The War: Notice to the North

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U.S. bombers struck hard and fast in Viet Nam before the 48-hour holiday truce.

The biggest target was the rugged, bomb-pocked Demilitarized Zone, where two North Vietnamese divisions have been massing for several months and funneling forces over the border. Last week one battalion of the 26th Marine Regiment had been searching for infiltrating forces for two days, when the infiltrators suddenly turned up under cover of fog and attacked two Marine positions. To back up the Marines, B-52 bombers swarmed in from Guam for the second straight week and blasted the area around the zone.

When the weather cleared in the Red River delta to the north, seven flights of American fighter-bombers hammered the Ha Gia fuel dump 14 miles outside of Hanoi and only three miles from Phuc Yen, North Viet Nam's largest airbase. It was the fourth raid on Ha Gia in two months and served notice on Hanoi that the U.S. would continue blasting strategic targets near the capital, despite the recent international uproar (TIME, Dec. 23) triggered by North Viet Nam's discredited charges that the U.S. was bombing residential areas inside Hanoi itself.

Ready for a Shift. All the while, Red fighter planes kept their distance. One exception: two prop-driven aircraft spotted by radar heading toward the cruiser U.S.S. Long Beach in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two Phantom F-4Bs streaked off the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk and downed them with air-to-air missiles. Though the skies were otherwise clear of enemy planes, U.S. pilots wondered how long they would stay that way. In the past two months North Viet Nam has built its air force from 70 to 110 MIGs. Curiously enough, North Vietnamese MIGs have also been spending more and more time on Red Chinese airfields across the border, possibly for pilot training.

What would happen if the MIGs suddenly swarmed aloft in numbers and became more aggressive? "We would simply have to do more of what we are doing now," shrugged one Air Force spokesman in Saigon. "We are not up there chasing MIGs. We are trying to put bombs on targets." So far, those targets have not included MIG airfields themselves, since Washington does not yet consider them worth the risk of enlarging the war. But if air opposition reached the point where U.S. planes were constantly forced to jettison their bombloads in order to defend themselves before reaching their targets, then the Air Force would be all for a shift in tactics—if the White House permitted it. "The MIGs," says one high-ranking Air Force officer in Washington, "would have to be taken out either in the air—or on the ground."