RIPPLE SALVO… #545… “Your Yankee Air Pirates have unveiled the extremely warlike and cruel face of American imperialism.”… bur first…
Good Morning: Day FIVE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE of a flashback of fifty years to the bombing of North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder…
2 SEPTEMBER 1967… HEAD LINES from The New York Times on a great football Saturday in New York…
VIETNAM: President’s News Conference: “PRESIDENT DENIES RIFT ON BOMBING–DEFENDS POLICIES–REPLIES TO SENATE PANEL’S CALL FOR WIDER WAR IN AIR–DIFFERENCES BELITTLED–JOHNSON BLAMES PRESS FOR REPORTS OF DIVISION AMONG HIS ADVISORS”... “President Johnson defended today his policy of controlled bombing of Vietnam and denied the existence of a rift between his military and civilian advisor. Speaking at an unscheduled news conference in his office the President offered a low-key cautiously worded reply to those who have demanded he widen the war. The Senate Preparedness Investigation Subcommittee headed by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, urged him yesterday to expand the air war, abandon ‘carefully controlled’ bombing and pay more attention to his top-level military advisors in selecting targets. Mr. Johnson said he did not want to argue with the committee. Then he added: ‘I believe our policy is a sound one. It is based on the best judgement that we have. Every decision is going to be made after we get all the facts and then we are going to do what we think is in the best national interest. I am sure the committee wants to do the same thing.’ “… Page 1: “Mansfield Says Johnson Backs U.N. Vietnam Move”... “Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, said today that the campaign he had been leading in the Senate to get the United Nations Security Council to take up the issue of the Vietnam war had the full support and cooperation of President Johnson.”… Page 1: “Vietcong Step-Up Private Terror–65 Villagers Kidnapped”... “The tempo of Vietcong terrorism and shellings quickened today as South Vietnam’s presidential election neared…B-52s attacked North Vietnamese concentrations inside the six-mile wide demilitarized zone separating the two Vietnams.”…
SUMMER IN AMERICA 1967: Page 10: “Whites and Negroes Split at New Politics Parley–Many Delegates Go To Caucus To Debate United Front In Chicago Talks”… “An emotionally charged division between Negro and white delegates threatened to destroy the effectiveness of the radical convention called by the National Conference On The New Politics. As full convention sessions opened here, virtually all the 400 Negro delegates were absent most of them at victims of the so-called Black Caucus debating whether to agree with a united front with the white liberals. The remaining delegates voted to send a peace mission o the Black Caucus to offer the Negroes three or more seats on the steering committee. They defeated however, a move to give Negroes half the membership of the panel. the desire of many of the Negroes for separate political action was forcefully presented by Floyd B. McKissick, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality. ‘No longer can the black man be a plank in someone else’s platform. We must be the platform ourselves if we are to survive.’ To the cheers of whites and Negroes present, he called for a movement in which ‘every black man has his say and maintained that ‘that kind of organization and only that kind of organization is what the black man needs.’ “… Page 10: “THURGOOD MARSHALL INDUCTED IN CLOSED CEREMONY”… “…new Justice sworn-in in a private ceremony in Justice Hugo Black’s office.”... Page 16: “3 Religious Bodies Stress Race Issue–Labor Day Messages–Cite the Wrongs Done Blacks”... “The Catholic message: Labor Relations in 1967 race relations…’this nation has failed to preserve racial peace and to achieve racial justice.’… ‘Race is the paramount issue facing America today.’ “… Page 13: “Wisconsin March Is Halted By Gas–Rocks Hurled At Milwaukee Police”… “Policemen fired repeatedly with teargas guns tonight to disperse civil rights marchers who were throwing bottles and rocks at them…it was the fifth consecutive night of turmoil in this racially tense city. Twenty marchers were arrested and one marcher died of a heart attack.” …
2 SEPTEMBER 1967… The President’s TS Daily CIA Brief: SOUTH VIETNAM: Lieutenant General Cao Van Vien, minister of defense and chief of the Joint General Staff, may get sacked after the election tomorrow…Plans for a housecleaning in the armed forces are reaching sizeable proportions with 200-300 officers reported on the list to get fired for corruption… COMMUNIST CHINA: Increasingly nasty Chinese treatment of foreign diplomats in Peking is leading several governments to consider pulling their representatives out of China altogether…The sacking of the British Embassy on 22 august was merely the most dramatic event in a long string of such humiliations. The problem is particularly acute for the British and Indonesians. Peking has refused to permit any evacuation of personnel or dependents from these embassies, regarding them as useful hostages for Chinese Communist citizens in London and Djakarta… The British are now proposing to the Chinese that tensions between the two countries can perhaps best be reduced by temporarily withdrawing all their personnel from each other’s capitals. Peking may or may not be receptive to this idea, but as matters stand pressure for reducing the foreign presence in China will keep on building up… ARAB WORLD: the oil-producing states at the summit meeting said aloud what they had been saying aloud what they along–they were all feeling the pinch. They agreed to start the pumps again, although it still remains to be seen if the hard-nosed Syrians, who boycotted the summit and who wanted an embargo, go along… NICARAGUA: The National Guard is evidently well on its way to wiping out the rural guerrilla units of a small pro-Castro terrorist organization…
2 SEPTEMBER 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… Page 5: “The air war in North Vietnam slowed down as if in anticipation of the balloting for President in South Vietnam. Bad weather over much of North Vietnam limited air strikes during the day, a spokesman said.”…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There was one fixed wing aircraft downed in Southeast Asia on 2 September 1967…
(1) MAJOR WILLIAM GEORGE BENNETT was flying an F-105A of the 333rd TFS and 355th TFW out of Takhli in a division of Thunderchiefs from Takhli on an armed reconnaissance mission west of Dong Hoi and was hit in the recovery from a bombing run. It is presumed MAJOR BENNETT was incapacitated by the ground fire since the aircraft impacted a steep karst with no voice call heard or ejection or parachute observed. The Major perished high on the side of a steep karst 20 miles west of Dang Hoi fifty year ago today and he remains on the battlefield where he fell. He is listed on the rolls of fallen warriors as “Killed in Action, Body Not Recovered.”… but remembered…
RIPPLE SALVO… #545…Dear readers, A few weeks ago I wrote to Ho Chi Minh (in my dreams) and posed a few questions for his consideration. I got the answer to one from the NVN Foreign Minister today… The question?…
HEY, HO! HOW’D YOU LIKE THOSE RED RIVER RAT RUNS ON YOUR PAUL DOUMER BRIDGE, OR THE LONGBIEN BRIDGE, IF YOU PREFER??? …. The answer from the North Vietnam Foreign Ministry…
“Bear: Ho Chi Sends, he’s sleeping in: Please share this with your war-mongering President Johnson and your fellow war criminal Yankee Air Pirates who are carrying out the treacherous schemes of your evil government.”…
“On two successive days–August 11 and 12–U.S. aircraft have several times bombed and attacked the Longbien Bridge and a number of populated districts in the center and suburbs of the city of Hanoi, capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
“More than 100 persons were killed or wounded and numerous homes were destroyed.
“The American aggressors have been punished as they deserved. Nine U.S. aircraft, according to first reports, were shot down, and a certain number of U.S. pilots captured alive.
“These bombings are a new escalation undertaken by American imperialism, attacking population sections of the capital in an attempt to exert pressure on the morale of the Vietnamese people.
“The U.S. imperialists began this insolently challenged peace-and-justice-loving public opinion in the world and grossly trampled on the 1954 Geneva agreements on Vietnam, and on all of international law. These barbarous bombardments, coming immediately after President Johnson’s decision to dispatch more troops to Vietnam and to put pressure on the clique of satellite countries to send more troops to South Vietnam, show that American imperialism is bent on intensifying and enlarging its aggression in Vietnam.
“These acts have unveiled the extremely warlike and cruel face of the American imperialists and reduced to nothing the arguments in favor or ‘peace negotiations’ from the Johnson Administration.
“No step-up in the escalation of the American imperialist adventures against North Vietnam will save it from inevitable defeat in the South. On the contrary, the more the Americans show themselves enraged, cruel, the more they will make the Vietnam people boil with hate, and the more determined to fight to the end for independence and liberty for their country, and more resolved to strike blows for a well-merited punishment.
“The American Government must take the entire responsibility for all the consequences of the new escalation of the war.”
In my dreams, the American response to this nastygram was LINEBACKER I, II, AND III, in 1967, not 1972. It was apparent that Ho’s behavior, and that of Giap and the rest of the boys in Hanoi, needed changing in August 1967, not encouragement. Alas, 36,000 more of America’s bravest and most loyal young men would die before the hammer would be dropped on the most evil government of North Vietnam.
RTR QUOTE for 2 September: THOMAS MOORE, Avenging and Bright: “Though sweet are our friendships, our hopes, our affections, Revenge on a tyrant is sweetest of all.”…
God bless the folks coping with the greatest natural disaster on the North American continent in American history…Harvey, a name that will live ill-famed forever…
Lest we forget… Bear