Communist guerrillas blew up railroad tracks just outside Saigon today, derailing a train. Four coaches jumped the tracks. The Vietnamese engineer and his assistant were. slightly injured. The train, bound for Phan Thiết, a coastal town 100 miles east of Saigon, hit the mine, only five miles from the city. It was believed to be the first time guerrillas had mined rail tracks so close to Saigon.
The South Vietnamese Interior Ministry announced today that Premier Trần Văn Hương had ordered the release of 473 prisoners in Saigon and the provinces to mark New Year’s Day, February 2 on the Oriental lunar calendar. The prisoners are to be freed January 25, the official Vietnam Press Agency reported. Meanwhile, representatives of several religions, including Buddhists and Roman Catholics, were reported to have signed a joint communiqué with a military representative, calling for national unity and an intensified struggle against Communism.
Communist China has substantially strengthened air defenses in Communist-held areas of Vietnam and Laos and in South China, well-qualified sources said today. The United States Air Force now estimates that it would suffer considerably larger losses than it might have expected six months ago in any major air strikes at targets in these areas. The sources said the new tactical situation was reflected in the loss of two jet fighter planes last Wednesday to heavy antiaircraft fire during the raid on the Route 7 link between North Vietnam and the Laotian territory held by pro-Communist Pathet Lao forces. China undertook the build-up after the clashes between United States destroyers and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin last August. It is said to involve not only the stationing of jet fighter planes and a large number of anti-aircraft guns in North Vietnam but also the assignment of Chinese Communist instructors.
Peking has made no public comment on the build-up, but the Government said officially in August, after the United States retaliatory air strikes at North Vietnam, that it felt legally justified in assisting North Vietnam. In the Hanoi area, 20 to 60 jet fighter planes, mainly of the Soviet MIG-17 type, have recently been observed. An average of 35 jet fighters are usually visible at air installations under United States surveillance. A Chinese Communist mission has been training North Vietnamese airmen in the region of Hanoi, the Communist capital, since the delivery of jets there, the sources added. North Vietnamese pilots are also believed to be undergoing training in South China. North Vietnam has received new 37-mm. radar controlled anti-aircraft batteries and other anti-aircraft equipment. Chinese technicians have delivered the weapons and trained the North Vietnamese in their use. Then, in some cases, they appear to have left the country.
The 37-mm. guns, which can be maneuvered into position in difficult terrain relatively easily, have been distributed along important communication lines in North Vietnam and Laos. They have been installed at key points along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, the system of routes through southern Laos over which the North Vietnamese send cadres and supplies to the Việt Cộng in South Vietnam. The 37mm anti-aircraft gun is of an old Soviet type, but it has been adapted by the Chinese and is being produced in their armories. It has been effective in Laos because of the terrain and because of the limited nature of operations by United States jet fighters and the propeller-driven T-28 fighter bombers of the Royal Laotian Air Force. Because the number of fixed, observable targets is limited, the Communists have been able to concentrate their anti-aircraft guns along lines of approach that fighter and reconnaissance planes are compelled to take. Thus, in the raid Wednesday on bridges along Route 7, two jet fighters — an F-100 and an F-105 — out of a force estimated at 24, were lost when they ran into massed antiaircraft fire.
The 37mm guns have not been spotted in South Vietnam. The heaviest anti-aircraft weapons directed by the Việt Cộng against United States and Vietnamese helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft have been large .50-caliber machine guns, in some instances employing tracer ammunition. According to United States Army sources, the number of helicopters shot down in South Vietnam in the last year, in the face of heavier anti-aircraft fire, has increased by 18 percent. According to these official statistics, however, the number of sorties flown by an expanded force of United States helicopters doubled in the same period and the losses actually decreased, proportionally speaking, by 9 percent. Plans have been made for continuing air strikes at targets in Laos along supply routes feeding the Pathet Lao and the Việt Cộng. Contingency plans have also been made for United States strikes at targets in North Vietnam to discourage or prevent traffic to the Việt Cộng.
Some United States Air Force officers say they would welcome a test with the Chinese Communist Air Force over Vietnam and Laos. With the superiority of United States matériel, they say, they are confident that a humiliating defeat would be inflicted on the Communists. Air Force units in the region and forward base installations are prepared for any such major clash. In Vietnam there are jet fighters and fighter-bombers at Đà Nẵng, Biên Hòa and Saigon. Other aircraft would be committed from aircraft carriers off Vietnam and from bases in Thailand. Other aircraft, with pilots who have already undergone terrain-familiarization flying in this region, would be moved up to these advance bases from the main United States installations in Okinawa and the Philippines.
The high command of the Royal Laotian Army is to be reorganized as “a first measure” toward ending discord and strengthening the armed forces to “face danger from without and within,” the Defense Ministry said today. A ministry communiqué said the decision was reached during a meeting Tuesday and Wednesday at the royal capital, Luang Prabang. The meeting was conducted by Prince Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist who is Premier In the rightist-leftist-neutralist coalition Government. Apparently the aim was to reduce the influence of General Phoumi Nosavan, the rightist leader. All general officers of the army, including General Siho Lamphouthacoul, a powerful rightist, attended the meeting. Although the communiqué gave no details of the reshuffle, informed Laotian sources said that General Kalkhoung, a Souvanna Phouma supporter who commands Zone 2, an important military area including Xiengkhouang and Thathom, would receive a high staff post in Vientiane. His command is to be taken over by General Van Pao, who is second in command. Another pro-Souvanna Phouma General, Lam Nguen Phrasavath, is to leave his Savannakhet command to become military police chief of Vientiane, the administrative capital.
The reshuffle is intended to stop power plays between Vientiane generals and politicians and to strengthen the army command in case of any new attacks in the civil war with pro-Communist Pathet Lao forces. Feuding between Vientiane’s right-wing factions has come to be regarded here as an obstacle to the war effort against the Communists. General Phoumi Nosavan has received support from the police, headed by General Siho Lamphouthacoul. Informed Laotian sources said General Siho Lamphouthacoul had originally refused to attend the Luang Prabang meeting and had proposed to send a representative. This was considered unacceptable by the other participants.
The latest wave of Laotian political turmoil was set off last April when the Government, led by Premier Souvanna Phouma, was overthrown by right-wing forces. Firm intervention by the United States and other nations that signed) the 1962 neutrality accords led to the Prince’s restoration as Premier. A major result of the turmoil and military defeats of the first five months of last year was the United States’ decision to increase its reliance on airpower in Laos. Last month, reports from Vientiane disclosed a sharp rift between the Laotian police force and right-wing political leaders, especially between General Kouprasith Abhay and General Siho Lamphouthacoul, leaders of the April coup.
As head of the Laotian police forces, General Siho Lamphouthacoul ordered the arrest of Sophal Bouphasiry, editor of the newspaper Sieng Mahason, because of an article charging that the police were not only negligent in reacting to a crime wave but also actively involved in widespread thefts. The newspaper is controlled by Oun Sananikone, the most outspoken and most rightist of three brothers who hold important Government posts. The political turmoil is also marked by bitter rivalry between General Phoumi Nosavan, a Deputy Premier and Finance Minister, and the influential Sananikone family. Last August, the national police forces were transferred to civilian control under the Ministry of the Interior, apparently in an attempt to reduce the influence of General Phoumi Nosavan.
The existence of a small but widespread faction of Chinese officials more sympathetic to Soviet Communism than the ideology of Mao Tse-tung has been indicated by recent developments in China. An increasing number of functionaries have been charged with “revisionism,” a Communist heresy synonymous in its Chinese form with Soviet Communism. The latest group to come under attack are certain teachers of political theory in high schools and colleges who, by virtue of their positions, play an important role in molding future Communist leaders. Articles in Jenmin Jih Pao, the party organ, under the authoritative signature “Commentator” declared: “Some teachers of political theory harbor revisionist views to a serious extent.” They “distort and obliterate the thought of Mao Tse-tung by every conceivable means,” the article declared. This is a severe accusation in China, where the party chairman’s words are sacred.
Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Canada-United States Automotive Agreement, eliminating tariffs for auto industry manufacturers, at the LBJ Ranch in Texas. The agreement would be approved by Canada two days later by an order in council, and by the United States Senate in October (and made retroactive to January).
The Congo charged today that leaders of three East African states had interfered in her internal affairs by meeting with Christophe Gbenye, the Congolese rebel chief. The Congo said President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, President Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania and Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda had violated the Charter of the Organization of African Unity by conferring with Mr. Gbenye. The meeting took place this week at Mbale in Uganda during a conference of the three leaders. In a communiqué, Premier Moïse Tshombe’s Government said the three leaders had also violated the spirit and the letter of the resolution passed by the Organization of African Unity at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last September. It recalled that the organization appointed an 11-nation commission to help the Congolese Government to bring about a national reconciliation. Mr. Kenyatta is chairman of the commission.
G. Mennen Williams, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, said today that the United States was in “a momentary eclipse of popularity” in Africa over the Congo issue.
Diplomats reported today the arrest of seven Burundi politicians in connection with the assassination of that East African nation’s Premier, appointed only recently in an apparent move to check Chinese Communist influence.
A Lebanese editor suggested this week that Arab states might be asking too much of Lebanon in making her the spearhead of their measures against Israel Kamel Mrowa, editor and publisher of the right-wing Al-Hayat, wrote that the Arab states should avoid placing Lebanon in an “embarrassing position.”
South Korean President Chung Hee Park declared today that he would strive to strengthen further “the traditional ties of friendship” with the United States to achieve three major objectives for this year.
Rapidly changing conditions and attitudes in the Philippines suggest that deep understanding is advisable in the coming months to prevent relations between the United States and its closest Asian ally from deteriorating.
Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato returns tomorrow from his hasty mission to Washington with his prestige considerably enhanced but with a host of thorny problems looming.
Nine people were killed and 50 injured at a train station at Bonassola, Italy, near Genoa, when a freight car with 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of dynamite exploded. Five of the dead and most of the injured had been passengers on a train that had stopped at the station shortly before the blast.
British part-time soldier Brian Spillett entered a neighbour’s house to try to save him from a fire. He failed, and both men died. Spillett would be posthumously awarded the George Cross for his bravery.
Sir Winston Churchill was reported “a little weaker” tonight in his struggle for life.
Hooligans set fire today to the home of a Jewish cabdriver recently fined for insulting behavior and for having damaged a swastika necklace belonging to the wife of the British Nazi leader, Colin Jordan. The driver, Wolfe. Busell, 42 years old, was working when the gang, using a petrol-soaked rag, set fire to his house at Chingford, damaging the front door and porch. When Mrs. Jordan tried to hire his taxi, he recognized her and shouted: “I don’t want you. I am a Jew, you stinking Nazi.” Mr. Busell told the court he lost his temper after she said, “Well, if you are a Jew, what are you doing out of the ovens?”
[Ed: Oh, Honey. I would have damaged more than a damned necklace.]
The USSR performs a nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan.
U.S. Marshals arrested 18 men in Philadelphia, Mississippi, including the sheriff and deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, in the case surrounding the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The chief law officers of Neshoba County and 16 other men were arrested this morning in connection with the slaying of three civil rights workers last June. Seventeen of them had previously been arrested — and then released — in the same case. Sheriff Lawrence Andrew Rainey and his chief deputy, Cecil Price, quietly surrendered their pistols to a deputy United States marshal who found them waiting for him in the courthouse at Philadelphia, 40 miles northwest of here.
The 225-pound, tobacco-chewing sheriff and his pudgy, dark-eyed deputy were taken before United States Commissioner Esther Carter here and later released on $5,750 bond each. Fourteen others from the Philadelphia and Meridian area were released under the same amount of bail. The two other suspects live outside the state. Deputy Marshal Charles Sutherland, a retired Army major, picked up Rainey and Price. It was about 8:30 A.M. and the courthouse square was whipped by a snow squall and bitter north winds. After yielding their sidearms, Rainey and Price put on windbreakers over their pink uniforms and got into the marshal’s car.
Earlier Mr. Sutherland and other marshals, who had moved into Philadelphia soon after dawn, rounded up several other suspects from the environs of that small east-central Mississippi county seat. First they picked up Jimmy Lee Townsend, a 17-year-old high school dropout. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that Townsend and nine others formed a lynch mob that intercepted and shot the civil rights workers outside Philadelphia last June 21. Before descending on the courthouse, Marshal Sutherland picked up two others accused by the FBI of being in the mob. They are Billy Wayne Posey, 28, who runs the filling station where Townsend works, and Jerry McGrew Sharpe, 21, another high school dropout.
There was a slight delay at the home of Patrolman Richard Willis, 40. Willis had been on duty last night for the Philadelphia Police Force and was asleep when the marshals called. But everyone else was dressed and ready to go. Sheriff Rainey had been expecting arrest since noon yesterday when a Federal grand jury in Jackson returned indictments charging the 18 men with conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Eight miles outside Philadelphia, marshals arrested Edgar Killen, a fiery 39-year-old fundamentalist who preaches in two small rural churches and runs a sawmill. The FBI said that several of the men arrested were members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of the Sovereign Realm of Mississippi. In the indictments, the grand jury revealed only the barest outline of how the civil rights trio — Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, both white, of New York; and James E. Chaney, a 21-year-old Black from Meridian — were slain.
According to the grand jury, the three men, who had been arrested earlier on a speeding charge were detained in jail by Deputy Sheriff Price from shortly after sundown to about 10:30 PM on January 21. Price released his prisoners in accordance with a plot so that they could be intercepted by the lynch mob while they were on the way back to their base. in Meridian, the indictments said. The three victims were halted about nine miles south of town. Price, according to the indictment, put them into a Neshoba County Sheriff’s car and drove them down a lonely side road to the spot where they were murdered.
Not until August 4, after an intensive search spurred by President Johnson, were the bodies found in an earthen dam several miles from the scene of the shooting. The members of the mob, according to the grand jury, were Price; Posey; Townsend; Sharpe; Horace Doyle Barnette, 25, who now lives in Cullen, Louisiana; Jimmy Snowden, 31, a laundry truck driver of Meridian; James Edward Jordan, 38, a construction worker who now lives in Georgia; Jimmy Arledge, 27, a Meridian truck driver; Alton W. Roberts, 26, a Meridian tavern employe, and Travis Maryn Barnette, 36, who runs a garage in Meridian. The FBI says that Horace Barnette and Jordan have confessed.
It was Posey, according to the indictment, who took the bodies to the dam where a bulldozer was used to cover them with tons of red clay soil. The 10 men named as participants in the lynch mob and the eight others were charged in two indictments. One charged the group with conspiring to deprive the young integrationists of their civil rights felony. The other indictment charged the group with a misdemeanor participating in a conspiracy in which law enforcement officials inflicted “summary punishment” on the youths “without due process of law.”
The felony indictment contains one count charging violation of a federal rights conspiracy statute that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The second indictment, containing four counts, charges violation of a second federal civil rights law that forbids law enforcement officers to deprive citizens of their rights. Maximum penalty on this indictment would be one year in prison and $1,000 fine for each of the four counts.
Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas will be sworn in at noon Wednesday for a four-year Presidential term that he believes offers the greatest opportunities in a generation for progress at home and more peaceful relations abroad. Thousands will watch the ceremony from the east plaza of the Capitol. Millions more will see Mr. Johnson’s inauguration on television, with all the major networks offering full coverage. It will be four years to the day since Mr. Johnson took an oath administered by his old friend Speaker Sam Rayburn on the same stand at the foot of the east steps of the Capitol and became Vice President of the United States. It will be 13 months and 28 days after he was hastily sworn in as the 36th President of the United States on a terrible autumn day in Dallas, Texas.
President Johnson announced today that four members of the White House staff, appointed by John F. Kennedy, were resigning and a fifth would leave soon. He also disclosed the work responsibilities of those on the White House staff who are remaining and their salaries. Mr. Johnson began a news conference in the living room of his house at the LBJ Ranch by announcing the resignations of two special assistants, P. Kenneth O’Donnell and David F. Powers; the President’s special counsel, Myer Feldman, and the White House staff physician, Dr. Janet G. Travell. He said his chief of Congressional liaison, Lawrence F. O’Brien, had also submitted his resignation but that “at my urgent request” he had agreed to remain “to launch the new legislative program” in the 89th Congress.
The Railway Labor Executives Association announced today that it favored government ownership and control of the railroad industry.
At 9:31 in the morning, 22 residents of a neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas, were killed when a U.S. Air Force KC-135 jet tanker crashed on North Piatt Street near 20th Street, and enveloped 11 houses in flame. All seven of the crew died in the accident. Loaded with almost 31,000 US gallons (120,000 L; 26,000 imp gal) of jet fuel, the KC-135 had taken off from McConnell Air Force Base on a training exercise to refuel a B-52 in flight. The site where the homes once stood is now Piatt Park.
The prospects for success of a renewed Congressional drive to restrict and control the growing mail-order trade in cheap guns have been enhanced this year.
Two bills have been introduced in the House aimed at giving Congress greater flexibility in handling contempt-of-Congress citations against witnesses who refuse to testily or to produce documents.
A new vote on the controversial waterfront labor contract was scheduled yesterday at International Longshoremen’s Association headquarters. It will be held next Thursday.
The John Birch Society, in its January Bulletin, announced that it had collected $3.2 million in donations in 1964, just about twice the amount it had received from members in 1963.
The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith announced last night that it would present President Johnson with its America’s Democratic Legacy Award for “distinguished contributions to the enrichment of our democratic heritage.”
Discovery this week of a deposit of 8,000 pounds of the agricultural pesticide endrin in a city sewer is the latest development in a year-long controversy in Memphis, Tennessee over stream pollution. The amount of pesticide was called enough to pollute the entire Mississippi River.
A blizzard struck the metropolitan New York area early yesterday, bringing heavily drifting snow, gale-force winds and bitter cold. The blizzard covered much of the East with snow from Maryland to Massachusetts.
“Oh What a Lovely War” closes at Broadhurst NYC after 125 performances.
“Outer Limits” last airs on ABC-TV.
The Searchers’ “Love Potion Number 9” peaks at #3.
4th AFL All Star Game, Jeppeson Stadium, Houston: The Western Division beats Eastern Division, 38-14; MVPs: Keith Lincoln, San Diego Chargers, running back; Willie Brown, Denver Broncos, cornerback.
Born:
Jill Sobule, American singer-songwriter (“I Kissed a Girl”), in Denver, Colorado.
Delton Hall, NFL cornerback (Pittsburgh Steelers, San Diego Chargers), in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Cedric Hunter, NBA point guard (Charlotte Hornets), in Wichita Falls, Texas.
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