industrial endeavors were embarked upon. You immediately feel or sense that you are in a poor country that does not have very much in the way of modern facilities.

BOMBING EFFECT IS LIMITED

Now this has a direct bearing, I think, on the effectiveness of our bombing policy because it does not give us very many outstanding targets to hit at. This is not a country with large munitions factories, large steel plants, large oil refineries, and things of that kind. They had some oil storage capacity and that was taken out, I believe, very effectively around Haiphong in one of our very early attacks last July. I did not see any substantial oil storage capacity anywhere that I visited, and I doubt if very much is left in the country.

This has an effect, as I say, on the bombing because it limits in a sense, the results of that bombing. If you are attacking largely roads and the rather small railroads that they have there, the results may not be terribly impressive.

Traveling outside Hanoi on the highways, highway No. 1, that is the main highway going down south, you run for considerable distances along side a rather narrow gauge railroad, a light railroad, the rolling stock of which is small. It is not comparable to our heavy railroads, and this railroad, and the others that I saw, have been damaged a good deal by our offensive, not infrequently you find large patches of track that have been blasted out by our bombs, and repaired. This is perhaps the most significant thing about it-that the railroad still is operative in spite of having been damaged repeatedly.

The same is true of the highways. On the trips that I made south, which were often made during darkness since we do not bomb during the night, at least in the north, I found the highways very heavily cluttered with truck traffic, and even columns of men and women carting stuff down to the south.

This is important because it indicates the scope of the effort that they put into continuing to move materials to the south in spite of our bombing offensive. I do not want to give you the impression that the offensive has not had results because it has. It has knocked out a great many of the bridges. In fact outside of the very large and important main bridge which connects Hanoi itself across the Red River, a bridge called the Long Bien Bridge, which runs for about three kilometers and which is the main connection between Hanoi and the north bank of the Red River, I did not see a single bridge which had not been damaged to some extent by our attacks.

Now some of the bridges have been taken out entirely. Some of them have only been damaged, and they have been put back into service. In some cases you will find a bridge, which normally took two traffic lanes, now taking one traffic lane.

HOW TRAFFIC CONTINUES TO MOVE

Of course, the bridges are one of the most vulnerable things that you find in that area since the Red River delta is crisscrossed by endless streams, canals, rivers and things of that kind, but in spite of very severe damage to the bridges, I did not find that traffic, the

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heavy truck flow to the south, had been materially halted. The reason for this is that they have evolved an extremely efficient and rather cheap way of throwing pontoons across these streams which enables them to maintain a traffic with very little interruption.

These pontoons are constructed out of the simplest of materials. The are built out of flat-botton canal boats. These are rather long narrow boats, probably they would run from the distance of that table to this one over here, and they are only perhaps two or three feet wide. They lash these boats together in a chain across the stream and put on top of the boats a platform of cut bamboo poles. The poles are often not even lashed down to the boats. They are not planks. They are just loose on top of the boats and as the trucks go over them, they make a tremendous rumble but they seem to be heavy enough to carry very substantial loads, and you can see the materials that are involved in putting across a pontoon like that are available all over the country and with practically no expense. All that you have to have is labor power.

Now, in most instances where the bridge has been taken out and pontoons have replaced it they divided the traffic flow. These canal boats are about wide enough to take one traffic stream, so they will divide the traffic flow and the south-moving trucks will go on one and then there will be another pontoon on the other side and the empties coming back north will be coming back on the other pontoon bridge.

I did not see these bridges actually being put into place but I did speak with foreigners in Hanoi who had seen the actual process, and they said it often took them not more than an hour or two to get a bridge in place. The materials are kept adjacent to the bridges ready for use if the bridge is knocked out.

In the case of railroad bridges, it is a more complicated proposition, because you cannot replace a railroad bridge with a wooden pontoon.

However, they have along the railroad, and this was true of every railroad that I saw, strewn along these railroads are great masses of railroad building material. These are the light rails that they use, and railroad ties, and ballast, and they have, of course, quantities of manpower which are available to be thrown into the task of repairing the roads.

Now, they do have a certain amount of bridge-building equipment, too, to replace the broken railroad bridges. However, that is a task which takes them longer. They cannot do that in a few hours, and so they have a different procedure there. When the bridge is knocked out or where the railroad has been knocked out for some considerable period of time, they will bring up a bicycle brigade.

Now these bicycle brigades are quite an extraordinary feature of the landscape. The bikes will carry about 600 pounds, a 600-pound load on an individual bicycle. It is balanced across the bike with 300 pounds on one side and 300 on the other, and they wheel the bikes along. They will bring a brigade up to a train which is blocked because of a cut in the railroad or a broken bridge, and they will unload that train in a matter of an hour or two, put the stuff on the bikes, move across a pontoon on the bikes to a train which is brought up on the other side, and reload the train and move along.

LARGE INVESTMENT IN MANPOWER

Now you can see that this kind of endeavor which is engaged in every day-because the principal targets of our bombing are the railroads and the highways-this causes them to invest large numbers of manpower to keep the traffic moving. But so far as I was able to observe, they do keep the traffic moving probably at about the rate that they are capable of absorbing the material and supplies in the south. There may be a little bit of a choking down on the reinforcements, but I doubt it myself, and so do most of the observers who have watched this process in Hanoi. They point out that there is a limit to the amount of men and materiel which can be absorbed in the south, and they think that the north is able to keep it going about at the rate that they want to.

That does not mean, however, that this does not put a heavy burden on the North Vietnamese regime because the investment in manpower, the investment in time and labor and in material is substantial. The materiel mostly comes from their allies, principally, I think, from China. I think they get most of their rails and railroad supply equipment, I think they get their rolling stock from the Chinese. It comes down on the railroad from China. The Chinese have a great interest in maintaining that railroad because one link of the railroad coming from China also links another part of China. It is a most convenient way between these two areas and so the Chinese have a substantial interest in keeping that going. And I think they invest a lot in that. So that I think one might say from the military standpoint, just looking at the railroad operation and the highway operation, that we get a small military benefit from this, because of the investment in manpower that we compel them to put into this effort.

SPIRIT OF NATIONAL UNITY

I would say this must be balanced, on the other hand, by what has happened to the country as a result of the bombing, and this is an observation which I made, and which was supported by the foreign diplomats, the westerners, and to some extent the Eastern Europeans who are in Hanoi. It is my feeling that the bombing has caused the country to acquire a spirit of national purpose or unity which it would not have otherwise. I think that this is perhaps akin to what we saw in England during the war. We did not see this but it occurred in Germany under the very heavy air attacks that went on there.

The people have a feeling of the mass participation in this war. They feel that they are in it with their leaders. I do not believe they would have that feeling otherwise. I think that without the bombing there would be natural lines of clevage in that population. I do not believe the Government is a hundred percent popular with the peasants. I am certain it is not all that popular with some elements in the population, the Catholic elements, for example, but because of the feeling that they are all being attacked in the same manner, they have rallied around the national cause on the basis of patriotism rather than communism.

The Government, as might be expected, plays very strongly on this theme. You find in their propaganda very little talk of communism,

a great deal of talk about nationalism, national spirit, the traditions of the Vietnamese people, and their unity in fighting this enemy.

In their propaganda you hear about national heroes. You do not hear about Communist heroes. I think this is an effective means of propaganda and I think it has created a fighting spirit in the north which they would not have otherwise, and I do not think that the Government could have created this without the bombing.

They have been clever about it. They have done one thing which I think has done a great deal to keep their morale up. They have encouraged the ordinary population to fight back against the airplanes. Now this fighting back is really more symbolic, I think, than real. They have issued guns, rifles, ordinary rifles to large masses of the population, and when the planes come over they are encouraged to fire back and occasionally, of course, they will shoot down an American plane. This gives the people a feeling that they are fighting against the enemy up in the sky and that they are all in this thing together. I think it is quite a clever propaganda device regardless of its military value which of course is quite slight.

EFFECT OF BOMBING ON NEGOTIATIONS

It would seem to me on the basis of what I was able to see, that the North Vienamese Government is able to continue the movement of supplies to the south, they are able to continue to maintain the war about on the present level despite the bombardment that is going on. What would happen if we were to sharply increase the bombardment is another question.

I tried to evaluate as best I could whether we were moving them toward the conference table as a result of the bombing, and I must say it does not seem to me that this is the result.

On the other hand, I do feel that there is a certain movement on the part of Hanoi toward the conference table, and I believe this derives not really from the bombardment but from certain other external factors which are extremely important, and the most important of these, I believe, is the situation vis-a-vis China.

SUPPLY OF WAR MATERIALS FROM RUSSIA

To evaluate this, I think you have to know a little bit about where North Vietnam gets its supplies and how dependent they are on outside sources for maintaining their present war effort. They principally get their military support from two sources; one is China and one is the Soviet Union, and I will expand on that a little bit, because it is interesting to see the difference in materials that come from one source and from the other.

From the Soviet Union they get in large part their most advanced military technology. They get from the Russians the SAM-2s, the surface-to-air missile 2's. These are not the latest Soviet model, as I am sure you gentlemen know, the SAM-3s are the latest ones that the Russians have, but the SAM-2s are quite good and they have a substantial number of these weapons, which they received from the Soviets.

Now, those weapons, for the most part, so far as I was able to observe, or to find out, come into North Vietnam by ship. They come to Haiphong.

The larger part of Soviet materiel arrives in Haiphong. They get the SAMs that way, they also get their advanced radar without which they can not operate their SAM systems, nor can they operate their antiaircraft, their conventional antiaircraft weapons with any great proficiency without good radar and they get a lot of that from the Soviet Union. They get their MIG-21s from the same source, and they also come in largely by boat and they come to Haiphong.

SOURCE OF INFORMATION ABOUT SUPPLIES

The CHAIRMAN. May I ask, Mr. Salisbury, did they tell you this or did you observe this?

Mr. SALISBURY. This information comes to me from a series of sources. Some comes directly from them because they do not make any bones about some of this stuff that you might expect them to. Some of it comes from the foreign diplomats in Hanoi who were extremely well informed as to the sources of supply, and who frequently visit Haiphong and see the material actually coming in there. I did not visit Haiphong myself, and I regard that as being a mistake on my part. I did not ask to go to Haiphong thinking that this was a very sensitive military area. I discovered later on that it may be sensitive, but it is often visited, in fact is freely visited by the foreigners in Hanoi, and I should have gone down there and had a look myself, but I got a lot of secondhand information which I think is quite reliable in that respect.

PETROLEUM PRODUCTS RECEIPT AND STORAGE

Now, the other major item which they receive from the Soviet Union and which also comes in through Haiphong is petroleum products, gasoline, oil, lubricants, all the things that they need to keep the trucks rolling to the south. They are not a producer of petroleum products themselves, and they are vitally dependent on this source of supply. They get some of it from Rumania but most of it comes in from the Soviet Union.

I mentioned earlier that their storage facilities, their large-scale tanks and things of that kind, have been taken out by our bombing offensive, indeed were taken out very early, and, as a result of that, for the most part the petroleum, the gasoline, the oil, is now stored in 55-gallon steel drums and these drums are scattered literally all over the countryside. You cannot drive a mile outside of Hanoi without seeing drums scattered into the field and along the highways. They are so dispersed that it would be literally impossible to knock out all their oil supplies at the present time.

Of course, this is a great bother for them. It is not very convenient if you have all your oil strewn over the countryside like that, but the truth of it is they have an awful lot of their material strewn out that way, again as a measure of dispersal to avoid losing it in a large-scale American attack.