Three More Notches

In its campaign to interrupt North Viet Nam's flow of arms and men to the Communist troops in the South, the U.S. possesses a large arsenal of tactics and weaponry as yet unused against Hanoi. Last week the U.S. introduced three new forms of military pressure against the enemy's supply lines. This was the response to the Communist use of the Tet holiday truce last month to funnel some 25,000 tons of war materiel southward. Each of the three new moves was carefully tailored for a specific and precise military mission.

. NAVAL BOMBARDMENT. Until last week the U.S. Seventh Fleet, patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, was authorized to fire only on shore batteries that fired first on them or on radar stations tracking U.S. ships for targeting purposes. Other coastal targets--roads, trucks, trains, SAM missile sites--have been taken care of by the fleet's fighter-bombers, whose activity is drastically curtailed during the monsoon month of March. Last week Navy guns attacked those North Vietnamese targets as well. The guided-missile destroyer U.S.S. Joseph Strauss opened up with 5-in. guns that lob 54-lb. shells from ten to 14 miles. Two minutes later, the guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Canberra began firing its eight-inchers, whose 260-lb. shells carry 17 miles.

The decision to use naval shelling will likely turn March from the safest to the crudest month for the Communists. The fire-directional-control computers on U.S. warships make Navy guns the most accurate conventional weapons available.

. ARTILLERY OVER THE DMZ. More than half the enemy's tonnage that moved southward during Tet was stacked in depots just north of the Demilitarized Zone. To counter that implicit threat, the U.S. artillery moved its 175-mm. "Long Toms" up to Gio Linh, two miles south of the DMZ, and began firing their 147-pounders at Red stockpiles and antiaircraft batteries as far as 20 miles away. Firing back, the Communists peppered the Long Tom positions with 655 mortar rounds in four attacks. They caused only light damage.

. MINING WATERWAYS. The aerial bombing of Ho Chi Minh's realm has successively diverted traffic from rail to road and, increasingly, from road to water. To impede two of the water supply routes, Navy A-6 jets took off from the carrier Enterprise by night and dropped mines to the bottom of the Song Ca and Kien Giang rivers. The U.S. uses several varieties of mines, which can be touched off variously by contact, by magnetic detection of a metal hull passing overhead, by sound, or even by the slight change in water pressure caused by any boat within range.

"Secret Weapon." The Reds introduced some new military measures of their own: for the first time in the war, they used Russian-built 140-mm. surface-to-surface rockets. The 90-lb. rockets, with a range of some 10,000 yds. but uncertain accuracy, are fired from stubby, easily transportable, disposable tubes of thin sheet metal. For weeks, Viet Cong cadres had been encouraging their troops with the promise of a new "secret weapon," and the 140-mm. rockets were presumably it. In a predawn attack, more than 50 were fired at the Danang airbase, killing eleven U.S. Marines, wounding 33 and damaging some aircraft and equipment. Said First Sergeant Carl Hallgren: "It sounded like 600 freight trains going overhead." Many of the rockets hit the village of Ap Do, just off the Danang runway. In all, 32 Vietnamese civilians were killed, more than 60 wounded and 172 families left homeless.

Unfortunately, American jets also grievously erred last week, bombing the friendly Montagnard village of Lang Vei, near the Laotian border, killing 95 civilians and wounding 200. Two delta-wing fighter-bombers dropped anti-personnel fragmentation bombs and delayed-fuse bombs on the mountain people, then swept in to strafe the survivors with cannon fire. It was the worst such allied mistake of the war.

150-Ft. Snipers. In the ground war, Operation Junction City, which for two weeks has had 35,000 infantrymen combing the Red redoubt of War Zone C with scant success, at last flushed out the elusive enemy. A lone U.S. company of the Big Red One 1st Division was inching through sweltering, triple-canopy jungle when it ran into a 500-man Viet Cong battalion. The company suffered heavy casualties as the Viet Cong climbed surrounding 150-ft. trees and shot down into the U.S. defense perimeter before air and artillery strikes and three other U.S. companies could come to the rescue. It was twelve hours before the last enemy snipers fell silent and withdrew, leaving 167 of their dead. The U.S. announced in Saigon that in the previous week Communist forces lost 2,332 dead and 1,108 defectors to the South--both new highs for any week in the war.

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