The Vietnam War, This Week, The Gazette and Daily, York PA
Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages
13 June 1965 – 19 June 1965
The Gazette and Daily, York PA
“The simple art of brotherhood.”
*****
A struggle for political influence between militant Catholic and Buddhist factions developed on Sunday as military leaders sought to form a new government. The armed forces took control of the Saigon administration Saturday after Premier Phan Huy Quat resigned under pressure from Catholics. Major General Nguyen Van Thieu, acting as a spokesman for the armed forces in a broadcast to the nation, promised a new war government dedicated to unity, discipline, and victory over the guerrillas. On Monday a committee of 10 generals took over as the new government. They pledged to work for the defeat of the guerrillas without imposing a dictatorship. Midweek the new military government imposed new stringent measures on the population to enforce discipline and curb war profiteering. In the central marketplace in Saigon, soldiers put up sandbag emplacements that would permit firing squads to carry out public executions with maximum publicity. Thousands of the city’s residents and peasants in their conical hats milled about the execution posts staring curiously at the sandbag walls.
An 800-man United States airborne battalion was flown to an airstrip near Dongxoai for possible use in the biggest battle thus far of the Vietnamese war. If the paratroopers were committed, their use would mark the first time an American unit had been sent into direct combat since Korea. The troop movement came after the guerrillas had torn through another government battalion Saturday. The National Front for Liberation troops were making their most strenuous attempt there to take and hold a district capital. Five Vietnamese battalions had been put out of action by guerrillas within the last two weeks. The losses were the worst ever suffered by government troops in a single action.
Late in the week, a fleet of eight-engined B-52’s from the US Strategic Air Command raided a jungle hideout where the rebels were reported masking for a sneak attack. It was the first time these planes, built mainly as nuclear bombers, had been used in Vietnam, although they used conventional explosives in the attack. The strike came a day after missiles fired by two US Navy F4 Phantom jets knocked out two MIGs in the skies over north Vietnam.
The first significant signs of potential Republican opposition to the administration's Vietnam policy developed Monday in reaction to the commitment of American troops to open combat in the Vietnamese war. An influential House Republican warned “we may be dangerously close to ending any Republican support of our present Vietnam policy.” The possibility of such a Republican defection exists, he said, “because the American people do not know how far the administration is prepared to go with large-scale use of ground forces to save face in Vietnam.” Later in the week a democratic senator warned the Senate that complete military victory in Vietnam “can be attained only at a cost far exceeding the requirements of our interest and our honor.” The British Prime Minister, faced with spreading criticism of his pro-US policy on Vietnam, said that his government was “deeply disturbed” about developments in that country during the past few weeks. Two other commonwealth Prime Ministers in London called for a cease-fire and an end to US bombing of North Vietnam. Later in the week, British leaders announced they would visit the governments involved in the Vietnam War in attempts to lay the groundwork for a peace conference.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told an audience of 7,700 Sunday in the Hofstra college commencement that man’s three most pressing problems were racial injustice, poverty, and war. He said that despite the ability to build giant machines that can explore space, modern man “has not learned the simple art of brotherhood.” The conflict in Vietnam, he said, “reveals that we stand in danger of a real war…the alternative to disarmament, to suspension of nuclear arms, of strengthening the United Nations, is to plunge us into annihilation.”
The US Secretary of Defense announced that six more combat battalions, plus supporting troops, were enroute to South Vietnam. The reinforcements would bring American military strength in South Vietnam, now numbering some 54,000, to a total of between 70,000 and 75,000 men. Of this total, 21,000 would be combat troops, ready to assist the South Vietnamese army.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, York Gazette and Daily)