<p>The days passed and Giap's troops were held in a grinder that slowly but surely wore them down. Ground sensors, part of the Igloo White system, fingered their resupply convoys and targeted them for strikes by tactical aircraft. Marine artillery hammered their positions. B-52s pulverized square miles of their forest cover. Always, they took heavy casualties. When the battle slowed to a halt in mid-March, the North Vietnamese had lost heavily. The Americans never knew just how heavily, but intelligence estimated the decimation of two divisions, with about 10,000 total casualties.
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<p>The Marines lost 199 men killed and about 1,600 wounded, with half of them requiring air evacuation. They took nine prisoners, and rounded up 41 suspected Viet Cong guerrillas.
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<p>The reconnaissance photographs tell the story. The hills around Khe Sanh, the high ground and the valley were transformed into a lunar landscape. Bomb craters made a contiguous carpet of cutouts. The Boeing B-52s from Strategic Air Command's 3rd Air Division had flown 2,548 sorties and dropped 59,542 tons of bombs. Seventh Air Force had dispatched 9,691 sorties and had dropped 14,223 tons of bombs. The First Marine Air Wing, supporting its ground units, sent off 7,078 sorties to drop 17,015 tons. The Navy sorties totalled another 5,337, with bomb loads of 7,941 tons.
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<p>To put this in another perspective, during World War II the USAAF dropped a total of 537,000 tons of bombs against targets in the Far East. Most of that tonnage was delivered to the main islands of Japan and dumped on cities and industries. The bombs dropped at Khe Sanh weighed a total of 98,721 tons. That was about 18 per cent of all the bombs dropped by the USAAF through the 45 months of World War II on targets in Asia.
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<p>The supplies delivered weighed 12,430 tons, and it required 1,124 sorties by daring tactical transport crews to land them or to drop them in the face of heavy, accurate and deadly enemy anti-aircraft fire.
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<p>The final verdict on the battle, as a battle, came from General Westmoreland, in a speech he made to SAC's 3rd Air Division on Guam. Khe Sanh, said Westmoreland, was " ... a battle won by you ... the thing that broke their backs was basically the fire of the B-52s."
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<p>The siege of Khe Sanh was lifted by mid-March when Giap's troops began fading back into the jungle. There was no surrender. A relief force of Marines came up Highway 9 on 1 April, a day after President Johnson had called a halt to the bombing of the North and had removed himself from the Presidential race.
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<p>Later, the base was dismantled and finally, on 23 June 1968, it was abandoned.
