Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Vietnam

I am the Marine veteran with sunglasses in the picture on Page 8 of the December 2017 issue (“Home Base Clinic Teams Up With Red Sox to Aid Vietnam Vets”). That ceremony in Fenway Park [honoring Vietnam veterans and their families on the field before a baseball game] was one of the proudest moments in my life. The Boston Strong folks gave us a standing 20-minute ovation as we left the baseball field. I finally felt gratitude for serving that I had never felt before. I served as a rifleman in Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division, at combat base An Hoa west of Da Dang in 1969. I know that you have heard many Vietnam veteran stories and probably a majority of them not so positive.…

When the shooting started at 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1968, during the Tet celebration of the Lunar New Year, U.S. Army radioman Frank Doezema was on guard duty in the northwest tower of the Hue compound that housed Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a Saigon-based organization that directed American combat forces in the country. Below was Duy Tan Street—the stretch of Highway 1 that passed through the city. To the north on a clear night you could see past the white walls of the two-story Hue University to the Huong River, the Truong Tien Bridge, and across the water the Citadel, a walled fortress that was once the seat of a Vietnamese empire. Doezema saw North Vietnamese Army soldiers moving in the streets below, hundreds of them. When they advanced…

Wartime use of aircraft began with French observation balloons in 1794 and the Italians using airplanes for the same purpose in 1911. World War I saw the combat roles of aircraft extend to bombing, air-sea rescue and fighter duels for control of the sky. Radar and helicopters debuted in World War II, and their roles were expanded during the Cold War and combat in Korea. By the time the United States became fully involved in Vietnam, combat aircraft had matured to become a reliable, ubiquitous and even essential element in warfare. In mid-1960s Indochina, seldom did U.S. troops fight without the crucial support of airplanes or helicopters flying overhead. The Communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighting in South Vietnam, usually without the benefit of air power, had to devote…

If there was anyone who knew how to win while outgunned and outmanned, it was the late Lt. Gen. Harold G. “Hal” Moore, who as a lieutenant colonel led his 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), to victory against the overwhelming firepower and vastly superior numbers of the North Vietnamese Army in the November 1965 Battle of Ia Drang. Moore and journalist Joseph Galloway recounted that desperately fought battle, which established what would become standard U.S. tactics in the Vietnam War, in the best-selling 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. Their book was the basis for Mel Gibson’s 2002 film, We Were Soldiers. Moore, who died at age 94 on Feb.10, 2017, was a “soldier’s soldier” in every respect and a much-admired senior spokesman for those…

The U.S. Air Force is looking back at the Vietnam War as it explores options for future low-cost, slower-moving aircraft that can be deployed for counterinsurgency, close-air support or reconnaissance missions against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in the Middle East and Africa. In their quest, Air Force officials are finding inspiration in the single-seat, propeller-driven A-1 Skyraider, an agile, slow-speed attack aircraft that could loiter over Vietnam battlefields and offer the type of close-air support that fast-moving jet fighters could not provide, Air Force Times reported. The new low-end aircraft would reduce the wear and tear on today’s fighters. It also could take off and land on shorter runways. In August 2017, pilots flew four light attack aircraft in demonstrations at Holloman Air Force Base in New…

In December 1951, after Lockheed Corp. aircraft designer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson returned from meetings with U.S. Air Force pilots fighting over Korea, he was committed to developing the world’s fastest and highest-flying fighter. Lockheed approved his team’s design on Oct. 31, 1952, as Model 83. The Air Force ordered two prototypes for testing on March 1, 1953. The first XF-104 prototype flew one year later. It was noteworthy for its short, wide wing with a super-thin leading edge only 0.016 inches thick. The prototypes underwent a series of modifications to solve landing gear and stability problems that arose during testing. However, production awaited installation of the design’s intended General Electric J-79 afterburning turbojet engines. The resulting YF-104 became the basis for the F-104A that entered service in 1958, achieving several…

TET OFFENSIVE Major Communist Ground Attacks Jan 30 - Feb 25, 1968 RESEARCH: ERIK VILL ARD In January 1968, during Vietnam’s Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrillas launched an offensive that ended in a disastrous military defeat for the Communists, but the extensiveness and strength of their attacks reverberated in the U.S. with dispiriting aftershocks that would ultimately give America’s enemy all the territory it had failed to win during Tet. This is how it happened: In the summer of 1967, frustrated with the stalemate on the battlefield and concerned about the aggressive American tactics during the previous year, Communist leaders in Hanoi decided to strike a decisive blow against the South Vietnamese and their U.S. allies. Their new campaign was designed to break the stalemate…

Introducing television to South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces was doomed from the start. For the pioneers assigned to build the American Forces Vietnam Network’s most remote broadcast facility, there was trouble even before they arrived: While still in Saigon, an AFVN engineer was badly injured in a grenade attack and evacuated out of the country. On May 15, 1967, AFVN officially opened its newest upcountry affiliate, designated Detachment 5, in Hue, South Vietnam’s third largest city. The Viet Cong answered defiantly with a mortar attack. Six weeks later, the TV tower collapsed when a fuel truck backed into a guy wire, knocking Channel 11 off the air for five weeks. The inauspicious beginning of the Hue TV station foreshadowed the detachment’s tragic demise in a Communist assault, which would seal a…

Air-to-air advances The U.S. bombing of North Vietnam compelled Hanoi to develop a defensive triad combining anti-aircraft artillery and groundfire; Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs; and a fighter force of MiG-17s, MiG-19s and MiG-21s. American fighters were more advanced, with sophisticated radar sensors and radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, yet many encounters became old-fashioned dogfights. Aces arose on both sides, including the U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom team of Steve Ritchie and Charles DeBellevue, above. Some fighters, such as the Vought F-8E Crusader, below, packed 20 mm cannons. Specialized two-seat F-105 “Wild Weasels” sought out and destroyed the radar sites used to guide enemy SAMs. Intelligence gathering American efforts to pinpoint a stealthy enemy’s location led to numerous technological advances. In the Igloo White program, “air delivered seismic detection sensors,”…

The New-York Historical Society unveiled a new exhibit, The Vietnam War 1945-1975, on Oct. 4, 2017. The exhibit features artifacts, video, audio and photographs of the conflict from its origins after World War II through the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975. Displays give an account of the war from both sides of the battlefield, while also showing the perspectives of anti-war protestors and supporters of the war. The exhibition is accompanied by an interactive website and runs through April 22, 2018.…

On a clear and moonless night, about 200 soldiers from the North Vietnamese Army’s 5th Battalion, 95th Regiment, crouched in the rice fields just west of Tuy Hoa, a small fishing town that served as the capital of Phu Yen province about 200 miles from Saigon. The battalion commander, Senior Capt. Le Xuan Cau, whispered final instructions to his three company commanders; nearby, a small group of local guerrillas who had led the NVA soldiers through the dark and unfamiliar countryside waited nervously for permission to leave before all hell broke loose. It was about 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 30, 1968, a time when most Vietnamese were enjoying the Lunar New Year holiday known as Tet. Le dismissed the guides and sent his company commanders back to their men. The…

The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War By Edwin E. Moïse, University of Kansas Press, 2017 Enemy confusion It’s a common misperception that the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrillas, shown here in 1967, conducted well-planned and coordinated attacks, says Edwin E. Moïse. Fought across the length and breadth of South Vietnam, the 1968 Tet Offensive ended in a military defeat for the Communists but, according to conventional wisdom, crippled President Lyndon B. Johnson politically and undermined public support for the war because of its scale and casualties. While broadly correct, the accepted narrative gets key aspects of the Tet Offensive wrong, as Edwin E. Moïse demonstrates forcefully in The Myths of Tet. In Vietnam, the U.S. military relied on statistical metrics—including the oft-derided…

A Soviet weapons system never matched by the United States was the self-propelled anti-aircraft gun, or SPAAG. Although the M42 Duster with its twin 40 mm cannons saw plenty of use, including in Vietnam, it was a “fair weather warrior,” lacking the radar that gave SPAAGs the ability to hit high-speed attack aircraft and made them a mainstay in armored and motorized units. Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns of the Soviet Union, No. 222 of Osprey’s New Vanguard series, traces the SPAAG’s evolution from the too-late-for-World War II ZSU-37 to the missile- and gun-armed 9K22 Tunguska, known in NATO as the Grison. The pages that the author, a veteran U.S. Army armor officer, devotes to Vietnam- nam focus primarily on the ZSU-57-2, a self-contained tracked vehicle whose radar-directed twin 57 mm cannons…