Good Morning, Happy St. Patrick’s Day…Day SEVENTEEN of a look back at Operation Rolling Thunder…50-Years Ago
17 MARCH 1966 (NYT)…ON THE HOMEFRONT… Thursday…The Big Apple was alive with out-of-state Irish for a parade and party. The President was at home in Washington in meetings concerning French participation in NATO. NYT page 1 lead story reported the early emergency splashdown of Gemini 8 in the Pacific. After a successful link-up with a satellite, a stuck thruster rendered flight unstable. Further ops were aborted. Gemini 8 was manned by Neil Armstrong and David Scott. They were picked up by helicopter near Okinawa… Page 4 carried a full report on an ongoing meeting of party leaders in Hanoi. Truong Chinh, a member of the Politboro, was quoted extensively. He told the North Vietnamese to expect a lengthy and protracted war. “We must defeat the United States,” and not expect other Communist countries to assist. He told visitors to NVN that the country was continuing to disperse industry and government organizations in anticipation of United States bombing attacks on the capitol and the port city of Haiphong. He said the leadership was confident that they could accept punishment and continue to fight. “The North Vietnamese people must enhance solidarity to defeat the war of destruction of the United States, defend North Vietnam, continue Socialist construction and activity and support the liberation of the South Vietnamese people. To fulfill these heavy and glorious tasks the people must firmly grasp the general strategic line of fighting a protracted war and mainly relying on our own forces.” In other news: Senator Wayne Morse included this in a speech: LBJ “… is leading us to war, and has been since he walked out on his campaign platform.”…Protests in Saigon continued and in Sydney, Australia, 2000 “cheered as 12 burned their draft cards.”
17 MARCH 1966… ROLLING THUNDER… USS Enterprise lost an A4C from VA-94 conducting a Rolling Thunder strike on a bridge 25 miles south of Vinh. While en route to the target the flight of two A4s took evasive action to avoid an SA-2 missile but the SAM blew the tail off LTJG FREDERICK CHARLES BALDOCK’s aircraft. He ejected, was captured, and imprisoned. He was declared a POW and released in February 1973.
RIPPLE SALVO…WHEN THE WEATHER CLEARS… Winter is a lousy time to fight a war in many regions of the world, mostly where it snows. In Southeast Asia Mother Nature’s weather factor comes in the form of monsoons, and in the late fall and lasting to about mid-April most of North Vietnam is clobbered with clouds and rain. Good rice country, lousy VFR bombing country. And Rolling Thunder was a predominantly VFR operation requiring ceilings of 8000-feet or better. In fact, for major strikes into targets in the Red River Valley, the President would specify the conditions that were required in order to execute the mission. Authorization to conduct a RT JCS strike might include, “…execute strikes only under optimum weather conditions, with good visibility and no cloud cover.” Therefore, when a bombing pause was ordered at Christmas 1965 and extended to the end of January 1966, both sides made use of the pause to adjust strategy, tactics and objectives based on the lessons learned in 1965. As noted above, and expressed by Truong Chinh, NVN was using the pause to prepare the people for a long war and instituting a dispersal program to eliminate high value targets. At the same time, the US was weighing a decision to move away from LOC targets in the panhandle and northwest of Hanoi to a different set of targets with POL and electric power high on the short list of meaningful targets. NVN, an agricultural nation that relied entirely on the USSR and China for war fighting materials, was simply a “funnel” for the flow of Soviet and PRC material required to defeat the South Vietnamese and their American partners below the 19th parallel. During the pause, the choices being considered by the US for the new Rolling Thunder program were: (1) Knock it off, on grounds that the net contribution to success had been negative. (2) Resume where we had left off and continue to do the same thing. (3) Resume where left off, but with slow escalation. or (4) Resume with fast escalation. The JCS chose (4) but the President demurred. That’s where Washington was in late-March. WHEN THE WEATHER CLEARS the bombs and SAMs, 37/57/87mm AAA, and MiGs would all resume sharing the skies over North Vietnam with Yankee Air Pirates and Red River Rats.
Lest we forget. Bear.
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