WHY THE B-52 FAILED TO DEFEAT THE VIETNAMESE

WHY THE B-52 FAILED TO DEFEAT THE VIETNAMESE
By David Bacon
Foreign Policy in Focus, 5/5/25
https://fpif.org/why-the-b-52-failed-to-defeat-the-vietnamese/

Children on a fighter plane in the Army Museum, Hanoi.

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

On the plane to Hanoi in December of 2015, I opened my morning 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 the next two weeks as I traveled through north Vietnam I tried to unravel the U.S. attitudes it reveals towards the people of this country and what they call "the American war."

It ends by quoting a former South Vietnamese Navy officer, Phuoc Luong.  "American technology is super," he told Philipps.  "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.  

Kham Thien Street after the bombing, in a photo from the Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi.

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, 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 Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

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 so many?  

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.

The Hanoi Station after the bombing, in a photo from the Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi.

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 Gaza or 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.

Children on a fighter plane in the Army Museum, Hanoi.

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.  

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

Hanoi 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. came several years after Uncle 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 wanted to deploy them in Syria.

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

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. 

The Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi today.

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.  

Then I went down into the old quarter below, looking for a cup of Hanoi's excellent coffee.

ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT

ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT
Photoessay by David Bacon
Labornotes, 4/24/25
https://labornotes.org/2025/04/ice-cant-erase-what-lelo-juarez-built

Lelo with his partner and niece in the May Day march next to the sign that says "With No Fear."

In 2022 I went to Washington State for May Day, and the following year as well.  Just south of Canada, in Bellingham and Mount Vernon, Community2Community and Familias Unidas por la Justicia  celebrate the workers holiday in the tradition followed by the rest of the world.  They march.  For me, a child of the Cold War, when May Day was the forbidden Communist holiday, it's a time to appreciate how the world has changed,  Brightly-painted hand-made signs and banners call out - "Another World is Possible!"  - a May Day sentiment if there ever was one.  Some demonstrations can be formal exercises.  Theirs are filled with farmworkers and children chatting in Mixteco or Triqui, with students and earnest young men in religoius collars, and of course with activists from a dozen unions.  

Both years I came a few days early.  I wanted to see the tulip harvest, or at least the end of it, since it's almost over by May.  Thousands of tourists come to see the flowers.  Fields of solid red and yellow blooms stretch for miles, from Mount Vernon halfway to the ocean.  Shiny BMWs and Acuras crawl bumper-to-bumper down tiny country roads, creating an urban-sized traffic jam.

Both years I got up early, before the madness, and drove those same roads, as yet still empty.  I wasn't looking for the flowers, though. Instead, I was keeping an eye out for beat-up Fords and Toyotas parked by the side of the fields, or dusty school busses transformed to transport labor.  I was seeking the workers.  I hoped I'd find the ones who stopped the harvest in the first year of the pandemic, using the power they'd discovered when they organized their independent union at the Sakuma blueberry farm a decade earlier.  (See Trouble in the Tulips, https://labornotes.org/2022/03/trouble-tulips-organized-farmworkers-win-basic-demands-quick-strike and Why These Farmworkers Went on Strike, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-these-farm-workers-went-on-strike-and-why-it-matters/)

Today one of those worker-organizers rots in a cell, in the infamous Tacoma Detention Center.  Lelo (Alfredo Juarez - as his mother named him) was a teenager when Triqui and Mixtec indigenous workers rose up in the Sakuma fields and labor camps.  As they fought for their union, Sakuma strikers put Lelo to work while he was still a boy.  Because he'd gone to school in Washington he could translate easily back and forth from classroom English to the Spanish of the streets and the indigenous language of his family.  

It took four years to win a contract for berry pickers at Sakuma Farms.  Indigenous Mexican migrants learned to use short walkouts to push up piece rates and protect each others' jobs.  Some left the fields for days or weeks, traveling from campus to campus, from Seattle to San Diego, asking students to picket and boycott Driscoll berries, the giant company that bought the fruit they picked.  In the end they won, and with that contract in hand, Familias Unidas por la Justicia became the voice for farmworkers across northwest Washington.

As I drove through the early morning, I saw a small group of workers hoeing weeds among the giant leaves of overgrown cabbages,.  As usual, I stopped to talk, then take some photographs. It didn't take long before I asked them if they'd ever worked at Sakuma.  The leader of the little crew proudly announced she and her workmates all belonged to Familias Unidas.  That morning they were not laboring at a union job, but they had thr union in their hearts.

Then I caught up with a larger crew cleaning the remaining flowers in a tulip field, and the experience was repeated.  I'd just walked into the rows with my camera when someone called out my name.  There was Benito Lopez, wearing his Familias Unidas sweatshirt, marking him as a member of the union committee.  Benito stayed in my Bay Area house on one of those boycott journeys a few years before.  He plays in a band and plays for FUJ and community fiestas, and his mirror sunglasses gave him away as a musician or a rocker as he worked down the row of flowers.

When the field was nothing but bare tulip stalks, and the petals from the last discarded blooms were trampled into the mud between the rows, the foreperson came to Benito to ask if the crew wanted to move to another field.  It was late in the day by then, and perhaps they might want to go home.  But the crew held an impromptu committee meeting in the dirt road, and decided they wanted to get a couple more hours in before quitting.  There's no written contract with Washington Bulb in the tulips, but it was clear that the supervisor knew he had to get their agreement.  That is the power that Lelo and Benito and the rest of the workers built.

The next morning I saw a huge machine, motionless in the middle of what had been a tulip field the day before.  I parked and walked down the dusty road from the highway, and found a crew eating breakfast.  Some were men in blue coveralls, and the others were women in regular work clothes.  They offered me their tacos.  Eating has social meaning in a field, so we ate together and talked.  

The men were H-2A workers, who come from Mexico to do this work every year on temporary work visas.  They clearly needed the work to support families back home.  But I wondered if the regular tulip workers in the picking crews were ever trained to work on the huge rig.  Those jobs probably pay better than cutting tulips and daffodils.  

The workers in Familias Unidas por la Justicia have tried to find a way to fight for the interests of both groups - H-2A workers and local residents.  During their organizing saga at Sakuma Farms, they had to defeat an effort to replace hundreds of strikers with H-2A workers.  Their success in doing that ensured they could keep their jobs win the strike.  Yet every year their marches carry banners honoring Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died from the conditions in a Washington field.  When his coworkers stopped work after he died, Familias Unidas helped organize their protest before the company cancelled their visas and fired them.  A worker is a worker, and everyone needs to be organized, the union says.

Breakfast over, the machine coughed to life and again began its ponderous travel down the now-bare field.  As it clanked along it dug up the tulip bulbs, separated them from the dirt, and spat a stream of them into a gondola alongside.  Behind it a small group of women gathered up any bulbs the machine missed.  Tulip bulbs must be worth a lot, I thought.

Now, looking at the images from those two years, I see the kind of hard labor Lelo gave the company as a worker in those flower fields.  Then I thought of the work he gave the union, when he decided that the most important thing was to change the lives of the people who work in them.  That was not an easy decision.  His actions, and those of his workmates, have made some powerful people very angry.  They are using his immigration status to remove him and throw him in a hole.  By extension they threaten anyone else who dreams of doing what Lelo did.  I can see the family Lelo has just started is out there on the May Day march, now facing such terrible danger.

These photographs are just a few of the many I've taken since that first strike at Sakuma Farms in 2013.  To me they show the hard reality of these workers' lives, and their determination over years to change it.  Getting Lelo out of detention will bring justice for him.  And it will move that struggle a little further down the road.  

Pablo Ramirez works in a crew of farmworkers weeding a field growing organic cabbage plants for seed at Morrison Farm.  Because it is an organic field, the grower doesn't use herbicide, and instead hires a small crew to weed the field before harvesting the seeds.  

Farmworkers clean a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.  The workers are members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia.  Benito Lopez is a leader of the union.

Juana Sanchez is a worker in the crew cleaning a tulip field.

Benito Lopez cutting the tops of tulip flowers.

Natalia Feliciano is a worker in the crew.

Natalia Feliciano walks in the mud and tulip petals.

The tulip cleaning crew leaves the field.

Benito Lopz, Juana Sanchez and other members of Familias Unidas hold a meeting to decide if they will continue working in another field.

The family of Benito Lopez at the Tierra y Libertad cooperative farm, started by the union.

Benito Lopez and his fellow musicians at a party after the May Day march, celebrating the successful strike a month earlier by workers in the tulip harvest.

Lelo speaks to a May Day march of migrant farmworkers and their supporters, calling for unions and human rights.

On the May Day march workers remind the growers that with no workers there will be no tulip harvest.

A march protesting federal regulations making it more difficult to protect the rights of H-2A and resident farmworkers the H2-A guestworker program, on the anniversary of the death of Honesto Silva.  The march stopped in front of the Ferndale Detention Center, where Lelo was later taken.

Foreman Jose Partida and other workers eat lunch in a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.

Helene Mancillas, Heidi Garcia and Ismael Lopez eat lunch on a break from their work collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan, Helene Mancillas and Heidi Garcia walk down the rows collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez works in the tulip field.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan and Heidi Garcia collect bulbs missed by the big machine.

Working behind the machine.

 A worker supervises the tulip machine as it makes it way down the field.

Two farmworkers pick bulbs out of the dirt on the tulip machine.

Two farmworkers on the machine.

As they cross the river into Mount Vernon during the tulip harvest, May Day marchers carry a banner remembering Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died in the fields.  Another sign says Without Workers There Are No Tulips.

Two young women on the May Day calling for unions and human rights for farmworkers. 

"Another World is Possible"