In 1970, US Soldiers Came to Rescue POWs In Vietnam, They Left Shocked

In 1970, US Soldiers Came to Rescue POWs In Vietnam, They Left Shocked

It’s 2:00 in the morning, 23 miles from Hanoi, and a Green Beret named Dick Meadows is standing in the middle of an enemy prison camp with a bullhorn. He just rode a helicopter straight down into the courtyard on purpose, crash-landing it through the trees. His men are moving cell to cell, cutting through doors with bolt cutters, looking for the roughly 50 American prisoners of war they flew 400 miles into North Vietnam to bring home.

And every cell is empty. No prisoners. No one to rescue. Nothing. The most carefully planned rescue in American military history had just landed on top of a camp with nobody left to save. So, why is this empty camp remembered as one of the greatest operations the United States ever flew? The most rehearsed raid in American history was built around a camp that was already empty.

In the summer of 1970, not one of the men who would fly it knew that. Their story starts 6 months earlier in a windowless room in Washington with a stack of photographs. By 1970, hundreds of Americans, most of them pilots shot down over the north, had been held for years in a network of North Vietnamese prisons.

Conditions were brutal. Many lived in isolation. Some were tortured. Letters home, when they were allowed at all, were rare and censored. Families back in America often had no idea whether their husbands and sons were even still alive. For the men in the camps, the worst part wasn’t the hunger or the beatings.

 It was the feeling of being erased, forgotten by the country that sent them. In May of 1970, Air Force analysts studying aerial photos reached a conclusion that set everything in motion. A compound about 23 miles west of Hanoi, a place called Son Tay, appeared to be holding around 55 American prisoners. At least six of them looked like they were in bad shape and running out of time.

And then the analysts saw something they couldn’t ignore. The prisoners were trying to talk to the sky. In the dirt of the compound, men had laid out laundry and trodden patterns into the ground. The kind of escape and evasion codes pilots were trained to use. One of them was a large letter K. In a downed pilot’s code, K means one thing. Come get us.

Think about that for a second. Men who’d been locked away for years, scratching a message into the dirt on the off chance that a camera 400 miles up might be watching. Someone was watching. And one man decided to do something about it. His name was Brigadier General Donald Blackburn. He’d led guerrillas in the Philippines in World War II and was the first commander of the military secret special operations unit in Vietnam.

When the Son Tay photos crossed his desk, Blackburn took them up the chain, all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A small feasibility study was formed in June. Its verdict, there were around 61 Americans inside Son Tay, and a rescue was possible. On July 19th, 1970, the Joint Chiefs approved the planning.

For the man to lead the ground assault, Blackburn wanted someone specific. Colonel Arthur Simons. Everyone called him Bull. He was a legend in the Special Forces community. The kind of officer who’d already spent a career doing the impossible in places most Americans couldn’t find on a map. The mission got a name.

Operation Ivory Coast. And it became something the American military had almost never done before. A single operation run jointly by the Army and the Air Force, reporting straight to the Joint Chiefs. But, here’s the detail that everyone missed at the time. And it matters for everything that follows.

The intelligence on Son Tay was already going stale. Spy plane images from July showed the camp looking less active than usual. By October, one set of photos showed almost no sign of anyone living there at all. While a different camp nearby suddenly looked busy. That was a warning sign. It got noticed, and it got argued about, but it did not stop the mission.

Hold that thought. Because it becomes the whole story later. To pull this off, Bull Simons interviewed more than 500 volunteers and picked around 100 of the best. Most of them from the Special Forces groups at Fort Bragg. Then, he took them to a quiet corner of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and built them a problem to solve.

 The CIA built a detailed tabletop model of the camp, down to the trees, code named Barbara. And the team built something even better. A full-size replica of Son Tay, made of 2x4s and cloth, that they could rehearse on at full speed in the dark. There was just one catch. Soviet reconnaissance satellites passed overhead on a schedule the Americans had memorized.

 So, every time a satellite was due, the entire mock camp came down, folded flat, hidden. Then, it went back up. Over and over for weeks. The raiders rehearsed the assault around 170 times. The air crews flew hundreds of practice sorties, including full dress rehearsals at night with members of the Joint Chiefs watching. These men could run the entire raid blindfolded.

 Some of them basically could. They thought of everything. Because the prisoners might be sick or shackled or too weak to walk. The raiders packed bolt cutters, axes, and crowbars. And they trained to carry men who couldn’t carry themselves. Leading the assault element was Captain Dick Meadows, the man you met at the start of this video.

 Already a near mythical figure in the special forces world. The overall ground force was run by Lieutenant Colonel Bud Sydnor, whose calm under pressure would, in a few weeks, quietly save the entire mission. And then, there was the part of the plan that sounds insane even now. To get assault troops inside the prison walls before the guards could react, one helicopter wasn’t going to land.

 It was going to crash, on purpose. A 14-man assault team would ride an HH-3 helicopter straight down into the tiny courtyard, clipping the trees on the way, and slam it into the ground inside the compound. They’d walk away from the wreck and go straight to work. The helicopter was written off before it ever took off.

A one-way ride, by design. You’d think someone would have called that reckless. Plenty of people did. But the men who would be in that helicopter volunteered for it anyway. On the night of November 20th, 1970, the force lifted off from bases in Thailand. This was not a few helicopters sneaking across a border.

This was an armada built around 56 raiders. Six helicopters carried the assault force. Big four-engine combat Talon planes led them through the dark, handling the navigation and dropping flares over the target. Propeller-driven Skyraiders flew close air support. Fighter jets swept ahead to deal with enemy MiGs and surface-to-air missiles.

Tankers waited in the sky to refuel the helicopters mid-flight, a piece of technology that barely existed yet and made the whole reach possible. And while all of that was crossing into North Vietnam from the west, the Navy was putting on a show in the east. Off the coast, three aircraft carriers launched the largest night operation of the entire Vietnam War.

59 aircraft roared toward Hai Phong Harbor, but they weren’t carrying bombs. They dropped flares and decoys, a giant deafening magic trick designed to make North Vietnam look the wrong way, while the real mission slipped in behind its back. It worked. The raiders crossed one of the most heavily defended patches of sky on the planet, and the enemy never saw them coming.

By 2:00 in the morning, they were over the camp. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected. A Combat Talon dropped flares, lighting the camp like daylight. A helicopter gunship opened up on the guard towers. Then the HH-3 came down exactly as planned, smashing through the trees and into the courtyard.

 The only injury on board was the flight engineer who broke his ankle when a fire extinguisher tore loose on impact. Dick Meadows stepped out into the wreckage, raised his bullhorn, and called out to the prisoners that Americans were here to take them home. But one piece of the plan had already gone wrong. In the dark, the two compounds looked almost identical.

The helicopter carrying Bull Simons and his support group landed at the wrong one, a barracks about 400 m away, full of enemy soldiers. A vicious firefight broke out. And here’s where all those rehearsals paid off. The ground commander instantly recognized the mistake, triggered a backup plan, they drilled for exactly this, and the team covered both objectives while Simon’s group got picked back up and flown to the real prison.

The whole error cost them about 6 minutes. [snorts] Think about how thin the margin was. One wrong landing in the dark, surrounded by enemy troops, 400 miles from help. On almost any other mission, that’s how disasters begin. Here, the men just executed the contingency they’d practiced and kept moving as if landing at the wrong heavily armed compound was a minor scheduling hiccup.

Inside the actual camp, Meadows’ men cleared every cell block, and one by one, the calls came back the same. Empty. Empty. Empty. Meadows radioed two words that gutted everyone listening. Negative items. No prisoners. The men had trained for months for a moment that wasn’t there, but they couldn’t stop to grieve it because the sky was about to fall on them.

As the raiders pulled back to extract, North Vietnamese air defenses finally woke up and fired more than 30 surface-to-air missiles at the American aircraft. One fighter was hit and its crew had to eject, but they were recovered. They blew up the crash-landed helicopter so the enemy couldn’t study it, loaded everyone aboard, and lifted off.

From touchdown to takeoff, the raiders were on the ground for about 27 minutes. They had penetrated the heart of North Vietnam, fought their way through, and were flying back out, and they had not lost a single man to the enemy. By the raiders’ own estimate, dozens of enemy soldiers were killed, with figures often cited between 100 and 200, though no exact count was ever possible.

Tactically, it was almost perfect. And it had rescued nobody. If you’re the kind of person who wants the real story behind the history, not the watered-down version, take a second to subscribe. We dig into the Vietnam War the way it actually happened, myths and all. All right, back to the camp. The raid was over in 27 minutes, but what it set in motion would outlast the war itself.

First, the question everyone asked, “How do you fly 400 miles to a camp that’s empty?” The answer is heartbreaking in its simplicity. The prisoners had been moved on July 14th, 1970, more than 4 months before the raid. The most likely reason was water. A nearby river had flooded, and the camp’s wells became unusable.

 So, the North Vietnamese relocated the prisoners about 15 miles closer to Hanoi, to a place the Americans later learned the POWs had nicknamed Camp Faith. Now, remember those stale recon photos from October? American intelligence had hints. And in the days right before the raid, a single late report even suggested the camp might already be empty and the prisoners moved.

 Senior commanders knew the risk. They weighed it against months of rehearsal, a tiny window of good weather, and a near certainty they could get in and out safely, and they made the call to go anyway. But here’s the part that gets distorted in the retelling. So, let’s be precise. The men who flew the mission were not told the camp was probably empty.

And the planner who later wrote the definitive account concluded that the people holding the clearest intelligence didn’t even know a rescue was being planned because the whole thing was buried under so much secrecy. Nobody knew for certain that the cells were empty. They gambled for the chance that 50 American lives were still inside.

When the news broke back home, the headlines were brutal. A daring raid and not one prisoner freed. Critics called it an intelligence failure. And on the surface, they were [snorts] right. But the men who were actually inside the Hanoi prison system would tell you those critics missed the entire point. Here’s the thing the failure headlines never understood.

The raid terrified North Vietnam. The Americans had just proven they could drop out of the sky in the dark right in the enemy’s backyard. The North Vietnamese realized that any of their scattered smaller camps could be next. So they did something that changed thousands of lives.

 They pulled their prisoners out of the isolated camps and packed them together into the central prisons in Hanoi. For men who had spent years in solitary confinement, alone in the dark, talking through walls in tap code, this was everything. Suddenly, they were in large rooms, dozens of them together for the first time in years.

They could see each other, organize, hold church services, take care of the sick and the broken. Um this is something that history needs to rethink. Um historians very often use the word failure. They say it failed to get any POWs. But the case that we lay out in the book is that it was absolutely a success.

 And that’s because the priority of the mission was to send the message. And that is of course to get as many POWs as you can, but when you do the math, if there were 60 or 70 POWs at Son Tay POW camp, think about it, it’s a total of 335. You’re getting something like 15% of the POWs. And the prisoners knew why it had happened. Words spread through the cells that America had sent its best men hundreds of miles into enemy territory to try to bring them home.

One of those prisoners was a fighter pilot named Sam Johnson, who’d already endured years of brutal treatment and would later spend decades in the United States Congress. Men like him had been told over and over by their captors that nobody back home cared whether they lived or died. The raid was the answer.

They had been told for years that they were forgotten. Son Tay was proof that they were not. That was the real rescue. Not a single body carried out of Son Tay, but the morale of hundreds of men lifted in a single night. Nearly every man who set foot on the ground at Son Tay came home with a Silver Star or higher.

Days later, the president pinned medals on them in person. And the raid left a longer shadow than anyone realized that night. The failure of intelligence helped force a reckoning in how America gathered and shared it. And the proof that a joint, precisely rehearsed special operation could reach anywhere on Earth became a template that shaped American special operations for decades to come.

The men themselves became legends. Dick Meadows would go on to help build America’s most famous counterterrorism unit, Delta Force, and would later sneak into Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis, operating alone under a false identity, Bull Simons came out of retirement near the end of his life to pull off one more impossible rescue.

 This time, freeing two American executives from a prison in Iran during the chaos of its 1979 revolution. These were not ordinary soldiers, and Son Tay was the night they showed the world exactly what they could do. The Son Tay raid is usually filed away as a famous failure. The raid that rescued no one. But, that’s the lazy version of history, and it misses what the men who lived it understood.

Sometimes the measure of a mission isn’t whether it hits its target. It’s what it tells people who’d been left in the dark. That somebody came. That somebody was still willing to risk everything for them. Those 50 American prisoners weren’t in their cells that night. But, because 56 men were willing to come for them anyway, thousands of others finally got to stop being alone.