In the late afternoon of Dec. 26, 1972, Maj. William F. Stacker taxied his aging B-52D Stratofortress onto the runway at Guam's Andersen Air Force Base and stopped. Normally he and his fellow BUFF pilots made rolling takeoffs, turning the corner from the taxiway and roaring off into the tropical skies, but this time was different. Thousands of personnel had gathered to watch the launch. Stacker had asked for, and received, permission to taxi into place and hold for a moment. As he sat there, seconds ticking away, Stacker and his fellow crew members looked out on perhaps the greatest armada of airpower assembled in any one place since the end of World War Ⅱ. Other B-52s were stacked up nose-to-tail as far as he could see, waiting to follow him into combat. "It's difficult to describe the feeling of leading such an array of power," he later told an interviewer. The last phase of Operation Linebacker II was about to begin. Days of intensive bombing had already inflicted heavy damage on North Vietnam. Rail yards and other transportation infrastructure had been devastated. Petroleum storage areas had been hard-hit, as had North Vietnamese airfields.
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