Tag: Bach Mai hospital

The Christmas Bombings of Hanoi, North Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War on December 11, 1972 Anniversary Tours, a
Communist Party-USA owned travel agency, booked Scandinavian Airlines, SAS,
flights out of JFK Airport bound for Hanoi, North Vietnam.

Among its passengers were folksinger Joan Baez,
the Episcopal Rev. Michael Allen of Yale Divinity, Barry Romo of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Gen.
Telford Taylor, the former chief counsel of the war crimes trials of the Nazis at Nuremberg, Germany.[1]

On December 13, 1972 Cora Rubin Weiss, Hanoi’s chosen liasion for POW mail and more, held a press conference and introduced Baez,
Allen, Taylor and Romo as departing for Hanoi. Baez said she wanted to meet
North Vietnamese and to witness war damage. Allen said they had 500 pieces
of mail for American POWs carried by Hanoi approved Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen
Detained in North Vietnam, COLIFAM. Weiss said this was COLIFAM’s 36^th mail trip.

ABC, NBC, CBS, AP and UPI covered this pro-Hanoi press conference.[2] Such
favorable coverage of the enemy in war was common during the war. A study of CBS by the
Institute for American Strategy showed that 83.33 % of stories about the
government of South Vietnam were critical while 57.3% of stories about the Communist enemy in Hanoi were favorable.[3]

The media coverage of “Christmas bombings” is a case study not only of media bias, but media support for the enmy in war.

The bombings were also a success story for America in the Cold War. A success later squandered, but that is another story.

Nixon’s vigorous prosecution of the war, ‘Peace with Honor,” was an election mandate, a landslide, forty-nine state, victory
over the single issue, anti-war candidate, George McGovern. McGovern had met secretly with Hanoi officials in Paris to seek political advantage against Nixon failing miserably to do so.

So, in an effort to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table, resoundingly reelected President
Nixon escalated the bombing of targets previously off-limits in North Vietnam.

The bombings ocurred December 18-29 — the so-called Christmas Bombings despite a 36 hour bombing
pause at Christmas.[4]

There was no Christmas bombing. Since Communists do not celebrate Christmas or
any other religious holiday, their outrage over bombings on a Christian holy
day was feigned. The bombings, none of which occurred on Christmas day, were
dubbed the Christmas bombings for maximum propaganda value in the USA where a
majority were Christians.

The bombings were to provide “maximum destruction …of military targets” and to “inflict the
utmost civilian distress.” Admiral Moorer said, “I want the people of Hanoi to hear the bombs.”

Bombing of the 5-railroad track Long Bien Bridge
across the Red River into Hanoi was only two miles from the Metropole Hotel.
Surrounded by beautiful women and good food, the Baez group was well cared for at the Metropole.

There they met other internationalists such as Jean Thoroval of Agence France Press, a Cuban, an Indian and others.

The Americans were shown films of deformed children, dying caged animals and “an
American soldier shooting fire from a hose.” They were taken to a bombsite.

Joan Baez remembers very telling details,

“We came to what looked like a large expensive movie set of a piece of the moon.
…Men [were] shouting out the number of dead…in the hundreds. …Here was a shoe…
a half-buried little sweater, a piece of broken dish… a book lying open, its
damp pages stuck together. The press was there with their cameras.”

Nearby a women “hobbled back and forth” singing,
‘My son. My son. Where are you now?”
Twas a movie set, which Baez, a professional entertainer, recognized,
but she somehow failed to identify as a propaganda show too well staged to be true.
Telford Taylor astutely asked if the bombed sites were recent or left over from bombing in June.[5]

Ultimately, Nixon’s idea was to destroy the North’s will to fight.[6]

“Wet His Pants”

Nixon’s strategy worked.

As Nixon and Kissinger first claimed, American POW’s later confirmed and the North Vietnamese admit today, the
December bombings were terrifying. Truong  Nhu Tang remembered, “I had been caught in the Apocalypse. The terror was
complete. One lost control bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible
orders to get out.”[8] One POW saw his prison guard “trembling like a leaf, drop his rifle, and wet his pants.”[9]

Joan Baez in the Metropole’s bomb shelter with Rev. Michael Allen of Yale Divinity,
Barry Romo of VVAW and Telford Taylor sang Christmas Carols.

Close by in the “Hanoi Hilton” the POWs cheered. The Vietnamese trembled.[7]

POW and Admiral James Stockdale, remembers: “At dawn, the streets of Hanoi were absolutely
silent. …Patriotic wakeup music was missing, …street sounds, the horns, all
gone. Our interrogators and guards (were solicitous)… morning coffee was
delivered…Any Vietnamese officer’s face . . . telegraphed… hopelessness,
remorse, fear. …[O]ur enemy’s will was broken.[10]
POW Michael O’Connor: “When we heard them crying in the streets, we knew it
would soon be over.”[11] POW Lt. Col. Frank Lewis remembers:  “I … danced around my cell like a
fool, yelling, and cheering … I cried with pleasure.”[12] The POW’s cheered.

The North Vietnamese had never experienced anything like it in decades of an American limited war strategy calibrated to send signals of
resolve with minimal provocations of either the enemy or his Soviet and Chinese Communist allies.

During thirteen days in Hanoi, the Vietnamese gave propaganda talking points to the
Americans–support the 9 Point Peace Plan, stop bombing and free South
Vietnamese political prisoners. Baez sang to a group of twelve POWs.[13]

Baez told a Japanese reporter, Tsuyoshi Doki,
“Nixon is nothing but a madman… When I return home, I will do my utmost so that
the antiwar movement can be unified and become more powerful.”[14]

Some 42,000 bombs fell seeking “maximum destruction of selected military targets.”
Hanoi’s 1,242 SAM missiles and artillery shells fired at American
aircraft fell back down amongst the civilians remaining in Hanoi.[15]

VVAW’s Barry Romo claimed the bombing was never to destroy military
targets, but to terrorize and demoralize the Vietnamese people. Bombs falling
on nonmilitary targets were not errors. The same homes and shops were hit several times, Romo claimed.[16]

Yet the actual orders from Washington were to “exercise precaution to minimize risk of civilian casualties…”[17]
Aircrews were ordered to maintain straight and level flight to “maximize
aiming time” and to “reduce the chances of civilian damage.”[18]
These orders increased crew exposure to the world’s best antiaircraft defenses.
Although not the nuclear holocaust the left frequently accused the US of
planning—whenever the U.S. showed even diplomatic firmness to Communist aggression–the
new smart bombs fell with great accuracy.

The New York Times claimed carpet bombing of square miles of densely populated
areas. Joseph Kraft wrote of “senseless terror” bombing. Dan Rather: “large
scale terror bombing.” The Washington Post quested Nixon’s sanity. Anthony Lewis called the President a “maddened
tyrant.”[19] Aerial photos showed that there was no indiscriminate carpet-bombing and no terror attacks upon civilians.[20]

Walter Cronkite uncritically cited the Soviet News Agency Tass and Radio Hanoi as
credible news sources about the alleged massive scale of the damages to
civilian homes and the President’s mental condition.[21]

Still on December 29, 1972 Nhan Dan reported excerpts from a statement of Lieutenant Colonel Luis (SIC) Henry
Bernasconi, navigator of a B-52 shot down on December 22. Now a POW Bernasconi
said, “We are taught that B-52s are used to bomb targets …tens of square miles.
Such targets do not exist in Vietnam. …B-52 bombing in densely [SIC] populated
areas is to kill more and more people to generate pressure.”[22]
Once released Bernasconi did not repeat such wild claims about B-52 target
sizes and intents to kill.

As the North Vietnamese now admit, their radar was successfully blinded, making their SAM missiles ineffective.[23]
Stanley Karnow’s first hand observations were that populations had evacuated,
damage in Hanoi and Haiphong was minimal, civilians were spared and the bombing
was accurately placed upon military targets.[24]

Back on the homefront on Christmas Eve, a small contingent of the members of VVAW, Brown
Berets, and Venceremos Brigade marched to the Veterans Administration Cemetery
in Los Angeles. They distribute leaflets titled “SIX MILLION VICTIMS—THE HUMAN
COST OF THE INDOCHINA WAR UNDER PRESIDENT NIXON.”[25] Six million was an outrageous number.

In contrast in South Vietnam when villagers moved to safer areas under government control the
Communists routinely mortared, bombed and mined markets and roads for no
military purpose whatsoever. Between 1968 and 1972, “roughly thirty thousand
civilians a year went to GVN hospitals with injuries from mines and
mortars…wounds [which] …greatly exceeded…those…by Allied shelling and bombing.”[26]
Unlike the communists raining artillery and mortar fire directly upon fleeing
South Vietnamese civilians, U.S. B-52s did not bomb people evacuating Hanoi.

Outrage Over “Carpet” Bombings of Hanoi

Le Monde compared the American
attacks to the horrific bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, a leftist
symbol of Fascist brutality against heroic Communist revolutionaries. Like
Pavlov’s dogs, the progressive media salivated on cue.

Friends of the Vietnamese communists, including the American media, were spitting mad and
hysterically outraged—not over the endless Viet Cong atrocities, but the bombing of Hanoi.

CBS’s Dan Rather called the bombing “(unrestricted) large scale terror bombing.” Radio Hanoi told
him and he parroted claims of “extermination raids on many populous areas.”

CBS’s Walter Cronkite quoted  as sources of fact the
Soviet News Agency, Tass, “U.S. bombers destroyed thousands of homes,” and
Radio Hanoi, “Nixon has taken leave of his senses.”

Henry Kissinger in his White House Years quoted the newspaper editorial headlines after the
bombings: “New Madness in Viet Nam” (St. Louis Post Dispatch,
December 19); “The Rain of Death Continues” (Boston Globe,
December 20); “Terror From the Skies”  (New York Times,
December 26); “Terror Bombing in the Name of Peace” (Washington
Post, December 28); “Beyond All Reasons” (Los Angeles Times,
December 28).[27] “Frighteningly callous to consequences,” Mary McCarthy wrote upon learning a
bomb had killed the French Chief of Mission,[28]
presumably an unconscionable assault utopian high intellect and culture.
Privately Nixon called it “media fueled hysteria,” but to his critics such the coverage “reasonable.”[29]

On the whole Nixon was silent to outrageously false claims of immorality, barbarism and butchery,
fearing he later said, of driving Hanoi away from peace talks in Paris.

Stanley Karnow says American newspapers, television, and radio had uncritically carried a
French reporter’s claims [in Le Monde] of “carpet bombing” of downtown
Haiphong and Hanoi.  Malcolm Browne of The New York Times, a war critic, said this was “grossly overstated.”

Indeed, even Tran Duy Hung, mayor of Hanoi denied such false claims.  Karnow says, “American antiwar
activists…during the attacks urged the mayor to claim a death toll of ten
thousand.” The suspects for such an intentional fabrication, a lie, would have
been Joan Baez, Barry Romo, Michael Allen, and Telford Taylor. Mayor Tran
refused to bump the numbers because “his government’s credibility was at stake.”

The North Vietnamese counted 1,318 civilian fatalities in Hanoi and 305 in Haiphong—a
pittance of the 85,000 killed in the real carpet firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.[30]

Earlier in 1972 the North Vietnamese had turned artillery upon civilians
fleeing Quang Tri and An Loc killing at least 15,000. There was neither
discernable media nor “peace” pilgrim outrage to this slaughter of the purely innocent.

And upon her return Joan Baez accurately estimated the casualties at 2,000.[31]

Parks says the civilian deaths in the Hanoi count were not entirely innocent. Civilians worked at
lawful military targets. Some were human shields. And still other civilians
were killed by “North Vietnamese SAMs or AAA projectiles…plummeted to the ground.”

Since “Hanoi fired more than 1,000 SAMs…[M]any
of the 1,318 civilian deaths can be attributed to these North Vietnamese
defenses.  …Measured against …the law of
war…Linebacker II is unprecedented in its minimization… of collateral civilian
casualties when compared with the intensity of effort against legitimate targets.”

That during the most intense bombing of the entire war Hanoi counted far less than 2,000 people
dead is “persuasive evidence (that)… the United States sought to avoid
collateral damage… so too had [the earlier] Rolling Thunder been “one of the
most constrained military campaigns in history.”

That the U.S. spent $100,000 for every truck destroyed [32]
was a measure of neither indiscriminate bombing nor economic waste, but of the
value Americans placed on innocent human life.

Bach Mai Hospital and Kham Thien Street

The few civilian targets hit loomed very large in propaganda about American bombing — the Bach Mai
hospital and Kham Thien Street, a residential area.

The North Vietnamese and their American friends said these were bombed intentionally.

Telford Taylor said Bach Mai hospital had been totally destroyed [For the 1,000^th time?] and Baez
claimed the bombing had injured POWs in the Hanoi Hilton. The hospital was
never targeted, but the area around Bach Mai was target rich with legitimate
military objectives.  It was only 1,000 meter from the Bach Mai Military Airfield and 200 yards from a POL fuel storage
facility.[33] Also air defenses and Radio Hanoi.

The prime target was clear.  “The overall control of
the NVA air defenses … one of the best … in the world … was directed by
an air defense command and control center located at (less than 500 meters away
at) Bach Mai airfield.” This air defense system commanded and controlled
from Bach Mai airfield allowed targeting of U.S. aircraft from ground level to
19 miles up.[34] Moreover, air defenses were located among civilians and patients at Bach Mai.

Only a laser-guided bomb finally hit Radio Hanoi, which was at Bach Mai protected by a concrete revetment.

In the event photos prove that only the corner of one wing
of the hospital, not its center, was accidentally destroyed killing 28.[35]

The hospital was hit in a tragic accident. Col. John Yuill lost control of his aircraft at the
very moment of his bomb release as two SAM missiles exploded above and below
him spewing his bomb train off target and onto a portion of the hospital.[36]
Though captions of photos in one war museum claim the hospital was “destroyed”[37]
and in another museum only “damaged,[38] a
careful analysis of photos shows a corner of the hospital hit and a big bomb
crater off to the side of the hospital.[39]
Views of remodeled hospital today[40]
seems to confirm that the left front part of hospital was hit, probably
accidentally as Col. John Yuill described it thereafter.

Similarly, on December 26, 1972 SAM attacks on another aircraft diverted a B-52 bomb train to
residential Kham Thien Street[41] where it was claimed that 287 were killed and 290 injured.[42]

Upon her return to Hanoi in early January Joan Baez would report that $400,000 had been raised to
rebuild Bach Mai Hospital.[43] The CPUSA’s Young Workers’ Liberation League had created the tax exempt Bach
Mai Hospital Relief Fund.[44] April 8-15, 1973 was Bach Mai Week during which local peace organizations canvassed
dor to door and sold pancake breakfasts.[45] Despite the monetary contributions of many
other Americans to the relief fund, e.g. through Bill Zimmerman’s fund raising
for Medical Aid to Vietnam; Bach Mai would remain unrepaired for nine years.

To the “humane” Vietnamese Communists Bach Mai was worth far more as a war trophy
and as cash flow than it was as a functioning hospital.

For those who dismissed official American sources, such as Pentagon aerial photos showing
minimal damage to Hanoi, the Baez contingency had brought back North Vietnamese
Government film. The COLIFAM delegation used NBC film.[46]
CBS would forevermore simply report Hanoi’s numbers and never covered Hanoi’s
subsequent repudiation of the claim of extensive casualties at Bach Mai, which
had been evacuated long before the bombing.[47]

After the signing of the Paris Accord Henry Kissinger visited Hanoi and shared
his observations with Nixon and Haldeman,

“It was absolutely amazing in Hanoi how remarkably precise the American bombing had been. There’s virtually no
destruction in the city of Hanoi of anything except military targets, the
railway yard is completely wiped out, but all the other buildings and facilities
still stand. Large storage areas have been demolished, but virtually nothing adjacent to them.”

And “Henry feels that it is…a total repudiation of the attacks on the P(resident) for his
so-called carpet bombing….”[48] POW James Kasler soon told a Congressional committee, “The Americans who came
to Hanoi…[reported] Hanoi… lying in shambles.” Yet “the city was barely touched
as has been proven by unbiased photographers who visited there after our [POW]
release” some 90 days later. Kasler insisted, American travelers  “distorted the truth about the bombing of
civilian targets…because they wanted the North Vietnamese to win and they were
willing to betray their own country to attain that goal.”[49]

In contrast to Hanoi’s death toll of 1,318 civilians in December 1972, during its Easter
offensive during the spring of 1972 Hanoi’s invading armies had turned its
artillery and rockets upon the civilian populations of An Loc, Hue, Quang Tri and other cities.

During the battles of April 1972 the North Vietnamese had rained
artillery upon tens of thousands of civilian refugees fleeing on roads running
south from battles in Quang Tri and in An Loc. Some 15,000 or so civilians were
slaughtered on the escape routes Highways 1 and Highway 13 respectively.

About this indiscriminate slaughter of helpless civilians in South Vietnam there was
silence among the self-anointed humanitarians and pacifists within the peace
movement. Against all evidence they persisted in claiming that all the barbarism
of war came from one side, the American side. By late that July President Nixon
had reported 860,000 refugees, 45,000 casualties (15,000 dead).  Such was the “liberation” (during
the Easter Offensive) of Quang Tri, Hue, An Loc, Binh Dinh province and other
areas benefiting from the humanitarian policies of the North.

December’s bombings gave the Americans the moral high ground, if there is such a thing in the
accidental killing of civilians in war.

Of course, Hanoi’s franchised peace movement usurped the high ground by
declaring Hanoi’s death toll of 1,318 civilians was indiscriminate carpet bombing of many square miles of North Vietnam.

For the first time in the war Hanoi was shaken.

The communists had angered the mad man Nixon. America could at long last negotiate from a position of strength.

Visiting at the invitation of her Vietnamese friends at
Choisy-le-Roi, Mary McCarthy and Mr. Phan and Vy discussed the antiwar
movement. Barbara Deming’s letter wanted American women to go to Hanoi to work
under the bombs. Mary McCarthy suggested a group of big names go to Hanoi to
risk their lives. Phan said, “The place to be effective had been America.” From Paris NFL representative Phan
Thanh Nam secretly ran Hanoi’s intelligence operations in the USA, in part by meeting “freindly” Americans like Mary McCarthy.
McCarthy says, “About the failure of Americans at home to rise in protest
against the bombing he was bitter.” Mary McCarthy doubted the value of another
demonstration particularly during Christmas. She said the antiwar people were tired, alone and discouraged.

Among McCarthy’s handwritten list of notables to ask to go to Hanoi during bombings there had been no takers:
[Roger] Hilsman, Wald + Luris, Gene McCarthy, Ramsey Clark, F[rances]
Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Francine Gray, Tom Wicker, Francis Plympton, Tom
Finletter, Bishop Moore, John Kerry, McGovern, Father Hesburg, Abraham Herchel,
Waldheim, Mayor Lindsey, Al Lowenstein, Rene Dubos, James Baldwin, Roy Wilkins,
Coretta King, Gary Wills, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowell, James Jones, Wm.
Styron, John Knowles, Andrew Young, Ron Dellums, Arthur Schlesinger, Bennington Moore.[50]

Maybe Vietnam twasn’t radical chic any more.

The Christmas bombings had all but won the war
and the gas had run out of the antiwar movement. Or so it seemed.

The Christmas bombings of Hanoi in December 1972 had outraged Hanoi, the American press and
Hanoi’s allies on the Second Front in the USA, a “peace” movement largely
seeking a Viet Cong victory. That December the U.S. opportunity to negotiate
from a position of strength had never been better. The enemy’s will and
capability to wage war had been challenged as never before.

Yet Henry Kissinger would negotiate a betrayal of South Vietnam and a “bugout” and declare it peace. John
Negroponte, a member of the Kissinger negotiating team later said, “We bombed them into accepting our compromises.”

The antiwar movement’s influence on domestic politics, specifically upon Congress, provided an
explanation for this strange surrender moments before a final victory seemed in clear sight.

“One With You in Struggle,” Tom and Jane Tell Communists

In December 1972, “I’m Viet Cong” Tom Hayden, founder of Students for a Democratic Society, frequent flyer to Hanoi
and its messenger to the antiwar movement, was in Norway with actress Jane
Fonda, notorious propagandist for Hanoi and patron of both Vietnam Veterans
Against the War and John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” charges of U.S. war crimes. Fonda was filming
“A Doll House”[1] for “progressive Marxist” Robert Losey.

Hayden and Fonda learned of the December bombings
of Hanoi and the port of Haiphong in a theatre in Paris. They marched off to
the Vietnamese mission to see some old friends, Nguyen Minh Vy and Madame
Nguyen Thi Binh, to ask them what to do. Jane flew to a Stockholm rally to denounce the “escalation of killing.”

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda telegraphed North Vietnam.  On December 26, 1972, Radio
Hanoi broadcast the text of the Hayden-Fonda message to Hanoi:

“HAYDEN-FONDA MESSAGE–here is a message from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden to the Vietnamese
people: [Word indistinct] Vietnamese will long live in people’s memory.  Defeat of B-52’s shows that our spirit and
resistance is stronger than technological power of any kind. We are one with you in struggle.  There will come [words
indistinct].  We are organizing international campaign for Nixon to sign the [“Hanoi-NLF”] agreement.”

Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.[2]

In an Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, brochure, Tom and Jane joined a broad coalition of
pro-Hanoi antiwar groups in escalating their claims of genocide in South Vietnam from four million[3]
to “six million.” After the widely described horrendous Christmas
bombings, Hanoi, despite the urging of Americans “peace” activists housed in
the luxurious French colonial Metropole hotel, curiously made no official
claims of genocide in the Hanoi bombings. Hanoi alleged only 1,600 dead in the
“carpet bombing” of a city of a million people. A real carpet-bombing of Tokyo in WWII took 85,000 souls.

1972 had closed with Fonda and Hayden telling fellow Americans they wanted to defeat the U.S.
forces– proclaiming their desire for a Communist victory. Though an American
peace would soon be at hand with North Vietnam, Tom and Jane, joined by many
other individuals and groups, would continue through the next two and a half
years to work tirelessly for a North Vietnamese Communist victory over the people of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Among those Hanoi front groups on the Viet Cong team after the Paris Peace Accords were: America Friends Service Committee, AFSC/NARMIC,
Clergy And Laity Concerned, Women Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, War Resisters
League, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, Fellowship of Reconciliation, SANE, Episcopal Peace Fellowship,
Medical Aid for Indochina, Indochina Resource Center, Don Luce’s Indochina Mobile [tiger cage] Education Project, church affiliated International
Committee to Free South Vietnamese Prisoners from Detention, Torture and Death[4].

There was the small, but more than symbolic Union of Vietnamese
in the U.S.A.[5] which attributed “the historic victory of our Vietnamese nation” to the wise and clear sighted leadership of the party Central Committee.”[6]

The Union was a front for Hanoi intelligence and influence operations in the USA.

Hanoi’s American operation included Nguyen Thi Ngoc Thoa in Washington, D.C.,  Nguyen Van Luy in SanFrancisco and later Dinh
Ba Chi in New York at the United Nations.[1] Both Luy and Thoa were active in the American antiwar movement, in Berkeley and in Hayden-Fonda’s IPC respectively.

[1] FBI, Acting Director to President, COLIFAM, internal Security-Revolutionary Activities, 6:05AM December
12, 1972