GOOD MORNING… Day EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHTY of a strike-fighter’s contribution to the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam war and remembering the men and machines that carried the war to the homeland of our enemy…where we blew things up (BDA report follows)…
RIPPLE SALVO… #880… SHORTLY AFTER OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER WAS TERMINATED ON 1 NOVEMBER 1968 the North Vietnamese contracted with a Canadian writer and film-maker to produce a documentary of the damage the American bombing campaign left behind. MICHAEL MACLEAR, author of THE TEN THOUSAND DAY WAR: Vietnam: 1945-1975, will be the tour guide for the RTR: Ripple Salvo #880 tour of 250 miles from Hanoi in Route Pack VI, southward through IV, III, II and completing the visit to Post-ROLLING THUNDER North Vietnam. …. IN THE WORDS OF MICHAEL MACLEAR… All aboard…
“As Ha Van Lao puts it, ‘Against the American air forces we led a popular war.’ The future UN ambassador was then helping organize civilian counter-measures. ‘When the enemy planes armed,’ he says, ‘everyone participated in the anti-aircraft defense–whether it was active defense such as manning the guns or passive defense such as organized use of shelters. And after the planes left everyone would recommence work and repairs–whether in the fields or factories. We had a slogan: ‘Combat and Construct.‘ Everyone was regarded as being in uniform, and civilians were kept closely identified with the military in a competitive spirit, This was the business of the cultural section of the Army,’says Ha Van Lao. ‘There was a cultural team that offered dances, singing, music. They organized basketball, volleyball, teams of athletes compete against one another.’ This interchange not least aided military morale and ‘We attached a great deal of importance to it for our fighters.’
“Naturally,’ says Ha Van Lau of the bombing, ‘it was terrifying. We had to adapt ourselves to a life of war, or we would have been beaten. We would have lost the war.’ “When the air strikes halted in November 1968 the North for a long time remained on full alert and remained suspicious. In the summer of 1969, at the tme when the formal Paris peace talks seemed to the Americans frustratingly unproductive, the author met Ha Van Lau in Hanoi and was then told that U.S. reconnaissance flights over the North had increased from 600 in November to 800 in April 1969, 1300 in May and 1450 in August. In claiming this, Hanoi took the position that President Nixon then wanted to document the extent of the bombing and North Vietnamese resistance to it. The author, as correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was invited to produce the first film documentary on the devastated areas in the hope that it might fave ‘an impact on your American neighbors.’ What followed was a journey through a wasteland extending down Highway 1 toward the Partition Line (17th parallel/DMZ).
“On the map the distance was 250 miles, once journey of only four or five hours. But travel time was logged at four days. The awesome bomb craters along the ‘highway’ interlocked almost end to end, negotiable only by jeep. There was just a very rough route stitched from broken-down rock, thousands of loose planks and nerve-racking bamboo platforms bridging the craters and canals. Wrecked vehicles and twisted rail lines littered the entire route, with rusted metal rising in grotesque shapes from the adjacent rice-lands. With side visits, three weeks ws spent covering 1000 miles of five of the worst hit provinces–residing in ‘guest centers’ which were straw-roof huts near former towns. Often it was a case of searching for places which on the old maps had once existed.
“Simply stated, urbane civilization had been erased in a region containing one-third or about six million of the North’s population. Statistics from the French era showed that five per cent or 300,000 of these people had been town and city dwellers (most of the U.S. estimate of 182,000 civilians dead had been killed in this region). Whatever the French had built in eighty years of occupation, and whatever the North had achieved in fifteen years of independence, had been wiped out.
“The journey showed that five cities had been leveled. These, traveling south, were the cities of Phu Ly, Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa, Vinh and Ha Tinh, each formerly with populations between 10,000 and 30,000. The North’s third largest city, Nam Dinh–population 90,000–was largely destroyed but at least recognizable. Another eighteen destroyed centers were classified as towns– but though the place names checked on the map, it was now impossible to know what these collections of overgrown debris had once been like. Traffic still passed through, peasants still marketed their produce along the highway, but there remained only ghost towns from the nightmare of Rolling Thunder. Across the whole landscape, journeying far from the highway, not a single habitable brick edifice could be seen: the schools, hospitals, and administrative buildings that had certainly once existed were now, like the factories, just so man heaps of rubble.
“At Phu Ly, only thirty-five miles south of Hanoi, local officials said the city had been leveled in eight successive days between 1 and 9 October 1966. It had been a cross-roads marketing town of 10,000. Ninh Binh, a provincial capital sixty miles south, was described in an old guide book as a cotton and coffee trading center of 25,000 people– and the main center of Roman Catholicism in the north. The cathedral spire, but little else, had somehow survived.
“Thanh Hoa, capital of the most populous southern province eighty miles from Hanoi, had been a major food distribution center, also trading in cotton, jute and timber. If was a total ruin; to find a place to sleep one traveled ten miles to a bamboo cluster of provincial offices hidden in the hills. Vinh, 160 miles from Hanoi in Nghe-an province where Ho Chi Minh was born, once served a fertile and densely populated plain of 1.5 million people. Formerly a city of 30,000. Vinh had the only immediately obvious military installations, a central rail terminal and an airport. It had been built in 1954–the year of the Geneva ‘Accords’; now it was at waist level. Year after year, said district officials, the bomber had kept bombing the rubble. At Ha Tinh, provincial capital on the 18th parallel 250 miles from Hanoi, the local mayor-without-a-city produced files citing that between 1965 and 1968 this province of 800,000 people had been bombed 25,529 times . This would equal one air strike every ninety minutes for some 1,500 days. In the first raid, March 1965, it was claimed that Ha Tinh’s municipal hospital containing 170 people and its secondary school filled with 750 students had been simultaneously destroyed. This was called ‘a conscious massacre’.The hospital’s Red Cross markings were discerning amid the ruins.
“After the account of this journey had appeared in a score of major newspapers, from The New York Times to the London Sunday Times, and after the American NBC network had televised the film, the U.S. Defense Department insisted that only military targets had been bombed–though it knew otherwise from Defense Secretary McNamara’s own findings.”………
RTR Quote for 2 August: GENERAL CURTIS LeMAY, USAF (Ret)…”When asked in July 1986 if the United States could have won in Vietnam, the retired General answered: “In any two-week period you want to mention….You can remember what went on at the end, when the B-52s finally went up north and started to bomb up there. They bombed for about seven days and the white flag practically went up. President Nixon stopped it right there to get our people out. Four or five more days would have ended the whole thing, but I think he was so disgusted and fed up with the opposition of the American people that he decided too just get the hell out of there and that was it.” (Clodfelter: The Limits of Air Power, pg. 207)
Lest we forget… Bear