ABSTRACT
While still in Paris, I had read about Nam Dinh in a dispatch from Salisbury printed in the International Edition of the New York Times. He had written then that a significant portion of that city had been destroyed by American bombing raids. The Pentagon had taken up the issue with him, insisting that only military targets had been hit. On December 30, 1966, the day I arrived in Hanoi, Salisbury had filed another story on Nam Dinh. ‘Are there or have there been military objectives in Nam Dinh?’ he asked in print (December 31). His answer:
The railroad runs through town and presumably there are freight yards and depots. There are a textile factory and a rice mill, both of which this correspondent saw. Both are operating, but the textile mill has been severely damaged. There is also a silk mill, which officials said had been destroyed.. . . Are there other war plants in town? This correspondent cannot say. He saw intensive destruction of civilian housing and ordinary business streets in considerable areas—damage so severe that whole blocks have been abandoned. These areas lie largely, but not entirely, in the vicinity of the textile plant. There is severe damage all over town. The bombed areas of Nam Dinh possess an appearance familiar to anyone who saw blitzed London, devastated Berlin and Warsaw, or smashed Soviet cities like Stalingrad and Kharkov.
