Throughout the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson was divided about how to proceed. Thrust into the role of president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson became consumed by the prospect that he would face an election less than a year after taking the presidential oath of office. For Johnson in 1964, politics overshadowed any sense of urgency, initiative, or imagination in the evaluation of America’s strategic options in Vietnam. As President Johnson saw it, he had only inherited the presidency and was “simply a trustee who would not command a real political mandate to determine major policy questions unless he prevailed in a national election.”1 Because winning the presidential election was Johnson’s overarching goal, he could not permit the situation in Vietnam to deteriorate to a deeper level of crisis. The impending election further constrained Johnson from either escalating the American commitment or embarking on a strategic withdrawal.2 Thus politics became the enemy of strategy in 1964, a theme that would have dire consequences.
Compounding President Johnson’s self-imposed political constraints was the fact that he relied heavily on the advice of his staff, which he inherited from President Kennedy. A product of the Ivy League, Kennedy had filled his staff positions with what were known as “the whiz kids” or “the best and the brightest,” essentially, the educated elite of East Coast schools. These men included McGeorge Bundy, the former dean of faculty at Harvard who became Kennedy’s national security advisor, and Robert McNamara, a Harvard graduate and CEO of Ford Motor Company before becoming the secretary of defense. A rift between the civilian and military advisors began during the Kennedy administration over both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. President Johnson’s dependence on Kennedy’s staff turned this rift into an outright divide between the military leadership and the administration. Because of service parochialism and interservice squabbling, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were continually undercut and outmaneuvered by McNamara and other civilian advisors.3
Despite the misgivings of the JCS, both Bundy and McNamara sold Johnson on the use of force in gradual responses to show American resolve in the face of Communist aggression and to punish North Vietnam for its continued support of the insurgency in South Vietnam. The first test of this policy came on 29 March, when Viet Cong guerrillas detonated a bomb outside the American Embassy in Saigon.4 Although Johnson took no action, he ordered the Joint Chiefs, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) to prepare contingency plans for future action against North Vietnam. This plan, produced by Adm. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, the commander in chief of Pacific Forces (CINCPAC), was forwarded to the JCS and became known as OPLAN 37-64.
OPLAN 37-64 was a three-phase approach, with gradual military force applied to stop the infiltration of North Vietnamese supplies into South Vietnam. The purpose of phase 1 was to deny Viet Cong sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Phase 2 called for reprisal strikes against North Vietnam in addition to an increase in a highly classified program known as OPLAN 34A. These covert operations began in 1961 and continued under President Johnson. During OPLAN 34A, small patrol boats inserted teams into North Vietnam and bombarded coastal facilities. Phase 3 called for strategic bombing of ninety-four military and industrial targets selected by the JCS, though this phase was intended as a last resort. Phase 1 began almost immediately in May 1964 as both air force and navy aircraft began armed reconnaissance flights over Laos in what was termed Operation Yankee Team. Operation Yankee Team convinced President Johnson and his advisors of the viability of gradual, limited application of military power.5
The Johnson administration continued to apply gradual pressure during the summer months of 1964; however, election year politics remained their primary concern. Concurrent with OPLAN 34A raids, the navy conducted electronic surveillance operations. Code-named Desoto, these patrols were conducted by destroyers operating in international waters along the coast of North Vietnam.6 Although the two operations were independent of one another, the attacks carried out by South Vietnamese patrol boats provoked responses by the North Vietnamese that were monitored by the American destroyers, thus providing intelligence on North Vietnamese military capabilities. The pace of these operations doubled in July 1964 as President Johnson sought to keep the situation in South Vietnam from degrading further. Less than three weeks after the Republican National Convention in July, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. The incident brought Johnsonian politics to the forefront and presented itself as the perfect vehicle for Johnson to ride from August through Election Day.7
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was in fact two separate incidents. The first occurred on 2 August, as USS Maddox (DD731) conducted a Desoto patrol off Hon Me Island. The destroyer was attacked by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. During the ensuing battle, aircraft from USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) sank one of the patrol boats, and the other two escaped. Desoto patrols continued, and in response to the attacks, President Johnson ordered another destroyer, USS Turner Joy (DD951), to accompany Maddox. On the night of 4 August, the second incident occurred. While both destroyers claimed to have been attacked, the hostile shapes seen on radar scopes were nothing more than returns caused by severe weather. Much controversy surrounded the events of this evening, and while declassified documents have shown that the second attack never took place, the results were far-reaching. Many high-ranking officials from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of State, and the Pentagon could not correlate the evidence assembled by McNamara as supporting a Vietnamese attack. Despite their doubts, people in both the intelligence and defense communities kept their silence. As much as anything else, they were aware that President Johnson would brook no uncertainty that could undermine his position.8 The first incident set the stage, allowing Johnson to show his restraint in the face of perceived Communist aggression. The second attack allowed him to show his firm resolve. The president ordered retaliatory strikes and went on national television to announce his response. As a result, on 7 August Congress passed a joint resolution, commonly referred to as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, with only two dissenting votes. The resolution gave President Johnson power to use military force in any way he saw fit against Communist aggression in Vietnam without the benefit of a declaration of war. The political support he gained also led to Johnson’s overwhelming victory in the 1964 presidential election.
Even with the resolution in Johnson’s favor, it took another Communist attack for Washington to escalate the war. Following a Viet Cong attack against U.S. advisors in Pleiku in February 1965, Bundy, with the support of Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Gen. William Westmoreland, recommended a reprisal strike against North Vietnam known as Flaming Dart I. The Viet Cong responded in kind by blowing up a hotel in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, where American servicemen were billeted. More retaliatory air strikes followed in Flaming Dart II. What Bundy and his advisors sought to engineer was a perpetual bombing campaign, which they described as a generalized and continuing program of “graduated and sustained reprisal.” Despite internal studies indicating that coercive bombing was an ineffectual strategy, Bundy and his team persisted. They ignored war game simulations and estimates from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department that concluded that a bombing campaign would fail to weaken Hanoi’s determination to support the insurgency.9 Flaming Dart proved tactically inconsequential, as Communist forces in South Vietnam continued the insurgency with little concern for American reprisal. More importantly, the limitations imposed on these early strikes, which were the prototype for Rolling Thunder, created a negative precedent that condemned the pending air war.
President Johnson began Operation Rolling Thunder on 2 March 1965 in an attempt to convince the government of North Vietnam to abandon its support of the insurgency in the South. As envisioned, the bombing was not a strategic campaign, nor was it an interdiction effort. Instead, the bombing was intended as a signal to North Vietnam, demonstrating U.S. resolve as well as concern to not destroy the North and to limit civilian casualties. The campaign was marred by disputes between senior military leaders and the civilian administration from the outset. Military leaders advocated decisive strikes in order to isolate North Vietnam and to destroy its production capabilities and transportation systems. Instead, the Johnson administration continued to apply gradual force, using bombing halts followed by escalation in an effort to persuade North Vietnam to negotiate for peace with the United States and South Vietnam.
The administration believed gradualism to be a safer means of signaling than bombing every significant target at once. By managing the escalation, Johnson preserved control. This minimized the chance of direct confrontation with China, the Soviet Union, and allies that continued to trade with North Vietnam. Thus the targets with the highest probability of impacting the war also carried the risk of triggering direct confrontation with China and the Soviet Union, something to be avoided at all costs.
The Johnson administration insisted on unprecedented control of the air war, making tactical decisions and dictating aircraft types and numbers, the ordnance they carried, and even their flight profiles. This planning was chiefly done during the administration’s infamous Tuesday luncheons. Through 1967 military leaders, including the chairman of the JCS, were not allowed to attend these meetings and were excluded from the target selection process. The lunch group limited targeting in terms of both geography and quality. Geographically, bombing was initially limited to targets south of the 18th parallel. It gradually moved north, a parallel each month, as North Vietnam failed to heed Washington’s warnings. The value of targets gradually intensified as well, with specific targets hit in response to Communist attacks in the South.
Because the Tuesday lunch group had little idea of day-to-day combat realities over North Vietnam, campaign targeting and planning suffered. There was little military logic to the targeting process. McNamara acknowledged that “the decision to hit or not hit [a target] is a function of three primary elements: the value of the target, the risk of U.S. pilot loss, and the risk of widening the war, and it depends on the balance among those elements as to whether we should or should not hit.”10 Operationally, it meant that target lists issued by Washington did not include targets for which materials had been produced by tactical commanders. Other approved targets were included that had been rejected on scene. The lists of approved targets also included unknown targets that had been developed in Washington from photography and other sources not available in Southeast Asia.11 Aircrews were given at most two weeks to destroy targets placed on the strike list before those targets were removed during the next meeting. According to Admiral Sharp, “Frequently we would make one or two strikes on a critical target, and then after it was hit (whether damaged or not) strike authorization would be retracted and permission to go back to that target would not be forthcoming for months, or maybe forever.”12 Monsoon weather prevented many targets from being struck, while at other times, targets remained on the list after they had been struck and destroyed. Serious delays were often experienced when tactical commanders asked for approval to strike targets because the JCS could not get an answer from the Tuesday lunch club. The process hobbled the air campaign from its initial stages to the bitter end.
Rolling Thunder execution was further hampered by poorly structured command-and-control arrangements driven more by political concerns and parochial interservice squabbling than tactical considerations. For example, the Seventh Air Force controlled its own aircraft and served as the Air Component Commander for MACV, Gen. William Westmoreland. The navy’s Seventh Fleet air assets reported separately up their service chain to CINCPAC, Admiral Sharp. Coordination was next to impossible, and it created a situation in which five separate air wars were fought: one in South Vietnam, one in Cambodia, one in Laos, one to interdict supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos, and one in North Vietnam. Each air war had its own command-and-control arrangement and its own restrictions, including rules of engagement (ROE). MACV controlled all sorties in South Vietnam, while the ambassadors to Cambodia and Laos ran the air campaigns in their respective countries. The campaign against North Vietnam was controlled by CINCPAC. It proved maddening to all who flew and fought.
The campaign suffered from the administration’s ambiguous goals and lack of coherent strategy. Throughout, Johnson and his staff remained divided over any goals, though they eventually became the following: (1) strategically deter North Vietnam from supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam; (2) raise the morale of military and political elites in South Vietnam; and (3) interdict North Vietnam’s support of the Communist insurgency in the South. Early strikes in 1965 did not alter Hanoi’s behavior, and the air campaign was viewed as a failure. Yet Johnson did not feel that he could back down without appearing weak on Communism. To stabilize the situation, ground troops became the quick and easy solution. Because the air war over North Vietnam and the ground war in South Vietnam were seen as antithetical, the air war was relegated to a secondary role, becoming a bargaining tool in exchange for negotiations. Johnson continually sought a middle ground, using policy options designed to result in the least international and domestic political cost. Fear of domestic repercussions pushed Johnson to continue using airpower, which offered results without risking additional lives, unlike the ground war. Thus interdiction, in the form of armed reconnaissance missions, became the means to achieve that end. Although he continually declined high-value targets that posed unacceptable risks, Johnson steadily increased interdiction sorties.
As a result, Rolling Thunder went through five distinct phases as interdiction efforts gained focus and intensity. During phase 1, from March to June 1965, a variety of targets were struck in failed attempts to deter North Vietnam. The air strikes, which were limited to targets below the 20th parallel to avoid heavy population centers, only hardened North Vietnamese resolve. More importantly, with Soviet and Chinese help, phase 1 led to the creation of the world’s most complex and lethal air defense network.
Phase 2, from July 1965 to January 1966, became an interdiction campaign aimed at roads, bridges, boats, and railroads. At the urging of Admiral Sharp, the focus shifted from interdiction to petroleum products. Sharp realized the campaign was not achieving the desired results and believed that by focusing on energy resources, North Vietnam might be forced to negotiate for peace.13
Phase 3, from January to October 1966, focused on North Vietnam’s petroleum, oil, and lubricant (POL) resources. Before this phase began, North Vietnam required only 32,000 tons of oil a year to supply its needs. By the time Rolling Thunder began targeting POL resources, North Vietnam had 60,000 tons of POL stocks in reserve. While the attacks destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the North Vietnamese supply, remaining stocks were dispersed throughout the country. These stocks proved more than adequate to meet North Vietnam’s needs and did little to affect the war.14
Phase 4, from October 1966 to May 1967, concentrated the campaign’s efforts on North Vietnam’s industry and power-generating capabilities. For the first time, targets in Hanoi were struck, but, as with phase 3, these efforts failed to cripple a nonindustrialized country. Because North Vietnam’s ports still remained off-limits, the strikes did not impede the country’s ability to receive and distribute supplies destined for the insurgency in South Vietnam.15
Phase 5, the final phase, from May 1967 to October 1968, concentrated on isolating Hanoi from Haiphong and both cities from the remainder of the country. It continued the destruction of any remaining industrial infrastructure. At its height, U.S. aircraft averaged over thirteen thousand sorties a month, a threefold increase from phase 1. These missions encountered incredibly lethal air defenses. During any given month of 1967, North Vietnam fired over 25,000 tons of ammunition from ten thousand antiaircraft artillery (AAA) guns and hundreds of missiles from over twenty-five surface-to-air missile (SAM) battalions.16 Growing frustration with the war and its rising cost in American lives ultimately led to Johnson’s March 1968 decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election and halt all bombing north of the 19th parallel.
From March 1965 until November 1968, air force and navy aircraft flew hundreds of thousands of sorties over North Vietnam. American pilots dropped 864,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. It is worth noting that during the same time period, the United States dropped 2.2 million tons of bombs on South Vietnam, their supposed ally, and 2.1 million tons on Laos. Yet Rolling Thunder still failed to achieve any of its objectives. All of this effort came at great cost to the United States both in dollars spent and in lives lost. Between 1965 and 1968 air operations throughout Southeast Asia consumed 47 percent of all American war expenditures. In 1965 the CIA estimated that Rolling Thunder cost the United States $6.60 to render $1.00 worth of damage; one year later, it cost $9.60. It is estimated that the $600 million of damage inflicted by Rolling Thunder was dwarfed by the $6 billion it cost to replace all the aircraft lost during the campaign.17
The interdiction campaign failed to stem the flow of supplies to South Vietnam, and no peace agreement was signed. When Rolling Thunder began, farmers made up 80 percent of North Vietnam’s laborers, and agriculture accounted for nearly half of the gross national product. Destroying industrial capability or oil supplies meant little to a nation that relied on bicycles for transportation and depended on water buffalo for farming. It was also inconsequential considering the amount of support given to North Vietnam by its Communist allies. As much as military leaders wanted to believe, Vietnam was not Germany in World War II and represented a poor choice for a bombing campaign. The Johnson administration never came to grips with these basic facts and wasted American lives, aircraft, and money on an air campaign that had little impact on the ability of North Vietnam to support the war in South Vietnam.
The Johnson administration maintained its tight control by utilizing restrictive ROE. In theory, the ROE preserved control of the gradual approach, allowing Washington to ratchet up pressure on the government of North Vietnam, forcing it to bend and eventually break. In reality, the ROE minimized destruction to North Vietnam’s most important targets while placing undue burden on military commanders and the men flying combat missions. The ROE required aviators to fly and fight in a manner contrary to common sense, training, and published doctrine. Washington’s interference and senior military complicity in these rules at times defies explanation. The ROE quickly became the focal point of condemnation concerning conduct of the air war and have echoed in histories since.
The rules often changed with each weekly phase of Rolling Thunder, creating confusion for aviators flying missions. In addition, the rules varied in each route package, making it difficult for pilots to know the current restrictions and keep track in the heat of combat. Never mind that a completely different set of rules existed for missions flown over Laos. Yet pilots were still held accountable for anything they did that might escalate tensions with the Soviets and Chinese.
ROE did not authorize follow-up strikes. If a target was missed due to weather or if it was just partially damaged, the entire authorization process had to be repeated. Targets of opportunity were also disallowed, meaning that if the primary target and the alternate were obscured by weather, unexpended ordnance could not be used on another target. This often resulted in carrier pilots jettisoning unexpended bombs in the water prior to returning to their ship.18
During interdiction efforts, restrictions limited the targets to be attacked along lines of communication such as roads, railways, and canals. Two types of targets were permitted, trucks and waterborne logistics craft (WBLC), and each came with its own special restrictions. Aviators were expected to differentiate military trucks from civilian trucks while flying thousands of feet in the air and often while evading hostile ground fire. They were permitted to strike trucks only when they were a safe distance from villages. Of course, the Vietnamese were aware of this restriction and routinely parked trucks in and around villages in order to take advantage of the modicum of protection. The restrictions associated with WBLCs, the name for any and all small ships (junks, ferries, barges, and even fishing vessels) were equally outrageous. Pilots were instructed that WBLCs presented a viable target only if they were motorized and traveling parallel to the coast within the international limit of 3 nautical miles, but not if they were transiting perpendicular to the coast. This restriction hampered aviators’ efforts, as vessels could sail in international waters and dart into port to deliver supplies under the cover of weather or darkness, sometimes both, and only for short periods of time. That aviators were expected to make these distinctions is an example of the irrationality of the operation’s rules.
Although the interdiction of supplies became the main focus of Rolling Thunder, the port facility of Haiphong remained off-limits. The presence of Soviet and Chinese ships and the potential reaction if they were struck were risks too great for Johnson and his advisors to take. Several NATO allies also continued to trade with North Vietnam, which only added to the sensitivities surrounding the port. The port at Cam Pha to the northwest of Haiphong included a significant Vietnamese coal depot, which remained off-limits as long as foreign ships were in the harbor. Of course, there wasn’t a day when a foreign-flagged ship wasn’t tied up at the pier, thus preventing any attack. Ships anchored offshore were also off-limits, even if visibly offloading munitions. Barges ferrying supplies to the piers were viable targets, but only once they were 600 meters from the ship.
Perhaps the most frustrating restrictions of the entire air war concerned the North Vietnamese defenses, specifically SAMs and MiGs. The Johnson administration knew that Soviet and Eastern Bloc technicians were installing, training, and in some cases operating SAM sites. Secretary of Defense McNamara’s concern about harming these advisors and the Soviet reaction led him to place the sites off-limits until they actually engaged American aircraft. At one point during the early stages of the air war, the assistant secretary of defense and McNamara’s close confidant, John McNaughton, ridiculed a request to strike a SAM site under construction. “You don’t think the North Vietnamese are going to use them!” he scoffed. “Putting them in is just a political ploy by the Russians to appease Hanoi.” The administration’s theory was that if the United States did not bomb the SAM sites, it would send a signal to the North Vietnamese, who, it was thought, would act in kind.19 The consequences of this decision cost untold numbers of men and aircraft once American forces were finally given permission to destroy SAMs. Likewise, the fear of Chinese intervention led to prohibitions on MiG airfields through 1967. This allowed North Vietnamese fighter aircraft to operate freely, with little fear of repercussions.
Restrictions came at great cost to aviators and had major ramifications on the outcome of the war. Instead of demonstrating U.S. restraint, restrictions actually strengthened North Vietnamese resolve. They lessened the burden on North Vietnam’s air defenses, allowing them to allocate and employ their defenses with great effect. The piecemeal targeting meant that each time a new set of targets was bombed, the North Vietnamese could expect similar targets to be attacked for the succeeding few weeks. This gave them the chance to concentrate their defenses on the predicted targets and routes, often with devastating results.20 Each time the United States threatened to overwhelm North Vietnam’s defenses, a bombing halt or some other self-imposed restriction invariably allowed the North to train, reequip, and overcome the Americans’ hard-fought advantage. During each bombing halt, they redeployed AAA and SAMs to cover gaps exposed during the most recent raids. A Vietnamese history of the war states, “During the first three months of 1967 the enemy launched no large attacks against Hanoi and Haiphong. This was due in part to poor weather and in part to the restrictions of the American imperialist policy of escalation. In this situation the Air Defense Service directed forces in both cities to vigorously prepare for combat.”21 It was a defensive advantage that Hanoi exploited at every opportunity.
While the United States was prepared for a potential nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, it was unprepared for the sustained level of operations required to support the growing conflict in Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder began with a peacetime mindset stemming from President Johnson’s attempts to limit American involvement and preserve his domestic agenda and his cherished Great Society programs. It ended up being fought using accounting and control measures introduced by Secretary McNamara, creating a state of mind that permeated all aspects of the war—from the government’s budget process to the services themselves. As the war was fought on the cheap, shortages in personnel, ordnance, aircraft, and even aircraft carriers affected the operations of every service, including the navy. The largest and most unintended consequence of this parsimony is that it unnecessarily exposed American servicemen to greater threats both on the ground and in the air.
No one was better qualified to attempt to make Johnson’s “guns and butter” policy work than Robert McNamara. During his tenure, McNamara introduced quantifiable accounting and control methods into his management of the Pentagon.22 His ability to reel off statistics on any relevant subject astonished subordinates and often left stenographers struggling to keep up. McNamara kept close tabs on every facet of the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy, using statistics and any other quantifiable data as a means of evaluating success. This included the use of expected sortie rates for each of the different types of aircraft then in service. Thus in his search for a measure to evaluate Rolling Thunder, McNamara chose sortie rates because of the lack of any other perceived criteria. In simplistic terms, the belief held that if the United States ratcheted up the pressure, flew enough sorties, and dropped enough ordnance, the North Vietnamese would mathematically be forced to quit. Coincidentally, this same thinking led to the use of “body counts” as a measure of success for the war in South Vietnam. Unfortunately, success or failure in war cannot be reduced to such simplistic terms, though this thought process dominated American policy throughout the war.23
Throughout, the navy and air force competed against each other over which service provided the most effective use of airpower. Though both services were committed to the use of airpower, animosity between the two services remained from the late 1940s, when the air force began efforts to wrest defense dollars for its large strategic bomber fleet at the cost of the navy’s newest aircraft carrier. The navy spent large portions of its budget to build and develop aircraft carriers for what it believed was the best use of airpower. Neither the navy nor the air force could admit the failure of Rolling Thunder without having to acknowledge to a certain degree that their service’s concept of airpower was based on a faulty premise.24 Given that the navy was trying to obtain funding for its next generation of supercarriers, which were some of the most expensive and complex ships ever developed (not to mention completely new aircraft to fill their flight decks), this was an extremely bitter pill to swallow.25 The navy stood to lose this funding, as it led to the question that if sea-based airpower could not succeed against North Vietnam, how could it be expected to succeed against the Soviet Union?
Funding concerns in conjunction with sortie counts resulted in aberrant thinking by service leadership. The reputation of each service became dependent on success as defined by sortie counts. Desire to impress exacerbated the normal interservice competition as each service strove to produce a higher number of sorties than the other. If McNamara’s analysts could produce statistics that showed that one service was better than the other using the limited criterion of sortie rates, the apparently “inferior” service stood to lose in the next round of appropriations.26 This was a fact not lost on either service.
When the sortie count was combined with restrictions imposed on aircrews by the ROE, a strategic divide developed between the pilots who were fighting the war and those directing it from thousands of miles away. This obsession with statistics rather than the real outcome of the bombing campaign was unfair, to say the least, to the men fighting. Service leaders forced tactical commanders to fly all the sorties allocated to them, even in marginal weather and when no real targets were available.27 Ordnance shortages eventually produced a situation where six aircraft would be sent with only one bomb each, when one aircraft could carry six bombs, simply to keep up the sortie rate. Sorties became something that could be measured, assimilated by a computer, reduced to a mathematical formula, divided into dollar amounts, and analyzed for cost effectiveness—never mind actual combat effectiveness.28 This obsession with numbers blinded senior leadership to the real goals of Rolling Thunder, as sorties were flown just for the sake of flying sorties, and bombs were dropped for similar reasons.
The strategic divide between Washington’s failed strategy and the harsh realities faced by the men executing it is epitomized by the experiences of USS Oriskany (CVA-34) and her embarked Carrier Air Wing 16 (CVW-16). At the end of World War II, aircraft carriers remained one of the primary instruments used to implement national policies and national security strategies, despite the growing reliance on nuclear weapons. Oriskany proved no different in this regard, using her aircraft to project power over land and sea. In Vietnam the “Mighty-O,” or simply “O-Boat,” as she was affectionately known, was one of the oldest carriers in the navy. Named after the costly Revolutionary War battle near Oriskany, New York, she was laid down in May 1944. Construction was rushed to ensure the carrier could participate in the end of World War II. With the end of the war, construction slowed and was eventually halted in 1947 as the navy and air force bickered over service roles and budgets. Design modifications were implemented, and Oriskany was eventually commissioned in September 1950.
Following multiple Far East deployments, including distinguished service in the Korean War, the carrier underwent refurbishment in San Francisco from 1957 to 1959. Originally built with a straight flight deck, Oriskany’s modifications gave her an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and many other improvements that permitted safer operation of new jet aircraft. These modernized carriers were known simply as 27C class carriers, in reference to the name of the modernization program: SCB-27.
Oriskany’s main battery, or primary weapon, was the embarked aircraft of CVW-16. Established in September 1960, Carrier Air Group 16 (CVG-16) was redesignated as CVW-16 during Secretary McNamara’s early restructuring of the Defense Department. The air wing consisted of approximately seventy aircraft in nine squadrons and detachments. During Vietnam the air wing was comprised of two fighter squadrons flying F-8 Crusaders (VF-162 Hunters, VMF[AW]-212 Lancers, and later VF-111 Sundowners), two attack squadrons flying A-4 Skyhawks (VA-163 Saints and VA-164 Ghost Riders), one attack squadron flying A-1 Skyraiders (VA-152 Wild Aces), one heavy attack squadron flying A-3 Skywarriors (VAH-4 Four Runners), one photographic reconnaissance detachment flying RF-8 Crusaders (VFP-63 Eyes of the Fleet), one airborne early radar warning detachment flying E-2 Tracers (VAW-11 Early Elevens), and a detachment of UH-2 Seasprite helicopters (HC-1 Pacific Fleet Angels). The ship and air wing made one western Pacific deployment in 1962. They deployed again in August 1963, arriving in the South China Sea shortly before the coup d’état that resulted in Ngo Dinh Diem’s death. As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated, Oriskany returned home in March 1964. When the Tonkin Gulf incident propelled America into the conflict in Vietnam, Oriskany was still undergoing repairs in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. America’s destiny in Vietnam had already been foretold before the ship was ready in 1965.
The original concept of Rolling Thunder called for air strikes that would eventually increase in force until the government of North Vietnam stopped supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. Policy makers continually thought that the level of bombing needed to achieve this goal would soon be reached. When this plan didn’t work, Johnson turned to interdiction, and the number of sorties and tonnage of bombs dropped expanded significantly each time. Politicians and military planners of the campaign never anticipated that Rolling Thunder would last for three and a half years, with thousands of tactical aircraft dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs. They also never anticipated the loss of over 850 aircraft over North Vietnam.29 The campaign evolved through a series of reactions to North Vietnam’s continued and increasingly conventional intervention in South Vietnam. Rolling Thunder never followed a carefully designed course or set strategy but simply developed out of a kind of impotent rage that American policy makers felt toward Hanoi’s recalcitrance. Restrictions and growing North Vietnamese defenses virtually guaranteed that each mission resulted in casualties. The navy alone lost 382 aircraft over North Vietnam during the three-year campaign.30 Oriskany and CVW-16 lost sixty-one aircraft during this time, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the navy’s combat losses. Operational losses were nearly as high, and when combined, they account for over one hundred aircraft lost. This fact alone makes Oriskany’s and CVW-16’s experience unique among the many squadrons and wings, both air force and navy, that flew during Rolling Thunder.
The significant losses experienced by CVW-16 while flying from Oriskany can be attributed to several factors. First and foremost was the strategic divide between those running the war and the pilots flying from Yankee Station. The restrictions imposed by both the Johnson administration and military leadership caused unnecessary losses and prolonged the war. Airpower could not be successfully used to send political signals to Hanoi, as North Vietnam construed the message differently from the way policy makers in Washington intended. North Vietnamese leaders saw that America lacked the determination to seriously threaten their support of the insurgency or the will to see the war through to the end. This led to North Vietnam’s response, which was an escalation of the violence, which in turn led directly to higher casualties among American pilots as the Johnson administration replied in kind.
The second factor had to do with unfortunate timing, as Oriskany’s deployments coincided with each major escalation of Rolling Thunder. She arrived on Yankee Station as the summer monsoons began and the air war shifted into the next phase. In addition, the navy’s shortage of aircraft carriers meant that there was little chance of altering the deployment dates in order to share the risk. In 1965 Oriskany arrived on station as Rolling Thunder began. In 1966 she arrived just as Rolling Thunder began targeting the North Vietnamese POL system. Following a disastrous fire in October 1966, there was inadequate time to train replacements before returning for the crescendo of 1967. As a result of the Stennis hearings, which publicly pitted McNamara against the military leadership, the restrictions were lifted, and Oriskany’s pilots paid a heavy price as they struck targets previously off-limits in Hanoi and Haiphong.
Finally, Air Wing 16 was aggressive. The men all realized the difference between America’s goals and limited aims and the totality of their involvement. As the war continued to escalate, aviators found themselves fully committed. They responded in the only ways available to them—with courage and professionalism. Ironically, this led to further casualties as they pressed their attacks on North Vietnam in deference to Washington’s limitations.
While Oriskany’s pilots never lost the will to fly and fight, their frustration steadily rose. As opposition to the war grew, the ROE became the focal point of this disenchantment. Men believed they had been hindered by the ROE and were then being unfairly criticized by their own leadership for failings that were not of their making.31 It took extraordinary leadership, professionalism, and courage for these men to continue flying their missions. Moreover, the success or failure of airpower in Vietnam cannot be the measure of success of the men who flew and fought. The blame for Operation Rolling Thunder’s failure falls squarely on the senior leadership of both the military and the politicians they advised. The pilots deserved much better than they got.