Foreign News: The Showdown

The showdown began at siesta time on a warm, summery day. Premier Ngo Dinh Diem was sitting down to a late lunch at Freedom Palace when nine 81-mm. mortar shells thumped down around the grounds, killing a civilian and wounding a couple of soldiers. The Premier rushed to the phone. "The palace is being shelled," he told French Commissioner-General Paul Ely, his voice disrupted on the line by adjacent explosions.

"I can't understand you," said the Frenchman. "The palace is being shelled," Diem repeated. "If it happens again, I shall order the National Army to respond."

Twenty-five minutes later, more mortar shells dropped into the palace, and the private army of the Binh Xuyen, 2,000 terrorists in arsenic-green berets, opened concerted fire against three main Vietnamese Nationalist strongpoints. Ngo Dinh Diem, long criticized for pacifism and procrastination, first ordered counterfire against the Binh Xuyen defenses. One hour later he sharply raised the stakes, and told the army to clear the Binh Xuyen out of the city.

Bombardment at Headquarters. For two days and one night the battle sputtered and flamed along the Boulevard Gallieni, a one-mile thoroughfare between Saigon's European quarter—which was ringed off from the shouting by the big French-colonial army—and the cluttered Chinese suburb of Cholon. The nub of the action was a cream-colored Vietnamese headquarters, defended by 100 Nationalists beneath a darkening pall of smoke. From there, TIME Correspondent John Mecklin reported:

"Headquarters was milling with Nationalists in khaki shorts and shirts, carrying Tommy guns. Small-arms fire was rattling from the Binh Xuyen a couple of blocks down the road, and Nationalist Tommy-gun fire rattled back at them. Next came the sullen, unmistakable, paralyzing crump of mortars, three in the courtyard outside, filling headquarters with dust and falling plaster. A deep red flame spouted out of a weapons carrier parked next to our car. Black, oily smoke drifted upwards. We could hear a staccato cry ai ai ai from someone who had been hit."

"The bombardment lasted for more than an hour, an enemy shell every two minutes or so—American shells as it happened, given to the Binh Xuyen by the French during the Indo-China War, when the terrorists were supposed to be helping fight the Communists. Our Nationalist garrison leaned forward impassively on their weapons, expecting an infantry attack. 'We are completely encircled.' a report came through to us. Outside I could see a number of grotesquely related things: fire leaping from densely packed wooden shacks; a rat scurrying down a gutter to escape; refugees huddled or fleeing, silhouetted against the red backdrop, beneath the city-wide canopy of smoke. Here and there on the sidewalk lay pairs of wooden clogs; their owners had jumped out of them so they could flee more quickly, barefoot, to shelter."