Elusive Victories

The battered city of An Loc was still under siege last week--the longest of the Viet Nam War, surpassing the 74-day record set at Khe Sanh in 1968. Nonetheless the South Vietnamese government proclaimed An Loc a major victory, on the grounds that it had not been overrun. Certainly its defenders deserved full credit for endurance and courage under the war's heaviest artillery barrage (TIME, June 26). But An Loc is not yet a victory for either side.

The South Vietnamese relief column, sent to reopen An Loc's lifeline in the early days of the Communist offensive, was still pinned down as of last week to the south along Highway 13. The relief force has suffered at least 5,000 casualties, but in the past month it has hardly advanced a yard.

"Those who proclaim a great victory at An Loc cannot have it both ways," writes TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud. "Either the North Vietnamese were badly beaten in their effort to take the town and therefore do not have a force of any great size still blocking the road, or else Lieut. General Nguyen Van Minh and his troops have been, in the bitter words of one Western military expert in Saigon, 'culpable in their failure to push on in there.' " By keeping the column stationary, Minh and his officers may actually have exposed it to at least as many casualties as it would have suffered had it pushed ahead and relieved the town.

The argument over An Loc was overshadowed by the larger fact that the North Vietnamese offensive has obviously been blunted, at immense cost to the Communists. U.S. officials believe that half or more of the 120,000-man North Vietnamese force that pushed into South Viet Nam has been killed or wounded--primarily by air strikes --and that all but 100 or 200 of the approximately 600 tanks with which the Communists began the offensive have been destroyed. "If I were Giap," declared one American general, "I'd begin to wonder how I was going to extricate myself."

The chief lesson of the offensive was that tactical air strikes could stop the Communists--but could not recover territory they had captured. That must be done by ground troops. The South Vietnamese armed forces, recovering at last from earlier disastrous defeats like QuangTri, have begun to address themselves to that task.

At Kontum in the Central Highlands, the untested ARVN 23rd Division routed the 1,000 to 2,000 North Vietnamese troops that tried to infiltrate the town. At Hue, General Ngo Quang Truong, the new regional commander, sent elements of the 1st ARVN Division and the South Vietnamese marines on spoiling actions against enemy units southwest and north of the city. To the north, a force of 2,000 marines were pushing into Communist-controlled Quang Tri province, though they were encountering heavy opposition twelve miles south of Quang Tri city.

President Nguyen Van Thieu took advantage of the improved military situation to announce that the next three months would be devoted to an all-out counterattack. Obviously worried that Washington might be on the verge of a ceasefire, Thieu evidently judged that if he is to survive politically, he must spur the military into making a genuine counteroffensive.

Even an all-out military drive would not enable Thieu to wipe out the North Vietnamese gains. Despite their failure to capture Hue, Kontum and An Loc, the Communists have achieved many objectives of their Easter offensive. Besides inflicting heavy casualties on several ARVN divisions, they have very nearly undermined the all-important Vietnamization program and paralyzed pacification efforts in much of the countryside. They have once again staked out large swatches of territory in South Viet Nam's historically vulnerable regions. Though the Communists control only a small percentage of the South's population, the offensive has left them in charge of much the same territory they held in 1954, at the time of the Geneva Agreement (see map).

What happens next? The North's Vo Nguyen Giap has, in addition to his forces outside South Viet Nam, at least 80,000 men left within the country. Unless President Thieu and his forces can keep the North Vietnamese from forming up in battle strength again--or some sort of tentative cease-fire is agreed upon--most U.S. advisers in Saigon fully expect the North Vietnamese to strike once more, perhaps between mid-July and mid-September.

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