Saturday, April 29, 1972
The Big Battle For Little An Loc
All the way to the battle area, the chopper had resounded with the peculiar dialogue of war, "Tunnel One Zero" -Colonel William Miller, the senior American adviser in An Loc -had coolly explained to "Sundog Three Five" -a forward air controller -how to find and destroy an enemy tank that had just moved into the outskirts of the town.Both "Tunnel One Zero" and "Crispy Zero Nine" -the other chief American adviser in An Loc, Lt. Col. Robert Corley -had talked quietly and professionally about the day's combat requirements with "Danger Seventy Niner" -Maj. Gen. James Hollingsworth, the senior American commander in III Corps. These talks were the real object of the long flight in the helicopter.The airborne conversations were fairly abruptly cut off by warnings of "heavy artillery." That meant a thunderous B-52 strike was soon to hit the enemy on the fringes of An Loc. So the chopper turned back again, to fly toward Lai Khe over the long stretch of highway where the ARVN 21st Division and the North Vietnamese 7th Division had been fighting for days on An Loc's approaches."It's been a good trip," Jim Hollingsworth said, with a grin. "It;s the second day since the battle began that we haven't been shot at; so that makes it exceptional."By escaping enemy antiaircraft fire we had beaten six-to-one odds, to be precise; for the battle for An Loc has been raging for exactly 14 days as these words are written. Before they can see print, moreover, An Loc may have been relieved, or it may have fallen to the enemy. It has been a bitter, bloody, ding-dong battle all the way. No one can foretell the end until it comes.Yet there are lessons to be learned from this prolonged bloodshed at An Loc. To begin with, the sheer scale of the enemy effort has been impressive. Large parts of three enemy divisions, the 9th, the 7th and the 5th, have been engaged. A tank regiment has been about used up, too -and a tank regiment, incidentally, of a fairly curious character, for some of the enemy tank commanders have come into An Loc with their crews chained in place.At one point, seven enemy tanks were inside the town in line before the forward command post of the South Vietnamese 5th Division. But the ARVN soldiers used point-blank artillery fire and a bazooka-like weapon known as LAWS and so the worst threat from the armor was beaten back. At another moment, the defense was weakening. But two battalions of South Vietnamese airborne troops were successfully lifted in.By now, by Jim Hollingsworth's best estimate, the fighting for An Loc has cost somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. The ARVN defenders have also taken heavy casualties. Even the An Loc hospital has been reduced to a shambles by the enemy's artillery fire. And the current word is that the enemy will use his artillery to flatten An Loc, if he cannot take the place.The lessons of An Loc cannot be understood, however, unless you understand what An Loc really is. The town is a "provincial capital," but the capital of a province, Binh Long, that has almost no people. An Loc itself in times of peace had a civilian population of no more than 7,000.In short, this little town at the back of beyond is not a sane military objective by this war's former rules. And this simple fact tells you a lot about Hanoi's current massive offensive in South Vietnam."The Big Battle for Little An Loc", by Joseph Alsop 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 Strips.