SALISBURY CONFIRMS BOMBING OF CIVILIAN TARGETS IN VIETNAM
In a dispatch from Hanoi dated December 25, Harrison E. Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of The New York Times, provided eyewitness testimony of the most crushing kind, verifying the charge that American bombing missions include civilian areas as "military" targets. On a visit to Namdinh, the third ,argest city in Vietnam, he was taken on an inspection tour by Mayor Tran Thi Doan, "a petite 40-year-old woman."
"Mayor Doan regards her city as essentially a.cotton-and-silk textile town containing nothing of military significance," he reports. "Namdinh has been systematically attacked by American planes since June 28, 1965. ; :
"The cathedral tower looks owt on block after block of utter desolation; the city's population of 90,000 has been reduced to less than 20,000 because of evacuation; 14 per cent of the city's housing, including the homes of 12? 464 | People, have been destroyed; 89 people have been killed and 405 wounded. .
"No American communiqué has asserted that Namdinh-contains some facility that the United States regards as a military objective. It is apparent, on personal inspection that block after block of ordinary housing, particularly surrounding a textile plant, has been smashed to rubble by repeated attacks by Seventh Fleet planes.
"The town lies.only 20 miles inland, which may explain why the Seventh Fleet seems to have made it its particular target. The textile plant, whose most dangerous output from a military point of view would presumably be cloth for uniforms, has been bombed 19 times, but is still operating under great difficulty.
"Other industries in Namdinh include a rice-processing plant, a silk factory, an agricultural-tool plant, a fruit-canning plant and a thread cooperative. All have been damaged in raids. The least affected operation is the rice mill, which is working at normal capacity.
"Street after street in Namdinh has been abandoned and houses stand torn and gaping. One deserted street is Hang Thao or Silk Street, which was the center of the silk industry. Almost every house on the street was blasted down April 14 about 6:30 A.M. just as the factory shifts were changing. ;
"Forty-nine people were killed, 135 were wounded on Hang Thao and 240 houses collapsed. Eight bombs -- MK-84's -- accomplished this. These are huge weapons weighing about 2,000 pounds.
"The residents of Namdinh have become specialists in United States weapons. They rattle off names like MK-81, MK-83 and MK-84 and various categories of missiles, including Bullpups , as. baseball fans do batting averages; most attacks have been carried out by F-105's and F-4's but B-57's, A-43's, A-4's and A-6A' s have also been used.
"Another target in Namdinh has been the Dao (Black) River dike. The dike has been hit six times and there have been many near-misses. Breaching of the dike would seriously affect the region's rice agriculture. However, supplemental and reinforcing dikes have been built. And with a plentiful labor force always at hand to repair gaps quickly, the danger of serious damage by air attack seems minimal."
As to the reasons for deliberately bombing a civilian. area like this, the local city officials could only speculate on the calculations of the American military staff in Saigon and their superiors in the Pentagon and the White House.
Nguyen Tien Canh of Namdinh's City Council thought the Americans believed they could intimidate the population by continuous attacks.
"A second suggestion was that the unannounced assault on Namdinh was supposed to be an object lesson to show Hanoi what United States air power could accomplish if it were directed more powerfully to North Vietnam's capital.
"Whatever the explanation, one can see that United States planes are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on.purely civilian targets. Whatever else there may be or might have been in Namdinh, it is the civilians who have taken the punishment."
Namdinh, Salisbury continues, “is far from being exceptional." In a brief tour of Namha Province, in which the city of Namdinh lies, he saw other civilian targets that had been the object of American bombing missions.
"President Johnson's announced policy that American targets in North Vietnam are steel and concrete rather than human lives seems to have little connection with the reality of attacks carried out- by United States planes.
my notable example is Phuly, : a town about 35 miles south of Hanoi on | Route 1. The town had a population of about 10,000. In attacks on Oct. 1, 2 and 9, every house and building was destroyed. Only 40 were killed and wounded because many people had left town and because an excellent manhole-shelter system was available.
"The community had no industry, but lay astride a highway and a railroad line running from Hanoi, which had a couple of sidings in town. Presumably, planes were attacking the railroad. But in the process they destroyed another residential community.'
Salisbury also confirmed that Hanoi had been bombed. In a December 27 dispatch, he reported crossing the Paul Doumer Bridge. "It appeared from this trip across the bridge, that bombing on Dec. 14 was directed at its approaches and fell short in each case, striking residential quarters. The bombs dropped in the Hoan Kiem and Gialem and Yenvien quarters." ;
With regard. to an American communiqué that the target was rail yards, Salisbury said: "Some bombs certainly fell along the railroad. But there are large numbers of apartment houses close by, and one after another was blasted out."
Salisbury's reports compelled the Johnson administration to alter its propaganda concerning the bombing of Hanoi. A spokesman had previously quibbled over the meaning of "Hanoi," claiming that "Hanoi" as defined by the Pentagon had not been bombed. .The American command in Saigon had issued a flat denial that Hanoi had been selected as a target. On December 26, however, when questioned about Salisbury's eyewitness testimony, the Pentagon admitted the attack but claimed that bombs. or other explosives had accidentally fallen in civilian areas while pilots had been aiming at "military" targets.
WHAT AMERICA IS DOING TO THE CHILDREN OF VIETNAM
The January issue of Ramparts magazine, published in San Francisco,. California, carries an article, "The Children of Vietnam," which: should be read by everyone concerned about the escalation of the war. In particular, it. should be read by every American with the slightest capacity to respond to the sufferings of others. The article is an account of what is happening to the children of Vietnam under the hail of bombs being poured on their country by the mightiest military power in all history.
For those who might decide -- before they read the article -- that it is just "Communist propaganda," an accompanying series of candid photographs in color should prove sufficient to shock them into realization of the truth.
The author is William F. Pepper, executive. director of ‘the New Rachelle Commission on Human. Rights, instructor in Political Science at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and director of that college's Children's Institute for Advanced Study and Research. He spent between five and six weeks in Vietnam in the spring of 1966 as a freelance correspondent accredited by the Military Assistance Command in that country, and by the Saigon regime.
After describing two typical cases of children maimed by "the weapons of America" --— napalm and white phosphorous -- who were lucky enough to be brought to Britain for treatment , ‘Pepper continues: ;
"There is no one. to provide such care for most of the other horribly maimed children of Vietnam; and despite growing efforts by American and South Vietnamese authorities to conceal the fact, it's clear that there are hundreds of thousands of terribly injured children with no hope for decent treatment on even a day-to-day basis, much less for the long months and years of restorative surgery needed to repair. ten searing seconds of napalm.
"When we: hear about these burned children at all, they're simply called '‘civilians,' and there's no real way to tell how many of them are killed and injured every: day. By putting together some of the figures that are available, however, we can get some idea of the shocking story.
"Nearly two years ago, for instance ~- before the major escalation that began in
early 1965 --— Hugh Campbell, former.Canadian member of the International Control Commission in Vietnam, said that from 1961 through 1963, 160,000 Vietnamese civilians died in the war. This figure was borne out by officials in Saigon. According to conservative estimates, another 55,000 died during 1964 and 100,000 in each of the two escalated years since, or at least #19 000 civilians have been killed since 1961. But just who are these civilians? ;
"In 1964, according to a UNESCO. population study, 4a?. 5 per cent of the people of Vietnam were under 16. Today, the figure is certainly over 50 per cent. Other United Nations statistics for Southeast Asia generally bear out this figure. Since the males over 16 are away fighting -- on one side or the other -- it's clear that in the rural villages which bear the brunt of the napalm raids, at least 70 per cent and probably: more of the residents are children.
"In other words, at least a quarter of a million of the. children of Vietnam have been killed in the war.
"If there are that many dead, using the military rule-of-thumb, there. must be three times that many wounded -- or at least a million child casualties since 1961."
Pepper cites other figures to support this fearful conclusion. Then he puts it in “American" terms:
"What we are