The War: Into the Buffer Zone

During the three years since he ordered the first U.S. air raid against North Viet Nam, Lyndon Johnson has insisted that presidential authority must be given for any bombing attack near the Chinese border. Repeatedly, he refused to issue that authority. Last week, with the President’s express permission, U.S. fighter-bombers swooped within twelve miles of China to deny Ho Chi Minh’s regime one of its few remain ing sanctuaries — the 30-mile buffer zone along the Chinese frontier.

In two days of raids, Navy and Air Force jets pounded away at the Communists’ vital northeast railway that connects Hanoi with Nanning in China’s Kwangsi province. Severing the single-line track repeatedly within the 30-mile zone, the planes knocked out the major rail-highway bridge and one of its two bypasses at Lang Son, a dozen miles from the border, and heavily damaged marshalling yards up and down the line. In the first raid, U.S. pilots caught the Vietnamese by surprise, blasted 143 rail cars for the biggest bag yet scored in a single day’s attacks.

Turning the Screw. The raids were part of the Administration’s newly ex panded list of Northern targets. Starting with the successful attack a fort night ago against Hanoi’s Paul Doumer rail and highway bridge, the missions were planned to apply yet another turn of the screw against North Viet Nam’s vital rail system. Though the U.S. has long been attacking the railways south of the buffer zone, Hanoi still imports the vast bulk of its war materiel by train. While petroleum, food and fertilizer imports come in mostly by sea, the rail system so far this year has car ried 62,000 tons of ammunition, weap ons and trucks into the north. By un loading the rail cars in the buffer zone, which the U.S. itself imposed on the area to prevent incidents with China, the Vietnamese have been able to stock pile materiel in the open until it could be trucked southward at night into the hands of the Viet Cong (see cover sto ry). “Now they will have a longer run to make,” observed Air Force Brigadier General J. M. Philpott, “and a new risk element.”

Pentagon officials maintained there was little risk of accidental intrusions into the Red homeland. Development of improved communications, navigational and radar equipment has greatly reduced the chances of U.S. supersonic jets straying over the border, they said.

As an added precaution, pilots have been ordered to make their bombing runs parallel to the frontier.

Manpower Demands. Despite congressional criticism that the air war has been ineffective, the North Vietnamese are obviously hurting. “The war is creating very great manpower demands,” re ported North Viet Nam’s ideological journal Hoc Tap in its July issue. In deed, Secretary of Defense Robert S.

McNamara estimates that fully half a million North Vietnamese have had to be mobilized to repair bombing damage. Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander of all Pacific forces, testified before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee’s hearings on the air war that the “drawdown on farm labor has reduced food production, and large amounts of food now have to be imported.” All told, he said, about half of the North’s war-supporting industry has been destroyed or disrupted.

Both Sharp and General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hotly denied before the committee that U.S. pilots were running out of lucrative targets in North Viet Nam. Said Wheeler: “I do not foresee any shortage of worthwhile military targets as long as North Viet Nam continues to be the source of manpower and the transmission center of supplies for the South.”

Improved Performance. There are still some inviting targets that have not been attacked. The North’s two big jet bases at Phuc Yen and Gia Lam have never been bombed. The Lao Cai railyard and a major power plant, at the northwest frontier with China, have escaped attack. So have hydroelectric dams, the air-defense headquarters in Hanoi, the Red River dikes and the country’s three major ports.

The targets spared so far have been proscribed by the President for political and humanitarian reasons. Nevertheless, military leaders are convinced that even with those restrictions the air campaign has been well worth its cost of 646 downed planes. Fully 30% of all war materiel destined for the South is being destroyed by air raids in North Viet Nam, said a Pentagon source. Though the North’s air-defense system continually grows stronger with SAMs and more than 7,000 ack-ack guns, U.S. plane losses are far less than expected, and in recent months have shown a marked decrease. There have been four times as many sorties over the North this year, Wheeler noted, and yet losses have been cut by two-thirds of the 1966 rate. He added that the improved performance has been accomplished by superior tactics, more effective munitions and better electronic gadgetry.

“During the last three months,” said Sharp, “we have begun to hurt the enemy in his home territory. Now we should increase our pressures.” That, clearly, is what Lyndon Johnson is determined to do.