Mis en ligne en 2017, ce récit visuel, basé sur des sources américaines déclassifiées en 2016, donne une vision précise des bombardements pendant la guerre du Viêt-Nam entre 1965 et 1973.

Bombing Missions of the Vietnam War

A visual record of the largest aerial bombardment in history

Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.

The bombardment of North Vietnam and its neighbors began shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, and continued until the last American was airlifted out of Saigon over a decade later. All told, the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps together conducted at least 2.8 millioncombat missions against ground targets, while the air forces of South Vietnam, Laos, Australia, and South Korea added an additional 360,000 missions to the tally.

In late 2016, the United States Department of Defense publicly released records of almost every bombing and ground-attack mission flown during the Vietnam War. (Ground-attack missions are strikes against ground targets using using rockets, missiles, cannons, and other non-bomb ordnance.) The data, meticulously digitized from the aircrews’ original after-action reports, allows us to visually reconstruct the air campaign, shedding new light on its sheer scale, intensity, and complexity. […]

Thomas Cooper is a cartographer and product engineer on the Story Maps team; a displaced Oregonian; a forager of cultural sustenance; a fair-weather motorcyclist; and a onetime expert on Kyrgyz supermarkets.

Accès au récit visuel : https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/vietnam-bombing/index.html

• Pour en savoir plus, lire l’article de Thomas Cooper sur son gigantesque travail : The Making of the “Bombing Missions of the Vietnam War” Story Map, ArcGIS Blog, 27/09/2017.