World: INFILTRATION FROM THE NORTH: THE VITAL TRANSFUSION

THE conflict in South Viet Nam is often described as a civil war, but is it really? The Communist Viet Cong guerrillas have mostly been South Vietnamese won over to the Red side by inducements or threats. But obviously, the North Viet Nam government aids and directs the Viet Cong.

One school of thought, represented by most U.S. military men, holds that direction from the North is crucial; yet another school holds that Northern assistance is of only limited importance, and that the South Vietnamese guerrillas could continue to fight for a long time even if no help from the North was forthcoming. This is one of the main arguments used against hitting supply lines from the North, or otherwise escalating the war.

Last week, Washington released an intelligence report on the degree of Northern penetration into South Viet Nam. The inevitable conclusion:

Northern help is indeed essential to the Viet Cong.

Thick Red Line. Between 1959 and last summer, possibly 34,300 guerrillas slipped from North to South Vietnam. Of the total, said a U.S. spokesman, 19,000 infiltrators are confirmed and 15,300 probable. But the probable figure is “strong.”

The annual flow of confirmed infiltrators grew from 1,800 in 1959-60 to 3,700 in 1961 to 5,800 in 1962. In 1963 the figure dropped to 4,000, but last year the thick Red line swelled further. During the first seven months of 1964, beyond which figures have not been released, 4,000 confirmed and 6,000 probable infiltrators entered South Viet Nam, meaning that perhaps as many as 20,000 came in throughout the year.

Before 1964, most were assumed to be Southerners trained in the North.

But 90% of last year’s arrivals were North Vietnamese. Slightly more than half of the South’s estimated 29,000 to 35,000 hard-core guerrillas are now probably from the North, many of them young draftees of the North

Vietnamese army (Viet Minh). U.S. officials reason that the pool of 90,000 South Vietnamese who went north after Viet Nam’s 1954 partitioning has run dry, hence Northerners are being thrown into the fight by the Reds. But the blatant sending in of Northerners also means that Hanoi, which has tried to pretend that it was not really directing the war in the South, is, in the grim words of one U.S. official, “ready to take off the eighth veil.”

Pajama Party. Trained at Xuanmai, a base near Hanoi, the infiltrators are given a big sendoff party, sometimes attended by North Viet Nam’s military boss (and victor of Dienbienphu), General Vo Nguyen Giap. They are trucked to the port of Vinh for staging, thence southwest to the border area, where they turn in all personal effects, including letters, which could identify them. The infiltrators exchange their equipment for guerrilla gear (such as rubber sandals, mosquito netting) and doff uniforms for the black-pajama garb of the Viet Cong.

They usually move in groups of 30 to 40. Led by guides from one jungle “station” to the next, the North Vietnamese start their six-month trek down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a labyrinthine maze of many paths, which U.S. advisers prefer to call “a line of drift.”

Other men and supplies, including chemicals for making explosives, enter along the Mekong River through Cambodia. Still other infiltrators come by sea to South Viet Nam’s northern provinces. But the trail, named in honor of North Viet Nam’s wispy-bearded President, remains the favorite route.

While streaming along the South Vietnamese border, the infiltrators peel off into assigned areas. Many are especially trained to fight as units in the South, or provide the nuclei for new Viet Cong units, or replace individual southern casualties. In addition to line troops, the influx includes officers, communications and ordnance men, propaganda experts, medics.

While the guerrillas obtain some of their weapons by capturing U.S. equipment from the South Vietnamese army, the infiltrators do bring in important amounts of Communist-bloc weapons and supplies, no small part of which is from Red China. Above all, the North continues to furnish strategic and psychological backing, a significant sense of being part of a larger cause—in short, a continuing transfusion of Red corpuscles to the Viet Cong guerrillas.