When America’s B-52s Met their Match

Fifty years ago during the “Christmas Bombings,” Soviet missiles devastated six of America’s vaunted strategic bombers in one day.

An American Boeing B-52 Stratofortress streaks across the sky.

By late 1972, America had been at war in Southeast Asia for seven long years. Peace negotiations between the US, the USSR, and the North Vietnam—then receiving ample military assistance from the Chinese—were yet ongoing, but soon fell apart without resolution.

That outcome would not do for US President Richard Nixon, then the face of a deeply unpopular American counterinsurgency in the jungles of Vietnam. Nixon warned of severe repercussions if the peace talks did not resume, lobbying the US Air Force to prepare a fitting show of force in the event they did not.

It was to be the deadliest bombing operation of the Vietnam War. American airpower experts—many of them veterans of successful strategic bombing campaigns during World War II—mistakenly believed overwhelming firepower could have the same outcome in Vietnam. The US Seventh Air Force named their eleven-day crusade Operation Linebacker II, the immediate successor of a continuous months-long aerial interdiction campaign staged earlier that year and spiritual successor to similarly scaled bombing campaigns in the Pacific and Europe more than a generation before.

Slated for the end of the December, participants later dubbed it “The Christmas Bombings,” and the American B-52 was the star of the show.

Unlike previous operations that had focused on enemy equipment trains traveling deep in the jungle, Linebacker II prioritized the pinpoint destruction of enemy military installations, factories, training complexes, and other urban targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong—something only the vaunted B-52 could accomplish.

Nixon and his cabinet wanted the B-52s to exert maximum pressure, the very purpose of its creation. A creature of the Cold War, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress entered the Air Force in 1955 as a long-range strategic bomber and nuclear deterrent. It was remarkably ahead of its time. Capable of delivering 70,000 pounds of munitions more than 8,800 miles and at an altitude up to 50,000 feet without aerial refueling, its six-turboprop engines and classic swept-wing design proved timeless. Seventy-six of these aircraft have remained in operation ever since—58 in active service, 18 in the reserve, and 12 in storage. With proper maintenance and upgrades the B-52 is set to continue flying for decades to come.

Back in 1972, the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had almost 400 of these aircraft in service, with more than 200 of them were stationed in Southeast Asia, fifty-four in Thailand and 153 in Guam. Linebacker II would rely on hundreds of bombers to deliver the intended psychological blow—complete and utter physical devastation. The sheer scale of the enterprise was problematic. Now two decades removed from its maiden flight, there were no more B-52s coming off American assembly lines. Each machine was extremely expensive, not only to produce, but also to maintain. Losses were catastrophic, and for that very reason B-52s were used in far smaller numbers on previous bombing missions.

But Linebacker II was different. There would be 129 B-52s in the first wave, supported by a host of aerial refuelers, F-4 fighter escorts, SAM-suppressing F-105s, and additional radar-jamming aircraft. Two more waves would follow, each flying the same approach, all at night.

This plan had a major flaw. When the B-52s dropped their bombs and turned for home, they flew directly into a strong headwind that slowed the lumbering airframes more than 120 miles per hour. As they turned, their electronic warfare emitters turned from the very enemy missile installations they were designed to block, creating an unmistakable target to enemy missile guidance radars.

Unfortunately for the American aircrews, North Vietnamese air defenses were no pushover. Spread across three air defense missile battalions, most were equipped with Soviet S-75M Dvina high-altitude air-defense missiles, each one capable of hurling a 195-kilogram warhead almost 100,000 feet in the air at three times the speed of sound. There were twenty-one enemy surface-to-air (SAM) missile installations in Hanoi and Haiphong themselves, with a complement of overlapping anti-aircraft artillery and radar networks.

The raid started on December 18 as 129 B-52s took to the skies over North Vietnam. The sortie marked the largest strategic bombing mission since World War II. B-52s dispatched from Guam had to refuel mid-air and remained aloft for more than twelve hours. The result was both encouraging and alarming. The B-52s dropped their bombs, but were met with a deluge of sixty-eight enemy SAMs fired into the sky.

Of these, three met their mark, downing three irreplaceable B-52s. The next night resulted in a better outcome; ninety-three sorties, and zero casualties.

But it was the third night that proved deadliest. On December 20, ninety-nine B-52 bombers departed into the inky night sky on the same trajectory as the previous nights’ sorties. Intent on destroying strategic rail yards and petroleum storage areas, in the words of the official Air Force history, “all hell broke loose” with another pilot observing flak so bright “you could read a newspaper in the cockpit.”

Thirty-four enemy missiles ripped through the night sky, slashing into the slow-moving formations of American bombers. The first wave lost four bombers, followed by two more in the third.

It would be a very unmerry Christmas for the US Air Force. Under pressure from the Nixon administration to continue the bombings amid domestic calls to stop them, Strategic Air Command continued to fly for another week, amassing 729 sorties in which American aircrews dropped 15,237 tons of bombs on North Vietnam.

Their losses were equally impressive; fifteen B-52s were shot down over Vietnam at a loss of 25 crewmen. Few others were rescued from the jungle. The tally amounted to almost half of all American B-52s shot down during the entire war (31 in all).

For all its bravado and bluster, Linebacker II illustrated the vulnerability of the American B-52 for the first time in combat. A failure to vary their tactics in the opening stages of the operation left American bomber crews exposed to keen North Vietnamese gunner crews whose relatively inexpensive Soviet missiles proved capable of inflicting devastating losses to American bomber crews.

The Air Force began improvising short-term variations to the B-52’s approaches. But the damage was done. By the eleventh night, Nixon called it quits. USAF losses were “unprecedented, and so was the devastation in Vietnam caused by the B-52s,” with over 1,600 military installations destroyed and 1,500 Vietnamese civilians killed.

Peace talks soon resumed in Vietnam, signed in January of the following year. It marked the beginning of the end of America’s odyssey in Vietnam.

Contrary to widespread American belief, Linebacker II had galvanized North Vietnamese resistance like so many strategic bombing campaigns before it. The sacrifices of American aircrews did not yield strategic fruit. Within three years, Hanoi would launch a massive invasion of its southern neighbor, capturing the city of Saigon in April 1975 and push the Americans out of Vietnam once and for all.