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Introduction
- University of North Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction While searching for a title for this book, I was inspired by Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place, in which the late Vietnam historian described in dramatic detail the fifty-five-day horrors at the French camp retranché of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Little did the author know that eighteen years after the French’s humiliating defeat at that small place near the Laotian border, a small plantation town near the Cambodian border was to bear the brunt of a longer and more brutal onslaught and prevail. The title to this book is also borrowed in part from the article “The Battle That Saved Saigon” by Philip C. Clarke (Reader’s Digest , March 1973). Its introduction reads: Three days before Easter last spring, the North Vietnamese struck South Vietnam with a fury unknown to the Vietnam war since the Tet offensive four years earlier. They poured south across the DMZ, smashed into the central highland from Laos, crossed the border from Cambodia and, with an army of 36,000 men and 100 Russian-made tanks, raced toward Saigon, boasting that they’d be in the city by May 19, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. From one end of the country to the other, bases and villages fell before the savagery of their onslaught. By April 5, all that blocked them from Saigon was a ragtag band of 6,800 South Vietnamese regulars and militiamen and a handful of American 2 Introduction advisors holed up in Anloc, a once-prosperous rubber-plantation town of 15,000 astride Highway 13, which led to the capital, 60 miles to the south. Here is the story of the communists’ thunderous assault on Anloc—and of the resistance that was to change the course of the war and made peace a possibility.1 The South Vietnamese army had indeed won a decisive victory against overwhelming odds. According to Maj. Gen. James F. Hollingsworth , Senior Advisor to ARVN III Corps, “The real credit goes to the little ARVN soldier. He is just tremendous, just magnificent . He stood in there, took all that fire and gave it back.”2 Special credit should also be given to the American advisors who fought valiantly alongside their counterparts and, more importantly , provided effective air support and coordinated resupply and medevac operations for the beleaguered garrison. Their mere presence constituted a tremendous boost to the morale of ARVN troops because it embodied the U.S. commitment to support South Vietnam in these darkest hours of its history. Recently, a retired U.S. Army officer requested my autograph for my book The Twenty-Five Year Century.3 He also said he was an advisor to an ARVN unit defending An Loc. I told that officer that, if I could borrow from Napoleon’s famous address to his victorious army at Austerlitz, I would tell him he is a brave man. An Loc, indeed, had become the symbol of the determination of the South Vietnamese Army and its people to stand at all costs in face of the enemy. A depleted army, outnumbered and outgunned, stood its ground and fought to the end and succeeded, against all expectations, in beating back furious assaults from three NVA divisions , supported by artillery and armored regiments, during three months of savage fighting. General Paul Vanuxem, a French veteran of the Indochina War, called An Loc “the Verdun of Viet Nam.” Sir Robert Thompson, special advisor to President Nixon, considered An Loc the greatest military victory of the Free World against Communism in the post-World War II era. Yet, this victory was largely unreported in the U.S. media, which had effectively lost interest in the war after the disengagement of U.S. forces following the Vietnamization of [44.200.27.175] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:50 GMT) 3 Introduction the conflict. With the exception of Trial by Fire—The 1972 Easter Offensive—America’s Last Vietnam Battle (Hippocrene Books, 1995) by Dale Andradé and The Battle of An Loc (Indiana University Press, 2005) by James H. Willbanks, very little in the U.S. literature on the Vietnam conflict has been written about this epic battle. Further, while the above two books provided a wealth of details about the use of U.S. airpower and the role of the U.S. advisors , they didn’t provide equal coverage to the activities and performance of ARVN units participating in the siege. This behavior may be a reflection of what...