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87 CHAPTER SEVEN The Attack Grinds to a Halt On 11 February, for reasons that were inexplicable at the time, the main attack along Route 9 came to a halt. The South Vietnamese forces stopped their advance about five kilometers beyond FSB A Luoi as they continued to search for enemy weapons caches in their respective areas of operation. General Abrams and his advisers had expected a much more rapid thrust, but the ARVN were less concerned about speed and more worried about securing their flanks. The armor column waited for orders from General Lam, but there was nothing but silence from I Corps. In the absence of orders from their higher headquarters, the ARVN commanders along Route 9 demonstrated little initiative or inclination to move aggressively toward Tchepone. At that point the westward thrust lost all momentum. The pause in the attack along Route 9 gave the North Vietnamese an opportunity to move in additional reinforcements and provided the enemy “both time and opportunity to organize his reaction in a more effective way.”1 On 10 February the Department of Defense had released a report depicting the enemy threat in the immediate Lam Son 719 area of operations as approximately fifteen thousand combat troops and some ten thousand administrative and logistical personnel, for a total of twenty-five thousand troops. However, the report also included another forty thousand enemy combat and logistical personnel in other parts of the panhandle of Laos, raising the total number of enemy troops who could be brought to bear on the situation to over sixty-five thousand. This reflected an increase of thirty thousand troops over the last figures previously released on North Vietnamese strength in Laos.2 These intelligence reports were not far from wrong. By that time the North Vietnamese 70B Corps had the preponderance of three infantry divisions at its disposal in southern Laos, with two more on the way. This force included an artillery regiment Chapter 7 88 that employed guns ranging from 105 mm to 240 mm; it also had a tank regiment that included T-54 tanks and numerous other armored and wheeled vehicles. Each of the assigned divisions was given a specific area of operation. The 308th Division, the Iron Division of Dien Bien Phu fame, operated from Khe Sanh to the South Vietnamese–Laotian border and by mid-February had one regiment engaged, with others en route. The 304th Division had responsibility for the area from the border west to A Luoi, with the 24B Regiment and advance elements of the 66th and 9th Regiments. The 320th Division, with only the 64th Regiment assigned in mid-February, operated west of A Luoi. The 102nd Regiment (Reinforced) was located north of Route 925 opposite the ARVN Ranger positions. By then the bulk of B70 Corps was located north of Route 9 and oriented on the northern flank of the South Vietnamese forces. However, elements of the 2nd Division and rear service units opposed the 1st ARVN Division on the southern flank. Later in February, the 324th Division would move into the Laotian Salient and join with the 2nd Division and rear service units to keep the pressure on the 1st ARVN Division and the Vietnamese Marine brigades that would be inserted into the area.3 As part of the thickening North Vietnamese defenses along Route 9, the enemy rushed additional air defense assets to the area. Eventually, they established an extensive air defense umbrella , characterized by overlapping fires from 12.7-mm, 14.5-mm, 23-mm, 37-mm, 57-mm, and some 100-mm guns. The Lam Son area of operations was fairly small, roughly thirty-five by sixty kilometers, and given the characteristics of the area, which included only a limited number of landing zones and fairly constrained low-level flight routes, the North Vietnamese did not have to be too imaginative to place their antiaircraft guns in the most advantageous positions. Therefore, they triangulated all clearings and much of the high ground with antiaircraft weapons. Additionally, they preregistered their mortars and artillery to zero in on the potential LZs. This would result in a highly hazardous situation for the helicopter pilots ferrying troops and supplies in support of the I Corps plan and would ultimately have a disastrous impact on the outcome of the operation. Meanwhile, to keep up the pressure on the units in South Vietnam, the B5 Front, with the 31st and 27th Infantry Regiments , 84th and 38th Artillery Regiments...

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