P.January 11, 2016
A little perspective is needed to appreciate the appalling command incompetence that generated these 7 years of useless attacks on the Thanh Hoa Bridge. After the first attacks, the North Vietnamese stopped relying on the Thanh Hoa Bridge for serious logistics traffic and substituted a couple of nearby shallow underwater fords for the rest of the war. Either ignorant of this or ignoring this, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and MACV turned the bridge into a showcase target and over the next 7 years mindlessly wasted 873 sorties on it, tragically losing 104 aircrew members (and 70+ planes) in the process. The North Vietnamese soon realized that the US was going to persist in bombing their showcase target so they moved 5 air defense regiments into the area, most of which probably served as superb air defense school units for the rest of the North Vietnamese air defense forces, courtesy of the steady stream of super-realistic (albeit expensive) targets that the USAF and USN obligingly provided on a regular basis.
PS. The claim of only 11 airplanes lost is pure cover-up by airpower apologists posing as historians. The detailed loss records for the entire Vietnam air war show 104 aircrew members killed or captured within 5 miles of the Thanh Hoa Bridge.
Also, some bright sparks did a study and found out that over 80 percent of these kinds of interdiction targets could be taken out with 16" shells from an Iowa-class battleship. In any event, that is a lot of lost aircraft and crews for little gain.
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