Hell was unleashed on Christmas 2024 with a spate of missile strikes and a devastating plane crash, turning one of the most auspicious holidays in the world into a somber occasion. The deadly events of the day also reignited the painful memories of the Christmas bombings during the Vietnam War that killed over 1,600 people in North Vietnam.
Russia launched a massive aerial strike on Ukraine in the early hours of December 25, 2024, targeting cities across the country with deadly missiles and drones.
According to local authorities, the northeastern city of Kharkiv was one of the most severely affected, receiving “massive fire” from ballistic missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched more than 100 drones and more than 70 missiles, including ballistic ones.
Not only did Christmas turn deadly, as many civilians lost their lives in the missile raid, but it also turned dark as missiles targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. “Every Russian massive strike takes time to prepare. It is never a spontaneous decision. It is a conscious choice not only of targets but also of time and date,” President Zelenskyy said in a statement.
In another devastating news in a different part of the world, an Embraer (EMBR3.SA) airliner carrying 62 passengers and five crew members on a flight from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan. Only 32 passengers are reported to have survived the deadly crash.
Footage of the crash that has been extensively shared on social media shows dense black smoke rising after the plane crashed to the ground along the seashore, bursting into flames. Injured passengers who managed to survive were seen stumbling from a portion of the fuselage that was completely damaged.
Though the exact cause of the crash is not known and the matter is currently under investigation, a flight-tracking site, ‘FlightRadar24,’ said that the aircraft had experienced “strong GPS jamming,” which “made the aircraft transmit bad ADS-B data,” i.e., the data that flight-tracking websites use to track airplanes while they are in flight.
Another deadly incident that dominated headlines on Christmas Day 2024 was the Pakistani air strikes in Afghanistan. The Pakistani military launched airstrikes against militants in neighboring Afghanistan, but scores of women and children were caught in the attack.
Pakistan alleges the Afghan government harbors armed groups, particularly the TTP, which regularly conducts cross-border attacks against Pakistani security forces.
The Afghan Taliban-led interim government acknowledged the Pakistani air strikes on Christmas Eve, and the Afghan Ministry of Defense reported that several refugees, including women and children, were killed or injured.
Hinting retribution, Enayatullah Khowarazami, spokesperson for Afghanistan’s defense ministry, wrote on social media platform X: “The Islamic Emirate will not leave this cowardly act unanswered and considers the defense of its territory an inalienable right.”
These deadly incidents just before Christmas have revived the memories of the devastating ‘Christmas bombings’ that the world witnessed in Vietnam decades ago.
Christmas Bombings
This is the story of Operation Linebacker II (also called Christmas Bombings), one of the most ruthless and destructive aerial bombardments in history that happened over 50 years ago during the Vietnam War. The war was fought between North Vietnam, backed by China and the Soviet Union, and South Vietnam, supported by the United States and its allies opposed to communism.
Operation Linebacker II involved US Air Force (USAF) B-52 bombers dropping more than 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam during the Vietnam War in 1972. The operation took place between December 18 and 29 and claimed the lives of more than 1,600 civilians, according to official records. The real number of casualties is believed to be much higher.
It was the largest bombing campaign undertaken since the end of World War II.
Prior to December 1972, US air campaigns in Vietnam were restricted to blocking the overland routes used by North Vietnam’s troops. Linebacker II was different, though, because it was designed to rock the Vietnamese “to their core,” as former US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger put it, by destroying high-value targets like industries, energy plants, railroads, and critical military infrastructure.
The USAF employed its B-52 Stratofortress for Linebacker II, a bulwark of the USAF’s bomber fleet since it was first introduced in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War.
With the ability to fly at high subsonic speeds at elevations of up to 50,000 feet and with a payload capacity of 32,000 kilograms, the bombers took off to cause devastating physical and psychological damage to the North Vietnamese forces.
Analysts and scholars later analyzed that President Nixon wanted maximum psychological impact on the North Vietnamese, and the B-52 was the best option at its disposal to achieve that goal. On December 17, US President Richard Nixon told Kissinger, “They’re going to be so god damned surprised.”
The following day, Operation Linebacker II began when 129 B-52s departed from Guam and Thailand to destroy the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The bombing began on December 18 and continued for the next eleven days, with a small respite provided on Christmas Day to allow USAF planners to analyze the impact and give the bomber crews a chance to relax.
However, the operation planners failed to consider two crucial points: the Vietnamese had an advanced Soviet-origin S-75 anti-aircraft system, and the tactics of the USAF bombers had not changed much since the Second World War.
The North Vietnamese missile gunners downed as many as fifteen B-52s, with six bombers shot down in just one night. This was a massive blow to the legendary B-52 Stratofortress and the US Air Force.
In his book “Vietnam’s American War: A History,” the Vietnam War historian Pierre Asselin claims that “1600 military installations, miles of railway lines, hundreds of trucks and railway cars, eighty percent of electrical power plants, and countless factories and other structures were taken out of commission.”
The US had been involved in the Vietnam War since 1965. Since at least 1968, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Thọ, a member of the North Vietnamese Politburo, had been holding covert negotiations in Paris in an attempt to reach a settlement.
After several rounds of talks, the final draft of an agreement was approved by both parties by October 18, 1972. Its main provisions included a cease-fire, the return of prisoners of war, the complete withdrawal of the United States from South Vietnam, and the establishment of a National Council of Concord and Reconciliation in that country to organize elections. Its members would be one-third neutral, one-third from the Saigon government led by South Vietnam leader Thieu, who was backed by the US, and one-third South Vietnamese communists.
President Nixon was happy with the deal since it fulfilled his pledge to the American people during his reelection campaign for “peace with honor.” The agreement “could now be considered complete,” he said in a cable to North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, adding that the United States “could be counted on” to sign it at a formal ceremony on October 31.
However, the United States broke its promise when President Thieu of South Vietnam, an ally whose government had been excluded from all negotiations, rejected the deal. So, in early December, Kissinger went to Paris to persuade Le Duc Thọ to pull back the North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, which the latter refused to do while insisting on implementing the agreement finalized in October.
The peace negotiations collapsed.
According to the United States, Operation Linebacker II forced the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to resume talks.
On the contrary, the bombardment and its aftermath are remembered in Vietnam as a valiant act of resistance when the Vietnamese withstood one of the worst bombing campaigns since World War II, unleashed on them by the enemy.
When the talks began, the North Vietnamese negotiators led by Le Duc Tho did not budge from their position, which they had held before the new round of talks commenced. This resilience was shocking after the devastation brought by 20,000 tons of bombs.
The Paris Peace Accords were finally signed in 1973 between the two sides and marked the beginning of the end of the US involvement in the war.
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