What happened on the first Arc Light mission?

The first Arc Light mission was flown from Andersen AFB on June 18, 1965, with B-52F crews rotating in from Carswell AFB (Texas) and Mather AFB (California). It was the first use of the bombers in Southeast Asia: 27 aircraft dropped 750-pound (340 kg) and 1,000-pound (455 kg) bombs on a Viet Cong stronghold. From Andersen it was 2,600 miles to Saigon, and the round-trip mission took between 12 and 14 hours. There were numerous last-minute changes, a complication that would become familiar in the years that followed.

Everything went wrong on that first mission. The B-52s reached the refueling area seven minutes earlier than planned because of tailwinds from a typhoon. The first aircraft to arrive was flying a circular holding pattern and collided with another that had just joined it. Both fell into the sea. The two B-52Fs were lost on June 19 while circling over the South Pacific, about 250 miles (400 km) off the coast near the Demilitarized Zone, unable to refuel in flight while waiting for the KC-135A tankers to arrive for the pre-strike refueling.

The rest of the B-52s completed the mission. However, the intended target, a Viet Cong battalion, was no longer there when the bombing began.