The Vietnam War This Week, The Daily Republican, Monongahela PA

Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages

 31 July 1966 – 6 August 1966

The Daily Republican, Monongahela PA 

Battles proliferate overseas as evil strikes at home.

*****

At the start of the week, US forces attacked guerrilla concentrations near Saigon where the Viet Cong had amassed a strike force of more than 5,000 men. B-52 bombers pounded the area with high explosive bombs and US troops swept in by helicopter. Heavy ground fire brought down two UH-1 helicopters in the operation, but they were quickly repaired and flown out. After the initial fight the enemy broke off contact and slipped away through the jungle. Units of the US 25th division 2nd Brigade reported only sporadic sniper fire and said the Viet Cong had abandoned an ammunition dump containing 90,000 rounds of ammunition, mines, booby traps, and automatic weapons. The assault was aimed at halting an unprecedented guerrilla buildup within striking distance of Saigon. Intelligence sources said the Reds had moved nine battalions into the Saigon area. Viet Cong battalions usually numbered between 400 and 600 men.

The next day an outnumbered company of infantrymen from the U.S. Army’s 25th Division beat off a six-hour assault by the Viet Cong on one of the bloodiest battle fields of South Vietnam. The Communists broke off the assault at dusk when airstrikes and artillery were called in. American casualties were described as light. Communist losses were not known. It was the third such battle in 24 hours in the central highlands about ten miles from the Cambodian border, 215 miles north of Saigon.

On Wednesday, the US Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division attacked at least three North Vietnamese regiments in the Ia Drang Valley of the rain-sodden Central Highlands. B-52 strategic bombers also hit the area, the scene of the war’s greatest battle last November. The thousands of cavalrymen were flown in by helicopter to reinforce US 25th Army Division troops who had fought at least nine major clashes in the Ta Drang Valley and Chu Pong Mountains in the past 24 hours to mark the start of a major new US offensive. During the battle, the 1st Air Cavalry Division reached a blood-soaked clearing where a lost platoon of 28 Americans fought almost to the last in an epic stand against swarms of Communists. Nine survived by playing dead. It was a small and dramatic incident in the vast scope of Operation Paul Revere, in which the air cavalrymen had killed an estimated 397 North Vietnamese regulars in two days of vicious fighting in the Central Highlands.

Meanwhile the United States marked the second anniversary of the first bombing raid on North Vietnam by sending the usual daily wave of jets north to do it again. “We went north today just like we do every day,” a spokesman said. There were no details. The spokesman also disclosed that American jets Thursday carried out an 83-mission raid against oil depots, supply points, highways, river and road traffic, and antiaircraft guns from Dong Hoi near the South Vietnamese border to Haiphong, 75 miles south of Red China. US planes also scattered more than 3 million propaganda leaflets over the Haiphong area. The leaflets told North Vietnamese the Hanoi regime did not dare admit sending troops into South Vietnam since that would be a denial of its “aggression” charges against United States. The leaflets showed pictures of North Vietnamese soldiers killed in the south.

(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Monongahela Republican)