(Cont'd)

Captain Robert J O'Neill MID

Another important factor to be considered in dealing with the main force units was the Viet Cong mentality. The men in the main force units had been indoctrinated with the idea that the formation of their units was the beginning of the end for the South Vietnamese Government. They had been successful for the first year of their operations. Following that they had been baulked by American and Australian forces for several months. Thus their morale must have been suffering after this apparent reversal of fortunes. No doubt they were able to rationalize their impotence for a short period, but they stood to lose many of their men to the Chieu Hoi programme if they were kept frustrated by inactivity, constantly on the move to escape our harassing artillery fire and air strikes. As their time became more fully occupied by defensive manoeuvring they would lose their grip over the vast tracts of country through which they had roamed at will. Their intelligence network would tend to deteriorate as people saw Communist for­tunes sink, while the sources available to the Government would tend to improve with better control over the villages.

The question of casualties was also of the utmost importance. It was obvious that operations against main force Viet Cong would result in higher casualties than operations directed at the village cadres. In particular, it was always possible that the main force could concentrate stronger forces than our battalion for a short period on ground of their own choosing if we went pursuing them, and so inflict heavy casualties on us in a short encounter. On the other hand, operations directed at villages were unlikely to result in many casualties to our own troops for if the degree of surprise necessary to trap the Viet Cong cadres had been achieved, then these Viet Cong would not be in a position to put up a heavy fight.

When we analysed the results of our operations over the previous six months, these considerations were well borne out. In eight conventional operations in which we were fighting Viet Cong main and mobile force troops, we suffered six killed and thirty-one wounded while the Viet Cong lost thirty-three killed and two captured. In five cordon and search operations we suffered one death and none wounded for the loss to the Viet Cong of sixteen killed, forty-seven captured, and one hundred and twelve suspects taken.

Time was another vital factor. Each of our operations had to be scrutinized in terms of the result gained for every day of operational time spent by the battalion. Not only was there the sheer cost of our soldiers' time to be considered, but the war could not be per­mitted to drag on indefinitely, enabling the Viet Cong to propagandize that they were uncrushable and to sustain their own morale, thus making the war all the more difficult to win for the Allies. Analysis of our operational effectiveness in terms of Viet Cong removed from their system per day of operational time showed conclusive results. The numbers of Viet Cong removed from their forces could be computed conservatively by adding the numbers of Viet Cong killed, captured and those who surrendered under the Chieu Hoi policy in anyone operation, or as a direct result of any particular operation. The conventional operations showed the following ratios for Viet Cong removed per day of operational time:

The fruitfulness of cordon operations at this time in Phuoc Tuy was obviously far superior to that of the conventional operations, but only because of the Task Force's earlier successes against Viet Cong main force units, such as the achievements of the Sixth Battalion at the battle of Long Tan, in which 245 Viet Cong were killed in a few hours. However, such successes could not be hoped for unless unusual circumstances prevailed, such as a Viet Cong attack on the base area. In this case, a choice of operational types would become less than academic for a direct threat to the security of Nui Dat could not be tolerated no matter what other operations were offering good prospects.

These arguments have considered only the two extreme alternatives of conventional operations and the cordon and search. Of course there are many types of operation which combine aspects of both extremes. These operations may be generally classified as interdiction in which the aim is to get between the main force and the villages to cut off those supplies and information which cannot be severed at the source. In a more conventional war such as the Burma Campaign in the Second World War, land interdiction is a very difficult method to use decisively because of the difficulties of pene­trating into the rear areas of an enemy without suffering huge losses. In guerilla warfare the opposing forces can range over vast spaces because most of the countryside is defended by neither side, and so interdiction becomes an important and often a decisive tactic.

In this situation of irregular warfare, the least regular of the opponents is distinctly more vulnerable to interdiction for his means of supply are, ipso facto, much the more tenuous and usually the more meagre. For example if a Vietnamese Government soldier lost his rifle in combat, it was much easier for him to receive a replacement than it would have been for a Viet Cong soldier in the same predicament. Also the psychological and political importance of contact with the people over whom the war was being fought rendered the Viet Cong even more vulnerable to interdiction. The Government forces were in the centres of population and could achieve direct and influential contact with the people, provided that they treated the people decently. The Viet Cong were out in the jungles and mountains and had either to travel from their bases to the centres of population or else they had to send reliable members into the villages to insert themselves into village society as discreetly as possible. But even their resident cadre personnel had to transmit reports and receive instructions and material supplies and so they could be rendered ineffective by close interdiction. Thus interdiction offered considerable potential as a means of combating the Viet Cong both in the villages and out in the main force units.

Our experience with interdiction had been limited up to the end of 1966 to one operation, Crowsnest, at Ngai Giao, where local supplies were captured before they had been collected by a visiting main force unit. While interdiction operations did not run the risks of heavy casualties in the same way as the conventional operations, it was obvious that they could tie down large numbers of troops for long periods of time in waiting for the Viet Cong to visit one particular place or to use one special set of trails. Consequently we were unable to reach any precise conclusions about the method of interdiction in the same way that we had been able to draw deductions from consideration of the cordon and search method and the conventional method. While it was clear that cordon operations were superior to conventional ones as a general rule for single battalion operations, each individual proposition for an interdiction operation had to be examined on its own merits in order to fit it into a table of priorities with other possible operations.

Having made these general considerations as to the effectiveness of various operational methods it was necessary to examine the possibilities of applying these conclusions to the coming few months of operations in Phuoc Tuy. In December 1966 the two main force regiments, 274 and 275, were still lurking deep in the jungles to the north-west and north-east of the province. It was quite out of the question to mount any significant operation against them from within our own resources. Not only were the Viet Cong too far from Nui Dat for a single battalion to venture, but the wild nature of the country made it easy for the Viet Cong to evade any searchers in their base areas unless the searchers were sufficiently numerous to place a tight cordon around a base area several miles across before moving in to make contact with the Viet Cong. This type of opera­tion called for battalions by the dozen, and so as far as our own initiative was concerned there was little which we could undertake against the main force regiments without American or South Vietnamese support.

There were still many villages with significant Viet Cong cadres within them, particularly around the east central region, on the edge of the rice production area and around the Long Hai hills in the south-east of the province. Close co-operation with the Vietnamese intelligence service revealed very detailed information concerning the numbers and identities of the Viet Cong cadres in each village. All that was lacking to enable the provincial authorities to pluck these cadres out of the villages were sufficient forces to cordon the villages skilfully and secretly. Several of these villages were small enough to be cordoned by a single battalion. The information concerning the Viet Cong enabled us to assign an order of priorities for clearing each of these villages, and so it was possible to begin the detailed planning and compilation of intelligence for several operations aimed at the village cadres.

We had discovered, chiefly from the captured diary of Nguyen Nam Hung, the Deputy Commander of 274 Regiment, the exact amounts of rice which the Viet Cong had taken for their main force units out of central Phuoc Tuy in late 1966. These quantities were sufficient to warrant a serious attempt to prevent the 1967 rice harvest from passing into the hands of the Viet Cong. The most important area was that around Dat Do, the rice bowl of the province. However, Hoa Long had also been used on occasions by Viet Cong agents, tax collectors and food gatherers as a source of supplies, and the former hamlets of Quang Giao and Xuan Son to the east of Binh Gia were still being used by small groups of Viet Cong food growers. The road system in Xuyen Moc District, especially Route 328, was carrying continual Viet Cong traffic between the coastal regions and the base areas in the north of the province. If this traffic was per­mitted to flow unhindered we could have been confronted with a large scale main force offensive as a result of their increased strength and confidence.

These local considerations relating to the various types of operation indicated that special emphasis was required on the rice production area. Cordon operations for several of the villages which made up the rice bowl were necessary and the outflow of rice had to be stopped. These practical considerations fitted in well with the theory outlined above, and reinforced the conclusions that the war in Phuoc Tuy was going well for the Government and that prospects for 1967 looked bright.

The translation of these ideas into practical effect commenced early in 1967. Brigadier Jackson had completed his term of duty in Vietnam in January and was succeeded by Brigadier Graham. Naturally, Brigadier Jackson had not wished to commit his successor to a long programme of predetermined operations and so there was a great deal of long range planning to be done after Brigadier Graham had taken over the command of the Task Force. During January, as a result of discussions between Brigadier Graham, the senior staff of Task Force Headquarters and Colonel Warr, the operational programme of the Fifth Battalion for the remainder of its tour in Vietnam took shape. This shape was approximate to allow flexible responses to Viet Cong initiatives and to administrative limitations, but nonetheless the principles behind these operations were quite firmly fixed as we proceeded into a new phase of the war.

The End
 

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