Here's another helicopter story from my social history of helicopters, The God Machine. This year is the 45th anniversary of the fight for Fire Support Base Ripcord, the last major battle in Vietnam fought by American infantry.
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By April 1970 "Vietnamization" of the war
was well underway. One spot of ground caught between the
U.S. Army's old offensive style and its new deference to South Vietnamese allies was an American artillery base operating on a steep-sided hill in the northwest quadrant of South Vietnam, noted on tactical maps as FSB Ripcord.
It was
a remote and roadless area, twelve miles from Laos, and too small for
an aircraft landing strip. Helicopters were the only way in, and
would be the only way out.
Until the last weeks of June 1970, Ripcord appeared to be a viable strong point for executing Operation Texas Star, a series of patrols and forward
artillery bases to block the movement of North Vietnamese supplies
from hidden storehouses in the A Shau Valley.
Something like a vast
warehouse you might find at the end of a rail line, storehouses hidden throughout
the A Shau received supplies via a major branch of the road called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
American forces had given up on trying to take and hold the A
Shau itself. An assault on the A Shau in April 1968 called Operation Delaware resulted in ten helicopters shot down in a single day, and
twenty-three damaged.
But perhaps the movement of North
Vietnamese supplies from the A Shau storehouses, which flowed east to
enemy forces on the coast, could be choked off without a frontal
assault; at any rate, this was the aim of Operation Texas Star. Once
Texas Star was well underway, the Third Brigade, 101st Airborne
Division hoped to hand the fighting over to ARVN troops in the spirit
of Vietnamization.
It would never happen. Ripcord had 200
troops of one battalion on hand on July 1, 1970, when nine battalions
of North Vietnamese began carrying out orders to wipe it out, along
with every perimeter camp held by American patrols.
The NVA plan was to reduce the base’s
defenses with barrages of heavy mortar fire and nighttime sapper
attacks. Anti-aircraft guns dug into nearby hillsides would shoot
down helicopters offering assistance. These hillsides were so steep
that the Air Force would not be able to use B-52 bombing raids to
dislodge the attackers. Then the NVA would overrun the hilltop. This
would remove the threat to the supply lines running out of the A Shau
Valley and probably hasten the Americans’ exit from Vietnam.
The NVA's grand plan, encircle and choke,
was on a smaller scale but otherwise much the same as had annihilated French forces at Dien Bien Phu
in early 1954. Ripcord was even more isolated than Dien Bien Phu,
which didn't bode well for the Americans.
Dien Bien Phu was an obscure village
175 miles west of Hanoi, near the Laotian border, when the French Expeditionary Corps decided in late 1953 to dispatch paratroopers to open up a stronghold
there. Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap identified the destruction of the base as
his best opportunity to break the enemy’s will. Using diversionary
attacks all around the country to disperse the under-strength French
forces, Giap’s Viet Minh forces cut the supply lines to Dien Bien
Phu and waited for monsoons to shut down French air support. Then
Giap attacked in force in March 1954, broached the defenses by
digging trenches and tunnels, and launched a final human-wave attack
that prompted a mass surrender. It's still studied in war colleges.
The fort at Dien Bien Phu had take months to reduce, and similarly NVA troops had prepared for a long
battle at Ripcord by digging log-reinforced bunkers into the steep
hillsides. Deep tunnels connected many bunkers, so North Vietnamese
troops could move to the best firing points without getting hit. They
hoped their DShK heavy machine guns and the frequent low cloud cover
would keep gunships away.
The shooting began on July 1. After two
weeks, American forces at Ripcord were holding on but wearing down.
Disaster looked certain after a spectacular mishap on July 18, when
Vietnamese machine-gun fire from across the valley brought down a
Chinook helicopter that was hovering over an ammunition dump. The
helicopter crashed on top of its sling load of ammunition, caught
fire, and triggered the entire cache in a spectacular series of
thunderous blasts, fuel-air fireballs, and smoke trails.
The mayhem lasted for eight hours.
While still under attack from NVA gunners outside, the troops had to
dodge fire from inside as well: from their own cluster bombs,
white-phosphorus rounds, grenades, artillery shells, and clouds of
tear gas. The chaos also destroyed a battery of 105mm howitzers.
On July 22 the word came: a daisy chain
was going to try to evacuate the troops, plus any equipment they could salvage. Gen. Sidney
Berry, acting commander of the 101st Airborne in nearby Camp Eagle,
had some misgivings when he wrote his wife that morning: “The
mountains seem loaded with 12.7mm AA machine guns. Yesterday, we had
two more helicopters shot down.”
Following an overnight bombardment of
the base perimeter intended to discourage the enemy gunners, fourteen
CH-47 Chinook helicopters launched before dawn.
At the base they
began hoisting everything of military value, including unwrecked
howitzers, radar sets, and two bulldozers. Evacuation of troops began
at 8:30 am. Mortar fire increased as the North Vietnamese realized
that the foe was trying to slip away. Orders directed NVA squads to
overrun the base without delay.
Using a nearby waterfall as a reference
point, UH-1 Huey helicopters traveled a specific path, landed, and paused
amid the exploding mortar rounds for excruciating seconds to let the
troops board. The fire from the hilltops was so intense at first that
troops were reluctant to leave the safety of bunkers and trenches to
get on the Hueys. But they decided that things weren’t going to get
any better.
Once loaded the helicopters turned and
dived off the hilltop. The evacuation was over shortly after noon, at
a high cost to the helicopter fleet (out of twenty Hueys used in the
operation by the Ghostrider Company of the 158th Aviation Battalion,
eleven were destroyed or damaged.) but with surprisingly few human
casualties.
After the war Gen. Benjamin Harrison
tracked down and interviewed several North Vietnamese commanders who
had tried to overrun his forces at Firebase Ripcord, while
researching a book on the battle. The retired enemies mentioned that
the NVA feared American gunships in particular for the way they
poured fire directly into bunkers dug into the sides of narrow
valleys, where no other aircraft could touch them – not even the
fearsome bombing runs by waves of B-52 bombers.
