A large number of Vietnamese children were massacred in Dang Ai, Thanh Hoa Province, North Vietnam, when American air raids hit the Vietnamese people with bombs in the middle of the night. The bodies of many Vietnamese children were accumulated side by side at the North Vietnam Health Center on August 14, 1972. They were caught in the indiscriminate misadventure of an air raid by the U.S. Army targeting the Thai Hong Hoa Bridge. Operation Linebacker was a continuous bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War from May 9 to October 23, 1972. It destroyed North Vietnam's road and rail networks and systematically attacked its air defense systems.
Thanh Hoa Province is located in the north central part of Vietnam, bordered by Laos to the west and the Gulf of Tonkin to the east. About 4.8 km northeast of Thanh Hóa City, the Thanh Hóa Bridge (Thanh Hóa Bridge), installed in 1964, was an elevated road and railroad; completed in 1964, it was a gray metal structure with concrete piers in the center and concrete abutments at each end. It was an important transit point for supplies to the Vietcong in South Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force finally destroyed Thanh Hoa Bridge in October 1972, but the North Vietnamese repaired it in 1973. The U.S. Air Force began targeting and bombing North Vietnam's rail network, including Thanh Hoa Bridge, in March 1965. The Thanh Hoa Bridge also survived the U.S. air strikes with more than about 300 rounds. The U.S. Air Force announced that only about 11 bombers crashed and a total of about 104 U.S. pilots were killed. The USAF pilots sang the song "Red River Valley" ironically.
The USAF needed many sorties to be destroyed by conventional free-fall bombing, as the bombing lacked precision and accuracy. The North Vietnamese were able to rebuild those bridges quickly. As Thanh Hoa Bridge collapsed and was not destroyed but held, the Air Force used for the first time the precision-guided bombs developed for modern aerial warfare. Precision-guided bombs were dropped from the Gulf War to the Iraq War and other wars, but many Iraqi civilians were indiscriminately abused and slaughtered in misfires.
