The Busiest Bombing Month

They may have been going all out to refute the contention that airpower has its limits in Viet Nam. Or demonstrating to the skeptical back home that there is no stalemate over North Viet Nam. Or warning Ho Chi Minh on the eve of the South Vietnamese elections that a willingness to negotiate should not be mistaken for any weakening of resolve. Whatever the reason, American fighter-bombers ranged up and down the vital railroad links between Hanoi and China last week, dispatching box cars, bridges and marshaling yards with lethal efficiency. Other sorties hit army barracks, antiaircraft emplacements, SAM sites and the Hoa Lac airfield --where the North Vietnamese had rigged up mock MIGs and painted bomb craters on the runways to fool the American flyers. The phony holes were quickly turned into smoking facts.

The week's work capped the busiest month of the air campaign against the North. Flying some 150 missions a day, U.S. pilots hit North Viet Nam harder than ever before in the 21-year-old air war. The result was a growing confidence among airmen that at last they are hurting Ho measurably and meaningfully. Said the director of intelligence for the Seventh Air Force in Saigon, Brigadier General J. M. Philpott: "We're really doing the job now."

Only Five Minutes More. Pentagon officials agree; they estimate that the bombing is now cutting off 30% of the supplies headed for South Viet Nam and 10-20% of the men who try to in filtrate from the North. Moreover, the daily devastation is being wrought at a diminishing price. When the U.S. began bombing the North, Ho's 7,000 antiaircraft guns and several dozen SAM missile sites brought the attrition rate of planes downed per mission to 3.2%.

Now it is about 2%.

The drop can be traced to a variety of causes. With more planes in the air, advance formations of fighter-bombers are free to go in over the target ahead of the primary mission, spraying enemy antiaircraft gunners with anti-personnel CBUs--canisters full of hundreds of bits of deadly metal shards.

North Vietnamese gun crews who survive are often baffled by confused white lines racing across their radar scopes, the result of the fresh jamming technology now in use.

U.S. pilots have improved their evasive tactics, and they are better trained at applying them. The threat from enemy fighter planes has almost disappeared: of Hanoi's once 110-M1G-strong air force, only half remains, and most of those are now based in China. Unless they risk refueling stops in North Viet Nam, the flight in from China leaves them with scarcely enough fuel for five minutes' dogfighting over Hanoi.

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