Flak from Hanoi

THE WAR

During 22 months of bombing raids against North Viet Nam, the U.S. has scrupulously sought to avoid harming civilians. Last week, as the first ac credited American correspondent to visit Hanoi in twelve years cabled back eyewitness accounts of damage to civilian areas, Lyndon Johnson's Administration confessed that the attempt has not been altogether successful. At the same time, the correspondent himself came under criticism for presenting to the nation what many observers considered to be an uncritical, one-dimensional picture of the effects of the U.S. bombing on the North.

Utter Desolation. The correspondent is Harrison Salisbury, 58, a prestigious and enterprising reporter for the New York Times for 17 years and now one of its assistant managing editors. Last spring and summer, Salisbury, who was based in Moscow for five years, traveled around the periphery of Red China, gathering material for a series of stories and at the same time sounding out Communist diplomats about his chances of getting into North Viet Nam. For months he heard nothing. Then, in the middle of last month's furor over charges that the U.S. had bombed civilian sections of Hanoi, Salisbury got the go-ahead. Picking up a visa at North Viet Nam's diplomatic mission in Paris, he flew to the Cambodian capital of Pnompenh, there boarded a Hanoi-bound flight with members of the three-nation International Control Commission whose job it is to supervise the 1954 agreement that divided Viet Nam. He arrived in North Viet Nam two days before Christmas, filed the first of his stories, via regular commercial cable to the Times's Paris bureau, on Christmas Eve.

What Salisbury saw — or was allowed to see — during his quick tour of Hanoi and its environs was, almost exclusively, widespread devastation in civilian areas; he was not taken near the military facil ities around those areas. "President Johnson's announced policy that American targets in North Viet Nam are steel and concrete rather than human lives," he wrote, "seems to have little connection with the reality of attacks carried out by U.S. planes." He reported 89 killed in one town, 40 in another, 24 in a third. In Nam Dinh, third largest city in the North (population:

90,000), he described "block after block of utter desolation" in residential districts. U.S. planes, concluded Salisbury, "are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets"—and, in Hanoi's view, they are doing it "deliberately."

Civilians Everywhere. The Administration reacted quickly, admitting that some civilians may have been killed.

Bombing civilians "is not national policy," Air Force Secretary Harold Brown said emphatically, "and it shouldn't be." But, the Pentagon said, "it is impossible to avoid all damage to civilian areas, especially when the North Vietnamese deliberately emplace" military targets in populated areas. U.S. planes sometimes have to jettison bombs willy-nilly in order to engage attacking MIG fighters. Moreover, some of Hanoi's own SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) have fallen back into populated areas.