Air Interdiction In World War II, Korea, And Vietnam – An Interview With Generals Partridge Smart Vogt Jr. by Gen. Earle E. Partridge

Author:Gen. Earle E. Partridge [Partridge, Gen. Earle E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786255655
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Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
Published: 2015-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Above: One of the strike aircraft in the Igloo White system was the Air Force AC-130. This gunship received information on possible truck locations while in flight over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The air craft commander then at tempted to interdict the suspected truck convoys.

Left: A camouflaged acoustical sensor hangs from a tree in the South east Asian jungle. Noise was picked up by the microphone and transmitted to the Igloo White surveillance center.

The situation changed in 1972. We had stopped the Rolling Thunder operations in 1968, which had had limited success for one simple reason (not because of the way the airmen conducted the war—Momyer{50} was one of the best professionals in the world, and he did a superb job of running that war). But how do you fight a war as a commander on the scene when your high-value targets were picked back in the White House a couple of days before? This is what was happening in Rolling Thunder. The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State would sit down with the President, usually at a breakfast meeting, and go over what targets they were going to destroy for the coming week, and regardless of the weather, the commanders could strike only those targets in the vital areas.

The air commander could work in-country (South Vietnam) and respond to requests for assistance and support, but the campaign against the North was a precisely controlled campaign, in which the targets were selected and put on a schedule, and that's all the commander could play with, whether it made military sense or not.

Now, how were these targets selected? Well, I happen to know because at the time I was head of what was known as the Policy Planning Staff{51} in Washington and had seen this selection process develop. It grew out of the same concern that I expressed earlier: "God, if we turned these airmen loose in a mad bombing campaign, all the world will turn against us, and the editorial opinion will drive us out of office. So we have to control carefully what they do." Every single target was weighed for the impact on the press, public opinion, collateral damage, number of civilian casualties, and not on whether the mission would help us win the war. Rolling Thunder evolved into a campaign of trying to "send signals," a favorite expression then. The President would say, "Next week I'm going to send them a signal. Boy, we're really going to warn them next week, so I want these targets hit." Then the next selection might be made on the basis of: "Well, we want to ease off on them for a while because we're going to step up negotiations. We want to demonstrate to them that we're nice guys." The "carrot and stick" approach. So we'd be limited to targets well out of the Hanoi area and to missions that weren't very meaningful, but which required the pilots to meet the enemy and take the same risks. This was not a campaign being conducted to achieve a decisive result.

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