Testifying before a joint Congressional Appropriations Committee, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird says the increase in U.S. military activity in Vietnam could add up to $5 billion to the 1973 fiscal budget, doubling the annual cost of the war. This increased American activity was in response to the North Vietnamese Nguyen Hue Offensive, also called […]

In a joint communique issued by the United States and the Soviet Union following the conclusion of summit talks with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev during President Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow (the first visit ever by an U.S. president), both countries set forth their standard positions on Vietnam. The United States insisted that the future […]

Heavy U.S. air attacks that began with an order by President Richard Nixon on May 8 are widened to include more industrial and non-military sites. In 190 strikes, the United States lost one plane but shot down four. The new strikes were part of the ongoing Operation Linebacker, an effort launched in response to the […]

Units of South Vietnam’s 9th and 21st Divisions, along with several South Vietnamese airborne battalions, open new stretches of road south of An Loc and come within two miles of the besieged city. In the Central Highlands, North Vietnamese troops, preceded by heavy shelling, tried to break through the lines of South Vietnam’s 23rd Division […]

Preceded by five B-52 strikes, which reportedly killed 300 North Vietnamese to the south, South Vietnamese forces arrive by helicopter to within two miles of An Loc in continuing efforts to relieve this besieged city. It had been surrounded by three North Vietnamese divisions since early April. The North Vietnamese had been holding An Loc […]

A series of air strikes over five days destroys all of North Vietnam’s pumping stations in the southern panhandle, thereby cutting North Vietnam’s main fuel line to South Vietnam. These strikes were part of Operation Linebacker, an air offensive against North Vietnam that had been ordered by President Richard Nixon in early April in response […]

Seventeen U.S. helicopters land 1,000 South Vietnamese marines and their six U.S. advisors behind North Vietnamese lines southeast of Quang Tri City in the first South Vietnamese counterattack since the beginning of the communist Nguyen Hue Offensive. The marines reportedly killed more than 300 North Vietnamese before returning to South Vietnamese-controlled territory the next day. […]

President Richard Nixon’s decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors is condemned by the Soviet Union, China, and their Eastern European allies, and receives only lukewarm support from Western Europe. The mining was meant to halt the massive North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam that had begun on March 30. In the continuing air war over […]