North Vietnam: Operation Linebacker II. It is one of the heaviest bombing raids in history. A shock-and-awe campaign of overwhelming air power aimed at subduing a determined adversary that, despite being comprehensively and repeatedly defeated, had resisted everything the world’s most formidable war machine could throw at it. Operation Linebacker II saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a 12-day period in December 1972, in a brutal assault aimed at shaking the Vietnamese “to their core,” in the words of then-US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “They’ll be so damn surprised,” US President Richard Nixon responded to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission. In what would become known as the “Christmas Bombings” in America and the “11 Days and Nights” in Vietnam (though no bombing actually took place on Christmas Day), parts of Hanoi were obliterated. An estimated 1,600 Vietnamese were killed in some of the most harrowing scenes of the conflict, in an operation compared by some to the Hamburg raids of World War II for the scale of the destruction and civilian death toll. The devastating losses were not all one-sided. At the same time, the United States Air Force suffered losses that would seem unfathomable today. Fifteen B-52s—the pride of the American fleet—were shot down, six in a single day, and 33 airmen were lost. Tragically, some believe all these deaths were largely in vain, with historians still debating the extent of the operation’s impact on the broader conflict. In the aftermath of the operation, both sides claimed to have prevailed: Washington claimed it had brought the Vietnamese back to the peace table, and Hanoi portrayed it as a heroic act of resistance, taking everything its enemy had and still had. But if the fog of war made those claims difficult to judge, half a century later it has done little to cloud the memories of American airmen who still recall flying through North Vietnam’s air defenses. “It almost felt like you could walk on the tips of those missiles in the sky, there were so many of them fired at you,” recalled one retired American airman. The flak was so brilliant, he said, that you could “read a newspaper in the cockpit.” “Linebacker II ended the American phase of the war, but its impact lasted only three years. Linebacker II did not bring lasting peace.” In Hanoi, “the story of the events of late December 1972 was not one of massive losses and destruction, but of heroic resistance by the Northerners,” wrote historian Asselin. “Indeed, the balance of U.S. forces had been such that Nixon had to beg Hanoi to resume peace talks and unilaterally and unconditionally end the bombing,” he wrote. Or as Kissinger, then-US National Security Advisor, would put it: “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”
