Hitting North Again

Two weeks ago, North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire shot down an unarmed U.S. RF4 Phantom reconnaissance plane, killing the crew of two. Since then other reconnaissance flights have been fired on but not hit. Late last week the U.S. retaliated with what Defense Secretary Melvin Laird elaborately called "limited-duration protective-reaction air strikes"--a 24-hour series of raids involving nearly 150 U.S. fighter-bombers from airfields in South Viet Nam and Thailand and from carriers in the Tonkin Gulf. Radio Hanoi asserted that the U.S. had attacked the port of Haiphong and other targets in the northern part of the country; the Pentagon insisted that the bombing took place below the 19th parallel, in the southern panhandle of North Viet Nam.

It was the biggest air attack on the North since early May, when U.S. jets raided supply routes just after the Cambodian invasion. This time the planes struck farther north than at any time since full-scale bombing stopped at Lyndon Johnson's order on Nov. 1, 1968.

The U.S. assault was delayed for a week after the RF4 incident because targets were obscured by bad weather. It was also held off because the North Vietnamese had moved their MIG fighters south toward the Demilitarized Zone in anticipation of a U.S. strike. The Air Force and Navy jets attacked only after the MIGs returned north. The U.S. said that the targets were limited to antiaircraft and surface-to-air missile sites, though some nearby troop concentrations and supply dumps were probably hit as well. Hanoi asserted that the Americans had hit a prisoner-of-war camp north of the North Vietnamese capital, wounding several captured U.S. pilots; a number of civilians were killed, Hanoi added. Hanoi also claimed to have shot down five U.S. jets and one helicopter.

Invented Fable. U.S. planes have been involved in more than 60 incidents over North Viet Nam since the bombing halt. Only a day before the latest attacks, U.S. and North Vietnamese negotiators argued at the Paris peace talks over the American right to carry out unarmed reconnaissance. Ambassador David K.E. Bruce insisted that the U.S. made it clear when the bombing stopped that it would continue overflights. North Viet Nam's Xuan Thuy said there was no such agreement, tacit or explicit, between Hanoi and Washington: it is "an invented fable" that "contradicts all logic."

Another Hanoi spokesman denounced the raids as "an extremely serious act of war against the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, a brazen violation of its sovereignty and security." One thing that may vex Hanoi is that by its count, the number of U.S. overflights is on the rise--from 7,970 in 1969 to 11,180 so far this year.

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