The enemy was very able too. Underestimating them seemed to be a cottage industry with our leadership and the whiz kids in Washington but down where the rubber met the Type PS Ball round, both the NVA and the Main Force VC were dangerous and stuck where they were if they outnumbered you.
I think that the Admiral may be right that if we hit them without restriction from the get-go, before the enemy had a chance to get all those bundles from the Eastern Bloc, they might have seen reason but I don't think so. Even we Lance Corporals at the time knew that the only way of stopping the NVA was to visit their back yard in person. As we thought about it back then, if we were in North Vietnam "everybody's the enemy".
Semper Fi
“if we were in North Vietnam “everybody’s the enemy” — so it would have been also when dropping bombs on “Ho-land”
The admiral’s (and the AF’s) point was that we should have hit the enemy’s strategic facilities like Haiphong before they set up their sophisticated air defense system.
I taught in the Air War College during my last 3 years on active duty, and I taught military history at a university for 10 years in retirement — my only point in bringing this background up is that I’ve given a great deal of thought to and reading about Vietnam in those positions (I was very bitter about the “no win strategy” when I left Vietnam).
Here are some notes I gave my university students for them to think about —
First, regarding the failed interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the reasons for the failure can be found in the lessons learned from three wars (WWII, Korea, Vietnam) as summarized by USAF Gen William W. Momyer who clearly states the conditions necessary to employ the effectiveness of airpower in stripping away enemy military capability with air interdiction.
“OVERLORD’S LESSONS: Every major ground campaign through the remainder of World War II was coordinated with an interdiction campaign… With the interdiction campaign destroying critically needed supplies, the Wehrmacht was then forced to fall back, or if units stood and fought, their positions could be overrun because of the logistics failure. Regardless of their will to fight, the lack of needed weapons, food, and ammunition made it infeasible for German units to stay in the battle.
“From these lessons of World War II, the concepts of interdiction developed: (a) Strike the source of the war material; (b) concentrate the attacks against the weak elements of the logistical system; (c) continuously attack, night and day, the major lines of communication supporting the army in the field; (d) inflict heavy losses on enemy logistics and forces before they approach the battlefield where the difficulty of successful interdiction is greatest . . ..”
Gen William W. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars, USAF, 1978.
After Vietnam, there emerged an anti-war shibboleth that interdiction doesn’t work because the US was unsuccessful in shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but as Gen Momyer made clear, we were dropping our bombs in the wrong places – we should have been bombing the supply depots in Haiphong and Hanoi rather than bombing monkeys in the Laotian jungle.
It must be noted that much is made of the fact that the US dropped more bomb tonnage in Vietnam than we did during WWII; and therefore critics of the war frequently still say “See, we could not have done any more – there was no way we could have won” – of course such statements are uninformed and silly because Johnson controlled the targeting of North Vietnam from the White House, consequently Johnson put all targets that could have ended the war off limits – in Johnson’s own words: “They (US Forces) can’t bomb an outhouse without my permission.”
Had Johnson desired to end DRV aggression quickly, 1) he could have bombed the Red River dikes, flooding the principal population center of the DRV causing paralysis to most of the economy and the Hanoi central government, 2) he could have mined Haiphong Harbor and destroyed the Haiphong docks stopping the major inflow of war supplies for the insurgents in the South that were coming by sea from Communist China and the Soviet Union, 3) he could have destroyed the RRs, bridges, and highways coming into North Vietnam from China over which war supplies were imported, 4) he could have bombed the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong where the RR and truck marshalling yards/supply depots were located for the onward shipment of war materiel to supply the communist combat forces in South Vietnam, 5) he could have permitted US Forces to destroy the MIG interceptor bases instead of making US fighters wait to engage them until after the MIGs took off, 6) he could have permitted US Forces to destroy the SAM sites when they were under construction instead of making US fighters wait to engage them until after the sites were completed and tracking US fighters to shoot them down.
Johnson did none of these things, condemning American fighting men to die taking on the North Vietnamese and their weapons that had been smuggled down the Trail one soldier at a time as they emerged from jungle border of South Vietnam instead of destroying their troops and weapons en masse in barracks and supply depots while they were still in North Vietnam.
Would those actions have worked? I believe they would have worked a lot better than what Johnson permitted.