RIPPLE SALVO… #835… GEORGE C. HERRING is the source for this Salvo… “The circumstances of the war thus posed a dilemma that we never really understood, much less resolved. Success would probably have required the physical annihilation of North Vietnam, but given our limited goals, this seemed excessive and, at best, dubious on moral grounds. It held out the serious threat of Soviet and/or Chinese intervention, a much larger and more dangerous war, maybe even a nuclear conflagration. The only other way was to establish a viable South Vietnam, but, given the weak foundation we worked from and the culture gap, not to mention the strength of the revolution in the South, this was probably beyond our capacity. To put it charitably, we may have placed ourselves in a classic no-win situation.”…. Salvo continues below… but first…
GOOD MORNING… Day EIGHT HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE of a 1,000 day review of the pages of history that included the 40-month air war over North Vietnam called Operation Rolling Thunder….
HEAD LINES from The NEW YORK TIMES on Tuesday, 18 June 1968…
THE WAR: Page 1: “SIGHTING OF ENEMY COPTERS NEAR THE DMZ IS REPORTED”… “The United States military command said last night that North Vietnamese helicopters might have entered the war for the first time. Unidentified aircraft were sighted on radar in the vicinity of the eastern end of the demilitarized zone Saturday night and Sunday night…This morning two men aboard the Australian destroyer Hobart, operating off the demilitarized zone, had been killed by a weapon that ‘may have been a United States air-to-air rocket called Sparrow’ early yesterday morning… The military command said: “The low flying aircraft were suspected to be enemy helicopter and were taken underfire by naval vessels and United States aircraft.’… Some South Vietnamese military sources, however, were less cautious than the Americans. They said that as many as 43 North Vietnamese helicopters had been seen in the air near the DMZ and that at least 12 of them were shot down”…. “IN THE CAMPAIGN against infiltrators on the edges of Saigon, South Vietnamese paratroopers and highly trained Special Forces soldiers said they had killed 15 enemy soldiers in two skirmishes”… Page 3: “FRIENDLY AIRCRAFT SUSPECTED”… “A report by CBS-TV last night said that ‘some Air Force and Navy officers now believe a Navy patrol boat reported sunk east of the DMZ ‘was sunk by a friendly aircraft.’ Seven sailors are missing.”… Page 3: “AUSTRALIA BLAMES U.S.”… “An Australian Navy spokesman said today that one of its destroyers, the Hobart, was struck yesterday off the coast of North Vietnam by an American air-to-air missile. Two were killed and several others wounded. It had been reported earlier that the damage was from North Vietnamese shore batteries.”…
PEACE TALKS: Nary a word…
Page 1: “HIGH COURT RULES 1866 LAW BARS COLOR LINE IN HOUSING IN ALL SALES AND RENTALS–Negroes Can Sue–Decision Goes Beyond 1968 Act On Ban On Bias In Private Sales”…”The Reconstruction Era statute had been thought by most lawyers only to secure the rights of former slaves to own property. It was invoked by lawyers for a St. Louis couple today. The Court in a paraphrase of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 said it provided that: ‘All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every state and territory, as it is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.'”… Page 1: “CHRONIC ALCOHOLICS’ JAILING FOR INTOXICATION IS UPHELD”… “…jailing chronic alcoholics for public drunkenness does not violate their constitutional rights.”… Page 1: “GUN REGISTRATION PUSHED IN CAPITAL– ADMINISTRATION IS URGED TO PRESS FOR STRICTER RULES”… “The Administration was reported today to be divided over whether to press for stricter gun controls than its proposed ban on mail order sales of rifles and shotguns. …being urged to publicly endorse recommendations for registration of all firearms and licensing of gun owners.”… Page 2; “3 ATOMIC POWERS MAKE U.N. PLEDGE–WILL HELP TO DEFEND NATION’S FACING NUCLEAR THREAT”… “The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union pledged today in the Security Council to provide immediate assistance to an nonnuclear-weapons country facing nuclear aggression”… Page 1: “McCARTHY PRODS HUMPHREY ON WAR–Challenges Him To Disclose If He Has Any doubts On Administration Policy…” Page 5: “SCORPION SEARCHER HEARD AT INQUIRY”…”A submarine captain said today his search of the ocean near the Azores for the lost submarine Scorpion had convinced him she was not at a salvageable depth…The statement wa made to a naval court of inquiry by Commander Albert J. Baciocco, which searched the Cruiser and Hyeres Banks near the Azores from June 1 through June 5.”… Page 28: “POVERTY PROTEST MAY DRAW 40,000–Solidarity ay Tomorrow Seeks To Advance Goals”…
18 June 1968…PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF (CIA TS/SI) NORTH VIETNAM: Bombing Effects. The Communist head of Italy’s biggest labor union recently returned from a trip to Hanoi and described North Vietnam as suffering “gravely” from US bombing, but determined to fight on for another 10 to 20 years if necessary…also told a news conference that the bombings had not weakened the North Vietnamese spirit. He said, “While the North Vietnamese do not expect any immediate results from the current talks, fruitful peace talks could begin when the Americans halt the bombing of the North.”
18 JUNE 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times…No coverage of the air ops north of the DMZ… VIETNAM: AIR LOSSES (Chris Hobson) There was one fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 18 June 1968…
(1) MAJOR G. J. BUTLER was flying an F-100D of 615th TFS and 35th TFW out of Phan Rang when hit by small arms fire as he was taking off. He was able to get enough altitude and airspeed to eject from his burning Super Sabre about 10 miles from the air base. He was rescued to fly and fight again…
SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/MIA/POW) ON 18 JUNE THE FOUR YEARS OF THE OPERATION OVER NORTH VIETNAM…
1965… NONE…
1966… NONE
1967… NONE…
1968… NONE… oohrah…
Humble Host flew #190. Enterprise on the midnite to noon schedule. Took wingman on an O-Dark-Thirty night strike on the Cam Lam ferry (Located at “the cxxx”) and we air delivered 6,000 pounds of Mk-82s on the ferry landing in exchange for the gunners return-fire of 8,000 pounds of 37/57-mm steel into our airspace, and that was just the tracers… Another memorable one tenth of an Air Medal… Also flew a maintenance test flight to bag another day trap…
RIPPLE SALVO… #835… George C. Herring’s books on the Vietnam War have been quoted here before (America’s Longest War and LBJ and Vietnam). This Salvo is from an essay he contributed to a book of essays under the cover, THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDS: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War, edited by Anderson and Ernst. This is quoted from Herring’s essay, “The War That Never Seems to Go Away“… Pages 340-342….
“With the exception of our own Civil War, where Americans were shooting at each other, Vietnam was also our most divisive war. I should inject a caveat here. Dissent in wartime is as American as cherry pie., and among all of our wars only World War II and the relatively brief Spanish-American and Persian Gulf wars have enjoyed near universal support, the latter, I would add, only after success was certain. Still, the Vietnam War did arouse more widespread and passionate opposition than other U.S. wars, and there are reasons for this. It occurred in a time of social upheaval, a time when Americans were questioning their own values and institutions as at few other periods in their history. It occurred in a time of generational strife. It occurred when the verities of the Cold War were coming under challenge. And, in the face of rising opposition, neither the Johnson nor the Nixon administrations could ever make a convincing argument that the war was either just or necessary in terms of U.S. national security. And, in a case where the world’s greatest power was fighting what Johnson himself once contemptuously dismissed as that ‘raggedy ass little fourth-rate country,’ the methods used, especially the bombing of North Vietnam, came under increasing criticism.
“The war thus divided Americans as nothing since the debate over slavery a century earlier. It divided neighbors, colleagues, and churches. Campus protests became a way of life, even in time at quiet, conservative institutions like the University of Kentucky. It divided class against class. It divided father against son, even among the families of top policymakers such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. I have seen no more poignant example of this than in James Carroll’s prizewinning book American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came between Us, the story of a close-knit Irish Catholic family torn apart by the war: the father an air force general, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; three sons who went very different ways, the author an anti-war priest, a follower of the Berrigan brothers; one brother an exile to Canada; the other an FBI agent whose job was to pursue draft dodgers and infiltrate the Catholic Left, in short, go after those like his two brothers. The father and the author-son split over the war and were not reconciled, even on the father’s deathbed. ‘A noble man,’ Carroll concludes. ‘I loved him. And because I was so much like him, I had broken his heart. And the final truth was…he had broken mine.’
“The war spurred various kinds of group and individual protest. By the early 1970s, street demonstrations were a common occurrence in most American cities. There were the so-called teach-ins on campuses and lie-ins at military induction centers. The folk singer Joan Baez refused to pay that portion of her income tax that went to the military budget. The heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali refused induction by the draft and thereby forfeited his title. Numerous Americans burned draft cards as symbolic acts of protest. As many as fifty thousand fled to Canada to avoid military service in the war. Some young men, like a Lexington, Kentucky acquaintance of mine, went to prison rather than fight in a war they considered immoral. Five Americans, emulating Vietnamese Buddhist acts of protest, burned themselves to death in public places, the Quaker Norman Morrison in November 1965 below McNamara’s Pentagon window.
“As the war dragged on, the protest mounted, and the divisions deepened, the internal turmoil itself contributed to a war-weariness that came to pervade the nation and fed a desire, even among some who approved the war, to end it regardless of the consequences. The protest and disharmony weighed heavily on policymakers as well, pushing them to extricate the nation from Vietnam. The very divisiveness of the war contributed to its lingering impact. The divisions still exist today.”… End Herring quote…
RTR quote for June 18: President Lyndon B. Johnson: “I don’t give a damn about the pinkos on the campuses: they’re just waving their diapers and bellyaching because they don’t want to fight.”…
Lest we forget… Bear…