Operation Rolling Thunder and Operation Menu: The History of the Vietnam War's Most Controversial Bombing Campaigns

The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren't so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam. Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diem's regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy's administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam. The seeds of Operation Rolling Thunder, America's elaborately constrained air war against North Vietnam, appeared almost from the first moment that the USA inherited the conflict from the French. The half-communist, half-nationalist Viet Minh rebels of Ho Chi Minh evicted the French in 1954, but not before the latter partially created an anticommunist state, South Vietnam, in the lower half of the nation. Home to many Vietnamese who stood to lose property and potentially their lives in the event of the country's reunification, the new state struggled with both Viet Cong guerrillas supplied by the north and its own internal corruption and factionalism. Many thousands of North Vietnamese fled there to escape Ho Chi Minh's repression and occasional mass executions as well. Predictably, the lack of resolve showed by the strictly limited operation failed to change the North's policies in the slightest. Both characteristics - Johnson's faith in the power of highly circumscribed operations and North Vietnamese political indifference to them - would appear throughout Operation Rolling Thunder. The North Vietnamese understood clearly the weaknesses of America's relative restraint, its defensive stance, and its increasing domestic anti-war movement. They exploited these advantages to the full, guided by one principle: winning. One of their prime strategic advantages lay in their use of Cambodia. Cambodia, headed by the effective quisling King Norodom Sihanouk, officially adopted a stance of neutrality. This neutrality represented a sham, however. Sihanouk permitted the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) to operate on Cambodian territory. He did so out of fear of North Vietnam and in the hope that the North Vietnamese would not attack him while he attempted to deal with the Khmer Rouge. Furthermore, the North Vietnamese developed a shortened supply route through Cambodia to lessen dependence on the partially compromised Ho Chi Minh Trail traversing Laos. Sihanouk allowed Hanoi to use the deep water port of Sihanoukville to bring weaponry and supplies in from ships sailing out of communist China, from where the Viet Cong moved them the short distance to the South Vietnamese border, along the so-called Sihanoukville Trail, without fear of American interdiction. This strategic situation changed briefly, however, during the 1970 Cambodian Campaign, when American and South Vietnamese forces crossed the border into Cambodia and brought the battle to the previously immune enemy there. What resulted was arguably the most controversial fighting of America's most controversial war.