Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [345]
History |
Operation Rolling Thunder
An NVA attack upon the highland town of Plei Ku in February 1965 curtailed several months of US procrastination about how best to prosecute the war in Vietnam, and elicited Operation Flaming Dart, a concerted bombing raid on NVA camps above the Seventeenth Parallel. Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained carpet-bombing campaign, kicked in a month later; by the time of its suspension three and a half years later its 350,000 sorties had seen twice the tonnage of bombs dropped (around eight hundred daily) as had fallen on all World War II’s theatres of war. Despite such impressive statistics, Rolling Thunder failed either to break the North’s sources and lines of supply, or to coerce Hanoi into a suspension of activities in the South. Bombing served only to strengthen the resilience of the North, whose population was mobilized to rebuild bridges, roads and railways as quickly as they were damaged. Moreover, NVA troops continued to infiltrate the South in increasing numbers.
As far back as 1954, the American politician William F. Knowland had warned that “using United States ground forces in the Indochina jungle would be like trying to cover an elephant with a handkerchief – you just can’t do it”. His words fell on deaf ears. The first regular American troops from the 3rd US Marine Division landed at Da Nang in March 1965; by the end of the year, two hundred thousand GIs were in Vietnam, and approaching half a million by the winter of 1967. In addition, there were large numbers of Australians and South Koreans, plus smaller units of New Zealanders, Thais and Filipinos.
The war these troops fought was a dirty, dispiriting and frustrating one: for the most part, it was a guerrilla conflict against an invisible enemy able to disappear into the nearest village, leaving them unable to trust even civilians. Missions to flush active Viet Cong soldiers out of villages, which were initiated towards the end of 1965, became known as Search and Destroy operations; the most infamous of these resulted in the My Lai massacre(See "The My Lai massacre"). Other jargon was coined, too, and added to the lexicon of conflict: in the highlands, fire bases were established, from where howitzers could rain fire upon NVA troop movements; elsewhere, free fire zones – areas cleared of villagers to enable bombing of their supposed guerrilla occupants – were declared; and scorched earth, the policy of denuding and razing vast swathes of land in order to rob the Viet Cong of cover, was introduced. And all the while, generals in the field were quick to establish that most symbolic arbiter in this insane war, the body count, according to which missions succeeded or failed.
In the North, outrage at the merciless bombing campaign meted out by a remote foreign aggressor engendered a sense of anti-colonial purpose; in the South, there was only disorientation. To some, the immensity of the US presence seemed to preclude the possibility of a protracted conflict, and was therefore welcome; to others, it felt so much like an invasion, especially when GIs began to uproot them and destroy their land, that they supported or joined the NLF. The Viet Cong themselves were no angels, though, often imposing a reign of terror, augmented by summary executions of alleged traitors. What’s more, successive Saigon governments were corrupt and unpopular, but the alternative was the Northern Communists so gruesomely depicted by American propaganda.
To survive, villagers quickly learned to react, and to say the right thing to the right person. Trying to appease the two sets of soldiers they encountered in the space of a day was like treading a tightrope for villagers, creating a climate of hatred and distrust that turned neighbours into informants. Since children were conscripted by