Viet Cong Strike near Pleiku

June 2, 1965 - Three well-executed Viet Cong ambushes near Pleiku have destroyed three convoys, killing more than 80 South Vietnamese government troops and two Americans.

Communist forces mounted a fourth ambush near Quinhon, on the coastal side of the vulnerable II Military Corps. Two South Vietnamese soldiers and five Viet Cong were said to have been killed in that skirmish.

In air action over North Vietnam, two U.S. Navy planes were shot down while attacking a radar station, bringing the losses in two days to four planes and six crewmen.

Four Americans were killed today aboard a support aircraft, a propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider modified for electronic jamming of enemy radar. It crashed inland after having been hit by antiaircraft fire.

As they did last week around Quangngai, the Communists in the South were peppering a variety of targets, both towns and truck convoys, and battering them with superior numbers.

They then lay in wait for relief forces, attacking and often annihilating them. 

Besides the attacks on the convoys, a Viet Cong battalion in Pleiku Province overran the district town of Lethanh, one of five smaller administrative capitals in the province.

U.S. military spokesmen in Saigon could not say tonight, 36 hours after the original mortar and ground assault on Lethanh, whether the town had been restored to government control.

One survivor from among the 100 men guarding the town said by radio that two-thirds of his colleagues had been killed or were missing with their weapons. He said all Lethanh headquarters buildings had been destroyed.

Late today, the U.S. Navy turned its biggest guns against the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.

In a joint operation with U.S. Marines and a South Vietnamese government airborne unit, the heavy cruiser Canberra fired the 260-pound shells from her 8-inch guns on a Viet Cong unit fighting along a vital north-south highway seven miles north of the newly opened airbase at Chulai.

It was the first time the Navy had used 8-inch guns — its largest conventional weapon since the retirement of battleships — in action since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

There was no report on the effectiveness of the naval gunfire.

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