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derivative filename/jpeg
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363-04785.pdf
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Digital Object Identifier
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363-04785
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Title
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New Series: Viet Nam, Past and Prospect
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Description
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First of a series of four articles published in the New York Herald Tribune about the war in Vietnam in 1965 and prognasticating its outcome in 1966, page unknown
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AI Usage Disclosure
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Draft transcripts were automatically generated via Google Document AI and are currently under review. Please report significant errors to Archives & Special Collections at archives@unl.edu.
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Transcript
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- Page 1
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New York Herald Tribune
Sunday, January 16, 1966
New Series: Viet Nam, Past and Prospect
This is the first of a series
of four articles reviewing the
war in Viet Nam during 1965
and assessing the prospects
in 1966.
By Beverly Deepe
A Special Correspondent
PLEIKU, South Viet Nam,
Amid mortar craters and
charred aircraft here on the
morning of Feb. 7, 1965, three
figures in the war against the
Communists in South Viet
Nam met in a gleaming C-123
transport. Before they
emerged, the nature of the
war had changed.
One was McGeorge Bundy,
special assistant to President
Johnson for national security
affairs, who took time before
the meeting to survey Pleiku's
blasted airplanes and heli-
copters and the billets where
shortly before eight Ameri-
cans had died and 125 had
been wounded in a Viet Cong
guerrilla raid.
With Mr. Bundy was Gen.
William C. Westmoreland, the
American commander, who
provided the C-123, called the
White Whale and the only
wall-to-wall carpeted airplane
in South Viet Nam.
The Vietnamese comman-
der-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Nguyen
Khanh, had arrived earlier
Meanwhile, in Saigon U. S.
Ambassador Maxwell D. Tay-
lor conferred by telephone
with the highest ranking
American officials in Wash-
ington.
Gen. Khanh, Mr. Bundy,
and Gen. Westmorelandes-
caped inquisitive reporters
inside the White Whale. Soon,
the key decision was told to
Gen. Khanh and within hours
49 U. S. planes from three 7th
Fleet aircraft carriers sped
north of the 17th Parallel to
bomb the military barracks at
the North Vietnamese city of
Dong Hoi.
At first, the bombing of
North Viet Nam was a policy
of tit-for-tat if you destroy
our installations, we'll destroy
yours. But it soon gave way to
general retaliation, and then
to regular and continual
bombing. In the beginning,
the policy was officially pro-
claimed an inducement to the
North to negotiate. High
ranking American officials
said hopefully: "We'll be at the
conference table by Septem-
ber."
But Hanoi did not negotiate.
The new official objective was
to hit the military installa-
tions and the communication
routes which allowed Hanoi to
pour men and materiel into
South Viet Nam. By the year's
end, however, official estimates
said North Vietnamese infil-
tration had more than doubled
-to 2,500 men a month.
Superficially, bombing North
Viet Nam failed. It did not
force Hanoi to negotiate; it
did not stop the infiltration.
But actually, the policy half
succeeded. By the end of the
year, the bombing had par-
tially paralyzed the economic
capacity and man-power re-
serves of North Viet Nam.
If the bombing did not
stop Hanoi's aggression, in
official eyes, it would at least
make it more expensive and
painful for North Viet Nam to
continue. Escalation was ac-
companied by a little noticed
policy of expansion, Laos was
known to be subject to Ameri-
can bombing raids throughout
the past year. By the begin-
ning of 1966, the air war
threatened to spread to Cam-
bodia, and then would engulf
whole Indo-Chinese
the
peninsula.
GROUND WAR
coup
The air war over North
Viet Nam, however, did not
abate sharp deterioration in
the allied ground efforts in
South Viet Nam, which had
been worsening since the fall
of the Ngo Dinh Diem re-
gime in November, 1963. The
repercussions of the
against Diem badly damaged
the government's administra-
tive and intelligence appara-
tuses. Amid government in-
stability in Saigon swirled
whirlwind changes of officials
at every level. The strategic
hamlet program, formulated
and nurtured by the Diem
regime, collapsed as the Viet
Cong regained one govern-
ment hamlet after another,
behind their
leaving
guerrilla bands and political
machinery.
own
With some accuracy the
situation in the countryside
could be measured by statis-
tics. Before the fall of
Diem, the Saigon government
claimed control of 8,000 of
the 12,000 hamlets in the
countryside. By the end of
1965, the most optimistic esti-
mate put the number of "paci-
fied," or pro-government,
hamlets at 2,000.
After the fall of Diem, mil-
itary commanders quickly be-
gan to change their "measle"
maps. Pink contested areas
became red; and white "mea-
sle pox"-which once had
been government controlled-
became contested "pink." By
the middle of 1965, govern-
ment provincial capitals and
district
were
headquarters
ringed by small oases of
friendly villages, but other-
wise were isolated by increas-
ing Red pressure in the coun-
tryside. Then, in July, 1964,
the first North Vietnamese
regular troops began appear-
ing. These units, later to be
designated as People's Army
of North Vietnam (PAVN),
solidified the growing Red
strength.
By the end of 1965, military
spokesmen said 9 PAVN regi-
ments had infiltrated from
(American,
North Vietnam.
Korean and Australian ground
units by late 1965 numbered
44 battalions-or roughly 15
regiments.
came
copters and 15,000 troops,
many of them airborne. By
the end of the year, Ameri-
can
combat military per-
sonnel numbered 130,000. The
outlook for 1966: the equiv-
alent of at least one division
a month for 12 months, or
nearly 200,000 more troops.
MARINES
The 1st Marines officially
were to provide "local, close-
in security" for the Da Nang
air base, but soon they began
what U. S. spokesmen called
"offensive patrolling for de-
fensive purposes." By mid-
July, American troops went
into unequovocal full combat
with Communist forces for the
first time since the Korean
war as the 173d Airborne
Brigade went out on a search-
and-destroy operation in the
Red stronghold known as D-
Zone.
With the new employment
of ground and air forces, the
U. S. role went through grad-
ual metamorphosis. At the
end of 1965 America was in a
war it barely realized it had
entered. The cold war had
gone hot in the jungles of the
Indochinese peninsula.
Beyond the ideological con-
flict, the war dramatized and
tested two systems of power.
One, the massive physical
power of America; the other,
the power of the Commun-
ists to manipulate the mass-
es, to incite uprisings, labeled
by the Chinese Communists as
the "war of liberation." Wash-
ington and Peking appeared
to agree it was the "war of
the future."
The essence of the war was
described by a 20-year-old
American private who saw
the buildup in Da Nang:
On March 8, 1965, the first
"I can tell you when Uncle
3,500 U. S. Marines
Sam moves in, there's no goof-
ashore and were welcomed by ing around," he said. "There
a bevy of girls.
The American and allied
buildup continued through-
out the year. In came part
of the 3d Marine Division,
and later the whole division,
a brigade of the 101st Air-
borne Division, elements of
the 1st Marine Division, the
Republic of Korea's Tiger
regiment and Marine Division,
an Australian regiment, and
finally the entire U. S. 1st
Cavalry Airmopile Division,
with its more than 400 heli-
was nothing here. Then the
Marines moved in and the
buildings started going up.
We got word an F-100 squad-
ron was moving in here and
we had 4 days to fill 200,000
bags of dirt to sandbag mor-
tar defenses. Even the colo-
nels were shoveling dirt.
"Now you can look down
this runway and for two miles
there are American jets wing
tip to wing tip," he said.
"That's real power."
The private, who had sat
14 hours a day for 13 months,
in a foxhole at the edge of
the DaNang runway turned to
the other side of the war.
INTELLIGENCE
"The Viet Cong know more
about what's happening on
this air base than the base
commander and the 20,000
American Marines around it,"
"There are 6,000
he said.
workers who come on here
daily. We know some of them
are Viet Cong. If the Viet-
namese security officer keeps
them off, he and his family
will be killed.
"The Viet Cong can come
on this base right under our
noses we don't know who's
who. We saw an old woman
carrying a bucket of drain oil
into the gate. When we
checked her, there was only
an inch of oil and the rest of
the bucket was a false bottom
filled with plastic explosive.
We captured one of the work-
ers drawing diagrams of all
the defense structures on the
base. We captured one of the
drivers of an American bus
taking down the tail num-
bers of all the American air-
craft on the base," the private
went on.
"Once my unit was given
five hours of leave to go to
the commissary. When we re-
turned, more than half of the
100 American foxholes around
the base had small paper bags
in them. Each bag had a
poisonous krait snake in it.
Some worker had just walked
around and dropped a snake
in each foxhole."
This conflict in the two
systems of power-the old
woman with a bucket of ex-
plosive and the double-the-
speed-of sound Phantom jets
-was the essence of Ameri-
ca's Inscrutable War, which
one
Western diplomat
described as "the unholy
trinity of terrorism, subver-
sion, and guerrilla warfare."
America's Inscrutable War
in Vietnam had brush-fired
into another area of the vola-
tile, underdeveloped, uncom-
mitted third world.
The next article will ex-
amine the difficulties of pub-
in Viet
lic administration
Nam, and the problems of
American rélations with the
South Vietnamese.
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Date
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1966, Jan. 16
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Subject
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Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Campaigns--Central Highlands; Vietnam (Democratic Repubic); Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Campaigns--Vietnam (Democratic Republic)
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Location
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Pleiku, South Vietnam
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Coordinates
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13.9805; 108.0010
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Container
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B4, F6
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Format
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newspaper clippings
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Collection Number
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MS 363
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Collection Title
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Beverly Deepe Keever, Journalism Papers
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Creator
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Copyright Information
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These images are for educational use only. To inquire about usage or publication, please contact Archives & Special Collections.
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Publisher
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Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
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Language
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English
