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The raids destroyed an estimated 75% to 80% of the two complexes. At least 50% of North Viet Nam's remaining POL (for petroleum, oil, lubricants) supplies went up in smoke, leaving the country with reserves adequate for only eight weeks—if they are not bombed again. The loss will make incalculably more difficult the flow of troops and materiel for the Communists' ever-more-desperate war in South Viet Nam. Though U.S. planners had feared that a dozen or more aircraft might be shot down, only one—an F-105 fighter-bomber hit over Hanoi—was lost.
3 a.m. Glow. In Washington, it was past 3 a.m. and the last U.S. plane had headed home. In the second-floor room in the White House where Lyndon Johnson sleeps, a bedside lamp glowed as the President talked in a low voice with the situation room in the West Wing basement. There, by instantaneous Teletype circuit to the Far East, military duty officers were checking in the returning jets, one by one.
The Ranger mission was the first to touch down, and relief showed on Johnson's face as he got the news: all were back safely. Then the score from Thailand clattered in. The President exulted: "It's incredible, it's really incredible that this could happen with the loss of only one plane."
The lights were on all night in the office of Robert Strange McNamara. Unshaven but wearing a fresh blue shirt and dark blue suit, the Secretary of Defense strode into the Pentagon's first-floor conference room to brief newsmen at 9:30 a.m. Flanked by maps , and aerial photos and flourishing a brown wooden pointer, he rattled off with electronic efficiency the detailed results of the raids and the reasons for them.
High Price. The attacks, said McNamara, were "aimed at the heart of the petroleum system—major storage facilities and the distribution apparatus," and should in time impose "a lower ceiling on the number of men that can be supported in the South." The North Vietnamese will not find it easy to replace the wrecked facilities, McNamara pointed out, since "they have only a limited rebuilding capability"; the repairs call for "stocks and materials—large steel plates, for example—which are in very, very short supply in North Viet Nam."
Even before the POL raids, said the Secretary, the U.S. in its 16 months of sustained air offensive against the North had accomplished three major objectives: 1) shoring up South Vietnamese morale, 2) "substantially" increasing the cost of infiltration for the Communists, forcing them to divert an estimated 200,000 workers to road-repair gangs, and 3) demonstrating to the aggressors that "as long as they continued their attempts to subvert and destroy the political institutions of the South, they would pay a high price not only in the South but in the North."
"Quasi-Conventional." Nonetheless, reported McNamara, round-the-clock surveillance of the Ho Chi Minh trail has not checked the relentlessly increasing infiltration from the North—"the foundation" of Hanoi's aggression. The Communists have feverishly built and camouflaged new roads to the South, imported an estimated 15,000 trucks from their allies, and made increasing use of motorized barges to haul war materiel down the country's maze of inland waterways.