by Max Hastings
Bill Colby recognised failure when he saw it: ‘The message sent to me was that the thing wouldn’t work. So, stop doing it.’ In the winter of 1963 he said as much to Robert McNamara, who made no response. The defense secretary persuaded himself that covert ops could help to sustain pressure on Hanoi, if placed under MACV control and backed by military muscle. He argued this to Lyndon Johnson in December, and soon afterwards the OPLAN34-A series was launched. Almost two hundred South Vietnamese were trained to parachute, paddle or swim into the North. Their briefings were imperfect, however: agents tasked to head for towns were urged to seek out Catholic priests, who would assuredly be anti-communist. So indeed the clergy were, but in consequence churches were under close surveillance. Some parachutists were detected because they wore shoes, rather than the universal sandals. One was captured in American blue jeans – promptly appropriated by the soldier who seized him. Many surrendered the moment their feet touched the ground.
The North Vietnamese staged occasional show trials of Saigon agents, while firing squads executed intruders who resisted capture. Most of the OPLAN34-A personnel were indefinitely imprisoned, the last survivors being released only in 1995. Colonel Clyde Russell, who ran the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG, overseeing the missions, told a later JCS inquiry: ‘We did commit most of these people without very high expectations … We never had a successful operation.’ Yet the raids continued because some soldiers and officials, McNamara foremost among them, fancied that they represented a low-cost, low-visibility means of keeping heat on the enemy.
The South Vietnamese crews of the high-speed patrol boats that conducted the amphibious raids relished being an elite – together with the cash bounties the US paid them. Most missions, launched out of Danang, lasted only a few hours of darkness. Craft operated in pairs, an average of once a week, their officers briefed by Americans using aerial photos. ‘Swift’ and ‘Nasty’ boats landed SEAL teams, Vietnamese Nung, to fire on shore installations. There were occasional clashes with North Vietnamese craft, some of which they engaged with their own 40mm guns. None of the Northern incursions was truthfully recorded – they appeared in logs under the cryptic heading ‘US liaison’. The Vietnamese found it thrilling to drive their 55-knot boats, which no communist craft could catch, and – in the words of an officer – ‘It was great to be taking the war to the North, instead of just passively defending our own territory.’
The communists had grown accustomed to repelling the raiders, so that coastal defences maintained a high state of alert. On 28 July, after an attack on the island of Hon Gio, Chinese-built Swatow-class patrol boats pursued the attackers for forty-five miles. Two days later, commandos were repulsed during an attempt to storm a radar station on Hon Me island; they merely sprayed the facility with automatic-weapons fire. The defenders were thus wide awake three days later when the destroyer Maddox, conducting a ‘Desoto’ electronic eavesdropping mission within a few miles of these same islands, entered waters claimed by North Vietnam, though beyond the limit recognised by the US. One of Maddox’s appointed tasks was to gather intelligence for MACV, including ‘determining DRV coastal patrol activity … [and] to stimulate and record North Vietnamese reactions in support of the U.S. Sigint effort’.
On 1 August, interceptors warned USN Capt. John Herrick, the mission commander at sea, of North Vietnamese transmissions indicating that their naval commanders had ‘DECIDED TO FIGHT THE ENEMY TONIGHT’, which persuaded Maddox to retire into less contentious waters. The communists then ordered P-4 torpedo boats and sixty-seven-ton Swatows to concentrate off Hon Me island next day, the 2nd, which the Americans interpreted as meaning that they intended to engage the US destroyer. The NSA sent urgent warnings to that effect to MACV and assorted naval commands – though not to the warship itself – early on 2 August: ‘THE INDICATED SENSITIVITY ON PART OF DRV AS WELL AS THEIR INDICATED PREPARATION TO COUNTER, POSSIBLE THE DRV REACTION TO DESOTO PATROL MIGHT BE MORE SEVERE THAN WOULD OTHERWISE BE ANTICIPATED.’ This was followed by a ‘Critic’ – Critical – message from the sigint unit at Phu Bai at 1144G,* reporting a Swatow boat’s acknowledgement of attack orders. Despite all this, the destroyer was allowed to resume its inshore Desoto mission. Around noon on the 2nd, Maddox caught sight of five communist craft off Hon Me, yet held its own course.
The command duty officer in Hanoi that afternoon was Senior Colonel Tran Quy Hai, a deputy chief of the general staff. Colleagues later asserted that, when telephoned by naval headquarters to report the presence of Maddox and seek instructions, he said: ‘What? They’re asking how we should respond? When an enemy ship violates our territorial waters we have to attack it! What the hell are they waiting for?’ The deputy director of combat operations called the naval command duty officer, who ordered three boats of Torpedo Group 135, supported by two patrol vessels, to engage Maddox.
At Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airbase Harry Williams, duty officer at the NSA interception station, received a navy sigint warning from San Miguel, Philippines, that an attack on US warships was imminent. There was also evidence of confusion within the North Vietnamese command chain: decrypts included a recall order issued to the P-4 boats, which failed to prevent the brief clash that followed. At 1400G Maddox spotted the North Vietnamese boats, turned east and increased speed to twenty-five knots. Forty minutes later Herrick signalled shore command that he would use his guns in self-defence as seemed necessary. Four F-8 Crusader aircraft, flying CAP above the carrier Ticonderoga, were vectored to support the destroyer. At 1505G, and absolutely contrary to the administration’s later claims that the communists fired first, Maddox’s 5-inch guns loosed three warning rounds, then began to shoot in earnest at the boats, which were making forty knots, bouncing across the swell towards the destroyer. The American shells missed, as did torpedoes fired by the attackers, but at 1520G the Crusaders arrived, dived on the P-4s and hit them hard with cannon fire: all three were badly mauled, four crewmen killed and six wounded. Maddox ended the action with a single bullethole in its upperworks; one Crusader suffered damage, but landed safely at Danang.
On 3 August North Vietnam’s chief of the general staff, Van Tien Dung, flew to the coast. The boats had not yet returned, having taken refuge beside an offshore island to repair their damage. The general professed to congratulate the navy. Yet on the helicopter flight back to the capital, Dung told an accompanying officer that he thought the attack had been a mistake, ‘at a time when we are trying to limit the conflict’; he thought the command duty officers had exceeded their authority.
Washington’s initial reaction to the clash was muted, but on the president’s instructions a stern warning was dispatched to Hanoi that any further ‘unprovoked’ attacks on American warships would have ‘grave consequences’. On 2 August McNamara was escorting Jackie Kennedy to mass when he was summoned back to the Pentagon. Next day he presided over a meeting with the Joint Chiefs at which they discussed a gloomy new general sitrep from Saigon. The secretary said: ‘We are losing … We can’t afford to take this and we won’t.’ There were reports of a Chinese air division moving into North Vietnam. The CIA’s McCone warned of possible Chinese air attacks on Saigon; the Russians might also take a hand, perhaps with fighter aircraft and without avowal, as they had done in Korea. A second carrier, Constellation, was sent to support Ticonderoga off the Northern coast. Another destroyer, Turner Joy, was dispatched to join the Maddox. Capt. Herrick, at sea, was in no doubt matters had got serious, signalling, ‘DRV HAS CAST DOWN THE GAUNTLET AND NOW CONSIDERS ITSELF AT WAR WITH US.’ He urged providing heavier warship support for the Desoto mission – which was ordered to close the coast once more on 3 August.
On the night of 3–4 August, South Vietnamese commandos staged another OPLAN-34A raid, during which four boats fired on shore installations at Vinh Son, and one was chased by the communists. This activity took place many miles from the locations where the North Vietnamese were still struggling to salvage their three craft damaged that afternoon. The Phu Bai int
erceptors, however, misinterpreted enemy radio traffic, believing that it presaged another looming attack on US warships; at 1656G, Phu Bai thus issued a new ‘Critic’ warning. That same day, the 3rd, one Swatow boat indeed tracked the American vessels by radar, but from a safe distance. Though there were tense hours at sea, not a shot was fired near Maddox or Turner Joy.
Nobody in Washington suggested pulling back the Desoto mission. Next morning, the 4th, the two destroyers resumed inshore eavesdropping. At 1840G Phu Bai issued a new warning: ‘POSS DRV NAVAL OPERATIONS PLANNED AGAINST DESOTO PATROL TONIGHT.’ Less than two hours later, in worsening weather the Maddox reported two ‘skunks’ – surface radar contacts – and three ‘bogies’ – air contacts – on its radars, range a hundred miles. Herrick speculated later that the latter might have been false ‘terrain returns’ from China’s Hainan island. At 2045G Herrick reported losing the surface ‘skunks’, but at 2108G picked up another. Navy Skyhawks overhead reported spotting the destroyers’ white wakes in the darkness, but no sign of any hostile craft. At 2134G every alarm bell rang aboard Maddox following a new radar contact at 9,800 yards, apparently closing at forty knots; Turner Joy’s operator also reported activity. Then the sonar team spotted something underwater, which Maddox’s Combat Information Center – though not the sonar operators – identified as an incoming torpedo. At 2140G Herrick reported that his ships were firing on ‘attackers’, but said the destroyers were finding it hard to sustain a radar lock on them. This was unsurprising, because they were figments of American imagination.
Reports from the warships – ‘am under continuous torpedo attack’ – passed to the Pentagon that night, still early morning in Washington, reflected errors by technical personnel afloat, and excitable reactions by their superiors. Adm. Ulysses Grant Sharp in Hawaii briefly endorsed the false reports as ‘renewed hostile action’. The North Vietnamese combat operations log, published years later and almost certainly authentic, shows that they deployed no ships near the Americans. Nonetheless, the destroyers responded to the new radar contacts by taking wild evasive action. Maddox could not identify a target for its guns, but Turner Joy expended over three hundred rounds of 5-inch ammunition, and recorded two dozen incoming torpedoes – all this, though flare-dropping aircraft glimpsed no sign of any enemy. At 2335G the ‘action’ was finally broken off, with Herrick reporting two enemy boats sunk and another damaged. Yet some of his subordinates remained sceptical that any clash had taken place. It soon became clear that the ‘incoming torpedo’ effects spotted by sonar operators were caused by drastic rudder movements as the destroyers manoeuvred. Within an hour Herrick was signalling ‘ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS,’ and soon afterwards, ‘NEVER POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED A BOAT AS SUCH.’
Yet in Washington, following the ‘Critic’ warning from Phu Bai, McNamara had warned the president of an imminent North Vietnamese attack. Three hours after the ‘battle’ ended, Johnson authorised a retaliatory strike against North Vietnamese bases. Five hours before the planes took off, Adm. Sharp warned the Pentagon that ‘a review of the action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful’. But then sigint produced an NSA intercept in which the North Vietnamese claimed to have ‘shot down two planes in the battle area … we had sacrificed two ships and all the rest are okay … The enemy ship could also have been damaged.’ This message related, in reality, to the events of the 2nd, about which the communists themselves were still confused. McNamara, however, seized on it as confirming the new 4 August attack. Along with specious ‘eye-witness reports’ from the destroyers, the defense secretary felt confident that he knew enough to allow the president to launch his air strikes.
At 6 p.m. on the 4th a Pentagon spokesman announced to the world ‘a second deliberate attack’. Rusk told aides at the State Department to dust down Bundy’s May draft of a congressional resolution. Johnson stormed to McNamara: ‘I not only want those torpedo boats that attacked the Maddox destroyed, I want everything in the harbour destroyed … I want to give them a real dose.’ The defense secretary did nothing to restrain the president’s fury, to correct his misapprehensions, even though evidence was available to do so. McNamara’s use of sigint was highly selective. Both then and in subsequent evidence before Congress, the defense secretary chose first to ignore, later to suppress, a mass of data showing the North Vietnamese preoccupied with rescuing their damaged boats, and explicitly ordered not to tangle with the Americans again. The fundamentals are plain, of what history knows as the Tonkin Gulf Incident: Maddox was ‘coat-trailing’ on a mission explicitly linked to OPLAN-34A. Given the repeated coastal commando raids taking place, it was unsurprising that North Vietnamese fingers were tight on triggers. The decision to commit their boats against the US warship was taken by a gung-ho communist officer whose decision was nonetheless regretted – and soon known in Washington to be regretted – by many of those in high places, albeit not by Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. No ‘second attack’ took place.
McNamara, however, was impatient for action. The president, at a critical moment in the election campaign, was anxious not to concede any opening for Republicans to charge him with weakness. He won plaudits for his prompt and tough response to an assault on the American flag. Thereafter, it was almost inevitable that the administration should lie and lie again, to conceal the multiple blunders and deceits perpetrated to justify air strikes on North Vietnam. The president delayed his 4 August national TV address until 11.36 p.m. Eastern time, when Adm. Sharp told him that Ticonderoga’s and Constellation’s planes were airborne. ‘Aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam,’ Johnson told his people, ‘has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas … repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense but with positive reply … We know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.’
The Joint Chiefs’ order to the navy began: ‘By 0700 local conduct a one-time maximum effort … with objective of maximum assurance of high level of target destruction.’ Sixty-four sorties were flown, which destroyed some North Vietnamese boats for the loss of two US aircraft. One of the pilots, Lt. Everett Alvarez, said that ‘it was sort of like a dream’ suddenly to find himself committed to a combat mission after years of make-believe. His dance with unreality turned into a nightmare: he spent the ensuing eight years in a North Vietnamese prison.
The president’s response to the Tonkin Gulf Incident reflected an anger of state, a frustration that a tinpot Asian communist republic should dare to defy the United States. The detail did not much matter to him: already on the morning of 4 August, Johnson indicated his intention to exploit the ‘second attack’ conjectured by sigint to secure a resolution from Congress supporting escalation. He would have been dismayed if, later that day, anticlimactic facts had pricked the bubble of his carefully-crafted indignation. It nonetheless reflects poorly upon his advisers, and above all on McNamara, that they failed to correct the earlier misinformation, or to calm the commander-in-chief. They allowed him to elevate into a major drama a brush at sea that could easily and should rightfully have been dismissed as trivial.
The only plausible explanation is that the defense secretary had himself become impatient for aggressive action. America’s leaders chose to exploit a skirmish provoked by their own inshore gamesmanship to rationalise a demonstration of will and capability. Earlier that summer Washington had sent a message to Hanoi by way of Canada’s ICC delegate, warning Pham Van Dong of ‘the greatest devastation’ if North Vietnamese meddling in the South persisted. After the Tonkin Gulf Incident, at American bidding the Canadian repeated his earlier words: there were lots more bombs where the 5 August ones had come from. In response Dong became ‘very angry’, and said, ‘The more USA spreads war, the greater will be its ultimate defeat.’
Following the Tonkin Gulf clash, McNamara told an important lie before the Senate: ‘Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was
not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions [in the same operational area as the Maddox], if there were any.’ The so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution, closely following Bill Bundy’s draft, was now laid before Congress. It empowered the administration ‘to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression’. Sen. Richard Russell spoke for most of his colleagues when he said: ‘Our national honor is at stake. We cannot and we will not shrink from defending it.’ Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who later played Brutus to Johnson’s presidency, said: ‘The proposition was: “Is it all right for American boats to fire back if they’re fired upon?” It’s pretty hard to vote against that.’ Democrats Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse cast the only dissenting votes against the 7 August passage of the Resolution, which thereafter provided the authority for America’s war-making in South-East Asia.
2 HAWKS ASCENDANT
At 1330G on 5 August, North Vietnam’s Party military committee met in the headquarters of the general staff, known as ‘Dragon Court’ because stone dragons flanked the nine steps leading to its entrance. They had just begun to review the events of 2 August when they heard of the American air attacks on the coast. This was followed, in turn, by news that two planes had been shot down and a pilot captured, prompting such a display of glee that the meeting was suspended, as also were immediate recriminations about the Tonkin Gulf clash. Those first raids prompted demonstrations in the streets of Hanoi that were – in the words of a British diplomatic witness – ‘as near to spontaneous as such things ever are in communist countries’. The bombing did more for North Vietnamese unity than any propaganda exhortation. A teenager who watched from his village as aircraft struck nearby oil tanks at first experienced mere shock and bewilderment. Then, ‘I began to see that the lives of young people like me would soon reach a turning point, when we would have to fight for the independence and freedom of our people.’ Far from being cowed by the bombs, they convinced the boy that his people were victims of unprovoked terror: he later became an air defence officer.
