In the early hours of 21 November 1970, 56 US Army Special Forces soldiers landed by helicopter at the Son Tay prisoner of war camp, west of Hanoi, to rescue the Americans believed to be held there. The raid, known as Operation Ivory Coast in planning and Operation Kingpin when it was carried out, surprised the North Vietnamese completely and brought every raider home. But the camp was empty: the prisoners had been moved in the summer.
Months of planning
In May 1970 US Air Force photo interpreters noticed a new wall and guard tower at a compound near Son Tay on the Song Con River, and intelligence came to believe that dozens of American prisoners were held there. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved planning for a raid in July. Air Force Brigadier General LeRoy Manor was named mission commander and Army Colonel Arthur D. "Bull" Simons his deputy, who would lead the raiders on the ground. The raiders trained at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on a full-size mock-up of the camp, with a detailed scale model for study.1
The force moved to Thailand in mid-November, and President Richard Nixon gave his final approval on 18 November. Air & Space Forces Magazine relates that the raid was planned for the night of 21 November but brought forward 24 hours because a typhoon threatened the weather over North Vietnam. From the hundred soldiers who had deployed, Simons picked 56 for the assault.2
Twenty-nine minutes on the ground
The helicopters and their escorts took off from bases in Thailand late on 20 November; in all, 116 aircraft from seven air bases and three aircraft carriers took part, including Navy diversion flights. At 2:18 a.m. a lead MC-130 dropped flares over the camp, a helicopter gunship shot up the guard towers, and a smaller HH-3 helicopter crash-landed on purpose inside the prison courtyard with the assault team.3
The helicopter carrying Simons landed by mistake about 400 meters to the south, beside a compound marked on the maps as a school. It held a large number of enemy troops, and the raiders attacked them before flying on to the prison; David Isby, writing for Defense Media Network, says more than 40 of them were killed and one raider was wounded. Correll judges the mistake extremely fortunate, since those troops might otherwise have caught the raiders at the prison by surprise. Inside the prison, the search found no one, and the team radioed the code words "negative items". The raiders were on the ground for 29 minutes and were back in Thailand before dawn. An F-105 escort hit by a missile went down over Laos, and its crew was rescued; Correll puts the other American casualties at a broken ankle and one minor bullet wound.4
An empty camp
The prisoners had been taken out of Son Tay in July, while the raid was still being planned; Isby writes that most were moved on 24 July and the rest over the following two months. The raid failed in its purpose, and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced on 23 November that the camp had recently been vacated. According to Manor, quoted by Air & Space Forces Magazine, the North Vietnamese afterward gathered prisoners from outlying camps into two prisons in Hanoi, where they could live in groups instead of solitary confinement, and their morale improved.5
