In 1965 it was already conventional wisdom that any division of ground troops should have a helicopter force available for liaison, casualty evacuation, command and reconnaissance tasks. What was new was the idea of using large forces of helicopter-mobile infantry in battle itself. They would arrive at their fighting ground in convoys of transport helicopters escorted by helicopter gunships. The gunships would ‘shoot them in’ to their landing zones, and the infantry would then deploy on foot. For fire support they would be able to call upon still more gunships and massed batteries of ‘Aerial Rocket Artillery’, as well as conventional artillery lifted in by transport helicopters. Their logistic lifeline would also be supplied by helicopter, and their casualties and damaged helicopters would be lifted out in the same way. The number of lorries and armoured vehicles in the airmobile division could thus be drastically cut, so that the entire formation would be released from a purely overland line of communication. Major parts of it would be free to skip within minutes from one point on the ground to another many miles distant. They could keep the enemy guessing and off balance.
This new idea had already been tested on a limited scale both in the USA and in Vietnam; but it was in 1965 with the deployment of the First Cavalry (Airmobile) Division that it really saw its full embodiment. It was then that the army’s helicopter enthusiasts were given the opportunity to demonstrate just how much they could achieve. In particular, they felt they had to prove that it was only by airpower under organic army command that the best results could be obtained. They were very concerned to undermine the airforce claim that all tactical aircraft should be an airforce responsibility. It was partly for this institutional reason, in other words, that the army committed itself so massively and so suddenly to the helicopter in Indochina.
The helicopter idea certainly had much to recommend it, and it is extremely doubtful that the war could have been fought at all without it. On the other hand it also proved to have several important defects. The most significant point, perhaps, was that helicopter troops suffered from exactly the same problem which bedevils all other types of airborne or airmobile troops – they have to be extremely careful about where they choose to land. They cannot set down in terrain which is either too rough in itself, or controlled by enemy fire. In Vietnam this meant that although helicopters might be able to move rapidly from one landing zone to another, their choice of landing zones turned out to be relatively limited. One commentator has remarked that ‘in fact the Americans simply became as tied to their helicopters as the French had been to their roads’.26 There is a great deal of truth in that statement.
The helicopter was an amazingly versatile and flexible weapon in Vietnam; but it could not land in thick jungle. It had to find a natural clearing, or perhaps have an artificial one blown or laboriously hacked out for it. As the war went on several different techniques were also developed for depositing men into the jungle from a hovering helicopter: but such methods could never provide a large-scale substitute for the ability to touch down at will wherever the helicopters were required. Casualty evacuation and resupply both tended to demand a properly cleared landing zone; and these two functions were both essential to troops in combat for any length of time. The result was that many operations were limited to areas which had landing zones nearby. The foot mobility of the fighting men was significantly hampered by the need to maintain this umbilical cord.
The security of landing zones was also important, since it was highly risky to land a helicopter under close range enemy fire. Airmobile soldiers always had a deep-rooted horror of running into a landing zone which was covered by snipers – or as Philip Caputo put it, ‘Happiness is a cold LZ’.27 As the war went on the NVA became increasingly effective in shooting down helicopters, as both anti-aircraft weapons and ambush skills improved. Particularly during the 1971 incursion into Laos they were able to stake out every jungle clearing which could possibly be used as a landing zone. Almost every helicopter assault met an ambush, and a total of 107 helicopters were lost in the operation as a whole.28 This total was untypically high, perhaps, because bad weather greatly restricted the times and altitudes which could be flown. It is nevertheless a striking illustration of the need for secure landing zones.
Landing zones were secured by infantry on the ground, who might arrive either on foot or in helicopters. In either case they might initially have to fight their way in against opposition; but their task was essentially a static defensive one. It was expensive in the one resource in short supply – manpower. American battalions in Vietnam usually went into action well understrength, so every detachment for landing zone security bit deep into total offensive fighting power. This task perhaps did as much as anything else to blunt the effectiveness of mobile operations.
Troops who were actually in contact, furthermore, were often deprived of helicopter support at the very time they needed it most. It was highly dangerous for resupply, reinforcement or medical helicopters to touch down in the middle of a firefight. They were forced either to wait until the firing had subsided, or to find an alternative landing zone at a distance. In either case the help they could bring to the ground troops would arrive late. It is true that in these circumstances many brave pilots ignored the risks and flew straight into the thick of the fighting; but that was not a recommended practice. It was the most certain way to lose helicopters.
The problems of selecting a landing zone were serious indeed; but airmobile infantry also suffered from a second handicap common to all airborne troops. They were relatively lightly equipped, and in most operations their ground movement was on foot. It is true that their supporting artillery batteries moved regularly by helicopter, and in some cases armoured vehicles did so too. On one memorable occasion even armoured boats were lifted bodily out of the water and set down in a new tactical area. In general, however, airmobile soldiers were transformed into foot-mobile soldiers as soon as they arrived on the ground.29
This meant that when they met the enemy they had little advantage in the firefight apart from their supporting arms called from a distance. When ambushed, an American unit was quite likely to be pinned down by NVA fire. Its mobility was suddenly limited to the speed with which an infantryman could crawl through thick vegetation: no more than about one metre per minute at the outside. Instead of ‘finding, fixing and destroying’ the enemy, it often became a case of ‘finding, being fixed and fighting a desperate battle to regain freedom of action’.
Schematic view of a ‘typical’ mobile sweep.
1 Americans advance to contact.
2 Americans pinned down by NVA ambush fire.
3 NVA manoeuvre to surround Americans. Americans try to find a clear landing zone for casualty evacuation and re-supply.
When American infantry found themselves walking into close range fire from a dug-in enemy, the only possible response was to hug the ground until the incoming fire abated. A unit’s movement was halted by bullets even more than by the jungle itself, and of course this was even more true in open ground: ‘Once a person gets hit, and your fire and manoeuvre stops in a paddy, your momentum is dead. It gives the enemy a chance to sight in. When the next man gets up, he’ll get dinged – then nobody wants to get up.’30 This was a most important limitation upon American mobility in Vietnam. As one NCO put it: ‘Every time I manoeuvre a man, I get him shot, and I say to hell with it.’31
NVA firepower thus presented a genuine physical obstacle once a firefight was joined. Units simply did not advance as they were supposed to. This was compounded, however, by the problems of casualty evacuation. It was a point of both policy and honour to extract all killed and wounded soldiers as fast as possible. This act was generally considered to be ‘more sacred than life itself,’ and it frequently distorted the shape of entire battles.32
The evacuation of casualties under fire is at the best of times a tricky operation. It involves great courage on the part of those who venture forward into places known to be beaten by enemy fire, and it can easily le
ad to their becoming casualties as well. It distracts all the other soldiers in the immediate vicinity, several of whom will probably have to break off the battle to carry each casualty to the rear. Perhaps most important of all, it distracts the local commander by making him responsible for arranging transport out of the battle area. Not only will his own mind be diverted from the battle itself, but his reports may implant misleading impressions in the minds of higher commanders. If they hear nothing of the fight apart from the details of casualty evacuation, they can very easily be led to assume the worst. They may imagine that each casualty evacuated represents only the tip of an iceberg, and they may lose perspective. In Vietnam radio communications allowed higher echelons to hear all these details as soon as they were reported, as well as to make hasty changes of plan as a result. Good radio communications did not always serve to clarify the position on the ground.
In one firefight, for example, a platoon commander received a hit in the eye, yet continued to report the battle on the radio. He did not reveal the fact that he had been wounded, but suggested instead that the evacuation of other wounded men was creating a crisis: ‘These bastards [i.e. the NVA] have too many MGs, and now the SOB’s are rolling us with grenades. The platoon is becoming split, due to care-for-the-wounded pulling the able bodied in opposite directions.’33 When he came off the air the picture he had painted was not corrected, and his superiors felt they had to send direct relief. In the event, however, the casualties had not been nearly as heavy as reported, and the relief had not been required.
There are many examples of operations which were virtually halted in their tracks as soon as it became necessary to evacuate casualties. We hear of one company commander who, at the height of a battle, ‘was now worrying more about getting a medevac ship in than about hunting the enemy’.34 In another case we hear of a South Korean unit, whose soldiers ‘were interested in getting their own back, whether the quick or the dead. After that they would deal with the enemy.’35 Care for the wounded often seemed to be given a higher priority than the continuation of battle.
This humanitarian reaction doubtless originated among the ‘buddies’ of men who had been hit.36 Their care for each other in danger is a striking illustration of unit cohesion, if not of aggressive instincts. On the other hand immediate casualty evacuation was also called for by higher command echelons and had both a strategic and a political rationale. We must remember that Westmoreland’s strategy was, faute de mieux, one of attrition. He had to inflict very many more casualties upon the enemy than they could inflict in return. It was therefore an important part of American strategy to lose as few men as possible. In order to keep the American public interested in the war, furthermore, the government wanted to demonstrate that it was doing everything it could to ease the lot of the combat soldier. The provision of an elaborate medical apparatus was thus of relevance to both these concerns.
It was felt that there was something contradictory about being killed in a limited war. If there was any chance at all of saving a wounded man, everything possible would be done for him. The statistics show that in this endeavour the Americans were astonishingly successful. A much smaller percentage of casualties died of their wounds than in any previous war. Within minutes of boarding the medical helicopter a combat victim could be receiving expert care, or even be en route to a base hospital in Japan.
It was not only the wounded who were evacuated. The killed were also shipped out of the battle area with rather more haste than in any previous war. In this case it was not so much the ‘limitation’ of the war which provided the rationale; but its psychic barbarity. There was a feeling that Vietnam was somehow not a civilised place to leave the bodies of American dead. Soldiers in action would sometimes expose themselves to enormous risks, and even death itself, in order to retrieve their comrades who had been killed. The same, it must be admitted, was also true of the Vietnamese soldiers on both sides.
In this very specialised sense, at least, we can call the Vietnam war one of the most humane there has ever been. The Americans often stopped their attacks in order to look after their casualties. Combined with the difficulties of the terrain and the volume of enemy fire, this consideration seriously impaired mobility on the battlefield. Colonel D. R. Palmer has gone so far as to suggest that it was the most important consideration of all. In a passage in some ways reminiscent of late nineteenth century French writing about ‘morale’, he claims that mobility is a state of mind rather than a purely physical attribute.37 He suggests that American infantry attacks could actually have maintained their momentum if both commanders and men had been less anxious to minimise losses.
One indicator of attitudes in any army is its training doctrine, and we find that the American doctrine for infantry combat changed radically in the first few years of the Vietnam war. At the start it had been theoretically accepted that infantry could fight its own way forward into enemy positions, using ‘fire and manoeuvre’. A unit which made contact would first build up a base of fire to pin the enemy to his positions. Under cover of this fire the infantry could manoeuvre forward in small groups and skirmish into the enemy area. There would then be a brief phase of combat at close quarters which, although it might be costly in friendly casualties, would lead to the annihilation of the opposing force. In 1965 both the Army and the Marine Corps had recommended a form of this procedure in their training manuals.38
In practice, however, ‘fire and manoeuvre’ was rarely used in Vietnam. There turned out to be both a carrot and a stick which tended to lead commanders in a rather different direction. The carrot was the unprecedented weight of supporting firepower which was now available to even the smallest unit; while the stick was the political requirement to avoid casualties. Taken together, these two factors inevitably encouraged the idea of substituting heavy supporting fire for the costly assault phase of an attack.
It came to be believed that a base of fire could be built up with sufficient power to physically destroy the enemy, rather than merely to pin him down. In this way the decisive action of the battle could be entrusted entirely to supporting arms, so that a final infantry assault would become superfluous. The infantry’s role would be limited to finding the enemy in the first place, and then helping to bring down fire upon him. As Colonel Palmer has remarked, this amounted to a tactic of ‘Manoeuvre and Fire’.39 The infantry found itself excused by technology from the dangerous need to stand up and advance after battle had been joined. In 1967 these tactics were codified in a training manual written by Colonel S. B. Berry and quickly given official blessing. In the conditions of Vietnam there was perhaps only one way in which American infantry could have been expected to manoeuvre under fire; and that was by riding in armoured vehicles. Inside a tank or an armoured carrier the soldiers enjoyed a relative immunity from fire, and their mobility was restored. On many occasions it was found to be perfectly practicable for these vehicles to charge forward into the midst of enemy positions, sowing mayhem and confusion as they went. It was an effective technique; but it was not one which lent itself to airmobile infantry. They had no armour heavier than their cumbersome flak jackets, and in effect this left them with no alternative but to adopt the new tactics of ‘manoeuvre and fire’.
The significance of the new tactics is that they assigned a purely passive or defensive role to infantry in the firefight. When they made contact, American troops almost always adopted a position of all-round defence, firing outwards and waiting for their supporting arms to become effective. As S. L. A. Marshall put it, ‘there had been no hand-to-hand fighting in the literal sense. Every firefight had had the nature of a small siege with the Americans holding the ramparts.’40 Even in supposedly mobile operations the tendency was to set up improvised perimeters which soon began to look very much like minor fire support bases. The onus of manoeuvre was handed to the enemy.
In some cases the NVA accepted the challenge and made frontal attacks upon the immobile American infantry. These assaults were generally expens
ive and rarely successful. More often, however, the NVA would try to move round a flank and complete an encirclement. In many ambushes the soldiers in front of the Americans would remain dug in and pin them with fire, while a mobile force made a wide sweep and started to infiltrate the position from the rear. This attempt was by no means always successful; but it did serve to increase the pressure on the beleaguered American infantry. It kept the initiative in communist hands.
In cases where complete encirclement was successfully achieved, the strains on the Americans could become very great indeed; both for those inside the threatened circle and for higher commanders outside. The whole character of an operation could be changed in an unexpected and unwelcome way. As Marshall put it, ‘More than any other distraction in war, the unit cut off and fighting for survival is likely to make a battle plan fall apart.’41 Or again:
It is a situation that too frequently occurs in the Vietnam fighting. The forward element, losing men and becoming pinned down, compromises the position of all the others. What has started out as an attack loses all form and deteriorates into a costly rescue act.42
Units of any size, from the biggest to the smallest, could and did become enmeshed in battles of this type. At Khe Sanh Combat Base in 1968, for example, it was a reinforced regimental group which found itself surrounded. Its predicament distracted the attention of the White House for the space of several entire weeks, and possibly shifted the whole balance of the war. At the other end of the scale lies the saga of ‘BAT 21’, an EB-66 aircraft which was shot down in 1972 in the Demilitarised Zone. There was known to be one surviving crew member; but he was surrounded by the best part of an NVA division. A battle lasting twelve days was fought to extract him, during which even B-52 bombers were used, and several more aircraft and helicopters were lost. The attempt was ultimately successful and the enemy was severely mauled into the bargain; but as an example of a rescue distorting the shape of other operations it must stand unsurpassed.43
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