World: That Others May Live

U.S. fighter-bombers last week continued to hammer at Hanoi's roads, bridges and fuel depots. As in the week before, Hanoi responded with the most sophisticated weaponry in its defensive armory—and again found it useless. Twenty SAM ground-to-air missiles were fired. All missed. Supersonic MIG-21 fighters rose to tangle with U.S. Air Force F-4C Phantoms flying bomber escort north of Hanoi. North Viet Nam is thought to have only 15 of the advanced Russian jets, and the encounter cost them two of those, knocked down by the Phantoms' Sidewinder missiles—the second and third MIG-21 kills of the air war.

Ordinary antiaircraft fire proved...