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“The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” These ominous words belong to president Richard Nixon [6]. These words foreshadowed the launch of the Linebacker operations, with the Linebacker II being the most intense strategic bombing campaign of the Vietnam War. In December 1972 more than 200 U.S. B-52 bombers struck Hanoi and Haiphong in raids that lasted for eleven days [7]. The campaign, sometimes called the “Christmas Bombings”, represented the pinnacle of American air power in Southeast Asia, both in scale and destructive force [9]. Strategic bombing as a concept had been debated since the First World War. Giulio Douhet famously argued that air attacks should aim to break civilian morale, forcing governments to surrender without prolonged ground campaigns [3]. Billy Mitchell and the U.S. Air Corps Tactical School, however, developed a different approach called the Industrial Web Theory. Instead of targeting populations directly, they stated that wars could be won by striking critical nodes of an enemy’s economy and infrastructure such as railroads, power plants and supply depots in order to paralyze the war machine while also exhausting the people mentally [13]. At first glance, Operation Linebacker II reflected this logic. Its targets included transportation networks, storage facilities, and industrial centers vital to North Vietnam’s ability to conduct war.