Bombing missions of the Vietnam War

Cover image: United States Navy A-6A Intruders, operating from the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, release their payloads over Vietnam. (Photo:  U.S. Navy/public domain )

Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.

In late 2016, the United States Department of Defense  publicly released  records of almost every bombing and ground-attack mission flown during the Vietnam War. (Ground-attack missions are strikes against ground targets carried out with rockets, missiles, cannons, and other non-free-falling ordnance.) The data, meticulously digitized from the aircrews' original after-action reports, allows us to visually reconstruct the air campaign, shedding new light on its sheer scale, intensity, and complexity.

The bombardment of North Vietnam and its neighbors began shortly after the  Gulf of Tonkin incident  in August 1964, and continued until the last American was airlifted out of Saigon over a decade later. All told, the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps together conducted at least 2.8 million combat missions against ground targets, while the air forces of South Vietnam, Laos, Australia, and South Korea added an additional 360,000 missions to the tally.

The map below shows nearly every bombing and ground-attack mission conducted between 1965 and 1975. (No missions from 1974 are visible, as the records from that year lack geographic coordinates.) Each point corresponds to an individual mission. The grid pattern visible at large scales is an artifact of rounding errors in the original after-action reports.

At the outset of the conflict, American military planners did not wish to engage in an unrestricted "total" war against North Vietnam, as they feared that the ensuing civilian casualties would elicit condemnation from the international community. The U.S. was also loath to draw China, a formidable adversary, into the conflict. 

So the U.S. forces initially adopted a tactical bombing strategy, dispatching small- and medium-sized fighter-bombers and ground-attack aircraft on smash-and-grab raids against military targets deep behind enemy lines.

These missions comprised the majority of bombing and ground-attack operations carried out during the war. But they did little to stem the flow of supplies and munitions to the Viet Cong. And as the communist forces grew accustomed to these strikes and subsequently strengthened their anti-air defenses, American pilots found themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack from below.

Frustrated by mounting losses and the guerrillas' dogged resilience, U.S. air forces eventually pivoted to a strategic bombing role, unleashing huge formations of heavy B-52 bombers against North Vietnamese cities in the hopes of demoralizing the enemy and crippling the North's economy. Releasing their payloads from the edge of the stratosphere, where they could be neither seen nor heard from the ground, these flying behemoths pummeled suspected enemy positions with relative impunity—albeit with limited accuracy.

The destruction wrought by American planes was staggering. Yet skeptics argue that the aerial bombardment of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia did more to harden the resolve of Northern Vietnamese forces than to induce them to the bargaining table.

Although the United States military spearheaded the aerial bombardment of Vietnam and its neighbors, it was joined by the air forces of several key allies. Some cohorts, such as South Vietnam (formally, the Republic of Vietnam) and the Kingdom of Laos, desperately sought to expel communist forces from their own borders. Others, like Australia and South Korea, simply hoped to keep the enemy at arm's reach. The Kingdom of Thailand, meanwhile, reached a "gentlemen's agreement" with the United States, allowing U.S. aircraft to operate out of its air bases, on the condition that Thai officers retained full command of the facilities.

The U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps all participated in the aerial bombardment of Vietnam and its neighbors. Initially, communication between the three branches was lackluster, reducing their overall efficacy. But as American forces became increasingly embroiled in the slow-burning conflict, the three branches developed effective protocols for intelligence-sharing and cooperative mission-planning, often to devastating effect.

The tempo of bombing operations fluctuated throughout the war, largely due to changing conditions on the battlefield, and changing political forces in Washington. Although there were certainly lulls in the bombardment, hardly a day went by without a single U.S. strike.

Many bombing and ground-attack missions were one-off strikes, hastily planned and executed in support of ground troop movements or outbursts along the frontlines. But the majority fell under one of 15 named campaigns. Below are five of the most significant bombing campaigns of the war.

The aerial bombardment of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia left a lasting impression on the people, and the landscapes, that it touched. To this day, swathes of Southeast Asia are strewn with unexploded ordnance—a nasty reminder of the air war. Although nonprofit groups like  the Halo Trust  have worked tirelessly to rid the land of munitions, scores of civilians are wounded each year.

The United States military also emerged from the war with a handful of new tactics and technologies, many of which would form the foundations of modern-day aerial warfighting. The Vietnam War witnessed the advent of precision-guided weapons, aerial refueling, advanced early warning systems, and improved communications between aircrews and troops on the ground. The conflict also catalyzed a shift away from the strategic bombing doctrine that had been employed to devastating effect in previous conflicts.

Whether these advancements have truly made U.S. air power a more effective fighting force—and a more just one—is debatable. But there's no doubt that the aerial bombardment of Vietnam will forever remain one of the most staggering sustained attacks in human history.