South Viet Nam: Target: SAM

By day and by night warplanes swept over the countryside, in the kind of effort the U.S. hoped would make the Communists talk peace. Over North Viet Nam, Air Force and Navy jets flew 1,030 sorties in twelve days. Combined with another 2,600 missions against Viet Cong positions in the south, it was probably the greatest show of airpower since World War II.

Three days of repeated raids took out the Ban Thach hydroelectric plant 80 miles south of Hanoi. Since the plant was of obvious value to Ho Chi Minh’s military organization, its destruction did not mean that the U.S. had decided to escalate the war further by attacking purely civilian targets. Its loss would be felt, however, by the civilians whose browned-out towns had depended on it for what little electricity was available for the area. “It’s a way to make the North Viet Nam people know there’s a war going on,” said one U.S. officer.

Not all the planes came back last week. High over the Song Chu river locks near Thanh Hoa, something slammed into the tail of a Navy F-4 Phantom jet, converting it instantly into flaming debris. It seemed the work of SAM, the mobile Russian rocket, which had already brought down two other high-flying U.S. jets. Apart from the half-dozen fixed sites clustered around Hanoi, the U.S. does not know how many SAM units there are in North Viet Nam, for as quickly as they fire, the mobile installations lumber off on their trucks and trailers to new locations. But as of last week, they have become the highest priority on the U.S. target list, if only they can be found.