Bear Taylor 
RIPPLE SALVO… KARNOW…. but first…
Good Morning: Day FORTY-ONE of a return to 1966 and Operation Rolling Thunder… “the air war with North Vietnam“
10 APRIL 1966 (NYT)… ON THE HOMEFRONT… A nice Easter Sunday in both New York and Washington…Page 1: “Showdown Looms in Buddhist Fight With Ky’s Regime, Catholics Ask for Action, Strong Reaction to Protests Urged, U.S. Trying to Prolong Talks.” Also on page 1: “Grades Inflated for Midshipmen.” An Academy spokesperson stated that the practice was necessary in order to graduate enough Naval Officers. The practice: limit the number of Mids given a failing grade…Small item on page 1: Jack Nicklaus back on top going into fourth round at Masters… Page 2: “U.S. War Construction in Southeast Asia To Hit Peak in Summer.” More than $1.5 billion to fund a labor force of 65,000 building airfields, docks, bridges, warehouses and cantonments. Labor force to increase to 82,000 to complete work at fourteen airfields, including four new airfields. Also, major construction at Cam Rahn Bay…Page 3: “Rusk in San Antonio to Meet With President,” and discuss the political situation in South Vietnam. Senator Richard Russell, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a “Hawk,” was quoted: “If a new government should come to power in South Vietnam, the United States should make an agonizing appraisal of the policy and perhaps get out of the country…street demonstrations in Saigon might be the beginning of an organized effort to turn the people of South Vietnam against America…If it becomes clearly evident that a majority of the Vietnamese do not want our help, I would favor withdrawing immediately both military forces and economic aid.” Page 4: A war report, with B-52s in action near Saigon. U.S Navy fighter-bombers cruised over the coastal shipping lanes for the second day in a row and reported sinking an additional 20 “cargo junks.” The Air Force fighters hit NVN barracks 75 miles west of Hanoi and storage areas north of the DMZ. Other targets of the day included supply roads in the passes and south….Page 14: An interesting protest of taxes going to pay for the war. Three hundred persons, including Joan Baez, “…decided to refuse to pay all of part of their 1965 income taxes in protest of American troops in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.” One protester was quoted: “…American actions will go down in history alongside the unforgivable atrocities of Italy in Ethiopia in 1935 and U.S. intervention in Santo Domingo with Russian criminal intervention in Hungary in 1956.” The protesters intended to leave their tax dollars where the IRS can seize them, or donate them to charity, but were firm on not handing money to the IRS…Page 6: Racial articles: IN Atlantic City the Mayor was moving to ease tensions arising from Civil Rights demands and demonstrations. Goal to improve the vacation city image before the tourist season. Mayor hosted a muster with minorities to discuss “bullying by police.” And in Delaware the Klu Klux Klan held a rally of more than 300, with 40 in full hooded regalia, erected a 40-foot cross in protest of Attorney General David Buckson initiative to pass legislation banning cross burning as necessary to keep from becoming “… the latest hot bed of Klan activity.” On the Editorial pages, James Reston essay, “The Private Debate on Vietnam,” included this: “…powerful forces at the Pentagon are irritated by all the disunity, the demonstrations, and the anti-Americanism in Saigon, Hue and Danang…Let’s talk this thing over or get out…We cannot go on like this: either we have to command the political and military situation, use our power to change it radically, or give it up as a hopeless job.” He concluded: “Fortunately, President Johnson is taking a cautious position. He is waiting this crisis out.” … Nicklaus leads the Master into the final round…
ROLLING THUNDER… It was a quiet day in the North and there were no fixed wing losses on this day in all of Vietnam…
RIPPLE SALVO… KARNOW…. This is a good place in my look back at history to insert the post-war assessment of Operation Rolling Thunder by Stanley Karnow in his 1983 “Vietnam: A History” (pages 454-455). In effect this is a preview of where we are headed presented here to assist in focusing on the enduring issues of the use and limitations of air power… KARNOW……
“Operation Rolling Thunder, the American air strikes against North Vietnam, went on almost daily from March 1965 until November 1968, dropping a total of a million tons of bombs, rockets and missiles — roughly eight hundred tons per day for three and a half years. During 1966 alone, according to an official Pentagon tabulation, the United States staged seven thousand air raids against roads, five thousand against vehicles, and more than a thousand against railway lines and yards in North Vietnam, hitting those same targets several times. One objective of Operation Rolling Thunder was to crack the morale of the Hanoi leaders, and compel them to call off the southern insurgency; the other was to weaken the Communists’ fighting capacity by impeding the flow of their men and supplies to the south. But neither goal was even remotely achieved. In August 1966, General Westmoreland conceded that he saw “no indication that the resolve of the leadership in Hanoi has been reduced.” Secretary of Defense McNamara, an architect of the air offensive, expressed the same conclusion more incisively a year later at a closed door session of a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He asserted that “enemy operations in the south cannot, on the basis of any reports I have seen, be stopped by air bombardment — short, that is, of the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people.” McNamara antagonized the generals and their congressional supporters by speaking the unpalatable truth, and President Johnson was soon to ease him out of office.
“Besides attacking Communist forces and convoys as they deployed to move from staging areas in the southern provinces of North Vietnam, the American air strikes were directed against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Hundreds of American aircraft bombed the Laotian routes every day, their missions facilitated by electronic detection devices and other sophisticated gadgets. Covert teams of South Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, many led by American officers, were also insinuated into the region to provide the American bombers with information on enemy activities. Even so the raids barely dented the southward movement of either Communist troops or supplies.
“The needs of the Communist fighting force was minimal…The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong needed no more than fifteen tons of supplies a day from the north in order to sustain their effort in the south. And since the Soviet Union and China were then furnishing North Vietnam with nearly six thousand tons of aid daily, only a tiny fraction had to trickle down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the Communists to wage war.
“Nor were U.S. air strikes effective against the infiltration of North Vietnamese combat divisions into the south. Though the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail grew in intensity, American intelligence experts estimated that the annual infiltration rate soared from thirty-five thousand in 1965 to one hundred-fifty thousand by late 1967. And most of the North Vietnamese who died while making the march were victims of dysentery, malaria and other diseases rather than U.S. bombs….
“The American investment in the bombing campaign was wildly disproportionate to the destruction inflicted, and official American estimates dramatized. By late 1967, the United States had imposed some $300 million in damage on North Vietnam — but at a loss to the American air force of more than seven hundred aircraft valued at approximately $900 million.
“The North Vietnamese developed one of the strongest air defense concentrations in the world, comprising eight thousand antiaircraft guns, more than two-hundred surface-to-air missile batteries, a complex radar system, and computerized control centers, all provided by the Soviet Union.”
Lest we forget….. Bear ………………… –30– ……………………..
