THE BOMBING AS VIEWED FROM HANOI
Greene, James Cameron and Felix
The Bombing as Viewed from Hanoi Two noted British correspondents recently visited North Vietnam separately. Their impressions of the impact of U.S. bombing that appear below are excerpted from...
...perhaps the result of split-second mistiming at 700 miles an hour...
...And so another village was fortified in its angry determination...
...Every bomb since has been a bonus for Ho Chi Minh...
...It took seven hours to return—but we returned...
...However obscure and elusive many things here may be, that fact is manifestly, tangibly obvious at every turn...
...bombing that appear below are excerpted from articles they wrote on their return— James Cameron in The New York Times and Felix Greene in The Observer of London—The Editors...
...and with Ho Chi Minh himself...
...They have learned how, over twenty-five years...
...Ninety-five per cent of the population are peasants, living in small, scattered villages...
...with shop assistants and fishermen...
...Vietnam is not Detroit, nor even Washington or London...
...In Vietnam there is always another way...
...So many bomb craters, so much expenditure of ammunition, for a bridge that was made usable again after a few nights' work...
...One hoped these were errors of intelligence, not of intent...
...From the moment the United States dropped its first bomb on North Vietnam, it welded the nation together unshakably...
...Will this sort of thing, the bombings, blow Communism out of their heads...
...even in their own interests the United States planners fail to recognize the realities of a society like this...
...When I drove to Haiphong it took three hours along the country's most important road...
...I heard many accounts of such incidents...
...Some food is even exported...
...I saw no beggars, and, as in China, no one accepted tips...
...with film stars and the military...
...But what can it achieve against a widely scattered peasant population who grow their own rice and vegetables and who live in houses made of bamboo and rushes...
...Apart from the cadres and politicians, who are now admittedly truculent, these people never in their lives wanted anything but to be let alone, to get on with their lives, which have always been hard...
...A bomb here, a bomb there, a family eliminated here or there...
...I fear we have learned less...
...What an impertinence, one felt, what arrogance, what an offense against manners...
...Vietnam is not an industrial country...
...Today, as far as I could discern, the people are solidly together...
...From North Vietnam, this seems not so much a "rabid imperialist aggression" as an inexcusable imposition...
...And—amazingly—everywhere the same unbounded confidence that it will be won...
...Or the pointless shooting of oxcarts and buses on country roads...
...This is a peasant, agrarian society, immensely resilient...
...The Pentagon's thought processes seem exclusively those of a highly developed and sophisticated Western society...
...Nor is this an economy that can be wrecked by high explosives...
...If there were formerly differences between the men at the top in Hanoi (and there was some evidence that there were) the bombing has effectively ended them...
...Because it is so backward economically, North Vietnam is difficult to hurt from the air...
...It is difficult to judge how far the bombing has affected the economy...
...by JAMES CAMERON T^here were several air raids while I moved about the country, and it is fair to try to analyze one's reaction...
...A nation of peasants and manual workers who might have felt restive or dissatisfied under the stress of totalitarian conditions has been obliged to forget all differences in the common sense of resistance and self-defense...
...or a wild assumption that in a country as backward as North Vietnam any substantial brick building must have some military purpose...
...I saw no food queues or signs of hunger, though cereals and meat are rationed...
...The North Vietnamese claim a six per cent increase in food production this year...
...But remember," said someone to me later, "what the Vietcong do in the South...
...The stories interlocked and rang true...
...To my non-military eyes, some targets seemed strangely trivial: for example, a small bridge across a stream on a country road...
...The Vietnamese stood aside and said nothing as I walked around the bomb craters and poked over the rubble...
...While I was away the road was cut...
...There are no "industrial complexes" by Western standards...
...I talked with peasants and professors...
...What supervened, I think, was not the emotion of fear (for I was in no particular danger) nor high-minded horror...
...If the day comes when the industries are bombed and destroyed, it will be a grievous and maddening setback to a nation that is only just beginning to grope among the problems and advantages of industry—but it will make, fundamentally, no difference at all...
...Here, it is a nuisance...
...It was somehow an outrage against civility...
...by FELIX GREENE TThe bombing of their country has ¦¦¦ united the North Vietnamese as nothing else could have done...
...Far from terrorizing the people, the bombings have stimulated and consolidated them...
...These people in North Vietnam are agreeable, shy people and very poor...
...So Vietnamese and Americans alike are caught in the hideous mathematics of terror...
...By the nature of the attacks so far, civilian casualties have not been very great, but they have been great enough to provide the government with the most totally unchallengeable propaganda it could ever have dreamed of...
...But what about the stories of the strafing of patients fleeing a bombed hospital...
...Six houses near by were also destroyed and four people killed...
...The people will mend it, or they will go some other way...
...Its people can survive the inconveniences of destruction, dismay, and death...
...they are not disabling...
...Intense and sustained bombing may be a militarily appropriate method of attacking an industrialized nation...
...The destruction of a bridge or a road—in Western terms it could be disastrous...
...a rice field churned into swamp—these are troublesome, infuriating...
...Everywhere, without exception, I found the same total determination to win this war, however long it might take, whatever the cost...
...There are some coal and iron ore mines, but there are hardly 1,000 enterprises in the whole of North Vietnam which might be termed "industrial," and most of those are little more than small workshops...
...Every single industrial enterprise in the country could be ruined—and it would directly affect about five per cent of the working population...
...It is not easy...
...One thing is sure, if the bombing of North Vietnam is designed either to terrorize the people into submission or to crush their economy into ruin, its effect on both counts is precisely the reverse...
Vol. 30 • February 1966 • No. 2
