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Learn more about the different ways you can partner with the Bill of Rights Institute. The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society. In the months immediately following his overwhelming triumph in the presidential election, Lyndon B. Johnson and his chief foreign policy advisers recognized that their South Vietnamese allies teetered on the brink of political collapse, that military momentum had shifted to the Viet Cong guerrillas and their patrons in Hanoi, and that American inaction could well hasten a communist victory.
This map of North Vietnam and South Vietnam highlights the major cities in both countries. Note the location of Da Nang, where U. In mid-February, after a few retaliatory air strikes above the 17th parallel where Vietnam was divided into North and South , he approved a program of sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. The dispatch of U.
Commanding General William C. Westmoreland worried that without combat troops to provide security, American air bases in South Vietnam would remain highly vulnerable to enemy attacks. Consequently, he asked for two battalions of marines to help defend the key air base at Da Nang.
On February 26, the president approved that request, and on March 8, approximately 3, U. At the end of July, Johnson announced he was immediately dispatching an additional 50, U. For its part, North Vietnam tried to match the U. The fiercest and most consequential of those clashes occurred in the Ia Drang Valley located in the Central Highlands south of Danang.
Elements of the highly mobile U. On November 14, , the 7th Cavalry landed at X-Ray landing zone while Bs bombed the surrounding enemy positions and nearby artillery provided fire support. For the next three days, the two sides engaged in bloody combat at close quarters, punctuated by heavy U. When the smoke cleared, the United States had lost soldiers and nearly as many were wounded. According to the imperfect U. Defense Secretary McNamara drew a more sober lesson. In other words, every year reaching out far into the future there were more babies born in the north than NVA we were killing in the south, so each year a new crop of draftees arrived as replacements for the dead.
Seven hundred miles north in Hanoi, President Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants likewise carefully studied the results of the Ia Drang campaign. They were confident they would eventually win the war. Their peasant soldiers had withstood the high-tech firestorm thrown at them by a superpower and had at least fought the Americans to a draw, and to them a draw against so powerful an enemy was a victory.
In time the same patience and perseverance that had ground down the French colonial military would likewise grind down the Americans. Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap studied the battles and correctly identified the helicopter as the biggest innovation, biggest threat and biggest change in warfare that the Americans brought to the battlefield. We did. You had tactics, and it takes very decisive tactics to win a strategic victory….
If we could defeat your tactics—your helicopters—then we could defeat your strategy. Our goal was to win the war. Nguyen Hu An, revealed to us in Hanoi in that they had figured out one other way to neutralize the American artillery and air power. Then, said An, the fight would be man-to-man and much better odds.
For the Americans, Ia Drang proved the concept of airmobile infantry warfare. Some had feared that the helicopters were too flimsy and fragile to fly into the hottest of landing zones. They were not. The rest brought in ammunition, grenades, water and medical supplies, and took out the American wounded in scores of sorties. Without them, the battles of the Ia Drang could never have taken place. The Huey was on its way to becoming the most familiar icon of the war.
General Giap also learned one very important lesson. When 1st Cav commander General Kinnard asked for permission to pursue the withdrawing North Vietnamese troops across the border into their sanctuaries inside Cambodia, cables flew between Saigon and Washington.
With that, the United States ceded the strategic initiative for much of the rest of the war to General Giap. From that point forward, Giap would decide where and when the battles would be fought, and when they would end.
And they would always end with the withdrawal of his forces across a nearby border to sanctuaries where they could rest, reinforce and refit for the next battle. Another political decision flowing out of the Johnson White House—limiting the tour of duty in Vietnam to 12 months 13 months for Marines —would soon begin to bite hard.
The first units arriving in Vietnam in had trained together for many months before they were ordered to war. They knew each other and their capabilities. They had built cohesion as a unit, a team, and that is a powerful force multiplier. But their tour was up in the summer of , and all of them got up and went home, taking all they had learned in the hardest of schools with them. One of those soldiers wrote of marching south in with a battalion of some men.
When the war ended in , that man and five others were all that were left alive of the General Giap knew all along that his country and his army would prevail against the Americans just as they had outlasted and worn down their French enemy. The battles of Ia Drang in November , although costly to him in raw numbers of men, reinforced his confidence. In the late s, Giap wrote this uncannily accurate prediction of the course of the Viet Minh war against the French:.
The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war.
Joseph Galloway had four tours in Vietnam during his 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent. The only civilian decorated for valor by the U. In the top-secret memo he wrote on his way back to Washington, excerpted below, he coolly predicts the deadly road ahead and the unlikely prospects for victory.
The situation…Pacification is thoroughly stalled, with no guarantee that security anywhere is permanent and no indications that able and willing leadership will emerge in the absence of that permanent security….
The dramatic recent changes in the situation are on the military side. They are the increased infiltration from the North and the increased willingness of the Communist forces to stand and fight, even in large-scale engagements. The Communists appear to have decided to increase their forces in South Vietnam both by heavy recruitment in the South especially in the Delta and by infiltration of regular North Vietnamese forces from the North.
Nine regular North Vietnamese regiments 27 infantry battalions have been infiltrated in the past year, joining the estimated 83 VC battalions in the South.
The rate of infiltration has increased from three battalion equivalents a month in late to a high of 9 or 12 during one month this past fall. General Westmoreland estimates that through North Vietnam will have the capability to expand its armed forces in order to infiltrate three regiments nine battalion equivalents, or 4, men a month, and that the VC in South Vietnam can train seven new battalion equivalents a month—together adding 16 battalion equivalents a month to the enemy forces.
Communist casualties and desertions can be expected to go up if my recommendations for increased U. Nevertheless, the enemy can be expected to enlarge his present strength of battalion equivalents to more than battalion equivalents by the end of calendar , when hopefully his losses can be made to equal his input…. To meet this possible—and in my view likely—Communist build-up, the presently contemplated Phase I forces will not be enough.
Phase I forces, almost all in place by the end of this year, involve South Vietnamese, 9 Korean, 1 Australian and 34 U. Bearing in mind the nature of the war, the expected weighted combat force ratio of less than 2-to-1 will not be good enough. With only 90 men on the ground and the next ninety at least an hour away 34 miles to Plei Me and back , he was operating lightly in a region largely unexplored and that American Intelligence had suggested could be filled with a regiment of enemy forces.
At that point Moore knew he would be fighting a battle for survival rather than mounting a first strike. His premonitions were confirmed when roughly 90 minutes after landing, his forces met with enemy fire. Shortly thereafter, the and broke off toward LZ Albany. At one point, strung out over a narrow road, these battalions halted to question two prisoners who had been captured.
Unbeknownst to them, the enemy commander, Lt. Over the next six hours, a bitter fight claimed the lives of American men and wounded. Unfortunately, some of these casualties were friendly fire incidents, as the fighting devolved to a situation where artillery and napalm airstrikes were called in to alleviate the pressure from PAVN forces At the battles at LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, men were killed and more than were wounded in a period of four days.
In the day Ia Drang campaign, Americans were killed. Enemy deaths have been estimated at 3,
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