Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Some of the fiercest May fighting focused on Kontum, a provincial capital set in a valley in the northern Central Highlands, bordered on three sides by a river. A relatively prosperous place boasting nine Catholic churches, it was defended by the 23rd Division, supported by some tanks, artillery and Popular Forces. The communists cut Route 14 south of the city before committing elements of three divisions to an assault from the north and north-west that began on 13 May. Brig. Ba wrote later: ‘It was a hell on earth – every day as bad as the last, shellfire for forty days.’ John Vann was everywhere – dropping in munitions, directing three hundred B-52 strikes in three weeks, urging on flagging commanders.

  When Ba’s bunker received a direct hit, medics had to triage and bandage the wounded, remove the dead, even as around them staff officers continued to run the battle. The night of 18 May was among the worst, when the Northerners overran half of Kontum city before being driven back. Air attacks repeatedly caught Northern tanks in the open. There was fierce fighting in three cemeteries bordering the city. By 0900 on the morning of 26 May, a communist officer admitted that the assault had run out of steam. Two of his remaining tanks struck ARVN mines, and the last two were destroyed by gunships. Hanoi’s history of the war acknowledges: ‘Our attacks began to slow and became progressively less effective … Meanwhile the enemy had brought up reinforcements, strengthened his defences and stepped up counter-attacks. On the night of 5–6 June Front headquarters ordered a withdrawal from Kontum, and closed down the Northern Central Highlands campaign.’

  Americans and South Vietnamese alike afterwards agreed that, without John Vann, Kontum would have fallen. He survived countless brushes with disaster, once using a rifle butt to fight off Vietnamese fugitives mobbing his Jet Ranger as it took off. Ba wrote sentimentally: ‘The victory belonged to no one more than this man whose sole objective was to enable the ARVN to defeat the communist aggressors. I often asked myself: “Why should an American devote his life to this struggle? Why should he have accepted the perils of Ap Bac, and now those of the Central Highlands?”’ Ba described Vann as a martyr who deserved the gratitude of every Vietnamese.

  The man himself became convinced of his own invincibility, but was proved wrong, as such wild figures usually are. On 9 June, flying with an inexperienced pilot in failing light, Vann was killed when his helicopter crashed. He was forty-seven, and left behind a debris of ill-maintained wives, lovers and offspring, American and Vietnamese. Neil Sheehan, author of Vann’s biography A Bright Shining Lie, one of the great Vietnam books, observed that while Vann saved Kontum, he did so in a fashion that negated his own purpose. He showed that without such Americans as himself, wielding air power, the South Vietnamese could not hold. Thus, all the subsequent fighting and dying merely postponed an outcome that was now ordained.

  Abrams said in the midst of the 1972 campaign: ‘The level of violence, and the level of brutality … is on a scale not before achieved.’ Even as the Quang Tri and Kontum battles were fought, further south three communist divisions advanced out of Cambodia, overrunning Loc Ninh before approaching An Loc, capital of Binh Long province. This was a garrison town of ten thousand people, situated between two rivers in the highland plateau region sixty miles north of Saigon. On the evening of 5 April enemy sappers captured its nearby airfield, from which defenders fled at the first glimpse of communist tanks. The invaders also cut the road further south, so that An Loc was thereafter dependent on air supply.

  Over the radio as the 3rd Ranger Group was airlifted into the town on 7 April, its commander Maj. Nguyen Van Biet – ‘Anh Hai’, or ‘Eldest Brother’ – warned that the airfield was under shellfire. As the helicopters touched the ground and men poured out, they found that the group’s headquarters staff had already suffered severe casualties. The Southern 5th Division’s commander Col. Le Van Hung told Maj. Biet, ‘You guys have arrived in the nick of time.’ His own men were wavering, one regiment already overrun.

  There followed a brief pause before the communist onslaught, during which a Ranger officer watched townspeople continue about their daily business as government loudspeaker trucks cruised the streets, urging them to stay calm, promising that reinforcements were coming, telling them to report immediately sightings of communist infiltrators. When the North Vietnamese opened their bombardment there was no pretence of respecting civilian life – 122mm rockets and 155mm shells from guns captured at Loc Ninh rained down on every quarter of the city. A Southern officer wrote: ‘Agonizing screams, bodies and body parts blown everywhere and even hanging from branches and rooftops, spelt tragedy. Many civilians took refuge in army bunkers.’ Up to two thousand artillery and mortar rounds a day fell on An Loc.

  One evening the Rangers were thrown into consternation when, without explanation, their American advisers dashed for a helicopter which disappeared into the eastern sky. What did this signify? Was the garrison being abandoned? The mystery was resolved only at dawn next day when a new adviser team arrived. Its commander apologised for the switch, which he said was made without warning to preserve security. He promised that An Loc would receive the full weight of American air support; morale revived when this pledge was fulfilled.

  At 0230 on 13 April the communists launched their first major ground attack. The spearhead tanks at first caused consternation: ‘Our soldiers were terrified,’ wrote a defender. But then a Regional Forces unit destroyed one with a LAW rocket. The garrison began to see that the tracked monsters were highly vulnerable in city streets, and knocked out tank after tank, with American aircraft joining in. Northern armoured crews showed themselves pitifully inept: in early-morning darkness one T-54 plunged into a bomb crater. Its companions made a disastrous tactical error, speeding on alone into the city, where they were destroyed piecemeal by LAW rockets and air strikes. By 0830, with seven NVA tanks gone, the survivors turned back.

  Adviser Captain Hal Moffett said later: ‘[The communists] didn’t use their tanks properly, and thank God for that. If they had used a good coordinated attack they would have rolled right on through, but they were completely disorganised and till this day I don’t understand what they were trying to do with the tanks, sending in four or five at a time.’ Southern troops now received cash bounties for every tank they destroyed: impoverished soldiers proved more willing to risk all for money than for their country. Some infantry with LAWs, said Moffett, ‘would let the tanks get within ten, thirty yards of them and then fire’. At the key bridge from the east, ‘These little guys sat there and waited until that tank got right in the middle of that bridge and blew its shit away.’ The rest of the communist armoured column turned away and tried to ford the stream lower down, only to fall victim to the USAF.

  The infantry fighting continued fierce and bloody; the defenders lost ground, and one Ranger battalion was almost wiped out. Wireless traffic was frequently interrupted by communist voices urging, ‘Surrender and live! Or resist and die!’ The North Vietnamese gained control of some north-eastern districts, and were repelled only when, in the midst of a rainstorm, an overhead US Spooky gunship delivered automatic fire with extraordinary precision. An exultant Southern officer called over the radio: ‘Right on the money! Keep going!’ As enemy bunkers collapsed, the same man reported: ‘A few terrified enemy soldiers ran out, gasping for breath and looking half-drowned by the rain.’

  At 0430 on the 15th the besiegers launched another barrage, which started fires in several residential areas. Half an hour later, a second major assault began in darkness. One Northern tank threw a track and another’s engine seized for lack of oil, so that just seven accompanied the infantry forward. By dawn the communists held outlying areas, only to repeat the mistake they had made two days earlier – sending forward unsupported tanks. Southerners with LAWs knocked out more T-54s; the attack stalled, the communists fell back. Another two Airborne battalions and a Ranger group arrived to reinforce the town. Though in the week that followed some outlying positions were lost, the communists failed to penetrate the
centre of An Loc.

  If the attacks were poorly managed – and prompted the sacking of a Northern divisional commander – the defence was no masterpiece of the military art. Col. William Miller, senior adviser, reported wearily that Hung, 5th Division’s commander, was ‘tired-unstable-irrational-irritable-inadvisable – and unapproachable’. Between 22 April and 10 May, besiegers and besieged sparred uneasily. By night the sky glowed from the illuminants dropped by C-47 flareships. Air strikes hammered the communist lines. The garrison, now 6,200 strong with twenty-five American advisers, launched counter-attacks which pushed back the North Vietnamese, and communist historians admit that their morale slumped. On 10 May in Saigon, President Thieu declared a national state of emergency. He noted proudly that in the face of the crisis, more than fifty-three thousand South Vietnamese had volunteered for military service: the prospect of apparently imminent communist victory concentrated some minds. It also deserves historic notice that while tens of thousands of Saigon soldiers deserted from Thieu’s army, scarcely any did so in order to join the communist ranks; instead, they merely sought to go home.

  Yet at An Loc the communist leaders remained implacable: having committed themselves, they refused to brook failure. On 11 May, reinforced with thirty-five new tanks, they launched another attack by five regiments, advancing on four axes. In the headquarters bunker the South Vietnamese could hear NVA tank engines, as smoke and dust drifted through the fighting holes. An American adviser warned his Vietnamese interpreter: ‘I should tell you – we may not be able to hold, so if you want to save your neck, stick with me, and be ready to go.’ In An Loc as elsewhere the decisive force, attested by Hal Moffett, was air power that broke up attack after attack: ‘a “daisy-cutter” [big bomb] stopped a battalion. Their leaders were hollering to the [communist] unit to get up and attack. Charge. Screaming at them. We could hear them. But the people wouldn’t attack. We annihilated the north-eastern penetration up there. I saw them running. We could have won the battle that day, we had the [NVA] running. But everything stopped for three hours.’

  Northern casualties had become enormous, and the communists had almost shot their bolt. Moffett provided a vivid after-action account. Some Southerners, he said, fought like tigers: ‘The Airborne troops were just fantastic … real go-getters.’ Others were not: one Ranger group ‘was completely pushed off the perimeter by approximately six [enemy soldiers]. They would not return fire and withdrew by throwing grenades. They said firing their weapons would give their positions away … I had [their] colonel come up to me crying … I mean just like a baby, tears running down his eyes, wanting to know why they couldn’t get air support.’

  Moffett was exasperated by some defenders’ passivity – allowing the attackers to set up mortars within plain view. But they faced one of the heaviest communist barrages of the war, in which An Loc’s hospital complex was devastated: ‘I would estimate that they killed three to five hundred people – women, children, kids, soldiers, the whole works. They just bombarded hell out of it.’ Meanwhile Cobras were obliged to fire from five thousand feet to escape the fearsome novelty of ground-to-air missiles. Strike aircraft had to attack from behind the ARVN positions rather than across them, to reduce their own exposure to enemy fire.

  Even as strife raged in the streets, a Southern division pushed north up Route 13 in an attempt to break the siege. It never achieved this, but at least the thrust monopolised the attentions of the communist formation blocking its path. The Americans committed a phenomenal air effort to supplying the beleaguered garrison: 2,693 tons of ammunition and rations were parachuted. On 11 May, B-52s dumped pulverising loads almost hourly around the clock, together with an average of almost three hundred tactical air strikes a day. Senior adviser Maj. Gen. James Hollingsworth told MACV: ‘If it had not been for the advisers you would have the [communists] … in Saigon, I do believe.’ This was so, not because of the ‘advice’ Americans provided, but thanks to their role as forward air controllers. In this last hurrah of the US Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam, after so many setbacks and failures, many officers and NCOs in the adviser teams displayed high courage, commitment and professional skill, which were decisive in stemming the communist offensive. Moffett and his group spent fifty-three days in An Loc: ‘When we came out we had to pull Vietnamese off the helicopter, we wouldn’t take any wounded because you take one out you have to take them all … I pulled four Vietnamese off the bird myself, just throwing them off so I could get on.’ Interpreter Tran Van De acknowledged: ‘A lot of people tried to desert, or pleaded wounds to get out.’

  Moffett’s army interviewer, in a conversation immediately after his extraction, asked if An Loc could survive another attack as heavy as that of 10 May. ‘No, sir … There are too many holes in the line, and they are too weak. If the [communists] came in like they did the last time … In my opinion [next time] they are going to have their shit together … I don’t think [the Southerners] would stay.’ The adviser was fiercely critical of some Vietnamese officers, who flinched from leaving their bunkers. He saw commanders send men under fire to fetch them cigarettes, or a wet rag to wipe the sweat off their bodies, ‘and the private didn’t look like he’d had a bath since he’d been there … Nobody seemed to give a shit about the private fighting the war.’ Here was a familiar institutional weakness of the South Vietnamese army.

  Though the communists sustained An Loc’s encirclement until 8 June, by mid-May the threat was receding. The NVA General Staff’s history comments ‘We had not fought well.’ The South Vietnamese suffered 12,500 casualties to hold the city. The attackers’ losses were probably nearer twenty-five thousand, together with thirty-six precious tanks.

  While Thieu’s army struggled in the South, President Nixon unleashed upon the North the heaviest air bombardment of the war, to punish Hanoi for its hubris. Between 1 May and 30 June the USAF and US Navy mounted eighteen thousand sorties, losing twenty-nine aircraft. On 8 May in a national TV broadcast, Nixon told the American people that he was taking ‘decisive action to end the war’: an assault on the North’s logistics and communications, code-named Linebacker, involving 330 sorties a day and including the first mining of the approaches to Haiphong harbour. Moreover, at the height of the 1972 fighting, five US Navy carrier groups, three bombardment cruisers and thirty-eight destroyers provided naval support to the South Vietnamese. This dramatic riposte to the grand insult of the communist offensive won Nixon astonishing popular enthusiasm: Americans applauded hitting the enemy from the air, as they had never much favoured engaging him in his own swamps and jungles.

  During April and May, huge air reinforcements were dispatched to the theatre, so that 210 B-52s were eventually operating out of Guam and Thailand, together with 374 F-4s. The emphasis was on communications targets, including the Yen Vien railyards and Hanoi’s Paul Doumer bridge, which was taken down by twenty-nine laser- and electro-optically-guided bombs. Between April and October, 155,548 tons of ordnance fell on the North. Overland imports were reduced from 160,000 tons a month to thirty thousand; those by sea from 250,000 tons to nil. The Chinese suspended shipments and closed their railways. Linebacker wrecked almost all North Vietnam’s oil storage and 70 per cent of its generating capacity. From the American viewpoint, the operation was far from cost-free: many aircrew were now relatively inexperienced, and this showed in June, when communist MiGs shot down seven American fighters for the loss of only two of their own. Overall, Linebacker cost forty-four planes. Meanwhile, though tactical air power made a devastating and almost certainly decisive impact on the Southern battles, so lean and mean was the North’s infrastructure that the bombing’s effects on its war effort were marginal.

  Nixon declined to recognise the latter point, however. His patience with Creighton Abrams finally expired when the soldier opposed Linebacker, urging instead a concentration of air resources in the South. Kissinger said, with his accustomed instinct for the jugular: ‘He’s had it. Look, he’s fat, he’s drinking too much, and he�
�s not able to do the job.’ In June Abrams came home, to be replaced in the last months of MACV’s existence by Fred Weyand. Abrams was not sacked, but was instead removed upstairs, to succeed Westmoreland as army chief of staff. He was a competent, decent officer, well-suited to conventional warfare in Europe. His progressive deterioration through his years of tenure in Saigon, especially in the last months, could be attributed to facing political and military pressures that might have overwhelmed any commander. A colleague who said that Abrams was required to ‘run a war on foundations of jello’ did not much exaggerate.

  On 22 May, Nixon became the first American president to visit Moscow, beginning a week of summit talks with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Each side was irked by the difficulty of discussing the vital nuclear issues that most concerned them, while the spectre of the war hovered above the table. Brezhnev’s interpreter wrote later: ‘If Vietnam was mentioned from time to time, it was with the sole purpose of “ticking the box” in order afterwards to be able to report to the Vietnamese and to our allies on the strong and unwavering posture of the USSR’s leadership.’ Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin warned that any further American escalation would oblige Hanoi to seek the assistance of Chinese forces. ‘Nixon listened with his teeth clenched. He then calmly but firmly rejected what he regarded as unfounded allegations, stressed his intention to end the bloodshed. He attributed lack of progress to Vietnamese intransigence, and appealed to us to influence our friends and allies.’ Though the Russians used strong words in response, their tone was notably mild.

  They feared Nixon, and were deeply anxious to prevent Vietnam from thwarting an accommodation with him. Several times during the summit, the Russians responded to American urgings that they should persuade the Vietnamese to negotiate in earnest by accusing the US of failing to curb Israeli excesses towards the Palestinians. This ball flew to and fro across the net. The Americans said: Israel is an independent state with which we have close relations, but which we cannot force to change its policies. The Russians riposted: the same is true of us and North Vietnam. The Moscow summit culminated in the ABM and SALT I treaties, which, in the views of both parties, were of vastly more import than Indochina.