"A Little Help From Their Friends: How Vietnam Withstood" Topic

…Largest Bombing Campaign in Human History

"Monday marks the 55th anniversary of the start of Operation Rolling Thunder, the US Air Force bombing campaign against North Vietnam which remains the largest sustained aerial bombing campaign in human history.

What was meant to be an eight week operation ended up lasting 44 months, until October 31, 1968. During the campaign, US aircraft carried out some 304,000 sorties over North Vietnam, dropping about a million tonnes of munitions, or an average of some 800 tonnes a day. Over six million more tonnes of bombs would be dropped elsewhere in Indochina by the time the US would withdraw from the region in 1975. By comparison, Allied planes dropped a total of ‘only' 3.4 million tonnes of bombs on the Axis powers between 1939 and 1945…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Short answer: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and ridiculously restrictive ROE.

"War is hell!"

Tech advances since WWII made it easier to drop massive amounts of ordinance on targets in e.g. SE Asia. No surprise there.

I've said this before. The cane, crutches and walker I got from the VA were made in Vietnam. I'm sure the Vietnam Vet's at the VA see the irony of that …

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

MJkerner-
Are you suggesting that we should (or could) have dropped even more bombs?

Well we almost turned Hanoi into as moonscape. But were not allowed to do total destruction of it. There were rumors after the war, that had we kept bombing Hanoi, rubbled the place, things may have worked out differently… maybe. I have nothing to prove this either way …

The impact of a real bombing campaign like the one in response to the 1972 Easter offensive shows how something similar might have impacted the war if tried in 1967 or 68. That bombing, which targeted the proper targets and mined the harbor brought North Vietnam to their knees and back to the negotiating table.

It is interesting that the advances in technology by 1972 made the impact that much greater…in 1972 the US took out a bridge with one precision guided bomb that had proven impervious to damage in the earlier bombing campaign despite repeated attempts to destroy it with conventional bombs.

MJK had it right.

They didn't need to drop more, they just needed to select better targets, and not have political restriction on those targets that needed to be hit, for various reasons.

Hamstringing your generals and lower level troops due to political worries back home loses wars.

For example, for a long time airbases, SAM sites, and storage depots were off limits, as were the docks and shipping in port. There were many, many other targets that were also off limits too.

Watch "Flight of the Intruder" for a great movie example of the above.

Yes, that was a great movie based on a book by the same name written by an Intruder pilot.

For example, for a long time airbases, SAM sites, and storage depots were off limits, as were the docks and shipping in port. There were many, many other targets that were also off limits too.

I too had heard the same from a number of sources as well as from the movie.

The US military had similar "stupid" ROE imposed on it in Iraq and A'stan. But those have mostly been removed since the advent of a new administration in D.C.

The Hanoi harbor facilities were off-limits in order not to offend any Soviet Bloc or Chinese ships in process of delivering war materiel to NV. Dikes, schools and hospitals were also off limits despite the fact that the North Vietnamese mounted vast numbers of AAA upon them.

Nixon finally took off the gloves (i.e. most of the targeting restrictions). The damage inflicted by the Linebacker bombing campaign was much more effective, and the mining and closure of Haiphong port halted further delivery of war materiel. The NV ran out of anti-aircraft missiles not long thereafter, at which point they re-considered their options and elected to return to the negotiating table.

A very interesting book on the history and background of the bombing campaigns over SVN, NVN, Laos and Cambodia is -

"SETUP – What the Air Force did in Vietnam and Why"
by Earl H Tilford
Air University Press
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
1991

Highly recommended.

B

Yes Linebacker got the North back to the Paris Peace Talks. They they were running out of SAMs. And much of Hanoi was getting rubbled.

Wonder if Linebacker started after TET how things may have changed ?

Yep, same reason why we didn't attack their air bases and SAM sites initially, too.