RIPPLE SALVO… #259… AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM… but first…
Good Morning: Day TWO HUNDRED FIFTY-NINE of a review of OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER on the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War…
16 NOVEMBER 1966… HEAD LINES AT HOME from the NEW YORK TIMES on a pretty cool Wednesday in New York…
Page 1: “Last of Gemini Flights Splashes Down close to target with landing in the Atlantic completing the Gemini series of 12 flights. Astronauts Lovell and Aldrin are well to finish on high note (great picture on Page 1) as NASA moves on to Apollo Phase of U.S. Plan for Manned Moon flight.”… Page 1: “Johnson Enters Naval Hospital for Operation on Abdomen, surgery is today at Bethesda will also remove a polyp.”… Page !: “Brezhnev Echoes Bulgaria Call for a Red Parley and states Soviet implicitly supports a plan for a world meeting to deal with Chinese, Rumania is silent and others at Sophia conference hint wide range of opinions on Bulgarian proposal.”… Page 1: “Israelis Put Onus For Raid on Syria asserting terrorism provoked their attacks on Jordan. U.N. meeting today.”… Page 1: “Enemy in Vietnam Downs 5 Copters, 3 Lost in Big Hunt for Vietcong Division…The loss of five helicopters to enemy gunners was announced by the United States command yesterday. contact between the United States and enemy troops was reported to be light and scattered…Three of the five helicopters were lost in Tayninh province, 60 miles north of Saigon. The other two were lost to ground fire Monday near Danang, 380 miles northeast of Saigon. Three men were killed. The five losses bring to 223 the number of American helicopters lost in the war.”… Page 2: “Red China Moderates Threats of Intervention In Vietnam War. ‘A remarkable by product of the upheaval in China known as the cultural revolution in the simultaneous moderation of Peking’s threats of intervention in the war in Vietnam.’…”… Page 2: “US Nuclear Subs Ply Gulf of Tonkin Gulf but Admiral declares they have no Polaris missiles…The presence of the submarines in the Gulf had not previously been confirmed.”… Page 3: “Suit Demands Negroes Be Put On Draft Boards…action in Mississippi seeks to block the induction of Black rights activist John Otis Sumrall, age 20.”… Page 5: “Students and Police Clash At Pembroke (R.I.) As General Wheeler, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Speaks.”
16 November 1966… The President’s Daily Brief…CIA (TS sanitized)… South Vietnam: Ky has completed his cabinet changes by splitting the Ministry of Economy and finance into three. Henceforth there will be three ministries for industry, commerce and finance. Southerners will fill all three posts as well as three other vacancies created when disgruntled southerners walked out last month. The three economic ministers are to form an economic council under the chairmanship of Ky with the governor of the national bank as secretary general. This will give the governor a major voice in over-all economic policy…
16 NOVEMBER 1966… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER…NYT: No coverage of air war in North Vietnam… “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson) Page 81: Two fixed wing aircraft downed in Southeast Asia on 16 November 1966…
(1) LCOL C.A. SMITH, COL G.F. BRADBURN and A2C ALLAN D. PITTMAN were flying an A-1G of the 602nd ACS and 14th ACW out of Udorn on an admistrtive flight between Nha Trang to Udorn when downed by ground fire in southern Laos. All three escaped the aircraft. LCOL SMITH and COL BRADBURN were rescued by a USAF HH-3E within two hours of the downing. AC2 PITTMAN was seen alive on the ground but was not rescued. A force of Royal Laotian Army troops and U.S. led “irregular troops” were put into the area and searched the area without success on 17 and 18 November. A few days later a Laotian villager escaped from a Pathet Lao camp and reported that an American aviator had been captured and shot by the North Vietnamese. A2C PITTMAN was declared dead in April 1978, but was Killed in Action evading the enemy in Laos in November 1966… Where he apparently remains today…No man left behind???
(2) CAPTAIN D.B. MOORE was flying an F-100D of the 614th TFS and 35th TFW out of Phan Rang on a strike mission in an area near the border of South Vietnam and Cambodia 40 miles west of Pleiku. CAPTAIN MOORE was hit by ground fire delivering napalm on a 300-foot run-in, flew his crippled and failing aircraft clear of the enemy controlled area and ejected. He was rescued by an Army helicopter…
RIPPLE SALVO… #259… At this point in the Vietnam War both sides– the United States and North Vietnam — were accusing the other side of “aggression in South Vietnam” as “justification of the war.” In every speech, press conference and paper for the record, the United States referred to North Vietnam as “the aggressor,” and vice versa. At the same time, both sides were adding troops by the thousands to their in-country forces. Justification for large American forces in South Vietnam became a growing challenge from critics at home and abroad for the Johnson Administration. On 15 November 1966 Secretary of State gave a speech in Washington entitled, “The Future of the Pacific Community” that zeroed in on the Administration answer to those critics. Here are the pertinent paragraphs of that speech that address American justification for waging war in South Vietnam… I quote Secretary Rusk…
“….indirect aggression by infiltration of men and arms across frontiers is still with us. It was tried in Greece, in Malaya, in the Philippines, and now in South Vietnam. The label ‘civil war’ or ‘war of national liberation’ does not make it any less an aggression. The purpose is to impose on others an unwanted regime. It substitutes terror for persuasion, force for free choice. And especially if it succeeds, it contains the inherent threat of further aggression–and even eventually war….
“The militant Asian Communists have themselves proclaimed the attack on South Vietnam to be a critical test of the technique. And beyond South Vietnam and Laos they have openly designated Thailand as the next target….
“Now, as a generation ago, some people are saying that if you let an aggressor take just one more bite, he will be satisfied. But one of the plainest lessons of our times is that one aggression leads to another–by the initial aggressor and perhaps by others who decide there would be profit in emulating him.
“Some assert that we have no national security interest in South Vietnam and Southeast Asia. But that is not the judgment of those who have borne the high responsibilities for the safety of the United States. Beginning with President Truman, four successive Presidents, after extended consultations with their principal advisors, have decided that we have a very important interest in the security of that area.
“There is a further and more specific reason why we are assisting South Vietnam: Out of the strategic conclusions of four successive Presidents came commitments, including the Southeast Asia collective Defense Treaty. The Senate approved it with only one negative vote.
“Our commitments are the backbone of world peace. It is essential that neither our adversaries nor our friends ever doubt that we will do what we say we will do. Otherwise, the result is very likely to be a great catastrophe.
“In his last public utterance President Kennedy reviewed what the United States had done to preserve freedom and peace since the Second World War, and our defensive commitments, including our support of South Vietnam. He said: ‘We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do as we have done in the past, our duty….’ ” End Rusk quote from 15 November 1966 speech…
From my perspective this was the “cross-over point” in the Vietnam war where the United States went from supporting the South Vietnamese in their civil war with the National Liberation Front/Vietcong to owning the war. Historians refer to this as “the Americanization of the war.” In response to the increasing numbers of North Vietnamese coming from the North to aid the Vietcong, we bucked up our troop strength to almost 400,000 by the end of 1966. At this point the war belonged to LBJ (and America). Eisenhower and Kennedy were off the hook–they had limited their commitment to a limited number of advisors and we were only there to support. LBJ came to fight, sort of. A good case also can be made that it was on JFKs watch where the war became our war, and American war. The assassination of President Diem on 2 November 1963 occurred in an American approved coup by South Vietnamese Army generals that was aided and abetted by our Ambassador Lodge and our CIA acting with the concurrence of the President. JFK would be assassinated in Dallas twenty days later leaving LBJ to sort it out. In either case–LBJ troop strength in the several hundred thousands or the Diem assassination during JFKs tenure– the Vietnam war became an American nightmare by November 1966.
What are the lessons of Vietnam for us in the 21st century and for the new Trump Administration? (1) Rusk said it well– if you say you are going to do something, do it, or all hades breaks loose, (2) appeasement and backing off when an aggressor takes and occupies the land of another sovereign nation invites more of the same, and (3) beware the cross-over point where assistance becomes ownership… Think: (1) red lines in Syria, (2) the Russian seizure of Crimea, and (3) a few hundred advisors in Iraq, and a few hundred more, and …
Lest we forget… Bear -30-