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Whatever the final tallies show in terms of civilian deaths or military targets, the bombing raids of the past two weeks were unprecedented in the history of the Viet Nam War. The usual comparisons with World War II are misleading; the use of fire bombs then caused more casualties and destruction. Still, the sheer tonnage dropped on Viet Nam in the recent raids surpassed virtually all of the famous bombing raids —Dresden, Hamburg, Coventry and London. The U.S. was not trying to do what former SAC Commander Curtis LeMay once suggested—bomb North Viet Nam back into the Stone Age—but to some it almost seemed so. The reaction at home and abroad was swift and almost unanimous (see box, page 14). One of the strongest official protests came from Sweden's premier Olof Palme, who condemned the bombing as a crime against humanity on the moral scale of such Nazi atrocities as the death camp at Treblinka. The equation with the Nazis outraged the Administration, which called in the Swedish ambassador to Washington to protest. Undeterred, Palme himself went to a department store to gather signatures on a nationwide petition to stop the bombing—to be sent to Nixon. On hearing that the bombing had been curtailed, he said: "I'm convinced the world's public opinion had a great deal to do with it."
For their part, while the bombing was in progress, most Americans seemed simply baffled or numbed; antiwar groups mounted only scattered, sparsely supported protests. It was partly a matter of shock at the sudden turn of events. After two decades of sustaining South Viet Nam intravenously with aid, and after eleven years of substantial military intervention, first with President Kennedy's advisers and later with Lyndon Johnson's half a million troops, the U.S. had seemed in November and until mid-December about to disengage altogether. Then, with stupefying speed, promises of a negotiated settlement turned into a harshly escalated war. The vision of the American prisoners of war in North Viet Nam coming home at last was replaced by the photographs of haggard men newly recruited to the captured ranks, as an average of three B-52s were shot down every two days. Vignettes of the flyers' fates materialized out of North Viet Nam too. One B-52 pilot was inflating his life raft twelve miles downstream from Hanoi in an attempt to escape, when he was surrounded by ferrymen. His last transmission on his survival radio: "Everything O.K. I am surrounded. I surrender."
Miles from Hanoi, another flyer tried to steer his parachute away from militiamen on the ground. Landing, he pulled out his pistol, but the North Vietnamese disarmed him, yelling, "Hands up! Hands up!" in English. The pilot, in Vietnamese, replied, "Toi xin hang [I surrender]." A third pilot only managed to smear his face with mud before he was captured. All told, the raids added 93 Americans to the list of missing and captured.