In 1966, Australia Fought The Most Dramatic Battle Of the Vietnam War
In 1966, Australia Fought The Most Dramatic Battle Of the Vietnam War
On the 10th of August 2016, a retired lieutenant colonel named Harry Smith was handed a report he had spent most of his adult life waiting for. It examined the conduct of 13 of his soldiers on a single afternoon in 1966. And buried inside, it was the one decision that mattered to Smith most that the man he believed was the bravest soldier on that battlefield would not be receiving the Victoria Cross.
8 days after that, Australia would mark 50 years since the Battle of Long Tan. 7 days after that report landed, the Vietnamese government cancelled the ceremony. You have probably heard of Long Tan. 108 men, 3 hours, a rubber plantation in monsoon rain, and a result so lopsided it became the story Australia tells about its whole war.
So, how does a battle Australia unambiguously won end up being the one Australians are still fighting over? It was August 1966, and the Australians had held Fuuktui province for barely 2 months. In the early hours of the 17th, their base at Nuidot was shelled. The Australian War Memorial records that the bombardment lasted 22 minutes and left 24 soldiers wounded, one of them seriously.
The next afternoon, a company was sent out to find whoever had fired those mortars. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, that was 105 Australians of DE Company, Sixth Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, plus three New Zealanders running the artillery radio. 108 men commanded by a major named Harry Smith.
At around 20 to 4, they made contact in the long tan rubber plantation. Then the monsoon broke. What D Company had walked into was not a mortar crew. Official historian Ian McNeel records that around 1,000 of the enemy made direct contact with the Australians that afternoon. And the Australians were not done yet. Not even close.
Behind them, 24 guns at Nui Dat began firing and essentially did not stop. The Australian Army’s own journal, The Cove, and the New Zealand Defense Force, both put the total above 3,000 rounds. Harry Smith, writing for the War Memorial, put it nearer 3 and a half thousand. When D Company began running out of ammunition, two Royal Australian Air Force Irakcoy flew resupply in at treetop height through the storm and pushed the boxes out over the position.
Then the armored personnel carriers arrived. Lieutenant Adrien Roberts pushed his troop across a flooded creek into the plantation and the enemy broke off. By the time the firing stopped, 18 Australians were dead and 24 were wounded. In the days that followed, the Australians walked the ground and counted the enemy dead.
The figure they recorded printed in almost every account since was 245 plus three prisoners. That number is where the trouble starts. 245 is not an estimate. It is a count. Australians walked the plantation, found bodies, and wrote the number down, which makes it a floor, not a ceiling. Vietkong units routinely carried their dead and wounded away.
So, what the Australians counted was only what got left behind. So, the real total has been argued over ever since, and the estimates do not cluster so much as scatter. At the low end, Vietnamese sources A district commander of the D445 battalion cited losses of about 150. And a peer-reviewed article in the journal History Australia notes the Vietnamese estimate a considerably lower toll than the Australian count.
In the middle sits the most rigorous work anyone has done on the enemy side. Brigadier Ernie Chamberlain is a retired Australian intelligence officer and Vietnamese linguist who served at Nui Dot and has spent decades reading Vietnamese unit histories in the original. His assessment is that around 1,750 Vietkong were in the area and about 210 were killed on the battlefield and at the high end Allied wartime reporting.
The New Zealand Defense Force has cited an estimate of 500 killed and the Sixth Battalion Association cites a captured Vietkong medical document recovered in 1969 logging close to 900 dead or missing. That is a spread of more than 500 human beings, depending on which document you believe.
But one piece of evidence cuts through more of the fog than anything else, and it is not an estimate at all. It is bookkeeping. In early 1968, Australian and New Zealand troops on Operation Cobberg captured the quarterm’s notebook of the 275 Vietkong Main Force Regiment, the principal enemy unit at Long Tan. Chamberlain worked through it.
On the 9th of August 1966, the quartermaster recorded the regiment’s strength as 1,01 men. On the 20th of August, 2 days after the battle, he wrote down a temporary reckoning of 852, a difference of 159 men in one regiment across the 11 days containing Long Tan. Chamberlain has separately identified 190 named men of that regiment killed working from Vietnamese death certificates and tombstone records.
Captured personnel records confirmed 65 dead in a single one of its battalions, including four company commanders. If the counting stopped there, this would be a very different story. But that same notebook quietly demolishes something else. You will hear constantly that 108 Australians beat 2 and a half thousand Vietkong.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and the War Memorial both use a figure of around 2,500 for the wider enemy force. But if the 275 regiment mustered 1,11 men in the local D445 battalion added roughly 400, the force actually available at Long Tan looks closer to 1500. Still an overwhelming number against 108 men, just not the number in the thumbnail.
If that sounds like nitpicking, keep watching because the bigger question was never settled at all. Nobody agrees on what the Vietkong were attempting that afternoon. There are three serious positions and historians still hold all three. The first is that neither side planned it. The war memorial and the ANZAC portal both describe an encounter battle.
a patrol walking into a force it had no idea was there. Harry Smith argued for the rest of his life that this was no ambush of his company because his platoon made contact at different times over more than an hour across a wide frontage. Ambushes do not work like that. The second is that it was bait. Chamberlain reads the Vietnamese sources as describing a deliberate attempt to draw an Australian force out of New and fight it on chosen ground.
There is even a Vietnamese phrase for the tactic, luring the Tiger down from the mountain. And the third is that long tan was never the point at all. That the mortar attack was preparation, that the regiment was positioning for a far larger assault on the Australian base, and that DE company blundered into the staging area early and wrecked the whole thing.
If you are waiting for me to tell you which one is right, so is everybody else. 60 years on, the evidence supports all three readings and nobody has closed it. If you want Vietnam history that shows you the arguments instead of hiding them, subscribing helps this channel keep doing the digging. So, the numbers were contested and the intent was contested.
But what happened to the men themselves made all of that look academic. Harry Smith came out of that plantation and did what any company commander does. He wrote up his people around 20 recommendations for decorations. He was told there were too many because in 1966 Australia still awarded imperial honors and imperial honors came with quotas.
A fixed allocation of decorations per number of troops per period. The heroism was not the limiting factor. The paperwork allowance was. Official historian Ian McNeel wrote that the quota system left the awards for long tan. in his words, little short of insulting given the heroism displayed. Smith’s list was cut roughly in half, and what survived was downgraded.
His own recommendation for a distinguished service order came back a military cross. And the recommendation he cared about most concerned his company Sergeant Major, Warrant Officer John Kirby, known to everyone as Big Jack. Kirby spent the battle crossing open ground under fire, carrying ammunition forward and dragging wounded men back.
Smith recommended him for the Victoria Cross. Kirby received a Distinguished Conduct Medal instead. Kirby never got the chance to argue about it. On the 6th of February 1967, less than 6 months after Long Tan, he was killed by friendly artillery fire. On another operation, aged 31, Harry Smith spent the next four decades refusing to let it go.
He wrote submissions and lobbyed prime ministers. In 2006, after meeting Smith personally, John Howard set up an independent panel to review the longt honors. And in 2008, the government accepted its findings. Smith’s military cross was replaced with the Star of Gallantry. Two of his platoon commanders, Dave Sabbat and Jeff Kendall, went from a mention in dispatches to the medal for gallantry.
He was 77 years old when he finally received it. And he still was not finished because Jack Kirby still did not have a Victoria Cross. Which brings us back to that report. On the 10th of August 2016, the Defense Honors and Awards Appeals Tribunal had reviewed the actions of 13 men at Long Tan and recommended honors or upgrades for 10 of them.
Medals for gallantry for Adrien Roberts, Frank Alcorta, and Barry Magnus, commendations for gallantry for Gordon Sharp, the platoon commander killed on the day, and six others. And it declined to recommend a Victoria Cross for Jack Kirby. The tribunal found the Distinguished Conduct Medal awarded in 1966 was the appropriate recognition of his conduct.
Harry Smith died on the 20th of August 2023, aged 90, 2 days after the 57th anniversary of the battle. The Kirby decision was never overturned. One more thing was never settled, and it is a lump of concrete. On the third anniversary of the battle in 1969, Australian soldiers went back to the plantation and put up a cross, the brass plaque named D Company and the armored troop and recorded who had erected it and when.
After the communist victory in 1975, the cross was taken down and then it was reused. Local people made it a grave marker for a Catholic priest named Muian Vansin. In 1984, it was recovered by the Dong Nai Museum in Bian Hoa, where it went on display alongside other relics of the war. In 1989, the local district committee put a replica up on the battlefield.
That replica became a pilgrimage site. According to the official history by Ashley Eekans and Ian McNeel, as of 2012, it was one of only two memorials to foreign military forces permitted anywhere in Vietnam. The other commemorates the French at DNBFU, which brings us to the 50th anniversary. More than a thousand Australians, many of them veterans, had flown to Vietnam.
Some had not been back since the war. On the 17th of August 2016, the Australian government announced that Vietnam would not permit the commemoration at the cross to proceed. The Department of Foreign Affairs stated that Australia had worked with Vietnamese authorities for 18 months to prepare it. The Veterans Affairs Minister, Dan Tahhan, called the decision a kick in the guts.
The prime minister rang his Vietnamese counterpart directly. Vietnam partially relented. On the day, small groups were allowed onto the site in rotations of up to 50 people for no longer than 15 minutes each. The Australian and New Zealand ambassadors laid a wreath and the visitors were barred from wearing their medals, barred from wearing uniform and barred from carrying flags or banners.
The following year, Vietnam gifted the original cross to Australia permanently. It went on display at the Australian War Memorial on the 6th of December, 2017. The dream I have all the time is all the young BS that were killed on the day. I still see their faces like Doug, Shorty, Mitch, Glenn. You still tell them that when I wake up in that morning, you know, that next morning that they’d all wake up with me, but they never do.
Every 18th of August, Australia marks Vietnam Veterans Day. The date is the anniversary of Long Tan. And there are historians and veterans who find that uncomfortable. Not because Long Tan does not deserve it, but because it now stands in for a war that ran more than a decade.
Australia’s largest and longest battle of the war was not long tan. It was coral and Balmoral in 1968, fought over weeks rather than hours, and it killed more Australians. Very few people outside the veteran community could tell you what happened there. Harry Smith understood that tension better than most. He described the cross not as a monument to 18 men, but as a symbol carrying every Australian lost in that war.
The question about Long Tan was never really how many died in that plantation. It is why a country that agrees the battle was won still cannot agree what it cost, what the enemy wanted, who deserved what, or who is allowed to stand on that ground and remember it. 3 hours in a rubber plantation and 60 years of argument. The file is still open.
If you want the battle itself, hour by hour, the full long tan video is on screen now. And if you want the fight Australians forgot, coral and balmoral is linked beside
