Anzac's Dirty Dozen (26 page)

Without effective indirect fire support, the enemy forces at Long Tan (and other such battles) relied on other factors to achieve success. Since they held the initiative, they could determine, within certain limits, where and when the battle would take place. While we do not know the details of enemy planning for the battle of Long Tan, we do know that typically these major battles were very carefully designed, the ground carefully selected and prepared, with soldiers briefed and thoroughly rehearsed.
⁵
Again, however, once battle began, VC/PAVN forces relied above all on massed infantry and the acceptance of high casualties in pursuit of carefully considered political and tactical objectives.

Holding the initiative gave the enemy in Phuoc Tuy considerable advantages, but once battle was joined these advantages were soon lost in the face of the flexibility, heavy firepower and armoured mobility usually found in the combined arms team. It is no surprise then, that the ‘butcher's bill' at Long Tan dramatically favoured the Australians: 245 enemy dead were found on the battlefield and another three were taken prisoner, with an unknown but probably large number of dead and wounded carried away by their comrades. In contrast, 17 Australians were killed in action at Long Tan, one died of wounds and 24 were wounded.

The casualties incurred in other landmark battles were similarly one-sided. At the battle in Baria, over 1–2 February 1968, an Australian rifle company mounted in armoured personnel
carriers lost seven men killed, to the enemy's 42 killed. At the battle of Long Dien, on 22 August 1968, a 1ATF force including tanks and armoured personnel carriers killed 40 enemy for the price of 12 Australians wounded. At Binh Ba, on 6–7 June 1969, an Australian rifle company in armoured personnel carriers with four Centurion tanks in support killed 99 enemy for the loss of one Australian killed and 10 wounded. Such was the power of the combined arms team.

But the 1ATF ‘victories' in these battles were curious because they appear to have had little impact on the enemy's ability to continue combat operations for the duration of the 1ATF tour of duty (from May 1966 to September 1971). These more usual operations were of a much lower intensity, taking the form of the thousands of fleeting contacts in which the average enemy strength was just six. Heavy firepower such as the artillery or airdelivered weapons, which had such decisive effect in the landmark battles, had little effect in these smaller contacts. Artillery and mortar ‘blocking' or ‘channeling' fire was sometimes applied with the aim of causing enemy casualties as they withdrew from the contact, but it is unlikely that this had any significant effect.

There were about 3900 such contacts between 1ATF and VC/PAVN troops over the period of the Australian presence in Phuoc Tuy. If we consider the sixteen landmark battles as a group, they resulted in 4075 Australian troops in combat with a total of about 8180 enemy soldiers, and they resulted in 287 Australian compared with 1010 enemy casualties. When we consider the 3900 contacts as a group, however, they collectively involved 82 700 Australians in combat against 20 980 VC/PAVN soldiers, and resulted in 1147 Australian and 4480 enemy casualties.
⁶
In terms of both effort and losses to both sides, therefore, such contacts far surpassed the landmark battles. Collectively, the contacts had a greater destructive effect on the VC/PAVN forces operating in
Phuoc Tuy than did the much more famous battles. Clearly then, the battle of the contacts was the real war that Australians fought in the province, the landmark battles were aberrations.

There is no question that VC/PAVN commanders in Phuoc Tuy were highly experienced and competent. Many had been fighting for many years before the Australians arrived. They must have known that large-scale battles would lead to military defeat at a high cost in terms of casualties. Then why did the enemy initiate the ‘landmark' battles?

The answer is that these battles do not represent simply a string of outstanding Australian military successes. The enemy fought them not to defeat the Australians on the battlefield, but primarily for political purposes. Speaking years later about the Tet Offensive of 1968, General Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam's chief strategist and Minister for Defence, acknowledged the importance of political and diplomatic objectives in large-scale VC/PAVN battles. He said ‘for us, you know, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic.'
⁷
Those Australian Army officers responsible for formulating doctrine for the conduct of ‘Counter Revolutionary Warfare' – a term then regarded as interchangeable with counterinsurgency – would have agreed. Australian doctrine stated that ‘counter insurgency operations are simultaneously political and military in their nature. There is no purely military solution.'
⁸
Both sides then, understood that the combat had a political as well as military purpose. Yet in our subsequent thinking about the war, we have all but lost touch with the possible political and diplomatic objectives that the enemy may have had. Seeing these landmark battles only in their conventional military terms – as purely military contests – absolves us from wondering whether the enemy achieved their political and diplomatic aims. What is more, if they did achieve
them, then we may be forced to reconsider whether they ‘lost' these battles at all, at least in these wider terms.

In
To Long Tan
, Ian McNeill advances several military and political aims that the VC may have had as they prepared for the battle: to recover the two liberated villages of Long Phuoc and Long Tan; to inflict casualties on the Australians and encourage the Australian public to demand their recall from Vietnam; and to reconnect the revolutionary forces with the people.
⁹
These are no doubt broadly correct, although one could quibble about particular aspects. It is doubtful, for example, whether by August 1966 the Australians had in fact ‘broken' the connection between the revolutionary forces and the people in Phuoc Tuy. But perhaps there were other political aims. We may not know precisely what combination of military, political and diplomatic purposes each of these battles was intended to serve, nor the weight given to each factor, until the archives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, commonly known as North Vietnam), the National Liberation Front (NLF), and the Provisional Revolutionary Government are open to examination. We can, however, speculate.

To return to the example of the battle of Long Tan, it is a fact seldom acknowledged that the battle took place in the middle of an election campaign in the Republic of Vietnam (the South). And this was not just any election campaign. It was a campaign for the election of a National Constituent Assembly which was to draw up a new constitution and electoral laws for a democratic South Vietnam. The election was a major step by the South towards establishing its political legitimacy. As such, it cut across everything the NLF – a communist-led coalition of nationalist and communist individuals and groups opposed to government of the Republic of Vietnam – and the government of the DRV stood for. From mid-July 1966, the NLF and the DRV mounted a campaign throughout South Vietnam of steadily increasing
violence, intimidation and propaganda against candidates for the election, polling stations, voters and government officials. Electors were warned not to participate under pain of death. The battle of Long Tan unfolded three weeks before polling day, and underscored the power of the NLF and DRV to carry through with their threats.

As the battle in the rubber plantation at Long Tan ended, a new psychological and propaganda struggle for the way the battle was to be perceived began in the villages of Phuoc Tuy. Almost immediately, NLF supporters in the province claimed the battle had been a defeat for the Australians. Two weeks before polling day, Radio Hanoi and Radio Peking broadcast lurid accounts of the battle claiming an overwhelming victory for PAVN forces.
¹⁰
This psychological struggle was a part of the battle that the NLF and DRV seem to have unreservedly won, for there was no comparable Australian psychological operations effort. The battle for the Vietnamese people's political allegiance in this regard – the much-vaunted ‘hearts and minds' – was never contested. Although their doctrine for counter-revolutionary warfare explicitly stated that psychological warfare played a ‘vital role' in counter-insurgency, the Australians deployed to Vietnam without any such capability.
¹¹
A psychological warfare capability only gradually built up within 1ATF, based on scratch groups of enthusiastic amateurs with little or no training, equipment pulled together from wherever it could be found, and with poor support from within the Task Force. It was not until April 1970, four years into the war, that a properly staffed and resourced 1st Australian Psychological Operations Unit was created, and even then it seemed to be an afterthought.

The scale of the psychological warfare effort on the other side and its rapid deployment suggest that, for the enemy, the political aims of the battle were at least as important as the military objectives.
¹²
Yet if the battle of Long Tan was an enemy attempt to adversely influence the vote for the National Constituent Assembly on 11 September 1966, it failed. Throughout the Republic of Vietnam, over 80 per cent of registered voters turned out to vote despite 210 VC-conducted anti-election incidents. In Phuoc Tuy Province, the turnout was even higher: 89.4 per cent of the province's 36 700 voters cast their ballot in the election.
¹³

While the enemy's aims in some of the landmark battles remain unclear, in others these aims can be linked to political or diplomatic developments. The battles of ‘mini-Tet' in May 1968 were timed to maximise the DRV bargaining position at the beginning of the Paris Peace talks. The battle of Binh Ba on 6–7 June 1969 was linked closely to the meeting of US President Richard Nixon and President Nguyen Van Thieu of the Republic of Vietnam at Midway Island on 8 June 1969. Similarly, the battle of Nui Le on 20–22 September 1971 was connected with the Republic of Vietnam presidential election less than two weeks later. Although specific political or diplomatic outcomes may or may not have been achieved through these battles, the socialist revolution survived in the South, despite allied efforts, to ultimately achieve victory.

At a meeting in Hanoi on 25 April 1975, Colonel Harry Summers, chief negotiator for a US delegation, was in conversation with Colonel Tu, his opposite number from the DRV. ‘You know you never defeated us on the battlefield', said Summers. Tu replied ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant'.
¹⁴
Military defeat at the hands of the American or Australian forces did not matter. What was necessary, but never fully achieved by the United States and its allies, was the political defeat of the enemy.

Beyond the prevailing misconceptions of the true nature of combat operations for Australians in Vietnam, other myths persist. There is no doubt, for example, that the VC had a well-merited
reputation for excellence in jungle warfare throughout South Vietnam. The US Army and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were rarely able to find the enemy in their search-and-destroy operations unless the enemy decided to ambush or attack isolated allied units. VC/PAVN ambushes, in particular, regularly inflicted heavy casualties on allied forces before the enemy broke contact and slipped away to fight another day. But again, this was not the pattern in Phuoc Tuy Province. A projection of this experience onto Australian servicemen in Vietnam is not at all accurate.

Through its operations in the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation, especially in North Borneo, the Australian Army had developed considerable experience in counter-insurgency warfare. It had developed high levels of skill at small group patrolling and ambushing at platoon, half-platoon and section levels. In Vietnam, it quickly applied these skills. Soon after the establishment of the 1ATF base at Nui Dat, reconnaissance, fighting and ambush patrols were deployed, and an intensive program of operations involving patrolling and ambushing was maintained until the withdrawal of the Task Force in late 1971. Of the 3909 Australian contacts in Phuoc Tuy, about one third (1300) were planned ambushes and another third were patrol encounters. Such ambushes involved Australians lying in wait for a group of enemy to enter a pre-selected ‘killing ground'. At the optimum moment the ambush was sprung by bursts of machine-gun and rifle fire, and most often the detonation of claymore mines. Ambushes were highly effective ways of contacting the enemy because they conferred on the Australian patrol the benefits of having selected and prepared the ground. This enabled mines to be positioned, machine guns to be sited to achieve maximum effect, flanks to be protected, camouflage checked and orders issued. In prepared Australian ambushes, patrols saw the enemy
and opened fire first in 96 per cent of contacts. Opening fire first not only achieved surprise, it confered significant advantages in lethality. In Australian ambushes, for every friendly soldier who was killed or wounded, there were ten enemy casualties.

The VC/PAVN in Phouc Tuy were much less successful at ambushing than the Australians. Such enemy ambushes were conducted on only 103 occasions, ten times less often than Australian patrols mounted. Not only did such ambushes occur less often, when they were executed they were less effective. Despite having the advantages of having selected and prepared ground, for every one VC/PAVN casualty suffered in their own ambushes, there were only 2.7 Australian casualties.
¹⁵
The ‘ambush battle' in Phuoc Tuy Province was not a success for the VC/PAVN.

There were several reasons for this outcome. First, VC/PAVN troops lacked the cross-country navigation skills possessed by Australian patrols. Using map and compass, the Australians moved through the jungle without relying on the network of tracks that criss-crossed it. The VC/PAVN, however, tended to depend upon these marked routes. They knew the track system well and used it to move swiftly between their jungle bases, but sometimes they were over-confident and moved along these tracks while talking and with weapons slung. Although the track network provided a means of rapid movement to the enemy, it also presented ideal opportunities for ambush. Australian patrols seldom used the tracks and were therefore much more difficult to ambush. Second, Australian patrols were highly skilled at what was called ‘bush craft' – the techniques of silently moving through the jungle, stopping to listen and observe, and maintaining high levels of security through the use of sentries and scouts. Third, whereas VC/PAVN units had few opportunities to practise their marksmanship skills, the Australians had regular practice. Through good bush-craft, excellent tactical drills, sound
marksmanship, high levels of self-discipline and effective junior leadership – all of which were the results of thorough training – the troops of 1ATF out-matched the VC/PAVN in this important counter-insurgency skill.