In 1966, 108 Australians Were Surrounded By 2,000 Enemy Soldiers At Long Tan. It Was A Massacre 

108 men a rubber plantation a few kilometers east of a base called Nui Dat and somewhere in the trees ahead of them    moving through the rain an enemy force that outnumbered them by around 10 to 1. On paper that is not  a battle. On paper that is an execution. A single infantry company low on ammunition cut off in the open against a reinforced regiment.

  By every rule of arithmetic those men should not have walked out of that plantation alive. That is the story the numbers tell. It is not the story of what happened. Because 18 Australians died at Long Tan that afternoon. And when the rain stopped and the sun came up they counted at least 245 enemy dead lying in front of their positions.

This is the battle of Long Tan. And almost everything about the way it gets told online including that word massacre has the ending backwards. Phuoc Tuy province South Vietnam    mid-1966. The first Australian task force had only just dug in at Nui Dat. A raw base carved out of rubber country still finding its feet.

Two months old. The men there were mostly young. A lot of them were national  servicemen conscripts barely out of their teens and up to  this point their war had been quiet mostly patrols and waiting with almost no real fighting. For weeks though something had been off. Australian signals intelligence at Nui  Dat had been tracking an enemy radio transmitter and it was creeping closer moving through the countryside toward  the base.

Patrols went out again and again to find whatever was attached to that radio. They kept coming back with nothing. The signal said a large force was out there somewhere. The ground gave up no sign of it. Then, in the dark, the base got hit. For about 22 minutes, mortar and recoilless rifle rounds walked across Nui Dat.

24 Australians were wounded before the guns went quiet. Somebody out there had brought a serious amount of firepower right up to the wire. The question was who and how many and where they had gone. The next morning, companies from the 6th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, went looking. They found the enemy mortar pits, empty.

Whoever fired them had melted back into the plantation. And then something almost surreal happened. Back at Nui Dat that same afternoon, a concert was on. Australian entertainers, flown in, playing to the troops. War and a pop show, a couple of kilometers apart. While that music played, Delta Company walked out to relieve another company and follow the enemy tracks east.

108 men heading into the Long Tan rubber plantation. Their commander was a major named Harry Smith. None of them knew that an entire reinforced  regiment was already in those trees. At about a quarter past 3:00, the lead platoon, 11 Platoon, bumped into a small group of Viet Cong at the edge of the plantation.

A short, sharp exchange. The enemy broke and ran, leaving one of their own dead behind. To the Australians, it looked like a chance contact, a few stragglers. So, they pushed on after them. That call seemed small at the time. It wasn’t. Because those stragglers were the forward edge of the 275th Regiment, a Viet Cong main force unit, backed by the local D445 Battalion.

Hundreds of fighters. Possibly well over a thousand in the immediate fight. Then the sky opened. This wasn’t a drizzle. It was a full monsoon downpour. The kind that drops visibility to a few meters and turns the ground to soup. And in that gray wall of water, 11 Platoon suddenly found itself pinned by fire coming from  the front and both flanks.

This is where the day takes a turn  nobody in that platoon expected. Within about 20 minutes, 11 Platoon had lost roughly a third of its strength. Its commander, Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp,    a national serviceman, was killed directing his men. His platoon sergeant, Bob Buick, took over what was left and tried to hold a line that was bending around  them on three sides.

Think about what that means for a second. A handful  of men, most of whom had never seen combat like this, flat in the mud, out of contact with the rest of the company,  with an entire regiment trying to close the gap and finish them. They needed the rest of Delta Company, and they needed the guns.

 Back at the base, the gunners went to work. 24 guns, 18 Australian and New Zealand 105 mm howitzers, plus six American 155  mm guns, all firing east, into a plantation they could not see, guided only by a voice on the radio. That voice belonged to a New Zealand artillery observer, Captain Murray Stanley, huddled with Harry Smith in the middle of the company.

In blinding rain, with the enemy sometimes only meters away, Stanley walked the shellfire in closer and closer until it was landing almost on top of the Australians themselves. They call that danger close for a reason. Get the maths wrong and you kill your own men. Stanley did not get it wrong. Over the course of the afternoon, those guns fired more than 3,000 rounds in support of one company.

It is one of the reasons Long Tan is studied to this day. The infantry held the line, but the artillery is what kept the line from being overrun. And here’s the detail a lot of retelling skip. Harry Smith didn’t just sit and absorb it.    He pulled his platoons back into a tight all-round position, a shrinking circle in the rubber, and made the enemy come to  him, straight into the guns, again and again.

Wave after wave came out of the trees. Each time  the Australians and the artillery broke them up. In the middle of that, the company sergeant major, Jack Kirby, moved between the platoons under fire, hauling ammunition to whoever was running low and pulling wounded men back into the shrinking circle.

By now small groups of Australians  were fighting almost on their own, sections cut off from each other in the gray, each one holding its own few meters of mud    and hoping the men beside them were still there. But it could not go on forever because Delta Company was burning through  ammunition faster than any plan had accounted for.

Everything was in place for them to hold. They just didn’t have enough bullets left to do it. Quick one before the next part. If a story like this is the reason  you’re here, hit subscribe. We dig into the real history behind the Vietnam War, the parts that get twisted online, and it genuinely keeps this channel going.

Okay. Back to the plantation. So, Delta Company was holding, barely. But, holding a line means nothing  once the magazines run dry. And that moment was coming fast. Around 5:00, Harry Smith got on the radio  and called for an emergency ammunition resupply. The problem was the weather. Visibility was almost nothing.

The enemy was all around the position, and there was no marked landing zone. Flying into that was close to suicidal. Two RAAF Iroquois helicopters from number nine squadron went anyway. They came in low over the rubber at treetop height through the storm and the tracer, and dropped boxes of ammunition wrapped in blankets down to the men below.

Then, they turned around and flew back out through the same fire. Hardly anyone who hears about Long Tan ever hears about that flight. It’s one of the bravest things anyone did that day, and the crews weren’t even on the ground. That resupply bought Delta Company just enough time, because help was finally moving.

A troop of armored personnel carriers led by Lieutenant Adrian Roberts was grinding east from Nui Dat  with fresh infantry from A Company on board. To reach Delta, they had to cross a flooded creek that had swallowed the ground in the downpour.  They made it across, and they arrived at the worst possible moment for the enemy, right into the flank  of a force that was massing for what might have been the final assault.

   The APCs came in with guns blazing at last light. For an enemy that had spent 3 hours trying to overrun 100  men, armor appearing out of the gloom was the end of it. The attack broke. As darkness fell, the Viet Cong pulled  back into the plantation and were gone. Delta Company had held,    but holding a position and surviving it are two different things.

And to understand  what these men had actually been through, you have to look at what they found in the light. On the morning of the 19th, Delta Company and the relief force  swept back through the plantation. What they walked into was the aftermath of an entire regiment’s  assault stopped in the trees.

They counted the enemy dead in front of the positions. The count reached 245  before they stopped counting, plus three prisoners taken. And that’s not a typo. 245 against a company of 108. Then there was the cost on the other side.    18 Australians were dead. 24 more were wounded. For a single company, more than a third of Delta was killed or hurt  in one afternoon.

11 of the dead were national servicemen,  regulars and conscripts side by side. Their average age was around 21. Some of the wounded had spent the whole battle lying in the open, unable to move, listening to it happen around  them. One of them, Private Jim Richmond, later described fire so heavy that the rubber trees above him were being shredded to pieces and a noise so total that he could not even shout across to the mates  lying near him to find out if they were still alive.

Numbers can make you forget what that actually meant to the men who were there. So, I want you to hear it from one of them.  And it doesn’t matter whether you knew him or not, in that in that split second of witnessing that, you have an image in your head, that guy, he will never hold his kids on his lap. He’ll never have a a Sunday lunch with mom and dad again.

You just You just sense the loss. And it’s just undescribable. I’m probably not making a good go of it now, but but that’s the way it is. It’s just an indescribable loss that you feel on that person’s behalf.  That is what victory cost the men who won it. Now, in the days after the battle, a very different version went out over the airwaves.

 Radio Hanoi announced a great victory. In the communist telling, they had wiped out an Australian force, killed hundreds of Australians, and destroyed around 21 tanks. There’s just one problem  with that. The Australians did not have a single tank in Vietnam    in 1966. Their tanks, Centurions, didn’t even arrive until 1968.

So, the enemy destroyed 21 tanks that did not exist, and killed roughly 40 times more Australians than actually died. So, not exactly a reliable source. And that’s the thing about Long Tan. The version you’ve heard from either side is usually not the full picture. So, let’s be honest about the numbers that are still argued over.

The 245 enemy dead in front of the position, that is a confirmed count. Everything above it is an estimate. Some Australian accounts suggest hundreds more were killed or carried off  in the night. The historian Ernie Chamberlain, working from captured Vietnamese documents, puts the total enemy dead closer to 210.

The official Vietnamese figure is as low as 47. No one will ever have an exact number because the enemy dragged away  their dead and wounded through the night. What isn’t in doubt is the shape of it. 108 men, outnumbered many times over, took on a regiment and broke it. There’s one more thing historians still argue about, and it goes to the heart of what Long Tan even was.

Was it an ambush or an accident? One reading  is that the shelling of Nui Dat was bait, meant to draw a company out into the plantation, where a whole regiment was already waiting to spring a trap.  Years later, an Australian veteran named Terry Burstall went back to Vietnam and interviewed the enemy commanders themselves, and some of them described more or less that plan.

The other reading is simpler. The regiment was moving on Nui Dat in force, and Delta Company blundered straight  into it before either side was ready for a fight. A collision, not  a trap. The honest answer is that both sides have shaped the story to suit themselves ever since. And that is exactly the kind of gap this channel exists to close.

 Which brings us back to that  word. If Long Tan was a massacre, it was not the one people expect. The men who were supposed to be wiped out walked out. Even so, this was not the battle that won the war. Historians like Ashley Ekins are careful to say it was not  a turning point.

 The enemy units were mauled, not destroyed, and the war ground on for nine more years. What Long Tan did do was secure the Australians’ grip on their own province, and it earned a place in the country’s  memory that has never faded. Three years after the battle, the survivors went back to the plantation and put up a concrete  cross where their mates had fought and died.

That cross had its own strange journey. After the war, it  was taken down by the communist government and, for a time, used to mark a priest’s grave. It was later recovered and in 2017 the original was  handed back to Australia. Today it stands in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra    with a replica out on the battlefield.

The recognition of the men took even longer. Harry Smith spent decades fighting for his soldiers to be properly decorated.    His own award had been downgraded at the time. In 2008, more than 40 years after the battle,    it was finally upgraded to the Star of Gallantry. Delta Company also received a United States Presidential Unit Citation awarded by President Lyndon Johnson himself.

   And the date itself became something bigger than one battle. In Australia, the 18th of August, the anniversary of Long Tan, is now Vietnam Veterans Day. One afternoon in the rain became the day a country remembers everyone  who served in that war. A hundred and eight men were supposed to be a footnote.

 A company that got swallowed in a plantation east of Nui Dat. Instead, they became the story Australia tells to explain what its soldiers can do when the numbers say they have no chance. Not a massacre. The opposite  of one. If you want to understand the men who fought this war up close, the gear they carried, the weapons, the tactics, watch this one next.

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