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This battle summary is based on a research report written by BG John D. Howard. For the purposes of the summary, the full report is not shown. To view the full report please refer to the references page. The War We Came To Fight: A Study of the Battle of An Loc, April - June, 1972 Chapter 1
During the North Vietnamese Army's (NVA) Easter
Offensive in the spring of 1972, a "new face of war" emerged
in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN); unlike previous years, the war
evolved into a mild-intensity conflict replete with massed forces,
sophisticated weaponry, and massive firepower on both sides. At
no place was this more apparent than in Military Region (MR) III
where United States air power proved to be the decisive factor in
lifting the siege of the beleaguered province capital of An Loc.
During a three-month period commencing in April, the United States
Air Force (USAF) provided the Vietnamese garrison and its handful
of U.S. advisors with their major means of fire support, their primary
source of re-supply, and interdiction of enemy forces at the tactical
level. This triad of support not only broke the NVA's stranglehold
on the once-prosperous rubber plantation town but also destroyed
the better part of three divisions that would have been poised to
move on Saigon, some 90 kilometers to the south, had An Loc fallen.
The attack on An Loc was only one facet of General Vo Nguyen Glap's military strategy to gain Hanoi's long-sought political ends in RVN. Unlike the Tet attacks of 1968, Glap chose not to use Viet Cong (VC) insurgents as his main attack force or depend upon a peripheral strategy that necessitated a popular uprising in the south (2). Instead, he directed conventional attacks in MR I, II, and III involving the commitment of practically all North Vietnam's regular forces; these divisional-size elements, well-balanced in armor, infantry, and artillery were oriented toward the destruction of RVN's armed forces, trapping, if possible, the remaining U.S. personnel in the country. This would yield the additional benefit of discrediting the U.S. as an ally since an arrangement would probably be made to extract these troops. Apparently, the basis for the NVA action revolved around the assumption that "Vietnamization" was a failure and that the U.S. public was so adverse to continued involvement in the Vietnam War that President Nixon would be unable to react to bolster Thieu's government (3). The importance of the upcoming November Presidential elections as an additional constraint on U.S. decisionmakers was not lost on NOrth Vietnamese planners. A similar situation had existed in 1968, and although the NVA and the VC suffered a staggering military defeat, they won an incalcuable political...more |
