The Great Bomb Flap

Never in history has a nation applied military power with more painstaking precision and reasoned restraint than the U.S. has in its bombing of North Viet Nam. The only targets that U.S. pilots may attack are the enemy's men and materiel heading south, the roads and trails they take and the weaponry thrown at American aircraft. From prestrike photo reconnaissance to leaflet warnings dropped in advance, every effort is made to avoid hitting civilians and residential areas. Nowhere is the effort greater than around Hanoi, the Red capital, currently home to some 300,000 people. It was precisely because U.S. accuracy had been flawless in the past that Hanoi was able to blow an apparent mistake into the great bomb flap last week.

For the pilots, the missions were as routine as any ever are in the face of North Viet Nam's formidable air-defense system. The targets: the Yen Vien railroad center northeast of the capital, and Van Dien, a major vehicle-repair depot known in Pentagon parlance as the "secondhand-car lot," with a capacity of some 500 trucks. Both had been hit for the first time on Dec. 2; and both were worth a second try, particularly Yen Vien, the country's largest rail choke point, handling one-third of the nation's military traffic.

The Clatter. A dozen Air Force F-105 Thunderchiefs highballed down the main line from the northeast and blasted the rail yards, then continued on over Hanoi, bomb racks empty, before wheeling for home. About the same time, some 20 Navy planes swooped in from the southeast, off their carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, to raze the used-car lot; and then headed back without passing over the city at all.

Next day the two targets were hit again, but even before the pilots suited up a second time, Teletypes were clattering around the world. The Soviet correspondent for Tass in Hanoi, the resident Agence France-Presse reporter and Radio Hanoi all claimed that the U.S. raiders the previous day had, as Tass put it, bombed "residential areas within the Hanoi city limits" for the first time, setting houses afire and killing, said Hanoi, more than 100 civilians.

The French reporter, Jacques Moalic, scaled casualties down to perhaps two or three dead but reported that the heavily residential neighborhood around the Paul Doumer bridge spanning the Red River (the city's limits at that point) had been "devastated." The French Communist daily L'Humanite also said that the Chinese embassy had been "touched by a projectile," whatever that meant. Peking caught the clue, soon put out a dispatch claiming that U.S. planes had "dive-bombed" the embassy and hit the nearby office of the New China News Agency.

The Search. Clearly something had fallen on Hanoi, but it was far from clear what that something was. While critics of U.S. bombing, from U Thant to the Vatican to Bertrand Russell, hastened to accuse the U.S. of escalating the war, Washington mumbled and fumbled until it was too late to erase the initial impact of the shrill reports.

At first, the State Department refused to confirm or deny that American bombs had fallen on Hanoi, for fear that through pilot error or accident they indeed had done so. Were the two scheduled targets--the rail center and car lot--within Hanoi proper? Well, said the department, they were each five nautical miles away. Away from where? The city limits? No, from the center of the city. What then, asked reporters, were the city limits? It turned out that the State Department had no idea.

That was embarrassing enough, but neither did the Defense Department have any idea, it seemed. It took two days of frantic searching through Pentagon folders before the Defense Department's intelligence division turned up a 1965 map showing Hanoi's boundaries and released it, revealing that the rail yard and truck depot were respectively three and five miles outside the city limits (see map).

The Irony. The unedifying spectacle in Washington did not reflect an effort to conceal the facts, but rather an honest ignorance. Not until pilots' reports from the field had been thoroughly analyzed could Washington be sure that a bombing mistake had not been made. The squadron commanders of the strikes called in each pilot and had him point out on prestrike aerial photos of the targets exactly where his bombs had hit. Their reports were cross-checked with other pilots on earlier and later phases. The conclusion: all the U.S. bombs were on the assigned targets, save for one planeload jettisoned 19 miles southwest of the city. Only then could Saigon and Washington announce with confidence that no bombs had fall en in the city of Hanoi.

In that case, what caused the damage? The most likely explanation is that it was one or more of North Viet Nam's SAM missiles that had failed to hit airborne U.S. targets and boomeranged on the city itself. More than 100 SAMs were fired at the U.S. planes during the week's raids. Indeed, the U.S. pilots had spotted one plummeting SAM as it exploded on a North Vietnamese junk, and the Pentagon produced testimonials from four foreigners living in Hanoi that what fell on the city were SAMs and antiaircraft shells.

Whether or not the rulers of Hanoi initially knew what had hit them, they surely must have soon found out from examination of the debris--which perhaps explains why the damaged quarter of the city was quickly sealed off to all observers. That the raids on Yen Vien and Van Dien did not technically constitute an escalation of the American bombing pattern they well knew: the fuel dump bombed by the U.S. last June 29 was closer to the city. On the other hand, the successive raids, two weeks apart, on Yen Vien and Van Dien may well have made the Communists feel that the noose was dangerously tightening around Hanoi.

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