Aircraft Carriers at War by James Holloway III

Author:James Holloway III
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2011-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

13

The Enterprise

Vietnam Redux

Shortly before daylight on 10 December 1966, the Enterprise joined up with the carriers Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ticonderoga, Kitty Hawk, and Constellation in Task Force 77 at Yankee Station, and by 0700 that morning it was launching the first sorties into North Vietnam in five months. Not much had changed since the previous July, when the Enterprise had departed Yankee Station. For both ship’s crew and the air wing it was déjà vu. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Marine Corps land-based tactical air and the carriers were still engaged in the Rolling Thunder campaign. The target selection was still coming mainly from the White House, with some Pentagon input and a pro forma CinCPac screening.

The positive aspects of this “sameness” was that the operations and the procedures were familiar to the 70 percent of the ship’s people and air wing aviators, who were on their second tour in the Tonkin Gulf. For the air wing pilots, this was useful. They would still be familiar with the order of battle of the Vietnamese aircraft and antiaircraft systems, the terrain over both South and North Vietnam, and the operational in-flight procedures.

For the flight crews, the downside was the apparent lack of progress. After two years of combat, the same targets were being attacked—the same bridges, airfields, car parks, missile sites, and power plants—and under the same rules of engagement (ROE) from a White House that severely limited the pilots’ tactics. These were ROE designed to avoid “collateral damage”—unintended damage to adjacent nonmilitary targets. Most of these Washington-mandated rules imposed restrictions in the selection of directions for attack- and flak-suppression runs that very much disadvantaged the pilots’ tactics and increased the aircrafts’ vulnerability to enemy defenses.

By this time, there was growing concern over the evident limited effectiveness of Rolling Thunder because of the restrictions placed upon target selection and the limited options available to the attacking pilots. An official U.S. Air Force military analysis of the campaign published in 2004 had this to say:

Operation Rolling Thunder was a frequently interrupted bombing campaign that began on 24 February 1965 and lasted until the end of October 1968. During this period, U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft engaged in a bombing campaign designed to force Ho Chi Minh to abandon his ambition to take over South Vietnam. The operation began primarily as a diplomatic signal to impress Hanoi with the United States’ determination, essentially a warning that the violence would escalate until Ho Chi Minh “blinked,” and secondly, it was intended to bolster the sagging morale of the South Vietnamese.

The Johnson administration also imposed strict limits on the targets that could be attacked, for China and the Soviet Union were seen as the defenders of Communism who might intervene if the North Vietnamese faced defeat. Consequently the administration tried to punish the North without provoking the two nations believed to be its protectors.

According to the U.S. Air Force’s leadership, the campaign had no clear-cut objective. Nor did its authors have any real estimate of the cost of lives and aircraft.

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