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Battlefield Chronicles

Vietnam War – Battle of Ngok Tavak & Kham Duc

Vietnam War – Battle of Ngok Tavak & Kham Duc

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Kham Duc Special Forces Camp (A-105), was located on the western fringes of Quang Tin Province, South Vietnam. In the spring of 1968, it was the only remaining border camp in Military Region I. Backup responsibility for the camp fell on the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), based at Chu Lai on the far side of the province. Battle Of Ngok Begins As Kham Duc Becomes Outpost The camp had originally been built for President Diem, who enjoyed hunting in the area. The 1st Special Forces Detachment (A-727B) arrived in September 1963 and found the outpost to be an ideal border surveillance site with an existing airfield. The camp was located on a narrow grassy plain surrounded by rugged, virtually uninhabited jungle. The only village in the area, located across the airstrip, was occupied by post dependents, camp followers, and merchants. The camp and airstrip were bordered by the Ngok Peng Bum ridge to the west and Ngok Pe Xar mountain, looming over Kham Duc to the east. Steeply banked...

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GWOT – The Battle of 73 Easting

GWOT – The Battle of 73 Easting

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In late February 1991, the desert along the Iraq–Kuwait border was a wholly unremarkable and barren place. There were no towns to name the coming battle; just wind, dust, and a flat horizon marred only by burning oil wells and the silhouettes of armored vehicles.  The Battle of 73 Easting Started as a Map Line To make sense of that emptiness, coalition planners drew a grid across the map. One of those north–south lines, labeled "73 Easting," would become shorthand for the last great tank battle of the 20th century. But on the morning of February 26, it was just another imaginary line in the sand. The battle that formed around it began months earlier, when Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait triggered Operation Desert Shield, the massive U.S.-led deployment to defend Saudi Arabia and prepare to evict Iraqi forces.  After a 43-day air campaign that wrecked much of Iraq's command and logistics, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf approved a bold ground plan: a huge, sweeping "left hook" by...

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Korean War – Night Fighter Team

Korean War – Night Fighter Team

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On January 21, 1953, during Korea’s Winter War. Night fighter team "George" of composite squadron three (VC-3) was operating from USS Oriskany (CVA-34) in the Sea of Japan. The Night Fighter Team Filed a Misleading Report Excerpt from combat report: Saw 75-100 trucks on G-3, seven trucks seen damaged. Meager to intense AA, much rifle fire was seen. The plane hit by 30 cal. Item - Lt. James L. Brown, USNR assigned F4U-5N #124713. One-night landing aboard without incident. 2.6 combat hours. Combat strike report comments, like that above, were distilled from the intelligence officers debriefing of pilots from returning strikes and later filed with higher command. They, in turn, used these reports from the pilots who flew the combat missions, and reported what happened, to plan later strikes, select subsequent targets, and subject to political considerations, the overall conduct of the war. Seldom did they tell what happened. It was just as well. Here is what really happened that night....

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Korean War – Firefight at Outpost 3 (1952)

Korean War – Firefight at Outpost 3 (1952)

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"There were 80 of us on that hill when an estimated 600-800 Chinese hit us hard that night. Sixty-six of us were killed, wounded or missing."PFC Edgar "Bart"Dauberman, USMC "Easy"Company, 2d Battalion 5th Marines  In the spring of 1952, General James A. Van Fleet, USA, Commander, 8th United States Army in Korea and supreme commander of all Allied Forces in Korea, undertook one of the most audacious operations in the history of warfare. With his Army fully engaged against Chinese and North Korean communists across the Korean peninsula, General Van Fleet completely realigned his entire force. Dubbed Operation Mixmaster, thousands of men and vehicles and thousands upon thousands of tons of supplies and equipment were shuttled hundreds of miles to new positions over a period of more than one week. It was a daringly unprecedented operation, and the Chinese and North Koreans, who could have ruined it all, were caught flatfooted. Hill Became the First Test of the Jamestown Line...

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Gulf War – The Battle of Khafji

Gulf War – The Battle of Khafji

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By late January 1991, the "war" part of the Gulf War still looked strangely distant. Since Operation Desert Shield transitioned to Operation Desert Storm, the war appeared very one-sided. Coalition jets had been pounding Iraqi command posts, radars, and armored columns in Kuwait and southern Iraq. That was all about to change.  Saddam Hussein aimed to strike back in The Battle of Khafji On the ground, Saddam Hussein still had large forces dug in, and he wanted to prove they could strike back against the American-led Coalition defending Saudi Arabia. His chosen target was the quiet Saudi border town of Khafji, just south of Kuwait on the Persian Gulf. It was a tempting target; the Iraqis not only needed a propaganda victory, but it's likely Hussein also wanted a reconnaissance-in-force to probe Coalition defenses and disrupt plans for a ground offensive he knew would be coming. Khafji had been evacuated of civilians months earlier, but on Iraqi maps it looked ideal: close,...

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Anglo-Zulu War: Wolseley And Rorke’s Drift (1879)

Anglo-Zulu War: Wolseley And Rorke’s Drift (1879)

I recently reviewed a biographical history of the men who flew on the famous Doolittle Raid of 1942 where I professed strong approval of that kind of book. Rorke's Drift Emerges as More Than a Single Famous Battle We now must jump back further to the year 1879 for a similar and equally effective work by the respected Zulu War historian James W Bancroft. This book, "Rorke's Drift: The Zulu War, 1879", is the sum of decades of work, provides biographies of the men awarded the Victoria Cross for their actions during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, a conflict marked by the shocking defeat of the British at Isandlwana followed by the heroics of Rorke's Drift over the period of 22nd to 24th January. But there was much more to the conflict than those iconic events. Britain's war with the Zulus tends to be defined in the broadest modern perception by the film "Zulu", a 1960s classic, which tells a story of the defense of Rorke's Drift, rather than the story. I love the movie and it does, without...

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War in the Pacific – The Battle of Manila

War in the Pacific – The Battle of Manila

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On February 3, 1945, American forces entered the outskirts of Manila, capital of the Philippines, beginning the Battle of Manila, a ferocious and destructive urban battle against the Japanese that would leave Manila the second-hardest hit Allied capital (following Warsaw) of World War II.  The Road to Manila and the First Days of Battle As part of his campaign to retake the Philippines from the Japanese (who had captured it from the Americans in 1942), General Douglas MacArthur first invaded the island of Leyte and then moved on to the island of Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands and home to the capital, Manila.  American troops were able to rapidly advance to Manila, leading MacArthur to believe it would be a relatively easy fight. They entered the city limits on February 3, quickly liberating Allied (mostly American) POWs and civilians from their incarceration at the University of Santo Tomas and Bilibid Prison. However, Japanese forces dug in and put up a fierce...

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WWII – The Defense of Wake Island

WWII – The Defense of Wake Island

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In December 1941, as Japan ripped across the Pacific, most American outposts collapsed in days. Guam fell between Dec. 8 and Dec. 10 to a larger Japanese landing force after only brief resistance by a small, lightly armed garrison of sailors and Marines. Wake Island was supposed to be another speed bump. Instead, a few hundred Marines, sailors, and civilian contractors turned it into a two-week fight that delivered the first American tactical victory of the Pacific War and a badly needed morale boost at home. The Defense of Wake Island Faces Long Odds From the Start Wake was an odd prize: a wishbone-shaped coral atoll about 2,000 miles west of Oahu, made up of three low islets named Wake, Wilkes, and Peale. By early December 1941, the U.S. had turned it into an unfinished outpost with roads, a triangular airstrip, and basic naval air facilities built by more than 1,100 civilian contractors. The garrison itself was tiny but well armed. On Dec. 4, 1941, the island held 449 Marines, 69...

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Custer’s Last Stand

Custer’s Last Stand

In 1868, many Lakota leaders of the Sioux nation agreed to a treaty, known as the Fort Laramie Treaty that created a large reservation for them in the western half of present-day South Dakota. They agreed to give up their nomadic life, which often brought them into conflict with other tribes in the region, with settlers, and with railroad surveyors, in exchange for a more stationary life relying on government-supplied subsidies. However, some Lakota leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse rejected the reservation system. Likewise, many roving bands of hunters and warriors did not sign the 1868 treaty and consequently felt no obligation to conform to its restrictions or to limit their hunting to the unseeded hunting land assigned by the treaty. Their sporadic forays off the designated lands continually brought them into conflict with settlers and enemy tribes outside the treaty boundaries. Custer Enters the Black Hills as Tensions Escalate In 1874, the tension between the U.S....

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WW II – Buna Gona: MacArthur’s Jungle Slugfest in the Pacific

WW II – Buna Gona: MacArthur’s Jungle Slugfest in the Pacific

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The first full year of World War II was a hard-fought one for the Allies in the Pacific Theater. In 1942, Thailand, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, and more were in Japanese hands, as were tens of thousands of American, Australian, and British prisoners of war. In January of that year, Rabaul fell to the Japanese, alarming Australians as Imperial Japan advanced on Papua New Guinea.  Buna Gona Forces Japan to Halt Its Advance The enemy reached the heights overlooking Port Moresby, New Guinea's largest city, but advanced no further. American landings on Guadalcanal and the threat of an Allied assault on the other end of New Guinea forced the Japanese to make some hard decisions.  American and Australian forces had checked the overland thrust across the Owen Stanley Range on the Kokoda Track by late September 1942, then turned the Japanese around at Ioribaiwa and chased them back through Isurava and over the jungle-sawtooth ridges to the Papuan north...

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WW2 – Bataan and Corregidor

WW2 – Bataan and Corregidor

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Within hours of their December 7, 1941, attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese military began its assault on the Philippines, bombing airfields and bases, harbors and shipyards. Manila, the capital of the Philippines, sits on Manila Bay, one of the best deep-water ports in the Pacific Ocean, and it was, for the Japanese, a perfect resupply point for their planned conquest of the southern Pacific. After the initial air attacks, 43,000 men of the Imperial Japanese 14th Army went ashore on December 22 at two points on the main Philippine island of Luzon. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of all Allied forces in the Pacific, cabled Washington, D.C., that he was ready to repel this main invasion force with 130,000 troops of his own. The Road to Bataan and Corregidor Begins with Miscalculation For whatever reason, MacArthur's claim that many troops were in error. In fact, his force consisted of tens of thousands of ill-trained and ill-equipped...

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Cold War – Operation Urgent Fury

Cold War – Operation Urgent Fury

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In late October 1983, the Caribbean went hot; much hotter than usual. Grenada, a postcard island with beaches, nutmeg fields, and a strategic runway under construction, had just spiraled into chaos. A Marxist government split, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was executed by hardliners, and a Revolutionary Military Council seized power.  Operation Urgent Fury Unfolded Amid Chaos in Grenada Nearby governments understandably panicked. Washington, worried about the hundreds of American medical students on the island and the runway's potential value to Soviet-aligned Cuba. On October 25, President Ronald Reagan sent in the troops.  The operation had a bold name—Urgent Fury—and a simple brief: rescue the students, stabilize the island, and restore legitimate authority. Simple on paper. In practice, it would expose the fractures inside America's joint war machine and force a generational fix. The opening act fell to Special Operations units and the Marines. Navy SEALs attempted...

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