United States Navy and Air Force planes knocked out six bridges today in a series of air strikes at North Vietnam. Military spokesmen described the raids as successes in a continuing effort to sever communications links that may be used to supply and reinforce Communist guerrilla units in South Vietnam. The Navy fighter-bombers, operating from the carriers USS Coral Sea and USS Midway, returned for a second strike at their targets after they failed to destroy two bridges assigned to them. A Navy spokesman afterward remarked with a smile: “We tied the Air Force.”
Early in the morning, elements of the South Vietnamese Army’s Fifth Division and an air-borne brigade were lifted by helicopter into a forest area 70 miles northwest of Saigon, a day after the area suffered saturation bombing. Aircraft of all four United States armed services and of the South Vietnamese Air Force, totaling 230 planes, had dropped 1,000 tons of bombs on what was described as a major stronghold of the Việt Cộng.
The airdropped troops, pushing through heavy jungle toward the target area, made no contact with the guerrillas as of the afternoon. according to a United States spokesman. Helicopters and fighter planes, supporting the airborne assault, reported no ground fire in the landing zones. In ordering the forest strike — the largest raid of the Vietnamese war — United States officers said they had detected bunker building in the area. There have been reports that the headquarters of the Việt Cộng forces and of their parent body, the National Liberation Front, are somewhere in the region.
Airmen said that the bombs, which included 2,000-pounders, ripped tree cover from at least 30 large wooden structures. Six secondary explosions — blasts of ammunition on the ground — were touched off by the bombs. One threw white smoke 3,000 feet into the air. A spokesman said 15 wooden structures and 2 vehicles had been destroyed. The Air Force strike at the North Vietnamese bridges was unusually successful. Thirty-five F-105 tactical fighter planes, supported by 35 other aircraft, were assigned three targets and were instructed to knock down each bridge in order before proceeding to the next.
The first bridge destroyed was a single-span structure, 236 feet long and 9 feet wide, south of Hanoi. The fighters then knocked out a road bridge of two spans. 515 feet by 10. The final demolished target was a three-span railroad bridge at Phú Diên Châu, 390 feet by 15, midway between Hanoi and the South Vietnamese border. All the aircraft returned to their bases. No enemy aircraft was encountered, and the ground fire was light to moderate.
Rear Admiral Edward C. Outlaw, commander of the carrier task force, sent Navy fighter-bombers out on a second strike when they failed to complete the destruction of two of their three assigned bridges. At the end of the day, a Navy spokesman was able to report that two bridges had been knocked out at Xóm Cả Trang, 185 miles south of Hanoi. On the initial strike, the larger of the two bridges there was rendered unusable by a direct hit with a 600-pound Bullpup missile, which was radio controlled and visually guided by the pilot. On the second strike a secondary bridge at Xóm Cả Trang was destroyed. Another, at Bài du thôn, 170 miles south of Hanoi, was finished off. It had been only damaged on the first strike.
North Vietnam asserted today that seven United States planes had been shot down and many others damaged in the bridge raids. A Hanoi announcement, broadcast by the Peking radio, said the people and the army had “scored brilliant victories.”
A 21-year-old girl led South Vietnamese policemen to a stockpile of Communist bombs and grenades in Saigon, the authorities announced today.
North Vietnam said today that it had protested to the International Control Commission against “grave piratical attacks by the United States and its agents” Thursday and yesterday.
Johnson Administration officials said today they were not surprised by the first signs that North Vietnam was preparing to install Soviet antiaircraft missiles to help defend Hanoi, its capital.
Peking asserted today that the question of war or peace in Vietnam hinged on whether the United States would “get out” of South Vietnam. In the continuing Chinese Communist campaign of militant opposition to any compromise settlement, an editorial in the Peking newspaper Jenmin Jih Pao appealed to the people of the world to “take action to force the United States aggressors to quit Vietnam.” The editorial said that withdrawal of all United States armed forces was an “indispensable precondition for a peaceful settlement of the Vietnam question.”
Jenmin Jih Pao, the organ of the Chinese Communist party, said the Vietnamese people were determined to “defend the North, to liberate the South and reunify the country. The aggressive nature of United States imperialism will never change and one cannot expect it to lay down its sword of its own accord. Only when it suffers still heavier defeats and when it is confronted with still more vigorous opposition of the people of the world can its plans of aggression and war be punctured.”
A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tokyo voiced the conviction today that Japanese public opinion would come to support the government in its backing for United States policy in Vietnam. Akira Sono, the ministry’s information director. declared that the continued American. bombing attacks against North Vietnam had not altered the Japanese Government’s support for United States policy. Mr. Sono acknowledged in a news conference that Japanese news reporting from South Vietnam often reflected leftwing political sentiment. The government is now studying the effect to which such reporting has influenced public opinion, he said.
More than 10,000 students from all over the country are expected to descend on Washington, D.C. tomorrow to protest against Administration policies in Vietnam.
About 300 students stormed the gates of the South Korean Government building after three battalions of combat troops had reinforced the police in the city to help quell disorders. Students battled policemen outside the building in the fourth consecutive day of rioting over plans by Korea to normalize relations with Japan. The police pushed the protesters back. The troops were rushed to the capital today, when 475 students were arrested in riots near two universities, according to police estimates. About 51 policemen were injured, 27 of them seriously. A 20-year-old student died tonight of head injuries. The police said he had received his wounds in a quarrel with other students. But charges of “police” brutality” were made by the students.
Premier Chou En-lai arrived in Jakarta by air today and urged African and Asian nations to “smash all imperialist schemes for aggression and war.” The Chinese Communist leader is there for celebrations beginning tomorrow to mark the 10th anniversary of the first! African-Asian conference, held at Bandung, Indonesia. It was attended by 29 nations, some of them just emerging from colonial status.
President Johnson has postponed a number of visits by foreign leaders because of “the Congressional workload” and “the situation in Vietnam,” the White House said today. Mr. Johnson, who said in his State of the Union Message January 4 that he hoped to visit Europe and Latin America this year, has also deferred planning for such journeys. George E. Reedy, the press secretary, said that a visit by Pakistan’s President, Mohammad Ayub Khan, scheduled for April 25 and 26, and one by India’s Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, scheduled for June 2 and 3, had been postponed until the fall.
France’s Minister of Defense declared today that in the absence of a common nuclear strategy the meeting of the North Atlantic alliance’s defense ministers would prove unsuccessful.
The Turkish Cypriot leader, Fazil Kutchuk, protested strongly tonight to the commander of the United Nations peace-keeping force, General Kodendera S. Thimayya, over the isolation of the Turkish quarter of Nicosia by Greek Cypriots.
President Tito of Yugoslavia marked the second day of his state visit to Algiers by joining President Ahmed Ben Bella at a 90-minute mass rally on Algiers’ Africa Square.
Authoritative Israeli sources asserted today that Lebanon had carried out a new step in Arab plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River.
Pope Paul VI culminated a Good Friday sunset observance by carrying a cross on a torchlit Way of the Cross journey where Christians once were thrown to lions.
The Chinese Communists calculated some time ago that the weakest psychological aspect of the Indian Army was the vast gap between officers and enlisted men, a vestige of British military organization. The Indian Army is now beginning to try to address the gap.
The Egyptian Government is asking the United States to provide $500 million worth of surplus food in the next three years, informed sources said today.
A Parisian physician, his brother and a friend were being held today as leaders of a gang that has looted churches and chateaux of art works valued at $7 million or more in recent years.
Sheriff James G. Clark of Dallas County (Alabama) was ordered by a three-judge federal court to cease using members of the county posse to police racial demonstrations. The posse is composed of civilians, including horsemen, appointed by the sheriff as auxiliary officers. The sheriff had used them frequently in racial disturbances starting in January. More than 2,000 persons were arrested during the months-long right-to-vote drive in the Selma area. The panel also restrained Mr. Clark and his agents from arresting, detaining under unreasonable bail “or punishing discriminatorily and without just cause any person exercising or seeking to exercise his right to vote or to register to vote, or to use public accommodations free from racial discrimination.”
Mr. Clark was also restrained from interfering with persons “organizing, meeting or assembling to discuss or advocate the exercise of their constitutional rights.” The injunction was sought by the Justice Department. “There is no question,” the court said, “that the purpose of Sheriff Clark’s personal actions and conduct, and also that of his agents, as herein found, was to suppress efforts by Blacks to exercise their lawful and constitutional rights.”
President Johnson is preparparing the biggest shift in diplomatic assignments in four years. The program will involve changes in at least five major State Department jobs and more than a dozen United States embassies.
Key industry and union sources feel that only the White House could avert a steel strike May 1. The government’s top mediator entered the steel negotiations today in an effort to stop the threatened strike.
President Johnson announced today he would nominate a Black Air Force officer, Major General Benjamin O. Davis, to be a lieutenant general, the highest rank ever held by a Black in the armed forces. His father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., was the first Black brigadier general in the American military.
Attorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he had banned disclosure of pre-trial evidence against persons accused of federal offenses. Attorney General Katzenbach told the nation’s newspaper editors today what information the Justice Department would, and would not, supply in Federal criminal proceedings.
Flood waters of the rampaging Mississippi River and tributaries spread over new areas. Evacuation of lowlands was speeded and dikes were bolstered.
Sargent Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity is looking with disquiet at New York City’s antipoverty program, sources within the Federal agency said yesterday.
The Administration has decided to build a small atomic submarine to carry out the first extensive exploration of the ocean bottoms, Congressional sources disclosed today.
A team of bandits took more than $130,000 worth of loot from deposit boxes in a Miami Beach resort hotel jammed with Passover celebrants.
The SFO Helicopter Airlines in San Francisco, the nation’s only unsubsidized service, is still managing to stay aloft despite a $1 million loss.
Twenty-seven cars of a Southern Pacific freight train derailed in a tangle of twisted steel and cargo that blocked the main coastal line through the San Fernando Valley.
In Huntsville, Alabama, scientists made the first test of the most powerful rocket engine system ever developed, the powerful first stage of the three-stage Saturn rocket, composed of five engines that could combine for 7.5 million pounds of thrust. “The thunderous sound of the first static test of this stage,” an author would later note, “brought home to many observers that the Kennedy goal” (of sending a man to the Moon before the end of the decade) “was within technological grasp.”
Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, the President of Planned Parenthood, told a gathering of the American Academy of General Practice in San Francisco that if the birth rate was not decreased, the world’s population would be 150 billion people by the year 2050. By 2015, the United Nations” prediction for the world’s population for 2050 was 9.6 billion people.
The Ranger project’s photographs of the moon have provided answers needed for the next steps toward landing men there, officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said today.
Born:
Martin Lawrence, American film and television comedian (“Martin”); at a U.S. military base in Frankfurt, Hesse, West Germany.
Jon Cryer, American actor (“Pretty in Pink”, “Superman IV”); in New York, New York.
Caren Kemner, American volleyball outside hitter (Olympic bronze medal, 1992, 1996), in Quincy, Illinois.
Ferrell Edmunds, NFL tight end (Pro Bowl, 1989, 1990; Miami Dolphins, Seattle Seahawks), in South Boston, Virginia.
Died:
Sydney Chaplin, 80, English actor and half-brother and business manager for Charlie Chaplin.
History Diaries 