Previous blogs discussed LBJ’s failed efforts to get the North Vietnamese to capitulate following Operation Rolling Thunder’s graduated bombing of targets in North Vietnam. Why did they fail? Our 7th Air Force pilots flying Wild Weasel missions quickly noted many vital targets were off-limits. They complained to command they were bombing the wrong targets, nonessential […]
The Vietnam War Revisited – Part IV- Was It Worth It?
This series of blog posts is based off my reading of The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, by Barbara Tuchman. The Vietnamese repulsed Chinese invasions for millennia, resisted the Japanese in WWII, and defeated the French after almost a century of colonization of Indochina. I recount and document this history of the Mandarin […]
Operation Rolling Thunder – Part II
A Followup – Operation Rolling Thunder From 1965 to 1968, the 7th Air Force conducted “graduated bombing” of North Vietnam targets to persuade the enemy to come to terms dictated by the LBJ administration to end the war and limit their ability to conduct the war. The backbone of the operation was the Wild Weasel […]
Vietnam War’s Operation “Rolling Thunder”
– Operation “Rolling Thunder” – Why keep writing blogs about a war from over fifty years ago? Because my generation owes it to the current generation to pass on what we learned, or failed to learn in order to not to repeat the same mistakes. Half of our population was not even born then, and […]