1943. The Massive Dnieper Offensive

The Soviets Battle Westward

Soviet soldiers operating a DShK heavy machine gun during the Battle of the Dnieper in November 1943 (source)

The parentheses indicate text that did not pass Soviet censors for military security or propaganda reasons.

(For more, see the complete 1943 Moscow reports.)

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

September 26, 1943

An article in the Army journal, Red Star, today puts the question that is on everyone's lips (here in Russia): "Where is Hitler's army going to stop?"

This (same) question must be on the lips of the people of Germany.

Red Star gives the answer. Hitler's army will stop where the Red Army lets it stop. The war in Russia today is being conducted under the direction of the Soviet high command. Hitler's generals have very little to do with it.

The most important fighting in Russia today is on the banks of the Dnieper. Up in Smolensk, the Red Army is battling its way westward down the Dnieper Valley into White Russia. The river turns south in White Russia and winds its way to the Ukraine. In the Smolensk region, the Russians are on both sides of the river.

Down in the Ukraine, the Red Army is mopping up the east bank of the river (and, according to unofficial reports, has already crossed the Dnieper in two places south of Kiev and is fighting on the western bank.) The Russians are approaching the outskirts of the capital of the Ukraine having captured the town of Brovary, only some seventeen miles away. Long-range Russian artillery probably has the suburbs of Kiev already under fire.

But the big story in Russia today is still Smolensk. Front dispatches this morning tell of the heroic exploits of Russian soldiers who crossed the Dnieper there and fought before their clothing was dry.

Smolensk is one of the most ancient cities of Russia. Historians have called it many things—"the key to Moscow," "the necklace of Russia."

Today it is more than just another ruined Soviet city liberated from the Nazis. It's an important milestone in a victory march which, if it continues, may be instrumental in the freeing of Leningrad—and the liberation of the Baltic States.

The newspapers this morning also print news of the formation of an Allied military-political commission to be established in Algiers.

The Soviet representative of this commission will be the Vice-Chairman of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat, Andrey Vyshinsky, who is also the Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs. This commission will have the initial task of dealing with armistice terms in Italy. More importantly, it will also deal with "similar problems of enemy territories liberated by the Allies."

Mr. Vyshinsky is a leading figure in the Soviet Foreign Office. He is second only to Mr. Molotov. You remember, it was Vyshinsky who acted as prosecutor in the purge trials in 1937.

Mr. Vyshinsky is going to be a busy man, even after the problems arising from the fall of Italy are settled.

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Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

September 28, 1943

The Red Army continues its amazing advance tonight, taking advantage of exceptionally good weather in the north to drive for complete capture of the Dnieper line.

Tonight's communiqué announced the capture of over a thousand towns and villages, mostly on the northern sectors of this offensive.

The biggest bag was the five hundred inhabited points captured in twenty-four hours in the direction of Mogilev, the city that is the primary objective of Russian troops now fighting their way into White Russia.

Three hundred towns and villages were captured in the Vitebsk direction. Vitebsk is also in White Russia. More importantly, since the fall of Smolensk, Vitebsk becomes the northern anchor of the whole position in the Dnieper valley. The city also protects the entire flank of the German army group holding the line south of Leningrad.

The Russians are advancing at the rate of six to twelve miles in this northern sector. Down south around Kiev, the Germans are obviously throwing in more and more reinforcements in front of the city. The fighting there is increasing in bitterness, and as a result the Russian advance has been slowed in this sector.

Along the big Dnieper pond, the Soviet command still has announced no bridgeheads across the river. The Dnipropetrovsk and Kremenchuk Red Army forces still are closing in on isolated groups of German soldiers whose fate is extremely perilous. Already we have reports of the Nazis abandoning large amounts of equipment on the east bank of the river. More can be expected.

The Tiger tank, at this moment, is probably one of the greatest liabilities that the German army possesses. This Tiger weight some sixty tons. You can't put a sixty ton tank on an ordinary pontoon bridge, especially across a river like the Dnieper.

It's the same problem with other heavy German equipment.

The weight of armor which the Germans hoped to roll to Moscow has, for the first time, turned into a major obstacle for them. Heavy armor is no use in a retreat—not when you have to carry it.

_______________________________

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

September 29, 1943

There is thunder over the Dnieper today; the thunder of Russian artillery shelling ferry crossings where the Germans are making desperate attempts to save manpower and equipment from being pushed into the river. Fierce air battles are being engaged up and down the river from Kiev southward. The Germans have increased their aircraft support on this front, but the hard-pressed Luftwaffe hasn't enough planes to meet the Russian superiority in the air.

The Russians are now engaged in a desperate battle for Kiev. The city of Kiev is on the western bank of the Dnieper. The Nazis are making a big stand on the eastern bank. We have few details of what is going on in this battle for Kiev, but all indications show it to be one of the biggest engagements since the original Red Army breakthrough at Belgorod and Orel.

This fighting in the Ukraine has now become a struggle for bridgeheads across the Dnieper; bridgeheads which both sides need for this winter's campaigning. The Germans need them for defensive strategy. The Russians need them for the coming winter offensive. It would be a great advantage if these bridgeheads could be established while the weather is comparatively good. However, such crossings cannot be captured without hard fighting, which promises to turn into some of the most desperate battles of the summer offensive.

Up in the north, the Russian troops are still rolling westward into White Russia. The advance on Gomel, Mogilev, and Vitebsk is going at a pace from six to twelve miles a day. The Germans don't seem to be able to do much about it. As long as the weather holds, this advance seems destined to continue until the German forces are engaged on the outskirts of these three cities which peg the Nazi defense line in White Russia.

A new high in Nazi criminality is being reached in this big westward retreat. Throughout their backward march, special demolition squadrons have been destroying property at random. All able-bodied residents of the scorched earth areas have been driven before the retreating Wehrmacht. The Russian troops have been moving so fast that they are daily freeing thousands of these helpless people who the Germans had neither time to kill, nor take with them.

Lately, the advance has been so fast that the Germans have not even had time to do a decent demolition job. But they are doing something more terrible.

Groups of fast tanks or armored cars are driving through undefended villages, firing incendiary bullets into haystacks, into thatched roofs; even shooting cattle and horses. People have been hunted down like rabbits. One order, discovered in the Ukraine, ordered all "men" from the ages of ten to sixty to cross the western side of the Dnieper. The order said that all who refused to obey the order would be considered partisans and shot.

_______________________________

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

September 29, 1943

It's not news anymore, but Moscow's siege guns boomed again tonight in salute. This time it was for the capture of another obscure town on the Dnieper: Kremenchuk.

We haven't gotten the full details yet on the capture of Kremenchuk, but Marshal Stalin's order of the day was addressed to the troops of the Steppe Front. (These Russian troops are led by Army General Ivan Konev—and there is a good story behind the men of the Steppe Front, even though today we don't have the full story.)

We heard about the Steppe Front for the first time last winter when the Red Army was arching westward from the Caspian in the Kalmyk Steppe just north of the Caucasus.

The next we heard of them, they were participating in the original summer's breakthrough at Belgorod. From Belgorod these troops participated in the capture of Kharkov. And the last we heard of them, they were fighting in the toughest battle in the entire summer offensive—the battle of Poltava.

It was the men of the Steppe Front that captured Poltava, (where the Germans had their biggest concentrations of armor and manpower to protect the troops falling back from the Donbass. Poltava was finally taken—by the troops of the Steppe Front. And now the men under General Konev have reached the Dnieper.) The capture of Kremenchuk virtually wipes out this Nazi salient that they maintained as a dangerous wedge into the heart of Ukraine.

The men of the Steppe Front have reached the Dnieper, but they will be hard to stop.

Late tonight, Marshal Stalin issued another order of the day. This was to celebrate the capture of the railroad town of Rudnia in the north. Rudnia is on the main railroad between Smolensk and Vitebsk, but it represents a major wedge between these two cities. Rudnia is only forty-four miles east of Vitebsk, and less than ten miles from the northern border of White Russia.

The other major development announced in the Soviet communiqué tonight is the advance of the Red Army to the eastern bank of the Dnieper, opposite of Kiev. The Russians are within artillery fire of the main part of the city right now. Their heavy guns are moving to the east bank of the river where they can fire into the German positions dug into the hills on which the ancient capital of the Ukraine is located.

German resistance on the approaches to Kiev is as fierce as it has been anywhere on this front since the war began.

Kiev is a bridgehead across the Dnieper which the Germans cannot afford to lose.

1949. Pro-Soviet Propaganda Downplays D-Day's Significance

In Berlin, the Fifth Anniversary of D-Day

"Children watch CARE parcels being unloaded at a warehouse in Berlin, immediately after the lifting of the Berlin blockade in 1949. The organization Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe was initiated in the 1940s." (H. William Tetlow/Getty Images) (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

June 6, 1949

Today is a holiday for the American troops in Europe in commemoration of the historic landings in Normandy.

Joseph Stalin once called this Allied expedition to the French coast the greatest single achievement in the history of wars.

However, today the Communist tune has changed. Only one Berlin newspaper so far makes any reference to the D-Day anniversary—the Russian-licensed Berliner Zeitung—and according to the present party line, we might as well have not made the effort on June 6, 1944.

According to the German Communist military analyst, the Normandy landings were made at a time when the Russian army had already won the war at Stalingrad. In fact, according to the pro-Soviet military editorialist, the war was decided even before we started bombing Germany.

On top of all this, the Communist newspaper makes the old charge that the Western Allies held off the invasion of the continent for two years for devious political reasons—America and Britain wanted the Red Army to emerge from its victory as weak as possible.

Germany was weak when we landed in France, the Communist paper says: "It is daydreaming to believe that a similar invasion, or even stronger force, could be successful if met by a strong and determined opponent."

This kind of propaganda poison probably has little effect here in Germany where people know something of the might the Western Allies used in gaining their share of victory.

However, this kind of smear campaign against the West attacks a basic concept the democracies hold in their struggle to gain a permanent peace: the notion that peace can only be achieved by a mutual understanding and respect among the peoples of the world.

This kind of peace was most certainly closer on D-Day five years ago when the Kremlin was praising the courage and sacrifice of the men who stormed the Normandy beaches.

It would appear that the prewar Chamberlain phrase "peace in our time" has been exchanged by the Kremlin to read "peace on our terms, and our terms only."

1945. The Death of A. Peter Dewey

The Americans Caught in the Midst of Rebellion

"Ho Chi Minh (center) and Võ Nguyên Giáp (far left) with American OSS agents planning coordinated action against the Japanese - 1945" (source)

This is the story of the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey, an American soldier and OSS agent accidentally killed by Việt Minh rebels after being mistaken for a Frenchman. Caught in the midst of the Vietnamese fight against the occupying French, British, and Japanese forces, Dewey became the first American fatality in the so-called Indochina Wars. As a non-aligned American, he had been sympathetic to the rebel cause.

On September 26, 1945, Dewey was on his way to an OSS-controlled villa for a lunch meeting with foreign correspondents Bill Downs and James McGlincy. He never made it. A firefight broke out between the rebels and the meager personnel at the villa in the wake of his death.

This text is taken from war correspondent Clark Lee's 1947 memoir One Last Look Around and is also featured here.

IN SAIGON, SEPTEMBER 1945

The French who saw us at first in Saigon cheered enthusiastically for the arrival of "les soldats Américains." They said openly, "Now we can put these Annamite beggars back in their places." They were crestfallen when we told them we weren't troops, but correspondents, and that no American forces were coming to the colony.

Actually, the American "forces" consisted of Colonel Dewey and his mission, plus a group of eight Air Transport Command personnel headed by Major Frank Rhoades. Dewey jumped from a transport plane into Saigon right after V-J Day and quickly got the 136 American war prisoners out of their camps and headed home. Then, instead of leaving, he got mixed up in a game that was too fast for him. "I am remaining to protect American property," he explained. What property? He had hung out the American flag from the offices of Standard Oil, Texaco, and Singer Sewing Machine. Also, he had intervened dramatically a few days before when Annamites had prepared to storm the Continental Hotel and threatened to kill the French people sheltered there. Dewey had bluffed the Annamites into believing the hotel was American property, exhibiting a "bill of sale" made over to him by the Corsican manager, and had waved the American flag to turn back the would-be attackers. Tragically enough, it was the lack of an American flag on his jeep that caused his death.

. . .

If our arrival was a disappointment to the French, it was even more so to the Annamites. Like all of the people of Asia they looked to Americans in the first weeks after the surrender as true liberators and believed in democracy for everybody, everywhere. They hoped the United States would guarantee their freedom. They knew the French would not give an inch more than they had to, despite the "liberal" promises of De Gaulle and his henchmen. If there had been any doubt in the minds of the Annamites about the French, it disappeared when the colonial overlords were released from internment after the Japanese surrender.

Feeling their oats once more, the French resumed their old habit of kicking around—literally—the despised natives. This was a grave mistake, because the French were not strong enough to get away with it pending the arrival of reinforcements of guns, tanks, rifles and hand grenades. Then the Annamites turned back on them and suddenly the French realized that they were dealing with people who were willing to give their lives to demonstrate to the world their desire for freedom. The Annamites were still fighting when the vanguard of British troops came in, and it was at this stage of the struggle that we reached Indo-China.

The Japanese just stood by and chuckled while the Annamites turned their arms on the French, kidnapped and killed many of the most hated of their tormentors, and drove the terrified colonials out of their suburban homes and into a narrow section of Saigon paralleling the Rue Catinat. Inside the city the Annamites quit their jobs. Most of them faded away into the countryside, hiding in villages which the British troops attacked and burned in reprisal for attacks on their supply lines. The city, stripped of ninety per cent of its populace, was paralyzed. We found the water supply off, the lights working only fitfully. To the disgust of the French, who for years had been accustomed to regard their servants as pieces of furniture, the servants disappeared. There were no rickshaws in the streets, no public transportation of any kind.

Along the Rue Catinat and the small "safe" area surrounding it, the French gathered in little worried knots. They were ashamed of their war record, their cooperation with the Japs, their inability to do anything now about the Annamite uprising. The men huddled in the cafes, unwilling even to take rifles and go out and protect the city. They shouted for more help—Japs, Gurkhas, Americans, it didn't matter—and they plotted how they would avenge themselves on the Annamites when their turn came.

Starting at seven in the morning, the French came out to parade up and down the Rue Catinat, stopping at the sidewalk cafes for an apéritif of anisette, ice, and water. At eleven they went into the few restaurants still open, but soon to close, and ate heartily for two hours and then disappeared for a siesta. About four in the afternoon, people started to emerge again and an hour before dusk everyone had gathered either in the candle-lit lobby of the Continental Hotel or on the sidewalk outside. We learned a new line there. All around the world, in Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, Egypt, the Philippines, Japan, young kids had approached us with outstretched hands and pronounced the local equivalent of "cigarette pour papa." In Saigon, Frenchmen stopped us on the street and, too ashamed to ask for themselves, begged, "A cigarette for my wife."

It was pitiful to watch the French when the sound of shooting was heard. One night a platoon of Japanese ran up on the double to take sentry positions outside the hotel, and there was a panicked rush for inside. Another night Annamites set fire to the market place four blocks from Continental. The French, silent and terrified, refused to go near the fire—even though the supply of food was growing scantier every day—but the Chinese stall owners made frantic and futile efforts to drench the flame with small splashes of water from leaking buckets. Most of the time there weren't any lights, and in the confusion of that pushing mass around the hotel, more than one Frenchwoman wound up in the room of an English officer or correspondent. Despite this amateur competition, the bright-looking half-caste girls roaming the Rue Catinat did a big business.

During one outbreak of shooting, the owner of the Continental called us into his office for an apéritif with him and some friends.

"Why," they demanded in an aggrieved tone, "do you not protect us from those devil Annamites?"

We baited them, "This is not the quarrel of Americans. For all we know, justice is on the side of the rebels. We hear that the French have been inexcusably cruel to them. In fact, we would just as soon shoot French as Annamites." This last remark was accompanied by an ostentatious fingering of carbine triggers.

"Ah, monsieurs," the hotel owned gushed, "it is quite right that you are. All of us in this room are not French. You are surprised, no? The fact that we do not come from Metropolitan France. We are Corsicans. This local political squabble is not of our making, but the fault of the French who have treated the Annamites inconsiderately."

Meantime, Frenchman and Corsican alike continued to plan for vengeance. They got it after the French troops under irascible General Jacques LeClerq finally arrived to take over behind Gurkha and Japanese guns. Witnesses later described the long lines of Annamite prisoners, manacled or trussed up, being marched down the Rue Catinat to the filthy jail, where they were fed miserably, given drumhead trials lasting a few minutes and then sentenced to many years at hard labor on Poulo Condore Island—or even condemned to die for distributing leaflets asking for independence. In this and other ways, the French finally got retribution for the humiliation that we watched them undergo.

At night, Annamites would slip into the city, set fire to the power plant and other buildings, and shoot off their rifles. The harassed [General D. D.] Gracey was unable to stop them with his small force, whose forays into the countryside and across the river to the Chinese quarter proved fruitless. He blamed the Japs for his troubles, accusing them of instigating the Annamites to fight, and at the same time he called on the Japs to assist him in putting down the fighting. In desperation, the British commander visited the home of the aged and ailing Japanese field marshal, Count Terauchi, and warned him that unless the Japs behaved themselves they "would not be sent back home to Japan." Gracey pointed out that the Allied plan was to repatriate the Japs in Nipponese shipping. Very few bottoms were available, Gracey said, and he threatened that unless Terauchi saw to it that his troops were good boys, no ships would come to Indo-China for them. This provided another big laugh for the Japs, who didn't care very much either way whether they stayed or went—after all, it was France that wanted the colony back.

Meantime, the fighting was getting sharper every night and more and more factories and homes were being burned by the Annamites. On the third night of our stay, Captain Joe Coolidge, a distant relative of the late Calvin and Colonel Dewey's No. 2 in the O.S.S., was shot through the throat and arm while escorting a group of French women and children through an Annamite barricade.

We got word of it through Colonel Dewey, who sent for us to come to his room at the Continental. Perhaps it was premonition that made Dewey talk at length about something that was on his mind. He had been doing a great deal of running around in the midst of the fighting, and had found the Annamites friendly when they discovered him to be American. "It's the French they're after. Not us, nor even the British. They won't shoot at the Japanese at all." Dewey's difficulty was to identify himself as an American. "I had an American flag on my jeep, he said, "but General Gracey forbade me to fly it. When I go up to one of the barricades, there is always a chance that the Annamites will kill me before I can identify myself."

Several of us stormed up to see Gracey and protest against his refusal to allow the American flag to be flown from automobiles. "I cannot permit it," he said. "That is a privilege of general officers only." If you chose to be strict about it—and Gracey did, for obvious reasons of European and Imperial prestige—the British general was correct in his position, according to military regulations. He went on to say that he had no objections to flags being painted on jeeps and cars, which was a meaningless concession in view of the total absence of paint in Saigon. Likewise, he agreed to flags being tied to the side of vehicles, but that was no assistance whatever since the important thing was to be recognized well before you drove up to a barricade, and a flag on the side was not visible from a distance.

The following day Colonel Dewey invited two of our party, Bill Downs and Jim McGlincy, to lunch at the O.S.S. house on the northern edge of Saigon. They drove out with Major Verger and with Captain Frank White, a member of the nine-man O.S.S. mission, and sat in the patio to have a drink and wait for Dewey to return from the airport.

Five minutes later there was heavy firing up the road, and an American officer came running toward the O.S.S. villa which was also, in effect, American Army headquarters in Saigon. The officer halted every few yards to crouch and fire his .45 back down the road at some invisible pursuers.

Hurriedly, Captain White issued carbines to the correspondents and to the other four men in the house, and they got behind the garden wall and fired at a crowd of Annamites who suddenly came into sight pursuing the American. The Annamites took cover—there were about a hundred of them—and the officer staggered into the yard behind the protective wall. He was Major Herbert Bluechel. His neck, shoulders, and most of his body was covered with blood and he appeared to be seriously wounded.

"They got the colonel," he gasped hysterically. "They killed the colonel."

The blood on Bluechel was Dewey's blood. The two Americans had been passing a barricade in their jeep. Dewey gestured to the Annamites ahead to remove the crisscrossed trees forming the road block, but they suddenly opened fire with a machine gun. The colonel's head was blown off. Bluechel, unharmed, jumped out of the jeep and sprinted frantically up the road.

"What a pity," Bluechel exclaimed. "The Annamites liked Dewey and he liked them and he believed they should be free. If they had only recognized us as Americans, they would never have shot."

Meanwhile, the Annamites began pushing toward the house. The Americans ran inside and took positions at the windows. Like Dewey, they did not want to kill Annamites, but they were being fired upon and there was no choice except to shoot back. Yelling and shouting, the Annamites advanced down a drainage ditch parallel to the road, pausing from time to time to fire their guns. They were bad marksmen and although their bullets bounced off the house, none of the Americans was hit.

Spacing their shots, the Americans picked off the attacking men. Three fell as they tried to run across an open field. Several others were wounded. Bill Downs shot down at least one man, and he says that the sight of the little brown figure falling will haunt him for years. But blood was being shed, hysteria had taken command, and there was no chance to stop and argue things out.

Briefly, the Annamites retired, and then returned with a machine gun. They fired one burst into the front of the house and then ceased fire. In this interlude a jeep with three more O.S.S. men drove squarely down the road without drawing a single shot, and turned into the yard. Meanwhile, six Japanese sentries who were on duty guarding the villa had taken a casual part in the fighting, firing once or twice but mostly just crouching out of the way.

After more than two hours of skirmishing, the Annamites began to withdraw, and McGlincy and Downs volunteered to walk across the field and try to reach the airport in search of reinforcements. They took their sidearms for defense, a bottle of "Old Crow" for courage, and on the theory that nobody would shoot at a singing man they walked along caroling at the top of their voices, "For he's a jolly good fellow." They made it to the airfield without trouble and dispatched a message for help. Then the two correspondents, with Major Rhoades of the A.T.C., drove back in a jeep through the Annamite positions, where a group were picking up wounded under a Red Cross flag. The Americans waved their arms and shouted, "Chee-wee, Chee-wee," which means American in the Annamite tongue.

Back at the house, the Americans decided to go out after Dewey's body. Major Verger took the precaution of changing his French army shirt for an American jacket. He tied a white handkerchief to his carbine and waved as the jeep gingerly approached the Annamite positions. "Where is the commandant?" McGlincy demanded of the sentries.

An excited young man—in civilian shirt and shorts like the other fighters for freedom—stepped forward and delivered a fiery speech on liberty and the rights of man, intermingled with violent protests against the Americans, who loved liberty, killing Annamites who sought it. Another young Annamite, about sixteen or seventeen, assisted in translating the leader's discourse.

Downs explained, "We would like to get Colonel Dewey's body."

There were lengthy negotiations, and finally the commander agreed to return Dewey's body if the Americans would bring back the bodies of the Annamite casualties. These terms were accepted. The Americans drove back to the scene of the battle, picked up three bodies, and piled them on the hood of the jeep.

When they returned to the barricade, the Annamite leader became even more violently excited. "Three for one is not fair exchange," he protested through the interpreter.

"Where is Colonel Dewey's body?" Downs asked.

"It is not here," the young man said. "I cannot go through with this agreement when you ask three for one." The Americans insisted that they had kept their part of the bargain.

The negotiations were broken up suddenly by the sound of firing. A group of Gurkhas were coming down the road, shooting off their rifles and driving before them a terrified group of native refugees, mostly women and children. The Annamites at the barricade glared at the Americans, as if they suspected that the negotiations had been a trap to hold them until the Gurkhas arrived. Then they faded away into the woods and behind nearby houses.

Dewey's body was never recovered. For months afterward the French used the missing American's body—the body of a man who believed they should be free—as a bargaining point against the natives. They refused to enter discussions until the body was produced and the Viet Nam government even offered a reward for the corpse.

Reports of Dewey's death in his flagless jeep—there had been a flag but it was wrapped around a pole and thus unidentifiable—quickly reached Lord Louis Mountbatten in Singapore as our stories went out. He sent an urgent message to General Gracey to fly down to Singapore and report on the incident, and the general asked for a lift in our B-25, which had returned after making a trip to Calcutta to pick up equipment for our crippled B-17. As we drove to the airport, we passed through a deathly quiet mile of no-man's land, with torn trees and the bodies of animals on the road—souvenirs of the Gurkhas drive the day before. Native villages along the road were aflame, and here and there Frenchmen crouched behind the stone walls of fine villas. Every few hundred yards there was a Japanese soldier with a rifle and a bayonet— unconcernedly guarding our route. Our own carbines and pistols were cocked as we peered over the sides of the truck.

Throughout the night there had been the sound of drums and shouting from the perimeter around the city and sporadically the noise of shots smashing into buildings. Circling over the city in the B-17 we counted a half dozen large fires, several of them quite close to the besieged Rue Catinat. These fires were symbolic funeral pyres of many natives, for the French came back in with American arms and with the help of the British engaged in bloodletting and slaughter. But eventually they would be the signal fires of freedom.

1965. The Desperate Situation in Vietnam

Terror Tactics and the Viet Cong

Viet Cong fighters crossing a river in 1966. Source: George Esper: The Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War 1961-1975, Associated Press, New York 1983.

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

September 27, 1965

The tragic execution of two more American soldiers by the Viet Cong—a brutal reprisal branded by the US government as "acts of wanton murder"—naturally stirs feelings of anger, disgust, and sorrow in all of us. And, although more than six hundred Americans have died in the undeclared war in Vietnam, the deliberate execution of Captain Humbert Versace and Sergeant Kenneth Roraback exposes all the brutal viciousness of the kind of personalized struggle that characterizes that communist-led guerrilla war to take over the country.

Intelligence reports indicate that the increased casualties suffered by the Viet Cong in the past six months of the intensified fighting have forced the guerrilla leadership to resort more and more to terror as an instrument of their control. The shootings, garrotings, and beheadings of village leaders, the reprisal murders of the families of men who defect from the Viet Cong and give the communist commanders a fearful hold over some forty percent of the countryside and about twenty-two percent of the South Vietnamese population.

The fact that leaders of the so-called "National Liberation Front" found it necessary to slay two captured American soldiers in reprisal for the Saigon government's trial and execution of three Viet Cong terrorists has the earmarks of an act of desperation—although this will be little comfort to families of the dead men.

It could be that the Viet Cong is beginning to lose some of the latent sympathy for their cause among large sections of the civilian population. By killing two US soldiers, the Viet Cong clearly sought to remind the people of the power of communist terror. Ironically, most of the US men fighting in Vietnam make no secret of their professional respect for the combat ability of the Viet Cong guerrilla soldier. They rate him as a skilled and courageous enemy.

A recent study of Viet Cong prisoners sponsored by the government revealed that the ordinary guerrilla fighter—which means most of them—knows and understands very little about the communism for which he is supposed to be fighting and dying. Their motivations for fighting are usually concerned with their own brand of nationalistic patriotism. The Viet Cong guerrilla has learned from the past to have a great contempt for the history of corruption, and the bloody hands of former would-be warlords and obese rice millionaires who ruled him from Saigon. But only the Hanoi-trained, hardcore guerrilla commanders know much about communist ideology. The war prisoners said that morale in the Viet Cong battalions now was beginning to suffer—not so much because of the intensified ground battle they are forced to fight, but because of the relentless, never-ending attacks from the air, night and day, that keep them ever on the move and give them little time to rest.

US intelligence experts here in Washington and in Saigon are now receiving reports about the military posture of the guerrilla forces following the Viet Cong's only partially successful Monsoon offensive. The dispatches are so encouraging for a change that there's reluctance to believe them. For example, out of thirty-three engagements fought with the Viet Cong a week ago, the guerrillas initiated only one battle. While last August the South Vietnam troops were killing three Viet Cong to every one of their own soldiers lost, the rate of killing last week was six to one.

The South Vietnam army has almost tripled its draft call-up since last January. In the past, the number of volunteers has been roughly equal to the draft call. Now more than two South Vietnamese youths are volunteering for everyone one who is drafted. And the most encouraging sign of all, for the first time this year the number of Viet Cong captured has exceeded the number of South Vietnamese troops missing in action—meaning gone over the hill—battlefield desertions.

American authorities explain that the past high rate of desertion from the Saigon army does not necessarily reflect on the courage of the Vietnam fighting men, nor does it mean enemy propaganda has won the AWOL soldier over to the communist cause.

They cite several instances where a man, sent from his delta home to fight in the highlands, will suddenly turn up missing. He might even join up with a Viet Cong guerrilla band going South and fight with them for a few weeks, but when he gets within striking distance of his village, he would desert the Viet Cong unit and rejoin his family. The reason? The AWOL soldier knew that it was time for planting—or harvest—in the family rice paddy, a fact of existence more important to him than a mere war.

In some cases, after the planting was done, the so-called deserter voluntarily reported again to the South Vietnamese army, ready to do his duty and not understanding why his absence caused an excitement at all.

All wars are unbelievable tragic. But the one in Vietnam is stranger and sadder than most—and it's not even an officially declared war.

This is Bill Downs, substituting for Edward P. Morgan, saying good night from Washington.