The Vietnam War, This Week, The Republican, Kane PA
Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages
3 April 1966 – 9 April 1966
The Republican, Kane PA
Anti-American demonstrations intensify.
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Rioting broke out Monday night as Premier Nguyen Cao Ky’s military regime wrestled with a rising rebellion on its doorstep and in the northern city of Da Nang. Government police with tear gas and clubs broke up about 500 teenage demonstrators at the old National Assembly building in the Tu Do but the youths then surged toward the Saigon River in the direction of the US embassy. Another thousand demonstrators struck out from the Buddhist Institute, but police beat them back with tear gas and club charges. The rioting was the worst to hit Saigon in a current crisis that threatened the life of Ky’s nine-month-old government. To ease the unrest, the government called for a new constitution in the fall, election of an assembly as early as 1967 as war and the countryside permitted, and backing off from attacking dissident Vietnamese military in Da Nang. The Buddhist demand for an assembly within three months still maintained the political tension. On Wednesday new demonstrations rocked Saigon and Hue, but the regime appeared to me making some headway toward ending the crisis.
On Thursday, hundreds of antigovernment demonstrators poured toward downtown Saigon and burned a US military jeep a few hours after Buddhist leaders demanded that Premier Ky’s military regime pledge publicly to give way to a civilian government in five or six months. “End the war immediately,” said one of the banners carried by the demonstrators. The demonstrations this week came just as US senior military officers felt the tide of battle had begun to turn in their favor. The Allied troops had taken the advantage from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops. Massive American firepower, constant bombing, and relentless pressure on Communist strongholds had produced impressive results. Two of the most quoted statistics backing this up were enemy bodies counted and the number of Viet Cong defectors. One senior official said, though, that he automatically cut body count figures in half. Another said that the current rate of more than 2,000 defectors a month included many refugees and a high percentage of persons on the fringe of the Communist movement. As far as the unrest went, US sources figured that the war was set back by six months or more following the collapse of a regime.
Demonstrations continued at the end of the week. On Friday Buddhist monks led 2,000 demonstrators into the heart of Saigon in the worst day of anti-American violence in seven days of rioting. A dozen Americans were beaten, manhandled, or chased by the mob. As the column of jeering, banner-waiving youths surged downtown from the Buddhist Institute, fully armed government paratroopers backed away. But riot police eventually waded into the mob, lobbing tear gas grenades and scattering the demonstrators into side streets.
US Marines slogged through another five miles of mangrove swamp southeast of Saigon in Operation Jackstay, bringing them within 13 miles of the capital. Their goal was to free the shipping route to Saigon from Viet Cong harassment. East of Saigon, a joint US-Australian operation was announced to drive the Viet Cong out of their base camps. Supported by New Zealand artillery fire, the Allied push in the past week accounted for 23 Viet Cong killed and the capture of 15 Communists, 10 weapons, two tractor-trailers, and 867 tons of rice. In Operation Lincoln, on the Cambodian frontier, the death toll of Communists rose to 438 after the wiping out of a reinforced Viet Cong platoon. Other American troops accounted for at least 15 Viet Cong killed near Tuy Hoa as the war continued on the ground and in the air despite the demonstrations in the northern provinces.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Kane Republican)