Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Nolan’s combat record was relatively humdrum, but other airmen experienced extraordinary dramas. On 20 April 1967 the navy’s famously brave Lt. Cmdr. Mike Estocin led a three-plane flight against Haiphong, where they took out three SAM sites but his A-4 suffered blast damage. He pulled out, convinced that he could stay airborne, and fired his last Shrike at a ground target before turning away, bleeding fuel fast. With just five minutes’ worth remaining, he plugged onto a KA-3 airborne tanker which flew back to Ticonderoga with his little Skyhawk still attached. Two miles from the flight deck he uncoupled, and made his approach with enough gas for a single pass. The plane burst into flames as he made a perfect landing. Estocin pulled open his canopy as the fire crews played foam, jumped down, tossed his helmet to a handler and walked away without a backward glance. It was a magnificent display of insouciance, but six days later he was less fortunate. A SAM-2 hit his aircraft as he attacked oil-storage tanks near Haiphong, and the remains plunged to the ground. Estocin was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

  One of the most dramatic, and often heroic, features of the air war was the sustained effort to rescue aircrew whose planes were hit. About one-third of downed aircrew were snatched back into American hands; a smaller proportion was taken prisoner by the communists; the rest perished. In the navy’s sector, offshore rescue crews experienced weeks of boredom, cruising over the sea in heavily armoured HH-3E helicopters, listening for an appeal that seldom came: then they were electrified by a summons, a hot flush of danger and drama. There was often a race between ‘the Angels’ and fishermen who could earn a rich ransom from the communists – the equivalent of $200 – for any American they retrieved from the sea.

  On 27 April 1966, after an A-6A was hit by flak, bombardier Brian Westin saw his wounded pilot Bill Westerman turn ashen, his left arm limp, oxygen mask off, the plane in an erratic climb. Westin unbuckled his harness, leaned over to take the stick and guide the plane towards the coast while radioing for help. Westerman roused himself sufficiently to resume control as they steered an erratic course back to Kittyhawk, while their squadron CO lingered alongside. They did not dare attempt a landing, instead ejecting into the sea. One in three of all those who took this route drowned before help could reach them. Westin was winched aboard a rescue helicopter, but then saw that his pilot was too weak from loss of blood to slip into a sling. The navigator once more jumped into the water, to help Westerman to safety. He waved away the Sea King, hastening the wounded man towards medical aid. He was himself rescued by a second helo, just as sharks began circling the blood in the water, and received a Navy Cross.

  A reconnaissance aircraft was once downed on the coast, its pilot killed. As the navigator stood forlorn on a beach surrounded by local people, he glimpsed a rescue chopper approaching, homing on his beeper. Unzipping his flight suit, he pulled a pistol, shot the militia man guarding him, then plunged into the surf and swam towards a successful pick-up. On another such occasion a Seasprite helicopter flew in darkness from a destroyer to pick up two F-4 crewmen hiding in thick cover on North Vietnamese soil. The Seasprite’s gunners held off enemy troops and picked up the Americans under intense fire, then landed back on board with only a few gallons of fuel remaining. Another pilot drifted offshore for hours while two helicopter attempts to recover him failed under fierce gunfire that mortally wounded a crewman. Overhead, fighters contrived to keep the North Vietnamese away from their man in the water until, at last light, a rescue chopper swooped. A triumphant voice called on all Task Force radio frequencies: ‘We got him out!’ A fellow-flier wrote: ‘For the pilots who fought this insane war year after year, this was one victory no one could dispute.’ In 1967 alone, seven navy helicopters were shot down while attempting rescues.

  The air force also achieved some extraordinary feats. As North Vietnamese troops approached a Crusader pilot who had ejected into thick cover south-west of ‘Dodge City’ – Hanoi – a chopper crew lowered a ‘jungle penetrator’, which exhausted its cable ten feet short of the pilot’s outstretched hands. Under fire, and with one crewman killed, the chopper descended into the canopy, using its rotors to hack a passage through the trees until the man on the ground could grab the sling, to be wafted aloft. The helicopter was so damaged that it was obliged to forced-land a few miles on, where a Jolly Green Giant extracted the whole party.

  Lt. Dieter Dengler was a German-born navy Skyraider pilot who crashed in Laos after being hit by ground fire. He was captured and held by the Pathet Lao for four months before making an escape with an air force pilot, Duane Martin. They lived for days on fruit, berries and a little rice until they reached water, built a raft, and drifted downriver until they reached a deserted village in which they found a little corn. Dengler was suffering from jaundice and malaria. When they reached another village, a man with a machete attacked them, fatally wounding Martin. Dengler stumbled on alone, until twenty-two days after his escape he could go no further. As he lay waiting to die, he laid out rocks to form the letters ‘SOS’. Miraculously, this was spotted by a passing USAF flier, who directed a helicopter to recover the stricken man. Dengler emerged weighing ninety-eight pounds, having lost sixty.

  While the air force and navy clamoured against politically-imposed constraints, they were obliged to accept the shortcomings of their attacks even upon the targets authorised. For instance, between March 1965 and November 1968, almost seven hundred sorties were launched against the Thanh Hoa rail bridge, eighty miles south of Hanoi. In March 1967, three hits were achieved with Walleye TV-guided glider bombs. Yet the bridge, and the rail link, stayed defiantly open. Hanoi’s Paul Doumer bridge was closed for six months from August 1967, but only following a long succession of failed attacks.

  That year, a sharp improvement in enemy missile performance caused American losses to rise. Every sortie was met by a hail of SAMs: eighty were fired on 21 August alone. A Russian general complained that his North Vietnamese allies were firing these vastly expensive toys ‘as if they were firecrackers’. In the month of August the navy lost sixteen aircraft. Around Hanoi, almost six hundred AA guns and fifteen SAM sites were deployed. Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer wrote: ‘The price of admission for our attacking forces ultimately became very high, almost prohibitive.’ In 1967 the navy claimed destruction of thirty SAM sites, 187 flak positions and 955 bridges – some of the latter number representing repeat strikes – together with large quantities of rail rolling-stock. Overall, it was estimated that bombing had inflicted $300 million worth of damage on North Vietnam – but at a cost of 922 aircraft destroyed, of which the cash value was three times greater. The ground defences now deployed eight thousand AA guns and two hundred missile launchers. The North’s electricity capacity had been cut by 85 per cent, yet the country kept going on portable generators. American intelligence about the enemy’s industry and infrastructure remained poor. There was little sign that the air offensive was impeding North Vietnam’s war effort.

  Fliers’ morale declined in the face of the losses and perceived lack of achievement. They referred derisively to their planners and commanders as ‘the Tonkin Bay Yacht Club’. Aircrew kept flying, bombing, and sometimes dying, but found it ever harder to believe that the results were worth it, though their commanders stubbornly resisted any implication that Vietnam signalled the limitation of air power. The 1984 edition of the USAF’s Basic Doctrine Manual persisted doggedly with the assertion that ‘Aerospace forces have the power to penetrate to the heart of an enemy’s strength without first defeating defending forces in detail.’ Such power, claimed the bomber barons, enabled attacking aircraft to assail ‘a selected series of vital targets’ which, if destroyed, would wreck the enemy’s capability and will to fight. A 1986 interviewer who asked Curtis LeMay if the war in Vietnam could have been won received the response: ‘In any two-week period you want to mention, through a program of unrestricted bombardment.’ This was the view LeMay, like Gen. William Momyer and Adm. Ulysses Grant Sharp, carried to his grave. In the eyes of posterity, ho
wever, it appears a fantasy. Tactical air attacks in the South, notably including those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, caused immense difficulties for the communist war effort. However, the political cost of Rolling Thunder to the US was much greater than the damage imposed upon North Vietnam. This would almost certainly have remained the case even had America’s air chiefs been granted the open range for which they clamoured.

  15

  Taking the Pain

  1 BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES

  In January 1966 Poland’s deputy foreign minister arrived in Hanoi bearing a message about the Americans’ eagerness to negotiate, which was contemptuously dismissed; in June, a Canadian emissary met the same response. A month later Jean Sainteny, French representative in the March 1946 negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, delivered new proposals. He urged the North Vietnamese to convert a winning hand into a peace agreement, saying that the Americans’ only aspiration was to save face. Yet even as the Frenchman was talking to Pham Van Dong, Ho himself entered the room. He told the visitor to go home and report to Washington that his people were wholly unafraid, and would fight to the end ‘even if we must sacrifice everything’. The communists had set their faces against any settlement that protracted the existence of the Saigon regime: they were bent upon victory, and nothing less.

  Just as the Luftwaffe’s 1940 blitz on Britain enabled Winston Churchill to energise the British people to meet it, so US bombing proved a godsend to North Vietnam’s leaders, empowering them to rally their citizens against a visible menace from the skies, rather than for the mere political objective of reunification. Old rifles were issued, enabling villagers to fire at enemy planes, which contributed little to air defence, but something to the shooters’ morale. Musician Van Ky said: ‘To our people, [the bombing] was nothing unexpected or strange – we were psychologically prepared for it. Uncle Ho told us at the start, “The war may become very prolonged, and our capital Hanoi may be destroyed, but we are not afraid.”’ A teenager said that he was urged by his mother to drop out of high school and join the army, in contradiction of the usual parental inhibitions, after a stray bomb landed on a local playground, killing several children including two of his cousins.

  A committed cadre remained for the rest of her days nostalgic for the exhilaration of the days when she was a young Party member under American bombardment: ‘We had an ideal, an aspiration, something to strive for. We competed fiercely with each other to fulfil every task, and I remember sometimes bursting into tears when others did better than me. Nobody needed to be conscripted – they were just eager to serve. And there was no corruption.’

  This was less than the whole truth. While North Vietnam’s people indeed displayed notable stoicism, it seems absurd to pretend that they embraced enthusiastically their ordeal by fire. A veteran who later became a university literature professor said in 2016: ‘For years Vietnamese have been told the war story as if it was a romance. Some of us are tired of this approach.’ A woman high school teacher agreed: ‘It was a terrible time. There was no happiness – we had so little of absolutely everything. The men knew they all had to join the military, but nobody wanted to go. I remember one of my pupils, called up before he had even finished school, returning just before he went South, and asking to be allowed to sit one more time at his old desk.’

  Pham Hung, living in an eastern coastal town, had a friend named Huong, notably handsome and a fine footballer, who led a lonely life because his father and most of his family had fled south in 1954. For years after Huong reached military age, he was rejected for service because of his parents’ past links with the French. At last the authorities were so impressed by his enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause that they dispatched him down the Trail. His martial zeal was faked, however: he sought only reunion with his father. He was imprisoned following an attempt to desert, and was last heard of making unsuccessful escape bids: ‘His story was a real human tragedy,’ said Hung. A similar sequence of events unfolded when army recruiters visited a remote village to take its draft quota: one family told their eldest son to hide in the jungle. Officials warned that unless the young man reported within three days, his parents would lose their ration cards. He duly went to the army, but deserted at the first opportunity down South, with the warm encouragement of the family.

  As a boy, Hung was bemused by his father’s obsessive commitment to his two sons’ education: he lashed and goaded them towards securing college places. One day Hung played truant to join a quest for wreckage from a downed US Navy fighter, for which he received the thrashing of his life. Only later did he understand the cause: college kids, like their counterparts in South Vietnam and America, escaped the draft. Hung’s father was desperate to keep his boys in education, because thus away from the war. Every Vietnamese remembered forever afterwards where they were on first seeing American aircraft: Hung, as a ten-year-old, was so terrified when he saw a nearby bridge blow up that he ran to hide his prized schoolbag and books, lest they should be destroyed. Afterwards, he laughed at himself for this preoccupation with childish possessions rather than with his life. He laughed less a few years later, however, when an army colonel’s wife and daughter, evacuated from Hanoi, were billeted in his parents’ little house. He fell in love with the daughter, a teenager like himself. One day her mother was walking back from the nearby town when she was killed by a bomb aimed at a bridge.

  Hung’s family lived in a small Buddhist community, not far from a matching Catholic one. The children of the two towns waged a miniature religious war, hurling pretend-grenades at each other, firing fantasy rifles, digging tunnels. It grieved some adults that the children’s games should be those of the battlefield, but such is the fashion in every warring society. Huge posters hung in village streets, depicting Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon as grotesques, their protruding tongues runways for bombers. At school every morning, pupils performed mass calisthenics while chanting prescribed slogans. Most Vietnamese received their only news through networks of government street loudspeakers. Propaganda asserted that their Southern counterparts lived in privation, exploited as slaves by the Americans.

  Bombers’ radar-baffling ‘chaff’ was strewn upon fields and homes. Even in rural communities, people spent countless hours in shelters – and learned to delay leaving them for several minutes after an ‘all clear’ sounded, to allow time for the last spent rounds and debris to fall out of the sky. Dogs were often named after Johnson, and later his successor: ‘The name Nixon was used to frighten children, as if he was a monster from a fairy tale.’ Because most raids took place in daylight, the Vietnamese adjusted to living, working, shopping as creatures of the night. Trains could reach Hanoi from the Chinese border inside the hours of darkness. Truck drivers were taught to familiarise themselves with stretches of road they could cover without benefit of headlights.

  Engineers displayed boundless energy and ingenuity in repairing damaged bridges and rail track. Six hundred thousand labourers, mostly women, were eventually employed on making good bomb damage: after pilots attacked the Kep railyards on the vital China line, it reopened to traffic inside twenty hours. A further 145,000 people manned air defence facilities. When so many men were absent performing military service, women bore a lion’s share of physical burdens. One peasant child’s earliest memory was of hearing his mother rise at 3 a.m. during the rice-planting and harvesting seasons, to fulfil the most strenuous tasks before the sun reached its full height. Yet on some days the hapless woman became so exhausted that she drifted into sleep in the midst of the paddy fields.

  Familiarity with attack did not breed contempt, but it diminished fear. Many Vietnamese city people seized respites conceded by the US government for national holidays, briefly to escape into the countryside. A Russian diplomat described the rush homewards through darkness in the last hours before a bombing pause was due to end: ‘Endless columns of lorries and fuel trucks jammed the narrow, ruined roads, on which bomb craters had been hastily patched up. As midnight approached, t
he atmosphere close to Hanoi grew tense, in queues of traffic that often stalled. I had to get out of the car and awaken one very young Vietnamese driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel.’

  Because of rationing, there was a constant search for food supplements. In the countryside these included stewed rat with saffron, grilled rat with lemon leaves, locusts, grasshoppers, beetles, silkworm larvae. No pet was safe. When an eleven-year-old was told that the family was moving home, he hugged a cherished pooch he had to leave behind: ‘Some strangers took it away in the morning and I understood that they were going to kill it.’ Dog was said to taste best if the flesh was beaten and softened before the animal was killed.