The Christmas Operation Where the U.S. Lost Six B-52 Bombers in One Day

Fifty years ago this week, the ole tricky dick himself, Richard Milhous Nixon, said to his then U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger, “They’re going to be so god damned surprised.”

Surprised about what? And who is “they”?

Operation Linebacker II was a 1972 U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War that saw more than 200 American B-52 bombers fly 730 sorties and drop over 20 kilotons of bombs on North Vietnam over 12 days.

In what would become known as “the Christmas bombings” stateside and “the 11 days and nights” in Vietnam (no bombing took place on Christmas day), huge portions of Hanoi were utterly destroyed.

Many historians credit the bombing campaign with bringing North Vietnam back to the negotiating table and hastening the end of the Vietnam War.

Although that’s not how the North Vietnamese saw it — they viewed the bombings as a heroic act of resistance in which they endured everything that the mighty U.S. Air Force could throw at them and yet remained standing.

The B-52 Stratofortress has been America’s preeminent strategic bomber for the past 70 years and has been continually upgraded at regular intervals.

Still in operation today, the B-52 and other strategic bombers represent a third of America’s modern nuclear triad.