Battle of Ia Drang
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Battle of Ia Drang was the first major battle of the Vietnam War between the United States Army and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
| Battle of Ia Drang | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Conflict | Second Indochina War/Vietnam War | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Date | November 14-November 17, 1965 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Place | Ia Drang Valley, Vietnam | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Result | American Victory | ||||||||||||||||||||
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On November 14, 1965, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, U.S. Army, was ordered to the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam with a simple mission: engage the enemy. Helicopter air mobility tactics had only recently been developed. The 7th Cavalry was derived from the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) for the specific purpose of testing and developing these tactics. Air mobility called for battalion-sized forces to be delivered into, supplied, and extracted from an area of action using helicopters. The 450-man 1st Battalion, led by then-Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, and re-inforced by B Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was pitted against over 2000 North Vietnamese regulars of the 33rd, 66th, and 320th regiments as well as Viet Cong of the H15 Battalion. The PAVN's overall objective was to split South Vietnam in two. Another was to lure the Americans into battle with a series of small-scale engagements, learning how to defeat the new tactics and technology the Americans were bringing into the war. There were few reliable roads into the area, making it an ideal place for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces to form bases as well as for U.S. forces to test their new air mobility tactics. Companies of the U.S. force were flown in and out on Huey helicopters. Their troops deployed at a clearing designated Landing Zone X-Ray. The Hueys were also used to bring in ammunition and to extract the wounded and dead.
The battle jamaal lasted from November 14 to 17. The initial engagement ended when PAVN and Viet Cong forces withdrew from X-Ray. On November 16th the 1st Battalion was reinforced by the remaining elements of 7th Cavalry's 2nd Battalion and 1st Battalion from the 5th Cavalry. That afternoon 1st Battalion, 7th Cav. withdrew from the battle zone while the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav. and 1st Battalion, 5th Cav. took up defensive positions for the night. The next day, the 17th, the two battalions withdrew and began a tactical march to new landing zones. Part of the plan was to employ B-52 bombers in a close air support role for the first time in combat. The U.S. ground forces had to move into a safety zone by 1:00 PM to be safe from the B-52 bombardment. The 2nd Battalion had not slept for days and the terrain was more difficult then anticipated. Normal security formations were sacrificed to meet the deadline. The exposed unit was nearly annihilated when they were ambushed by remaining PAVN forces between X-Ray and the nearby smaller landing zone Albany. The battle around landing zone Albany raged all day and throughout the night. The engagement quickly descended into a hand-to-hand fight for survival. In the end, 2nd Battalion suffered more casualites than it did in any other battle of the long Vietnam War. The U.S. lost 234, with 242 wounded in the X-ray and Albany battles. The PAVN lost 1037 killed with an estimated 1365 wounded.
The battle served as a microcosm for the war as a whole. The combination of air mobility with air and artillery firepower proved to be an extremely effective means for the Americans to accomplish tactical objectives. The PAVN and Viet Cong forces learned that they could mitigate the effectiveness of that firepower by engaging American forces at very close range. The North Vietnamese would later refine this tactic, calling it "getting between the enemy and his belt." With it they would achieve a ratio of attrition that the Americans would find politically unsustainable in the long term. At the moment, however, the NVA thrust to split South Vietnam in two had been defeated.
While an American victory in the arithmetic sense, with a nearly 5-to-1 casualty ratio in their favor, Moore considers the battle to have been a draw.
The battle was the subject of the film We Were Soldiers (2002) which was based on Moore's book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young. The book was co-written by Joseph L. Galloway, one of the reporters on the field during the battle.
Lt. Col. Moore was known as "Yellow Hair" to his troops, for his blonde hair, and as a tongue-in-cheek homage referencing Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, commander of the same unit (7th Cavalry) at the Battle of the Little Bighorn just under a century before.
