by Eric Hammel
By the time Coolican opened fire, Major Frank Breth had climbed onto the roof of the main building. From there he looked out on a scene of total chaos—people yelling, gunfire and detonations, a maelstrom of noise and confusion. As the veteran Marine major tried to shut out the noise and look for clear targets, he saw the remnant of an NVA sapper platoon moving north along Highway 1, directly toward the compound's front gate. As they approached, many of the NVA were cut down, principally by the three Marine security guards and Captain Jim Coolican. However, about fifteen of the enemy kept on coming.
The Marines manning the southwest guard post shot down about half of the remaining NVA, but one of the NVA stuffed a grenade into the bunker's firing aperture, killing all three Marines. Taking careful aim at a figure carrying what seemed to be a satchel charge, Major Breth fired his M-16 and dropped him to the ground. But other NVA quickly followed. Breth continued to fire his M-16 on full automatic. Then it seemed like everyone was yelling, "Shoot! Shoot! They're coming down the road! Shoot!" Breth and another Marine major began hurling grenades from the roof, right down on the NVA survivors. The NVA turned and ran. The assault on the front gate of the MACV Compound was over.
The NVA platoon had little room in which to maneuver, and all their routes of attack were obvious and easy to seal off. After a series of futile attacks on the eastern and southern compound walls, the 804th NVA Battalion backed off. From then on, the greatest danger the Americans inside MACV faced was from the wild shooting of the thoroughly panicked men in the adjacent central station of the GVN National Police. In fact, an Australian Army advisor was probably killed by fire from the police station.
As the RPG and small-arms fire directed against MACV died down, the advisors could hear shooting from all around the city, mainly from AK-47s. Hue seemed to be under attack everywhere at once.
*
Elsewhere south of the Perfume, the K4B NVA Battalion appeared to have achieved success in its zone—the triangle formed by the Perfume River to the northwest, Highway 1 to the northeast, and the Phu Cam Canal to the south. At any rate, a large number of isolated civil objectives in that sector were seized, and VC cadres were soon moving in to set up a civil government of their own. However, a small number of thinly manned ARVN posts on the south bank of the Perfume could not be taken by the widely dispersed K4B NVA Battalion, and, strangely, a number of small, isolated ARVN camps and facilities in its zone were left undisturbed throughout the night.
The Communists later claimed that all three assault battalions in the 4th NVA Regiment zone, south of the Perfume River, were in position to attack their objectives in advance of the initial rocket volley. They even claimed that the K4C NVA Battalion and an attached sapper unit—the force that had been pinpointed, bombarded, and delayed by artillery fire on the afternoon of January 29—had completed a forced march from the Ta Trach ferry sites during the evening of January 30. However, the K4C NVA Battalion's main objective, the cantonment of the 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion, was not seriously molested during the night. Certainly it was not attacked by the reinforced K4C NVA Battalion.
No Communist unit attacked the 1st ARVN Engineer Battalion compound, on the southern edge of the city, nor the U.S. Navy's Hue LCU ramp, on the Perfume River. If, as they later claimed, the Communists reduced all the civil targets on their long list of objectives, they nevertheless did a spotty job of reducing military targets.
To the Communists, clearing the military opposition was a means to an end. That end was the civil objectives, because of what they symbolized. The Communists were seeking the general uprising. Ultimately, however, passing up or wasting opportunities to destroy military targets was their undoing.
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Chapter 6
It is an axiom of night battle that things are never as bad as they seem. Daylight invariably chases away the deepest of fears and the wildest of speculations shared by combatants on both sides. No matter how bad things really are, they are never as bad as they seem to be at night.
Long before dawn offered Hue's beleaguered defenders the first glimmer of hope, Brigadier General Ngo Quang Truong was at work planning and ordering the relief of the city. Heavy fighting seemed to be raging everywhere in Hue at once, and the reports General Truong was receiving at the 1st ARVN Division CP were vague, often bordering on panic, and thus of little use beyond establishing the scale of the Communist plan. But Truong intuitively grasped what there was to grasp, gathered what information there was to gather, and acted while there was still time to act. Above all, he knew, it was vital to launch some form of counterattack before the Communists reduced all their objectives and consolidated all their gains. Blooded warrior that he was, Truong knew for a certainty that the Communists could not have seized all their objectives without error or setback. He knew from bitter experience that fluid situations tended to work to the advantage of the defender. The sounds of gunfire from all directions and the reports Truong was able to gather on his radio told him the situation remained extremely fluid and that, probably, the Communist timetable was a shambles. Moreover, he quickly learned that he still had the means for knocking the Communist plan further askew and, hopefully, defeating it in short order.
General Truong was quite right. The Communists had only come near to winning a swift victory. But they had failed to do so, and time definitely was not on their side.
The 6th NVA Regiment continued to battle mightily for key objectives within the Citadel, but the situation around General Truong's CP seemed to have stabilized. Even though Truong's troops were unable to attack out of the compound, at least the Communists seemed unable to attack into it. On the south bank of the Perfume River, the 4th NVA Regiment appeared to have conceded several key objectives. The MACV Compound was no longer under direct pressure, and the cantonments of the 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion and the 1st ARVN Engineer Battalion, both on the southern fringe of the south bank of the Perfume, had never been molested at all.
*
Unfortunately for Hue's defenders, the axiom that dawn imposes reality and presents new opportunities cuts in both directions.
At G hour, the handpicked 3rd Company of the 6th NVA Regiment's 800th NVA Battalion had made its way from the Huu Gate, on the southeastern end of the Citadel's southwestern wall, toward the Ngo Mon Gate, the southeastern entrance into the Imperial Palace. However, before getting very far, this company had been diverted to help two other NVA companies that were stalled in their bid to overrun Tay Loc Airfield. The 3rd Company did not get back on the track for several hours.
At about 0500, shortly after the Hoc Bao Company was ordered back from Tay Loc Airfield to help defend the 1st ARVN Division CP, General Truong ordered the 1st ARVN Ordnance Company to abandon its depot beside the airfield and withdraw to the 1st ARVN Division CP compound. The way things seemed to be going in the Citadel, conceding the depot and the airfield to the Communists was preferable to losing the ordnance troops or being forced to fritter away assets in rescuing or supporting them. Soon the 800th NVA Battalion renewed its attack on the recently abandoned airfield and secured it without further loss. The NVA soldiers destroyed the light observation airplanes they found parked near the runway and looted the ordnance depot of its stores, including many weapons.
Far behind schedule, the 800th NVA Battalion's 3rd Company set out again to seize the Imperial Palace and the huge flag platform on the southeastern wall of the Citadel, opposite the Ngo Mon Gate. However, the company was delayed again by Lieutenant Nguyen Thi Tan's 1st ARVN Division Reconnaissance Company. Following its evening scouting mission west of the city, the company had infiltrated Citadel streets by way of the 1st ARVN Division CP compound. Lieutenant Tan's troops, skilled at moving without detection, launched tiny hit-and-run delaying actions against the NVA infantry company. However, at 0600 a platoon of NVA sappers the ARVN scouts apparently did not engage seized the Ngo Mon Gate from an eight-man squad of sentries.
As soon as the Ngo Mon Gate was seiz
ed, the main body of the long-delayed 3rd Company side-slipped Lieutenant Tan's tiny blocking force and poured into the palace compound. It routed or took prisoner all the GVN civil guardsmen and national policemen within. Then, to underscore the deeply symbolic victory, each of the NVA liberators took his turn sitting on the imperial throne.
A platoon from the 800th NVA Battalion's 3rd Company seized the flag platform in the center of the Citadel's southeastern wall at the same moment the Ngo Mon Gate fell. The Communist soldiers swiftly pulled down the gold-and-red GVN flag—the same banner General Truong's troops had raised the previous morning. For the moment, nothing more was done, but the fact that the GVN flag was not flying was obvious to all who could see the flagpole in the dawn's early light.
*
General Truong's first priority was to plan the relief of his own CP compound, with its vital command-and-control communications links, not to mention the 1st ARVN Division's brain trust. (It must be said that, in addition to directly overseeing the battle for Hue, Truong and his staff officers remained in control of the rest of the 1st ARVN Division, which was engaged to the hilt in heavy fighting from the DMZ to south of Hue.) One of Truong's first acts was to contact Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Lam, the I AFVN Corps commander. Though Lam's own CP was under siege in the NVA's all-out attack on Quang Tri City, the corps commander hastily contacted his superiors in Saigon—also under Communist attack—and convinced them to transfer the 1st ARVN Airborne Task Force to Truong's direct control.
Then General Truong radioed the commander of the 2nd ARVN Airborne Battalion and asked if that crack strategic-reserve unit had been molested during the night in its temporary bivouac north of the city. No, the battalion was safely beyond the cordon the Communists had thrown around the city. It was fully intact and awaiting orders.
General Truong ordered the 2nd ARVN Airborne Battalion, numbering around 300 troops, to proceed to the 1st ARVN Division CP by the most expedient route, rolling up Communist units if they could be swiftly overrun, but bypassing them if they could not. It was essential to the plan emerging in Truong's racing mind that at least one strong, competent combat unit reach the division CP as soon as possible, intact and ready to launch a counterassault.
The 2nd ARVN Airborne Battalion swiftly left its bivouac and marched directly toward the Citadel. However, as soon as the lead paratroop company reached the built-up area—at about sunup—it ran into a company of the 806th NVA Battalion deeply entrenched within stout civilian buildings. The thrust instantly bogged down as all the paratroop companies were sucked into bloody, time-consuming house-to-house firefights.
In addition, General Truong had ordered the 7th ARVN Airborne Battalion and the 3rd Company, 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion, to attack together from PK 17. Their objective was the western corner of the Citadel. Directly overseen by the 1st ARVN Airborne Task Force headquarters, these fresh units proceeded rapidly along Highway 1. But, like the paratroopers, they also ran afoul of the waiting 806th NVA Battalion. Outside An Hoa village, just to the northwest of the Citadel, this second relief force became bogged down in bloody, painstakingly slow house-to-house fighting against the superbly entrenched NVA battalion.
*
Ongoing radio inquiries revealed to General Truong that about half the 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion was in the battalion cantonment south of the enemy cordon. This force seemed quite capable of securing the southern route into the city. Truong ordered the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Phan Huu Chi, to attack north along Highway 1 with everything he had. Truong hoped Chi could get as far as the Nguyen Hoang Bridge, which carried Highway 1 across the Perfume River. If Chi could get across the bridge, he was to fight his way into the Citadel.
Lieutenant Colonel Chi's armored unit was equipped with eleven 26-ton M-41 light tanks armed with 76mm guns and several M-113 armored personnel carriers (APCs) armed with .50- and .30-caliber machine guns. These weapons would have been more than adequate in many situations in the bush, but they were not up to attacking directly up a narrow highway into the teeth of NVA soldiers emplaced in masonry buildings and equipped with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of lethal B-40 RPGs. Three successive armored attacks were beaten back, each with heavy losses for absolutely no gains.
*
Though the 3rd ARVN Regiment CP was at PK 17, itself under indirect bombardment through the night of January 30, all four infantry battalions of the 3rd ARVN had been arrayed in or around Hue. The 1st and 4th battalions—which had been conducting sweep operations near the coast east and southeast of the city—awoke to find that their separate bivouacs were surrounded by elements of the 4th NVA Regiment's 804th NVA Battalion. The 4th Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, was pinned throughout the day on January 31, but continuous counterattacks finally carried the 1st Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, through the encirclement and to the east, toward the coast.
The 2nd Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, had been on a routine sweep west of the city on January 30. Like its sister battalions to the east, it had been in a bivouac in the field when the attack started. It was not directly attacked during the night, nor did it find any Communist forces in its immediate vicinity at dawn. However, when this 250-man unit attempted to move eastward along the north bank of the Perfume River, it was unable to breach the Communist cordon around the west side of the Citadel.
The 3rd Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, had been at the 1st ARVN Division training center, a camp on the north bank of the Perfume River, a short distance west of the Citadel. The battalion was an asset of dubious value, however. Though it was the only battalion in the 1st ARVN Division that was nominally at full strength with 700 officers and men, its size was due to the recent intake of a large number of new conscripts. The battalion was not very far along in its training syllabus when the battle erupted. General Truong undoubtedly wished he had a more experienced unit emplaced so close to the Citadel, but it is another immutable law of battle that, when you must go, you must go with what you have. The Communist force that lay in the unskilled ARVN battalion's path to the Citadel was apparently neither very strong nor very well consolidated, but the half-trained government troops were not up to breasting even that weak tide. Nothing much happened. The ARVN battalion was unable to advance, and the weak Communist force was unable to counterattack.
*
The Communists were doing extremely well around the periphery of the urban battlefield. Small, well-rehearsed VC commando units staged swift predawn assaults on suburbs and neighborhoods to the east and northeast of the Citadel, seizing without serious opposition many police stations and civil buildings. Farther out, hard-hitting VC main-force units seized one village and hamlet after another. Among the many outlying villages that fell that night was Thuy Thanh, from which Marine Sergeant Jack Lofland's CAP Alpha-2 was ejected during a bloody battle.
Several so-called fortified hamlets along Highway 1 north of Hue were attacked by elements of the reinforced 5th NVA Regiment. The GVN Regional Forces (RF) and Popular Forces (PF) units in these hamlets were easily destroyed or booted out. Chief among the lost hamlets west of Hue, on the west side of Highway 1, was Thon La Chu, in which a multistory American-built concrete bunker was converted for use as the command post of the Tri-Thien-Hue Front headquarters.
*
Even senior NVA field commanders candidly concede that the seeds of the eventual and costly Communist defeat in Hue were sown by the 4th NVA Regiment's inability to capture the MACV Compound and the 6th NVA Regiment's inability to reduce the strategically vital 1st ARVN Division CP. In fact, aside from Tay Loc Airfield and the 1st ARVN Ordnance Company depot inside the Citadel—positions relinquished at General Truong's order—the Communist infantry and sapper battalions did not turn ARVN or American military units out of even one position within the city limits.
Despite the Communists' singular military failure inside Hue, the appearance of victory that first day was theirs. At 0800, January 31, triumphant NVA soldiers raised a 54-
square-meter blue-and-red NLF flag from the pole on the Citadel's massive flag platform. This symbolic act signaled to the world that Vietnam's ancient imperial center had fallen. Indeed, the Communist commanders hoped that the huge banner would serve as a beacon, drawing in all of Hue's citizens who wanted to throw off the yoke of capitalist oppression.
The NLF flag became a beacon, all right. From January 31 until it was taken down on February 26, the best efforts of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, half the Vietnamese Marine Corps, and portions of ten U.S. Marine and U.S. Army infantry battalions would be aimed at tearing down that huge, defiant NVA banner and replacing it once again with the gold and red of the Republic of Vietnam. It would be done, but on the ruins of eight of every ten of Hue's buildings and at the expense of thousands of Vietnamese and hundreds of American lives.
***
Chapter 7
Although the 4th and 6th NVA regiments and their attached NVA and VC sapper battalions were having mixed luck seizing military objectives within the Citadel and south of the Perfume River, VC commando units had seized control of most of the GVN, provincial-, and municipal-government apparatus by sunup. Most GVN National Police, Thua Thien Provincial Police, and Hue Municipal Police barracks, stations, and outposts were swiftly overrun, as were government offices of every type.
As NVA and VC military units struggled to reduce military targets, VC "insurrection" units spread out to arrest the hundreds of Hue citizens whose names and addresses appeared on Communist hit lists. One of the most-wanted targets was Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Khoa, the Thua Thien Province chief. When the Communists finally blew up his stoutly defended residence at 0800, January 31, they learned that Khoa had flown the coop before they had even surrounded the building. A political sycophant who had risen to authority under the old Diem regime, Khoa had left his wife and children at home at the first report of gunfire and fled on foot six blocks to the sprawling city hospital complex. There the province chief hid out in an attic. In the morning, a Communist military unit set up a headquarters in the room below his hideout.
