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LAWRENCE DALY

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weaponry could devise.

The Vietnamese call them “gauvas’—a gauva is a tropical pear.

Actually, it looks like a metal cricket ball. But inside are 300 steel pellets.

The bomb spirals to earth af- ter being spilled from a Contain- er Bomb Unit or ‘“mother-bomb” as the Vietnamese call them.

On hitting the ground the bombs explode, hurling the steel pellets and bomb fragments from the C.B.U. over an area 1,000 yards long and 200 yards wide.

Each plane carries four C.B.U.s. So one plane-load con- sists of 360,000 pellets plus the fragments of 1,200 bombs.

’ Self-evidently, neither the pel- lets nor the bomb splinters de- stroy steel or concrete. They are deliberately designed to kill or cripple people.

The pellets, propelled by ex- plosives, strike their victims at a greater velocity than bullets and death is often caused by the pellets penetrating the brain, the lungs or intestines of the victim.

These anti-personnel bombs are usually dropped by the sec- ond wave of planes swooping in after the first wave of planes drop high explosives and incen- diaries.

Clearly, the object is to kill and maim those trying to help the victims of the earlier raid.

‘The calculated use of these anti-personnel bombs against ci- vilian populations was, of course, not the only evidence of war crimes I encountered in North Vietnam.

I saw with my own eyes the ruins of schools, pagodas, hospi- tals and peaceful village hamlets which have been deliberately bombed.

I spoke to eye witnesses and relatives of the dead.

They talked with deep but controlled emotion as they stood pointing to great bomb craters or at the ruins of their homes and relived the attacks.

Their dignity was impressive beyond words. Often they fought back tears as they spoke of the loved ones they had lost and of their deterination never to sur- render to American bombing.

Perhaps the most moving ex- perience. which filled me with a terrible hatred of what the

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A Scottish miner visits Vietnam

Americans are doing in Vietnam was to see and speak to the vic- tims themselves.

More often than not they were children being treated in hospi- tals deep in the jungle or moun- tain. caves.

On one occasion near the city of Viet Tri we nearly became victims ourselves.

‘We were actually interviewing civilians wounded by pellet bombs when the alert went.

We took cover in deep shel- ters and for fifteen minutes the ground shook and shuddered with the blast of exploding bombs.

One of the planes peeled off to attack the tiny hamlet of Hoa Phong only 500 yards away from where we were sheltering.

It fired a Bullpup incendiary missile at the thatched - roof homes of the villagers.

When the planes sheered off we went to see what had hap- pened. Three houses in the ham- let were destroyed.

An old woman and two chil- dren were wounded and a num- ber of the villagers’ domestic animals were killed.

Had it not been for the deep shelters which the villagers of both North and South Vietnam have dug everywhere—the casu-

*-alties would have been far more

numerous and serious.

Even neutral Cambodia has not escaped the fury of American air attacks. I visited several bombed Cambodian villages near the frontier.

There were _ authenticated cases of American troops land- ing from helicopters and drop- ping grenades into bunkers shel- tering the villagers. I saw a 15-year-old Cambodian girl whose body was a mass of na- palm burns.

On another occasion I saw how U.S. planes totally disre- garded the fact they were in Cambodian air space by swoop- ing over the frontier after attack- ing villages in South Vietnam.

But despite the genocidal war

A bombed Catholic church in Haiphong.

from the air being waged against .

the people of Vietnam—I found everywhere a bitter, unrelenting determination that they will never allow themselves to be bombed into submission.

I remember particularly speak- ing to miners in a mountain cave at Hong Gai. Most of them were in their twenties. ;

“We shall never surrender,” they said. “The people of Viet- nam had to fight for their inde- pendence throughout the whole of our history — against the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japa- nese.

“We fought and defeated the French colonialists.”

And they added: “We are grateful to the Russians for their assistance.

“But if necessary we shall fight and win this war on our own.

-We will make our own deci- sions.”

Since I have been in Vietnam

the Americans have stepped up their war by shelling the coastal villages and dropping mines in the rivers.

They will not succeed in de- moralizing the civilian popula- tion any more than the Nazi blitz destroyed our morale.

‘North Vietnam’s Prime Minis- ter, Pham Van Dong, declared while I was in Vietnam:

“To strike against the civilian population is the main objective of the Americans. Why?

“Because they know it is diffi- cult to hit military targets.

“In the South there are no military targets. It is a war of liberation. They know the people are the source of all power. So they hit the people .. .”

Our shame is that so far, the British Government.has not been compelled to dissociate itself from an America doing its damn- edest to turn Vietnam into a desert.

A slice of our exciting history

UCH of the romance of

Canada is associated with our forests, and waest Cana-

cribs — you name it and it was built from the mighty trees that

The men who logged these trees were real Canadian pion- eers, and in more ways than ome. They pioneered in the con- struction of the Canadian labor movement.

An exciting part of this human drama took place in the woods of British Columbia where log- gers struggled to consolidate union ofganization against the intransigent opposition of the bess-logger.

Mytle Bergren, in her book “Tough Timber”, which has just had a second big printing by Progress Books, weaves together the poignant story of this organ-

May 26,

ization and infuses it with al- most unbelievable color of the west-coast logger and the spirit of the woods. x

Tough Timber will spirit you into the land of the mighty Douglas fir, and sweeping pine, spruce and alder, which at one time covered the land of B.C. It will let you mingle with the men and the women at their sides who chopped them down and hewed them into the logs out of which much of our early homes were fashioned. It will deepen your understanding and intensify your pride in Canada’s labor movement. It will add much to your centennial enjoyment.

1967—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 7.