USS Maddox and the August 4, 1964 Attack That Never Happened

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On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was running a DeSoto signals intelligence patrol near Hon Me Island, which South Vietnamese commandos under the covert Operation 34A program had raided days earlier. The episode explains that 34A used fast patrol boats bought from Norway, first crewed by Norwegian skippers, with targets approved by U.S. commanders in Honolulu, and that Hanoi saw the raids and the patrols as one operation. When three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats closed within 10,000 yards, the Maddox fired three warning shots first. In the clash that followed, the torpedoes missed or failed, F-8 Crusaders joined in, four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, and the Maddox took a single 14.5 millimeter round. North Vietnam claimed a 12-mile territorial limit; the U.S. said its ships stayed eight miles out.

Two nights later the Maddox and USS Turner Joy spent two hours in a storm firing at radar and sonar contacts that the hosts attribute to propeller cavitation and weather effects. Captain John Herrick cabled that many contacts and torpedoes appeared doubtful and urged a complete evaluation, but Robert McNamara did not halt the response, and a 2005 declassified NSA study found analysts passed up only intercepts that fit an attack. Lyndon B. Johnson announced retaliation before midnight, Operation Pierce Arrow followed, and on August 7 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, unanimous in the House with two Senate votes against, including Wayne Morse. In 1995 McNamara asked General Vo Nguyen Giap what happened on August 4, and Giap answered absolutely nothing.

• Johnson was recorded joking that for all he knew the Navy was shooting at whales out there.
• Pilot James Stockdale, flying overhead that night, wrote that he saw nothing but black water and American firepower.
• Shot down later, Stockdale spent over seven years in the Hanoi Hilton fearing captors would force the Tonkin truth from him.
• Fear of a U.S. invasion accelerated Mao Zedong's Third Front campaign to move Chinese industry into the interior.
• Release of the 2005 NSA study was reportedly delayed over fears of comparisons to the intelligence used before the Iraq invasion.