Not their kind of war

The first of two articles on Vietnam by CLARE HOLLINGWORTH rrODAY, in spite of American bombing of targets in North Vietnam and the danger of the local struggle becoming a major war, there is a military stalemate, with the Vietcong in complete control of the major part of the country but unable to dislodge the Americans and the Vietnam Government forces from the principal towns.

This stalemate could continue indefinitely. By maintaining a formidable range of sophisticated and powerful weapons with forty thousand men the Americans have dug themselves in often literally In an effort to secure their firm hold on Saigon and the six main air bases. It is evident that the Amerlcans had made little preparation for (and had little understanding of) the kind of limited war now in progress in South Vietnam.

Senior American officers in Saigon complain that th Pentagon has been so preoccupied with nuclear strategy since the end of the Korean war that they have given but scant attention and thought to guerrilla or subversive war of the kind, for example, the British fought in Malaya. . They certainly had evolved no tactics to compete with the latest refinement of Mao Tse-tung techniques which the Vietcong had developed and adapted during the long years of fighting since the end of the Second World War. The Vietcong can easily deploy considerable effort at little cost to themselves while the Americans are forced to expend resources on a vast scale. The rebels have the sympathy of a large majority of the Vietnamese r local tribesmen in the areas where they operate. They have a superb intelligence network and it is quite impossible for a foreigner to distinguish between a Vietcong rebel and a Vietnamese Government soldier because they are the same people who dress, talk, and generally behave in an Identical manner. The terrorist can and frequently does walk lafely io the streets of Saigon.

So far the Americans have found nothing to attract the rebel population to their side. President Johnson's offer of million; if dollars for aid and development was dismissed by the Vietcong radio as " pour les oiseaux." Nor do the Americans have a clearly defined objective other than to save the country from communism, and each one of the Services appears, so often, to be following a- slightly different policy.

The Americans and the Vietnamese Government have no effective intelligence service. From time to time a paid agent will provide some worthwhile information or a captured rebel will be persuaded by means fair or foul to disclose the position of a rebel unit. It is a matter of luck rather than management. In an effort to discover where and in what numbers the rebels and supplies were crossing the frontier from Laos into South Vietnam in the isolated and forested areas of the Central Highlands, the Americans established a number of Special Forces' posts. It was planned that these excellent American soldiers would also be able to recruit and to train the local warlike tribes as soldiers and then use them to help to patrol the area. This experiment is not a success. A few of the posts have been withdrawn because it was impossible to supply them: in one case five American aircraft were lost during a series of drops. Furthermore, the tribesmen were willing to accept the local equivalent of "The Queen's Shilling" and enlist in the Vietnamese Army, but after they had been issued with a rifle and uniform and drawn their pay for a few weeks they slipped away, some, no doubt, to join the Vietcong but others merely to return to their tribe or village.

Many patrols

The easy movement of rebels on the Ho Chi Minh trails are ineffectively lessened by mounting large numbers of patrols from fixed bases in the rear a technique the British Army has developed in Borneo. ' Constant air patrols even if the weather allowed this would not lead to the detection of more than a small percentage of infiltrators. On the Cambodian frontier In the Mekong Delta the rebels make great use of the waterways seven thousand miles of which are navigable and, apart from the two or three months at the end of the dry season, they hide among the crops and the weeds.

In both areas they mine the roads for which neither they nor their civilian supporters have any use and set up well devised ambushes for Vietnamese Government troops. They lay mines in the waterways of the delta and occasionally resort to terrorism in the cities or loft mortar bombs on to airfields. Early efforts to pacify the villages surrounding Saigon and other key towns have failed. A prearranged plan was drawn up for the successive pacification of various areas by the military, but this failed because of a lack of police and other administrative officials to take over when the troops had moved on. No identity cards were issued, nor were forces made available to guard the "strategic hamlets" as the pacified villages were termed at night.

This enabled the Vietcong to slip back again under cover of dark. The massive bombing of interdiction targets south of Hanoi and north of the demilitarised zone on the 17th parallel has raised the spirits of the population of Saigon. This was action and they believed it would bring Ho Chi Minh and his minions In South Vietnam to their knees. But this has not stopped the inflow of military supplies including guns, small arms, mortars, rockets, plastic, and ammunition. ft has rendered all these operations far more difficult and dangerous, as the Vietcong themselves state, but the initiative still remains firmly In rebel hands.

In the South, whenever a reconnaissance aircraft spots what it thinks is a rebel unit or a patrol makes contact with the Vietcong one or two squadrons of American helicopters are rushed to the scene. This swift mobile response to rebel action is the only original American contribution to anti-guerrilla tactics, which has, in any case, been developed from those the French used in Algeria. The helicopter is growing increasingly elaborate with built-in machine-guns and rockets; two special helicopter squadrons carry powerful searchlights for night operations. The "Eagle" squadrons by day and the " Specials " by night are used to swoop down and pick up the odd small group of suspects for interrogation In what is deemed to be Vietcong country.

How often the interrogation gives valid results and how often the Vietcong are correctly identified one cannot be sure. To my mind the helicopter produces a totally false sense of security for its occupants perhaps because the noise of the engine drowns the noise of small arms fire. The Vietcong will soon and suddenly produce light ack-ack guns and shoot the lot out of the sky. But for the moment the helicopters are universally used as a cover for ground troops. The South Vietnamese Army cannot be persuaded to attempt to make contact with the rebels without them. They make no secret of the fact that they dislike fighting and generally when contact is made they demand a helicopter for immediate evacuation.

The large number of dead rebels claimed by the Americans in their communiques are almost entirely caused by air action. If a party of rebels is caught. in the open or a headquarters or training area located in a forest explosives and napalm do their work. But this brings no advance in military terms.

Radar stations

Nor does the construction of the Da nang defence complex which is now the main American base. It was built to prevent the rebels cutting Vietnam into two by driving a wedge from Pleiku in the west to the sea and-has been developed to contain two squadrons of Hawk missiles and the Marines with all their weapons. Radar stations indicate the movement of Chinese bombers and fighters hundreds of miles away and the Da nang runway and aprons are packed with aircraft on the alert for. operations in the north.

But the presence .of the Seventh Fleet just 'over the horizon -precludes another Dien Bien Phu type of operation by the Vietcong. Should the Chinese or North Vietnamese attack in a desperate effort to dislodge the Americans, experts believe they will throw hordes wave after wave of men into the battle. In this event it is reasonable to assume the Amerlcans have a carefully thought-out contingency plan for the use in a. limited area. of tactical nuclear' weapons. , Tomorrow: South Vietnam's political morass

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