Customer Reviews

The Linebacker Raids: The Bombing Of North Vietnam, 1972

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While showing signs of thorough research, this book is peppered with errors and generally flawed by the author's extreme bias against airpower. A more evenhanded approach to the subject matter could have produced a winner from the material available but this is just another pseudo-scholarly rant against US involvement in SEA.

Although the books is not a marvel or a classic piece of literature, it has a matter of fact style which gives the reader plentiful information and a welth of very well organised data regarding the Linebacker raids of 1972. John Smith writes with short, simple but powerful sentences and he also uses many first hand accounts, some of them from the Vietnamese side. I found especially useful the appendices which cover such topics as the air refuelling, the electronic war, the SEAD missions etc. The book is recommended for the serious students of the Vietnam air war, but a certain background of knowledge is necessary.

The United States Air Force still believed in 1972 that air power decided wars: precision bombing would destroy enemy morale, forcing surrender. (The peoples of China, Spain, Britain, Germany, Japan and Korea had obviously not shared this belief, and had not surrendered under bombing.)

But the USAF, and Presidents Johnson and Nixon, knew better: they would bomb Vietnam to submit. (Incidentally, British firms made many of the bombs. The British Ambassador in the USA said, "The United Kingdom was naturally only too happy to sell the bombs but preferred in future it not be said that they were to be used in Vietnam.")

The war ended with an agreement attainable at any time, if the US Government had not had delusions of victory. Vietnam refused to negotiate while the bombing continued; it made no concessions to stop the bombing, and when talks resumed after the bombing it had not changed its position.

The book compares the bombing of Vietnam with the war against Iraq: here too, air power was not decisive: "The bombing did not cause the surrender of Iraq." This is also a warning for us now: NATO air strikes on Serbia will not succeed: an air war, to achieve its stated objectives, will have to be followed by a ground war. And just why should British troops kill and be killed in Serbia?

This book, by focusing on the technical side of the war, fails to mention one outstanding fact: that the bombing, like the war itself, broke all international law and morality. As the American historian Henry Commager wrote "some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost, the war in Vietnam was one of those wars, and those who resist it are the truest patriots." Successive US Governments failed in their immoral aims, and Vietnam won its unity, independence and sovereignty. As Ho Chi Minh said, "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom."