HY 2020 Unit V Assessment Question 2

Unit V Question #2

What was Operation Rolling Thunder? Be sure to outline the purpose of the operation, the role of new military technologies, and if the operation successfully completed its mission.

Operation “Rolling Thunder” commenced on March 2, 1965. Rolling Thunder was a sustained bombing campaign against the North, partly in response to a Viet Cong attack on the United States air base at Pleiku. The codename came from a line in Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage: “The battle roar settled to a rolling thunder, which was a single, long explosion.” (Millett, A.R., Maslowski, P. & Feis, W.B., 2012). The reason for bombing the North was to raise South Vietnam’s morale, compel Hanoi to abandon the Viet Cong, and interdict the flow of men and supplies moving toward South Vietnam (Millett, A.R., Maslowski, P. & Feis, W.B., 2012). While reading the book, I learned that more civilian advisors preferred a more gradual approach, rather than a bombardment of bombings on the North. The only issue with this was that the North can become more persistent and the death tolls can keep rising as long as the North Vietnam supported the war. The Air Force proposed a 94 target plan on the North that would destroy its economic centers in the course of sixteen days. One idea was that with the fall of the economic centers the Viet Cong (VC) would not survive without its support and the facilities were considered treasures to the North Vietnamese. Operation Rolling Thunder was made to destroy supplies and all resources from the North and make their fight for control nonexistent. In late 1965, JCS determined that the oil resource was essential to the North’s infiltration capacity. All their maneuvers and transportation relied on this resource. Destroying this would take the Norths ability to maneuver impossible. Johnson started in the spring by destroying oil factories and storage units in unpopulated areas before hitting the main resources. In June, bombs struck large POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants) facilities in Hanoi and Haiphong, which had previously been off limits (Millett, A.R., Maslowski, P. & Feis, W.B., 2012). By doing this, 80 percent of the North’s bulk fuel had been destroyed. This still made no difference because of the underground network of roads and passageways that the North had. This made aerial attacks useless and didn’t do much to the north as far as supplies. McNamara had to come up with another strategy to impair the north. The careful implantation of seismic and acoustic sensors, weapons, and manned positions, this may stop the supply travels. With the sensors, the air force can see seismic intrusion and pinpoint the location of moving trucks, allowing the United States war planes to come and destroy them. This new technology od seismic pin points changed the tide of the war. Operation Rolling Thunder was overall, once over in October 31, 1968, a failure of an operation. The Unites States dropped a total of 634,000 tons of bombs and inflicted $600 million in damages, killing 52,000 civilians out of the 18 million population. In warplane losses alone it cost $10 to inflict $1 worth of damage. And between 1965 and 1968, North Vietnam received more than $2 billion in foreign aid, more than compensating for its losses (Millett, A.R., Maslowski, P. & Feis, W.B., 2012). I do not believe this was a successful operation, and many others do not as well. We did not cause nearly enough damage to the North than we thought we have originally. We lost more money and they gained more money in aid than was cased to their supplies and economic facilities.