WHY THE B-52 FAILED
Dispatch from Hanoi, 12/29/15
By David Bacon
Photo of the bombing of Hanoi Station on Christmas Day
1972, from the Hoa Lo Museum in Hanoi.
On the plane to Hanoi earlier this month, I opened my
copy of the New York Times to find an article by Dave Philipps: "After 60
Years, B-52's Still Dominate the U.S. Fleet." The piece stuck with me for
weeks as I traveled through north Vietnam, trying to unravel U.S. amnesia
towards the people of this country and what they call "the American
war."
Philipps ends with a quote from a former South Vietnamese
Navy officer, Phuoc Luong.
"American technology is super," he tells him. "It's a great plane. In Vietnam we
didn't use it enough. That's why we lost."
If anyone knows the B-52, it's the people of Hanoi. The
enormous planes bombed them day and night for twelve days at Christmas in
1972. Today there's a museum dedicated
to the bomber, and the wreckage of one still sits in a small lake in the middle
of the city.
When I tried to imagine what it was like living amid the
constant deafening explosions, I found an earlier article in the archives of
Mr. Philipps' newspaper that gives an idea.
It describes a visit by Telford Taylor, who'd been a judge at the
Nuremberg war crimes trials, folksinger Joan Baez, and two other U.S. citizens
in 1972. They'd gone to Hanoi that
Christmas to deliver mail to pilots of those B-52s. Some had managed to survive being shot down
while delivering President Nixon's brutal holiday greeting, and then were
apprehended by the people they'd been bombing.
The visitors described their fear in the midst of
cataclysmic destruction, and their subsequent journey through the city and its
ruins. "The most horrible scene
that I've ever seen in my life was when we visited the residential area of Khan
Thieu [sic], and as far as I could see, everything was destroyed," mourned Yale
University Divinity School associate dean Michael Allen.
Thirty years later another Times writer, Laurence
Zuckerman, also wrote about this iconic airplane: "The B-52's Psychological Punch: The
Enemy Knows You're Serious." Zuckerman
was reacting to a documentary on the B-52s by filmmaker Harmut Bitomsky. Zuckerman's piece was not exactly a paean to
the aging airplane, but like Philipps, he couldn't quite hide a certain
admiration for its long life.
The B-52 was built originally in the early 1950s to drop
nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Since
then it's carried "conventional" bombs, releasing them instead over
people and homes in dozens of other countries. "It is the longevity and
versatility of the giant bomber, which started flying in 1952 and is expected
to remain in service until 2037, that is so fascinating," Zuckerman
commented.
While both writers carefully note that carpet bombing
inspired massive protests both in the U.S. and internationally, what's
glaringly absent in their pieces is any sense of what it means to be under the
B-52, on its receiving end.
The Christmas bombing of Vietnam was a war crime. No U.S. official was ever tried and punished
for it, and it was as irrational as it was savage. The negotiations for the U.S. troop
withdrawal from South Vietnam would reach a conclusion within a few weeks of
it. Could some minute extraction of
leverage in those talks have been worth the deaths of more than a thousand
Vietnamese?
Throughout the eight years in which the U.S. bombed North
Vietnam, its bombers had few military targets.
One airman quoted by Philipps tried to claim that bombing nevertheless
had some strategic value: "We're
doing a lot more than killing monkeys and making kindling wood out of the
jungle," he claimed. The B-52s
targets, however, were people and the infrastructure that held their lives
together. U.S. planes bombed dikes to
try to cause flooding in Hanoi and the countryside. They bombed the Long Bien railroad bridge -
the link that brought food and coal into Hanoi so that people could eat and
keep warm.
The B-52s and their accompanying F-4s and F-14s bombed
the small town of Sapa in the hills north of Hanoi, near the Chinese
border. Sapa is the cultural center for
many of Vietnam's ethnic minorities. It
has no military value. Why bomb it, if
the purpose was not to terrorize people and extract revenge for their defiance?
Traveling through the north, I sometimes asked ordinary
people - taxi drivers or restaurant workers - what I should see in Hanoi. Mostly they'd tell me to go to the Army
Museum. One morning I did, and I could
see why. On the ground outside the main
halls are captured tanks, a Huey helicopter, and rows of bombs. In the courtyard pieces of shot-down planes
have been welded together into a tower, topped by the tail assembly of a U.S.
jet.
Kids are climbing all over them. At the museum entrance sits an old MIG
fighter the Vietnamese got from the Soviet Union. Parents send their children up a small
ladder bolted to the side, and there they pose for iPhone pictures, next to the
14 red stars painted on the fuselage, each representing a U.S. plane it shot
down.
It was a moment for conflicting feelings. I was glad to
see the instruments of war surrounded by happy families - no war anymore. Then I thought about the pilot of the
MIG. How terrifying it must have been to
fly up into the anti-aircraft and missile fire above Hanoi and shoot at the
B-52s and their phalanx of fighter escorts.
And then I realized, it must have been terrifying for the U.S. pilots too. Eighty four planes were shot down over
Vietnam during the Christmas bombing, including 34 of the giant
Stratofortresses, according to the museum.
Today's remote controlled wars, with drones guided from
computer screens in Colorado, seem antiseptic by comparison -- for the
pilots. Not so for those under the
bombs. For people living in the ancient
cities of Sana'a or Kunduz, the reality today is much as it was for people in
Hanoi that Christmas.
I believe people also had another reason for urging me to
go to the museum. Hanoi has long since
been rebuilt. In the city and its
environs Vietnam is on a building binge, and the impact of the war is no longer
so visible. Children born during the
Christmas bombing are celebrating their 43rd birthdays.
People walk through the Army Museum exhibit halls, mostly
lined with photographs showing all the things they did during that war. Some show Central Committee meetings that
made the decision to fight the Americans.
Some show people in demonstrations, especially in the South, demanding
that the foreigners leave. Some show the
hard work of people in the north, sending food and soldiers south to drive them
out. There are many portraits of people
killed, or imprisoned in the infamous tiger cages, for fighting the U.S. and
the South Vietnamese government it propped up until the last helicopter took
off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy on May 1, 1975.
But despite the bombing and the meticulous documentation
of the war's terrible cost, I felt little hostility or bitterness in the people
I met. In the end, they'd won. How could the war's planners back in
Washington have thought it would turn out otherwise? The Vietnamese were no latecomers to
insurrectionary organizing. They were
hardly ignorant or apolitical countryfolk, although this was certainly the
prevalent stereotype in Congress and the Pentagon.
The Army Museum is focused on the American war. But the half dozen other museums in Hanoi
that also document Vietnam's revolutionary history make plain how long
liberation took. Sophisticated political
organizations took decades to mature and gain experience. By the time of the U.S. intervention, they'd
been at it for many, many years. That
experience finally brought about the U.S. defeat.
If anything, the Vietnamese official history on display
in museums is even angrier with France than with the U.S. Long rooms and galleries of photographs show
the nationalists and their first resistance to the French colonizers starting
in 1858. It joined the rising
revolutionary wave of the early 20th century, and crystallized in the launch of
the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s.
Hanoi's Hoa Lo monument (now largely overshadowed by a
new office and residential complex) preserves the prison where the anti-French
resisters were held. In the cells of the
old French Maison Centrale, dioramas of prisoners in manacles and leg irons
shout at their jailers with their fists raised.
Two guillotines, used to chop the heads off those who couldn't escape,
sit in dark corners of this and the official history museum. Even the women's museum has a floor dedicated
to those imprisoned by the French.
That history of resistance went on far longer than the
U.S. war - almost a hundred years.
During much of it Ho Chi Minh was not even in Vietnam to lead it. He was first an itinerant sailor, then in
Moscow working for the Comintern, and finally was sent to one country after
another, to jumpstart movements like those that had already begun in his own
country. While it's possible to see why
western governments feared and demonized him as a hardened revolutionary, the
Vietnamese resistance movements were not dependent on any single person. The final defeat of the U.S., in fact, came
several years after Ho had died.
The language used to demonize Vietnam's Communists and
nationalists by those they sought to overthrow was just as vituperative as that
used in the U.S. Congress against Muslim radicals today. Terrorist, after all, was a term used to
describe anarchists and socialists for over a century. That language of terrorism and the cold war
was used to create hysteria that easily justified sending U.S. advisors, and
then troops, into Vietnam once the French had been defeated in 1954. Ultimately, it was used to justify the B-52s
and the 1972 Christmas bombing. It cost
millions of Vietnamese lives, and tens of thousands of U.S. lives as well.
When President Reagan and his successors sought to
overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" to make later interventions
acceptable, they once again used that language.
It justifies even today's use of the B-52s, 63 years after they began
flying. The U.S. Air Force has no
intention of retiring the 76 remaining planes in its fleet. In fact, the successors to General Curtis
("Bomb them back to the stone age") LeMay now want to deploy them in
Syria.
They are institutionally unwilling to remember. Bombing did not defeat the Vietnamese. Phuoc Luong is wrong. More B-52s would not have won that war. They will not win any new war against a
people willing to do whatever it takes to survive and win.
Walking through the streets of Hanoi, I could see see
why. One morning I went out to Long Bien
Bridge to take photographs at sunrise.
The trains going north leave downtown Hanoi just as it gets light. It's a great moment to see them emerge from
the warren of houses next to the tracks, their old cars flashing past as they
set out across the long span over the Red River.
Long Bien is an old bridge, and was one of the four great
bridges of the world when it was built in 1902.
A plaque at one end reminds the commuters who trundle past on bicycles
and scooters that it was built by Gustav Eiffel, who used the same iron that
went into his tower along the Seine in Paris.
During the American war it was probably the one structure U.S. bombers
could clearly see from on high, and they blew it apart over and over.
Down below the bridge abutment is the Long Bien market,
where many of the city's fruit and vegetable sellers go to meet farmers
bringing produce into the city. As I
took pictures of the train and the stalls below, I tried to imagine the columns
of smoke, the deafening roar of jet engines and then explosions, the screams of
people torn to shreds with their dogs, their pushcarts and melons.
As the trains passed I wondered if the locomotives were
the same as those that must have been repaired a thousand times during the
war. They look old. Despite the glitz of Hanoi's new wave of
foreign investment, Vietnam is still a poor country. Things must be saved and reused again and
again, including railroad cars and bridges.
I felt that persistence as the sun came up. It's why the bombing, despite its immense
destruction, failed so utterly.
Kham Thien street after the December 1972 Christmas
bombing, from the Hoa Lo Museum in Hanoi.
In the 38th Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards David
Bacon won first-place in the photo series category for his August 6, 2014 cover
story for the East Bay Express, "Living on the Streets of Oakland," a
photo essay that examined the situation of homeless people in the Bay Area's
third largest city.
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