Question about cluster bombs in Vietnam

Wendigo

Banned
Excerpt from a book about the Vietnam War:

The "guava" cluster bomb, officially designated CBU-24, was even deadlier. Loaded with 640 to 670 separate BLU-26 bomblets, each packing 300 steel pellets, just one guava could send 200,000 steel fragments shooting in all directions as it hit the ground.

A single B-52 bomber loaded with guava bomblets could saturate an area slightly smaller than a square mile with more than 7.5 million deadly steel pellets.

My question is is it really plausible that a single B-52 armed with cluster bombs could fill a whole square mile with over 7 million steel pellets?

How effective would an attack like this be?

Would everyone caught within the bombs' area of effect get injured or die? Or was there a chance of surviving unscathed?

How do steel ball bearings compare to steel darts in terms of lethality in cluster bombs?
 
First thing to note is that the square mile wouldn't be a square, it would be a long and thin rectangle along the path of the B52's flight. This pic is 3 B52s with regular bombs.
Carpet_Bombing_2.JPG


Secondly, what cluster bombs use steel darts? Artillery can use flechettes when firing over open sights but I don't think steel darts were an option for cluster bombs.

Thirdly the effectiveness depends on the terrain, heavy wooded terrain, or other obstacles will soak up and/or deflect a lot of the BBs, they'd be better in open country. However I wouldn't want to be in an obstacle filled forest when a vic of B52s unload overhead.
 
One other note - steel ball bearings don't have a lot of penetrating power. If you're in a well built fighting position with overhead cover then you're pretty much immune from shrapnel of this sort and are only really at risk if a bomblet lands inside your position.
 
???
Why would they not dig in in deserts? Heck, it's even more useful to do it there, as it gives you a cooler, shaded microenvironment, which beats the heck out of the surface.

Simple, sand is the only terrain that carries the force of bombs and favors the attacker. You can tunnel through dirt and stone and it'll save you from bombs, but not sand.
 
Some rocky desert soil is too hard to dig into. In that terrain, you laboriously pile stones into above-ground sangars.
 
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