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University Daily Kansan Friday, March 24, 1961
U.S., SEATO Forces Poised For Immediate Action in Laos
By Charles R. Smith United Press International
(Editor's Note: The writer of the following dispatch returned this month from Laos, where he covered the war in that troubled kingdom for two months.)
TOKYO — (UPI) — American military forces in the western Pacific are ready to move swiftly if the United States is forced to intervene militarily in Laos to check Communist aggression, according to informed American military sources.
These sources said the American forces have "been ready for anything" during the simmering Laotian crisis and still are.
QUALIFIED MILITARY sources in Vientiane, Bangkok, Taipei, Tokyo and Okinawa, major American military bastion in the Far East, said the United States probably was better prepared for immediate decisive military action in the Laotian crisis than in any international crisis since the U.S. Marines landed in Lebanon almost three years ago.
That's what the Americans are telling their allies in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization's (SEATO) military advisers meeting in Bangkok. Put simply, the American position is this: the United States is ready for anything. It is ready to talk and seek a peaceful solution, but it won't take any pushing around from the Reds.
IF AMERICAN military action in Laos becomes necessary, these sources said the powerful U.S. Seventh Fleet — the backbone of the U.S. military forces in the Orient—would play the leading role in the
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Paratroopers and other combat troops would be moved immediately by U.S. Air Force troop carriers to Laos or the Thai border areas, depending on the situation. Sources said a joint task force, composed of the Seventh fleet vessel, the Marines and the Army troops on Okinawa, alerted in late December for possible action in Laos, could be on the move "within minutes" after word was given from Washington.
first move. The leading role soon would shift to the Air Force, just as it did in the early days of the Korean conflict. But in the long run it would be the Army that would bear the brunt of the war — a war that most military men say would be fought under even more "impossible" conditions than those in Korea, where many modern methods of warfare had to be scrapped and old basic infantry tactics re-learned.
Initially, combat air operations would be carried out primarily by planes of the 13th Air Force in the Philippines with huge U.S.-built air bases in northern Thailand being used as needed.
Here, in a nutshell, is what would happen if the United States moved militarily in Laos. The first troops into the country probably would be Marines from the Third U.S. Marine Division in Okinawa, a battalion of which is always aboard Seventh Fleet ships ready for immediate movement to any trouble spot. Under current plans, sources said, these Marines would be lifted by helicopters to land areas, probably Bangkok, and moved into Laos or up-country Thailand by transport planes with the helicopters following to move them subsequently.
ships to Laos or Thai border areas because of their limited range.
THE HELICOPTERS would not be able to move the Marines from the
SOURCES SAID that at least one air base in Thailand, only a few miles across the Mekong River from Vientiane, has been undergoing construction work during the past two months to enable it to handle larger planes. There have been reports of at least one other huge airstrip being cut out in the northern Thailand area.
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