Saturday, June 3, 1972
Raids Stall N. Viet Supplies
SAIGON (UPI) --North Vietnam will need 1,000 truckloads of supplies for each 100-car freight train halted in China as a result of U.S. bombing of rail lines, U.S. Air Force sources said Thursday.So far it isn't getting them.North Vietnam is thought to have a truck fleet of about 11,000 vehicles, 3,000 of them engaged in shuttling cargo down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.But reconnaissance photos have given no indication that the North Vietnamese have begun to redeploy either the Ho Chi Minh trail vehicles or the 8,000 trucks used to carry cargo from Hanoi southward to the three mountain passes serving the trail, sources said."We know their trains are stopped by the Chinese border. The bridges are out."Perhaps the reason they haven't tried to redeploy the truck fleet is the fact that many of the railroad bridges were built for economy reasons as dual purpose bridges and when the rail line was knocked out it also knocked out the highway," an Air Force source said.The source said the reconnaissance flights have failed to turn up any indication that the North Vietnamese have begun a crash program of road construction into China to make up for the crippled rail lines.The North Vietnamese proved themselves master road builders in constructing the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in Laos. However, the Air Force source said, "there's a terrain difference. Laos is mostly triple canopy jungle. The country is more open in North Vietnam. It would be harder to hide the trucks."The Air Force began in a limited way using its laser guided bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail about a year ago. But the first heavy employment came this year in North Vietnam.Airmen like the laser bombs because fewer planes are used and fewer bombs dropped to hit a target.And there is less likelihood of a bomb going astray and hitting a non-military target."Raids Stall N. Viet Supplies", by (UPI), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Saturday, June 3, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.