Isolated Thunderclaps: Operation Rolling Thunder
by America’s first sustained bombing campaign of North Vietnam, was riddled with problems. Against the loss of a thousand aircraft and many of their crews, the expenditure of two billion dollars, and the deaths of tens of thousands of North Vietnamese non-combatants, the operation failed to achieve its stated objectives.
This Soviet and Chinese military support was put to deadly use. From 2 March 1965 to 31 October 1968, the duration of Rolling Thunder, 922 U.S. planes were lost over North Vietnam.78 Such losses were disproportionately high compared with losses over the South. In 1966, for example, though only 30% of American sorties were flown over the North, 60% of U.S. losses were incurred there.79 A report in May 1967 from the Office of the Secretary of Defense stated that the air campaign against “heavily defended areas” cost the United States one pilot in every 40 sorties.80 Given that a tour of duty in Vietnam could last for 200 missions,81 the long-term odds were stacked against U.S. strike pilots. Clearly, Soviet and Chinese military support was instrumental in North Vietnam’s ability to defend itself and hurt the Americans.
The North Vietnamese resistance effort, however reliant on external support, was nonetheless ultimately determined by its own citizens and leadership. The country was able to capitalize on its low-tech advantages over the United States in order to counter American technological dominance. To counter U.S. high explosives in the form of air-dropped mines or direct air attack, villagers found suspicious objects and poked them with long sticks from behind bamboo shields; they dragged logs and chains to set off mines and foul sensors; they created false truck convoys with fake headlights; and they constructed dummy supply dumps and bridges.82
Camouflage was raised to an art.83 To aggravate the U.S. further, the geography of the area was such that it made movement almost impossible for aircraft to control.84 As Sullivan reported, this situation was worsened by North Vietnam’s “primitive”85 transportation system. Earl Tilford, published in Armed Forces and Society, emphasized the uselessness of American technological superiority in the face of North Vietnam’s sound strategy of resistance.
Cluster bombs, napalm, herbicide defoliants, sensors dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to monitor traffic and aid in targeting, gunships, and electro-optically guided and laser-guided bombs all promised much, and while some delivered a great deal of destruction, in the end technologically sophisticated weapons proved no substitute for strategy.86
North Vietnam simply did not require technological superiority to resist effectively. In fact, its technological inferiority to America actually proved to be an advantage. Though it lost 65% of its oil supplies, Hanoi was not phased; this had little effect upon a nation whose primary source of farming energy was the water buffalo, and whose primary mode of transportation was the bicycle.87 America’s bombing campaign, even at its height, failed to hurt North Vietnam’s agricultural economy enough to impede its war effort, or even to elicit a political response. Harry Ashmore and William Baggs, American newspaper editors in North Vietnam attempting to initiate peace talks in 1967, noted that the bombing of the North simply “had not disrupted the economy of the mostly agricultural country.”88 McNamara, by this time fully disillusioned as to bombing’s real effectiveness, agreed.89 Rolling Thunder, as it was executed, was simply unable to bring the North Vietnamese agricultural economy to a standstill.
In addition to its ineffectiveness against the North, Operation Rolling Thunder made America’s military situation in South Vietnam much more vulnerable. The first U.S. ground forces in Vietnam were deployed to Da Nang on March 8, 1965, to defend its air base.9091 A direct line can be drawn from this first ground involvement to the North Vietnamese and nlf’s Tet Offensive, which destroyed the U.S. military’s hopes for a short war and broadened and deepened American public opinion against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Rolling Thunder, along with the rest of America’s military involvement in Vietnam, soon fell victim to the negative publicity generated by Tet.92
After this disastrous campaign, in which almost 4,000 Americans were killed, Johnson exclaimed on March 28 1968 that “everybody is recommending surrender.”93 In a nationally broadcast speech three days later, he announced (along with his own resignation from the next election campaign) a partial bombing halt that would stop U.S. attacks over North Vietnam.94 By November 1968, just before the U.S. election, all bombing of North Vietnam ceased.95 McNamara later explained that in this way Rolling Thunder “not only started the air war but unexpectedly triggered the introduction of U.S. troops into ground combat as well.”
Thus, Operation Rolling Thunder ended in terrible disappointment for the Johnson Administration. It was a failure on massive terms. Severely limited and controlled by the Communist-fearing civilian administration in Washington, and hampered by a gross underestimation of North Vietnam’s human capability to resist, the campaign was doomed from its onset. Though North Vietnamese 52,000 civilians died as a result of Rolling Thunder,96 Hanoi remained resolute. In the end, nothing – neither military nor political gains – could be shown for America’s losses in the air.
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