There is no doubt that the Americans became highly proficient in extracting both surrounded units and individual soldiers from tight corners. In so doing they were often also able to inflict very damaging losses upon the enemy. This should not, however, blind us to the fact that in each one of these battles it was the NVA who really held the initiative. It was they who manoeuvred to surround the Americans, and they who chose when to make a fight of it. At the point of contact on the ground, where it mattered most, it was they who continued to enjoy superior mobility.
The NVA also enjoyed superior mobility in another respect, which was in some ways even more important. This was that they could usually break off combat when they chose. The American hope that supporting arms could destroy their opponents without the need for an infantry assault was rarely realised in practice. In firefight after firefight it transpired that the NVA had slipped away before being genuinely destroyed or overrun. They certainly suffered heavy casualties; but they were prepared to pay this price if it meant that their units could survive as working organisations. The NVA recognised that there was a significant difference between losing a proportion of their soldiers and losing a unit as a whole: they consistently chose the former option.
Exfiltration from the scene of combat was a highly developed art among the North Vietnamese forces. When the order was given to disengage, they could split down quickly into small groups to crawl out of the battle area in every direction, exploiting the terrain and American bafflement to the full. Only much later, at a good distance from the scene of the fighting, would they regroup at a pre-arranged rendezvous and count their losses. This formed an integral part of their plans, and it was extremely difficult to counter.
From the American point of view the fact of enemy disengagement could usually be represented as a success. It removed the pressure from beleaguered infantry and left them in control of the battlefield. In terms of relative attrition also it often appeared to be highly profitable. There was rarely, however, very much that the Americans could do by way of pursuit.44 After each firefight they would typically be more concerned with casualty evacuation and policing the battlefield than with following up their elusive tormentors. Like Napoleon after Borodino or Bautzen they would find themselves disappointed that the spoils of a hard-fought victory appeared to be so slight. They failed to win any of the spectacular trophies which are inseparable from truly decisive military action.
It was the indecisive nature of their firefights which ultimately became so frustrating to the Americans. Unable or unwilling to overrun enemy positions while they were still manned, they relied upon the firepower of supporting arms to do the job for them. When this assistance turned out to be less than decisive, they would realise belatedly that they had lost the initiative. The enemy was free – admittedly at great cost – to manoeuvre, disengage and fight another day. As Philip Caputo remarked of his first battle: ‘Like so many of the thousands of firefights that were to follow, it began with an ambush and ended inconclusively.’45
Truly decisive battles seemed to require the complete encirclement of entire enemy units, so that not even small groups of soldiers could worm their way out of the trap. This realisation came home to the Americans very early in the war, after the battle of Ap Bac I in January 1963. On that occasion a South Vietnamese commander had allowed an enemy mainforce battalion to escape from contact after it had inflicted considerable damage upon his greatly superior forces. There was more than a suspicion that he had deliberately given the Viet Cong a ‘golden bridge’ for their escape, in order to spare himself the costly necessity of making an assault. With this cautionary tale before them, therefore, the Americans came to Vietnam with a determination that the same thing should not happen to them.
There is no doubt that American commanders at all levels had the intention of inserting fresh units behind an enemy to cut off his retreat at the same time as he was being engaged frontally by fire. They looked for battles of annihilation in which encircling or blocking forces would be just as important as those involved in the main firefight itself. There had to be an ‘anvil’ as well as a ‘hammer’, a ‘seal’ as well as a ‘jitterbug’, or a ‘cordon’ as well as a ‘sweep’. All this was well understood, and the literature is liberally sprinkled with just those phrases. The difficulty in mobile warfare, however, lay precisely in providing the ‘anvils’, ‘seals’, or ‘cordons’ which were required.
We have seen that an American unit which actually made contact was often effectively prevented from manoeuvring or destroying the enemy on its own. It would call for outside assistance while remaining pinned to the spot. This posed a double problem for the higher echelons of command, since they then had to think both about giving immediate relief to the pinned unit and at the same time about inserting other units as blocks behind the enemy. All this often proved to be an excessively complex requirement in the time available, and it usually happened that although the Americans might achieve the former task, they would fail in the latter.
A major difficulty was to be found, as so often in Vietnam, in the nature of the terrain. As Marshall explained, The jungle is simply not meant for fighting. It mocks manoeuvre.’46 It proved to be no easier to lay on a timely intervention on the rear of a firefight which flared unexpectedly than it had been to manoeuvre the units actually in contact. Available reserves had to be scraped together without much notice, and secure landing zones had to be found at the right distance from the fighting. Once the reserves had been safely deposited on the ground they still had to beat their way forward through the underbrush to a point where they would be useful – usually giving plenty of warning to the enemy as they came, and quite possibly running into a new ambush. Even when they were finally in place there was little guarantee that they could effectively cover all avenues of escape.
The NVA was highly skilled in the art of exploiting the slightest gap in a surrounding cordon, and in jungle conditions that gap might only need to be a few feet across. When we add to this the need for the cordoning troops to adopt an all-round defensive position, we can see that the operation required a very large number of men indeed – perhaps one for every metre of the cordon. In many cases the net could only be made complete by using artillery or air bombardment to fill the spaces between infantry units; but the enemy seemed willing enough to accept the losses entailed in passing through such a barrier of fire. Especially at night it was almost impossible to prevent this escape through the jungle. It is therefore with some reason that the Americans are particularly proud of those few battles in which the cordon did work as planned.
To some extent all this was a matter of ‘sending a boy to do a man’s job’.47 Because they had excessive confidence in their technological edge, the Americans perhaps felt they could make do with fewer infantry on the ground and fewer reserves than the task actually required. Their planning perhaps took too little account of the local difficulties, and assumed that each infantryman would be able to multiply himself by firepower and mobility rather more than was actually the case. At all events it seems clear that they often committed too few men to each action, with inadequate genuinely effective firepower and mobility. Contrary to the popular belief, the Americans deployed too little of their much-vaunted combat power, in these battles, rather than too much.
As for the enemy, he seems to have struck upon a highly effective way of multiplying manpower and firepower by combat technique. The key seems to have been constant movement and a willingness to accept high casualties when taking the initiative, combined with the use of terrain, camouflage, dispersion and entrenchment to minimise casualties at other times. In this way the NVA was able to keep an effective army in being, even though it was technologically unsophisticated and relatively lightly armed.
When an NVA regiment passed into South Vietnam from its sanctuaries in Laos or Cambodia, it would typically move in small groups to a large pre-prepared and fortified base area situated in difficult terrain. In this base it could re-group, study
local conditions and conduct rehearsals for forthcoming operations. While it was in its base area, furthermore, it was well poised to accept battle on favourable terms with such American units as might stray in. In the event of a co-ordinated large-scale sweep it could refuse action and retire in small groups. In normal times, however, it would enjoy almost as great an immunity from attack in its bases as the Americans did in theirs.
A central operational principle for the NVA was known as ‘one slow, four quick’. This meant that their attacks or major ambushes would be meticulously planned and prepared well in advance. Arms, food and medical supplies would be sent out ahead of the combat troops and cached near the intended scene of battle. Only when everything was fully ready would the infantry make their four quick actions. First there would be a rapid movement, still in dispersed groups, to the battle area. Then a sudden concentration on the field itself would deliver a violent and unexpected blow at the decisive point, covered by ambush parties on the flanks to confuse and delay enemy relief attempts. The third phase was a quick but thorough policing of the battlefield to collect weapons and casualties. Finally there would be an equally rapid withdrawal to a known rendezvous point.
This technique by no means guaranteed success at the decisive point itself, where a dug-in firebase or a well-protected convoy would often manage to fight its way out of difficulty. The technique did, however, frequently achieve the advantages of surprise and ensure that regrouping was effected with the minimum of consternation and panic. It kept the initiative with the NVA at every stage, and sometimes stretched American mobility and ‘responsiveness’ to the limit. In important respects it forced the Americans to ‘run in order to stand still’. They certainly needed all the technological assistance they could get if they were to avoid a defeat comparable to that of the French before them.
The NVA was a regular army using many of the tactical methods of the guerilla. It proved to be almost a match for the Americans in the mainforce battles, and we may perhaps ask whether its technique might not have a general relevance to the future of warfare. Already in Burma during the Second World War we were hearing of both Chindits and the ‘one man front’ while soon after the war a number of theorists were suggesting that dispersion and guerilla methods would have an increasing part to play in the regular operations of the future. In Vietnam there seems to have been no more than a continuation of this existing problem.
Vietnam was also characterised by a patchwork of fire support bases supplied by air. These too had precedents in the Second World War, as most notably at Imphal-Kohima and Bastogne. In these cases there was a move away from a linear defence towards an ‘archipelago’ defence. It was realised that even a relatively small force could hold out indefinitely if it disposed of air resupply plus the defensive firepower of modern weapons. This, once again, would seem to be a pointer for the future.
The most important tactical lesson of Vietnam, however, is that even the most advanced technology may fail to deliver everything that it seems to promise. The Americans found that for all their superabundance of modern equipment they still lacked a surveillance system capable of finding everything that had to be found. They lacked firepower which could hit everything there was to hit; and they did not have the mobility to go everywhere they wanted to go. This in itself must have amounted to a great disappointment; but it was compounded by a tactical doctrine which often seemed to ignore such embarrassing technical shortfalls. It is almost as if the Americans assumed that their equipment would work to the most optimistic manufacturer’s specifications. They seemed to believe that supporting firepower really could destroy an enemy without the need for an infantry assault; that rapid casualty evacuation could be performed without tactical dislocation; and that blocking forces could easily be inserted behind an enemy with speed and effect.
American tactics in the mainforce war were not always fully appropriate to the hard realities of either the jungle battlefield or the available equipment. They led to victories which were less than complete, and a rising sense of frustration with the war. There were many other causes of this frustration, to be sure; but from the combat soldiers’ point of view it must surely have been the deficiencies of battlefield technology which were of especial importance.
The Rambo Generation and the War After Vietnam
When ‘Forward Into Battle’ was first written in 1981, the Vietnam war was still too fresh and too painful for there to be much American commentary, literature or cinema about it. Just as the period from 1918 to 1927 had been something of ‘a time of silence’ for British and French commentators on the Western Front, so the nine years of shock and national re-assessment immediately after the 1973 ‘peace’ treaty left the Americans strangely mute. Vietnam was quietly excised from West Point curricula, the army made it clear that it had never really liked the draft after all, and decent citizens made vows that they would not raise such a painful subject as Vietnam in public conversation. The very words ‘counter-insurgency’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ easily reverted to their pre-Kennedy level of odium. The American military press today routinely carries articles on ‘low intensity’ warfare instead.
Also similar to the reaction after 1918, ‘The Imperial Republic’ soon found that the very idea of overt intervention overseas had became a potent taboo. Vietnam had been the foreign adventure to end all foreign adventures. Just as there were to be ‘no more Passchendaeles’ in the 1920s and 30s, so there were now to be ‘no more Hamburger Hills’ in the 1970s and 80s. President Ford won but little kudos by his rearguard ‘Mayaguez’ operation, but highlighted military fumbling when a costly battle was fought to save hostages who were already safe.48 President Carter fell from grace with his own abortive hostage rescue in Iran; and President Reagan did no good either by his still more tragic intervention in Beirut. Massive deployments to El Salvador and Nicaragua were ruled out, and the Soviet Union was effectively given carte blanche to find its ‘place in the sun’ in Angola, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.
By the mid-1980s, however, a sea change had occurred in the Vietnam debate. The desire never to repeat such a war was still as strong as before, but it was now mixed with a flood of books and films which drew the images of Vietnam out into the open, out of the shadows of the repressed subconscious. The ‘survivalist’ cult flourished, and even mainstream fashion was influenced by jungle fatigues and combat clothing. A wave of rightist revanchism appeared, which sought to ensure that America should walk tall once again, and which perceived as weakness the limitations on action imposed by fighting a limited war. ‘Someone wouldn’t let us win,’ complained Rambo, and in this he expressed the thoughts of a generation.
The new national mood released foreign policy from some of the shackles of its earlier rules of engagement. When Grenada was occupied and Libya bombed, the applause from the domestic audience was frenetic. When Colonel North was arraigned for bypassing the constitutional niceties, he was hailed in many patriotic circles as a hero. In strictly military affairs, also, there was a corresponding injection of new funds and a toughening of attitude. Vietnam now became a humiliation to be avenged, or at least a parable to guide future action. The military accepted a version of what had happened which largely absolved it from direct blame,49 but which strengthened its resolution never again to accept false strategies from outsiders and businessmen.
Perhaps the most direct impact of Vietnam on military policy, apart from abolition of the draft, was the construction of a new conventional version of the nuclear ‘massive retaliation’ thinking of the 1950s. In Korea General MacArthur had been baffled by the restrictions of limited war, and had declared that ‘there is no substitute for victory’. But because this would have implied the use of nuclear weapons and the start of World War III, he was promptly dismissed by President Truman. In the 1960s, therefore, the military establishment reluctantly accepted all the restrictions on its Indochina war that were placed upon it. These included respect for the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos, and a bombing c
ampaign in North Vietnam that was only ‘graduated’. By the 1980s, however, both of these approaches had been discredited.
The air force pointed to Operation Linebacker II at Christmas 1972, when the B52s had finally been released to bomb Hanoi. Not only had this led to a surprisingly light toll of the attacking aircraft, flying against the most strongly defended target in the world, but it seemed to be successful in ‘bombing the enemy to the conference table’.50 It stood in stark contrast to all the futile years since 1965, when countless aircraft had been lost attacking negligible targets, producing no political effect except a strengthening of international hostility. For the future, therefore, the air force was keen for a ‘gloves off policy, from which the first fruits were perhaps seen in Libya in 1986.
The army’s analysis of the Vietnam experience concentrated on the question of attrition as opposed to hot pursuit. In the event it had been compelled to fight a purely defensive war, forbidden before 1970 to pursue the invaders to their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. The defensive had necessarily been ‘active’ and firepower-oriented because the US forces lacked sufficient manpower to hold a continuous fortified line along the South Vietnamese frontier. This led to constant recriminations, since whenever ground had been won in some bitterly-contested firefight, it soon had to be abandoned to allow the troops to go searching and destroying elsewhere. The attritional aims had not been achieved, either, since the North Vietnamese had always been free to remove their forces to safety whenever they wished, and hence to accept casualties only at a level they believed they could bear. In this way they were given time to turn the weapon of attrition around, so that its decisive bite was felt against US servicemen instead of against themselves. It was the steady trickle of returning body bags that finally lost Uncle Sam his war with the American public.
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