Flak from Hanoi

THE WAR

During 22 months of bombing raids against North Viet Nam, the U.S. has scrupulously sought to avoid harming civilians. Last week, as the first ac credited American correspondent to visit Hanoi in twelve years cabled back eyewitness accounts of damage to civilian areas, Lyndon Johnson's Administration confessed that the attempt has not been altogether successful. At the same time, the correspondent himself came under criticism for presenting to the nation what many observers considered to be an uncritical, one-dimensional picture of the effects of the U.S. bombing on the North.

Utter Desolation. The correspondent is Harrison Salisbury, 58, a prestigious and enterprising reporter for the New York Times for 17 years and now one of its assistant managing editors. Last spring and summer, Salisbury, who was based in Moscow for five years, traveled around the periphery of Red China, gathering material for a series of stories and at the same time sounding out Communist diplomats about his chances of getting into North Viet Nam. For months he heard nothing. Then, in the middle of last month's furor over charges that the U.S. had bombed civilian sections of Hanoi, Salisbury got the go-ahead. Picking up a visa at North Viet Nam's diplomatic mission in Paris, he flew to the Cambodian capital of Pnompenh, there boarded a Hanoi-bound flight with members of the three-nation International Control Commission whose job it is to supervise the 1954 agreement that divided Viet Nam. He arrived in North Viet Nam two days before Christmas, filed the first of his stories, via regular commercial cable to the Times's Paris bureau, on Christmas Eve.

What Salisbury saw -- or was allowed to see -- during his quick tour of Hanoi and its environs was, almost exclusively, widespread devastation in civilian areas; he was not taken near the military facil ities around those areas. "President Johnson's announced policy that American targets in North Viet Nam are steel and concrete rather than human lives," he wrote, "seems to have little connection with the reality of attacks carried out by U.S. planes." He reported 89 killed in one town, 40 in another, 24 in a third. In Nam Dinh, third largest city in the North (population:

90,000), he described "block after block of utter desolation" in residential districts. U.S. planes, concluded Salisbury, "are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets"--and, in Hanoi's view, they are doing it "deliberately."

Civilians Everywhere. The Administration reacted quickly, admitting that some civilians may have been killed.

Bombing civilians "is not national policy," Air Force Secretary Harold Brown said emphatically, "and it shouldn't be." But, the Pentagon said, "it is impossible to avoid all damage to civilian areas, especially when the North Vietnamese deliberately emplace" military targets in populated areas. U.S. planes sometimes have to jettison bombs willy-nilly in order to engage attacking MIG fighters. Moreover, some of Hanoi's own SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) have fallen back into populated areas.

From his temporary White House in Austin, the President declared that he has never authorized bombing anything "except military targets." Dwight Eisenhower backed him up. "I know U.S. operations are aimed exclusively at military targets," said Ike, "but unfortunately, there are some civilians around those targets." Added he: "Is there any place in the world where there are not civilians?"

No Choice. So, once again, the U.S. was reacting to rather than anticipating an event. Administration officials would have done better to acknowledge earlier on their own initiative what every military expert has long known was inevitable: that some civilians would be killed in U.S. raids. In failing to do so, they not only helped to widen the "credibility gap," which is already causing Lyndon Johnson considerable trouble at home, but enabled Hanoi to use the Salisbury reports to stir up a virulent new round of anti-Americanism from London to New Delhi. Even France's normally prudent Le Monde declared that "not a day passes but that the American press catches the President or his collaborators in the flagrant act of lying."

At home, the long-quiescent dove-hawk debate broke out anew. A dozen religious leaders wrote to Lyndon Johnson to express their regret that he is sanctioning the bombing of targets "in or near residential sections of Hanoi, even if many civilians die." Democratic Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Vance Hartke of Indiana called on Johnson to stop the bombing unilaterally. On the other hand, South Carolina's Congressman Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, urged the U.S. to "flatten Hanoi if necessary" and "to hell with world opinion." Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard Russell declared that Hanoi's "intransigence" left the U.S. with "no choice but to inflict greater punishment on the Communists."

In all the commotion, the Administration missed a chance to point out the contrast between the relatively small number of civilian casualties in the North and the deliberate war waged by the Viet Cong directly on civilians in the South--something that practically all the critics of the air war on the North conveniently ignore. During the past year alone, Viet Cong terrorists have methodically murdered more than 3,000 civilians in the South, kidnaped 10,000 others--village chiefs, technicians and teachers, and often their wives and children as well. In the past decade, they have slaughtered 30,000 civilians in a bloody campaign aimed at destroying whatever leadership and expertise existed in the South.

Face Value. U.S. officials by no means accepted Salisbury's overall picture of the bombing war. Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper pointed out (and the Times dutifully reported) that the paper has been a consistent critic of the U.S. role in Viet Nam; he complained that Hanoi would "let a New York Times reporter in but not objective reporters." Others speculated that Salisbury may have fallen into the same trap in Hanoi as he did in Pnompenh last June. At that time, he accepted at face value assurances from Cambodian officials that there was "probably" no such thing as a "Sihanouk trail" along which Hanoi was trucking supplies into South Viet Nam.

Eight days later, Times Chief Far East Correspondent Seymour Topping, now the paper's foreign editor, reported that Hanoi was indeed using a Sihanouk trail and that "the movement of trucks on the route has been confirmed by American and other foreign observers."

Salisbury also failed to emphasize that his casualty and damage statistics came, unverified, from Hanoi. Only near the end of his fifth dispatch did he casually write: "It should be noted, incidentally, that all casualty estimates and statistics are those of North Vietnamese officials." He also gave the impression that some of the most heavily bombed areas were of no military significance.

Yet the Pentagon pointed out that Nam Dinh, for example, has four major targets: a big transshipment area for war materiel, a thermal power plant, petroleum-storage facilities and key rail links to the South. Even if Salisbury's report of 89 civilian deaths there is true, said the Defense Department's Arthur Sylvester, that would mean "rather precise bombing," considering that the U.S.

has made 64 raids on the city.

Salisbury also claimed that incessant bombing of Highway 1 and the rail line running parallel to it had scarcely interrupted traffic. A British newsman recently back from North Viet Nam reached just the opposite conclusion.

"Heavy American bombing has reduced all travel--road, rail and river--to a crawl, and then only by night," wrote Norman Barrymaine in a recent Look article now reprinted in Aviation Week.

"Highway 1 is so badly battered that peasants call it the 'Road of Bygone Days.' The 100-kilometer road journey from Haiphong to Hanoi can take three or even four days."

Ringed with Fire. Perhaps the most stinging criticism of all came from Navy Commander Robert C. Mandeville, who recently returned to the U.S. after leading a squadron of Intruder jet attack bombers in frequent raids on Nam Dinh. "Simply unbelievable," he said of Salisbury's conclusion that the town had no really valuable military targets.

For one thing, Mandeville pointed out, 100 antiaircraft batteries protect Nam Dinh, and "the North Vietnamese don't waste their AA batteries--they only put them around stuff they want to protect." The town, he said, was so "ringed with fire" that "nobody wanted to go to that place."

Salisbury's series also came under attack at the Times. In a 2,000-word front-page story at week's end, Military Editor Hanson Baldwin quoted U.S.

military men as saying that Salisbury's estimates of civilian damage appeared to be "grossly exaggerated." Some casualties, they noted, are inevitable. Said one: "You can't fight an immaculate war." Defending Salisbury, Managing Editor Clifton Daniel said that "in a place like that, you test the water with your toe. Obviously, where he has been permitted to go so far is to look at bomb damage."

The implication was that Salisbury was getting little more than a guided--or misguided--tour. Nor was he alone.

Dashing into a bomb shelter at his Hanoi hotel during an alert, Salisbury bumped into four visiting U.S. women who belong to such organizations as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Due next week are several clergymen, including U.S. Pacifist A. J. Muste, who has led antiwar rallies in New York, Washington and Saigon. Though the ladies and the preachers were traveling without clearance from the State Department, a total of 57 Americans--47 of them newsmen--have validated passports to visit the North. So far, Hanoi has agreed to admit only two--Salisbury and Louis Lomax, a Negro TV commentator for KTTV in Los Angeles who was en route to Hanoi last week after stopping in at the State Department for a briefing.

Distorted Picture. Why did Hanoi open its doors to selected visitors? It obviously hoped that by controlling their movements they would get a view of U.S. bombing as ineffectual against military targets and brutal against civilians. It hoped, by this distorted picture, to reinforce the widely held impression that the U.S. is a big powerful nation viciously bombing a small, defenseless country into oblivion, and thus spur international demands for an end to the air war.

"Consider what would happen if we didn't bomb," said Air Force Secretary Brown. "There is no doubt that it would make it a lot easier for them to move anything South." Even more important, the bombing is the American equivalent to Communist guerrilla warfare in the South. It is a way for the U.S. to keep the North off balance, to disrupt its transportation and communications networks, and to remind it constantly that it is engaged in a war of aggression it will not be allowed to win.

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