by Max Hastings
Do Thi Thu and her fellow-students at Hanoi University were almost as hungry as their compatriots down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. ‘The boys felt it most,’ she said. There was little meat and few vegetables; potatoes or maize were sometimes substituted for rice. Even water for washing was in short supply. In the evenings, instead of amusements or movies there were long meetings of the Youth Union, to discuss how to become a good citizen, which could degenerate into fierce arguments – especially one night when a student put down his watch in the washroom and a bad citizen stole it. There was no smoking, no alcohol and almost no sexual relationships: ‘We were good kids. People didn’t complain much – we just accepted this was how things were.’
As a Hanoi teenager, Pham Phuong felt no animosity towards the Americans. Then the air campaign started, however. With the deluge of bombs came terror: the first explosion prompted her to run and hide under a tree. Thereafter, life-changing counter-measures were adopted. Phuong and her family were among hundreds of thousands evacuated from cities to the countryside, where the people were welcoming but food was always short. Evacuee families were separated, each member taking up quarters in a different house, so that uncomprehending small children ran hither and thither, sobbing, in search of their mothers. Huts were lit only by kerosene lanterns which conferred sooty noses on those who embraced them closely in order to read.
Phuong, a pretty young schoolgirl and then an office book-keeper, experienced austerity beyond the imagination of most Westerners. She walked two miles to primary school, and later five miles to high school – barefoot, of course. As a teenager, instead of fantasising about boy–girl romance, she spun secret dreams of smart clothes, especially silk trousers – and above all about more and better food. Her father forbade her to attend the open-air screenings of Chinese and Russian movies, mostly about wars: tickets were prohibitively expensive. She enjoyed an occasional treat after school, visiting her uncle to listen to programmes on his little Chinese-made radio; she did not set eyes on a TV set until after the war ended. And yet Phuong was the daughter of a relatively privileged family, proud of its scholarly tradition – her father read fluently in English, French and Russian. An expertise in communications secured his continued employment, but when the time came for her to attend college she was rejected because of her ‘unsound’ class background, as the daughter of an ‘intellectual’.
A single black mark on one’s personal record could blight a career. When Nguyen Dinh Kien received his draft notice, his parents secured him a deferment because he was their only surviving son, after his elder brother was killed fighting in Laos. His government file recorded the fact that his father had once been a security guard for the French, and asserted that ‘he has not yet worked hard enough in his personal ideological struggle’. Kien wrote later: ‘These harsh, bitter words caused untold problems throughout my life.’ His application for Party membership was rejected. Despite a good school record he was debarred from the most cherished privilege – travel abroad for study. When he volunteered for pilot training, although he passed every test he was rejected as ‘unreliable’. For years he was denied an army commission.
After young men donned uniform, for all that loved ones knew of them thereafter, they might have been swallowed by a dragon, as was figuratively the case. Families suffered terribly, awaiting news about the battlefield fate of husbands and children: for five months after NVA soldier Nguyen Hien Dinh was killed in 1965, his kin knew nothing. Hien’s mother ran out to meet the postman each time he called on their remote village – and received only a headshake. Their first intimation of tragedy was a Tet greeting from his regiment, such as was sent to next-of-kin of all fatal casualties, with Hien’s name misspelt. They received formal notification of his death only three weeks later.
Le Duan and his colleagues achieved extraordinary success in mobilising North Vietnam and sustaining its people’s will for war. But personal justice, fulfilment, happiness had no place on their agenda, with or without American bombing.
2 FRIENDS
At the outset of Rolling Thunder, the US embassy in Moscow opined that direct Russian intervention remained unlikely so long as North Vietnam’s existence as a socialist state was not threatened. While this proved true, bombing goaded both the Soviets and the Chinese to dispatch aid on an unprecedented scale. The first SAM-2 site was established south-east of Hanoi in April 1965. A typical battery comprised four to six launchers deployed at fifty-yard intervals around a radar and communications van. Each thirty-five-foot missile resembled a flying telephone pole with stubby winglets – a two-stage rocket soaring to a ceiling of almost sixty thousand feet, pursued by the white trail left by its kerosene and nitric acid fuel. A booster burned for five seconds after launch, then a sustainer took over for a further twenty. Missiles were usually fired in pairs or fours, and a 350-pound warhead was almost invariably lethal if it exploded within a hundred yards of an aircraft. In 1965 a plane fell for every seventeen SAMs launched, but as electronic counter-measures improved, that ratio improved in the Americans’ favour to thirty-five to one. By 1972 it took an average sixty missiles to achieve a ‘kill’.
Several hundred Russian technicians and aircrew served in North Vietnam as instructors and advisers, and most enjoyed the experience. Col. Yury Kislitsyn, born in Kazakhstan in 1934, was a highly experienced SAM-2 commander when posted east: ‘I was very keen – it was romantic, you know.’ Petr Zalipsky from Vintnitsa, a twenty-one-year-old corporal, was the youngest of a hundred men who endured an apparently interminable train journey across Russia and China. Every arriving Russian was issued with an identity document in the vernacular, stating that he was a Soviet citizen, ‘providing assistance to the Vietnamese people in their struggle against the American aggressors, who should be given all possible assistance’.
Lt. Valery Miroshnichenko was twenty-one when he went to Vietnam, a twenty-hour flight that involved five refuelling stops. His superiors made plain that the assignment was a privileged one: to mask their military status he and his comrades travelled in civilian clothes, selected from a large Moscow wardrobe of East German-tailored suits, ‘extremely chic for the time’. They entered themselves in a North Vietnamese hotel register as ‘visiting engineers’. ‘We kept looking around, laughing, exchanging remarks about how lovely and interesting everything was, when suddenly Bang! Bang! There were explosions and cannon fire – two Phantoms hitting an oil-storage facility. They made three passes, with anti-aircraft guns shooting. We found ourselves pushed into the dirt, spoiling our lovely clean shirts. When the firing stopped and we got back on the bus, there were no more jokes.’ The journey to their appointed missile site involved a ferry trip, and through every moment of the forty-minute passage the Russians nursed terrors that US aircraft would catch them in mid-river.
In 1966 Lt. Valery Panov became senior officer at a Haiphong communications facility, relaying take-off warnings from the Soviet trawlers that shadowed US carriers. The Russian detachment wore Vietnamese uniforms with no distinguishing marks, and lived discreetly and uncomfortably in the roofless ruins of an old French barracks. They suffered from chronic heat rash, and because of a water shortage did most of their washing in the sea. In the course of the war only eighteen Russians were killed by US aircraft, but Panov once came close enough to an exploding bomb to spend two days concussed by a masonry fragment that struck his helmet. ‘It was a special time,’ he said sombrely, ‘when you could depend only on yourself and the next man.’ One of Maj. Viktor Malevanyi’s officers took shelter in a fresh bomb crater, believing that the same spot is never struck twice. He turned out to be wrong, and was blown to fragments.
Most of the Vietnamese in the thousand-strong regiment trained by Petr Zalipsky’s unit spoke a little of his language, and some technical personnel had studied in Russia. From July 1965 their battery launched missiles at least every second day, sometimes more often: ‘There was constant tension.’ In view of the urgency of the need, training was cut from six months to
three, and the Russians learned to share the fierce Vietnamese hatred of the Americans. Battalion commander Major Ilinykh, a popular and emotional character, urged his three controllers before their first launch: ‘My dear guys, please catch the bastards and destroy them, prove we are Soviet patriots!’ Local Vietnamese civilians, who viewed the foreign officer as their would-be saviour, greeted every appearance of his KAZ-59 ‘goat’ vehicle with cries of ‘Ilinykh! Ilinykh!’
When the Russians shifted locations, villagers presented them with pineapples and bananas, and helped to dig trenches – a backbreaking task in the stony ground. Folk legend held that shot-down American aircrew were safe if they fell into military hands, but became liable to be torn limb from limb if civilians or militia got to them first, as had sometimes been the fate of Allied aircrew in wartime Germany. Valery Panov asserted with some relish: ‘The peasants would kill them with hoes and bury them in the nearest bomb crater.’ Valery Miroshnichenko said: ‘We all were bursting to do some shooting at the Yanks, to show them who was boss.’ Viktor Malevanyi, who had lived through World War II as a child in occupied Ukraine, said: ‘Vietnamese feeling against the Americans was even more bitter than ours had been towards the Germans.’
A radar controller peered at one approaching American formation and puzzled over an appropriate aiming point for his SAM-2. As a result of US jamming, said Petr Zalipsky, ‘all we could see on the monitor was a horizontal line, while the vertical one flashed light. The lead aircraft was throwing chaff that baffled our beam. One had to try to figure out which aircraft was the jammer. There were two groups of fifteen aircraft – F-4D and F-105. My instinct was just to fire at the centre of the formation. I gave Major Ilinykh the coordinates. He said, “Okay, shall we chance it? Maybe we’ll hit something in the midst of that mass of light.”’ They fired, and as usual claimed a hit, though often this was no more plausible than a MACV body count.
The eventual ten Vietnamese missile regiments adopted the slogan ‘Keep moving, or die,’ because harsh experience showed that to remain in any location above twenty-four hours was to invite American devastation. They could dismount launchers within an hour, to shift to a new location perhaps five miles distant. They learned to activate tracking radars only five to seven seconds before a missile launch. ‘Two bright spots appeared very close to each other on the screen,’ in the words of Nguyen Kien Dinh, sweating in the stifling heat of the guidance van. ‘The three operators read off the aircraft’s speed, simultaneously shouted “Target!” … Then battalion gave the order, “Launch two missiles, range …”’ There was a flash of light, a white cloud, and a thunderous explosion. The bright streak of the missile could be seen speeding towards the enemy aircraft, and the van rocked slightly. Six seconds later a second SAM-2 blasted skywards, and thereafter crews heard only the voice of the guidance officer reading off ranges. When the two signals met on the screen a bright spot blossomed, enveloping the target’s return signal. All three guidance operators shouted ‘Warhead detonation!’ Successes were relatively rare, however: Kien’s missile battalion operated for two years before achieving a confirmed kill.
Advantage in the electronic war tilted hither and thither through the course of Rolling Thunder. It is hard to overstate the impact made by awareness of homing Shrikes on the courage and morale of defending missile crews. When North Vietnamese personnel understood that activation of their tracking radar invited obliteration, sometimes within seconds, some became conspicuously reluctant to open fire. They took refuge in claims that they were unable to identify a target, prompting the fury of commanders. One day near Haiphong in 1966, confronted with this excuse for inertia, a senior officer visiting a battery’s control van exploded: ‘Even my old eyes can see the target on your screen! Launch your missiles, damn it! They’re attacking the Uong Bi power plant!’ In December 1967 the defenders faced a crisis: the Americans began successfully to jam the guidance-channel radio link between missile-control vans and their associated SAM launchers. The balance tilted back, however, when a PoW under interrogation revealed details of the new Walleye TV-guided bomb, together with its intended targets. Two months later, on St Valentine’s Day 1968, an almost intact F-105 fell into communist hands, laying bare the secrets of its jamming pod.
Russians found the summer heat of Vietnam almost intolerable, even working in shorts and showering every few hours. Sugar melted. Cigarettes were rationed. They seldom received post, and their radios could pick up no home station. Newspapers appeared in bundles, weeks late. The arrival of a parcel – containing perhaps caviar, salami, brown bread, ‘short’ calendars for soldiers close to the end of their tours, vodka and Russian champagne – was a big event. Officers also received brandy.
The Russians came from a society that was scarcely affluent, yet they were shocked by the barefoot poverty of North Vietnam, and by the relentless labours performed by women. Russians were as fascinated as Americans by their beauty, but non-fraternisation rules were strictly enforced. Girls from a nearby village dropped by to chat to Petr Zalipsky’s unit ‘and maybe allow a few kisses, but if you put your hands where they shouldn’t be, or tried to press a girl into a corner, she would punch you – only softly, but that was enough. They were very strong.’ Zalipsky’s friend Ivan fell in love with a stunning half-French girl who worked in the canteen, and they requested permission to marry. Instead, the girl vanished and Ivan was smartly sent home to Russia. When Valery Miroshnichenko saw women shifting rocks under guard and asked who they were, his interpreter said coldly, ‘They are convicts being punished for having affairs with foreigners.’
The ten-year-old son of a North Vietnamese radio engineer had been brought up never to speak to strangers, and a young Russian named Selyagin who was posted to work with his father was dismayed when every time ‘Uncle Se’ offered him a sweet, the child screamed his head off: ‘I was so scared of his height, thick hair and grey eyes.’ Most Russians, however, found themselves welcomed. One delighted local children with card tricks. In a society bereft of personal cameras, others made themselves popular by photographing family groups and distributing prints. But the Vietnamese monitored every movement of their guests, even to the latrines, and were conspicuously reluctant for these supposed allies to learn their language.
The Russians hated the mosquitoes, ‘big as B-52s’ in the wondering words of one soldier. They were fascinated by the vicissitudes of diet. Their hosts provided them with far more generous rations than their own people received, together with copious supplies of beer, but meat was always short. Petr Zalipsky’s unit used grasshoppers as bait to catch giant frogs – ‘delicious, with sweet white flesh like chicken … to this day I prefer frog to seafood’. Many learned to enjoy eating snake, which they thought better than the local pork, which had bristles still clinging to it. Ants routinely invaded mess tins, and milk was seldom available. Valery Panov felt fortunate that at Haiphong he could fish in the sea, occasionally use a trawl line to catch wild ducks. Yury Kislitsyn said: ‘This was a very hungry country: we had a saying that Vietnamese eat anything that crawls except tanks, everything that swims except aircraft-carriers, everything that flies except B-52s.’ One day he fondled his pet dog, Kao-Kee – and the next day ate it, with tolerable satisfaction.
Maj. Petr Isaev headed the Soviet aviation adviser group in the late 1960s, when North Vietnam’s defence was spearheaded by MiG-21s. He witnessed more than a few fiascos, for instance a Vietnamese wing commander making a wheels-up belly landing in front of a crowd of VIP spectators because he had forgotten the correct position for the under-carriage lever. The Vietnamese felt understandably humiliated, and the Russian sought to console him, shrugging, ‘Anything can happen in the flying business.’ Isaev was more dismayed by the manner in which ideology pervaded training: a committee decreed which Vietnamese should fulfil a given mission, though half its membership was bereft of flight qualifications. When he sought to change such practices and introduce after-action analysis, he was sternly rebuffed by the regi
ment’s political officer, who said through an interpreter, ‘Comrade, you have come here to help us in our struggle against the American aggressors. Other matters are absolutely no business of yours.’
As relations between China and the Soviet Union became more acrimonious, there were suspensions and outright stoppages of Russian rail shipments through Mao’s territory, including coffins. Thereafter Soviet personnel who died had to be buried where they fell, so that Petr Zalipsky and his comrades joked with the local girls that they must fulfil Russian custom ‘and visit our graves with vodka and brown bread’. A fierce competition developed between Chinese and Russian technicians and diplomats, to snatch technology from shot-down US aircraft, with the Vietnamese often deceiving both about wrecks’ whereabouts. Soviet diplomat Anatoly Zaitsev recalled a song one of his colleagues composed, about their mad dashes through jungle and paddy to reach unexploded ordnance or downed planes before the Chinese:
Come for a date with me
At six in the evening after the war.
I’ll wait for you in Arbat Square,
I’ll be holding a piece of F-105 under my arm.
Local villagers appropriated aluminium, a precious metal for domestic purposes. ‘By the morning after a crash,’ said a wondering Russian in the salvage trade, ‘there would be nothing left of a wreck. The Vietnamese had taken it to make combs and rings.’ The Soviet embassy in Hanoi reported bitterly to Moscow in March 1967: ‘Our military specialists work in a very difficult atmosphere … often unnecessarily worsened by Vietnamese comrades … [who] on various pretexts conceal crash sites and delay visits. On numerous occasions shot-down aircraft have been examined before the arrival of Soviet specialists by others who turned out to be Chinese … and removed everything of value.’
