The air war reaches the capital
The air campaign against North Vietnam began in 1965 and is covered in full in the article on Rolling Thunder. This article looks at one year of it. In 1967 the campaign moved closer to the heart of North Vietnam than before, and the arguments about it, in the Pentagon, in Congress and in the White House, became some of the sharpest of the war.
For the first two years, the bombing was tightly managed from Washington, with targets chosen at weekly meetings and large areas around Hanoi and Haiphong closed to attack. The restrictions were meant to limit the risk of drawing in China or the Soviet Union and to avoid heavy civilian casualties. Military leaders disliked them, believing they gave the enemy safe areas and time to rebuild.
New targets in 1967
Over the course of 1967 the limits were loosened in stages. Targets approved by President Johnson included power plants, rail yards, bridges, factories and air bases that had previously been off limits. Strikes in the Hanoi area and near Haiphong, the main port, became more frequent. Among the best-known targets was the Paul Doumer Bridge across the Red River at Hanoi, which American aircraft attacked in August 1967, and the main airfield at Phuc Yen near the capital, attacked in late October. Aircraft also struck the rail line connecting Hanoi with China.
The logic was to hit the transport system that carried supplies from the ports and from China to the south, and to raise the pressure on Hanoi’s leaders. Haiphong harbour itself was handled more cautiously. Ships from the Soviet Union and other countries unloaded there, and attacking them risked a wider crisis. Proposals to mine the harbour were repeatedly raised by the military chiefs and repeatedly resisted by civilian leaders.
The cost in aircraft and pilots
The new targets were also the best defended. North Vietnam had built up an air defence network with anti-aircraft guns, surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft, helped by equipment and training from the Soviet Union. The area around Hanoi became one of the most heavily defended in the world, and American crews who flew there remember it as dangerous.
The United States lost many aircraft over North Vietnam in 1967, the total reaching into the hundreds, and the figure for the war as a whole was larger still. Many of the aircrew who were shot down were killed, and others were captured. The prisoners were held in Hanoi and other places, and their treatment later became a major issue. One of those shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 was a young Navy pilot, John McCain, who was captured and held for more than five years. Such losses fed the criticism that the campaign cost more in lives and aircraft than the damage justified.
McNamara and the military chiefs
The central dispute was between the Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Robert McNamara, whose doubts about the war are the subject of their own article, had concluded by 1967 that the bombing was not achieving its objectives. The staff studies he relied on suggested that the campaign had not seriously reduced the flow of men and supplies to the south, since the movement was small in volume compared with North Vietnam’s capacity to adapt and repair. He argued that more bombing would yield little extra, would cost more American lives and could increase the risk of a wider war.
The Joint Chiefs saw it differently. They argued that the problem was not that bombing had failed but that it had not been applied with enough force. They pressed for a larger campaign, including the closing of Haiphong, the destruction of all significant targets and the removal of limits on areas near the Chinese border. The chiefs also complained that the weekly approval system wasted the advantage of surprise.
The conflict came into the open in August 1967, in the Senate hearings chaired by Senator John Stennis. The service chiefs and other officers criticised the restrictions, and McNamara gave a more sceptical account in his testimony. The episode, described further in the account of the hawks and doves, left Johnson in a difficult position. He sided with neither entirely: he approved more targets, but refused to remove all the limits or to mine the harbour.
Bombing and diplomacy
The air war was linked to diplomacy. In September 1967 Johnson offered in the San Antonio formula to stop the bombing if productive talks would follow promptly, a signal that bombing could be traded for negotiation. Hanoi’s position was that the bombing had to stop without conditions before talks could begin. There was a standing tension between the military wish to increase pressure and the diplomatic wish to leave a door open, and the two approaches sometimes undercut each other.
Effects and what followed
Historians still debate what the bombing achieved. It damaged roads, bridges, power supplies and industry, and it forced North Vietnam to disperse its economy and employ huge numbers of people on repairs and air defence. It also probably increased civilian hardship. But it did not stop the movement of supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it did not bring Hanoi to the negotiating table on American terms. Evidence also suggests that the bombing hardened the resolve of many North Vietnamese.
McNamara left the Pentagon at the end of February 1968. After the Tet Offensive, Johnson announced on 31 March 1968 that he would restrict the bombing to the southern part of North Vietnam, and the following months saw the start of talks in Paris. Rolling Thunder was formally ended in the autumn of 1968. In the narrow sense, then, 1967 was the year in which the debate about the air war reached its peak, and the year in which the argument that bombing alone would not win the war gained its strongest supporters inside the government.