Word: mortars
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Costly Battle. Next day 20 helicopters with U.S. pilots were kept busy jungle-hopping troops of the South Vietnamese 7th Division to build up an assault on the Viet Cong stronghold near Due Hoa. One helicopter crash-landed on a muddy pineapple field and was battered by Communist mortar and rifle fire, killing two Vietnamese soldiers and injuring three Americans, who set the helicopter afire to keep it out of Viet Cong hands. Said one hard-worked U.S. pilot: "It sounded like World War II out there." Even Saigon was not safe: on Christmas Day, a 26-year...
...Katanga gunners'main target was the U.N. headquarters. One afternoon, two Belgian whites in civilian clothes, carrying the tube, tripod and shells of a mortar, walked down a street in the center of town, set up their weapon in a used-car lot; then, casually, they began bombarding the U.N. office building five blocks away. The fire of little, informal squads like this one was remarkably accurate-they were getting instructions from the roof of the tallest building in town, the new hospital, which the U.N. later captured...
Biding Its Time. At first, it seemed curious that the U.N. did not follow up its plane and mortar bombardment with an all-out strike against the positions of the Katangese in the city. But delay had its purpose. Fact was, the U.N. was gathering strength for an attack that could not lose. The U.N. now had 4.500 men to Tshombe's 2,000. More reinforcements were coming in by air, plus 106-mm. and 75-mm. field pieces, as well as bazookas, jeeps, food and ammunition...
...doctors at Prince Leopold Hospital complained about the aim of some of the U.N.'s gun crews. For ten hours one night, mortar shells blasted the hospital walls and roof; patients crawled screaming into the corridors; one African woman in the process of giving birth rose in terror and fled before her delivery, was not seen again. A U.N. spokesman admitted the firing, said the rounds were aimed at a Katangese army camp 800 yds. beyond the hospital. But some of the shells even hit a Roman Catholic cathedral in an African residential section, and others exploded near...
...Robot Commando will fire rockets by voice command. War toys, too, are more realistic than ever. There are aircraft carriers that catapult planes from their decks, tanks that advance relentlessly until a well-aimed stone hits a vulnerable spot. One Civil War set comes with a firing mortar, exploding bunker and battle sound-effects record...