Google Earth Community: US Air Force Bomb Data Vietnam War 1965-75

Historical Records of US Air Force Combat Activities 1965 - 1975, Indochina

INTRODUCTION
This Google Earth file for Lao PDR was produced from an updated copy of the US Air Force Bombing Database for SE Asia provided by the US Embassy in Vientiane, Lao PDR in April 2006 to the Swiss Federation for Mine Action (FSD). Please download the attached file. The file is in compressed Google Earth "kmz" file format. If you have GE installed just download it, click on it and it should open in GE correctly displayed and attributed.

This file shows US Airforce only air strikes in Xieng Khouang Province (Plain of Jars), Lao PDR and is also filtered to only show attack sorties using large general purpose (GP) bombs. No cluster bombies are shown.

Height of bars shows total number of bombs.
Points are individual sorties.
Red points are 500lb, purple are 750lb (B52 strikes), other colors are other miscellaneous GP munitions
The top point in each stack shows the total number of bombs dropped on any one specific XY target coordinate location.

To use in GE Spin around and look for the "skyscraper, city blocks" to see the worst bombed areas. A website is going up shortly on the [url=http://www.nra.gov.la]NRA website[/url] and the bombing data will also be available through that shortly.

The Lao National Regulatory Authority for UXO (NRA) is also currently preparing a Lao Victim Information System (LVIS) based on the Cambodian CMVIS system.

GEOGRAPHICAL AREA OF COVERAGE
This file is only for Xieng Khouang Province (Plain of Jars), Lao PDR.
Other files are available detailing cluster munition totals and sorties in other areas of SE Asia.

CAVEATS
This file shows and only shows US Air Force sorties between 1965 and 1975 where General Purpose Munitions were used. No cluster munitions are shown in this file (only large bombs not bomblets are shown).

NARA staff did not create standardized files from all SEADAB files in the National Military Command System, Information Processing System or NIPS, format. Consequently, data are not available through the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) resource for the following time periods: January 1-April 30, 1970; July 1-August 31, 1970; January 1-February 28, 1971, and August 16-December 31, 1973. Unfortunately some of these periods of missing data coincide with peak periods of heavy bombing activity in Lao (e.g. Lam Son Offensive, January 1971

Unfortunately, the existing US Air Force Bombing database also records only a small fraction (and in some cases none) of extensive air-bombing campaigns and air-dropped land mine "seeding" operations of Air Forces of the Republic of South Vietnam, Royal Lao, Thai, Khmer FANK, Mong and CIA (Igloo White & Air America).

A few data points are clearly wrong and are the result of data entry errors that have not yet been caught.

EACH US AIRFORCE SORTIE HAS THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION AS FOLLOWS:

LATITUDE. Degrees Latitude. Degree Decimal format. WGS 1984 horizontal datum
LONGITUDE. Degrees Longitude. Degree Decimal format. WGS 1984 horizontal datum
DATE. Date of Combat Mission
LAT_IND60. Degrees Latitude. Degree Decimal format. Indian 1960 horizontal datum
LON_IND60. Degrees Longitude. Degree Decimal format. Indian 1960 horizontal datum
NUM_ACRFT. Quantity of aircraft involved in the mission [numeric]
AIRCRAFT. Type of aircraft involved in the mission. e.g. F-4, A-4
LOAD_QTY. Quantity of Ordnance expended / jettisonned [numeric]
LOAD_LBS. Weight of Ordnance expended. [numeric] CAUTION - this field should not be considered accurate.
ORDNANCE. Ordnance type. Specific type, eg. MK-82 HDGP.
ORD_CLASS. Ordnance class. Less specific, e.g. MK-82 500 LB Bomb
CATEGORY. Ordnance category. Generic, e.g. General_Purpose
TARGET. Target of mission. e.g. Motor Vehicle, Bridge,
BDA. Bomb Damage Assessment. Destroyed, No Damage, Unobserved

DETAILED DESCRIPTION
Each USAF attack sortie is displayed as a single sortie point.
The color of the sortie point indicates the munition type used.

RED sortie points are 500lb General Purpose Bombs.
PURPLE sortie points are 750 lb General Purpose Bombs.
Other colors indicate other size types of General Purpose Bombs.

Each sortie point has all metadata attached to it and can be queried in Google Earth. The height above ground level of each sortie point is relative to the number of munitions (General Purpose bombs dropped)
Sorties that attacked the same target point are stacked up one on top
of the other. The total amount of munitions dropped on a single target
can be found by querying the top point in a stack.

The effect of displaying the information by this method is to turn Google Earth into a "fly-through bar chart". By seeing where "skyscraper towers" are clustered the most heavily UXO contaminated areas can be readily identified.

In the most heavily bombed areas on the border passes between Lao & Vietnam were the Ho Chi Minh Trail crossed through the mountain range some specific targets were bombed almost everyday and as a result received over 10,000 large General Purpose bombs over the course of the US Air Force Campaign

All provinces of SE Asia are available. Due to the large number of data points (Air Sorties) it is necessary to breakdown the dataset into provincial datasets. For example, western districts of KHAMMUANE, SAVANNAKHET provinces in Lao PDR are placed in separate files

DATA SOURCE
US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Washington DC
1970-1975 Southeast Asia Aerial Bombing Database (SEADAB)
1965-1970 Combat Activities Asia (CACTA)

Ordnance_DSCA records for SE Asia (Cambodia, Lao PDR & Vietnam).

Compiled from US Department of Defense contemporaneous records of combat activities MicroSoft Access database created from NARA databases by Management Support Technology Inc. Fairfax, Virginia under contract to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Humanitarian Assistance and Mine Action unit (DSCA-HAMA) US Department of Defense. Data provided to Governments of Lao PDR. Cambodia, Socialist Republic of Vietnam by DSCA-HAMA in support of humanitarian demining.

Horizontal Datum of current data: WGS 1984. Datum Transformation Parameters used dx +190 dy +840 dz +308. Source of Parameters: Lao National Geographic Department in cooperation with National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

DETAILED BACKGROUND HISTORY OF THE DATA
The records were declassified in 1976 and provided to the US National
Archives on computer compatible tapes (CCTs) for safekeeping. A Freedom of Information Act inquiry was not required. In 1994-5, the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC) requested the US Humanitarian Demining Assistance Teams to provide information about the bombardments during the war. Tom Smith of DSCA-HAMA (a veteran of the US Army, who saw combat in Vietnam) contacted the national archives and was informed of the existence of the tapes. He initiated the quest to read the data on the tapes and make it useful to Lao PDR, Lao PDR, and Vietnam. Data was recovered for the express purpose of providing support to humanitarian demining operations in SE Asia. Project concept and every dollar of funding have been provided by US Dept of Defense, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, Humanitarian Assistance and Mine Action section (DSCA-HAMA). Management, and monitoring were provided by Tom Smith. POW-MIA search operations had absolutely nothing to do with this effort. In fact, they stated flatly that the historical records of combat activities were of little or no use to their search efforts.

Source of data for CACTA and SEADAB were debriefs of pilots returning from missions. Records were written down (pen/pencil onto paper forms). Data entry was accomplished via "keypunching" - type a key which punches a hole in a paper card or along a roll of tape. Data was recorded using IBM 360 mainframe. This machine is the size of a small office.

The data was copied from the tapes to hard drives. The data had been
compressed to save space and had to be decompressed. The machine used to implement the algorithm was found in a garage. However, it was never used.

There was a search for the original IBM programmer. The person who wrote the algorithm was located. He was employed in the same building as Management Support Technology Inc., the DSCA contractor. He explained the algorithm and the data was uncompressed to ASCII, fulfilling the terms of the DSCA contract. This data was provided on a cdrom to Michael Sheinkman in Lao (a Handicap International employee working with the database unit at UXO Lao). It could not be used in that form. Codes were used to represent ordnance types, aircraft types, airfields. The records were a series of unintelligible numbers and letters, without explanation. UXO Lao requested that the US Humanitarian Demining Programme convert these raw data into a relational database with explanations for the ordnance,. aircraft, target, bomb damage assessment. This work was done by Mark Jacobs (who works at MIT).

The geographic coordinates were recorded in military grid reference system (MGRS) format and were not directly usable in a GIS. Some records recorded location data with 4 digits, others 6 digits, others 8 digits. Mark Jacobs parsed the MGRS character strings to two fields (north and east) containing numeric data (meters). Michael Sheinkman checked the sample data produced by Mark Jacobs by overlaying it onto scanned maps and GIS vectors and conveyed recommendations to reduce errors.

Please also refer to the Scientific American article (August 2001 issue, author Daniel Lovering).

An indication of the number of US aircraft operating in Lao PDR is given by the following selected quotes:

"By December (1972) there were fifty-four B-52Ds in Thailand and 152 B-52s (53 D models and 99 G models) on Anderson Field in Guam for a total of 206 bombers available in the theater. In addition, there were now 450 tactical support aircraft assembled in Thailand: F-4s, F-105s, F-111s, A-7s and EB-66s.

"B52 Bomb weight loads varied with the mission but could go over 60,000 lbs."

"Ultimately, America did not lose in Vietnam for lack of an air effort, even though one can argue that the lack of a focused air effort over the North from 1965 to 1968 and the collateral damage wrought in the South by the air campaigns cost the allies popular support and squandered any real possibility of a military success. The fact remains that between 1964 and 1973 US aircraft dropped eight million tons of bombs and lost over 2,000 aircraft, more than they deployed to fight in Desert Storm.

Between 18 June 1965 and 15 August 1973, SAC scheduled 126,663 B-52 combat sorties and launched 126,615. Of these, 125,479 actually reached the target, and 124,532 released bombs. More than 55 percent of these sorties were flown in South Vietnam, 27 percent in Laos, 12 per-cent in Cambodia, and 6 percent in NVN. Altogether, the USAF lost 31 B-52s, 18 to enemy fire over NVN. Half of the American money spent on the war, about $200 billion, was spent on US aerial operations."

Further information can be obtained from:

Lao National Regulatory Authority
National UXO Database
Ban Sisavath tai, P.O. Box 345
Vientiane, Lao PDR
<a href="Website: [url=http://www.nra.la.gov" target="_blank">]http://www.nra.la.gov]</a> NRA website [/url]

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