![]() One survivor in particular caught his eye. Dozens of craters, some 12 yards in diameter and three yards deep, pockmark the area,” Jean Leclerc du Sablon wrote in a dispatch that appeared in The New York Times on December 29, 1972. ![]() “On Kham Thien some houses still stand, but many of these are without roofs or windows. In one area of Hanoi, Kham Thien, 287 people were killed in one night alone – mostly women, children and elderly – and 2,000 buildings destroyed by US bombs, according to the Vietnamese newspaper, VN Express International.Īn Agence France Presse journalist, who visited Kham Thien shortly after the US bombing, described a scene of “mass ruins … desolation and mourning.” “To this day, they can still smell the rotting bodies.” “Those who survived told me when they went out to look, they found dead bodies lying around,” she said. The human cost on the ground was almost indescribable.ĭuong Van Mai Elliott, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel recounting her family’s experience, “Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family,” said the Christmas bombings were her relatives’ most frightening experience of the whole war. The flak was so bright, he said, you could “read a newspaper in the cockpit.”Ī picture released on December 19, 1972, of Vietnamese people carrying victims of the American air raids on Hanoi and North Vietnam. “It almost felt like you could walk across the tips of those missiles in the sky there were so many fired at you,” recalled one retired US airman. In the aftermath of the operation, both sides claimed to have come out on top – Washington claiming it brought the Vietnamese back to the table for peace talks and Hanoi painting it as a heroic act of resistance in which it took everything its foe had and still remained standing.īut if the fog of war made it hard to judge those claims, half a century on it has done little to dim the memories of the the US airmen who can still recall flying through the North Vietnamese air defenses. Tragically, some believe all these deaths were largely in vain, with historians to this day debating the extent of the operation’s influence on the wider conflict. Fifteen B-52s – the pride of America’s fleet – were shot down, six in one day alone, and 33 airmen lost. At the same time, the United States Air Force sustained losses that today would seem unfathomable. The devastating losses were not all one way. In what would become known as “the Christmas bombings” in America and “the 11 days and nights” in Vietnam (no bombing took place on Christmas day), swathes of Hanoi were obliterated.Īn estimated 1,600 Vietnamese were killed amid some of the most harrowing scenes of the conflict, in an operation likened by some to the Hamburg raids of World War II for the sheer scale of the destruction and civilian death toll. ![]() “They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” US President Richard Nixon replied to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission. Operation Linebacker II saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972, in a brutal assault aimed at shaking the Vietnamese “to their core,” in the words of then US national security adviser Henry Kissinger. ![]() A shock-and-awe campaign of overwhelming air power aimed at bombing into submission a determined opponent that, despite being vastly outgunned, had withstood everything the world’s most formidable war machine could throw at it. It was one of the heaviest bombardments in history.
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