Operation Rolling Thunder and Operation Menu: The History of the Vietnam War’s Most Controversial Bombing Campaigns

Before the Vietnam War, most Americans would have been hard pressed to locate Vietnam on a map. South Vietnamese President Diem’s regime was extremely unpopular, and war broke out between Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam around the end of the 1950s. Kennedy’s administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, and shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.

Over the next few years, the American military commitment to South Vietnam grew dramatically, and the war effort became both deeper and more complex. The strategy included parallel efforts to strengthen the economic and political foundations of the South Vietnamese regime, to root out the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgency in the south, combat the more conventional North Vietnamese Army (NVA) near the Demilitarized Zone between north and south, and bomb military and industrial targets in North Vietnam itself. 

The United States, attempting to maintain its status as leader and defender of the non-communist world, gradually offered more and more support to South Vietnam’s leaders in Saigon, and direct military intervention became inevitable after the famous Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which also greatly influenced Operation Rolling Thunder. The actual incident consisted of a skirmish between three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, which managed to put exactly one machine-gun bullet hole in an American vessel, and a follow-up in which spooked American gunners fired at phantasmal radar image on a night of severe storm. These false images, caused by meteorological conditions, later received the sobriquet “Gulf of Tonkin ghosts.”