The Vietnam War, This Week, The Inquirer, Philadelphia PA
Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages
21 November 1965 – 27 November 1965
The Inquirer, Philadelphia PA
Thanksgiving 1965 brought little to be thankful for.
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Vietnamese paratroopers driving to link up with US First Air Cavalry troops in a crushing squeeze play killed hundreds of Communists Saturday in heavy fighting near the Cambodian border. Allied war planes backed up the ground force with bombs and napalm in 40 airstrikes. The Vietnamese airborne troops were pushing south from behind Chu Pong Mountain where the first cavalry this week both dealt and suffered the worst heaviest death toll in a single action. US cavalrymen were moving up to join the Vietnamese.
On Monday Communist troops ambushed the force of nearly 1,000 US First Infantry Division soldiers 40 miles northwest of Saigon but were routed by the Americans in a fierce fight. At least 40 Viet Cong were reported killed. A spokesman said that US planes had streaked into action to pound the attacking Viet Cong after they hit the battalion-sized force from the American “Big Red One” division Saturday night.
On Tuesday US Air Force jets blasted two Soviet-made missile sites northwest of Hanoi, hitting one missile while still on the launchpad. One of the missile sites, 34 miles northwest of Hanoi, was destroyed, a spokesman said. A huge sheet of fire lashed across the site where the missile was hit on the launching pad. At the other installation, 41 miles northwest of the Vietnamese capital, radar equipment was destroyed.
Five government outposts were believed Tuesday night to have been overrun but the town of Tuy An withstood heavy assaults in a battle that shifted attention from the central highlands to the central coast. One civilian was killed and two were wounded in Viet Cong attacks on two villages in another area Wednesday. A civilian was killed and three civil guards wounded when guerrillas fired 20 mortar rounds into Thuong Duc, 25 miles south west of Da Nang.
At the end of the week, the first nuclear powered American warships committed to the Vietnam war – the carrier Enterprise and the guided missile frigate Bainbridge – moved into combat stations off the coast of South Vietnam. A military source said the enterprise soon would be launching planes against North Vietnam from its 4½ acre flight deck. The enterprise was the biggest aircraft carrier in the world , a $144 million, 75,000 ton giant whose a pressurized water cooled nuclear reactors gave it the capability of steaming five years without refueling. It had 95 planes aboard.
President Johnson said that America sought a world of “real and lasting peace” where “reason will replace rockets and reason will replace terror.” Mr. Johnson said these national goals were possible “because we believe in them and believing in them we can do them.” Several days later the president expressed deep anguish over high American battle losses in Vietnam but the losses had not altered US determination to resist Communist aggression there. The president believed the American sacrifice was essential to defend freedom in its “hour of need.” A record total of 240 Americans killed in Vietnam in one week underlined a new official warning Thursday that the war would be long. “It involves a long conflict and we must be prepared to accept this,” General William C. Westmoreland, the US commander, told the American people in a Thanksgiving day interview.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Philadelphia Inquirer)