Anzac's Dirty Dozen (27 page)

Patrol contacts, which made up one third of all Australian contacts in Phouc Tuy, occurred when a moving Australian patrol bumped into a moving VC/PAVN patrol and a fire-fight ensued. Unlike ambushes, in patrol encounters neither side had selected the ground in advance, and to that extent they represent a form of contact in which the ground played little part and the contest was determined by the battle skills, resources and determination of the two sides. Of these contacts, the Australians saw the enemy and opened fire first in 78 per cent of cases.
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Once again, 1ATF patrols reaped the benefits of most often initiating the contact: for every Australian casualty in such contacts there were nine enemy casualties. In the remaining 22 per cent of cases the enemy fired first, but even then they regularly failed to maximise this advantage: for every enemy casualty in patrol encounters where the Australians were caught unawares, there were only 1.4 casualties from 1ATF. The cause of this imbalance was, once again, the superior bush-craft of the 1ATF patrols.

A third enduring myth concerning the Australian experience in Vietnam – or rather another inappropriate imposition of the wider American experience on to the Australians in Phuoc Tuy Province – was the idea that the VC ruled the night. The VC/ PAVN certainly dominated the province in the night hours before the arrival of 1ATF in May 1966, but over subsequent years this nocturnal superiority was wrestled away. Although the enemy used the hours of darkness to redeploy and resupply its forces unseen, the most significant night-time activity was the penetration of the villages of the province. Until late 1968 the VC/ PAVN had virtually unimpeded night-time access to all villages
and towns for food collection, intelligence gathering, taxation, recruitment, proselytising and socialising.

Australian doctrine for counter-revolutionary warfare recognised the importance of isolating the insurgents physically and psychologically from the population.
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It advocated that this process should begin early in the struggle. Deficiencies or vulnerabilities in the insurgent organisation were to be identified and exploited. One of these vulnerabilities was the insurgents' reliance upon access to the villages for food. By cutting off VC/PAVN access, the Australians knew that they could bring pressure on the large enemy forces without engaging them in direct battle. Most enemy penetrations into villages occurred at night when, under cover of darkness, enemy patrols could cross the open rice paddies and enter the villages without being seen and prevented by counter-insurgent forces. Soon after their arrival, Australian units therefore began to increase their ambush patrols close to the civilian settlements that gave support to the VC. In 1968, 1ATF initiated 123 successful ambushes within 2.5 kilometres of Phuoc Tuy villages. This figure fell to 113 in 1969 due to Australian ‘out of province' operations, but rose again to 132 in 1970, indicating the steadily increasing pressure that 1ATF applied.
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By itself, 1ATF never had enough troops to clamp a permanent military cordon around all the villages of Phuoc Tuy Province. Inevitably there would be gaps in any protective screen that the Australians attempted to establish. The building of the illfated barrier minefield was an attempt to overcome this deficiency. In any case, providing security around the villages did not become the top priority for 1ATF until General Creighton Abrams, Commander, United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, implemented a pacification strategy in April 1969. Abram's plan elevated the security of the Vietnamese people to top priority, reversing the policies set earlier by General
William Westmoreland (in which providing security was third priority after bringing the enemy's main force elements to battle and training South Vietnamese forces). From April 1969, the Australians increased their efforts to secure the villages of Phuoc Tuy against enemy penetration. Intensive ambushing around village perimeters was implemented and the training of ARVN and village militia forces was begun in earnest. While gaps might remain through which enemy patrols might enter villages, from mid-1969 the enemy was increasingly faced with having to fight their way into and out of the villages.

Considerable Australian effort was also put into training the local government forces of the province. With the exception of the Revolutionary Development Cadre, Province Reconnaissance Units, and some units of the Regional Force, in 1968 provincial militia forces were poorly trained, badly led and indifferently armed. These largely amateur soldiers were mostly based in the villages and hamlets of the province, and were expected to defend their villages against VC/PAVN penetrations. In 1968 and early 1969 most Phuoc Tuy villages lacked the barbed-wire fences, bunkers and compounds that might have enabled their militias to repel attempted enemy penetrations. They were incapable of putting much pressure on the battle-hardened enemy, even when they initiated contacts. They lacked the training to take advantage of a surprised enemy, and could quite often suffer more casualties than their adversaries in these exchanges. Not surprisingly, a ‘live and let live' attitude developed in which village militias did not fire on the VC/PAVN if the VC/PAVN did not fire on them.

Throughout 1969, however, the Australians built bunkers and fences and trained these militias, particularly in those villages giving the strongest support to the insurgents. As well as defensive measures, training also emphasised offensive patrolling and ambushing. Gradually, this improved the confidence, combat performance and
aggression of the militias. The net result was that the provincial militias stopped waiting in their bunkers for the enemy to initiate contacts and increasingly went out looking for the enemy around their villages, particularly at night. In 1969, slightly more than half of all contacts between the village militias and the VC/PAVN were initiated by the militias. By 1970 this had risen to 65 per cent, and in 1971 to 70 per cent. A gradual improvement in the combat performance of the militias was also evident in their loss ratios: in 1969, when the provincial militias initiated the contact, they achieved a casualty ratio of one villager for every 1.9 enemy casualties; by 1970 this had risen to one provincial soldier casualty for every 2.7 enemy casualties. By this stage the provincial militias were out-fighting the VC around their villages.
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While there were some notable tactical failures in these militia contacts, it is clear that they were making an increasingly aggressive and effective contribution to the security of the villages.

By these various means, the steady denial of the VC/PAVN night-time village penetrations produced a food crisis for the enemy that began in 1969 and extended until the end of 1971, when Australians troops withdrew from Vietnam. During this period, VC/PAVN night-time movement into villages was regularly interdicted by provincial militias and Australian patrols, while enemy movement between jungle bases was ambushed day or night. The loss of the freedom of entry to the villages forced the VC/PAVN into putting more and more effort into searching for food at the expense of conducting military operations. Enemy-initiated contacts throughout Phuoc Tuy steadily fell over the period from 1969 to the withdrawal of 1ATF in late 1971: in 1969 the enemy initiated 380 contacts in Phuoc Tuy; in 1970 these had declined to 223; and in 1971 had sunk to 135.
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The enemy was losing control of the night. This is not the picture presented in Hollywood accounts of the war, and it is not the
Vietnam of popular mythology – but it is the war fought by the Australian in Phuoc Tuy Province.

The last of the myths related to the Australian experience in Vietnam concerns the iconic small arms of that war: the AK47 and the M16. The enemy's AK47 has over time taken on the lustre of a ‘super weapon', one that is widely thought to have been far superior to its allied equivalent, the M16. A typical example is this glowing testimonial from a US Army officer, Colonel David Hackworth. Hackworth relates that, after jumping into a hole where a bulldozer had just unearthed an AK47 that had been buried for ‘a year or so', he shouted to his soldiers ‘Watch this guys, and I'll show you how a real infantry weapon works'. He then cocked the weapon and immediately fired 30 rounds. ‘That was the kind of weapon our soldiers needed', he later wrote, ‘not the confidence-sapping M-16'.
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There is no doubt that the AK47 was a robust and highly efficient weapon, capable of operating effectively even when exposed to the mud, dust and water of tropical Vietnam. But did it really so far surpass the M16 as Hackworth implies? It is true that when first introduced into service in the US Army, the M16 was prone to stoppages. High rates of breakdown in any weapon can be extremely confidence-sapping to those soldiers whose lives may depend on their reliability and performance. In this case, however, the explanation was relatively simple. Cleaning kits had not been issued, and training on the care and maintenance of the weapon had been neglected. These and other problems were quickly solved.

It was also true that the M16 was not as robust as the AK47. It was specifically designed to fit under a weight limit and as a consequence was not so tough or rugged. The Australian and American forces, however, had a much more efficient resupply system than did the VC/PAVN. Failed or broken M16s could be
replaced with relative ease. But for the VC/PAVN, replacement of a failed AK47 required that a new weapon be shipped down the Ho Chi Minh trail, a long and difficult route even under the best conditions, and one that was also under frequent air attack. The replacement weapon might take months to get into the hands of a soldier in Phuoc Tuy Province. For the VC/PAVN a weapon of robust design, one that above all could survive the rigours of extended combat use in the jungle, was very important.

However, a number of other design features of the AK47 rendered it less salubrious than many allied soldiers thought it to be. On firing a burst, the muzzle tended to climb, causing some of the bullets to pass harmlessly over the target. Later models (such as the AK74) were fitted with a muzzle compensator to counter this tendency. The M16, however, having a ‘straight line butt' – in which the axis of the barrel passed in a straight line through the firer's shoulder – and also having less recoil, was far less affected by this tendency. The result was that it was much easier to keep an M16 pointed at the target than it was with the AK47. Although it was heavier, the muzzle velocity of a bullet from an AK47 was also substantially lower than that of the M16, so that while the AK47 bullet could penetrate light foliage and scrub without deflection, the weapon's effective range was shorter than that of the M16. In the give and take of these technical differences, the weapons came out about even.

The most significant disadvantage of the AK47 over the M16, however, was its greater weight. The AK47, fitted with a 30-round magazine, weighed in at 5.22 kilograms; the M16 weighed about 3.30 kilograms when similarly loaded. (For comparison, the Self Loading Rifle or SLR also carried by Australian infantrymen tipped the scale at 4.54 kilograms.) The result was that a man armed with an M16 could carry nearly 2 kilograms more ammunition (or over 120 cartridges) than a man carrying the same
weight but equipped with an AK47. Multiply this by the number of men in an Australian platoon equipped with M16s – between 7 and 11 – and the result begins to add up to a substantial advantage in firepower. The typical combat of Vietnam, where contacts were very brief but intense and targets were rarely seen, commonly generated high volumes of fire. Giving away all that extra ammunition was a distinct disadvantage to the AK47, but one that few authors have ever noted.

Of course, not every Australian soldier carried an M16, but neither did every one of their enemies carry an AK47. Insofar as the weapons captured in combat by Australians in Phuoc Tuy represent an accurate sample of the weapons used by the enemy in contact, then AK47s were carried by a little more than 50 per cent of enemy soldiers.
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However, the proportion of AK47s to other weapons changed over the course of the war, with AK47s being captured in greater proportions in the final years of Australian operations. Thus, although the AK47 was a highly effective weapon, it did not have an overwhelming influence on the battlefield.

The other small arms in enemy use were the SKS carbine, and a range of World War II vintage weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and modern machine guns. With the exception of the rocket-propelled grenade launcher, especially the RPG7, all of these weapons were somewhat inferior to similar small arms used by the Australians.
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Some enemy soldiers were also equipped with captured M16s, which suggests that they did not regard that weapon as overly inferior.

A proof of the effectiveness of a small arm is how long it remains in combat service. The AK47 – or its variants – is still to be found on battlefields around the world today, signifying that its design was, and remains, excellent. But the M16 and its variants are also still found on contemporary soldiers. Since both were
originally fielded forty-odd years ago, the numerous armies that equip their soldiers with these weapons or their more modern variants have been unable to find better weapons. This is a sure sign that both weapons were well designed for their intended purpose.

In any case, many Australian infantrymen preferred the SLR. It was heavier than the M16, longer, only capable of semi-automatic fire – one shot each time the trigger was pulled – and fired a heavy bullet with high muzzle velocity which produced a substantial ‘kick'. On the face of it, it seemed a poor weapon by comparison to the AK47 or the M16. But it was robust and reliable. In the jungle engagements typical of combat in Vietnam, the SLR had very high penetrative power. Its bullet might pass through several small trees without deflection, before finding its target. It was popular with Australian soldiers because of its high ‘stopping power' – the ability to render an enemy incapable of further resistance with a single shot.
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