The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  If they were going to have a mine, that’s where they’d have the mine. If they had panji stakes and you went down feet first, the stakes would go through your foot and you’d be stuck and you wouldn’t be able to get out. But if you went down and put your hand down and you felt around and there were no panjis, no collapsible board with the nails on the inside of it which snapped onto your hand, or there were no trip-wires or anti-personnel mines, then you were okay. But you would have to be careful you weren’t touching around the inside and they might have had something there as well.

  On average it used to take about five minutes to go down a hole. Time meant nothing when they entered the tunnels.

  I don’t know how long it would take down the tunnel, I never checked, but you might be down there for forty, forty-five minutes. One bloke once went down there in daylight and came back out and it was dark and everybody had gone home because they’d forgotten he was down there. He was so fucking angry, so pissed off! He had to make his own way back, in the dark.

  Corporal Bill Gallagher was working down a tunnel system during ‘Operation Crimp’ when he collapsed. The others had to rush down, and luckily were able to get him out alive. Sandy McGregor realised what had happened:

  Basically the air was rotten and we’d done it when we’d pumped in the smoke. I felt very much responsible for that. I should have twigged that the smoke was going to burn up oxygen and our blokes were not going to be able to breathe. But, of course, it was standard operating procedure from the 173rd Airborne Brigade to blow smoke and find other entrances and that’s what we did.

  General Westmoreland didn’t want guys to go down the tunnels. He didn’t tell me. He thought it was almost below their dignity to go down the tunnels, but after we took out so much gear, equipment, lists of intelligence, hit lists of Americans in Saigon, even photos of Chinese advisers, all sorts of stuff, he decided to develop a team of people who could go down tunnels and get all the right equipment and it became the order to search out tunnels. But we were the first.

  Dennis Ayoub was among the Diggers who rushed to extricate Bill Gallagher. They knew he was in an area where the tunnel dropped to a lower level. The tunnel was about the size of the coffin it almost became for Bill Gallagher, just big enough for Dennis and the others:

  I was then eleven stone and I was on my hands and knees and my bum used to scrape against the tunnel and my head used to hit the top of the tunnel as I crawled along with a torch and a pistol.

  Somehow we had to get down and behind Bill to push him back up. He was unconscious and he was gagging. Probably the best thing he did was to be overcome by the fumes because he was using less oxygen.

  I didn’t realise I was claustrophobic until I did that. I was petrified about going down again – I did, but I was petrified because of the space there. If I have to get under the house even today I’m scared. I had to get under my mother’s house recently after she died, and it brought it all back to me.

  During ‘Crimp’, Sandy McGregor’s team stumbled onto a tunnel system so massive that its exploitation could have changed the course of the entire Vietnam War. He summed up the situation in his book No Need for Heroes:

  We had gone to find and destroy the Saigon-Cholon/Gia Dinh political and military headquarters of the Viet Cong. By the time we left we knew we’d found it and we were pretty sure we’d destroyed it. History shows that the former assumption was correct while the latter was well off the mark.

  Working in four teams of six men, each attached to an infantry company, the engineers worked underground from daylight until dark. They discovered and extracted an extensive array of intelligence. They had investigated tunnels for 700 metres in one direction and 500 metres across that line but they still had no idea how far the tunnels extended. Sandy McGregor:

  We had taken out truckloads of equipment and documents, including photographs of the Viet Cong’s foreign advisers and a hit list of political and military figures in Saigon whom the VC wanted to assassinate.

  I’d be very surprised if some of the VC papers returned to the Vietnamese by the USA in July 1993, as part of the two countries’ reconciliation over US troops Missing In Action, weren’t from the half ton extracted from the tunnels under Ho Bo Woods.

  McGregor and his team had discovered underground hospitals and classrooms with so much gear that their American superiors assumed they must have found the Viet Cong HQ they’d been seeking. Two of Sandy’s team, Les Colmer and Barry Harford, reached a trapdoor which they discovered, after a painstaking search for booby traps, led to a new third level. But, alarmed at a ticking sound they heard on opening it, they withdrew and sought further instructions. They were told to leave the area and blow all the entrances and to make them unusable to the enemy.

  Two decades later, Sandy McGregor discovered that on the other side of that trapdoor lay the military HQ of the southern command of the Viet Cong. The enemy had withdrawn down their tunnels and held off attacking the tunnel rats, hoping to bluff the searchers into believing they were of little strategic importance:

  The Viet Cong had pulled back as far as they could without abandoning important installations. The next step would have meant bloody warfare which we would probably have won, but at a terrible cost.

  Would it have changed the course of history? The Viet Cong planned the Tet Offensive of 1968 from those tunnels. Ten years later they launched the final assault on Saigon from there, by which time the network had grown from 200 to 400 miles.

  McGregor discovered that the Viet Cong had started digging the tunnel complex as far back as 1945, during their war of independence with the French. As many as 5000 troops lived and worked in the complex, many without seeing daylight for up to six months at a stretch:

  If we had continued for another couple of days, we would have discovered and ultimately destroyed their underground city. It is not stretching the imagination to see how that could easily have led to the capitulation of Hanoi. As it turned out, the Americans’ decision to pull out led only to the fall of Saigon.

  But that was to come. In the meantime, the Diggers acclimatised themselves to a strange form of warfare, where the enemy was often a phantom and most of what they saw was a deadly illusion: rice caches that were massive booby traps; innocent villagers who were Viet Cong; grenades wired in trees; mines everywhere; panji pits; enemies without uniforms who became expert insurgents and night fighters. It is to the great credit of the Diggers who served in Vietnam that they proved yet again they were capable of maintaining their focus in this twilight zone. Dennis Ayoub:

  First you looked for booby traps. When you found one, you knew something big was around: a rice cache, ammunition cache, a tunnel. The traps could be vines across the track, panji pits, twigs or leaves turned the wrong way, things too neat. In one, there were 14 booby traps, grenades, set in the trees around the entrance. Not all of them were set because they had to get down there too quickly.

  Later on, the Viet Cong changed their style of booby traps. They took mines out of the minefields and they even used US M16 ‘Jumping Jack’ mines against the Diggers by putting them in and around tracks. The Diggers had to be constantly alert. Dennis Ayoub recalled how, when he slept in the jungle, he slept directly on the ground:

  I had an insert of a blow-up Li-Lo which I inflated about a third full and I slept with that under the back of my neck and down the centre of my back. I’d sleep with my heels on the ground, my bum cheeks on the ground and my shoulders on the ground. I’d sleep with my rifle straight down my stomach.

  You’d only hear the sentries changing every hour. When the next bloke moved, just the rustle of his clothing was enough to wake you. You wouldn’t startle but your eyes would just open. But in the meantime you’d been sleeping so that you knew you were asleep and resting but you were aware of any sound. You could rest because soldiers can teach themselves to go, not a deep sleep where you snore, but like a coma where you meditate. You can hear the outside noise but you could rest.


  You could wake up by the clock. If you knew you were on sentry duty at ten o’clock you’d wake up right on time, a few minutes before and when the previous sentry came to get you, you’d be immediately ready.

  Mike McDermott recalled a similar constant state of tension when he would lie propped up against a tree at night, holding his weapon:

  I’d listen for the change of sentries. I always slept on my right side, north–south. I’d do it by compass so if something happened during the night I’d know immediately, that was northeast or west, or whatever.

  One of the major differences from previous wars in the Diggers’ service was the presence of National Servicemen, or ‘Nashos’ – young men selected for a two-year term in the Army by a national conscription ballot. On 10 November 1964, Sir Robert Menzies announced his government was introducing conscription, referring to the increased ‘risks in this corner of the world’. All 20-year-olds were required to register for the ballot (except for ‘Aboriginals, non-naturalised migrants, employees of a foreign government and those already members of the military forces’). The government needed only a modest number of conscripts to serve. It was limited to 4200 in 1965 and then 8400 a year thereafter, from a pool of 750,000 young men eligible from 1965 through to 1972. The ballot was conducted by choosing marbles representing birth dates. Then the selected men faced a series of tests to determine whether they met the Army’s medical, psychological, educational and security standards. The result was that almost 64,000 conscripts served in the Army between 1965 and 1972. Of these, 19,450 went to Vietnam (where they made up less than half of each unit in which they served). In Vietnam, 200 National Servicemen were killed and another 1279 were casualties. Retired Army Sergeant Major Wally Thompson worked with many of them:

  In Vietnam we had National Servicemen and in many ways they were more mature than the regulars because they’d been out in the workforce, they knocked around a bit more, they’d had a career and because they were slightly older, from 19 through to 21.

  There is a bit of a myth about National Servicemen being forced to go to Vietnam. They were all volunteers. But, even so, if you’ve trained with a whole lot of blokes, you’re not going to be the dingo who didn’t put your hand up, so there was a lot of peer pressure.

  The Australian Army’s insistence on training its soldiers to a satisfactory level before committing them to combat was adhered to with the National Servicemen who served in Vietnam. The training generally took up to a year out of the two-year National Service period and included basic recruit training, jungle training at the Jungle Training School at Canungra and, where appropriate, specialist training. This was in contrast to many US conscripts sent to Vietnam. Much of this can be attributed to the greatly reduced numbers of our soldiers who served in Vietnam. Whereas the Americans were forced to train their troops on a massive scale, the Australians received the same level of individual training and testing that had been available to their forebears. Wally Thompson had first-hand experience in the training, which ensured that each soldier could proficiently use his weapon and was placed into the army’s lowest element, a section (usually around 11 men). This was known as ‘company collective training’. The Diggers would progress to unit training, where officers would oversee and test whether individual companies (of up to 120 men) were up to speed. Wally Thompson:

  Everyone who went to Vietnam had to be rubber-stamped that they went through Canungra. They’re sorting out [if we’re] up to speed, but they’re also looking at leaders at all levels. Even up to Canungra stage, there were people sacked from private to major who weren’t considered up to speed. The culling process continued right until they embarked.

  When the average soldier went away, he would have been three months recruit training, then they would go to the infantry centre for their initial deployment training aimed at making them a soldier working in a section in a platoon environment. Once they completed that, usually another three months, that ensured that soldiers who went to Vietnam were, in the main, well prepared and trained.

  Wally Thompson recalled that the basic philosophy was that if soldiers weren’t trained properly, if they didn’t know how to use their weapons correctly or they didn’t know how to use tactics properly within the area they were assigned to, they would sustain a lot of casualties.

  People, individually, doing brave acts, is not how it should have to happen. Someone shouldn’t have to sacrifice his life for the rest. It does happen on occasions but we train everything for a team to avoid that.

  Many of the lessons learned by our World War II Diggers against the Japanese on the Kokoda Track and subsequently in New Guinea, Borneo and Malaya were applied by the Diggers who fought the Viet Cong. They had some benefits that the Diggers on the Kokoda Track would have welcomed with open arms, as Wally Thompson pointed out:

  Blokes in Vietnam knew if they were wounded, we could get them back on a helicopter and they’d have the best medical treatment they could get within half an hour. When they arrived back at Vung Tau, they’d be stripped off and straight into a surgical team. You couldn’t get that back in Australia. So that’s why the death rate was so low there.

  If that had been on the Kokoda Track the death rate wouldn’t have been so horrendous. Most soldiers aren’t killed instantly; they die of shock or haemorrhage. I can’t understand how the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels got them back along that Track.

  Retired Colonel Ted Love believes the continuation training which the Vietnam veterans received during their service played a major role in maintaining their high morale:

  Combat power has two elements: one is human and one is physical. I can teach you all the physical stuff, like how to fire your mortar or drive your truck or fire your gun but, on the personal side, I want your morale to be high. I want you to know what you’re going to do and why you’re doing it. I want commitment and peer-group loyalty and then medical, dental and spiritual support, communication and mail. And medical services in the field.

  In Vietnam the standard was if somebody was injured or hit, 20 minutes to a surgery team. And you must have logistic backup for all these things. Unless you’re a contented person who’s highly trained with the gear, you’ve got a problem.

  While the Americans tended to rely on the use of overwhelming force and firepower, regularly ‘telegraphing their punches’ by heavily bombarding an area before inserting their troops, the Australians tended to rely on stealthy patrolling. The Diggers avoided operating alongside the Americans, preferring to work with small patrols that operated quietly in the jungle. They often challenged the Viet Cong at their own game. Contact with the enemy led to rapid-response drills, which rarely saw the Diggers caught in a static situation and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.

  Brigadier Ted Serong, CO of the Team, summed up the difference between the two forces: ‘Conventional soldiers think of the jungle as being full of lurking enemies. Under our system, we do the lurking.’

  The US Commander General Westmoreland also recognised the difference, noting the Australians were ‘thoroughly professional … small in numbers and well trained, particularly in anti-guerrilla warfare … the Australian Army was much like the post-Versailles German Army in which even men in the ranks might have been leaders in some less capable force’.

  The courage and skill of the Vietnam Diggers, including the Nashos, came to the fore on the afternoon of 18 August 1966, in a rubber plantation at a place called Long Tan.

  The Australian 1st Task Force had only recently established a defensive base at Nui Dat, in the heart of Phuoc Tuy Province. The Viet Cong effectively controlled the area and regarded the Australians’ presence there as a direct challenge. They decided to teach the new arrivals a lesson and to establish an early superiority over them. (It later transpired the Viet Cong had also hoped a bloody defeat of the Diggers would encourage the growing anti-war movement in Australia.) The Viet Cong plan was simple. They would stage a surprise mortar attack on the Australian base, knowing this would draw out
a reaction force that would seek out the mortar positions. They prepared an extensive ambush aimed at wiping out this reaction force.

  The mortar attack began at night on 16 August. It caught the base unawares and wounded 24 soldiers. The base artillery responded with a barrage. All night the Diggers at the base waited for the anticipated attack. It did not come. At dawn on 17 August, B Company 6 RAR moved out to search the area. They found five mortar sites but no enemy troops. The following day, D Company swapped places with B Company and headed towards the Long Tan rubber plantation. They had no real expectation of encountering the enemy, which traditionally melted into the jungle after a strike to fight again another day. Each member of D Company carried three days’ rations and 60 rounds of ammunition.