Is Carpet Bombing Effective? -- Attacks May Push Iraq Force To Dig Further, Some Say

It begins without warning, because the bombers fly at such high altitudes that they cannot be heard from the ground. Then there is a zooming sound as the bombs begin falling, and a few seconds later the ground begins to tremble and shake as if rent by an earthquake.

The noise of the explosions is deafening, popping eardrums like overstretched balloons. Powerful shock waves ripple outward for many yards, eerily visible because of the dust and debris borne in their wake. People are crushed by the concussion, and rocks and metal are shredded into shards that whirl through the tortured air like shrapnel.

Afterward, the ground is pockmarked by huge craters and littered with corpses. Then the survivors begin to stagger out of their hiding places. Many are dazed and disoriented, deafened and unable to keep their balance. Blood flows profusely from their ears and noses, and the whites of their eyeballs have turned brilliant red.

That, according to those who witnessed it 20 years ago in Vietnam, is the result of a carpet-bombing attack by U.S. B-52 bombers, like the ones being carried out today on Iraqi troops in Kuwait and southeastern Iraq.

``One Vietnam vet told me they used to call it `the devil's freight train,' '' says Tom Wisker, a weapons consultant who hosts a military affairs program on New York radio station WBAI-FM.

Although its effectiveness so far is a matter of debate, such bombing forms an essential element of U.S. military strategy in the Persian Gulf war, according to U.S. military and government officials and outside experts. More than 500,000 Iraqi soldiers are dug into well-prepared defensive positions in and around Kuwait, and U.S. officials say they will not begin ground operations against those troops until they have been softened up by systematic pounding from the air.

Initial targets of this bombing have been Iraq's elite Republican Guard units, which are arrayed behind the front in southeastern Iraq and northern Kuwait. But before long, if they have not already, the strikes will be extended to all Iraqi forces in Kuwait, including the deeply entrenched front-line units along the Kuwaiti-Saudi Arabian border, military analysts say.

The air campaign is being waged with a variety of weapons, ranging from anti-personnel cluster bombs to electronically guided missiles. But the centerpiece of it, according to analysts, is high-altitude carpet bombing from the two dozen B-52s operating in the Gulf.

Each of these behemoths can carry more than 30,000 pounds of bombs, which they typically drop from an altitude of 30,000 feet, dispersing them in a pattern designed to fill a predetermined rectangular area on the ground.

Some of these 500- and 750-pound bombs are designed to explode on impact. Others carry a fuse that delays the blast until the bomb has buried itself several feet into the earth, making them especially effective against troops in submerged bunkers, as the Iraqis are.

The details of the planes' bombing formations in the Gulf have not been revealed. But if they operate as they did in Vietnam, military experts say, they will attack in ``cells'' of three or four planes. One such cell can drop enough explosives in one run to turn a rectangle of two square miles into a moonscape.

The planes drop their bombs in a pattern that lays down a ``carpet'' of overlapping circles of explosions with the epicenters about 75 yards apart, each creating craters up to 15 feet deep and 30 feet across. When this is done properly, a targeted position such as a bunker can be destroyed even if the nearest bomb lands many yards away.

``Even if it doesn't take a direct hit, it's likely to take three close ones,'' said Piers Wood, a retired Army colonel who is now chief of staff for the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. ``That's likely to make such big holes on either side that it just collapses and kills everybody.''

Those who witnessed carpet-bombing strikes on enemy forces in Vietnam, such as Michael Pahios, a former Marine lance corporal who served there in 1967 and 1968, have memories of the experience that are as vivid as they are unpleasant.

Pahios recalls watching carpet-bombing runs from one or two miles away as he patrolled in Vietnam's A Shau Valley with his infantry unit. Even from that distance, he says, it was terrifying.

``You could feel the whole ground shake,'' said Pahios, 44, of Brooklyn, N.Y., now a television graphics typesetter. ``Boom-boom-boom-boom. Ten bombs every few seconds. One-two-three, one-two-three.''

After the strikes, Pahios said, his unit would advance into the bombed area. ``It looked like the moon,'' he said. ``The whole area was completely destroyed. Vegeta-

tion, trees, everything. It was crater after crater.'' The enemy death toll from such bombing was high, he said, and those who survived were frequently ``crazed, dazed, bewildered.''

The air assault on the Republican Guards has continued with little respite since the opening hours of the war, and U.S. pilots say the strikes have inflicted considerable damage and that the landscape around some guard units is pitted with craters.

But despite this destructive ferocity, U.S. military officials acknowledge that some Republican Guard units are still relatively unscathed thus far because they are so widely dispersed.

This leads some outside analysts to question how successful carpet bombing will be in uprooting the Iraqis. They point out that many North Vietnamese units survived carpet bombing by learning to dig deep bunker complexes, and that Iraqi soldiers are also believed to be highly skilled at entrenchment.

``They've had nothing to do for the past five months but to prepare for a U.S. air attack,'' says Steven Kosiak, a specialist in aircraft technology at the Center for Defense Information. ``The Republican Guards have maybe thousands of bunkers dispersed over hundreds of square miles. Those B-52s just do not carry enough ordnance to be effective against that range of targets.''