Hell in An Loc Page 23
As the 2nd Battalion was pinned down at the western end of the runway, Colonel Dao, the 18th Division commander, and Lieutenant Colonel Hieu, the 43rd Regiment commander, went to the front to assess the situation. The next day, Major Che attacked enemy positions north of the runway, using two companies from his battalion and the 43rd Reconnaissance Company under Capt. Nguyen Tan Chi, after an intense artillery barrage. The enemy put up a strong resistance, firing their 12.7mm machineguns and mortars at the 2nd Battalion men charging in the open across the runway and causing many casualties to the attackers. Major Che stopped the attack and requested help from the 43rd Regiment. That night, Colonel Hieu, the 43rd Regiment commander, sent Che a few cans of beer. Che told his orderly to crawl to the frontline to give some to Captain Chi.
The next day, the 18th Division dispatched to the 2nd Battalion the TOW platoon that was detached by ARVN/JGS to the 18th Division to conduct tests on the use of TOW against enemy fortifications.12 TOW (Tube-launched, Optical-tracked, Wire-guided) missiles are crew portable or installed on vehicles. The TOW antitank missile was introduced for service in the U.S. Army in 1970; it had an effective range of three kilometers. Colonel Dao allocated seven TOWs to the 2nd Battalion to be used against reinforced concrete bunkers that had previously withstood artillery fire. In Major Che’s estimate, each TOW cost about three million Viet Nam piasters (or 2,500 U.S. dollars) at the time. Although the target was not enemy tanks, in Che’s opinion the use of TOWs in this case was appropriate because it could save a lot of his men’s lives.
The platoon under Second Lieutenant Phuong fired two TOW missiles in conjunction with a four-barreled XM-202 antitank weapon at the enemy-occupied bunkers located on the north side of the runway. Unable to stand the intense heat generated by the antitank missiles, the frightened enemy defenders ran in all directions like—in Major Che’s words—“bees whose hive has been broken.”13 The survivors escaped into the adjacent valley, leaving behind their wounded and dead comrades. Che ordered a frontal assault on the enemy positions. The enemy offered no resistance. Many wounded and dead North Vietnamese soldiers lay inside and around the bunkers. The 2nd Battalion captured many weapons, including one 12.7mm machinegun and two 61mm mortars. Quan Loi airport, the last strategic objective and the important link to the outside world, was finally under the control of ARVN troops. A few days later, deserving soldiers from the 2nd Battalion were awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross for this important victory. Major Che, the battalion commander, was awarded the Vietnamese National Order and the Gallantry Cross with palm, the highest decoration for valor in combat. He was also awarded the U.S. Bronze Star with “V” Device by General Hollingsworth, the III Corps senior advisor, for this outstanding achievement.14
Brig. Gen. Ly Tong Ba, former 23rd Division commander, recalled his interesting experience regarding the use of TOWs to remove NVA chot during the 1972 Easter Offensive in Kontum in the Central Highlands. Ba, an armor officer, skillfully used his armor units to beat back repeated assaults from two NVA divisions. However, he was unable to destroy a battalion-size chot well protected by the fortified chapel of Kontum; he was particularly concerned that the enemy would reinforce and expand the above enclave in order to launch new attacks. Ba had already used a combined tank-infantry task force to try to destroy the enemy chot, but the narrow streets leading to the chapel left little room for his tanks to maneuver. As a result, he had lost one infantry company and one M-41 tank in that failed mission.
Ba called Colonel Rhotenberry, senior division advisor, and asked for TOW missiles because he was convinced that only this weapon could destroy the intended target. Rhotenberry refused, arguing that it would be against the rules because TOW must be used against tanks and not fortifications. Ba was not ready to give up. He called Mr. John Paul Vann, the senior II Corps advisor, and reiterated his request. He explained to Vann that he needed to “solve” the battlefield that very night because the situation may become dangerous if the enemy chot were not removed. Vann again refused because it would be against the rules.
“In case Kontum is lost tonight,” replied Ba, “then Mr. Vann, would you sit there and wait to meet Hoang Minh Thao15to drink coffee with your TOW missiles.”16
Vann finally relented and agreed to release the TOW missiles. Ba directed his infantry units and the 1/8 Tank Company to be ready to assault the chapel, a fortified structure of Kontum Cathedral, then he moved a jeep mounted with the TOW system to a discrete location near the objective.
“The TOW missile left the launching pad like a magic arrow, a white and bright trace lunged forward in the direction of the chapel,” Ba later recalled, “A thunderous noise! The chapel exploded, smoke, dust, tiles, structures shot skyward. The entire fortified chapel complex suddenly disappeared. No weapon fire was heard from the enemy position. The 75mm recoilless rifles, B-40s, B-41s and the entire battalion were put out of combat in the nick of time. Our tanks and infantry launched the assault and overran the objective. The last NVA chot in Kontum was removed before the city was shrouded under darkness and the Central Highlands rain.”17
The Kontum experience, no doubt, had made the use of TOW in the destruction of enemy fortifications more acceptable and this was probably the reason ARVN/JGS created a TOW platoon to conduct tests on the use of TOWs on reinforced bunkers and fortifications. And Colonel Dao, the 18th Division commander, was fortunate to have at his disposition the TOW missiles to deal with the American-built structures at Quan Loi airport.
A few days after the 43rd Regiment’s success in Quan Loi, the 52nd Regiment, in turn, scored another victory: two battalions of the regiment operating in the vicinity of Phu Kien hamlet west of An Loc engaged an enemy battalion. After one day of fierce fighting, the NVA soldiers withdrew, leaving behind sixty-seven dead.18 However, the NVA were not ready to give up after these successive setbacks. In a last-ditch effort to isolate the newly lost Quan Loi airport, the enemy used a sizable force to establish blocking positions between the airport and the city of An Loc. On September 8, the 2nd and 3rd Battalions, 43rd Regiment, received orders to eliminate the enemy chot. The enemy blocking forces were rapidly overrun, leaving sixty-five dead on the terrain.19Obviously, after five months of tough fighting and constant bombardment, the few remaining NVA forces were exhausted and had no stomach for another deadly—and futile—resistance.
In late September, the 48th Regiment, which had replaced the 43rd at Quan Loi, launched a sweeping operation to eliminate the last pockets of enemy resistance in the area. On September 23, the 3rd Battalion engaged a battalion-size enemy force and forced the last remaining NVA unit to withdraw from the outer perimeter of An Loc.
Meanwhile, some good news from MRI that lifted the morale of the whole country! On September 15, ARVN troops, after bloody combat, had retaken the Citadel of Quang Tri, the last NVA bastion south of the Thach Han River. The previous night, under cover of artillery fire, the 3rd Marine Battalion from the 147th Brigade blew a hole in the Citadel wall from which the attacking forces rapidly gained a foothold on the southeastern corner of the fortress. During the night, the Marines fought block by block and used hand grenades to annihilate the last pockets of resistance. Finally, the following morning, after forty-eight days of uninterrupted fighting, the Vietnamese Marines—like their U.S. counterparts in World War II in Iwo Jima—raised the national flag on the main headquarters of the Citadel and its surrounding walls.
Without question, the recapture of Quang Tri was a personal victory for Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, the I Corps commander and the rising star in the Vietnamese Army. With that victory, Truong reached the zenith of his military career. Sir Robert Thompson, who directed the successful counter-insurgency campaign against the Communist guerillas in Malaysia after World War II and was now an advisor for President Nixon, openly called General Truong one of the world’s finest generals. He stated that he would not hesitate to put British troops under General Truong’s command. An article in Time magazine even speculated that Truong was a likel
y candidate to replace President Thieu. Of course, President Thieu was not amused. A suspicious man, Thieu began to keep Truong under his watchful eyes.
While all this transpired, the negotiations in Paris appeared to be heading toward some kind of peace accord. In November 1972, President Thieu, expecting a post-Paris agreement “land-grabbing” period, in which both sides would try to occupy as much land as possible before an international control organization was put in place, ordered the corps commanders to take necessary actions to counter the enemy effort to grab more land. Consequently, General Minh, III Corps commander, decided to pull the 18th Division out of An Loc and to use it as the Corps reserve. On November 29, the 18th Division was replaced by three Ranger groups (3rd, 5th and 6th) under the command of Col. Nguyen Thanh Chuan, commander of Ranger forces in III Corps.
Twelve
Assessing the Battle of An Loc
Historians and even generals seem to have a tough time categorizing a siege as “successful” or “unsuccessful” from the defenders’ perspective. The authors of Valley of Decision, for example, mentioned that during a meeting of the National Security Council on March 27, 1968, Gen. Earl Wheeler, Chairman of the JCS, seemed to suggest that Hanoi had achieved its goal at Khe Sanh—that is, the NVA may have lured U.S. troops away from Hue and Saigon, their main objectives during the Tet Offensive. General Westmoreland, the former MACV commander, on the contrary, stated in a 1968 interview that he was proudest of his decision to hold Khe Sanh, implying that Khe Sanh constituted an important U.S. victory.
What then are the yardsticks for measuring the success or failure of a siege? General Wheeler seemed to suggest that Khe Sanh was a failure because the U.S. had forfeited the initiative and had fallen to NVA’s stratagem of holding U.S. forces in Khe Sanh with ambushes and limited attacks on outposts on surrounding hills while launching all-out assaults on Hue and major urban centers. Deceiving and outwitting the enemy are as old as warfare itself. In Art of War, fourth-century B.C. Chinese strategist Sun Tzu called it “practice of dissimulation” or “artifice of deviation.” One of its forms is dubbed the duong dong kich tay (or show off in the east and strike in the west) strategy. It is not clear whether or not the NVA intended to apply this strategy at Khe Sanh. Some military analysts believe that the enemy initially wanted to take both Khe Sanh and Hue but later decided to abandon the first objective and to concentrate on the second. In any event, the attack on Hue forced General Westmoreland to use three U.S. Marine battalions to help recapture the city and raised concerns in Washington about the vulnerability of the Khe Sanh base.
With regard to assessing the siege of Khe Sanh, General Wheeler and General Westmoreland, as seen earlier, had opposite views. While General Wheeler viewed it as a strategic failure, General Westmoreland considered it a victory, possibly because by applying overwhelming U.S. airpower, he had inflicted heavy casualties on NVA forces.
It is clear, however, that neither initiative nor casualties can be used to assess the success or failure of a siege because initiative is rather an elusive concept and the number of casualties is but one of many factors contributing to the final outcome of the siege.
In a final analysis, the only logical yardstick to measure the success or failure of a siege, in my opinion, is “objective.” In other words, a siege is successful or unsuccessful depending upon whether or not it helps achieve the objectives that have been clearly set forth.
In this regard, the siege of Nasan in 1953 was a success for the French because it thwarted the Viet Minh’s plan to take over the Thai Highlands while inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy regular forces. Dien Bien Phu, on the other hand, was a strategic blunder with grave geopolitical consequences for the French. The surrender of the camp retranché, in effect, marked the beginning of the end of French presence in Indochina. It was also the beginning of the dismantlement of the French colonial empire as its defeat and humiliation at Dien Bien Phu encouraged organized armed insurrections in its African colonies.
In the case of Khe Sanh, General Westmoreland’s main objectives were not clearly stated; but, based on documents which have been made available, they appeared to be: a) protect the DMZ; b) support his barrier concept to cut off the battlefields in the south; c) support an eventual invasion of Laos; and d) inflict heavy casualties on the NVA with overwhelming U.S. airpower.
Under mounting pressure from President Johnson and his military advisor, Gen. Maxwell Taylor—who were concerned about a possible repeat of Dien Bien Phu—General Westmoreland evacuated Khe Sanh in April 1968. The abandonment of Khe Sanh defeated General Westmoreland’s first three objectives because it exposed the left flank of the two northern provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien south of the DMZ,1 aborted the barrier concept to interdict NVA’s supply lines to the south, and annulled the MACV commander’s cherished dream of invading Laos. The heavy casualties suffered by the enemy may have delayed but didn’t stop the General Offensive: In 1972, the NVA hurled their finest divisions supported by armor and artillery regiments across the DMZ to attack Quang Tri province while making deep envelopments in the south in an effort to capture Kontum in MRII and An Loc in MRIII.
History will probably record the failure of Khe Sanh to achieve U.S. objectives and agree with General Wheeler’s suggestion that Hanoi may have accomplished its goals in that siege (deceiving the enemy and securing its supply lines to its forces in the South).
While the siege of Khe Sanh was somewhat controversial in that its assessment depends upon the criteria used to measure its outcome, and Dien Bien Phu was a severe military setback which caused the French to lose the Indochina War itself, An Loc was undeniably the greatest feat of ARVN’s arms. On the other hand, unlike the sieges of Nasan, Dien Bien Phu, and Khe Sanh, where the battle sites were chosen by the French and the American generals, the reverse was true for An Loc. The NVA leaders chose An Loc as the main objective in their thrust toward the capital city of South Viet Nam. As such, ARVN’s objectives were self-evident: a) hold An Loc at all costs; and b) inflict maximum casualties on the enemy and destroy their will to fight. By all accounts, An Loc had achieved these goals. Like the Russian stand at Leningrad during World War II—which had saved Russia from the German invasion—the battle of An Loc had practically saved the capital city of South Viet Nam from the onslaught of the NVA’s divisions rushing from their sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Also, because Nasan and Khe Sanh had never been completely surrounded by the enemy—they could be resupplied and reinforced by air anytime during the siege—they were not true sieges in the strict definition of the word. They may be called a “semi-sieges,” and consequently, it is not appropriate to compare them to the other two sieges. The following comparison between Dien Bien Phu and An Loc, on the other hand, would reveal the following similarities and differences.
The French had 15,000 men defending Dien Bien Phu whereas at the beginning of the battle, ARVN had only about 7,500 men at An Loc.
The attacking forces were two divisions, plus a number of independent regiments, totaling about 30,000 troops in the case of Dien Bien Phu. In the case of An Loc, the attacking forces were also two divisions supported by armored and artillery regiments. The total enemy force amounted to some 21,000 troops—excluding one division engaged against ARVN’s rescuing forces moving from the south.
At Dien Bien Phu, there was no civilian population, whereas in An Loc there were many thousands of civilians who needed food, medical care, and physical protection.
At Dien Bien Phu, the French had a perimeter of defense measuring sixteen kilometers by nine kilometers, but An Loc had a defense perimeter only a tenth as large. In other words, in the early stages of the siege there were points within Dien Bien Phu well beyond enemy artillery range, which was never the case in An Loc.
Dien Bien Phu had the disadvantage of being on a valley floor, subjected to deadly artillery fire from the enemy batteries well bunkered inside the surrounding hills. Although the topography of An Loc was somewhat
different, the city of An Loc itself was no less vulnerable as it is the only open terrain in the middle of a forest of impenetrable bamboo and rubber plantations.
At Dien Bien Phu, the French had twenty-eight artillery guns (twenty-four 105mm and four 155mm) and twenty-four 120mm mortars. In An Loc, during the most crucial days of the battle, only one 105mm gun was available to provide close support. (The other guns had been destroyed by enemy artillery during the first attack.) The French had tanks at Dien Bien Phu whereas the Viet Minh had none. In the case of An Loc, the reverse was true.
What then were the causes of success of the defense of An Loc? First, it was the air support available that made the biggest difference between An Loc and Dien Bien Phu. Day after day, B-52 sorties hit NVA assembly areas, logistical installations, even the first echelon assault units. B-52 strikes were so accurate that they could hit enemy troops less than one kilometer from the An Loc perimeter and disrupt enemy offensive schemes.
Second, it was the determination of ARVN troops. The French had at Dien Bien Phu some of their best units (paratroopers and legionnaires), but they also had many hill tribe paramilitary units called partisans who deserted en masse after the first waves of attack in which they were exposed to the Viet Minh’s deadly artillery fire. (It is significant to note that the garrison of An Loc received some 80,000 artillery rounds, or three times the number that were fired into Dien Bien Phu.)
With regard to ARVN’s performance in An Loc, Lewis Sorley reported that General Abrams responded vigorously to critics who said that South Viet Nam had defeated the invaders only because of American air support. “I doubt the fabric of this thing could have been held together without U.S. air,” Abrams told his commanders. “But the thing that had to happen before that is the Vietnamese, some numbers of them, had to stand and fight. If they didn’t do that, ten times the air we’ve got wouldn’t have stopped them.”2 According to senior ARVN commanders in An Loc I interviewed, General Hung, undoubtedly, was the man who was instrumental in holding together the “fabric” of the defense of An Loc against vastly superior enemy forces—and in spite of a deteriorating relationship with his American advisor. While French General De Castries requested Hanoi’s permission to surrender when the situation in Dien Bien Phu became hopeless, General Hung doggedly fought on, even when enemy forces were converging on his command post and were firing B-40 rockets directly at his underground bunker. Hung’s vow to his men that he would never be taken alive had galvanized the spirits of the defenders during the darkest hours of the siege.