The War: Ripping the Sanctuary

(See Cover)

It was siesta time in Viet Nam’s clammy cities as the droop-nosed F-4 Phantom jets snapped off the U.S.S. Ranger’s dipping flight deck. Next into the crystalline sky burst four flights of A-4 Skyhawks. Then the mission, 45 planes strong, streaked low across the Gulf of Tonkin toward the craggy, familiar coastline of North Viet Nam—and a target never before attacked by American pilots.

The strike area was two miles northwest of Haiphong (pop. 375,000), North Viet Nam’s biggest port and second largest city. First, the leading Phantoms bombed and rocketed the formidable concentration of radar-directed antiaircraft batteries ringing the port’s walled oil-storage facilities. While other F-4s prowled overhead and to the north to ward off any attacking MIGs, the Skyhawk attack bombers swooped on their targets. Within eight minutes, they had dropped 19 tons of bombs and 5-in. Zuni rockets on the nation’s principal oil-storage complex (capacity 476,000 barrels), its only pipeline for offloading tankers, and three piers through which North Viet Nam funneled 95% of its fuel supplies.

A wall of red flame leaped 3,000 ft., followed by a coiling pillar of oily black smoke that rose five miles and was visible 150 miles offshore. Exclaimed Commander Charles R. Smith, 39, of Dalhart, Texas, who wrestled his Vigilante reconnaissance plane through the heat and flames to photograph the holocaust: “It looked as if we had wiped out the entire world’s supply of oil.”

Fifty-five miles to the west, as the Navy craft headed back to the carrier, 70 U.S. Air Force jets from bases at Korat and Ta Khlj in Thailand crisscrossed Hanoi, raining 72 tons of 750-lb. bombs in 25 minutes on North Viet Nam’s second biggest petroleum depot (202,000 barrels), 3½ miles northeast of the capital city’s center. At about the same time, A-4s from the U.S.S. Constellation blasted a smaller, 48,000-barrel fuel-tank area at Do Son, twelve miles southeast of Haiphong.

Tactical Triumph. Thus, more than a year after U.S. commanders in the field first urged bombing raids on the North’s vital industrial targets, the U.S. last week finally attacked the hitherto-sacrosanct Hanoi-Haiphong complex. The operation was a triumph of tactical planning and destructive efficiency. Said an Air Force colonel who took part in the Hanoi raid: “We did the kind of surgical job that hasn’t been done in this war.”

U.S. planes previously had knocked out 15 lesser fuel dumps elsewhere in the North. Now, inside the “Red envelope,” they had gone after the biggest, most lucrative targets yet. The Haiphong installation included 35 storage tanks on the surface and three underground, 16 warehouses, rows of oil barrels in an open storage area. The Hanoi storage farm, across the Red River from the city, contained 32 revetment-protected tanks, 13 supporting buildings, and railroad spurs that comprised the country’s main oil-transshipment center.

The raids destroyed an estimated 75% to 80% of the two complexes. At least 50% of North Viet Nam’s remaining POL (for petroleum, oil, lubricants) supplies went up in smoke, leaving the country with reserves adequate for only eight weeks—if they are not bombed again. The loss will make incalculably more difficult the flow of troops and materiel for the Communists’ ever-more-desperate war in South Viet Nam. Though U.S. planners had feared that a dozen or more aircraft might be shot down, only one—an F-105 fighter-bomber hit over Hanoi—was lost.

3 a.m. Glow. In Washington, it was past 3 a.m. and the last U.S. plane had headed home. In the second-floor room in the White House where Lyndon Johnson sleeps, a bedside lamp glowed as the President talked in a low voice with the situation room in the West Wing basement. There, by instantaneous Teletype circuit to the Far East, military duty officers were checking in the returning jets, one by one.

The Ranger mission was the first to touch down, and relief showed on Johnson’s face as he got the news: all were back safely. Then the score from Thailand clattered in. The President exulted: “It’s incredible, it’s really incredible that this could happen with the loss of only one plane.”

The lights were on all night in the office of Robert Strange McNamara. Unshaven but wearing a fresh blue shirt and dark blue suit, the Secretary of Defense strode into the Pentagon’s first-floor conference room to brief newsmen at 9:30 a.m. Flanked by maps , and aerial photos and flourishing a brown wooden pointer, he rattled off with electronic efficiency the detailed results of the raids and the reasons for them.

High Price. The attacks, said McNamara, were “aimed at the heart of the petroleum system—major storage facilities and the distribution apparatus,” and should in time impose “a lower ceiling on the number of men that can be supported in the South.” The North Vietnamese will not find it easy to replace the wrecked facilities, McNamara pointed out, since “they have only a limited rebuilding capability”; the repairs call for “stocks and materials—large steel plates, for example—which are in very, very short supply in North Viet Nam.”

Even before the POL raids, said the Secretary, the U.S. in its 16 months of sustained air offensive against the North had accomplished three major objectives: 1) shoring up South Vietnamese morale, 2) “substantially” increasing the cost of infiltration for the Communists, forcing them to divert an estimated 200,000 workers to road-repair gangs, and 3) demonstrating to the aggressors that “as long as they continued their attempts to subvert and destroy the political institutions of the South, they would pay a high price not only in the South but in the North.”

“Quasi-Conventional.” Nonetheless, reported McNamara, round-the-clock surveillance of the Ho Chi Minh trail has not checked the relentlessly increasing infiltration from the North—”the foundation” of Hanoi’s aggression. The Communists have feverishly built and camouflaged new roads to the South, imported an estimated 15,000 trucks from their allies, and made increasing use of motorized barges to haul war materiel down the country’s maze of inland waterways.

During the first five months of this year, southbound enemy truck traffic has doubled over that during the same 1965 period, while delivery of Red supplies south of the 17th parallel has jumped 150% and of troops 120%, to an estimated 4,500 men a month. As evidence, McNamara displayed a recent infra-red reconnaissance photograph of a 51-truck convoy creeping bumper-to-bumper at night down a North Vietnamese section of the trail. Said he: “Some of these routes are new, some have been widened and upgraded for all-weather truck use. Bypasses have been built, and bamboo-trellised canopies rigged over some jungle roads to inhibit aerial observation.” What it boils down to, warned the Defense Secretary, is that the Reds are shifting “from a small-arms guerrilla action against South Viet Nam to a quasi-conventional military action.”

Truck and barge convoys obviously cannot move without oil—which North Viet Nam does not produce or even refine, depending wholly on imports, mostly from Russia. In recent months, these imports have soared by 60%, and Hanoi has begun dispersing and burying its vulnerable storage tanks, as clearly shown by reconnaissance pictures. Given the “perishable nature” of such a target, the Secretary added crisply, “it became much more desirable to attack it now than it had been earlier.”

Consistent Progression. Chary of expanding the conflict, President Johnson has been markedly reluctant to use his bombers in this fashion, even during recent weeks when he has been faulted in voters’ polls for not prosecuting the war with greater intensity. In fact, though last week’s attacks on Hanoi-Haiphong were almost universally described as escalation, in the strictest sense they were no such thing. As a European observer in Saigon put it, they amounted to “a change in quantity but not in quality,” whereas escalation in terms of modern warfare also implies technological and qualitative change.

Given the fact that the U.S. has long been hitting every means of transport from truck to barge in the North, the decision to bomb major sources of the fuel on which they depend is a compelling, consistent progression. In any case, as Vice President Hubert Humphrey observed last week, even though “there will be friends who disagree with us, it is our men who are there. It is our men who are facing Communist bullets.”

Why did the President spare Ho Chi Minh’s biggest oil pool for so long? Plans for POL strikes in the Hanoi-Haiphong area have been actively advanced ever since Johnson’s Christmastide pause in the air war proved that Hanoi was interested not in the conference table but in conquest. As in most of his major decisions, the case for bombing Hanoi-Haiphong had to be repeatedly presented, chewed over, rehashed and represented before Johnson made his final determination. The strongest argument for the raids, of course, was the ever-rising Communist infiltration rate along a route that military men, not exactly in jest, now call the “Ho Chi Minh boulevard.” The President’s top advisers were of two minds on the question, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk tentatively doubtful of the raids’ worth but ultimately persuaded that they were militarily essential. McNamara himself was skeptical of their value until mid-June, fearing that they might prove excessively costly in U.S. aircraft losses.

The Clincher. The final decision was undoubtedly nudged by the polls, which have indicated rising unease over the war. Johnson was anxious to demonstrate anew to domestic critics and foreign doubters that the U.S. is determined to honor its commitment in Viet Nam. He was also impatient for some tangible evidence of victory before November’s congressional elections.

But the President’s reasons went deeper than politics. About a month ago, his inner clock began telling him that the time had come to press the allied military advantage to the hilt. One reason, as Under Secretary of State George Ball testified last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is that there are telling signs of “weakening morale” in North Viet Nam. The clincher was inevitable: with American casualties running close to 1,000 a month, no responsible commander could indefinitely overlook the enemy’s logistical base.

Naturally, the Administration decided that it would be imprudent to take any dramatic action until the political unrest in Saigon subsided. Then, on June 18, the President clearly signaled his intentions by telling a Saturday news conference in the oval office that “we must continue to raise the cost of aggression at its source.” The raids were scheduled for the subsequent Friday—only to be delayed by weather and the Pentagon’s insistence that perfect visibility was an essential safeguard against accidental bombing of residential areas. Then, on Saturday, the attack was postponed again by a news leak, whose significance for a time seemed to overshadow the event itself in much of the reporting from Washington. Finally the mission was reset for last Wednesday.

Immense Pains. Seldom has a military operation been more meticulously prepared. It was fitted into a time when no Russian tankers would be visiting Haiphong. Allied governments with troops in Viet Nam were consulted, other allies advised. Above all, immense pains were taken to avoid civilian casualties. Pilots, hand-picked for their bombing prowess and knowledge of the terrain, studied hundreds of photographs and maps of the assigned areas—and were sternly warned to scrub their bombing runs if they had any doubts about hitting the assigned target. Said one base commander: “We wanted the first team in.”

At the two attack bases in Thailand, Major General Gilbert L. Meyers, Saigon-headquartered vice-commander of the U.S. Seventh Air Force, showed up personally in the briefing rooms. “We’ve got one of those targets we’ve been waiting for,” he lectured before a wall map of Hanoi. “Now let’s do a good job on it, and we may get the other targets we want. I want all bombs in the target at all costs.”

Pet Pipedream. Even the Russians did not claim that the U.S. had bombed innocent civilians. Indeed, though the Administration had dire misgivings in advance about world reaction, most foreign comment was either fairly mild or else cut-and-dried violent, as if the tirades had been spiked for weeks in expectation of the raids.

U.N. Secretary-General U Thant was predictably pious (and for a neutral official, inappropriately political), expressing “deep regret” over the bombing of “heavily populated areas” and plugging his pet pipedream that by halting the air strikes the U.S. could end the war. The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano viewed with concern, fretting that “news such as this cannot be learned without regret and also without worries.” Charles de Gaulle, to nobody’s surprise, joined his Moscow hosts in an expression of “alarm” and a warning of the “increasing instability” in Southeast Asia,which—he forbore to note—had been largely foisted on the world by 80 years of resolute French misrule.

Among U.S. allies, reactions ranged from cheers to tears. The British Commonwealth’s two Harolds—Britain’s Prime Minister Wilson and Australia’s Prime Minister Holt—found themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum. Wilson, harried by a flatulent left wing that even deplores Washington’s support of the pound sterling, declared that “we must dissociate ourselves from the bombings” but stoutly reiterated his fundamental support for U.S. war aims.

Harold Holt, on his first Washington visit since taking office, had no such problem. Reflecting Australia’s awareness of its own stake in Viet Nam in his arrival address, he graciously assured his smiling host: “In the lonelier and perhaps even more disheartening moments which come to any national leader, I hope there will be a corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend, that will be all the way with L.B.J.”

Save for Britain and France, the only European nations in the alliance, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was virtually solid in its support of the U.S. “Only those on the side of the aggressors are against this move,” said Thailand’s Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman. “The sinews of war must be destroyed.” Added Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Narciso Ramos: “About time!”

Most Communist governments seemingly dusted off the rote anticapitalist, anti-imperialist tirade from the agitprop manual. Indeed, their response was probably the most realistic of all, for they had plainly long accepted the inevitability of U.S. raids on such inviting targets. One Moscow commentator noted that Soviet policymakers had regarded them as “imminent for some time.” Peking, preoccupied with its internal “purification” purge, unstoppered the prescription brimstone but pointedly refrained from any specific threat to enter the war or increase its assistance to Hanoi. As for Hanoi, its reaction had a certain surrealistic quality, with broadcasts about “a big victory” and “a glorious feat of arms” in which, it claimed, seven U.S. planes were downed. Actual details of Hanoi’s reaction were reported in a down-East country-weekly vein: “Misses Phuc and Due,” said one broadcast, “were very busy today going back and forth to support troops with cartridges and water.”

At home, congressional and press critics raised the cry that the President had abrogated a longstanding pledge to spare Hanoi and Haiphong. Beyond the assurance that “population centers” would be avoided, the Administration had never in fact made any such promise. New York Times Columnist James Reston went so far as to fault Johnson for his offer to negotiate with Hanoi after “he said he would not.”

Sheets of Shrapnel. The North Vietnamese had a more pragmatic view of U.S. policy. Having repeatedly and unequivocally rejected all logical conditions for a settlement, they took the precaution of assembling around Haiphong and Hanoi one of the world’s most lethal concentrations of antiaircraft guns and missiles. Haiphong’s precious complex was guarded by 56 multicaliber antiaircraft guns and seven SAM sites. Hanoi’s installation bristled with more than 90 ack-ack guns, countless massed machine guns and nearly a score of missile sites. How heavily defended the targets were—thanks to the help of Moscow and Peking—the pilots well know.

Lieut. Colonel James R. Hopkins, 42, of Norman. Okla., a veteran of 47 World War 11 missions, 100 Korean War missions and 60 raids over North Viet Nam, led the Air Force pack into Hanoi and admitted that he was as nervous as “a football player going out to play.”

Weaving in from different headings and altitudes to outfox the ground gunners, the attacking jets approached at medium height, climbed abruptly, then dive-bombed their targets, plunging through sheets of bullets and shrapnel. “As we approached, I knew we had a go,” said Hopkins. “The weather was beautiful, but the sky was filled with automatic-weapons fire and flak. I laid my bombs down the center of the area occupying the storage buildings and pump houses.” Hopkins’ co-leader, Major James H. Kasler, 40, of Indianapolis, recalls: “The whole place was going up. Every bomb that went in set off a secondary explosion. As we pulled out, the flak was real heavy. It was as thick as I’ve ever seen up there.”

After detecting a radar aiming-signal pulsing from a Russian-installed surface-to-air rocket site 30 miles north of the city (one missile was believed fired but never visually spotted), four Thunderchiefs went after the nest, which was demolished by one of them. Whereupon four MIG-17s jumped the F-105s damaging two. Outmaneuvering one MIG, Major Fred L. Tracy, 38, of Goldsboro, N.C., got on his adversary’s tail, opened up with 20-mm. cannon and was credited with a probable kill. The remaining MIGs fled.

“Speak Saroya.” Darting in minutes later with only a camera to shoot, Major Hallet P. Marston, 37, of Miami, hit flak so dense that it twice kicked his RF-101 photo-jet into a 90° bank. A veteran of 101 Korean reconnaissance missions and 78 photo flights over North Viet Nam, Marston reported that he had “never run into more intense, aimed fire. When I varied, the fire varied.” Nor did the flak let up until the attackers ducked behind a mountain ridge on the way home—after running a 60-mile flak alley leading away from the capital. Over Haiphong, shrugged Navy Commander Albert Schaufelberger, 39, a burly Detroiter who was the first pilot to release his bombs on target, defenders put up “moderate to heavy flak—you get subjective when you describe it.”

The Air Force pilots over Hanoi drew small comfort from the stringent warning to avoid residential areas. Their orders specified that if any plane got shot down outside a city, a jet protective patrol would be put overhead and a helicopter brought in to rescue them within the hour. If, however, a pilot crashed his aircraft in an urban area, he was told that he could “speak saroya,” Air Force jargon for goodbye. Going in on the fourth wave over Hanoi, the pilot of the downed F-105 Thunderchief did in fact speak saroya: hit by crippling fire, he bailed out. Later, he was identified by Hanoi as Captain Murphy Neal Jones, 28, from Louisiana, and described as wounded in the hand and face. By way of celebrating his survival, his captors paraded Jones at night in a truck through the streets of Hanoi, under the glare of spotlights and the threats of fist-shaking mobs.

“Cloud Nine.” The more than 100 airmen who got home were rhapsodic over their success in hitting targets that they have long ached to obliterate. When the nuclear-powered Enterprise finished an eight-month spell on Yankee Station off North Viet Nam in June, a squadron commander noted that the ship had launched more strike missions than any other carrier in a comparable period. Yet, he added ruefully, “we just haven’t done the job we could have.” Said a diplomat in Saigon: “How would you feel if you” were a pilot in the best air force in the world and had to write home to your wife and tell her that you got two trucks last week?” The frustration ended with the Hanoi-Haiphong strikes. General Meyers said that his men “were on Cloud Nine.” Pointed out one Air Force commander: “You don’t have to worry about trucks if you get the POL.”

They had also followed orders. Photographs, Meyers reported, showed “very little spillover” from the Hanoi target: “I counted six bombs right on the edge, but they hit the railroad that brings the POL in there from Haiphong. They cut the line.” By one U.S. official’s estimate, the only North Vietnamese in the capital who could have been killed were those employed in the storage area—ten at most. By contrast, the Viet Cong and North Viet Nam regulars killed 12,000 South Vietnamese civilians in 1965 alone.

Turn of the Screw. North Viet Nam with a primitive, resilient economy, can probably meet its bare needs with whatever petroleum replenishments it can dribble in through minor ports and air-harassed rail and road routes from Red China. As for its war effort below the 17th parallel, Viet Cong and “hardhat” Northern regulars were in many cases beginning to hurt for supplies even before the latest squeeze on the pipeline.

The U.S. could squeeze a lot harder. One idea already in the contingency-planning stage is to blockade the port of Haiphong with mines timed to go off 72 hours after they are laid (to give nations that trade with North Viet Nam time to get their ships out). If worst came to worst, the U.S. could destroy the power and irrigation dams in North Viet Nam’s Red River Valley, flooding millions of acres of crops.

There were those in Washington, nonetheless, who hoped that, with the latest turn of the screw, Hanoi was beginning to hurt. Nor did it appear, from the immediate reaction, that Russia or Red China would do much to escalate a largely verbal commitment to the war. With a Hanoi delegation coincidentally in Moscow last week discussing further military aid, Kremlinologists believed that Russia would probably supply North Viet Nam with more MIG-21 supersonic fighters and IL-28 medium bombers, and had further promised to step up the flow of spare parts, technicians and training advisers. But the Russians did not seem eager to send in “volunteers.”

As for Peking, while claiming that it had recently rejected a secret U.S. offer to make a “token withdrawal” from South Viet Nam in order to get negotiations going, Communist China went curiously out of its way to knock down fears that the escalation in Viet Nam could lead to an extension of the war. In a Chinese news-agency dispatch, Peking denounced what it called the Soviet “nonsense that the U.S. expansion of the aggressive war against Viet Nam is fraught with the danger of an atomic war and could drag the whole world into a total war.” The Russians, the statement explained, have “tried to alarm people with such sensational talk” in order to persuade the Vietnamese to give up their “struggle against U.S. imperialism.” Plagued by internal difficulties, militarily no match for U.S. power, and with its embryo nuclear installations highly vulnerable to U.S. retaliation, Red China, in the view of most Sinologists, can only exhort Hanoi to keep fighting.

“Polls & Pols.” That, in all likelihood, is North Viet Nam’s only course of action, and under the dogmatic leadership of such zealots as Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap (TIME cover, June 17), the Communists are convinced that their war of liberation will succeed. From all indications, Hanoi has come to the conclusion that its trump card will be the U.S. public’s increasing disenchantment with the war. “American polls, as well as many of the pols in Congress,” notes one Hanoi-watcher, “give them some rational reason for banking on a lack of U,S. determination.” Thus, ironically, the major test of the war may not be in Indo-China but in the U.S. itself.

North Viet Nam’s rulers may even realize that the best means of inflaming U.S. public opinion against them would be brutal, wanton retaliation for the bombings against Americans in South Viet Nam. Nonetheless, one possibility, which Hanoi had already hinted at for weeks, is that the regime will stage “war criminal” show trials of American air men. It could also launch air strikes at U.S. bases in South Viet Nam, which would probably prove suicidal, given the U.S.’s advantage in the skies.

Perhaps the most likely form of reprisal is sneak mortar barrages on American installations, particularly in crowded, chaotic Saigon. One U.S. diplomat in the South Vietnamese capital cheerfully forecast that the Viet Cong may attempt another assault on the American embassy, similar to the plastique bombing of the mission last year that claimed four lives. “They have mortars right here in Saigon,” said he. “With people hemmed into Hoovervilles and packing-crate alleys, a mortar attack from such a place would be next to impossible to prevent.”

The first retaliatory foray came at week’s end—and suggested Trafalgar as directed by Charles Chaplin. In broad daylight, the North sent three of its PT boats after American destroyers patrolling the gulf 60 miles southeast of Haiphong. Detected as they closed at high speed, the mosquito boats were swatted by U.S. jets called in from the Constellation. All three were sunk. American swabbies dutifully rescued the 18 North Vietnamese crewmen.

“A Growing Burden.” In any event, last week’s raids by the U.S. almost certainly portend much more of the same—stepped-up destruction of the North’s remaining petroleum installations, roads and railroads, docks and power plants. The oil fires fringing Hanoi and Haiphong still blazed as 200 U.S. jets each day flew back to blast smaller POL targets.

The President, making his first public pronouncement on the raids at week’s end at Omaha and Des Moines, delivered a resolute restatement of the U.S. commitment and intent. Once again Johnson pleaded that if North Viet Nam’s leaders “will only let me know when and where they would like to ask us directly what can be done to bring peace to South Viet Nam, I will have my closest and most trusted associates there in a matter of hours.” Until then, the President grimly emphasized, U.S. air strikes on the North “will continue to impose a growing burden and a high price on those who wage war against the freedom of their neighbors.” Vowed Johnson: “We will see this through; we shall persist; we shall succeed.”

American pilots who in one year have forged a brilliantly successful new tactical role for air power over Viet Nam, showed last week that the U.S. can indeed succeed. On the ground, American fighting men are not only taking on wily veterans of guerrilla warfare but are also inflicting losses that no foe can afford to take indefinitely. Yet in the long run, the kind of success envisaged by the President can be earned only by the nation that is most determined to win—at any price. The time for magnanimity, as the U.S. finally made clear last week, is at the conference table.