Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  He took a long route to the colors. After an initial term at the New Mexico Military Institute, he attended Duke University in North Carolina for two years. He made it to West Point in 1935 and graduated in 1939, a second lieutenant of infantry at age twenty-four, two years older than most of his classmates.8 As the son of a long-serving officer, well aware of the rhythms of the army, he felt like he was already behind. That nagging idea motivated him his entire life, to Vietnam and beyond.

  He had an opportunity right away, and he took it. With World War II raging overseas, America reluctantly prepared for war. The draft commenced in 1940, and the army worked to modernize its moribund force structure. Having seen the brilliant exploits of Nazi German paratroopers and glidermen in the Netherlands and Belgium during the blitzkrieg of 1940, the U.S. Army established its own airborne element. Eager to contribute and ever hungry for a challenge, Lieutenant Ewell joined the new 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  Tough and willing to experiment, Ewell and his fellow paratroopers figured out how to organize, train, and carry out mass parachute jumps. Their parachutes weren’t the slow, steerable flying wings used today at public sport parachuting. The army used the T-4 parachute, a round hemispheric canopy twenty-eight feet in diameter. Mounted on a man’s back, the T-4 featured a strong cord snapped onto a metal wire inside the transport aircraft, typically a twin-engine C-47 Skytrain, the military version of the popular DC-3. Called a static line, the cord stayed hooked securely to the plane as the jumper went out the door. The cord pulled open the backpack, and the ’chute blossomed out with a strong jerk, which paratroopers called the opening shock. The parachutes dropped men quickly, about five hundred feet in twenty seconds or so. Landings were abrupt and hard. Ewell and the others learned to bend their legs, turn into the wind if possible, and above all, to keep their feet and knees together.9 A lot of ankles and knees paid for that hard-won practical knowledge. Old men, unless in great physical condition, need not apply.

  A few months after America declared war, when a delegation of new airborne generals and colonels came to Fort Benning for a demonstration and a practice jump, Ewell acted as jumpmaster, sending the senior guys out the door of the C-47. His stick (group of jumpers) included a patrician artillery colonel named Maxwell Davenport Taylor. Ever interested in talent that could be helpful to the army and himself, Taylor took note of the all-business Ewell.10 That tough young West Pointer had potential.

  On November 15, 1942, Colonel Howard R. “Skeets” Johnson activated the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and Ewell took command of the 3rd Battalion. Just three years out of West Point, he held a lieutenant colonel’s billet, commanding six hundred paratroopers. When the 501st jumped into the darkness over Normandy to initiate the great invasion on June 6, 1944, Ewell found himself with few followers, about forty in all. Most of his paratroopers had been scattered all over the flooded, marshy stretches west of Utah Beach. Well, U.S. Army paratroopers had long been taught to find who they could and start going after Germans. Ewell and his men did so. His bunch included his 101st Airborne Division commander, Maxwell Taylor. Once again, Taylor noticed this gangly young battalion commander who refused to quit.

  Once the Normandy operation wrapped up, the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment returned to England to stage for the next mission. It came on September 17, 1944. The Americans and the British 1st Airborne Division jumped to take a series of bridges leading to the Rhine River. The idea was to get a crossing and force the end of the war. While the daylight drop went well, the operation failed. German tanks counterattacked violently, and British armored forces struggled to link up. The British paratroopers sixty miles north at Arnhem were cut up and forced to pull out. Many didn’t make it.

  Neither did Skeets Johnson. On October 8, a German mortar shell killed the charismatic 501st commander. Major General Maxwell Taylor appointed twenty-nine-year-old Julian J. Ewell to take over.11 Johnson had been a larger than life, inspirational commander. He led the regiment on runs and in battle, and carried an M3 “Grease Gun” automatic weapon. He used it, too. Now he was gone.

  Ewell had big jump boots to fill. It wasn’t his style to be a “personality,” so he wasn’t. The regiment lost 662 paratroopers, more than a quarter of its strength, in seventy-two days of combat in the cold, dank woods on the border of the Netherlands. The survivors were withdrawn to camps near Rheims, France, to bring in replacements, retrain, reequip, and rest.

  The Germans ended that interlude on December 16, 1944, with their powerful Ardennes counteroffensive. Both American airborne divisions were thrown in to blunt the German panzer attacks. The 82nd Airborne Division went to Werbomont and relative obscurity, although the paratroopers fought with distinction. Ewell and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division ended up in Bastogne, surrounded, hard pressed, and soon enough famous.

  Ewell lived up to every expectation from his subordinates and his superiors. The 501st led the U.S. truck movement into Bastogne, getting there late on December 18, right ahead of the Germans. Recognizing the unforgiving minute, Ewell didn’t wait for formal orders. After a quick look at the terrain and a glance at the black horizon, already alight with nearby artillery explosions, Ewell led his men out into the frozen fields. His 501st took up positions facing due east, right in the path of Panzer Lehr, the German main effort.

  Snow, ice, and bone-chilling cold made it perilous. Day after day, night after night, led by tanks, the Germans surged forward again and again. Fighting was vicious and bloody. But the Americans did not back up. Tireless, courageous, and smart, Ewell roamed the thinly held front lines hour after hour, day and night. He arranged and rearranged the 501st defenses against the successive German attacks. It all cost 580 men, but Ewell’s regiment held. He was badly wounded in the foot on January 9, 1945. That merited the Purple Heart. Maxwell Taylor ensured that Ewell also received the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor.12 Well he should. Ewell earned it.

  After less than six years in uniform, Ewell had proven himself. Compared even to known high performers like Westmoreland, Ewell had shown the right stuff. Had he been advanced to general right then, or soon after, the army would have benefited greatly. But left to sit for two decades, restless and frustrated, watching those he considered less able move upward, Ewell stewed. His already acerbic outlook curdled even more. He watched others advance well ahead of him: William Westmoreland, Creighton Abram, Reuben Tucker, John “Mike” Michaelis, and his classmate Harry W. O. Kinnard. And through it all, Ewell marked time.

  Maxwell Taylor tried to help him. He put Ewell on his staff in Berlin after the war, helped him get command of the 9th Infantry Regiment in Korea during the last months of the war, and arranged for him to take charge of cadets at West Point. When Taylor came back on active duty under President John F. Kennedy, he sent for Ewell and kept him in his outer office. Finally, in 1963 Ewell pinned on his first star. Making brigadier general at twenty-four years in service matched the usual pace of U.S. Army promotion. But for Ewell, it was far behind the rest of the great colonels of World War II.

  From 1965 until 1968, Ewell served in Germany and in stateside posts. Nobody in Vietnam asked for the old 501st commander. Finally, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland gave Ewell a chance. He didn’t offer Ewell the 101st Airborne, the one the 501st veteran really wanted. Instead, Ewell received orders to the 9th Infantry Division—Westy’s World War II division—south of Saigon. Things down there did not look good. Well, as the acid-tongued Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King supposedly said after Pearl Harbor: “When they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches.”13 On February 25, 1968, they did.

  WHAT DID EWELL INHERIT?

  Stated briefly: a mess. The Mekong Delta and the area south of Saigon amounted to South Vietnam’s overcrowded, flooded basement. Because the area’s farmers grew rice, the staple crop for the entire country, both sides wanted to control the Delta. The Viet Cong movement origin
ated in Kien Hoa Province, and by February of 1968, the best estimates showed only 38 percent of the northern Mekong Delta under Saigon’s authority. The southern reaches were probably worse, but it was hard to tell. ARVN’s optimistic reporting rarely passed the smell test. One number wasn’t disputed. Only 84 percent of the required rice harvest made it into Saigon’s economy.14 The rest fed the Viet Cong or rotted in the water-logged paddies.

  The unhappy Delta formed the rickety foundation of the shaky, war-weakened South Vietnamese state. That old soldier Julius Caesar once wrote that all Gaul was divided into three parts.15 For ARVN, South Vietnam split into four: the north (I Corps), the Central Highlands (II Corps), the Saigon region (III Corps), and the Mekong Delta (IV Corps). There were provinces and districts and such, but they didn’t matter too much. The four corps tactical zones did.

  Each had its own character. The north, with a population of 3 million in five provinces, abutted Laos and North Vietnam. Most of the people lived in and around the coast, to include the key cities of Quang Tri, Hue, Da Nang, and Chu Lai. The ARVN I Corps (two divisions) tried to secure the populace. For MACV, III Marine Amphibious Force employed two U.S. reinforced marine divisions (1st and 3rd) and the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). The NVA dominated, and some of the war’s biggest conventional battles, Khe Sanh and Hue city, occurred up north. Westmoreland moved half his maneuver battalions into this area, which he saw as decisive in his quest to find and attrit NVA regiments.

  The Central Highlands, with 3 million more people in twelve provinces, bordered Laos and Cambodia. Again, most people lived on the coast, with a number inland around the cities of Pleiku and Ban Me Thuot. ARVN’s II Corps (two divisions) attempted to hold the villages. The U.S. I Field Force included the 4th Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the Republic of Korea forces (two divisions and a brigade of ROK marines). As up north, the Americans sought to engage NVA and VC Main Force units.

  The Saigon region, with 4.7 million people in eleven provinces and the capital zone, also fronted on Cambodia. The ARVN III Corps (three divisions) worked on pacifying the towns and hamlets. The U.S. II Field Force included the 1st Infantry Division and 25th Infantry Division, both between Cambodia and Saigon to the northeast and northwest respectively. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and 199th Light Infantry Brigade also served in this area, as did two-thirds of the 9th Infantry Division, the Australian/New Zealand Task Force, and the Thailand forces. The U.S. units nearest Cambodia sought NVA organizations; the rest tangled with the VC.

  Finally, the Mekong Delta population totaled 6.5 million in sixteen provinces. ARVN’s IV Corps (three divisions) tried to keep order in the Delta in the face of a strong, long-standing VC insurgency. One brigade of the 9th Infantry Division, part of a unique army-navy riverine task force, served in the Delta. The United States had largely ceded the fight in IV Corps to the ARVN. Said another way, the VC had pretty free rein down there.

  For emergencies, the South Vietnamese relied on their airborne, marine, and ranger units to shift around the country as required to meet emergencies. Westmoreland at MACV used the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile, which is to say heliborne) and the 101st Airborne Division (soon to convert to the airmobile configuration, too). For Tet, both of these divisions had brigades in multiple regions, with most of the 1st Cav up north and two-thirds of the 101st near Saigon.16 Although all American maneuver battalions were quite mobile by both air and ground, they tended to stay in or near their assigned areas. The northward shift of 3-5th Bastard Cav, including PFC Tom Hagel, was unusual in that regard.

  Thus the U.S. Army outfits in country came in two major flavors: regional (most of them) and national (1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne). Accordingly, Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division, a regional division, most closely matched the 1st, 4th, and 25th infantry divisions, each with a few armored/mechanized units. The stitched-together 23rd Infantry Division (“Americal,” a World War II nickname), which wise guys called Metrecal after the bland diet drink powder, had been assembled in country from orphan brigades and late-arriving units. All of the U.S. Army divisions fielded three brigades and nine or more maneuver battalions (walking “leg” infantry, mechanized infantry, armor, or cavalry). In both theory and practice, battalions moved between brigades as the mission required. As a highly mobile mechanized battalion, 2-47th switched brigades a lot.

  Even though battalions include regimental designations, like Chuck Hagel’s 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, the numbers amounted to a historical name. In World War II, three such battalions made a regiment, and almost always fought together as an integrated whole. Korea saw the same practice. But a pre-Vietnam conversion junked the World War II regiments. Battalions gave up any semblance of regimental affiliation. Battalions could be, and were, swapped between brigades like Lego pieces. Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division included 6-31st, 2-39th, 3-39th, 4-39th, 2-47th, 3-47th, 4-47th, 2-60th, 3-60th, and 5-60th.17

  The 9th’s line-up fielded two mechanized battalions (including 2-47th), five leg infantry, and three riverine infantry outfits. As far as paratrooper Ewell saw it, he had five useful maneuver battalions and five with issues. The division had already sent 3-5th Cavalry (with tanks, APCs, and Tom Hagel) away and gained the 6th Battalion, 31st Infantry in return, a good deal, as the new battalion had just formed at Fort Lewis, Washington, and so came as a cohesive, well-trained team, admittedly having practiced searching mock Vietnamese villages in snow drifts. But the two mechanized battalions, while handy for road clearing and immensely useful in and around Saigon during Tet, really did not seem to have much utility in the marshy Mekong Delta. Ewell wrote later that he assessed mechanized units to be “more of a hindrance than a help” and “more and more difficult to employ,” especially in the May to October wet season when monsoon rains soaked the already soggy ground. He sent one mechanized battalion to the 1st Infantry Division and received a leg infantry outfit in return. Only 2-47th kept their tracks, and by Ewell’s direction: “We finally had to keep them partially unhorsed in order to force them into learning to conduct effective offensive small-unit foot operations.”18 There’s a lot of vitriol behind that sentence. Ewell didn’t trust 2-47th, and that caused him to lean especially hard on the battalion. And Ewell sure knew how to lean hard.

  The riverine battalions also seemed less than effective. Ewell’s 2nd Brigade had, since June of 1967, affiliated with the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 117 to form the Mobile Riverine Force. At first, the armored gunboats, motorized landing craft, and barge artillery caught the VC by surprise. But the advantage didn’t last. Viet Cong leaders figured out where the boats could go and put themselves elsewhere. “However, after about six months,” Ewell’s division chief of staff wrote later, “the Viet Cong in the upper Delta had pretty much learned to cope with the Riverine Force and, in fact, were beginning to establish ambushes along the waterways.”19 Yet due to the navy’s commitment, the Mobile Riverine Force remained active past its use-by date. Ewell and plenty of others wondered why the marines didn’t pick up this amphibious role. But the Marine Corps units came ashore as the first U.S. ground combat battalions back in 1965, way up north on the coast. And the marines liked to keep their guys together, under their own generals. So the 9th and the navy were stuck with the riverine mission. Ewell didn’t like it. He had to figure out how to make it work.

  MAKING IT WORK—MECHANIZED, leg, or riverine—meant finding, fixing, fighting, and finishing the elusive Viet Cong. Ewell had no doubt about his core task: killing VC. In an operational document, Ewell’s staff summarized their commander’s thinking this way: “The simplest and most relevant statistical index of combat effectiveness was the average number of Viet Cong losses inflicted daily by the unit in question.”20 Stack ’em up. That was the gist of it.

  That wasn’t easy in the face of an experienced guerrilla foe. As Ewell put it: “You didn’t have any great tactical battles, like the Bulge [1944 German Ardennes counteroffensive], it was just a question of grinding these people dow
n.” He went on: “The only way you could get them out of there was to beat on them until they were so weak that they just didn’t dare come into the populated areas.”21 That was what the new commanding general wanted his division to do.

  Before he took command of the 9th Infantry Division, Ewell made a close study of the American tactics used in Vietnam. He had heard plenty about the pluses and minuses of “search and destroy” operations. In the purest form, the term meant looking for NVA/VC units and finishing them off, killing Cong in accord with Westmoreland’s attrition strategy. But by late 1967, search and destroy carried connotations of rogue U.S. units rampaging through the countryside burning villages and slaying civilians. Exaggerated or not, the phrase became toxic back in the United States. So MACV changed the name to “search and clear.” Whatever you called them, in Ewell’s view, “the tactics were pretty well chosen and did the job.”22 So he started there.

  The basic American method long predated Vietnam. Ewell knew it well from World War II. Send a bullet, not a man.23 Industrialized and technologically advanced, the United States relied on its mass of quality weaponry to make up for lack of numbers and to keep young Americans alive. Thus Charles Dean Hagel, Curtis LeMay, and thousands of others did their business in 1941–45, death from above, war from the air. Their dangerous bombing missions spared hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines from the carnage of an opposed landing on the Japanese home islands. Under the lash of American high explosives, the Japanese, as well as the Germans, and eventually the North Koreans and North Vietnamese, experienced horrors aplenty. But we saved our people. That was hard war indeed.

  Rather than throw people at the enemy, Americans used prodigious firepower, an endless, destructive torrent of bombs and shells. Close was good enough, and more was better. At Anzio, Italy, in 1944, it took about 200 artillery rounds to kill one German. By Korea in 1953, it took 300 artillery projectiles to account for one Chinese communist soldier. By Vietnam, the estimate ran to 340 howitzer shells to get a single Viet Cong guerrilla. In the 25th Infantry Division in early 1967, it took an average of 896 rounds to kill one opposing soldier. 24 The profligate outputs amazed even veterans of the worst battering matches in World War II. A quarter century after Vietnam, U.S. information technologies would enable widespread use of precise smart munitions, one shot, one kill. But those armaments were in their infancy in Vietnam. In 1968, we had plenty of dumb and lethal ammunition, and the enemy didn’t. Better to fire away than to lose our guys.