World: New Bombing Strategy

If 31 months of bombing by the U.S. has not succeeded in breaking North Viet Nam’s spirit, it has certainly taken an enormous toll of its national substance. Despite the dispute in the U.S. over extending the range of targets, there are so few major ones yet unbombed that U.S. pilots spend most of their time returning to plaster the same old places time and again. Last week the U.S. not only further shrunk the list of off-limit targets but employed a new aerial bombing strategy that threatens to paralyze completely North Viet Nam’s transportation and supply arteries.

Flying through cloud-laden skies that signaled the approaching monsoons, Navy attack planes from the carriers Oriskany and Coral Sea rained bombs and missiles for the first time on the port of Cam Pha, which is only 46 miles northeast of Haiphong and serves as its auxiliary port. Under congressional pressure to hit North Viet Nam harder, President Johnson gave the go-ahead to bomb Cam Pha when no ships were at the piers, thus seeking to avoid hitting any Russian vessels. After Navy scouts found the right moment, the raiders demolished Cam Pha’s wharves, badly damaged its rail facilities, destroyed its four giant handling cranes and set fire to huge piles of coal, North Viet Nam’s only remaining money-earning export.

Chop & Smash. The Cam Pha raid, and raids on five other previously forbidden places in recent weeks, reduced the number of untouched targets in North Viet Nam to a mere 46. Most of those 46 are too insignificant (small factories, pint-sized petroleum dumps) to warrant the risk of U.S. lives; other potential targets, such as factories in downtown areas, are ruled out on humanitarian grounds. Of the major targets not yet hit, many will probably be bombed in time. The most likely remaining targets: the power station and railyards at Lao Cai, an important supply link with China; three MIG fields near Hanoi and one at Haiphong; and the dock facilities at Hon Gai, the only unscathed port.

The day after they hit Cam Pha, planes from the two carriers bombed Haiphong itself, penetrating closer to its center (eight-tenths of a mile) than ever before. Avoiding the Soviet and other foreign ships jamming the piers, the pilots smashed overcrowded warehouses, chopped up the railyards and knocked spans from both the rail and highway bridges over which supplies must pass to reach the rest of the country. U.S. strategists have decided that, for the time being at least, they will not try to deny access to Haiphong from the sea by bombing its dock areas or mining its harbor—and thus risking a confrontation with Russia if its ships are hit by a U.S. attack. Instead, the U.S. planners intend to seal off access to the port from the land side, hoping that Soviet and other materials will simply pile up on the docks.

Trap & Destroy. The U.S. has also begun to apply a new treatment to roads and rail lines elsewhere in the North. In the past, U.S. flyers would bomb a road or a bridge in one place, wait until it was repaired and then hit it again. Trouble was that the North Vietnamese became too fast and facile at fixing things up, and transportation continued to move, at least sporadically. Since last spring, the U.S. has used a strategy known as “pursuit-of-a-target system.” Now, U.S. flyers seek to make a whole series of cuts in roads and rail lines in a steady round of attacks, thus trapping trains and truck convoys between the cuts and making them easy targets. Pilots have noticed in recent weeks that fire from antiaircraft batteries and SAM missile sites has fallen off considerably in some areas; they believe that the reason may be that it is getting increasingly harder to supply the sites with ammunition.

To get the surgical precision necessary to hit only certain targets in the North Vietnamese cities, Navy pilots recently began using a new, superaccurate torpedo-shaped missile that is called “the Walleye” (after the various species of fish, particularly the American pike, that have protruding eyes). The bomb’s eye is a television camera in the nose of the warhead. To fire the Walleye, the pilot points the bomb at the intended target until the camera has locked onto the object, which must be bright and distinct enough to stand out from the surroundings. Then, as the missile is released and glides groundward, the camera commands stubby fins that steer the projectile into the target. Increasingly, the Walleye is fixing its baleful stare on the few remaining choice targets in North Viet Nam.