The Uncovered Country

There was a hush over Hanoi last week--an air of impending doom as palpable as the crachin, the drizzle that cools the city each afternoon. From all sides the growing weight of U.S. air power pressed in on North Viet Nam's capital. Jets roamed the skies almost at will, striking day after day with surgical precision at North Viet Nam's tenuous communication and transportation line. American bombs still fell short of North Viet Nam's cities and factories, though an occasional power plant was hit when it happened to be near a road or bridge.

The U.S. aim was to sever the supply lines that carry Hanoi's men and arms into the battle for South Viet Nam. After U.S. Thunderchiefs and Skyraiders cut the bridges at Thanhhoa, above Vinh and at Dong Phuong Thuong (see map), roving jets prowled highways and rail lines, shooting up trucks and destroying the North Vietnamese's scanty rolling stock. Though the Communists could still cross their unbridged rivers by arranging makeshift spans of wicker boats at night, they were being forced more and more to avoid the roads.

MIGs & Sidewinders. Hanoi's propagandists met the challenge from the air with the only thing they have to spare: words. North Viet Nam's goat-bearded President Ho Chi Minh soothed his anxious population with wild claims of 165 U.S. and South Vietnamese planes shot down (the actual toll since February has been less than 30). But Ho apparently did get help of sorts from Red China late last week when four silvery MIG-17s tangled briefly with U.S. Navy Phantom jets, then fled toward the Chinese island of Hainan, 150 miles east of North Viet Nam. In terms of aerodynamics performance, the slow (730 m.p.h.) MIGs were clearly inferior to the 1,600-m.p.h. Phantoms with their heat-seeking Sidewinder rockets. One of the planes was sent flaming into the clouds while the others scuttled for home. At week's end both Peking and the Pentagon were denying it was theirs. Peking quickly shrilled that it had won the fight, and that one Phantom's Sidewinder had circled around and knocked down another U.S. plane.

But not even President Ho believed that his uncovered country could long endure an all-out air war with the U.S. Although Peking loudly rejected Lyndon Johnson's "carrot-and-stick" bid last week, Ho was more cautious. Hanoi radio reported the gist of the President's speech, and Ho released an earlier interview in which he demanded American withdrawal from South Viet Nam.

Road to Greatness. With a wobbly economy and an average annual income of $90 a year, North Viet Nam is in no shape to pursue progress by means of war. Its gross national product of $1.5 billion is little more than half of what the U.S. spends each year in South Viet Nam. Fully 72% of its 18 million people are grubbing a life from the soil of the Red River Delta and the thin strip of coastline to the south. Nearly a million have been shunted into the hills behind Hanoi in a desperate forced-labor attempt at turning that barren region into a rice-growing area. Because production lags so badly, Hanoi recently cut its 1965 grain production goal from 9,500,000 tons to an insufficient 7,000,000; at the same time it buttressed the monthly rice ration of 22 lbs. with corn and sweet potatoes. So desperate is North Viet Nam for farm productivity that the Hanoi regime demands manure from all citizens. Quotas are established for both cows and men in all communes, and prizes awarded to outstanding producers. Observes Orientalist P. J. Honey: "They receive the title of Kien Tuong phan, which defies translation into English."

But despite his country's overwhelming dependence on night soil, Ho Chi Minh long ago recognized that the road to national greatness is paved with factories. Shrewdly, he geared his industrial development programs to meet agricultural needs. Among the targets that U.S. bombers might next hit are those that supply the chemical fertilizers, iron for farm implements, and coal for blast furnaces that lie at the heart of Ho's hard-won industrial "complex."

A Preference for Phosphate. It's not all that complex. The basic ingredient in North Viet Nam's industrial mix is coal, located mostly around Hongai just east of the sprawling port of Haiphong. Described by visitors as "West Virginia with bamboo," the area is programmed to produce 4,000,000 tons of coal this year. Already it exports to Japan and France, providing Hanoi with badly needed foreign exchange. Much of the rest is burned in two blast furnaces at Thainguyen, a pig-iron foundry 85 miles north of Hanoi, developed in part through Russian aid. Thainguyen is Ho's show place, and its products (150,000 tons last year) provided North Viet Nam with bridge spans and farm tools, gunboats and bicycle frames.

Just to the west of Thainguyen lies a chemical complex, tucked into the rough foothills where the Red River emerges from the mountains. The Vinh-yen and Phutho plants produce superphosphate fertilizers essential to Ho's farms. The only other industry of consequence in North Viet Nam is a textile works at Namdinh, near the coast.

Shabby Neckties. Hanoi itself is effectively without industry. The city's principal boulevard, Dongkhanh Street, was lined in French days with hundreds of small shops. Most are now empty, and those still in operation offer a pitifully small variety of such things as shabby neckties. The only other touch of color is from purple-blooming caybang trees along the roadways. Men and women alike wear somber black pajamas, and the elegant silk ao dais that grace the streets of Saigon are rarely seen. There are few cars or trucks on the broad street, and even the rich can afford nothing more than bicycles and motor scooters. Everyone else walks.

There is little sign of discontent with the squalid life. After all, poverty has been the pattern for centuries. Thousands of volunteers turned out patriotically to dig the slit trenches (Hanoi's air-raid shelters) that have been cut through the once verdant parks along the Red River and the capital's two lakes, reminders of Ho Chi Minh's grim determination to pursue his quest for control of all Viet Nam, even if it costs him his economy and the lives of his people.

Ministerial Swap. At 75, Ho is the senior Communist leader in Asia. Red China's Mao Tse-tung was still a party underling in 1923 when Ho was tapped by Stalin to lead the revolution in Asia. Though Mao now swings more weight, Ho is reluctant to accept him as any kind of overlord, subtly and cautiously tries to play Mao off against the Russians in order to secure greater freedom of action for himself. Says one Western diplomat admiringly: "The older Ho gets, the more skilled he becomes at playing one man against another, one faction against another, one nation against another."

He has plenty of men and factions to deal with in his own government. Western experts separate Ho's lieutenants into pro-Peking and pro-Moscow categories. Solidly in the so-called Moscow camp is Premier Pham Van Dong, 59, who is nominally Ho's second-in-command. But Pham is counterbalanced in the party power structure by Secretary General Le Duan, a Peking-style hardliner. And last week, in a cabinet shuffle that had Ho-watchers from Washington to Moscow scratching their heads, the standing committee of the National Assembly met in extraordinary session to replace Ho's hand-picked Foreign Minister Xuan Thuy with another pro-Peking stalwart named Nguyen Duy Trinh. The assumption: Thuy had urged negotiations with the U.S. before American bombs could wipe out North Viet Nam's industries.

Straight-Shooters. At the heart of Ho's complex political equation is Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, 52, the stocky, slab-cheeked victor of Dien-bienphu and the man who runs Ho's considerable military establishment. Giap is tentatively pro-Moscow in his political orientation, but for a Communist general, he is basically apolitical. Unswervingly loyal to Ho, Giap has honed North Viet Nam's 250,000-man army into one of Asia's toughest military units. Though short on transportation and heavy artillery, Giap's men are tautly disciplined and almost overweeningly proud. Some U.S. military men maintain that any invasion by Giap's troops could be slowed and maybe even stopped by the application of U.S. air-and seapower, but it would clearly be a tough, hard fight. North Viet Nam's navy, numbering about 26 PT-boats and some 50 armed junks, is inconsequential, while the straight-shooting air force mounts only 36 jets --all obsolescent MIG-15s and 17s.

Even with the aid of Chinese MIGs and Russian antiaircraft missiles (none of which have yet turned up), Ho's country could be reduced to an even more dire penury than it now suffers by a mere week of U.S. air strikes. Communist that he is, Ho doubtless dreads the thought of massive aid with manpower from Red China, for it would mean virtual occupation by his vast neighbor. But he presumably has got Lyndon Johnson's message that the U.S. is staunchly committed to the cause of freedom in Southeast Asia.

Thus, however the struggle is finally resolved, Ho must come out a loser.

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