Repost 2015: The War We Came To Fight: A Study of the Battle of An Loc, April – June, 1972

  

Dead Commie tanks, courteous of  M72 LAWs.

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.

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