The first article is here.
1968 was a watershed year for both the Vietnam War and the Trail. A year before that, in 1967, the Vietnamese forces of the Vietnamese People's Army conducted a series of powerful ground attacks against South Vietnam from the territory of Laos - the so-called border battles of 1967. They showed that it was possible to transfer rather large forces along the "path" and supply them in a volume sufficient for conducting combined arms combat. Although these battles were lost by the Vietnamese, they managed to achieve the movement of American troops to the areas necessary for the Vietnamese - the latter were forced to go on a major redeployment to repel North Vietnamese attacks to the south, and denied some territories.
The CIA, as a result of these events, came to the conclusion that a major attack from the North Vietnamese was ahead, but no one knew the details.
By that time, the "trail" had grown considerably.
If in 1966 it included 1000 kilometers of roads, then by the beginning of 1968 there were more than two and a half, and about one-fifth of these roads were suitable for moving cars in any season, including the rainy season. The entire "trail" was divided into four "base areas", with a huge network of camouflaged storage bunkers, dugouts, parking lots, workshops, and so on. The number of troops on the "path" was estimated at tens of thousands of people. The power of the anti-aircraft defense of the trail has increased. If at first it consisted almost exclusively of DShK machine guns and trash left over from the French era, then by 1968 many sections and logistics bases on the "trail" were covered with a dense network of anti-aircraft batteries, their number in some of the "base areas" numbered in the hundreds. True, at that time these were mainly 37-mm cannons, but during attacks from low altitudes, they posed a serious threat to the Americans. Slowly but surely, 57-millimeter guns, dangerous for aircraft at medium altitudes, began to "seep" onto the trail.
The latter came along with guidance radars and anti-aircraft artillery fire control devices, which made them much more effective than even the old large-caliber cannons.
The "path" itself by that time "sprouted" through Cambodia. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who ruled this country since 1955, at a certain moment believed in the inevitability of the victory of communism in Southeast Asia and in 1965 broke off diplomatic relations with the United States (in fact, for a variety of reasons). From that moment, Vietnam received permission to use Cambodian territory for the delivery of supplies in the same way as it used the territory of Laos. The "trail", passing through the territory of Cambodia, made it possible to deliver people, weapons and materials directly to the "heart" of South Vietnam. The Americans, who knew very well about this route, called it the "Sihanouk Trail", although for Vietnam both the Lao and Cambodian parts of the "trail" were part of a single whole.
As the American bombing of the trail grew, so did the losses of the sides on it - more and more Vietnamese and Lao were killed by American bombs, more and more often Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners shot down an American plane. The American special forces also suffered losses on the trail.
Thus, by the beginning of 1968, the trail was an extremely serious logistics route, but the Americans could not even imagine how serious and large-scale everything was.
On January 30, 1968, Vietnam launched a full-scale military offensive to the south, which went down in American military history as the "Tet offensive," after the holiday of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. If Viet Cong fighters attacked in most sectors of the front, then a regular army was advancing on the city of Hue. Tanks and artillery were used during the offensive.
Heavy fighting cost the parties huge losses. Although the United States and South Vietnam won a crushing victory on the battlefield, they had little to rejoice in: it was clear that the losses inflicted on the northerners would not force them to abandon the war, but the offensive had a crushing effect on US public opinion. The picture of the huge masses of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, operating in South Vietnam as at home, literally struck the imagination of the American public. One of the results of this offensive and its subsequent sequels ("mini-Tet" in May 1968, and the offensive of 1969) was the election of US President Richard Nixon with his policy of "Vietnamizing" the war, which eventually led to the defeat of the Americans and their allies.
A devastating "surprise" for the US military and the CIA was not only the offensive itself, but also what huge masses of troops, military equipment and ammunition the "trail" allows.
With this it was necessary to urgently do something.
In 1968, almost simultaneously with the Tet offensive, the United States launched Operation Igloo White, which had been in preparation for two years. The content of the operation was the scattering of seismic sensor networks on the "path", created on the basis of marine radio acoustic buoys. Initially, the scatter was carried out by converted anti-submarine aircraft "Neptune" from the Navy, later, due to the risk of losses, they were replaced by specially equipped reconnaissance fighters RF-4 Phantom and transport C-130. The data from the sensors were collected by specially equipped EC-121 aircraft. A little later, they were replaced by the small-sized OQ-22B Pave Eagle.
The operation is often assessed as unsuccessful, but this is not so: in fact, the sensors gave a lot of information, and the computers used by the Americans at that time could already process these data arrays. It would be correct to say that the operation was not as successful as the Americans would have liked. But the operation expanded their ability to attack the "trail". This mainly concerned the detection of well-camouflaged and moving at night and in adverse weather conditions of convoys of trucks.
Now it was necessary to have the strength and means to attack them. Previously used tactical aircraft, both jet aircraft in the border areas with South Vietnam and piston Skyraders and Counter Intruders in Northern Laos, simply could not technically destroy trucks in the required quantity.
This could be done by the AC-130 already successfully tested over the trail. But they had to be converted from the transport "Hercules" C-130, and these aircraft were not enough. The first "combat" "gunship" based on the C-130 was received already in the middle of 1968. Since the planes were urgently needed, the Americans again had to take half measures, however, successful.
In parallel with the AC-130 program, by mid-1968, the Americans were able to transfer to Vietnam a couple of experimental heavy attack aircraft AC-123 Black Spot - transport C-123 Providers equipped with additional radars, night vision systems, a computerized sighting system for dropping bombs and, for one from a pair of aircraft - a system for detecting electromagnetic surges that occur when the ignition system of a gasoline engine is operating (and all trucks on the "trail" were gasoline ones).
At the same time, a program was launched to convert outdated C-119 piston transport aircraft, which were available in large numbers, into Ganships.
The efforts were crowned with success by early next year. The AS-123 made it possible to "test" the search and sighting equipment, which later began to be used on the AS-130, the AS-119K with automatic cannons and night vision systems immediately began to be used above the trail and "closed" the gap in the equipment of the American Air Force, which was not managed to close the AC-130. By 1969, both AS-119K and AS-130 began to appear above the "path" in larger and larger numbers.
The number of destroyed trucks has gone sharply into the thousands.
The Americans, true to themselves, brought the "gunships" into special operations squadrons and used them from bases in Thailand. So all AS-130A were consolidated into the 16th Special Operations Squadron.
If in 1966 the A-26, flying from a Thai air base, could destroy under a hundred trucks in a month, and even set a record, now, with the advent of "sighted" "Hanships" and a network of sensors, giving them indicative zones where there was a sense look for the enemy, hundreds of trucks were destroyed overnight by a pair or three planes. The Ganships turned the roads on the “path” into true “tunnels of death”. Today it is impossible to accurately assess the losses inflicted by them - the Americans overestimated the number of trucks they destroyed at times. But in any case, we are talking about thousands of cars a year - every year. In just one month of combat use, one AC-130 usually destroyed several hundred vehicles and several thousand people. "Hanships" became a real "scourge of God" for Vietnamese transport units, and every morning, when at the checkpoints that the Vietnamese set up between the tracks on the "trail", they counted the trucks that had left the flight, then usually dozens of cars were missing. Winged death reaped a terrible harvest every day …
The gunships were also involved in the destruction of numerous anti-aircraft batteries. Flying together with the RF-4 Phantom, the AC-130 Ganships, using external guidance from the Phantoms, massively destroyed air defense systems on the trail at night, after which they operated on those roads along which new guns could be transferred to positions …
Despite the Hanships' extreme success in destroying the trucks, their flights were not the main point of effort. In the air, the Americans continuously ramped up bombing strikes to completely destroy the infrastructure of the "trail", and they also increased the proportion of carpet bombing from B-52 bombers. The number of sorties over Laos after 1968 has consistently exceeded ten thousand per month, the number of bombers in one attack, as a rule, was more than ten, sometimes amounting to several dozen machines. The land of Laos still bears the traces of these bombings and will carry them for tens, and in some places hundreds of years.
Usually, when reconnaissance determined the approximate location of the Vietnamese "base" (and it could only be found "approximately", all structures on the trail were carefully camouflaged and removed underground), the area of its location was covered either by a series of massive air strikes or by "carpets" from strategic bombers … The number of bombs in such raids in any case was in the thousands, and the strip covered was several kilometers across. The possible presence of civilians nearby was not taken into account. After the strike was struck, special forces moved into place, whose task was to record the results of the attack.
The same was done against bridges and crossings, intersections, road sections on mountain slopes and all more or less important objects.
Since 1969, the Americans have decided to start bombing the Cambodian part of the trail. To this end, ground reconnaissance first identified the locations of the main Vietnamese transshipment bases in Cambodian territory, after which a series of Menu operations was planned by a limited number of Pentagon officers.
Its meaning was as follows. Each base found on the Cambodian side of the trail was given a code name, such as "breakfast", "dessert", etc. (hence the name of the series of operations - "Menu"), after which the operation of the same name was carried out to destroy it. It was necessary in absolute secrecy, without assuming any responsibility and without informing the press, to wipe these base areas off the face of the earth with powerful carpet bombing strikes. Since there was no congressional sanction for such a use of the US Air Force, a minimum of people were devoted to the details of the operation. The only attack weapons used over Cambodia were the B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers.
On March 17, 60 bombers were launched from the Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. Their missions indicated targets in North Vietnam. But when approaching Vietnamese territory, 48 of them were re-targeted to Cambodia. During the first strike on Cambodian territory, they dropped 2,400 bombs on the base area 353 with the American code name Breakfast ("Breakfast"). Then the bombers returned several times, and when the strikes on the 353 area ended, the number of bombs. dropped on it, reached 25,000. It must be understood that area 353 was a strip of several kilometers long and the same width. The estimated number of civilians in the area at the time of the start of the bombing is estimated at 1,640 people. It is unknown how many of them survived.
Subsequently, such raids became regular and were carried out until the end of 1973 in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy. The US Air Force Strategic Air Command carried out 3,875 raids on Cambodia and dropped 108,823 tons of bombs from bombers. More than one hundred kilotons.
Operation Menu itself ended in 1970, after which a new Operation Freedom Deal began, the Deal of Freedom, which had the same character. In 1970, a coup d'état took place in Cambodia. A right-wing government headed by Lon Nol came to power. The latter supported the actions of the Americans in Cambodia, not only in the air, but also on the ground. According to some modern researchers, the massacres of Cambodians during the American bombing ultimately gave rise to the support of the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian countryside, which allowed them to later seize power in the country.
The secret air war over Cambodia remained a mystery until 1973. Earlier, in 1969, there were several leaks to the press about this, but then they did not cause any resonance, as did the protests at the UN from the government of Sihanouk. But in 1973, Air Force Major Hal Knight wrote a letter to Congress stating that the Air Force was waging a secret war in Cambodia without the knowledge of Congress. Knight didn’t mind the bombing, but he was against the fact that they were not approved by Congress. This letter caused a political scandal in the United States, led to several broken careers, and during the impeachment of Nixon, they tried to impute this war to him as another article, according to which he was supposed to be dismissed, but in the end this particular point of charges was not brought against him. was.
The North Vietnamese government, interested in concealing the presence of Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, never commented on these strikes.
Massive (including carpet) bombing of the "trail", raids of attack aircraft and "gunship" from Thai air bases, search operations of special forces on the trail continued throughout the war and only after 1971 began to decline, and stopped completely only with the US withdrawal from the war … Attempts to constantly introduce various innovations did not stop, for example, especially for hunting trucks, in addition to "gunships", an assault version of the B-57 tactical bomber - B-57G, equipped with a night vision system and 20 mm cannons, was created. This was very helpful, because since 1969, all A-26s were finally withdrawn from the Air Force due to concerns about the strength of the fuselages.
By that time, the air defense of the "trail" had reached significant power. Unable to shoot down large numbers of Americans, the air defense system nevertheless thwarted many attacks on base areas and trucks. DShK machine guns and 37-mm cannons were supplemented with 57-mm guns, often Soviet S-60s, which formed the basis of the air defense of North Vietnam, or their Chinese clones "Type 59", later 85-mm anti-aircraft guns were added to them, and a little later - 100 mm KS-19 with radar guidance. And since 1972, the Vietnamese have finally acquired a means of protecting convoys of trucks - Strela MANPADS. At the beginning of 1972, the Vietnamese were able to allocate S-75 air defense systems for the protection of the trail, which sharply complicated their bombing for the Americans. On January 11, 1972, US intelligence recorded the deployment of the air defense system on the "path", but the Americans continued to act out of inertia. On March 29, 1972, the Strela MANPADS crew over the "path" was able to shoot down the first AS-130. Its crew managed to jump out with parachutes, and later the pilots were evacuated by helicopters.
And on April 2, 1972, the S-75 air defense system demonstrated a new facet of reality in the skies over Laos - another AS-130 was shot down by a rocket, and this time none of the crew managed to survive. After that, the "gunships" never flew over the trail again, but the attacks of tactical jet aircraft continued.
In general, out of the thousands of trucks destroyed on the trail, "gunship" accounts for an impressive 70%.
In turn, Vietnamese air defense fire from the ground led to the loss of hundreds of American aircraft and helicopters. By the end of 1967 alone, this number was 132 cars. This number does not include those cars that, being damaged by fire from the ground, were then able to "hold out" to their own. Assessing this number of downed aircraft, it is worth remembering that the "trail" was not included in the unified air defense of North Vietnam and that most of the war it was protected by extremely outdated small-caliber anti-aircraft guns, something more or less modern began to arrive there closer to the middle of the war, and the air defense system - at the very end.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the air operations of the Navy against the "trail". They were limited. Naval carrier-based aircraft attacked, together with the Air Force, objects on the trail during the previously mentioned operations Steel Tiger and Tiger hound, in the area of their conduct over the central and southern parts of Laos. Later, when these operations were combined into a common "Commando Hunt", joint strikes with the Air Force in these areas continued. But the Navy had another "problem" place - the Mekong Delta.
The Mekong River originates in Cambodia and from there flows to Vietnam and further into the sea. And when the flow of goods for the Viet Cong went through Cambodia, the Mekong River was immediately included in this logistics network. Cargo for the partisans was delivered to the river in different ways, after which they were loaded onto boats of various types and delivered to Vietnam. The importance of river routes increased especially during the rainy season, when normal roads became impassable, often even for cyclists.
The Navy naturally took action. In 1965, during Operation Market time, they cut off the supply of the Viet Cong by sea, then, with the help of quite numerous and well-armed river flotillas, they began to "crush" the river routes.
In addition to river armored boats, the Americans used floating bases of river forces, converted from old tank landing ships, which could provide the actions of both boats and several helicopters. A little later, after the appearance of the OV-10 Bronco light attack aircraft, the Navy began to use them over the river as well. The boats and the VAL-10 “Black pony” squadron reliably blocked the movement of boats along the river during daylight hours, but it was impossible to do this at night.
The Navy responded with its own "gunships" - heavy attack aircraft. In 1968, four P-2 Neptune anti-submarine aircraft were converted into an attack version. The aircraft were equipped with a night vision system and radar similar to those used on the A-6 deck attack aircraft, added radar antennas at the wingtips, installed six 20-mm automatic cannons built into the wing, one 40-mm automatic grenade launcher and underwing weapon attachments. The magnetometer was dismantled, and a stern gun mount with paired 20 mm automatic cannons was installed in its place.
In this form, the planes took off in search of boats and patrolled over the areas of the "trail" adjacent to the Mekong River. The main area of "patrolling" was the border of South Vietnam with Cambodia.
From September 1968 to June 16, 1969, these aircraft flew about 200 sorties, about 50 per vehicle, which was 4 sorties per week. Unlike the Air Force, the Navy's aircraft were based only in Vietnam, at Cam Ran Bay airbase (Cam Ranh). In the future, these operations were recognized by the Navy as ineffective and the "Neptune" went into storage.
Air strikes along the "trail" continued until the very end of the war, although after 1971, their intensity began to decline.
The final component of the US air war against the trail was the spraying of the defoliant, the infamous Agent Orange. The Americans who began spraying defoliant in Vietnam quickly realized the benefits of the destroyed vegetation over the trail as well. From 1966 to 1968, the US Air Force tested specially equipped C-123 Provider aircraft, modified to spray aerial sprays. The aircraft were equipped with tanks for sprayed composition, a 20 hp pump. and underwing sprayers. There was an emergency discharge valve for the "cargo".
From 1968 to 1970, these aircraft, adopted as the UC-123B (later, after the modernization of the UC-123K), sprayed defoliants over Vietnam and Laos. And although Vietnam was mainly the zone of spraying, the territories of Laos, along which the "path" passed, also, as they say, got it. The number of people affected by defoliants is unlikely to ever be accurately calculated.
However, American attempts to destroy the Vietnamese logistics route did not even come close to an air war.
Congress didn’t give permission to invade Laos or Cambodia, but the American command and the CIA always had different workarounds. The Americans and their local allies made several attempts to disrupt the work of the "trail" by ground forces. And although the participation of US troops in these operations was expressly prohibited, they still did go there.
Ground battles for the "trail" were quite fierce, although they began later, as a result of air strikes. And it was in these battles that the Americans managed to achieve serious success.
