Nevertheless, the enemy can be expected to enlarge his present strength of 110 battalion equivalents to more than 150 battalion equivalents by the end of calendar 1966, when hopefully his losses can be made to equal his input….To meet this possible—and in my view likely—Communist build-up, the presently contemplated Phase I forces will not be enough. In the attack, Lieutenant Walter Marm earned the Medal of Honor when he single-handedly captured an enemy machine gun position (
By 3:20 PM, the last of the battalion arrived and Moore established a 360-degree perimeter around X-Ray.
The enemy column—men of the newly arriving 8th Battalion of the 66th Regiment—stopped 120 yards short of the ambush and took a break. Though under heavy pressure, Savage's men turned these back. November 1965 was the deadliest month yet for the Americans, with 545 killed.The North Vietnamese regulars, young men who had been drafted into the military much as the young American men had been, had paid a much higher price to test the newcomers to an old fight: an estimated 3,561 of them had been killed, and thousands more wounded, in the 34-day Ia Drang campaign.What happened when the American cavalrymen and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) collided head-on in the Ia Drang had military and civilian leaders in Washington, Saigon and Hanoi scrambling to assess what it meant, and what had been learned.Both sides understood that the war had changed suddenly and dramatically in those few days. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. With that, the United States ceded the strategic initiative for much of the rest of the war to General Giap. Another 71 Americans had been killed in earlier, smaller skirmishes that led up to the Ia Drang battles.To that point, some 1,100 Americans in total had died in the United States’ slow-growing but ever-deepening involvement in South Vietnam, most of them by twos and threes in a war where Americans were advisers to the South Vietnamese battalions fighting Viet Cong guerrillas. That afternoon Moore's command departed the field. To many, this marks the beginning of the U.S.’s Vietnam War in the days of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ordered troop build-up. Following a failed North Vietnamese attack on the Special Forces camp at Plei Me in October, the commander of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, Colonel Thomas Brown, was instructed to move from Pleiku to seek and destroy the enemy. In fact, there were three North Vietnamese Army regiments within an easy walk of that clearing, or the equivalent of a division of very good light infantry soldiers.Two of those enemy regiments had already been busy since arriving in the Central Highlands.
Telegrams were thus dispatched via taxi cab driver to families, informing them of their loss. Stockton, an Army brat who had grown up in horse cavalry posts all across the West, had resurrected black cavalry Stetson hats for his men and smuggled the 9th Cav’s mascot Maggie the mule aboard ship and 8,000 miles to Vietnam in defiance of another of Dick Knowles’ orders.
For his actions in leading the defense of X-Ray, Moore was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Pilots Major Bruce Crandall and Captain Ed Freeman were later (2007) awarded the One of those soldiers wrote of marching south in 1965 with a battalion of some 400 men. The Battle of Ia Drang was fought November 14-18, 1965, during the The three-day battle resulted in 834 North Vietnamese soldiers confirmed killed, and another 1,000 communist casualties were assumed.In a related action during the same battle, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ambushed by North Vietnamese forces as it moved overland to Landing Zone Albany. Danielsen’s men joined the line, and Stockton’s helicopter crews got out of their birds and joined the battle with their M-60 machine guns and the pilots’ pistols.Knowles was furious at Stockton for disobeying his orders. The clearing was silent for now.
The first of these touched down at 10:48 AM on November 14 and consisted of Captain John Herren's Bravo Company and Moore's command group. He did a cautious aerial reconnaissance by helicopter and selected a football field–sized clearing at the base of the Chu Pong Massif, a 2,401-foot-high piece of ground that stretched to the Cambodian border and beyond for several miles. A very angry PAVN battalion was right behind them.Knowlen and his men beat back three waves of attacking North Vietnamese, but the company commander feared the next attack would overrun his position.
It would be many hours before the battalions were at full strength and the battle would last for several days.For the first two of those days, it was the job of the 1The U.S. troops defeated a much larger enemy force, but with very heavy loses.To many, this marks the beginning of the U.S.’s Vietnam War in the days of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ordered troop build-up.
One of those platoons set up near the trail and began hearing the noise of a large group moving toward it on the trail.