The Vietnam War, This Week, The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle PA

Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages

 24 April 1966 – 30 April 1966

The Evening Sentinel, Carlisle PA

Bicycles and junks – necessity is the mother of invention.

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US jets and naval artillery blasted Viet Cong attacking a Vietnamese government command post along the central coast on Monday, hurling back the attackers and killing 50 Communists. The fighting started when the Communists struck a government battalion in the Khanh Hoa sector, about 200 miles northeast of Saigon, just as it was moving out on a search and clear operation before dawn. The government troops held them at bay and called for help. US fighter planes screamed in on low-level bombing and strafing runs and an American destroyer lying just offshore opened up with its big guns. Two waves of the attackers were forced back before the Viet Cong decided to break off the engagement and leave. Friendly casualties were light.

A tangle of Russian-made jets and US fighter planes over the weekend represented the Communists’ first significant challenge to US supremacy in the skies over North Vietnam. About 15 jets, including MIG-17s and the newer and faster MIG-21s, engaged the attacking American Air Force jets in three dog fights, and two of the Communist planes fell victim to sharpshooting US Air Force pilots. The engagement represented the first time North Vietnam’s fledgling Air Force had risked its planes in an attempt to halt the American bombing raids. On Wednesday giant B-52 bombers striking in North Vietnam for only the second time since the war began poured hundreds of tons of bombs on a critical supply route to the South. Communist MIG jets rose to challenge other American war planes striking near Hanoi. The Guam-based B-52 bombers for the second time blasted the Mu Gia Mountain pass at the mouth of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the main Communist supply route for infiltrating men and materials into South Vietnam.

On Thursday American infantrymen swarmed over a Viet Cong supply complex believed to be the largest in South Vietnam. They destroyed it and tons of food and supplies with white phosphorus grenades and cigarette lighters. The defenders fled across the border into the sanctuary of neutralist Cambodia. A battalion of the First Infantry Division sweeping the communist “War Zone C” along the Cambodian border found enough food, livestock, and uniforms to outfit about six Communist regiments. They also seized motorized sampans used for transporting the equipment.

A US Army brigade of 5,000 men landed Friday in South Vietnam to raise American troop strength there to 255,000 – equal to the number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars in the south. Another small advance contingent of a 4,500-man Australian task force also arrived. Arrival of the American reinforcements coincided with stepped-up US air efforts to block further Communist infiltration into the south. Hanoi had been forced to resort to fleets of junks to bring in men and the US Navy disclosed another devastating raid against a junk flotilla. Fighters from the carriers Enterprise, Kitty Hawk, and Hancock hit the junk fleet late Thursday in North Vietnamese waters a short distance from the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam.

The assassination of a political leader in Da Nang and angry exchanges between Buddhist and Catholic leaders threatened South Vietnam with a new wave of political unrest. But a tense situation that threatened to embroil American troops in Saigon eased when government officials convinced Buddhist students that a Vietnamese guard and not a G.I. killed one of their classmates. The students called off anti-American demonstrations.

Communists, sending some men into battle on bicycles, were stepping up the infiltration of South Vietnam despite US air and ground action to stem the flow of men and materiel. US officials said that several thousand more men had been sent into the south, bringing estimates of combined North Vietnamese regulars and “hard-core” Viet Cong troops to 90,000. This did not include some 165,000 irregulars. Officials said, however, that military operations were going well. They said prisoner of war reports indicated the Communists were suffering under the pressure from US air and ground actions.

(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Carlisle Evening Sentinel)