ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED 14 JUNE 1966

RIPPLE SALVO… #106… HERE WE COME… but first….

Good Morning: Day ONE HUNDRED SIX of a look back at the air war over North Vietnam fifty years ago…

14 JUNE 1966… ON THE HOME FRONT… (NYT)… A mostly sunny and humid Tuesday in New York…

Page 1: “Seven Shot In Chicago Riot AS Settlement Efforts Fail”… “Violence flared again tonight in Chicago’s principal Puerto Rican neighborhood. Rock tossing youths ran through the community on the northwest side smashing cars and store windows and traffic lights, tipping over mail boxes, stealing merchandise and harassing police cars. By the time police restored order seven persons had been shot and several others had been injured enough to require hospital treatment. It was the second night of rioting. The wave of violence followed the shooting yesterday of a Puerto Rican youth by a patrolman. Tonight Puerto Rican community leaders suggested police leave peace efforts to them. The police backed out and 1,200 young Puerto Ricans took to the streets and the rioting began…so much for neighborhood watch… Page 3: “No Progress Seen In Pacifying Hue”…U.S. aides believe the situation will continue to deteriorate. “The ruling military junta has made almost no progress toward pacification of this religious city in the last week, despite the presence of more than 350 loyal combat police. Hue’ is in the 19th day of anarchy with no effective authority since May 26. Thousands of Buddhist family altars are in the streets and the dissidents insist that if the police of military move them, they will find others to replace them. “We will be absolutely nonviolent.” On a highway nine miles south of Hue more than 650 altars line the center of the highway. Almost every Buddhist family has become involved…

Page 4: “People in Red China Directed To Emulate the Army”…Defense Chief Lin Pao has moved to the forefront of ongoing purge of bourgeois elements in China. “China’s army, that dedicated, indoctrinated elite force of about three million regulars has emerged as the communist rulers continue major changes in their country. “The weekend of Hung Chi, the Communist party’s important journal in ideology attempted to explain the background of the drive against the bourgeois elements and to set a course for the future. Creatively studying and applying Chairman Mao’s works have given great impetus to the entire revolutionary cause in China. To learn from the army in a big way has become the general slogan for the whole nation and for all trades.”

14 JUNE 1966 PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF…CIA (TS sanitized)…South Vietnam: there has been no further trouble reported from Saigon since the riot police dispersed several thousand Buddhist-led demonstrators this afternoon, Vietnam time. In Hue’ the opposing forces seem to have reached a temporary impasse. Colonel Loan now has 400 of his combat police from Saigon in the city but he plans to move slowly to restore order. In the military sphere the South Vietnamese armed forces report a total of 50,503 personnel losses for the first quarter of 1966, more than 34,000 of these dropped from the rolls as deserters. Regular force desertions–some 18,600– ran at a rate of 20.1 per thousand during the quarter. This compares with an average of 14’2 last year and 8’3 per thousand in 1964. Conscripts who represent 7-per cent of south Vietnamese military strength accounted for more than 30-per cent of the total desertions….Communist China: Remarks last week by foreign Minister Chen Yi seem designed mainly to inform the US that the domestic upheaval in China has not weakened Peking’s determination to resist any settlement in Vietnam except on Communist terms. Chen reiterated the conditions for ending the war which Peking has stated before…North Vietnam: four full pages of briefing material and every word is still TS after 50years, i.e., redacted…???

14 JUNE 1966… ROLLING THUNDER OPERATIONS… NYT (15 June reporting 14 June Ops): Page 14: “US Jets Down Unidentified Plane Over North Vietnam”…”U.S. Navy planes attacked two unidentified aircraft over the North Vietnam coast just before dawn today…the propeller driven transports were flying 18 miles northeast of Thanh Hoa on a moonless night therefore positive identification was impossible. Fighters from the carrier Ranger were vectored for the intercept and shoot down by the USS Coontz. One aircraft was downed with a Sparrow missile. The other aircraft disappeared from radar. Elsewhere in North Vietnam yesterday, United States fighter-bombers, Navy and Air Force, flew 60 missions raking rail lines, roads, highways, bridges, truck convoys, radar and AAA sites. All the raids took place in the southern part of the country near Thanh Hoa, Vinh and Dong Hoi... “Vietnam: Air Losses”…One aircraft lost on 14 June 1966…

(1) One F-105D of the 421TFS and the 388TFW flamed out after takeoff from Korat and the pilot ejected safely.

RIPPLE SALVO… #106… FOREWARNED… This evening I was asked if the statements in LGEN Pete Piotrowski’s “The Secret War and Other Conflicts,” concerning Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s comments on a CBC documentary entitled “The Ten Thousand Day War” several years ago were true… here is my ripple salvo response…

Bud…. Gen. Piotrowski did write this–I have his book…

Then I checked the fact checkers and found as many shards of truth to the tale as I needed to conclude that Rusk was in contact with somebody in the Swiss Embassy and did pass info… LBJ/McN/Rusk regularly let the world know what the next set of targets would be in order to elicit a response from Ho Chi… Sort of like, “If you don’t talk to us, we are going to bomb the dickens out of……….” Fill in the blank…power plants, oil storage, north of 19-degrees, airfields, etc…. They also used the weekly magazines to send messages… on occasion the word on targets was leaked to test American public opinion… Real life example: “When the weather clears Navy pilots will take out the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant,” ran in a January 1967 Newsweek “Periscope” column just to test public and congressional reaction…when the weather cleared VA-1113 and Andy Burnett (Silver Star) were there… so were the guns and missiles.

50 years ago this week in June 1966, after talking about it from March to late May, the issue was, “When we escalate another notch in our ‘strategy of gradualism’ what will we bomb?”… State and Defense concluded is April that the oil supply line would be the thing to obliterate and McN made the recommendation to LBJ to do NVN’s oil system…storage, transportation, bridges, rail lines, etc… (But no mines or ports). Delays followed because Rusk talked it over with the Brits whose interests would be adversely affected… The Brits wanted to think about it…So we backed off for a month…Of course, the delay and the heads up led NVN to disperse, duplicate and defend the system… So when we started bombing the oil system NVN was ready… “The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition,” (6 or 7 volumes, volume 6 is the “air war)” is a great keeper for anybody who spent some time carrying the fight to the heartland… More fun than reading Hillary’s emails…

This issue of telling the bad guys we were coming and where we would be rolling in was covered in an earlier Ripple Salvo…

The long discussed decision to go after the North energy supplies goes into high gear over the next two weeks and will be reported day by day as it unfolded fifty years ago.

Lest we forget…….. Bear ………. –30– ………..

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