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Being the typical geek engineer that I was back then, it
struck me that every attack we suffered (which usually
began about 0300 hours) started and stayed at the tree
line… out at the 300 meter point.
Charlie’s intentions
were clear and obvious: get our attention by massing men
along the 300 meter line, on one side of the site, and
lay down enough fire to keep our attention until their
Sappers on the other side of the site could
successfully penetrate our perimeter. At that time, if
enough havoc ensued from the Sapper attack, the line of
VC on our side of the site would move forward and try to
penetrate our perimeter, if at all possible. If and when
they did, they would then rush through the site, firing
at targets of opportunity until they came to the side
where the Sappers had entered, at which point they would
then exit and disappear into the forest, having done as
much damage as they could without being annihilated
themselves.
Variations of this tactic took place often. Sometimes
from the North, sometimes from two corners at the same
time, and sometimes from three or more sides. In effect,
it was a Viet Cong version of a hybrid of infiltration,
penetration and frontal attack. When they pulled it off,
it was a ballet of beauty. When the Sappers failed to
gain entrance to our site, the main enemy force stayed
out at the 300 meter line, plinking away at us to their
heart’s content until they tired of it and went home.
Watching this time after time, what
I couldn’t figure out was why they stayed at the 300
meter line? Was it because that’s where I and my
Infantry squad had left the tree line, or did they
settle in at the 300 meter point simply because they
knew we couldn’t hit anything out that far?
To find out,
and there from devise a better set of tactical plans our
site’s CO could use to defeat Charlie when he hit us, I
asked for and received permission to level our field of
fire out to 500+ meters along the most dangerous section
of our perimeter: the section I and my men defended.
Setting about with backpacks full of C-4 and DET
(detonation) cord, it took us about 3 weeks to fell the
trees from the 300 meter mark out to around 500 meters
from the perimeter of the site. With that done, we
sprayed the newly cleared area with Agent Orange, and
then sat back to wait and see what would happen when
Charlie hit us.
If you know of Agent Orange, then you
know it doesn’t do its magic over night. It normally
takes one or two seasons before the vegetation it is
used on dies, and another year or so before all of it
wastes away to the point that the ground is clear.
Either way, for our purposes we now had a good, solid
500 meter deep field of fire along the perimeter where
Charlie tended to congregate for his 0300 parties.
Sure as shootin’, the next
time Charlie came at us along this sector he advanced
through the 500 meter clear fire zone and on up to the
300 meter line, where he then took up his normal position and
held it. I was incredulous. It seemed that even though
the ground was clear for another 200 meters behind him,
he was still content to come up to the 300 meter mark
and set up shop.
Tracking the number of times this
happened, and talking to a few fellow Signal Officers
from other signal sites like Ghia Nghia and Pr’line
Mountain, I soon developed the opinion that the VC in
the Central Highlands area had been schooled in the fact
that the men who manned Signal Sites couldn’t hit
anything beyond 200 – 250 meters… and so digging in at
the 300 meter range and firing RPGs and mortars at us
all night was about all they had to do to create the
havoc they needed to draw our fire to one side of the
Signal Site, while their Sappers worked their way in
through the other.
So how could we stop this? For all
practical purposes there was no way we could stop
determined Sappers from coming through the fence,
Claymores or not. Similarly, we couldn’t exactly ignore
the fact that concentrated frontal fire was coming at us
from the opposite side of the site. This, plus when you
consider that for us to succeed in stopping the frontal
fire we had to pick out and hit a large number of what
appeared to my Signaleers-cum-infantry men as tiny
little moving spots out at 300 meters, where most of my
men couldn’t even focus, the whole thing seemed absurd
and un-doable. This was especially the case since out
where they were, at 300 meters, all they had to do was
aim for the general area of the Signal Site itself, fire
whatever they had, and they were bound to hit something.
I mean, if nothing else, sitting there as a concentrated
Signal Site with all manner of buildings, equipment,
generators, antenna towers, and people, we were a target
rich environment for them. Their job was considerably
easier than ours.
Over time I tracked these early
morning firefights, and found that fully 68% of the
fights took place with the enemy settling in along a
line that ran parallel to our perimeter… out at the 300
meter level. And with the exception of the Sappers
themselves, rarely, if ever, did Charlie come in any
closer. Lots of RPGs, lots of mortar work, but no
in-close fighting unless the Sappers hit what they came
for and our men, who normally would be busy mounting a frontal facing perimeter
defense, turned to chase down the Sappers roaming around
behind us.
Night after night I stewed over this issue.
Why was it that the Signal Corps sent men into the field
that couldn’t hit targets out to 300 meters. Did they
not have to qualify at that distance? What about 400
meters? The Infantry boys I commanded did… most of them
could hit targets out to 500 meters. Why not my men?
Eventually I came to understand that this wasn’t the
problem at all. Instead, it appeared that those above me knew something I did
not know. They knew that the enemy couldn’t hit us any
better than we could hit him. As far as they were
concerned, Vietnam was a 300 meter war, and that was
that. At that distance we both could throw rocks at each
other every day, all day long, and 99% of us would still
make it home for dinner. The only thing that changed
this scenario was artillery fire, which we on our side
quickly and happily called in on our friends out in the
bush, while they lobbed mortar after mortar at us, and
fired RPGs until they were blue in the face. Vietnam
being a 300 meter war, when it came to hitting forward
bases or Signal Sites, the real war fighters were the VC
Sappers that tried to work their way up to and through
our lines.
For me, there was something unsettling about
this. What I found disconcerting was the presumption—
doubtlessly by those above me—of an assumed set of
preconditions that set the framework for how this form
of “Signal Site under attack” combat would take
place. To wit: the enemy would engage and we would
respond. By virtue of the fact that a Signal Site was a
target rich environment the enemy would gain a little
bit of ground such that a few signal systems would be
blown up and a few communication links would be knocked
out of service. While all of this took place a few men
on both sides would be shot, until eventually the enemy
would feel it had accomplished its goal and disengage.
As to the damage the enemy left behind, with the
exception of our wounded and dead, because we had
logistical strength on our side, it would take little
more than an hour or so for us to bring up to speed new
UHF, microwave or whatever communication links were needed to bridge
those circuits lost during the firefight. All of this having been
accomplished, both life, death and the war would go on.
So for this young Second Lieutenant the problem at the
time wasn’t that my men couldn’t hit a barn door at 300
meters, the problem was something completely different.
From my earlier perspective I had come to believe that
what we were fighting on our signal sites was a 300
meter war, and that what our side needed to do was raise
the rifleman skills of our Signaleers such that they
could conduct effective long range fire. What I now came
to realize however was that the problem was much deeper.
The problem was that at Brigade level or higher a
decision had been made to let enemy engagements at the
Company Grade level—my level—those involving remote
fixed base Signal Sites, play themselves out. Some harm
might be done, but in the end whatever damage occurred
would—most of the time anyway—be minimal and
could be quickly fixed.
In other words, the combat
strategy decided upon for fixed Signal Sites seemed to be such that Company
Grade Officers in charge of remote sites were expected to
remain in place and defend the site, rather than
proactively go out and engage the enemy and destroy him.
Or put another way, our tactical plan for a site attack
was to play defense, not offense.
Just so that what I mean by "defense" is clear, I am not
talking about our having been left to our own devices to fight the
enemy without any ability to take the fight to him. For sure, we had everything at our disposal from
artillery that we could call in from miles away, to
gunships, “go fasts” and even naval fire. All of that
and more was at our—my—Company Grade level command to
bring down upon Charlie… sitting out there at 300
meters. But what we—I—did not have were the resources or
the authority I
needed to leave the site and engage the enemy on the ground and defeat him.
Why? Because
that was not the objective.
In a fixed base environment, like that of a Signal Site
on top of a hill, tactical responses to enemy actions
against the site took a different route than in a
non-fixed base environment. Thus, for example, if a
convoy of resupply vehicles and troops on their way up
to our Signal Site came under fire (as in fact
happened), then just about any Junior Grade Officer
could organize a team to go to their rescue, me
included. But when it came to defending the site against
a frontal attack, leaving the base to engage the enemy
in tactical ground combat was out of the question.
My task as a Company Grade
Officer fighting a battle at a remote site like Lang
Bien Mountain… far from my
Company’s headquarters back in Nha Trang… was to toss
rocks at the enemy until he went away. If in the process
I could scare him off and minimize my own losses, all
the better. If not, then the Army would pick up the
pieces after the battle was over, bring online a few of
the spare communication systems we held in reserve for
just such an event, and soldier on. What we would not do
however was close with the enemy by maneuver and destroy
him. To do that would have required a different set of
tactics, and a different manpower strength for both the
Signaleers and Infantry men that manned our and most
other sites…
different than what had been allocated to the 32 remote
Signal Sites that existed in Vietnam in 1962.
Let me say again, we are not saying here that the Signal
Corps or Company Grade Signaleers throughout Vietnam
were not authorized to and/or avoided closing with the
enemy. Tons of stories abound of circumstances where
they did just that. From the archives of Signal Corps
files we can provide example after example that make the
point that Signal men were in the thick of ground
fighting, and often took it to the enemy by initiating
and carrying out a proactive tactical response to his
presence. For instance, look at this one example:
a proactive engagement that took place at the base of
Lang Bien Mountain itself—the same mountain I'm talking
of—during the Tet Offensive. And to make the point even
more salient, two separate tactical engagements were
launched, by two different Company Grade Signal Officers:
"At Dalat, in the mountains of south central Vietnam,
signal-men of the 362d Signal Company and Company E, 43d
Signal Battalion, both attached to the 1st Signal
Brigade's 73d Signal Battalion, were in continuous
action from 1 through 6 February 1968. During the
afternoon of 1 February members of the 218th Military
Police Detachment were pinned down in their small
compound by fire from an estimated two platoons of Viet
Cong. Major William R. Crawford, the commander of 362d
Signal Company, upon learning of the plight of the
military policemen, immediately organized and led a
20-man rescue team. The small force of signal-men
engaged the enemy with individual weapon and grenade
fire, evacuated wounded military policemen, and laid
down a base of fire that enabled the uninjured soldiers
to withdraw. At the same time, inside Dalat, Captain
Donald J. Choy, the operations officer of the 362d, led
a heavily armed convoy to the Villa Alliance Missionary
Association compound, which was surrounded by Viet Cong.
The signalmen fought their way to the compound and
successfully evacuated the thirty-four occupants. All
told, the signal troops of the 362d Signal Company and
Company E, 43d Signal Battalion, rescued and provided
shelter for more than sixty non-combatants."[1]
Clearly, Signal men planned and engaged in tactical
ground battles, closed with the enemy, and destroyed him
whenever it made sense or seemed necessary. But not from
perfectly defensible Signal
Sites to the extent that Signal men left the site to
engage the enemy attacking it. In my
view, as a simple shave tail Second Lieutenant, this
unwritten rule said more about the Vietnam war than
anything one could imagine. What it said was that the
overall goal of the war was not to defeat the enemy by
doing everything one could, every time one could, to
destroy him, but instead the goal seemed to be to to
keep him at bay and unable to gain more influence in the
South until some mysterious political or other global event occured.
Whatever it was, on Lang Bien Mountain anyway, the goal
was certainly not to engage our enemy on the ground and defeat
him every time he popped his head up.
So what was going on?
Why such a milquetoast approach to ground combat from
fixed base Signal Sites? Did this feed into a larger
theater of war plan? Was the goal to keep the pressure
on the NVA with search and destroy missions from
Infantry units, while us fixed base folk were told to
just sit there, defend ourselves, and not make any
noise? Was the goal to wear down and tire the VC and NVA,
ultimately lowering their
expectations until they gave up and went
back North, from whence they came? Was the goal to wait
until the South got strong enough to fight its own war,
without us? Was the goal to wait for Henry Kissinger to
declare in his basso profundo voice that he had
brought peace to the world, while golden rays of
sunlight streamed down from the heavens above and
violins played in the background? Whatever
it was, it sure didn't include Company
Grade Officers like me launching a full on press from a
Signal Site, to destroy the SOBs shooting at
us.
Dramatics aside, I do not want to paint too bleak a
picture... but the strangeness of our not acting to
engage the enemy more aggressively and directly does
raise the question: what kind of war
strategy was this? To let the enemy live for another
day? To let him engage with you when he wanted, but
leave you penned up in your little fire base or Signal
Site, acting all heroic by running around firing mortars
and M-14s out at him somewhere along the 300 meter line,
but otherwise knowing deep down inside that there was no
way in hell you were going to stop him from walking away
intact, and coming back another day? What kind of war
was this?
Anyone that knows anything about war strategy knows that
winning a war requires three interlocking pieces: an
effective strategy, sitting atop of an effective
operational plan, designed to achieve tactical goals.
When we faced Charlie on our signal site, we had none of
these, except, again, that of calling in fire support from afar
and hoping for the best.
Am I saying that by being discouraged from going after
the enemy our commander's combat tactics and intent were
lacking? Yes, because at the very least it seemed to
this Officer that the goal of war... even at my level...
should have been to destroy the enemy. Destroying the enemy is the fundamental strategy that
underlies any war, isn't it? When Eisenhower got his orders from
the Combined Chiefs in WWII they were simple and to the
point: “enter the continent of Europe and, in
conjunction with other Allied nations, undertake
operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the
destruction of her armed forces.”
What were the orders
that the Infantry Captain that ran our Signal Site held?
Did they contain the phrase destroy the enemy and her
armed forces? Likely not… they probably contained little
more than “protect the Signal boys running the equipment
on your site.”
The fact is, we were not manned to close
with and destroy our enemy by fire and maneuver, so even
if our Signal Site's CO wanted to he could not have.
Instead, all we were able to do was work to keep our Signal equipment
humming, and if we came under attack engage the enemy in
a long distance fire fight, calling in air strikes and
artillery until he tired of the game and went home. In
other words, let him live for another day… another day
of shooting at my men and trying to kill them.
I'll say it again, and then I'll let the issue rest: to me this
one example of just one remote Signal Site speaks
volumes about the underlying problems of the entire
Vietnam War. The objective seems never to have been to close with the
enemy and destroy him.
Taking On The Enemy
As to how a remote site like ours
could, when we came under attack, have easily closed
with the enemy and destroyed him, remember that tactics
work both ways. For us, the tactical choice of
maneuvering warfare… via small fire teams and/or squad
or platoon level actions, to say nothing of a site level
engagement, while it did not exist, could have done the
job if someone had allowed it to exist and ordered it.
But allowing such a scenario to exist just wasn’t in the
cards. Stopping this from happening were a number of
factors, including the reality that the Army seemed from
a tactical level to treat forward operating bases and Signal Sites as some
sort of strange appendage where, because of the number
and type of differing services (Signals, Engineers,
Infantry, MPs...) that inhabited them,
unified command ceased to exist.
Let’s look at my
situation up on Lang Bien Mountain:
My own Company HQ
was light years away from where I was. It was in Nha Trang. I, on the other
hand, was up on Lang Bien Mountain, outside of Dalat.
For me, as a matter of routine, to undertake a tactical maneuver
whenever I felt it necessary, by leading a
squad of men to press the enemy in a, say, envelopment action, would have
required both my CO’s permission back in Nha Trang as
well as that of the Captain running the site I was on.
From my CO’s
perspective (518th Signal Company), what he expected out
of me in any engagement was "the normal routine." As
such, when we
came under attack I was to send an urgent
message back to the Operations Room in Nha Trang and let
them know our Signal Site was under attack. There the OD
would send a runner over to the CO's BOQ, about 15 minutes away
by Jeep.
That runner would then rouse the CO from his bed, drive him by Jeep
back to
Company HQ, order a cup of coffee for him, and settle
him into a chair next to a squawking, static driven
radio… to listen frantically until the sun came up for
me to call in updates.
If I had asked him for permission to engage with the
enemy via, for example, a squad level envelopment movement, he would have gone apoplectic… as
that probably would have required him to get the Battalion
Commander (459th Signal Battalion) out of bed too… by
sending someone down to the Duy Tan Hotel in downtown
Nha Trang to bang on his door and also rouse him from his
sleep. All for what? A Second
Lieutenant that wanted to mount a squad rush around the
flanks of the VC attacking a Signal Site populated with
an Infantry Captain commanding it, and two more Signal
Officers too boot? A Second
Lieutenant whose day job was keeping AN/TRC-24 VHF gear
running?
Ah me… it
brings a smile to my face even today… the idea that if I
had been a little bit more proactive I could have had all
of that brass running around in Nha Trang at 0300 hours,
trying to figure out what the hell to do with some
junior Company Grade Officer asking for permission to
leave his Signal Site and engage the enemy. A
Signal Officer at that.
Harrumph. Not on my watch they
would have said.
Humor aside, the truth be told, there
was nothing my CO could do to change the situation I was
in. Too many people would have had to coordinate with
each other and agree to let me go forward to allow such
a thing to happen. Additional trained men would have
had to be assigned to our Signal Site… men with the
capacity to perform this kind of operation… and all of
this would have had to be set up in advance… for every
Signal Site in-country. And if all of this could come to
pass, then the whole operation—or more
correctly—capability to mount such an operation—would
have had to come under the command of the Infantry
Captain that commanded our site, not some shave tail
Second Lieutenant fresh out of Signal OCS.
Still, it
makes one wonder: why wasn’t this most simple of
tactical capabilities provided to the FOBs and Signal
Sites that peppered Vietnam? A small team of soldiers capable
of mounting a squad rush or distributed operation, based
on a small unit development
of enfilading fire. If I could see the need for it,
surely someone else above me must have too. Was this really
what the Vietnam War was all about? Company grade
tactics that avoided engaging with the enemy in all
cases except where crossed rifles sat on your collar, or
something like the Tet Offensive was in play?
If you were in any branch other than the Infantry, was
the idea that you were simply not supposed to engage the
enemy… instead, your lot in life was to go into
defensive mode and tolerate him until he went away or
someone came to your rescue? Again... I’m not suggesting that
fights with the enemy were ever avoided in Vietnam, or
that all possible was not done to kill him when the
opportunity presented itself… what I’m
talking about is the absence of planned offensive
actions when a FOB or Signal Site came under attack.
Yes, we did our share of search and clear missions to
keep the area surrounding our Signal Site empty of
Charlie. But those maneuvers were planned in advance,
held during times of non-conflict, and had nothing to do
with an 0300 firefight.
At the risk of boring you, allow me to belabor the point
one more time: why did we not have offensive
tactics planned to counter each and every form of attack
Charlie might level at us… especially at night? If I, a
fresh Second Lieutenant, could see the facts relating to
how Charlie placed his men at the 300 meter line, how
they maneuvered, when they would attack and when they
would hold back, then surely others did too. Regardless
of how you look at it, our goal should have been to do
more than just keep our Signal gear humming. It should
have been to close with the enemy, by chasing the
bastards
until we trapped and annihilated them.
What we should
have had at our disposal was the manpower needed to use
any of the five forms of maneuver that are most commonly
used to fight small scale engagements.[2] Considering that
most of the men on Signal Sites back then were, well,
Signal Corps men, clearly what was needed was to train
Signaleers (and their Officers) as much like Infantry
men as Signal men. If you think that’s self defeating,
consider then the simple fact that the bulk of the
fighting done on Signal Sites was done by Signal men
anyway.
Why? Simply because there were more of us on those
Signal Sites than the Infantry boys they sent to keep us
out of trouble. Unfortunately, the Signal men I
commanded were neither trained for small scale offensive
tactical engagements, nor was I… not for the kind of
basic tactical engagements of the type we would have
needed to mount to not just drive the enemy away, but
destroy him in the process.
We could have folks… that’s all I am saying here. When
he came at us, we could have engaged and
destroyed him.
Let me close this by
demonstrating how easy it would have been from the
perspective of a Signal Site on top of a mountain in
Vietnam to close with the enemy and, if not destroy him,
make him think twice before he came back again.
Let's take Lang Bien Mountain, and let's look more
closely at the relatively simple envelopment movement
and how it could have been applied along the perimeter
that Charlie was most fond of attacking us from.
Generally speaking, along the perimeter shown in the
pictures in Views
#1 – #3 we had between 300 and 500 meters of a
cleared field of fire. From the "first line of
defense" (see above picture) it would have been relatively easy
for the Signal men in the trenches along this perimeter to keep Charlie engaged—conducting a shaping
operation if you will—while a small squad of 8 to 12 men
worked their way through a pre-planned spot in the
perimeter fence until they could take Charlie on from
the side, or better still, in the rear, where the
command and control for both his frontal assault and his
Sappers took place. You can see a scenario such as this
in Views #1 and #2. View #1 shows where the
Signal men that normally ran the site would set up shop
when the site came under attack, along what we called the
first line of defense. If
you look back from the position of the guard dog pen
shown in View #1,
what you would see is shown in View #2.
The tree line center-left in View #2(delineated by
the relatively flat upper portion of the red,
heavy dotted line) is in an area just to the left (as
you look at the picture) of the entrance to the site.
It lies at the far edge of the free fire zone we had
cleared (foreground of picture), and would have made
an ideal path along which our men could have made a
concealed exit from the Signal Site, to work their way
back towards the VC, who would have been lined up along
the 300 meter line just off of the bottom left side of
the picture. Note that while the picture does not
show it, in mounting such an envelopment action the
men would have been able to keep themselves concealed in the brush
and tree line that lay along their path, again, just off to the left side of the
View #2 picture, until they had Charlie in a position to
pour enfilading fire on him.
Considering that a Signal Site
such as the one shown here, perched on top of a hill,
provides an ideal line of entrenchment from which a
shaping operation can be maintained, while fire support
from local artillery or gun ships could, in our
hypothetical situation, have been called in to
contribute to that shaping operation, having a dozen or
so men trained and ready to slip through the wire to
engage the enemy in an envelopment action from the side
would have been extremely
effective. This is
especially the case considering that, as earlier stated, we were the ones exercising control over the
clearing of the field of battle in the first place. That
is, with a little fore thought on our part we could have structured
the tree line in front of our perimeter to allow us to
conduct an envelopment action designed to target the very
spot that Charlie came back to occupy, time after time,
night after night.
In other words, since we were the ones cutting down the
trees and clearing the field, we could easily have
shaped its size and layout so that during an attack we
could mount a squad rush and move a team of our Signal men, undetected,
to envelope Charlie’s line.
A basic form of small scale tactical engagement,
envelopment movements like this are designed to seize
objectives to the rear of an enemy, so that the enemy
can then be destroyed in his then current position. As
most of our readers know, envelopments avoid the enemy’s
front, where he is protected and can easily concentrate
fire. Single envelopments maneuver against one enemy
flank; double envelopments maneuver against both. Either
variant can develop into an encirclement. If, as in our
hypothetical case, Sappers were pressing at one point
along our perimeter, while Charlie was keeping up a hot
field of fire at another to take our attention away from
the Sappers, we could have run a double envelopment…
allowing the Sappers to breach the perimeter and funnel
their way into a trap where we could have then taken
them on from the side, while at the same time a squad of
Signal men could have taken to the field to envelop the
area where Charlie had mounted his frontal attack.
- - - - -
Sitting back in a defensive position, squatting
down inside a line of trenches, and hoping and praying
that the Sappers to your rear do not overrun you while
you wait for the artillery and gunships to drive the
enemy from in front of you is no way to fight a war.
Small battle tactics have been known for centuries.
Given the right training, the Signal men I saw in
Vietnam
were fully capable of mounting any of the five basic
tactical forms… if only we had been given enough manpower… and
the authority… to do so.
Fifty years removed from that
war, I am now of the opinion that the Vietnam War was
lost because starting at Corps level and going up, right
up to and including the Joint Chiefs, DOD and White
House, the tough decision to engage with and destroy the
enemy every time the opportunity presented itself was never made. It wasn’t made on the Signal Site
I sat on, it seems not to have been made by either Westmoreland or
Abrams when they sat in Saigon
and approved operational plans
for services like the Signal
Corps, and it wasn’t made in the
White House, by any of the Presidents that led that war,
a war in which an
order could readily have been given to destroy North
Vietnam’s capacity to wage war. An order only slightly
different from the one
Eisenhower received, but with
the same import. An order,
perhaps, worded like this:
“enter
the region known as Vietnam and, in conjunction with other
Allied nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart
of Hanoi and the destruction of her armed forces.”
(emphasis added)
To me it appears that
order was never given. The Vietnam War was not lost, it
was given away.
Thank You
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Footnotes:
[1]Quotation from PART THREE
COMMUNICATIONS MATURE AND MOVE TOWARD VIETNAMIZATION,
1968-1970, CHAPTER IX U.S. Army Signal Troops and Tet:
1968 Hanoi Changes Strategy; Page 109.
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[2] For those of you who have forgotten, there are 5
basic forms of battle tactics:
1) Envelopment: The
envelopment is a form of maneuver in which an attacking
force seeks to avoid the principal enemy defenses by seizing
objectives to the enemy rear to destroy the enemy in his
current positions. Generally envelopments avoid the enemy
front, where he is protected and can easily concentrate
fires. Single envelopments maneuver against one enemy flank;
double envelopments maneuver against both. Either variant
can develop into an encirclement.
2) Turning
Movement: A turning movement is a form of maneuver in
which the attacking force seeks to avoid the enemy's
principal defensive positions by seizing objectives to the
enemy rear and causing the enemy to move out of his current
positions or divert major forces to meet the threat. A major
threat to his rear forces the enemy to attack or withdraw
rearward, thus "turning" him out of his defensive positions.
Turning movements typically require greater depth than other
forms of maneuver. The most famous example of a turning
movement is the Inchon landing of the Korean War.
3)
Infiltration: An infiltration is a form of maneuver in
which an attacking force conducts undetected movement
through or into an area occupied by enemy forces to occupy a
position of advantage in the enemy rear while exposing only
small elements to enemy defensive fire. Typically, forces
infiltrate in small groups and reassemble to continue their
mission. Infiltration rarely defeats a defense by itself.
Commanders direct infiltrations to attack lightly defended
positions or stronger positions from the flank and rear, to
secure key terrain to support the decisive operation, or to
disrupt enemy sustaining operations. In the case of the VC,
Sappers would infiltrate Signal Sites, usually in
coordination with a frontal attack, using the time gained to
destroy communications equipment, towers and the like.
4) Penetration:
A penetration is a form of maneuver in which an attacking
force seeks to rupture enemy defenses on a narrow front to
disrupt the defensive system. Commanders direct penetrations
when enemy flanks are not assailable or time does not permit
another form of maneuver. Successful penetrations create
assailable flanks and provide access to enemy rear areas.
Because penetrations frequently are directed into the front
of the enemy defense, they risk significantly more friendly
casualties than envelopments, turning movements, and
infiltrations. One of the most famous examples of a
penetrating movement was Sherman’s Meridian Campaign and his
March to the Sea.
5) Frontal
Attack: The frontal attack is arguably the most costly
form of maneuver, since it exposes the majority of the
attackers to the concentrated fires of the defenders. As the
most direct form of maneuver, however, the frontal attack is
useful for overwhelming light defenses, covering forces, or
disorganized enemy resistance. It is often the best form of
maneuver for hasty attacks and meeting engagements, where
speed and simplicity are essential to maintain tempo and the
initiative. Commanders may direct a frontal attack as a
shaping operation and another form of maneuver as the
decisive operation. Perhaps the most famous example of a
front attack... one that failed... is The Charge of the
Light Brigade in the Crimean War.
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Additional Sources:
Information on tactical forms of battle
extracted from General Military
Strategic, Doctrinal, Operational, and
Leadership Concepts. The document
lists no author to whom we can give
credit.
Photos of Lang Bien Mountain courtesy
author's collection, as well as:
• Sp4 Dennis Ferguson; photo
obtained online
• E Company, 43rd Signal
Battalion; photo obtained online
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