March 2, 1965: Operation Rolling Thunder begins.
“Rolling Thunder” was an aerial bombardment campaign conducted over North Vietnam by the U.S. and South Vietnamese Air Forces and U.S. Navy from March 1965 until its discontinuation in November of 1968. By that point, the operation had, according to American estimates, killed 182,000 North Vietnamese civilians. It was the successor to Operation Flaming Dart, a shorter joint operation carried out over the course of seventeen days in February, and it was an escalated effort by the American government with broader targets and broader goals - namely, the destruction of North Vietnam’s infrastructure and industry and the demoralization of the North Vietnamese government and people. The North Vietnamese were undeniably outmatched in terms of technology, but the Americans were met with their own problems, which limited the effectiveness of the entire operation. Historians debate whether Rolling Thunder crippled North Vietnam’s capacity to fight, or whether the United States’ lack of coordination (among many other shortcomings) made Rolling Thunder a failure.
Its failure, if it was indeed a failure, was not due to a lack of firepower; by 1968 around 900,000 tons of bombs had been dropped by American aircraft during Rolling Thunder alone, compared to 698,000 throughout the entire Korean War.