Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316 . By: NWD Date: 2011
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were already assigned to NATO on that station. The 60 , 000 figure which we just mentioned was to reappear later, much later in fact, when Secretary McNamara travelled to Saigon in late July to ltnegotiatelt t he new force levels for Program 5.
4.
Bombing in the North : Reexamined
Its Contribution to the Ground War
In early May attention also focused on how the bombing campaign i n the North could better contribute to successful military outcomes in the South. Three i mportant memos appeared during the first vleek in May , all devoted to this problem . On 5 May , in a draft memorandum for the President, John McNaughton proposed that all of the sorties allocated t o t he ROLLING THU~mER program be concentrated.on the lines of c ommtmication, or vlhat he called the lt funnel lt through which men and supplies to t he south must flo,,, between 17-200 , vlhile res erving the options and the i ntention to strike in the area north of this (or in the 20-23 0 area ) as necessary to keep the enemy '. s investment in defense and in repair cr ews high throughout the country. In arguing for this course of action, he noted that General Wheeler , ,,,hen General Westmoreland vlaS in Washington i n April, had said that t he bombing campaign ,,,as reachj.ng the point where all of the worth'i'lh ile fixed targets, except the ports had been struck. McNaughton did not believe that the ports should be struck nor closed by mining , primarily because of the confrontation vIhich he saw thi s might cause with the Soviet Union. Examining the bombing alternatives, he ob served that we could continue to conduct attacks north of the 20 0 parallel, that is continue striking minor fixed targets while conducting armed reconnaissance against movement on r oads, railroads and watervlays . This course , though, was costly in American lives and in his estimation involved serious dangers of escalation, either with the Chi nese or the Russians. The loss rate in Hanoi/Haiphong Route Package 6 for example was more than six times the l oss rate in the southernmost route packages 1 and 2, and actions in the Hanoi/ Haiphong area involved serious risks of generating confrontations with the Soviet Union and China, both because they involved destruction of MIGs on t he ground and count ers vIi th MIGs in the air and because they might be construed as U. S. intention to crush the Hanoi regime. The military . gain of the expanded bombing appeared to be slight; in fact, McNaughton could l ocate no evidence at the time to establish some convincing connection beti"een operations in the north against targets north of the 20 0 parallel and enemy actions in the South . Furthermore , if the United States be.l ievcd that air attacks in t:be aree. ,-TOuld change Hanoi ' s will , they might have been vIorthvlhile, he added, and consequently reduce the . l oss. of American life in the south and the risk of the expansion of the war in t he North . Hovrever , McNaughton noted there was no evidence that this vlould be the case, for there was considerable evidence that such
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