrival of the new American Congress. In

Kissinger’s view, Le Duc Tho continued to negotiate principally to avoid giving Nixon an excuse to escalate the air war. Finally on December 12, Le Duc

Tho announced his decision to return to Hanoi for consultations. He and

Kissinger had a final fruitless meeting on December 13. With Christmas so

near, Le Duc Tho may have thought that there was little risk of Nixon taking

dramatic military action.15

In fact, Kissinger had been about to break off the negotiations himself, and

he had recommended to Nixon an intensification of the bombing of North

Vietnam. Unfortunately, the President had already taken Kissinger’s advice in

late November to cut the number of sorties hitting North Vietnam by a fourth.16

While Nixon had long favored using B–52s against Hanoi before signing a

cease-fire, he now realized that the big bombers could ignite “peace is at hand”

sentiment. He blamed Kissinger’s press conference for some of that sentiment,

but more to blame was the disclosure of North Vietnamese terms acceptable to

most Americans. The root problem was Thieu’s refusal to go along. Nixon

reluctantly concluded that he would have to threaten Hanoi as well as Saigon if

he wanted to get out of Vietnam with a respectable cease-fire agreement before

the new Congress made matters still more difficult.

On November 30, Nixon alerted a few of his subordinates to the possibility

that he would order B–52s against Hanoi if the North Vietnamese refused to

complete a cease-fire agreement—or having signed one, broke it. He said as

much in a meeting that day with Secretary of Defense Laird and the Joint Chiefs

of Staff; Kissinger was also in Washington during an intermission in the Paris

talks and attended the meeting with his assistant General Haig. Over the next

two weeks, the administration wrestled with the question of whether to escalate

and how much. Laird opposed any escalation in the bombing. As usual, Moorer

found himself caught between Laird and Nixon. Until Nixon made his decision,

Moorer remained sufficiently cool toward using B–52s against Hanoi that Laird

could tell Nixon that Moorer also opposed it. When Haig called to check on

this, Moorer insisted that Laird misunderstood him. Moorer may well have

been of two minds. He had learned from the Air Staff to expect both B–52 losses and Soviet gains in knowledge about the aircraft with its advanced radar jamming capabilities. These costs may have seemed too much when the Defense

Department was writing off Vietnam and looking to the future.17

Kissinger also remained reluctant to use B–52s against Hanoi. He preferred

to restrict that job to fighters as in the past and keep the B–52s further south.

But the northeast monsoon would prohibit much fighter bombing before spring,

and even if the Congress still permitted bombing then, fighters could only provide more of what the North Vietnamese had already experienced. Kissinger

could not offer a persuasive alternative to B–52 strikes in the Hanoi-Haiphong

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B–52s at Last
region, a course fervently advocated by General Haig. On December 14, Nixon

gave the orders to launch a three-day campaign (subsequently extended) in

Route Package Six with B–52s and tactical air. According to Nixon’s original

orders, the bombing was to be preceded by reseeding mines in the harbors.

These orders were altered so that the mining followed the commencement of

the bombing and did not rob it of surprise. The services gained an extra day to

prepare when Nixon decided to begin bombing on Monday, December 18,

rather than Sunday; he did not like the symbolism of beginning on Sunday, and

Kissinger wanted to wait until after Le Duc Tho left Beijing.18

To weather the bad publicity bearing down on him, Nixon chose to remain

silent. He sent Kissinger to explain to the press why the talks had broken down,

and during Linebacker II the President refused to comment. Administration

spokesmen did object to charges that Hanoi had been leveled by B–52 “carpet

bombing,” but they did not release intelligence photos to prove that point until

months later.19 Although friends of the administration despaired at the

President’s silence, it did have advantages. Since he had issued no ultimatum,

Hanoi could return to the bargaining table with less loss of face. Since he did not

seem personally concerned about allegations of leveling Hanoi, he might appear

more likely to do just that—the publicity could get no worse. In fact, Nixon was

bluffing, and the B–52s were given targets only on the outskirts of Hanoi.

* * *

During his service in South Vietnam, General Haig had seen B–52s hit

enemy forces within a few yards of his American troops. This extraordinary

accuracy made a great impression on him, and he assumed that the B–52s over

Hanoi could bomb with the same accuracy. Haig did not understand that the

ground-controlled skyspot bombing system could not reach into the Red River

Delta. There B–52s had to rely on their own radar. There enemy missiles and

MiGs made accurate bombing far more difficult than in the more friendly skies

of South Vietnam. Under the circumstances, Linebacker II was remarkably

accurate. But stray bombs did provide grist for North Vietnamese propaganda

by hitting homes and a hospital.20

The North Vietnamese had taken care to have American visitors who preferred a communist victory to a continuance of the war. On Saturday, December

16, four Americans arrived in Hanoi with Christmas mail for American prisoners. Through displays of this kind, the North Vietnamese government and the

American antiwar movement continued to exploit the plight of the prisoners.

Visitors usually provided rave reviews of North Vietnam’s treatment of

American prisoners—after meeting only those few deemed reliable. In recent

months, Hanoi’s American visitors had included former Attorney General

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To Hanoi and Back
Ramsey Clark and film actress Jane Fonda, both of whom performed their propaganda roles with relish. Fonda even posed for a photograph as a crew member on an antiaircraft gun ready to shoot down fellow Americans; she returned

home to marry the onetime student radical Tom Hayden, who had visited Hanoi

twice during Rolling Thunder.21

In this Christmas 1972 group, the regime took the unusual risk of including

Telford Taylor, a Columbia law professor who, as an Army brigadier general just

after World War II, prosecuted German war crimes cases at Nuremberg. Like

other visitors to Hanoi, Taylor had made no secret of his opposition to American

involvement in the Vietnam War. But Taylor’s familiarity with Nazi Germany

and bombing there gave him a standard of comparison sorely lacking among

American pilgrims in Hanoi. By the same token, anything favorable he said

about the North Vietnamese or critical of American air operations would carry

more weight than the less well-informed reactions of his traveling companions:

Michael Allen, assistant dean of Yale Divinity School; Barry Romo, “Maoist”

and representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Joan Baez, singer and

pacifist whose former husband had gone to jail for resisting the draft.22

Two days before Linebacker II, the Taylor group entered an Hanoi full of

adults and children. As so often in the past, the regime’s evacuation orders were

widely ignored. The citizens had long since learned that Hanoi was the safest

place in Vietnam, north or south. Monday evening, December 18, when the

bombs began to fall in unprecedented numbers on the airfields and railyards

north and west of the city, a real evacuation began. By the end of the campaign,

more than half the residents may have left, at least for a short time. Those who

did not go far enough soon found that they had left the relative safety of Hanoi

for the suburban target area.23

As for the Taylor group, they learned that they could not leave Hanoi either

to explore Haiphong and other places in the targeted region or to return home.

Their planned one-week visit extended to two weeks, because their flight was

canceled after the terminal at Gia Lam airport suffered damage from bombs

probably intended for a nearby railyard. An occasional Chinese plane was the

only way out of North Vietnam, and Taylor had to beseech the Chinese ambassador for seats. The group left on December 29, a few hours before the last

bombs fell in the Red River Delta.24

Their stay in Hanoi necessarily conformed to the rhythm of the bombing.

At first the B–52s came in three long waves spread through the night. Later a

compressed single wave permitted a better night’s sleep especially if it came

before midnight. Once the B–52 bombing was over for the night, Hanoi could

look forward to several quiet hours until the fighters came in the early afternoon

searching for a break in the clouds that would permit laser-guided bombing of

targets downtown. The quiet morning hours were ideal for showing the

American visitors bomb damage, newly captured B–52 crews, and model prisoners. Much of the rest of the day and night was spent in the Hoa Binh Hotel

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bomb shelter, where Baez sang her songs, tape recording them with the rumble

of distant bomb explosions for a new album.25

Taylor’s first dispatch to the New York Times appeared on Christmas day

while he was still in Hanoi. He wrote it just after visiting Bac Mai Hospital,

which had been hit by bombs intended for warehouses on the opposite side of

Bac Mai airfield. Taylor could see the airfield and oil storage tanks; he assumed

that they were the targets and not the hospital. In his major exaggeration of

damage, Taylor reported that the hospital was “destroyed.” Later, some readers

would learn that only part of the complex had been destroyed, that patients had

been evacuated before the bombing, and that North Vietnamese authorities

reported the death of twenty-nine people (none of them patients). While Taylor

was moved by the “terrible scene,” he knew that (after four days of bombing)

“Hanoi looks nothing like the Berlin or Hamburg of World War II,” that the

bombing had been “relatively concentrated in certain areas,” and that “one can

drive through the city for many blocks and see no damage whatever.”26

Amid shrill vituperation of the bombing in the press, including the New

York Times, Taylor provided some reasonably accurate information. In this

respect, his articles were a welcome contrast to Harrison Salisbury’s Christmas

series five years earlier.27 Unlike Salisbury, Taylor saw bombing operations as

well as bomb damage. Even though he did not approve of those operations,

Taylor had definite views about how downed aircrews should be treated. He

disliked seeing the North Vietnamese publicly display their new captives. After

his first such session at the International Club, he complained to the authorities,

and his group was not invited again—even Baez, who deemed the aircrews

guilty of genocide and thought that the North Vietnamese officials were handling the prisoners with “great restraint.”28

Taylor was even more unhappy to discover that American prisoners were

not provided with bomb shelters. His group had been taken to the southern outskirts of the city to visit the prison camp called the “Zoo” by its inmates; toward

the end of the war, a few cooperative prisoners were segregated there and it

became known as a “good guy camp” to the majority of prisoners incarcerated

downtown or along the Chinese border. The North Vietnamese apparently

wanted to show off some minor roof damage in the compound. After Taylor

criticized the lack of bomb shelters, prisoners were given shovels and told to

start digging. Fortunately for the North Vietnamese, Taylor did not realize that

the conditions about which he was objecting were among the mildest the prisoners had endured.29

Taylor’s perspective was much different than that of prisoners at Hoa Lo

(or the “Hanoi Hilton” as they called it), to whom he was not introduced even

though their cells were much closer than the “Zoo” to his hotel. He thought the

citizens of Hanoi were bearing up extremely well under the bombs and showing

a lot of the “London pride” he recalled from World War II. The prisoners at the

Hilton, on the other hand, could compare the behavior of their guards during

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these raids with what it had been before. For the first time, many of the guards

seemed afraid and even deferential. Few made much of an effort to stop the

prisoners from cheering the B–52s.30

Except for a daytime laser-guided strike on a railyard only a couple of

blocks west, the Hilton prisoners were at least a mile away from the bombing

until the night after Christmas. Then a load of B–52 bombs fell on shops and

homes along Kham Thien Street not far south of the same railyard. More than

two hundred people were reported to have died in the most deadly bombing

error of the campaign. The natural supposition that the downtown railyard had

been the target was wrong. Only laser-guided bombing was permitted against

targets near so densely populated a neighborhood. The B–52 targets that night

were a couple of miles away.31

The Bac Mai error a few nights earlier (a much smaller miss) had probably

been the result of a B–52 being hit by a surface-to-air missile just before bomb

release. A similar occurrence may well have contributed to the bombing error

which demolished the flimsy buildings on Kham Thien Street, but so large an

error suggested that a crew may have confused the downtown railyard with one

of the four suburban railyards targeted that night: Gia Lam, Kinh No, Duc Noi,

and Giap Nhi. The Gia Lam railyard was often called “Hanoi railyard” in the

planning documents and distinguished from the downtown Hanoi railyard only

by their assigned target numbers, so there may have been a misunderstanding

about which yard was to be attacked. More likely, the radar image of the downtown railyard was mistaken for another yard. Like the downtown yard, Giap

Nhi was southwest of the Red River. In the case of Kinh No, an exceptionally

large supply dump lay next to the yard and bombs were aimed at the supplies

outside the yard as well as the rails inside.

On the night of the Kham Thien bombing, two B–52s were hit by surfaceto-air missiles near the time they released their bombs. One (whose target was

Giap Nhi railyard) crashed southeast of Hanoi—killing two crew members and

putting the surviving four in prison. The other crippled B–52 (whose target was

the Kinh No railyard and supply dump) limped back to Thailand with a wounded gunner. Rather than bail out over northern Thailand, the pilot was told to

bring his wounded gunner all the way back to U-Tapao. But the pilot, the navigator, the radar-navigator, and the electronic warfare officer perished in the

crash landing. The wounded gunner pulled himself from the wreckage. The

copilot also survived thanks to the courage of Capt. Brent O. Diefenbach, a

B–52 pilot who had just landed. He saw the crash, flagged down a Thai truck,

and told the driver to take him to the site, where he got the injured copilot out of

the cockpit just before the plane exploded.32

Each of the two B–52s lost on this the eighth night of Linebacker II was

especially vulnerable because another B–52 in its three-ship cell had dropped

out with mechanical difficulties. Two-ship cells proved much less effective than

three-ship cells in jamming missile radar and guidance signals. Yet Strategic

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Air Command continued to insist that two-ship cells “press on,” and the next

night two more B–52s were shot down in the same way.

To the end of Linebacker II, Strategic Air Command maintained the

requirement that each B–52 crew press on unless their bomber developed truly

crippling mechanical difficulties; if some of its jammers were not working or if

another ship in its cell had to abort, a B–52 was still expected to press on despite

its increased vulnerability to enemy air defenses. In other respects, however,

Strategic Air Command made major tactical changes after the third night, when

six losses spurred criticism from the White House as well as from crews flying

the missions. Despite Kissinger’s assurances that the B–52 loss rate was bound

to decline as the B–52s attacked targets further from Hanoi, President Nixon

was upset. “I raised holy hell,” Nixon would recall, “about the fact that they

kept going over the same targets at the same time.”33 Although Nixon’s diagnosis missed key tactical problems with Linebacker II, he was right to think that

Strategic Air Command could do better.

Strategic Air Command’s major problem was insufficient compression. On

the first night, 129 B–52s flew over the Red River Delta one cell of 3 B–52s at

a time. They came in three waves at four-hour intervals, each wave requiring a

half hour to drop its bombs. The three-wave procedure was repeated on the second and third nights with 90 B–52s each night using basically the same routes.

The interval between waves gave the surface-to-air missile launchers enough

time to reload. Normally about 70 missile launchers were within reach of the

B–52s; at no time were they able to knock down more than 3 B–52s in a single

wave even when the wave took a half hour to pass over. Finally, on December

26, Strategic Air Command sent more than 113 B–52s over the delta in only fifteen minutes; the missile launchers could fire only once in less time with more

targets—they got 2 B–52s rather than the 6 they had hit on the night of

December 20–21, when three widely separated waves had permitted reloading.

The compression of December 26 was achieved by sending the B–52s in from

seven different directions simultaneously.

Since compression proved to be so significant, why did Strategic Air

Command wait so long to adopt it? In fact, Strategic Air Command had thought

its opening wave on December 18 was already extraordinarily compressed.

Never before had more than forty B–52s hit the same target area in half an hour,

and they were part of a strike package of about a hundred aircraft (not counting

the tankers that refueled the B–52s from Guam or the tankers that refueled the

fighter aircraft from Thailand). Just getting so many B–52s in the air at once was

a challenge, not to mention merging B–52s from Guam and Thailand in a single

wave. Fears of a mid-air collision were fed by memories of four B–52s lost in

two air refueling accidents that killed crew members and a major general.34

Strategic Air Command sought to preserve as much as possible of the routine quality of the missions the crews were accustomed to flying in South

Vietnam. Each cell of three B–52s would fly nearly the same route over the tar264

To Hanoi and Back
get area, one cell at a time. If that was not bad enough, SAC planners made the

job of enemy missile crews even easier by requiring the B–52s to make a sharp

post-target turn as soon as they had dropped their bombs. In theory, this turn

would get B–52s out of the target area as soon as possible. In fact, it was a turn

into the strong wind with which the B–52s had flown over Hanoi from the

northwest.

“They had us turning into a hell of a head wind, about 100 knots from west

to east,” one crew member recalled. “As a result out [ground speed] was about

200 knots less than it was going in, which didn’t help any.”35 Not only would the

B–52s have cleared the target area more quickly by continuing to the southeast,

but their post-target turn interfered with their ability to jam surface-to-air missile

radar; most of the B–52s lost on the first three nights of Linebacker II were hit by

missiles in the post-target turn. Especially vulnerable were B–52Gs that had yet

to receive new jamming equipment already installed in the older B–52Ds and in

some B–52Gs. After the disastrous third night, Strategic Air Command kept the

B–52Gs away from targets near Hanoi for the rest of the campaign. The command was slower to abandon the post-target turn that had been adopted years

earlier for dropping nuclear bombs. Rather than give it up, Strategic Air

Command first tried having the B–52s release chaff during the turn, a technique

scorned by the command’s own analysts.

To support three waves a night, Seventh Air Force could provide two flights

of chaff-dropping F–4s per wave. Since each of these chaff flights could create

one corridor, Strategic Air Command was limited to two bomber streams per

wave. This restriction proved worse than fruitless, because the high winds above

thirty thousand feet played havoc with the chaff corridors, and most of the B–52s

flew their missions largely without benefit of chaff until Strategic Air Command

and Seventh Air Force agreed to abandon corridors in favor of a chaff blanket.

The only way Seventh Air Force could provide enough chaff to blanket Hanoi

was to compress the three waves of the early nights into one wave a night—a

compression that had the even more important advantages already discussed.

While thinking through these changes, Strategic Air Command for four nights

simply cut its effort to a single wave of thirty B–52s per night and mostly hit targets many miles from Hanoi. Then, on the night after Christmas, all the principal

elements in Strategic Air Command’s new approach to bombing near Hanoi

came together with a full complement of more than a hundred B–52s, one-wave

compression, a chaff blanket, and replacement of the sharp post-target turn by at

most a gentle dogleg.36

With all these improvements, Strategic Air Command still lost two B–52s

on the night of December 26. As already mentioned, both of the B–52s lost that

night had been deprived of normal jamming support when one of the three ships

in its cell had aborted with mechanical difficulties. But Strategic Air Command

did not take the natural next step of requiring an entire cell to abort if one of its

three B–52s could not complete the mission. The SAC commander, General

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Meyer, insisted that his B–52s “press on” in keeping with Washington’s

demand for a “maximum effort.” This phrase from World War II had been

introduced into Linebacker II planning by Lt. Col. Richard Secord, an Air Force

special operations officer then serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Secord’s insistence on “maximum effort” stimulated Joint Staff questions about

its meaning, if any, but it resonated with Meyer—one of the leading fighter aces

of World War II.37

Meyer called not only for his B–52s to press on, but also for the other two

World War II fighter pilots commanding Linebacker II forces to attack surfaceto-air missile sites more effectively. Like Meyer, both General Johnson at

Eighth Air Force on Guam and General Vogt at Seventh Air Force near Saigon

were aces. Like Meyer, both won their victories in Europe. Although Johnson

shot down seventeen German aircraft, he himself was shot down, imprisoned,

and for a time overshadowed by a Pacific ace with the same name (except a

middle initial of “R” instead of “W”) and five more victories.38 Meyer’s twenty-four victories ranked him twelfth among American pilots in World War II

and he added two more victories as a jet pilot in Korea. While Vogt’s eight victories in World War II ran well ahead of what anyone achieved in the Vietnam

War, they had not been enough to make him a leading ace in a war with hundreds of aces. He found himself in Linebacker II relegated to third place in a

pecking order established three decades earlier in the skies over Germany.

Meyer was clearly in charge, and Vogt usually learned Meyer’s plans with

barely enough time to throw together support packages. Throughout the

Vietnam War, Strategic Air Command had refused to subordinate its contribution to the operational control of the Seventh Air Force commander. This had

always irritated the latter, whoever he was. Now Strategic Air Command was

not merely going its own way, but instructing Seventh Air Force to follow along

smartly. After the severe B–52 losses of the third night, Meyer communicated

his frustration to Vogt: “If unable to provide SAM suppression as requested

would appreciate your letting me know in some detail.”39 While Vogt promised

a “max effort,” he noted that Meyer’s plan simultaneously to go after targets as

widely separated as Hanoi and Quang Te airfield (thirty miles south) would

require him to split his missile suppression forces, which were, in any case,

inadequate for night work.40

During the summer, Vogt had considerable success with hunter-killer teams

pairing F–105 Wild Weasels and F–4Es using cluster bombs, but those missions

had been in daylight and relatively good weather. Some of his F–105 Weasels

were replaced by F–4Cs that he had refrained from sending to the Red River

Delta because, in the Weasel configuration, they carried only one jamming pod

rather than two. But in Linebacker II, Vogt risked sending the F–4C Weasels

north to maximize his missile suppression force. They did have the virtue of

flying more easily in formation with F–4Es than had the F–105 Weasels—

which were left to operate independently of the hunter-killer teams. If Strategic

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Air Command restricted itself to one wave going against targets close together,

Vogt could provide five hunter-killer teams (a total of ten F–4s), plus five

F–105 Weasels and eight Navy A–7Es.41

F–4C Weasels and F–105 Weasels encountered a new problem during

Linebacker II. A single radar site appeared to be involved in shooting down

about half the eleven B–52s lost on the first four nights. Instead of the Fan Song

radar associated with surface-to-air missiles since Rolling Thunder, this deadly

new site had a Team Work radar using frequencies that the Weasels could not

track. Team Work radars had been active through the summer, but only in support of antiaircraft artillery. Given the Air Force’s emphasis on dropping laserguided bombs from medium altitude, artillery had usually not been able to

reach high enough with accuracy. Shifting Team Work radars to missile support

suddenly left the Air Force without an effective response. None of the B–52

jammers was very effective against Team Work, and the jamming itself could

be tracked adequately to permit barrage firing of surface-to-air missiles.42

Vogt attributed the failure of his hunter-killer teams’ suppression of surface-to-air missile expenditure during Linebacker II mostly to the difficulty

those teams had operating at night. About all they could do then was fire antiradar missiles at suspected sites just before the B–52s arrived. That might keep

the sites from turning on their radar. The Weasels soon ran out of Standard antiradar missiles and had to rely on their older Shrikes. In any case, they could

intimidate only Fan Song radars and not the new Team Work radar. While

Meyer was more interested in Vogt’s results than Vogt’s problems, Vogt did

receive vocal support from the commander of Pacific Air Forces, General Clay,

who was even more thoroughly cut out of Linebacker II planning than was

Vogt. Clay proposed daylight B–52 raids so that the hunter-killer teams could

do a better job of suppressing surface-to-air missiles.43

Given the prevalence of bad weather, however, F–4Es were unlikely to have

much more opportunity to attack missile sites in daylight. Any slight improvement in missile suppression would be purchased at the price of a greater threat

from MiGs that would perform better in daylight. Meyer responded that he

might try a daylight B–52 raid in the less well-defended parts of North Vietnam,

but even there he continued to operate only at night.44

Meyer was more taken with the idea of attacking missile sites with B–52s,

F–111s, and A–6s. Because Strategic Air Command had originally been told to

attack all its targets in three nights, no thought was given then to attempt

“rolling back” North Vietnamese air defenses. Now the indefinite extension of

Linebacker II and the heavy early losses of B–52s combined to encourage

directly attacking those defenses and not just reacting to them with Wild

Weasels and hunter-killer teams. When, on the fifth night, all thirty B–52s were

scheduled to bomb targets near Haiphong, Strategic Air Command asked the

Navy to attack the missile sites in that area with A–6s before the B–52s arrived.

The Navy complied, and no B–52s were lost that night. The next night, the

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B–52s themselves attacked missile sites, and F–111s also turned their attention

to the missile sites after Christmas.45

Pacific Air Forces analysts later questioned the wisdom of the planned

strikes on missile sites, because those strikes all used high-explosive “iron

bombs” rather than cluster bombs. Except for an operating radar’s vulnerability

to radar-seeking warheads, the scattered equipment at a missile site was hard to

hit. Consequently, the hunter-killer teams used the shotgun effect of cluster

bombs. But A–6s and F–111s came in over their targets at a few hundred feet

and were not permitted to risk shooting themselves down with cluster bombs.

B–52s, on the other hand, were capable of dropping cluster bombs safely, but

did not. Pacific Air Forces estimated that four B–52s dropping cluster bombs

could have been more effective in suppressing a missile site than more than two

hundred B–52s dropping iron bombs—which was another way of saying that

the twenty-one B–52 sorties actually employed against missile sites had a very

low probability of success. Two of thirteen sites attacked by B–52s and F–111s,

however, were judged to have suffered 50-percent destruction, and the B–52s

got the credit for one of these sites. Another two sites were empty when

attacked; since it only took about four hours to move missile launchers away

from a site, the attackers were fortunate that this was not more of a problem.46

The last B–52 lost in Linebacker II was hit by a missile on December 27 just

after bombs away against a missile site. The crew made it back to Thailand before bailing out; for returning his crew safely, Capt. John D. Mize earned the first

Air Force Cross awarded to a Strategic Air Command pilot in Southeast Asia.

His crew had already run into more than their share of trouble when their B–52

was damaged on two earlier nights. This time they thought that their bombs

struck the very missile site that got them; they were hit ten seconds after bomb

release and their bombs required fifty seconds to reach the target. But Strategic

Air Command concluded not only that their bombs had missed the targeted missile site, but that the missile in question had been launched by another very successful site which had already been bombed by B–52s and F–111s—and was

about to be struck again by B–52s on the 27th without apparent success.47

While missile sites may have been a poor target for F–111s and B–52s,

shifting them from attacking airfields was probably a good idea. The MiGs had

given the B–52s little trouble at night, and there was slight evidence that airfield

attacks had much to do with this outcome. The major factor seemed to be a lack

of night-flying experience on the part of the MiG pilots. Although runways

were frequently cratered, they were operational most of the time. The F–111s’

most successful moment came when a single sortie managed to cause a brief

hiatus in operations at Yen Bai airfield after a big raid with forty-four A–7s and

F–4s failed to make an impression. But one or two F–111 sorties per airfield

could not drop enough ordnance to produce much more than harassment.48

Nevertheless, Linebacker II was a breakthrough for the F–111s that until

then bore a reputation for flying into the ground. When forty-eight F–111s had

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arrived at Takhli Air Base, Thailand, less than three months before, they were

still under the cloud of the losses suffered during the 1968 deployment. Four

losses in the fall of 1972 did not improve their image. There was a strong suspicion that heavy rain had caused the F–111’s terrain-following radar to go

blank—a fatal shock to crews accustomed to flying low over the deserts of the

American West. By mid-December, however, the storms of the southwest monsoon had given way to the incessant clouds and light rain of the northeast monsoon. In Linebacker II, F–111s did not fly into the ground. Indeed, the airfield

and missile-site raids were conducted without a loss. Two F–111s were lost on

raids closer to downtown Hanoi; one after attacking a radio transmitter and the

second after attacking port facilities on the Red River. The latter’s crew was the

first to gain enough altitude to eject safely and be captured; upon their eventual

return to the United States they would report that small arms fire had ruptured

their F–111’s hydraulic control system. Flying low usually freed the F–111 from

missiles and artillery, but brought new risks from less formidable weapons.49

Possibly more effective than strikes on airfields or missile sites were strikes

on suspected missile storage and assembly facilities. Just before Christmas,

Strategic Air Command recommended striking the Quinh Loi storage facility in

southeastern Hanoi. Reconnaissance photography indicating missile equipment

in the compound led to the inference that at least some of about twenty warehouses might contain missiles. When the Joint Chiefs vetoed using B–52s

against this urban target because civilian casualties were likely, General Meyer

in Omaha called General Vogt in Saigon. Vogt then asked the Chairman of the

Joint Chiefs to permit a daylight bad weather raid by fighter aircraft using the

loran transmitters in Thailand. Loran often did not function well at the fringe of

its range in the Hanoi area, where heavy antiaircraft fire discouraged F–4 pilots

from making a sufficiently straight and level bomb run. Admiral Moorer’s

authorization of the Quinh Loi raid indicated the seriousness with which

Washington viewed the missile threat.50

Vogt made the most of this authorization, and sent thirty-two A–7s led by

eight loran-equipped F–4s on December 28. A fortunate break in the weather

permitted half the force to drop its bombs visually, and five of the warehouses

suffered extensive damage. On the next two nights, a total of forty-three B–52s

struck the missile support facility at Phuc Yen near the major MiG base; as

expected, these much heavier raids (twenty miles northwest of Hanoi) did much

more damage than the Quinh Loi raid. Meanwhile, another package of F–4s and

A–7s made a daylight raid on the missile support facility at Trai Ca, thirty miles

north of Hanoi. This target was also in a rural area and fifteen B–52s struck it

that night. But here there were no secondary explosions as at Phuc Yen; the

hundreds of bomb craters were scattered through a much less compact facility

than the one at Quinh Loi.51

Since the number of missile launches detected by American intelligence

dropped from seventy-three on December 27 to forty-eight on December 28 to

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twenty-five on December 29, the Phuc Yen, Quinh Loi and Trai Ca strikes may

have been very successful. General Vogt was especially enthusiastic about

Quinh Loi, and after the war he liked to tell how “SAC bombers were literally

saved by tactical application of all-weather bombing.”52 Apart from the fact that

the Phuc Yen raids did more obvious damage, there is the larger question of the

effectiveness of all these attacks on missile support facilities during the last two

days of the campaign. Admiral Moorer would later recall that American intelligence’s assessment of a missile shortage was based not only on missile launches, but also on North Vietnamese complaints about a shortage.53

Nevertheless, it should be noted that earlier in Linebacker II, missile

launches had declined even more sharply, only to recover. After peaking at

more than two hundred on the third night, missile launches dropped to forty on

the fourth night and fell to a mere four on the sixth night (December 23). During

this period, Strategic Air Command cut B–52 sorties from about a hundred in

three waves per night to thirty in one wave per night. Then too, targets were

attacked further from Hanoi. On the nearly missile-free sixth night, B–52s

began by hitting missile sites for the first time; three sites fifty miles northeast

of Hanoi were hit before other B–52s dropped their bombs on the Lang Dang

railyard—even farther from Hanoi and protected principally by the three missile sites just struck. To supplement a paltry four surface-to-air missiles

launched, the MiGs made an unusually determined effort, but their air-to-air

missiles missed. Although a B–52 gunner’s claim of two kills could not be verified, it was clearly a very bad night for North Vietnamese air defenses. From

this nadir, missile launches rose on the two nights after Christmas to about seventy per wave (a rate equal to that of the first three nights).54

Judged solely on missile launches then, there was no guarantee that an

extension of Linebacker II would not have been met by a resurgence of missile

launches. On the other hand, the North Vietnamese may have been suffering

from a real and fairly persistent missile shortage. America’s own lavish expenditure had quickly run dry the supply of the newer Standard antiradar missiles,

leaving only the older Shrikes. But when American chaff supplies in theater ran

short, they were replenished from outside the theater. Similarly, for the North

Vietnamese, much may have depended on whether new Soviet missiles were

being trucked across the border by the Chinese. At any rate, Linebacker II had

no way of stopping truck traffic.

* * *

Although Strategic Air Command did make several worthwhile changes in

tactics during Linebacker II, B–52 crew members grumbled that those changes

should have been adopted much earlier, even before the beginning of the cam270

To Hanoi and Back
paign. In November, a crew had bailed out over Thailand after their B–52 had

been hit by a surface-to-air missile near Vinh, North Vietnam.* It was the first

B–52 ever lost to enemy fire, and bomber crews in Thailand and Guam did not

think Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, seemed sufficiently concerned about the loss. The SAC commander’s insistence that every

B–52 “press on” contrasted with earlier guidance urging avoidance of enemy

air defenses. General Meyer expected to take some losses as a consequence, but

although he had a computer model for estimating attrition of B–52s on nuclear

missions against the Soviet Union, Meyer had nothing comparable for a conventional war. His intelligence chief suspected that Meyer may have applied

some “political English”; Meyer’s estimate of losing 3 percent of the sorties

both alerted the administration that American lives would be lost and indicated

that Strategic Air Command could do this job at a cost modest by the standards

of World War II.55

From the point of view of the B–52 crews, General Meyer was simply too

far away in Omaha to confront the reality of their situation adequately. Meyer’s

own staff had difficulty getting decisions from him early enough in the planning

cycle. “After about two days of clock fighting, including handing bags to crews

as they were taxiing out,” his intelligence chief recalled, “a critical path chart

was developed to help ‘stimulate’ General Meyer to a decision. This chart was

approximately 20 feet long, and turned out to be a remarkably useful tool.”56 It

made clear to Meyer the many necessary steps that had to be taken in the limited time between his decisions and bombs on target. At any moment during the

campaign, the staff was planning strikes two days ahead while making changes

in the orders for the next day and getting feedback on the current day. With an

eleven-hour time difference, nighttime strikes in Hanoi occurred during the

daytime shift at Strategic Air Command headquarters. The staff work went on

around the clock there as well as in other headquarters acting in response to

orders from Omaha: Eighth Air Force on Guam, Seventh Air Force at Saigon,

and Task Force 77 in the Gulf of Tonkin. When final guidance reached the

wings and squadrons, there was usually little time to spare.

To begin with, Meyer had been given three days warning to launch a threeday campaign; a fourth day of preparation added for political and diplomatic

reasons helped by permitting the timely deployment of more tankers.

Compressing the hundred daily sorties into three waves a night (rather than the

usual routine of sending B–52s out around-the-clock in cells of three) strained

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* A few weeks before the first B–52 combat loss, North Vietnamese air defense forces

held a conference on the best techniques for using SAMs to bring down a B–52; a manual

under development since 1969 was issued after the conference. During Linebacker II, however, departures from following the manual’s advice sometimes met with apparent success.

See Linh Cuu My’s translation of Gen. Hoang Van Khanh’s “Taking Aim at the B–52s” in

Vietnam magazine, Apr 1996, especially pp 30–31. A fuller account of the conference and

the initial shoot-down is in Merle Pribbenow’s translation of the History of the People’s

Army of Vietnam, Vol II (Hanoi, 1994), Chapter 12, Section 4. 
maintenance and control as well as air refueling. Fortunately, Guam had gained

some relevant experience a few weeks earlier when a typhoon had required the

rapid evacuation of B–52s. Nevertheless, there was a collective sigh of relief

when the first night’s operations went off reasonably well. The loss of three

B–52s that night was within Meyer’s prediction of 3 percent, and a loss-free

second night seemed to confirm that Meyer knew his business.

The six losses on the third night upset Meyer’s subordinates and his superiors. After the first wave lost two B–52Gs (with inferior jamming equipment)

and a B–52D attacking the Yen Vien railyard northeast of Hanoi, General

Johnson called from Guam and Meyer decided to press on with most of the second and third waves while cancelling a second-wave strike by six B–52Gs on

the Gia Lam railyard and repair shops just across the Red River from downtown. The third-wave strike by B–52Ds on Gia Lam was permitted to proceed

at the cost of one B–52D. When two B–52Gs in the third wave were lost attacking the Kinh No railyard and storage area northwest of Hanoi, Meyer banished

the B–52Gs from the Hanoi area for the remainder of a campaign that President

Nixon had extended indefinitely on the second day.57

Authorization of new targets sometimes caused Meyer to modify his

orders rather late in the planning cycle. For example, on December 23 after

giving Eighth Air Force targets for the following night (December 24) in the

Thanh Hoa area well south of Hanoi, Meyer received permission to hit the Kep

and Thai Nguyen railyards north of Hanoi; he changed the targets for

December 24 accordingly, rather than wait until after Christmas to hit the new

targets.58

Although Meyer kept Linebacker II’s reins in his hands throughout the

campaign, eventually he did give Johnson on Guam more mission planning

responsibility. For the biggest raid right after Christmas, Johnson’s orders were

to send seven streams of bombers simultaneously from different directions into

the Red River Delta—four streams of B–52Ds were to converge on the Hanoi

area while three streams of B–52Gs hit Haiphong and Thai Nguyen. Johnson

and his Eighth Air Force staff chose the axis of attack and egress for each

bomber stream; it was a demanding challenge to synchronize so many converging aircraft without a midair collision.59

Secretary of Defense Laird asserted his authority in Linebacker II just as he

had in Linebacker. Until December 27, Admiral Moorer had to gain Laird’s

approval for every target; on that day, Laird agreed to give Moorer the authority to approve targets for tactical aircraft outside the Hanoi and Haiphong control zones and the buffer zone along the Chinese border, provided those targets

had been authorized during Linebacker. While approving most targets nominated by Moorer, the Secretary denied a request to hit Gia Lam airfield—where the

terminal had already been hit by stray bombs probably intended for the neighboring railyard. On the other hand, he approved a guided-bomb strike on the

Hanoi powerplant that had been off-limits throughout Linebacker.60

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Meyer usually sought Washington’s approval to hit a target, but in the case

of Lang Dang railyard Moorer repeatedly called for strikes. This yard became

the most heavily bombed target in the campaign. More than eighty B–52 sorties

dropped about forty-five hundred bombs on Lang Dang in four raids. The principal justification for this target was the large number of freight cars counted in

reconnaissance photography. Lang Dang was in the buffer zone along the

Chinese border, and the North Vietnamese were using the northeast railroad to

bring supplies from China at least as far as Lang Dang. Another attraction of

Lang Dang for Moorer may have been the ability of the B–52s to strike it without a loss. The first attack there on December 23 made that point. It was a good

place to send the B–52Gs, whose jammers had proved inadequate against

Hanoi’s air defense radar network.61

Despite all the changes in targets and tactics that were making Linebacker

II more survivable for B–52 crews, some of the crew members carried a lingering bitterness toward General Meyer. This was especially true on Guam. When

he came to Andersen Air Force Base after the campaign to present medals, tension would lead to stories about a near riot—albeit one that occurred mostly

within the minds of those hostile to Meyer.62

Although U-Tapao Air Base had the only B–52 crew member who refused

to fly a Linebacker II mission, less discontent boiled up there than on Guam.63

On the first three nights, U-Tapao suffered only two losses compared to Guam’s

seven. All of Eighth Air Force’s vulnerable B–52Gs were based on Guam, and at

first the more important targets near Hanoi were assigned mostly to the Guam

bombers. On opening night, Guam B–52s hit the priority targets—railyards at

Kinh No, Yen Vien, and Gia Lam—while U-Tapao attempted to suppress MiG

activity by raiding the airfields at Phuc Yen, Kep, and Hoa Lac (all further from

Hanoi than the targeted railyards). While the Guam crews were experiencing

especially severe losses on the third night, one U-Tapao crew member even managed some humor by blowing timeout on a whistle; his comrades swore afterward that the North Vietnamese stopped firing missiles for ninety seconds.64

The Guam crews were left with far more time than the U-Tapao crews to

brood about their losses. During three out of the next four nights, U-Tapao

flew all of the Linebacker II B–52 missions and Guam returned to the relatively safe missions over South Vietnam. Even counting the southern runs, Guam

crews were expected to fly no more than every other day and most flew less.

The long twelve-hour missions that reduced the frequency with which Guam

crews could fly also provided many uneventful hours in the air for sharpening

grievances.65

For the first five nights of Linebacker II, most U-Tapao crews flew every

night. While their missions lasted only three hours, night after night of combat

was exhausting and Eighth Air Force finally shifted enough crews from Guam

to U-Tapao so that crews there would have to fly only every other night.

Making maximum use of U-Tapao made sense; a B–52D from there could carry

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a bomb load to Hanoi (thirty tons) more than three times that of a B–52G flying

from Guam (nine tons) and nearly twice that of a B–52D flying from Guam

(sixteen tons), four times as fast. The B–52Ds had been modified to carry heavier conventional bombloads in Southeast Asia, while the newer, longer range

B–52Gs had continued to prepare for the possibility of nuclear war against the

Soviet Union. With a third as many B–52s, U-Tapao crews dropped twice as

much tonnage as Guam crews in Linebacker II. When Guam crews were pulled

out of Linebacker II following the severe losses of the third night, U-Tapao

crews began to bomb easier targets with the improved tactics already being

adopted by Strategic Air Command. Since most Guam crews did not participate

in this evolution, many got the wrong impression that the Omaha headquarters

failed to react until after Christmas.

For U-Tapao, a major upturn in morale came on the fifth night, when new

tactics combined happily with an absence of losses. Someone posted a score for

the evening; “Christians 30; Gomers 0.”66 The crews called it the Bob Hope

Special in honor of the famous comedian who had entertained them before they

took off, just as he had entertained so many other servicemen over the years.

“The best damn thing that happened during the whole nonstop operation to take

a lot of the pressure off was the Bob Hope Show,” one captain recalled. “It

saved a lot of guys.”67 After the show, Hope met all the crews in their premission briefings. “He was very sober about it,” another captain remembered. “He

said he didn’t know anything funny to tell about the situation,” but he did tell a

World War II North African story that “calmed the atmosphere.”68

Another encouraging aspect of Linebacker II was the lackluster performance of the MiGs. A few came up every night, probably to determine the altitude of the B–52s for the missile sites. When the MiGs did threaten the B–52s

directly, B–52 gunners proved more than equal to the occasion. The gunners’

response to success was less ebullient, however, than the way fighter pilots celebrated victories. Airman First Class Albert E. Moore, who shot down one of

the two MiGs for which B–52 gunners received credit, felt some ambivalence.

“On the way home,” he said afterward, “I wasn’t sure whether I should be

happy or sad. You know, there was a guy in that MiG. I’m sure he would have

wanted to fly home, too. But it was a case of him or my crew.”69

Meanwhile, Seventh Air Force’s newest air-to-air capability had little

opportunity to prove itself. Just as Linebacker II was getting underway, a half

dozen upgraded “Rivet Haste” F–4Es joined a like number that had arrived at

Udorn in November. The December contingent boasted the capability to identify MiGs beyond visual range by interrogating their transponders, a capability

heretofore absent in Southeast Asia F–4Es but already possessed for several

months by some F–4Ds. All twelve of the new F–4Es, however, had an electronic telescope that would permit daylight identification of enemy aircraft

beyond visual range even if their transponders were turned off. All twelve had

the leading edge of their wings modified with slats that could be extended to

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improve dogfighting maneuverability. These new capabilities did not result in

any MiG kills during Linebacker II, but the electronic telescope did stop one

F–4E from shooting down another F–4E on December 29. The Air Force’s

three fighter air-to-air victories in December went to aircrews in older F–4s and

not to the newcomers, who had ruffled some feathers by replacing seasoned

veterans of the famous 555th “Triple Nickel” squadron (which had racked up

far more air-to-air victories than any other Air Force squadron in the war).70

While very satisfied with the way MiGs were handled from the beginning,

B–52 crews complained about their vulnerability to surface-to-air missiles,

especially during the first three nights of the campaign. Although many of their

complaints were met by improvements in the orders issuing from Strategic Air

Command headquarters, other complaints encountered resistance all the way up

the chain of command. The big B–52s were far less agile than the fighter aircraft that had proved themselves capable of out-maneuvering missiles, and after

the early missions, wing commanders at both U-Tapao and Andersen scolded

some of their pilots for making evasive maneuvers during the bomb runs. Not

only was this insistence on steady bomb runs an old tradition associated with

General LeMay in World War II, but there were new technical reasons to

uphold it. A steady run improved accuracy as always, but now in the same way,

B–52s could maintain the three-ship cells that best employed electronic jamming to fend off surface-to-air missiles.71

The temptation to maneuver during the bomb run was hard to resist. The

B–52 pilots had not experienced this kind of stress before, and it took them a

few days to get used to a more threatening environment. One navigator noted

the confusion caused by a particularly bright planet low in the sky on the first

night: “The pilots kept seeing the damn thing and thinking it was a SAM and it

was just some planet floating out there in space.”72 Although they were above

thirty thousand feet and beyond the range of accurate antiaircraft artillery fire,

the guns below, nevertheless, put on an unnerving show. As a crew member put

it, “it’s like watching the Fourth of July from the top looking down.”73

The problem with Strategic Air Command doing most of the planning for

Linebacker II in Nebraska was not distance from Hanoi, but distance from the

aircrews. The staff at Offutt was bigger and better equipped, but the men flying

combat missions naturally took a dim view of a remote headquarters telling

them how to risk their lives. It would have been better to have staff work from

Omaha support the Eighth Air Force commander in the theater—rather than tell

him exactly what to do. This procedure would not necessarily have produced

better orders, but crew members might have been better disposed to receive

them from a commander in their midst.

General Meyer’s emphasis on bombing railyards and supply depots made

sense. They were good area targets, and they had been very little damaged by

the summer’s laser-guided bombing. Most important, several of them lay on the

outskirts of Hanoi and Haiphong where few civilians would be killed, but many

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in the adjacent cities might be frightened by the unprecedented torrent of bombs

exploding so near.

A defect of the railyards as a target system was the location of the largest

and most important yard in the heart of Hanoi. While the city train station was

hit by laser-guided bombs during Linebacker II, the yard as a whole could only

be seriously damaged by B–52 area bombing and that was forbidden to protect

civilians downtown. Just across the Red River from downtown Hanoi lay the

Gia Lam railyard, which was bombed by B–52s and suffered severe damage not

only to locomotives, rolling stock, and track, but also to its important repair

facility. This was one of nine yards that Air Force intelligence judged more than

50-percent destroyed by Linebacker II. The nearby storage area at Gia Thuong

also suffered heavy damage, and the adjacent Thanh Am oil tank farm was hit

again after losing two-thirds of its capacity earlier in the year.74

Another badly damaged railyard and storage area was at Yen Vien, across

the Canal des Rapides a couple of miles further up the northeast railroad where it

intersected with the northwest railroad. Although a longer and less important

route to China, the northwest railroad included a railyard of great importance at

Kinh No (where the northwest line intersected with a short line running to the

ironworks at Thai Nguyen and joining the northeast line at Kep). Around the rail

spurs at Kinh No lay the largest storage complex in North Vietnam. For months

this had been Meyer’s top priority, and here Strategic Air Command had its

greatest bomb damage to a railyard in Linebacker II, achieving 75-percent

destruction. Although a nearby yard at Duc Noi was judged to be only 50 percent

destroyed, its adjacent storage facility was almost entirely gone.75

The weight of bombs on Kinh No was exceeded only by the bombing of

Lang Dang railyard (sixty miles from Hanoi on the northeast line near the

Chinese border), but American intelligence judged that less than a third of this

busy facility was destroyed. When Washington demanded that it be hit repeatedly late in the campaign, the thousands of bombs that cratered the yard managed to miss most of the hardware. Better luck rewarded strikes on railyards at

Thai Nguyen and Kep, as well as on a rail siding near Haiphong. The railyard

in downtown Haiphong, like the one in Hanoi, remained off limits to B–52s, but

the oil tank farm on the edge of Haiphong went up in smoke.76

As an interdiction campaign, the strikes on railyards and supply areas had

limited potential. The summer assault on bridges had caused the North

Vietnamese to shift most of their imports to trucks. That shift was even easier

during Linebacker II, when pervasive bad weather permitted only one laserguided bomb attack on a bridge; a flight of F–4s took down the main bridge

over the Canal des Rapides. F–111 low-level attacks with unguided bombs

failed to bring down two other bridges. The only other bombed targets at all

related to truck traffic were the oil tank farms and the vehicle repair shops. The

principal truck repair shop was at Van Dien on the southern edge of Hanoi;

twenty-one B–52 sorties damaged about a fourth of this facility. Even total

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destruction could have had only a modest impact, since neighboring China was

not only the source of truck cargoes, but also of the trucks themselves.77

Fear, not interdiction, was the most promising product of B–52 assaults on

Van Dien, Gia Lam, Yen Vien, Kinh No, and other targets ringing Hanoi. The

B–52s attacked at night to gain the protection of darkness from MiGs, but night

was also the most fearsome time to attack. Hanoi had been accustomed to daylight attacks by a few fighters. Now hundreds of big B–52s dropped thousands

of bombs on the edge of the city. An occasional error brought B–52 bombs into

the city’s heart and underscored the implied threat that more might follow. If the

Americans were willing to send fighters against the downtown rail station

(albeit with guided bombs), might they ultimately use the B–52s there just as

they had against all the railyards in the outskirts? Indeed, the string of B–52

bombs which hit Kham Thien Street on the south side of the Hanoi railyard

gave the false impression that the Americans had already done so.

The shock value of Linebacker II was enhanced by an initial element of

surprise. The scale of this campaign was probably far beyond anything expected by the North Vietnamese. Nevertheless, there had been warning signs that

helped them prepare. The breakdown in the talks on December 13 was followed

by a renewal of tactical reconnaissance sorties over the Red River Delta on

December 15, together with an increase in SR–71 and drone reconnaissance

sorties. Thirty tankers from the United States reached Okinawa on December

17 and 18 to support the compressed B–52 waves from Guam; another twentyfive for refueling fighters would go to the Philippines after the start of the campaign, bringing the total number of tankers working in the theater to nearly two

hundred.78

On December 16, the North Vietnamese cancelled orders deploying a surface-to-air missile regiment from Hanoi to South Vietnam. That would have

reduced the number of Hanoi’s active missile sites from twelve to eight.

Whatever concern existed at the top of the Hanoi regime failed to stir Hanoi’s

air defense troops. The commander of the regiment whose move south had been

cancelled decided to go on leave, as did his two battalion commanders and

many of their men. Even when the General Staff called for the highest state of

readiness on December 17, that regimental commander stayed on leave.79

Meanwhile, signs of impending attack mounted. Early on the morning of

the eighteenth, the North Vietnamese intercepted a Navy carrier message about

rescue helicopters and at noon intercepted an RF–4 message reporting weather

in the Hanoi area. When more than forty B–52s took off from Guam in the

afternoon, there was no way to hide the fact from a Soviet trawler sitting off

shore. Always before, Guam had launched three-ship cells more than half an

hour apart—except on the seventeenth, when there had been no B–52 launches

at all. The North Vietnamese General Staff told the air defense forces to expect

a B–52 attack that night. A car was sent to fetch the missing regimental commander. He arrived in time for the first wave, but one of his battalion comman277

B–52s at Last
ders did not. Nevertheless, another of his battalions shot down the first B–52

lost in Linebacker II.80

“The enemy could not achieve the element of surprise,” Lt. Gen. Hoang

Phuong would brag years later, “because they could not maintain the secrecy of

their strategic intentions, the targets they intended to attack, the forces they

were going to use, the direction of attacks, the flight paths to attacks, the opportunities for attacks etc. Although this is something that should never be done in

military operations, it was a mistake that the enemy made.”81 This postwar

bravado at least indicated the importance of shooting down B–52s for North

Vietnamese morale. It may well be true that if no B–52s had launched from

Guam before U-Tapao B–52s had launched, Strategic Air Command might

have achieved greater surprise for the first wave. Thereafter, the element of surprise was bound to shrivel. Greater variation in tactics during the first three

nights might have helped in the duel with the missile sites. Although shock

effect could be achieved at first despite some warning, Hanoi’s citizens were

bound to become somewhat inured to the B–52s as night after night most of the

bombing remained outside the city. They might begin to feel helpless, however,

if bombing were to continue without any opposition from missiles.

Fighter aircraft may also have made a direct contribution to the psychological impact of Linebacker II. Most of the electric lights went out in Hanoi. The

city’s powerplant, which had been off limits during Linebacker, ceased to operate after a flight of four F–4s dropped laser-guided bombs on its boiler house,

generator hall, control building, and machine shop. Linebacker had already

done severe damage to the national power grid, and several electrical targets

were hit again in Linebacker II. On four occasions, a total of six F–111s made

low-level strikes with unguided bombs on the heart of the grid, the transformer

station at Dong Anh just north of Hanoi. Once again Dong Anh was put out of

operation, as it had been in Rolling Thunder and Linebacker.82

Perhaps the most important bomb dropped by a fighter in Linebacker II

was one whose malfunctioning laser guidance system caused it to miss the

Hanoi powerplant and hit an office building. This occurred on the afternoon of

December 21, when a break in the weather afforded the best opportunity for

laser-guided bombing during Linebacker II. General Vogt sent three flights of

F–4s against three different targets in Hanoi—it was the most he could send

since each flight required one of his precious four laser-guidance pods (leaving

only one for backup). Despite the relative clarity of the weather, the flight

attacking the powerplant ran into some clouds that forced the F–4 with the laser

designator to descend to twenty-five hundred feet. Even such risk-taking did

not succeed in getting all eight bombs on the target. Two failed to guide. When

the flight returned to Ubon, the crews reported that one of the no-guides had

struck a big building well south of the powerplant. Seventh Air Force intelligence concluded that the bomb had hit communist party headquarters, and

General Vogt expected dire repercussions. But since North Vietnam said noth278

To Hanoi and Back
ing about it, it never got into the press. “And you know,” Vogt would say after

the war, “I think it had a salutary effect on the outcome of the negotiations,

because I really think these guys thought we were now going after communist

leadership.”83

Whatever the truth of Vogt’s deduction, the decision of the United States at

the beginning of the war not to threaten the existence of the North Vietnamese

regime had limited the impact of American air operations there. In Linebacker

II, the only authorized target linked directly with the leadership was Radio

Hanoi. This propaganda tool and symbol of the regime was bombed several

times, but not even a laser-guided attack succeeded in putting it off the air. So

eager had Washington been to hit this target, that on the first two nights,

General Meyer had sent B–52s against it. Area bombing was ill-suited to so

small a target. Yet several communications targets and missile sites were

bombed by B–52s that had slight chance of doing any effective damage. These

awkward missions were born of frustration over the lack of precision bombing

capability in bad weather.

Bad weather also kept Strategic Air Command and Seventh Air Force from

seeing what, if anything, they had hit. Bomb damage assessment was difficult in

the absence of photography that had to wait on better weather. Even reconnaissance drones, which could fly through any weather at low altitude, could still be

foiled by the misty conditions of the northeast monsoon. In any case, the

Strategic Air Command was launching only four drones a day at the beginning

of Linebacker II; after Christmas the launch rate increased to six a day when a

third C–130 launch aircraft was deployed. Traveling at a few hundred feet over

the Red River Delta, the drones were limited in the number of targets they could

photograph. Often, imperfect navigation caused a drone to miss a planned target

entirely. Fewer than half the drones followed their planned route. Sometimes

route planning was the problem. Two drones missed photographing the Bac Mai

hospital because the Defense Intelligence Agency had provided the wrong street

address.84

Emphasis on photographing the bombing error at the Bac Mai hospital

indicated the extent to which drones had to answer to Washington’s political

requirements rather than to the theater’s tactical requirements. Had the destruction of particular targets been truly critical to Linebacker II, the reconnaissance

problem would have been more than frustrating. But the critical requirement of

Linebacker II was dropping a lot of bombs near Hanoi; so long as they did not

kill too many civilians, it did not much matter to the Nixon administration what

they hit.

It did matter how many planes were lost, not least because those losses presented the Nixon administration’s enemies in Hanoi and Washington with political ammunition. B–52 losses were the most costly, because of the aircraft’s

fame as a nuclear bomber as well as its size and the size of its crew. The B–52’s

normal crew of six (pilot, copilot, navigator, radar navigator, electronic warfare

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B–52s at Last
officer, and gunner) meant that Hanoi could quickly increase its collection of

American prisoners. While five of the fifteen B–52s lost to surface-to-air missiles in Linebacker II managed to limp out of North Vietnam, a radar navigator

disappeared after bailing out over Laos and the crash landing at U-Tapao took

four more lives. Of the thirty-four B–52 crew members known to have been

captured by the North Vietnamese, one died in captivity: Lt. Col. Keith R.

Heggen, the deputy airborne commander of the Andersen strike force in the

third wave on the third night. Twenty-seven others were missing in North

Vietnam and later presumed dead. For many surviving B–52 crew members,

Linebacker II had been a close call. In addition to the fifteen B–52s lost, three

were severely damaged and six more suffered minor damage.85

B–52 losses overshadowed, but did not diminish, the loss of eleven fighter,

attack, and reconnaissance aircraft, not to mention an Air Force rescue helicopter

and an Air Force EB–66 jammer—the latter brought down by engine failure.

The Air Force lost two F–111s (at least one to small arms fire) and two F–4s on

air-to-air missions in daylight (both to MiGs). The Navy’s six losses included

two A–6s, two A–7s, an F–4 and an RA–5; antiaircraft artillery accounted for

three, surface-to-air missiles for one, MiGs for one, and for one the cause was

unknown. The cause of the loss of a Marine A–6 was also unknown. Although

the number of B–52 losses was not much greater than that of these smaller aircraft, three times as many aircrew were involved in the B–52 incidents.86

Since fighter aircraft suffered less expensive losses than B–52s while flying more than three times as many Linebacker II sorties, the Pacific Air Forces

commander, General Clay, could argue that the entire job of bombing the Red

River Delta should be returned to the fighters. On December 28, he declared

that there remained “few if any targets” worth losing more B–52s.87 Given

Clay’s displeasure over Strategic Air Command’s dominance of the campaign

and his own limited role, this suggestion did not carry much weight in

Washington. In any case, Hanoi’s indication that it was eager to complete a

cease-fire agreement was all that President Nixon required to call off all bombing north of the twentieth parallel on December 29.88

By that time General Haig had already visited President Thieu in Saigon

with President Nixon’s ultimatum: go along with a cease-fire now or go on

alone. By underlining Nixon’s promise to react against another North

Vietnamese offensive, Linebacker II may have helped this medicine go down a

little easier—as did a surge of imported American military equipment (including planes and tanks). Haig tried to get General Vogt to add his assurances that

the United States would come to the aid of South Vietnam if North Vietnam

attacked, but Vogt refused. “I could see the resolutions that were being introduced in Congress against any resumption of bombing,” he recalled years later

after the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. “And I didn’t feel I

could, in good conscience, offer reassurances to these people under those circumstances. I can sleep nights as a result. I wonder if other people do.”89

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Chapter Eleven

Reverberations

In 1975, two years after signing a cease-fire agreement in Paris, the North

Vietnamese completed their conquest of South Vietnam. North Vietnamese

forces moved almost unimpeded through Laos or across the Demilitarized Zone

to join those already in South Vietnam. This time the United States refused to

intervene. Charged with covering up his administration’s responsibility for

breaking into Democratic party headquarters at Washington’s Watergate building, Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency to avoid impeachment.

Although Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, had been House minority leader, he

could not muster enough support in Congress for renewed involvement in

South Vietnam. Without American air power, the South Vietnamese army disintegrated in two months.

America’s sour aftertaste of the Vietnam War was sweetened for the Air

Force by the obvious success of American air power in 1972, a success only

underlined in 1975 by the disastrous consequences of American air power’s

absence. While the bitterness of many who had served in a frustrating war was

exacerbated by declining Air Force manpower and budgets, the service pursued

new technologies stimulated by the Southeast Asian experience—new fighter

aircraft, new radar aircraft, new means of countering enemy radar, new means

of operating in darkness, and new guided weapons.1

The doctrinal legacy of the war was more muddled than the technical legacy. The war’s emotional impact sometimes added to the difficulty of determining how best to use the new technologies. In public discussion, the Air Force

tended to emphasize the dramatic contribution of the B–52s in Linebacker II

rather than the pathbreaking use of laser-guided bombs against bridges in North

Vietnam and tanks in South Vietnam. In contrast to laser-guided bombing,

B–52 area bombing was an older technology available at the beginning of the

war and useable in any weather. B–52s could have attacked North Vietnam in

early 1965 without being inhibited by clouds or surface-to-air missiles; B–52

radar could find targets in any weather and North Vietnam had yet to deploy

SAMs. By withholding America’s all-weather heavy bombers and doling out

targets gradually, President Johnson helped the northeast monsoon to shield the

Red River Delta of North Vietnam from the much lighter bomb loads of Rolling

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Thunder’s fair-weather fighter aircraft. Slow gains brought by restricted bombing dribbled away during the annual respite from November to April.

Linebacker II bolstered the Air Force’s argument that had B–52s been used in

the Red River Delta at the outset, the war would have come to a much quicker

and more satisfactory conclusion.

The situation in 1972 differed in important respects from 1965. An open

invasion exposed communist forces to air power in ways that North Vietnam’s

earlier support for insurgency had not. Having built relationships with the

Soviet Union and China that reduced their support for North Vietnam, President

Nixon sought only a cease-fire that left North Vietnamese forces in South

Vietnam and brought home the prisoners of war. These differences in the contexts of Rolling Thunder and Linebacker caused doubts about claims that the

war might have been won by launching a Linebacker II early in Rolling

Thunder. Skepticism inside the Air Force eventually found public expression,

most prominently in Maj. Mark Clodfelter’s The Limits of Air Power (New

York, 1989). Too young to have served during the Vietnam War, this Air Force

Academy professor found it “difficult to fathom” the “lingering conviction” of

Air Force generals that their way of using air power could be decisive in a limited war.2 Clodfelter was most concerned about guerrilla war, but he also worried about the utility of air power in more conventional forms of limited war

under the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Soon after the publication of Clodfelter’s book came a radical transformation of world politics. In the waning days of the Soviet Union, American air

power proved very effective against an Iraq waging conventional war without

any major allies. For those persuaded by the Vietnam War that American air

power was ineffective, the Gulf War came as a great surprise—not least for the

Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had bragged about his ability to emulate

Hanoi’s victory. In August 1990, Saddam told Dan Rather of CBS Television

that “the United States depends on the Air Force. The Air Force has never

decided a war in the history of wars.”3

Since Iraq did not resort to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, the

Gulf War remained limited not only to conventional weapons, but also to targets

that could be hit without endangering civilian residences. The Johnson administration’s avoidance of enemy civilian casualties had been so thoroughly inculcated that it was an integral part of the air campaign plan the Air Force produced for President George Bush. But this self-imposed restraint did not cripple

air power, because Desert Storm exploited the precision of laser-guided bombing in dramatic new ways.

The laser-guided bombs that “plinked” tanks in Kuwait had their predecessors in the laser-guided bombs that destroyed tanks in South Vietnam. The

laser-guided bombing of Iraq, however, was quite different than the laser-guided bombing of North Vietnam. Linebacker’s laser-guided bombs had hit mostly

bridges. Desert Storm’s laser-guided bombs first struck Iraq’s command centers

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To Hanoi and Back
and communications nodes. Unlike North Vietnam’s rulers, the Iraqi regime

and its ability to lead were threatened from the outset. U.S. Air Force surveillance planes had a much better picture of Iraqi air defenses than did Iraqi air

leaders. Crippled early, Iraqi air defenses were never able to offer much resistance. Improved air-to-air missiles (especially Sparrows) downed the few Iraqi

aircraft that flew within range. Although much larger than North Vietnam’s,

most of Iraq’s air force was destroyed on the ground or fled to Iran. In contrast

to the sanctuary enjoyed by North Vietnamese airfields for much of Rolling

Thunder, Iraqi airfields were methodically attacked—each hardened aircraft

shelter penetrated by a laser-guided bomb.

The improved accuracy of laser-guided bombs meant that their targets in

Iraq could be more precisely defined—not just a particular office building, but

a particular office. Indeed, the precision of bombs often exceeded the precision

of intelligence about enemy activity. The bomb itself could give the first close

look at a target, as a camera electronically transmitted imagery showing the target growing larger and larger in the center of the bomb’s field of view until detonation. When some of this video tape appeared on commercial television, the

American public got a new image of air power. During the Vietnam War, the

care of aircrews to avoid civilian casualties had never overcome the image of

leveled cities that the public had derived from the Second World War. In Desert

Storm, the public saw a precision so amazing that some came to expect air warfare without any civilian casualties at all.

The major incident involving civilian casualties in Iraq occurred when two

laser-guided bombs hit a targeted bunker. A great improvement in the newer

laser-guided bombs used in Desert Storm was their ability to penetrate bunkers,

but intelligence about what was in the bunkers was not equally penetrating.

Target planners did not know that the Iraqi leadership was using the bunker as

an air raid shelter as well as a command center. Publicity about these casualties

caused Washington to restrain bombing in the capital city of Baghdad for the

remainder of the Gulf War.4 Those who fought the air war over North Vietnam

were very familiar with enemy willingness to put its military assets amid its

civilian population or anywhere else American bombs were apt to yield useful

propaganda. In such matters, the Iraqi regime was, in fact, far less skillful than

the Vietnamese communists.

Better led than the Iraqis, the North Vietnamese also enjoyed the great

advantage of worse weather for bombing. Although American air power made

great strides during the 1980s in its ability to operate at night, laser-guided

bombing continued to depend on clear weather. Even in the relatively poor Iraqi

weather of Desert Storm, the skies were clear enough that, over the course of

six weeks, laser-guided bombs fell in Iraq every day but one. The contrast with

North Vietnam is evident when it is recalled that in the two weeks of

Linebacker II, laser-guided bombing was possible on only two days.

When the weather did break in Linebacker II, General Vogt had only four

283

Reverberations
laser designation pods that could be used in the high-threat area around Hanoi

and Haiphong. Two decades later, Gen. Charles A. Horner, the Desert Storm air

commander (who had flown in Rolling Thunder and was determined not to

repeat its errors), could call upon more than a hundred aircraft with laser designation capability. Horner did not have to build big formations to protect his precision bombers, not only because they were more plentiful, but also because his

forces attacked enemy defenses at once. Some of his aircraft used new “stealth”

technologies to hide themselves from enemy radar while they were bombing

Iraq’s air defense control centers; stealth was the product of research animated

by North Vietnam’s air defenses. In Rolling Thunder, the Air Force had been

forbidden to attack enemy airfields for two years. In Desert Storm, enemy airfields were attacked on the first night.

The intensity of laser-guided bombing in Desert Storm was a function of

American leadership and planning as well as favorable weather and improved

technology. Although some Air Force generals did propose gradual escalation

during the early planning for Desert Storm, the old aversion to gradualism

reasserted itself in the Air Force and in the White House. There was a realization that, for an air campaign, timing is as important as weight of effort. This

fundamental truth had been trampled in the 1960s by the Rolling Thunder campaign. Eventually, almost all the targets in North Vietnam on the original ninety-four target list were bombed, but eventually was not nearly soon enough.

Targets that should have been bombed in the first few days were kept off limits

for years.

Meanwhile, the bombs kept falling on less important targets, so that in the

end, North Vietnam absorbed some eight hundred thousand tons. Yet this was

only a tenth of the eight million tons dropped on Southeast Asia as a whole,

with South Vietnam bearing the brunt of this onslaught and nearly all the additional eight million tons of artillery shells. No other part of the world had ever

been bombed so heavily. In Germany during World War II, the rate of bomb

tonnage reached the same level by 1945, but the Vietnam War lasted twice as

long; Japan suffered a half million tons in less than a year. Of course, the bombing of Germany and Japan was far more devastating, because their major cities

were demolished. A high proportion of the bombing in Southeast Asia did nothing more than tear up the jungle.

American air power dropped about a hundred thousand tons of bombs on

Iraq and Kuwait in six weeks—close to the rate bombs had fallen in Southeast

Asia, Germany, or Japan. But the Gulf War was over in only six weeks, thanks

in part to an acceleration in target destruction permitted by greater precision.

Once again, B–52s were largely confined to bombing troop positions in the

south rather than urban targets in the north. This time, however, fighter aircraft

were better equipped to attack urban targets than they had been in Rolling

Thunder or even Linebacker. This time the President authorized urban targets

from the beginning.

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To Hanoi and Back
Laser-guided bombs made urban targeting acceptable to American political

leaders early in Desert Storm, but this precision was used with far greater caution four years later when Bosnian Serb military depredations provoked the

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to launch an air campaign for the

first time. Operation Deliberate Force lived up to its name. Avoidance of casualties, even Bosnian Serb military casualties, governed the careful selection of

aiming points made personally by NATO’s American theater air commander,

Lt. Gen. Michael E. Ryan (future Air Force Chief of Staff, veteran of Rolling

Thunder, and son of Gen. John D. Ryan, Sr., Pacific Air Forces commander and

Air Force Chief of Staff during the Vietnam War). For the first time in so large

an operation, most of the bombs dropped were guided; American planes

dropped almost nothing else. Despite constraints reminiscent of Vietnam, guided bombing, together with a more favorable situation on the ground, produced

an effective air campaign using little more than a thousand bombs and lasting

only two weeks.

Three and a half years after Deliberate Force in the spring of 1999, a much

bigger NATO air campaign ended a Serbian reign of terror in Kosovo. In deference to the sensibilities of NATO member countries, Operation Allied Force

began nearly as cautiously as Deliberate Force. Gradually additional targets

were approved. Although, in the end, twice as many unguided bombs would be

used, more than seven thousand guided bombs and missiles attacked targets

with an accuracy that usually fulfilled NATO’s wish to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage. Faulty intelligence did lead to a deadly attack on

the Chinese embassy in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Nevertheless, this version

of gradualism progressed much more rapidly and successfully than Rolling

Thunder. Only two NATO planes (both U.S. Air Force) were lost, and both

pilots were rescued. There were no bombing pauses. Targets like airfields and

powerplants (that were only permitted by the Johnson administration after two

years of Rolling Thunder) were hit during the eleven weeks of Allied Force.

Allied Force attacks on leadership facilities in Belgrade contrasted with avoidance of targets in downtown Hanoi during Rolling Thunder and Linebacker.

Even during Linebacker II, most of the bombs that struck downtown Hanoi

were intended for targets on the outskirts.

Once again in Allied Force, the old B–52s played important roles—but

nothing like Linebacker II’s area bombing near cities. Early in Allied Force,

B–52s launched cruise missiles against targets throughout Serbia and later

dropped unguided bombs on Serb troop concentrations in Kosovo. Newer B–1s

also used unguided bombs, but the Air Force’s newest bombers, stealthy B–2s,

flew all the way from Missouri to deliver only new all-weather guided bombs.

The Air Force employed fighter aircraft (F–117s, F–15s, F–16s, A–10s) that

had emerged after the Vietnam War. Except for B–52s and some types of

bombs, little of the Air Force hardware used in Vietnam remained in active service. That was true of people as well. One major exception was the air com285

Reverberations
mander for Allied Force, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, who had flown F–4s in

South Vietnam. This time General Short was serving under President Bill

Clinton, who had protested the Vietnam War in his college years and learned to

rely on air power in his White House years.

The leading role that the Air Force played in Allied Force, Deliberate Force,

and Desert Storm grew out of the post-Vietnam years when the service was

widely seen to be filling mostly a supporting role for potential ground operations. While focusing on the defense of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, many in

the Air Force came to see the ground-attack mission of fighter aircraft as restricted to bombing enemy troops and supply lines. The bombardment of Soviet cities

would be the job of nuclear missiles and bombers; it was to be avoided if at all

possible, because it would mean a nuclear war devastating to friend and foe

alike. Strategic bombardment was synonymous with nuclear bombardment.

When the Air Force had to think about waging war against Iraq, many Air Force

officers had difficulty coming to grips with a “strategic air campaign” that would

be waged with conventional bombs dropped by fighter aircraft.

To some degree, this conceptual problem was already present during the

Vietnam War. Partly because Rolling Thunder and Linebacker were waged

mostly with fighter aircraft dropping conventional bombs, commanders tended

to define those campaigns as tactical interdiction rather than strategic campaigns. Since the North Vietnamese had to import nearly all their military supplies, an air campaign confined to bombing North Vietnam could not hit the

industries on which the enemy war machine depended. On the other hand, the

Air Force did want to threaten enemy leadership—an objective that was traditionally “strategic” and during Rolling Thunder politically unacceptable. The

Johnson administration confined Rolling Thunder largely to interdiction, but

President Nixon’s Linebacker II campaign moved beyond interdiction to intimidation.

Even Rolling Thunder interdiction had a strategic component, for the objective was not merely to limit the flow of supplies to South Vietnam but to hurt the

North Vietnamese economy. Indeed, the latter objective may well have been the

one toward which the most progress was made. Soviet and Chinese military supplies could more than keep up with American interdiction, but North Vietnam

lost the few industries that carried its hopes for modernization. Although the

United States refrained from bombing dikes, a considerable portion of the agricultural labor force was diverted to the war effort; North Vietnam had to import

rice. Years of bombing had taken a heavy toll on the country’s transportation system, especially railroads. Many of the small cities and villages on the principal

transportation routes had suffered extensive destruction in contrast to relatively

limited bomb damage in the major cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. In 1973,

President Nixon offered $3.25 billion for reconstruction, but North Vietnam forfeited the money by persisting with its conquest of South Vietnam.5

The North Vietnamese leaders became so accustomed to concentrating on

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To Hanoi and Back
war, that even after the collapse of South Vietnam, they had trouble thinking

about anything else. They had to fend off a Chinese invasion while bogged

down fighting an insurgency in Cambodia. Together with the severe handicap

imposed by their Marxist ideology and by an American trade embargo, the old

men of the communist regime in Hanoi permitted their country to fall father and

farther behind Thailand and the other booming economies of Southeast Asia.

Even gigantic China was quicker to encourage capitalist practices. Not until the

late 1980s and a new generation of Vietnamese leaders, did the Vietnamese

economy begin to improve.

The war that left Vietnam saddled with an aging leadership actually facilitated an important transition in the leadership of the U.S. Air Force. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command began to unravel in Southeast Asia. Fighter

pilots played a more central role than did B–52 pilots, who spent most of the war

bombing the jungle of South Vietnam. The very fact that an aircraft designed to

drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union was used instead to provide close air

support signalled the need to reconsider the mission of the Strategic Air

Command. Eventually, fighter pilot veterans of Vietnam took charge of the Air

Force, eliminated the Strategic Air Command, and put long-range bombers

together with fighters in a new Air Combat Command.6

Long before those developments, General McConnell began to prepare the

way for them as Air Force Chief of Staff. He sent an especially able fighter

commander, General Momyer, to take charge of Seventh Air Force and helped

Momyer get a fourth star. At the same time, McConnell sent General Ryan from

Strategic Air Command to get some fighter experience as commander of

Pacific Air Forces before becoming Chief of Staff of the Air Force. McConnell

then replaced Momyer at Seventh Air Force with General Brown, who had

begun his career as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, but had been a

fighter operations deputy in the Korean War. Although Brown had never served

in the Strategic Air Command, he became Air Force Chief of Staff in 1973 and

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a year later. When Brown went to Seventh

Air Force, McConnell sent General Holloway, a World War II fighter ace, to

take over the Strategic Air Command; this shock led to others for SAC, and

their next commander was an even more famous World War II fighter ace,

General Meyer.

In 1982 General Gabriel became Air Force Chief of Staff, the first of a succession of Vietnam War fighter pilots in that job. The fact that he had risen to

the top even after his involvement in the Lavelle affair demonstrated the degree

to which the Air Force had been able to deflect the political currents swirling

around the Vietnam War. The Lavelle affair had divided the Air Force for a

time, but only Lavelle himself was sacrificed.

The Air Force’s essential response to the Vietnam puzzle was to work

toward coming out of the war in the best shape possible. Since there seemed to

be no permissible way to win the war, the Air Force looked for ways to fight

287

Reverberations
that would build its technology and preserve the precious lives of its aircrews.

The other services sought similar ends, and while the Air Force did more to

develop new technology, the Navy was quicker to exploit the value of realistic

air combat training. Because common sense (supported by the Air Force’s own

studies) had long indicated that a pilot was most vulnerable and least effective

in his first few combat sorties, Seventh Air Force followed the practice throughout the war of keeping aircrews away from Route Package Six until they had

flown several sorties in Laos or the panhandle of North Vietnam. But the

Navy’s Top Gun training program went further and clearly helped the air-to-air

performance of their pilots in Linebacker.

After the war, the Air Force began its Red Flag exercises at Nellis Air

Force Base, Nevada, where units could attack ground targets in the face of

extraordinarily realistic air defenses—not just fighters, but antiaircraft artillery

and surface-to-air missiles as well. Here allied air forces learned to work with

Americans very much the way they would in the Gulf War. This training would

permit remarkably smooth operations with remarkably low losses from the

opening night of Desert Storm.

Those who compare the Air Force’s concern for aircrew survival in Iraq

and North Vietnam unfavorably with the bold expenditure of aircrew lives during World War II miss the fundamental differences in the character of those

wars. Whether the U.S. should fight smaller wars with less at stake than World

War II is another question—one about which the Air Force has not been given

and will not be given much to say. But the Air Force can have considerable

impact on the degree of sacrifice that a war exacts.

The Vietnam War cost the lives of more than a million Vietnamese, and

more than a million Cambodians died at the hands of Pol Pot’s communist

regime in the aftermath of the war. While the American sacrifice exceeding

fifty thousand lives was painful, it is well to remember that four times as many

South Vietnamese government troops died in combat. During the war, most of

the killing occurred in South Vietnam. The bombing of North Vietnam probably killed fewer than a hundred thousand North Vietnamese.7

Combat over North Vietnam accounted for more than a quarter of the

almost two thousand Air Force people killed or missing in Southeast Asia. Of

about twenty-two hundred Air Force planes lost in the war, more than six hundred were shot down over North Vietnam.8 Nearly three hundred of the Air

Force men shot down there were captured and came home at the end of the war.

Unlike most of the Vietnam veterans who had returned individually to cool or

even rude receptions, the groups of released prisoners were welcomed warmly

by crowds of Americans. The disturbing fact that the prisoner exchange included only thirteen Americans captured in Laos (where the Air Force alone had

lost more than four hundred planes) fed fears that communists might still be

holding American prisoners. The families of the missing were sufficiently well

organized to keep the Defense Intelligence Agency at work for decades after the

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war in an unprecedented effort to determine the fate of every American lost in

Southeast Asia.*9

Except for one Marine who decided to come home after collaborating with

the communists, the families of the missing got back only remains.10 Even the

remains came out slowly enough to bolster allegations that the Vietnamese government had a warehouse of them to release little by little, at least until the U.S.

government ceased to embargo trade with Vietnam. The end of the embargo in

1994 angered families who believed that the American government had thereby

reduced pressure for determining the fate of their relatives. Three years later, a

former Air Force prisoner of war and Florida congressman, Douglas “Pete”

Peterson, returned to Hanoi as America’s first ambassador to the Socialist

Republic of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War veterans who commanded air power in the Gulf War

sought to ensure that the coalition sacrifice in Southwest Asia would be far less

than the allied sacrifice in Southeast Asia, let alone World War II. General

Horner told his aircrews that no target was worth their lives unless they were

operating in close support of troops. With their new technology and greater

freedom to use it to its best advantage, his crews proved able to take out their

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Reverberations

* Since a much higher percentage of downed aircrew was rescued in Laos than in

North Vietnam and the percentage of aircrew who survived a shoot-down was probably no

higher in Laos, the percentage captured was probably much lower in Laos. Nevertheless,

the number of missing in both regions left room for suspicion that the communists had kept

prisoners after the exchange in 1973. In 1993, Stephen J. Morris, an Australian researcher

associated with Harvard University and Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center, found a

startling document at the communist party central committee archives in Moscow. The

document appeared to be a Russian translation of a September 1972 report to the North

Vietnamese politburo by Lt. Gen. Tran Van Quang; the document stated that the North

Vietnamese then held 1,205 U.S. prisoners of war, not merely the fewer than 600 released

about six months later. After Vietnamese and U.S. officials challenged the authenticity and

accuracy of the document, relations between the two countries continued to improve. But

the document deepened doubts, all the more so because it surfaced in the wake of Russian

president Boris Yeltsin’s assertion that American prisoners were held in his country during

the Vietnam War and that some might still be alive there. For an argument that long after

the war American prisoners remained alive in Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union, see

John M.G. Brown, Moscow Bound: Policy, Politics and the POW/MIA Dilemma (Eureka,

Calif., 1993). In the fall of 1996, the U.S. released a national intelligence estimate of 1987,

“Hanoi and the POW/MIA Issue” (SNIE 14.3–87), which supported the view that the

Vietnamese government had the remains of more than 400 Americans in storage; this estimate also took note of the fact that France had yet to receive the remains of thousands of its

soldiers killed in Vietnam during the 1940s and 1950s. But together with release of the

1987 estimate, the national intelligence community also issued an assessment which cast

doubt upon that estimate. As to China, in 1973 that country released two CIA officials held

since 1952 and two pilots captured during the Vietnam War—one Air Force and one Navy.

Air Force Capt. Philip E. Smith’s F–104 was shot down by a Chinese MiG–19 on

September 20, 1965, when a navigational equipment failure caused him to wander off

course near China’s Hainan Island; see Smith’s Journey Into Darkness (New York, 1992).
targets quickly, while sparing almost all their own lives and making possible the

survival of almost all coalition troops. The U.S. sent more than half a million

men and women to the Gulf, and fewer than two hundred were killed in action.

For General Horner, the Gulf War’s extraordinarily low cost in lives was a

great relief and a great satisfaction. He knew all too well from his own experience as an F–105 strike and Wild Weasel pilot over North Vietnam during

Rolling Thunder that war could be far more lethal. Only a year before the Gulf

War, he had occasion to recall a Vietnam dilemma publicly and help change the

Air Force’s official view of it.11

On June 30, 1989, General Horner pinned the Silver Star on Lt. Col. John

R. “Bob” Pardo (USAF, retired) and Col. Stephen A. Wayne for an act of lifesaving courage over North Vietnam on March 10, 1967. Captain Pardo and

Lieutenant Wayne were pilot and backseater of an F–4 bombing the Thai

Nguyen iron works. They were hit by antiaircraft fire while pulling off the target. Normally, getting themselves out of North Vietnam would have been

enough of a challenge, but another F–4 was in even worse shape and running

short of fuel. In a similar situation during the Korean War, Maj. Robbie Risner

had pushed his wingman out of North Korea and survived to be shot down more

than a decade later over North Vietnam (where he was imprisoned). There

“Risner’s Push” was joined by “Pardo’s Push.” Pardo wedged the other F–4’s

lowered tail hook (a vestige of the F–4’s naval origin) against the edge of his

windshield; the lowered hook permitted him to stay below the tail wash. Both

aircraft made it to Laos before the crews had to bail out, and all four men were

rescued.12

“Pardo’s Push” became famous at air bases throughout Southeast Asia—so

much so that a briefing team made the circuit to discourage any more pushing.

Logic seemed to dictate that this technique could cost more aircraft than it

would save, and that therefore Pardo and Wayne had set a bad example which

should not be honored. But a warrior’s calculus of risk is as much a matter of

emotion as of logic. In the end Pardo and Wayne got their reward, and it was not

merely a medal, for on the same day they received the medals the pilot of the

other F–4 (Earl D. Aman) retired from the Air Force with twenty-two more

years of service than on that much more difficult day over North Vietnam;

Aman’s backseater (Robert W. Houghton) also completed a full career in the

Air Force. In finally honoring Pardo and Wayne, the Air Force was saluting all

the men who had taken great risks to bring their comrades home.13

When General Horner subsequently told his aircrews in Saudi Arabia that

targets were not worth their lives, he echoed senior officers in Thailand. Such

admonitions were not always phrased with sufficient care to have the intended

effect. On the very morning of Pardo and Wayne’s celebrated sortie over North

Vietnam, F–4 aircrews were advised that “our little brown brothers aren’t worth

any one of you getting killed.”14 Pardo was disturbed by the remark, which

undervalued the unavoidable risks aircrews were taking. Senior officers walk a

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To Hanoi and Back
fine line between getting crews to avoid unnecessary risks and honoring their

courage.

As for most of us looking back upon the men who risked their lives in the

deadly skies over North Vietnam, we can honor their courage only with our

attention. We may never be able to agree about the political significance of their

war, but even across the years we can sense their worth.

291

Reverberations
292

To Hanoi and Back
Maps

293

Preface
294
 Cam Ranh Bay •

• Takhli

Ubon

•

• Don Muang

VIETNAM

 U-Tapao

•

• Phu Bai

CHINA

BURMA

NORTH VIETNAM

LAOS

THAILAND

CAMBODIA

SOUTH

HANOI

VIENTIANE

BANGKOK

PHNOM

PENH

SAIGON

Gulf of Thailand

South China Sea

Gulf of Tonkin

Phan Rang •

Tuy Hoa •

Tan Son

Nhut

• • Bien Hoa

Pleiku •

Nha Trang •

• Da Nang

•

Binh

Thuy

Qui Nhon • 

• Korat

Udorn • • Nakhon

Phanom 

Chu Lai •

Southeast Asia

National Capital

• Principal U.S. Air Base

Phu Cat •

Prior to 1967, the boundary between Route Packages 4 and 5 was a straight-line extension of the southern boundary of Route Package 6 west

to the Laotian border. Similarly, the boundary between Route Packages 6A and 6B was a straight line from the southwestern corner of RoutePackage 6 to Hanoi, after which that boundary followed the northeast railroad to China. While pilots could see the northeast railroad, they couldnot see imaginary straight lines that completed the boundary between Air Force and Navy operating areas. Consequently, the straight-line boundaries from Hanoi to the Laotian border were bent to follow roads. In 1972, the Hanoi and Haiphong prohibited areas were eliminated, and theHanoi restricted area was reduced from a radius of 30 nautical miles to a radius of 10 nautical miles.

Statistics

299

Preface
300
U.S. and South Vietnamese fixed-wing aircraft flew more than 6,000,000

sorties in Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1973. More than 2,000,000 sorties

attacked ground targets with about 8,000,000 tons of bombs. Of this total, about

800,000 tons were dropped on North Vietnam by about 350,000 attack sorties.

Only about 20 percent of the effort against North Vietnam was directed at Route

Package Six, a region that included the country’s two largest cities, Hanoi and

Haiphong.

In the Southeast Asia of 1967, the Air Force stationed about 1,500 aircraft,

of which the 450 in Thailand focused on North Vietnam and Laos; another 150

at Da Nang, South Vietnam, operated both north and south of the demilitarized

zone; most other aircraft in South Vietnam expended the bulk of their effort

there. The 60 B–52s in Thailand and Guam dropped most of their bombs in

South Vietnam, but also hit targets in the North Vietnamese and Laotian panhandles. The Navy normally kept one or two carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, with

about 75 aircraft apiece.

In the Southeast Asia of 1972, there were more than 200 B–52s operating,

and the Navy increased its presence to four carriers much of the time. Even after

major deployments in response to North Vietnam’s invasion of South Vietnam,

however, the number of Air Force fighters in the area was fewer than 400, as

compared with more than 500 five years earlier. Most Air Force fighters there

in 1972 were F–4s operating from Thailand, some of which were replaced by

A–7s and F–111s later in the year; by the end of the year, the Air Force had

removed all of its aircraft from South Vietnam (except those transferred to the

South Vietnamese).

Air Force fighters attacked Route Package Six with about two tons of

bombs each, while Navy fighters averaged less than one and a half tons. No

B–52 bombed Route Package Six until 1972, when each carried up to thirty

tons of bombs. Indeed, the B–52s in 1972 played a much bigger role throughout North Vietnam than they had during Rolling Thunder. In 1972, more than

two-thirds of the bomb tonnage used in North Vietnam by the Air Force was

delivered by B–52s (compared to less than a quarter during Rolling Thunder).

The tonnage dropped in North Vietnam by Air Force fighters during 1972

was much less than during Rolling Thunder—not only due to the smaller number of fighters available, but also to the emphasis given the new laser-guided

bombs. A few guided bombs could do the work of hundreds of “dumb” bombs

scattered around a target. Only a half dozen new Pave Knife targeting pods

were available for F–4s needing to maneuver in the face of air defenses while

keeping a laser guidance beam fixed on a target. Only that small number of new

pods could be used in the most heavily defended portion of North Vietnam. To

protect those precious pods, the Air Force built large formations in which escort

aircraft far outnumbered bombing aircraft. 

While the Air Force could supply copious statistics about the weight of its

effort in North Vietnam, there was no satisfactory quantitative measurement of

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Statistics
results. Estimates of damage to targets (see Table 5 below) were not reliable

and, in any case, did not really measure effectiveness. Only by considering the

entire situation could any appreciation of possible effectiveness begin to take

shape. The Air Force had reason to believe the Linebacker campaigns in 1972

more effective than the Rolling Thunder campaign of 1965–68.

Whatever the effectiveness, the cumulative cost was high. Although aircraft attrition calculated as a percentage of sorties was far lower than for any

previous air war, this war’s length and scope added up to an unprecedented

number of sorties and a large number of losses. The Air Force alone lost 2,257

aircraft, 638 of them over North Vietnam, where Air Force men killed and missing totalled 413 (after 333 Air Force prisoners of war came home, most of them

shot down in North Vietnam). This was less than 1 percent of the more than

55,000 American lives lost in Southeast Asia. Vietnamese losses on both sides

were much greater. South Vietnamese government forces lost nearly a quarter

million killed, and in 1995 the Socialist Republic of Vietnam announced that

communist military killed exceeded a million, while civilian deaths approached

two million. The new figure for communist military dead was about twice the

American estimate and the civilian toll about five times the American estimate.

Most of the casualties on both sides were suffered in South Vietnam. American

intelligence had estimated civilian deaths from bombing in North Vietnam at

about 50,000 for Rolling Thunder alone.

Critics of the air war over North Vietnam often argued that the cost of

planes lost (not to mention aircrews killed, wounded and captured) far exceeded the cost of targets destroyed (not to mention people on the ground killed and

wounded). But a meaningful comparison was not possible. The real question

was how much did the losses of each side mean to their respective war efforts.

As usual in war, the answer to that question had at least as much to do with timing and context as with numbers.

Tables:

1. U.S. and South Vietnamese Attack Sorties

2. USAF Combat and Combat Support Sorties in North Vietnam

3. USAF Attack Sorties in Route Package Six

4. USAF Air-to-Ground Munitions Expenditure in North Vietnam

5. USAF Bomb Damage Claims in North Vietnam

6. USAF Aircraft in Thailand and South Vietnam

7. Deployment of USAF Fixed-Wing Aircraft at Selected Bases

8. USAF Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia by Aircraft Type

9. USAF Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia by Cause

10. USAF Aircrew Losses in North Vietnam

11. U.S. Military Personnel in Thailand and South Vietnam

302

Statistics
303

Statistics

Table 1

U.S. and South Vietnamese Attack Sorties

*Total USN and USMC attack sorties in North Vietnam for 1965 were 13,677. 

Source: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Southeast Asia Summary, Nov 21, 1973,

Table 304; the USAF column adds B–52 sorties for North Vietnam from HQ USAF,

Southeast Asia Management Summary, final semiannual review, 1974, which is also the

source of USAF attack sorties for 1965. Total sorties for 1965 are from Table 321 (Apr

19, 1972) of the OSD report. 

North Vietnam

Year

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

Jan 1973

USAF

11,599

44,762

55,680

41,743

213

699

1,195

21,225

1,262

USN

*

32,594

42,587

40,848

72

404

510

26,754

787

USMC 

*

3,695

8,672

10,326

-

-

-

459

44

VNAF

614

814

127

-

-

-

-

-

-

Total SEA 

133,210

291,967

359,353

416,140

352,434

245,690

177,958

244,215

21,121
Table 2

USAF Combat and Combat Support Sorties in North Vietnam

Source: HQ USAF, Southeast Asia Management Summary, final semiannual review, 1974.

In addition to the fighter and B–52 attack sorties listed above, there were five

gunship sorties—four in 1967 and one in 1972. These have been included in

the total column.

304

Statistics

Year

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

Total

Fighters

11,599

44,482

54,312

41,057

213

699

1,195

17,096

755

171,408

B–52s

-

280

1,364

686

-

-

-

4,440

533

7,303

Recce

3,294

7,910

11,714

7,896

2,905

3,320

2,044

1,965

132

41,180

CAP &

Total

26,122

78,637

101,089

76,681

8,022

11,674

9,582

37,815

2,327

351,949

Support 

5,554

16,924

28,078

24,027

3,965

4,849

2,924

4,655

381

91,357

Attack Combat

Escort

5,675

9,041

5,617

3,015

939

2,806

3,419

9,658

526

40,696
Table 3

USAF Attack Sorties in Route Package Six

Source: HQ PACAF monthly Summary Air Operations Southeast Asia. 

This table illustrates seasonal (monsoonal) variation in operations over the

Hanoi-Haiphong area for the two years during which it was most heavily

bombed. Most Air force sorties in Route Package 6 were in Route Package 6A

(Hanoi area), while most Navy sorties were in Route Package 6B (Haiphong

area). The decline in sorties for September 1967 was due to unusually bad

weather that month. Although the Air Force used fewer attack sorties in 1972,

this was more than counterbalanced by the accuracy of F–4 guided bombing

and the weight of B–52 bombing; there were 17 B–52 sorties in Route Package

6 for April and 729 in December. In 1967 the Air Force relied upon unguided

bombs dropped by fighters. Despite the effectiveness of guided bombing in

1972, there was pressure on Seventh Air Force to increase the number of attack

sorties in Route Package 6; some of the increase in September 1972 involved

good-weather testing of the Long Range Navigation (loran) system for bombing during the inevitable bad weather later in the year (see Chapter 9).

305

Statistics

Month

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Total

1967

556

162

268

611

1,040

1,564

1,606

1,478

878

1,439

608

454

10,664

1972

-

-

-

63

164

278

256

187

765

354

-

1,521

3,588
Table 4

USAF Air-to-Ground Munitions Expenditure in North Vietnam*

* The number of munitions is given rather than their cumulative weight. Not included are

750-pound and 500-pound bombs dropped by B–52s (about 150,000 tons, two-thirds of it

dropped in 1972). Of the 8,000,000 tons of air munitions expended in Southeast Asia by

the U.S., nearly 800,000 tons struck North Vietnam (of which the Air Force share was

nearly 500,000 tons).

Source: HQ PACAF monthly Summary Air Operations Southeast Asia.

306

Statistics

Munition Type

100/125/250-pound bombs

260-pound fragmentation bombs

500-pound bombs*

500-pound laser-guided bombs

750-pound bombs*

1,000-pound bombs

1,000-pound TV-guided Walleye bombs

2,000-pound bombs

2,000-pound laser guided bombs

2,000-pound TV-guided bombs

3,000-pound bombs

3,000-pound laser-guided bombs

Cluster bombs

Rockeye cluster bombs

Mines

Napalm

Bullpup radio-guided missiles

Shrike radar-seeking missiles

Standard radar-seeking missiles

Rockets

March 1965–

October 1968

18,703

3,735

227,304

-

358,941

21,058

103

5,350

-

-

10,597

-

43,658

-

3,024

5,162

1,944

2,263

8

868,424

April 1972–

January 1973

202

-

93,292

113

2,948

3,226

-

1,918

3,917

299

158

28

18,959

10,552

-

36

-

1,032

286

188,513
Table 5

USAF Bomb Damage Claims in North Vietnam

* Bombed but not tallied in this period.

Source: HQ PACAF monthly Summary Air Operations Southeast Asia.

While these figures indicate distribution of effort, they should not be taken as

an accurate inventory of damage. The difficulty of estimating the degree of

damage in the best conditions was compounded by weather, dust, smoke, darkness, deception, repair and repeated strikes in the same area. 

307

Statistics

Target Type

Vehicles

Tanks

Locomotives

Rail Rolling Stock

Watercraft

Bridges

Railroads

Roads

Ferry Slips

Oil Tanks

Buildings

Construction Eqpt.

Aircraft

Runways

AAA Sites

Field Artillery Areas

SAM Sites

Radar Sites

Destroyed

5,455

-

17

1,036

89

1,305

-

-

53

*

5,938

-

96

-

1,682

*

80

109

Damaged

3,469

-

59

775

128

1,794

1,464 cuts

19,324 cuts

166

*

4,570

-

25

19

1,196

*

93

152

Destroyed

1,635

38

1

56

221

250

-

-

-

2,760

1,207

35

36

*

217

9

40

55

Damaged

869

20

6

32

162

55

20 cuts

36 cuts

-

86

369

32

6

*

89

1

5

19

Mar 1965 – Oct 1968 Apr 1972 – Jan 1973
Table 6

USAF Aircraft in Thailand and South Vietnam

* In addition to the B–52s in Thailand, there were B–52s on Guam, where the number varied from about 30 in 1965 to about 150 in 1972.

† After 1970 the remaining F–105s were Wild Weasels carrying radar-seeking missiles to

combat surface-to-air missiles.

‡ By this date no USAF aircraft were based in South Vietnam. In addition to F–4s and

B–52s, the Thailand-based attack force included 65 A–7s and 45 F–111s which arrived in

late 1972. 

Source: HQ USAF Southeast Asia Management Summary, semiannual review, August

1973.

308

Statistics

Year (June 30)

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

Total

460

889

1,429

1,768

1,840

1,602

1,132

989

675

F–105

79

126

129

108

70

65

12

30

24

F–4

18

188

182

218

288

212

216

355

218

B–52*

-

-

10

28

39

39

44

54

53

†

‡
Table 7

Deployment of USAF Fixed-Wing Aircraft at Selected Air Bases

Source: HQ USAF monthly Southeast Asia Management Summary.

These bases were the ones most heavily involved in air operations over North

Vietnam.

309

Statistics

Base

Korat (Thailand)

Takhli (Thailand)

Ubon (Thailand)

Udorn (Thailand)

U-Tapao (Thailand)

Andersen (Guam)

Kadena (Okinawa)

Da Nang (S. Vietnam)

Aircraft

Type

F–105

F–105

EB–66

KC–135

F–4

EC–121

C–130

RF–4

RF–101

F–102

A–1

C–130

B–52

KC–135

B–52

KC–135

Other

F–4

F–102

O–1

O–2

Number

Deployed

76

52

19

8

76

6

7

25

15

6

14

4

15

28

43

40

48

51

6

48

19

Aircraft

Type

F–4

F–105

EB–66

F–4

KC–135

F–4

AC–130

OV–10

F–4

RF–4

B–52

KC–135

U–2

C–130

B–52

KC–135

KC–135

RC–135

SR–71

Other

F–4

AC–119

EC–47

A–1

OV–10

O–2

Number

Deployed

39

30

19

97

18

100

12

9

105

20

54

54

3

10

148

6

59

5

4

44

14

3

12

2

32

41

July 1967 July 1972
Table 8

USAF Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia by Aircraft Type

*Operational losses were due to mechanical failure, weather, accident, or pilot error.

Source: HQ USAF Southeast Asia Management Summary, final semiannual review,

1974.

310

Statistics

Aircraft Type

A–1

B–52

B–57

C–130

EB–66/RB–66

F–4/RF–4

F–100

F–102

F–104

F–105

F–111

HH–3/CH–3

HH–43

HH–53

HU–16

O–1

O–2

RC–47

RF–101

T–28

Other

Total

N. Vietnam

18

18

5

2

3/1

193/38

16

1

4

282

3

3/1

1

1

1

2

3

1

27

1

-

625

Total

150

18

38

34

4/2

382/76

198

7

8

334

8

10/14

10

9

2

122

82

2

33

17

177

1,737

N. Vietnam

2

-

-

-

-

2/1

-

-

3

3

-

1/-

-

-

-

-

-

-

1

-

-

13

Total

41

12

18

21

9/-

63/7

45

8

6

63

3

4/3

4

1

2

50

22

-

6

6

126

520

Combat Losses Operational Losses*
Table 9

USAF Aircraft Combat Losses in Southeast Asia by Cause

* This figure should probably be somewhat larger (and the unknown/other figure correspondingly smaller). Rob Young, historian of the National Air Intelligence Center,

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, credits the MiGs with 74 USAF losses (52 to

MiG–21s, 18 to MiG–17s, and 4 to MiG–19s). The USAF claimed to have downed 137

MiGs (68 MiG–21s, 61 MiG–17s, and 8 MiG–19s). For a breakdown of USAF air-to-air

victories by weapon employed, see R. Frank Futrell et. al., Aces and Aerial Victories

(Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1976), p 157.

Source: HQ USAF Southeast Asia Management Summary, final semiannual review,

1974.

Michael M. McCrea, U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force Fixed-Wing Aircraft Losses and Damage in Southeast Asia (1962–1973) (Washington: Center

for Naval Analyses, 1976) gives the following causal breakdown for USAF

losses in North Vietnam: antiaircraft artillery (253), automatic weapons and

small arms (130), surface-to-air missiles (87), MiGs (64), own ordnance (3),

unknown/other (80).

311

Statistics

Year

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

Total

Ground

Fire

7

12

25

142

267

260

252

206

124

64

78

6

1,443

Surface

to Air

Missiles

-

-

-

5

18

28

3

-

-

4

49

3

110

Aerial

Combat

-

-

-

3

8

22

9

-

1

1

23

-

67

Ground

Attack on

Air Bases

-

-

6

10

6

18

35

12

2

1

6

-

96

Unknown/

Other

-

-

-

-

-

6

5

-

-

1

7

2

* 21
Table 10

USAF Aircrew Losses in North Vietnam

* Of the USAF personnel captured in Southeast Asia, 23 were known to have died in captivity. Subsequent to the prisoner exchange in 1973, none of the USAF’s missing men

returned home alive.

† Aircrew involved in operational losses are given in parentheses; numbers outside parentheses are for losses to hostile action only.

Source: HQ USAF Southeast Asia Management Summary, final semiannual review, 1974.

312

Statistics

Aircraft Type

A–1

B–52

B–57

C–130

EB–66/RB–66

F–4

RF–4

F–100

F–102

F–104

F–105

F–111

HH–3/CH–3

HH–43

HH–53

HU–16

O–1

O–2

RC–47

RF–101

T–28

Total

Rescued

9

44

4

-

7

130 (4)

22 (2)

14

-

(3)

99 (3)

-

10 (4)/1

-

6

4

-

2

-

6 (1)

-

358 (17)

Killed

2 (2)

4

2

-

2

7

5

2

-

-

18 (1)

-

-

1

-

2

-

3

-

1

-

49(3)

Missing*

6

38

3

19

4

128

30

5

1

3

96

6

3

-

-

-

2

-

8

10

2

364

Captured*

2

24

-

-

12

116

18

5

-

1

99

-

3

3

-

-

-

-

-

10 

-

293

†

†

†

†

†

†

†

†

†

†
Table 11

U.S. Military Personnel in Thailand and South Vietnam

Source: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Southeast Asia Summary, Sep 26, 1973 (Table

104) and Jul 18, 1973 (Table 103). 

313

Statistics

Year (Dec 31)

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

USAF

44

57

1,212

1,086

2,943

9,117

26,113

33,395

35,791

32,901

27,858

26,851

35,856

Total

319

542

4,353

4,126

6,505

14,107

34,489

44,517

47,631

44,470

36,110

31,916

43,168

USAF

68

1,006

2,429

4,630

6,604

20,620

52,913

55,908

58,434

58,422

43,053

28,791

7,608

Total

875

3,164

11,326

16,263

23,310

184,314

385,278

485,587

536,134

475,219

334,591

156,776

24,172

Thailand South Vietnam
314
1. For a more extensive discussion of

the early bombing of North Vietnam, see

two other volumes in the Air Force’s official history of the Vietnam War: Jacob

Van Staaveren’s forthcoming Gradual

Failure: The Air War Over North Vietnam,

1965–1966 and Robert F. Futrell’s The

Advisory Years to 1965. Futrell deals

mostly with South Vietnam, as does

another volume in the series, John

Schlight’s The War in South Vietnam: The

Years of the Offensive, 1965–68. Jacob

Van Staaveren’s Interdiction in Southern

Laos, 1960–1968, a fourth volume in the

series, covers Laos. On the development

of bombing policy, see especially Mark

Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The

American Bombing of North Vietnam

(New York, 1989). See also David M.

Barrett, Uncertain Warriors (Lawrence,

Kan, 1993); Larry Berman, Planning a

Tragedy (New York, 1982) and Lyndon

Johnson’s War (New York, 1989); Robert

Buzzanco, Masters of War (Cambridge,

England, 1996); Harold P. Ford, CIA and

the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes,

1962–68 (Washington, 1998); Robert L.

Gallucci, Neither Peace Nor Honor

(Baltimore, 1975); Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay

Any Price (Chicago, 1995); Leslie H. Gelb

and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of

Vietnam (Washington, 1979); William

Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government

and the Vietnam War, 4 vols (Washington,

1984–94); David Halberstam, The Best

and the Brightest (New York, 1972);

George Herring, LBJ and Vietnam (Austin,

Tex, 1994); David Kaiser, American

Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the

Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge,

Mass, 2000); Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s

Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kan, 1998);

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: the Lost

Chance for Peace and the Escalation of

315

War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif, 1999);

H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (New

York, 1997); Robert A. Pape, Jr., Bombing

to Win (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Robert D.

Schulzinger, A Time for War (New York,

1997); R.B. Smith, An International

History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols

(London, 1983–91); Wallace J. Thies,

When Governments Collide (Berkeley,

Calif, 1981); James Clay Thompson,

Rolling Thunder (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980);

Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Setup (Maxwell AFB,

Ala, 1991); Brian VanDeMark, Into the

Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the

Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York,

1991); and Frank E. Vandiver, Shadows of

Vietnam (College Station, Tex, 1997).

2. Jack S. Ballard, The United States

Air Force in Southeast Asia: Development

and Employment of Fixed-Wing Gunships,

1962–1972 (Washington, 1982).

3. For more data on the F–4 and the

F–105, see esp Marcelle Size Knaack,

Encyclopedia of US Air Force Aircraft

and Missile Systems, Vol I, Post-World

War II Fighters, 1945–1973 (Washington,

1978); PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike

Operations in Southeast Asia, 1 Jan 65–31

Dec 69,” vol II, “Hardware, Strike

Aircraft,” AFHSO K717.103-13A. See

also David Anderton, Republic F–105

Thunderchief (London, 1983); Walter J.

Boyne, Phantom in Combat (Washington,

1985); Glenn E. Bugos, Engineering the

F–4 Phantom II (Annapolis, 1996); Robert

F. Dorr, McDonnell Douglas F–4

Phantom II (London, 1984); Jon Lake, ed,

McDonnell F–4 Phantom (London, 1992);

J.C. Scutts, F–105 Thunderchief (New

York, 1981); and Ron Westrum, Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at

China Lake (Annapolis, 1999). For a

fighter pilot’s analysis of F–4 air-to-air

Notes

Chapter 1
tactics, see Marshall L. Michel III,

Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam,

1965–1972 (Annapolis, 1997). Michel

points to the F–4’s “adverse yaw” as a

problem for pilots, who had to remember

to use rudder pedals only (with the aileron

stick held in the center) when making hard

turns.

4. R. Frank Futrell, et al., Aces and

Aerial Victories (Washington, 1976).

5. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Ops in

SEA, 1 Jan 65–31 Dec 69, vol II,

Hardware, Strike Aircraft,” AFHSO

K717.103-13A; Max J. Cleveland, Jim F.

Gallagher, and Richard T. Sandborn,

“Vulnerabilities of the F–4C and the

F–105 Aircraft to Ground Fire in SEA,”

Aug 1, 1967, doc 18, hist, 7 AF, Jul–Dec

1967. Problems with the survivability of

flight control systems in Vietnam led to

the introduction of “fly-by-wire” electrical

flight controls, first as a backup system in

some F–4s and then after the war as a

replacement for hydraulic and mechanical

controls in the F–16 and subsequent aircraft. See William Elliott’s “The

Development of Fly-By-Wire Flight

Control,” Air Force Materiel Command,

1996.

6. Earl H. Tilford, Jr, Search and

Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961–1975

(Washington, 1980).

7. Charles K. Hopkins, SAC Tanker

Operations in the Southeast Asia War (HQ

SAC, 1979).

8. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Ops in

SEA, 1965–68,” vol III, “People,”

AFHSO 717.03-14; Capt E. Vallentiny

and TSgt D. G. Francis, “Attack on

Udorn,” CHECO rpt, 1968, AFHSO

K717.0413-86; Capt James R. Barrow and

Maj Benjamin H. Barnette, Jr, “Base

Defense in Thailand,” CHECO rpt, 1973,

AFHSO K717.0413-200; hist, 8 TFW,

Oct–Dec 1972.

9. Trip rpt, Col George G. Loving, Jr,

HQ USAF/XOX, 21 Nov 67, WNRC Acc

341-71A-6048, Box 9, RL(67) 38-9,

Policy-Asia.

10. Carl O. Clever, “The U.S. Air

316

Notes to pages 7–14 

Force Build-up in Thailand-1966,” 13 AF,

AFHSO K750.04-9; Warren A. Trest,

TSgt Charles E. Garland and SSgt Dale E.

Hammons, “USAF Posture in Thailand1966,” CHECO rpt, 1967, AFHSO

K717.0413-41; PACAF, Corona Harvest

rpt, “In-Country and Out-Country Strike

Ops in SEA, 1965–68,” vol IV, “Support

Facilities,” AFHSO K717.03-15J.

11. Barrow and Barnette, “Base

Defense in Thailand”; Maj Edward B.

Hanrahan, “An Overview of Insurgency

and Counterinsurgency in Thailand,”

CHECO rpt, 1975, AFHSO K717.0413-

212.

12. Lt Col Monty D. Coffin and Maj

Ronald D. Merrell, “The Royal Thai Air

Force,” CHECO rpt, 1971, AFHSO

K717.0413-173; David K. Wyatt,

Thailand: A Short History, (New Haven,

Conn, 1984); Nigel J. Brailey, Thailand

and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated

Asian Revolution (Boulder, Colo, 1986);

John L.S. Girling, Thailand: Society and

Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1981); Robert M.

Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon

Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of

Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the

Vietnam War (Jefferson, NC, 1994);

Robert J. Muscat, The Fifth Tiger: A Study

of Thai Development Policy (New York,

1994); U. Alexis Johnson with J.O.

McAllister, The Right Hand of Power

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984).

13. Intrvw, Lt Col Robert G.

Zimmerman, Corona Harvest, with Col

Roland K. McCoskrie, Washington, Jul

14, 1975; hist, CINCPAC, Annex B,

USMACTHAI, 1966.

14. Intrvw, Terry Anderson, Texas

A&M University, with Maj Gen Charles

R. Bond, Jr., USAF Ret, Jul 21, 1981.

15. Clever, pp 272–75.

16. Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P.

Harahan, eds, Air Superiority in World

War II and Korea: An Interview with Gen.

James Ferguson, Gen. Robert M. Lee,

Gen. William Momyer, and Lt. Gen.

Elwood R. Quesada (Washington, 1983),

pp 69–72. On Moore’s relationship with

Westmoreland, see intrvw, Capt Mark

Cleary, Air Force historian, with Lt Gen
Joseph H. Moore, San Antonio, Sep

24–27, 1984. In 1941–42 when he was a

P–40 squadron commander in the

Philippines, Moore earned a reputation for

courage and resourcefulness under fire.

17. Intrvw, Lt Col John Dick, Corona

Ace, with Gen William W. Momyer,

Pentagon, Jan 31, 1977.

18. Intrvw, Lt Col John N. Dick, Jr,

Air Force historian, with Brig Gen Cleo

M. Bishop, Ft Walton Beach, Fla, Jul 7–8,

1976; intrvw, Lt Col Arthur W. McCants,

Air Force historian, with Gen Louis T.

Seith, Oct 27–28, 1980; Bond intrvw; Jack

Broughton, Going Downtown: The War

Against Hanoi and Washington (New

York, 1988), pp 105–6; Chuck Yeager,

Yeager: An Autobiography (New York,

1985), pp 380–91; Schlight, War in South

Vietnam, pp 139–40, 174.

19. Memo, Momyer, subj: Multi-purpose Fighter, May 7, 1968, CHECO

microfilm, CH-23-3-6; memo of conversation with Momyer, Oct 5, 1971, Brig Gen

Robert N. Ginsburgh, Chief, Office of Air

Force History, Ginsburgh Papers, AFHSO;

Momyer, reports on Corona Harvest,

1974–75, AFHSO K239.034-2; William

W. Momyer, Air Power in Three Wars

(Washington, 1978) and The Vietnamese

Air Force, 1951–1975 (Washington,

1977). See also Warren A. Trest, Air

Commando One: Heinie Aderholt and

America’s Secret Air Wars (Washington,

2000), pp 157–212.

20. Memo, Momyer, “Command and

Control in SEA, 1966–1968,” Nov 1970,

AFHRA K740.131.

21. See esp Capt Robert M. Snakenberg’s intrvw with Lt Col David P. Blackbird, Nov 9, 1969, AFHRA K239.0512-

302. Blackbird was an intelligence officer

at HQ 7 AF in 1966. See also Capt

Russell W. Mank, “TACC Fragging

Procedures,” CHECO rpt, Aug 15, 1969.

22. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“Intelligence Production, 1962–68, OutCountry Targeting,” pp 45–49, 106–12.

23. The most highly placed communist agent in Saigon appears to have been

Vu Ngoc Nha, adviser to Presidents Diem

and Thieu until 1968; see Bui Tin,

317

Notes to pages 14-20

Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a

North Vietnamese Colonel (Honolulu,

1995), pp 58–60. On the difficulty of

inserting agents into North Vietnam, see

John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty (New

York, 1991), pp 302–6; Sedgwick

Tourison, Secret Army, Secret War

(Annapolis, 1996); John L. Plaster, SOG:

the Secret Wars of America’s Commandos

in Vietnam (New York, 1997); Richard H.

Schultz, Jr., The Secret War Against

Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of

Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in

North Vietnam (New York, 1999);

Kenneth J. Conboy and Dale Andrade,

Spies and Commandos: How America

Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam

(Lawrence, Kansas, 2000); Military

Assistance Command Studies and

Observations Group (MACSOG) annexes

to MACV annual histories; JCS MACSOG Documentation Study (1970); Tom

G. Abbey, “The Role of the USAF in

Support of Special Activities in SEA,”

CHECO rpt, 1976; Charles F. Reske,

“Operation Footboy,” Vietnam, Oct 1995,

pp 30–36. Confronted with the failure of

its agent insertions, MACSOG made some

attempts to deceive the North Vietnamese

into worrying about fictitious agents and

resistance movements.

24. Intrvw, Col John E. Van Duyn

and Maj Richard B. Clement, Corona

Harvest, with Gen Hunter Harris, Apr 21,

1971; Adm U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for

Defeat (San Raphael, Calif, 1978); intrvw,

Etta-Belle Kitchen, U.S. Naval Institute,

with Adm Sharp, Sep 1969–Jun 1970, San

Diego.

25. Ltr, Gen Hunter Harris to Gen

John P. McConnell, Mar 12, 1966, Corona

Harvest 0222694.

26. A good introduction to the influence of thinking about “limited war” is

Stephen Peter Rosen, “Vietnam and the

American Theory of Limited War,”

International Security, Fall 1982, pp

83–113. On Johnson and MacArthur, see

Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon

Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (New

York, 1991), pp 397–401.

27. Gallucci, Neither Peace Nor
Honor, argues that Johnson and his advisers did not expect Rolling Thunder to do

much more than provide the politically

necessary prelude for massive intervention

on the ground in South Vietnam. See esp p

53.

28. Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle:

The Turbulent Life of General Curtis

LeMay (New York, 1986).

29. Intrvw, author with Gen LeMay,

Pentagon, Sep 14, 1985; Deborah Shapley,

Promise and Power: The Life and Times

of Robert McNamara (Boston, 1993), esp

p 620, fn 23; Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (New

York, 1971), esp p 37. See also Robert S.

McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In

Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of

Vietnam (New York, 1995), esp pp 114–15

and 121 where McNamara recalls

LeMay’s “stubbornness.”

30. Col Reade F. Tilley, USAF Ret,

remarks at dedication of LeMay exhibit,

National Air and Space Museum’s Silver

Hill facility, May 17, 1993.

31. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor,

Mission with LeMay (New York, 1965), p

565. See also LeMay with Maj Gen Dale

O. Smith, America Is in Danger (New

York, 1968).

32. LeMay, remarks at Bolling Air

Force Base, Apr 13, 1984, transcript in

Wayne Thompson, ed, Air Leadership

(Washington, 1986), p 40.

33. LeMay, quoted in Futrell,

Advisory Years, p 201.

34. LeMay, Offutt AFB, Neb, Mar

15, 1954, quoted in memo of that date by

Capt William B. Moore (USN), International Security, Winter 1981/82, p 27.

35. Ibid.

36. Lyndon Baines Johnson, The

Vantage Point (New York, 1971);

VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire.

37. Intrvw, Dorothy Pierce

McSweeny, Lyndon Baines Johnson

Library (LBJ Lib), with Gen John P.

McConnell, Pentagon, Aug 28, 1969.

38. Intrvw, Lt Col Bissell and Maj

Riddlebarger, Corona Harvest, with Col

Henry H. Edelen, Jr, Jan 27, 1970; hist,

JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, esp chap 25. Lt.

318

Notes to pages 20–26

Gen. Charles G. Cooper, USMC Ret, provides a vivid example of the brutal contempt President Johnson sometimes displayed toward the Joint Chiefs in “The

Day It Became the Longest War,” Naval

Institute Proceedings, May 1996, pp

77–80.

39. JCS Bombing Chronology, LBJ

Lib, National Security File, Agency

Reports, Box 33, # 2. See also David C.

Humphrey, “Tuesday Lunch at the

Johnson White House,” Diplomatic

History, winter 1984, pp 81–101.

40. The JCS 94 target list was incorporated in CINCPAC Operations Plan 37-

64, Dec 17, 1964, as Appendix VII to Annex R. See PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“Out-Country Strike Operations, 1965–

68,” vol V, pt I, “Plans, Concepts and

Doctrine,” AFHSO K717.03-22, pp A-2-

1–6.

41. JCS Bombing Chronology.

42. The growth of the target lists is

discussed in PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“Targeting Out-Country (NVN), 1962–

68,” AFHSO K717.03-1, pp 55–62.

43. See 7 AF’s Tiger Out-Country

Active Target List, Jun 1969, AFHRA

K740.323-5.

44. Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of

Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif, 1983);

Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the

Chinese Model (Cambridge, Mass, 1971);

Joseph Buttinger, The Smaller Dragon

(New York, 1958) and Vietnam: The

Dragon Embattled (New York, 1967).

45. Martin J. Murray, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina

(1870–1940) (Berkeley, Calif, 1980);

Virginia Thompson, French Indochina

(London, 1937); Charles Robequain, The

Economic Development of French IndoChina (London, 1944).

46. Cadet Robert L. Cummings, Jr.,

USAFA, “The Vietnamese Railroad System,” 1984, AFHSO; Chen Jian, “China’s

Involvement in the Vietnam War,” China

Quarterly, Jun 1995, pp 356–87; Xiaoming Zhang, “The Vietnam War, 1964–

1969: A Chinese Perspective,” Journal of

Military History, Oct 1996, pp 731–62;

John W. Garver, “The Chinese Threat in
the Vietnam War,” Parameters, spring

1992; Qiang Zhai, “Beijing and the Vietnam Conflict, 1964–1965: New Chinese

Evidence,” Cold War International History

Project (CWIHP) Bulletin, winter 1995–

96, pp 233–50, “Beijing and the Vietnam

Peace Talks, 1965–68: New Evidence

from Chinese Sources,” CWIHP, Working

Paper No. 18, Jun 1997, and China and

the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel

Hill, North Carolina, 2000); Smith, International History of the Vietnam War;

Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of

Deterrence (Ann Arbor, 1975) and

“China’s Role in the Vietnam War,” in

Jayne Werner and David Hunt, eds, The

American War in Vietnam (Ithaca, NY,

1993), pp 71–76. According to Chen Jian,

the number of Chinese troops in North

Vietnam peaked at about 170,000 in 1967;

Whiting’s estimate had been 50,000. In

1998 the Cold War International History

Project published the transcript of a 13

Apr 1966 conversation in which both Le

Duan of North Vietnam and Deng Xiaoping of China confirmed that at least

100,000 Chinese military personnel were

already in North Vietnam. See Odd Arne

Westad, et al., eds, “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the

Wars in Indochina, 1964–1977,” CWIHP,

Working Paper No. 22, May 1998.

47. Momyer, Air Power in Three

Wars, pp 174–88.

48. Col Delbert Corum, et al., The

Tale of Two Bridges (Washington, 1976).

49. When veterans and other Americans began to visit Vietnam in the 1980s,

the Vietnamese made a tourist attraction of

the tunnels at Vinh Moc near the coast a

few miles north of the former Demilitarized Zone. See Daniel Robinson and Joe

Cummings, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia:

A Travel Survival Kit (Berkeley, Calif,

1991), pp 309–10; Susan Brownmiller,

Seeing Vietnam (New York, 1994), pp

173–78; and Janet Gardner’s film A World

Beneath the War (New York, 1997).

50. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” monthly reports, Oct

1966–Oct 1967.

51. Memo, Maj R. N. Smedes, HQ

319

Notes to pages 26–32

USAF Plans, to CSAF, subj: CINCPAC

Meeting with JCS, Sep 15, 1966.

52. Msg, Lt Gen Moore to Lt Gen

Compton, HQ USAF DCS/Plans and Ops,

080520Z Nov 1966.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. Momyer, Air Power in Three

Wars, pp 174–75; Sharp intrvw.

56. Van Staaveren, Interdiction in

Southern Laos, pp 255–83.

57. The gradual evolution of McNamara’s thinking on Rolling Thunder

can be traced in his In Retrospect. See esp

pp 207–71.

58. Walt Rostow described his Washington experience in The Diffusion of

Power (New York, 1972) and London target planning in Pre-Invasion Bombing

Strategy (Austin, Tex, 1981); see also his

The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto (Cambridge, England, 1960). For examples of his advocacy

of bombing oil and electricity targets in

1965, see the State Department’s Foreign

Relations of the United States (hereafter

FRUS), 1964–1968, II, 378–80 and 692–

98. On the Bundys, see Kai Bird, The

Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and

William Bundy (New York, 1998).

59. Intrvw, Col John E. Van Duyn and

Maj Richard B. Clement, Corona Harvest,

with Maj Gen Robert N. Ginsburgh, May

26, 1971; Humphrey, “Tuesday Lunch at

the Johnson White House,” pp 81–101.

60. Intrvw, Maj Samuel E. Riddlebarger and Capt R.G. Swenston, Corona

Harvest, with Walt Rostow, Oct 17, 1970.

61. Memo, Ginsburgh for Gen

Wheeler, subj: Flooding the Red River,

Mar 8, 1968, JCS Chron File, Ginsburgh

papers, AFHSO; Ginsburgh intrvw, May

26, 1971; intrvw, Robert Pape with

Ginsburgh, Apr 5, 1990; intrvw, James C.

Hasdorff, USAF historian, with Brig Gen

Noel F. Parrish, Jun 10–14, 1974; McConnell intrvw, Aug 28, 1969; Robert F. Futrell, The United States Air Force in Korea

(New York, 1961), pp 623–29.

62. On Vietnamese communism and

its leaders, see Bui Tin, Following Ho Chi

Minh; William J. Duiker, The Communist
Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo,

1981); Bernard B. Fall, The Two VietNams (New York, 1963); James Pinckney

Harrison, The Endless War (New York,

1982); John T. McAlister, Jr., Viet Nam:

The Origins of Revolution (New York,

1969); Douglas Pike, History of Vietnamese Communism (Stanford, Calif, 1978);

Thai Quang Trung, Collective Leadership

and Factionalism: An Essay on Ho Chi

Minh’s Legacy (Singapore, 1985); William

S. Turley, “Origins and Development of

Communist Military Leadership in

Vietnam,” Armed Forces and Society, Feb

1977, pp 219–47.

63. See esp Bui Tin’s memoirs. See

also Robert J. O’Neill, General Giap: Politician and Strategist (New York, 1969);

Peter MacDonald, Giap: The Victor in

Vietnam (New York, 1993); John Colvin,

Giap: Volcano Under Snow (New York,

1996); Cecil B. Currey, Victory At Any

Cost: The Genius of Viet Nam’s Gen. Vo

Nguyen Giap (Washington, 1997); Douglas

Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam

(Novato, Calif, 1986); Vo Nguyen Giap,

People’s War, People’s Army (New York,

1962) with a foreword by Roger Hilsman

and a profile of Giap by Bernard B. Fall;

Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War Against

U.S. Aero-Naval War (Hanoi, 1975).

64. Futrell, Advisory Years, pp 230–

31; Zoltan Buza and Istvan Toperczer,

“MiG–17 over Vietnam,” Wings of Fame,

VIII (1997), pp 100–117.

65. Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union

and the Vietnam War (Chicago, 1996), pp

57–72.

66. On the question of North Vietnam’s fear of excessive Chinese intervention, Douglas Pike expresses skepticism in

his Vietnam and the Soviet Union (Boulder,

Colo, 1987) p 86; and Gaiduk, The Soviet

Union and the Vietnam War, pp 65 and

266, argues the opposite position. See also

William J. Duiker, China and Vietnam:

The Roots of Conflict (Berkeley, Calif,

1986); Eugene K. Lawson, The SinoVietnamese Conflict (New York, 1984); F.

Charles Parker IV, Vietnam: Strategy for a

Stalemate (New York, 1989); W. R.

Smyser, The Independent Vietnamese:

320

Notes to pages 32–35

Vietnamese Communism between Russia

and China, 1956–1969 (Athens, Ohio,

1980); and the works already cited by

Allen Whiting, Chen Jian, John Garver,

and Qiang Zhai.

67. On the growth of American

knowledge about the MiG–17 and the

MiG–21, see the USAF Tactical Fighter

Weapons Center’s Project Red Baron

reports on air-to-air encounters in SEA,

esp Red Baron II, vol II, pt 1 (Nellis AFB,

Nev, 1973), appendices A–C, and Red

Baron III, vol III, pt 1 (Nellis AFB, Nev,

1974), pp 5–30. See also Michel, Clashes,

esp pp 75–81; and Curtis Peebles, Dark

Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S. Aircraft Programs (Novato, Calif, 1995), pp

217–43; Robert L. Young, “The Influence

of the North Vietnamese MiG–21 Fighter

on the U.S. Air Force Air-to-Air Kill Ratio

in Southeast Asia,” MA thesis, Central

Missouri State University, 1995. Early in

1968, HQ PACAF DCS/Intelligence summed up the air-to-air combat experience of

Rolling Thunder in “North Vietnamese Air

Force Fighter Patterns,” AFHRA 1000673.

Also in 1968, the Air Force tested a

MiG–21 (Project Have Doughnut), and the

next year two MiGs (Project Have Drill/

Have Ferry); in 1997 the Air Force’s

National Air Intelligence Center declassified the technical exploitation reports for

both projects as well as the Have Drill/

Have Ferry tactical exploitation report.

68. “SA–2” was the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) designation

for the Soviet “V–75 Dvina.” See Maj A.

Dokuchayev, “‘We Too Defended Vietnam’: Participants in Combat Operations

Tell Their Story,” Krasnaya Zvezda,

Moscow, Apr 13, 1989, JPRS-UMA-89-

015, pp 54–56; Lt Col A. Dokuchayev,

article in Krasnaya Zvezda, Dec 29, 1990,

JPRS-UMA-91-005, pp 133–36; Mark

Vorobyov, “Dvina: Guarding Vietnam’s

Skies,” Military Parade, Jul–Aug 1998,

pp 101–3. See also Steven J. Zaloga,

Soviet Air Defense Missiles (Coulsdon,

England, 1997), pp 36–76. On Dang Tinh,

see Turley, “Origins and Development,”

pp 237–38.

69. Notes of meeting, White House,
May 16, 1965, 6:45 pm, LBJ Lib, Meeting

Notes File, published in FRUS, 1964–

1968, II, 665–68. See also Hist, JCS,

Vietnam 1960–68, pp 26–1–5. McNaughton raised an alarm over the danger of

Russian SAM sites in North Vietnam as a

possible “flash point” even before reconnaissance aircraft provided evidence of

their construction. See McNaughton’s

draft memo of Mar 24, 1965, “Plan of

Action for South Vietnam,” The Pentagon

Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition

(Boston, 1971), III, 348–51.

70. Notes of meeting in Cabinet

Room, Jul 22, 1965, noon, LBJ Lib,

Meeting Notes File, published in FRUS,

1964–1968, III, 212.

71. Ibid., p 213. Brown did not actually replace Eugene Zuckert as Secretary

of the Air Force until Oct 1, 1965.

72. Notes of meetings in Cabinet

Room, Jul 26, 1965, 12:30 pm and 6:10

pm, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, published in FRUS, 1964–1968, III, 240–57.

For Ball’s account of his role in the

Johnson administration’s deliberations on

Vietnam, see his The Past Has Another

Pattern (New York, 1982); see also James

A. Bill, George Ball: Behind the Scenes in

U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn,

1997) and David L. DiLeo, George Ball,

Vietnam, and the Rethinking of Containment (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991).

73. Capt Melvin F. Porter, “Air Tactics Against NVN Air/Ground Defenses,”

CHECO rpt, Feb 27, 1967. See also John

Morrocco, Thunder from Above (Boston,

1984), pp 106–10. As a young officer,

Gen. Charles A. Horner (who led coalition

321

Notes to pages 35–42

air forces in the Gulf War) flew on this

mission; see his recollections in Al

Santoli, Leading the Way: How Vietnam

Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military, An

Oral History (New York, 1993), pp 21–22.

74. Bernard C. Nalty, Tactics and

Techniques of Electronic Warfare: Electronic Countermeasures in the Air War

Against North Vietnam, 1965–1973

(Washington, 1977), pp 31–52.

75. See Jon M. Van Dyke, North

Vietnam’s Strategy for Survival (Palo Alto,

Calif, 1972), a study based on the North

Vietnamese press and accounts by foreign

visitors.

76. Johnson, Vantage Point, p 136.

77. Notes of meeting, President’s

Office, May 16, 1965, 6:45 pm, LBJ Lib,

Meeting Notes File, published in FRUS,

1964–1968, II, 665–68.

78. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV, pp

32–53. McNamara’s In Retrospect devotes

a chap to the “Christmas Bombing Pause.”

For the North Vietnamese role in these negotiations, see Robert K. Brigham, “Vietnamese-American Peace Negotiations:

The Failed 1965 Initiatives,” Journal of

American-East Asian Relations, winter

1995, pp 377–95.

79. See Johnson, Vantage Point, pp

578–91 for a list of peace initiatives. The

best introduction to the negotiations is

Allan E. Goodman, The Lost Peace:

America’s Search for a Negotiated

Settlement of the Vietnam War (Stanford,

Calif, 1978), supplemented by his later

abridged and updated account, The Search

for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam

War (Berkeley, Calif, 1986).

Chapter 2

1. 7 AFP 552, Rolling Thunder

Operations, Jul 15, 1968; Hopkins, Tanker

Operations; Sharp intrvw, Mar 14, 1970.

2. Nalty, Electronic Warfare, pp

10–13; DIA/JCS, Southeast Asia Military

Fact Book, Jan 1967.

3. Msg, JCS to CINCPAC, 110011Z

Nov 66.

4. Memo, Maj C. W. Myers, Dir/

Plans, USAF, to CSAF, subj: Rolling

Thunder 52, Aug 18, 1966.

5. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

71–74; study, Naval Systems Analysis

Group, Effectiveness of Air Strikes

Against North Vietnam, Oct 1966.

6. Msg, JCS to CINCPAC, 111708Z

Nov 66; Edelen intrvw [Edelen was a

USAF liaison on JCS Rolling Thunder tar-
get selection team (65–68)].

7. See note above.

8. David C. Humphrey, ed, Foreign

Relations of the United States, 1964–1968,

IV, Vietnam 1966 (Washington, 1998), pp

890–987; Defense Dept, US-Vietnam Relations 1945–1967 (Washington, 1971),

VI, C, 2, published in George C. Herring,

ed, The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam

War: The Negotiating Volumes of the

Pentagon Papers (Austin, Tex, 1983), pp

209–370; Jerzy Michalowski, “Polish

Secret Peace Initiatives in Vietnam,” Cold

War International History Project Bulletin,

winter 1995–96, pp 241, 258–59; Wallace

J. Thies, When Governments Collide;

Goodman, Lost Peace; David Kraslow and

Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for

Peace in Vietnam (New York, 1968).

9. Msg, Wheeler to Sharp, 10 Dec

66, in JCS Official Record, Rolling Thunder 52, sec 13; msgs, US Embassy Poland

to State Dept, Dec 7, 1966, and State to

embassy, Dec 10, 1966, both in DOD

negotiations vols, VI, C, 2, p 44. See also

McNamara, In Retrospect, pp 249–50.

10. DOD, US-Vietnam Relations

1945–1967, VI, C, 2, p 13; msgs, PACAF

to 7 AF, 232345Z Dec 66 and 152020Z

Dec 66; msg, CINCPAC to CINCPACAF,

151938Z Dec 66. The North Vietnamese

may still have been willing to talk after

the Dec 2–4 bombing, but not after the

Dec 13–14 bombing; see especially James

G. Hershberg with L.W. Gluchowski,

“Who Murdered ‘Marigold’?—New

Evidence on the Mysterious Failure of

Poland’s Secret Peace Initiative to Start

U.S.-North Vietnamese Peace Talks,

1966,” Cold War International History

Project, Working Paper No. 27, Feb 2000.

11. Ibid.

12. William M. Hammond, The

United States Army in Vietnam: The

Military and the Media, 1962–1968

(Washington, 1988), pp 272–79; Baltimore

Sun, Dec 14, 1966; msg, NMCC to JCS,

152025Z Dec 66.

13. Washington Post, Dec 30, 1966.

14. Phil G. Goulding, Confirm or

Deny: Informing the People on National

Security (New York, 1970), p 67. See also

322

Notes to pages 42–46

hearings, Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate, Trip to North Vietnam, 90th

Cong, 1st sess (Washington, 1967); memo,

W.P. Bundy, State Dept, on conversation

between British Ambassador Sir Patrick

Dean and Secretary of State Dean Rusk,

Dec 30, 1966.

15. Tom Wolfe, “The Truest Sport:

Jousting with Sam and Charlie,” Esquire,

Oct 1975, p 230.

16. New York Times, Dec 25, 1966

Jan 18, 1967; Harrison E. Salisbury,

Behind the Lines-Hanoi (New York, 1967);

intrvw, Paige E. Mulhollan, Univ of Tex

oral hist proj, with Harrison E. Salisbury,

New York City, Jun 26, 1969. In his A

Time of Change (New York, 1988),

Salisbury revealed his belief that the North

Vietnamese sought to send a peace feeler

through him to the Johnson administration,

but that Johnson would not see him and

Rusk would not listen. Rusk did send

Johnson a four-page memo describing

Salisbury’s conversation with Pham Van

Dong and suggesting there was probably

nothing new in it. See Rusk’s memo of Jan

14, 1967, in the LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to the President, vol 18, #8a.

17. See note above.

18. New York Times, Dec 27, 1966.

19. Ibid.

20. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Dec 1966; study, Dir/Ops

and ACS/Intel, USAF, Analysis of

Planned Target Systems in North Vietnam,

Mar 10, 1967.

21. New York Times, Dec 27, 1966.

22. Intrvw, Tom Belden, Jacob Van

Staaveren, and Hugh Ahman, USAF hist

prog, with Harold Brown, Pasadena, Calif,

Aug 29–30, 1972 AFHRA K239.0512-620

[Brown was Secretary of the Air Force

(1965–1969)]; memo, Under Sec State

Nicholas Katzenbach to Dep Sec Def

Cyrus Vance, subj: Civilian Casualties in

North Vietnam, Jan 26, 1967.

23. Rpt, Maj Bernard Appel and Capt

Philip R. Meinert, 7 AF, Bombing Accuracy in a Combat Environment, May 10,

1968; rpt, E.H. Sharkey, RAND, Weapon

Delivery Accuracy of USAF Strike

Fighters, Aug 10, 1966; Bernard Appel,
“Bombing Accuracy in a Combat

Environment,” Air University Review,

Jul–Aug 1975, pp 38–52.

24. DIA/JCS, SEA Military Fact

Book, Jan 1967.

25. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” 1966.

26. New York Times, Dec 27, 1966;

msg, CINCPAC to JCS, 230440Z Dec 66;

msg, 7 AF to PACAF, 181410Z Dec 66.

27. Goulding, Confirm or Deny, pp

52–92.

28. New York Times, Dec 29, 1966.

29. Salisbury, Behind, pp 182–84.

30. Washington Post, Feb 12, 1967.

31. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Jun–Sep 1966; rpt, Col

H.W. Hise, J–3, Factors Affecting A/C

Losses in SEA, Sep 1966; memos, Dep

Sec Def Vance to Sec AF, Sec Nav, and

ASD/I&L, Oct 29, 1966; memo, Vance to

Sec AF, Sec Nav, CJCS, DDRE, Dir DIA,

Jan 10, 1967; CM-2073-67, Study to

Reexamine the US Air Campaign Against

the North Vietnam Air Defense System,

Jan 20, 1967; rpt, JCS Night Song Study

Gp, Mar 30, 1967.

32. See note above.

33. See note 31; Nalty, Electronic

Warfare, p 53.

34. Appel and Meinert rpt; Sharkey

rpt. The pattern of increasing dive bomb

release altitude and decreasing accuracy

repeated the Korean War experience. See

5 AF Operations Analysis Memo No. 69,

“History of Bombing Accuracy During the

Korean War,” Sep 9, 1953.

35. Institute for Defense Analysis,

Analysis of Combat Aircraft Losses in

Southeast Asia (Washington, 1968); Hise

rpt.

36. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Aug 1966, May 1967.

37. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Operations, 1 Jan 1965–31 Dec 1969,” vol II,

“Hardware,” sec 2, “Munitions,” 1971, pp

29–50; msg, 7 AF to PACAF, 111330Z

Feb 67.

38. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Dec 1966.

39. Ibid.

323

Notes to pages 46–54

40. Nalty, Electronic Warfare.

41. Institute for Defense Analysis,

Analysis of Combat Aircraft Losses in

SEA; briefing, Brig Gen Robin Olds to

Corona Harvest staff, Maxwell AFB, Ala,

Sep 29, 1969.

42. Rpt, Robert E. Hiller and Samuel

J. Scott, Ops An, 7 AF, Comparison of

Dive Bomb Tactics Between 355th TFW

and 308th TFW, May 1967.

43. End-of-tour report (EOTR), Brig

Gen William S. Chairsell, Cmdr 388th

TFW, Jul 8, 1967; Appel and Meinert rpt;

7 AFP 55-2, Rolling Thunder Operations,

Jul 15, 1968: Maj John C. Pratt, “Air

Tactics Against NVN Air Ground Defenses, December 1966–November 1968,”

CHECO rpt, 1969.

44. See note above.

45. EOTR, Col Robin Olds, Cmdr

8th TFW, Aug 31, 1967; Olds briefing,

Sep 29, 1969; Hopkins, Tanker Operations; Col Jack Broughton, Thud Ridge

(Philadelphia, 1969).

46. DJSM-10-67, atch IIa, Impact of

MiG Threat on US Operations Over NVN,

Jan 3, 1967; msg, PACAF to AFCP,

142145 Dec 66; msg, CSAF to CINCPACAF, 151539Z Dec 66.

47. Olds briefing, Sep 29, 1969;

intrvw, unidentified Corona Harvest interviewer with Col Olds, Comdr 8th TFW,

Jul 12, 1967; Intrvw, Maj Geffen and Maj

Folkman, Corona Harvest, with Col Robin

Olds, Colo Springs, 1968, AFHRA

K239.0512-051.2; Olds EOTR; Ralph

Wetterhahn, “Operation Bolo,” Retired

Officer Magazine, Nov 1995, pp 39–43.

48. Rpt, Lt Col C. H. Asay, Maj J.D.

Covington, and Capt J.B. Stone, 8th TFW,

History of Operation Bolo, no date; Maj

Dale F. Tippett, “Operation Bolo,” Corona

Harvest rpt, 1971; Institute for Defense

Analysis, Air-to-Air Encounters in Southeast Asia, vol I (Washington, 1967); Lt

Charles H. Hefron Jr, “Air-to-Air Encounters in Southeast Asia, 1 Jan–30 Jun

1967,” CHECO rpt, 1967.

49. See notes 54 and 55; msg, CSAF

to AFLC, 232319Z Dec 66.

50. On Olds’ World War II service,

see Hub Zemke with Roger A. Freeman,
Zemke’s Wolf Pack (New York, 1988), pp

194–201.

51. DIA/JCS, SEA Military Fact

Book, Jan 1967; rpt, Maj Gordon Y. W.

Ow, Ops An, 7 AF, Mission Bolo, Feb 13,

1967.

52. See note above.

53. See note 51; rpt on MiG kill,

Olds, Jan 2, 1967.

54. See note above.

55. Msg, 7 AF to PACAF, 240144Z

Apr 67; Institute for Defense Analysis,

Air-to-Air Encounters in SEA, vol III

(Washington, 1969).

56. Msgs, Wheeler to Sharp and

Westmoreland, 170001Z Feb 67, 181602Z

Feb 67, and 222246Z Feb 67.

57. Msg, Wheeler to Sharp and

Westmoreland, 181602Z Feb 67.

58. Msg, 7 AF to PACAF, 110905Z

Feb 67; msg, CINCPAC to JCS, 242256Z

Feb 67; Gravel, Pentagon Papers, vol IV,

p 144.

59. DOD, US-Vietnam Relations

1945–1967, VI, C, 3; Thies, When

Governments Collide; Goodman, Lost

Peace; Kraslow and Loory, Secret Search;

Johnson, Vantage Point; Harold Wilson, A

Personal Record: The Labor Government,

1964–1970 (Boston, 1971); Chester

Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in

Vietnam (New York, 1970); intrvw, Paige

E. Mulhollan, Univ of Tex oral hist proj,

with Chester Cooper, Arlington, Va, Jul

9–Aug 7, 1969.

60. DOD, US-Vietnam Relations

1945–1967, VI, C, 3, p 62.

61. Ibid.

62. Rpt, Dir/Ops and ACS/Intel,

USAF, Analysis of Planned Target Systems in North Vietnam, Mar 10, 1967; Defense Intelligence Digest, DIA, Jun 1967,

p 49; Van Dyke, North Vietnam’s Strategy

for Survival; Fall, The Two Viet-Nams.

63. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Jan 1967 and Feb 1967.

64. Recommendation for decoration,

354th TFS for Capt Merlyn H. Dethlefsen,

Jun 12, 1967; intrvw, Hugh N. Ahmann,

USAF oral hist prog, with Dethlefsen,

Maxwell AFB, Ala, Dec 20, 1971; recommendation for decoration, 357th TFS for

324

Notes to pages 54–60

Maj Leo K. Thorsness, Jul 19, 1967;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” Mar 1967.

65. Maj Robert S. Deas, Air Command and Staff College, “Thai Nguyen

Iron and Steel Complex,” draft Corona

Harvest rpt, Jan 1970; Lt Col Deas, Air

War College, “Two Days at Thai

Nguyen,” draft AU SEA mono, Jul 1976;

Maj Jack A. Phillips, Air Command and

Staff College, “Thai Nguyen Steel Mill,”

draft Corona Harvest rpt, Feb 1970.

66. See note above; “Weekly Intelligence Summary,” 7 AF, Mar 19 and Apr

9, 1967.

67. Msg, 380th TFW to 7 AF,

161225Z Mar 67; “Weekly Intelligence

Summary,” 7 AF, Apr 2, 1967; PACAF,

“Summary of Air Operations in SEA,”

Mar–Apr 1967; DCS Intel, HQ PACAF,

and ACS Intel, HQ HQ USAF, The Effects

of United States Air Operations in

Southeast Asia, 2 vols, (Hickam AFB,

Hawaii, 1969).

68. Intrvw, Col John E. Van Duyn

and Maj Richard B. Clement, Corona

Harvest, with Gen John D. Ryan, CSAF,

May 20, 1971.

69. Msg, CINCPACAF to 7 AF,

200310 Feb 67; intrvw, James C. Hasdorff,

USAF oral hist prog, with Gen Ryan, San

Antonio, Tex, May 15–17, 1979.

70. Rpt, DCS/Plans and Ops, USAF,

Combat Target Task Force, Oct 1967.

71. Msg, 388th TFW to 7 AF,

260645Z Jan 67; Chairsell EOTR.

72. Ryan intrvw, May 20, 1971.

73. Msg, CINCPAC to CINCPACFLT, 030516Z Apr 67; msg, CINCPAC to

CINCPACFLT, 182238Z Mar 67; msg,

CINCPAC to COMUSMACV, 240315Z

Mar 67.

74. Maj Albert L. Michael, “Ryan’s

Raiders,” Corona Harvest rpt, 1970.

75. Lt Col John A. Ryan, Jr,

“LABS,” Air University Review, spring

1957, pp 92–99.

76. Intrvw, Dr. James C. Hasdorff,

USAF Academy, with Col Ben M.

Pollard, USAF Ret, May 12, 1992. A

radar operator, Maj Pollard was the

Raiders’ highest-ranking officer.
77. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” May 1967; Pollard intrvw.

Maj Pollard was operating the radar when

his F–105F was hit by flak just before

bomb release on the Kep rail yard strike.

78. Ryan intrvw, May 20, 1971; rpt,

Dir/Ops, USAF, Commando Nail, May 9,

1968; msg, 7 AF to CSAF, 201200Z Dec

1967.

79. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Apr–May 1967.

80. Baltimore Sun, Apr 21, 1967.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid.

83. Msg, CJCS to CINCPAC,

222239Z Apr 67; memo, Maj R. A. Eubank, Dir/Plans, USAF, to CSAF, subj:

Operations Against North Vietnam, Apr

22, 1967.

84. Rpt, Dir/Ops and ACS/Intel,

USAF, Analysis of Planned Target Systems in North Vietnam, Mar 10, 1967.

85. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Nov 1967; Defense Intelligence Digest, DIA, Aug 1965, Sep 1966,

Aug 1967.

86. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Apr 1967; HQ PACAF and

HQ USAF, Effects of United States Air

Operations in SEA.

87. Msgs, CINCPAC to JCS,

230037Z Mar 67 and 182222Z Mar 67;

msgs, CINCPAC to CINCPACFLT and

CINCPACAF, 232100Z Apr 67 and

271920Z Apr 67; msg, CJCS to CINCPAC, 222239Z Apr 67; DIA/JCS, SEA

Military Fact Book, Jan, 1967.

88. Msg, CINCPAC to CINCPACAF

and CINCPACFLT, 100539Z May 67;

msg, CINCPAC to JCS, 062317Z May 67;

Nalty, Electronic Warfare, pp 116–46.

89. Hist, 8th TFW, Jan–Jun 1967;

msg, 7 AF to CINCPACAF, 150825Z May

67; PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations

in SEA,” May 1967; Institute for Defense

Analysis, Air-to-Air Encounters in SEA,

325

Notes to pages 61–68

vol III.

90. Hist, 366 TFW, Apr–Sep 1967;

Maj Gen Frederick C. Blesse, Check Six:

A Fighter Pilot Looks Back (Mesa, Ariz,

1987) pp 112–52; Blesse, “No Guts-No

Glory,” reprinted in USAF Fighter Weapons Review, spring 1973, pp 1–28. On

Gen Momyer’s opposition to putting a gun

on the F–4, see the interview with Gen

Wilbur L. Creech conducted by Hugh

Ahmann of the Air Force history program

in Jun 1992.

91. New York Times, Apr 25, 1967.

92. Ibid.

93. Washington Post, Apr 26, 1967.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid.

96. Msg, JCS to CINCPAC, 022248Z

May 67; Sharp intrvw, Apr 4, 1970.

97. Ginsburgh intrvw, May 26, 1971

[Ginsburgh was JCS liaison on NSC staff

(1966–1969)]; hist, JCS, SEA 1960–68, pt

III, pp 41-9 and 41-10.

98. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Operations, 1 Jan 1965–31 Dec 1969,” vol II,

“Hardware,” sec 2, “Munitions,” 1971;

Melvin F. Porter, “Second Generation

Weapons in SEA,” CHECO rpt, 1970;

Corum, The Tale of Two Bridges; draft

mono, Off of AF Hist, The Development

of Non-Nuclear Air Munitions for Use in

Southeast Asia 1961–1973, no date.

99. Msg, CJCS to CINCPAC,

162100Z May 67; msg, CINCPAC to

CINCPACFLT, 200250Z May 67;

Ginsburgh intrvw, May 26, 1971; PACAF,

“Summary of Air Operations in SEA,”

May 1967; John Colvin, “Hanoi in My

Time,” Washington Quarterly, spring

1981, pp 143–46.

100. New York Times, May 20, 1967;

Johnson, Vantage Point, p 368; memo, Sec

Def to CJCS, subj: Hanoi Prohibited

Zone, May 22, 1967; msg, CJCS to CINCPAC, 230144Z May 67.

Chapter 3

1. Gen Westmoreland’s troop request

of Mar 18, 1967 is quoted extensively in 

Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV, 427–31.

2. JCSM-218-67 to Sec Def, Apr 20, 
326

Notes to pages 68–74

1967, quoted in hist, JCS, Vietnam

1960–68, III, chap 43, pp 3–7. See also

CSAFM-M-57-67 to JCS, Apr 14, 1967,

quoted in hist, JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III,

chap 43, p 3.

3. Notes, meeting of President and

advisers, Apr 27, 1967, in New York

Times, ed, Pentagon Papers, pp 567–69.

See also memo, W. Rostow to President,

Apr 27, 1967, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to the President, vol 26, #35;

William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier

Reports (New York, 1976), pp 227–28.

4. DPM, May 19, 1967, in Gravel,

Pentagon Papers, IV, 170.

5. Draft memo, McNamara to President, subj: Actions Recommended for

Vietnam, Oct 14, 1966, in NYT Pentagon

Papers, pp 542–51.

6. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Jan 19, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 19, #119. See also Gibbons, The

U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pt

IV, pp 479–82.

7. Ginsburgh intrvw, May 26, 1971,

AFHRA K239.0512-477; intrvw, LBJ Lib

with Nicholas Katzenbach, Nov 23, 1968.

8. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

May 9, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 27, #79; W. Rostow memo to

President, May 6, 1967, circulated to No

Committee members and quoted in

Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV, 162–65.

9. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

May 19, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 28, #63.

10. Johnson, Vantage Point, pp

256–57.

11. Memo, Harold Brown to McNamara, Jun 3, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Country

File, Vietnam, box 83, 3G, #13; Richard

Helms to President, 22 May 67, LBJ Lib,

NSF, CF, Vietnam, box 83, 3F, #54.

12. Intrvw, Dorothy Pierce, LBJ Lib,

with Harold Brown, Pentagon, Jan 17,

1969; Brown intrvw, Aug 29–30, 1972;

draft study, Jacob Van Staaveren, “United

States Air Force Operations Against Infiltration in Southern Laos, 1960–1968,” Office of Air Force History, 1978, pp

587–624.

13. Hist, JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III,

chap 35, pp 21–30.

14. Intrvws with Harold Brown cited

in note 12.

15. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jun 1967.

16. The scope of North Vietnam’s

1967–68 northeast monsoon transportation

effort is given in the History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, vol II, chap 11, sec

3 (Hanoi, 1994); Merle Pribbenow’s translation says that on the “strategic transportation route” Group 559 had 5372 trucks

to move 61,000 tons of supplies. See also

briefing, Capt R. E. Adamson, Jr, USN, to

Sec Def, 19 May 1967, Corona Harvest

0216806; JCS 2472/50, Operations

Against North Vietnam, Apr 22, 1967;

McNamara testimony, Hearings before the

Preparedness Investigation Subcommittee

of the Committee on Armed Services,

Senate, Air War Against North Vietnam,

90th Cong, 1st sess (Washington, 1967),

hereafter cited as Stennis hearings, p 277.

17. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Jun 28, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 32, #44; Jul 6, 1967, vol 33,

#35J.

18. Defense Intelligence Digest, Sep

1967, pp 32–33; HQ PACAF and HQ

USAF, Effects of United States Air Operations in SEA, I, chap 4, pp 10–18; Cummings, “Vietnamese Railroad System”.

19. See chap 2.

20. See chap 2.

21. See note 18.

22. Momyer, Presentations to Sec

Def, Jul 8, 1967, AFHRA 1002619;

CIA/DIA, An Appraisal of Bombing of

North Vietnam, Sep 1967.

23. Ltr, Gen B.K. Holloway, Vice

CSAF, to Gen John D. Ryan, CINCPACAF, Jun 30, 1967, AFHRA 165.06-

189.

24. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” May 1967; see also

chap 2 above.

25. Intrvw, Wayne Thompson with

Col Richard D. Vogel, USAF Ret.

Melbourne, Fla, Jun 13, 1986; HQ

PACAF DCS/Intel, Index of USAF

Personnel MIA/POW in Southeast Asia,

1974.
26. JCS Bombing Chronology, Sep

1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Agency Reports, box

33; hist, JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III, chap

44, pp 1–2.

27. Ibid.; Momyer briefing cited in

note 22.

28. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jun 1967.

29. Msg, Sharp to Wheeler, subj:

Turkestan Incident, 190245Z Jun 67; msg,

Ryan to McConnell, subj: Soviet Ship

Incident, 172140Z Jun 67; msg, Ryan to

McConnell, 18142026Z Jun 67; msg, Maj

Gen William G. Lindley, Jr., Deputy Cmdr

7/13 AF, to Sharp, subj: Turkestan

Incident, 181450Z Jun 67; all in PACAF

msg file, “Alleged Bombing of Soviet

Ship ‘Turkestan’,” AFHRA K717.052-4.

30. Msg, CINCPAC to NMCC, Jun

2, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres,

vol 30, 3108a; memo, W. Rostow to Pres,

LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, Jun 3,

1967, vol 30, #108; State Dept Bulletin,

Jun 26, 1967, p 953, quotes U.S. note

delivered to Soviet charge d’affaires,

Washington, Jun 3, 1967; Goulding,

Confirm or Deny, pp 139–52.

31. U.S. notes delivered to Soviet

Embassy, Washington, Jun 20, 1967, quoted in State Dept Bulletin, Jul 10, 1967, p

44; memo of conversation, Rusk with

Dobrynin, Jun 16, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF,

Memos to Pres, vol 31, #38c; Broughton,

Thud Ridge and Going Downtown;

McNamara, In Retrospect, p 245.

32. U.S. note delivered to Soviet

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jul 13, 1967,

quoted in State Dept Bulletin, Aug 7,

1967, pp 170–71; msg, CINCPAC to

CINCPACFLT, CINCPACAF, and

COMUSMACV, 010430Z Jul 1967.

33. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

198.

34. Sharp intrvw, Apr 4, 1970; Sharp,

Strategy for Defeat, pp 177–85; msgs,

Sharp to Westmoreland, 192000Z Jun

1967 and 2703282 Z Jun 67,

Westmoreland’s Back Channel File, Army

Center of Military History; McNamara, In

Retrospect, p 283.

35. Momyer’s second briefing, Jul 8,

1967, AFHRA 1002619.

327

Notes to pages 74–78

36. Meeting, White House, Jul 12,

1967, LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s Notes, box

1, #38a; hist, JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III,

chap 43, p 29; memo, W. Rostow to

President, Jul 17, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF,

Memos to Pres, vol 35, #106, and Jul 18,

1967, #88; Evans and Novak column,

Washington Post, Aug 4, 1967, p 19;

Stennis hearings, p 65.

37. Cabinet meeting, White House,

Jul 19, 1967, LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s

Notes, box 1, #38a.

38. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Aug 9, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 37, #17.

39. JCS Bombing Chronology, Sep

1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Agency Reports, box

33; hist, JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III, chap

44, pp 1–2.

40. See note above.

41. “CSAF Concept for Isolation of

the Port of Haiphong,” Jul 19, 1967; hist,

JCS, Vietnam 1960–68, III, chap 44, pp

6–7; msg, CINCPACFLT to CINCPAC,

312154Z Jul 1967, PACAF DO Read File,

AFHRA K717.312.

42. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1960–68, III,

chap 44, p 7; see chap 2 above, pp 4–7.

Although Gen McConnell argued to

increase the Navy’s armed reconnaissance

authority in the Haiphong donut rather

than send Air Force planes there, some of

his subordinates continued to call for an

end to route packages. See the Jul 1967

study prepared for Secretary Brown by

McConnell’s targeting staff under Col

Edward Ratkovich, “Targeting Concept

for NVN,” AFHRA 1000574, which lists

22 highway bridges, causeways and ferries

around Haiphong together with nearly 300

other recommended targets in North

Vietnam: “Route packages and assignment

of areas of responsibility to the different

air forces must be eliminated.” When

briefed by Ratkovich on Jul 29, Secretary

Brown remarked dryly that “the only targets you have not recommended are firebomb raids against the cities, towns, and

villages” (quoted by Maj Gen Simler in

cover letter). By then McConnell had

already skimmed the cream of this study

for his Haiphong donut proposal, and
Brown could only ask Ratkovich to develop recommendations for “incremental

changes in policy” (i.e., nothing so dramatic as an end to route packages).

43. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Jul 31, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 36, #12.

44. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Jul 27, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 36, #50.

45. Intrvw, Joe B. Frantz, LBJ Lib,

with Senator John Stennis, Washington,

Jun 17, 1972.

46. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Aug 1, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 37, #121.

47. Intrvw, Michael L. Gillette, LBJ

Lib, with Symington, Washington, Nov

28, 1977.

48. “Airpower Probe,” Aviation

Week, Jul 3, 1967, p 7; Stennis hearings,

pp 10–11, 406.

49. Summary Report by Preparedness

Investigation Subcommittee of the

Committee on Armed Services, Senate,

Air War Against North Vietnam, 90th

Cong, 1st sess (Washington, 1967), hereafter cited as Stennis report.

50. Stennis hearings, p 8.

51. Ibid., p 14.

52. Ibid., p 10–11.

53. Ibid., p 13.

54. Memo, W. Rostow to Pres, Aug

9, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres,

vol 37, #32.

55. Ibid.

56. Stennis hearings, p 140.

57. Ibid., pp 136–38.

58. Ibid., p 168.

59. Notes by Jim Jones of meeting of

President and advisers, Aug 18, 1967, LBJ

Lib, Meeting Notes File, #118.

60. Ibid.

61. Stennis hearings, p 209.

62. Ibid., p 335.

63. Ibid., p 281.

64. Ibid., p 307.

65. Stennis report, p 9.

66. Stennis hearings, p 70.

67. Ibid., p 228.

68. Ibid., p 142.

69. Ibid., p 277.

328

Notes to pages 78–86

70. Press conf, Sep 1, 1967, Public

Papers of the President, 1967, II, p 816.

71. Ibid., p 818.

72. CIA intel info cable, Oct 4, 1967,

LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, vol 44,

#59a.

73. NSC meeting, Nov 29, 1967,

noon, LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s Notes, box

1, #136a.

74. Ltr, Moorer to author, Mar 24,

1989; telcon, author with Greene, Mar 20,

1989. The Aug resignation allegation was

made public by Mark Perry in his Four

Stars (Boston, 1989), pp 163–66. The

May resignation allegation appeared in

Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War

(Novato, Calif, 1988), p 463. Perry’s

account has received support from Lewis

Sorley, Honorable Warrior: General

Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of

Command (Lawrence, Kan, 1998), pp

268–70, 285–87 and 303–4.

75. Intrvw, Dorothy P. McSweeny,

LBJ Lib, with Gen Wheeler, Pentagon,

May 7, 1970. Col Ginsburgh had long

sought Wheeler’s greater involvement; see

chap 1 above.

76. Buttinger, Vietnam: A Dragon

Embattled, I, 3–43; Cummings,

“Vietnamese Railroad System.”

77. Corum, The Tale of Two Bridges.

78. JCS Bombing Chronology, Sep

67, LBJ Lib, NSF, Agency Reports, box

33.

79. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Aug 11, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 38, #70. See AFHRA

2K740.3421 for after action msgs from

355 TFW, 1112392 Aug 67; 8 TFW,

111300z Aug 67; 432 TRW, 111100Z Aug

67. See also John Piowaty, “Dropping

Doumer Bridge,” Vietnam, Oct 1993, pp

35–40.

80. Stennis hearings, p 365.

81. CIA/DIA, Appraisal of Bombing,

Sep 1967.

82. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Aug 1967.

83. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 1, pp 97–117.

84. Olds intrvw, 1968.

85. Ibid. See also Col Robin Olds,
“Special Report, 1 Oct 66–31 Aug 67.”

86. Intrvws, Wayne Thompson,

Office of Air Force History, with Col

Robert R. Sawhill, USAF Ret, Bolling

AFB, Mar 3, 1982, and Col Kenneth W.

Cordier, USAF Ret, Arlington, Va., Mar

25, 1986.

87. Memos, Arthur McCafferty to

President, Aug 21, 1967, Bromley Smith

to President, Aug 21, 1967, and Arthur

McCafferty to Smith, Aug 26, 1967, LBJ

Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, vol 39, #5a, 5,

and 71a; Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 1, pp 92–96; Peter

J. Kumpa, “Peking Calls U.S. Bombing

Near Line Grave Escalation,” Baltimore

Sun, Aug 23, 1967, p 1.

88. Herring, Pentagon Papers, pp

717–71; McNamara, In Retrospect, pp

295–302; Cooper, Lost Crusade, pp

377–81; Johnson, Vantage Point, pp

266–67; Kraslow and Loory, Secret

Search, pp 218–28; Marvin and Bernard

Kalb, Kissinger (Boston, 1974), pp 70–77;

Thies, When Governments Collide, pp

180–94; Goodman, Lost Peace, pp 59–60.

89. Memo, unsigned, Aug 18, 1967,

LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, vol 39,

#136; notes by Jim Jones, meeting of

President with his advisers, Aug 18, 1967,

LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, #118.

90. Quoted in Herring, Pentagon

Papers, p 770. See also U.S. Embassy

Paris to State, 5545, Oct 20, 1967, in

Herring, pp 768–69. For recent

Vietnamese views on the relationship

between the Kissinger initiative and their

planning for the Tet Offensive, see Robert

S. McNamara, James Blight, Robert K.

Brigham, Thomas Biersteker and Col.

Herbert Y. Schandler, Argument Without

End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam

Tragedy (New York, 1999), pp 292–301.

91. Notes by Jim Jones, meeting of

President with his advisers, Sep 5, 1967,

LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, #2.

92. Notes by Jim Jones, meeting of

President with his advisers, Sep 12, 1967,

LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, #7. See also

memo, W. Rostow to President, Oct 6,

1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, vol

44, #44.

329

Notes to pages 86–93

93. Msg, CINCPAC to JCS, subj:

Rolling Thunder, 080726Z Oct 1967, LBJ

Lib, NSF, Country File, Vietnam, box 84,

3I, #56a.

94. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Sep 14, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 41, #5.

95. Memo, Katzenbach to President,

Oct 19, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 46, #16a.

96. Memo, Wheeler to President,

CM-2697-67, Implications of Proposal for

Cessation of Hostilities, Oct 19, 1967, LBJ

Lib, NSF, Memos to Pres, vol 46, #37a.

97. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Sep 27, 1967, LBJ Lib, NSF, Memos to

Pres, vol 43, #27; memo, Bromley Smith

to W. Rostow, Sep 27, 1967, NSF,

Country File, Vietnam, box 219, Reprisal

Program, vol VII, #29; Cooper, Lost

Crusade, pp 381–83.

98. Meeting, White House, Oct 2,

1967, 2:50 pm, LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson

Notes, box 1, #103.

99. Notes by George Christian, meeting of President with advisers, Oct 11,

1967, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, #19.

100. Hist, 433 TFSq, Oct–Dec 1967,

attached to hist, 8 TFWg, Oct–Dec 1967;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” Oct 1967.

101. Tactical Fighter Weapons

Center, Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 1, pp

328–35.

102. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“In-Country and Out-Country Strike

Operations in SEA, 1965–69,” vol II,

“Hardware,” sec 2, “Munitions.”

103. Olds intrvw, Jul 12, 1967; Olds

intrvw, 1968; Olds EOTR; Sawhill intrvw.

104. Tactical Fighter Weapons

Center, Red Baron II, vol IV, pt i, pp

366–74.

105. Meeting, President with his

advisers, White House, Oct 23, 1967, LBJ

Lib, Tom Johnson’s Notes, box 1, #119a.

106. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Oct–Nov, 1967; hist,

388 TFWg, Apr–Dec 1967; HQ PACAF

and HQ USAF, Effects of United States

Air Operations in SEA, vol I, chap 4, p 23.

107. Gene I. Basel, Pak Six (La
Mesa, Calif, 1982), p 120.

108. New York Times, Nov 19, 1967,

p 3; Washington Post. Nov 19, 1967, p 17.

109. Colvin, “Hanoi in My Time,” p

153. Another sign of disarray in Hanoi

was the imprisonment of more than forty

“revisionists” apparently for their proRussian views, views more likely to lead

330

Notes to pages 93–101

to a negotiated settlement with the United

States than the harder line promoted by

the Chinese. See Judy Stowe,

“‘Revisionism’ in Vietnam,” a paper for

the annual meeting of the Association for

Asian Studies, Washington, Mar 1998.

110. CIA/DIA, Appraisal of

Bombing, Sep 1967, AFHRA K193.56-1.

1. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars,

pp 177–81; msg, PACAF to Dep Cmdr

7/13 AF, 230232Z Sep 67, PACAF DO

Read File, AFHRA 717.312. For Ryan’s

Raiders, see chap 2 above.

2. Intrvw, Lt Col John N. Dick, Jr.,

USAF historical program, with Gen

Gabriel P. Disosway, Dallas, Tex., Oct

4–6, 1977.

3. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars,

pp 177–78.

4. Rpt, AF Systems Command, Have

Dart Task Force, Mar 1968; HQ PACAF

DCS/Intelligence, “North Vietnamese Air

Force Fighter Patterns,” Mar 1968.

5. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, Event 87, pp

381–92.

6. Msg, Ryan to Momyer, 062202Z

Jan 68, AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll

TS31.

7. Msg, Momyer to Ryan, 080730Z

Jan 68, PACAF DO Read File, AFHRA

K717.312.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Maj William E. Reder, “EB–66

Operations in SEA, 1967,” draft CHECO

rpt, Nov 26, 1968, AFHRA K717.0413-63.

11. Ibid.

12. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, pp 81–89;

“Out Country Operations, 1965–68,”

Corona Harvest final rpt, p 63.

13. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 3, pp 14–24;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” Jan 1968; computer printout, “SEA

Casualties by Date of Incident,” USAF

Military Personnel Center, Oct 22, 1982.

14. Nalty, Electronic Warfare, pp

116–46; Capt Carl W. Reddel, “College

Eye,” CHECO rpt, 1968; Capt Richard M.

Williams, A History of Big Eye/College

Eye (552d AEW&C Wg, 1969); Grover C.

Jarrett, History of College Eye, Apr

1965–Jun 1969 (ADC, 1969).

15. Olds briefing, Sep 29, 1969.

16. Ibid.

17. OT&E Final Rpt, TAC Test 66-

183, USAF Tactical Warfare Center, Eglin

AFB, Rivet Top Evaluation Team, Mar

1968, AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll

S192; 7 AF OpOrd 510-68, Aug 67,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll TS16;

Pratt, Air Tactics Against NVN Air Ground

Defenses.

18. Rpt, 7 AF Dir of Tactical Analysis, “Relative Effectiveness of College

Eye, Rivet Top, Big Look,” Jan 10, 1968,

supporting document 14 for Reddel,

College Eye.

19. See notes 16 and 17.

20. See note above.

21. Wheeler to McNamara, JCS CM1798-66, subj: Review of Operating

Procedures in Order to Avoid Violating

Red Chinese Airspace, Sep 29, 1966;

Ryan intrvw, May 20, 1971.

22. Msg, Momyer to Ryan, 080730Z

Jan 68, PACAF DO Read File, AFHRA

K717.312.

23. Msg, 7 AF to CSAF, subj: A–6A

Operations, 201200Z Dec 67, PACAF DO

Read File, AFHRA K717.312; Vice Adm

Malcom W. Cagle, USN, “Task Force 77

in Action off Vietnam,” U.S. Naval

Institute Proceedings, Naval Review Issue,

1972, pp 100–101.

24. See above chap X2 hist, Det 1,

Chapter 4
428 Tac Fighter Sq, Mar 15–May 31,

1968; Michael H. Gorn, The TFX:

Conceptual Phase to F–111B Termination

(1958–1968) (Air Force Systems

Command, 1985); Herman S. Wolk,

Research and Development for Southeast

Asia, 1968 (Washington, 1970), pp 27–29;

Bill Gunston, F–111 (New York, 1978);

Robert F. Coulam, Illusions of Choice:

The F–111 and the Problem of Weapons

Acquisition Reform (Princeton, 1977).

25. 7 AF OpOrd 523-68, Jan 1968,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll TS66;

Maj Victor B. Anthony, Tactics and

Techniques of Night Operations,

1961–1970 (Washington, 1973), pp 206–7.

26. Intrvw, Maj Richard Clement and

Charles Hildreth, AF hist program, with

Gen John P. McConnell, Washington, Nov

4, 1970.

27. Brown intrvw, Aug 29–30, 1972.

28. Ryan intrvw, May 15–17, 1979.

29. See chap 2 above.

30. Maj Richard A. Durkee, “Combat

Skyspot,” CHECO rpt, 1967.

31. The most recent and extensive

study of Site 85 at Phou Pha Thi is

Timothy N. Castle, One Day Too Long:

Top Secret Site 85 and the Bombing of

North Vietnam (New York, 1999). See

also Msg, Col Pettigrew (US Air Attaché

Laos) to Gen Momyer, subj: MSQ-77 at

Lima Site 85 Laos, 070445Z Jul 67,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll TS15;

msg, Ambassador Sullivan to Secretary of

State Rusk, 130930Z Mar 67.

32. For an account (based on American intelligence and a Hanoi exhibit) indicating two AN–2s attacked Phou Pha Thi

and were lost while another pair orbited

several miles away, see Castle, One Day

Too Long, pp 76–78. For another account

based on Vietnamese sources indicating

three AN–2s were lost, see Istvan Toperczer, Air War Over North Vietnam: The

Vietnamese People’s Air Force (Carrollton,

Tex, 1998), pp 30–31. See also Victor B.

Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, “The

War in Northern Laos, 1954–1973,”

Center for Air Force History, 1993, pp

251–58; Capt Edward Vallentiny, “The

Fall of Site 85,” CHECO rpt, Aug 1968

331

Notes to pages 101–104

with supporting documents on CHECO

microfilm TS-70; draft CHECO rpt,

“Commando Club Project (OL-26),”

CHECO microfilm TS-70; Tactical

Fighter Weapons Center, Red Baron II, vol

IV, pt 2, pp 398–99; Kenneth Conboy with

James Morrison, Shadow War: The CIA’s

Secret War in Laos (Boulder, Colo, 1995),

pp 188–96; Timothy N. Castle, At War in

the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. MIlitary Aid

to the Royal Lao Government 1955–1975

(New York, 1993), pp 94–97; Richard

Secord with Jay Wurts, Honored and

Betrayed (New York, 1992), pp 74–92;

Roger Warner, Back Fire (New York,

1995), pp 200–234; Christopher Robbins,

The Ravens (New York, 1987), pp 41–85.

33. Msg, Ambassador Sullivan to

Gen Momyer, 141248Z Mar 68; intrvw,

author with Col Gerald H. Clayton, USAF

Ret, Pentagon, Mar 31, 1988; “Chamlong

Looks Back at Past,” excerpts from the

autobiography of Maj Gen Chamlong

Simuang, JPRS-SEA-015, 18 May 1990.

See also David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted

Shackley and the CIA Crusades (New

York, 1994) and Jane Hamilton-Merritt,

Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the

Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos,

1942–1992 (Bloomington, Ind, 1993).

34. Lt Col James Gormley, “Commando Club,” Corona Harvest spec rpt,

1970, AFHRA K239.032-31; hist, 388

TFW, Apr–Dec 1967; PACAF, Corona

Harvest rpt, “Targeting, Out-Country,

1962–68,” pp 333–44; PACAF, “Summary

of Air Operations in SEA,” Nov 1967–

Mar 1968; intrvw, Lt Col Charles M.

Heltsley, Air War College, with Maj Gen

John C. Giraudo, Treasure Island, Fla,

8–12 Jan 1985, AFHRA 1105191. As commander of the 355 TFW, Col Giraudo had

opposed attempting to use ground radar

controlled bombing in the Red River delta.

35. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“Out-Country Strike Operations,

1965–68,” vol I, Subtask Id, pp 122–31.

36. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, pp 67–72.

37. See note 33.

38. C.V. Sturdevant, “Effect of Strike

Force Formation Size and Spacing on Vul-
nerability to SAMs and Suggested Delivery Tactics for Commando Club Missions,” PACAF Operations Analysis Note

68-1, Feb 15, 1968, AFHRA

K717.310468-1.

39. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Operations, Jan 1965–Mar 1968,” vol IV,

“Support: Tactical Electronic Warfare,”

esp pp 78–82, 101–2; PACAF, “Summary

of Air Operations in SEA,” Nov 1967.

40. See note above.

41. See note 37; Nalty, Electronic

Warfare, pp 116–46; James E. Pierson, A

Special Historical Study of Electronic

Warfare in SEA, 1964–68 (Kelly AFB,

Tex, 1973), pp 120–21.

42. See note above.

43. DIA/JCS, SEA Military Fact

Book, Jan 1968, pp 13–19; Col Gordon E.

Danforth, “Iron Hand/Wild Weasel,”

Corona Harvest spec rpt, 1970; Maj

Richard B. Clement, “The SAM Story,”

Corona Harvest spec rpt, 1970.

44. Msg, 355th TFWg to 7 AF,

190835Z Dec 67, PACAF DO Read File,

AFHRA 717.312; Nalty, Electronic Warfare, pp 41–49; PACAF, Corona Harvest

rpt, “In-Country and Out-Country Strike

Operations, Jan 1965–Dec 1969,” vol II,

“Hardware,” sec 2, “Munitions,” pp 72–80.

45. Msg, CINCPAC to CINCPACAF,

subj: Rolling Thunder, 270447Z Jun 67,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll TS16.

46. CIA/NPIC, Photographic Interpretation Report, “KH–4 Mission 1042-1,

17–22 Jun 1967, South China and North

Vietnam Edition,” Jun 1967, in Kevin

Ruffner, ed, CORONA: America’s First

Satellite Program (Washington, 1995), pp

307–14. See also Robert A. McDonald,

“Corona’s Success for Space Reconnaissance, A Look into the Cold War, and

a Revolution for Intelligence,” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing,

Jun 1995, pp 689–720.

47. William H. Greenhalgh, Jr., “U.S.

Air Force Reconnaissance in Southeast

Asia, 1960–1975,” draft, AFHRA, 1976.

48. Hist, 67th RTSq, Jul–Sep 1967.

49. Msg, 7 AF to CINCPAC,

060700Z Nov 67, PACAF DO Read File,

332

Notes to pages 104–110

AFHRA K717.312.

50. Msg, CINCPACAF to CINCPAC,

210351Z Nov 67, PACAF DO Read File,

AFHRA K717.312.

51. Msg, CINCPACFLT to CINCPACAF, 020354Z Dec 67, PACAF DO

Read File, AFHRA K717.312.

52. Msg, CINCPACAF to CINCPAC,

subj: NVN Air Defense, 262032Z Dec 67,

MACV Records, Federal Records Center,

Suitland Md.

53. N. Charzenko and Lt J. D.

Reeves, “Analysis of Tactical Employment of the MK–36 Destructors and Other

Mines,” Innovations Gp, Plans Dir, HQ

USAF, Nov 1967; hist, 8th TFWg,

Oct–Dec 1967; CIA/DIA, Appraisal of

Bombing (through Dec 1967).

54. AF Special Communications

Center, Comfy Coat Rpt WC3-73, “Evolution of Countermeasures to MK–36

Magnetic Mines,” Mar 1973, AFHRA

K370.491-1 (1001281).

55. Memo, Rear Adm W. R. McClendon, Deputy Dir for Ops, NMCC, to Sec

of Defense, subj: Allied Bombing of

Soviet Merchant Ship, 8 Jan 1968, LBJ

Lib, National Security File, Vietnam

Country File, Box 85, 3J, #32a; msg, Walt

Rostow to President, 100714Z Jan 68,

CAP80237, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Vietnam Country File, Box 85, 3J,

#22; memo for record, Brig Gen James A.

Shannon, USAF, Dep Dir for Ops, NMCC,

subj: Inadvertent Release of Mark 36

Weapons in International Waters, Dec 31,

1967, LBJ Lib, National Security File,

Vietnam Country File, Box 85, 3J, #39a.

56. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1960–68, pt

III, pp 44–14 and 44–15.

57. Harriman to Rusk, Nov 29, 1967,

Bucharest 803, in Herring, Pentagon

Papers, pp 794–800.

58. Ibid., p 795.

59. Ibid., p 523.

60. Ibid., p 805.

61. Ibid.

62. Msg, Wheeler to Sharp and Westmoreland, 051946Z Jan 68, Westmoreland’s Backchannel File, Army Center of

Military History.

63. Msg, Bunker, Westmoreland,
Komer, And Locke to Rusk, 050528Z Jan

68, POL 27, Vietnam, 1/1/68, State Dept.

64. Msg, Sharp to Wheeler, 062331Z

Jan 68, Westmoreland’s Backchannel File,

Army Center of Military History.

65. Msg, 355th TFWg to NMCC,

140920Z Dec 67; msg, 388th TFW to

NMCC, 141115Z Dec 76; msg, 460th

RTSq to PACAF, 182035Z Dec 67; msg,

388th TFWg to NMCC, 180925Z Dec 67;

all in PACAF DO Read File, AFHRA

717.312. See also CIA/DIA, Appraisal of

Bombing (through Dec 1967); HQ PACAF

and HQ USAF, Effects of United States

Air Operations in SEA, vol I, chap 4, 15,

and vol II, pp 122–25; Corum, The Tale of

Two Bridges, pp 75–77.

66. The six Americans shot down

near Hanoi 14–17 Dec 1967 and returned

in 1973 were Capt James E. Sehorn, Maj

James F. Low, 1Lt Howard J. Hill, Maj

Kenneth R. Fleenor, 1Lt Terry L. Boyer,

Capt Jeffrey T. Ellis.

67. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, events 70–79;

Futrell, Aces and Aerial Victories, pp

72–74.

68. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, event 75D.

69. Futrell, Aces and Aerial Victories,

pp vi and 44–64.

70. Hist, 8th TFWg, Oct–Dec 1967,

pp 10–12.

71. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, event 54c.

72. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 2, event 79.

73. Ibid.

74. For the summer 1967 railroad

campaign, see chap 3 above.

75. Msg, 7 AF to CINCPACAF,

190355Z Dec 67, PACAF DO Read File,

AFHRA 717.312; msg, CINCPAC to 7

AF, 192300Z Dec 67, CH 0243009.

76. Hist, 388 TFWg, Apr–Dec 1967.

77. Hist, 388th TFWg, Apr–Dec

1967; Johnson, Vantage Point, pp 378–79.

333

Notes to pages 110–121

78. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Sep 1967, 5-A-8.

79. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Johnson, 1967, Book II, pp 1182–83.

80. Memo, Col Robert N. Ginsburgh

to Gen McConnell, Dec 27, 1967,

McConnell’s Personal Notebook, vol II,

item 507, Office of Air Force History.

81. Ibid.

82. McConnell intrvw, Aug 28, 1969.

83. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Johnson, 1967, Book II, pp 1077–78.

Years later McNamara was asked when he

decided to resign, and he replied: “I’m not

sure I decided. It would have been the

President who decided.” See McNamara’s

deposition in Westmoreland vs CBS, Mar

26, 1984, p 2. See also McNamara, In

Retrospect, pp 311–14.

84. Goulding, Confirm or Deny, pp

ix–x; McNamara, In Retrospect, pp 303–5.

85. Gallup Poll, Nov 5, 1967.

86. For Johnson versus R. Kennedy,

see Gallup Poll of Oct 1, 1967; for

Johnson versus Republicans, see Gallup

Poll of Oct 22, 1967.

87. Terry Dietz, Republicans and

Vietnam, 1961–1968 (New York, 1986),

pp 113–28.

88. Ibid.

89. Gallup Poll, Oct 29, 1967.

90. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Johnson, 1967, Book II, pp 733–46;

Johnson, Vantage Point, pp 445–49;

Gallup Polls, Aug 13 and Sep 6, 1967. On

the Stennis Hearings, see chap 3 above.

91. Notes on meeting of Aug 18,

1967, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, #118.

92. Memo, W. Rostow for President,

Oct 20, 1967, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Vietnam Country File, Box 83, 3F,

#45 and 45a.

93. For LeMay’s departure, see above

chap 1.

94. Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, Oct

4, 1967, LBJ Lib, National Security File,

Vietnam Country File, Cabinet Papers.

Chapter 5

1. On intelligence reporting before

the Tet Offensive, see James J. Wirtz, The 

et Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War

(Ithaca, NY, 1991), Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 
334

Notes to pages 121–127

1968: Understanding the Surprise

(London, 1995), and John Prados, “The

Warning that Left Something to Chance:

Intelligence at Tet,” Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, summer 1993, pp

161–84. A revised version of the Prados

article appears together with Mark

Jacobsen’s “President Johnson and the

Decision to Curtail Rolling Thunder” and

several other informative essays in Marc

Jason Gilbert and William Head, editors,

The Tet Offensive (Westport, Conn, 1996).

For the most widely read description of

the offensive, see Don Oberdorfer, Tet!

(Garden City, NY, 1971). For the views of

the communist general in charge of the Tet

offensive in Saigon, see Tran Van Tra,

“Tet-the 1968 General Offensive and

General Uprising,” in Jayne Werner and

Luu Doan Huynh, The Vietnam War:

Vietnamese and American Perspectives

(Armonk, NY, 1993).

2. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports,

pp 407–39.

3. Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How

the American Press and Television

Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet

1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols

(Boulder, Colo, 1977).

4. Ibid., I, p 253–60.

5. Ibid., I, p 653–54.

6. Gallup poll, Mar 31, 1968, based

on interviews 15–20 Mar 68.

7. On the May 1967 debate, see

above chap 3.

8. On the Stennis Hearings, see

above chap 3.

9. Congressional Record, Jan 30,

1968, p 1398.

10. New York Times, Feb 4, 1968, IV,

12.

11. Hearings before the Committee

on Armed Services, Senate, Authorization

for Military Procurement, Research and

Development, Fiscal Year 1969, and

Reserve Strength, 90th Cong, 2d Sess

(Washington, 1968), p. 3.

12. Ibid., pp 12, 26.

13. Ibid., p 754.

14. Ibid., pp 758–62.

15. Ibid., p 765.

16. Ibid., p 770.

17. James Reston, “The Big Peace

Battle,” New York Times, Mar 12, 1968, p

17.

18. Hearings before the Committee

on Foreign Relations, Senate, Foreign

Relations Assistance Act of 1968, Part 1-

Vietnam, 90th Cong, 2d Sess (Washington,

1968), p 101.

19. Ibid., p 184.

20. See above chap 3.

21. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

May 14, 1968, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to Pres, vol 67, #42.

22. Memo, R. Ginsburgh to W.

Rostow, Feb 28, 1968, LBJ Lib, National

Security File, National Security Council

Hist, Mar 31 Speech, vol 3, #37.

23. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Feb 3, 1968, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to Pres, vol 59, #75; Feb 10,

1968, vol 61, #98; Feb 19, 1968, with att

memo from McNamara, vol 63, #35 and

35a. See also msg, Sharp to Wheeler,

020208Z Feb 67, Westmoreland’s Back

Channel Msg File, US Army Center of

Military Hist; press conf, Feb 16, 1968,

Public Papers of the Presidents, Johnson,

1968–69, I, 234; Herbert Y. Schandler,

The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon

Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton, 1977),

pp 89–90.

24. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1960–68, pt

III, chap 44, p 16.

25. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

234–36.

26. Notes of President’s Tuesday

lunch meeting, Feb 6, 1968, LBJ Lib,

President’s Appointment File, box 89.

27. Notes of National Security

Council meeting, Feb 7, 1968, LBJ Lib,

Tom Johnson’s Notes of Meetings and

NSF, NSC Meetings File. David C.

Humphrey (“Searching for LBJ at the

Johnson Library,” Society for Historians

of American Foreign Relations Newsletter,

Jun 1989, pp 3–4) has pointed out discrepancies in the two sets of notes. For one

thing, Tom Johnson (and no doubt others

at the meeting) did not know enough

about aircraft to distinguish between an

IL–28 and a MiG–21; in his notes, the

IL–28s are called “MiGs.”
28. Hist, 8th TFW, Jan–Mar 68, pp

27–28; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Feb 1968, sec 1, p 8

and sec 5, p A-4.

29. Hist, 555 TFS, Jan–Mar 1968.

30. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Feb 1968, sec 1, p 8

and sec 5, p D-1. Buza and Toperczer,

“MiG–17 Over Vietnam,” pp 100–117,

indicate that the North Vietnamese practice of hiding aircraft off the airfields

began as early as 1966.

31. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron II, vol IV, pt 3, pp 159–79;

Futrell, Aces and Aerial Victories, pp

78–79. Lt Col Wesley D. Kimball and 1st

Lt John Daday of the 555 TFS probably

shot down a MiG–21 on Mar 29, 1968.

32. CIA/DIA, Appraisal of Bombing,

Jan–Mar 1968, pp 3–4; hist, 388 TFW,

Jan–Mar 1968; hist, 355 TFW, Jan–Mar

1968.

33. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Feb 1968, chap 1, p

8.

34. See Bernard C. Nalty, Air Power

and the Fight for Khe Sanh (Washington,

1973).

35. Memo, Art McCafferty (NSC

staff) to W. Rostow, Feb 21, 1968, 3:25

pm, LBJ Lib, National Security File

Country File-Vietnam, Box 84, 3I, #21.

On bombing controlled by Phou Pha Thi’s

radar (from Nov 1967 until it fell into

enemy hands in Mar 1968), see the preceding chap. President Johnson and his

advisers discussed radar-controlled “systems” bombing with particular reference

to Radio Hanoi and the Hanoi port facilities at Feb 20’s Tuesday Lunch meeting.

See Tom Johnson’s Notes of Meetings,

LBJ Lib.

36. Ambassador Taylor had “grave

reservations” about the introduction of

American ground forces at Da Nnang

because he suspected they would be used

for more than protecting the air base and

that it would be “very difficult to hold the

line against an increasing ground involvement.” Foreign Relations of the United

States, 1964–1968, II, 347–49.

37. Gen Bruce Palmer, Jr., US

335

Notes to pages 127–133

Intelligence in Vietnam, a special issue of

the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, vol 28,

no 5, 1984; memo, John A. McCone, Apr

2, 1965, quoted in Gravel, Pentagon

Papers, III, 352–53.

38. Joint Staff, SEA CABIN Study

Group, “Study of the Political-Military

Implications in Southeast Asia of the

Cessation of Aerial Bombardment and the

Initiation of Negotiations,” Nov 22, 1967,

LBJ Lib, National Security File, Country

File, Vietnam, Box 95, 6G(1)b, #26e.

39. Memo, Ginsburgh to Wheeler,

Nov 29, 1967, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Country File, Vietnam, Box 95,

6G(1)b, #26b; hist., JCS, Vietnam,

1960–68, pt III, chap 47, p 10.

40. Schandler, Unmaking of a

President, pp 92–120; Westmoreland, pp

460–77.

41. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1960–68, pt

III, chap 49, pp 1–8.

42. Westmoreland, pp 465–69.

43. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

575; hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1960–68, pt III,

chap 49, pp 10–11.

44. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

547.

45. McPherson’s notes of meeting,

Feb 27, 1968, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes

File, Box 2, #47.

46. Meeting, Dec 5, 1967, 6 pm, in

LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s Notes, box 1,

#146a. On Clifford’s opposition to 1965

troop deployment, see Clark Clifford with

Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the

President: A Memoir (New York, 1991)

and George W. Ball, The Past has Another

Pattern: Memoirs (New York, 1982).

47. McConnell intrvw, Aug 28, 1969.

McConnell draft msg to Gen Nazzaro,

CINCSAC, Mar 4, 1968, AFHRA

1028520; ltr, McConnell to LBJ, Mar 27,

1968, AFHRA 1028520.

48. A condensed version of the

Pentagon Papers was published by the

New York Times in its newspaper and in

one volume (New York, 1971). Senator

Mike Gravel (Democrat, Alaska) entered

more of this classified history into the

Congressional Record and subsequently

sponsored publication in five volumes by
Beacon Press (Boston, 1971). For an

account of the “A to Z” reassessment, see

the Gravel edition, IV, 238–59, 549–84.

See also Gelb and Betts, The Irony of

Vietnam, and Schandler, Unmaking of a

President. Schandler wrote the portion of

the Pentagon Papers relating to the Tet

offensive.

49. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

252.

50. Memo with attachments,

Secretary of the Air Force Brown to

Deputy Secretary of Defense Warnke,

subj: SEA Alternative Strategies, Mar 4,

1968, LBJ Lib, Clifford Papers, box 1,

Memos to Read (2), #1a; Brown intrvw,

Aug 29–30, 1972.

51. Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of

Intervention (New York, 1969), pp

176–77; Hoopes to Clifford, Feb 13, 1968,

LBJ Lib, National Security File, Country

File, Vietnam, Box 83, 3G, #5b. On the

second JASON report, see also Gravel,

Pentagon Papers, IV, 222–25. On

McNamara’s Wall see chap 3 above.

52. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

252.

53. Johnson, Vantage Point, p 399.

See also memo, W. Rostow to Pres, Mar

4, 1968, 1:45 pm, LBJ Lib, National

Security File, NSC Hist, Mar 31 Speech,

vol 7, #3.

54. Schandler, Unmaking of a

President, p 203; Johnson, Vantage Point,

pp 402–03.

55. Philip E. Converse, Warren E.

Miller, Jerod G. Rusk, and Arthur C.

Wolfe, “Continuity and Change in

American Politics: Parties and Issues in

the 1968 Election,” American Political

Science Review, Dec 1969, pp 1083–1105.

56. Intrvw, LBJ Lib with Clark

Clifford, Jul 14, 1969.

57. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Johnson, 1968–69, I, p 404. For Mrs.

Johnson’s view, see (Claudia T.) Lady

Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New

York, 1970), esp pp 633–47.

58. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Johnson, 1968–69, I, p 410.

59. Clifford’s handwritten memos of

conversations with President and senators,

336

Notes to pages133–137

LBJ Lib, Clifford Papers, Notes Taken at

Meetings, 2, esp #11, #21, #30, #33;

Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV, 589–93;

Schandler, Unmaking of a President, pp

210–12.

60. Meeting notes, Mar 19 and 22,

1968, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, Box

2, #53 and #54.

61. Ibid. See also memo, Clifford to

Wheeler, Mar 5, 1968, attaching Rusk

bombing cutback proposal, LBJ Lib,

Clifford Papers, Box 2, Memos on

Vietnam Feb–Mar 1968, #7a, #7b, #7c;

Johnson, Vantage Point, pp 397–400.

62. Gravel, Pentagon Papers, IV,

233–34.

63. Hoopes, Limits of Intervention;

Clark M. Clifford, “A Viet Nam

Reappraisal: The Personal History of One

Man’s View and How It Evolved,”

Foreign Affairs, Jul 1969, pp 601–22.

Clifford’s role in President Johnson’s Mar

1968 decisions has been scaled down in

succeeding accounts, beginning with

Johnson’s memoirs, The Vantage Point.

Schandler, whose account of Tet in the

Pentagon Papers portrayed Clifford as

crucial, retreated considerably from that

view in Unmaking of a President. Warren

I. Cohen followed this line still further in

Dean Rusk (Totowa, New Jersey, 1980).

64. Walter Isaacson and Evan

Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and

the World They Made (New York, 1986),

esp pp 642–741.

65. Memos, W. Rostow to President,

Oct 19, 1967 (National Security File,

Memos to Pres, vol 46, #30a), Oct 25,

1967 with attachment (vol 48, #80 and

80a), and Nov 3, 1967 (vol 47, #46). The

following Wise Men attended the Nov

1967 meeting: Dean Acheson, Clark

Clifford, McGeorge Bundy, Supreme

Court Justice Abe Fortas, Robert Murphy,

Henry Cabot Lodge, Arthur Dean,

Douglas Dillon, George Ball, Gen

Maxwell Taylor, and Gen Omar Bradley.

Two members of the administration with

close ties to this group also participated in

the meeting: Averell Harriman and

William Bundy (brother of McGeorge

Bundy and son-in-law of Dean Acheson).
66. Memo, McGeorge Bundy to

President, Nov 10, 1967, LBJ Lib,

National Security File, Memos to Pres, vol

50, #36b.

67. Ibid. M. Bundy helped Stimson

write his memoirs, On Active Service in

Peace and War (New York, 1947).

68. Clifford intrvw.

69. Johnson, Vantage Point, pp

415–17. Attendance at the Mar 1968

meeting of the Wise Men was the same as

the Nov 1967 meeting (see note 62 above)

with the following additions: Arthur

Goldberg, Cyrus Vance, and Gen Matthew

Ridgway.

70. Meeting notes, Mar 26, 1968,

LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File, Box 2, #1

and #2.

71. Notes of meeting of President

with House and Senate leaders, Apr 3,

1968, LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s Notes of

meetings, Box 2, Apr 1968, #2d; Johnson,

Vantage Point, esp pp 415–19.

72. “President’s Address to the

Nation,” Mar 31, 1968, Public Papers of

the Presidents, Johnson, 1968–69, I, pp

469–76; “Statement by the President

Following Hanoi’s Declaration of

Readiness to Begin Discussions,” same

source, p 492. President Johnson raised

the possibility he would not run again on

Oct 3, 1967 in a meeting with Rusk,

McNamara, Rostow and Helms; see notes

of the meeting in LBJ Lib, Tom Johnson’s

Notes, #105a.

73. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Feb 29, 1968, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, NSC Hist, Mar 31 Speech, vol 3,

#54; memo, CIA, subj: Question

Concerning the Situation in Vietnam, Mar

1, 1968, LBJ Lib, NSC Hist, Mar 31

Speech, vol 4, #2.

74. Congressional Record, Apr 2,

1968, p 8569.

75. Ibid., pp 8569–77.

76. Ibid., pp 8572–73.

77. Ibid., p 8574.

78. Meeting notes, Apr 9, 1968, LBJ

Lib, Meeting Notes File, Box 2, #61.

79. Draft ltr, Clifford to President,

May 4, 1968, LBJ Lib, Clifford Papers,

Box 3, Southeast Asia Bombing Pause,

337

Notes to pages 137–146

Apr 1968, #2.

80. Meeting note, May 4, 1968, LBJ

Lib, Meeting Notes File, Box 2, #3.

81. Memo, Rusk to President, May

18, 1968, with attached Bunker msg,

171048 May 68, LBJ Lib, National

Security File, Memos to Pres, vol 77, #7a

and #7b.

82. Meeting note, May 25, 1968, LBJ

Lib, Meeting Notes File, Box 3, #13.

83. CIA/DIA, Appraisal of Bombing,

Jul–Oct 1968.

84. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Apr–Oct 1968.

85. Lt Col John Schlight, “Jet

Forward Air Controllers in SE Asia,”

CHECO rpt, Oct 15, 1969; Ballard,

Gunships.

86. Hist, 8th TFW, Apr–Jun 1968;

HQ PACAF and HQ USAF, Effects of

United States Air Operations in SEA, esp

vol II, chap 7, p 12; memo, George A.

Carver, Jr., CIA, to W. Rostow, May 31,

1968, with attached report, “North

Vietnamese Truck Losses since 31 Mar

1968,” LBJ Lib, National Security File,

Country File, Vietnam, Box 83, 3F, #17

and #17a.

87. C. William Thorndale,

“Interdiction in Route Package One,

1968,” CHECO rpt, Jun 30, 1969.

88. Melvin F. Porter and Maj A. W.

Thompson, “Operation Thor,” CHECO

rpt, Jan 24, 1969.

89. Nalty, Air Power and the Fight

for Khe Sanh, pp 68–81.

90. See note 83; Col Royal W.

Connell, “Operation Thor,” Corona

Harvest spec rpt, Feb 1970; C. William

Thorndale, “Air War in the DMZ, Sep

1967–Jun 1968,” CHECO rpt, Aug 1,

1969; Porter and Thompson, “Operation

Thor”; Lt Col Valentino Castellina,

“Operation Neutralize: The Pattern is Set,”

Corona Harvest spec rpt, Jun 1969;

Warren A. Trest and Maj Valentino

Castellina, “Operation Neutralize,”

CHECO rpt, Jan 5, 1968. Since the war,

the tunnels at Vinh Moc (on the coast east

of Vinh Linh) have become a tourist

attraction.

91. See note above. Farris R.
Kirkland, “The Attack on Cap Mui Lay,

Vietnam, Jul 1968,” Journal of Military

History, Oct 1997, pp 735–60, argues for

Operation Thor’s success and describes it

as the Vietnam War’s “only extensive

operation involving substantial forces of

all four services.” The Army used Thor in

artillery courses and to justify funding for

a new fire control data system.

92. Msg, Abrams to W. Rostow,

231304Z Aug 68. LBJ Lib, Clifford

Papers, Box 5, Abroms (1), #1.

93. Thorndale, “Interdiction in Route

Package One”; HQ PACAF and HQ

USAF, Effects of United States Air

Operations in SEA, vol I, esp chap 1, pp

9–12, and chap 7, pp 1–13; HQ USAF

Operations Analysis and RAND,

“Measures of the 1968 Out-Country

Bombing Campaign in Southeast Asia,”

Dec 1968; PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“Out-Country Strike Operations, Apr

68–Dec 69,” Dec 1, 1970, subtask Ie,

North Vietnam, Apr–Nov 68.

94. See note above.

95. See note 93.

96. Brig Gen George J. Keegan, Jr.,

“7 AF Summer Interdiction Program,”

appended to Thorndale, “Interdiction in

Route Package One.” 

97. Thorndale, “Interdiction in Route

Package One,” p 28.

98. Keegan, p 63.

99. The author is indebted to Merle

Pribbenow for sharing his translation of

the History of the People’s Army of

Vietnam, vol II; the discussion of air interdiction in the North Vietnamese panhandle

during 1968 is in chap 11, Sec 3.

100. On McNamara’s Wall, see chap

3 above. See also Gary L. Telfer, Lane

Rogers, and V. Keith Fleming, U.S.

Marines in Vietnam: Fighting the North

Vietnamese, 1967 (Washington, 1984), pp

86–94.

101. Thorndale, “Interdiction in

Route Package One,” pp 40–42.

102. Keegan, pp 69–70.

103. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Oct 1968.

104. Msg, Abrams to W. Rostow,

231204Z Aug 68, LBJ Lib, Clifford

338

Notes to pages 146–151

Papers, Box 5, Abrams (1), #1.

105. Thorndale, “Interdiction in

Route Package One,” pp 44–52.

106. White House press release,

“Summary of General Abrams’ View,”

Aug 23, 1968, LBJ Lib, Clifford Papers,

Box 5, Abrams (1), #3; ltr, M. Bundy to

President, Aug 15, 1968, with attached

memo, LBJ Lib, National Security File,

Memos to Pres, vol 91, #2c and #2d; ltr,

President to M. Bundy, Aug 25, 1968, LBJ

Lib, National Security File, Memos to

Pres, vol 91, #2a.

107. New York Times editorial, Jul

29, 1968; msg, W. Rostow to President,

191510Z Aug 68, transmitting Adm

McCain’s msg, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to Pres, vol 91, #35; memo,

W. Rostow to President with Brig Gen

Ginsburgh’s memo attached, Aug 22,

1968, LBJ Lib, National Security File,

Memos to Pres, vol 92, #115 and #115a;

notes of meeting of President with his

advisers, Sep 4, 1968, LBJ Lib, Meeting

Notes File, Box 3, #38.

108. Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold

L. Schecter, The Palace File (New York,

1986), pp 21–41.

109. Anna Chennault, The Education

of Anna (New York, 1980), esp pp

163–214. Clifford’s Counsel to the

President (p 583 in the 1992 edition) confirms that the Johnson administration

learned from the FBI, CIA, and NSA

about Chennault’s efforts to influence the

Thieu government and through it the U.S.

election. Thieu, of course, probably would

have taken the same stand without any

prompting from Chennault or Nixon. See

also the entries for Jan 9–12, 1973, in

H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries:

The Complete Multimedia Edition (Santa

Monica, Calif, 1994), and Jules Witcover,

The Year the Dream Died (New York,

1997), pp 408–52.

110. Bui Diem with David Chanoff,

In the Jaws of History (Boston, 1987), pp

235–46.

111. Notes, meeting of Oct 14, 1968,

9:40 am, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File,

Box 3, #68a.

112. Notes, meeting of Oct 14, 1968,
1:50 pm, LBJ Lib, Meeting Notes File,

Box 3, #57. These notes were taken by

Bromley Smith. See also Tom Johnson’s

notes of the same meeting in LBJ Lib,

Tom Johnson’s Notes, #25a.

113. See note above. Despite North

Vietnamese eagerness to avoid any public

linkage of the “facts of life” with the

bombing halt, President Johnson did point

to them in his televised address (Oct 31,

1968) announcing the halt: “We cannot

have productive talks in an atmosphere

where the cities are being shelled and

where the demilitarized zone is being

abused.” See Public Papers of the

Presidents, Johnson, 1968–69, II, p 1101.

339

Notes to pages 151–156

114. Some of Johnson’s ambivalence

during this period is reflected in Walt

Rostow’s memos to the President (LBJ

Lib, National Security File). See esp Oct

29, 12:40 am, vol 102, #59. See also the

chronology of the decision’s development

in the draft “Briefing Paper” of Oct 30,

vol 102, #26a, and the notes for the 6:40

pm NSC meeting on Oct 31 in the

Meeting Notes File, Box 3, #69.

115. Memo of Gen Momyer’s conversation with the President, Oct 23, 1968,

LBJ Lib, National Security File, Memos

to Pres, vol 101, #66a. See also notes of

meeting, Oct 14, 1968, 9:40 am, LBJ Lib,

Meeting Notes File, Box 3, #68a.

Chapter 6

1. Defense Intelligence Digest, Sep

1968 (pp 17–18), Nov 1968 (pp 7–9),

May 1969 (p1), Nov 1969 (pp 4–9), Sep

1970 (p 13), Oct 1970 (p 13).

2. CIA Intelligence Information

Cable, DB-315/03896-68, Oct 25, 1968,

LBJ Lib, National Security File, Memos

to Pres, W. Rostow, vol 101, #35a; CIA

Special Report, “Sino-Vietnamese

Relations Over the Last Two Years,”

SC00791/69A, Dec 19, 1969; Defense

Intelligence Digest, Oct 1968 (pp 5–7),

Apr 1969 (pp 9–11).

3. Defense Intelligence Digest, Aug

1968 (pp 15–17), Dec 1970 (pp 26–28).

4. Msg, Maclehose (Hanoi) to

Foreign Office (London), Jun 27, 1968,

LBJ Lib, National Security File, Memos

to Pres, W. Rostow, vol 86, #17a; CIA

Intelligence Information Cable, DB314/10635-68, Jul 2, 1968, LBJ Lib,

National Security File, Country File,

Vietnam, box 84, 3H(3), #2; CIA/DIA,

Appraisal of Bombing, Jul–Oct 1968;

William S. Turley, “Urbanization in War:

Hanoi, 1946–1973,” Pacific Affairs, Fall

1975, pp 370–97; Nigel Thrift and Dean

Forbes, The Price of War: Urbanization in

Vietnam, 1954–1985 (London, 1986).

5. Msg, Stewart (Hanoi) to Foreign

Office (London), Sep 12, 1968, LBJ Lib,

National Security File, Country File,

Vietnam, Box 85, 3K(2), #5.

6. Msg, W. Rostow to President,

CAP82407, 191912Z Sep 68, LBJ Lib,

National Security File, Memos to Pres, W.

Rostow, vol 95, #83.

7. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Dec 1969; OASD

Comptroller, Southeast Asia Statistical

Summary, Table 321, Oct 1973.

8. HQ PACAF, Intelligence Index of

USAF Personnel MIA/PW Southeast Asia,

1974; AFMPC, “Summary of Casualties

Due to Hostile Action in Southeast Asia,”

Nov 1968; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Nov 1968; Hist, 432

TRW, Oct–Dec 1968; W. Rostow to

President, Nov 15, 1968, LBJ Lib,

National Security Files, Country File,

Vietnam, box 138, Bombing Halt Memos,

vol 6, #8.

9. Ibid.; Summary notes, 594th NSC

Meeting, Nov 25, 1968, LBJ Lib, National

Security File, NSC Meetings, vol 5, tab

76.

10. Memo, W. Rostow to President,

Nov 14, 1968, LBJ Lib, National Security

File, Memos to Pres, W. Rostow, vol 105,

#4; PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations

in SEA,” Dec 1968.

11. Nixon’s version of these events is

in his RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

(New York, 1978) and in his Six Crises
(New York, 1962). Recent scholarship has

tended to confirm Nixon’s view that Hiss

was a communist spy. See Allen

Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers

Case (New York, 1978) and Stephen E.

Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a

Politician, 1913–1962 (New York, 1987).

12. Nixon, RN, Warner paperback

edition, I, 150–53.

13. Ibid., p 187.

14. See above chap XVII. See also

Nixon, RN, I, 357; Dwight D. Eisenhower,

The White House Years: Mandate for

Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY,

1963). Some scholars have been skeptical

about the importance of Eisenhower’s

nuclear threat in ending the Korean War;

see Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy

During the Korean War,” and Rosemary J.

Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending

of the Korean Conflict,” both in

International Security, winter 1988/89.

15. Richard M. Nixon, article,

Foreign Affairs, Oct 1967.

16. The Soviet proposal to engage in

nuclear strikes against China was revealed

to the public by H.R. Haldeman, The Ends

of Power (New York, 1978), Dell paperback edition, p 129.

17. Kraslow and Loory, Secret

Search, pp 221–24; see above, chap 3.

18. Henry Kissinger, White House

Years (Boston, 1979), pp 9–10; Nixon,

RN, I, pp 421–22.

19. Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear

Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York,

1957).

20. Ibid., p 418.

21. Ibid.

22. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

230–35.

23. Nixon, RN, I, pp 399–401;

Kissinger, White House Years, p 10.

24. Henry A. Kissinger, “The Viet

Nam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs, Jan

1969, p 224.

25. Ibid., p 233.

26. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

24–38.

27. Ibid.

28. Intrvw, Lt Col Lyn R. Officer and

Hugh N. Ahman, AFHRA, with Dr.

340

Notes to pages 156–163

Robert C. Seamans, Jr., Sep 1973–Mar

1974, AFHRA 1005183. For Ryan’s problems with Congress, see intrvw, Lt Col

Arthur M. McCants, Jr., and James C.

Hasdorff, AFHRA, with Gen John W.

Vogt, Annapolis, Aug 8–9, 1978.

Seamans’ Undersecretary and successor as

Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. John L.

McLucas, noted years later that Ryan was

“quite nervous when we talked at lunch

(we had lunch together frequently for

business purposes). I would often notice

that the whole table was shaking from his

legs doing a fast motion beneath.” See

intrvw, Dr. George Watson, AFHSO, with

McLucas, Apr–May 1996, AFHSO

K239.0512-2157.

29. Edgar F. Puryear, Jr., George S.

Brown, General, U.S. Air Force: Destined

for Stars (Novato, Calif, 1983), pp

186–87.

30. Ibid., p 173. See also Bishop

intrvw.

31. Puryear, Brown, p 176.

32. Intrvw, Maj Richard B. Clement

and Capt Ralph G. Swenston, AFHRA,

with Gen George S. Brown, Oct 19–20,

1970, AFHRA 904349.

33. Ibid.

34. OASD Comptroller, Southeast

Asia Statistical Summary, Table 351, Apr

18, 1973.

35. Ltr, Gen George S. Brown to Lt

Gen Glen W. Martin, DCS/Plans and

Operations, HQ USAF, Feb 15, 1969.

36. Memo, Col D.P. McAuliffe,

Executive to Chairman JCS, subj: Debrief

by Gen George S. Brown on his Meeting

with the President, Feb 7, 1969.

37. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

235–41; Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of

Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White

House (New York, 1983), pp 48–50.

38. NSSM-1 and responses,

Congressional Record, CXVIII, pt 13,

May 10, 1972; see also Washington Post,

Apr 25, 1972.

39. Ibid.

40. Transcript, President’s news conf,

Mar 4, 1969, Public Papers of the

Presidents, Richard Nixon, 1969

(Washington, 1971), p 183.
41. Ibid., pp 185–86. See also JCS

Hist, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp 47–48.

42. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp

42–47.

43. Memo, Brown to Abrams, subj:

Hanoi’s Shift in Strategy, Mar 17, 1969.

44. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp

218–22; Kissinger, White House Years, pp

239–54; Nixon, RN, I, pp 471–72.

45. New York Times, Mar 26, Apr 27,

and May 9, 1969. See also Washington

Post, Apr 27 and May 18, 1969.

46. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

252–53.

47. Intrvw, James C. Hasdorff, USAF

hist prog, with Lt Gen Robert E. Pursley,

Stamford, Conn, Sep 16, 1983; Hersh,

Price of Power, pp 90–91.

48. News conf transcripts, Melvin

Laird, Saigon, Mar 10 and Aug 21, 1969,

in SAFAA, Selected Statements on

Vietnam; New York Times, Mar 8, 1969.

49. Nixon, RN, I, 476. See also

Kissinger, White House Years, pp 313–21.

50. Samuel Zaffiri, Hamburger Hill

(Novato, Calif, 1988).

51. Nixon, RN, I, 487.

52. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

277–78, 304.

53. Nixon, RN, I, 532.

54. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Nixon, 1969, pp 544–56.

55. Kissinger, White House Years, p

280; Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le

Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris

(Hanoi, 1996), pp 97–104.

56. Kissinger, White House Years, p

283.

57. John E. Woodruf, “Thieu Expects

Power Fight Among Ho’s Successors,”

Baltimore Sun, Sep 4, 1969, p 1.

58. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

284–85. See also Tom Wells, The War

Within (Berkeley, Calif, 1994), pp 355–79.

59. Hersh, Price of Power, pp

120–29.

60. Nixon, RN, I, 495.

61. Kissinger, White House Years, p

304.

62. Nixon, RN, I, 494.

63. Hist, SAC, FY 1970, Historical

Study 117, I, 151.

341

Notes to pages 163–170

64. Ibid., pp 153–56.

65. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

304–5.

66. Gallup poll of Oct. 12, 1969,

based on data gathered Oct. 2–7, 1969.

67. Quoted by Eric Pace, “Hanoi

Calls Moratorium ‘Timely Rebuff’ to

Nixon,” New York Times, Oct 15, 1969, p

16.

68. Nixon, RN, I, 496.

69. Kissinger, White House Years, p

285.

70. Nixon, RN, I, 500–501.

71. Nixon, RN, I, 503.

72. Ibid., pp 503–4. See also

Kissinger, White House Years, p 305.

73. “Address to the Nation on the

War in Vietnam,” Nov 3, 1969, Public

Papers of the the Presidents, Nixon, 1969,

p 902. Nixon also said that the communists had executed 50,000 when they took

over North Vietnam in the 1950s. This is

the figure given by Fall in The Two VietNams, p 156, but it has been questioned

by Gareth Porter and Edwin E. Moise. In

Land Reform in China and North Vietnam

(Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), p 222, Moise

estimates 5000.

74. “Address to the Nation on the

War in Vietnam,” Nov 3, 1969, Public

Papers of the Presidents, Nixon, 1969, p

907.

75. “Address to the Nation on the

War in Vietnam,” Nov 3, 1969, Public

Papers of the Presidents, Nixon, 1969, p

909.

76. Gallup poll released Nov 4, 1969.

77. Gallup poll, Nov 23, 1969, based

on data gathered Nov 12–17, 1969.

78. Quoted by John D. Carroll,

“Nixon Thanks Congressmen,” Baltimore

Sun, Nov 14, 1969, p 1.

79. Twenty years later the crowd on

Nov 15, 1969, was still considered to be

the largest demonstration ever held in

Washington. By then the National Park

service had revised its estimate of the size

of that crowd upward to 600,000. See

Karlyn Barker, “Size of Abortion-Rights

March Disputed,” Washington Post, Apr

11, 1989, p B1.

80. Quoted by Stanley Karnow,
“Hanoi Praises Protests Against War in the

U.S.,” Washington Post, Nov 14, 1969, p

16. See also New York Times, Nov 13,

1969, and William Meyers, “November in

Hanoi,” The Nation, Dec 8, 1969.

81. Hist, SAC, FY 1970, Hist Study

117, I, pp 192–95.

82. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, p

347; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Dec 1969, sec 5, p 8.

83. Hist, 355 TFWg, Jan–Mar 1970;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” Jan 1970, sec 5, pt A, p 1.

84. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jan 1970, sec 5, pt A,

p 6.

85. Maj Jack Cremin, Aug 8, 1979,

quoted by Puryear, Brown, p 172. See also

Capt Paul W. Elder and Capt Peter J.

Melly, “Rules of Engagement, Nov

1969–Sep 1972,” CHECO rpt, Mar 1973.

86. PACAF, Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Feb 1970, sec 1, pp

1–2; hist, 8th TFWg, Jan–Mar 1970.

87. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp

349–51.

88. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp

230–57. For a harshly critical view of

Nixon administration policies and actions

regarding Cambodia, see William

Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon,

and the Destruction of Cambodia (New

342

Notes to pages 170–177

York, 1979).

89. Kissinger, White House Years, p

498.

90. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, p

354. The loss of the F–4 was reported in

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” May 1970, sec 5, pt A, p 1; in all

other respects this report was silent about

the early May raids into North Vietnam.

91. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, p 1969–70, p

354.

92. PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” May 1970, sec 1, pt A, p 1.

93. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

499–501.

94. Elizabeth H. Hartsook, “The Air

Force in Southeast Asia: The Role of Air

Power Grows, 1970,” Office of Air Force

History, Sep 1972, p 18.

95. Vice President Agnew, intrvw on

CBS Face the Nation, May 3, 1970, quoted in Secretary of the Air Force, Public

Affairs, “Selected Statements on

Vietnam,” Jan–Jun 1970.

96. Daniel Z. Henkin, Assistant

Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs, May

4, 1970, quoted in Secretary of the Air

Force, Public Affairs, “Selected

Statements on Vietnam,” Jul–Dec 1970.

97. Gallup Poll, Jun 4, 1970, survey

807-K, question 11, index 61, intrvws

May 21–26, 1970.

Chapter 7

1. Marie Smith, “Support for the

Captives’ Families,” Washington Post,

May 2, 1970, p 4.

2. “Summary of Efforts to Date on

Behalf of PW/MIA,” 1972, AFHRA

K143.430-13; “Operation Homecoming

from Inception to Implementation,

1964–1973,” AFHRA 1015703; staff summary sheet and attachments, Lt Col

Kloberdanz, HQ USAF/XPPGS, subj:

Correspondence to Mrs. Rita E. Hauser

[UN], Mar 11, 1970, John D. Ryan papers,

AFHRA 1024030.

3. Jim Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale,

In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s

Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam

Years (New York, 1984), pp 372–76.

4. Robert and Elizabeth Dole with

Richard Norton Smith, Doles: Unlimited

Partners (New York, 1988); histories, 23

TFW, Jan 1966–Dec 1970.

5. Minutes, Interagency Prisoner of

War Intelligence Ad Hoc Committee, esp

1970 mtgs, AFHRA 1018954-14.

6. “MiG Sweep,” newsletter of the

Red River Valley Fighter Pilots

Association, Jul 1969.

7. Gardner Hatch and Patti Sheridan,

eds, Red River Valley Fighter Pilots

(Paducah, Kentucky, 1989), pp 27–28.

8. Ltr with numerous attachments,

Amarjit Singh Vasir, Bangkok, to author,
Dec 18, 1987; intrvw, author with Amarjit

Singh Vasir, Pattaya, Thailand, Nov 7,

1987.

9. Some pilots did think that many

prisoners were second-rate pilots. See

Zalin Grant, Over the Beach (New York,

1986), p 288, who quotes a Navy pilot:

“But a sizable portion of the POWs were

fuckups. They got shot down either

because of their fear or out of stupidity.”

There was a widespread conviction that

increased pilot experience would increase

effectiveness and reduce losses. The major

study of this relationship during the

Vietnam War looked only at air-to-air

combat, where despite a relatively small

number of engagements, a correlation was

found. See Tactical Fighter Weapons

Center, Red Baron III, vol III, pt 1, pp

127–53.

10. New York Times, Jun 5, 1970, p 8.

11. Ibid.; Arthur Scheer, “H. Ross

Perot,” in Eleanor W. Schoenebaum, ed,

Profiles of an Era: The Nixon/Ford Years

(New York, 1979), pp 493–94.

12. Goodman, Lost Peace, pp

78–122; Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied:

The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris

Agreement (Bloomington, Indian, 1975),

pp 79–101.

13. John P. Wallach, “Bombing

Cutback Offer Linked to POW Release,”

Baltimore News American, Oct 14, 1969,

p 1.

14. Richard Nixon, “Statement on

Appointing Frank Borman as Special

Representative on Prisoners of War,”

Public Papers of the Presidents, 1970

(Washington, 1971), pp 649–50; RN, pp

448 and 531. See also Henry Kissinger

memo for Secretaries of State and

Defense, Jan 22, 1970, AFHRA 1018954-

6; minutes, DOD POW Policy Committee,

Mar 9, 1970, AFHRA 1018954-6; minutes, Interagency POW Intelligence Ad

Hoc Committee, Aug 7, 1970, AFHRA

1018954-14.

15. Guenter Lewy, America in

Vietnam, pp 297–99.

16. Gloria Emerson, Winners and

Losers (New York, 1976), pp 342–50;

Life, Jul 17, 1970, pp 26–29.

343

Notes to pages 177–181

17. The complete text of Borman’s

speech was given wide distribution by the

State Department both in the Department

of State Bulletin, Oct 12, 1970, and as a

pamphlet entitled “U.S. Prisoners of War

in Southeast Asia.” See also State

Department messages relating to

Borman’s trip in AFHRA 1018953–16.

18. Article 85, Geneva Convention

Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of

War, 1949.

19. North Vietnam’s reservation to

Article 85 is quoted in Richard A. Falk,

ed, The Vietnam War and International

Law, III (Princeton, 1972), p 895.

20. Against the Crime of Silence:

Proceedings of the Russell International

War Crimes Tribunal (New York, 1968).

21. Bernard B. Fall, Street Without

Joy, 4th ed (New York, 1967), pp

295–311.

22. Albert D. Biderman, March to

Calumny (New York, 1963); William

Lindsay White, The Captives of Korea

(New York, 1957).

23. Ibid. See Stuart I. Rochester and

Frederick Kiley, Honor Bound: The

History of American Prisoners of War in

Southeast Asia, 1961–1973 (Washington,

1998) and John G. Hubbell, P.O.W. (New

York, 1976), for surveys of the American

prison experience in North Vietnam. More

than thirty Air Force officers who had

been prisoners surveyed their own experience in reports prepared at the Air War

College in 1974. See esp Armand J.

Myers, et al., “Vietnam POW Camp

Histories and Studies, vol I,” Air War

College, 1974, AFHRA 1033169, and

Hervey S. Stockman, “Authority,

Leadership, Organization and Discipline

Among US POWs in the Hanoi Prison

System,” Air War College, 1974, AFHRA

1033170. Prisoner John M. McGrath, a

Navy lieutenant commander, taught himself to draw; his drawings of various

methods of torture can be seen in his

Prisoner of War: Six Years in Hanoi

(Annapolis, 1975). Many of the prisoners

have published memoirs; these have been

discussed by Craig Howes, Voices of the

Vietnam POWs (New York, 1993) and
Elliott Gruner, Prisoners of Culture:

Representing the Vietnam POWs (New

Brunswick, New Jersey, 1993).

24. Intrvw, Capt Mark C. Cleary,

AFHRA, with Col Carlyle S. Harris,

Tupelo, Miss, Nov 16, 1982, AFHRA

K239.0512-1359.

25. Everett Alvarez, Jr., and Anthony

S. Pitch, Chained Eagle (New York,

1989), p 164. See also Henry James

Bedinger, “Prisoner-of-War Organization

in Hanoi,” MA thesis, San Diego State

University, 1976.

26. HQ USAF, SEA PW Analysis

Program Report 800-2, “Places and Dates

of Confinement of Air Force, Navy, and

Marine Corps Prisoners of War Held in

North Vietnam, 1964–73,” Jun 1975. On

the “Alcatraz Gang,” see Sam Johnson

and Jan Winebrenner, Captive Warriors

(College Station, Tex, 1992); an Air Force

F–4 pilot shot down in North Vietnam,

Johnson later became a Republican congressman from Texas.

27. Capt. Gerald Coffee (USN, Ret),

Beyond Survival: Building on Hard TimesA POW’s Inspiring Story (New York,

1990), pp 195–22.

28. Intrvw, Capt Mark C. Cleary,

AFHRA, with Brig Gen Robinson Risner,

Austin TX, Mar 1–2, 1983, AFHRA

K239.0512-1370; Risner, The Passing of

the Night: My Seven Years as a Prisoner

of the North Vietnamese (New York,

1973); Gen T. R. Milton, “Robinson

Risner: The Indispensable Ingredient,” in

John L. Frisbee, ed, Makers of the United

States Air Force (Washington, 1987), pp

307–27; Col Jon B. Reynolds, “The Eagle

in the Hilton,” Air Force Magazine, Feb

1983, pp 82–85. As the years in captivity

lengthened and newer, younger prisoners

sometimes outranked older prisoners, the

practice of turning to the senior ranking

officer in any group for leadership was not

always practical; see, for example, Pollard

intrvw, May 11, 1992.

29. The four full colonels were John

P. Flynn, David W. Winn, Norman C.

Gaddis, and James E. Bean. New prisoners informed the old-timers that subsequent to capture, Risner had been promot344

Notes to pages 181–185

ed to colonel and Stockdale to Navy captain. But since the prisoners’ knowledge

of promotion after capture was necessarily

incomplete, they determined the identity

of the senior ranking officer based on rank

at the time of capture. See Col Larry

Guarino, A POW’s Story: 2801 Days in

Hanoi (New York, 1990); Stockdale and

Stockdale, In Love and War; Jeremiah A.

Denton, Jr., with Ed Brandt, When Hell

Was in Session: a Personal Story of

Survival as a P.O.W. in North Vietnam

(New York, 1976); Richard “Pop” Keirn,

Old Glory is the Most Beautiful of All

(Pittsburgh, 1996); intrvw, Capt Mark C.

Cleary, AFHRA, with Brig Gen David W.

Winn, Colo Springs, Feb 8–9, 1983.

30. Keirn, Old Glory is the Most

Beautiful of All pp 7, 64.

31. Risner, Passing of the Night, p

31.

32. On German imprisonment of

American airmen in World War II, see

Arthur A. Durand, Stalag Luft III (Baton

Rouge, 1988). On Japanese prison camps,

see E. Bartlett Kerr, Surrender and

Survival: The Experience of American

POWs in the Pacific, 1941–1945 (New

York, 1985), and Stanley L. Falk, Bataan:

The March of Death (New York, 1962).

For a survey of the prisoner of war experience from the Hundred Years War to the

Vietnam War, see Richard Garrett, P.O.W.

(London, 1981).

33. Executive Order 10631, Aug 17,

1955.

34. Report of the Air Force Advisory

Committee on Prisoners of War, Nov

1963. After the Vietnam War, the wording

of the Code of Conduct’s Article V was

changed from “I am bound to give only

name, rank, service number, and date of

birth” to “I am required to give name,

rank, service number, and date of birth.”

The Code’s next sentence, “I will evade

answering further questions to the best of

my ability,” remained unchanged.

35. Suggested Training and

Education Guide for the Code of Conduct,

Aug 1955, sec 2d(3), in ibid., p 53.

36. Ibid., sec 3a, p 54.

37. Report of the Air force Advisory
Committee on Prisoners of War, Nov

1963, p 94.

38. Ibid., pp 27–28.

39. Ibid., pp 92–93.

40. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love

and War, pp 332–36; Denton, When Hell

Was in Session, pp 89–98; Scott Blakey,

Prisoner at War: The Survival of

Commander Richard A. Stratton (New

York, 1978), pp 113–37; Hubbell, P.O.W.,

pp 240–43, 265–69.

41. Hubbell, P.O.W., pp 183–99.

42. Daniel De Luce, “Hanoi Displays

Defenses Against U.S. Air Radio [sic],”

Philadelphia Bulletin, Mar 2, 1970;

Blesse, Check Six, pp 128–30.

43. Guarino, A POW’s Story, p 43;

Wilfred Burchett, At the Barricades: Forty

Years on the Cutting Edge of History

(New York, 1981); Robert Manne, Agent

of Influence: The Life and Times of

Wilfred Burchett (Toronto, 1989), esp pp

51–52.

44. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love

and War, pp 253–54.

45. HQ USAF, “The Special

Exploitation Program for Selected United

States Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia,

1967–1968,” Jun 1975, AFCHO K142.04-

31; Guarino, A POW’s Story, pp 426–28;

Alvarez, Chained Eagle, pp 186–87;

Hubbell, P.O.W., pp 320–48, 429–49.

46. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir

(New York, 1988), pp 175–241. See also

Staughton Lynd and Thomas Hayden, The

Other Side (New York, 1967) and Herbert

Aptheker, Mission to Hanoi (New York,

1966).

47. Maj. James B. Overton, “Enemy

Capture/Release of USAF Personnel in

SEA,” CHECO rpt, 1969; Daniel

Berrigan, Night Flight to Hanoi (New

York, 1968).

48. John McCain with Mark Salter,

Faith of My Fathers (New York, 1999), pp

189–204.

49. Col George E. Day, Return with

Honor (Mesa, Ariz., 1989); Maj Donald

K. Schneider, Air Force Heroes in

Vietnam (Maxwell AFB, Ala, 1979), pp

54–59.

50. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love

345

Notes to pages 185–191

and War, esp pp 207–13 and 456.

51. Overton, “Enemy

Capture/Release,” pp 43–79. See also

Corona Harvest intrvws with Maj Joe V.

Carpenter and Maj Fred N. Thompson,

Jun 1970, AFHRA K239.0512-283 and

K239.0512-284; Thompson and Carpenter,

“Facing Interrogation,” Corona Harvest

spec rpt #70-17, 1970. For an admiring

portrait of Kasler as a fighter ace in Korea

by a squadron mate and distinguished

novelist, see James Salter, Burning the

Days (New York, 1997), pp 146–56; Low

was an ace in the same squadron.

52. Hubbell, P.O.W., pp 252–87,

312–78, 506–8.

53. Memo for service secretaries

from G. Warren Nutter, Assistant

Secretary of Defense for International

Security Affairs, subj: DOD Policy on

Early Release of POWs by the Enemy, Jul

3, 1970, AFHRA 1018954-1. See also

Nutter memo of Nov 22, 1969, and

Charles W. Havens III memo of Dec 1,

1969, AFHRA 1018964-30; minutes of

DOD POW Policy Committee and

Subcommittee, esp Jan 29, 1970, and Mar

9, 1970, AFHRA 1018954-6; minutes of

the Air Staff E&E/POW Committee, esp

Mar 2, 1970, AFHRA 1018954-16.

54. Excerpt from the Code of

Conduct quoted by Lt Gen Maddox, Cmdr

ATC, ltr to HQ USAF, subj: DOD Policy

on Early Release of PW’s by the Enemy,

Aug 26, 1970, AFHRA 1018964-30.

55. Harry S. Ashmore and William

C. Baggs, Mission to Hanoi: A Chronicle

of Double-Dealing in High Places (New

York, 1968), pp 112–73. Twenty years

after the Vietnam War, former prisoners of

war continued to be vehement in their

opposition to early release; see, for example, intrvw, Dr. James C. Hasdorff, USAF

Academy, with Brig Gen Jon A. Reynolds,

USAF Ret, Apr 20, 1992.

56. Mary McCarthy, Hanoi (New

York, 1968), p 111.

57. Ibid., p 112.

58. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1969–70, pp

501–8.

59. Ibid.

60. Hist, JCS, Vietnam, 1971–72, pp
587–88. On negotiations to end the

Korean War, see U.S. Department of State,

Foreign Relations of the United States,

1952–54, vol XV.

61. Article III, Code of Conduct for

Members of the Armed Forces of the

United States, Executive Order 10631,

Aug 17, 1955.

62. Lt Col John A. Dramesi, USAF,

Code of Honor (New York, 1975), pp 105

and 196–97.

63. Schneider, Heroes, pp 54–61.

64. HQ USAF, “US Aircrew

Members Escape from Permanent

Detention Facilities in North Vietnam,”

Nov 1975, AFCHO K142.04-33, pp 5–12;

Hubbell, P.O.W., pp 355–60.

65. See note above; Dramesi, Code of

Honor, pp 85–119.

66. HQ USAF, “U.S. Aircrew

Members Escape from Permanent

Detention Facilities in North Vietnam,”

Nov 1975, AFCHO K142.04-33, pp

46–48; Guarino, A POW’s Story, pp

195–208, 283–301; Lt Col Jon A.

Reynolds, “Question of Honor,” Air

University Review, Mar–Apr 1977, pp

104–10; Dramesi, Code of Honor, pp

22–34.

67. The fullest published account of

the effort to extract prisoners from Son

Tay is Benjamin F. Schemmer, The Raid

(New York, 1976), which was based on

extensive interviews with participants. See

also Tilford, Search and Rescue in

Southeast Asia, pp 103–12.

68. Tran Van Don, Our Endless War

(San Rafael, Calif, 1978), pp 1, 16–17,

20–21.

69. Intrvw, Charles Hildreth and

William McQuillen, Air Force historians,

with Brig. Gen. Manor, Eglin AFB, Dec

31, 1970, AFHRA 239.0512-700; intrvw,

Hugh Ahmann, et al., Air Force historians,

with Manor, Jan–May 1988, AFHRA

K239.0512-1799; rpt, Manor, subj: Son

Tay prisoner of war rescue operation, Dec

18, 1970, AFHRA; hearing before the

Committee on Foreign Relations, senate,

Bombing Operations and the Prisoner-ofWar Rescue Mission in North Vietnam,

91st Cong, 2d sess (Washington, 1970);

346

Notes to pages 191–195

William R. Karsteter, “The Son Tay Raid,”

annex to hist, Aerospace Rescue and

Recovery Service, Jul 1970–Jun 1971; Jay

M. Strayer, “The Son Tay Raid: A

Personal Perspective,” Friends Journal

(Air Force Museum Foundation), fall

1995, pp 2–6 and 34.

70. Public Papers of the Presidents,

Nixon, 1970, pp 825–31; Manor intrvws;

Kissinger, White House Years, pp

699–701, 980–82; Hersh, Price of Power,

p 304; Schermer, pp 114–15; Lucien S.

Vandenbroucke, Perilous Options: Special

Operations as an Instrument of U.S.

Foreign Policy (New York, 1993), p 62.

71. Manor rpt; Manor intrvws;

intrvw, Col Robert L. Gleason and Maj

Richard B. Clement with Lt Col Keith R.

Grimes, 1970, AFHRA K239.0512-478;

intrvw, John F. Fuller, Air Force historian,

with Lt Col Grimes, Apr 19, 1974,

AFHRA K239.0512-1565; John F. Fuller,

Thor’s Legions: Weather Support to the

U.S. Air Force and Army, 1937–1987

(Boston, 1990), pp 310–12.

72. Manor rpt.

73. Ibid.; Schemmer, The Raid, pp

168–71; intrvw, Lt Col V.H. Gallagher and

Maj Lyn R. Officer, Air Force historians,

with Col Royal A. Brown, Feb 9, 1973,

AFHRA K239.0512-657.

74. Kissinger, White House Years, p

982.

75. Schemmer, The Raid, p 148. But

Palmer, “U.S. Intelligence and Vietnam,”

p 84, found no evidence to support

Schemmer’s contention that Laird told

Nixon.

76. Hearing before the Committee on

Foreign Relations, Senate, Bombing Operations and the Prisoner-of-War Rescue

Mission in North Vietnam, 91st Cong, 2d

sess (Washington, 1970), pp 7, 9 and 22.

77. William Beecher, “U.S. Rescue

Force Landed 23 Miles from Hanoi,” New

York Times, Nov 24, 1970, p 1; George C.

Wilson, “Helicopter Force Hits Camp Near

Hanoi,” Washington Post, Nov 24, 1970, p

1; Charles W. Cordry, “Helcopter Force

Finds Camp West of Hanoi Vacated,”

Baltimore Sun, Nov 24, 1970, p 1.

78. Michael Getler, “U.S. Admits It
Hit Bases Near Sontay,” Washington Post,

Nov 28, 1970, p 1; William Chapman,

“The Sontay Story: Action Heavier, Scope

Greater Than At First Indicated,”

Washington Post, Nov 29, 1970.

79. William Beecher, “Laird Says

Raids Struck at Missile and Gun Sites,”

New York Times, Nov 22, 1970, p 1; Peter

Braestrup, “Air Raids Limited, U.S. Says,”

Washington Post, Nov 23, 1970, p 1.

80. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Nov 1970.

81. Msg, McCain to Moorer, subj:

SAM sites in RP-1 and Freedom Bait,

230320Z Nov 70, AFHRA CHECO

microfilm roll T94.

82. Ltr, Col Irby B. Jarvis, Cmdr 388

TFW to 7 AF/DO, with att rpt, undated,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll T96.

83. Ltr, Col H. E. Hayes, Dep Cmdr

for Ops, 432 TRW to 7 AF/DO, undated,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll T96.

84. Ltr, Col Daniel C. Perry, Cmdr,

366 TFW to 7 AF/DO, Nov 24, 1970;

msg, hand carried, 8 TFW to 7 AF,

241130Z Nov 1970; both in AFHRA

347

Notes to pages 195–200

CHECO microfilm roll T96.

85. Ltr, Col H. E. Hayes, Dep Cmdr

for Ops, 432 TRW to 7 AF/DO, undated,

AFHRA CHECO microfilm roll T96.

86. Guarino, A POW’s Story, pp

270–301; Hubbell, P.O.W., pp 536–53;

Johnson and Winebrenner, Captive

Warriors, pp 230–53.

87. HQ USAF, “Places and Dates of

Confinement of Air Force, Navy, and

Marine Corps Prisoners of War Held in

North Vietnam, 1964–73,” Jun 1975,

AFCHO K142.04-13.

88. Hearing before the Committee on

Foreign Relations, Senate, Bombing

Operations and the Prisoner-of-War

Rescue Mission in North Vietnam, 91st

Cong, 2d sess (Washington, 1970), pp

1–2, 25, and 47; Schemmer, The Raid, pp

135 and 193.

89. Valerie Kushner quoted by

George Lardner, Jr., “POW Families

Praise Rescue Attempt,” Washington Post,

Nov 25, 1970.

90. Mrs. Howard J. Hill quoted by

Lardner.

Chapter 8

1. Intrvw, Wayne Thompson with Lt

Gen John P. Flynn, USAF Ret, on flight

from Randolph AFB, TX, to Andrews

AFB, MD, Jun 25, 1981.

2. Intrvw, Lt Col John N. Dick, Jr.,

AFHRA, with Gen Lavelle, McLean VA,

17–24 Apr 78, AFHRA K239.0512-1036.

See also intrvw, Maj Scott S. Thompson,

AFHRA, with Gen Nazzaro, Tucson AZ,

Feb 3–6, 1980, AFHRA K239.0512-1189.

3. Lavelle intrvw.

4. Ibid.

5. See Bernard Nalty’s manuscript on

the air war in southern Laos at the Air

Force History Support Office, Bolling

AFB. See also Van Staaveren, Interdiction

in Southern Laos.

6. Ryan intrvw, May 15–19, 1979;

Lavelle intrvw.

7. Lavelle intrvw. In his 1979 intrvw,

almost a decade after the fact, Gen Ryan

said he did not remember anything about

discussing the C–5 with Lavelle. In 1990

the author corresponded with a number of

people who had been involved with C–5

matters in 1970. Former Secretary of the

Air Force Seamans recalled that there had

been a proposal for the Air Force to take

charge of the Lockheed plant and that he

had talked to Lavelle about it, but

Seamans doubted that Ryan had favored

the idea. Former Undersecretary McLucas

thought that Lavelle’s account rang true

but could not remember the details. Lt.

Gen. Harry Goldsworthy, USAF Ret,

wrote that he had briefed a proposal to

Ryan to force Lockheed into bankruptcy

(with greater Air Force participation in

plant operations) but that Ryan had shown

little interest. Lt. Gen. Otto Glasser,

USAF Ret, suspected that Lavelle fabricated his recollection out of bitterness

toward Ryan. Maj. Gen. Otis Moore,

USAF Ret, who was Ryan’s executive
officer at the time and later Lavelle’s

chief of staff in Vietnam, recalled that

Lavelle was in trouble with Ryan over

something in 1970.

8. Lavelle intrvw.

9. Lavelle intrvw.

10. Defense Intelligence Digest, Jan

1972, p 38.

11. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Oct 1971–Mar 1972.

12. The best introductions to the

Lavelle affair are: Col Gordon A.

Ginsburg, “The Lavelle Case: Crisis in

Integrity,” Air War College, Apr 1974;

Col James R. Olson, “Preplanned

Protective Reaction Strikes: A Case Study

on Integrity,” Air War College, Apr 1974;

George C. Wilson, “The Lavelle Case,”

The Atlantic, Dec 1972, pp 6–27.

13. The Feb and Mar 1971 strikes

were called Louisville Slugger and

Fracture Cross Alpha. See the msg traffic

for those operations in CHECO microfilm

rolls T114 and T115, AFHRA.

14. Lavelle intrvw, pp 603–12;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” Sep 1971, p 4-A-4 and p 4-1. See

also msg traffic on Operation Prize Bull in

CHECO microfilm rolls T110 and T125,

AFHRA.

15. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1037–38.

16. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1042–43.

17. See msg traffic on Operation

Proud Deep Alpha in CHECO microfilm

rolls T110, T125 and S589, AFHRA.

18. Melvin F. Porter, “Proud Deep

Alpha,” CHECO rpt, 1972, p 50.

19. Porter, “Proud Deep Alpha,” pp

32–39.

20. Haldeman, Haldeman Diaries,

Apr 23, 1970; Mar 30, Jun 2, and Jun 23,

1971; Jan 8, Jan 17, and Feb 5, 1972.

21. Hist, Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Vietnam, 1971–73, pt I, pp 254–96; Elder

and Melly, “Rules of Engagement”; Lt

Gen Phillip B. Davidson (USA, Ret),

Vietnam at War (Novato, Clif, 1988), pp

669–70.

22. Msg, Adm Moorer to CINCPAC,

241609Z Jul 71, quoted in HQ MACV

348

Notes to pages 200–206

memo on protective reaction authority,

Mar 18, 1972, CHECO microfilm roll

T137, AFHRA.

23. Msg, COMUSMACV, 010940Z

Aug 71, quoted in HQ MACV memo on

protective reaction authorities, Mar 18,

1972, CHECO microfilm roll T137,

AFHRA. See also msg, CINCPAC to

MACV, 251345Z Jul 71, quoted in same

source.

24. Lavelle presented his rationale

extensively and repeatedly in hearings

before the House and Senate committees

on armed services. See Hearing before the

Armed Services Investigating

Subcommittee of the Committee on

Armed Services, House of

Representatives, Unauthorized Bombing of

Military Targets in North Vietnam, 92d

Cong, 2d sess (Washington, 1972);

Hearings before the Committee on Armed

Services, Senate, Nomination of John D.

Lavelle, General Creighton W. Abrams,

and Admiral John S. McCain, 92d Cong,

2d sess (Washington, 1972).

25. Lavelle intrvw; Moorer testimony, Senate Lavelle hearings, pp 442–59.

See also HQ MACV memo on protective

reaction authority, Mar 18, 1972, CHECO

microfilm roll T137, AFHRA.

26. Lavelle intrvw; Moorer testimony, Senate Lavelle hearings, pp 442–46;

Ryan testimony, pp 263–64; Gabriel testimony, pp 205–8; PACAF, “Summary of

Air Operations in SEA,” Nov 1971.

27. President’s news conf, Dec 10,

1970, Public Papers of the Presidents,

Nixon, 1970, p 1101.

28. Msg, JCS to COMUSMACV,

101716Z Apr 71, quoted in HQ MACV

memo on protective reaction authorities,

Mar 18, 1972, CHECO microfilm roll

T137, AFHRA.

29. Lavelle intrvw.

30. Lavelle intrvw; Moorer testimony, Senate Lavelle hearings, pp 446–47.

See also msgs, CINCPAC to MACV,

050410Z Dec 71, and JCS to MACV,

222208Z Nov 71, both quoted in HQ

MACV memo on protective reaction

authorities, Mar 18, 1972, CHECO microfilm roll T137, AFHRA.
31. Lavelle did not introduce this

matter in the 1972 hearings but only in his

1978 intrvw (after Meyer’s death). See

also PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations

in SEA,” Dec 1971.

32. Lavelle intrvw; Maj Gen Alton

D. Slay testimony, Senate Lavelle hearings, pp 292–95. The two versions differ.

Slay said that the raid occurred while

Lavelle was still in Washington and was

approved by Abrams; and that the raid

failed to knock out the radar. 7 AF and

PACAF records appear to confirm

Lavelle’s claim that he had returned and

that the radar was out of commission for

almost three weeks. The after action msg

on the raid by the 388 TFW, 051215Z Jan

72, is quoted in HQ MACV memo on protective reaction authorities, Mar 18, 1972,

CHECO microfilm roll T137, AFHRA, as

is the JCS response: 051658Z Jan 72 and

072347Z Jan 72.

33. Lavelle testimony, Senate Lavelle

hearings, p 7; Slay testimony, Senate

Lavelle hearings, p 299; Lavelle intrvw.

34. Gabriel testimony, Senate Lavelle

hearings, pp 197–225; Capt Douglas J.

Murray testimony, pp 225–39; Sgt Lonnie

Douglas Franks testimony, pp 156–95.

35. See Lavelle, Gabriel, and Slay

testimonies in Senate Lavelle hearings.

36. See note above.

37. The Franks letter to Senator

Hughes was passed to the Secretary of the

Air Force by Senator Symington in a letter

of Mar 6, 1972. See also Lt Gen Louis L.

Wilson, Jr, “Report of Investigation Concerning Alleged Falsification of Classified

Reports for Missions in North Vietnam,”

Mar 20, 1972, with supporting intrvw summaries, Lavelle IG collection, Air Force

History Support Office; intrvw, Lt Col

Arthur W. McCants, Jr, with Gen Louis L.

Wilson, Jr, Tucson, Ariz, Nov 7–8, 1979;

Franks testimony, Senate Lavelle hearings,

pp 156–95; Daniel St. Albin Greene, “The

Sergeant Who Shook Up the Brass,”

National Observer, Sep 23, 1972.

38. On Col Broughton and the

Tukestan incident, see chap 2. In Lavelle’s

case the possibility of court martial lingered for some time. In June 1972, Lt.

349

Notes to pages 206–209

Delbert R. Terrill, Jr., filed charges against

Lavelle on behalf of the Concerned

Officers Movement, a group opposed to

continuing the war in SEA. Terrill, an Air

Force Academy graduate working on the

Air Reservist magazine at Bolling AFB in

Washington, was also featured on a television interview program about his charges.

In the fall, Sgt Franks, who had raised the

original alarm about false reporting, also

filed formal charges. The Secretary of the

Air Force held to his original decision not

to court martial Lavelle. A transcript of

the Terrill interview on WTOP’s

“Newsmakers” program of Jul 2, 1972, is

in the Lavelle IG file, Air Force History

Support Office.

39. Seamans intrvw; Laird, memo for

Chairman JCS, subj: Command of Air

Elements in Southeast Asia, Mar 30, 1972;

memo, Lavelle to Ryan, subj: Retirement,

Mar 31, 1972; Lt Gen Robert J. Dixon

(Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel), memo

to Gen Ryan with attached chronology of

Lavelle affair, May 26, 1972. All three

memos and the chronology are in the Air

Force IG Lavelle files, Air Force History

Support Office. The Dixon chronology

indicates that Ryan briefed Moorer about

the IG report on Mar 23, 1972, before

recalling Lavelle. After Ryan told Lavelle

on Mar 26 that Ryan intended to relieve

him of his command, Laird asked Ryan to

withhold action for a few days. While

Laird did approve Lavelle’s relief on Mar

30, Lavelle requested retirement on Mar

31 and was still offficially commander of

7 AF when he retired on Apr 7.

40. On Lavelle’s medical problems,

see Maj Gen Thomas H. Crouch’s

“Resume of Events Leading to the

Medical Evaluation and Retirement for

Physical Disability of Gen J.D. Lavelle,”

no date (1972), Lavelle IG Files, Air

Force History Support Office. Maj Gen

John Giraudo, who was director of Air

Force legislative liaison in 1972, later

recalled being present when Ryan asked

for Lavelle’s retirement as a two-star at

Andrews Air Force Base just after Lavelle

got off the plane from SEA; see Giraudo

intrvw. Lavelle’s own recollection was
that from the outset Ryan said he would

support Lavelle’s advancement on the

retired list to three stars (but not four); see

the Lavelle intrvw.

41. On the 1967 hearings, see chap 3.

42. Report of the Armed Services

Investigating Subcommittee of the

Committee on Armed Services, House of

Representatives, Unauthorized Bombing of

Military Targets in North Vietnam, 92d

350

Notes to pages 209–224

Congr, 2d sess (Washington, 1972); Senate

Lavelle hearings.

43. Lavelle testimony, Senate Lavelle

hearings, pp 16–17, 59–60; Ryan testimony, pp 263–65; Moorer testimony, pp

444–49.

44. Correspondence relating to

Senator Hughes’ requests for information,

in AF/IG files on Lavelle case, Air Force

History Support Office.

Chapter 9

1. USAF Statistical Digest, FY 1973,

p 86; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jan 1973, p 4-A-7;

Maj Donald L. Ockerman, “An Analysis

of Laser Guided Bombs in SEA,” Air

Operations Report 73/4, HQ 7 AF,

Thailand, Jun 28, 1973, AFHRA

K740.041-4, pp ii, 9, 36–46.

2. Hist, USMACV, Jan 1972–Mar

1973, annexes J, K, and L.

3. Msg, Moorer to McCain and

Abrams, 040006Z Apr 72, PACAF Source

Documents for Corona Harvest V, vol I,

Tab 14, AFHRA 717.03-221.

4. Kissinger, White House Years, p

1098.

5. Hersh, Price of Power, p 506, citing a White House tape recording made

public during the Nixon impeachment proceedings.

6. Ibid.

7. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978;

Seamans intrvw. Secretary of the Air

Force Seamans discussed the Nixon meeting with Vogt shortly after it occurred.

8. Haldeman Diaries, Apr 6, 1972.

9. Haldeman Diaries, Apr 6, 1972;

Kissinger, White House Years, p 1111;

Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General

Creighton Abrams and the Army of His

Times (New York, 1992), pp 312–16.

10. Kissinger, White House Years, p

1112.

11. Intrvw, John T. Mason Jr., U.S.

Naval Institute, with Adm Thomas

Moorer, Washington DC, 1975–81; memo,

Secretary Seamans to Secretary Laird,

subj: Southeast Asia Air Operations, Apr

24, 1972, Seamans papers, Air Force

History Support Office. See also Seamans’

autobiography, Aiming at Targets

(Washington, 1996), esp pp 194–96. For

an example of a backchannel message

from Kissinger to Bunker, see Kissinger,

White House Years, p 1181. The author is

indebted to Graham Cosmas of the Army

Center of Military History for insight into

Bunker’s role.

12. Moorer intrvw; Hersh, Price of

Power, pp 465–79; Gen Alexander M.

Haig, Jr., with Charles McCarry, Inner

Circles, p 245; Walter Isaacson, Kissinger

(New York, 1992), pp 380–85.

13. Pursley intrvw; Haig, Inner

Circles.

14. Haig, Inner Circles, p 206.

15. Pursley intrvw. See also Hersh,

Price of Power, pp 576–77.

16. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” esp Mar 1968, Jan

1972 and Jul 1972.

17. Histories of 8 TFW, 49 TFW, 366

TFW, 388 TFW and 432 TRW.

18. A detailed summary of carrier

deployments is in Rene J. Francillon,

Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club (Annapolis, 1988),

esp pp 83–86. On the “Rose Garden,” see

Maj Charles Melson and Lt Col Curtis

Arnold, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The War

that Would Not End, 1971–1973

(Washington, 1991), pp 153–73.

19. Charles K. Hopkins, “SAC

Bomber Operations in the Southeast Asia

War,” HQ SAC, 1983, pp 657–755.

20. Gen Louis T. Seith, USAF Ret,

worked for Adm Moorer as Vice Director
of Joint Operations (J-3) in 1972. He

recounted Moorer’s turkey story in Seith

intrvw. See also Secretary of the Air Force

Seamans’ recollections of Moorer’s

attempt to persuade Nixon not to deploy

more B–52s in Seamans.

21. Quoted in Hopkins, “SAC

Bomber Operations,” p 690.

22. EOTR, Lt Gen Gerald W.

Johnson, Sep 1971–Sep 1973.

23. JCS Hist, Vietnam 1971–73, p

356.

24. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations Against North

Vietnam, 1 Jul 1971–30 Jun 1972,”

AFHRA 1007439, pp 68–70.

25. Hist, 307 Strategic Wing,

Apr–Jun 1992; Hopkins, “SAC Bomber

Operations,” pp 733–34.

26. Hist, 307 Strategic Wing,

Apr–Jun 1972; Hopkins, “SAC Bomber

Operations,” pp 734–35.

27. Moorer intrvw; JCS hist, p 367.

28. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Apr 1972; Bernard

C. Nalty, Electronic Warfare, p 89.

29. Msg, Vogt to Ryan and Clay,

subj: Daily Wrap-up, 161115Z Apr 72,

AFHRA 717.03-221.

30. Minutes, 7 AF Commanders

Conf, Jul 18–19, 1972, AFHRA 1009446.

See also SAC ops input to Corona

Harvest, 1 Jul 1971–30 Jun 1972, pp

27–33, AFHRA DABIN 579870.

31. Nixon, II, 65; Haldeman Diaries,

Apr 16, 1972.

32. SAC intel input to Corona

Harvest, 1 Jul 1971–30 Jun 1972, AFHRA

DABIN 579869, pp 155–58.

33. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1154–64; Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and

the Vietnam War, pp 234–37; Anatoly

Dobrynin, In Confidence (New York,

1995), pp 243–48.

34. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1180–81; Loi and Vu, Le Duc ThoKissinger Negotiations.

35. JCS Hist, p 378; Nixon, RN, II,

78–86; Haldeman Diaries, Apr 26, 1972.

36. Nixon, RN, II, 79; Haldeman

Diaries, May 4, 1972. Alexander Haig

carried the message from Johnson to

351

Notes to pages 224–232

Nixon. See Haig, Inner Circles, pp

285–86.

37. Kissinger, White House Years, p

1180. See also pp 1181–86.

38. Moorer intrvw, Aug 24, 1976.

39. Sorley, Thunderbolt, pp 323–25.

40. Moorer intrvw, Sep 10, 1976;

MACV hist, Jan 1972–Mar 1973, B–63.

41. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Apr–Oct 1972.

42. See, for example, Ambrose,

Nixon, I, 543. Adm Moorer (see intrvw

cited above) thought that “Linebacker”

was a chance selection from an approved

list. But his staff officers might well have

selected a name they deemed appropriate.

43. Peter DeLeon, “The LaserGuided Bomb: Case History of a

Development,” RAND R-1312-1-PR, Jun

1974; Joan Lisa Bromberg, The Laser in

America, 1950–1970 (Cambridge, Mass,

1991).

44. DeLeon, pp 6–26.

45. Porter, “Second Generation

Weaponry in SEA.”

46. Ockerman, “Analysis of Laser

Guided Bombs”; intrvw, Lt Col Robert G.

Zimmerman, USAF hist prog, with Maj

Richard M. Atchison, Maxwell AFB, Ala,

Jul 16, 1975.

47. HQ 7 AF, Dir of Ops, “History of

Linebacker I Operations,” AFHRA

1006559.

48. Hist, 8 TFW, Jul 1–Sep 30, 1972.

49. See PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” May–Sep 1972.

50. Nixon, RN, II, 85–86.

51. Ibid.

52. PACAF, “USAF Air Operations

Against North Vietnam,” pp 95–96;

PACAF, “Summary of Air Operations in

SEA,” May–Oct 1972.

53. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA”; Ockerman, “Analysis

of Laser Guided Bombs”; R. L. Blachly, P.

A. Conine, and E. H. Sharkey, “Laser and

Electro-Optical Guided Bomb Performance in Southeast Asia (Linebacker I),”

RAND R-1326-PR, Oct 1973; Capt

Edward J. Dunne, Jr., 7 AF Ops Anal Br,

“US Air Forces Vs the 130 MM Gun,

Apr–Nov 1972,” Jan 20, 1973, AFHRA
K740.041-1; Maj Edward J. Dunne, Jr., 7

AF Ops Anal Br, “The US Air War

Against Tanks,” May 20, 1973, AFHRA

K740.041-2; David R. Mets, “The Quest

for a Surgical Strike: The United States

Air Force and Laser-Guided Bombs,” Air

Force Systems Command, Armament Div,

1987, AFHRA 1003440.

54. RAND R-1326-PR; Maj Calvin

R. Johnson, “Linebacker Operations,

Sep–December 1972,” CHECO rpt, Dec

31, 1978, p 39.

55. Hist, 8 TFW, Apr–Jun 1972.

56. David R. Mets, “Background

Notes on Bridge Attack and Defense,” HQ

Armament Div, Air Force Systems

Command, Eglin AFB, Fla, 1987.

57. Futrell, The United States Air

Force in Korea, pp 291–95.

58. PACAF, Corona Harvest, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Ops in

SEA, 1 Jan 65–31 Dec 69,” vol II,

“Hardware,” sec 2, “Munitions.”

59. Corum, The Tale of Two Bridges.

For the recent recollections of a North

Vietnamese female soldier, Ngo Thi

Tuyen, who helped to defend the Thanh

Hoa bridge, see Karen Gottschang Turner

with Phan Thanh Hoa, Even the Women

Must Fight: Memories of War from North

Vietnam (New York, 1998), pp 51–69.

60. Ibid. pp 84–85.

61. Ibid. pp 85–86.

62. Ibid. pp 88–92; msg, 8 TFW to

HQ 7 AF, Oprep-4 122, 111300Z Aug 67,

AFHRA 2K740.3421; msg, 355 TFW to

HQ 7 AF, Oprep-4 103, 111239Z Aug 67,

AFHRA 2K740.3421.

63. Msg, Cmdr 7 AF to CINCPACAF

and CSAF, subj: Daily Wrap-up, 101130Z

May 72; Jeffrey Ethell and Alfred Price,

One Day in a Long War: May 10, 1972,

Air War, North Vietnam (New York, 1989).

64. The author is indebted to Robert

L. Young, historian of the National Air

Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air

Force Base, Ohio, for data on Air Force

and Navy aircraft losses to Chinese

MiG–19s (J-6s). On one occasion a

MiG–21 did bring down an Air Force

F–105 with a gun and on another occasion

a MiG–17 used a missile successfully

352

Notes to pages 232–239

against a Navy F–4.

65. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol II, pt 1, pp 98–105;

Ethell and Price, One Day in a Long War,

pp 151–64.

66. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol II, pt 1, pp 136–43;

Randy Cunningham with Jeff Ethell, Fox

Two (Mesa, Arizona, 1984); Daniel L.

Haulman and Col William C. Stancik, Air

Force Aerial Victory Credits: World War I,

World War II, Korea, and Vietnam

(Maxwell AFB, Al: USAF Historical

Research Center, 1988), pp 63–64.

67. Haulman and Stancik, eds, Air

Force Victory Credits.

68. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, Vols I and III; Richard J.

Harris, Doreen K. Wolownik, and Nancy

K. Harris, “Air-to-Air Conflict over North

Vietnam, 1 Apr–30 Nov 1972,” Center for

Naval Analyses, Jul 1974.

69. Intrvw, Hugh N. Ahmann, USAF

hist prog, with Lt Gen Carlos M. Talbott,

Alexandria, Va., Jun 10–11, 1985.

70. See preceding chap for Lavelle

affair.

71. Talbott intrvw; EOTR, Maj Gen

Alton D. Slay, Aug 1971–Aug 1972,

AFHSO K740.131 SLAY; minutes, 7 AF

commanders’ conf, Jul 18–19, 1972,

AFHRA 1009446.

72. Summaries of the daily

Linebacker confs are in Appendix B of

Tactical Fighter Weapons Center, Red

Baron III, vol III, pt 1. See also minutes, 7

AF commanders’ conf, Jul 18–19, 1972,

AFHRA 1009446. On the Red River

Valley Fighter Pilots Association, see chap

7 above.

73. Maj Gen Doyle Larson, USAF

Ret, “Direct Intelligence Combat Support

in Vietnam: Project Teaball,” American

Intelligence Journal, spring/summer 1994,

pp 56–58; Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978;

PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “USAF Air

Operations in Southeast Asia, 1 Jul

1972–15 Aug 1973,” vol II, pp IV

146–48, AFHRA 1051287; EOTR, Col

Scott G. Smith, Cmdr, 432 TRW, Apr

1972–Mar 1973, AFHRA K717.131, p 4.

74. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978;
Tactical Fighter Weapons Center, Red

Baron III, vol III, pt 1, pp 86–106.

75. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol III, pt 1, pp 50–51; hist,

8 TFWg, Jul–Sep 1972; hist, USAF

Tactical Fighter Weapons Center, Jul

1972–Jun 1973; PACAF, Corona Harvest

rpt, “USAF Air Operations in Southeast

Asia, 1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” vol II,

IV-156–58, AFHRA 1051287.

76. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol III, pt 1, pp 86–106.

77. Histories, Tactical Air Command,

Jul 1972–Dec 1975.

78. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol III, pt 2, chaps 4 and 5;

Red Baron III, vol II, pt 1, pp 148–55.

79. Karl J. Eschmann, Linebacker:

The Untold Story of the Air Raids over

North Vietnam (New York, 1989), p 128.

80. Maj John W. Siemann, “COMBAT SNAP: AIM–9J Southeast Asia

Introduction,” CHECO rpt, Apr 24, 1974;

Harris, et al., “Air-to-Air Conflict,” pp

30–42; Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron, vol III, pt 2; intrvw, author

with Col Larry D. Griffin, Arnold AFB,

Oct 14, 1993. In 1972, Griffin was

assigned to the Naval Air Systems

Command as a Sparrow product engineer.

81. Futrell, Aces and Aerial Victories,

pp 123–25. I am indebted to Rob Young,

historian of the National Air Intelligence

Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base, Ohio, for his painstaking statistical

analysis of the Air Force’s air-to-air losses

over North Vietnam.

82. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” 1967–72; rpt, DIA,

“Target Systems in North Vietnam,” DI646-43-72, Jul 3, 1972.

83. Intrvw, M.F. Porter, CHECO historian, with Gen John W. Vogt, Jr., Saigon,

Nov 12, 1972; DIA Intelligence Study, DI646-43-72, Oct 16, 1972, p 67; ltr, Lt Col

Donald H. Gregory, Air Force Intel Svc,

to AF Armament Lab (Eglin AFB), subj:

Air Strikes on North Vietnam Airfields,

Mar 26, 1973; Air Force Intelligence

Service target folders, box 11, Mational

Defense University Library.

84. Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

353

Notes to pages 239–245

Red Baron III, vol III, pt 1.

85. Maj David E. Thomasson, “An

Analysis of USAF Combat Damage and

Losses in SEA, Apr 72–Mar 73,” HQ 7 AF

Operations Analysis Branch, Jun 30, 1973.

86. Rpt, DIA, “Target Systems in

North Vietnam,” DI-646-43-72, Jul 3,

1972; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” 1967–72.

87. Harris, et al., “Air-to-Air

Conflict.”

88. HQ 7 AF, “History of Linebacker

I Operations,” pp 38–42.

89. Slay EOTR, p 83.

90. Thomasson, “Analysis of USAF

Combat Damage.”

91. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” pp IV195–203, AFHRA 1051287.

92. Ibid, pp IV-171–73.

93. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” May–Oct 1972;

Kissinger, White House Years, p 1098.

94. The North Vietnamese and their

Russian advisers claimed to have shot

down an F–111 near Hanoi with a SAM

on Mar 30, 1968. This claim does not

square with USAF records, which show

that the F–111 lost on that date never got

out of Thailand and crashed there after its

crew ejected safely; the loss was attributed

to a tube of sealant material carelessly left

where it could jam the pitch-roll control

mechanism. Like all other F–111 missions

in 1968, that one had been sent against a

target in Route Package One far from

Hanoi. On the Vietnamese and Russian

claim, see Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and

the Vietnam War, p 62. On the 1968 F–111

deployment, see “History of Combat

Lancer,” Det 1, 426 TFS, by Jack R.

Hayes, historian of 474 TFW, Nellis AFB,

Nev, and Giraudo intrvw. On Ryan’s

Raiders, see chap 2 above.

95. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt, “InCountry and Out-Country Strike Ops in

SEA, 1 Jan 65–31 Dec 69,” vol II: “Strike

Aircraft,” Nov 2, 1970, pp 210–12.

96. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” vol I, chap II,
pp 51–61. See also JCS hist, Vietnam

1971–73, pp 430–31.

97. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” May 1975,

AFHRA 1008184, vol I, chap II, pp 41–51;

Hopkins, Tanker Operations, pp 90–94.

98. Don Harten, “Godzilla Versus the

F–111” in Hatch and Sheridan, eds, Red

River Valley Fighter Pilots, p 22. See also

Col A.A. Picinich, et al., “The F–111 in

Southeast Asia, Sep 1972–January 1973,”

CHECO rpt, Feb 21, 1974.

99. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978;

Herman S. Wolk, Research and

Development for Southeast Asia, 1965–67

(Washington 1969), pp 68–70.

100. Smith EOTR; Johnson,

“Linebacker Operations”; Msg, 7/13 AF

Security Police to 13 AF, subj: Security of

LORAN and TACAN Sites, 041449Z Oct

72, AFHRA 1008707.

101. Seamans intrvw; Vogt intrvw,

Nov 12, 1972; Palmer, “U.S. Intelligence

and Vietnam.” Seamans also got in hot

water with Nixon for agreeing with a

reporter that it was pssible the war might

last three more years. Seamans was widely

misquoted as having asserted that the war

would last three more years; see Seamans,

Aiming at Targets, pp 195–96.

102. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” May 1972; HQ

USAF Targets Working Group, Bulletin

37, Aug 8, 1972.

103. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” 1967 and 1972.

104. DIA Intelligence Studies: DI646-40-72 (May 18, 1972), DI-646-43-72

(Jul 3), and DI-646-43-72 (Oct 16);

William G. Cooper, Jr., “Communist

Chinese Increase Truck Production,”

Defense Intelligence Digest, Jan 1971, pp

34–35.

105. DIA Intelligence Study, DI-646-

40-72, Jun 16, 1972. Walt Rostow told

Mark Clodfelter (Limits of Air Power, p

167) that Gen Haig was Rostow’s source

for the story that the Chinese held back on

sending supplies to North Vietnam for

three weeks and stopped transshipment of

Soviet supplies for three months. Haig did

354

Notes to pages 245–250

not discuss this matter in his memoirs. In

Aerial Interdiction in Three Wars

(Washington, 1994), p 377, Eduard Mark

raises doubts about the Rostow-Haig

account. Clodfelter gives a different version in “Nixon and the Air Weapon,” an

essay in An American Dilemma: Vietnam,

1968–72, edited by Dennis E. Showalter

and John G. Albert (Chicago, 1993), p 92.

Here Clodfelter claims merely that the

Chinese prohibited only Soviet shipments

for three weeks and no longer.

106. Minutes, 7 AF commanders’

conf, Jul 18, 1972, AFHRA 1009446.

107. PACAF, “USAF Air Operations

Against North Vietnam,” pp 113–18; DIA

Intelligence Study, DI-646-43-72, Oct 16,

1972.

108. DIA Intelligence Study, DI-646-

35-72, “The Availability of Rice in

Indochina during 1971–72,” Apr 1972.

109. AFNIEC, “Basic Target Annex

for Campaign against NVN Dike System,”

Mar 21, 1968.

110. McConnell intrvw, Aug 28,

1969; memo, Brig Gen Ginsburgh to Gen

Wheeler, subj: Flooding the Red River,

Mar 8, 1968, Ginsburgh Papers, AFHSO;

Ginsburgh intrvw, Apr 5, 1990; Futrell,

The United States Air Force in Korea, pp

623–29. At the Stennis hearings in 1967,

McConnell had testified that in both

World War II and the Korean War bombing agricultural targets had been permitted; see Stennis hearings, pt 3, p 213.

111. Public Papers of the President,

1972, pp 744–52; “Behind the Furor over

Bombs on Red River Dikes,” U.S. News &

World Report, Aug 14, 1972; W. Hays

Parks, “Linebacker and the Law of War,”

Air University Review, Jan–Feb 1983, pp

12–16. Former Attorney General Ramsey

Clark took a North Vietnamese tour of

bombed dikes and supported North

Vietnamese charges that the dikes were

targeted when he testified before Senator

Edward Kennedy’s Judiciary

Subcommittee to Investigate Problems

Connected with Refugees and Escapees on

Aug 16, 1972: Problems of War Victims in

Indochina, Part III: North Vietnam

(Washington, 1972).
112. Elder and Melly, “Rules of

Engagement”; HQ USAF DCS Plans and

Ops, “Rolling Thunder-Linebacker: A

Preliminary Comparative Analysis,” Aug

1972, AFHSO K143.507-9.

113. JCS hist, Vietnam 1971–73, pt

1, pp 377–441.

114. Parks, “Air War and the Law of

War,” p 169. Laird eventually did approve

bombing the Hanoi power plant during

Linebacker II in Dec 1972.

115. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978.

116. Associated Press, Jun 14, 1972.

See also DIA Intelligence Study, DI-646-

40-72, Jun 16, 1972, p 26; Melvin F.

Porter, “Linebacker: Overview of the First

120 Days,” CHECO rpt, 1973, pp 37–40.

117. Memo for record, Col Richard

L. Lawson, Asst Dep Dir for Strike

Forces, Dir of Ops, HQ USAF, subj: NVN

Air Campaign Coordinating Meeting, Jun

8, 1972; PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jun 1972.

118. Capt Jack L. Tinius,

“Psychological Operations Against North

Vietnam, Jul 1972–January 1973,”

CHECO rpt, May 24, 1974; TSgt John

Tomassi, “Stray Goose Crew Remembered

During Ceremony,” Air Force News

Service 98106, Jul 1998.

119. Ibid. The North Vietnamese got

some propaganda mileage of their own out

of the currency leaflets. Articles appeared

in the European press about American

counterfeiting, and the North Vietnamese

even tried to blame their inflation problem

on the leaflets. See Robert W. Chandler,

War of Ideas: The U.S. Propaganda

Campaign in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo,

355

Notes to pages 250–255

1981), pp 117–23.

120. Memo for record, Col Richard L.

Lawson, Asst Dep Dir for Strike Forces,

Ops Dir, HQ USAF, subj: NVN Campaign

Coordinating Meeting, Jun 8, 1972.

121. DIA Intelligence Study, DI-646-

43-72, Oct 16, 1972, pp 49–53.

122. HQ 7 AF Tactical Analysis Div,

Air Operations Rpts 73/1 (“US Air Forces

Vs the 130MM Field Gun”), 73/2 (“US

Air War Against Tanks”), and 73/4 (“An

Analysis of Laser Guided Bombs in

SEA”), AFHRA K740.041-1, 2, and 4.

For a skeptical analysis of Linebacker’s

effectiveness, see Mark, Aerial

Interdiction in Three Wars, pp 367–400.

123. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978;

Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1341–94; Haig, Inner Circles, pp

294–303. See also Hung and Schecter, The

Palace File; Diem and Chanof, Jaws of

History; Loi and Vu, Le Duc ThoKissinger Negotiations.

124. Nixon, RN, II, 193.

125. Kissinger, White House Years, p

1390.

126. Moorer intrvw, Sep 10, 1976.

127. Pacific Air Forces kept a summary of the many JCS and CINCPAC

messages defining air operating authorities

and limitations for North Vietnam,

Apr–Jun 1972. See PACAF Source

Documents for Corona Harvest V, “Study

on North Vietnam,” vol I, Tab 12,

AFHRA 717.03-221. See also Kissinger,

White House Years, pp 1200 and 1303.

128. Nixon, RN, II, 201–2; Kissinger,

White House Years, pp 1308 and 1329–30.

129. Nixon, RN, II, 179.

Chapter 10

1. A thorough accounting of B–52

bombs dropped by target and by unit is in

HQ SAC’s “Chronology of SAC

Participation in Linebacker II,” Aug 12,

1973. The data there is more complete

than HQ PACAF’s “Linebacker II USAF

Bombing Survey,” Apr 1973, AFHRA

1011707, which accounts for only about

35,000 of the more than 48,000 bombs

dropped by the B–52s in Linebacker

II.The figures given in Appendix 1 of

Eschmann’s Linebacker are drawn from

the PACAF survey. On bombing statistics

for fighter aircraft, see also PACAF,

“Summary of Air Operations in SEA,” Jan

1973.

2. North Vietnam’s official statements on casualties for Linebacker II 
were published in a single volume by the

DRVN Commission for Investigation of

the U.S. Imperialists’ War Crimes in Viet

Nam, The Late December 1972 U.S. Blitz

on North Vietnam (Hanoi, 1973). These

statements give the number killed at

Hanoi (1,318) and Haiphong (305). The

number killed in other cities and villages

is not always rendered so precisely but

appears to be about 400. In this volume

the only total figure for North Vietnamese

killed by Linebacker II is “thousands,”

which was probably thought to be the

most impressive way of rendering “two

thousand.”

3. Adm Moorer’s testimony, hearings,

House Appropriations Subcommittee on

Dept of Defense, “Briefings on Bombings

of North Vietnam,” Jan 9, 1973, pp 18–21;

SAC Linebacker II Chronology.

4. Hist, 8 TFWg, Oct–Dec 1972. For

North Vietnamese claims that MiG–21s

shot down two B–52s, see Toperczer, Air

War Over North Vietnam.

5. SAC Linebacker II Chronology, p

315; PACAF Linebacker II Bombing

Survey. Col Herman Gilster, who wrote

the PACAF survey, later published an

expanded version as part of his The Air

War in Southeast Asia: Case Studies of

Selected Campaigns (Montgomery, Alab,

1993); here Gilster expresses his skepticism that North Vietnam was running out

of SAMs, but intelligence data at least

indicates a sharp decline in SAM launches

on the last two nights.

6. The text of the cease-fire agreement signed in Paris on Jan 27, 1973, cam

be found in the appendices to Goodman’s

Lost Peace. Nixon’s letters to Thieu are

appended to Hung and Schecter, The

Palace File; see esp Nixon’s letter of Nov

14, 1972, pp 385–86.

7. Ryan intrvw, May 20, 1971.

8. Hist, SAC, FY 1973, pp 98–104.

9. Hist, SAC, FY 1973, p 102.

10. Hist, SAC, FY 1973, pp 102–6;

hist, JCS, Vietnam 1971–73, p 436.

11. For Kissinger’s own regrets about

using this phrase, see his White House

Years, pp 1399–1400.

12. Nixon, RN, II, 209; hist, SAC,

356

Notes to pages 255–261

FY 1973, pp 102–6.

13. Kissinger’s memoirs stress his

differences with Nixon on the urgency of

settling with North Vietnam before the

election. See White House Years, p 1308.

Nixon on the other hand, recalls that in

Oct he was leery of escalating the bombing after the election. See Nixon, RN, II,

201.

14. On the administration’s view of

Congress, see Kissinger, White House

Years, pp 1306–7 and 1426.

15. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1418–41; Loi and Vu, Le Duc ThoKissinger Negotiations, pp 387–422. For

evidence that Hanoi had disagreements

with its South Vietnameseallies about the

details of a cease-fire agreement, see

Robert K. Brigham, Guerilla Diplomacy:

The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the

Vietnam War (Ithaca, New York, 1999).

16. Kissinger later agreed that his

advice had been bad in this case. See

White House Years, p 1426.

17. Adm Elmo R. Zumwalt, On

Watch: A Memoir (New York, 1976), pp

412–15; Nixon, RN, II, 230; Kissinger,

White House Years, pp 1420–35; Haig,

Inner Circles, pp 306–9; Moorer intrvw,

Mar 18, 1977; Secord, Honored and

Betrayed, p 106.

18. Haldeman Diaries, Dec 15, 1972;

hist, JCS, Vietnam 1971–73, pp 663–70.

For the Linebacker II execute order, see

msg, JCS to CINPAC and CINCSAC,

subj: Linebacker II Operations, 170010Z

Dec 72.

19. The long sought photographs

appeared in Aviation Week & Space

Technology, Apr 25, 1972, pp 14–23; see

also p 9.

20. Haig, Inner Circles, p 308.

21. Sixteen years later, a few months

before leaving Hayden, Fonda apologized

on national television for her infamous

antiaircraft photo. She also apologized for

calling former POWs liars in 1973 when

they said they had been tortured. These

apologies came during an interview with

Barbara Walters on ABC’s “20/20,” Jun

17, 1988. On Ramsey Clark’s visit, see

hearings, Aug 16–17, 1972, Senate
Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate

Problems Connected with Refugees and

Escapees, Problems of War Victims in

Indochina, Part III: North Vietnam

(Washington, 1972).

22. In addition to Telford Taylor’s

newspaper articles cited below, see Joan

Baez, And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir

(New York, 1987), pp 193–225.

23. Hearings, House Appropriations

Comm, Subcomm on Department of

Defense, Briefings on Bombing of North

Vietnam, p 18.

24. Baez, pp 221–22.

25. Baez’s Hanoi album, Where Are

You Now My Son?, was released by A&M

in 1973.

26. Telford Taylor, “Hanoi is

Reported Scarred But Key Services

Continue,” New York Times, Dec 25, 1972.

See also Frank McGee’s televised intrvw

with Taylor, NBC, The Today Show, Jan

3, 1973. For bomb damage photography

of Bac Mai hospital, see Parks,

“Linebacker and the Law of War,” pp

22–23. On press reaction to Linebacker II,

see Martin F. Herz, The Prestige Press

and the Christmas Bombing, 1972

(Washington, 1980). For the North

Vietnamese view, see the Democratic

Republic of Vietnam, Commission for

Investigation of the US Imperialists’ War

Crimes in Viet Nam, The Late December

1972 US Blitz on North Viet Nam (Hanoi,

1973), pp 41–42.

27. See chap 2 above.

28. Baez, p 213.

29. Telford Taylor, “Hanoi Exhibits

Downed Yanks to Boost Morale,”

Chicago Tribune, Jan 10, 1973.

30. Lt Col Jon A. Reynolds,

“Linebacker II: The POW Perspective,”

Air Force Magazine, Sep 1979, pp 93–94.

Other POW memoirs are cited in chap 7

above. See, for example, Guarino, A

POW’s Story, pp 328–33; Stockdale and

Stockdale, In Love and War, pp 431–32.

31. Telford Taylor, “Hanoi Under the

Bombing: Sirens, Shelters, Rubble and

Death,” New York Times, Jan 7, 1973;

SAC Linebacker II Chronology, pp

221–52.

357

Notes to pages 261–267

32. For Capt Diefenbach’s account,

see Col Billy F. Shackelford, Lt Col

Charles G. Luse, and Lt Col Neil C. Ray,

“Eleven Days in December,” Air War

College, 1977, AFHRA 1028277, pp

86–88. See also Hist, 307 Strat Wg,

Oct–Dec 1972.

33. Nixon, RN, p 246. See also

Haldeman Diaries, Dec 20, 1972.

34. For insight into thinking at SAC

HQ, see the long letter from Brig Gen

Harry Cordes, USAF Ret, to Brig Gen

James McCarthy, undated (1977), AFHRA

1028673.

35. Capt Burke, quoted in hist, 307

SW, Oct–Dec 1972.

36. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

esp pp 221–52.

37. Secord, Honored and Betrayed,

pp 105–8.

38. See Gerald W. Johnson with John

and Charlotte McClure, Called to

Command: A World War II Fighter Ace’s

Adventurous Journey (Paducah, Kentucky,

1996).

39. Msg, Meyer to Vogt, subj:

Linebacker II, 210220Z Dec 1972, Vogt

read file.

40. Msg, Vogt to Meyer, 210540Z

Dec 1972, Vogt read file. The fourth

night’s missions went off as planned

against widely separated targets. 7 AF

continued the practice begun in Aug of

bringing together representatives from

each unit involved for after-action discussions. For example, the fourth night’s mission was discussed at Udorn on Dec 24.

See msg, Col Olsrefski, 7/13 AF, to Gen

Vogt, subj: Linebacker Conference,

241715Z Dec 72, AFHRA 1009448.

41. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” vol II, sec IV,

pp 195–203, 276–82.

42; PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” AFHRA

1008185, pp IV-273–82. In Dec 1982 the

official Vietnamese newspaper Nhan Dan

published an account of SAM operations

by Gen Hoang Van Khanh. He attributed

SAM success in Linebacker II partly to
track-on-jam techniques. A translation

appeared in the Apr 1996 issue of Vietnam

magazine, pp 26–33.

43. Msg, Clay to Meyer and Vogt,

subj: B–52 Operation, 221935Z Dec 1972,

Vogt read file.

44. Msg, Meyer to Clay and Vogt,

subj: B–52 Operation, 232020Z Dec 1972,

Vogt read file.

45. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

1 Jul 1972–15 Aug 1973,” vol II, sec IV,

pp 276–86.

46. PACAF Linebacker II Bombing

Survey, pp 16–18. Navy A–6s appear to

have had about the same level of success

against the Haiphong missile sites that

B–52s and F–111s achieved in the Hanoi

area. Adm Moorer told a House appropriations subcommittee that in both areas a

total of five occupied sites were known to

have been damaged. Hearings, House

Appropriations Subcommittee on Dept of

Defense, “Briefings on Bombings of

North Vietnam,” Jan 9, 1973, pp 20–21.

47. Hist, 307 Strat Wing, Oct–Dec

1972; SAC Linebacker II Chronology, p

263.

48. PACAF Linebacker II Bombing

Survey, pp 14–16.

49. Picinich, “The F–111 in

Southeast Asia”.

50. PACAF, Corona Harvest rpt,

“USAF Air Operations in Southeast Asia,

Jul 1972–Aug 1973,” vol II, sec IV, p 269;

Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978; hist, 8

TFWg, Oct–Dec 1972.

51. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

pp 273–309; PACAF Linebacker II

Bombing Survey, pp 41–42; HQ USAF

Intel photo rpt, “Linebacker II,” undated

(1973).

52. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978.

53. Moorer intrvw, Sep 10, 1976.

54. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

esp pp 182–99.

55. Ltr, Brig Gen Harry Cordes,

USAF Ret, to Brig Gen James McCarthy,

undated (1977), AFHRA 1028673.

56. Ibid.

57. Johnson, Called to Command, p

206; Brig Gen James R. McCarthy and Lt

358

Notes to pages 267–274

Col George B. Allison, Linebacker II: A

View from the Rock (Maxwell AFB, Ala,

1979), pp 85–86; SAC Linebacker II

Chronology, p 131. For an account by a

crew member on one of the B–52Gs shot

down on the third night, see Maj Robert

A. Clement, “A Fourth of July in

December: A B–52 Navigator’s

Perspective of Linebacker II,” Student

Report 84-0540, Air Command and Staff

College, Mar 1984.

58. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

pp 184–85.

59. For the perspective of HQ 8 AF

on its enlarged planning responsibilities,

see McCarthy and Allison, Linebacker II:

A View from the Rock, pp 121–23.

60. Hist, JCS, Vietnam 1971–73, pp

666–78.

61. Hist, SAC, FY 1973, pp 112 and

120; SAC Linebacker II Chronology, p

303.

62. A former B–52 pilot, Dana

Drenkowski, brought crew grievances to

public attention with articles in Soldier of

Fortune and Armed Forces Journal (Jul

1977, pp 24–27). The Air Force took these

allegations seriously enough to publish an

official response in the latter journal (Aug

1977, pp 24–25).

63. For a different interpretation, see

Jeff Ethell and Joe Christy, B–52

Stratofortress (New York, 1981). They

conclude that morale at U-Tapao was

worse than on Guam; in gauging morale,

much depends on whom you interview. In

addition to the B–52 crew member who

refused to fly, an F–4 crew member also

refused.

64. Hist, 307 Strat Wg, Oct–Dec

1972, pp 70–71.

65. For another account of Guam

operations in addition to McCarthy and

Allison, Linebacker II: A View from the

Rock, see “Supplemental History on

Linebacker II,” 43 Strat Wg and 72 Strat

Wg (Prov).

66. Hist, 307 Strat Wg, Oct–Dec

1972.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.
70. Col Lawrence E. McKenny,

“Rivet Haste SEA Introduction Final

Report,” Apr 1973, hist, Tactical Fighter

Weapons Center, FY 1973, vol V, doc

129; Tactical Fighter Weapons Center,

Red Baron III, vol II, pt 2, pp 305–8; hist,

432 TFW, Oct–Dec 1972; Smith EOTR.

71. “Supplemental History on Linebacker II,” 43 and 72 Strat Wgs (Prov);

hist, 307 Strat Wg, Oct–Dec 1972; Col

Billy F. Shackelford, Lt Col Charles G.

Luse and Lt Col Neil C. Ray, “Eleven

Days in December,” Air War College,

1977,AFHRA 1028277, pp 63–74. The

unpublished study by Shakelford, et al.,

gives a view from U-Tapao that can be

compared with the Guam perspective in

McCarthy and Allison, Linebacker II: A

View from the Rock. See also Brig Gen

James R. McCarthy and Col Robert E.

Rayfield, B–52s Over Hanoi: A Linebacker

II Story (Fullerton, Calif, 1996).

72. Hist, 307 Strat Wg, Oct–Dec

1972.

73. Ibid.

74. HQ USAF Intel photo rpt,

“Linebacker II,” undated (1973), p E–1.

75. PACAF Linebacker II Bombing

Survey, pp 40 and 52. The Secretary of

Defense’s Scientific Advisory Group also

examined Linebacker II and came to similar conclusions. See memo, R.F.

Linsenmeyer, J35, to J3, subj: Linebacker

II Operational Report, Jul 2, 1973,

AFHRA 1009451.

76. Hist, SAC, FY 1973, pp 112–20.

77. PACAF, “Summary of Air

Operations in SEA,” Jan 1973. This issue

(which appeared in Mar 1973) covers

Linebacker II. See esp pp 4-B-35–38.

78. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

pp 84–86.

359

Notes to pages 275–281

79. Maj Gen Tran Nhan, “The Aerial

Dien Bien Phu,” Nhan Dan, Dec 1987,

FBIS-EAS-88-006 and 008. Tran Nhan

was deputy commander of the Hanoi air

defense sector in Dec 1972.

80. Ibid.

81. Lt Gen Hoang Phuong, “The 12-

Day Air Defense Campaign in December

1972,” Tap Chi Quan Doi Nhan Dan, Oct

1987, JPRS-SEA-88-009.

82. Adm Moorer’s testimony, hearings, House Appropriations Subcommittee

on Dept of Defense, Jan 9, 1973,

“Briefings on Bombings of North

Vietnam,” p 19.

83. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978; see

also msg, Vogt to Ryan, Meyer, and Clay,

subj: Daily Wrap Up, 211045Z Dec 1972.

84. Maj Paul W. Elder, “Buffalo

Hunter,” CHECO rpt, Jul 24, 1973, p 35.

85. SAC Linebacker II Chronology,

pp 313–15. During the Vietnam War, the

Air Force lost a total of 25 B–52s, including 17 in combat and 8 by accident (for

example, air refueling collisions); the first

combat loss occurred in Nov 1972 and the

17th in Jan 1973 (both over North

Vietnam).

86. Michael M. McCrea, “U.S. Navy,

Marine Corps, and Air Force Fixed Wing

Aircraft Losses and Damage in Southeast

Asia (1962–1973),” Center for Naval

Analyses, Aug 1976. This report includes

microfiche with details on each loss.

87. Msg, Clay to Meyer and Vogt,

subj: B–52 Operations in NVN, 281913Z

Dec 1972, Vogt read file.

88. Kissinger, White House Years, pp

1457–59; msg, JCS to CINCPAC and

CINCSAC, 291407Z Dec 72.

89. Vogt intrvw, Aug 8–9, 1978. See

also Haig, Inner Circles, pp 309–11.

Chapter 11

1. For insight into the attitudes and

experience of Air Force leaders in the

years immediately following the Vietnam

War, see esp two interviews conducted by

the Air Force history program: Lt Col

Maurice Maryanow and Dr. Richard H.

Kohn interviewed former Chief of Staff

Gen David C. Jones in 1985–1986; Dr.

George M. Watson Jr., interviewed former

Secretary of the Air Force Dr. John L.

McLucas in 1996. See also Richard P.

Hallion, Storm over Iraq: Air Power and 
360

Notes to pages 281–290

the Gulf War (Washington, 1992); Santoli,

Leading the Way; and James Kitfield,

Prodigal Soldiers (New York, 1995).

2. Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, p

209. See also Raymond W. Leonard,

“Learning from History: Linebacker II and

U.S. Air Force Doctrine,” Journal of

Military History, Apr 1994, pp 267–303.

3. Transcript of Rather’s intrvw with

Saddam Hussein, Aug 29, 1990, FBISNES-90-170.

4. Wayne Thompson, “After Al

Firdos: The Last Two Weeks of Strategic

Bombing in Desert Storm,” Air Power

History, Summer 1996, pp 48–65.

5. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), pp 37–43; Senator

George McGovern, “Vietnam: 1976,”

Washington: Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, 1976.

6. On the role of the Vietnam War in

this transition, see Col Mike Worden, Rise

of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of

Air Force Leadership, 1945–1982

(Maxwell AFB, Ala, 1998).

7. Estimates of Vietnamese casualties

are provided by Lewy, America in

Vietnam, pp 442–54; Thomas C. Thayer,

War Without Fronts: The American

Experience in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo,

1985), pp 101–8 and 125–34.

8. John M. Granville, “Summary of

USAF Aircraft Losses in SEA,” TAC, Jun

1974; McCrea, “U.S. Navy, Marine Corps,

and Air Force Fixed-Wing Aircraft Losses

and Damage.”

9. See Paul D. Mather, M.I.A.:

Accounting for the Missing in Southeast

Asia (Washington, 1994); Lewis M. Stern,

Policies of the Vietnamese Government

Concerning Captured and Unaccounted

For United States Soldiers, 1969–1994

(Jefferson, NC, 1995); Edward P. Brynn

and Arthur P. Geesey, “Joint Personnel

Recovery in Southeast Asia,” CHECO rpt,

1976; Malcom McConnell with Theodore

G. Schweitzer III, Inside Hanoi’s Secret

Archive (New York, 1995).

10. For Robert Garwood’s version of

his collaboration, see Winston Groom and

Duncan Spencer, Conversations with the

Enemy: The Story of PFC Robert

Garwood (New York, 1983).

11. Gen Horner has recorded some of

his experiences during the Vietnam War in

Santoli, Leading the Way, pp 19–22, 47–50

and 99–100. See also Kitfield, Prodigal

Soldiers.

12. On Risner’s Push, see John

Darrell Sherwood, Officers in Flight Suits:

The Story of American Air Force Fighter

Pilots in the Korean War (New York,

1996), pp 4–5.

13. Hatch and Sheridan, eds, Red

River Valley Fighter Pilots, pp 55–57;

Steve Smith, “Pardo’s Push,” Airman, Dec

1996, pp 38–41. When Col Aman came

down with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Col

Pardo helped to persuade General Motors

to donate a van which the Earl Aman

Courage Foundation fitted with a lift; see

the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots

Association newsletter, Mig Sweep, fall

1996, p 16.

14. Ibid., p 55.
Glossary

AAA Antiaircraft Artillery

AF Air Force

AFB Air Force Base

AFHSO Air Force History Support Office (Washington, DC)

AFHRA Air Force Historical Research Agency (Maxwell AFB, Alabama)

ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam)

CAP Combat Air Patrol

CHECO Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations 

(an Air Force project with offices in South Vietnam and 

Hawaii)

CIA Central Intelligence Agency 

CINCPAC Commander in Chief Pacific

CWIHP Cold War International History Project

DCS Deputy Chief of Staff 

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency 

DMZ Demilitarized Zone (between North and South Vietnam) 

DO Director of Operations

FBIS Foreign Broadcast Information Service 

FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States (documentary volumes 

published by the State Department) 

FY Fiscal Year (during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government’s

fiscal year ran from 1 July to 30 June) 

Hist History

HQ Headquarters

IG Inspector General 

Intvw Interview 

JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff

JPRS Joint Publications Research Service 

LBJ President Lyndon Baines Johnson

361

Preface
LORAN Long-Range Navigation System

Ltr Letter 

MACSOG MACV Studies and Observations Group 

MACV U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

MIA Missing in Action 

MiG Mikoyan-Gurevich (Russian aircraft design bureau or an aircraft 

designed by it)

Msg Message 

Mtg Meeting

NSSM National Security Study Memorandum

NVN North Vietnam

OASD Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense 

OSD Office of the Secretary of Defense

PACAF Pacific Air Forces

POW Prisoner of War 

PW See POW 

RP Route Package 

Rpt Report 

SAC Strategic Air Command

SAM Surface-to-Air Missile

SEA Southeast Asia

TAC Tactical Air Command

TFW Tactical Fighter Wing

TRW Tactical Reconnaissance Wing 

USAF U.S. Air Force

USA U.S. Army 

USMC U.S. Marine Corps

USN U.S. Navy 

USSAG U.S. Support Activities Group (Thailand)

WNRC Washington National Records Center 

362

Glossary
Bibliography

This book relies primarily on the records of the United States Air Force and

especially the large collection of records maintained by the Air Force Historical

Research Agency (AFHRA) at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Copies of

some of those documents are also held by the Air Force History Support Office

(AFHSO) at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Not far away in

Suitland, Maryland, is the Washington National Records Center (WNRC) that

still holds the records of Headquarters U.S. Air Force for the 1960s and 1970s;

ultimately many of these headquarters records will be transferred to the National Archives. Target folders prepared by Air Force intelligence personnel in

Washington during the war are maintained by the National Defense University

library.

The richest repository of documents on Washington decision-making during

Rolling Thunder is the Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) Library at Austin, Texas.

Access to the papers of Richard Nixon’s administration has been more restricted, and the author had not yet begun work in those papers when this book was

written.

Most of the Army, Navy, and Marine records cited in this book are copies

in Air Force holdings. Parallel historical efforts are underway in the other services to exploit their records on the war. Navy volumes will offer a much fuller

picture of the role of the Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), and the

Army is preparing a volume on the Army generals who led Military Assistance

Command, Vietnam (MACV); the MACV records have been transferred from

Army custody to the National Archives, but the Army Center of Military

History maintains extensive files on Generals Westmoreland and Abrams. The

Defense Department has provided casualty files and other records on the missing in action to the Library of Congress.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union opened Moscow’s archives to fruitful research and some useful Chinese material has come to light, there remains

a dearth of reliable information about Vietnamese communist decision-making.

Foreign researchers are only beginning to gain access to Vietnam’s less sensitive records. During the war, American intelligence agencies did process a

tremendous quantity of data, and some of this raw material survives (e.g., captured documents and prisoner interrogation reports), as do thousands of reports

written by intelligence analysts. The U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Ser363

Preface
vice (FBIS) and the Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) provided translations of North Vietnamese broadcasts and publications throughout the war.

Many of these translations are filed by subject with Vietnamese items in

Douglas Pike’s collection, which was housed at the University of California,

Berkeley, before it was transferred to Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Part

of the Pike collection is available on microfilm—as is Cornell University’s

John M. Echols collection of Vietnamese and other writings on the war. The

Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International

Center for Scholars in Washington has tracked early results of research in

Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese records through its bulletin and published

working papers.

Air Force Historical Research Agency

During the Vietnam War, this agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama,

was called the Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center. While unit histories with supporting documents continued to make up the bulk of the agency’s

holdings, the Vietnam War caused the establishment of two new document collection programs—CHECO and Corona Harvest. Project CHECO (the changing

words behind this acronym eventually became “Contemporary Historical

Evaluation of Current Operations”) microfilmed about a thousand reels of documents at Seventh Air Force headquarters and at wings in South Vietnam and

Thailand. Although much of this microfilm is of poor quality, it is valuable

because most of the paper documents never reached the United States. CHECO

historians also wrote more than two hundred reports, some of which are listed

below in the section on official histories.

Corona Harvest was an elaborate effort to derive lessons from the war.

Each Air Force major command submitted assessments of its wartime problems; Pacific Air Forces alone required more than thirty thick volumes for its

input. Committees of officers at the Air University (Maxwell Air Force Base,

Alabama) integrated and softened input findings; after retirement, General

Momyer was asked by the Chief of Staff to read the Corona Harvest reports and

recommend improvements in the Air Force. Meanwhile the Corona Harvest

team at Maxwell had also produced brief special reports on Air Force functions

and problems in Southeast Asia. Throughout the Corona Harvest process, thousands of documents were collected and numbered.

In the wake of CHECO and Corona Harvest, the agency began to microfilm histories and other documents. After documents already in the holdings

had been microfilmed, each new item began to receive a computer index

(“IRIS”) number as well as the old catalog subject number and in many cases a

Corona Harvest number. Agency catalog numbers all begin with the letter “K”

and include a decimal point in the middle. IRIS numbers are normally seven

digits beginning with “1” and not interrupted by a decimal point; some IRIS

364

Bibliography
numbers begin with “8” or “9” and have only six digits. Corona Harvest numbers begin with “CH.” CHECO microfilm is cited by giving the reel number.

Agency holdings include teletype messages, correspondence, intelligence

reports, plans, orders, after-action reports, trip reports, end-of-tour reports, unit

histories, interview tapes, interview transcripts and personal papers (e.g., papers

of Generals McConnell and Ryan). A few personal papers are held in the Air

Force History Support Office at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

(e.g., papers of Generals Ginsburg, LeMay, McConnell, Vogt, and Secretary of

the Air Force Seamans); that office also has papers relating to the Lavelle affair.

While some Air Force records on the Vietnam War remain classified, the service’s declassification program has opened many. 

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library

This presidential library on the University of Texas campus at Austin has

also made progress in declassifying its important holdings. The Meeting Notes

File and Tom Johnson’s Notes of Meetings are invaluable; the President’s taperecorded conversations were not yet open when the author was conducting

research for this book. Within the voluminous National Security File are the

national security adviser’s memos to the President (several per day), the files of

various aides, a name file (which includes memos by Colonel Ginsburgh), a

Vietnam country file, agency files (including, for example, a JCS bombing

chronology and reports on JCS war games), minutes of NSC meetings, National

Security Action Memoranda, and NSC histories (with supporting documents).

The Clark Clifford Papers and the Warnke/McNaughton Papers are also of great

value. The Westmoreland Papers came to the library from the Army Center of

Military History, which has copies. David C. Humphrey, formerly national security archivist at the library, has published two very helpful articles on its holdings: “Searching for LBJ at the Johnson Library” (SHAFR Newsletter, June

1989, pp 1–17) and “Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House” (Diplomatic

History, Winter 1984, pp 81–101.)

Interviews

The author has had the privilege of talking to hundreds of the Air Force’s

Vietnam veterans, ranging from Generals Momyer and Vogt to the pilots who

flew the missions and the airmen who maintained the planes. Over the years, Air

Force historians have recorded and transcribed more than two thousand interviews, most of them dealing in some way with the Vietnam War. While the Air

Force Historical Research Agency’s 1989 catalog of the Air Force Oral History

Collection does not have a subject index, the older 1982 catalog does. The Air

Force Academy has its own collection of interviews with former prisoners of

war.

365

Bibliography
The Johnson Library has built an excellent collection of interviews with

Washington decision makers. The U.S. Naval Institute has conducted extensive

interviews with Admirals Moorer and Sharp, among others. Texas A & M

University has a useful interview with Maj. Gen. Charles R. Bond, Jr. See also

Robert McNamara’s deposition in the case of Westmoreland vs. CBS, March

26, 1984, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Published Collections of Documents

After the “Pentagon Papers” were leaked to the press in 1971, they were

published in several incomplete editions. The most complete edition was the

official one: United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, 12 volumes (Washington: GPO, 1971). It does not, however, have all the documents made available by Senator Mike Gravel (Democrat, Alaska) in his well-indexed version:

The Pentagon Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition, 5 volumes (Boston: Beacon, 1971–72). The New York Times hit the street first with its one-volume

paperback edition: The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971). More

than a decade later, documents on negotiations finally became available in

George C. Herring, ed., The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers (Austin: University of Texas, 1983).

For useful background, see Sanford J. Ungar, The Papers and The Papers: An

Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers (New

York: Columbia, 1989).

The State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series published its Vietnam volumes for 1965–66 (David C. Humphrey, ed.) in 1996–98

with the rest of the war to follow in due course. For the Nixon years, The

Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House: the Multimedia Edition, CD

ROM (Santa Monica, California: Sony, 1994) are revealing. The transcripts of

Nixon’s tape-recorded conversations in Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Abuse of Power:

The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997) discuss the Pentagon Papers

but contain little else about the Vietnam War. The first published installment of

Johnson’s tape-recorded conversations covers only 1963–64; see Michael R.

Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1997). The many volumes of the Public Papers of the

Presidents of the United States give the text of press conferences and speeches.

Beginning in 1965 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published an annually updated edition of its one-volume document collection: Background

Information Relating to Southeast Asia. The Congressional Record has often

published important documents; for example, on May 10–11, 1972, the Record

included National Security Study Memorandum No. 1, January 1969, and A

Summary of Agency Responses. University Publications of America has published microfilm editions of MACV records (Graham Cosmas, ed.) and the

National Security Files at the Johnson Library (George C. Herring, ed.). 

366

Bibliography
Congressional Hearings and Reports

This selection is in chronological order:

Air War Against North Vietnam. Hearings, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Senate Armed Services Committee, August 9–23, 1967 (“Stennis

Hearings”). Summary Report, 1967.

Bombing Operations and the Prisoner-of-War Rescue Mission in North Vietnam. Hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Secretary of

Defense Laird, November 24, 1970.

Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia: January 1972. Staff report by James Lowenstein and Richard Moose for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1972.

Bombing As A Policy Tool in Vietnam: Effectiveness. Staff study on the

Pentagon Papers by Robert Biles for the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, 1972.

Unauthorized Bombing of Military Targets in North Vietnam. Hearing, House

Armed Services Committee, June 12, 1972.

Problems of War Victims in Indochina, Part III: North Vietnam. Hearings,

Senate Judiciary Committee, August 16–17, 1972.

Nomination of John D. Lavelle, General Creighton W. Abrams, and Admiral

John S. McCain. Hearings, Senate Armed Services Committee, September

11–22, 1972.

Bombing of North Vietnam. Hearings, House Appropriations Committee,

January 9, 1973.

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam: April 1973. Staff report by James

Lowenstein and Richard Moose for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1973.

Relief and Rehabilitation of War Victims in Indochina: One Year After the

Ceasefire. Study mission report for the Senate Judiciary Committee, January 27, 1974.

Vietnam: May 1974. Staff report by Richard Moose and Charles Meissner for

the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1974.

Weather Modification as a Weapon of War. Hearings, Subcommittee on

International Organization and Movements, House Foreign Affairs

Committee, September 24, 1974, with appended declassified hearings,

Weather Modification, Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, March 20, 1974.

Vietnam: 1976. Senator George McGovern’s report to the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee, 1976.

Aftermath of War: Humanitarian Problems of Southeast Asia. Staff report for

the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1976.

The War Powers Resolution. A special study by John H. Sullivan. House

Foreign Affairs Committee, 1982.

367

Bibliography
U.S. Air Force Histories

This book, like those below, rests in part upon a foundation provided by

hundreds of unit histories, as well as by the CHECO and other Air Force historical reports listed after the books.

The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia

Ballard, Jack S. Development and Employment of Fixed-Wing Gunships,

1962–1972. Washington, 1982.

Berger, Carl, ed. An Illustrated Account. Revised ed. Washington, 1984.

Bowers, Ray. Tactical Airlift. Washington, 1983.

Futrell, Robert F. The Advisory Years to 1965. Washington, 1981.

Schlight, John. The War in South Vietnam: The Years of the Offensive,

1965–1968. Washington, 1988.

Van Staaveren, Jacob. Interdiction in Southern Laos, 1960–1968. Washington,

1993.

Other Books

Buckingham, William A., Jr. The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia,

1961–1971. Washington, 1982.

Cooling, Benjamin Franklin, ed. Case Studies in the Achievement of Air

Superiority. Washington, 1994.

———. Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support, Washington,

1990.

Fox, Roger P. Air Base Defense in the Republic of Vietnam, 1961–1973.

Washington, 1979.

Futrell, R. Frank, et al. Aces and Aerial Victories: The United States Air Force

in Southeast Asia, 1965–1975. Washington, 1976.

———. Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air

Force, 1907–1984. Maxwell AFB, 1989.

Gilster, Herman L. The Air War in Southeast Asia: Case Studies of Selected

Campaigns. Maxwell AFB, 1993.

Lane, John J. Command and Control and Communications Structures in

Southeast Asia. Maxwell AFB, 1981.

Mark, Eduard. Aerial Interdiction in Three Wars. Washington, 1994.

Meilinger, Phillip S., ed. The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower

Theory. Maxwell AFB, 1997.

Mrozek, Donald J. Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam. Maxwell AFB,

1988.

———. The U.S. Air Force After Vietnam. Maxwell AFB, 1988.

Nalty, Bernard C. Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh. Washington, 1973.

368

Bibliography
Tilford, Earl H., Jr. Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961–1975.

Washington, 1980.

———. Setup: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why. Maxwell AFB,

1991.

Trest, Warren A. Air Force Roles and Missions: A History. Washington, 1998.

Watts, Barry D. The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine. Maxwell AFB, 1984.

Werrell, Kenneth P. Archie, Flak, AAA, and SAM. Maxwell AFB, 1988.

Worden, Mike. Rise of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of Air Force

Leadership, 1945–1982. Maxwell AFB, 1998.

USAF Southeast Asia Monograph Series

These monographs were written at the Air University Airpower Research

Institute, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, by veterans of the war in

Southeast Asia. The series includes nine monographs printed in seven volumes,

with Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, A.J.C. Lavalle the general editor for volumes I through IV, and Colonel Robert E. Rayfield the general editor for volume VI.

Burbage, Paul, et al. The Battle for the Skies Over North Vietnam. Volume I,

1976.

Corum, Delbert, et al., The Tale of Two Bridges. Volume I, 1976. 

Doglione, John A., et al. Airpower and the 1972 Spring Invasion. Volume II,

1976. 

McCarthy, James R., and George B. Allison. Linebacker II: A View from the

Rock. Volume VI, 1979.

Momyer, William W. The Vietnamese Air Force, 1951–1975, an Anaylysis of its

Role in Combat. Volume III, 1977.

Project CHECO Reports

(Written in Southeast Asia or Hawaii and printed in Hawaii.)

Abbey, Tom G. “The Role of USAF in Support of Special Activities in

Southeast Asia.” 1976.

Barnette, Benjamin H., Jr., and James R. Barrow. “Base Defense in Thailand.”

1973.

Bonetti, Lee. “The War in Vietnam, January–June 1967.” 1968.

Bonetti, Lee, et al. “The War in Vietnam, July–December 1967.” 1968.

Breitling, Patrick J. “Guided Bomb Operations in Southeast Asia: The Weather

Dimension, 1 February–31 December 1972.” 1973.

Brynn, Edward P. “Reconnaissance in Southeast Asia, July 1966–June 1968.”

1969.

369

Bibliography
Brynn, Edward P., and Arthur P. Geesey. “Joint Personnel Recovery in Southeast Asia.” 1976.

Burch, Robert M. “The ABCCC in Southeast Asia.” 1969.

———. “Command and Control, 1966–1968.” 1969.

———. “Tactical Electronic Warfare Operations in Southeast Asia, 1962–

1968.” 1969.

Burditt, William R. “Rules of Engagement, October 1972–August 1973.” 1977.

Colwell, Robert F. “USAF Tactical Reconnaissance in Southeast Asia, July

1969–June 1971.” 1971.

Durkee, Richard A. “Combat Skyspot.” 1967.

Elder, Paul W. “Buffalo Hunter, 1970–1972.” 1973.

Elder, Paul W., and Peter M. Melly. “Rules of Engagement, November 1969–

September 1972.” 1973.

Fessler, George R., Jr. “Air Refueling in Southeast Asia, 1964–1970.” 1971.

Francis, David G., and David R. Nelson. “Search and Rescue Operations in

Southeast Asia, 1 April 1972–30 June 1973.” 1974.

Garver, Richard B. “Drug Abuse in Southeast Asia.” 1975.

Hanrahan, Edward B. “An Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in

Thailand Through 1973.” 1975.

Harrison, Philip R. “Impact of Darkness and Weather on Air Operations in

Southeast Asia.” 1969.

Heffron, Charles H., Jr. “Air-to-Air Encounters Over North Vietnam, 1

January–30 June 1967.” 1967.

Helmka, Robert T., and Beverly Hale. “USAF Operations from Thailand,

1964–65.” 1966.

Hurley, Alfred F. “The EC–47 in Southeast Asia.” 1968.

Johnson, Calvin R. “Linebacker Operations, September–December 1972.”

1978.

Lowe, LeRoy W. “Search and Rescue Operations in Southeast Asia, 1 June

1971–31 March 1972.” 1972.

Lynch, Walter F. “USAF Search and Rescue Operations in Southeast Asia, 1

July 1969–31 December 1970.” 1971.

Machovec, Frank M. “Southeast Asia Tactical Data Systems Interface.” 1975.

Melyan, Wesley R.C. “Arc Light, 1965–1966.” 1967.

———. “Arc Light, January–June 1967.” 1968.

Melyan, Wesley R.C., and Lee Bonetti. “Rolling Thunder, July 1965–December 1966.” 1967.

Montagliani, Ernie S. “Airmunitions in Southeast Asia.” 1969.

Morita, Claude G. “USSAG/7AF in Thailand (1973–1975).” 1979.

Nicholson, Charles A. “The USAF Response to the Spring 1972 North Vietnamese Offensive.” 1972.

Overton, James B. “Enemy Capture/Release of USAF Personnel in Southeast

Asia.” 1969.

370

Bibliography
———. “Rolling Thunder: January 1967–November 1968.” 1969.

———. “USAF Search and Rescue, November 1967–June 1969.” 1969.

Paterson, L.E. “Air War in the DMZ, January–August 1967.” 1968.

———. “Evolution of the Rules of Engagement for Southeast Asia, 1960–-

1965.” 1966.

Penix, Guyman, and Paul T. Ringenbach. “Air Defense in Southeast Asia,

1945–1971.” 1973.

Picinich, A.A., et al. “The F–111 in Southeast Asia: September 1972–January

1973.” 1974.

Porter, Melvin F. “Air Tactics Against North Vietnam Air/Ground Defenses.”

1967.

———. “Control of Airstrikes, January 1967–December 1968.” 1969.

———. “The EC–47 in Southeast Asia, April 1968–July 1970.” 1970.

———. “Evasion and Escape, Southeast Asia, 1964–1971.” 1972.

———. “Interdiction in Southeast Asia, 1965–1966.” 1967.

———. “Interdiction of Waterways and POL Pipelines.” 1970.

———. “Linebacker: Overview of the First 120 Days.” 1973.

———. “Operation Thor.” 1969.

———. “Proud Deep Alpha.” 1972.

———. “Second Generation Weaponry in Southeast Asia.” 1970.

———. “Tactical Control System Operations in Southeast Asia.” 1969.

Pralle, James B. “Arc Light, June 1967–December 1968.” 1969.

Pratt, John C. “Air Tactics Against North Vietnam Air Ground Defenses,

December 1966–November 1968.” 1969.

Project CHECO Team. “Possible Communist Counter to Punitive Air Strikes.”

1965.

———. “Punitive Air Strikes.” 1965.

———. “Rolling Thunder, March–June 1965.” 1966.

Reddel, Carl W. “College Eye.” 1968.

Render, William E. “EB–66 Operations in Southeast Asia, 1967.” 1968.

Sams, Kenneth. “Command and Control, 1965.” 1966.

Sams, Kenneth, et al. “The Air War in Vietnam, 1968–1969.” 1970.

Schlight, John. “Jet Forward Air Controllers in Southeast Asia.” 1969.

———. “Rules of Engagement, 1 January 1966–1 November 1969.” 1969.

Seig, Louis. “Impact of Geography on Air Operations in Southeast Asia.” 1970.

Sheets, Gary D. “Air Operations in the DMZ Area, 1966.” 1967.

Siemann, John W. “Combat Snap: AIM–9J Southeast Asia Introduction.” 1974.

Smith, Mark E. “USAF Reconnaissance in Southeast Asia, 1961–66.” 1966.

Stevens, Eldon L. “Psychological Operations: Air Support in Southeast Asia,

June 1968–May 1971.” 1971.

Thompson, A.W. “Strike Control and Reconnaissance (SCAR) in Southeast

Asia.” 1969.

Thorndale, C. William. “Air War in the DMZ, September 1967–June 1968.” 1969.

371

Bibliography
———. “Interdiction in Route Package One, 1968.” 1969.

———. “Interdiction in Southeast Asia, November 1966–October 1968.”

1969.

———. “Tactical Recon Photography Request/Distribution.” 1969.

Tinius, Jack L. “Psychological Operations Against North Vietnam, July 1972–

January 1973.” 1974.

Trest, Warren A. “Control of Air Strikes in Southeast Asia, 1961–1966.” 1967.

———. “Lucky Tiger Special Air Warfare Operations.” 1967.

———. “Operation Tally Ho.” 1966.

———. “USAF SAC Operations in Support of Southeast Asia.” 1969.

Trest, Warren A., and Valentino Castellina. “Operation Neutralize.” 1968.

Trest, Warren A., and Charles E. Gorland. “Counterinsurgency in Thailand,

1966.” 1967.

Trest, Warren A., and Dale E. Hammons. “USAF Operations from Thailand,

1966.” 1967.

Trest, Warren A., et al. “USAF Posture in Thailand, 1966.” 1967.

Vallentiny, Edward. “The Fall of Site 85.” 1968.

———. “USAF Posture in Thailand, 1967.” 1969.

Vallentiny, Edward, and D.G. Francis. “Attack on Udorn, 26 July 1968.” 1968.

Wade, Thomas D. “Seventh Air Force Tactical Air Control Center Operations.”

1968.

Weaver, Robert B. “Air-to-Air Encounters Over North Vietnam, 1 July 1967–

31 December 1968.” 1969.

Wright, Monte D. “USAF Tactics Against Air and Ground Defenses in Southeast Asia, November 1968–May 1970.” 1970.

Other Air Force Printed Studies

Anthony, Victor B. Tactics and Techniques of Night Operations, 1960–1970.

Washington, 1973.

Anthony, Victor B., and Richard N. Sexton. The War in Northern Laos, 1954–

1973. Washington, 1993.

Drew, Dennis M. Rolling Thunder 1965: Anatomy of A Failure. Maxwell AFB,

1986.

Greenwood, John T. Chronology of SAC Participation in Linebacker II. Offutt

AFB, 1973.

Hartsook, Elizabeth H. The Administration Emphasizes Air Power, 1969. Washington, 1971.

———. Air Power Helps Stop the Invasion and End the War, 1972. Washington, 1978.

———. The End of U.S. Involvement, 1973–1975. Washington, 1980.

———. Role of Air Power Grows, 1970. Washington, 1972.

———. Shield for Vietnamization and Withdrawal, 1971. Washington, 1976.

372

Bibliography
Hopkins, Charles K. SAC Bomber Operations in the Southeast Asia War. 5 volumes. Offutt AFB, 1983.

———. SAC Tanker Operations in the Southeast Asia War. Offutt AFB, 1979.

Nalty, Bernard. Tactics and Techniques of Electronic Warfare: Electronic Countermeasures in the Air War Against North Vietnam, 1965–1973.

Washington, 1977.

Pierson, James E. A Special Study of Electronic Warfare in Southeast Asia,

1964–1968. Kelly AFB, 1973.

Van Staaveren, Jacob. The Air Campaign Against North Vietnam, 1966. Washington, 1968.

———. The Search for Military Alternatives, 1967. Washington, 1969.

———. Toward A Bombing Halt, 1968. Washington, 1970.

———. USAF Deployment Planning for Southeast Asia, 1966. Washington,

1967.

———. USAF Plans and Operations in Southeast Asia, 1965. Washington,

1966.

Wolk, Herman S. Logistics and Base Construction in Southeast Asia, 1967.

Washington, 1968.

———. Research and Development for Southeast Asia, 1965–67. Washington,

1969.

———. Research and Development for Southeast Asia, 1968. Washington,

1970.

———. USAF Logistic Plans and Policies in Southeast Asia, 1965. Washington, 1967.

———. USAF Logistic Plans and Policies in Southeast Asia, 1966. Washington, 1967.

Air Force Drafts

Cummings, Robert L., Jr. “The Vietnamese Railroad System.” Washington,

1984.

Deas, Robert. “Two Days at Thai Nguyen.” Maxwell AFB, 1976.

Greenhalgh, William H., Jr. “The U.S. Air Force in Southeast Asia, February

1965–November 1968.” Maxwell AFB, 1973.

———. “U.S. Air Force Reconnaissance in Southeast Asia, 1960–1975.” Maxwell AFB, 1976.

Nalty, Bernard C. “Interdiction in Southern Laos, 1968–1972.” Washington,

1993.

Sunderland, Riley, and Jacob Van Staaveren. “Constraints on the Use of Air

Power in Three Wars.” Washington, 1971.

Van Staaveren, Jacob. “Gradual Failure: The Air War Over North Vietnam,

1965–66.” Washington, 1997.

373

Bibliography
Other U.S. Government Histories

The classified histories and studies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pacific

Command, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the National Security

Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency are invaluable. Several government agencies have published relevant volumes:

Army

Bergen, John D. Military Communications: A Test for Technology. Washington,

1986.

Clarke, Jeffrey J. Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973. Washington, 1988.

Hammond, William M. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–

1968. Washington, 1988.

———. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973. Washington,

1996.

Meyerson, Joel D. Images of a Lengthy War. Washington, 1986.

Spector, Ronald H. Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960. Washington, 1983.

Navy

Hooper, Edwin Bickford, Dean C. Allard, and Oscar P. Fitzgerald. The Setting

of the Stage to 1959. Washington, 1976.

Marolda, Edward J. By Sea, Air, and Land: An Illustrated History of the U.S.

Navy and the War in Southeast Asia. Washington, 1994.

———. Operation End Sweep. Washington, 1993.

Marolda, Edward J., and Oscar P. Fitzgerald. From Military Assistance to

Combat, 1959–1965. Washington, 1986.

Muir, Malcom Jr. Black Shoes and Blue Water: Surface Warfare in the United

States Navy, 1945–1975. Washington, 1996.

Marine Corps

Cosmas, Graham A., and Terrence P. Murray. Vietnamization and Redeployment, 1970–1971. Washington, 1986.

Dunham, George R., and David A. Quinlan. The Bitter End, 1973–1975. Washington, 1990.

Melson, Charles D., and Curtis G. Arnold. The War that Would Not End, 1971–

1973. Washington, 1991.

Shulimson, Jack. An Expanding War, 1966. Washington, 1982.

Shulimson, Jack, et al. The Defining Year, 1968. Washington, 1997.

374

Bibliography
Shulimson, Jack, and Charles M. Johnson. The Landing and the Buildup, 1965.

Washington, 1978.

Smith, Charles P. High Mobility and Standdown, 1969. Washington, 1988.

Telfer, Gary L., Lane Rogers, and V. Keith Fleming, Jr. Fighting the North

Vietnamese, 1967. Washington, 1984.

Whitlow, Robert H. The Advisory and Combat Assistance Era, 1954–1964.

Washington, 1977.

Office of the Secretary of Defense

Rochester, Stuart I., and Frederick Kiley. Honor Bound: The History of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973. Washington, 1998.

National Defense University

Dillard, Walter Scott. Sixty Days to Peace: Implementing the Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam 1973. Washington, 1982.

Keaney, Thomas A. Strategic Bombers and Conventional Weapons: Airpower

Options. Washington, 1984.

Mather, Paul D. M.I.A.: Accounting for the Missing in Southeast Asia. Washington, 1994.

Warden, John A., III. The Air Campaign. Washington, 1988.

Watts, Barry D. Clausewitzian Friction and Future War. Washington, 1996.

Central Intelligence Agency

Ford, Harold P. CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–

1968. Washington, 1998.

Congressional Research Service

Gibbons, William Conrad. The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships. Parts I (1945–1961), II

(1961–1964), III (January–July 1965), and IV (July 1965–January 1968).

Washington, 1984–94.

U.S. Government Evaluations and Statistical Reports

This list is very selective.

Seventh Air Force

Project CHECO Reports. See list above. Most of these were written at Seventh

375

Bibliography
Air Force and printed at Pacific Air Forces.

Weekly Air Intelligence Summary.

Pacific Air Forces

Gilster, Col. Herman L., and Capt. Robert E.M. Frady. Linebacker II USAF

Bombing Survey. Hickam AFB, 1973.

North Vietnamese Air Force Fighter Patterns. Compiled by DCS/Intelligence,

March 1968.

Project Corona Harvest Inputs. See discussion of Air Force Historical Research

Agency above.

Summary of Air Operations in Southeast Asia. Monthly.

Pacific Command

Rolling Thunder Digest. Quarterly.

Sharp, Adm. U.S. Grant, and Gen. William C. Westmoreland. Report on the

War in Vietnam. Washington, 1968.

Joint Chiefs of Staff

McPherson, Maj. Gen. John B. Night Song Study Group Report: An Examination of U.S. Air Operations Against North Vietnam Air Defense System. 3

volumes. Washington, 1967.

Defense Intelligence Agency

Southeast Asia Military Fact Book. Semiannual. Prepared with JCS.

Office of the Secretary of Defense

Southeast Asia Statistical Summary. Tables frequently updated through 1973.

Headquarters USAF

Trends, Indicators, and Analyses. Monthly.

USAF Management Summary: Southeast Asia. Monthly until final issue in

November 1973.

USAF Management Summary: Southeast Asia Review. Semi-annual until final

issue in February 1974.

USAF Statistical Digest. Annual.

376

Bibliography
Tactical Air Command

Granville, John M. Summary of USAF Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia.

Langley AFB, 1974.

USAF Tactical Fighter Weapons Center. Project Red Baron II: Air-to-Air

Encounters in Southeast Asia. 5 volumes. Nellis AFB, 1972–73. Project

Red Baron III. 4 volumes. Nellis AFB, 1974. For predecessor study, see

Institute for Defense Analyses section below.

Air University

Project Corona Harvest Reports. See discussion of Air Force Historical

Research Agency above.

Central Intelligence Agency

An Appraisal of Bombing of North Vietnam. At least quarterly. Prepared with

Defense Intelligence Agency.

Palmer, Gen. Bruce, Jr. U.S. Intelligence and Vietnam. Washington, 1984.

U.S. Government Contract Studies

BDM Corporation

A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam. 9 volumes. Washington, 1979.

Center for Naval Analyses

McCrea, Michael M. U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force Fixed-Wing

Aircraft Losses and Damage in Southeast Asia (1962–1973). Arlington,

Va, 1976.

Summary of Air Operations in Southeast Asia. Arlington, Va, monthly.

Institute for Defense Analyses

Air-to-Air Encounter in Southeast Asia. 4 volumes. Arlington, Va, 1974. This

is the initial installment of what became Project Red Baron at the USAF

Tactical Fighter Weapons Center, Nellis AFB, Nev.

Analysis of Combat Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia. 5 volumes. Arlington,

Va, 1968.

The Effects of U.S. Bombing on North Vietnam’s Ability to Support Military Operations in South Vietnam and Laos: Retrospect and Prospect. Arlington,

1966. Better known as the Jason Study.

377

Bibliography
RAND

Blachly, R.L., P.A. CoNine, and E.H. Sharkey. Laser and Electro-Optical

Guided Bomb Performance in Southeast Asia. Santa Monica, 1973.

Davison, W. Phillips, and Stephen J. Hosmer. Some Vietnamese Communist and

Anti-Communist Views on Bombing Restrictions and Negotiations. Santa

Monica, 1969.

DeLeon, Peter. The Laser-Guided Bomb: Case History of a Development. Santa

Monica, 1974.

Dews, Edmund, and Felix Kozaczka. Air Interdiction: Lessons from Past

Campaigns. Santa Monica, 1981.

Fisk, D.M., P.R. McClenon, and J.J. Surmeier. Some Methodological Problems

of Wartime Costing—A Case Study Using the Southeast Asia Outcountry

Air War. Santa Monica, 1970.

Heymann, Hans, Jr., et al. Security and Assistance in Thailand. Santa Monica,

1965.

Hoeffding, Oleg. Bombing North Vietnam: An Appraisal of Economic and

Political Effects. Santa Monica, 1966.

Hosmer, Stephen T. The Fall of South Vietnam. Santa Monica, 1975.

———. Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future. Santa

Monica, 1970.

Jenkins, Brian M. Giap and the Seventh Son. Santa Monica, 1972.

———. Why the North Vietnamese Keep Fighting. Santa Monica, 1972.

Johnson, Dana J. Roles and Missions for Conventionally Armed Heavy

Bombers—An Historical Perspective. Santa Monica, 1994.

Joint Studies with Headquarters USAF Operations Analysis. Santa Monica,

Calif, 1968.

Kellen, Konrad. Conversations with Enemy Soldiers in Late 1968/Early 1969.

Santa Monica, 1970.

———. A Profile of the PAVN Soldier in South Vietnam. Santa Monica, 1966.

Nutt, Anita Lauve. Prisoners of War in Indochina. Santa Monica, 1969.

Reinhardt, G.C., and E.H. Sharkey. Air Interdiction in Southeast Asia. Santa

Monica, 1967.

Simons, William E. Coercion in Vietnam? Santa Monica, 1969.

Solomon, Robert L. Boundary Concepts and Practices in Southeast Asia. Santa

Monica, 1969.

Sweetland, Anders. Rallying Potential Among the North Vietnamese Armed

Forces. Santa Monica, 1970.

Vick, Alan. Snakes in the Eagles Nest: A History of Ground Attacks on Air

Bases. Santa Monica, 1995.

Weiner, M.G., J.R. Brown, and R.E. Koon. Infiltration of Personnel from North

Vietnam, 1959–1967. Santa Monica, 1968.

Winnefeld, James A., and Dana J. Johnson. Joint Air Operations: Pursuit of

378

Bibliography
Unity in Command and Control, 1942–1991. Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 1993.

Zasloff, Joseph J. Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960.

Santa Monica, 1967.

———. Political Motivation of the Viet Cong. Santa Monica, 1968.

———. The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency, Santa Monica,

1964.

Vietnamese Perspectives

The Pike and Cornell microfilm collections (described in the introductory

section of this bibliography) include Vietnamese publications in English as well

as translations by the U.S. government and others. For example, Hanoi published

in English a 1973 report of the Commission for Investigation of the U.S.

Imperialists’ War Crimes in Viet Nam entitled The Late December 1972 U.S.

Blitz on North Vietnam. A more recent and extensive Vietnamese publication in

English is Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations

(Hanoi, 1996). Although U.S. government translations of Vietnamese works have

become infrequent since the end of the Cold War, in 1996 the U.S. Defense

Language Institute translated a 1987 report by the Military History Institute of

Vietnam to Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, entitled A Consolidated Report on the Fight

Against the United States for the Salvation of Vietnam by Our People. After retiring from the U.S. government, Merle Pribbenow translated the Military History

Institute’s History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, Volume II: The Coming of

Age of the People’s Army of Vietnam During the Resistance War Against the

Americans to Save the Nation, 1954–1975 (Hanoi, 1994).

Seeking dialogue with Hanoi’s historians and other officials, a group of

American scholars went there for a conference in 1988; the Americans published

their papers together with a summary of views expressed by the Vietnamese in

Jayne Werner and David Hunt, eds., The American War in Vietnam (Ithaca, New

York: Cornell, 1993). In 1995–98, former Secretary of Defense Robert

McNamara and colleagues from the Johnson administration together with some

American scholars traveled to Hanoi for a series of meetings with Nguyen Co

Thach, Vo Nguyen Giap and other Vietnamese experts on the war. A retired U.S.

Air Force general, William Y. Smith, participated in those discussions. See Robert

S. McNamara, James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, with Thomas J.

Biersteker and Col. Herbert Y. Schandler, Argument Without End: In Search of

Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York: Public Affairs, 1999).

The names of Vietnam’s leading figures have been credited as authors of several volumes published in Hanoi. See the entries for Ho Chi Minh, Hoang Van

Kanh, Le Duan, Truong Chinh, Van Tien Dung, and Vo Nguyen Giap in the next

section of this bibliography, which also lists publications of leaders of South

Vietnam (Nguyen Cao Ky, Tran Van Don, Bui Diem, Nguyen Tien Hung, Nguyen

379

Bibliography
Anh Tuan, Cao Van Vien, and Lam Quang Thi) as well as Vietnamese communists who broke with Hanoi’s official view (Bui Tin, Tran Van Tra, and Truong

Nhu Tang). For an oral history of female soldiers, see the entry for Karen

Gottschang Turner. See also the entries for Don North’s interview of Trinh Thi

Ngo (“Hanoi Hannah”) in Vietnam magazine, as well as that magazine’s translation of General Hoang Van Khanh’s 1982 account (in the Hanoi press) of efforts

to shoot down B–52s. Included below are several examples of recent Vietnamese

fiction, among them celebrated novels by two authors from the north, Bao Ninh

(The Sorrow of War) and Duong Thu Huong (Novel Without a Name).

Memoirs and Participant Publications

Allison, George B. “The Bombers Go to Bullseye.” Aerospace Historian,

December 1982, pp 227–38.

Alvarez, Everett, Jr., and Anthony S. Pitch. Chained Eagle. New York: Donald

I. Fine, 1989.

Anthis, Rollen H. “Airpower: The Paradox in Vietnam.” Air Force Magazine,

April 1967, pp 34–38.

Ariel (pseudonym of Morris J. Blachman). “The Stupidity of Intelligence.”

Washington Monthly, September 1969, pp 23–28.

Ashmore, Harry S., and William C. Baggs. Mission to Hanoi. New York:

Putnam’s, 1968.

Baez, Joan. And a Voice to Sing With. New York: Summit, 1987.

Ball, George. “A Light that Failed.” Atlantic Monthly, July 1972, p 39.

———. The Past Has Another Pattern. New York: Norton, 1982.

Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. New York: Pantheon,

1993.

Basel, G.I. Pak Six. La Mesa, California: Associated Creative Writers, 1982.

Bedinger, Henry James. “Prisoner of War Organization in Hanoi.” MS thesis,

San Diego State University, 1976.

Bell, Brig. Gen. Ken. 100 Missions North. Washington: Brassey’s, 1993.

Berent, Mark. Storm Flight. New York: Putnam’s, 1993. This is the last of five

Berent novels giving a veteran’s fictional history of the air war over

Southeast Asia.

Bingamon, H.W. Reckonings: Stories of the Air War over North Vietnam. New

York: Vantage, 1988.

Blesse, Frederick C. Check Six. Mesa, Arizona: Champlin Museum, 1987.

Bohlen, Charles E. Witness to History. New York: Norton, 1973.

Brace, Ernest C. A Code to Keep. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.

Broughton, Jack. Going Downtown. New York: Orion, 1988.

———. Thud Ridge. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969.

Bui Diem with David Chanoff. In the Jaws of History. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1987.

380

Bibliography
Bui Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel.

Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995.

Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival. New York: Random House, 1988.

———. The Strength of Government. Cambridge: Harvard, 1968.

Burchett, Wilfred. At the Barricades. New York: Times Books, 1981.

———. Vietnam North. New York: International, 1966.

Butler, Jimmie H. A Certain Brotherhood. Colorado Springs: Cricket Press,

1996. A novel.

Cao Van Vien. The Final Collapse. Washington: Army Center of Military

History, 1983.

Carroll, James. An American Requiem. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Carson, Don. “Flying the Thud.” Air Force Magazine, April 1974, pp 18–23.

Clement, Robert A. “A Fourth of July in December: A B–52 Navigator’s

Perspective of Linebacker II.” Air Command and Staff College, 1984.

Clifford, Clark. “A Viet Nam Reappraisal.” Foreign Affairs, July 1969, pp

601–22.

Clifford, Clark, with Richard Holbrooke. Counsel to the President. New York:

Random House, 1991.

Colby, William, and Peter Forbath. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Colby, William, with James McCargar. Lost Victory. Chicago: Contemporary

Books, 1989.

Colvin, John. “Hanoi in My Time.” Washington Quarterly, spring 1981, pp

138–54.

———. Twice Around the World. London: Leo Cooper, 1991.

Coonts, Stephen. Flight of the Intruder. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986.

A novel.

Cooper, Charles G. “The Day It Became the Longest War.” Naval Institute

Proceedings, May 1996, pp 77–80.

Cooper, Chester L. The Lost Crusade. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970.

Cunningham, Randy, with Jeff Ethell. Fox Two. Mesa, Arizona: Champlin

Museum, 1984.

Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War. Novato, California: Presidio, 1988.

Day, George E. Return with Honor. Mesa, Arizona: Champlin Museum, 1989.

DeBellvue, Charles. “Navigator Ace—An Interview with Lt. Col. Chuck

DeBellvue.” Navigator, Winter 1983, pp 5–11.

Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence. New York: Times Books, 1995.

Dramesi, John A. Code of Honor. New York: Norton, 1975.

Duffy, Dan, ed. North Viet Nam Now: Fiction and Essays from Hanoi (Viet Nam

Forum 15). New Haven: Yale University Council on Southeast Asia

Studies, 1996.

Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without A Name. New York: Morrow, 1994.

Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

381

Bibliography
Enthoven, Alain C., and K. Wayne Smith. How Much is Enough? New York:

Harper & Row, 1971.

Fulbright, J.W. The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. New York: Liveright,

1970.

Fulbright, J.W., with Seth P. Tillman. The Price of Empire. New York:

Pantheon, 1989.

Gates, Robert M. From the Shadows. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Gillcrist, Paul T. Feet Wet: Reflections of a Carrier Pilot. Novato, California:

Presidio, 1990.

Ginsburgh, Robert N. “Strategy and Air Power: The Lessons of Southeast

Asia.” Strategic Review, summer 1973, pp 18–24.

Goldwater, Barry M., with Jack Casserly. Goldwater. New York: Doubleday,

1988.

Goulding, Phil G. Confirm or Deny. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Guarino, Larry. A POW’s Story. New York: Ivy, 1990.

Gulley, Bill, with Mary Ellen Reese. Breaking Cover. New York: Simon&

Schuster, 1980.

Haig, Alexander M., Jr., with Charles McCarry. Inner Circles. New York:

Warner, 1992.

Haldeman, H.R. The Haldeman Diaries. New York: Putnam’s, 1994. See the

section of this note on “Published Collections of Documents” for the complete edition on CD-ROM.

Haldeman, H.R., with Joseph DiMona. The Ends of Power. New York: Times

Books, 1978.

Hayden, Tom. Reunion. New York: Collier, 1988.

Hayslip, Le Ly, with Jay Works. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places.

New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Hess, Martha. Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Ho Chi Minh. Selected Writings. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House,

1977.

Hoang Van Chi. From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North

Vietnam. New York: Praegar, 1964.

Hoang Van Kanh. “Taking Aim at the B–52s.” Vietnam, April 1996, pp 26–33.

Originally published in Nhan Dan (Hanoi) December 6–10, 1982.

Hoopes, Townsend. The Limits of Intervention. New York: David McKay,

1969.

———. “The Nuremberg Suggestion.” Washington Monthly, January 1970, pp

18–21.

Humphrey, Hubert. The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics.

Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Jensen, Jay R. Six Years in Hell. Orcott, California: P.O.W., 1989.

Johnson, Gerald W., with John McClure and Charlotte McClure. Called to

382

Bibliography
Command. Paducah, Kentucky: Turner, 1996.

Johnson, Lady Bird (Claudia T.) A White House Diary. New York: Holt,

Rinehart & Winston. 1970.

Johnson, Lyndon Baines. The Vantage Point. New York: Holt, Rinehart &

Winston, 1971.

Johnson, Sam R., and Jan Winebrenner. Captive Warriors. College Station:

Texas A & M, 1992.

Johnson, U. Alexis, with Jef Olivarius McAllister. The Right Hand of Power.

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984.

Kasler, James H. “The Hanoi POL Strike.” Air University Review,

November–December 1974, pp 19–28.

Keirn, Richard “Pop.” Old Glory is the Most Beautiful of All. Pittsburgh:

Dorrance Publishing Co., 1996.

Kiley, Fred, and Tony Dater. Listen. The War. Colorado Springs: USAF

Academy, 1973. Poetry.

Kissinger, Henry. “The Viet Nam Negotiations.” Foreign Affairs, January 1969,

pp 211–34.

———. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

———. Years of Renewal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

———. Years of Upheaval. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.

Komer, Robert W. Bureaucracy at War. Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1986.

Kross, Walt. Splash One. Washington: Brassey’s, 1991. A novel.

Krulak, Victor. First to Fight. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984.

Laird, Melvin. “A Strong Start in a Difficult Decade.” International Security,

fall 1985, pp 5–26.

Lam Quang Thi. Autopsy: The Death of South Viet Nam. Phoenix: Sphinx,

1986.

Lansdale, Edward Geary. In the Midst of War. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Larson, Gerald D. “How a Fighter Pilot Sees the Air War in Vietnam.” Air

Force Magazine, July 1967, pp 45–49.

Le Duan. The Vietnamese Revolution. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing

House, 1970.

Lehman, John F., Jr. Command of the Seas. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1988.

LeMay, Curtis E., with MacKinlay Kantor. Mission With LeMay. Garden City,

New York: Doubleday, 1965.

Marr, David G., ed. Phan Boi Chau’s “Prison Notes” and Ho Chi Minh’s

“Prison Diary.” Athens: Ohio University, 1978.

Maurer, Harry. Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam, 1945–1975, An Oral

History. New York: Henry Holt, 1989.

McCain, John, with Mark Salter. Faith of My Fathers. New York: Random

House, 1999.

McCain, John S., Jr. “Admiral McCain Assesses the War in Southeast Asia.”

383

Bibliography
Air Force Magazine, September 1972.

McCarthy, James R., and Robert E. Rayfield. B–52s Over Hanoi. Fullerton,

California: California State Fullerton Press, 1996.

McCarthy, Mary. Vietnam. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967.

McCutcheon, Keith B. “Marine Aviation in Vietnam, 1962–1970.” US Naval

Institute Naval Review, May 1971.

McDaniel, Norman A. Yet Another Voice. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975.

McNamara, Robert S. The Essence of Security. New York: Harper & Row,

1968.

———. Out of the Cold. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and

Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.

McNamara, Robert S., James G. Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, with Thomas J.

Bierstecker and Col. Herbert Y. Schandler, Argument Without End: In Search

of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy. New York: Public Affairs, 1999.

McPherson, Harry. A Political Education. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Michel, Marshall L., III. Clashes: Air Combat Over North Vietnam,

1965–1972. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997.

Mitchell, James R. “Down on the Ninety-Ninth.” Air Force Magazine,

September 1973, pp 112–16.

Momyer, William W. Air Power in Three Wars. Washington: GPO, 1978.

———. “The Evolution of Fighter Tactics in SEA.” Air Force Magazine, July

1973, pp 58–62.

———. “Our Top Airman in Vietnam: An Interview.” Airman, May 1967, pp

4–7.

———. “TAC Air’s Responsiveness.” Air Force Magazine, December 1972,

pp 32–37.

———. “Tactical Lessons of Vietnam.” Aviation Week and Space Technology,

May 21 and June 4, 1973.

Moorer, Thomas H. “What Admiral Moorer Really Thinks About Airpower’s

Effectiveness in SEA.” Air Force Magazine, November 1973.

Mulligan, James A. The Hanoi Commitment. Virginia Beach: RIF Marketing,

1981.

Nitze, Paul H., with Ann M. Smith and Steven L. Reardon. From Hiroshima to

Glasnost. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989.

Nixon, Richard. In the Arena. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

———. Leaders. New York: Warner, 1982.

———. Real Peace. Boston: Little Brown, 1984.

———. The Real War. New York: Warner, 1980.

———. RN: The Memors of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap,

1978.

Nguyen Anh Tuan. South Vietnam: Trial and Experience. Athens: Ohio

384

Bibliography
University, 1987.

Nguyen Cao Ky. Twenty Years and Twenty Days. New York: Stein & Day, 1976.

Nguyen Tien Hung, and Jerrold L. Schecter. The Palace File. New York:

Harper & Row, 1986.

Nichols, John B., and Barrett Tillman. On Yankee Station. Annapolis: Naval

Institute Press, 1987.

North, Don. “Hanoi Hannah Speaks Again.” Vietnam, April 1996, pp 18–24.

An interview with Trinh Thi Ngo.

Olds, Robin. “Forty-Six Years a Fighter Pilot.” American Aviation Historical

Society Journal, Winter 1968, pp 235–39.

———. “How I Got My First MiG.” Air Force Magazine, July 67, pp 38–44.

———. “The Lessons of Clobber College.” Flight International, June 1969, pp

1053–56.

Oudes, Bruce, ed. From: The President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files. New

York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Palmer, Bruce, Jr. The 25-Year War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,

1984.

Parker, James. Codename Mule: Fighting the Secret War in Laos for the CIA.

Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995.

Patti, Archimedes. Why Viet Nam? Berkeley: University of California Press,

1980.

Piowaty, John F. “Reflections of a Thud Driver.” Air University Review,

January–February 1983, pp 52–53.

Polgar, Thomas. “Managing the Company Store.” Vietnam, August 1989, pp

42–48.

Pratt, John Clark. The Laotian Fragments. New York: Avon, 1985. A novel.

Pratt, John Clark, ed. Vietnam Voices. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

Price, Raymond. With Nixon. New York: Viking, 1977.

Radvanyi, Janos. Delusions and Reality. South Bend, Indiana: Gateway, 1978.

Red River Valley Fighter Pilots. 2 vols. Paducah, Kentucky: Turner, 1989–93.

Includes aircrew biographical sketches and recollections.

Reynolds, John A. “Linebacker II: The POW Perspective.” Air Force

Magazine, September 1979, pp 93–94.

Risner, Robinson. The Passing of the Night. New York: Random House, 1973.

Rollins, Kelly (pseudonym). Fighter Pilots. Boston: Little Brown, 1981. A

novel.

Ronning, Chester. A Memoir of China in Revolution. New York: Pantheon,

1974.

Rostow, W.W. “The Case for the Vietnam War.” Times Literary Supplement,

June 9, 1995, reprinted in Parameters, winter 1996–97, pp 39–50.

———. The Diffusion of Power. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

———. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

385

Bibliography
Rusk, Dean, as told to Richard Rusk. As I Saw It. New York: Norton, 1990.

Safire, William. Before the Fall. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Salisbury, Harrison E. A Time of Change. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

———. Beyond the Lines—Hanoi. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

Santoli, Al. Leading the Way: How Vietnam Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military;

An Oral History. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Schuyler, Keith C. Elusive Horizons. South Brunswick, New Jersey: A.S.

Barnes, 1969.

Seamans, Robert C., Jr. Aiming At Targets. Washington: NASA, 1996.

Secord, Richard, with Jay Wurts. Honored and Betrayed. New York: Wiley,

1992.

Sharp, U.S. Grant. “Airpower Could Have Won in Vietnam.” Air Force

Magazine, September 1971.

———. Strategy for Defeat. San Rafael, California: Presidio, 1978.

Singlaub, John K, with Malcolm McConnell. Hazardous Duty. New York:

Summit Books, 1991.

Smith, Philip E., and Peggy Herz. Journey into Darkness. New York: Pocket

Books, 1992.

Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval. New York: Vintage, 1978.

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Stirling, John Bull. “Voodoo Reconnaissance in the Vietnam War, 1966–1967.”

Air Power History, winter 1996, pp 14–27.

Stockdale, Jim, and Sybil Stockdale. In Love and War. New York: Harper &

Row, 1984.

Strayer, Jay M. “The Son Tay Prison Raid: A Personal Perspective.” Friends

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Strober, Gerald, and Deborah Strober. Nixon: An Oral History of His

Presidency. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Sullivan, William H. Obligato. New York: Norton, 1984.

Taylor, Maxwell D. Swords and Plowshares. New York: Norton, 1972.

Thompson, Sir Robert. Make for the Hills. London: Lee Cooper, 1989.

Tran Van Don. Our Endless War. San Rafael, California: Presidio, 1978.

Tran Van Tra. Concluding the 30-Year War. Vol 5 of History of the Bulwark B–2

Theater. Arlington, Virginia: FBIS, 1983.

———. “Tet—the 1968 General Offensive and General Uprising” and “The

War That Should Not Have Been.” Jayne Werner and Luu Doan Huynh,

eds., The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. Armonk,

New York: Sharpe, 1993.

Trotti, John. Phantom Over Vietnam: Fighter Pilot, USMC. Novato, California:

Presidio, 1984.

Truong Chinh. The August Revolution. 2d ed. Hanoi: Foreign Languages

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———. The Resistance Will Win. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House,

386

Bibliography
1960.

Truong Nhu Tang with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A Vietcong Memoir.

New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985.

Turley, G.H. The Easter Offensive. Novato, California: Presidio, 1985.

Turner, Karen Gottschang, with Phan Thanh Hoa. Even the Women Must Fight:

Memories of War from North Vietnam. New York: John Wiley & Sons,

1998.

Tuso, Joseph F. Singing the Vietnam Blues: Songs of the Air Force in Southeast

Asia. College Station: Texas A&M, 1990.

Van Tien Dung. Our Great Spring Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press,

1977.

Vo Nguyen Giap. Banner of People’s War. New York: Praegar, 1970.

———. Big Victory, Great Task. New York: Praegar, 1968.

———. People’s War Against U.S. Aero-Naval War. Hanoi: Foreign

Languages Publishing House, 1975.

———. People’s War, People’s Army. New York: Praegar, 1962.

Vo Nguyen Giap and Van Tien Dung. How We Won the War. Philadelphia:

RECON, 1976.

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Moore, ed., The Vietnam Debate. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of

America, 1990.

Walt, Lewis W. America Faces Defeat. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

———. Strange War, Strange Society. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1970.

Weber, Joe. Rules of Engagement. Novato, California: Presidio, 1991. A novel.

Weber, Ralph E. Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words.

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Westmoreland, William C. A Soldier Reports. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Wetterhahn, Ralph. “Change of Command.” Air and Space, August/September

1997, pp 62–69.

———. “Operation Bolo.” Retired Officer Magazine, November 1995, pp

39–43.

Whitcomb, Darrel D. “Tonnage and Technology: Air Power on the Ho Chi

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Wolff, Robert E. “Linebacker II: A Pilot’s Perspective.” Air Force Magazine,

September 1979, pp 86–91.

Zumwalt, Elmo R., Jr. On Watch. New York: Quadrangle, 1976.

Biography

Ambrose, Stephen. Nixon. 3 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987–92.

Barrett, David M. Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam

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Bibliography
State University Press, 1988.

Bill, James A. George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy. New

Haven: Yale, 1997.

Bird, Kai. The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. New

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Bornet, Vaughan Davis. The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1983.

Brands, H.W. The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of

American Power. New York: Oxford, 1995.

Brodie, Fawn M. Richard Nixon. New York: Norton, 1981.

Caro, Robert A. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. New York:

Knopf, 1990.

———. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. New York: Knopf,

1982.

Coffey, Thomas M. Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay.

New York: Crown, 1986.

Cohen, Warren I. Dean Rusk. Towtowa, New Jersey: Cooper Square, 1980.

Colvin, John. Giap: Volcano Under Snow. New York: Soho, 1996.

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Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Currey, Cecil B. Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1988.

———. Victory At Any Cost: The Genius of Vietnam’s Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.

Washington: Brassey’s, 1997.

Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960.

New York: Oxford, 1991.

———. Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973. New

York: Oxford, 1998.

DiLeo, David L. George Ball, Vietnam, and the Rethinking of Containment.

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Dugger, Ronnie. The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson. New

York: Norton, 1982.

Edwards, Lee. Goldwater. Washington: Regnery, 1995.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam.

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven: Yale, 1995.

Hanson, Victor Davis. “The Right Man.” MHQ, spring 1996, pp 56–65. On

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Hendrickson, Paul. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five

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388

Bibliography
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———. “Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House.” Diplomatic History,

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Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Isaacson, Walter, and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men. New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1986.

Kalb, Marvin, and Bernard Kalb. Kissinger. Boston: Little Brown, 1974.

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Macdonald, Peter. Giap. New York: Norton, 1993.

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Matthews, Christopher. Kennedy and Nixon. New York: Simon & Schuster,

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McConnell, Malcom. Into the Mouth of the Cat: The Story of Lance Sijan. New

York: Norton, 1985.

McGovern, James R. Black Eagle: General Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr.

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Morris, Roger. Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of An American Politician.

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———. Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy.

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O’Neill, Robert J. General Giap. New York: Praegar, 1969.

Powers, Thomas. The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.

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Quill, J. Michael. Lyndon Johnson and the Southern Military Tradition.

Washington: University Press of America, 1977.

Schandler, Herbert Y. The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and

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Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1978.

Schoenbaum, Thomas J. Waging Peace: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy,

and Johnson Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Schulzinger, Robert D. Henry Kissinger. New York: Columbia, 1989.

Shapley, Deborah. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert

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Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.

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Bibliography
New York: Random House, 1988.

Solberg, Carl. Hubert Humphrey. New York: Norton, 1980.

Sorley, Lewis. Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics

of Command. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

———. Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Terrill, Ross. Mao. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Trewhitt, Henry L. McNamara. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Valenti, Jack. A Very Human President. New York: Norton, 1975.

Vandiver, Frank E. Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson’s Wars. College

Station: Texas A&M, 1997.

Woods, Randall Bennett. Fulbright. New York: Cambridge, 1995.

Zaffiri, Samuel. Westmoreland. New York: William Morrow, 1994.

Ziemke, Caroline F. “Senator Richard B. Russell and the ‘Lost Cause’ in

Vietnam, 1954–1968.” Georgia Historical Quarterly, spring 1988, pp

36–71.

The Vietnam War and Air Power

Other sections of this bibliography give a more comprehensive indication of

official and biographical sources consulted. The concluding section, however,

merely offers students of air power some routes into the war’s wider literature.

Addington, Larry H. “Antiaircraft Artillery Versus the Fighter Bomber: The

Duel Over Vietnam.” Army, December 1973, pp 18–20.

Ambrose, Stephen E. “The Christmas Bombing.” MHQ, spring 1996, pp 86–95.

Anderson, William C. Bat-21. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

Andrade, Dale. Trial By Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive. New York:

Hippocrene, 1995.

Appel, Bernard. “Bombing Accuracy in a Combat Environment.” Air

University Review, July–August 1975.

Bates, Charles C., and John F. Fuller. America’s Weather Warriors, 1814–1985.

College Station: Texas A&M, 1986.

Berman, Larry. Lyndon Johnson’s War. New York: Norton, 1989.

———. Planning A Tragedy. New York: Norton, 1982.

Brigham, Robert K. Guerrilla Diplomacy: the NLF’s Foreign Relations and the

Vietnam War. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999.

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398

Bibliography
Abbott, Joseph S.: 218

Abrams, Creighton W., Jr.: 135, 138, 146, 

149, 152, 221, 222

aircraft protection: 207

B–52 employment: 226, 256

bombing policy: 163–64, 204–5, 223

Cambodia: 173

Lavelle affair: 200–201, 208, 209

Aces, North Vietnam: 186

Aces, U.S.

Korean War: 64, 183, 189

Vietnam War: 8, 55, 236–37, 241

World War II: 52, 86, 221, 266, 287

Acheson, Dean: 137, 138

Agan, Arthur C., Jr.: 99

Agnew, Spiro T.: 174, 176

Aiken, George: 115

Airborne Battlefield Command and 

Control Center: 17

Aircraft, North Vietnam

An–2: 102

Il–14: 96

Il–28: 34, 126–27, 142

J–6: 236

MiG–15: 33, 54

MiG–17: 33, 241

attacks on U.S. aircraft: 54, 110–11, 

127–28

capabilities: 34, 92, 237

MiG–19: 87, 214, 236–37, 242, 289n

MiG–21: 120, 240

attacks on U.S. aircraft: 52–55, 86, 

90, 96, 98, 103, 110, 127, 171, 

201, 242

capabilities: 34, 127, 237, 241

losses: 54–55, 90, 203, 226, 236–37, 

241, 242

Aircraft, U.S.: 308–9

A–1: 9

A–6: 59, 60, 100–101, 280

China border violation incident: 87, 

236

strikes: 87, 90, 108, 128, 203, 223, 

225, 229, 267, 268

A–7: 203, 225, 226, 246, 267, 269, 280

399

A–12: 106

AC–130: 231, 233

B–1: 285

B–2: 285

B–24: 234

B–29: 234

B–52: 214, 216

employment

Abrams position: 223, 224, 226

airfield attacks: 226, 257, 261, 

266, 268, 273

arguments against use: 132, 227

attrition models: 271, 272

Cambodia raids secrecy: 173–74

Christmas bombing: 255

Guam based: 9, 23, 223–24, 255, 

264, 271–74, 275, 277–78, 

280

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 255–58, 

260–66, 267–68, 270–77, 

279–80

JCS position: 269

Johnson position: 3, 20, 26, 35, 

39, 67, 124, 128, 145, 225, 

256, 281

Laird position: 223, 224

LeMay position: 21–22, 82, 93

missile suppression: 266–68

missiles, vulnerability to: 107,

201, 275

mission abort issue: 263, 265–66

morale: 273–74

Nixon position: 220, 221, 223–25, 

226–28, 253, 257–58, 259, 

260

personnel housing: 223, 224

petroleum facility attacks: 225, 

226, 262, 276

psychological effect: 277–78

rail facilities, attacks on: 225, 255, 

257, 261, 263, 270, 272–73, 

275–76

Rolling Thunder: 3, 20, 27

Stennis subcommittee position: 

82–83

Index

Numerals in bold indicate illustrations
Thailand based: 5, 10, 128, 223–25,

255, 263, 264, 268, 273–74

warehouses, attacks on: 227, 262

losses: 240, 255–56, 263, 264, 265, 

268, 271, 272, 279–80

strikes: 39, 82–83, 124–25, 130, 132, 

167–68, 170–71, 220, 223–24, 

228, 251, 256–57, 284

B–52G: 265

B–57: 20

C–130: 201, 231, 234, 251

C–130E: 194

DC–130: 213

E–3: 17

EB–66: 50, 53, 97, 98, 103, 231, 280

EC–121: 17, 53, 63, 92, 97, 98–99, 

103, 105, 165, 213, 222, 239

EC–130: 17

F–4: 9, 71, 144, 202, 205, 207, 212, 

214, 224, 226, 251, 269

aircraft downed: 54–55, 90, 92

capabilities: 7, 10, 34, 59, 225, 226, 

243

escort mission: 39–40, 50, 97–98, 

103, 205, 227, 243, 246

employment: 143–44, 245–46, 247, 

265

pods: 7, 53, 54, 112, 231, 243

strikes: 9, 58, 63–64, 71, 90, 127, 

128, 172, 175, 202, 203, 205, 

207, 223, 224, 226, 234, 235, 

251, 255, 269, 276, 278

F–4C: 61, 73, 92, 266, 267

F–4D: 61, 74, 91, 102, 108, 223, 239, 

241

F–4E: 223, 241, 243, 266, 267, 274–75

F–5: 240

F–8: 40n

F–100: 233

F–100F: 36, 143–44

F–104: 236

F–105: 64, 111, 118, 205, 214, 227, 

266, 267

capabilities: 6, 60, 245

employment: 39–40, 266

jamming pods: 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 243

losses: 6, 49, 53, 61, 86, 90, 103, 104

strikes: 57, 58, 59, 63, 86, 96, 103, 

110, 112, 128, 206–7, 225, 

231, 233, 235, 267

Wild Weasels: See Wild Weasels.

F–105D: 103

400

Index

F–105F: 36–37, 52, 57, 59–60, 112

all-weather and night bombers: 

60–61, 73, 95, 101, 245

employment: 53, 61, 73, 105

losses: 61, 95, 103

strikes: 57, 95, 101–2

F–105G: 171

F–111: 59, 61, 101, 245–46, 255, 267, 

268–69, 276, 280

KA–3: 40n

KC–135: 9–10, 40n, 53, 214, 231

OV–10: 231

RA–3B: 155

RA–5: 256, 280

RF–4: 155, 156, 171, 172, 194n, 196, 

205, 213, 247, 277

SR–71: 106, 277

T–38: 240

T–39: 194

U–2: 106

WC–130: 194n

Aircraft losses, North Vietnam: 63–64, 

239–40, 256, 274

MiG–17: 92, 111, 112, 128, 226, 236–37

MiG–19: 214

MiG–21: 54–55, 90, 203, 226, 236–37, 

241, 242

Aircraft losses, U.S.: 57–59, 66, 73–74, 89,

176, 243, 302, 310–11. See also Air 

defenses, North Vietnam.

1972: 242

A–1: 195

A–6: 280

A–6, over China: 87

A–7: 226, 268

Air Force vs. Navy: 48

attrition models: 271, 272

B–52: 255–56, 263–64, 265, 268, 271, 

272, 279–80

B–52D: 272

B–52G: 272

Black Friday: 86, 104

Black Wednesday: 86

C–130: 251

EB–66: 50, 98

EC–121: 165

F–4: 6, 8, 35, 50, 54, 61, 86, 90, 92–93, 

103, 104, 110, 113, 127, 187, 203, 

226, 236, 237, 239, 240, 245, 256, 

268, 280

F–4D: 173, 241

F–4E: 241
F–104: 236, 289

F–105: 6, 49, 50, 53, 61, 86, 90, 92–93, 

103, 104, 110, 226, 237

F–105F: 61, 95, 103, 195

F–105G: 171

F–111: 245, 246, 269

helicopters: 171

Laos: 288

Laos vs. Thailand risks: 161

post-target turn: 265

RA–5: 237

rates: 48–49

reconnaissance aircraft: 155–56, 280

Route Package Six: 48–49

Aircraft sorties: 301–5

Aircraft technology. See also Electronic 

technology; Bombing accuracy and 

effectiveness.

fuel tanks, self-sealing: 8–9

gun pods: 64, 90, 112, 241

hydraulic control systems: 8–9

survivability: 9

Air defenses, North Vietnam

antiaircraft artillery: 33, 35, 37, 40, 46, 

49, 57, 143, 196, 212, 269, 275

downs U.S. aircraft: 57–58, 73, 86, 

93, 143, 156, 242, 280, 290

estimates of: 40, 242–43

on irrigation dikes: 46, 250

Atoll air-to-air missiles: 86, 98, 103, 120

B–52 downing conference: 271n

Christmas bombing: 255

Fan Song radar: 267

flak: 40, 57–58

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 25, 40–41, 

110–11, 143, 277

interlocking radar system: 205

Kep: 74

Lang Dang railyard: 217, 270

MiGs: 52–55, 74, 86, 89, 92–93, 96, 97, 

98, 110–11, 127–28, 201, 

236–37, 255–56, 268, 270, 274

missile launch rates: 269–70

Moc Chau radar: 206

Nam Dinh: 46, 47

optical controllers, surface-to-air 

missiles: 105

panhandle: 143, 196, 197, 201

Phuc Yen airfield: 54–55, 90, 103–4, 

127–28

radar: 5, 40–41, 105

reconnaissance flights, resistance to: 

401

Index

155–56

Soviet trawlers’ role: 277

surface-to-air missiles: 35–37, 40, 50, 

103, 104, 105, 107, 120, 143, 

171, 225

Team Work radar: 267

Thai Nguyen iron works: 57–59

weather influences: 244

Yen Vien railyard: 86

Air operation coordination and integration. 

See Command and control issues.

Alcatraz prison: 182

Allen, Michael: 261

Aman, Earl D.: 290

Andersen Air Force Base, Guam: 23, 216, 

223–24, 273–74, 275, 277–78, 280

Anderson, Gregory L.: 171

Anderson, Jack: 222

Anderson, William R.: 179

Antiwar movement: 114, 168–69, 170, 

174, 204, 260–62

Antiwar protest demonstrations: 114, 149, 

168, 170

Aptheker, Herbert: 187

Armstrong, Larry D.: 127

Arnett, Peter: 122

Arnold, Henry H. “Hap”: 137

Ashmore, Harry S.: 190

“A to Z” assessment: 132–33

Atterberry, Edwin L.: 192

Aubrac, Raymond: 87

Baez, Joan: 261, 262

Baggs, William C.: 190

Baker, Doyle D.: 111

Baldwin, David L.: 74

Ball, George: 36, 44, 132, 137–38

Barnet, Richard J.: 170

Basel, Gene I.: 93

Bean, James E.: 113

Bell, Holly G.: 171

Berg, Kyle D.: 182

Berrigan, Daniel: 188

Berrigan, Philip: 188

Bien Hoa Air Base: 20, 106

Black, Jon D.: 188

Black Friday aircraft losses: 86, 104. See 

also Aircraft losses, U.S.

Black Wednesday aircraft losses: 86. See 

also Aircraft losses, U.S.

Blesse, Frederick C.: 64

Blue Chip command center: 16
Bob Hope Show: 113–14, 274

Bolo, Operation: 53–55, 96–97

Bombing accuracy and effectiveness: 

17–18, 45–46, 58, 101–2, 154. See 

also Laser-guided bombs; Walleye 

television-guided bombs; Weather.

artillery interdiction: 146

Bac Mai hospital error: 217, 263, 279

bomb damage claims: 307

Bosnia: 285

bridge interdiction: 247–48

Bullpup missiles: 234

cluster bombs: 244

Combat Skyspot: 102, 225, 260. See 

also Radar bombing, ground.

Commando Club: 103–4. See also

Radar bombing, ground.

Desert Storm: 283, 284

exaggerations: 247–48

F–111: 245, 246

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 226

jungle: 15

Kham Thien street error: 217, 263

loran sorties: 247

missile suppression: 267–70

night missions: 73–74

oil storage facilities: 203–4

radar. See Aircraft, U.S., A–6, B–52,

F–105F, F–111; Radar bombing; 

Ryan’s Raiders.

railroad interdiction: 248, 276

SA–2: 244

Serbia: 285

Tactical Fighter Weapons Center: 239

Taylor assessment: 262–63

telecommunication links: 252

Vinh raid: 225

World War II: 283, 284

Bombing policy: 82, 83, 124–25, 128, 130,

132, 170–71, 223–24. See also

Aircraft, U.S., B–52; Lavelle affair; 

Targets.

aircrew survival: 288–89

airfields prohibition: 284

all-weather bombing: 95–96

antiwar movement influence: 204

armed reconnaissance: 232

B–52 cutback in exchange for prisoners:

178–79

barrier concept: See McNamara Line.

bombing halts: 37–38, 56, 87–88,

134–36, 138–40, 142, 149, 

402

Index

151–53

bombing resumption: 163, 167–68, 

172–73, 196–97, 203

British position: 44

Brown, Harold: 70, 133

Brown, George S.:162, 164

Cambodia: 164–65

China border buffer zone: 63, 87, 248, 

250

CIA position: 42, 89, 129, 162, 164

civilians: 82, 279, 282, 285

Clifford position: 133–34, 136–37, 

141–42

communist leadership targeting

prohibition: 252, 278–79

congressional position: 44, 62, 64–65, 

76, 78–83, 88–89, 115, 122–24, 

209, 258

elections, influence: 20, 115–16, 122, 

134–35, 138, 149, 254, 258

Ellsberg questionnaire: 162–63

escalation issue: 63

Freedom Train campaign: 229

Ginsburgh influence: 30–31

gradualism: 29, 67, 93–94

ground forces influence: 129

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 24, 42, 62–63, 

65–66, 69, 74–78, 87–88, 92, 

108–9, 133, 137, 138–39, 203, 

225, 226–28, 250–51, 254, 255, 

256, 259

illegitimate raids: 202

Institute for Defense Analyses study: 

133

irrigation dams and dikes: 46, 249–50

JCS resignation issue: 83–84

Johnson position: 19, 23–24, 30, 41, 42, 

43, 62, 65, 67–69, 76–81, 83, 

85, 87, 89, 149, 281

Kissinger position: 159, 253–54, 259

Laird position: 162, 221–22, 225, 

250–51, 252, 259, 272

land route interdiction: 229

Laos: 4–5

McConnell position: 123–24

McNamara position: 23, 36, 61, 67, 70, 

71, 76, 79, 81–83, 85, 115, 126, 

131, 133

MiG bases: 55, 77, 126–27, 142

mining: 227–29

Momyer position: 25, 76, 81, 88–89, 

95–97, 152
multiweek bombing programs: 24

Nineteenth parallel: 140–41, 142, 143

Nixon position: 150, 162, 228, 259

No Committee position: 68–69

nuclear weapons: 23, 167

political influences: 31, 42, 168–69, 170

protective reaction strikes: 171–72, 206, 

207

Rostow, Walt, position: 30–31, 78, 125

route packages system: 18–19, 221

rules interpretation issue: 204–5

Soviet advisors casualty issue: 36

Soviet ship incidents: 75, 108

Salisbury journalism influence: 44–47

Senate Armed Services Committee: 76, 

78–83, 88–89, 123–24

Senate Foreign Relations Committee: 

124

Sharp position: 79–80, 82

smart bombs: 219. See also Laserguided bombs; Walleye 

television-guided bombs.

sortie rates: 70–71, 91–92, 92n, 155

Stennis hearings: 82–84, 115

target restrictions: 41–43, 55–56

Tet offensive influence: 122–23, 126

Tet bombing pause: 56

Thailand: 5–6, 107–8

trolling: 205

truck interdiction: 148–49

twentieth parallel: 70, 122, 139, 140,

141, 143, 203, 253, 258

urban targets: 19, 284–85

Wheeler committee: 23

Wheeler position: 80–81, 82, 89, 90, 

126, 133–34, 141, 142, 162, 164

Wheeler Study Group report: 129–30

“Wise Men” meetings: 137–39

A to Z assessment: 132–33

Bombing procedures and techniques: 67, 

68, 69, 108, 228–29, 260, 270–71. 

See also Bombing accuracy and 

effectiveness; Command and 

Control issues; Electronic

technology; Tactics.

A–6 employment: 59

anti-MiG sweeps: 96–97, 100

area bombing: 281

chaff: 243, 265

compression issue: 264–65

EC–121 employment: 98–99

escort and support: 231, 255, 266

403

Index

evasive maneuvers during bomb runs:

275

forward air controllers: 143–44

ground-controlled bombing formations: 

102–5

ground forces support: 145

hunter-killer teams: 36, 231, 243, 266– 

268

Iron Hand hunter-killer flights: 36, 37

jamming, electronic: 97–98

laser designation pods: 284

loran use: 202–3, 246–47, 269

low altitude: 60n

mining: 67, 68, 69, 108, 228–29, 260

night missions: 7, 59, 61, 144

nuclear weapons: 60, 167

photography, area surveillance: 106–7

radar bombing. See Radar bombing.

river mining: 108

roads closing: 147–49

Route packages concept: 28–29

sortie rates: 70–71, 91–92, 155, 231–32

surprise element: 278

toss bombing: 60

Bomb tonnage dropped: 284, 301, 306

Bond, Charles R.: 13

Boothby, Harold W.: 113

Border sanctuaries: 164

Borman, Frank: 179–80

Bosnia: 285

Boyd, Charles G.: 218

Bradley, Omar: 137, 138

Brestel, Max C.: 111

Brezhnev, Leonid: 33

Bridge Busters: 233

Bridge destruction. See Bombing accuracy

and effectiveness, bridge

interdiction; Targets, bridges.

Brinks Hotel car bombing: 20

Broughton, Jacksel M.: 75, 208

Brown, Frederick I.: 147

Brown, George: 42, 65

Brown, George S.: 116, 160–62, 164, 

171–72, 201, 211, 287

Brown, Harold: 35, 70, 91n, 101, 123, 133

Bui Diem: 150

Bundy, McGeorge: 30, 137, 138, 149

Bundy, William: 30, 68

Bunker, Ellsworth: 89, 110, 116, 142, 163, 

211, 222

Burchett, Wilfred: 57n, 88, 187

Burdett, Edward B.: 103
Bush, George: 282

Byrd, Robert C.: 79

Cambodia: 3, 132, 172–74, 227, 287, 288

Campbell, Nathan C.: 40n

Canal des Rapides bridge: 26, 46, 63, 72, 

85–86, 88, 92, 112, 119, 276

Cannon, Howard W.: 79, 82

Cappelli, Charles E.: 93

Carver, George: 138

Casteel, John: 40n

Casualties: 20, 44, 45–46, 288, 289, 302, 

312

Chairsell, William S.: 52n, 176

Chennault, Anna: 150–51

Chennault, Claire L.: 13, 22, 150

China, Peoples Republic of: 26, 33, 141, 

154, 236, 248, 277

Chinese border

airspace violations: 63, 87

buffer zone: 24, 44, 71, 72, 77, 250, 254

targets hit inside buffer zone: 78, 84, 85,

217, 270, 272, 273, 276

Choke points: 28, 147–48

Christian, George: 113, 254

CIA, position on bombing policy: 42, 89, 

129, 162, 164

Civilian casualties: 279

Clark Air Base: 138

Clark, Ramsey: 261

Clay, Lucius D., Jr.: 200, 257, 267, 280

Clifford, Clark: 68, 122, 126, 131, 135, 

136, 141–42, 143, 156

Clifton, Charles C.: 55

Clinton, Bill: 286

Clodfelter, Mark: 282

Cloud seeding: 194–95

Club bars: 11

Cobeil, Earl G.: 187

Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War: 

184–85, 190, 191

Collingwood, Charles: 190

Colvin, John: 94

Combat Skyspot radar: 102, 225, 260

Combat Tree equipment: 239

Command and control issues: 15, 16, 22, 

23. See also Lavelle Affair.

Abrams-McCain relations: 228

Airborne Battlefield Command and 

Control Center: 17

air operations coordination and

integration: 18–19

404

Index

approval procedure: 13

B–52. See Aircraft, U.S., B–52.

Bond commission position: 13

Brown, George S., leadership style: 

160–62

control centers: 16–17

fragmentary orders: 16

Guam discontent: 273–74

interdiction belts authority: 77–78

JCS appointments: 160–61

Kissinger influence: 222

LeMay, as Chief of Staff: 21–22

loran: 246–47, 264–70

McConnell, as Chief of Staff: 22–23

McConnell legacy: 287

McNamara-LeMay conflict: 21

Momyer command: 13–15, 16–18

Momyer leadership style: 160–62

Monkey Mountain control center: 17

Nixon-Laird conflict: 221–22

Nixon-Vogt communication: 221

presidential control: 19–20

Pursley-Haig conflict: 222

Rolling Thunder: v–vii, 3, 18

Rolling Thunder bombing programs: 24

route packages system: 18–19, 28

Ryan appointment as PACAF 

commander: 59

Sharp-Westmoreland cooperation: 161

Site 85 (Phou Pha Thi): 102–3

Slay appointment: 238

Strategic Air Command

declining influence: 287

role: 271–72, 275

Seventh Air Force conflict: 266

target identification number: 25

target lists confusion: 25

Task Force 77 role: 19

Teaball fusion center: 239–40

theater conflicts: 15, 16

Vogt appointment: 221

Commando Club: 103–4

Congress, U.S.

Tonkin Gulf Resolution: 20

Vietnam War, position on: 44, 62, 

64–65, 76, 78–83, 88–89, 115, 

122–24, 135, 170, 209, 258

Con Son Island prison: 179–80

Constellation (Connie). See Aircraft, U.S., 

EC–121.

Cooper, Damon W.: 257

Corder, John A.: 127
Credit, aircraft downing: 111–12, 128, 237

B–52 gunners: 274

equal for backseater: 8, 111

rules revision: 111

Cronkite, Walter: 122

Cunningham, Randy: 237

Cuthbert, Bradley G.: 155

Da Nang Air Base: 5, 10, 17, 20, 53, 54, 

63, 64, 127, 129, 142, 187, 193, 

196, 223

Dang Ngoc Ngu: 186n

Dang Trinh: 35

Davis, Joseph: 230

Davis, Rennard C.: 188

Day, George E.: 188, 189, 191

DeBellevue, Charles B.: 212, 237, 241

Defense Advisory Committee on Prisoners 

of War: 184

Defense Intelligence Agency target 

identification numbers: 25

Dellinger, Dave: 45

Denton, Jeremiah J., Jr.: 183, 185

DePuy, William E.: 138

Desert Storm: 282–83, 288

Dethlefsen, Merlyn H.: 57–58

Diefenbach, Brent O.: 263

Dirksen, Everett: 115, 150

Dirty Bird Prison: 192

Disosway, Gabriel P.: 95–96, 99

Dixon, Robert J.: 172

Dobrynin, Anatoly: 75, 108, 167, 169

Dole, Robert: 175, 176

Don Muang Air Base: 6

Dorsett, Tracy: 127

Douglas, Helen Gahagan: 156

Doumer Bridge: 46, 47, 112, 128, 153

bombing prohibited: 63, 77, 93, 109

dropped by bombing: 85, 110, 235

target for bombing: 84-85, 110–11, 113, 

122, 126, 235–36, 251

Doumer, Paul: 84

Draft lottery: 168

Dragon’s Jaw. See Thanh Hoa bridge.

Dramesi, John A.: 192–93

Driscoll, William: 237

Drones, reconnaissance: 107, 213, 279

Easter offensive: 219–20

Edelen, Henry: 23

Eisenhower, Dwight D.: 76, 125, 156, 157

Elections influence on war: 20, 115–16, 

405

Index

122, 134–35, 138, 149, 254, 258

Electronic technology. See also Loran; 

Radar bombing.

Bolo Operation: 53, 54, 96, 97

Combat Skyspot radar: 102, 225, 260

Combat Tree: 239

electronic countermeasures pods: 39, 40,

49, 50–52, 70, 148–49

electronic telescope: 274–75

identification transponders: 98–99

Pave Knife pods: 231

radar warning gear: 17, 48, 51, 87, 97, 

100, 103, 205

sensors: 70, 148, 200, 246

Teaball fusion center: 239–40

terrain avoidance radar: 59–60, 245

Elliot, Robert M.: 128

Ellsberg, Daniel: 132, 162

Ellsberg questionnaire: 162–63

Emerson, Gloria: 179

Fall, Bernard: 181

Feighny, James P.: 128

Feinstein, Jeffrey S.: 237

Findley, Paul: 115

Flight formations: 40, 51–52, 103–5, 240

Flynn, John P.: 103, 197, 199

Fonda, Jane: 212, 261

Ford, Gerald: 281

Foreign-object-damage bumps: 241

Fortas, Abe: 135

Forward air controllers: 143–44

Frags, fragmentary orders: 16

Francisco, San D.: 156

Franks, Lonnie D.: 208

Freedom Bait Protective Strikes: 196

Freedom Train campaign: 229

Fuel tanks, self-sealing: 8–9

Fulbright, J. William: 44, 115, 124, 140, 

170, 195

Gabriel, Charles A.: 207, 208, 210, 287

Gaddis, Norman C.: 186–87

Gadoury, William: 103n

Galbraith, John K.: 44

Gate Guard interdiction belts: 28–29

Gates, Thomas: 160

Gayler, Noel: 257

Gelb, Leslie: 132

Geneva Accords (1954): 31, 92

Geneva Agreement (1962): 4

Geneva Conventions: 180–81, 184
Ginsburgh, Robert N.: 30–31, 125, 130, 

249

Giraudo, John C.: 52n

Goldberg, Arthur: 138

Goldwater, Barry: 20

Goulding, Phil: 61–62

Gradualism: 29, 67, 93–94, 285

Graham, Neil J.: 112–13

Greene, Wallace M., Jr.: 84

Grubb, Wilmer N.: 197–98

Guarino, Lawrence N.: 183, 187

Gulf War: 282–84, 290

Habib, Philip C.: 138, 175

Hague Convention of 1899: 184

Haig, Alexander M., Jr.: 222–23, 259, 260, 

280

Hall, James H.: 127

Hamburger Hill, battle of: 165–66

Ham Rong Bridge: See Thanh Hoa bridge.

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 25–27, 33, 41–42, 

51, 61, 82, 226

air defenses: 25, 110–11, 143, 277

B–52 employment: 261–63, 267, 272

bombing policy: 24, 42, 62–63, 65–66, 

69, 77–78, 87–88, 92, 108–9, 

133, 137, 138–39, 203, 225, 

226–28, 250–51, 254, 255, 256, 

259

Linebacker II campaign: 267, 272

mining: 67, 68, 69, 93–94, 125–26, 

227–29

Nixon position: 225, 226, 259–60

restricted and prohibited zones: 24, 43–

44, 62, 71, 72, 75–78, 87, 88, 89, 

107–9, 126, 133, 250–51, 254

targets: 26, 62–63, 261–63, 277

Hanoi Hilton: See Hoa Lo prison.

Harriman, W. Averell: 109, 151

Harris, Carlyle S.: 182

Harris, Hunter: 15, 18, 19

Harris, Jeffrey L.: 236

Hartke, Vance: 44

Hatfield, Mark: 115

Hawkins, Augustus F.: 179

Hayden, Thomas E.: 187–88, 261

Hegdahl, Douglas B.: 189–90

Heggen, Keith R.: 280

Helms, Richard: 69–70, 89, 159

Heltsley, Charles M.: 52n

Hershey, Lewis B.: 168

Hill, Howard J.: 198

406

Index

Hirsch, Thomas M.: 64

Hiss, Alger: 156

Hoa Lo prison: 182, 197, 262–63

Hoang Phuong,: 278

Hoar, Dean L.: 40n

Ho Chi Minh: 4, 31–32, 87, 167, 193

Ho Chi Minh Trail: 4–5, 9, 28, 56, 59,

70–71 , 171, 196–97, 200, 246

Hollings, Ernest F.: 79

Holloway, Bruce K.: 73, 133, 167, 206, 

287

Holt, Harold: 113

Hoopes, Townshend: 133, 134, 136

Horner, Charles A.: 284, 289–90

Houghton, Robert W.: 290

House Armed Services Committee: 44, 

209

Howerton, Rex D.: 128

Hughes, Harold E.: 208, 209, 210

Humphrey, Hubert: 116, 149

Hussein, Sadam: 282

Hydraulic control systems: 8–9

Hyland, John D.: 76

Ickes, Harold: 116

Income tax exemption issue: 11, 50–52, 

161–62

Ingress procedures: 50–52

Institute for Defense Analyses, JASON 

division: 133

Interdiction belts concept: 28–29

Iraq: 282–84

Iron Hand hunter-killer flights: 36, 37

Iron Triangle: 72

Irrigation dams and dikes: 31, 46, 249–50, 

251

Jackson, Henry M.: 79, 159

James, Daniel, Jr.: 54

Johnson, Gerald W.: 211, 266, 272

Johnson, Harold E.: 58n

Johnson, Lyndon B.

A–12 employment: 106

advisors: 23

airfields targeting: 34

Armed Services Committee relations: 

78–89

B–52 employment: 3

bombing halts: 37–38, 134–36, 138–40, 

149, 152

bombing policy: 19, 23–24, 62, 63, 85,

129
bridges interdiction: 88

cabinet: 21

Clifford conversion myth: 136–37

escalation: 33–34

Gallup poll ratings: 115, 122

Haiphong area prohibition: 126

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 92, 108–9

McNamara Line: 29

McNamara resignation: 83–84

MiG bases: 89

missiles suppression: 35–36

North Vietnam invasion policy: 4

nuclear weapons: 125

peace negotiations: 56, 69, 109

political influences: 114–16

railroads interdiction: 4, 41, 42

reconnaissance program: 156

reelection refusal: 139

reinforcements: 134, 136

Soviet ship incidents: 75, 108

San Antonio formula: 88

taxes, raising: 115–16

twentieth parallel: 139, 140, 141, 143

visit to Vietnam and Thailand: 113–14

Johnson, Roy L.: 29, 79, 107

Joint Chiefs of Staff: 24–26, 42, 44, 65, 

67–68, 70, 81, 83–84, 125–26, 151,

162, 164, 269

Kadena Air Base: 106, 224

Kasler, James H.: 183, 187, 189

Katzenbach, Nicholas: 68, 89, 140

Keegan, George J., Jr.: 147, 148, 161

Keirn, Richard P.: 183

Kennedy, John F.: 21, 30, 37

Kennedy, Robert F.: 37, 57n, 135

Khe Sanh siege: 134

Khrushchev, Nikita: 33

Kissinger, Henry: 87, 232

B–52 employment: 220, 226, 256

bombing resumption: 169

Cambodia: 173

Haiphong mining: 228

income tax exemption issue: 161–62

Laird workaround: 222

Nixon selection: 157–58

North Korea EC–121 shoot down 

incident: 165

nuclear strategy: 158

peace negotiations: 166–67, 227, 

258–59

peace negotiations, secret: 202–3

407

Index

prisoners of war: 195

“The Viet Nam Negotiations”: 9

Korat Air Base: 6, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 

73, 85, 90, 103, 112, 114, 118, 128, 

148, 176, 196, 223, 233, 243, 245

Korat conference: 176–77

Korat plateau: 6, 12

Korea, EC–121 plane incident: 165, 222, 

228

Korean War: 19, 234

Kosovo: 285

Kosygin, Aleksei: 33, 42, 56, 69

Kraslow, David: 157

Ky, Nguyen Cao. See Nguyen Cao Ky.

Laird, Melvin R.: 211, 221–22, 257, 259

bombing policy: 162, 204, 225, 250–51, 

252, 253–54, 272

Cambodia: 174

Haiphong mining: 228

Nixon–Laird conflict: 221–22

prisoners of war: 175, 176, 191, 195

protective reaction strikes: 173–74, 206

Secretary of Defense appointment: 

159–60

Vietnamization: 165

Laos

aircrew losses: 289n

bombing policy: 4–5

interdiction bombing: 143, 148

invasion policy: 4–5

McNamara Line: 29

Meo forces: 102

panhandle: 4, 6, 202

Site 85 (Phou Pha Thi): 102–3

truck interdiction: 143

Laser-guided bombs: 215, 219, 230–31, 

232–33, 243, 247–48, 252, 263

against Canal des Rapides Bridge: 276

communist party headquarters hit by 

errant bomb: 278–79

in Deliberate Force: 285

during Desert Storm: 282–85

against Doumer Bridge: 235–36

against Hanoi powerplant: 251

against Hanoi radio: 279

against Lang Chi hydroelectric plant: 

251

Lavelle, John D.: 199–200, 204–7, 208, 

209, 210, 211, 238

Lavelle affair: 202–3, 287

after action messages: 207
bombing authority: 204

disciplinary response: 208–9

exposed: 208

false reporting: 201–2, 238

Leaflet and radio drops: 251–52

Le Duan: 32, 167

Le Duc Tho: 227, 253, 258–59

Leeser, Leonard C.: 171

LeMay, Curtis: 21, 82, 116, 150n

Linebacker: 229–30

after action meetings: 238–39

air defenses, North Vietnam: 242

bad weather: 244–45

bridge busting campaign: 233, 247–48

deployable strength: 223

effectiveness: 247

escorts: 247

F–111 employment: 245–46

laser-guided bombs: 219, 230–31, 232– 

33, 243, 247–48, 252

against Doumer Bridge: 235–36

against Hanoi powerplant: 251

against Lang Chi hydroelectric plant: 

251

leadership targeting prohibition: 252

leaflet and radio drops: 251–52

loran: 246–47

MiG capability degradation: 241–42

Nixon position: 232

redeployment: 246

sortie rates: 231–32

supplies interdiction: 252–53

Talbot appointment: 238

Teaball fusion center: 239–40

Linebacker II. See also Aircraft, U.S.,

B–52, employment.

airfield suppression: 273

civilian casualties: 279

F–111 employment: 268–69

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 267, 272

MiGs performance: 274

missile suppression: 266–68

morale: 273–74

psychological effect: 277–78

railroads: 272–73, 275–76

Locher, Roger C.: 236

Lodge, Henry Cabot: 42–43, 158, 175

Lodge, Robert A.: 236

Lon Nol,: 172, 173

Loory, Stuart H.: 157

Loose deuce formation: 240

Loran (Long Range Navigation): 200, 

408

Index

202–3, 246–47, 253, 255, 269, 

Lovett, Robert A.: 137

Low, James S.: 189

Luce, Don: 179–80

Lynd, Staughton: 187

MacArthur, Douglas: 19

Macovescu, Gheorghe: 109

Madden, John A., Jr.: 241

Maddux, Sam, Jr.: 190

Maharajah Clothiers party suits: 177

Mai Van Bo: 88, 166

Mai Van Cuong: 186n

Mallon, Richard J.: 171

Manor, Leroy J.: 193–94, 195

Mansfield, Mike: 140

Mao Tse-Tung: 26

March Against Death: 170

Marcovich, Herbert: 87

Marigold peace initiative: 42–43

Marine Corps, U.S.: 5, 15, 20, 59, 84, 90,

100–101, 111, 121, 128–34, 145–

48, 165, 177, 200, 223, 231, 280, 

289

Marshall, Winton W.: 206

Martin, Graham A.: 13, 15

Matheny, David P.: 188

Maurer, Ion Gheorghe: 89, 109

McCain, John S., Jr.: 149, 161, 196, 199, 

204, 232, 256

McCain, John S., III: 188–89

McCarthy, Eugene: 134–35

McCarthy, Mary: 190

McCone, John: 129

McConnell, John P.: 13, 19, 22–23, 35, 70, 

117, 132

agricultural targets: 31, 249–50

air defenses: 82

B–52 bombing mission: 124–25, 256

bombing resumption: 151

command and control issues: 18

F–111 employment: 101

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 77

irrigation dams and dikes: 31, 249–50

leadership legacy: 287

troop escalation: 67

McCoskrie, Roland K.: 13

McGovern, George: 254, 258

McKinney, George H., Jr.: 111, 113

McKnight, George G.: 192

McNamara Line: 29, 70, 80, 81, 133, 148, 

200, 202
McNamara, Robert: 20, 21, 75, 123, 131,

164, 222

barrier concept. See McNamara Line.

bombing halts: 37–38, 68, 70, 71, 74, 

76, 79, 88, 93, 122, 129, 133, 

136

bombing policy: 31, 36, 68–69, 82, 114, 

115, 132, 133, 209

casualties: 45, 126

departure: 83–84, 114, 131

F–111 development: 101, 245

missiles suppression: 35

nuclear weapons: 125

target selection: 81, 82, 85, 90, 221, 250

Tonkin Gulf incident: 20n

McNamara Wall. See McNamara Line.

McNaughton, John T.: 23, 35, 68

McPherson, Harry C.: 139

Mengtzu airbase, China: 63

Meo forces: 102

Messett, Thomas: 235

Meyer, John C.: 201, 206, 211, 256, 265–

66, 269, 271, 275, 279

Meyers, William: 170

Mikhail Frunze incident: 75

Military personnel, U.S.: 313

Miller, Carl: 233, 235, 251

Miller, Jack: 79

Mining: 67, 68, 69, 108, 228–29, 260

Missiles, North Vietnam

Atoll: 86, 98, 103, 120

SA–2: 35, 120, 244

SA–3: 244

SA–4: 244

SA–7: 244

Missiles, U.S.: 7

AGM–78: 105

Bullpup: 234

Cruise: 285

Falcon: 91–92, 111

Shrike: 36, 105, 195, 243, 267

Sidewinder: 7, 55, 90–91, 118, 236, 241

Sparrow: 7, 55, 91, 118, 239, 240–41

Standard antiradar: 243, 270

Mize, John D.: 268

Momyer, William W.: 13–15, 47, 53, 81, 

99, 113, 117, 160–62, 287

A–12 employment: 107

bad weather bombing: 95–97, 100

bombing policy: 25, 28, 29, 42, 76, 152

gun pods: 64

Marine air operations: 145

409

Index

MiG bases: 127

MiGs effectiveness: 88–89

Site 85 (Phou Pha Thi) evacuation: 

102–3

Monkey Mountain control center: 17, 100

Monsoons. See Weather.

Moore, Albert E.: 274

Moore, Joseph H.: 13, 14, 28–29, 112

Moorer, Thomas H.: 84, 195, 196, 221

bombing policy: 160, 220, 222

Hanoi-Haiphong area strikes: 226, 228, 

251, 254, 259, 269, 272

Lavelle affair: 204, 205, 207, 209

Moratorium, nationwide: 168–69

Morgenthau, Henry, Jr.: 116

Morris, Stephen J.: 289n

Morrison, Anne: 44

Morrison, Joseph C.: 156

Morse, F. Bradford: 115

Morton, Thruston: 115

Munitions: 306. See also Bombing 

accuracy and effectiveness; Laserguided bombs; Missiles, U.S., 

Ordnance; Walleye televisionguided bombs.

Murphy, Robert: 138

Nakhon Phanom Air Base: 9, 102, 148, 

200, 239

National League of Families of American 

Prisoners and Missing in Southeast 

Asia: 175–76

Navy, U.S.: 7–8, 11, 18–20, 26–29, 36, 40, 

48–53, 59–66, 71, 77–78, 91, 140– 

41, 185–86, 205, 229, 232, 234, 

236–43, 267, 288. See also

Command and control issues; 

Denton, Jeremiah J., Jr.; Gayler, 

Noel; McCain, John S., Jr.; 

Moorer, Thomas H.; Route packages; Sharp, Ulysses S. Grant; 

Stockdale, James B.

Nazzaro, Joseph J.: 161, 199, 200

Ngo Dinh Diem: 4

Nguyen Cao Ky: 4, 117, 193

Nguyen Dinh Uoc: 20n

Nguyen Duy Trinh: 57n

Nguyen Hong Nhi: 186

Nguyen Ngoc Loan,: 122

Nguyen Van Bai,: 186

Nguyen Van Coc,: 186

Nguyen Van Thieu: 4, 150, 167, 191, 253, 
256, 280

Nixon, Richard M.

aircraft losses: 264

air power use: 219–21

anticommunism: 156

antiwar movement: 168–69, 170

B–52 employment: 220, 221, 223–25, 

226–28, 253, 257–58, 259, 260

B–52 cutback for prisoner exchange 

offer: 178–79

bombing policy: 114–15, 228, 253–54

bombing resumption: 163, 167, 172–73

bombing ultimatum: 166–69

cabinet appointments: 159–60

Cambodia: 162, 164–65, 172–73

cease fire: 256, 282

China: 64–65, 157, 203

detente: 227

force withdrawals: 165, 168, 169, 170

Haiphong mining: 228, 229

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 225, 226, 259–60

income tax exemption issue: 161–62

irrigation dams and dikes: 250

Kissinger selection: 157–58

Linebacker: 227–32

Linebacker II: 255–60

military, views on: 204, 240

Nixon Doctrine: 166

North Korea EC–121 shoot down

incident: 165

Okinawa: 224

prisoners of war: 175, 179

protective reaction strikes: 171–72, 206, 

207

resignation: 281

rocket attacks response: 163

SALT negotiations: 169, 227

secret plan to end war: 150, 157–59, 204

secrecy and suspicion: 164–65

Soviet Union’s proposal for nuclear 

attack on China: 157

summit meeting, Moscow: 227, 254

twentieth parallel, bombing line: 253, 

256, 257–58, 280

“No Committee”: 68–69

North Vietnam

agriculture: 249

air force: 33, 34–35, 241–42

American antiwar movement: 168–69, 

170, 260–62

Ashmore-Baggs visit: 190

Berrigan-Zinn visitor group: 188

410

Index

Cambodia insurgency: 287

China assistance: 26–27, 33, 236, 248, 

277

China rail link: 26

China relations: 154

economy: 286–87

electric power: 154, 155

French influence: 25–26

Hanoi population growth: 154–55

Hayden visitor group: 187–88

invasion threat: 4

leadership: 31–32, 287

oil pipelines: 153–54

pig iron production: 57, 154

population dispersion: 154

prisons. See Prisons, North Vietnam.

railroads: 71–74, 84–86

SAM inventories: 244

Sino-Soviet rivalry: 33

South Vietnam intervention: 20

Soviet hydroelectric project: 154

Soviet military assistance: 33, 62, 71, 99

Soviet ship incidents: 75, 108

supplies: 56, 82, 141–42, 144, 146–47, 

248–49, 276

transportation infrastructure: 153–54

truck losses: 248

typhoon damage: 155

U.S. reconstruction offer: 286–87

Nuclear weapons: 23, 125

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy: 158

Nugent, Patrick J.: 132

Oil products facilities, U.S. attacks on: 

29–30, 41, 43, 47, 50, 68, 82, 202, 

203, 225, 226, 262, 276

Okinawa: 9–10, 224

Olds, Robin: 53, 54, 64, 86, 91, 99, 111, 

117

Operation Allied Force: 285

Operation Bolo: 53, 96, 97

Operation Deliberate Force: 285

Ordnance. See also Laser-guided bombs; 

Missiles, U.S.; Munitions; Walleye 

television-guided bombs.

bridge busting: 233–34

cluster bombs: 49–50

CBU–24: 231

CBU–52: 231, 243–44

F–4 guns: 241

gun pods: 64, 112

mines: 234
Mk–36 Destructor mines: 108

Overly, Norris M.: 188, 189

Pacific Air Forces. See Clay, Lucius D., 

Jr.; Harris, Hunter; Nazzaro, Joseph

J.; Ryan, John D.; Vogt, John W.

Pacific Command. See Navy, U.S.

Panek, Robert J.: 171

Pardo, John R. “Bob”: 290

Paul Doumer Bridge. See Doumer Bridge.

Pave Knife pods: 231

Peace negotiations

Aubrac initiative: 87–88

bombing ultimatum: 166–69

cease-fire: 166, 194, 203, 253–54, 256, 

257–59, 280

China position: 141n, 154

congressional position: 258–60

informal talks: 139

international inspection proposal: 258

Kissinger initiative: 87–88, 90

Kissinger position: 158–59

Marigold peace initiative: 42–43

Nixon position: 150–51

North Vietnam position: 109, 151, 152, 

166, 167, 258–59, 280

Paris: 142, 150–52, 166–67, 227, 253, 

258–60, 277

Polish initiative: 42–43

Pope Paul letter: 56

Rumanian initiative: 109–10

Salisbury role: 44–47

San Antonio formula: 88

Soviet position: 56, 150–51, 253, 280

talk-fight strategy: 139

Tet pause: 56–57

“The Vietnam Negotiations”: 159

Wilson-Kosygin talks: 56–57

Pell, Claiborne: 194n

Percy, Charles: 115

Pereslavl-Zalesskiy ship incident: 108

Perot, H. Ross: 178

Peterson, Douglas: 289

Pham Hung: 141, 141n

Pham Van Dong: 32, 109

Pham Van Ngan: 186n

Phantom backseaters: 8, 10, 55, 58, 74,

111–12, 113, 128, 235, 236, 290

Phantom. See Aircraft, U.S., F–4.

Photography, area surveillance: 106–7

Phou Pha Thi (Site 85): 102–3

Phu Cat Air Base: 193, 196

411

Index

Phuc Yen airfield: 33, 34, 54, 63, 77, 80, 

81, 88, 89, 90, 103, 114, 119,

127–28

Podgorny, Nikola: 254

Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee

of the Senate Armed Services 

Committee: 76, 78

Prisoners, U.S.: 175–76, 191, 218, 260–61,

288–89

4th Allied Prisoner of War Wing: 197

antileadership actions: 183

B–52 cutback exchange offer: 178

Borman mission: 179–80

Camp Unity: 197

capitol exhibit: 178

Code of Conduct: 184–85, 191

collaborators: 289

conditions: 175, 178

confession extortion: 181, 185–86

Defense Advisory Committee on 

Prisoners of War: 184

early release: 188, 189, 190

escape attempts: 191–93

exchange: 9

“fink release” program: 187

Geneva Conventions: 180–81, 184

Hayden, Thomas E.: 187–88

Korean War experience: 184–85

leadership: 183

National League of Families of 

American Prisoners and Missing 

in Southeast Asia: 175–76

Nixon position: 175, 179

North Vietnamese in South Vietnam: 

178

North Vietnam position: 180–81, 186

Perot advocacy: 178

physical remains: 289

practice reunion: 176

prisoner dispersion: 182–83

propaganda tools: 186, 187

Red River Valley Fighter Pilots

Association: See River Rats.

rescue attempt: 193–97

River Rats: 176–77

secret communications: 181–82

Son Tay prison rescue attempt: 193–97

Soviet imprisonment: 288–89

tap code: 182

Telford Taylor perspective: 261–62

torture: 181, 183, 187, 188

Weiss list: 197
Prisons, North Vietnam: 92, 175, 180, 

183–84, 188–89, 192, 218

“Alcatraz”: 182, 183

“Big House”: 182

“Country Club”: 182

“Dirty Bird”: 192

“French House”: 182

Hoa Lo (“Hanoi Hilton”): 182, 183, 

197, 198, 262–63

“Plantation”: 182, 188

Son Tay: 193–97

“Zoo”: 182, 183, 187, 192, 197, 262

Prisons, South Vietnam: 179–80

Protective reaction strikes: 173–74, 202, 

206

Protests, antiwar, U.S.: 114, 149, 168, 170

Pruett, William D.: 171

Pueblo incident: 123, 130, 175

Pursley, Robert E.: 164–65, 222

Quang Tri: 227

Quesada, Elwood R.: 13–14

Radar bombing

airborne radar: 59–61, 225

ground radar: 102–4

Radford, Charles: 222

Radio Hanoi: 129, 279

Railroad car repair shops

Gia Lam: 72, 112, 272, 276

Thai Nguyen: 251

Railyards, North Vietnam

attacks on, U.S.: 39, 72, 87, 112, 245, 

255, 261, 263, 275–76

in Chinese buffer zone: 84, 85, 217, 

270, 273, 276

Gia Lam: 46, 63, 72, 217, 263, 272, 

273, 276

Hanoi: 62, 263

Kep: 61, 73, 272

Kinh No: 257, 263, 272, 273, 276

Lang Dang: 217, 270, 273, 276

Nam Dinh: 46

Thai Nguyen: 272, 276

Vinh: 225

Yen Bai: 61

Yen Vien: 41, 43, 45, 46, 65, 72, 77, 85, 

86, 112, 272, 273, 276

Rainmaking operations: 194–95

Rather, Dan: 282

Read, Benjamin: 109

Reconnaissance: 17, 106–7, 155, 156, 161, 

412

Index

165, 171, 195, 206, 213, 273, 277

armed: 16, 24, 35, 43, 92, 126, 172, 

206, 232, 248

attacks upon and losses: 156, 172, 197, 

205, 222, 237, 280

drone: 107, 213, 279

Red Cross: 180

Red Flag exercises: 240

Red River Valley Pilots Association: 

176–77

Refueling, aerial: 9–10, 40, 214, 246

Restricted bombing areas. See Chinese 

border, buffer zone; HanoiHaiphong area, restricted and

prohibited zones.

Risner, Robinson: 183, 189, 190, 191, 193, 

290, 555

River Rats: 176–77

Ritchie, Steve: 212, 237

River mining: 108

Rivers, L. Mendel: 44, 64

Rivet Top: 99–100

Robb, Charles S.: 132

Robinson, Rembrandt C.: 222

Rockefeller, Nelson: 114, 158

Rogers, William P.: 159, 174

Romney, George: 114

Romo, Barry: 261

Roosevelt, Franklin D.: 116

Rostow, Walt Whitman: 30, 31, 68–69, 71, 

75, 78, 79, 80, 85, 88, 89, 114, 

125, 129, 132, 149, 151, 155

Route packages

One: 18, 27, 28, 33, 48, 74, 86, 143, 

144, 145, 146, 148, 155, 161, 

193, 197, 232, 252, 257

Two: 18, 141, 143, 161

Three: 18, 141, 143, 155, 161

Four: 18

Five: 18, 61, 233, 248, 251, 254

Six: 18, 24, 48, 49, 74, 86, 96, 107, 

143, 197, 207, 232, 233, 248, 

254, 260, 288

Ruhling, Mark J.: 155

Rusk, Dean: 23, 36, 38, 62, 69, 75, 88, 90, 

109, 110, 122, 124, 126, 131, 

135–36, 139, 143, 151

Russell, Bertrand: 45, 180

Russell, Richard: 62, 79, 123, 135, 140, 

151

Ryan, John A., Jr.: 60n

Ryan, John D.: 58, 73, 107, 117, 160, 199, 
287

B–52 bombing mission: 257

bad weather bombing: 59–61, 95–97, 

100–101, 245

barrier project: 200

bombing accuracy: 206

bombing policy: 246

command changes: 237–38

fighter sweeps: 111

Lavelle affair: 199–201, 208–10

Ryan, John D., Jr.: 111

Ryan, Michael E.: 285

Ryan’s Raiders: 59–61

Saigon area offensive: 142, 163

Sainteny, Jean: 166

Salisbury, Harrison: 44, 46, 262

SALT negotiations: 169, 227

Sarit Thanarat: 12

Schemmer, Benjamin F.: 194n

Seamans, Robert C., Jr.: 160, 208, 222, 

247

Secord, Richard: 266

Senate Armed Services Committee: 

79–83, 88–89, 123–24

Senate Foreign Relations Committee: 124

Sensors: 70, 148, 200, 246

Seventh Air Force. See Brown, George S.; 

Clay, Lucius D., Jr.; Lavelle, John 

D.; Momyer, William W.; Moore, 

Joseph H.; Vogt, John W.

Seventh-Thirteenth Air Force: 13

Sharp, Ulysses S. Grant: 15, 56, 82, 110

air defense system attack: 63, 65, 106

nuclear weapons use: 125

panhandle strikes: 59, 77–78, 161

targets: 15, 18–19, 41, 47, 56, 79–80, 

82, 161

Shinn, William C.: 171

Short, Michael C.: 286

Shriver, Sargent: 254

Sijan, Lance P.: 191–92

Silent majority: 170

Simmonds, Darrell D.: 112

Simons, Arthur D.: 193, 194, 195

Singkapo Sikhotchounamaly,: 103

Site 85 (Phou Pha Thi): 102–3

Slay, Alton D.: 207, 210, 238

Smith, Margaret Chase: 79, 80, 81

Smith, Philip E.: 289n

Smith, Scott G.: 212

Son Tay prison rescue attempt: 193–97

413

Index

Souvanna Phouma: 102

Soviet Union

advisors: 85, 105

aircraft furnished: 33

attacks on ships, U.S.: 75, 78, 108

Mikhail Frunze incident: 75

military assistance: 62, 71, 99

North Vietnam hydroelectric project: 

154

peace negotiations: 167, 169

Pereslavl-Zalesskiy incident: 108

Prisoners of War imprisonment: 289

SALT negotiations: 169, 227

Turkestan incident: 75

U.S.-China relations concern: 169

Squadrons, U.S. Air Force

67th Reconnaissance Technical: 106

67th Tactical Fighter: 5

497th Tactical Fighter: 5, 73, 144

555th “Triple Nickel”: 233, 275

Stanfield, Donald N.: 172

Starbird, Alfred D.: 70

Stennis, John: 78, 79, 123, 135, 140, 209

Stilwell, Richard G.: 12–13

Stimson, Henry L.: 137

Stockdale, James B.: 183, 185, 187

Stone, John B.: 117

Strategic Air Command: 6, 10, 15, 266, 

287

Stratton, Richard A.: 185–86

Sullivan, William H.: 102–3, 188

Survival training: 182, 185

Sutton, William C.: 171

Swimming pool construction, Thailand: 11

Sylvester, Arthur: 44

Symington, Stuart: 14, 21, 79, 80–81, 82, 

83, 88, 89, 113, 122, 124, 135, 209

Tactical Fighter Weapons Center: 239

Tactics. See also Bombing procedures and 

techniques; Electronic technology.

388th vs. 355th Tactical Fighter Wing 

procedures: 51–52

air control development: 98–100, 102

bombing altitudes: 49, 61, 243

Combat Tree equipment: 239

electronic countermeasures: 51–52, 

103–5, 243

evasive maneuvers: 275

F–111 employment: 101

fighter role: 14, 286, 287

fighter sweeps: 111
flak suppression: 39, 49

formations: 40, 51–52, 103–5, 240

identification, friend or foe: See Combat 

Tree equipment, above; radio 

identification transponders, 

below.

ingress altitudes: 51–52

jamming pods: See electronic

countermeasures, above.

jettisoning: 47, 53, 96, 103

loran missions: 246–47

MiG defense: 53–55

Navy vs. Air Force bomb release 

altitudes: 49

night missions: 73–74, 248

Pardo’s Push: 290

pilot and aircrew training: 240, 288

post-target turn: 265

radio identification transponders: 98–99

Red Flag exercises: 240, 288

Rivet Top mission: 99–100

sortie rates: 70–71, 91–92n, 155, 231–32

surface-to-air missiles: 50–52, 105–7

terrain avoidance radar: 59–60, 245

three-ship cells, B–52: 263–65

Top Gun training program: 288

Taft, Robert A.: 156

Takhli Air Base: 6, 9, 10, 51, 54, 57, 75, 

85, 90, 98, 101, 107, 128, 176, 

194, 208, 223, 233, 245, 269

Talbot, Carlos M.: 238

Tanner, Charles N.: 186

Tan Son Nhut Air Base: 14, 16, 99, 100, 

106, 238

Tap code: 182

Targets. See also Route packages; 

Weather.

agricultural: See irrigation dikes, below.

airfields: 34, 242, 257

Bac Mai air defense control bunker: 252

Bac Mai airfield: 92, 93

Bai Thuong airfield. See Thanh Hoa

airfield, below.

Ban Karai pass: 172

bridges: 26, 63, 65, 72–73, 84–85, 88, 

112, 119, 128, 233–35

Canal des Rapides Bridge: 26, 46, 63, 

72, 85–86, 88, 92, 112, 276

Cap Mui Lay sector: 145–46

China border buffer zone: 44

choke points: 147–48

dikes. See irrigation dikes, below.

414

Index

Dong Anh powerplant: 62

Dong Hoi airfield: 207

Doumer Bridge: 47, 63, 77, 84–85, 110, 

112, 113, 235–36

Duc Noi railyard: 276

electrical power infrastructure: 251

Gia Lam airport: 92, 251, 261

Gia Lam railyard: 62–63, 72, 112, 217, 

263, 272, 276

government and leadership immunity: 

31, 35

Ha Gia tank farm: 50

Hai Duong bridge: 71

Haiphong area: 26, 43–44, 71

Haiphong cement plant: 41–42, 62, 251

Haiphong powerplants: 61, 215

Ham Rong Bridge: See Thanh Hoa 

bridge, below.

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 26, 62–63, 

261–63, 277

Hanoi oil storage facilities: 276

Hanoi powerplant: 47, 65–66, 215, 251, 

272

Hanoi tank farm: 43, 226

Hoa Lac airfield: 34, 63–64, 263

Hon Gai port: 26–27

Iron Triangle: 72

irrigation dikes: 25, 31, 37, 46, 130, 

133, 249–50, 286

Kep airfield: 63, 64

Kep railyard: 61, 73–74, 272, 276

Kien An airfield: 65

Kinh No railyard: 257, 272, 276

Lang Chi hydroelectric plant: 251

Lang Dang railyard: 217, 270, 273, 276

Longbien Bridge. See Doumer Bridge, 

below.

MiG bases: 39, 41, 63–65, 77

Mu Gia pass: 60, 172, 173

Nam Dinh: 46

oil storage facilities: 29–30, 41, 47

panhandle: 28, 229

Phuc Yen airfield: 33, 34, 54, 63, 77, 

80, 81, 88, 89, 90, 103, 114, 119, 

127–28

powerplants: 41, 47, 61, 65–66, 251, 

272

Quang Te airfield: 266

Quan Lang airfield: 203, 205–6, 209

Quinh Loi: 269, 270

Radio Hanoi: 279

railroads: 26–27, 41, 71–74, 84–85, 
272–73, 275–76

Red River port facilities: 128–29

Ron ferry: 60–61

Song Duong bridge: 72

surface-to-air missiles: 243–44, 256, 

266–68

telecommunication links: 252

Thai Nguyen ironworks: 26–27, 41, 55, 

59, 119, 128, 251

Thai Nguyen railyard: 272, 276

Thanh Am oil tank farm: 276

Thanh Hoa airfield: 34, 142, 226

Thanh Hoa barracks: 203

Thanh Hoa bridge: 24, 27, 65, 85, 215, 

227, 234–35

Thanh Hoa warehouses: 227

transportation infrastructure: 77, 257, 

276–77. See also railroads, 

above; trucks, below.

trucks: 144, 146–47, 148–49, 248–49

tunnels: 27

urban targets: 19, 284–85

Van Dien truck depot: 41, 43, 50, 65, 77

Vinh: 225

Vinh Linh: 27, 145–46

warehouses: 45, 226, 227, 256, 262, 264

Yen Bai airfield: 268

Yen Vien railyard: 41, 43, 65, 72, 77, 

85–86, 112, 272, 276

Taylor, Maxwell: 137, 138

Taylor, Telford: 261, 262

Teaball fusion center: 239–40

Terrain avoidance radar: 59–60, 245

Terry, Ross R.: 186

Tet offensive of 1968: 121, 122–23, 126, 

139, 169

reaction to: 38, 116, 122, 123, 124, 134

U.S. military response to: 125–26, 128, 

130–31

Thailand: 3

Air Bases. See Don Muang; Korat; 

Nakhon Phanom; Takhli; Ubon; 

Udorn; U-Tapao.

Air Force facilities: 6, 8–9

income tax breaks for U.S. personnel: 11

Korat plateau: 6, 12

prostitutes: 11–12

U.S. air operations policy: 5–6

U.S. military assistance: 12

U.S. relations: 12

Thanh Hoa airfield: 34, 142, 226

Thanh Hoa bridge: 24, 27, 65, 85, 182,

415

Index

215, 234–35

Thanom Kittikachorn: 12

Thieu, Nguyen Van. See Nguyen Van 

Thieu.

Thirteenth Air Force: 13

Thompson, Richard: 169

Thorsness, Leo K.: 58n

Thud. See Aircraft, U.S., F–105.

Thud Ridge: 51

Thurmond, Strom: 79, 80, 122, 140

Titus, Robert F.: 111

Tonkin Gulf incident: 19–20

Tonkin Gulf Resolution: 20

Toperczer, Istvan: 54n

Top Gun training program: 288

Tour of duty policy: 10–11

Trail, Richard L.: 40n

Transponders, radio identification: 98–99

Tran Van Quang,: 289n

Trautman, Conrad: 192

Trinh: 109

Truck repair shops

Thanh Hoa: 203

Van Dien: 276

Truman, Harry S.: 19

Truong Chinh: 32

Turkestan incident: 75

Ubon Air Base: 6, 10, 52, 53, 58, 64, 73,

85, 89, 91, 92n, 97, 98, 99, 108, 

127, 128, 144, 172, 176, 198, 223, 

224, 233, 241, 251, 278

Udorn Air Base: 8, 10, 13, 17, 100, 147, 

176, 177, 194, 196, 207, 223, 236, 

238, 241, 246, 274

United Kingdom, bombing position: 42, 

44, 56–57

U.S. forces withdrawal: 165, 169, 170, 

178–79

U-Tapao Air Base: 216, 223, 263, 273–74, 

278, 280

Vance, Cyrus: 68, 138, 151, 222

Vang Pao: 102

Vasir, Amarjit Singh: 177

Venereal disease: 12

Victory credits: 8, 111–12, 128, 237, 274

Vietnamization: 165, 169–70, 179, 221, 

223

Vogel, Richard D.: 74

Vogt, John W.: 200, 211, 220–22, 226, 

243, 253, 266, 267, 269, 280
all-weather bombing: 270

armed reconnaissance: 232

B–52 employment: 220–21

bombing accuracy: 235

bombing policy: 246

F–111 employment: 245

Hanoi-Haiphong area: 278–79

Long Chi Dam: 251

Linebacker II: 257

MiG fighters: 239

Nixon, meeting with: 220–21

Voight, Ted L., II: 128

Vo Nguyen Giap: 20n, 32–34

Vorybyov, Mark: 244n

Wallace, George: 150n

Walleye television-guided bombs: 65–66,

85, 91, 97, 128, 232–33, 234, 

235–36

against Doumer Bridge: 234

against Hanoi powerplant: 251

against Phuc Yen airfield: 90

against Thanh Hoa Bridge: 234

Warehouses, attacks on: 45, 226, 227, 256, 

262, 269

Warnke, Paul: 132

Watergate: 281

Wayne, Stephen A.: 290

Weapon system officers: 7–8, 101, 237

Weather: 28, 39, 41, 43, 61–62, 66, 93, 95–

97, 144, 148, 155, 220, 244, 279, 

283

Weiss, Cora: 197

Welander, Robert O.: 222

Westmoreland, William C.: 14, 15, 59, 67, 

68, 70, 76, 110, 116, 121, 125, 

129, 130, 131, 161

Weyand, Fred C.: 238

Weyland, Otto P.: 95–96

Wheeler, Earle G.: 23, 30, 35, 42, 68, 69, 

75, 89, 123, 138, 160, 163

air defenses: 82

bombing halts: 110

bombing policy: 43, 55–56, 80–81, 82, 

90, 126, 133–34, 141, 142

bombing resumption: 163, 164, 167

Haiphong harbor: 78

416

Index

MiG bases: 127

reconnaissance: 156

resignation threats: 83–84

troop call-up: 130–31

Wheeler Study Group report: 129–30

White, Theodore H.: 150n

White, Thomas H.: 160

Wild Weasel: 36–37, 195, 205, 227, 231,

243, 267, 290

F–4C: 266–67

F–100F: 36

F–105F: 36, 52, 57, 95, 105, 112, 197, 

206–7, 225, 226

F–105F as all-weather and night 

bomber: 59–61, 95, 101, 245

F–105G: 171

Williams, David O., Jr.: 128

Wilson, Harold: 56

Wilson, Louis L.: 208

Wings

4th Allied Prisoner of War: 197

8th Tactical Fighter: 10, 52, 54n, 64, 

108, 233, 235, 243, 247

49th Tactical Fighter: 223

336th Tactical Fighter: 5

355th Tactical Fighter: 10, 51, 128, 223

366th Tactical Fighter: 10, 64, 223, 233

388th Tactical Fighter: 10, 51, 59, 103, 

112, 128, 223, 233

432d Tactical Reconnaissance: 10, 207, 

212, 233, 247

474th Tactical Fighter: 246

“Wise Men” meetings: 137–39

Wolfe, Tom: 44

Wright, James: 170

Xuan Thuy: 166

Yeltsin, Boris: 289n

Yokota Air Base: 60, 106

Zemke, Hubert: 54n

Zhou Enlai: 141n

Zimer, Milan: 111

Zinn, Howard: 188

Zuckerman, Solly: 30