North Vietnamese take Hue, advance on Da Nang

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33803, 27 March 1975, Page 19

North Vietnamese take Hue, advance on Da Nang

V Z P.A -Reuter—Copyright)

DA NANG, March 26.

North Vietnamese troops captured the former imperial capital. Hue, today and advanced toward isolated Da Nang, the last Government bastion in upper South Vietnam.

Military intelligence sources said a North Vietnamese armoured column rumbled into Hue and the last Government troops surrendered South Vietnam’s third-largest city without a fight.

Communist rockets bombarded Da Nang this morning, threatening the start of a giant American air and sea moving of one million people from the refugee-swollen city.

Communist gunners ringing the city fired a barrage of 14 rockets at the Da Nang air base, killing six people and wounding 34. Most of the victims were civilians. Virtually all of the 300,000 civilians and most of the 25.000 troops in Hue, 400 miles north of Saigon, fled to Da Nang during recent days in a mass retreat climaxed by a Dunkirk-style evacuation by sea. Boats bringing refugees from Hue were still arriving this morning at the besiegedport of Da Nang, 50 miles to the south, but in sharply reduced numbers.

The capture of Hue, one of the bloodiest American battlefields of the war, left the Communists in control of 11 of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces and half the nation’s territory. More than 1000 American marines were killed or wounded during the 1968 Tet offensive in 26 da.ys of fierce fighting for control of Hue, a walled city of stately streets and Buddhist shrines. United States officials said that American planes and ships would begin carrying one million people out of Da Nang today, in a replay of an extensive movement of antiCommunist refugees from

North Vietnam two decades ago.

ago. In Saigon. President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered Government troops today to stand and fight in their current positions against the two and a half week-old Viet Cong and North Vietnamese offensive. President Thieu, in an order read to troops, called on his “fellow soldiers” to stop the Communist advance “at all i costs.” “You must mobilise all your initiative and ability to destroy as many enemies as you can and to counter-attack strongly,” he said. Civilian-piloted, strippeddown American jetliners packed with refugees were to begin flying 10,000 people a day to Cam Ranh Bay, a United States-built base on the central coast.

But American ships will carry the bulk of the refugees from Da Nang, the second largest city in South Vietnam, to the Cam Ranh sand dunes along the South China Sea.

Foreigners, including hospital workers and missionaries, began abandoning Da Nang today in the face of the relentless Communist sweep across South Vietnam’s [northern provinces. The Rev. Generoso Bono, a [Brazilian Roman Catholic priest, said that he has fled Communist advances in IndoChina nine times in the last

25 years. He said “now is the time” to flee again. U.P.I. reporters who travelled by boat to the beach east of Hue before the North Vietnamese seized the city said the Communists were sporadically shelling the retreating troops and civilians. The reporters said that the beach was littered with boots, packs, weapons, and personal belongings left behind when the owners discovered they had to swim to boats waiting off shore. Tuyet Trinh, a 20-year-old war widow with three children and no money, was one of the lucky ones to get on a South Vietnamese ship travelling to Da Nang. Clutching one child on each hip and the third trailing behind her, she wandered briefly on the Da Nang dock, then sank to the ground, weeping. Relief workers took the family to a temporary refugee camp.