Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, Revised Edition by Edwin E. Moise

Author:Edwin E. Moise [Moise, Edwin E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2019-07-15T06:00:00+00:00

Detection of North Vietnamese Radar

The after-action reports made it clear that the destroyers had not detected any use of radar by their supposed attackers. “There were strong indications that the boats did not have radar…. USS TURNER JOY verified on ECM equipment (BLR) that contacts had no radar in operation by complete absence of normal CHICOMM or DRV seaborne radars.” “The boats were not using radar.”35 This was not treated as astonishing, because the U.S. Navy had been under the impression that the P-4 torpedo boats of the People’s Navy lacked radar. Officers on the Maddox had seen the radar masts on all three of the torpedo boats that had attacked them on August 2.36 But these officers nevertheless wrote their reports on the August 4 incident as if they believed that North Vietnamese PT boats lacked radar.

An old adage says that surprise is a major factor in warfare, and it has been argued the North Vietnamese would surely have wanted to achieve surprise in an attack against the destroyers.37 This would have meant maintaining electronic silence when possible and, when forced to use either radar or radio, using it in short bursts to make detection by the destroyers difficult.

There are two things wrong with this argument. One is that a desire to preserve secrecy does not automatically confer an ability to preserve secrecy. An attack by a widely scattered group of vessels, far out to sea on a dark night in poor weather, would have required a great deal of use of radio and radar, regardless of what anyone would have preferred.

The other problem is that a desire for surprise only explains why attacking vessels would have restricted radio and radar use up to 2139G, the moment when the Turner Joy opened fire. If V-1 and the others were real PT boats, some explanation other than a desire to catch the destroyers by surprise must be found for their willingness to maintain for two additional hours a degree of electronic silence that would have crippled their efforts to sink the destroyers and prevented them from summoning rescue when damaged or sinking, when the 5-inch shells falling on them would have made it impossible for even the most blindly optimistic to suppose that the Americans were not aware of their location and intentions.

Passive radar use could have helped hypothetical PT boats to some extent. A radar set can spot the signals of another set without sending out any signals of its own, and thus without being detectable. Passive radar, however, can indicate only the bearing of an enemy vessel, not its range. From a series of bearings taken at different times one can sometimes deduce the range to an enemy vessel and its course and speed, but the enemy vessel must be holding a constant course and speed, and one must not be shadowing the enemy vessel by moving on the same course and at the same speed. If one did happen to be paralleling an enemy vessel on the

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