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This montage, assembled from fragmentary reports sent out by foreign diplomats, correspondents and visitors in the two weeks since the bombing began, offered only narrow glimpses of North Viet Nam's agony. So far, Hanoi officials have released no estimate of overall casualties, but there were reports from some areas. In the colorful Kham Thien shopping district of Hanoi, once the home of 5,158 families but partially evacuated before it was struck, city officials have already counted 215 dead and 257 wounded—with many more missing or still buried in the rubble. French observers in North Viet Nam claimed that close to 1,000 civilians are dead or wounded in the suburban town of Thai Nguyen.
U.S. officials presented a quite different picture of the bombing. A communique released by the U.S. military authorities in Saigon ticked off in businesslike fashion the targets American planes had been after: airfields, shipyards, railyards, warehouses, power plants, communication towers, truck parks, and SAM and antiaircraft installations. The report stated that dozens of these targets were destroyed or heavily damaged—the Phuc Yen airfield was bombed, the Hanoi port facility on the Red River hit hard, "all buildings" in the Haiphong petroleum-product storage area were struck, and the Thai Nguyen thermal power plant was virtually wiped out, and on down the target list.
The split images—one of widespread, indiscriminate destruction in residential areas, the other of selective military targets bombed with crosshair precision—come together only when maps of the military targets are laid over maps of the cities and towns of North Viet Nam. Then it is at once evident that many of those targets lay smack in the middle of the most populous metropolitan and suburban areas in the North. The Hanoi thermal power plant, for instance, was only 1,000 yds. from the very center of the city. A main petroleum storage area was only 200 yds. from the Bach Mai hospital. The town of Thai Nguyen lay right next to one of the key power plants.
With targets that close to populous or off-limit areas, like hospitals, and with more than 1,400 sorties being flown in the first week alone of the two-week operation by virtually every kind of Air Force and Navy plane in the Indochina arsenal in every kind of weather and through the densest aerial defenses in the world, mistakes were inevitable. Particularly with the massive (100 a day) use of B-52s—each group of three lays its bombs in a row of "boxes" a mile and a half long by half a mile wide—civilian casualties were inescapable regardless of the precision of pilots or particularity of targeting.