Aug. 5, 1964 - The United States rushed fighting men, planes, and ships to Southeast Asia today. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, announcing the reinforcements at a news conference this morning, disclosed among these the assignment of an antisubmarine task force to the South China Sea.
This clearly was intended to thwart any possible intervention by the Chinese Communists. The North Vietnamese are not known to have any submarines.
In a television interview this evening, McNamara was asked to comment on the possibility of Soviet or Chinese Communist intervention.
“We are prepared for any action they may take,” he replied.
In related news, Communist China accused the U.S. today of “deliberate armed aggression” against North Vietnam and said the Chinese people would not “sit idly by.”
In an official statement, the Peking Government said Washington had taken the first step toward extending the war in Indochina.
Referring to the American raids on North Vietnamese installations as “a surprise attack,” the Peking statement said Washington had thus gone “over the brink of war.”
The statement gave no hint of what Peking intended to do, and analysts in the Far East speculated that the Chinese Communists might not yet have decided on any action.
As Peking’s strongest statement on the situation so far, it appeared to commit China to some concrete move.
It spoke of “lending a helping hand” and added that “the debt of blood incurred by the United States to the Vietnamese people must be repaid.”
The “wholly premeditated aggression” by the U.S. against North Vietnam, Peking said, amounts to aggression against China.
“The situation is of the utmost gravity,” the statement went on. “President Johnson created the myth of the second Tonkin Gulf incident as a pretext to bomb North Vietnam and to extend the war in Indochina.”
In fact, Peking added, the second Tonkin Gulf incident never occurred. On Tuesday, it said, North Vietnam “did not have a single war vessel on the waters where the American warships were.”
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