On 2 January 1963 South Vietnamese troops, carried by American helicopters and supported by armored personnel carriers and artillery, attacked a Viet Cong force near the hamlet of Ap Bac in the Mekong Delta. The guerrillas were badly outnumbered, but they held their ground all day, shot down five helicopters and slipped away after dark. The battle was small, yet it shook American confidence in the South Vietnamese army and in the official optimism about the war.
The plan
In 1963 American soldiers in South Vietnam served as advisers and helicopter crews, not as combat units. The operation at Ap Bac belonged to the 7th Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), in Dinh Tuong Province in the Mekong Delta. Its American adviser, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, followed the battle from a light spotter plane overhead.1
South Vietnamese intelligence reported a small Viet Cong force near Ap Bac. The ARVN plan sent an infantry battalion in by helicopter, two Civil Guard battalions on foot and a company of M113 armored personnel carriers, with a parachute battalion held in reserve. The historian Charles E. Kirkpatrick writes that intelligence expected about 100 men. In fact more than 300 Viet Cong of the 261st and 514th Battalions were waiting in prepared positions.2
A day of failures
The Civil Guard companies were pinned down early in the morning. When the helicopters brought in reinforcements, they came under heavy fire as they landed. Kirkpatrick counts three H-21 transports and one of the escorting UH-1 gunships shot down within five minutes, and he writes that every H-21 and all but one of the UH-1s were hit. In all five helicopters were lost.3
The M113s were ordered forward to rescue the trapped troops, but they were slow to arrive and were held up at the canals. The Viet Cong concentrated their fire on the leading vehicles and killed the exposed gunners one after another, and the armored attack broke off. The parachute battalion was held back until late afternoon by Brigadier General Huynh Van Cao, the commander of IV Corps, and was then dropped on the west side of the position instead of the east, where Vann wanted it, so it could not seal the line of retreat. After nightfall the Viet Cong withdrew, and by morning the hamlet was empty.4
The cost
Three Americans were killed and eight wounded. Kirkpatrick writes of about 80 South Vietnamese killed and more than 100 wounded. A Military History review of Max Hastings, published on HistoryNet, gives 191 South Vietnamese and American casualties against a Viet Cong loss of 57. All of these figures are estimates.5
Victory or defeat?
General Paul Harkins, the American commander in Saigon, described Ap Bac as a South Vietnamese success because the enemy had left the field. Kirkpatrick notes that Harkins relied on Cao's briefing and did not visit the battlefield. Vann and the reporters who had seen the battle disagreed. David Halberstam of The New York Times, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press and Neil Sheehan heard Vann's blunt account of the failures, and their reports reached American readers.6
For the Viet Cong it was the first time they had stood and fought a large ARVN force, supported by helicopters and armor, and held their position. Kirkpatrick calls the battle one of the turning points of the war, because it led many Americans to doubt that the South Vietnamese could win on their own. Two years later American combat troops were fighting in Vietnam themselves, as at Ia Drang in 1965.7
