by Max Hastings
In July 1966 the Russians wrote angrily to the North Vietnamese government, suggesting that delays in unloading cargoes at ports reflected a desire to keep Soviet vessels at Haiphong, to deter American attacks. The Soviet embassy reported to Moscow that far from the Vietnamese being grateful for industrial equipment supplied, much was simply stored. The recipients also complained ungraciously about the poor quality of Russian materiel. In March 1968 they introduced a law to ‘punish counter-revolutionary activity’, which included a ban on Soviet diplomats’ travel, and barred all unauthorised conversation with local people. A member of the Russian mission appears to have been expelled for contacting the eclipsed Giap faction. The Hanoi politburo, said the embassy angrily, regarded the USSR merely as a ‘rear area’ providing equipment for their war effort, and despised its anxiety to see peace made with the Americans. An NVA general told the Soviet chargé, ‘Had we been defeated, we would have had no choice but to agree to talks. As it is, we are constantly winning decisive victories. What would talks mean for us? Losing everything, above all friendship with China, which is utterly opposed to negotiations.’
On the SAM sites, however, there was a tolerable working relationship between Russian advisers and their Vietnamese pupils. Lt. Valery Miroshnichenko said: ‘You told them to learn something and they did so, even if they did not understand what they had learned. It wasn’t so much that they lived in fear, as that they were driven by discipline, thoroughness, striving for victory. They were constructing a communist society.’ He and his comrades were fascinated by how much the Vietnamese accomplished on their miserable rations – ‘a couple of spoonfuls of plain rice … Where did their strength come from? They were like ants, fixed solely upon achieving appointed tasks.’ North Vietnamese commanders grudgingly authorised a small increase in the rations of missile crews, in hopes of improving their visual skills.
In June 1965, in response to a request from Le Duan, China dispatched to Vietnam a contingent of military engineers and logisticians. More than 170,000 troops – mostly pioneers or engineers – followed during the ensuing year, and between 1965 and 1968 a total of 310,011 Chinese served there, together with 346 advisers. Fifty-seven-year-old Col. Guilin Long was a railway specialist who had served through both the civil war and the Korean conflict. He was summoned to the PLA General Staff building in Beijing one day in April 1965, to be ordered to join a ten-man command group flying immediately to Vietnam. Their role was to direct the repair of rail links damaged by American bombing, and thus speed the flow of arms and supplies from China. Long’s special responsibility was to be the border crossing at Huu Nghi Quan – ‘Friendship Pass’ – and the 150-mile Hanoi–Lao Cai sector. Led by a senior general, on arrival in North Vietnam they were greeted by Pham Van Dong and other members of the politburo. ‘The situation was extremely serious,’ Long wrote in his memoirs. ‘If Vietnam’s national rail network deteriorated further, the whole war effort would be at risk.’
He was able to exploit his 1950–53 experience in sustaining North Korea’s rail system under air assault. He felt his age, however, travelling relentlessly through the worst of the monsoon season. During the heat of the day, when the temperature sometimes touched 36 degrees Celsius, ‘we grew dizzy and found our clothes bathed in sweat. When it rained, we were coated in mud from head to foot … We did not live well.’ In June the first of the workforce arrived – five regiments of the PLA’s Railway Corps, plus a regiment of anti-aircraft artillery. Long assumed the title of engineering director for the ‘No. 1 Detachment of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Engineer Corps’, though it is unlikely that any of its personnel had been consulted about their posting.
Long established a headquarters in Lang Son province, his workers encamped around the tracks. The Chinese were dismayed to learn that Saigon radio had carried reports of their arrival. When US reconnaissance aircraft circled the area, on 3 July the Vietnamese persuaded them to shift quarters. This did not spare them from strafing, however, which inflicted significant casualties. Long wrote: ‘We found ourselves in the same predicament as in Korea twelve years earlier … All our locations were obviously known to the enemy.’ Vietnamese cadres suggested that the blue cotton suits worn by every Chinese betrayed their nationality.
As the summer advanced, beyond the grief inflicted by American bombing, temperatures sometimes reached 49 degrees, with humidity of 85 per cent. The men labouring on the tracks consumed fifteen litres of water a day, yet some nonetheless collapsed. Diseases spread and multiplied through bacteria present in every stream and puddle. China’s soldier-labourers fell prey to endemic skin sores and insomnia. Food was short: the Vietnamese provided their allies only with pumpkin and water spinach, accompanied by a few bananas. Long’s regiments had to import canned food and dried vegetables from China. Soldiers hated the local centipedes, leeches and mosquitoes as much as did their American counterparts a few hundred miles to the south. They found snakes attacking eggs stacked in the mess kitchens, and slithering into sleeping quarters – one man died from a viper bite. Thousands succumbed to malaria. ‘Though we of the Railway Corps had suffered all manner of difficulties in the [civil war] and in Korea, we were never before obliged to work in such a hostile environment,’ wrote Long.
Then the bombers came again, intensifying their misery. A 9 July 1965 raid on the western line damaged both stations and bridges. On 23 August, US aircraft hit the northern line and the Chinese working on it. A big 20 September attack on the Thanh Hoa River bridge inflicted twenty hits and serious damage; five further raids followed. The Chinese took pride in the fact that their men contrived swift repairs: the link to China was never severed for long. Further south, however, important bridges in Bac Giang province, near Hanoi, were hit repeatedly – a Chinese soldier drove a blazing truck off one span under fire, lest it explode and inflict further damage. More anti-aircraft guns were summoned from Beijing; deep trenches and bunkers dug; camps dispersed and much reduced in size. Flak crews claimed spectacular successes, as gunners always do, suggesting that they shot down eleven US aircraft during four October raids, and damaged another seventeen. When the Chinese first arrived they had only two intelligence personnel to monitor American activity. Over the ensuing two years the air defence network expanded to include thirty-one raid-plotting tables and an elaborate telephone warning system. To improve the soldiers’ parlous physical conditions, the threadbare PLA authorised unprecedented indulgences: a spare set of working clothes for every man, plastic sandals in place of canvas shoes, mosquito repellent, snakebite remedies, medical advisers. The Vietnamese grudgingly allowed their guests to plant their own vegetable patches.
The perils did not abate, however. On the afternoon of 21 August 1966, Guilin Long was driving to inspect a construction site on Route 1 near Yulong mountain when US aircraft struck. Because of the noise of his own vehicle, he was oblivious of peril until he saw soldiers dashing for the shelter of the nearby jungle. He and his aides stopped the car and leapt out into a hail of cannon fire. Blast from an explosion hurled Long into a nearby trench. His chief of operations was killed along with their driver; the Vietnamese interpreter was wounded. Long’s personal escort suffered a severed artery in his arm which caused him to collapse as he tried to pull his unconscious chief out of the trench. When Long recovered his senses, he found himself drenched in the man’s blood. The colonel was later sent home, suffering concussion and spinal damage. He became one among 1,675 Chinese personnel wounded, along with 771 killed, during Rolling Thunder.
So far as is known, no Russian or Chinese aircrew flew in combat against the Americans. Under a September 1966 agreement between Hanoi and Pyongyang, however, North Korea initially committed to combat ten MiG-17 pilots, later increased to twenty, based at Kep airfield north-east of Hanoi, and known as ‘Group Z’. A total of eighty-seven North Koreans flew for North Vietnam at one time or another between early 1967 and their withdrawal at the end of 1968. They lost fourteen pilots killed, and claimed to have shot down tw
enty-six US aircraft.
On 23 December 1966, New York Times deputy managing editor Harrison Salisbury arrived in Hanoi on a visit with momentous propaganda consequences. He had been chosen to receive a visa from among a host of media applicants, because he was a declared opponent of US bombing. Salisbury was shown sites in Hanoi where three hundred homes were said to have been destroyed and ten people killed – five miles from the USAF’s nearest authorised targets. A Vietnamese–Polish Friendship high school was said to have been destroyed. He was also driven sixty miles to Nam Dinh, which he was told had been hit fifty-two times, killing eighty-nine people and wrecking more than one-tenth of the city’s housing. He reported that US aircraft were ‘dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets’.
Salisbury encountered difficulties familiar to every visitor granted privileged access to a totalitarian state. He was thrilled by the experience, and empathised with a poor Asian people subjected to bombardment in a doubtful cause by the most powerful nation on earth. However, he gave insufficient weight in his dispatches and subsequent book to his inability to check anything that his hosts told him, crediting some North Vietnamese assertions that were simply untrue – for instance, that the Americans had been deliberately bombing the Red River dykes and the Nam Dinh textile mill. The US government sought to discredit some of Salisbury’s findings by highlighting the fact that he used statistics of casualties that also featured in communist propoganda pamphlets. Salisbury published a photograph purporting to show a destroyed Catholic cathedral which later investigation revealed to be undamaged. The journalist’s vivid and emotive articles, like similar later reports by left-wing Western visitors to North Vietnam, revealed considerable credulousness.
Nonetheless, the US government was unable convincingly to deny important and unwelcome truths, foremost among which was that a substantial proportion of American air-dropped ordnance fell in the wrong places. For instance, during attacks on Nam Dinh’s power plant, bombs landed on the adjoining textile mills. Navy fighters shot at guns sited on dykes. Once, aircraft tasked to attack one railyard instead bombed another, close to Hanoi. One of the foremost USAF chroniclers of the war, Wayne Thompson, acknowledges in his own account: ‘Even if a pilot correctly identified a target, most of his bombs were apt to miss.’ By the air force’s own estimates, only half of the ordnance dropped by F-105s, which customarily carried six 750lb bombs, landed within five hundred feet of the aiming point. This constituted reasonable accuracy, but left a wide margin for what would come to be called ‘collateral damage’. Moreover, jettisoned bombs, fuel tanks, air-to-ground missiles and a mass of debris from North Vietnamese shells and missiles had to land somewhere. It was beyond dispute that substantial damage had been inflicted on non-military facilities and homes, substantial numbers of civilians killed.
Salisbury conveyed to the world – for his reports reached a huge audience, making an impact beyond anything the Hanoi politburo might have anticipated – two important messages. First, that American bombing was hurting innocents; second, that a simple people were responding with determination and courage. Lyndon Johnson’s clumsy attempts at humanitarian restraint went for naught, since Salisbury demanded why so many trivial targets in the countryside were being attacked, while Hanoi’s power plant and the huge Paul Doumer bridge remained – at that date – unviolated. Yet nobody got quite what they wanted out of the New York Times man’s trip. A February 1967 poll showed that while 85 per cent of Americans now acknowledged that civilians were being killed, 67 per cent continued to favour bombing. The months that followed witnessed a substantial intensification of the air war.
In the last six months of World War II, under Curtis LeMay’s direction the USAAF dropped 147,000 tons of bombs on Japan, killing 330,000 Japanese. Operation Rolling Thunder unleashed four times as much ordnance, and eventually killed fifty-two thousand out of eighteen million North Vietnamese. Half of Haiphong’s residents fled; Hanoi’s population shrank by a third. In 1966 the air campaign cost the United States $6.60 for every dollar’s worth of damage it inflicted, and almost $10 a year later. The previous spring, when Cmdr. James Stockdale was asked by his pilots, ‘Why are we fighting?’ he responded: ‘Because it is in the interests of the United States to do so.’ The longer the bombing continued, however, and the higher losses mounted, the more sceptical became those who did the work. Lt. Eliot Tozer, an A4 pilot, wrote in his diary: ‘The frustration comes on all levels. We fly a limited aircraft, drop limited ordnance, on rare targets in a severely limited amount of time. Worst of all, we do all this in a limited highly unpopular war.’
Tozer’s sensations were shared at the top of the command chain. At the end of a 1967 briefing a despairing Gen. John McConnell of the USAF held his head in his hands and lamented, ‘I can’t tell you how I feel … I’m so sick of it. I have never been so goddamn frustrated.’ Rolling Thunder destroyed 65 per cent of Hanoi’s oil storage, 59 per cent of its power plants, 55 per cent of major bridges, 9,821 vehicles and 1,966 rail cars. Yet Hanoi was able to leverage the bombing to formidable effect, to induce Moscow and Beijing to provide much-increased aid. By 1968 China was shipping a thousand tons of supplies a day down the north-east railroad. North Vietnam had received a total of almost $600 million in economic and $1 billion in military aid, enormous sums for a relatively small, primitive Asian nation.
The Pentagon’s secret 1966 JASON study showed notable perspicuity about the unintended consequences of Rolling Thunder: ‘bombing clearly strengthened popular support of the regime by engendering patriotic and nationalistic enthusiasm’. The study acknowledged that ‘those more directly involved in the bombing underwent personal hardships and anxieties … Morale was probably damaged less by the direct bombing than by its indirect effects, such as evacuation of the urban population and the splitting of families.’ Nonetheless, ‘a direct, frontal attack on a society tends to strengthen the social fabric of the nation, to increase popular support of the existing government, to improve the determination of both the leadership and the populace to fight back’.
RAND analyst Oleg Hoeffding argued in December 1966: ‘The US campaign may have presented the [Hanoi] regime with a near-ideal mix of intended restraint and accidental gore.’ Though Hoeffding’s tone was flippant, he asserted a truth that remained fundamental: ‘Hanoi has reaped substantial benefits from its response to what was an exaggerated threat assessment … As to the effects on public morale and the effectiveness of government control, the cautious guess would be that they have redounded to the regime’s net benefit … The bombing has produced enough incidental damage and civilian casualties to assist the government in maintaining anti-American militancy, and not enough to be seriously depressing or disaffecting.’
Yet the Joint Chiefs remained unwavering in their enthusiasm for more bombing. In an almost Strangelovian memorandum of 16 June 1967, Gen. Earle Wheeler urged intensified attacks on Hanoi–Haiphong, saying ‘there is some possibility that it could be decisive … although no expert on domestic or world opinion, I believe that more rather than less vigorous action will bring increased support, except from the communists from whom we would only gain increased respect. Finally I do not believe that this would entail serious risk … 123 attack sorties … are worth their human cost if they only reduce allied deaths in SVN by one. Stated in another way, the air campaign pays its way in lives if it is responsible for only 1.6 per cent of the difference between potential and actual infiltration [of the South by the NVA] – in dollars, if it is responsible for 2.1 per cent of the difference in infiltration.’
Well before the closure of Rolling Thunder in March 1968, however, its meagre results had precipitated an extraordinary political recantation, apostasy, conversion: that of Robert McNamara. Before his final departure from office on 29 February, at a private luncheon he was moved to assert in emotional terms his distress about the ‘crushing futility’ of bombing. He, like some military chiefs more enlightened than Earle Wheeler, had come to unde
rstand that victory by this means, if it was achievable at all, could be won only by imposing devastation on a scale wholly incompatible with the values of the United States.
Lyndon Johnson’s desire to display might and resolve in Vietnam was constrained by his own uncertainties: fears for the Great Society programme; concern about provoking Soviet or Chinese military intervention; anxiety to sustain allied support for, or at least acquiescence in, American war-making; hopes of protecting both his domestic political base and the global image of the United States. The president declined to acknowledge that it is impossible to bomb an enemy nicely, with much prospect of breaking his will. Moreover, so small were the communists’ supply requirements that it is unlikely that even the intensified air campaign advocated by the Chiefs would have produced a different outcome. Amid the Sino–Soviet confrontation of the late 1960s, it is hard to imagine a scenario wherein either major communist power would have abandoned its ally, even had America’s airmen reduced North Vietnam to rubble – or, more appositely, to matchwood and straw.
16
Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy
1 PEACENIKS
Two parallel Vietnam wars evolved in 1967: the first was, of course, America’s intensifying battlefield struggle; the second was the ever-fiercer fight against it back home. CBS TV began broadcasting The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a show that became the surprise hit of the season. Although its satirical sallies were soft stuff by twenty-first-century standards, a row exploded about whether the anti-war folk singer Pete Seeger should be allowed a guest appearance. He finally delivered a rousing rendering of a number in which the punchlines ran ‘We’re waist-deep in the big muddy/But the big fool says to push on.’ The song was supposedly about an army platoon exercising in 1941 Louisiana, but nary a single viewer doubted, or was intended to doubt, that it really addressed Vietnam and the leadership of Lyndon Johnson.
