Saturday, April 29, 1972
The All-Or-Nothing Red Drive And How The News People See It
Four years ago a monster North Vietnamese offensive rolled out of the demilitarized zone and into the northern provinces of South Vietnam.Three U.S. Army divisions had been moved to the far north to strengthen the defense of I Corps Zone which from the beginning had been almost exclusively U.S. Marine Corps country.They were shifted north just in time. No bases were lost but the pressure on most U.S. forces was heavy and unremitting. Camp Eagle, the base of the U.S. 101st Division, was hard hit by a sapper battalion. Camp Evans, the base of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division, was mortared and rocketed and when its ammo dump blew, 57 helicopters were destroyed. Da Nang was under heavy fire day and night despite incessant patrolling of the rocket belt, and Camp Carroll, the Marine artillery base some miles east of Khe Sanh, took a terrible pounding.Though in this loosely controlled infiltration the NVA replacements were killed by the thousands, the cost was high. About 400 Americans were being killed weekly at that time and most of them were getting it in I Corps Zone.Higher headquarters reckoned that the Communist might keep the offensive energized until early fall, which estimate then seemed gloomily unrealistic. The battle flamed high throughout May and ground to a halt in early June.This North Vietnamese offensive in the north during the 1968 spring was a lunge born of desperation.Now that we are witnessing another such all-or-nothing try by Hanoi"s forces, the remarkable thing is that it commands more attention in the United States and is getting a larger play in the press than did the battle of four years ago in which hundreds of Americans died.The main object of this hurrah would seem to be to deride the performance of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) when it is no longer directly helped by U.S. ground forces.The offensive had hardly begun to roll when antiwar editorialists latched onto the theme that the ARVN loss of ground proved that President Nixon's program of Vietnamization would not work.Such a conclusion is both historically inaccurate and in the military sense an absurdity. Mr. Nixon did not start Vietnamization. It was initiated by President Johnson and Gen. W. C. Westmoreland. The ARVN cannot be strong everywhere and massively counter-concentrate at will. The frontier is too far extended and the avenues of invasion are too numerous.So at the beginning of battle loss of ground by the ARVN was a normal expectation, though it was played up as a near-disaster. There was no sound reason to fight to the last for bases that could be by-passed by foot troops and then either pounded into submission by heavy weapons or besieged until squeezed dry of ammunition. The sounder tactical option was speedy withdrawal.Even so, analysts have been writing invidious comparisons between ARVN and American performance, pointing out that when in U.S. hands the same bases were many times hard hit but never yielded. All such criticism is irrelevant as there is no similarity in the two situations.When American forces held the north, U.S. aircraft could plaster the DMZ and restrain its potential as an invasion launch platform. Only lately has the DMZ become so thickly sown with sophisticated antiair missiles that a chopper dare not fly over it. Only lately has enemy armor been able to mass there. These are fresh gifts to the aggressors from the Soviets who, like the Red Chinese, want peace for Indochina provided it means a defeat for U.S. policy."The All-or-Nothing Red Drive And How the News People See It", by Brig. Gen. (Ret.) S.L.A. Marshall, Military Affairs Analyst, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Saturday, April 29, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.