North Viet Nam: Bombs Away

Retired General Curtis LeMay peered through his bombsight and let loose with a blockbuster. Target: the U.S. air war over North Viet Nam. “We’re hitting the wrong targets,” said the former Air Force Chief of Staff last week in Washington. “We’re getting people killed who shouldn’t be killed because of too little and too late.” The U.S. attacks, LeMay remarked, “should have knocked hell out of ’em—so we must be hitting the wrong targets. We should bomb the things that really would hurt them, industry, ports, power plants. We’ve been pecking around the edges. I want to get this war stopped without a further loss of life.”

Harsh words from the man who tailored U.S. strategic air power in the cold war, but it was not hard to understand his pique. Last week, with the total of U.S. sorties over the North rising to 16,000 since February, Hanoi seemed no closer to negotiation than ever. Moreover, four more American planes were shot down by North Viet Nam’s sharp-eyed gunners, raising to 121 the number of U.S. aircraft lost so far (60 for the Navy, 61 for the Air Force). The loss rate—.75% per sortie —is still higher than World War II and only slightly below Korean War levels.

Goodbye, SAM. No one could say, however, that U.S. aircraft were not active and to a considerable degree effective. Though the Hanoi-Haiphong industrial complex remained inviolate, American planes kept up their interdictory hammering of roads, rail lines and military posts. A flight of Navy Skyhawks from the carrier Independence took out the third of some 20 Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile sites—this one just 52 miles northeast of Hanoi. In 90 dizzy seconds, the Skyhawks swooped on their prey at 570 m.p.h., slammed 500-lb. and 1,000-lb. bombs into the site and watched one SAM squirt wildly along the ground “like a balloon that the air’s coming out of.” It was vengeance of a sort for the five U.S. planes that have fallen so far to the long arm of SAM.

The big strategic development of the week came along the Y-shaped network of railroad lines leading into and out of Hanoi (see map). Flights of Air Force Thunderchiefs and Phantoms shattered three rail bridges on the already-mangled Hanoi-Lao Kay line, chewed up 300 yards of track and a railway yard. The Lao Kay-Lang Son line is the only rail link between Red China’s Yunnan province and the rest of China, and with the U.S. hitting it twice a week since Sept. 4, all traffic to Yunnan is now moving by highway or air. So far, Peking has not retaliated. “We figured it was a pretty good calculated risk,” says a military spokesman.

A Bigger Risk. American planners still feel that the risk involved in blasting North Viet Nam’s industrial complex—as LeMay demands—is too high. Such attacks would do little to hamper North Viet Nam’s war effort, since most of its weapons and ammunition come from Red China and Russia. More important, goes the U.S. reasoning, if Ho Chi Minh’s “hostage” industries—coal and iron mines, port facilities and Red River dams—were taken out, he might enlarge the war by sending his 450,000-man army south in an all-out move to take South Viet Nam.