The Vietnam War, This Week, The Morning Call, Allentown PA

Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages

28 March 1965 – 3 April 1965

The Morning Call, Allentown PA 

Terror in Saigon.

*****

The cost of the Vietnam War was going up The American taxpayer was now spending more than $2 million a day. Every time a helicopter crashed, the loss was a quarter million dollars, and there had been 75 chopper losses so far. Every time a Skyraider fighter-bomber was lost, it cost over $400,000, not to mention the possible loss of life. A shell from a US-supplied 155 mm howitzer cost $46. During an average month of combat, more than 10,000 were fired – close to half a million dollars’ worth.

Communist China was refusing to let the Soviet Union ship arms through China or fly them over its territory to North Vietnam. Specifically, the Chinese would not permit Soviet antiaircraft missiles through. The Soviet Union had promised to send military equipment to the Hanoi regime. China had accused the Russians of failing to aid Vietnam because of alleged efforts to win US favor. Meanwhile, the Kremlin had stepped up its home front agitation over Vietnam. The Communist paper Pravda devoted a page to accounts of meetings in Russia to denounce US actions in Vietnam and reports of denunciations from abroad.

On 30 March a bomb exploded at the US Embassy in Saigon. A US military medical officer on the scene of the blast said one American secretary was killed and another may have died of wounds. He said he thought about 30 Americans had been wounded, ten of them gravely. There were about 150 people in the embassy at the time of the blast. The next day the grim figures came in – two Americans and 11 Vietnamese killed, and 183 persons injured, 54 of them Americans. President Johnson denounced the attack as a wanton act of ruthlessness and an outrage. He said he would immediately ask Congress for authority and funds to build a new embassy.

Just hours after the Saigon bombing, US and South Vietnamese war planes destroyed a North Vietnamese jet airbase. Officials said the raid had been planned beforehand and was not in direct retaliation for the bloodiest attack on US citizens in the history of the war. On the day following the bombing of the US Embassy, aircraft from the US Air Force and Navy and from the South Vietnamese Air Force swooped down on six radar sites on the north Vietnamese coast and on islands in the South China Sea. More than 120 American and South Vietnamese fighter-bombers engaged in the raid. At the same time more than 70 US Air Force planes unleashed the greatest incendiary attack of the war on the communist Viet Cong’s notorious Zone D in Boi Loi Forest 25 miles northwest of Saigon. Preparations for the fire raid had begun in January when Air Force C123s began spraying trees to defoliate them. Recently more than 3 million leaflets were dropped on the area, warning the population to leave. For a total of 40 hours American planes flew over forests repeating the warning through loudspeakers.

President Johnson said that he and his staff were willing to “do anything an honorable people can do” to discuss a Vietnam settlement. At the same time, the president said, “I know of no far-reaching strategy that has been suggested or promulgated” during conferences in Washington. The British foreign secretary told the House of Commons on Thursday that the Reds within the past day or so had begun to modify their previously “difficult and impossible” stand, which included demands for unconditional withdrawal by the United States from South Vietnam. The same day the heads of states of 17 nonaligned countries appealed for immediate negotiations, without any preconditions, for a political solution to the war in Vietnam.

The Johnson administration decided on Friday upon an increase in men, money and equipment for South Vietnam to offset the growing strength of the Communist Viet Cong insurgents and to increase the pressure upon North Vietnam for diplomatic settlement. Among steps agreed-upon by President Johnson and his advisers were assignment of several thousand additional military personnel to South Vietnam for training purposes, continued airstrikes against North Vietnam, and increased economic assistance to strengthen the position of the South Vietnamese government.

(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Allentown Morning Call)