Week of November 3

On October 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson officially ordered a full halt to the bombing campaign against North Vietnam known as Operation ROLLING THUNDER. Johnson hoped ending the bombing completely would spur more productive peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese government. The bombing campaign, which Johnson had restricted to southern North Vietnam in March, lasted for nearly four years, making it one of the longest military operations in United States history at the time.

ROLLING THUNDER began in the final months of 1964. Its original purpose was to end Hanoi’s support for the southern Communist insurgency known as the Việt Cộng by striking North Vietnam’s small industrial base. As the campaign successfully accomplished this relatively quickly, military leaders expanded ROLLING THUNDER goals to cutting off the flow of food, fuel, ammunition, and troops from North to South Vietnam. U.S. aircraft were forbidden to strike targets inside the so-called Hà Nội-Hải Phòng “donut,” the area in and around North Vietnam’s capital and most important port city that remained off limits throughout the campaign.

By most of the measures devised by American leaders, ROLLING THUNDER should have severely damaged North Vietnam’s ability to continue the war. According to one estimate, between March 1965 and April 1967, American bombers destroyed or disabled 85 percent of North Vietnam’s petroleum storage capacity, 70 percent of its power generation capacity, 70 percent of its ammunition storage resources, and 25 percent of its barracks facilities, among other targets. Despite all this, nearly all analysts agreed with a 1967 CIA report that concluded: “these losses . . . have not meaningfully degraded North Vietnam’s material ability to continue the war in South Vietnam.”

How was this the case? When ROLLING THUNDER began, the North Vietnamese soon learned to disperse their military assets widely throughout the country, greatly reducing U.S. bombers’ ability to attack large or significant targets. The Hà Nội government also redirected more and more war materiel into neighboring Laos and Cambodia via the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, and they mitigated most damage to bridges, roads, and supply routes by continuously constructing numerous bypasses and alternate routes. Finally, when it no longer had the ability to replace material losses with its own industrial capacity, North Vietnam was able to resupply itself with enormous amounts of supplies, ammunition, weapons, aircraft, and equipment from China and the Soviet Union, both of which increased their support of North Vietnam to match the pace of U.S. bombing.

The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps lost almost 1,000 aircraft, and the nearly same number of American aviators ended up killed, missing, or captured during Operation ROLLING THUNDER’s nearly four years. But the Vietnamese sustained the worst toll. Though the precise number is debated and difficult to accurately quantify, many tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed during the operation, most of whom were civilians.

As ROLLING THUNDER continued month after month, it began to cost the Johnson administration much of its political capital. The bombing campaign prompted increased opposition to the war, which grew in intensity over the years. In March 1968, President Johnson went on national television to announce he was greatly restricting the bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to encourage peace negotiations. He ended the campaign altogether after October 31, 1968.

Historians disagree over why ROLLING THUNDER did not manage to achieve its primary objectives, despite the overwhelming superiority of American airpower. Some argue that the restrictions placed on the bombing by political leaders, who insisted on managing the war from Washington, D.C., hampered its effectiveness over the long term. Aircraft, for example, were prohibited from attacking targets in the vicinity of Hà Nội and Hải Phòng as well as any targets near the Chinese border, for fear of provoking China and the Soviet Union to enter the war. Some scholars also point to the U.S. decision to make the campaign a gradual escalation of strikes, which ostensibly allowed Hà Nội the time to devise solutions and to construct an advanced air defense system.

Other historians instead argue that ROLLING THUNDER was seemingly ineffective because no amount of bombing was able to halt or even slow the flow of war materiel into the country from China and the USSR. They also often cite historical precedents showing that the capacity of airpower alone to greatly damage the war-making ability of a particular nation is limited. This was especially true in North Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s because of that nation’s largely non-industrialized, agricultural economy. Moreover, historians say, the American reliance on firepower and other conventional warfare approaches was always ill suited to a war with few large set-piece battles and no front lines, especially against an enemy with a very small industrial base.¹

¹John Schlight, A War Too Long: The USAF in Southeast Asia, 1961–1975 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996), 45–53; Jacob Van Staaveren, Gradual Failure: The Air War Over North Vietnam, 1965–1966 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 2002), 4, 79; Carl Berger, ed. The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: An Illustrated Account (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1977), 74, 79, 82–83, 88–89; Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: The United States Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 2000), 26–27, 41, 94, 133, 138–141, 149–150, 286, 227; George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 173–179 (see p. 179 for aircraft loss number); Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Like Rolling Thunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964–1975 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), xvii–xxiv, 24, 39–41, 59, 65; Robert Buzzanco, “The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam During the Johnson Years,” in Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the Vietnam War (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 175; Barbara Tischler, “The Antiwar Movement,” in Young and Buzzanco, eds., Companion to the Vietnam War, 386; U.S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 63–104, 124; Robert K. Brigham, “An Unwinnable War,” in Robert J. McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, 4th ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 212–219; John A. Nagl, “The Failure of Counterinsurgency Warfare,” in McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, 220–233; Spencer C. Tucker, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 991–993. For the cited CIA report, see McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, 205–206.