[Everett I. Mendelsohn, associate professor of History of Science, recently returned from a Southeast Asian tour which took him to South Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.

Under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker service organization, Mendelsohn visited Quaker projects and sought to assess the possibility of a peaceful solution to the Vietnamese conflict through conversations with Vietnamese civilians. In Cambodia he met with a high representative of the National Liberation Front.

His departure from South Vietnam was delayed ten days by the Viet Cong urban offensive.

Mendelsohn questions the rosy picture of military progress presented by the United States government, and says the Thieu-Ky regime may be nearing collapse.

He believes the Viet Cong offensive, and the unlimited character of our response to it, have limited the future options open to us in South Vietnam. He fears that we will face continued miltary setbacks until we either withdraw, or resort to nuclear weapons.

The following remarks are taken from an interview which Parker Donnam had with Professor Mendelsohn on Thursday, Feb. 22]

What effect did this trip have on your opinion of the war?

I expect the trip didn't radically change my views of the war, it did two other things though. One: it personalized them. I think it's hard even with the greatest imagination to recognize what happens to specific people in specific parts of a country, with out seeing them. Seeing the war at first hand, meeting people who had been involved in it, people who have suffered from it, meeting people who have opposed it on the scene, gave me a series of new insights.

The other set of changes that I came away with, also had to do with getting some things at first hand. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I met with a high official of the National Liberation Front. He is a well educated man, not an unattractive man, obviously quiet intelligent, I gather that he's on the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front.

Even having been an opponent of the war, but having read the U.S. press primarily, and in detail, it was hard to believe anything but that the enormous firepower and large scale military operations the U.S. was waging was indeed winning the war. Perhaps it could never really become militarily victorious. It seemed from everything I'd been able to read that we were winning military victories.

Mr. Y [we shall call him] had quite a different view. So far as I could tell, in all honesty, he believed that the National Liberation Front was winning. We pressed him on this in a number of ways. We asked him about the impact of the firepower on the Vietnamese and he said, yes when it comes to bombing a village or a town, the enormous firepower from the air takes its toll. Primarily, he pointed out, on civilians, and in person I was able to see this on the ground later on. He said, however, that when it comes to controlling the country-side, this can be done only by infantry troops with riflles going out and winning an area and then controlling it and keeping it. And he said that the enormous gains of the firepower were lost in this kind of combat. He pointed out that the rifle of the N.L.F. soldier was just as effective as the rifle of the American. Even more, he pointed out that the N.L.F. soldier generally knew the terrain he was fighting in; it was friendly to him, whereas it was foreign to the American soldier.

He pointed out one other thing. He said the very history of the war suggests that the United States is not winning, indeed, might well be losing. He pointed out that the fighting takes place during the dry season, the winter months for us, November through April. For the rest of the year, he said everyone just sits tight and holds on to what they have and hopes not to be washed away by the flood.

He said in the winter of 1965-66, the first year of major escalation, the United States had some 200,000 ground troops in Vietnam. He said during that winter the U.S. attempted to launch offensive actions in all four areas, from the I Corps in the North down to the Delta. He said that they weren't really effective in too many of them, but they were on the offensive in all four.

The next year, the winter of 1966-67, during the dry season the U.S. had some 400,000 troops on the ground, yet was able to launch an offensive action in only the I Corps area. In the other three areas they were on the defensive, or holding tight. He said that in the winter of 1967-68, the United States forces with over 500,000 men on the ground, were unable to launch an offensive in any single of the four corps areas. Indeed, he said, to the contrary his own forces, stronger than they had been before, were able to be effective in all of the areas.

This, mind you, was two weeks before I got to Saigon, some two weeks before their attacks on all the cities.