Saturday, May 6, 1972
Viet Drive Opens Road To Kontum
SAIGON --South Vietnamese paratroopers and infantrymen Friday reopened vital Highway 14 in the central highlands for convoys to carry badly needed military supplies to threatened Kontum city, spokesmen at Pleiku said. They met little resistance.It was the first government counterattack since the North Vietnamese offensive began March 30.At the same time, the government and the United States began a crash program aimed at reversing military defeats.Several hundred South Vietnamese paratroopers made a combat assault in the central highlands in an effort to clear North Vietnamese from the Chu Pa Mountain Pass on Highway 14 between Kontum and Pleiku.Field reports said 40 North Vietnamese troops had been killed in the initial fighting.A news report from Pleiku said that the combat assault was made eight miles south of Kontum and 19 miles north of Pleiku in efforts to reopen the vital supply route.The South Vietnamese paratroopers ran into Communist resistance shortly after being landed by helicopters and at dusk, fighting was still reported.The paratroopers had found three-man Communist gun crews entrenched in caves on the mountains. U.S. and South Vietnamese fighter-bombers dropped canisters of napalm on the North Vietnamese positions.Kontum, under threat of Communist attack both from the north and west, has been cut off by road from Pleiku for several weeks.Although the counter attack is small compared to the overall North Vietnamese offensive, it seemed to be an attempt to gain the initiative in at least one area.The Saigon command said fighting countrywide had slackened off to its lowerst level of the North Vietnamese offensive. Sightings of truck convoys, however, indicated that the Communists were pausing again to regroup and resupply for another wave of assaults. The old imperial capital of Hue was believed to be the main target.Smiling broadly and declaring he was "very confident with the whole situation," President Nguyen Van Thieu flew to Hue Thursday to confer with his tough new commander on the northern front.Thieu met for two hours with Lt. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, considered the strictest disciplinarian in the Vietnamese armed forces, who had taken over command of the crumbling northern quarter only 24 hours earlier.Hue, at the brink of anarchy Wednesday, was returning to normal Thursday after Truong issued orders to government soldiers streaming south to return and help defend the city or be shot on sight.Field reports said that Highway 1 leading south to Da Nang, 50 miles away, was a sea of humanity Thursday with refugees fleeing Hue. The reports said Hue's population had fallen to about 50,000 to 100,000 from a refugee-swollen high earlier in the week of 300,000.The offensive appeared to have reached at least a temporary lull, South Vietnamese spokesmen in Saigon reported. They said there were 54 "enemy-initiated incidents" across the country in the 24 hours ending at 6 a.m. Thursday, fewest actions since the start of the all-out Communist drive March 30.The United States Thursday began replacing tanks lost by the South Vietnamese in the route at Quang Tri. Big M48 tanks began arriving at Da Nang aboard giant C5A Galaxy transports, the biggest aircraft in the world. Other tanks were being shipped from Japan."Viet Drive Opens Road To Kontum", by (AP & UPI), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Saturday, May 6, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.