The Air War Resumes

The scene was oddly reminiscent of the days in 1968 when American pilots flying Rolling Thunder missions regularly went down over North Viet Nam. In Hanoi, four U.S. airmen --two still in their flight suits, two already in P.O.W. blues--were trotted out before gloating Communist newsmen at a press conference. The flyers, said their captors, had ejected from two F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers that had crashed near Hanoi and Haiphong. "All four looked very miserable and showed great fear on their faces," Radio Hanoi reported. They had come, it added, for a "brazen" attack "deep into the mainland of North Viet Nam."

Not so. As Hanoi well knew, the pilots were casualties of a fierce but little-noticed air war that has boiled up rapidly--not over North Viet Nam but over the Communist infiltration routes into Laos and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Viet Nam and Cambodia. In one 27-hour period last week, four Phantoms ran into fatal trouble over Laos. One was downed by ground fire; two ran out of fuel while trying to evade missiles and flak along the North Vietnamese border; the fourth was destroyed by a missile-armed MIG-21--the first kill by a North Vietnamese jet since January 1970, when a MIG shot a U.S. helicopter down over Laos. Striking back, U.S. planes attacked five North Vietnamese missile and radar sites, one of them only 73 miles from Hanoi.

A Gauntlet. Like the ground war, the air war has subsided in South Viet Nam only to continue in Laos and Cambodia. By some measures, American air activity is way down; since the peak days of 1968, aircraft sorties have declined by 65%, while the number of U.S. combat planes in the area has dropped from 1,350 to about 350.

Since President Nixon took office, however, 3,000,000 tons of U.S. bombs have been dropped in Indochina --slightly more than the total dropped in the last three years of the Johnson Administration. During the past ten months, the tonnages have begun to decline fairly rapidly. But the bombing is still substantial, particularly in the Laotian-North Vietnamese border area around the key mountain passes through which the North Vietnamese push troops and supplies into the war at the advent of each dry season.

When the monsoon skies cleared a month or so ago, the infiltration and the Laotian air war started up again with dry-season intensity. This time, however, the Communists were ready with a vastly improved air-defense setup. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, once a relatively safe run for U.S. pilots, has become a gauntlet of fire that bristles with a variety of antiaircraft weapons. Overlooking the trail from the North Vietnamese border are 22 SAM-2 battalions with more than 130 launchers; their 30-mile-range missiles pose a serious threat to nimble fighters as well as lumbering B-52s.

So of course do the MIGs, which are beginning to venture within sight of U.S. aircraft again; for the past 3 1/2 years, the North Vietnamese pilots have generally avoided combat. The Communist air force, which boasts 165 combat aircraft (including 40 advanced MIG-215 has not been improved since 1968, when it dropped out of the war after suffering sharp losses against the better-trained U.S. pilots. One theory has it that with the reduction of U.S. air strength, Hanoi's air chiefs have come under pressure to be less timid with their precious planes. Says a military analyst in Saigon: "I can imagine a situation in the North Vietnamese Politburo where the civilians demand of the military, 'Well, you've got the damn things. When the hell are you going to use them?' "

Plucky Army. U.S. commanders need no convincing. Airpower is now considered to have been proved not only effective but essential in military terms, and it continues to have a devastating impact on civilian life in Indochina. Because of new techniques, including low-level "saturation" attacks, the effectiveness of airpower in stopping the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail has risen from a dismal 15% to a remarkable 85% over the past two years. Close air support, moreover, has saved Cambodia's plucky army from disaster in any number of battles.

Even so, it is still true that aircraft alone cannot save a weak fighting force. The Communists proved that again last week when despite fierce U.S. air attacks, they easily brushed Thai and Laotian troops from the strategic Plain of Jars, as they do every year when the monsoon rains subside and the skies clear.

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