‘Like walking on missiles’: US airman recalls the horror of the Vietnam ‘Christmas bombings’ 50 years on

By Brad Lendon, CNN
Published 7:09 PM EST, Sat December 17, 2022

(CNN) — It was one of the heaviest bombardments in history. 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. ... 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. ... “They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” US President Richard Nixon replied to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission.

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. ... An 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.

The devastating losses were not all one way. At the same time, the United States Air Force sustained losses that today would seem unfathomable. Fifteen B-52s – the pride of America’s fleet – were shot down, six in one day alone, and 33 airmen lost. ... 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. ... 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.

But 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. ... “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. ...The flak was so bright, he said, you could “read a newspaper in the cockpit.”



A US B-52 bomber flies over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

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A picture released on December 19, 1972, of Vietnamese people carrying victims of the American air raids on Hanoi and North Vietnam.

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