Word: norths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Question of Significance. McCloskey was ready with a prepared statement. "There has been a considerable reduction in infiltration," he said, adding that the North was no longer sending as many men South as it had lost in battle. Many newsmen came away from the briefing with the conviction that Secretary of State William Rogers, who is committed to 'U.S. disengagement, had orchestrated McCloskey's performance in an effort to create a climate conducive to new U.S. withdrawals...
Almost immediately, the Pentagon sharply questioned State's interpretation of the infiltration data. "They are making hard assumptions based on soft estimates," said one officer. During the first six months of 1969, said the Pentagon, some 100,000 North Vietnamese troops joined enemy units in the South, more than replacing the 94,000 Communists killed during the same period. The Pentagon refused to release the figures for July and August, which reportedly show a 50% decrease in Southbound troop movements. It did note, however, that even so dramatic a decline could be explained by record monsoons in Laos, which...
Hanoi, convinced that Nixon's delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam's Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.'s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal...
...somewhat fewer than the 244 killed during the week of the last "high point" earlier in the month. Enemy losses were put at 2,757. Last week U.S. Marines and infantrymen engaged in a number of sharp fire fights, most notably in the rolling hills near Danang and north of Saigon...
Despite the reports of declining infiltration, allied fighting men thus found no shortage of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters. In fact, U.S. headquarters in Saigon places enemy strength at the same level as it was nine months ago: 205,000 combat troops, plus 45,000 administrative and political cadre (see map following page). Powerful enemy forces remain deployed throughout the country, with the heaviest concentrations in the III Corps area, which contains Saigon. While the enemy maintains strong support forces in its Laotian and Cambodian sanctuaries and north of the Demilitarized Zone, few large units have recently crossed into...