POST ASKS TO BE SHELLED

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 13

POST ASKS TO BE SHELLED

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright)

SAIGON, August 20.

About 600 Viet Cong today overran and possibly wiped out a small United States marine volunteer outpost, from where the last words were a radio call for American artillery and air strikes on the platoon’s own position.

“If there are any survivors, there cannot be many,” a marine spokesman told a United Press International correspondent, David Lamb, at Hoi An, an American bastion 370 miles north of Saigon and close to south-west of the overrun base.

today, Stratofortresses pounded Communist positions just below the northern border, in the Mekoflg Delta below Saigon and in the Tay Ninh area near the Cambodian border.

At dawn today, the guerrillas again shelled two United States bases near Tay Ninh, but did not follow up with ground attacks. United States observers say the Communist drive in this area appears to have died out because of poor strategy and superior American firepower.

First reports indicate that nine marines and a medical orderly died defending their post against an assault by a full battalion of Communist guerrillas. About 100 South Vietnamese Popoular Force militiamen tried to fight their way to the Americans’ side, but the United States artillery fire, requested by the marines when the Communists breached their defences, blew up the post’s ammunition dump and blocked the way of the would-be rescuers. At least 24 South Vietnamese were killed in their vain attempt to reach the marines. The Viet Cong charged over the barbed-wire defences erected by a volunteer “combined action platoon” stationed on the coast to defend a cluster of South Vietnamese fishing villages. With the guerrillas already in their midst, the marines radioed for artillery fire and air strikes, giving their own position as the target zone because so many of the Viet Cong were there.

The incident, at a point only 20 miles south of the huge marine base at Da Nang, came after a day of disaster for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam.

In nation-wide battling, particularly heavy near the Cambodian border north-west of Saigon, United States troops and South Vietnamese forces killed at least 290 Communists.

Seventeen Americans were killed and 112 wounded, and the South Vietnamese reported 10 men killed and 51 wounded.

Late last night and again