by Wallis W. Wood

Reprinted with permission from American Opinion, June 1967

Wallis W. Wood, Coordinator for TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now), is a former news editor for The Review Of The News. He is now touring the country forming local TRAIN Committees to demand that President Johnson stop supporting the Communist arsenal of the Vietcong; permit our military to win in Vietnam; and then bring our boys home.

MORE THAN two-hundred American soldiers are now being killed by the Communists each week in Vietnam. Another two hundred of our servicemen are daily maimed and wounded there by Communist forces. Hundreds more are missing in action, or known to be held by the enemy. And, although the State Department describes itself as concerned by indications that captive Americans have been subjected to mutilation, torture, murder, and brainwashing, little is done to secure their release —or even encourage their hopes for a speedy victory.

The grim statistics are that since 1961 the United States has suffered more than sixty-thousand casualties in this undeclared war, and the toll is rising rapidly. It is as though every young man between the ages of twenty and twenty-four in the city of Detroit had been struck down: Our casualties in Vietnam are already double the number of such youths in San Francisco; triple the number in Indianapolis; and four times the number in Fort Worth.

Already more than eleven-thousand young Americans have been sent home from Vietnam in military coffins to the jeers of parading clergymen and students, and the tears of their parents and widows and orphans and sweethearts. There are those who say their very presence in Vietnam was a dishonor. But no one says that who watched how hard they died, or who ever tried to explain to a four-year-old boy why his soldier daddy will never come home again. Eleven-thousand times the telegram has arrived to announce that a young American has died for something in Vietnam; that something had better be worth it.

The official Code of Conduct for members of our Armed Forces requires that they keep faith with the United States under all circumstances of combat. There is no question that our troops have met this high standard. But has the United States kept faith with them?

I

FOR MORE THAN six years American forces have been committed to battle in Vietnam. We now have nearly half a million troops supporting that effort and we are currently spending in excess of $2 billion per month to prosecute the war there. Yet in all that time we have failed to stop North Vietnam, a country that is smaller than our own state of Missouri, with practically no industry of its own, and a population of only 17 million people. Something very serious is wrong here. Something very serious indeed. General Thomas A. Lane says what is wrong is that “never before in history has any army been so hobbled and sacrificed as are our forces in South Vietnam today.” General Lane may well be right.

Despite the fact that the United States is the greatest industrial giant in the history of man, defective equipment and a shortage of essential supplies have consistently plagued our troops in Vietnam since 1961. During the last two years there have been major and serious shortages in ammunition for rifles and machine-guns, medium and heavy bombs, anti-tank guns, mortars, rockets, helicopters, howitzer shells, trucks and troop carriers, and even drugs and other medical supplies. Many of the ancient artillery pieces Secretary McNamara has made available have proved defective; our men have been issued boots that fall apart and shells (some older than the servicemen who fire them) that do not explode when they hit their target. Reports of such things have come regularly and in volume from Vietnam. And Defense Department spokesmen in Washington have just as regularly denied them.

In April of 1966, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee listened to Secretary of Defense McNamara describe reports of bomb shortages as “baloney.” Within weeks Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul F. Ignatius confessed to Senators that there had, indeed, been a “temporary” shortage of some types of bombs. But he emphasized that current supplies were “more than adequate.” Four months after that tardy admission and questionable assurance, a veteran pilot in Vietnam told Aviation Week & Space Technology that American pilots were still being sent on missions over Communist North Vietnam carrying only two bombs, although their jet fighters were designed to hold twenty-four. Other pilots have repeatedly confirmed this charge.

Lieutenant Norde Wilson, a veteran of 125 bombing missions over North and South Vietnam, disclosed in a nationwide radio broadcast on November 13, 1966: “I was there, and there definitely was a bomb shortage…. Of course, this is the information that Secretary McNamara had denied, but the information that he was putting out to the people was in direct contradiction of what the facts were at the time.” Lieutenant Wilson says it’s this way: “You ask the ordnance officer, the man in charge of loading the ordnance and who knows what is in the magazines, why you are only carrying rockets; he says, ‘Because we are short of bombs.'”

In September, another combat pilot, who asked that his name be withheld, wrote from Vietnam to a national aviation weekly describing the normal briefing before our planes are sent to attack Communist targets. “Policy dictates,” he revealed, “that pilots will be briefed on the shortage of 20-mm. ammunition, and will use it only when deemed absolutely necessary by the flight leader….” The policy was set in Washington; the situation reflected the norm.

Few military officials now dare protest this lack of vital supplies. Those who do find that reprisal can be swift. Last December Major General Jerry D. Page, Commandant of the Air War College, dared brief military officers at a secret, three-day seminar on just how serious were the ordnance shortages plaguing our forces in Vietnam. In January General Page was replaced as Commandant and reassigned to Okinawa on the ground that it was improper for him to criticize Secretary McNamara for sending men to fight and die with only a handful of bullets and a prayer. General Page declined comment.

Members of the Senate Military Preparedness Subcommittee have repeatedly stressed that, Secretary McNamara’s denials notwithstanding, ammunition, bombs, and other critical materials have repeatedly been in short supply in Vietnam. In March of this year the Subcommittee prepared its third Report in as many years describing munitions shortages. According to the New York Times of March twenty-sixth, the study disclosed that important military operations in Vietnam had to be postponed, canceled, or re-planned because of insufficient ammunition. Secretary of Defense McNamara immediately classified the Senate Report as “Secret” and thereby suppressed the Subcommittee’s findings. As ill-equipped American soldiers died in Vietnam, the Administration rushed to issue its own politically oriented study. Not surprisingly, it denied that any ammunition shortages existed. Defense Department spokesmen refused to comment when asked why the Military Preparedness Subcommittee’s Report was being withheld from the public.

Indicative of the shortages are hundreds of letters from concerned and angry wives and parents who have written to Congress after receiving letters from husbands and sons in Vietnam asking to be sent small arms and ammunition. General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about this problem last April by Senator Richard Russell. His reply was astounding. “A hand gun,” he said, “in the hands of soldiers who are not well trained in its use is a very dangerous weapon indeed to the soldier himself and to his comrades.” American soldiers crawling into tunnels after the Vietcong are denied the small arms they need in a war killing two-hundred Americans a week because the politicians who now run the Pentagon are worried about gun safety.

Our pilots do not have to crawl through Vietcong tunnels with bayonets because they are not permitted small arms; or guard howitzers for which there are no shells; or discover as did Marines at Da Nang that Washington has held up on mosquito spray they need in the midst of a malaria epidemic that forced the evacuation of eight-hundred servicemen; or go without needed mortars, and fortification and communication and electronic equipment; or obey the general order not to fire on the Vietcong unless first fired upon (if they miss). But the problems of our pilots are just as critical, and their handicaps just as incredible.

Imagine for a moment that you are an American pilot, stationed aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam. You are at war. And this is how you have been ordered to wage it:

At your briefing session, before beginning a mission, you are handed a seven-page pamphlet of instructions. Does it contain descriptions of your targets or the area you will attack? No, it consists of detailed instructions from Washington on the strategic targets you are not allowed to attack and areas in North Vietnam where you cannot fly. Remember these instructions. You could be court-martialed for violating them.

As you enter your plane’s cockpit, you learn that because of orders from Washington you have only a few rounds of ammunition for your machine-guns; use them sparingly, and only on orders from your flight leader.

You will need to make only one pass over your target: You are carrying only four bombs. You know that if you had the full complement of twenty-four bombs only one-sixth as many sorties would have to be flown. The high number of missions, as unnecessary and dangerous as they are, helps convince the folks back home that we are fighting to win—they help keep the people anesthetized .. . and the Administration in office.

Shortly after takeoff from the carrier, you notice a Soviet ship in the waters below. It is loaded with supplies and making straight for the harbor at Haiphong, Communist North Vietnam. But you are not allowed to disturb it. You have been briefed that our Ambassador in Moscow called upon the Soviet Foreign Ministry on August 13, 1966 to assure the Communists that American pilots will not interfere with implements of war on their way to Hanoi.

As you near the coast of North Vietnam you see supplies being unloaded from other ships. You remember another pilot who asked Senator Stuart Symington: “Is not a North Vietnamese barge loaded with weapons and ammunition a legitimate military target?” And you remember Senator Symington reported to the Senate how that pilot was under orders from Washington not to attack until the goods had reached the cover of the Ho chi Minh trail. You are all too familiar with those orders— as are the families of the thousands of young Americans who will never go home alive when those goods below you get through to the Vietcong.

You know that if you approach too near Haiphong harbor you will be shelled by one of the Red Chinese warships stationed there—you remember how you learned that piece of information and the faces of friends who are dead because of those ships. You have been ordered not to return fire; the orders came from Washington.

Over the mainland of Communist North Vietnam you can see crews building another surface-to-air missile site and surrounding it with the latest highly sophisticated anti-aircraft cannons from the Soviet Union. As long as it is under construction you are under orders from Washington not to attack. Day by day you will see it come nearer and nearer to completion. Later, when it is fully operational and heavily defended, you will be ordered to destroy it. And your losses will be heavy.

Several miles further on you pass over a Communist air strip. On the ground you see the dozen Soviet-built MiG jet fighters which are stationed there. They are sitting ducks; but you are under orders from Washington not to disturb the airfield or the planes. You are not allowed to fire unless and until the Communists’ jets are airborne and after you.

But you are risking your life for something. What are your targets? You remember a paragraph a friend wrote home in a letter which found its way into the Congressional Record of January 26, 1967:

I am a regular officer and therefore expect to risk my life as part of my job. But why should I do it “several times a week” on long missions, in a multi-million dollar airplane, so as to knock out an “empty barracks” or an “empty bus” or a buffalo pulling an irrigation wheel in a rice paddy?

You remember that the pilot who wrote the above paragraph was killed during his seventy-seventh mission over Communist North Vietnam. You remember that his target that day had been a single truck.

You remember another pilot you know who explained to Aviation Week & Space Technology how Secretary McNamara’s glowing Defense Department statistics should be interpreted:

When an article reads “structures destroyed” the definition means a straw-thatched hut. “Boat” means anything from a 12-foot, one-man dugout to slightly larger sampans. “Bridge” means a bamboo footbridge or a pair of logs felled across a stream. “Pack animal” means a water buffalo, cow, or even a pig or goat.

If you are ordered to attack supplies moving south over the Ho chi Minh trail you know your restrictions. Washington has ordered that targets more than 204 feet from the trail may not be attacked. You know that the North Vietnamese have learned this from experience, and that when they see you coming they back off a hundred yards to safety. Your orders also dictate that no villages may be attacked, no matter how obviously superficial their appearance. As a pilot who is a friend of yours wrote to a national weekly on March 28, 1966: “The Communists know this, too, and they build huts over the beds of their trucks. When airplanes are overhead, they stop, and boom, you have an instant village.”

#

IN NEARLY two and one-half years of bombing missions over Communist North Vietnam, more than four-hundred young American pilots have been killed, captured, or are listed as missing. The United States has lost more than five-hundred planes during air strikes over the North. In the past two years, more than three-thousand American airplanes and helicopters have been downed while in flight or destroyed by the enemy or rendered unserviceable.

Because of the vast number of missions flown, more than 900,000 tons of bombs have been dropped over North and South Vietnam—fully one-third more than the total amount dropped in the entire Pacific Theater during World War II. This is equal to twelve-thousand pounds of explosives for every square mile of North and South Vietnam—an area less than one-half the size of Texas. The United States air offensive is currently expending more than fifty-thousand tons of explosives every month—three times the highest rate during the Korean War. Yet the U.S. Military Command in Saigon reports that troops and supplies are successfully entering South Vietnam from the North at an increased rate. How can this be? Secretary McNamara told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January that he doubts “any bombing that I could contemplate in the future would significantly reduce the actual flow of men and material to the South.” And he adds that he never thought it would.

It is not difficult to see why.

Former Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay has been blunt and specific: “We are hitting the wrong targets. We’re getting people killed who shouldn’t be killed.” And he summed up the effect of American air strikes against the Communists by saying, “All we’re doing now is pecking around the edges”—passing over ships and ports loaded with supplies, and vulnerable air bases and missile sites, and massive Vietcong troop sanctuaries along the borders of Laos and Cambodia, to hit water buffalo and grass huts and outhouses in the jungle.

The Senate Military Preparedness Subcommittee recently confirmed this harsh appraisal. In March of this year it warned that the restrictions handicapping American pilots have caused an unnecessarily high loss of American lives and aircraft. Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. told his colleagues in the Senate on February 15, 1967:

I have put this question to ask military leaders: If you were ordered to conduct the war in such a way as to bring it to an early conclusion with the least possible American military casualties, would you follow present operating procedures? The answer was “No.”

For more than a year the Joint Chiefs of Staff have unanimously recommended to the President that fuel and oil stocks in North Vietnam be destroyed. They have also strongly advised closing the Communist port of Haiphong; they well realize that North Vietnam is totally dependent upon imports to maintain its war effort. But while two-hundred American boys are killed in Vietnam each week by the highly mobile Vietcong, the President has refused the military permission to totally destroy these supplies. On orders from Washington, also, the Strategic Air Command is forbidden its primary purpose — strategic bombing—and is used instead against tactical targets in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, smaller tactical bombers and jet fighters are sent against supposedly strategic targets in the North. And, on orders from Washington, the Communists are allowed “privileged sanctuaries” along the Red China-North Vietnam border; in Cambodia; in Laos, including parts of the Ho chi Minh trail; and in much of North Vietnam itself. Many air fields, military installations, steel mills, ports, dams, power plants, and other vital industries and installations go untouched in North Vietnam on direct orders from the politician who is our Commander-in-Chief—while brave men die.

One terrible and overwhelming fact must be faced: Our soldiers and our pilots are being maimed and killed fighting a war that they are not being allowed to win. The Johnson Administration is not keeping faith with the men who must fight this war, with the half-million super-patriots, the half-million anti-Communists, who are fighting and dying in action against the forces of the International Communist Conspiracy.

II

ON FEBRUARY 17, 1967, a day in which thirty American boys were dying in Vietnam at the hands of the Communist Vietcong, a suave Ambassador recently returned from Moscow to become Undersecretary of State was addressing a smart banquet in Cincinnati. That day over a thousand boys from cities like Denver and Dubuque and Los Angeles —and, yes, Cincinnati—lay in field hospitals suffering wounds from which many of them would never recover. But these boys and their Communist enemy were thirteen-thousand miles from Cincinnati. And so there was applause from the wealthy “Liberal” audience when Undersecretary of State Foy D. Kohler took the elegant rostrum, smiled patronizingly, and declared:

Today, we can no longer talk of a Sino-Soviet bloc. Indeed, we cannot properly refer to a Soviet bloc. The Communist world has ceased to he a monolithic entity.

On March 10, 1967, Leonid Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, told an equally posh gathering of “Liberals” in Moscow that “the unanimity and fraternal solidarity of socialist countries is a tried and trusted weapon of struggle against the aggressive forces of imperialism, for preserving and strengthening peace.” That statement translates: “On every important battlefront, all Communist countries have been united; we will continue to stand united, and we will win.”

One look at the battleground of Vietnam proves that this claim is not merely propaganda. The war in Vietnam is a Communist war. Communist aggression there is supported by every Communist government in the world. In the matter of killing American soldiers in Vietnam, there are no cracks in the Communist monolith.

Soviet leaders have consistently and openly boasted of their support of Ho chi Minh’s war in Vietnam. On September 29, 1965, Comrade Brezhnev told a Plenary Meeting of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.:

The Soviet Union has been fulfilling its internationalist duty to the Vietnamese people. We have been rendering great assistance to the Vietnamese comrades. We have already delivered to the Democratic Republic of {Communist North} Vietnam a considerable amount of weapons and military equipment. Our line is to continue to render the DRV every assistance, both material and political, which it needs to repulse American aggression.

Brezhnev’s remarks were virtually ignored by the American Press. No television network did a “White Paper” on this issue; no angry editorials appeared. In fact, virtually the only newspaper to carry the story in the United States was The Worker, official publication of the Communist Party, U.S.A. And it quoted Brezhnev’s remarks at length, including these revealing paragraphs:

“We have been rendering great assistance to the Vietnamese comrades,” said Brezhnev. He added that the USSR’s deliveries of arms and military equipment have already reached a “considerable amount.”

“We have,” he said, “been consistently advocating the unity of all fraternal socialist countries in giving support to the Vietnamese people fighting against imperialist aggression. This aid to Vietnam is our internationalist duty.”

“Unity” and “support” are the two words which most accurately describe the attitude and actions of Communists the world over toward their “war of liberation” being fought against the people of Vietnam. Yet, on May 11, 1966, another day on which thirty American boys were killed by the Communists in Vietnam, Secretary of State Dean Rusk pleaded with Congress to allow a greatly increased shipment of American hardware to the Communists. As American boys died at the hands of the Soviet-supplied Vietcong half a world away, the Secretary declared:

We want the Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe to understand that we will go step by step with them as far as they are willing to go in exploring every path toward enduring peace. We require only that our willingness and our actions be genuinely matched by theirs.

Within weeks Leonid Brezhnev was declaring for at least the hundredth time that Soviet policy was “invariable” in support of the Vietnamese Communists. “We are taking new measures and making new efforts to help speed up the victory of the heroic Vietnamese people,” he boasted. Again, his words were widely quoted in the Communist Press, but curiously ignored by America’s other communications media.

On December 13, 1966, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party concluded a two-day meeting in Moscow by pledging “to continue all-round support to the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against the criminal aggression of U.S. imperialism.”

The whole Communist world has echoed the refrain. Premier Todor Zhivkov of Communist Bulgaria promises that “the Bulgarian government has extended and will continue to extend moral-political support and material aid” to Communist North Vietnam. Communist Hungary’s dictator Janos Kadar is even more forthright. On December third he declared: “We are fighting against U.S. aggression in Vietnam and will go on helping our Vietnamese brothers until their cause is crowned by ultimate victory.” Four months earlier, Communist delegates from Bulgaria, Czecho-Slovakia, Communist Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union met in Moscow. At the end of the conference, the representatives declared:

We are rendering and will go on giving the DRV {Communist North Vietnam} ever increasing moral-political support and every kind of assistance, including economic help and assistance with means of defense, materials, equipment and specialists, needed to repulse the American aggression victoriously.

The delegates also promised that their governments would send “volunteers” to fight in Vietnam as soon as Hanoi requested them.

It was in the face of such virtual declarations of war that Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Congress on May 11, 1966: “The Soviet Union and other nations of Eastern Europe are increasingly conscious of their stake in stability and in improving peaceful relations with the outside world.” Communist Czechoslovakia was quick to deny the validity of Rusk’s claim by broadcasting the truth: “The entire [Communist] world has joined to provide Vietnam with all conceivable assistance.”

As Dean Rusk well knows, the simple and incontrovertible truth is that the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc of Central Europe are providing in excess of eighty percent of the strategic supplies which the Communists are using to kill American soldiers in Vietnam. Throughout 1966 ships from the Soviet bloc arrived unmolested at ports in North Vietnam on the rate of one vessel every two days. By the end of the year, total aid to Hanoi from brother Communists had passed $2 billion.

On December 27, 1966, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya told its readers:

Every month tens of thousands of tons of technical equipment and food are shipped from Black Sea and Far East Soviet ports to the DRV. Ship communication between our countries has become regular, with the Soviet maritime fleet following a line service schedule. These vessels carry mineral fertilizers and rolled ferrous metal, automobiles and tractors, cables and paper, medical equipment and canned goods, flour and oil, {as} part of the aid rendered by the Soviet people to fraternal Vietnam in its heroic struggle against the U.S. militarists.

In addition to the above, U.S. News & World Report and The Reporter have this year noted in a series of articles that Soviet aid to North Vietnam has included the following heavy equipment: small warships and coastal vessels, amphibious vehicles, tanks, transport planes, most of the trucks transporting supplies southward, cranes, and road-building equipment. U.S. News & World Report for April 3,1967, revealed that Soviet arms sent to Hanoi in the past eighteen months include thousands of 7.62-mm. rifles; light and heavy machine guns; battlefield rockets (including five-inch stabilized-fin rockets and 140-mm. rockets that weigh only eighty-five pounds but can hit targets six miles away); 40-mm. anti-tank grenade launchers; standard mortars; and the huge 120-mm. mortars.

On February 3, 1967, Secretary of Defense McNamara provided some idea of the extent of Soviet shipments of aircraft to Vietnam when he admitted that Soviet planes now operative in North Vietnam include: twenty of the new, delta-winged MiG-21s; approximately one-hundred MiG-15 and MiG-17 jet fighters; a heavy complement of IL-28 bombers; and scores of helicopters, including the giant Mi-6 which is capable of transporting seventy fully equipped Vietcong or thirteen tons of cargo.

Soviet officials even boast that they have built or assisted more than fifty industrial enterprises in North Vietnam, including those that produce most of Hanoi’s machine tools and ninety percent of its industrial coal. The Reporter of January 12, 1967 cites Soviet descriptions of a fourteen-acre machine tool plant near Hanoi that was completely equipped by the U.S.S.R. Washington has thus far refused military appeals to target this plant for bombing.

The Soviets have even stationed a “fishing trawler” off the coast of Guam to radio warning of the takeoff of our B-52 bombers on their way to strike Vietnam—they do not even bother to hide their broadcast gear. Captured Vietcong guerrillas boast venomously of the fact that their troops and missile and anti-aircraft batteries receive two-hour advance notice of air raids when our bombers begin the six-hour, 2,500mile flight from the Pacific island to their targets. Another Soviet radar and communications vessel in Tonkin Gulf monitors the activities of our carriers— also to warn Communist troops, missile crews, and anti-aircraft batteries in North Vietnam of impending attack.

Most revealing and most significant of the enormous amount of Soviet aid being sent to help kill more and more Americans in Vietnam are the facts concerning Communist North Vietnam’s air defenses. General John P. McConnell, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, has described these as “the greatest concentration of anti-aircraft weapons that has ever been known in the history of defense of any town or any area in the world.” They are entirely the product of the Soviet Union.

More than thirty missile batteries, each capable of firing six surface-to-air (S.A.M.) missiles, have been built in North Vietnam by the Soviets. More than a thousand Soviet-built S.A.M.’s have already been fired at American planes. There are nearly ten-thousand anti-aircraft guns currently in operation in North Vietnam. Most common and effective are the Soviet’s large and highly sophisticated 37-mm. cannon, though the U.S.S.R. has also supplied the smaller but equally deadly 12.7-mm. guns.

The more than five-hundred American planes and the more than four-hundred American pilots that have been lost over North Vietnam testify to the effectiveness of Hanoi’s Soviet-supplied air system. People’s World, a Communist newspaper published in San Francisco, could hardly contain its glee as it reported in its issue of November 5, 1966:

U.S. planes, despite their multiplied speed and short flying distance over Vietnamese territory, are absorbing larger loss rates than the U.S. Air Force took from anti-aircraft over Germany in World War II. The dense AA gun and missile network and the sophisticated radar network, functioning with split-second accuracy on a country-wide scale, are all supplied by the U.S.S.R.

To ensure the proper and accurate use of their sophisticated equipment for killing American soldiers, the Soviet Union has trained several thousand Vietnamese in the U.S.S.R., and has sent additional thousands of Soviet military and technical personnel to North Vietnam for the same purpose. In January of this year, The Reporter magazine, which has never had a reputation for zealous anti-Communism disclosed:

The Soviet experts train their students in or near Hanoi, then go with them to the actual battle stations to see how they do under fire. More coaching follows on the spot, so it is almost inevitable that the Soviet officers and soldiers actually man the radar screens and the missile-launching devices, at least in the initial stages of instruction.

We have been discussing all of this to establish that the Communists killing and maiming and wounding American soldiers in Vietnam could not continue to do so for any time at all without massive and continuous aid from other Communist countries. They are totally dependent upon these regimes, particularly and especially the Soviet Union, for their supplies. It is equally clear that the United States is therefore at war in Vietnam with the Soviet Union and the entire Communist bloc of nations. What is fantastic is that Communist aid to North Vietnam is only made possible by the trade and aid which President Johnson has insisted that we send to these very Communists—while brave men die.

III

ON JANUARY 12, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson delivered his third State of the Union message, pledging to continue his Administration’s policy of “building bridges” to the Soviet Union and to the Communist-controlled countries of Central Europe. As brave men died of the metal of that policy, he advised the Congress:

This is what I have come to ask you…. To make it possible to expand trade between the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

This short statement formalized the realization of a cherished goal of the International Communist Conspiracy—a goal the Communists had actively promoted for more than a decade. In 1955 Nikolai A. Bulganin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, announced that “when the Party Central Committee emphasizes the great importance of introducing advanced technology into our national economy, it bases itself on the fact that the struggle for technical progress in our country is the struggle for the building of a Communist society.” In keeping with that aim, Soviet leaders formally proposed increasing trade with the United States. During 1958 they offered to place substantial orders for equipment and technical data if satisfactory credit terms could be arranged. In January of 1959, Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan flew to Washington to ask that trade restrictions be removed and long-term credit be arranged in the United States for the U.S.S.R.

Our general trade restrictions remained in force, however, until American soldiers were being slain by Communist troops armed and equipped by the Soviet Union and its allies. Then, the gates were opened. In the first six months of 1966, according to the Department of Commerce, there was a forty-four percent increase in American trade with the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and, of course, the Soviet Union—the same Communist regimes that were and are supplying North Vietnam with more than eighty percent of the implements of war with which it has killed eleven-thousand young Americans and maimed or mutilated fifty-thousand more.

The Johnson Administration encouraged and allowed these regimes to order from the United States such critical materials as steel tubing, copper cable, iron ore, and copper “scrap.” Diesel engines, electric motors, rocket engines, turbines, and generators were cleared. So were ball bearings, roller bearings, valves, pistons, exhaust manifolds and other miscellaneous automotive, truck, and aircraft parts. The Administration even encouraged shipment to the Communists of data on radar devices and equipment to improve their aircraft and naval communications and navigation. Electronic computers and parts were sent to the Soviet Union, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, East Germany, and Hungary. Technical data on constructing mills for the manufacture of copper rods was cleared for Romania; for aluminum tubing and coils to Czecho-Slovakia; for a cold-strip rolling mill to East Germany; for a steel-strip galvanizing line to Bulgaria; for fifteen chemical plants to the Soviet Union. Other data released to the Communists by the Johnson Administration described mining, communications, construction, railways, and other industrial equipment. *

Machine tools, naturally, were high on the Communists’ list. Precision grinding machines, metal polishing machines, boring machines for pistons, metalworking devices, cutting machinery, and drilling machines were all cleared by the Administration for shipment. The happy recipients included the Soviet Union and every Communist-bloc country in Central Europe using such machine tools to provide the hardware for killing our soldiers in Vietnam. And as it happened, because of a blackout in the “Liberal” mass media, only a few Americans learned that on October 13, 1966, Congressman John Ashbrook had warned the Congress:

The machine tool industry can rejuvenate itself, for machine tools can build machine tools. Machine tools are needed to build guns, tanks, missiles. A machine automotive plant can be converted to make gears for tanks or submarines. In short, the machine tool is the principle sinew of war. One expert declared before a Senate subcommittee some years ago that he would rather send them a missile than a machine tool, because a missile is fired and expended bat machine tools will produce a rifle or a missile over and over again.

Under the Johnson “bridge-building” program the Soviet Union has also received technical instructions and specifications for the building of a tire-cord factory; synthetic rubber was sent to Czecho-Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and East Germany; tires and tubes went to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria; Hungary got machinery (and spare parts) to recap tires; and, rubber processing machines and parts were cleared for the Soviet Union. Additional American materials cleared by the Administration for export to the Communist arsenal of the Vietcong include: ship stabilization systems; radio-beacon transmitters and parts; coaxial cable systems; and radio receivers and their replacement parts.

To keep all of their American machinery running properly, export licenses were granted to the Communists for petroleum, gas, lubricating oil, Diesel fuel, grease, and other petroleum products, as well as petroleum drilling and production equipment. The Soviet Union is virtually Communist North Vietnam’s only source for oil. Some 25,000 metric tons of petroleum have arrived in Vietnam from the Soviet Union every month for the past eighteen months. Only the Kremlin knows how much of that was trans-shipped from the United States.

It does not seem possible that the cornucopia of American technology could yield further fruit for the Communists. But on October 7, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his determination to do even more to seek “healthy economic and cultural relations with the Communist states.” The Commander-in-Chief of America’s Armed Forces said “we do not intend to let our differences on Vietnam or elsewhere prevent us from exploring all opportunities….” As part of this added effort he promised: “We will reduce export controls on East-West trade with respect to hundreds of non-strategic items.”

Five days after the President’s speech, the Department of Commerce issued a 68-page list of commodities that could be freely exported to the Soviet Union and Central European Communist countries supporting the Vietcong. In an accompanying press release, the Commerce Department referred to the items that had been removed from the control list as “peaceful goods, which may be freely exported without any risk to the United States’ national interests.” The Department also announced that it had consulted with other interested departments, including Defense, State, Agriculture, Interior, and the Intelligence Community, in taking this step.” Senator Karl E. Mundt was apparently one of the first outside the Administration to examine the Commerce Department’s incredible list. On March 10, 1967, he told his Senate colleagues:

I have here two versions of this bulletin. I am tempted to put in the Record the one they first sent me, before it was censored, changed, and modified. But I wish to be fair. After they sent it to me, and I had made a few comments of shock and despair as to what I found in it, they said, “There are some little footnotes in here that indicate some of these proposals for exports to Communist countries have not yet been completely finalized.”

“Well,” I said, “I do not want anything that has not been finalized; just send me a new list, then.” I said, “What you send me, I intend to use.” If other Senators wish to see the original copy, they will have to send for it; I intend to keep mine for future reference.

Some day I will find out for sure whether these things are finalized, but for the moment, I will take their explanation at face value.

Some of the items in the first bulletin that might have disturbed Senator Mundt were new Diesel engines, jet aircraft engines, additional machine tools, rifle cleaning compounds, oil, aluminum, rubber, scrap metal, natural gas, iron ore, industrial chemicals, automobile parts, ground and marine radar, and airborne navigation equipment. Because of his protest, however, the first two—the new Diesel engines and jet aircraft engines — were deleted. But every other item cited above remained in the final list, ** and is now cleared for unlimited, unrestricted export to Czecho-Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Outer Mongolia, and the U.S.S.R.— for potential trans-shipment to Vietnam.

Congressman Glenard P. Lipscomb, after reading the revised bulletin, expressed grave doubts that any member of the Intelligence Community—”particularly those who should be most concerned, the military intelligence agencies”—would have approved clearance for many of the four-hundred items. He wrote to the various agencies. Here is a summary of the replies that he received:

The Director of Naval Intelligence wrote: “The Office of Naval Intelligence, definitely a member of the ‘Intelligence Community,’ had no part in the consultations which preceded the revision of the Commodity Control List.”

Major General Jack E. Thomas, Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, for the U.S. Air Force, replied: “No intelligence officer of the U.S. Air Force participated in the revision of the Current Commodity Control List.”

The Army reported that its Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence “was not consulted regarding the commodities listed.”

And the Department of Defense acknowledged that the Defense Intelligence Agency “was not requested to supply intelligence on the 400 commodities that are covered in Current Export Control Bulletin No. 941.”

So much for the Commerce Department’s contention that the “Intelligence Community” had been consulted. So much for the myth that these goods will do anything but help to kill American soldiers in greater and greater numbers.

In the speech of October seventh referred to above, President Johnson also announced several other sweeping concessions to the arsenal of the Vietcong:

We intend to press for legislative authority to negotiate trade agreements which could extend most-favored-nation tariff treatment to European Communist states. And today I am announcing the following steps:

. . . I have just today signed a determination that will allow the Export-lmport Bank to guarantee commercial credits to four additional Eastern European Countries — Poland and Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.

The Secretary of State is now reviewing the possibility of easing the burden of Polish debts to the United States….

The Export-lmport Bank is prepared to finance exports for the Soviet-Italian Fiat auto plant….

It took Communist leaders only fourteen days to evaluate the effects of this new American beneficence. On October twenty-first, Communist delegates from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, CzechoSlovakia, Romania, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Outer Mongolia, and Cuba announced in Moscow that they would promptly begin increasing their shipments of military supplies to Communist North Vietnam. An additional $1 billion was promised, with $800 million coming from the Soviet Union and $30 million from Communist Poland. The Communists obviously interpreted the President’s proposals as a form of aid to their efforts. And well they might.

In August of 1966 a Soviet broadcast from Hanoi informed the world that: “for several blocks around the port [of Haiphong] one sees on every street neat crates shining with fresh paint, trucks and cars made by Soviet and CzechoSlovak works.” Apparently, Soviet exports to Communist North Vietnam include automobiles. Yet President Johnson offered the Soviets that $50 million loan to help build an automobile factory in Russia. Forbes magazine for October 1, 1966 revealed that most of the machine tools in the factory will also come from the United States. “It will really be the United States that puts the Russians on wheels,” the editors of Forbes concluded. They might have added—”And North Vietnam, also.”

Since 1945 the United States has given Communist Poland $550 million in military and economic aid. Since 19f54, the Administration has also “sold” Poland $26 million in agricultural products; and since Poland received a three-year, interest-free “loan” on its purchases, that money is just now coming due. But on December twenty-ninth our Ambassador to Poland, John A. Gronouski, told Polish officials in Warsaw that the Johnson Administration would accept repayment in Polish currency — not American dollars—and promised that the money would be spent in Poland for “mutually advantageous projects.” Thus at one stroke the United States freed Poland of a $26 million debt. And Communist Poland, as a direct consequence of this American subsidy, was able to increase its aid to Communist North Vietnam by nearly the same amount. Three days before Ambassador Gronouski’s pledge, the Chicago Tribune reported:

Weapons of the Polish armed forces are being shipped from Stettin harbor in Poland in ever increasing quantities to North Vietnam harbors…. While on one side of the Stettin harbor American wheat is being unloaded from freighters, on the other side of the same harbor weapons are loaded which are being used against American soldiers…. The Poles receive the wheat [from the U.S.] on credit and they in turn ship their weapons to North Vietnam on credit.

But Administration officials continue to claim as they did on January 26,1967:

You may he assured that American production and scientific knowledge are not being used against American troops through trade with Communist countries.

Bluntly: That is a lie!

In his 1966 State of the Union message, President Johnson declared: “Our nation is now engaged in a brutal and bitter conflict in Vietnam…. It must be at the center of our concerns.” For the rest of the year his Administration steadily expanded American aid to the Communist enemy our soldiers must fight. Commerce Secretary John T. Connor said it was good business: “We . . . would rather discuss contracts than contrasts . . . we have hopes of building some fairly strong bridges as time goes on.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk claimed it was good politics: “We want the Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe to understand that we will go step by step with them as far as they are willing to go in exploring every path toward enduring peace.” And Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said such policies were good strategy: “The trade that we have had with members of the Communist bloc in Europe has, in my opinion, loosened the ties of those countries to the Soviet Union. I strongly support the President’s proposal to expand trade with the Communist bloc in Europe.”

A courageous few have spoken out in opposition. Senator Karl E. Mundt is one. As he told the Senate on March 14, 1967:

If increasing the armament of those fighting against HS is the shortest to peace, every American President in history except Lyndon B. Johnson has been totally and completely in error; because he is the first to propose it.

And the editors of Barron’s warned in their issue for January 16, 1967:

There remains a final, supreme consideration for any American businessman who may still hanker after elusive profit from selling to the Communists. He must decide in his own private conscience whether the profit is worth the personal risk that some day, soon or late, on some near or distant battlefield, his neighbor’s son or his own may be struck down by a weapon which his zeal for trade put into an enemy’s hand.

Unmoved by such considerations, in his State of the Union message for 1967 —as brave men died—President Johnson offered this evaluation:

We have avoided both the acts and the rhetoric of the cold war. When we have differed with the Soviet Union, we have tried to differ quietly and with courtesy. Our objective is not to continue the cold war, but to end it.

The very next day Vice President Humphrey told a press conference in Washington: “I know that as far as [the President] is concerned, the cold war is over.” That day, thirty more American soldiers were killed in Vietnam.

IV

Is there any wonder that Congressman H.R. Gross of Iowa felt called upon to tell the House of Representatives on February 15, 1967:

It is time that the citizens of this country were made to understand that they and their fighting men have been made the victims of a betrayal to international politics and intrigue.

Betrayal is a harsh and ugly word. But we have seen that it is an accurate choice.

It applies to the battlefield in Vietnam, where our soldiers are asked to die but forbidden to win. It applies to the Administration in Washington, whose aid enables our enemies to continue this war.

Without the support of the Soviet bloc, Communist North Vietnam’s war effort would quickly collapse. Even with this aid, General John P. McConnell, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, declares that the United States could force North Vietnam’s surrender “virtually overnight.” But President Johnson, the Commander-in-Chief, admits that he does not want victory. His goal, he told troops at Ft. Campbell on July 23, 1966, is to find “a way to make an honorable peace desirable to the Communist leaders in Hanoi.” Until that happens, he told visiting state legislators in Washington on June 16, 1966, “we must continue to fight until men are convinced that it is better to talk than to fight.”

So long as the United States subsidizes and supports our Communist enemies, even as they continue to kill our sons, that day will never come.

We have seen how the actions of the Johnson Administration are prolonging the fighting in Vietnam. Our commander there, General William C. Westmoreland, has warned that under the current restrictions “we must prepare ourselves for what the Communists call a protracted war. The time is not measured in months, it’s measured in years.” Always more specific, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has suggested that “this is the kind of war we’ll most likely be facing for the next fifty years.”

Forgotten is the warning of an American General who spoke from another war against the Communists in which we were not allowed to win:

From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea, written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo. There is no substitute for victory.

Ignored are the words of General Curtis E. LeMay, the able and outspoken former Air Force Chief of Staff:

The way to end the war in Vietnam is to win it!

As we write, the streets of San Francisco and New York are packed with thousands of pro-Vietcong agitators demanding America’s surrender in Vietnam. They march thirty abreast down American streets behind the flag of the Vietcong. Not a handful of them. Not fifty or a hundred, or a thousand. But hundreds of thousands.

While brave men die.

But let’s not kid ourselves. While the pro-Vietcong activists have certainly served to lower the morale of the young men who must face death daily while lesser men prance, it is not they who tie the hands of our military. It is not they who aid and supply the arsenal of the Vietcong killing American soldiers in Vietnam. It is the Johnson Administration which is doing that.

What will you do to help stop it?

Will you even try?

Is affluence so comfortable and moderation so sweet that honor and indignation and the blood of our sons no longer have meaning?

What will you do?

While brave men die.

It is time for an aroused and angry public to demand: Let’s stop all aid to our Communist enemies, and let’s stop it now.

It is time to insist: Let’s win this war, and bring our boys home.

It is time for a flood of letters, petitions, telephone calls, and telegrams to every politician, every newspaper, every person of influence in the United States, until these demands are met.

It is time to win.

• For a more complete list of authorizations for shipment to the Communists by the Administration see Congressional Record, January 26, 1967, Page H693.

** For the complete list see Congressional Record, March 26, 1967, pp. S3543-S3547.