United States and South Vietnamese fighter-bombers, in the largest air strike of the war, dropped 1,000 tons of bombs today on what was described as a major stronghold of the Việt Cộng. In a dawn-to-dusk raid, 230 aircraft saturated a heavily wooded area in Tây Ninh Province, where political and military leaders of the Việt Cộng are believed to maintain their headquarters. The target area, about two miles wide and four miles long, is 72 miles northwest of Saigon near the Cambodian border.
Navy planes operating from the carriers USS Midway and USS Coral Sea off the South Vietnamese coast joined for the first time with planes of the Air Force, Army, Marines and South Vietnamese Air Force in operations against the Việt Cộng. The Navy, which carried out 38 percent of the sorties, dropped 300 tons of bombs including a number of 2,000-pounders.
To participate in the joint raid, the Midway and Coral Sea moved south from their stations off North Vietnam, which has been the target of their fighter-bombers. Colonel Jean K. Woodyard of Newark, Ohio, an Air Force operations officer, said that the bombing was directed at “bunker-like installations” in the target area. All the bombs were of the general-purpose type with instantaneous fuses.
The results of the strike against the Việt Cộng were not immediately known, although returning pilots reported six secondary explosions after their strikes. Ground fire was described as lighter than had been expected. All aircraft up to a late hour had been reported returned to their bases. Two Navy planes were lightly hit by small-arms fire.
Two Army light observation planes hovered over the target area. One saw to it that none of the aircraft strayed over the Cambodian border and the other guided fighter-bombers away from the village of Katum in the northeast corner of the strike area. Katum, which is inhabited by friendly mountaineer people, was the only village in the region. United States officers declined to identify the nature of targets except to say that the saturated area was considered one of the “major Việt Cộng strongholds.” Colonel Woodyard, who flew over the area this morning, added that he had seen a garden with a trail extending from it that joined with a network of other trails.
The joint strike was undertaken after General William C. Westmoreland, Commander of the United States Military Assistance Command, ordered a “maximum effort.” General Westmoreland, who originally asked for the use of United States jet aircraft within South Vietnam, has urged his intelligence officers to find targets for the potent air power made available to him
There have been reports for years that members of the Central Committee of the South Vietnam National Liberation Front. which is the political organization of the Việt Cộng, its clandestine camps, the Liberation Radio, and central military headquarters of the Việt Cộng operate in the region that was bombed today. Some of the headquarters are said to be moved periodically through the dense forests that cover many hundreds of square miles. The region has often been struck by United States planes. Some months ago it was seeded with leaflets warning the population to leave. It was declared a “free bomb zone” in February, which means that anything that moves in the area can be fired upon. The region is a training area for the Việt Cộng. Groups infiltrating from North Vietnam through Laos are processed at camps in the forests there before moving on to their permanent units in South Vietnam.
In another strike, at North Vietnam, six F-105’s of the United States Air Force supported by 15 other jet aircraft conducted armed reconnaissance today along Highways 7 and 8, which run east to west and extend about 120 miles southwest of Hanoi. In the same area, jets dropped nine tons of bombs on a boat landing at Mường Xén. The planes encountered light to moderate ground fire but all returned to their base, a United States spokesman said.
South Vietnamese bombers, led by Vice Air Marshal Kỳ, then sink four ships in another night raid. South Vietnamese bombers sank four Communist warships north of the 17th Parallel last night in the second successive after-dark raid on North Vietnamese targets, a South Vietnamese spokesman reported today.
Sites near Hanoi, capital of North Vietnam, are being prepared for the installation of surface-to-air protective missiles, official sources said tonight. However, they said there were no indications of the presence of the weapons themselves or the radar-guiding equipment that would send the missiles homing on attacking planes. Officially, there was no comment from the Defense Department on this development. Previous reports that such measures were under way in North Vietnam have been denied at the Pentagon.
It could not be determined whether the sites under construction had been photographed or viewed from the air or learned about through other intelligence means. Neither could sources confirm that Soviet technicians were at work on the projects. However, it was assumed that this was probably so, as the North Vietnamese are not believed capable of doing the job alone.
The sites in preparation are believed to be for the Soviet weapon known as the SAM-2, a missile with an altitude capability of up to 100,000 feet. This would be sufficient to reach any aircraft now being used in the Vietnam war by the United States and the South Vietnamese. It was a similar weapon that brought down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane, which was photographing areas in the Soviet Union in 1960. If the actual weapons reach the Hanoi sites it will be because Communist China has lifted its ban on the shipment of Soviet equipment through its territory to North Vietnam.
Apparently, the eventual supply of these weapons to the North Vietnamese by the Soviet Union would not surprise officials in Washington. Delivery would mean that the Soviet Union had made good the promise of Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin, who visited Hanoi recently. The SAM weapons are well known to United States military authorities. Twenty-four sites with weapons installed were observed in Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis and photographed from low altitude. They are still in Cuba, although the ballistic missiles that provoked the crisis were removed by the Soviet Union.
An explosion ripped through an ammunition storage area last night at the United States Army’s 117th Aviation Company compound in Quy Nhơn. A military spokesman said there was a possibility that the blast had been set off by Việt Cộng saboteurs. There were no casualties, the spokesman said, but six cases of rockets were destroyed and four helicopters, two trucks, and one forklift were damaged. The spokesman said the exact cause of the explosion had not been determined, but that an investigation was going on. Quy Nhơn, 270 miles northeast of Saigon, was the site of a Việt Cộng terrorist attack on an American enlisted men’s billet early in February. Twenty-three men were killed and more than 40 wounded in that attack, in which a guerrilla suicide squad planted bombs in the billet.
Meanwhile, United States warplanes from the Seventh Fleet followed up leaflet raids during the day with the first United States night flight over North Vietnam. A spokesman said no bombs had been dropped and no bullets fired, however, because no targets were seen. The Saigon radio said Vietnamese fighter-bombers were also over North Vietnam in the night hours and had bombed a military convoy.
A Vietnamese firing squad today executed a Việt Cộng terrorist who tried to blow up a Đà Nẵng hotel filled with United States servicemen on April 4. The terrorist, Lê Dậu, also known as Lê Độ, 24 years old, was killed in the center of Đà Nẵng’s public soccer stadium in the early afternoon. He was convicted of an attempt to place a plastic bomb inside the Grand Hotel hours after a contingent of United States Army military police checked in 10 days ago.
The Việt Cộng have threatened to execute a kidnapped United States aid official, 46-year-old Gustaf Hertz of Leesburgh, Virginia, if the government executes another terrorist, who is being held in Saigon in the bombing of the United States Embassy. March 30. The guerrillas have not mentioned Lê Dậu in this respect.
Peking called on the Vietnamese Communists today to drive the United States forces out of Vietnam. At the same time, it endorsed Premier Pham Van Dong’s four-point proposal for “solving the Vietnam question.”
Prime Minister Harold Wilson, visiting Washington, pledged to President Johnson moral support for the U.S. position in the war in Vietnam. Prime Minister Wilson and American officials agreed today that serious discussions on means of improving the world’s financial system should get under way by this summer. Agreement on ways to enlarge and improve international monetary resources to finance the growing volume of world trade is not expected to be reached before late 1966. The subject is technically complex and is a matter of political disagreement among the major industrialized nations.
However, Mr. Wilson expressed strongly today his view that a start must be made soon, and his position received a sympathetic reception at the Treasury Department. A visit by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, to the United States this summer was arranged. He will begin Cabinet-level talks on the matter with the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry H. Fowler. Just before he comes here, he will meet his French counterpart, Valery Giscard d’Estaing.
The meeting of the Prime Minister with officials at the Treasury Department was apparently the most fruitful — in the sense of producing concrete results — of the several sessions that Mr. Wilson had today with high-ranking American officials, including President Johnson. Following his talk with the President, Mr. Wilson reiterated his support for United States policy in Vietnam, although he added that the British were not in a position to be of material assistance because of their heavy commitments elsewhere, in Asia.
Presidential envoy Ellsworth Bunker ended his mission to Jakarta in apparent failure as the United States and Indonesia appeared to drift further apart.
Indonesia and North Korea in a joint statement issued in Jakarta today strongly condemned the bombings by the United States of North Vietnam. The statement was signed by President Sukarno and the North Korean Premier, Kim Il Sung, who is on a seven-day visit to Indonesia.
The Central Intelligence Agency has advised Congress that Cuba seems to be focusing its subversive efforts largely on Venezuela, Guatemala and Colombia, spending more than $1 million.
Homosexuality has become “an alarming political and social matter” in Cuba, a leading newspaper of Premier Fidel Castro’s Government warned today. In an article titled “Revolution and Vices,” El Mundo of Havana said that sexual deviants were blatant in Cuban cities and had infiltrated intellectual and art life. The article singled out the ballet and suggested it was better to disband some dance troupes than to tolerate them as known centers of immorality.
Joint industrial planning, a gradual elimination of internal tariffs and a continental payments union have been urged as the main steps toward the creation of a Latin-American common market within 10 years.
Despite its arms talks with Israel and four Arab states, the United States is seeking to tone down any impression that it is a major contributor to the Middle East arms race.
West Germany paid Israel $75 million in cash and goods, the 13th and final installment of three billion deutschemarks ($882,000,000) in reparations for the costs associated with the relocation of 500,000 Holocaust survivors from Germany to Israel and their subsequent support by the Israeli government. Payments had commenced in 1952, and most were in the form of the fair market value of West German products and services as requested by a purchasing office in Köln. The last head of the Israeli purchasing mission, Dr. Felix Shinnar, told the press that the reparations “paid for construction of 49 Israeli merchant ships and equipment and machinery for 500 Israeli industrial enterprises.”
The U.S. State Department said today that it now supported a Congressional resolution condemning Soviet persecution of Jews. Such condemnation, the State Department said, might contribute to the world pressure on the Soviet Union to stop anti-Semitic practices.
The Indian External Affairs Minister charged today that the Pakistan army was occupying two posts inside Indian territory in the Rann of Cutch, the salt marsh bordering on the Sind area of West Pakistan.
Security police have frustrated a plot by pro-Peking Bulgarian Communists in high places to overthrow the government of Premier Todor Zhivkov, sources said.
The first prototype of the Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma helicopter made its maiden flight.
At 7:22 AM today, a small group of officials and scholars bowed their heads over a cheap bedstead in a small hall bedroom in Washington, D.C. Outside, in a tiny garden, an Army bugler stood among freshly opened hyacinths and sounded taps. Thus was commemorated the death of Abraham Lincoln a century ago. Lincoln was shot in his box at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth. Carried across 10th Street to the modest home of William Peterson, a tailor, Lincoln lingered unconscious until the next morning. He died at 7:22 AM, one hundred years ago, this day.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has approved an advance authorization of whatever amount of economic and military assistance President Johnson may eventually request for carrying on the war in South Vietnam.
Vice President Humphrey predicted today that the 89th Congress, “acting out the will of the American people, “would approve all President Johnson’s proposed Great Society legislation.
A freedom of information committee charged today that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his information chief “confuse the Defense Department’s public in formation policy with the public relations program of the Ford Motor Company.”
The federal government’s threat to withhold funds to force the South to comply with the Civil Rights Act drew support from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights which is meeting in Atlanta.
Negotiators for the steel industry and the United Steelworkers of America failed to reach agreement today on extending their present contracts past the strike deadline of May 1. The Steelworkers Union rejected as completely inadequate an industry offer of limited contract improvements in exchange for an extension of a May 1 strike deadline.
Minnesota’s riverbank communities, warned that the worst is yet to come, made last-minute preparations to face their wettest Easter weekend in history. Makeshift dikes in downtown St. Paul held fast today, protecting industries there from the turbulent, rising Mississippi.
The use of birth control pills by American women has been so successful that it has been unnecessary to take any of the five approved types off the market, the Food and Drug Administration reported to Congress today.
Jerome J. Keating, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, told a Senate subcommittee that the nation’s mail service will become worse than it already is unless a $35 million budget cut is restored.
Representative Adam Clayton Powell threatened today to try to cut off all federal financial support for New York City’s antipoverty program. The New York Democrat charged Mayor Wagner to his face with violating the anti-poverty statute Congress enacted last year by failing to include enough poor people in the development and administration of the city’s plan. Then, in a television interview in the corridor outside a House hearing room, Mr. Powell declared that he would ask the Controller General to stop allocations of anti-poverty aid to New York City because of the illegality of its program.
The 15-day strike at Bloomingdale’s in New York ended today when employes voted overwhelmingly to accept a contract providing for a wage increase and other benefits.
Theories about the surface of the moon as revealed by the Ranger photos, including one supposition that the moon has a subsurface layer of ice, were told at a scientific meeting.
Iowa Governor Harold Hughes, all 230 pounds of him, lumbered through his residential neighborhood at dawn in his pajamas and bathrobe chasing his Irish setter.
James Baldwin’s 1954 stage drama “The Amen Corner” opens at Ethel Barrymore Theatre, NYC; runs for 84 performances.
NFL changes penalty flag from white to bright gold.
The Boston Celtics, forced tonight to put on one of their strongest battles in years, just managed to beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 110–109, and win the Eastern Division championship of the National Basketball Association for the ninth straight season. The Celtics will meet the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals.
Major League Baseball:
Gordy Coleman cracks a 5th-inning homer off former Red Bob Purkey as the Reds down the Cardinals, 10–4. Vada Pinson adds a 3–run homer off Purkey, who allows 9 runs.
An error set up the eighth-inning single that ruined Bennie Daniels’s bid for a no-hitter today, but the Washington Senators went on to a 3–1 victory and spoiled the Chicago White Sox’ home opener.
The fine hand of Mel Stottlemyre pitched the New York Yankees to their first victory of the season tonight — a seven-hit 4–0 shutout over the Los Angeles Angels.
Norm Cash and Al Kaline hit home runs today and Dave Wickersham settled down after a rocky start to pitch the Detroit Tigers to a 6-4 victory over the Minnesota Twins.
New York Yankees 4, California Angels 0
Washington Senators 3, Chicago White Sox 1
Cleveland Indians 3, Kansas City Athletics 7
Detroit Tigers 6, Minnesota Twins 4
Chicago Cubs 1, Milwaukee Braves 5
Houston Astros 4, New York Mets 5
Cincinnati Reds 10, St. Louis Cardinals 4
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 911.91 (-0.95)
Born:
Linda Perry, American songwriter and singer (4 Non Blondes – “What’s Up”; Christina Aguilera – “Beautiful”); in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Kevin Stevens, NHL left wing (NHL Champions, Stanley Cup-Penguins 1991, 1992; NHL All-Star, 1991, 1992, 1993; Pittsburgh Penguins, Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers), in Brockton, Massachusetts.
Anthony Miller, NFL wide receiver (Pro Bowl, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995; San Diego Chargers, Denver Broncos, Dallas Cowboys), in Los Angeles, California.
Mark Dennis, NFL tackle (Miami Dolphins, Cincinnati Bengals, Carolina Panthers), in Junction City, Kansas.
Michele Redman, American golfer (2 LPGA Tour titles), in Zanesville, Ohio.
Soichi Noguchi, Japanese astronaut (1996 NASDA Group, NASA Group 16 (1996); STS-114 [Discovery], 2005; Soyuz TMA-17 (Expedition 22/23), 2010; SpaceX Crew-1 (Expedition 64/65), 2020-2021; in Yokohama, Japan.
Died:
Sydney Chaplin, 80, English actor, half brother of Charlie Chaplin and his business manager.
History Diaries 