RIPPLE SALVO… #158… UNITY LOST… but first…
Good Morning: Day ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE of the days and nights of ROLLING THUNDER…
6 AUGUST 1966… THE FRONT PAGE OF THE HOME TOWN NEWSPAPER… NYT… Fair and warm in Harlem…
Page 1: “Johnson Warns Of Spending Cuts”…”President Johnson warned today that the government might have to cut its spending ‘in those areas where prices are rising in an inflationary way.’ The President, presumably with the steel price increase in mind, gave his warning in the form of several paragraphs added to a statement he issued on signing the $5 Billion space authorization bill. However, there was no specific threat and it appeared clearer than ever today that there would be no effort to roll back the steel increase.”… Page 1: “Wertz Predicts President Will Sign Air Strike Bill”…”Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz today described the Senate passed bill to end the airline strike as a ‘workable amalgamation.’ He said he had not ‘one moments doubt’ that President Johnson would sign it if it was passed by Congress. Mr. Wirtz expressed his views in two hours of testimony before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee…The official made his remarks as the committee took up the bill that the Senate passed. It would end for up to 180-days the 27 day strike of the International Association of Mechanics against Eastern, TWA, United, Northwest and National airlines.”…”House Backs Curb On Housing Bias”…”After three days of debate the House approved today the compromise open-housing section of President Johnson’s civil rights bill of 1966. By a vote of 198 to 179. Representatives defeated a motion to strike the housing section from the bill. Shortly afterword, an amendment t eliminate the fair housing enforcement board was defeated by a vote of 70 to 51…It is now virtually certain that the bill, with controversial housing section in tact will win final approval in the House next week and be sent to the Senate, where its fate is very much in doubt.”…
Page 1:…”U.S. Rejects Note By Soviets On Raids“…”The United States Embassy refused today to accept a Soviet protest note alleging ‘provocation and criminal actions’ against Soviet merchant ships delivering cargo to North Vietnam. The protest, the second by Moscow in less than a month, complained that ‘large caliber bullets struck a Soviet vessel’ Tuesday during a United States air attack on dock facilities at Haiphong, North Vietnam’s major port. The note also charged that United States planes, helicopters and warships were harassing Soviet ships and attempting to obstruct their entry into port and their unloading of cargoes.”... Page 1: “Rusk Hints Drive On North Vietnam Is Not Ruled Out”…”Secretary Dean Rusk suggested today that the United States did not exclude the possibility of sending ground troops into North Vietnam. At a news conference, Mr. Rusk obscured a distinction that United States officials had maintained, with more of less emphasis, between aerial bombing and physical invasion of the North. Twice Mr. Rusk declined the opportunity to say that the United States ruled out ground action there. The Secretary of State reiterated that the United States abjured any desire to destroy the regime in Hanoi.”…
Page 1: “Rock Hits Dr. King As Whites Attack March In Chicago”…”The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was struck by a stone yesterday as a crowd of whites raged out of control and battled policemen in a white residential section of Chicago. A special force of 960 policemen succeeded in preventing Dr. King and 600 civil rights demonstrators from being critically injured during a march to protest segregated housing. But they could not prevent angry whites from attacking cars and buses with stones, firecrackers and bottles. Three hospitals reported that they had treated 28 persons, most of them whites who were injured in battles with police and bottles that fell short of the demonstrators…In an effort to control the crowd, which at one point numbered more than 4,000, the policemen discharged their revolvers above the heads of the rioters and clubbed and arrested scores of whites in five hours of disorder…around midnight the police said the violence had spread to widely scattered areas of Chicago. There were sniper attacks on police cars in the South Side Negro area. The police said they had received reports that two white youths had been shot in a racially integrated area on the Far Southside by Negroes…”…
6 August 1966…The President’s Daily Briefing…CIA (TS sanitized)…South Vietnam: Ky has assured Ambassador Lodge that he will say no more about marching north. In his speech in the Philippines next week Ky will discuss the nature of “revolutionary war.” If questioned, Ky intends to say his goal is the independence of South Vietnam… Soviet Union: A Soviet nuclear submarine is prowling near Bermuda. This is farther west than Russian submarines normally operate but they are not complete strangers to the area. In late 1965, for instance, one was detected snooping around the Gemini 6 and 7 recovery zone. The Soviets have three types of nuclear submarines–two that carry missiles and one for torpedo attack. There is some reason to suspect the one now off Bermuda may be the type equipped with eight 450-mile air breathing cruise missiles…
6 AUGUST 1966… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times (7 August reporting 6 August ops) Page 1:…”In North Vietnam, Air Force fighter-bombers dodged 14 surface-to-air missiles as they attacked fuel dumps and radar installations in a broad arc around the port of Haiphong yesterday. For the fourth consecutive day no planes were reported lost to enemy fire in the north. In an engagement today in the Gulf of Tonkin, United states Navy planes sank two North Vietnamese PT-boats and heavily damaged a third. The small craft were reported to have opened fire o a flight of Navy jets as they were returning from a strike on the Bai chay storage area 25 to 30 miles northeast of Haiphong. The spokesman said the planes continued toward the carrier Constellation but that planes heading for other targets in North Vietnam were diverted to the enemy boats that were camouflaged and at anchor 55 miles east of Haiphong…B-52s stuck targets near Danang… “Vietnam: Aircraft Losses”(Chris Hobson)… Two fixed wing aircraft lost on 6 August…
(1) CAPTAIN ALLEN K. RUTHERFORD was flying an F-105D of the 421st TFS and 388th TFW out of Korat on a strike mission in Route Package 6 and was hit by AAA over an island 25 miles northwest of Hon Gai… CAPTAIN RUTHERFORD turned seaward and flew his damaged aircraft 160 miles south before he was forced to eject. He was rescued by USAF HU-16…
(2) A 421st TFS F-4C out of Cam Ranh Bay suffered an engine failure while on combat air patrol. The crew ejected and were rescued by helicopter …
RIPPLE SALVO… #158… “SCHISM”…”…a split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences of opinion or belief…”
Great lunch and conversation today (Friday) with good friends and old warhorses bearing the wrinkles of multiple tours being shot at in the air war in Vietnam. Two Navy guys, a Marine and an Air Force rescue helicopter driver who knows the rocks and karsts of Laos like the back of his collective hand, and our lovely wives. The ladies always cluster at the far end of our roost and I have no idea what they talk about. That’s because old aviators have a lot to talk about and listen to. At our end it was all: how the heck did our beloved country get this screwed up?…
I used the opportunity to suggest the roots of our destructive path date to the seeding of progressivism that came with the Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, but it wasn’t until 1966 that we started to come apart at the seams. We were a united country (with significant differences below the surface) through World War II. The 60s were where the schism that divides us today started to open up, fed by civil rights and Vietnam War issues. The combination of these issues served as a wedge that when pounded relentlessly by the progressives maul created the cracks that have become the “Great Schism” that may well destroy our republic. Since I didn’t get a lot of support for my interpretation of our past and ideas about where our nation is headed, I returned from lunch to my cave to put some more ponder into my thesis (…”a statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be proved…”). In the summer of 1966 the cracks became the “Great Schism” and national unity began to evaporate. Thus, I am back to the books. I think I got a little help on my thesis from the erudite Admiral Jim Stockdale, who wrote the following in his:
“Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot.” Pages 95-96, I quote…
Those of us who entered prison early actually saw three different wars. The first lasted three years and two months– the war of reactive gradualism decided on by LBJ and his jolly gang on 1 December 1964–the war that ran its course as described above (Rolling Thunder). Then there was a three-year, two month “hiatus” war–like the “limited” war, practically as long as America’s World War II–but no air planes in the sky, absolutely no American that we could detect having any effect on us one way or another. It lasted from late 1968 to late 1971–I was in solitary for the first half of it, and I was brutalized more in 1969 than a year in prison. Some don’t like to hear this, but life was easier for us in prison when America was bombing and hammering at their gatews. to have your our bombing “paused” was somehow considered contemptible. And then the old JCS “short war” loomed into view in late 1971–the mining of theharbors, the tactical bombing of military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong, and the climax: seemingly endless streams of B-52 bombing Hanoi and Haiphong military complexes starting on the wondrous night of December 18, 1972. In eleven days, North Vietnam was shut down completely.
That was commitment. A long time coming and, in hindsight, perhaps too late for an emotionally drained America. But for what it’s worth, I believe fr the October 1964 JCS “short war” plan had been accepted and put in motion during that spring of 1965–a move that would have been perfectly natural and totally possible–then we would have a free and secure South Vietnam today; we would have about forty thousand fewer headstones in Arlington Cemetery right now; and we would have all been home before Christmas 1966. What is known as the 60s–antiwar disruption and all–would never have happened.
How did we get so screwed up? the American government tried to do something the Founding fathers knew would never work: to send (“sneak” may be a better word) armies into war without a solid consensus of public support. Hear out two of my most trusted friends:
Ross Perot, a savvy patriot in everybody’s book, says “If we didn’t learn anything else from Vietnam, it is that you don’t commit your men to the battlefield unless you commit the American people first. They fell just as dead in Vietnam as they did on Omaha Beach in Normandy. first commit the nation; then commit the troops.”
Fred Weyand, combat general in Vietnam and former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, says: “When the army is committed, the American people are committed, and when the American people lose their commitment it is futile to try to keep the army committed.”
The Founding Fathers drove a spike into the Constitution they framed, a spike aimed specifically at that crucial need for public commitment, ensuring that no soldier marches off to a war that becomes an expendable sideshow of a Washington power struggle: the provision that only the Congress can declare war.”
History is the teacher. Our Vietnam experience is instructive and pertinent to our current conduct of national affairs. Unfortunately, the lives of 58,000 brave Americans lost in that war, that experience, that lesson, apparently means little or nothing to our leaders. Witness our strategy for countering ISIS. We are dribbling bombs and executing a “strategy of gradual defeat,” and we are doing it without the commitment of the people and the commitment of the Congress. As a consequence, we will continue to widen the Great Schism that divides our beloved United States into strongly opposed sections of tribes of many cultures and colors with different opinions and beliefs. A Great Schism that erupted to 1966 and grow….. UNITY LOST!… FOREVER?…
Lest we forget… Bear ………. –30– ………..