With this improvement, soldiers could now move twice as fast and carry three times as much load. In December , 5, troops were assigned to maintain the trail, which stretched for more than miles. Expansion of the Trail During the early s, the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi campaigned for a massive improvement of the trail. This was done in secrecy. Hence, the trail was more than just a series of jungle trails; it was a political, strategic and economic anchor of the ongoing war. Consequently, engineers were designated to expand the walkways into flat roads.
Bridges were improved to support truck convoys able to transport soldiers at night. In , the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi launched massive campaigns to improve the trail. Several engineers were assigned to widen the footpaths into flat roads. The engineers also strengthened the bridges to make them capable of supporting truck movement and Hanoi could now use truck convoys to transport troops at night.
The North significantly increased supplies to their troops in the South. In and , the war became more intense and the Ho Chi Minh Trail became more and more important to Hanoi.
Supplies were now transported at night by trucks and personnel were positioned at vulnerable points to maintain and repair trucks that broke down. At every third and fifth point between stations, refuelling points were set up. The role that the trail played in the war effort alerted US planners and made them think of ways they could cut off the supply route. Several operations were launched by the US to try and disrupt the movement of supplies using small ground units.
In and , the US also carried out aerial bombardment of the trail. This was known as Operation Rolling Thunder. The trail still managed to operate and the bombings did not slow down the activities along the trail.
Air and ground raids by US forces became common knowledge and were supported by American media. In December , B bombers made their first strike in the Laotian panhandle. The strike crews were supported by a full range of aircraft. Cs dropped flares to illuminate the targets. UCs sprayed the jungle growth with defoliant to make the trail more visible.
Other aircraft flew in forward air control, electronic countermeasures, and reconnaissance roles. The AC gunship, effective in the early going, was withdrawn from operations in Laos in because of vulnerability to ground fire. It was succeeded by more advanced gunships, the AC and the AC The Air Force replaced many of the propeller aircraft in Steel Tiger with jets, which were faster, more flexible, and better able to survive the enemy guns.
After , F-4 Phantoms made more than half of the air strikes on the trail. The Air Force flew about 80 percent of these. Of the aircraft shot down in the Laotian panhandle in those years, belonged to the Air Force.
It merged into a total bombing halt—and the end of Rolling Thunder—on Oct. The halt, however, did not apply to Laos. With more resources available for Laos, a new phase of the war against the Ho Chi Minh Trail was about to begin, and it would be considerably more intense than the early Steel Tiger and Tiger Hound operations. By , McNamara had lost faith in the air war against North Vietnam and was ready for change. An alternative was proposed by John T.
McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, who had heard the idea from a colleague at Harvard. Against the advice of military leaders, McNamara launched the project in September The barrier in Vietnam would be called Dye Marker. The portion in Laos was Muscle Shoals, and the technology for it—as well as the name by which the program is best remembered—was Igloo White. The barrier in Vietnam was eventually canceled, but the Igloo White portion of the project was implemented.
The trail was sown with 20, seismic and acoustic sensors, dropped by aircraft and placed by Special Forces teams. The sensors had to be replaced every few weeks as the batteries ran down.
Sensors tracked the direction and speed of convoys on the trail. From this, it was possible to predict where the trucks were going and when they would get there. Air strikes were sent in, and as the aircraft approached the strike zone, the sensors updated the location of the trucks. Some aircraft, notably the AC gunship, were able to find trucks on their own. When the air campaign against the trail escalated in , Igloo White would be central to it and would remain so for the rest of the war.
Operation Commando Hunt began promptly on Nov. In fact, every interdiction campaign after was called Commando Hunt. The numerical designations changed with the monsoon season. As before, most of the strikes were in the dry season. A key characteristic of the seven Commando Hunt campaigns was the use of the Igloo White sensors. The drill was to cut the road at several places with laser guided bombs and seed the ground between the cuts with mines, which made it more difficult for the enemy to repair the road cuts.
This forced the North Vietnamese to divert their trucks to out-of-the-way routes, and it created traffic jams—lucrative targets for air attack. There were two problems. North Vietnamese forces had bypasses unknown to the Air Force, and they were very good at clearing the blocking points.
They threw rocks tied to cords into the mined area and drew them backward to set off the mines. Once they had a path through the antipersonnel mines, the rest of the clearance was easy.
Relatively few bombs would, on average, strike the narrow roads. Where they did, temporary bypasses could be readily constructed in treeless areas where the soil, tilled by thousands of bombs, had become easier to work. Craters in the road could be filled with the spoil from adjacent craters. The most effective weapons in Commando Hunt were the gunships.
They flew a comparatively small percentage of the sorties, but accounted for an exceptionally large share of the results. At the peak of Commando Hunt VII, the average number of trucks reported as destroyed or damaged per sortie was as follows:. Between and , North Vietnam used a second infiltration route that was considerably less hazardous than the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
This alternative route became more important in , when Commando Hunt air strikes intensified on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon after the Nixon Administration took office in , the secret war in Laos—which had been under way for the past four years—became a political issue.
By the end of the year, a growing list of Senators was complaining about Administration secrecy in Laos, and national newspapers had joined the fray. US involvement in Laos was publicly acknowledged for the first time in a statement by President Nixon on March 6, This was just one part of several American ground and air strikes against villages and roads along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Since such raids had become common knowledge and were being reported in the American media, the U. State Department felt compelled to announce that these controversial missions were authorized by the powers granted to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the August Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. But the Johnson administration came under increasing criticism at home and abroad because of the bombing raids along the trail in Laos and Cambodia.
Congressional opponents of the Johnson administration thought the president was escalating the war without authorization. There was also an immediate response in the international community. On March 4, about 2, students attacked the U. Embassy in Moscow. There was also a reaction in non-communist capitals.
Prime Minister Lester Pearson of Canada expressed concern about the risk of escalation, but said that Canada understood the U. Sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail still exist today, and parts of it have been incorporated into the Ho Chi Minh Highway, a paved road that connects the north and south regions of Vietnam. In the summer of , the pass once more appeared on the list of bombing targets.
On July 16 and 17, F fighter-bombers dropped 18, pounds of munitions on Mu Gia. Mu Gia and other strategic spots along the Ho Chi Minh trail became a struggle between American attempts to shut down the supply route and Vietnamese ones to keep them going. Defending the route was a core of committed laborers, who protected the trail by making it physically hard to bomb.
Over the short term, this meant that the trail was maintained by guerrilla warfare standards, composed of narrow passageways — ranging from a mere six to eight feet wide. Although this limited the transfer of supplies to pack animals and bicycles, it made the area a more difficult target for bombing. Over the long term, Hanoi made preparations for widening parts of the trail to accommodate guns and trucks, which eventually increased the systems supply capacity and allowed the North Vietnamese to respond militarily to US aircraft.
The bombing of Mu Gia continued through the winter, spring, and summer of According to a May 6, Time magazine article, during one week-long series of sorties, Guam-based Bs unloaded tons of high explosives on the pass.
The attacks continued through December , maximum-effort strikes using thirty or more huge bombers. It became a very bloody business, and a very considerable number of US aircraft went down along the Trail. Despite the hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs that were dropped on Mu Gia and other strategic sections of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Rolling Thunder campaign begun in March failed in its interdiction objectives for reasons that are still debated by military historians.
As early as the summer of , internal review and mounting congressional and public pressure to find coercive leverage over North Vietnam led to a reevaluation of the bombing strategy.
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