Cease-Fire Breaches By Viet Cong Alleged

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30325, 28 December 1963, Page 13

Cease-Fire Breaches By Viet Cong Alleged

(N.Z, Press Association—Copyright)

SAIGON, Dec. 26. The South Vietnamese Government charged today that Communist guerrillas broke their promised Christmas ceasefire in at least four provinces, attacking hamlets and outposts, the Asso-

ciated Press reported. “The Viet Cong’s promise of a cease-fire was a lie; like everything else, they say,” a Government spokesman said. Viet Cong plans to stop fighting for 24 hours were announced last week by “Liberation Radio,” the Communists’ clandestine transmitter.

Military activity throughout the nation apparently was reduced over Christmas, although the Government carried out several operations.

Although South Vietnam is a predominantly Buddhist nation with only about 15 per cent of the population Christians, Christmas was observed on an unprecedented scale in Saigon. The most successful Government operation of the Christmas holiday was late on Tuesday night in the Mekong river delta, where a Government ambush was reported to have accounted for the deaths of 12 Viet Cong. American military sources today applauded the withdrawal of South Vietnamese troops from isolated mudwalled forts in the face of mounting Communist pressures, United Press International reported from the town of Camau.

United States military men long had advocated the abandonment of the postsand

a switch in strategy from fixed defences to more mobile operations. Troop withdrawals from the outposts have been going on quietly almost since the overthrow of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. For thousands of Vietnamese peasants in the Mekong delta, the last remaining symbols of central Government authority are being erased as small detachments of troops march off to return only on occasion and then in force.

The yellow and red striped Government flags which fluttered over watch-towers are being pulled down in small villages throughout the five southernmost provinces which make up the area of the Vietnamese Army’s 21st Division. The price in blood to fly the flag in the southern Mekong delta became too high.

With their mud walls and spike-filled moats, the little forts once were were defensible against a seige by poorly armed guerrillas. But barbed wire entanglements and minefields surrounding the forts offer protection against the mortars and recoiless rifles now being used by the increasingly-better armed Viet Cong guerrillas. A senior American adviser referred to the Government outposts as “supply dumps for the Viet Cong.”

American advisers for years had seen the outposts as strategic and military liabilities. Their cost was high, both in men killed in their defence, and in weapons captured by the Viet Cong, who depended on the forts as their greatest source of me dem American weapons.