U.S. = War, Inc. (part 4)
“Shooting at whales” in the Gulf of Tonkin
As I witness Americans once again dancing to the tune of war drums and I get pushback for not genuflecting at the blue-and-yellow altar, I feel the need to inform. To follow is the second installment of a series of articles highlighting how God’s Country™ has been marketing and using war as a way to fatten the wallets of the powers that shouldn’t be. Please allow me to put the lie to the myths surrounding the start of the Vietnam War.
“Through the darkness, from the West and South, the intruders boldly sped. There were at least six of them, Russian-designed Swatow gunboats armed with 37-mm and 28-mm guns, and P-4’s. At 9.52 they opened fire on the destroyers with automatic weapons and this time from as close as 2,000 yards. The night glowed eerily with the nightmarish glare of air-dropped flares and boat’s searchlights. Two of the enemy boats went down.”
No, this isn’t Tom Clancy; it’s Time Magazine in August 1964. “While on routine patrol in international waters, the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack,” declared Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The Vietnam War had found its Maine.
The Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964, read: American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression.
“The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an ‘unprovoked attack’ against a U.S. destroyer on ‘routine patrol’ in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 — and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a ‘deliberate attack’ on a pair of U.S. ships two days later,” write journalists, Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.
President Lyndon Johnson, speaking on national television on the evening of August 4, 1964, announced airstrikes against North Vietnam. In response, the Los Angeles Times exhorted readers to “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.”
Asked to explain North Vietnam’s actions, Secretary of State Dean Rusk chalked it up to “a great gulf of understanding between that world and our world, ideological in character.”
“Shortly after the events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson met with congressional leaders and lobbied them to grant him broad powers to respond to the supposed provocation,” says historian Donald R. Shaffer. “House and Senate leaders quickly acceded to his request.”
By a nearly unanimous vote, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, thus authorizing Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Over the next two years, 400,000 U.S. soldiers shipped out to South Vietnam.
Propaganda patterns often border on predictability. Like the Maine, the Maddox was not on a pleasure cruise. “U.S. ships had been supporting South Vietnamese commando raids into North Vietnam,” says Shaffer. The crew of the Maddox was gathering intelligence to support those raids. Despite the aggressive nature of its mission, there is still no reason to believe the Maddox was fired upon.
According to Cohen and Solomon, “Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to ‘freak weather effects,’ ‘almost total darkness’ and an ‘overeager sonar man’ who ‘was hearing ship’s own propeller beat.’”
Squadron commander James Stockdale, who would later serve as Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, was a navy pilot flying over the Gulf of Tonkin that night. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” Stockdale recalled, “and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there. There was nothing there but black water and American firepower.”
“There was no battle. There was not a single intruder, never mind six of them,” Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post states bluntly. “Never mind Russian designed Swatow gunboats armed with 37mm and 28mm guns. They never opened fire. They never sank. They never fired torpedoes. They never were.”
At the time, Lyndon Johnson himself reportedly told a State Department official that “those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” One year after the dubious incident, LBJ openly admitted: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
An internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified in 2005. It concluded that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident of August 4.
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