CHARLIE BLACK REPORTS |
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Charlie Black was a simple straightforward
sort of a guy. Charlie was a home town newspaper reporter in Columbus
Georgia, who covered the military beat for the Columbus Enquirer. When
the army's new concept of airmobility started taking shape at Ft. Benning,
Charlie took notice; after all it was his beat, and it was home town
stuff. Charlie became a familiar face to the men of the 11th Air Assault
Division as they trained and refined the new doctrine of airmobility.
When the colors were unfurled for the new 1st Cavalry Division Airmobile
on July 1, 1965, Charlie was there reporting the story. When the Air
Cav went to war Charlie went too; after all, it was his beat. |
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Charlie Black |
Crazy Horse Stalls Planned Offensive
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer Military writer,
is in Viet Nam reporting on activities of the 1st Cavalry Division. This
report was published June 24, 1966.)
AN KHE – Operation Crazy Horse was ended by the First Air Cavalry Division on June 3 with field commanders’ reports
verifying the effect of the 20-day offensive on Communist forces which
had been committed on the western flank of the Red monsoon offensive.
The Communists left 307 (Crazy
Horse Edit: The final enemy KIA was in excess of 500) bodies on the field while friendly forces’ deaths
were light for the over-all campaign.
A First Air Cavalry spokesman here summarized the
immediate tactical effects of Crazy Horse as having accomplished these
things:The First Air Cavalry Division was already in the field on the eastern
wing of the battle for the central highlands. There its Second Brigade, the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division and the Third Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division were ranged to the west and north of Pleiku. The units were stationed to counter expected thrusts by the 32nd, 33rd, 98th and 34th North Vietnamese regiments. The forces were kept busy east of An Khe shifting into the west, where the campaign is called “Operation Paul Revere”.
- It put the 2nd Viet Cong regiment out of action with at least 40 per cent losses, loss of its rear services and headquarters area, and the disintegration of its guerrilla support units.
- It stopped a planned attack on the Binh Dinh Special Forces camp, a planned ambush of First Cavalry relief, and a diversionary raid on our base at An Khe before the enemy got started.
- It forced the survivors of the 2nd Viet Cong Regiment to flee to the area of another Viet Cong unit which puts a heavy strain on a creaky supply system and is a hard morale blow to the entire apparatus in the area northwest of the Crazy Horse zone.
- It destroyed all supplies and base facilities in an area never searched before and compromised the entire trail system used by the Communists in this area.
- It ruined the over-all Communist aim of engaging and tying down First Air Cavalry forces to keep them from being committed to fighting in the west where the enemy had planned a coordinated offensive in the Kon Tum-Dak To-Pleiku areas.
The operation was begun by patrols from the Binh Dinh Special Forces Camp which uncovered the original warning of Communist intent by killing a mortar survey officer from the Viet Cong regiment and capturing his documents. Special Forces advisers at the camp were down to half strength because of casualties the Green Beret specialists suffered leading their irregulars into combat during the 20 days of fighting in the mountains around their base.
Cavalry Losses Light
First Air Cavalry losses were light when the over-all
number of men involved were considered – but the personality of Operation
Crazy Horse was one of particularly violent, small unit actions and some
units had moderate or heavy casualties in the individual actions.
The Air Cavalrymen, in the final analysis, counted
half a dozen enemy bodies for every one of their fallen comrades and the
destruction of Communists trapped in narrow canyons and along jungle trails
and battered by bombs, rockets and artillery, is believed to have been extremely
heavy. Those casualties – incurred by 852 raids, 90,000 rounds of shells and rockets, and daily attacks by jet fighter-bombers – are
estimated at being many more than the enemy dead counted by infantrymen
on the ground.
The ROK soldiers, elite troops chooses for this first
commitment of Korean soldiers on foreign soil in recent world history,
proved sensationally effective in the few days they spent sweeping the
south of the battle area at the close of the operation. They accounted for 91 enemy dead in two-company action
which involved a complicated night maneuver by one of the companies, under
heavy fire, in thick jungle, on June 3-4. Their losses were light. One
battalion had been engaged in the fight.
A representative battalion from the 22nd Vietnamese
Army Division which had light contacts north of Phu Cat, swept and blocked
one arc of the trap. It
never figured heavily in the campaign and left several days before the
end of the operations.
(Most regular Vietnamese troops in the II Corps area are involved to providing
security for various headquarters and go into the field mainly for massive
road clearing projects for occasional truck convoys from the coast to out-lying
headquarters, or in relief of outposts or headquarters under attack from Communist
forces.)
The campaign was called an attack in which the First
Air Cavalry Division “applied
the total techniques of air mobility in the most difficult terrain we have
ever seen,” by its commanding general, Major General John Norton.
Norton Cites Problems
Maj. Gen. John Norton
Norton underscored the difficulties of the opening rounds
of the fighting. “There
was a combination of a very few good landing zones, firepower and air support
available to us, which convinced us that if we maintained contact for the first
few days we could punish the enemy by massive use of firepower. Our recourse
then would be to build more landing zones on ridges. With our ability
to always keep two companies back to back on all of our perimeters at night,
these considerations all argued in favor of taking the risk of being forced
to fight at close quarters. We expected a hard fight and expected to
destroy a large number of the enemy. It was a calculated risk, as is
all combat,” General Norton said.
The close quarter combat raged in exactly the manner the division commander
and Brig. General John Wright, assistant division commander and the field tactical
representative of division headquarters, had expected and prepared for. Col.
John J. (Big Thunderbolt) Hennessey sent his First Brigade paratroopers into
the thickly jungled mountains quickly and then fed in additional battalions
as the fighting went on.
In a series of encounters between small American units
and the Viet Cong, the enemy broke, split into small units and ran for hiding
and escape routes. The
air mobile cavalrymen immediately shifted from the offensive slashes into target
areas to a ring of ambushes around the battlefield. (In one sector of
this ring, for example, there were a total of 40 ambushes of squad to platoon
size with 2,000 Claymore mines waiting to be tripped. Viet Cong fell
into the traps in groups of as large as 15 and were cut down night after night
along the jungle trails they believed secret and safe.)
The punishing air raids, helicopter patrols and artillery
barrages and the sweeping ROK and CIDG units drove the Viet Cong into the
ambushes. The
closing days of the fighting saw the scattered, lost survivors coming in
to surrender.
Communist Plans
Norton said intelligence reports had verified that the
entire Communist offensive was planned – according to supplies stockpiled – to last until
June 27. Other sources say the strategy was designed to hold the cavalry
forces close to their own base until a coordinated attack by several North
Vietnamese regiments had achieved its goals of overrunning Dak To, a district
headquarters near the Laotian border northwest of Pleiku; isolating Pleiku
with a series of raids and attacks, and doing the same for Kontum, the headquarters
of Kontum province.
The blow by the 2nd Viet Cong Regiment was to mask the
actions of the 33rd. To build up the Viet Cong regiment, it had received
North Vietnamese soldiers, survivors of the defeats suffered by Communists
around Bong Son since February, and a battalion of Northern regulars. The regiment had assumed the name
of the “Song Be Regiment,” after the river which runs through the
Vinh Tinh Valley which they hoped to seize from allied control.
The campaign now underway in the west, “Operation Paul Revere” was
opened by the 25th Infantry Division’s Third Brigade on May 27 in a battle
which completed the destruction of the 18th North Vietnamese Regiment, based
in Cambodia, as an effective combat unit. The regiment had lost 406 men
to the Air Cavalry in April and left 256 bodies behind after a raid on a Special
Forces outpost, aimed at drawing pressure off the trapped Viet Cong east of
here. It was turned into a debacle by two hard-fighting companies of
the Third Brigade.
Intelligence gained from prisoners and agents alerted the Field Forces Viet
Nam headquarters at Nha Trang, commanded by Major General Harry W.O. Kinnard,
and brought a quick concentration of U.S. brigades into the areas where the
Communist force intended to attack.