From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Monte Davis"  wrote in message
news:53f2m1l0r7tt3hk0pss55sbu8t2i04fbk7{at}4ax.com...
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote:
>
>>Gary obviously isn't familiar with Rolling Thunder and Linebacker.
>
> No, I think he was envisioning a lot sterner punishment in response to
> the 1975 offensive than either of those. Anti-war exaggerations aside,
> they weren't anywhere close to WWII levels of flatten-it-all bombing.

Hopefully we'll never again  have to resort to the WWII fire bomb raids of
Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden .....
McNamara admitted in 'The Fog of War'  after incinerating 100,000 civilians
in one raid on Tokyo that Lemay told him  "If we'd lost the war, we'd
all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

I still don't think those who claim that we should 'have used our airpower
in Vietnam' realize how vast that effort was

Just  to relive the seige of Khe Sanh http://www.danshistory.com/vietnam.shtml#line2

 By the end of Operation Niagara on March 31, 1968 some 26,700 sorties
(2,700 by B-52s) had been flown and 110,000 tons of munitions dropped in
the effort. An incredible 76,000 tons of the total came from B-52 bombers
arriving in "three ships" every 90 minutes and bombing as close
as 300 yards to friendly troops
-------

Some 'leaders' should have been prosecuted for idiotic tactics that doomed
flight crews

----------

During the first three nights bombers attacked in formations of three using
the same altitudes and tracks at evenly spaced intervals. On the first
night three B-52's were lost and on the third night, a staggering 6 planes
went down in a nine hour period.

 An incident never widely publicized reveals the bitter frustration that
many in the Air Force were feeling toward a war that wasn't being fought to
win. Returning aircrews from the raid staged a protest at their base at
Guam over the serious losses and predictable tactics. The Air Force
leadership quietly ordered a Christmas Day stand down. The Vietnamese
immediately boasted that their air defenses had killed nine bombers and
that the Americans couldn't endure the losses.

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