Curtain of Fire

The U.S. conduct of the war in Viet Nam is a mixture of awesome power and judicious restraint. It involves hunting out the enemy while trying to spare the peasant he mingles with and resembles, bombing the North's strategic areas while avoiding civilian centers, mingling U.S. troops with Vietnamese soldiers without meddling in their quarrels. Last week, as the war heated up again after a period of relative quiet during the political crisis, the U.S. demonstrated that combination of power and restraint in a series of massive but carefully controlled air actions over North Viet Nam.

During the week more than 1,000 U.S. warplanes roared over North Viet Nam to drop an estimated 10 million Ibs. of bombs on the country's heartland. One result was a curtain of fire clearly visible from the rooftops of Hanoi that virtually cut off the capital and the port of Haiphong without directly descending on Ho Chi Minh's two main cities or their civilian populations. U.S. aircraft, flying within 75 miles of the Chinese border, also hit trains and railroad yards, road and rail bridges, highways and ferries, barracks, power plants, and even SAM missile sites.

Massive Blackout. Navy planes from the Seventh Fleet carriers began by hitting the Hai Duong rail and highway bridge connecting Hanoi and Haiphong, dropping its two spans with 1,000 and 2,000-lb. bombs. At the same time, Air Force fighter-bombers pounded the Phu Ly bridge south of Hanoi to Vinh. When an F-100F electronic "cover" plane for the Phu Ly attack detected on its radar a SAM missile site 15 miles south of Hanoi, other Air Force planes went in to knock it out. Zeroing in for the kill, the pilots spotted a missile being launched from yet another site; they blasted it as well, altogether destroying seven SAM missiles on the ground.

In successive daily raids, Air Force planes pounded the major northwest railway to Red China, knocking out five bridges and five trains and virtually immobilizing the line. Then, in the most successful surprise air attack of the war, the Navy sent two A-6 Intruders skimming across the South China Sea at night to hit the Uong Bi power plant 14 miles northeast of Haiphong. The plant, whose generators supply a third of Haiphong's and a fourth of Hanoi's electricity, had been put out of action last December in a 55-jet attack, but the Communists had since restored it to service. Each of the two A-6s carried 15,000 Ibs. of bombs--and they scored a direct hit. Out went all the lights for miles around in a massive blackout. Another U.S. raid leveled a 100-building complex south of historic Dienbienphu.

The massive U.S. attacks were not without loss: 13 planes were shot down by Red anti-aircraft fire, and five of the pilots were rescued, four lost, and four reported missing. At week's end, however, U.S. planes got in their licks by shooting down two Soviet-built MIG-17s from a flight of six that tried to intercept Air Force jets north of Hanoi.

Mounting Losses. While keeping up the lethal pressure on Ho in the North, U.S. planes also helped out in the ground war against the Viet Cong in the South. The week's biggest action was started by a tip from a defector from the 1st Viet Cong Regiment. U.S. Marines took him aloft to pinpoint the regiment's hide out in the rice paddies and small hills ten miles west of Quang Ngai, then launched Operation Hot Springs to trap his onetime comrades. First, U.S. pilots pounded the enemy redoubt in 98 sorties that used 20,000 Ibs. of bombs. Then three battalions of U.S. Marines and two battalions of Vietnamese troops were flown into the battle zone. They formed two east-west lines and, charging through the smoke of burning huts, squeezed the Viet Cong between them. The enemy slipped out after 48 hours, but not before leaving behind 220 dead and a huge store of weapons.

Last week General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported that the enemy's losses are mounting fast. So far this year, 13,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers have been killed and another 1,700 captured; in addition, some 3,500 have defected. Altogether, said Wheeler, an estimated eleven enemy battalions have been put out of action in 1966. For all that, he added, "there is still heavy and sustained fighting ahead of us." Reason: infiltration from the North is running at the rate of 4,500 men a month.

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