More Fighting In Saigon

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31672, 7 May 1968, Page 17

More Fighting In Saigon

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) SAIGON, May 6. Bitter street battles raged in Saigon again today on the second day of what the Viet Cong claims is a new nationwide offensive.

The Viet Cong shelled more than 120 targets across the country yesterday. Military authorities in Saigon say that 160 Viet Cong were lulled in attacks on the capital today. Enemy shells hit the Tan Son Nhut air base about daybreak, and allied forces sealed off the normally busy airport One savage battle developed in the old French military cemetery on the edge of the airport where the Viet Cong’s mortars and rockets rained on South Vietnamese troops. Guerrillas set fire to a block of houses in a Saigon suburb to hold off a South Vietnamese battailion trying to take the area. The fighting flared there some hours after another guerrilla group had attacked Tan Son Nhut and a police station. Five heavy. Chinese-made rockets were pumped into the airport and Government sources later reported that Colonel Luu Kim Cuong, commander of the Vietnamese 33rd Air Wing, had been killed.

As black smoke and flames from the houses set on fire by the guerrillas whirled hundreds of feet above Saigon, firemen brought their fire engines to within 300 yards of the fighting Vietnamese sat on top of their houses just outside the battle area watching the fighting, but the fire was slowly spreading and policemen with megaphones called on all civilians to leave the area. Troops crouched in doorways or behind parked

vehicles, and lay in gutters in the area, only two miles northwest of the city centre. For a short time a party of reporters and photographers had their escape route from the area cut off by sniper fire, but they finally managed to run to safety. MARINES’ CLAIM

Marines based at the fort of Dong Ha, just below North Vietnam, are said to have killed in one week 1095 North Vietnamese who were making their greatest war-time effort, with a full division in the attack, to seize any allied military bastion. Yesterday they killed 240 Communists, using napalm to stop enemy charges only 60 yards from allied lines. Major-General Rathvon Tompkins, commander of the United States 3rd Marine Division, said: “We have a good battle on our hands. Our forces face the attack of more than 6000 North Vietnamese.” For the past week the bodies of North Vietnamese have been piling up around the marines’ headquarters base, 12 miles south of the Demilitarised Zone.