South Viet Nam: The U.S. Has the Initiative

Scarcely four months ago, on the eve of the monsoons, the Viet Cong scented victory as well as rain in the air. They had successfully moved from Phase 1 (political agitation) in the Red guerrilla manual of arms to Phase 2 (terrorism and small-unit battles). Hoping the monsoons would give them haven, they readied Phase 3: all-out battalion and regiment-size assaults on the frayed and battle-weary South Vietnamese army.

But something happened on the way to Phase 3. The skies indeed opened up — and rained napalm, machine-gun bullets and Bull-Pup missiles from U.S. fighter-bombers, which by last week were flying over 400 lethal sorties a day. No weather could hide the Viet Cong from the radar eyes of the Guam-based B-52s and their pulverizing 750-and 1,000-lb. bombs. And by the tens of thousands each week, U.S. fighting men swarmed into Viet Nam (total at the end of last week: 128,000), first to relieve the pressure on Vietnamese troops, then to go aggressively hunting and killing the enemy on their own from the Mekong Delta to the Viet Cong’s highland sanctuaries. Phase 3 died aborning, because wherever two or three V.C. companies tried to gather, Allied planes were soon on the scene—and often enough with helilifted Allied troops not far behind.

Dagger Thrust. By last week it was evident that Hanoi had lost far more than the momentum of its own tidy timetable for the war. The latest series of reports to Saigon from U.S. officials stationed in each of the nation’s 43 provinces showed a marked improvement in peasant morale, and confidence in Premier Ky’s government. There is also a sharp increase in willingness to inform on the Viet Cong—and to cooperate with the anti-Communist forces. A small but significant example of this occurred in Ben Cat last week when a V.C. terrorist stepped out of a crowd to hurl a grenade at U.S. troops passing on the street near by. Before he could throw it, a young Vietnamese in the crowd felled him with a flying tackle; time was when no civilian would have dared to raise a hand against the Reds.

For over a month, the “kill ratio” of combat dead has been running more than 3 to 1 in favor of the allies, a clear reflection of the fact that it is now the U.S. and Saigon that have the initiative and the guerrillas the defensive. Moreover, the U.S. is constantly adding to its variety of offensive capabilities: fortnight ago, 15 miles south of Qui Nhon, a U.S. Marine raiding force in battalion strength stormed ashore from assault boats of the Seventh Fleet’s amphibious task force, swept three coastal areas in Operation Dagger Thrust. Though the marines nabbed few V.C. this time, Dagger Thrust is a valuable new tactic.Since the task force’s troops are always based at sea rather than in shore installations, security can be complete—and so can the surprise of the stab. Near Danang, the marines were using a new device to smoke the V.C. out: portable smoke generators to spot the updraft from concealed tunnel entrances.

Fire & Metal. The Viet Cong were still toying with Phase 3 here and there. Twice within five days they assembled V.C. and North Vietnamese army regulars in regimental numbers and struck at government units along Route One north of Qui Nhon. Hardly had the shooting started when allied planes spewing fire and metal were on top of the Communists. The result: one of Hanoi’s worst beatings of the war, with some 700 enemy dead in one engagement alone. At week’s end the desperate Viet Cong tried another regimental assault, this time in the Delta, 30 miles from Saigon. Again, the Reds were routed, and in a day-long battle nearly 200 guerrillas were killed or wounded.

Off the battlefields, the Viet Cong were still making war in their own macabre way. Two American prisoners of war, Captain Humbert R. Versace and Sergeant Kenneth M. Roraback, were executed by the Communists in reprisal for Saigon’s shooting of three Danang agitators. The Reds’ disregard of the Geneva Convention could only be termed murder—which is precisely what the U.S. branded it last week.

North Viet Nam—a signatory of the 1949 convention—chimed in with its own flouting of the military code: henceforth, howled Hanoi, U.S. pilots downed over North Viet Nam would be regarded as “war criminals liable to go before tribunals,” Nuremberg-style. The Saigon government, whose crackdown of Viet Cong terrorists was the nominal trigger of the Red reprisals, responded to the cruel dilemma. Last week, five criminals convicted of murder and rape were publicly executed in a downtown square. The life of a Viet Cong agitator was spared.