Fighting Intensifies Throughout Vietnam

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31761, 19 August 1968, Page 17

Fighting Intensifies Throughout Vietnam

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

SAIGON, August 18.

The North Vietnamese launched heavy co-ordinated attacks today against at least 10 allied positions in two provinces near the Cambodian border, north-west of Saigon, and overran a strategic United States radio relay station, according to an Associated Press report—while sharp fighting also broke out in the northern provinces.

The action across the country was the heaviest in four days of intensified ground fighting which military officials have said could be the prelude to the longexpected third Viet Cong offensive.

The latest Communists attacks have followed the heaviest clashes in two months along the demilitarised zone, in the central highlands, and on two other sides of Saigon. Savage fighting has left 425 Communist and 80 allied troops dead, and another 329 allied troops wounded in half a dozen major actions over the last three days. New fighting and Communist mortar attacks were reported today in the far northern provinces south of the major cities of Hue and Da Nang.

In Saigon itself, plainclothes police swarmed around the An Quang pagoda today to break up any antiGovernment demonstration while 200 militant Buddhists met to discuss church unity. The Buddhists are holding a three-day meeting to find ways of ending a two-year split between militants and moderates.

North west of Saigon, North Vietnamese regulars attacked a mountain relay station and a patrol base in Tay Ninh province, and forced United States troops there to move to higher ground. Battlefield reports said the enemy had captured four bunkers.

The enemy first pounded the base with rockets and mortars, and then opened up on infantrymen of the United

States 25th Division with machine-guns and bazookatype rockets. The relay station occupies the site of the former Nui Ba Den special forces camp, It is an important observation post guarding inflltration routes near the Cambo-

dian border, and also houses sophisticated electronic equipment used to guide allied aircraft in the South Vietnamese lowlands, including the entire Mekong Delta. Enemy troops tried to overrun it last May, killing 19 Americans and wounding 24.