The Most TERRIFYING Multi Gun Vehicle Of The Vietnam War You’ve Never Heard Of 

The Most TERRIFYING Multi Gun Vehicle Of The Vietnam War You’ve Never Heard Of 

Imagine a narrow street in the old imperial city of Hue.  Early 1968.    A squat tracked vehicle rounds the corner, barely taller than the Marines walking alongside.  She stops.  Six barrels are aimed at the stone wall behind which the North Vietnamese riflemen are holed up.  Then the entire street disappears in a cloud of dust and fire, and when it dissipates, only a hole remains where the building was.

  Search for this machine on the Internet and you will find that it is called the most terrible equipment of the Vietnam War.    A weapon that the enemy was supposedly afraid of even before it fired a shot.  This is great material for a preview. But that’s mostly not what the actual documents say. Because the real story of this thing is stranger than the legend, and, frankly, much more interesting.

  So how did a machine that the U.S. Army studied, tested, and tossed in the trash eventually become the weapon that Marine Corps colonels called the most effective in the worst urban battle of their war? To answer this, we need to go back to the 1950s to a truly strange idea. After World War II, American planners were haunted by the thought of Soviet tanks flooding into Europe.

  The army needed something that could destroy these tanks and still fit into the cargo planes of the time .  It had to be light enough to fly, small enough to hide, and yet deadly enough to be useful.  What they got was this , a machine so strange that it was named after a Greek word that roughly means “thing.” Historian Kenneth Estes, who has traced the origin of the name, says this rough translation is pretty close to the truth.

It weighed only about 9 tons.  Her crew consisted of three people.  And instead of a conventional turret with a single gun, it had six recoilless guns on its “shoulders,” three on each side, like some kind of mechanical hedgehog.  The first versions were hastily assembled from the chassis of another unsuccessful light tank destroyer.

  And after a series of meetings about the project in the early 1950s, Allis-Chalmers was awarded a contract to build a batch of prototypes.    The entire design had to be lightweight, as it was intended to be delivered into battle by air, and it had to be powered by the same six-cylinder engine that was already on army trucks.

  In other words, it was designed with its own limitations in mind from day one.  Here’s the point where almost everyone gets it wrong.  These guns are usually called 106- millimeter guns.    The actual caliber was 105. The military specifically changed the markings so that no one would accidentally load the wrong ammunition into the older gun it replaced.

  It’s a small detail, but it shows how the whole story of this car was slightly distorted during the transfer.  The army tried it and said “no.”  It was cramped , slow, with weak armor, and the guns had to be loaded from outside, in the open , under fire.    The Marine Corps , always short of money and never shying away from second-hand equipment, said yes .

  When production ended, records from the Marine Corps Tanker Historical Fund in Vietnam listed the total as 297 vehicles, not thousands. Less than 300 for the entire war.  One of the young Marines who became the commander of such a machine was Jim Green, who served south of Da Nang.  Listen as he describes the car he was given and the problem no one has solved.

I was the commander of a three-seater anti-tank personnel carrier.  It is called “Ontos”, O-N-T-O-S, “Ontos”. It weighs only 10 tons, with a crew of three: driver, loader and commander.  Instead of one gun turret, it has six recoilless guns, three on the left side and three on the right.  So in a firefight, you had to reload these 106-millimeter guns, and the loader had to climb outside, which is not very safe.

So, during combat, you can’t force the loader to get out in the middle of a firefight , so you had to move 400-500 yards or further away from the combat so he could reload. This reloading problem, described by Green, is the main flaw in the design in one sentence.  To load new shells, a crew member had to climb out and do it manually, while fully exposed, which meant driving hundreds of yards away from the battle to prepare to fire again.

  The Marines sent their Ontos to Vietnam in the first half of 1965, hoping to hunt armored vehicles. There was only one problem.  The enemy did not bring tanks, at least to these sections of the front. For most of the war, North Vietnamese troops and the Viet Cong fought against the Marines without the very thing the Ontos was built to destroy.

This brings us to the first myth worth debunking.  ” Ontos” is presented as a formidable tank hunter.  In Vietnam, he did not disable a single enemy tank.  The only tanks he destroyed were previously , in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when he hit two light tanks.  Historian Peter Brush explains this clearly in his history of this machine.

So, a weapon designed to destroy tanks ended up in a war where there were no tanks to destroy.  And instead of becoming useless, he received a second life that no one expected. The Marines aimed these six guns at bunkers, forest belts, and buildings, using the vehicle as a battering ram for infantry.  And then came the shell that gave Ontos a reputation as a nightmare.

  An anti-personnel shell, loaded with thousands of small steel arrows— flechets— turned each barrel into a giant shotgun.  You will come across a video claiming that one volley fired 57,000 steel arrows at once.  Be very careful with this number.  Sources can’t even agree on how many arrows were in a single shell: estimates range from 8,000 to almost 10,000.

 And this huge number for a volley is just someone’s guess, multiplied by six. What is true is quite grim and without exaggeration.  At close range, these arrows could shred almost everything in a cone in front of the machine. But this same little machine had an annoying habit of giving itself away. Every time the guns fired, a huge cloud of flame erupted from the rear, raising dust and smoke that showed everyone around where it was hiding.

  And the armor that was supposed to protect the crew was barely half an inch thick.  Bullets from heavy machine guns could pierce it through.  The mine could destroy it from below.  It was never a “miracle weapon.”  It was a fragile, loud, half-blind machine that just hit like a sledgehammer.  On the battlefield, Ontos lived a harder and less cinematic life than the legends suggest.

  Jim Green recalled that during his patrols, the enemy rarely engaged in combat during the day.  The day, more or less, belonged to the Marines.  The night, he said, belonged to the other side.  And when the Siege of Kheshan blockaded that remote Marine base in early 1968, about 10 Ontos were delivered by heavy Sea Stallion helicopters to help hold the perimeter.

Sitting in fixed positions awaiting an assault.  Which finally brings us to the city of Hue. End of January 1968. During the festive truce, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops stormed South Vietnamese cities in the so- called Tet Offensive.  The old imperial capital, the city of Hue, suffered the most.

  Thousands of enemy soldiers dug in within its stone buildings and ancient fortress, the Citadel.  And the Marines sent to retake the city found themselves in a situation they were barely prepared for.  Fighting in every house in a dense city against an enemy that was entrenched and had no intention of going anywhere.

  There is a bitter irony hidden in the choice of timing .  Just weeks before the Tet Offensive, in December 1967, the Marine Corps quietly disbanded its specialized anti-tank battalions—the very units that had been created around the Ontos.  The surviving vehicles were distributed almost randomly between tank battalions.  And within a few weeks, these decommissioned cars became almost irreplaceable.

    A short pause before the climax.  If you found this video worth your time, please take a second to subscribe.  This channel explores the corners of the Vietnam War that major documentaries simply skip.  And every follower really helps us continue our research.  OK.    Let ‘s go back to Hue. Good.  So, this is where this strange story finally bears fruit, and this is where ” The Loser” showed itself to its fullest.

  The Marines combined the small 9- ton Ontos with a 50- ton Patton tank.  The Patton provided thick armor and durability.  ” Ontos” brought speed and those six guns.  And this next detail is the most important .  According to the official 1968 history of the Marine Corps , the tankers initially lacked the specialized explosives needed to breach Hue’s thick masonry walls.

Ontos shells could do it.  At a range of 300 to 500 yards, a single Ontos could punch a hole about 4 square yards straight through a wall.  And the infantry burst into this hole.  The commander of the first Marines in that battle, Colonel Stanley Hughes, called the Ontos the most effective of all the marine support vehicles .

  Read this again .  Not one of the most effective, but the only most effective. Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Cheatham, who led the grueling advance through the southern part of the city, said that this little machine was as much of a help as any other piece of equipment in his battalion.  The tactic was simple and audacious.

  The Ontos would jump out of cover, fire a salvo at the target, and then retreat before the enemy could take aim behind the characteristic cloud of powder gases.  One Marine who fought at Hue, Dale Dye, later described watching the Ontos loader jump out of the back of the vehicle to reload as bullets pelted the armor around him, and somehow he smiled the whole time.

  It was a brutal, up close, personal job, and a little car that no one wanted found itself at the very epicenter of it.  Inside the Citadel itself, the fighting was some of the fiercest of the entire war.  Advances were measured by individual buildings and walls, and the Marine advance sometimes stalled—not because the enemy was too strong, but because the tanks and Ontos simply ran out of the heavy shells needed to continue pushing their way forward.

  By the time the fighting in Hue finally subsided in early March, after about a month of hellish close combat, the city lay in ruins, and both sides had paid a staggering price. All this time, these few little Ontos have been at the heart of the fiercest street battles, doing a job they were never designed to do.  Now about that horror.

Marines in Hue indeed reported that enemy soldiers would flee as soon as the Ontos fired an aiming shot, even before the main guns opened fire.  This is true.  And this is the testimony of the people themselves who were there. But here’s an honest point that regular content farms will never tell you about.  This fear is described exclusively from the American side.

In Vietnamese reports that have emerged, the Ontos is seen as just another lightly armored vehicle that can be disabled by a missile or mine.  So when you hear that the enemy was frightened by this technique, understand whose memory it really is.  It’s the Marines telling you that the enemy was fleeing. Which, to be fair, they often did.

  For despite all its firepower, Ontos remained vulnerable until the very end.  During the Battle of Hue, three such vehicles were destroyed.  On February 7, an enemy missile destroyed one Ontos supporting the 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and killed its driver.  The same thing that saved so many Marines could still be destroyed with one well-aimed shot.

  And that was actually the beginning of the end of this whole strange experiment.  By 1969 and 1970, the Ontos were simply falling apart. Spare parts ran out, guns became obsolete, and the surviving vehicles were quietly dismantled for parts and decommissioned . The Marines who had grown to love them in Hue saw them disappear.

  A few units still remained in distant corners of the world.  According to historian Peter Brush, the last operational Ontos was only decommissioned in 1980, guarding the fence line at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Long after almost everyone had forgotten that the thing even existed.  So, here’s what’s really left.  Not a terrifying superweapon that made an entire army tremble.

  Something better.  And much more human.  A car that was rejected by the army. Built by a tractor company .  Too thin-skinned to withstand an accidental missile hit.  Which several hundred Marines were dragged into the worst street fight of their war and turned into the only thing that kept them alive. Legend calls it the scariest machine you’ve never heard of.

The documents call her a “loser” who saved the Marines in Hue.  And this story from the very beginning did not need any exaggeration.  If you want to see how Marine armored vehicles actually fought for every street in the same battle, the Patton tanks that marched alongside the Ontos have their own story.

  And she will be next.