RIPPLE SALVO… #782… “NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN, THE SAUL ALINSKY (RULES FOR RADICALS) DISCIPLE TURNED NEWSPAPER REPORTER AND SOCIAL CRITIC, WROTE IN THE WASHINGTON POST IN THE WAKE OF THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY REVOLT. ‘The condition of youth has changed in important ways. College is no longer voluntary business. You go to college or you go to war; you get your degree or you resign yourself to a life of low paying jobs. Nor are students the rollicking adolescents of the old rah-rah collegiate culture. At the best universities today, they enter freshman year with better academic training than seniors left with a generation and a half ago. They may not be mature, but they are serious people who take questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, racism. and emancipation, personally and passionately. They do not agree with the way their universities deal with these questions. As a practical matter, they cannot leave the universities, so they are fighting for a part of the decision-making process….’ “… (The Year the Dream Died)… but first…
GOOD MORNING: Day SEVEN HUNDRED EIGHTY-TWO of recalling the days and nights of Operation Rolling Thunder, the air war fought with North Vietnam fifty years ago…
HEAD LINES from the OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER for Friday, 26 April 1968…
Page 1: “COLUMBIA GIVES IN–PROTEST CONTINUES”… “Columbia University bowed today to a militant student protest that has disrupted campus life for four days and said it would suspend construction fo a controversial gymnasium. But the few hundred–out of the Ivy League university’s 27,500 students–who carried out the protest continued to sit-in at five buildings, demanding amnesty from punishment for their demonstration. Columbia, hemmed in on three sides by predominantly white and residential Morningside Heights, sits atop a bluff overlooking Harlem and the 30-acre Morningside Park, The gym would be built on two acres of the park, which separates the campus from the Negro community.”… Page 1: “WORLD STUDENTS PUSH VIETNAM WAR PROTEST”… “Student demonstrations against the war in Vietnam broke out in widely scattered parts of the world today but they appeared to be spontaneous and not part of a coordinated plan. However, in New York a spokesman for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and as many s 1,000 American educational institutes were expected to protest the war today. He called it ‘an International political strike,’…‘HOISTED FLAGS’… In Paris leftist students hoisted Viet Cong flags on the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Sorbonne chapel and the Eiffel Tower called for a major demonstration early. The flags were removed by the police. In Rome anarchists and pro-Peking students staged sit-in at Rome University. In Tokyo, police arrested more than 100 students who took part in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration.”…
Page 1: “MASSIVE H-BLAST RATTLES NEVADA DESERT–WAVE ROLLS OVER AREA”… “An experimental hydrogen bomb, the most powerful tested in the United States, exploding under a desert mesa today and sent earthquake-like shock wave rolling for hundreds of miles. There were no reports of damage or vented radiation from the underground blast, despite more than a week of protests from scientists and others that the shot was potentially dangerous. The effects of the detonation of the device 3,806 feet deep at the Nevada Test Site, 100 miles northwest of here, appeared to be just about what the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated–a rolling ground motion felt as far as 250 miles away.”… Page 1: “GOLDBERG RESIGNS AS U.N. ENVOY–LBJ NAMES GEORGE BALL”… Page 1: “LBJ VOWS FULL ROLE IN ELECTION”… PAGE 3: “President Greets King Olav V of Norway”… Page 1: “U. S. Reveals Losses In Gold Crisis– Nation’s Stockpile Dips To Lowest In 32-Years”…
THE WAR: Page 1: “JETS POUND SAIGON AREA TO COUNTER RED BUILD-UP”… “U. S. B52 bombers, flying some of the war’s closest raids to Saigon, hit enemy targets within 26 miles of the capital today to break up Viet Cong forces believed massing for their second major offensive of 1968. The raids came after South Vietnamese police ordered all boats and vehicles entering Saigon be searched for arms and explosives. The police had earlier thwarted a Viet Cong attempt to smuggle guns into the capital on a river junk…. In the continuing small-scale fighting around the capital, 10 U.S. soldiers were killed and 82 wounded in action 12 to 38 miles from Saigon. Only 26 enemy were reported dead in the battles, and 18 of them were killed by U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers that attacked a bunker complex 25 miles northwest of the capital.”…
26 APRIL 1968… THE PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF (CIA/ TS-SI) SOUTH VIETNAM: The most critical spot at the moment is the area around Hue. N-Day terminology has appeared at least once in intercepts from this region… SOUTH KOREA: The South Koreans are delaying a decision on the dispatch of 6,000 more troops to Vietnam. They say they are waiting until they can judge the extent of infiltration from he North this summer…. CZECHOSLOVAKIA/SOVIET UNION: Relations had seemed to be settling down in recent weeks, but now new signs of mutual irritation are appearing…This friction has been punctuated by a courtly but surprisingly explicit debate between the media of the two countries… POLAND: The students say there will be demonstrations in all major university cities beginning on Monday to continue through Mayday… The students hope that emphasizing economic issues, they can get more support that they had last time from the workers… ISRAEL/ARAB STATES: The Israelis are digging their heels in on the diplomacy front. They infuriated U Thant by flatly rejecting his letter requesting a cancellation of their parade in Jerusalem. Thant is thinking of adding his complaint to that of the Jordanians in the Security Council…. NORTH VIETNAM: Bridge Repairs. The completion of a raid bypass bridge south of the Doumer Bridge over the Red River at Hanoi may permit through rail traffic into and south of the North Vietnamese capital for the first time since Mid December 1967. since that time, the North Vietnamese have been forced to rely on ferries to move rail cars across the river or tranship cargo by truck or watercraft….HANOI CIVIL DEFENSE…People in Hanoi are still digging in for new US air attacks–antiaircraft artillery was being brought into the city and new trenches being dug. soon after the bombing restriction, there were press reports that civil defense preparations were being pushed forward…. NORTH VIETNAM ON SITE SELECTION: Yesterday Hanoi radio’s daily offering on the talk site issue was a rather limp piece from the party newspaper rehashing the same arguments put forward for the past two weeks. the broadcast breaks no new ground but seems milder than earlier ones, as if Hanoi were temporarily marking time in its propaganda treatment of the subject….
26 APRIL 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER…The OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER (AP/UPI) No coverage of air war north of DMZ… “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were two fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 26 April 1968…
(1) A C-130B of the 29th TAS and 463rd TAW out of Clark AFB, P.I. was downed while attempting to drop supplies to troops in the A Shau Valley on a very bad weather. Decks of clouds precluded suppression of enemy fire as was the usual support for such drops. On the 26th a decision was made to go without the suppression fire. As a stream of C-130s dropped below the clouds to make the drop at an abandoned air strip, they were met by enemy fire. Seven of 20 drops incurred damage from the enemy’s sight and automatic weapon fire. The 21st mission was met by heavier fire including 37mm ground fire resulting in a fire in the aircraft’s cargo. The crew attempted to jettison the cargo but the fire spread as the pilot attempted to get back to the air strip to land. Unfortunately, the aircraft lost altitude, hit trees and exploded killing all eight on board. Today we remember the last flight of that valiant crew: MAJOR LILBURN R. STOW, CAPTAIN JAMES J. McKINSTRY, MAJOR JOHN LEWIS M,cDONALD, TECHSGT RUSSELL RICKLAND FYAN, SSGT BERRYL STANLEY BLAYLOCK, SGT DANIEL JEROME O’CONNOR, STG LARRY RICHARD TODD, and A1C KENNETH LEE JOHNSON. “No more drop attempts were made on the 26th although they were resumed with more success the next day.”… Fate is the hunter…
(2) LCOL J.A. SAFFELL was flying an A-1E of the 1st ACS and 56th ACW out of Nakhon Phanom on a dusk armed recce mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and was hit by AAA in the port wing causing LCOL SAFFELL to eject immediately. He was rescued “eventually.”… Probably a great story here…
SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/MIA/P[OW) ON 26 APRIL FOR THE FOUR YEARS OF OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… We remember. Humble Host suggests: google the name of the warrior for whom you would like to “Leave a remembrance” and link to “Names For Faces On The Wall” and put a little heart into remembering a fallen brother in arms…
1965… None…
1966… None…
1967… LCR MICHAEL JOSEPH ESTOCIN, USN (KIA) MEDAL OF HONOR…
1968… None…
RIPPLE SALVO… #782… At the same time more than 520,000 American men and boys were serving in Vietnam, including the troops who were actually taking the war to the enemy homeland–the warriors of Operation Rolling Thunder– General Hershey, the Director of the Selective Service, was increasing the draft call for 1968 by 100,000 to call for an induction of more than 400,000. The American home front was simmering at the edge of 212-degrees F. The civil rights issues combined with the anti-war citizenry was about to find an additional source of energy for demonstrations for change in a general election year and heated campaign… The summer of 1968 was at hand. The catalytic agent that brought dissension in America to boil was the college crowd… Columbia and California at Berkeley in the van… As April comes to an end, here is a summary of where the nation stood as the war went on and on. American warriors were dying by the hundreds every week at the front while hundreds of thousands at home protested, demonstrated, and rioted. … Obedience at war. Disobedience at home…. Quoted from “The Year the Dream Died” (Jules Witcover)…
” …April had begun and ended. like the other early months of 1968–in political and societal turmoil. The war in Vietnam and racial conflict continued to be the prime stimuli for the unrest, in the streets and on the campuses of America. On April 26, as many as a million college and high school students joined the national student strike; the next day, an estimated 90,000 protesters marched in New York, and the day after that, Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend and successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led more than a hundred blacks to Washington as the vanguard of King’s planned Poor People’s Campaign and March on the capital. They met with cabinet and legislative leaders, pressing their legislative demands on them while warning that SCL would be ‘more militant than ever’ in its avowedly nonviolent campaign for equal rights.
“But it was the Columbia campus rebellion that reflected the much broader generational spearhead taking place around the globe, and particularly in Europe–in Germany, as already noted, and in Italy, France and above all, Czechoslovakia. Their student protest that had begun in the fall of 1967 had blossomed into ‘The Prague Spring’ of courageous challenge of the dead-hand communist regime. a buoyant openness reigned that had not been seen since the iron fist of Stalinism had first come down across central and eastern Europe.
“The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and consequent inner-city riots had cast pall over April at home, further dividing America along racial lines. ‘I thought the country was coming apart,’ Pat Buchanan said much later in a C-SPAN interview. ‘Nixon was sort of riding through…Were we helped by the Columbia demonstrations? You bet we were. The country did not like riots and they did not like the demonstrations.’
“The Columbia protest, and others of lesser intensity on other campuses demonstrated, however, that a fierce determination to confront the establishment order remained in many quarters of the land, ever as it flared abroad, and particularly among the rebellious young. ‘At a time when the radical movement was the most disheartened and dispirited,’ Mark Rudd (a leader of the Columbia protests, etc.) ‘…the Columbia student rebellion broke through the gloom as an example of the power the radical movement could attain.’…….
“The complacency of many in the generation that had come after the great civil rights battles of the late 1950s and early 1960s was rapidly falling away. If some of the ream had died with King’s death, much of it remained in the minds and hopes of the protesters against the status quo–in Vietnam and at home, on campuses like Columbia and in the political [process increasingly under scrutiny and attack.”… End quote (Pages 190-91)…
RTR Quote for 26 April 1968: SENATOR RUSSELL B. LONG, Democrat, Louisiana, 25 April 1968 on the Poor People’s March: “When that bunch of marchers comes here, they can just burn the whole place down and we can just move the capital to some place where they enforce the law.”
Lest we forget… Bear