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2020 $8 Vietnam War,"Operation Rolling Thunder", Mint Sheet, Marshall Islands
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This sheet was issued by the Marshall Islands to commemorate Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained American bombing campaign carried out against North Vietnam from March 2, 1965, to November 2, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson authorized the operation partly in response to a Viet Cong attack on a U.S. air base at Pleiku, intending the campaign as a gradually escalating series of air raids meant to bolster morale in South Vietnam while pressuring North Vietnam's communist leadership into negotiations. What began as strikes limited to the southern portion of North Vietnam steadily expanded northward over the following years, eventually reaching military and industrial targets throughout the country, with only Hanoi, Haiphong, and a buffer zone along the Chinese border kept off limits.
The stamp featured on this sheet depicts a Grumman A-6 Intruder conducting a bombing run, one of several aircraft types that carried out the campaign alongside the A-4 Skyhawk, F-4 Phantom, and F-105 Thunderchief. By the campaign's end, American forces had dropped more than a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, destroying more than half the country's bridges and nearly two thirds of its power generating capacity. North Vietnam's air defenses grew increasingly sophisticated over the course of the campaign, aided heavily by Soviet support, and American losses mounted steadily as a result, with pilots and weapons officers shot down over the North accounting for the majority of American prisoners of war held during the conflict.
Johnson ultimately halted the campaign at the end of October 1968 in hopes of pursuing a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam, though historians continue to debate its overall strategic value. This sheet, marked with the POW/MIA emblem alongside its central image of a B-52 loaded with ordnance, honors both the scale of the air campaign and the airmen who carried it out, many of whom paid a heavy price during the more than three and a half years Rolling Thunder remained underway.
This sheet was issued by the Marshall Islands to commemorate Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained American bombing campaign carried out against North Vietnam from March 2, 1965, to November 2, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson authorized the operation partly in response to a Viet Cong attack on a U.S. air base at Pleiku, intending the campaign as a gradually escalating series of air raids meant to bolster morale in South Vietnam while pressuring North Vietnam's communist leadership into negotiations. What began as strikes limited to the southern portion of North Vietnam steadily expanded northward over the following years, eventually reaching military and industrial targets throughout the country, with only Hanoi, Haiphong, and a buffer zone along the Chinese border kept off limits.
The stamp featured on this sheet depicts a Grumman A-6 Intruder conducting a bombing run, one of several aircraft types that carried out the campaign alongside the A-4 Skyhawk, F-4 Phantom, and F-105 Thunderchief. By the campaign's end, American forces had dropped more than a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, destroying more than half the country's bridges and nearly two thirds of its power generating capacity. North Vietnam's air defenses grew increasingly sophisticated over the course of the campaign, aided heavily by Soviet support, and American losses mounted steadily as a result, with pilots and weapons officers shot down over the North accounting for the majority of American prisoners of war held during the conflict.
Johnson ultimately halted the campaign at the end of October 1968 in hopes of pursuing a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam, though historians continue to debate its overall strategic value. This sheet, marked with the POW/MIA emblem alongside its central image of a B-52 loaded with ordnance, honors both the scale of the air campaign and the airmen who carried it out, many of whom paid a heavy price during the more than three and a half years Rolling Thunder remained underway.
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