Operation Vendetta

To pacify and secure Line Alpha, the Australians brought back strategies that helped them beat the insurgency in Malaya. Resettlement was an important part of Australian counterinsurgency strategy—clearing villages one by one, processing the inhabitants and interning suspected insurgents.

Prior to the arrival of 1ATF, American, Australian and South Vietnamese forcibly resettled the thousand inhabitants of a village called Long Tan, just within Line Alpha’s eastern frontier.

Long Tan should have been abandoned, but patrols kept reporting a large Viet Cong presence around the village. The Americans were skeptical but 1ATF commander Brig. Oliver David Jackson knew the Viet Cong were out there.

Australian secret signals intelligence had tracked a radio transmitter to the area around Long Tan. Even though the Aussie patrols had yet to make contact with the large Viet Cong force gathering around Long Tan, in hindsight, it was inevitable that they would be drawn into combat.

Events escalated in the early hours of Aug. 17, 1966. The Viet Cong bombarded the Nui Dat base from within Line Alpha. The attack injured 24 of 1ATF’s men. Australian and New Zealand artillery returned fire and the bombardment soon stopped.

Jackson sent out B Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, which found the firing positions by the afternoon and began tracking the enemy fire team.

At noon the next day, Jackson sent out D Company to continue the search to the east. The Aussies and their Kiwi artillery liaisons trekked into the rubber plantation around Long Tan not knowing that around them was the Viet Cong 5th Division. The division was a mix of differently trained and organized forces.

1,600 full-time soldiers of the 275th Viet Cong Main Force Regiment provided the bulk of the force. They were better trained and organized than the local insurgents commonly associated with the name “Viet Cong.” In addition to the 275th Regiment, 500 North Vietnamese Army soldiers and 550 soldiers from the D445 Provincial Battalion.

The Viet Cong had hoped to lure 1ATF from their base, but they didn’t seem to have readied an ambush. The Australians stumbled upon the large force in waiting and both sides scrambled in action.

There was no better company to be facing the Viet Cong that day. Maj. Harry Smith had served in Malaya and then three years with 2 Commando. He wanted his men to be ready for anything and rode them hard.

“We didn’t walk anywhere,” Sgt. Bob Buick of 11 Platoon would later recount, “we fucking ran.” This special forces-level training was arduous on the men and caused friction with Smith’s commanding officer. But all that hard work was about to pay off.

11 Platoon made first contact at around 15:40, firing on a unaware Viet Cong screening patrol in green uniforms. The Viet Cong patrol retreated, leaving behind a trail of blood from one of their wounded. 11 Platoon gave chase and came under machine gun fire. Pinned down, the Aussies called in artillery support from the 18 Australian and New Zealand batteries at Nui Dat.

Once the firing began, it barely let off for three hours, dropping over 3,500 shells on the hills and plantation around Long Tan. Firing at eight rounds per minute through lightning strikes for hours without a break at their maximum range of five kilometers—Long Tan was to be a showcase of close artillery support.

Heavy fire had trapped 11 Platoon and mortars soon began bombarding the rest of the company. At 16:15, Smith estimated that they faced a platoon of Viet Cong. Ten minutes later, Smith reported a company of enemy. Then as 10 Platoon moved up to help extract 11 Platoon at 16:40, that estimate rose to a battalion-size force.

To make matters worse, torrential monsoon rain began to pour, halving visibility and hampering movement.

11 Platoon didn’t return to the rest of D Company until two hours into the battle. Its platoon commander was dead and Buick had to make the difficult decision to leave behind 14 other men he knew or believed to be dead.

As the Viet Cong tested D Company’s positions, the Australians were running out of bullets. Task force headquarters at Nui Dat dispatched Huey helicopters with cases of loose ammunition while mustering reinforcements including armored personnel carriers. The wounded were piling up, but help was on the way.

From 18:35 to 18:50, D Company had only around 60 fighting men available. The Viet Cong launched human wave assaults on their entrenched position. Friendly artillery formed a wall of destruction between the Aussies and the encroaching enemy, falling as close as 25 meters from the company’s position. Then at 19:00, there was silence.

The battle was over and 18 Australians had lost their lives—11 of them conscripts. The reinforcements from Nui Dat arrived and escorted D Company back to base. The company owed its survival to the intense artillery support rained in by their Kiwi forward observers, and outstanding leadership at the company and platoon levels.

D Company left behind a battlefield littered with body parts. In an era when body counts meant everything, the Australians counted 245 enemy dead, but the real number likely was much higher. The fighting had severely bloodied the Viet Cong and firmly established the Australian presence in Phuoc Tuy.

Large-scale combat was an anomaly in the small-scale patrolling that embodied the Aussie counterinsurgency strategy. While this wasn’t the last major battle of their campaign, it was the deadliest engagement of the Australian effort in Vietnam. The thought of the sacrifices made at Long Tan being forgotten is a worry for Martin Walsh.