A war too long: Part II. (2024)

The second air war took place in the skies over North Vietnam.Between March 1965 and the end of October 1968, Air Force and Navyaircraft conducted Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaigndesigned to force Ho Chi Minh to abandon his ambition to take over SouthVietnam. Over the objections of many Air Force leaders, the operationbegan primarily as a diplomatic signal to impress Hanoi withAmerica's determination, essentially a warning that the violencewould escalate until Ho Chi Minh blinked, and secondarily as a means tobolster the sagging morale of the South Vietnamese. In the view of theAir Force, the campaign had no clear-cut military objective nor itsauthors any real estimate of the cost in lives and aircraft. GeneralLeMay and others argued that military targets, rather than theenemy's resolve, should be attacked and that the blows should berapid and sharp, with the impact felt immediately by the NorthVietnamese Army on the battlefield as well as by the politicalleadership at Hanoi. Secretary McNamara favored the measured applicationof force and was convinced that the war could be won in the South. Heinitially emphasized strikes against the extended battlefield, whichconsisted of South Vietnam and the areas immediately beyond its borders,instead of proceeding directly against the targets many deep withinNorth Vietnam advocated by LeMay. When Rolling Thunder failed to weakenthe enemy's will after the first several weeks, the purpose, thoughnot the pace, of the campaign began to change. By the end of 1965, theJohnson administration still used air power in an attempt to changeNorth Vietnamese policy, but the bombing tended to be directed againstthe flow of men and supplies from the North, thus damaging the enemymilitarily while warning him of the danger of greater destruction if hemaintained the present aggressive course.

Although the bombing campaign was taking on more of a militarycoloration, forcing Ho Chi Minh to give up his goal of absorbing SouthVietnam into a unified communist state remained the underlying purpose.The change in the conduct of the air war was not sufficient to satisfyLeMay and like-minded members of the military leadership, who believedthat the United States could not end aggression with these strategies.The ill-conceived attempt to bomb Ho Chi Minh into being a goodneighbor, in part the product of a cultural bias that perceived amilitarily backward North Vietnam as succumbing to the use (if not themere threat) of American might, had failed. McNamara's persistingin such an effort, even in the form of aerial interdiction, servedmainly to estrange LeMay and other uniformed leaders from the civilianofficials of the Department of Defense. In essence, the senior officersargued that military considerations should determine the use of force,whereas the civilians, typified by Secretary McNamara, insisted thatselective pressure, controlled by them and combined with diplomaticovertures, would prevail and compel North Vietnam to call off itsaggression in the South.

Within Congress, doubts about the McNamara policy mounted as thebombing dragged on without an appreciable effect on the leadership atHanoi. At last in August 1967, after more than two years of RollingThunder, the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate ArmedServices Committee began to probe the conduct of the air war. Under theleadership of John C. Stennis, a Democrat from Mississippi, thesubcommittee provided a sympathetic forum where the admirals andgenerals presented their case for stronger action. In the words ofDemocratic Senator W. Stuart Symington of Missouri, a member of thesubcommittee and the first Secretary of the Air Force, Rolling Thunderresembled an attack on an octopus; he, along with the other members ofthe subcommittee and the uniformed witnesses, believed in going for thehead, which would mean an escalation of the bombing in terms of targetsand tonnage. In contrast, Secretary McNamara argued unsuccessfully thatattacking the head of the octopus was not necessary if all the tentacleswere pounded to a pulp, as he maintained the limited bombing was doing.The consensus of the subcommittee was that the policy represented bySecretary McNamara had failed and that purely military considerationsshould prevail in selecting and attacking targets. Nevertheless, thehearings resulted in little more than an expansion of the target list,for the President undertook no dramatic escalation. The secret sessionsdid, however, destroy what remained of McNamara's credibility withCongress, contributing to his disenchantment with the war and edging himtoward resigning, which he did early in 1968.

Besides opening divisions within the Department of Defense, thebombing contributed in some measure to the increasing opposition to thewar and to the way it was being fought. Those among the populace whobelieved that the United States was doing too little could point toRolling Thunder as an example of how American servicemen were riskingtheir lives in operations that could not bring victory. At the oppositepole were those who felt that Rolling Thunder was unworthy of the UnitedStates, a form of war that unleashed the latest technology of violenceagainst the civilian populace of North Vietnam. As the then-secrettestimony before the Stennis subcommittee made clear, the nation'suniformed leaders did not advocate warfare against the population of theNorth, but attacks on undeniably military targets in crowded citiescould not help but maim and kill noncombatants. Complicating anydispassionate judgment of the air war was the enduring myth that aerialbombardment was capable of unerring accuracy. Tracing its roots to thebombs-in-a-pickle-barrel legend of World War II, this myth had beenreinforced by recent references to the surgical precision of aerialattack and by President Johnson's ill-advised remark that, whereasViet Cong steel was plunged into flesh and blood, American bombs weredirected only at steel and concrete. When an American reporter permittedto travel in North Vietnam sent back dispatches describing civiliancasualties and the destruction of homes, the abiding belief of theAmerican people in the precision of aerial bombing reinforced theenemy's propaganda.

When Rolling Thunder began in March 1965, strikes were limited tospecific targets south of 20 degrees North latitude, but the area ofoperations rapidly expanded and the nature of the attacks changed.Within a few weeks Air Force fighterbombers were flying armedreconnaissance in that same area, hitting targets of opportunity. Thefirst target north of the 20th parallel was bombed in May, and byNovember a few strikes had been authorized north of Hanoi against therail lines entering the country from China. Because it represented a useof military force for diplomatic purposes, Rolling Thunder wascontrolled directly from Washington. Targets were chosen in the WhiteHouse, at times when the President was having lunch with a few keyadvisers. At first, squadrons in South Vietnam and Thailand carried outthe strikes approved for the Air Force, but after the construction ofnew airfields in Thailand, all the raids against the North originatedthere. The fleet of aircraft the Air Force operated from Thailand grewfrom 83 to 600. At first, the main burden of carrying the air war toNorth Vietnam fell to the F-105, but the F-4C joined it in mid-1965 andthe F-4D somewhat later; the F--111, the operational version of the TFX,served briefly in 1968. The first of the few B-52 strikes directedagainst the North during this period took place in April 1966 andpounded the infiltration routes exiting into Laos; the Air Force Chiefof Staff, General McConnell, did not want to send these bombers againstthe Hanoi-Haiphong region where the defenses were strongest.

Until November 1965, Air Force and Navy aircraft alternated inattacking Rolling Thunder targets throughout the North, but beginningthat month, six armed reconnaissance areas, called route packages, werecreated, with each the responsibility of one of the two services. DuringApril 1966, when infiltration into the South increased through thedemilitarized zone, responsibility for strikes in the route packageabutting the zone was turned over to General Westmoreland as part ofSouth Vietnam's extended battlefield. Meanwhile, attacks continued,with certain exclusions, in the rest of North Vietnam. At various times,aircraft could not strike the potential targets within a thirty-mileradius of Hanoi, those within ten miles of Haiphong or thirty miles ofthe Chinese border, the MiG bases, and, until they demonstrated thatthey were actual weapons and not mere tokens of Soviet support, thesurface-to-air missile sites.

The lists of authorized targets and excepted areas changedthroughout the bombing campaign. In June 1966, for instance,fighter-bombers flew a series of powerful attacks against seven majorpetroleum storage areas, destroying some seventy percent of NorthVietnam's tankage. The air war escalated further in February 1967when aircraft hit power plants, military airfields, and railway yardswithin the buffer zones around Hanoi and targets along the Chineseborder. Nevertheless, Rolling Thunder was fought in flurries, withperiods of escalation or intensified activity separated by pauses in thebombing designed to facilitate a North Vietnamese response throughdiplomatic channels. In actuality, the pauses allowed the enemy time tobind up his wounds.

During Rolling Thunder, Air Force and Navy aircraft frequentlyattacked the highway bridge at Thanh Hoa, but the raids proved futile.Workmen swarmed over the bridge by night or in weather too bad forfollow-up bombing and repaired the damage, with traffic rerouted acrossa nearby underwater bridge whenever the steel structure could not beused. A captured naval aviator, whose aircraft was one of sixteen shotdown during the attacks on the Thanh Hoa bridge was blindfolded and inthe dark of night placed in the back of an open truck. After a shortdrive, the truck stopped, his captors removed the blindfold, and hefound himself in the middle of the river at Thanh Hoa, the truck parkedon the underwater bridge that American intelligence had not yetdetected. The Paul Doumer bridge, which carried the railroad and ahighway over the Red River at Hanoi, came under attack during theenlargement of the target list that resulted from the hearings of theStennis subcommittee. Air Force fighter-bombers succeeded in droppingthree of the spans, but North Vietnamese laborers immediately set towork on an underwater replacement bridge.

Besides struggling successfully to repair bomb damage, whether tobridges or to power plants, North Vietnam responded to Rolling Thunderby building a modern radar-controlled air defense system, perhaps themost formidable ever devised. Shortly after the bombing began, thenumber of North Vietnamese antiaircraft guns of all calibers doubled to2,000. The proliferation of these weapons forced the fighter-bombersafter the first few weeks to change their tactics from low-level,high-speed bomb runs to higher altitude penetrations. The defenders,however, acquired a weapon, the surfaceto-air missile, that could engagehigher flying aircraft. Reconnaissance craft detected Soviet-suppliedsurface-to-air missiles for the first time in March 1965 and hadidentified fifty-six sites by the end of the year. Complementing theguns and missiles, the North Vietnamese Air Force had about 100 MiG-17sand MiG-21s, as well as a few MiG-19s, a collection of interceptors thatbegan, during the following year, to pose a threat to the Americanfighter-bombers.

By the summer of 1966, the North Vietnamese were defending theirterritory with a radar-directed system of aerial defense that includedinterceptors, surface-to-air missiles, and antiaircraft guns. Ingeneral, the enemy used his interceptors to harry the approachingfighter-bombers, forcing them to drop their bombs earlier than plannedto rid their aircraft of the drag that impeded them in dogfights againstthe MiGs. To avoid the surface-to-air missiles, which were deadly athigh altitude but could not change direction readily, the F-105s andF-4s dived sharply, a maneuver that placed them in the killing zone ofthe antiaircraft guns. The weakest link in the enemy's defensesproved to be the radar that controlled the surface-to-air missiles andthe largest of the guns. The Air Force exploited this weakness with aNavy-developed missile, the Shrike, that destroyed the transmitter byhoming on the radar signals. Later, an improved missile of this kind,the Standard Antiradiation Missile, replaced the Shrike as the normalmeans of forcing hostile radar to shut down. In addition, the Air Forceused jamming transmitters, mounted in orbiting aircraft or enclosed inpods hung from the fighter-bombers, to conceal the genuine radar returnsand confuse the North Vietnamese operators. Using antiradiation missilesand the electronic countermeasures, pilots neutralized the surface-toairmissiles, enabling the attackers to remain beyond the reach ofantiaircraft fire.

Along with the formidable defenses, the restrictions on targetshelped determine the tactics employed by American air power duringRolling Thunder, for the pilots had to avoid trespassing in Chinese airspace or damaging non-North Vietnamese shipping at Haiphong or someother port as they carried out the contradictory mission of persuadingHo Chi Minh that North Vietnam could be destroyed, without actuallydestroying it. The Air Force at times compensated with unusual tacticsor techniques for the defenses and the prohibition, but not for thebasic contradiction. Since airfields in North Vietnam were at timesexempt from attack and those in China always so, the attackers could notdestroy the MiGs on the ground, and aerial combat was inevitable. Toimprove the odds, radarequipped EC--121s, military versions of theLockheed Constellation transport, orbited over the Gulf of Tonkin andwarned American pilots of the approach of hostile jets. A favoritemaneuver of the North Vietnamese fighter pilots was to climb sharply,forcing the F-105s to jettison their bombs in expectation of a dogfight.Radar in the EC-121s detected these tactics, and a screen of F-4s, armedwith heat-seeking missiles and flying at an altitude lower than theF-105s, could intercept the approaching enemy.

Perhaps the most spectacular tactical innovation occurred inJanuary 1967, when fourteen flights of F-4s posed as bomb-laden F-105sby using the appropriate radio call signs, approach route, altitude, andspeed. Anticipating easy kills, the North Vietnamese attacked, and thePhantoms, primed for battle and unencumbered by bombs, destroyed sevenof the MiGs in twelve minutes. Four days afterward, this timemasquerading as weather reconnaissance craft, the F-4s again lured theMiGs into attacking and destroyed two more. Having learned the danger ofoverconfidence, the North Vietnamese began to rely on hit-and-runattacks, firing heat-seeking missiles from behind their intendedvictims, then bolting for safety.

For air-to-air combat, the Air Force normally used the multibarrel20-mm cannon and three kinds of air intercept missiles the AIM-9 Sidewinder, AIM-7 Sparrow, and AIM-4 Falcon--all supersonic and accurate atranges varying from two to ten miles. The Sidewinder, first used incombat by Chinese Nationalist pilots over the Taiwan Strait in 1958, wasa heat-seeking missile developed by the Naval Ordnance Test Station atChina Lake, California. The Sparrow, developed by the Raytheon Companyfor the Navy, relied on radar for guidance. The Hughes Aircraft Falconcame in several models, some with radar in the nose to track the victim,whereas others homed on the heat generated by engines. To enhance theaccuracy of the Sparrow and the radar-guided versions of the Falcon,McDonnell Douglas fitted fire control radar in the F-4 to help highlightthe target. Since the air intercept missiles were ill-suited forclose-in fighting, some F-4Cs and all subsequent models of the Phantomcarried a 20-mm gun either installed in a pod attached to the airframeor built into the aircraft.

After the Wise Men recommended against further escalation of thewar, President Johnson conceded that Rolling Thunder had failed to makeHo Chi Minh relent. Hoping that a reduction of the bombing would succeedwhere intensification had failed and entice Hanoi into negotiating asettlement of the war, the President on April 1, 1968, ended the bombingnorth of the 19th parallel and halted it altogether on November 1. Col.Ray Bowers, who had studied the campaign while assigned to the Office ofAir Force History, summed up the accomplishments of Rolling Thunderbetween the spring of 1965 and the fall of 1968 when he told an audienceat the Air Force Academy, "Measured by its unsatisfactory outcomeand by the ... planes lost in North Vietnam, the controlled applicationof air power that was Rolling Thunder stands as a sad failure."

During the air war against the North, Air Force tactical fightersflew 166,000 sorties and the Navy's carrier aircraft 144,500. TheB-52s, which strictly speaking were not a part of Rolling Thunder, sawlimited action, flying just 2,330 sorties. The enemy downed 526 AirForce aircraft; fifty-four fell victim to surface-to-air missiles,forty-two were destroyed by MiGs, and the remainder succumbed toantiaircraft fire. Of the 745 Air Force crew members shot down onmissions against the North, 145 were rescued, 255 were known to havedied, 222 were taken prisoner, and the fate of 123 others was unknownwhen the operation ended.

The air war along the trails of southern Laos complemented bothRolling Thunder and the air war in South Vietnam. The objective of thisthird air campaign was to impede the flow of men and equipment fromNorth into South Vietnam; in 1965 this traffic was estimated at 4,500men and 300 tons of cargo each month. The Air Force, the Navy, and theMarine Corps all participated in this air war; the Air Force withF-100s, F-4s, F-105s, and B-57s from both South Vietnam and Thailand.The weight of the aerial effort varied with the weather, which clearedover southern Laos during a dry season that normally lasted fromNovember through April and facilitated both road traffic and airoperations. Although the campaign in this region came to be conductedyear-around, initially the activity all but stopped with the onset ofthe monsoon rains, as the focus of aerial interdiction shifted to thedemilitarized zone where the tempo of infiltration increased with thebeginning of dry weather.

Like Rolling Thunder, the interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail insouthern Laos was subject to political constraints. The settlementnegotiated between the communist and noncommunist factions in 1962banned a military headquarters in Laos, and the United States used itsembassy at Vientiane for that purpose, with the ambassador functioningas the military authority in the kingdom and the military attaches ashis staff. Decisions as to the number of sorties, targets, and ordnancereflected the need to preserve the nominal neutrality of the Laotianprime minister, Souvanna Phouma, who did not object to the air war aslong as his loyal subjects were not endangered and his government notinvolved to the extent that might invite North Vietnamese retaliation.The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved each of the recurring interdictioncampaigns, the Seventh Air Force provided the aircraft and nominated thetargets, and the ambassador vetoed any target that in his judgment mightjeopardize noncombatants, captured Americans, or the appearance ofneutrality on the part of Souvanna's government.

The original Barrel Roll campaign, begun in December 1964, gave wayduring the following April to a more extensive interdiction programcalled Steel Tiger. As the rains abated, infiltration increased and thenumber of air strikes multiplied, concentrating on the part of SteelTiger closest to the South Vietnamese border, a region called TigerHound. Aircraft hit trucks, storage and bivouac areas, bridges,buildings, and antiaircraft sites. In December 1965 B-52s dropped theirfirst bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Although American aircraft had by the end of 1965 claimed thedestruction of more than 1,000 trucks, along with structures of everysort, including bridges, few results could be verified and the number ofthe enemy killed could not be determined. Infiltration continued notonly through Laos, but also by way of Cambodia and the demilitarizedzone and by sea. As time passed, the carefully camouflaged network ofroads and trails, waterways and pipelines, depots and bivouac areassteadily expanded in southern Laos, and the enemy established alogistics complex in Cambodia.

Because of the troops and cargo that traveled the infiltration andsupply routes, the tempo of the fighting in South Vietnam continued toincrease despite an enemy death toll that rose from an estimated 35,000in 1965 to as many as 181,000 in 1968. Realizing the importance of theHo Chi Minh Trail through southern Laos in sustaining the war in SouthVietnam, the United States early in 1966 intensified the air campaignagainst this route and experimented with a number of new interdictiontechniques. Until the rains arrived in May, Air Force, Navy, and MarineCorps aircraft flew more than 6,000 sorties, cratering roads anddestroying 1,000 trucks, along with buildings, antiaircraft sites, andboats. World War II vintage A-26s began hunting and attacking trucks;the Combat Skyspot radar, which had proved effective in South Vietnam,began directing strikes in southern Laos at night and in bad weather;and AC-130 gunships equipped with special detection devices to locateand attack trucks moving by night saw their first action early in 1967.At times, South Vietnamese ground reconnaissance teams were flown byhelicopter to the vicinity of the trail to locate targets and call forair strikes.

Meanwhile, the B-52s began making a greater contribution to theinterdiction effort, flying some 400 sorties against portions of thetrail opposite the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam betweenApril and June 1966. Westmoreland sought to expand still further the useof the bombers by inaugurating a systematic campaign against themountain passes leading from North Vietnam into Laos. The ambassador,however, vetoed the proposal, doubting both the effectiveness of thebombing and his ability to sell such a program to Souvanna Phouma.

The North Vietnamese reacted to the interdiction campaign bystrengthening the antiaircraft defenses and by assigning troops andlaborers to repair damage and build new routes, some of which wouldremain undetected for months, even years, under the jungle canopy. Bymid-1966, Air Force reconnaissance craft had identified about 300antiaircraft sites bristling with guns, mostly 37-mm types; the laborforce by this time totaled an estimated thirty-eight North Vietnameseengineer battalions and 16,000 civilian laborers, many recruitedlocally. A North Vietnamese transportation division controlled theentire operation, which included way stations, guides and food, andcommunications all along the roads and rivers.

This transportation division attempted to make the Ho Chi MinhTrail secure, and devised many techniques for avoiding detection fromthe air. As much as possible, trucks moved by night; in daylight theywere camouflaged with green paint, tarpaulins, and tree branches.Whenever aircraft approached, moving trucks darted onto side roads andwaited for at least an hour after the intruders had disappeared beforeresuming the journey. Bicycles, oxcarts, boats, and human porterssupplemented the trucks in carrying supplies. Troops destined for thebattlefields of South Vietnam also used the Ho Chi Minh Trail, usuallytraveling on foot in small groups. The soldiers were warned not todiscuss their travel, make any unnecessary noise while en route, orleave litter on the road in short, to avoid any action that might revealtheir schedule or betray their presence. If aircraft did appear, theindividual infiltrators either froze in their tracks, threw themselvesdown, or moved off the trail into the rain forest. The jungle proved avaluable ally of the North Vietnamese, for by binding together the topsof trees, the enemy created an extensive trellis to hide his movementsand his installations from searching aircraft. Trucks and infiltratingtroops crossed rivers and streams without being detected on pontoonbridges, hidden by day, or on underwater spans made of sandbags.Telephone lines were strung along five-foot poles that were too short tocast the telltale shadows that might alert photo interpreters to thecourse of the trail. This sustained effort, requiring the full-timeactivity of tens of thousands of soldiers who might otherwise have beenfighting in South Vietnam, seemed proof that the bombing of the Ho ChiMinh Trail had disrupted the North Vietnamese war effort.

In the summer of 1966, when the seasons changed and theinfiltration shifted northward to the demilitarized zone, the aircraftassigned to operations in Tiger Hound followed suit and began bombing inthe Tally Ho area just north of the zone. Early in 1967, when the dryweather returned to southern Laos, the Air Force stepped up its bombingattacks, its efforts at night interdiction, and its support of groundprobes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These operations, and the attempt toturn the roads and trails to mud by seeding the clouds to cause rain,failed to significantly reduce enemy infiltration. The Air Forceattributed this failure to the need to consult the ambassador atVientiane, which made the bombing in southern Laos, like the air waragainst North Vietnam, a tentative, stop-andgo undertaking.

In the meantime, Secretary McNamara, losing confidence in RollingThunder as a means of forcing the enemy to end the aggression in theSouth and negotiate an end to the war, began seeking a substitute forthe bombing of North Vietnam less costly in lives and aircraft. Heproposed, instead of intensified attacks on the heavily defended North,that air power join in a systematic effort to choke off the flow of menand equipment across the demilitarized zone and through southern Laosinto South Vietnam. He ordered the establishment of what sometimes wasdescribed as McNamara's Wall--a barrier of barbed wire anddefensive strongpoints sealing the routes across the demilitarized zoneand a field of electronic sensors detecting infiltration west of thezone through southern Laos. Work on the barrier along the demilitarizedzone began during the second half of 1967 but was never completed; besetby shortages of transportation and materials and by poor roads, theproject soon collapsed in the face of determined enemy resistance.Meanwhile, the electronic portion of the wall began to take shape. Underthe guidance of the Air Force, Task Force Alpha came into being, itsbrain an electronic surveillance center built at Nakhon Phanom,Thailand, on the border with Laos. To monitor the movement of trucks andmen along suspected segments of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, aircraft droppedacoustic and seismic sensors, along with thousands of tiny button bombsto help activate them. Orbiting EC--121s relayed signals from activatedsensors to Nakhon Phanom, where computers matched the information withpreviously stored data, and controllers requested strikes by elements ofGeneral Momyer's Seventh Air Force.

Aircraft especially equipped for the operations of Task Force Alphabegan arriving at Nakhon Phanom late in 1967. The Navy contributed asquadron of Lockheed OP-2E patrol bombers, which joined Air Force CH-3Chelicopters in planting the sensor fields. Besides the helicopters, theAir Force supplied a squadron of F-4s to drop sensors in areas tooheavily defended for the helicopters or the OP-2Es and eighteen A-1Es todispense the tiny bombs that, when driven over or stepped on, emitted anoise that activated the sensors. A detachment of forward aircontrollers in O-1s arrived to direct both the placement of the minesand sensors and the strikes launched in response to the electronic data.Despite successful tests of the system on the trail in December, thefull-scale inauguration of the program had to be postponed when theassigned aircraft were diverted in January to the defense of Khe Sanh.The marines manning the base benefited, however, from the sensors inpinpointing hostile movements and acquiring targets for air strikes orartillery.

Between December 1964 and the end of 1967, American aircraft flew185,000 sorties of all kinds against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Of thistotal, 80 percent were the work of the Air Force, which lost 107 of the132 aircraft shot down over southern Laos during this period. As aresult of the reduction and then the termination of Rolling Thunder,resources became available to transform the air campaign in southernLaos from essentially a dry-weather attempt at interdiction into asuccession of sensorassisted air campaigns, called Commando Hunt, thattried throughout the year to impede the infiltration of men andsupplies.

The air war fought over northern Laos had a lower priority thanoperations over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, or southern Laos. Neitherthe communist Pathet Lao nor their opposition could recruit the forcesor obtain the outside aid that would bring victory. North Vietnam usedthe Pathet Lao to protect the western flank of the Ho Chi Minh Trail;the United States hoped to safeguard the radar sites in Laos thatdirected the bombing of North Vietnam and, at the same time, tie downNorth Vietnamese resources that might be used to greater effect in SouthVietnam or in southern Laos. The main antagonists, therefore, were moreinterested in keeping their Laotian factions in the field and fightingthan in winning. Victory, after all, might require the diversion of menand materiel needed for more important operations elsewhere.

Disagreements arose over how air power could best sustain theforces loyal to the government and opposing the Pathet Lao. The Americanambassador at Vientiane wanted to control the air support needed by thegovernment forces and the irregulars recruited by General Vang Pao fromthe Meo tribe in the mountains of Laos. He tried repeatedly to persuadethe Air Force to set aside aircraft for his exclusive use in providingclose air support for the troops in northern Laos, but General Momyerresisted attempts to assign fighter-bombers to the ambassador or to theLaotian generals. Momyer's responsibilities extended from theMekong delta to the demilitarized zone, including the roads and trailsof southern Laos, and embraced every kind of air support frombattlefield strikes to long-range interdiction. He was determined toretain the freedom to use his aircraft wherever and however he deemedbest. Instead of continuing to maintain a few jet fighter-bombers onalert for operations in northern Laos, as his predecessor had done,Momyer preferred to allocate sorties from his overall force in responseto requests from Vientiane. Although the Air Force increased the numberof B-26s and A-1s assigned to Southeast Asia, types of aircraft wellsuited to the kind of war being fought in northern Laos, the ambassadordid not become his own air commander.

The fighting in northern Laos remained largely a war of proxies,with few Americans (or North Vietnamese, for that matter) serving there.The North Vietnamese provided supplies and a small core of disciplinedsoldiers for the Pathet Lao. An even smaller contingent of Americanairmen acted as forward air controllers for Vang Pao's army oroperated the scattered radar sites that directed strikes in southernLaos and North Vietnam. Udorn in Thailand functioned as a pilot trainingcenter and maintenance depot for the fledgling Royal Laotian Air Force,and a C-130 flying out of there served as an airborne command post foroperations over northern Laos.

American aerial activity in northern Laos varied in intensity overthe years. As an immediate consequence of the peace accord of 1962, theUnited States shifted its attention to South Vietnam and limited itsactivity in northern Laos to providing military aid, conducting theoccasional show of force, and carrying out clandestine operations. Thesecirc*mstances contributed to the creation of a loosely structuredoperating organization for which the embassy, the Central IntelligenceAgency, and the military shared responsibility. Two years later, whencivil war erupted despite the settlement of 1962, the United Statessided with the Royal Laotian government against the communist PathetLao. After 1964 the fighting intensified, but by 1968 it had more orless settled into an annual pattern in which the Pathet Lao advancedonto the Plain of Jars in northern Laos during the dry season (winter),exposing its forces to air attacks that inflicted casualties and hackedaway at the supply and communication lines extending from North Vietnam.By the coming of the summer rains, the drive had spent itself, and theinitiative passed to the government troops as the communists fell backto restock and regroup. In this annual cycle of combat, the Laotiangovernment came to rely more and more on air power, both American andits own, and on the guerrilla army of Vang Pao.

Air Force pilots became proficient in the kind of close air supporton which the Meo tribesmen depended. The first such strikes, deliveredduring a dry-season offensive by the Pathet Lao in 1965, demonstratedthat Air Force units could work directly with the Laotian forces,whether regulars or Vang Pao's guerrillas. Laotian reliance onAmerican air power increased during 1966, after the commander of theLaotian air arm launched an unsuccessful coup that undermined the moraleand effectiveness of his organization as well as the government'sconfidence in its air force. The Americans had no choice but to supplythe needed sorties until the Laotians could again fly them.

The reduction and later the cessation of the bombing of NorthVietnam in 1968 changed all four of the air wars in Southeast Asia. Thegreatest change was in the North, where for more than three yearsAmerican aircraft were authorized to go only to fly reconnaissancemissions or to retaliate for some action by the enemy, usually an attackon reconnaissance craft. In the South, air power became a shield for theAmerican disengagement and withdrawal. In Laos, the purpose of airoperations remained interdiction in the south, preventing the enemy frombuilding up for a final onslaught as American strength in South Vietnamdeclined, and tying down resources in the north that the NorthVietnamese might otherwise use to turn the American withdrawal into arout. As a result, air power no longer used against North Vietnam foundready application in South Vietnam and in the two wars being fought inLaos.

By imposing a limit on American participation in the war--theeffect of the decisions made following the Tet offensive of early1968--the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson began modifyingthe partnership between the United States and South Vietnam. Theultimate objective remained a free and independent South Vietnam, butthe United States no longer pursued that goal by means of a bombingcampaign in the North and by a war of attrition in the South foughtlargely by American troops. Instead, the United States began to trainand equip the South Vietnamese to take over the war, while at the sametime engaging in negotiations with the enemy to end the fighting andacknowledge the right of South Vietnam to exist. North Vietnam provedwilling enough to talk; in May 1968, after Rolling Thunder diminished inscale, the Hanoi government entered into preliminary discussions atParis that involved the United States, South Vietnam, and, after muchhaggling, the political leaders of the Viet Cong. Not until January1969, after Rolling Thunder had ended and when Richard M. Nixon, aRepublican, was about to take the oath of office as President, did thepreliminaries end so that the negotiators could begin addressing issuesof substance. The discussions soon revealed that North Vietnam, althoughwilling to participate, would make no major concessions that mightjeopardize the ultimate conquest of the South; fight and talk became thenational policy, which persisted after the death of Ho Chi Minh inSeptember 1969.

The Nixon administration took over the basic strategy adopted byPresident Johnson and named it Vietnamization, a label proposed bySecretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. The original choice,deAmericanization, had seemed not only less euphonious but also hurtfulto South Vietnamese pride since its use acknowledged that the UnitedStates had indeed taken over the war. Ideally, as Vietnamizationprogressed, freshly equipped and newly trained South Vietnamese would inan orderly fashion assume full responsibility for fighting the war. TheAmericans in the ground forces, which contained the greatest share ofdraftees and suffered the most casualties, would be the first to departas the South Vietnamese took over. In this way, the toll of Americanskilled and wounded would decline sharply; and this benefit ofVietnamization would affect a large segment of the nation'spopulace, the families of the draftees, thus encouraging widespreadsupport, if not of the war itself, at least of the manner in which itwas being liquidated. However, the reduction of American casualties, andthe resulting political effects, soon took precedence over the difficultjob of fitting out and training the armed forces of South Vietnam. HenryA. Kissinger, the national security adviser to President Nixon (andafter August 1973 the Secretary of State), warned early in the processof Vietnamization that troop withdrawals would become "saltedpeanuts" for the American people, with each one whetting thepublic's appetite for another. Kissinger was correct. Heacknowledged years afterward that by late summer of 1969, "We wereclearly on the way out of Vietnam by negotiation if possible, byunilateral withdrawal if necessary."

The emphasis on bringing the men home represented an attempt toplacate the antiwar movement in the United States, which since 1965 hadmounted several large public demonstrations against American policy inSoutheast Asia. The motives of the demonstrators varied from a sincerebelief that the war was morally wrong to a fear of being drafted andpossibly serving in South Vietnam. By embarking on a well-publicizedcourse of disengagement and withdrawal (and later by easing the impactof the draft preparatory to abolishing it altogether), the Nixonadministration bought time for negotiation but at the same time relaxedthe pressure on North Vietnam to respond. The United States clearly wasleaving South Vietnam, but North Vietnam had no intention of doing so.The American withdrawals thus represented a concession by the Nixonadministration to the antiwar faction rather than a reaction toconcessions by the communist side in the peace negotiations. Not even aseries of secret discussions between Kissinger and representatives ofNorth Vietnam could persuade the communists to accept a program ofmutual troop withdrawals.

Vietnamization in all its aspects--disengagement, withdrawal, andthe strengthening of South Vietnamese forces--permeated American effortsin Southeast Asia, affecting all four of the wars in which the Air Forcewas engaged: the fighting over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, northernLaos, and southern Laos (which came to include Cambodia). From late 1968until the spring of 1972, when a North Vietnamese invasion of the Southcaused a reorientation of air operations, every undertaking by the AirForce overt or secret, authorized or unauthorized, inside South Vietnamor outside the country was designed to facilitate in some way thewithdrawal of American combat forces, their replacement by SouthVietnamese, and the negotiation of an end to the war. During 1965 airpower had protected the build-up of American ground forces in SouthVietnam; now it formed a shield for their withdrawal.

In South Vietnam, throughout the years of Vietnamization andwithdrawal, air power, ranging from strikes by fighter-bombers to thebattering delivered by B-52s, helped defeat the enemy or hold him incheck in a number of battles. The fighting often erupted at fire supportbases or other outposts, but the most significant action of this periodtook place at Ap Bia mountain in the spring of 1969 during a raid on thesupply depots within the A Shau Valley. An initial probe revealed thatthe mountain was an enemy stronghold; air power and additional troopshad to be employed for its capture. The soldiers fighting there begancalling the objective "Hamburger Hill," as troops were fedinto what seemed to them like the military equivalent of a meat grinder.The mountain was finally conquered at the cost of fifty-six Americanskilled, with more than ten times that number of North Vietnamese dyingin its defense, but the victors promptly withdrew. Lt. Gen. Phillip B.Davidson of the Army, at the time a staff officer with the militaryassistance command, declares in his book, Vietnam at War, that thebattle "catapulted the doves into shrill flight," but whattroubled opponents of the war like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Democratfrom Massachusetts, was not so much that fifty-six soldiers had diedcapturing an important mountaintop as that the objective had beenabandoned once it was overrun. In Kennedy's opinion, this latestsearch and destroy operation had given away what Americans hadsacrificed their lives to capture, an objective that might well have tobe taken again at further cost. Apparently the Nixon administrationshared the senator's concern that lives were being squandered, forthe Chief Executive in the aftermath of the Hamburger Hill fightinginstructed Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, who had succeeded Gen. William C.Westmoreland as Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, tolimit American casualties.

Davidson argues in his volume that the battle for Ap Bia mountainand the resulting Presidential decision to hold down casualties markedanother turning point in the war, since it deprived the American forcesof a sense of purpose by acknowledging that this was indeed a"no-win" conflict. Beginning in 1969 and accelerating insubsequent years, morale and discipline did decline, in part because thewar was being liquidated. Put as starkly as possible, no one wanted tobe the last American killed in Southeast Asia. Other factors, however,affected the armed forces during the period of Vietnamization andwithdrawal. Some, like racial strife and the abuse of alcohol and drugs,were embedded in contemporary American society; others, like oppositionto the war, had shallower roots. Although the opponents of the Vietnamconflict remained a small, if articulate, minority, the American publicwas undeniably becoming indifferent toward the war, and servicemen feltthat their sacrifices were barely acknowledged, let alone appreciated.Conditions in Southeast Asia put a unique stamp on these behavioralproblems and on the growing sense of alienation. For example, members ofthe different races, who had cooperated in combat to survive, might beat each other's throats when not in danger from the common enemy;but racial animosity was not the only problem to surface in the rearareas. Boredom punctuated by fear of rocket or mortar attack, isolationfrom what was familiar and pressure from peers, and ready access toalcohol and drugs created a subculture of dependency. Addiction to drugsrepresented a problem that the services had not encountered previously;when punishment did not work, treatment programs had to be established.

During this turbulent time, the armed forces fell woefully short oftheir standards for disciplined behavior. Orders were disobeyed; and inthe ground forces, unpopular officers and noncommissioned officers wereattacked, even killed. At My Lai in 1968, scores of unarmed villagersbelieved to have aided the enemy were shot to death. Scandals eruptedinvolving kickbacks and thefts at military clubs, and an Air Forcetransport assigned to the embassy at Saigon was used to smuggle drugs.Bad as these times were, the armed forces survived as institutions, inpart because the war ended with it the strains that had contributed toalienation and demoralization but also because of the positive effectsfrom the efforts made to improve race relations, treat drug addictionand alcoholism, and root out crime and punish the criminals.

However much it may have contributed to the decline in morale andthe breakdown of discipline, the struggle for Hamburger Hill clearlysignaled the end of the massive American search and destroy operationsthat symbolized the war of attrition fought in South Vietnam. For thesoldier or marine hacking through the undergrowth or the airman bombingNorth Vietnamese troops within yards of some embattled outpost, theresult may well have seemed a distinction without a difference, but thefact remained that husbanding American lives now took precedence overkilling the enemy. The statisticians continued their arcane work longafter the resignation of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who hadrelied so heavily on statistics. They turned from the standard yardstickof attrition, the kill-ratio of Americans to enemy soldiers, to chartsand graphs depicting progress in equipping and training the expandedarmed forces of the Republic of Vietnam. The war in South Vietnam becamea race against time, an effort to prepare the South Vietnamese to takeover the war before the American withdrawal thrust it upon them.

In terms of aircraft for the South Vietnamese Air Force,Vietnamization began (and ended, for that matter) as a matter ofquantity more than quality. The number of operating squadrons doubled by1972 from twenty to forty, but the additional aircraft tended to beNorthrop F-5s, which were not standard fighter-bombers in the U.S. AirForce; A-37s, Cessna T-37 trainers modified for use as attack aircraft;helicopters provided mainly by the Army; and old C-123 transports. Boththe F-5 and the A-37 were short-range aircraft suitable mainly foroperations within South Vietnam. The only Air Force gunships madeavailable to the South Vietnamese, derived from the slow and vulnerableC-47 and C--119 transports, were useful mainly for defending outpostsagainst infantry attack, especially at night. The modernization andexpansion programs that produced the forty squadrons excluded aerialtankers, the more modern of the gunships, F-4s, and B-52s. Even theC--130 transport was a late addition to the South Vietnamese inventoryof aircraft. The usual justification for withholding aircraft was thatthe particular model was either not needed for self-defense or toocomplicated for the South Vietnamese to fly and maintain.

The American concern that South Vietnam's air arm might beunable to absorb the most modern equipment was founded in fact, at leastwhen Vietnamization began. Whether a more intensive program of trainingmight have made a difference is arguable at best, for instructionremained geared to the equipment the South Vietnamese were receiving andthis effort encountered serious obstacles. When the Vietnamization ofthe air arm began in earnest in 1969, that service was an estimated twoyears behind the army, which had expanded in 1967. Even as theirinstructors tried to make up for lost time, South Vietnamese training tobe pilots or mechanics rapidly had to master highly technical subjects,a truly discouraging task since few of the trainees had either thefluency in English or the technical background to absorb the instructioneasily. Training posed the most difficult obstacle to expanding andequipping the South Vietnamese Air Force.

Whatever the problems that lay ahead, some 65,000 American troops,including slightly more than 2,500 airmen, left the country in 1969, asthe actual American strength in South Vietnam declined from a peak ofalmost 550,000 early in the year to 484,000 by the end of December.Tactically, the proportion between air and ground reflected the factthat air power had to compensate for the diminishing size of the groundforce, but other considerations were involved. The Air Force not onlysuffered fewer casualties than the combat arms of the Army and MarineCorps but also relied on volunteers rather than draftees, although someof those who donned its uniform had no doubt been motivated by fear ofthe draft and possible combat service in the infantry. The death orwounding of a comparatively few volunteers--a proportion of them pilots,who were long-term or career officers--seemed likely to have less impacton the public than more numerous casualties among draftees.

For the U.S. Air Force, Vietnamization got underway in 1969 whenthe air arm of South Vietnam grew from 17,500 officers and airmen and400 aircraft to a total strength of 36,000 with 450 aircraft. Thedisparity in growth between manpower and aircraft resulted from the timeneeded to train men to service and operate the new airplanes. Theprocess of learning took many forms. For example, the Air Force arrangedfor South Vietnamese and American airmen to serve side by side in theair support centers of each corps preparatory to a transfer ofresponsibility for the entire tactical air control system. At the sametime, South Vietnamese forward air controllers and air liaisonspecialists assumed a greater role in directing air strikes, includingthose flown by American aircraft. The number of sorties by SouthVietnamese forward air controllers increased during the year from 505 inJanuary to 1,083 in December, expanding from ten to twenty-five percentof the total flown. A similarly encouraging increase took place in theaggregate sorties flown by the South Vietnamese; from 55,000 in thefirst quarter of 1969 the number rose to 74.000 during the last threemonths of the year, a tribute to improving maintenance as well as toflying skill. Meanwhile, the infrastructure of bases changed to supportSouth Vietnam's increased share of aerial operations. By October1969 the U.S. Air Force had virtually turned over to the SouthVietnamese the air base at Nha Trang, and by early the following yearairmen of the two nations worked together at Da Nang, Pleiku, Bien Hoa,Binh Tuy, Soc Trang, and Tan Son Nhut.

Growth continued throughout 1970. By year's end, the SouthVietnamese Air Force had thirty squadrons organized into five airdivisions, ten tactical wings, five maintenance wings, and seven airbase wings. The greatest increase in aircraft had come in helicopters,with transfers from the U.S. Army raising the total from 112 to 310.More important than numbers of aircraft, the South Viet namese flew halfof all the strike sorties in their nation. The greater participation bySouth Vietnam's air arm was necessary because more was beingdemanded of air power and fewer U.S. Air Force units were available torespond; during 1970, 150,000 Americans departed, including more than10,000 airmen and eleven of the twenty fighter squadrons based in theSouth, reducing the total American strength in the country to 334,000.

The withdrawal of American forces continued into 1971, with anadditional 50,000 leaving in the spring, en route to a year-endobjective of only 184,000 Americans still serving in South Vietnam.Since the need of an aerial shield for the dwindling ground forcecontinued, so too did the expansion of the South Vietnamese Air Force.The air arm ended the year with 1,222 aircraft, including 500helicopters, a second squadron of AC-119 gunships, and three squadronsof C-123s added to the two on hand when the year began. Although thenumber of fighter squadrons remained at nine throughout the year, pilotsgained experience as they flew sixtythree percent of all strike sortiesin South Vietnam and thirty-nine percent of those in Cambodia, where thefighting had spread in 1970.

Despite the greater burden being assumed by South Vietnameseairmen, the United States persisted in its refusal to equip them withthe latest aircraft, particularly for air defense and interdiction. Asurge in MiG activity over Laos during late 1971 persuaded theDepartment of Defense to accelerate South Vietnam's acquisition offifty-seven F-5Es fitted out for air defense. The South Vietnamese hadnot received the means to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail because of thetacit assumption that the Commando Hunt series of attacks in southernLaos would continue, but Secretary of Defense Laird insisted in 1971that South Vietnam's air arm be given an interdiction force that,although not the equal of the American operation centered at NakhonPhanom, could to some extent disturb the flow of men and supplies fromNorth Vietnam. The Americans proposed that ground patrols sowmodest-sized sensor fields to find targets for a five-squadron fleet ofsingleengine mini-gunships. Testing began in Florida of ashort-takeoff-and-landing airplane, the Fairchild Peacemaker, which wasto serve as the gunship. Neither the Air Force, the Military AssistanceCommand, nor the Pacific Command displayed much enthusiasm for theproject; the addition of a multibarrel machinegun made the aircraftoverweight and dangerously unstable; and by the time the idea was readyfor a combat test, the enemy had overrun the area from which thegunships were to have operated. Consequently, South Vietnam neveracquired the means for aerial interdiction.

The South Vietnamese, besides lacking a satisfactory weapon foraerial interdiction, did not receive the training or equipment necessaryto conduct the kind of search and rescue operations that in the courseof the war saved 3,883 persons from death or capture. Excluded fromVietnamization were the HH-3 and HH-53 helicopters and the HC-130P, acombination airborne command post and aerial tanker. Although all threeserved the Americans well, the Air Force did not transfer these aircraftto the South Vietnamese. Even so, Vietnamization interfered with theAmerican rescue forces, which were displaced by an expanding SouthVietnamese Air Force from their normal operating bases close to thelikely scenes of aerial action.

Although the South Vietnamese air arm could not interdict trafficon the Ho Chi Minh Trail or rescue downed airmen, it continued toprogress in other fields. By early 1972, for instance, it had assumedvirtually full responsibility for the tactical air control system withinthe country. Officers and enlisted men trained by the Americans ran thecontrol centers and also served as air liaison specialists with groundunits. The Air Force forward air controllers turned most of the countryover to their South Vietnamese counterparts and continued to operateonly in the vicinity of Bien Hoa and Da Nang.

Until the spring of 1972, when North Vietnam invaded the South, theCommando Hunt series continued in dry season and wet, as the Air Forcefought its war in southern Laos. Over the years, marauding aircraft,often responding to sensor signals, claimed to have damaged or destroyeda vast number of cargo-laden trucks, as many as 25,000 in a single dryseason, and to have touched off tens of thousands of secondaryexplosions, which served as proof of successful attacks on supplycaches. Yet, these claims and the impact on the enemy defiedverification. Cameras and most other airborne sensors could notpenetrate the jungle canopy; and with the passage of time, strongerdefenses on the ground made it increasingly difficult for intelligencepatrols to move into the maze of roads, trails, waterways, pipelines,supply storage areas, and troop bivouacs of the Ho Chi Minh Trail insouthern Laos. Improved aerial sensors like infrared detectors, radar,and low-light-level television proved effective over the more exposedportions of the trail; and ever more devastating firepower that includedlaserguided bombs, 40-mm cannon instead of 20-mm, and a 105-mm howitzerinstalled in some gunships increased the likelihood of destructive hits.Despite the greater potential for detection and destruction,comparatively few truck carcasses were seen and the level of enemyactivity in South Vietnam remained essentially constant. In an attemptto determine the effectiveness of the Commando Hunt campaigns, analystscarefully studied the patterns of sensor activation, listed as destroyedonly those trucks seen to explode or burn, subtracted only that numberfrom the estimated North Vietnamese inventory, and assigned an arbitraryweight of cargo, depending largely on the direction of travel, to eachtruck that air power eliminated. Unfortunately, even this analysisproved a better measure of effort than of results.

Since an aura of uncertainty surrounded the calculations of trucksand cargo destroyed, officials in the Department of Defense proposed anew target, manpower, that was judged more likely to affect the resolveof the North Vietnamese and their leadership. However, Americanintelligence had to locate the bivouac areas that the People's Armyof North Vietnam used during the march southward before the B-52s thatnormally attacked truck parks and supply depots could be directedagainst infiltrating troops. American officials believed that the impactof aerial interdiction could be multiplied if these areas were locatedand the bombing proved accurate. Other communist states, these analystsreasoned, would replace trucks and their cargo, with no real cost toNorth Vietnam, but the killing and wounding of infiltrating soldierswould exact a direct penalty, forcing the North Vietnamese and theirleaders to reconsider the wisdom of continued aggression. During thetesting period for the new concept of targeting, the bivouac sitesproved as hard to find as other components of the trail network; resultswere at best inconclusive when the aerial interdiction campaign ended.

Whether paying in lives or materiel, the North Vietnamese did notshrink from the cost of keeping the Ho Chi Minh Trail operating. Part ofthat price entailed the deployment of more and deadlier antiaircraftweapons, along with their crews, to protect the logistics complex.During the spring of 1972, the proliferation of antiaircraft guns, theappearance of surface-to-air missiles within Laos, and the moreaggressive use of MiGs changed the nature of the air war over southernLaos. Air Force fighters had to escort missions against the trail, notonly to suppress antiaircraft fire but also to deter the NorthVietnamese interceptors, and gunships had to be fitted with jammingequipment to blind the radar

directing the surface-to-air missiles. Despite such measures, theenemy succeeded for a time in driving the gunships, certainly thedeadliest of truck killers, away from portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The main purpose of the air war in southern Laos was to disrupt theenemy's efforts to mass troops and stockpile supplies for anassault timed to catch the Americans as their withdrawal from SouthVietnam neared its completion. The campaign of interdiction the AirForce conducted in southern Laos was extended secretly and on a lesserscale into Cambodia in the spring of 1969. The Cambodian ruler, PrinceNorodom Sihanouk, in the hope of appearing neutral and thus preservingthe independence of his nation, attempted to accommodate both the UnitedStates and North Vietnam. Taking advantage of Sihanouk'sambivalence, the Hanoi government established a supply line extendinginland from the port of Sihanoukville to a complex of military bases andstorage areas on Cambodian soil along the border with South Vietnam.When a North Vietnamese defector pinpointed the location of theheadquarters in Cambodia that directed operations along the border andinside South Vietnam, General Abrams requested permission for an airattack. President Nixon approved a secret strike by B-52s, delivered onMarch 18, which, judging from the violent reaction when a reconnaissancepatrol arrived at the scene by helicopter, may well have hit theintended target. This raid served as the precedent for a series ofsecret bombing attacks against the six North Viet namese bases withinCambodia, a campaign that lasted fourteen months and totaled 3,875sorties.

In keeping with his policy of appeasing both sides, Prince Sihanoukdid not object to the bombing of a region dominated by the communistsand no longer under the control of his government, but he raised to thestatus of an embassy the Viet Cong diplomatic mission to Phnom Penh, hiscapital city, and made no move against the North Vietnamese supply linepassing through Cambodia. A group of dissident Cambodian generals,headed by Lon Nol, took advantage of Sihanouk's absence from thecountry and tried to put an end to the policy of accommodation byexpelling the North Vietnamese from their bases. On March 18, 1970, theanniversary of the first of the secret strikes by B-52s, Lon Noldeclared the absent leader deposed and moved against the enemy.Resources failed to match determination, however; not only was LonNol's army unable to defeat the North Vietnamese and theirCambodian communist allies, his aggressiveness seemed likely to prodthem into a counterattack that might well overrun the entire country.Since the bases located along the South Vietnamese border, besidesthreatening the American policy of Vietnamization and withdrawal,sustained operations against Lon Nol, President Nixon approved aninvasion of this part of Cambodia. The American incursion, as thePresident preferred to call it, began on May 1, and lasted until the endof June; South Vietnamese troops then took over, but American airoperations continued.

The American attack into Cambodia had both immediate and long-termmilitary effects. The operation resulted in the destruction of a hugequantity of food and munitions stockpiled mainly for operations in SouthVietnam, including 7,000 tons of rice and weapons--enough to equipseventy-four battalions with rifles and twenty-five battalions withmortars and machineguns. Estimates of the short-term impact on the enemyvaried, but Kissinger concluded that the loss of food, ammunition, andweapons represented a fifteen-month setback for North Vietnamese plans.The cost in American lives totaled 338, with 1,525 wounded. Yet, even asit reaped these benefits for the near future, the United States assumedan abiding responsibility for the survival of the Lon Nol regime. Thefate of the Khmer Republic, which Lon Nol proclaimed at Phnom Penh,depended in large measure on the success of the South Vietnamese inpreventing the reestablishment of the destroyed bases. Unfortunately theArmy of the Republic of Vietnam, in spite of American air support,proved unequal to the task. Supplied by the North Vietnamese, localcommunist forces advanced steadily, eventually isolating Lon Nol'scapital except for airlift and the convoys, escorted by aircraft andmakeshift gunboats, that forced their way up the Mekong River. TheCambodian army, hurriedly expanded, armed, and trained, never outgrewits dependence on American air power to hold the enemy at bay, and theair war in Cambodia, undertaken to complement the campaign of aerialinterdiction in southern Laos, continued after the United States and thetwo Vietnams had agreed to a cease-fire.

In the United States, the political impact of the invasion wassudden and violent, but also subtle and long lasting. Lulled by theAmerican withdrawals just ten days before the attack, the President hadpromised that another 150,000 troops would leave South Vietnam within 12months the antiwar movement erupted in outrage at this extension of thewar. Not only did demonstrations disrupt college campuses throughout thenation, a number of government officials, ordinarily expected to supportthe administration, declared their opposition and resigned or, likeSecretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel, were dismissed. During anantiwar demonstration at Kent State University, a contingent of the OhioNational Guard, which the governor had mobilized to maintain order,fired into a crowd, killing four and wounding nine.

The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State furthersplit an already deeply divided nation. An estimated 500,000 opponentsof the war assembled in Washington, and, on the same day, 150,000marched in San Francisco. The administration denounced those whodemonstrated against the war, especially the students; thePresident's supporters rallied to his cause and, in the case ofconstruction workers in New York City, clashed with the antiwar faction.The period of comparative harmony that followed the announcement ofVietnamization and the first troop withdrawals vanished, althoughtemporarily. Further reductions in American forces assigned to SouthVietnam and the first steps toward an all-volunteer army restored thecalm, but the sudden outburst of opposition triggered by the invasion ofCambodia cast a long shadow. Throughout the remainder of the war,President Nixon remained concerned about a resurgence of antiwarsentiment and its possible effect on Congress. His worries, moreover,were grounded in fact, for the political aftermath of the invasion ofCambodia included the repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, atmost a symbolic protest of the way in which the war had metastasized,and enactment of the Cooper-Church amendment and the War Powers Act.

The Cooper-Church amendment began as an immediate response to theCambodian incursion. Senators John Sherman Cooper, a Republican fromKentucky, and Frank Church, a Democrat representing Idaho, offered anamendment to military assistance legislation prohibiting the further useof American forces in Cambodia without the express consent of Congress.The Senate adopted the rider, but the House of Representatives refused.By year's end, after months of debate, a defense appropriations actemerged containing a revised version of the amendment that ignoredCambodia, from which the American troops had withdrawn, and in effectforbade the introduction of ground forces into Thailand or Laos.

Unlike the Cooper-Church amendment, the War Powers Act, from itsinception, addressed basic political questions rather than a transitorycrisis like the invasion of Cambodia. Due to concern over theinvolvement of the nation in the Vietnam War and the expansion of thatconflict, largely by executive action, Congress tried to assert greatercontrol over the military aspects of the nation's foreign policy.In October 1973, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passedlegislation that required the President to report within forty-eighthours if he should commit American troops overseas or if hesubstantially enlarged an existing commitment. The military involvementwould have to be terminated after sixty days, plus an additional thirtydays for withdrawing the force, unless Congress decided otherwise. Afterwarning that such a law would impose unconstitutional and dangerousrestrictions on Presidential authority and seriously undermine thisnation's ability to act decisively and convincingly in times ofinternational crisis, President Nixon vetoed the legislation. Congressvoted to override, however, and the War Powers Act became law.

Less than a year after the invasion of Cambodia, South Vietnameseforces, with the encouragement of General Abrams, attacked Laos. FromKhe Sanh, which American forces had reoccupied to serve as a supplybase, the assault troops advanced toward the site of Tchepone, a villageastride the Ho Chi Minh Trail that had long ago been abandoned andbombed to rubble. After reaching Tchepone and destroying the materielstockpiled in the vicinity, the South Vietnamese planned to withdraw byway of the A Shau Valley, rooting out supply caches and disrupting thepassage of men and cargo through that conduit for infiltration. TheCooper-Church amendment limited the degree of assistance that Americanforces could provide to air support and, as a result, the SouthVietnamese divisions had to attack without their American advisers andair liaison parties.

The attack, launched on February 8, 1971, was poorly planned andbadly executed. Despite precautions designed to preserve secrecy, theNorth Vietnamese became aware, at least in general terms, of theoperation and redeployed their forces accordingly. Moreover, planners atthe headquarters of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,overestimated the ability of low-flying helicopters to survive on theirown in the face of hostile antiaircraft fire, which proved far moreintense than anticipated, and had to call for help from Air Forcefighter-bombers and B-52s. The contribution of the Air Force varied fromflak suppression so that helicopters could disembark their troops, tostrikes against North Vietnamese infantry closing in on the outpoststhus established, and ultimately to attacks on tanks bearing down on theretreating South Vietnamese. Bad weather hampered close air support bythe fighter-bombers, which on one occasion broke off their support of abeleaguered South Vietnamese strongpoint to participate in the attemptedrescue of the crew of a downed F-4. Throughout the invasion, PresidentNguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam sought to avoid the kind of casualtiesthat might undermine his nation's support of the war, behaving muchas his American counterpart had in the aftermath of Hamburger Hill. Whenthe South Vietnamese leader judged that the losses were becomingunacceptable, he called a halt to the operation, a decision that leftthe invasion force scattered and vulnerable to the devastating NorthVietnamese counterattack. Although a raiding party did land byhelicopter near Tchepone to create an illusion of victory, thewithdrawal became a rout as the enemy attacked, driving the SouthVietnamese back across the border in headlong flight. The operation hadattracted a North Vietnamese force of perhaps 40,000, with as many as20,000 killed or wounded, mostly victims of air attacks, thus easing thepressure on the Americans who had not yet left South Vietnam. However,the number of South Vietnamese killed and wounded equaled from a thirdto a half of the North Vietnamese total, and the action only disruptedtraffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail temporarily. According to the reckoningof General Davidson, an intelligence officer for Generals Westmorelandand Abrams, after no more than a few weeks the enemy again channeled menand cargo through the area around Tchepone. This latest operation in thecampaign against the enemy's supply lines in southern Laos hadproved inconclusive at best.

The air war the Air Force waged in northern Laos resembled thefighting in Cambodia, as a hard-pressed ally came to rely more and moreon American air power. The combat in northern Laos flared sporadicallyon two fronts--the Plain of Jars and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. On thePlain of Jars, the Meo tribesmen commanded by Vang Pao depended onaerial bombing to stop the annual dry season offensive launched by thecommunist forces, which over the years included an increasingly largerproportion of North Vietnamese. Once this attack had lost momentum, VangPao advanced, trying to take advantage of the mobility of his irregularsto isolate the strongpoints opposing him and force a withdrawal by anenemy shaken by bombing and, because of air strikes against his supplylines, desperately short of food and ammunition. To the south, nearerthe border with South Vietnam, other troops loyal to the government ofPrime Minister Souvanna Phouma mounted an occasional threat to thewestern fringes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail but were unable to interferewith the traffic it carried.

The fortunes of war fluctuated with the season. At the onset of dryweather, usually in November or December, the Pathet Lao, spearheaded byNorth Vietnamese soldiers, pushed boldly onto the Plain of Jars. Thegovernment at Hanoi, unwilling to ignore the real prize, South Vietnam,did not divert enough men and material to crush the Meo; and by the timethe rains began falling in May or June, the communists were bloodied,exhausted, and eager to fall back to their supply bases nearer NorthVietnam. Vang Pao's irregulars materialized around the enemy'soutposts at the beginning of the rainy season when the annual retreatwas about to begin. The subsequent pursuit produced varying results in1970: the Meo reoccupied almost the entire Plain of Jars and continueduntil Vang Pao's tribesmen were utterly spent, the communists hadreplenished themselves, the skies had cleared, and the cycle was aboutto begin again. Over the years this process worked against the Meogeneral; since he obtained his soldiers exclusively from among hismountain people, the recruiting base was limited and subject to steadyattrition, forcing him to turn increasingly to boys and old men.Reinforcements might come from elsewhere in Laos, but the royal army hadthus far shown little aggressiveness in its forays toward the Ho ChiMinh Trail.

The situation seemed so bleak early in the dry season of 1968-1969that Souvanna in June 1969 decided to make public both the presence ofNorth Vietnamese troops in his country and the American bombing alongthe Ho Chi Minh Trail and in northern Laos. The Laotian premier wascareful, however, to point out that American air power was the onlyweapon that could hold the North Vietnamese in check. In commenting onSouvanna's statement, which aroused no public controversy in theUnited States where the Nixon administration had just taken office, theDepartment of State drew a distinction between the two air wars beingfought in Laos: operations against the trail were an extension of thewar in South Vietnam and would continue as long as there was fighting inthat country; those in the northern part of the kingdom were directedagainst the North Vietnamese intruders and might end in the unlikelyevent the Hanoi government withdrew its forces. Souvanna failed in hisattempt to dramatize his nation's plight and gain internationalsupport, but the immediate military crisis abated and the annual patternof warfare reasserted itself.

Because air power was an effective means of checking the NorthVietnamese and economical in terms of the loss of American life, the AirForce undertook various measures to improve its own operations and thoseof the Laotians. During 1969, the Royal Laotian Air Force, recoveredfrom the effects of the mutiny of three years earlier, received newequipment like the AC-47 gunship and underwent a housecleaning as theAmerican air attacha, a at Vientiane tried to suppress smuggling. Themisuse of aircraft for this purpose could not be ended, but it was mademore difficult by circulating a schedule of all administrative flightsamong the senior officers in the hope that those who were honest wouldtake action against the obvious abuses, such as apparently purposelessflights to areas dealing in gold or drugs, while those who were nothonest would join in demanding greater control because the profits werenot being divided equally. In addition, Air Force instructors begantraining Meos to fly T-28s in support of Vang Pao's troops, andthese pilots demonstrated a willingness to run almost any risk to helptheir fellow tribesmen on the ground.

In general, the weapons and tactical refinements employed by theAir Force reflected the gravity of the military situation and thedependence of the ground forces on air power. The use of laserguidedbombs increased and would increase even more as the years passed. Thenumber of forward air controllers flying in Laos grew, and some beganusing jets instead of O-1s. To facilitate the diversion offighter-bombers to meet emergencies in northern Laos, theSeventh/Thirteenth Air Force distributed lists of standby targets withenough information on each so that a pilot arriving on the scene wouldhave a clear idea of the target and its defenses. In February 1970, witha communist dry-season offensive gathering momentum, B-52s flew theirfirst bombing mission in northern Laos, a disappointing strike thatproduced 130 secondary explosions but, according to a reconnaissanceteam that examined the target, only 20 enemy dead. In May of that year,F-4s again began standing alert at Udorn in Thailand, the revival of apractice abandoned by Gen. William W. Momyer, when he commanded theSeventh Air Force. Other aircraft that saw action in northern Laosincluded the AC-119K and AC-130 gunships; the OV-10, a twin-turbopropaircraft designed by North American Rockwell for observation and armedreconnaissance in counterinsurgency operations; and for a time in 1972,the F-111.

Neither the arsenal of aerial weapons nor the use of Combat Skyspotand other bombing aids to improve accuracy could do more than buy time,and even this delaying action became more difficult. As the Americanwithdrawals from South Vietnam continued, fewer sorties were availablefor attacks in northern Laos. The North Vietnamese, moreover, begansending MiGs against American aircraft operating in the region. Thefirst intervention of this kind, on December 17, 1971, resulted in thedowning of three F-4s, victims of surprise and the inexperience of theircrews. Afterward, when the Sovietbuilt interceptors approached,propeller-driven aircraft like the gunships or OV-10s retreated westwardand F-4s jettisoned their bombs to engage the enemy. During February andMarch of the following year, Air Force fighter pilots shot down threeMiGs.

By the time the MiGs appeared, American air power had once againhalted the annual communist advance, but the invasion of South Vietnamabsorbed the sorties that would otherwise have supported Vang Pao'sadvance and harried the North Vietnamese retreat. By the spring of 1972,air support had become even more important to the Meo general, whosearmy was on the verge of collapse after years of unceasing attrition.Vang Pao tried to rally his exhausted force and inspire it to furtheraction, but the physical and emotional price exacted from the Meo overthe years proved too great. The subsequent battles had to be foughtmainly by an improved royal army, which performed well against thePathet Lao and, when sufficient aircraft could be spared from higherpriority operations in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, could hold itsown even against the North Vietnamese. Victory remained elusive,however; like the fighting across the border in the two Vietnams, thestruggle in northern Laos ended in a cease-fire.

Throughout the period of Vietnamization and withdrawal, the air warcontinued over North Vietnam, though on a lesser scale than the RollingThunder campaign, which ended in 1968. Easily the most daring operationof this period was the Son Tay raid of November 1970, designed toliberate some of the Americans who were prisoners of the NorthVietnamese. The treatment and ultimate freedom of these captives, mostlyairmen shot down over the North, had become the object of public andgovernmental concern within the United States. Like the North Koreansbefore them, the North Vietnamese sought to use their prisoners forpurposes of propaganda, in the case of the Hanoi government both toreinforce the national sense of purpose and to gain sympathy throughoutthe world. They paraded captured pilots through the streets of recentlybombed towns to demonstrate that the Americans, in fact, paid a pricefor the damage they inflicted and to channel popular emotion that mightotherwise have been directed against the communist authorities, whodemanded a seemingly endless sacrifice of time, wealth, labor, and lifeitself. Again as in Korea, torture and mistreatment produced filmed"confessions" of war crimes, usually delivered withexpressions or gestures which made it clear that the statement had beenmade under duress.

As the number of prisoners increased, they began to communicatesecretly. One of the methods of secret communication was suggested byCapt. Carlyle "Smitty" Harris, who remembered a lesson he hadbeen taught in Air Force survival school. An instructor there had toldhim that by tapping on walls Americans imprisoned during the Korean Warhad been able to exchange information. Harris introduced to the prisonsof North Vietnam this tap code, which was based on the image of a squaregrid containing twenty-five letters of the alphabet (K was excluded),beginning at the upper left corner. A series of taps directed thelistener down the grid to a particular row; then came a pause and othertaps that led to the right and a specific letter. In this way, andthrough improvised sign language and carefully passed notes, theAmerican captives overcame isolation and organized themselves, searchingout the highest ranking officer in each compound so that he could takecommand. Anyone who did assume command could expect to be severelytortured if the prison authorities discovered his role, as they did fromtime to time, and those caught communicating might also be punished.Despite the risks, the constant effort to communicate and organizehelped the prisoners maintain their sanity through years of captivity inwhat proved to be America's longest war.

At the end of that conflict, the number of captured and missingAmericans totaled 3,000; of these, twenty-three members of the Air Forcewere known to have died while in confinement. Capt. Lance P. Sijan wasone of those who perished. Shot down over North Vietnam on November 9,1967, he avoided capture for six weeks. After falling into theenemy's hands, the emaciated and injured pilot escaped into thejungle while being taken to prison, only to be recaptured in a matter ofhours and tortured. He endured weeks of mistreatment before dying inHanoi's Hoa Lo prison, which the Americans held there called the"Hanoi Hilton." Sijan was the first graduate of the Air ForceAcademy to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

Other attempts to escape from captivity in North Vietnam were nomore successful than Sijan's. It was possible to break out ofconfinement, but, as had been true during the Korean War, a toweringAmerican simply could not lose himself among much smaller Orientals andvanish into an essentially hostile society. Only an American rescue teamfrom outside North Vietnam seemed to have a chance of freeing theprisoners, and during the summer of 1970 a joint task group was formedin the United States to attempt just such a rescue. The likeliestprospects for liberation were the fifty-five Americans held at Son Tay,some twenty-five miles from Hanoi, for their prison compound nestledbeside a bend in a river that facilitated identification from the airand interfered with access by the troops garrisoned nearby. In commandof the rescue effort was Brig. Gen. Leroy J. Manor, an Air Force veteranof some 275 fighter missions in Southeast Asia who trained air commandosat Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; Col. Arthur "Bull" Simons,an Army officer experienced in special operations, led the actualassault.

Aerial photographs of Son Tay enabled the force to construct notonly a detailed tabletop model of the objective, but also a full-scalereproduction made of wood and canvas that was disassembled whenever anorbiting Soviet intelligence satellite came within range. Using anairfield where the Doolittle raiders had prepared for their 1942 attackon Japan, a force of volunteers trained to penetrate deep into NorthVietnam, land one helicopter in the prison yard and two others outsidethe walls, free the prisoners, and fly them to safety in Thailand. Onthe night of November 20, when the assault force arrived at Son Tay, onehelicopter deposited its troops at the wrong building and triggered afirefight with the troops quartered there. One of the other helicopterscrash-landed in the compound and the other set down safely outside thewalls; both disgorged their troops, who breached the wall, but found noprisoners. The assault force regrouped and withdrew in the two undamagedhelicopters, returning to Thailand with one man slightly wounded andanother hobbled by a broken ankle. One of the F-105s protecting theraiders from surface-to-air missiles was shot down by that very type ofweapon, but the two-man crew survived and was rescued. There were nolosses among the one hundred or more carrier aircraft that staged ademonstration off the coast, dropping flares and feinting toward shoreto divert attention from the aircraft approaching Son Tay from an inlanddirection.

The compound at Son Tay had been empty since July, when the NorthVietnamese transferred the captives as flood waters lapped at the baseof the prison's walls. Enemy fire and mechanical failures hadfrustrated low-altitude aerial reconnaissance during the interveningfour months, but two important and contradictory pieces of informationhad surfaced. High-altitude photographs revealed signs that the prisonmight be occupied, but a list of prisoner-of-war compounds smuggled outof Hanoi had not included Son Tay. Unfortunately, there was no time forfurther low-altitude photography from drones; while visiting Hanoi, anAmerican citizen opposed to the war had received a list of five captiveswho had died recently, prompting concern that the health of all theprisoners was deteriorating, making prompt action seem all the moreimportant. The raid therefore went ahead to take advantage of acombination of good flying weather and a suitable phase of the moon,conditions that would not occur again for at least a month. Doubts aboutthe presence of the prisoners at Ton Say remained within theorganization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; when Manor dispatched Simonsand the raiding party, everyone on the operation was certain thatfifty-five Americans lay confined in the darkness at the bend in theriver.

American reaction to the raid ranged from tributes to the obviousheroism of the assault force and expressions of concern for theprisoners to condemnations of American intelligence for not realizingthat the compound had been abandoned. Even the administration seemeddivided. Whereas President Nixon saluted the participants as heroes andhailed the operation as a success because it reached the objective andreturned without loss of life, his vice president, Spiro T. Agnew,complained of the faulty intelligence that had allowed the raid to goahead. Dr. Kissinger, who later would characterize the operation as anegregious failure of intelligence, suggested sarcastically that theforce should have brought back something, perhaps a baby water buffalo.The person to whom he spoke apparently missed the edge to these words,assumed that an animal of this kind had been brought back, and launcheda futile investigation to locate it.

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese reacted to the raid byconsolidating in larger prisons the captives from isolated sites likeSon Tay, but this worked to the long-term advantage of the prisoners bystrengthening the organizational structure among them and making iteasier to communicate with and to sustain one another. Among the moreencouraging items of news circulating from cell to cell was the story ofthe small group that had penetrated the heavily defended heartland ofNorth Vietnam and attacked the compound at Son Tay.

After Rolling Thunder ended, American officials expected thatunopposed aerial reconnaissance, rather than daring raids like thedescent on Son Tay, would be the usual purpose of missions over theNorth. Unfortunately, aerial reconnaissance proved far from routine. InNovember and December 1968, two Air Force RF-4Cs and an escorting F-4were shot down over the North, along with two Navy aircraft. The missilebatteries afterward fell silent, lending substance to the Nixonadministration's belief that North Vietnamese negotiators at Parishad at least tacitly guaranteed the safe passage of unarmedreconnaissance craft over their country. The government at Hanoi notonly denied that any such agreement existed but reinforced the denial byagain firing at the American jets, shooting down one in 1969 and anotherearly the following year. In February 1970, after the second downing,the President directed that fighter-bombers escort the reconnaissanceflights, as had been done during the last two months of 1968, with theaccompanying F-4s authorized to retaliate instantly against any gunbattery or missile site that opened fire. A duel ensued between theescorts, whose work of retaliation came to be reinforced by strikeslaunched especially for the purpose, and the hostile gunners, as AirForce and Navy aircraft carried out sixty so-called "protectivereaction" attacks during the balance of 1970, twice that number in1971, and ninety during the first three months of 1972. Usually theprotective reaction strikes hit gun or missile batteries that had triedto down reconnaissance craft over the North, but beginning in 1971 theyalso were directed against those that fired on American aircraftattacking targets on the Ho Chi Minh Trail within range of weapons onNorth Vietnamese soil.

As 1971 drew to an end, aerial reconnaissance produced mountingevidence that North Vietnam was preparing for a major offensive.President Nixon applied the principle of protective reaction to thissituation by authorizing a series of attacks on a variety of targets insouthern North Vietnam. Beginning on the day after Christmas, Americanaircraft launched five days of strikes, totaling more than 1,000sorties, against airfields, oil storage areas, surface-to-air missilesites, supply dumps, and truck parks associated with the buildup. Againin February, when North Vietnamese artillery began firing at SouthVietnamese outposts across the demilitarized zone, Nixon invokedprotective reaction and approved two days of strikes against thosebatteries.

Despite the changing definition of protective reaction, Gen. JohnD. Lavelle, commander of the Seventh Air Force, went too far in applyingthe concept. Confident that he was carrying out the implied, if notopenly expressed, wishes of his superiors, Lavelle interpreted thepolicy of protective reaction to include attacks on potential threats toAmerican aircraft like the airfields that MiGs might use, the radarsthat might control their interceptions, and not only surface-to-airmissile sites but also the dumps where missiles were stored and thetrucks that carried them to the launch sites. Lavelle believed not onlythat the North Vietnamese air defenses formed a unified threat, but alsothat the radar which transmitted or the guns which fired during onemission remained a danger for all subsequent sorties, even though thehostile site might remain silent on a particular day. Consequently, hedirected his pilots to assume, in effect, that the radar-controlleddefenses were always functioning and never to report an absence of enemyactivity. Some of Lavelle's subordinates pushed this reasoning tothe limit and falsely reported enemy opposition to justify the need toretaliate. Instances of false reporting caught the conscience of a youngsergeant in the Air Force, Lonnie D. Franks, who thought thatfalsification of the record was wrong, whatever the circ*mstances, andwrote a letter to Senator Harold Hughes, a Democrat from Iowa,describing what was going on. Hughes turned the information over to theAir Force, the Inspector General investigated, and Gen. John D. Ryan, atthe time the Air Force Chief of Staff, accepted Lavelle's immediateretirement for personal and health reasons. Ironically; Lavelle'ssuccessor, Gen. John W. Vogt, received a pep talk from President Nixon,who urged him to be more aggressive than the officer he was replacing.

In the autumn of 1972, the Armed Services Committees of the Houseand Senate conducted separate inquiries into the unauthorized bombing.The Senate committee found, in effect, that the punishment the Air Forcemeted out to Lavelle--retirement in the grade of lieutenant generalrather than as a four-star general--was insufficient. As a result, heassumed the retired rank of major general, but this demotion did notaffect his retirement pay, which was based on the highest grade that hehad achieved while on active duty, that of general. In contrast, theHouse committee decided that the bombing missions dispatched by Lavellehad been not only proper but essential.

Lavelle's involvement in the unauthorized air strikes becamepublic at a time when the prestige of the American military wasdeclining. The My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers hadmistreated and murdered unarmed South Vietnamese villagers, had beenrevealed and the atrocity, as well as attempts to conceal it, had beeninvestigated. The so-called Pentagon Papers, a collection of officialdocuments relating to American involvement in the conflict and anarrative of decision-making by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,had appeared and cast doubt on the wisdom and motives of civilianofficials and military leaders. New reports of racial strife, drugabuse, and fraud within the services came to light with sickeningfrequency. Yet another blow would fall in July 1973, when a formerofficer in the Strategic Air Command, Hal M. Knight, revealed the secretbombing of Cambodia, begun in 1969 on order from the White House, andthe system of false reporting that had thus far concealed fourteenmonths of B-52 strikes. No wonder that the American public lostenthusiasm for a war that seemed to corrupt even those who fought it.

The succession of protective reaction strikes that began inDecember 1971, including the unauthorized attacks for which GeneralLavelle was blamed, appeared to have served their purpose. As the winterof 1971-1972 gave way to spring, the Nixon administration was confidentthat its use of air power had forestalled a North Vietnamese offensive.Such was not the case, however, for on March 30, 1972, Gen. Vo NguyenGiap, the victor at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and North Vietnam's mostprominent military leader, sent almost his entire army-- initially125,000 troops supported by tanks and artillery--knifing into SouthVietnam. After striking first in northernmost South Vietnam andadvancing toward Quang Tri City and Hue, the enemy attacked from thetriborder region, where the territories of South Vietnam, Laos, andCambodia converged, toward the town of Kontum and from the bases he hadreestablished in Cambodia toward An Loc and ultimately Saigon.

Seen from Hanoi, the situation was never more promising; supplieswere in place, Giap's soldiers were ready, the remaining Americanground forces were largely support and advisory units, and the SouthVietnamese had given way to panic in the last stages of their retreatfrom Laos a year earlier. Moreover, the United States would hold aPresidential election in November 1972, and a communist victory in thespring might have the same effect as the Tet offensive of 1968, anddrive the Chief Executive from office. Indeed, the antiwardemonstrations ignited by the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 may have madeNixon appear even more vulnerable than Johnson had been. Whether theoffensive represented an attempt to crush South Vietnam or merely toadvance a good distance along the road to ultimate victory (and theactual objective has for years remained the subject of debate amongAmericans), the prospects for success seemed excellent.

The leaders at Hanoi had a distorted view, however. Although Nixoncontinued to worry about the antiwar movement and its possible impact onCongress, he had survived the agitation that followed the invasion ofCambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and seemedincreasingly likely to win reelection. Similarly, Thieu remained incontrol in South Vietnam despite the manifestations of discontent thathad surfaced as a consequence of the previous year's severecasualties in Laos. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had suffered adefeat there, but it remained intact, was absorbing more Americanequipment and learning to use it, and when fighting on South Vietnamesesoil would benefit from the presence of the American advisers on whom somany of the commanders had come to depend. Moreover, Giap turned hisback on the very tactics that had enabled the Tet offensive of 1968 todemoralize the American people and the Johnson administration. Bylaunching a series of conventional attacks tied to roads and dependenton artillery support, the North Vietnamese general ignored the fact thathis People's Army and the Viet Cong, who played almost no role inthis latest offensive, were most mobile before the battle and least soafter the fighting began. Giap's forces had an uncanny ability tomass men and supplies for a surprise attack, but once the battle wasjoined, they lacked the communications to shift forces and takeadvantage of unexpected changes in the tactical situation. Indeed, ifthe North Vietnamese could not overwhelm a stoutly defended position atthe outset, they tended to attack again and again rather than probe forweaknesses elsewhere in order to bypass and neutralize the bastion. Thishabit immobilized them and made them especially vulnerable to airstrikes.

When North Vietnam invaded, the United States tried to support thedefenders with the aerial strength already in the theater, includingabout 300 Air Force aircraft of all types, some deploying across thePacific in response to the enemy buildup that triggered the recentprotective reaction strikes. As the Army of the Republic of Vietnamstruggled to contain the offensive and the South Vietnamese Air Forcequickly demonstrated that it could not cope with the emergency, AirForce flight and ground crews intensified their efforts and succeeded inlaunching more than 500 combat sorties per day.

For a time in early April, the defense of the northern provinceswas subordinated to the attempted rescue of an Air Force officer, Lt.Col. Iceal E. Hambleton, the sole survivor of the six-man crew of anEB-66 electronic warfare aircraft shot down over the battlefield.Disregarding the perilous situation of the South Vietnamese forces,Seventh Air Force headquarters arranged to suspend artillery fire intothe region where he had parachuted and diverted to the task of findingand retrieving him aircraft that otherwise would have been attacking insupport of the hard-pressed South Vietnamese. Surviving on whateverberries and vegetables he was able to find (on one foraging expedition,he stabbed to death a North Vietnamese who attacked him), Hambletonfollowed the instructions he received on the hand-held radio that was apart of his survival equipment, avoided capture, and made his way down astream to meet a patrol of South Vietnamese marines who brought him tosafety.

The eleven-day rescue effort cost the lives of nine Americans whoseaircraft were shot down while searching for Hambleton or trying to pickhim up and deprived a desperate South Vietnamese division of air andartillery support at a critical time. The American adviser attached tothis unit warned that the division's officers resented the obviousfact that the Seventh Air Force would risk the lives of thousands ofSouth Vietnamese soldiers to rescue one of its own officers.Nevertheless, the division survived the immediate threat, if only tocollapse shortly thereafter, and however demoralizing the rescue mayhave been for the South Vietnamese, the concern the Air Force showed formembers of its aircrews helped sustain their morale.

When the combined efforts of the American squadrons in SoutheastAsia and the air and ground forces of the Republic of Vietnam could notstop the three-pronged offensive, President Nixon approved the increaseof American aerial strength in Southeast Asia without reinserting groundforces. From the beginning of the invasion until the end of June, thetotal number of Air Force aircraft in the region increased from 1,153 to1,426 as the equivalent of fifteen squadrons deployed there, includingthe B-52 force that expanded from eightythree aircraft to 202 and, bythe time the war ended, flew almost 3,000 sorties in a single month. Tosustain the B-52s and the tactical fighters, the Air Force during thespring of 1972 deployed another 110 KC-135 aerial tankers, raising thetotal number to 187. The Navy dispatched four additional aircraftcarriers to the Gulf of Tonkin, bringing the number there to six, thelargest concentration since the Vietnam War began. The Marine Corps,which had withdrawn all its air and ground forces except for a smallnumber of advisers, sent a total of four squadrons from airfields inJapan to Da Nang and Bien Hoa. Concerned over the need to coordinate hisoperations with the ambassador in Laos, Vogt had earlier soughtexclusive control over air operations, not only over the two Vietnams,but throughout Southeast Asia. President Nixon seemed agreeable butnever sent the necessary instructions, and the old system prevailed.Since no marines were fighting on the ground in 1972, the newly arrivedMarine Corps squadrons encountered no conflicting priorities in carryingout the assignments that the Air Force general gave them.

As the fighting on the ground intensified, all the American aerialmight be focused on saving South Vietnam. The air war in southern Laosended and operations in Cambodia and northern Laos received only thesurplus sorties from the systematic campaign that extended frombattlefields like An Loc, Kontum City, and Quang Tri City to therailroads, ports, and bridges of North Vietnam. The general strategy wasto bomb the offensive to a standstill by killing as many as possible ofthe advancing enemy soldiers, while at the same time disrupting theforward movement of the supplies and reinforcements needed to sustainthe operation.

Unlike President Johnson, who preferred close personal control overindividual targets, President Nixon tended, with some exceptions, toauthorize strikes against areas or classes of targets and leave thedetails to his military commanders. Blows against targets in Hanoi andHaiphong required clearance from the White House, as they had duringRolling Thunder, and the network of irrigation dikes in North Vietnamremained exempt from attack, although the occasional stray bomb thatmissed an antiaircraft site or other target and exploded near a dikeemboldened North Vietnamese propagandists to level charges that theUnited States was waging war on the civilian populace by trying to drainthe rice paddies. Nixon approved not only attacks on the rail lineleading from China but also the mining of North Vietnamese harbors, anaction that he felt he could take with little or no risk of a Soviet orChinese reaction. Because of the rivalry between the two communiststates, which had resulted in border clashes as recently as 1969, eachwas wary of openly aiding North Vietnam or anything else that mightencourage the United States to improve its relations with the other,even though inaction might delay what both saw as the inevitable triumphof communism in Southeast Asia.

The aerial interdiction campaign against North Vietnam began April6, with attacks in the southern part of the country and rapidlyexpanded. On April 16, B-52s, escorted by fighters and aircraftspecializing in electronic countermeasures and suppression ofsurface-to-air missiles, bombed the fuel storage tanks at Haiphong,setting fires that, reflected from cloud and smoke, were visible fromthe bridge of an aircraft carrier 110 miles away. Shortly afterward,carrier aircraft joined Air Force fighterbombers in battering a tankfarm and a warehouse complex on the outskirts of Hanoi. When theseattacks failed to slow the offensive, naval aircraft began mining theharbors on May 8, and two days later the administration extended theaerial interdiction campaign, formerly Freedom Train but now designatedLinebacker, throughout all of North Vietnam.

The President approved this double-edged escalation even though heintended to visit the Soviet Union, North Vietnam's principalsupplier, later in May for a major conference, assuming correctly thatGeneral Secretary Leonid Brezhnev would not cancel the meeting at a timeimmediately following Nixon's visit to Peiping, when the UnitedStates and China were drawing closer. President Nixon chose to lay minesand intensify the bombing to deprive the Soviet Union of any propagandaadvantage that might accrue if South Vietnam collapsed during his tripto Moscow. This did not happen, for he also correctly judged that airpower could save the day, for the mining and other forms ofinterdiction, combined with aerial intervention on the battlefields ofSouth Vietnam, brought the North Vietnamese offensive to a halt.

In terms of tactics employed and results obtained, Linebacker was avast improvement over Rolling Thunder. During Linebacker, Americanaircraft attacked targets like airfields, power plants, and radiostations that did not fall into the category of interdiction, but themain objective remained the disruption of the flow of supplies andreinforcements to the units fighting in the South. Laserguided bombsproved effective, especially against bridges, severing the bridge atThanh Hoa, which had survived Rolling Thunder, and the highway andrailroad bridges over the Red River at Hanoi, dropped in the earlieraerial campaign, but repaired. At both places, however, the enemy againmade use of alternate means of crossing the streams, usually travelingat night on ferries or movable pontoon bridges. Electronic jamming andclouds of reflecting chaff, as in Rolling Thunder, confused the radarscontrolling the surface-to-air missiles and the antiaircraft guns. NorthVietnamese MiGs, as they had during Rolling Thunder, gave battlethroughout Linebacker but failed to gain control of the sky, in partbecause American radar, whether airborne, at sea, or in Thailand,detected the interceptors rising from the runways, enabling controllersto direct Air Force F-4s and Navy fight ers against them. During the warin Southeast Asia, both the pilot and the weapon systems officerreceived full credit for each aerial victory. As a result of changes inthese pairings, two backseaters, Capts. Charles B. DeBellevue andJeffrey S. Feinstein, but only one pilot, Capt. Richard S."Steve" Ritchie, became Air Force aces; all three of theseofficers made their fifth kill during Linebacker, which lasted untilOctober 1972, when the President, encouraged by progress in the trucenegotiations, restricted the bombing to southern North Vietnam.

Despite the damage inflicted in North Vietnam by Linebacker airoperations, interdiction tended to be more effective closer to thebattlefield. Within North Vietnam, the road net was more extensive,labor more readily available for repair and construction, and alternateroutes were already well established. Nearer the advancing troops,supply lines narrowed, as though entering a funnel that ended at thefront-line unit, alternate routes had to be built from scratch, and fewcivilians were at hand to supplement the work of the military engineers.The defenses remained dangerous, however, especially when the SA-7heat-seeking missile, a weapon carried and fired by an individualsoldier, joined crew-served guns and missiles in protecting the invasionforces.

The other purpose of the air war--inflicting casualties on theadvancing enemy--was pursued on all three fronts. The deadliest aerialweapons were B-52s, gunships, and fighter-bombers using laser-guidedweapons, the last especially effective against artillery in the northernprovinces of South Vietnam. On that front, the invaders drove the SouthVietnamese from Quang Tri City on May 1; its capture delineated thehigh-water mark for the North Vietnamese. The attacking North Vietnamesetrapped several American advisers and senior South Vietnamese officersin the city, but four Air Force HH-53 helicopters and their escort ofA-1s succeeded in snatching them from the very hands of the enemy.Despite heavy losses in the area between Quang Tri City and Hue, wherethe North Vietnamese had concentrated their antiaircraft defenses, AirForce fighter-bombers used laserguided bombs to attack bridges andartillery positions, slowing the enemy's advance and reducing theseverity of his artillery barrages, so that the South Vietnamese couldregroup. On May 18, when amphibious tanks and infantry crossed the lastriver barrier before Hue and moved against the city, fighter-bombersdestroyed eighteen of the vehicles with laser-guided bombs and killedsome 300 soldiers. The North Vietnamese drive bogged down, only to berenewed five days later, but air power again intervened, enabling thedefenders to force the enemy back across the river.

Success in defending Hue inspired a counterattack, launched on June28, to recapture Quang Tri City. Although B-52s and fighter-bomberscleared the way for the advancing South Vietnamese, President Thieutried to avoid using aircraft against the North Vietnamese entrenched inthe city itself, hoping to minimize the damage to the houses there sothat displaced families could return to their own dwellings instead ofbecoming dependent on the government for shelter. Unfortunately, aninfantry attack floundered in the streets of the town, and B-52s had tojoin in the sort of destructive pounding that South Vietnam'spresident had hoped to avoid. By mid-September, the ruins of Quang TriCity were under South Vietnamese control, and the threat to the northernprovinces had ended.

In the meantime, B-52s helped blunt the other two attacks. AtKontum City in the highlands, John Paul Vann, an officer retired fromthe U.S. Army and now a civilian adviser to the South Vietnamese,informally assumed command of the defenses, manipulating air strikes andpulling back from indefensible ground to shorten the lines and make themost efficient use of the troops available to him. As the NorthVietnamese advanced on Kontum City, they encountered strong resistanceat Polei Kleng and attacked by night but came under attack when an AirForce AC-130 gunship responded to the call for help. The aircraftmounted a 105-mm howitzer, which went into action after the sensoroperators located the sources of the heaviest North Vietnamese fire. Thedeadly aerial barrage broke up the attack, and saved Polei Kleng, ifonly temporarily. At Kontum City, B-52s did what the gunship had done atPolei Kleng, although fighter-bombers and South Vietnamese A-37s addedtheir firepower and American and South Vietnamese transports deliveredsupplies to the troops on the ground. Early in the battle for the town,a gamble paid off when the defenders fell back so that a carefully timeddeluge of high explosives from B-52s, invisible in the substratosphere,could catch the enemy as he moved forward. The North Vietnamesesucceeded, however, in cutting the roads leading into Kontum City. Aslong as the airfield could be used, South Vietnamese C-123s landedcargo, but when the attackers began raking the runway with direct fire,American C-130s had to supply the defenders by parachute. When thebattle approached a climax, South Vietnamese A-37s joined Air Forcefighterbombers and Army helicopter gunships in destroying Soviet-builttanks, but the battering by the B-52s weakened the enemy, so that SouthVietnamese forces could check his advance and by the end of May beginexpelling him from the captured portions of the town.

The defense of An Loc, considered the gateway to Saigon, closelyresembled the battle for Kontum City. At both places the People'sArmy tried stubbornly to seize a stronghold that could easily have beenneutralized and bypassed, while Americans orchestrated thedefenses--Vann at Kontum City and Army Maj. Gen. James F. Hollingsworth,the senior adviser to the local corps commander, at An Loc.Hollingsworth realized, as did Vann, that he had devastating aerialfirepower at his disposal, provided the South Vietnamese could hold onlong enough to force the enemy to mass and present worthwhile targets."You hold, and I'll do the killing," the generalreportedly told the South Vietnamese, and largely because of the B-52s,air power killed North Vietnamese on a scale that disheartened them anddisrupted their plans. Airlift proved critical in enabling the defendersto cling to the ruins of An Loc, since they could be supplied only byparachute. The available drop zones were small, however, and theantiaircraft weapons were dangerous, none more so than the SA-7heat-seeking missiles. Until radar became available in May to direct theparachute deliveries, as much as twothirds of the cargo dropped from AirForce C-130s came down in enemy territory. At the time when the dangerto An Loc was greatest, aircraft swarmed in the skies overhead;unexpected fighter-bombers arrived, causing controllers to reschedulestrikes, but every bomb helped. Despite confusion and savageantiaircraft defenses, air power prevailed. By late May the enemyoffensive had stalled, and within two weeks the North Vietnamese werepulling back, ending the threat to Saigon.

Nixon's use of air power to disrupt supply lines and kill theenemy on the battlefield stopped the offensive, helped drive the enemyback a short distance, and did so without the reintroduction of theground forces he had withdrawn from South Vietnam. In fact, the lastcombat troops of the U.S. Army departed in August 1972, while the SouthVietnamese were counterattacking, leaving behind only 43,000 Americanairmen and support personnel. Yet, the very success of American aerialactivities might have caused misgivings at Saigon, where the dependenceof his armed forces on the Americans troubled President Thieu. When hiscommanders had failed during the recent offensive, the advisers tookover, bringing to bear a volume of firepower that South Vietnameseforces could not by themselves generate. Thieu realized that theAmerican's unilateral departure would leave South Vietnam at themercy of the North Vietnamese forces still in the country. Since theAmericans would certainly leave, his only hope lay in the mutualwithdrawal of all foreign troops. The South Vietnamese chief executivetherefore opposed any settlement that left elements of the People'sArmy in place within South Vietnam.

In contrast, the United States was now willing to accept acease-fire that gave the North Vietnamese the fruits of their recentoffensive, during which they had captured or consolidated their controlover large areas south of the old demilitarized zone, in the westernhighlands, and along the Cambodian border. After such a settlement, theenemy would occupy a position from which he could, at least detach thenorthern third of the nation, if not cut South Vietnam in half--as hadbeen feared when the American ground forces intervened in 1965. Tooffset the geographic advantage thus conferred, the United Statescontinued to supply the Republic of Vietnam with military equipment,speeding deliveries in anticipation of a truce that would imposerestrictions on future military aid. Consequently, the South VietnameseAir Force expanded to an actual strength of sixty-five squadrons, withmore than 61,000 officers and men. Except for the A-37s and C-123s, fewof the 2,000odd aircraft of twenty-five different types had provedeffective during the offensive that just ended. Moreover, the tacticalinventory still did not include heavy bombers, howitzer-equippedgunships, and high-performance fighter-bombers with the laser-guidedweapons that had done so well at An Loc and elsewhere; nor were thereany aircraft for long-range interdiction, rescue, or electroniccountermeasures against, for example, radar-controlled surface-to-airmissile complexes. Impressive as the influx of materiel was in numericalterms-- South Vietnam was credited with having the fourth largest airforce in the world--Thieu feared that his country could not defenditself against an established enemy and continued to insist that theNorth Vietnamese be forced to pull back from the territory of SouthVietnam.

By the end of October 1972, with the Presidential election fastapproaching in the United States, Kissinger declared that peace was athand and a settlement in sight. His optimism proved unfounded. Not onlywas Thieu rebelling at what had come to be called a cease-fire in place,but the North Vietnamese also seemed disinterested in even so favorablea settlement. Once his hand had been strengthened by an overwhelmingvictory over his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, President Nixonsought to remove first one and then the other of the obstacles to peace.He obtained Thieu's reluctant assent to an in-place arrangement byoffering "absolute assurance" that he intended to take"swift and severe retaliatory action" if North Vietnam shouldviolate the terms of the agreement. Put simply, the President gave hispersonal pledge that he would respond to any future invasion as he hadto the offensive of 1972, an assurance that implicitly bound thegovernment of the United States to that course of action. He then soughtto remove the other roadblock, the stubborn attitude of the governmentin Hanoi, by ordering a resumption of the bombing of the heartland ofNorth Vietnam.

"This is your chance to win this war," the President toldAdm. Thomas H. Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."And if you don't, I'll consider you responsible."The opportunity presented to the admiral in this melodramatic fashionrepresented a consensus on the part of three men--the President; hisadviser on national security, Dr. Kissinger; and Army Maj. Gen.Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Kissinger's principal militaryassistant--that B-52s should hit targets at Hanoi and Haiphong and thusforce North Vietnam to accept a settlement. President Nixon thusunleashed an air campaign, called Linebacker II, that began on December18, and ended on the 29th, with a thirtysix-hour pause for the Christmasholiday. The B-52s again flew from Guam and Thailand, refueling asnecessary from KC-135 tankers. Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers andattack aircraft struck by day, often using radar or other bombing aidsbecause of cloud cover, and the B-52s and their escorts by night. Theheavy bombers followed F-111s, which used their speed and their abilityto hug the ground to attack from treetop height the airfields used byMiGs and, later in the operation, the most dangerous of thesurface-to-air missile sites. Fighter-bombers patrolled in the eventMiGs should challenge the -B-52s; they carried radarhoming missiles tosuppress surface-to-air missile batteries and scattered chaff to confusehostile radar. Air Force EB-66s and Grumman EA-6s of the Navy and MarineCorps orbited nearby, broadcasting jamming signals to reinforce theeffects of the chaff. Plans initially called for the -B-52s to rely moreon chaff than on their own jamming transmitters in penetrating theradar-controlled defenses of Hanoi and Haiphong. Approaching in a singlestream of three-aircraft cells to reduce the likelihood of midaircollisions, the B-52s followed a corridor of chaff to the target,dropped their bombs, turned sharply, and headed back toward their bases.For a number of reasons, what looked good on paper did not succeed inpractice. The initial corridor alerted the defenders to the direction ofthe attack and enabled them to launch their missiles in salvos withoutradar guidance, relying on proximity fuzes set for the altitude reportedby MiGs shadowing the column of B-52s. In addition, the chaff tended todrift during the approach of the bomber stream, some seventy miles inlength, and leave gaps in the coverage despite periodic replenishmentfrom F-4s. Finally, the sharp turn after they released the bombs causedthe jamming signal radiating from beneath the bomber to point outward,more nearly parallel to the ground, instead of downward, increasing thevulnerability of the B-52s to radar-guided missiles. Taking advantage ofthese weaknesses, the surface-to-air missile crews downed eleven of thehigh-flying B-52s by the time operations were suspended for Christmas,six on the night of December 20-21.

The losses, which to the aircrews seemed to result from rigidadherence to flawed tactics, dealt a numbing, though not crippling, blowto morale, but a change in plans restored spirits when the attacksresumed. Besides employing only B-52s with modernized jamming equipmentagainst the most heavily defended targets, tactics, beginning with themission on the night of December 26, called for clouds rather thancorridors of chaff, for more compact bomber streams approaching fromdifferent directions, and for the avoidance of sharp turns thatneutralized jamming signals. During the final three days of the bombing,surface-to-air missiles claimed only four B-52s. The new tactics helpedreduce the losses, as did attacks on the missile sites by F-4s indaylight and F-111s at night and the decreasing number of missilesfired. The North Vietnamese had fired almost all of their surface-to-airmissiles; and because of the mining of the harbors, damage to the railsystem, and the unwillingness of either China or the Soviet Union torisk upsetting the delicate diplomatic balance with the United States,they could not easily replenish their stocks. At this point, after morethan 700 nighttime sorties by B-52s and some 650 daylight strikes byfighterbombers and attack aircraft, the Hanoi government agreed to enterinto purposeful negotiations.

For the Americans held prisoner at Hanoi, the B-52 raids seemed asign that freedom was near. Morale soared as the guards stopped tauntingtheir captives or threatening retaliation and scrambled for coverwhenever the bombers drew near. Most of the other prisoners would surelyhave agreed with Air Force Col. Jon A. Reynolds that the B-52s hadforced the enemy to negotiate, even though neither Nixon nor Kissinger,perhaps to avoid antagonizing the North Vietnamese so near theresumption of talks, claimed at the time that they had bombed the enemyto the conference table. In addition, the Linebacker II campaign servedto reinforce the pledge given Thieu that in case of a future invasionAmerican air power would come to his aid. The battering of North Vietnamalso gave the South a respite in which to absorb recently arriveAmerican military equipment and recover from the effects of the pastyear's invasion, but neither Linebacker II nor the talks thatfollowed forced Hanoi to agree to withdraw its troops from SouthVietnam.

The United States paid a price for the accomplishments ofLinebacker II. Besides the fifteen B-52s that fell victim tosurface-to-air missiles, ten other aircraft, four from the Air Force andthe others from the Navy or Marine Corps, were shot down over the Northor so badly damaged that the crews either crash landed or took to theirparachutes. Of the one hundred Air Force crewmen shot down, thirty-fivewere killed; twenty-six were rescued; and thirty-nine parachuted, werecaptured, and were later released. The air war was not one-sided,however. Air Force fighters destroyed four MiGs, and tail gunners inB-52s shot down two others.

Despite headlines in American newspapers decrying the carpetbombing of a densely populated city, an interpretation based principallyon the reports of a French journalist at Hanoi, later investigationsrevealed that, except for the destruction of part of the Bach Maihospital by bombs intended for the airport nearby, the damage waslimited almost exclusively to targets that were military in nature, likeair bases and storage areas for oil and other supplies, or related tothe war effort, like rail yards and power plants. Indeed, the Hanoigovernment stated that exactly 1,624 civilians had been killed at Hanoiand Haiphong during the entire Linebacker II campaign, a far cry fromthe tens of thousands killed during World War II at places like Hamburg,Dresden, and Tokyo. Several factors no doubt contributed to thecomparatively modest death toll: the B-52 strikes had been carefullyplanned to minimize the bombs falling into residential areas,fighter-bombers used laser-guided weapons where accuracy was essential,and the North Vietnamese had built shelters and possibly evacuated alarge number of noncombatants. In the United States, the wildlyexaggerated stories of saturation bombing triggered no great outcry ofopposition. The news may well have been believed, but the bombing,however savage, seemed to mark the end of a long and burdensomeinvolvement in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the college campuses, which hadnurtured opposition to the war, were closed for the holidays.

Occasional flights over North Vietnam, including patrols to preventMiGs from interfering with American air operations in northern Laos,continued after Linebacker II had ended. On January 8, 1973, the crew ofan F-4D--Capt. Paul D. Howman, the pilot, and 1st Lt. Lawrence W.Kullman, the weapon systems officer--shot down a MiG southwest of Hanoiwith a radar-guided AIM-7 missile. This was the last aerial victorybefore the signing of the cease-fire, which went into effect on January29. The agreement froze the current battle lines in South Vietnam,reestablished a coalition government of communists and anticommunists inLaos, permitted the withdrawal of the last American combat forces, andresulted in the release of the 591 Americans held prisoner in NorthVietnam.

After the cease-fire became operative, the Military AssistanceCommand, Vietnam, became the much smaller Defense Attache Office, whichdispensed military advice to the armed forces of the republic andsupervised the work of the civilians hired to perform maintenance andconduct technical training. To enforce the truce with air power, asPresident Nixon had promised, the Air Force established a newheadquarters at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, the United States SupportActivities Group/Seventh Air Force, under General Vogt, who had comethere from his headquarters in South Vietnam. The new command exercisedoperational control over the eighteen Air Force fighter-bomber squadronsand one reconnaissance squadron in Thailand and over a detachment ofMarine Corps attack aircraft based there. General Vogt and his staffalso maintained coordination with the Navy's carrier task force inwaters nearby and with the Strategic Air Command, which had 200-oddB-52s at hand in the western Pacific to resume the bombing of NorthVietnam. Various factors, such as cuts in congressional funding now thatthe war had ended and the need on the part of the Air Force toredistribute resources that had been tied down in Southeast Asia,contributed to a decline in American strength as the months passed. When1974 drew to a close, only twenty-five B-52s and twelve tactical fightersquadrons in Thailand remained to provide an immediate striking force ifNorth Vietnam should violate the cease-fire.

American airmen continued to fight over Cambodia, where thecease-fire in Laos and the two Vietnams had no effect on the strugglebetween the communist Khmer Rouge and the government. President Nixonsought to use air power to hold the enemy at bay in Cambodia, butcongressional and public acceptance of such a course of action was atbest unenthusiastic after more than a decade of involvement in therecently concluded Vietnam War. Moreover, the past was overtaking theChief Executive and further eroding support of the policies he advocatedfor Southeast Asia. In 1969, when the secret bombing of Cambodia began,a reporter had written a story that mentioned the closely heldoperation. Although the account passed unnoticed by other journalistsand the general public, the President became obsessed with stoppingleaks of classified information, and the administration illegally begantapping the telephone lines of a number of citizens, including reportersand government officials. The fear of disclosures intensified afterDaniel Ellsberg, a former marine and at various times an analyst for theRand corporation and a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary ofDefense (International Security Affairs), became disillusioned with thewar and turned over to the New York Times the classified collection ofdocuments and explanatory text that was published as The PentagonPapers. To obtain evidence against Ellsberg, who was accused of theftand espionage, operatives acting on behalf of the administration brokeinto the office of the psychiatrist he had consulted, an illegal actthat ultimately resulted in the dropping of the charges against him.During the election campaign of 1972, another team of burglars with tiesto the White House entered the headquarters of the Democratic NationalCommittee at the Watergate office and apartment complex in Washington,D.C., in search of information that would further diminish theparty's already slim chance of gaining the Presidency. Even asPresident Nixon and Dr. Kissinger were seeking funds from Congress topursue the bombing in Cambodia, suspicion was mounting that theadministration, perhaps the Chief Executive himself, had been involvedin two burglaries, an attempt to conceal them, and the illegalsurveillance.

In a climate of war weariness and growing mistrust of thePresident, a number of senators and representatives believed he hadoverstepped his constitutional authority. Congress asserted the power ofthe legislative branch and authorized continuation of the bombing onlyuntil July 15, 1973. At 11:30 local time on that day an A-7D of the354th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing landed at its base in Thailand afterflying the last combat mission of the war over Southeast Asia. All told,the Air Force had flown 5.25 million sorties over South Vietnam, NorthVietnam, northern and southern Laos, and Cambodia, losing 2,251aircraft, 1,737 because of hostile action and 514 for operationalreasons. A ratio of roughly 0.4 losses per 1,000 sorties comparedfavorably with a 2.0 rate in Korea and the 9.7 figure during World WarII. Beginning with the deaths of Capt. Fergus C. Groves, II, Capt.Robert D. Larson, and SSgt. Milo B. Coghill in 1962, 1,738 officers andenlisted men of the Air Force were killed in action in Southeast Asiaand another 766 died in accidents or from illness.

Legend has it that at the time the bombing ended in Cambodia,someone played over the radio channel used by strike aircraft a taperecording of a toilet flushing, a crude symbol of the fate manypredicted for Southeast Asia. By the end of 1975, communist governmentscontrolled South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but when this came topass, the Nixon administration, swept into office by a huge margin in1972, no longer existed. The secret bombing of Cambodia and thefalsification of official records that preserved its secrecy surfaced inthe summer of 1973, further undercutting the President. A selectcommittee of the Senate developed evidence that linked the President tothe concealment of illegal activities by members of his staff, and theHouse Judiciary Committee found even stronger proof while draftingarticles of impeachment. (One of the articles considered but rejected bythe House committee accused the Chief Executive of abusing hisconstitutional powers by secretly bombing Cambodia.) Rather than facethe near certainty of impeachment by the House of Representatives and atrial in the Senate, the President resigned on August 8, 1974. Hissuccessor, Gerald R. Ford, a long-time Republican congressman fromMichigan and minority leader of the House of Representatives, hadreplaced Agnew when the former Vice President, caught in a web ofcorruption stretching back to his days as a county official in Maryland,had resigned after pleading nolo contendere to a single charge of incometax evasion, thus accepting a conviction without formally acknowledgingguilt.

Even as the power and prestige of the executive branch ofgovernment declined, the American public experienced an abrupt increasein the cost of living. At the root of the economic woes wererestrictions by Arab oil producers on the export of petroleum to theUnited States and the other nations that supported Israel, the victor inyet another war in the Middle East. The resulting scarcity drove upprices and made it difficult for South Vietnam to fuel the war machinethat the United States had given it. Meanwhile, long lines andescalating prices at gasoline stations diverted the attention of theAmerican public from Southeast Asia and diminished the likelihood thatPresident Ford, in the event of another North Vietnamese invasion, couldmuster support to intervene even with air power.

Despite the oil shortage and the collapse of the Nixonadministration, South Vietnam seemed for a while to be holding its own.Sometimes Thieu's army actually lashed out to improve the tacticalposition imposed on it by the cease-fire, but at other times the NorthVietnamese were able to carve out gains of their own. Despite theapparent stalemate, portents for South Vietnam's future grewincreasingly ominous. Stocks of fuel and ammunition could not sustainthe air strikes and artillery barrages to which the South Vietnamese hadbecome accustomed, vast amounts of equipment lay unused for lack ofmaintenance specialists, and the air arm, even if all its officers andmen were fully proficient and all its airplanes functioned perfectly,could not survive against the kind of antiaircraft defenses the enemyhad used during the 1972 offensive. Further, North Vietnam lost no timemoving that defense into the territory overrun in 1972 and convertingthe Ho Chi Minh Trail into an expressway for supplies andreinforcements.

In Cambodia the situation was much worse. After the bombing stoppedin the summer of 1973, the United States continued to deliver weapons,perhaps in greater quantities than the government could absorb, butNorth Vietnam could supply the communist insurgents more easily, and theKhmer Rouge tended to make better use of what they received. Kissinger,by this time Secretary of State, hoped to negotiate an end to thefighting, but the communists saw no need to talk when they were closingin on the capital, undeterred by an occasional local setback. On April12, 1975, nine days after an Air Force HH-53 had flown a Marine Corpscommand element to the embassy at Phnom Penh, Marine helicopters landedand, while a crowd of Cambodians watched passively, flew the ambassadorand his staff to safety. Two Air Force helicopters then landed to pickup the marines in the command and security detachments, completing theevacuation.

Even as the Khmer Rouge tightened the vise gripping Phnom Penh, theNorth Vietnamese on March 10 launched an offensive that rapidly gatheredmomentum and overwhelmed South Vietnamese resistance. Within the Fordadministration, discussion focused on military aid at a time when onlyarmed intervention could have made a difference, although even massivebombing might have failed to ensure the survival of South Vietnam, sodesperate were the circ*mstances. Evacuation rather than interventionbecame the watchword, as Air Force transports and others chartered fromprivate firms attempted to fly out as many people as possible. The earlyevacuees included hundreds of infants being cared for at orphanages inSaigon. During this "Baby Lift," tragedy struck when the rearcargo door of a C-5A burst open in an explosive decompression of thecabin, and the transport crashed as the crew tried to land, killing 172,mostly infants, of the 300 persons on board. Despite this disaster, morethan 50,000 Americans, South Vietnamese, and citizens of other nationsescaped by land or sea before the advancing enemy reached the outskirtsof Saigon.

As at Phnom Penh earlier, helicopters offered the final means ofescape, but the evacuation from Saigon was complicated by hordes ofpanic-stricken South Vietnamese fighting for a place on the rescuecraft. Amid confusion and open hostility from local residents, the lastAmerican fled from Saigon on April 29. Air Force and Navyfighter-bombers and Marine Corps helicopter gunships provided escort,along with AC-130s by night, as Air Force and Marine helicopters rescuedmore than 6,000 persons from the Defense Attache Office and from theAmerican Embassy. Radar at air defense sites tracked the rescuehelicopters, but only once did the escort have to act; an Air Force F-4silenced a radar with an antiradiation missile, and an accompanyingfighter bombed the 57-mm battery the radar directed. The finalevacuation from Saigon was successful, though only in a narrow sense,for it signified hopes destroyed and dreams betrayed. As George C.Herring writes in America's Longest War: The United States andVietnam, 1950-1975, "The spectacle of U.S. Marines using riflebutts to keep desperate Vietnamese from blocking escape routes and ofangry ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] soldiers firing on thedeparting Americans provided a tragic epitaph for twenty-five years ofAmerican involvement in Vietnam."

The military involvement in Southeast Asia had not quite ended,however. On May 12, 1975, Cambodian naval forces seized the Americancontainership Mayaguez, although it was in international waters, andPresident Ford decided to use force to recover the vessel and its crewof thirtynine. While aircraft maintained surveillance of the ship,Pacific Air Forces ordered sixteen CH-3 and HH-53 helicopters to gatherin Thailand for the operation. En route, one of the HH-53s crashed,killing all twenty-three airmen on board. On the 13th, the surveillanceaircraft observed a small fishing boat moving away from the island wherethe Mayaguez rode at anchor. Air Force A-7s promptly fired across thebow and dropped tear gas canisters in the hope of disabling the guardsso that the Americans, if they were on board, could seize the craft andescape. The Americans were indeed on board, but the chemical agentaffected both captives and captors; a Cambodian retained control byholding his gun against the skipper of the vessel, while the unarmedsailors from the Mayaguez, blinded by the gas, could not rush theguards.

Intelligence indicated that the fishing boat had taken theprisoners to Koh Tang, an island midway between the one where thecaptured ship was anchored and the mainland. To prevent the Cambodiansfrom interfering as a boarding party seized the Mayaguez, the rescueforce attacked patrol boats and shore installations along the Cambodiancoast while some 230 marines landed from Air Force helicopters tocapture Koh Tang and free the ship's crew. The Mayaguez wasabandoned, but infantry armed with a variety of automatic weaponsdefended Koh Tang. On the morning of May 15, eight of the helicopterslanded their troops, and the defenders opened fire, damaging two of thecraft and shooting down three others. Meanwhile, a fishing boat carriedthe crew of the Mayaguez, released by their captors, to an Americandestroyer. Since no Americans were held on Koh Tang, fighterbombers,attack aircraft, and gunships battered the island's defenders.Aerial firepower, however, could not save the 100 or more marinesclinging to a part of the objective; reinforcements had to land and helphold off the enemy to permit an orderly withdrawal. By the time another100 marines entered the fight, all but one of the nine helicopters thatbrought in troops during the day had been shot down or damaged.

By early afternoon, even though the marines had been unable to forma unified defensive perimeter, the withdrawal began, and it continuedinto evening. In a daring nighttime rescue, Capt. Donald R. Backlundcould hear bullets tearing into his machine as he held it a few feetabove the beach while an isolated group of marines, under cover of firefrom the multibarrel gun in the helicopter, made their way up itslowered ramp. A C--130 transport appeared overhead and dropped a15,000-pound bomb of the type used to clear landing zones forhelicopters during the fighting in South Vietnam. The resulting blast,plus sensor-directed barrages from AC--130s and strafing by OV-10s,suppressed the hostile fire to such an extent that the three helicoptersstill capable of flight could carry away the last of the marines.American casualties totaled forty-one killed, including the twenty-threemembers of an Air Force security detachment who died in the earlierhelicopter crash, and forty-nine wounded. The casualties also included acopilot and a flight mechanic killed on helicopters shot down during themorning attack and six wounded helicopter crewmen. Of the fifteenhelicopters exposed to hostile fire, four were brought down and ninedamaged.

Hailed as a demonstration that American resolve had not beenundermined by the communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam, therescue operation had nevertheless been marred by hurried planning andbased on faulty intelligence that sent a hastily assembled force againsta far stronger enemy. True, the Mayaguez was safely in the hands of itscrew, but that fact had no impact on the course of subsequent events inSoutheast Asia. During December 1975, the communist faction took over inLaos, and the following year saw a revolution in Thailand and theemergence of a government, as anticommunist as its predecessor, thatnonetheless sought to distance itself from the United States and set adeadline for the withdrawal of the American forces based there. Afterthe North Vietnamese conquest of the South, the communist triumph inLaos, the emergence of a hostile regime in Cambodia (which became thePeople's Republic of Kampuchea), and the shift of policy inThailand, the United States could no longer maintain a military presencein Southeast Asia. The American perimeter in the western Pacific nowextended from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines.

Within Southeast Asia, one of the announced purposes of theAmerican involvement had come to pass, even though the main goal, thesurvival of a noncommunist South Vietnam, had not. China did not come todominate the region, but this outcome, however temporary it might be,resulted from the interplay of rivalries between China and the SovietUnion, between China and Soviet-supported Vietnam, and between Vietnamand the Chinese-aided Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. While these tensionspersisted among the communist states, the independence ofwestern-oriented nations like Thailand and Malaysia seemed reasonablysecure.

Col. John S. Schlight, USAF (Ret.) graduated from St.Vincent's College in 1950, and earned MA and Ph.D. degrees inHistory from Princeton. After serving for five years as a navigator,Col. Schlight spent the rest of his career until 1976 in academicmilitary positions, nine years at the U.S. Air Force Academy and threeyears at the National War College. His final position was as the DeputyChief of the Office of Air Force History, where he retired in 1983.After that tenure, he moved on to the U.S. Army's Center ofMilitary History until his civilian retirement.