'Like walking on missiles': US airman recalls the horror of the Vietnam 'Christmas bombings' 50...

It was one of the heaviest bombardments in history. A shock-and-awe campaign of overwhelming air power aimed at bombing into submission a determined opponent that, despite being vastly outgunned, had withstood everything the world’s most formidable war machine could throw at it.

Operation Linebacker II saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days in December 1972, in a brutal assault aimed at shaking the Vietnamese “to their core,” in the words of then US national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

“They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” US President Richard Nixon replied to Kissinger on December 17, the eve of the mission.

In what would become known as “the Christmas bombings” in America and “the 11 days and nights” in Vietnam (no bombing took place on Christmas day), swathes of Hanoi were obliterated.

An estimated 1,600 Vietnamese were killed amid some of the most harrowing scenes of the conflict, in an operation likened by some to the Hamburg raids of World War II for the sheer scale of the destruction and civilian death toll.