In 1968, The NVA Charged An Australian Firebase Twice. It Was A Disaster

At a/4 to 4 in the morning on the 26th of May 1968, mortar rounds began landing on a patch of open scrub north of Ben Hoa that had been empty 2 days earlier. The Australians called it fire support base moral. Inside the wire sat the rifle companies of the third battalion, Royal Australian Regiment 3, dug in for less than 72 hours.

 The nearest friendly gun was 4 and a2 km away at another base. Outside the wire, moving up through the dark across bare ground, was a regiment of the People’s Army of Vietnam. The barrage lifted after a few minutes, and the ground assault came in from the northeast across flat scrub with almost no cover on it.

 It came at battalion strength, aimed squarely at the sector held by D Company. on the opposite face of the perimeter. At the same time, enemy sappers pushed Bangalore torpedoes under the southern wire and blew a gap in front of a company. Two assaults on two sides of the base timed within minutes of each other. The men in the forward pits could hear the assault line moving before they could see any of it.

 The arithmetic was ugly. One Australian infantry battalion on the ground for 2 days with no artillery of its own inside the perimeter. Every gun supporting Balmoral was sitting at fire support base Coral to the south, firing onto grid references passed back by radio. The men in the pits had claymore mines, machine guns, and whatever the gunners at Corral could put down in the time it took an assault line to cross a few hundred meters of open patty.

 The wire had been laid in a hurry, and it was thin in places. What the regimental commander outside that wire didn’t know was that all of this had been arranged. three RAR hadn’t wandered into his base area by accident. The battalion had been marched and flown into the middle of it deliberately, put down in open country where it could be seen and told to sit there and wait. It was bait.

 And on the northeast face, on the exact axis the assault was now coming down, two shapes had been sitting under camouflage netting since first light the previous morning. The leading assault line pushed through the last of the low scrub and reached the outer strand of wire in front of de company. Behind them, the mortars kept working and the heavy machine guns in the treeine were firing tracer flat across the open ground to mark the run-in.

 Nothing in front of them moved. The Australian pits held their fire while the range closed because the order had been to let the assault commit itself to the open before anyone touched a trigger. Then in the dark behind the forward positions, one of the two shapes on the northeast face started its engine. May of 1968 was the second act of the Tet offensive and the North Vietnamese were pushing at Saigon again.

 The first Australian task force was pulled out of Fuaktoy province where it had worked for 2 years and knew every track and sent north into the third core area to sit across the approach routes into the capital. The operation was called Touan Thong. For the Australians, it meant setting up fire support bases inside base areas the enemy had held and supplied for years with no friendly population around them and no knowledge of the ground.

 The first of those bases was Coral, occupied on the 12th of May. The North Vietnamese hid it that night before the position was properly dug. Got in among the guns, and it took the rest of the night and part of the next morning to put that right. The lesson was expensive and it stuck. A fire support base is at its most vulnerable in the first hours after it goes in before the pits are deep and the wire is out.

 When the task force commander, Brigadier Ron Dunston, decided to push a battalion further north to find the base camps feeding the attacks, the officer he gave the job to had watched exactly how Coral had gone wrong. That officer was Lieutenant Colonel Jim Shelton, commanding three RAR. On the 24th of May, he took the battalion into an area of operations north of Coral onto the ground that would become Balmoral.

 The insertion was built around the assumption that the enemy would come. Two rifle companies went forward on foot to seize and secure the position with the battalion tactical headquarters following behind them in armored carriers. Only once B and D companies had the landing zone locked down did the rest of the battalion come in by helicopter from fire support base Kooji.

There were contacts on the way in and at least one enemy soldier was left on the ground. The timing was what mattered. The North Vietnamese had expected the Australians to stay south and by the time they worked out that a battalion had walked into their supply area. It was late afternoon with no time left to organize anything for that night.

 Three R spent the hours of darkness digging pits, laying wire, and setting claymores. The first evening went by without a shot fired at them, which was the one thing that hadn’t happened at Coral. The next decision looked like a mistake. Balmoral was to be a battalion defensive position and nothing more. So, the guns of 161 Battery Royal New Zealand artillery were lifted out and flown south to Coral.

 Every tube supporting the operation now sat in one place from where it could range across the entire area of operations, including Balmoral. It gave the gunners better coverage of the ground. It also meant that when the attack came, the men at Balmoral would be listening for their own shells arriving from 4 and 1/2 km behind them.

 Shelton wanted armor on the position. On the 25th of May, four Centurion tanks of two troop C squadron first armored regiment were ordered up from Coral to Balmoral, escorted by two infantry platoons from B company 1 R under Captain Bob Hennessy. A troop of Centurions moving across open country in daylight is a slow and conspicuous thing, and every set of eyes in that base area would have tracked it.

 The run took most of the afternoon because partway along the route, the column drove into a position nobody had plotted. The North Vietnamese opened up on the Australian infantry from a line of bunkers at close range and pinned the leading platoon with machine gun fire. The Centurions came forward off the track and began working the bunker line with canister, a tank round that opens on leaving the barrel into a cone of steel balls.

 The infantry were pulled back out of the fire behind it. What the column had struck was the edge of a large prepared base camp. And the scale of the position was the first hard evidence of what had been sitting in that scrub the whole time. They broke contact and drove on because the order was to reach Belmoral before dark and the tanks came through the wire at 3:00 in the afternoon.

 Two enemy soldiers were left behind. One Australian was wounded and B company of one R flew back to Coral. On paper, it was a minor scrap. In practice, it had just shown in front of an audience what four centurions and a couple of infantry platoon could do to a bunker line in daylight. And the North Vietnamese commander now knew there were tanks inside Balmoral.

 His name was Fan Viet Dong, and he commanded the 165th Regiment. The Australians were sitting on top of his logistics, 4 1/2 km from anyone who could reinforce them in a hurry. and every day they stayed meant more of his base area found and cleared. He was given the job of removing them. That evening, the men in the pits watched tracer lights and scattered shots, working through the treeine to the north, which is the standard signature of a unit moving into assembly areas.

 Shelton spent the daylight hours reading his own ground. Scrub and low growth came in close on the southern, eastern, and western faces, and any attacker using them would arrive under cover, almost to the wire. The northeast was open, flat, and bare for the last few hundred meters. A commander with time would come through the scrub. A commander under orders to hit fast with a battalion in assault formation would come across the open, and Shelton put two of his four centurions directly on that axis, sighted them on the ground.

the assault would have to cross and left them there through daylight under netting so that nothing showed and nothing moved. At 3:45 on the morning of the 26th, the mortars and rockets came down, thickened with heavy machine gun and small arms fire out of the treeine. The assault followed the barrage in immediately across the open ground from the northeast at a strength of up to a full battalion.

 It fell on D company commanded by Major Peter Phillips on the southern face. At the same moment, sappers got Bangalore torpedoes under the wire in front of a company under Major Hory Howard and blew a gap wide enough to push a company through. Nobody came through that gap. The southern attack was there to drag Australian machine guns and mortars away from the northeast and it did nothing else which told Shelton inside a couple of minutes where the real weight was going.

 Every weapon that could bear was left facing the open ground, and the battalion mortars stayed on their northern targets. The two Centurions on the northeast axis rolled forward out of their positions in the dark, engines up, and their machine guns opened first, hosing the ground the assault line still had to cross.

 Then the main armament started putting canister down the line of the assault into a formation crossing bare ground with nothing to get behind. Each round opens on leaving the barrel and covers a wide arc at short range and at the distance involved. The tanks were firing into a line of men standing up in the open.

 The attack stalled at the wire and broke apart on the outer strand under the combined fire of the infantry and the tanks. Rocket propelled grenades came back at the centurions and achieved nothing against the armor. One of them, call sign 32, sat in the northeast sector through the last of the fighting and finished the morning undamaged.

 To the south, Coral was catching it as well. Between a/4 and half, mortars, recoilless rifles, and rockets came down on that base to hold the guns there occupied, and one Australian was lost and another wounded. The guns there kept firing for Balmoral through all of it. At Balmoral itself, the defenders stopped shooting at the assault line and started calling helicopter light fire teams and an AC47 gunship onto the ground behind it, working over the assembly areas and the mortarbased plate positions in the treeine. Around 5 in

the morning, the North Vietnamese broke contact and pulled back, dragging most of their casualties out under covering fire while the Australian guns at Coral fired onto the withdrawal routes. Clearing patrols went out at first light and found six enemy soldiers on the ground along with a large quantity of weapons, ammunition, and equipment abandoned in the scrub.

 Three RAR had lost another three men and had 14 wounded. A regiment had thrown a battalion at the position and hadn’t put a single soldier through the wire. At 6:00 that same morning, a second Australian force went out after the bunker system found during the road move. D company of one RAR and one troop of C squadron under Major Tony Hammet pushed out on a reconnaissance in force.

At 27 minutes past 12, the leading platoon was hit with small arms and rocket propelled grenades, having paused a short time before to talk CRA bombers of number two squadron Royal Australian Air Force onto a bunker complex nearby. The base area was turning out to be far bigger than the task force had estimated.

 For the next 2 days, three RAR patrolled out from Balmoral and came back to the same pits every night. The position stayed exactly where it was in the open with the tanks still on the northeast face. Shelton didn’t move the base, thin out the garrison, or change the layout after the first attack because the layout had worked. Anyone watching the Australians through those two days would have seen a battalion that had beaten off a battalion and then changed nothing at all, which is a fair description of an invitation.

 At 2 in the morning on the 28th of May, the 165th regiment came back and this time it came with two battalions. The preparation was 60 mm and 80 mm mortar fire from the south. Coral was brought under indirect fire again from a quarter to 3 to hold the guns down. It was the same plan as two nights earlier, run by more men against a position that had spent 48 hours ranging every approach to it and had lost nothing off the perimeter in the meantime.

 It opened the same way as well. Sappers blew the wire in front of a company on the southern face and the assault came in behind the explosions on the same ground and at the same point as two nights before. This time the Australians didn’t wait to find out whether it was the main effort. It was broken up before it reached the wire by claymore mines and small arms fire with M60 machine guns, L1 A1 rifles, and M16s firing into an approach the defenders now knew by heart.

 The gap blown in the southern wire was never used on either night. The main assault came in at 10 3 from the northeast over the same open ground into the same company. Philillips and D Company took the weight for the second time in three nights. The infantry had the tanks again canister and machine guns down the axis with artillery from Coral and the battalion mortars putting continuous close fire onto the approach.

 This attack was better coordinated than the first one, and it was stopped on the wire all the same, and across both nights, the perimeter was never penetrated at any point. It lasted half an hour before the North Vietnamese called it off. At 20 to 4, a small probe developed from the east and dissipated almost at once.

 Helicopter light fire teams and AC47 gunships worked the ground behind the attack under direction from forward air control aircraft. From 5 in the morning until first light, the guns at Coral fired continuously onto the withdrawal routes, breaking up every attempt made to get the casualties out, and the regiment finally pulled back at 5 with most of them still lying where they had fallen.

 At first light, a clearing patrol from D Company went out with tanks and armored carriers in support. The ground north of the base was pocked with old craters from B-52 strikes, and the patrol found attackers still down inside them, pinned there since the withdrawal and unable to cross open ground in daylight. The craters were worked over one at a time with the carriers standing off.

 The daylight count came to 42 enemy soldiers on the ground and seven prisoners against one Australian lost and eight wounded. Weapons, ammunition, clothing, and equipment were recovered in quantity from the approach and from the craters. A regiment had attacked a single Australian battalion twice in three nights on the same axis with the same opening move and had gone backwards on both occasions without ever getting inside the perimeter.

 The prisoners taken that morning were the first the Australians at Balmoral had seen up close. And once they were sorted out and looked at properly, they explained part of why the assaults had come on the way they did. A large number of the enemy soldiers recovered that morning were 16 and 17 years of age.

 The evidence coming out of the prisoners indicated the North Vietnamese had started taking 15year-old boys into combat units to replace the losses of the Tet fighting. that is who had been sent at the wire in a salt formation over open ground twice against tanks. They were buried in a common grave north of the wire dug out by a bulldozer because the number was beyond what the burial parties could handle by hand in open ground in that heat.

 Later patrolling turned up a large field of shell scrapes in the scrub to the northeast. The shallow holes an assault force digs while it waits for the order to move. The regiment had lain out there in the dark, a few hundred meters from two camouflage centurions it never saw. On ground, the Australian gunners had already ranged.

 They had been that close on two separate nights, and both times they had gone in across the open because the open was the fast way to the wire. Peter Phillips was awarded the military cross for the handling of decomp across the two attacks. Balmoral was held until the task force finished in the third cors area and went back south to Puaktui in the first week of June.

 Across the whole of Coral and Balmoral from the 12th of May to the 6th of June, 26 Australians were lost and around 100 were wounded. The confirmed figure on the other side of the wire was at least 267 with 11 prisoners, 36 crew served weapons, and 112 small arms recovered. It remains the largest and longest battle the Australian army fought in Vietnam.

 The Centurions came off the position and drove back down the same road they had come up on the 25th of May, past the bunker line where they had first fired canister in daylight with the infantry pinned in front of them. Three R went south to Nuiidat and back into Puaktoy province where the ground was known and the war was quieter. Balmoral had been on the map for a fortnight.

 In that time, a North Vietnamese regiment had come at it twice on the same axis with two battalions on the second attempt and had not once put a man inside the wire. Yeah.