U.S. AIR FORCE COLONEL, JAN. 1965–JAN. 1966;
SEPT. 1972–FEB. 1973
We bombed Hanoi with B-52S for the first time in December 1972. It was called Operation Linebacker II and it was 11 days of bombing. I led the third attack. A lot of people, me included, think that’s what basically ended the war because up until then the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese were dragging their feet.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that if we got too tough on North Vietnam, the Chinese would come in. We didn’t want that. We didn’t want to get into a Korean-style war with China. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger opened the doors to China and the best I can tell, they got tacit approval from Mao Tse-Tung that the Chinese wouldn’t react if we beat up on North Vietnam. They had been arguing in Paris over the size of the table and all this kind of crap, but a few days into the bombing of Hanoi, North Vietnam finally agreed to get together and talk…
We took off from Guam after the usual pre-takeoff briefings. You’re loaded with fuel, loaded with bombs. You’re at max gross weight. These were all World War II bombs, stuff the guys hadn’t dropped on Berlin. They were 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. During the 11 days of Operation Linebacker II we ran out of the 500 pounders.
After takeoff we formed up into three-ship cells. The cells were separated by a few miles and each cell had a title: cobalt, orange, etc. So when you called cobalt, you’d be talking to the commander of that cell. We flew about four hours to just off the coast of Vietnam. The “D” models had to refuel because they weren’t as fuel efficient as the “G” models. So those guys had to hit the tanks.
We went northwest up through South Vietnam off into Laos until we were due west of Hanoi, then we cut east and ran down Thud Ridge. From the time we took off from Guam until we were over Hanoi was about five hours. I started off from Guam with maybe 30 B-52s, and I picked up 20 more based in Thailand after the refueling off the coast of Vietnam. So by the time we got up to Hanoi we had 50-some birds, plus fighter support and such like. As airborne commander I was in charge of all that.
It was a night mission. It was black—all you could see were a few lights on the ground. I’m talking to the cell commanders, the fighters. There was an airborne early warning control plane too. And there were Navy ships also in the command and control business out in the Gulf of Tonkin. So I was yakking with all kinds of people—I had more damn radios than you can believe. Trying to keep track of all that was going on kept you kind of busy.
We came in at 35,000 feet. There was a hell of a tail wind. We were going lickity-split down Thud Ridge into downtown Hanoi then releasing and making a hard right, turning southwest into Laos. We believed that Hanoi was the best-defended city in the world at that time.
We weren’t sure how many MiG fighters were going to be attacking and how many were measuring our altitude. We were doing a good job jamming the command and control of the surface-to-air missiles. Normally SAMs have a proximity fuze so when the warhead goes by at a certain distance, it’s programmed to go off—it has its own radar. But we had them jammed so they didn’t go off. Then the North Vietnamese set them to go off at a certain altitude. I counted 30 of these SAMs fired just at our cell. They were coming up all over the place. The idea was to be in the lethal SAM ring for the minimum amount of time. A lot of guys would get hit in that post-target turn. I lost one B-52 on my mission. We lost a total of 13 or 15 B-52s during Linebacker II.
Our targets were railroads, military installations like army bases, radar sites, airfields and so forth. The enemy was running out of SAMs. By the last night of the 11-night operation it was damn near a milk run.
After 11 days of this, the North Vietnamese told the U.S. they wanted to resume the peace negotiations. Linebacker II gave everybody a good excuse to restart the talks. It was obvious that Hanoi was on its knees militarily. After the third or fourth night things were looking pretty good for us. One of our guys called the B-52 “God’s avenging dump truck.” I think it’s a pretty good label.
Interview and photography by Jeffrey Wolin from Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans
Originally published in the December 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
