Operation ROLLING THUNDER begins. In this almost four-year campaign, U.S. Air Force, Marine, and Navy aircraft bomb military, industrial, and infrastructure targets throughout North Vietnam. ROLLING THUNDER’s original purpose is to end North Vietnam’s support for the Communist insurgency by striking its small industrial base. As the campaign progresses, cutting off the flow of food, fuel, ammunition, and troops from North to South Vietnam also becomes a major objective of the bombing.
By most U.S. measures, ROLLING THUNDER appears to severely damage North Vietnam’s ability to continue the war. According to one estimate, between March 1965 and April 1967, American aircraft destroy or disable 85 percent of North Vietnam’s petroleum storage capacity, 70 percent of its power generation capacity, 70 percent of its ammunition storage resources, and 25 percent of its barracks facilities, among other targets. However, nearly all observers agree with the conclusion of a 1967 CIA report that, “these losses . . . have not meaningfully degraded North Vietnam’s material ability to continue the war in South Vietnam.”
In response to the bombing, the North Vietnamese disperse their military assets widely throughout the country, reducing U.S. bombers’ ability to attack large or significant targets. The Hanoi government also directs more and more material through Laos and Cambodia via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It mitigates most damage to bridges, roads, and supply routes by continuously constructing numerous bypasses and alternate routes. Finally, North Vietnam replaces any materiel losses suffered as a result of U.S. bombs with large amounts of supplies, ammunition, weapons, aircraft, and other equipment from China and the Soviet Union, both of which increase their support of North Vietnam as a result of the bombing.
The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps lose almost 1,000 aircraft, and the nearly same number of American aviators is killed, missing, or captured during Operation ROLLING THUNDER. Though the precise number is debated, many tens of thousands of Vietnamese are killed during the operation, most of whom are civilians.
In America and elsewhere in the world, the bombing campaign prompts increased opposition to the war, which intensifies over the following years. After March 1968, President Johnson greatly restricts the bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to encourage peace negotiations, and he ends the campaign altogether after October 31, 1968.1
Historians often disagree over why ROLLING THUNDER failed to achieve its primary objectives, despite the overwhelming superiority of American airpower. Some argue that restrictions placed on the bombing by political leaders, who insist on managing the war from Washington, D.C., hamper its effectiveness over the long term. Aircraft, for example, are restricted or prohibited from attacking targets in the vicinity of Hanoi and Haiphong as well as any targets near the Chinese border, for fear of provoking China and the Soviet Union to enter the war. Some also point to the decision to make the campaign a gradual escalation, which ostensibly allowed Hanoi the time to devise solutions and to construct an advanced air defense system.
Others instead argue that the bombing of North Vietnam is ineffective because of its inability to halt or even slow the flow of war materiel into the country from China and the USSR, and that historically speaking, airpower’s capacity to greatly damage the war-making ability of a particular nation is limited. This is especially true in North Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s because of its largely agricultural economy. Moreover, historians say, the American reliance on firepower and other conventional warfare approaches is ill suited to a war with few large, set-piece battles and no front lines and to an enemy with a very limited industrial base.
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