On 14 November 1965 helicopters set down Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, in a clearing called Landing Zone X-Ray at the foot of the Chu Pong massif, in the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam's Central Highlands. The Americans had landed almost on top of a North Vietnamese division. The fight at X-Ray lasted three days, and on 17 November another battalion was ambushed on the march to a clearing called Albany. It was the first major battle between U.S. forces and the regular North Vietnamese Army.
Into the valley
The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), newly arrived in Vietnam, moved its infantry by helicopter. The war correspondent Joseph L. Galloway, who covered the battle on the ground, describes the valley as an enemy sanctuary that no French, South Vietnamese or American force had yet entered, some 37 miles from the provincial capital of Pleiku and close to the Cambodian border. Moore was ordered to take his roughly 450-man battalion into the valley on a search-and-destroy mission.1
He had only 16 Huey helicopters, so the first lift put just 90 men on the ground, alone for half an hour or more while the aircraft flew back for the rest. Then the troopers caught a frightened North Vietnamese soldier who told them through an interpreter that two regiments were on the mountain, eager to kill Americans. Galloway writes that in fact three North Vietnamese regiments, the equivalent of a division, were within easy reach of the clearing.2
Three days at X-Ray
Within an hour of the landing the battle was joined, and it lasted three days and two nights. The North Vietnamese commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyễn Hữu An, told Galloway in Hanoi in 1991 that his tactic was to hug the Americans by the belt buckle, closing so tight that U.S. artillery and air power could not be used without hitting American troops. The perimeter held, with massive artillery and air support, and for the first time B-52 bombers were used in direct support of troops on the ground, striking the slopes of Chu Pong. When the North Vietnamese pulled back, they left a ring of their dead around the American position.3
Ambush at Albany
On 16 November Moore's battalion was lifted out. The next morning the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, marched out toward a clearing called LZ Albany, believing, as one of its officers later recalled, that it was making an administrative move out of the way of the B-52 strikes. Strung out along some 550 yards of trail in tall elephant grass and thick jungle, with its company commanders called forward to the head of the column, it walked into an ambush by fresh North Vietnamese troops.4
The fighting broke down into hand-to-hand combat. Galloway counts 155 men of McDade's battalion killed and 120 wounded in six hours, and the U.S. Army's own account names 155 troopers of the battalion killed at Albany. In all, Galloway puts American losses in the four days at X-Ray and Albany at 234 killed and more than 250 wounded, and cites an estimate of 3,561 North Vietnamese killed in the whole 34-day campaign, a figure that comes from American counts.5
What Washington took from it
Galloway writes that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, sent to Vietnam after the battle, warned President Johnson in a memo of 30 November that the enemy had matched the American escalation and that more troops would bring only a stalemate at a higher level of violence. In Saigon, General William Westmoreland's staff read the Ia Drang figures as a kill ratio of about twelve to one and adopted a strategy of attrition. Moore's book We Were Soldiers Once... and Young and its film made X-Ray famous. The whole battle is told in our article on the Battle of Ia Drang.6
Also on this day
- 1659: Battle of Nyborg. Danish, Brandenburg and Polish troops, backed by Michiel de Ruyter's Dutch fleet, attacked the Swedish army of Philip of Sulzbach on Funen in the Dano-Swedish War of 1658-1660.
