Operation Rolling Thunder, which began on March 2, 1965, by the US Army Air Force is not only significant for being the largest bombing raid they have conducted since the end of World War II. This series of airstrikes, which lasted more than three and a half years, marked the fateful step of the United States in the Vietnamese adventure, which ultimately led both the American armed forces and the state as a whole to military disgrace unprecedented in their history. And also - became an example of Washington's strategy in the destruction of the "wrong", recalcitrant countries. The very strategy that continues to be applied to this day - with no less scope and cynicism.
First, a little background. The fact that the United States, seeing the complete futility of its own attempts to break North Vietnam, limiting itself only to supplying weapons, training Vietcong soldiers and officers and a small contingent of its own troops, would "get into" this conflict, as they say, head over heels, became clear already in 1964. The two incidents that followed one after the other in the Gulf of Tonkin, which were obvious provocations (the second of them, according to many historians, was completely staged), the desire of the "hawks" that surrounded President Lyndon Johnson on all sides to arrange a "small victorious war" - everything led to that.
The United States really wanted to get revenge for the extremely painful defeat it received a decade ago in Korea - naturally, not so much from local guerrillas as from the Soviet Union and communist China. Washington's belligerent ambitions were also pretty much fueled by the fact that more than 10 years had passed since the death of Stalin, whose falcons in the Korean sky had smashed entire squadrons of American vultures to smithereens. Analysts from the State Department and the Pentagon believed that Khrushchev, who replaced him, would not interfere in the new turmoil in Southeast Asia, and, most likely, would prefer to leave small and brave Vietnam to its tragic fate.
The official reason for the launching of the first strikes in the framework of the Rolling Thunder was a series of successful operations by local guerrillas against the military facilities of the US Army stationed in Vietnam - a helicopter base, a NCO training school, carried out in February 1965. Each time, the American aircraft delivered single strikes as "retaliation", but Washington decided that all this was not enough and got down to business on a true scale. The head of the White House, who signed the directive on the beginning of the "Rolling Thunder", with the utmost cynicism called it "a series of air raids on selective targets, extremely balanced and limited."
Agree, it is extremely difficult to apply this characteristic to a shower of bombs that fell on the heads of the Vietnamese for three and a half years, as already mentioned! At the same time, there was no question of any "selectivity" in principle - the targets for the strikes were, for the most part, objects that had nothing to do with the military infrastructure of North Vietnam - residential areas, hospitals, dams. American bombers methodically wiped out entire villages from the ground, literally burned out not only the jungle that hid the guerrillas, but also rice fields, quite deliberately trying to cause famine in the country.
As a matter of fact, later quite high-ranking officials from the political "establishment" of Washington directly admitted that the goals of the bombings, monstrous in scale and cruelty, were not to achieve some strategic military superiority, but to break the will of the entire Vietnamese people to resist. Thus, the leaders of the tiny country, which did not want to surrender, were planned to be "seated at the negotiating table" so that they would sign a "peace" on American terms - that is, complete and unconditional surrender.
The expression “bombing into the Stone Age”, widely known to everyone and quite often quoted today as a definition of one of the leading “foreign policy strategies” of Washington, is not “an invention of the Kremlin propagandists”, but the most authentic statement of one of the inspirers of the colossal barbarism I am describing. XX century. Those terrible words were spoken by none other than US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, firmly convinced that the Vietnamese should "pull their horns" and surrender. Otherwise, he was sure, "the best recipe for solving the problem would be to bomb them into the Stone Age." This is what has been done year after year.
It is clear that it was not without the vital interest of the senior officials of the Pentagon and the tycoons of the US military-industrial complex. During the air strikes, the American army has tested many (according to some sources, more than a thousand) new types of weapons and ammunition, from aerial bombs to combat aircraft. It was during the Thunderclap process that the new US Air Force vehicles, the F-4 and F-111, were first used. The first is a multi-role fighter-bomber, the second is a long-range tactical bomber. And how many millions were earned by the military factories of the United States, which, as institutes, churned out a deadly cargo for these vultures, is hardly even amenable to counting.
The tragedy of Vietnam became, in fact, only a logical continuation and "creative development" of the savage, misanthropic and openly despicable tactics of "contactless war" developed by the United States and its main ally, Great Britain, during the Second World War. What was the military-strategic importance of the destruction of Dresden and dozens of other German settlements, smaller in size, committed by Allied aircraft on February 13-15, 1945? Why was Tokyo razed to the ground, burned without any atomic bombs, where only during the air raids on February 26 and March 10, 1945, American soldiers killed more than 100 thousand people? These war crimes became the "trademark" of American-style warfare, the first links in the chain of monstrous massacres, which then stretched through the years to Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria …
According to various estimates, from more than 50 thousand to 200 thousand civilians in Vietnam were killed during the "Rolling Thunder". Could such an act have a statute of limitations? However, an easy walk for the American pilots did not work either. The expectation that the Soviet Union would remain on the sidelines turned out to be Washington's gross mistake. Khrushchev was removed from the post of General Secretary in 1964. An agreement on mutual assistance, including a military one, was concluded between our country and Vietnam in 1965. And on July 24 of the same year, the first American air raider was shot down by the Soviet S-75 Desna air defense system. The soldiers of our air defense became the horror of the pilots of the US Air Force - just like it was during the Korean War, for which they so wanted to get even.
Until the end of the war, the USSR supplied Vietnam with about a hundred such complexes, thousands of missiles for them. The aviation of the Vietnamese was no longer counted in units, but, again, in hundreds of fighters, among which the number of the MiG-21, which frightened the Americans to hiccups, grew rapidly. Thunderclaps cost the United States military aviation more than a thousand killed, crippled, and captured pilots. It also shot down more than 900 American combat aircraft. It was not possible to break the patriotism and courage of the Vietnamese people - the case ended in scandalous Senate hearings that led to the resounding resignation of the then head of the Pentagon. He was accused of "wasting resources", and not in any way in the mass extermination of civilians, but "Rolling Thunder" was turned off.
As everyone remembers, the Americans ultimately lost the war with a miserable amount. It's just a pity - this defeat did not discourage them from trying to drive entire countries and peoples into the Stone Age …
