It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the country we now know as Vietnam has been the cradle of the post-war theory and practice of the air-mobile and airborne operation. This trend started in the late 1940s with the French use of air-transported troops and continued through the late ’60s and ’70s when the US Army brought in the true air-mobile division and its helicopters. The reason for this concentration of innovative effort is that Vietnam has been almost continuously at war since 1940; first it was the Japanese, then the French, then the Viet Minh or Vietcong, then the Americans. Whoever the enemy, the result has been sickeningly familiar: a devastated country, a shattered government and a scattered and demoralized population. This unhappy process continued with increasing emphasis after 1945, by which time the Viet Minh, or communist movement, had gained most of the support in the country and had set up a form of government. This was all knocked on the head when the French returned and took control of what they considered to be their rightful colony.
The Viet Minh objected and the differences soon came to be too deep to be settled by other than fighting and the Viet Minh took to the hills and became a guerrilla force, working with the support and encouragement of Red China, just across the northern border. The French Army in Vietnam was poorly supported from home and was at all times short of essential equipment and supplies. The numbers of actual Frenchmen in the ranks was never much higher than 30 per cent, the remainder being locally recruited Vietnamese or foreigners serving in the Foreign Legion. In 1950 the proportion was 65,000 French in the Expeditionary Force whose total was 152,000, with a further 120,000 locally recruited Vietnamese units. By 1952 the French figures were 51,000 out of a total of 192,000, and early in 1953 the French government imposed a cut of 20,000 on the Expeditionary Force bringing it down to just over 170,000 at which it stayed until the end. The navy and air force are included in the numbers of Frenchmen, so that the army share was even less than appears at first glance. The quality was therefore variable, but at the core of the army were the French Mobile Columns and the parachute battalions, though many men in these were foreigners too. The French government never allowed French conscripts to go to Vietnam, and the war was fought on a shoestring. As can be imagined, this did little for good morale among the rank and file.
The parachutists were all regulars and almost without exception they were veterans of World War II from the Free French units in the British Army, or, as has often been hinted, from men who had served in the German Fallschirmjaeger and who had joined the Legion because they could find no other way to earn their living. Certainly German was a common language in the Legion at that time, but it had always been fairly common even before the war, so this may not be as powerful an indicator of nationality as some have tried to imply. The fact is that whatever their background, the men of the parachute battalions were tough, well trained, professional fighters. But they were inadequately equipped and only barely adequately armed by the standards of the day. Support weapons were few, signals equipment and radios were elderly and not entirely reliable, and worst of all the aircraft were not only few but also antiquated. The best that the French could muster were some Junkers-52s seized from the Germans in 1945, and these they positioned at Hanoi. It speaks volumes for the Junkers that these planes kept going, despite the fact that most of them had already fought one war and must have been at the limit of their designed life.
The load-carrying limitations of the Junkers were so severe that for most of the parachute operations the troops had to jump into action with only very light scales of weapons and ammunition, but fortunately in a guerrilla war this was all that was needed in the early stages. Most of the action in the first two years took place in the northern part of the country within easy range of Hanoi so that the JU-52s could fly to and from the drop zone without refuelling.
With so few troops the French were hard-pressed to contain a guerrilla war and they quickly adopted the technique of fortifying selected strong points and patrolling from them. The Viet Minh easily by-passed these firm bases and controlled the outlying countryside, particularly at night. As time went on and the Viet Minh grew stronger they picked off the smaller posts one by one and ambushed the roads. The French were increasingly pulled into a war where the initiative lay with the enemy and most of the fighting took place on ground and at times chosen by him. It is all very similar to what happened 15 years later when the US Army found that it had committed itself to the same course, with similarly predictable consequences. The parachute force was used to reinforce the small garrisons that were attacked, and to extricate them if the battle went against them. They also jumped in to mount counter-attacks, or in rare cases to make surprise sweeps into the middle of a Viet Minh-held area.
The French airborne troops were used in almost exactly the way that the US Army used its air-mobile formations in the later war, with one vital exception; with their helicopters the Americans could extricate units which were in trouble. For the French parachutists the only way out was on foot.
There is no point in attempting to recount all the actions in which parachutists were used during the French Indo-China War. The French records show that there were in all no fewer than 156 separate and identifiable operations ranging in size from a small patrol to a brigade, but it will help to catch the flavour of the type of war that was fought if we briefly examine a few of the occasions when the airborne arm was used. The first use of a battalion was on 27 May 1950 when one was dropped to recapture the small outpost of Dong Khe that had been taken by a surprise assault the day before. The drop zone was a large jungle clearing on top of a hill out of range of Dong Khe and there was no opposition as the drop was totally unexpected. Rallying quickly the battalion assaulted the post and after a fierce fight recaptured it before nightfall. A mobile column moved quickly up the road and relieved them within 24 hours. The next large operation was in October of that year when the guerrillas under General Giap launched a large assault on several points along the Cao Bang ridge, north-east of Hanoi. They took two key posts and the garrisons were forced to retreat in some disorder, closely pursued by six elated Viet Minh battalions. One parachute battalion was hurriedly alerted and dropped in the path of the Viet Minh to allow the garrisons to get clear, which they did, but the parachutists lost 80 per cent of their men, a virtual wipe-out of a complete unit. A few days later another battalion was dropped as part of the same rescue operation to clear a road in front of the retreating force, and this they managed to do without too many losses.
For the next year the battalions were continually in one action or another, most of these being pure reinforcement operations, but on 14 November 1951 there was a genuine brigade-sized offensive assault. This was the seizure of the town of Hoa Binh, which was a route centre in the middle of a flat plain 20 miles in front of the French fixed positions and a commanding position from which the Laotian border could be controlled. The brigade was flown in and dropped as close as possible to the town and with a quick assault the surprised defenders were pushed out and fled into the fields. A strong ground column moved up later in the day and relieved the parachute brigade, which then became part of the garrison. This was unfortunate because many of the parachutists were still in Hoa Binh when it was invested by the Viet Minh some months later, and a large number were lost in the stiff fighting which followed the forced withdrawal of the French garrison.
By 1952 the aircraft position improved, but it was not before time since the Junkers were by then on their last legs and becoming highly unreliable, not least from shortage of spares. There were now some ex-World War II C-47s from the USA and in late 1952 the French were able to buy a small number of new C-119 Flying Boxcars. At no time did the transport force exceed 75 machines, and for much of the war it was about 50. These were flown unceasingly, supplying the distant posts in hostile territory, running a shuttle service to those with an airstrip, and launching the various air assaults. The French aircraft industry had still not recovered from the effects of the war, and practically every other available transport plane was involved in Korea. The Korean War badly affected the supply of modern equipment to the French, and this was no more acutely felt than in the provision of aircraft; the USA was not keen to support what it considered to be a colonial war and it was some time before it was realized that both the UN and the French were fighting the same enemy. By then the commitment to Korea was too deep to allow much more than a trickle of supplies to Vietnam. In fact the Viet Minh were supplied by Red China with more up-to-date US equipment, captured in Korea, than the French could get legitimately from the United States.
In the middle of 1953 there was one highly successful airborne raid which helped to restore the rather flagging morale of ‘Les Paras’ and also the planning staff. Operation Hirondelle was what the US Army later came to call a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the high ground to the north-east of the Red River delta. This was the area that had been lost to the Viet Minh three years before in the action along the Cao Bang ridge, and it had bitter memories for the survivors. Three battalions were dropped close to Lang Son where there were substantial stocks of supplies, weapons, ammunition and fuel stored in caves and quarries in the hills. These dumps were all completely destroyed and so were some vehicles. The brigade then made its way back to the coast, clearing the ground of any warlike material as it went, and was picked up by coastal boats of the navy two days later. It was a well planned and well executed operation undertaken with the primary objective of disabling another Viet Minh offensive, but with a secondary one of demonstrating to the Americans that the French forces were capable of decisive action and therefore worth supporting with arms and material.
By this time there were some helicopters in Vietnam, not many, but sufficient for minor operations and one valuable use of them was to act as an airborne reconnaissance patrol for road convoys. Helicopters were good for spotting ambushes ahead of the convoy, though there were so few that this task was often done by light fixed-wing aircraft too. The Viet Minh were now so strong that they virtually controlled all the roads outside the actual French garrison areas, and any military movement was likely to be ambushed at any time.
Unfortunately, just as the French were beginning to receive sizeable supplies of American aid and were being accepted as co-fighters in the struggle against communism the whole French military effort was brought to its knees by the siege of Dien Bien Phu. This isolated town was captured by a brigade drop on 20 November 1953 and quickly consolidated by a ground force. It was then fortified and the Viet Minh slowly closed in, cutting the roads and forcing the garrison to rely on air supply. However, as there were two airstrips the French were not worried and in fact they hoped that the Viet Minh would batter themselves to pieces in making frontal assaults against their dug-in positions. But the Viet Minh were more skilful and mounted a series of diversionary attacks all over Vietnam, exhausting the French and wearing out the mobile reserve. Meanwhile they steadily brought artillery in from China and dug the guns into well-concealed positions overlooking the garrison. Worse still, they brought in whole regiments of anti-aircraft guns of all sizes, and prepared to isolate Dien Bien Phu from the air as well as the ground.
By January 1954 the French Air Force in Vietnam still had only 75 transport aircraft which were totally committed to supplying 15 garrisons, three of which were entirely dependent on the air for all supplies and reinforcements. Chief among these three was Dien Bien Phu where the pressure was mounting and though 25 more planes arrived in February the transport fleet was still dangerously over-extended. American aid was sent in the form of extra maintenance staff and equipment, but this was only a partial relief and all aircraft were worked to the limit. As Dien Bien Phu became invested the airstrip came under fire; by mid-March the only way to send in supplies was to use parachutes and on the 14th a battalion jumped in to reinforce. Another arrived by the same route on 4 April and a third on the 7th. By that time the perimeter was so small that about 20 per cent of all resupply drops landed among the Viet Minh and there was no way of getting the wounded out as even the light aircraft could no longer come in through the anti-aircraft barrage.
Desperate to hold on to what was now an obviously doomed garrison the French continued to drop battalions into the perimeter. Two companies were dropped on 11 and 13 April and the remainder of that battalion on 2 May. On 7 May it was all over and the Viet Minh accepted the surrender of the garrison; 11,000 men went into captivity, 30 or 40 per cent of whom were parachutists. It was the end of French rule in Vietnam, and all but the end of the parachutists. There had never been more than 12 battalions of parachutists in Vietnam at the best of times, and it was generally eight. Seven of these were sent into Dien Bien Phu, and none came back. It says much for the morale of the troops that of the few who remained most went to Algeria and joined the battalions there to fight a similar sort of war in a very different environment.
The French used their airborne troops in Vietnam with considerable skill and ruthlessness. The casualties were always heavy, but this was not allowed to make any difference. Had there been more fighter and reconnaissance aircraft it is very likely that the parachutists would have been even more successful and certainly their losses would have been lower, particularly in the fighting retreats and counter-attacks where they were so frequently used. The final sacrifice at Dien Bien Phu must not be allowed to cloud the picture since it was completely against normal French tactics to go on reinforcing failure to that extent. Unfortunately it became a political fixation and once past a certain point there was no way out at all. On the credit side it was clearly demonstrated how quite a small transport fleet could make an enormous difference to the mobility and capability of an army, and that light aircraft and helicopters were essential for reconnaissance. Later, in Algeria, these airborne methods were refined and adapted to make greater use of helicopters, but it was also shown in Vietnam that lavish supplies and support are not necessary for an airborne war against guerillas, though they do make it easier. For a demonstration of economy, thrift and quick planning the airborne operations in Vietnam are hard to beat. The pity is that they were in the end unsuccessful.
The Korean War began in 1950 and it was not long before the US Army found it necessary to use airborne troops, and employed them in the traditional and correct way. After the initial invasion of South Korea by the North, and the retreat of the South Korean Army, there was a turn-around and the United Nations forces – which at this stage were almost entirely American and South Korean – surged northwards over the border and on the River Yalu. From there they had to retreat once again and come back to the south of the original border. However, on the way to the Yalu, with spirits high and visions of chasing the North Koreans right out of the country, there were several attempts to use parachute troops in front of the UN advance to disrupt the North Korean lines of retreat. The largest drop was in October 1950.
The 11th Airborne Division was moved to Japan as soon as the war started and when the operation was planned they moved across to Korea to hurriedly prepared mounting bases on dirt airstrips where they waited with their tactical transport aircraft for the word to go. The 187th Regimental Combat Team was chosen for the drop and at that time it was about 3,500 strong. A regimental combat team was roughly equivalent to a brigade, having three infantry battalions and all the supporting arms and services to enable it to act independently of its divisional headquarters for quite long periods. The idea had originated in World War II and was retained for some years afterwards. Indeed it still exists under another name for practically all airborne brigades in all armies are well able to operate on their own, just as the regimental teams were designed to do.
On 22 October the 187th Regimental Combat Team was dropped on to two separate drop zones about 25 miles north of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and astride two main roads and a railway line. Tactically the operation was not decisive, though it was in the proper tradition for parachute forces, but the advance was so rapid that the troops were scarcely in position before the ground elements caught up with them. However the actual airborne side was impressive. It was the first time that the C-119 tail-loading aeroplane had been used operationally and it was the clearest possible case for scrapping all the old side-door aircraft straight away. The US Air Force had been steadily re-equipping with the C-119 for some time before 1950 and for the Pyongyang drop they were able to muster 80 of them. These 80 carried all the men and to supplement them there were 40 C-47 Dakotas whose job was to drop ammunition and supplies only. The drop went down with copy-book precision and the aircraft returned for a second and third lift in which they dropped 12 105mm howitzers, four 90mm guns, four 3-ton trucks, 39 jeeps, 38 trailers and 584 tons of assorted ammunition on to the two drop zones before the end of the day. It was a staggering display of the advances in airborne techniques since 1945, and it was the first time that such quantities of heavy support weapons and vehicles had been parachuted in one operation. Naturally there was no opposition from the North Koreans throughout this display of aerial might, either on the ground or in the air, and the troops could take their time in clearing the drop zones of the piles of ammunition and supplies that were stacked on them.
Next year the 187th repeated the operation in another part of Korea during a brief northward push by the UN. The pattern was the same, as were the results. This time no fewer than 3,300 men were dropped together with weapons and ammunition in the same quantity as the year before. Once again C-119s were used to fly the men, and once again the older wartime aircraft were used to carry the ammunition and supplies. This time the C-47s were missing, perhaps because they were needed elsewhere, or perhaps because they could not carry enough. In any case this drop was unusual in that C-46 Curtiss Commandos were flown on the supply missions in what must have been their last operational use.
The only other use of airborne troops in Korea was the dropping of small parties of sabotage troops who cut railways or shot up designated enemy troop centres on much the same lines as the SAS had done in the Western Desert or the SOE had done in France. Unfortunately these small raids were not particularly successful as the Koreans were not much concerned by having a railway line cut. They merely set several hundred coolies to work to rebuild the line so that it was generally working again within 24 hours; meanwhile the sabotage party was being vigorously pursued. The country was so inhospitable, as were the inhabitants, that very few of these small parties survived and the idea was dropped as being uneconomical.
At the same time, the early 1950s, the British Army was fighting a long and tiring campaign against communist terrorists in Malaya. These terrorists lived in the jungle and the British used the same techniques as the Chindits had used in Burma in 1944. Long-range patrols walked into the jungle and took the terrorists on at their own game on their own ground. The patrols were supplied by air drops and casualties were evacuated by light aircraft when a suitable strip could be found. When the Special Air Service appeared in Malaya they perfected the use of the parachute in placing patrols far into thick jungle and then walking out or attacking the terrorist camps from an unexpected direction. Parachuting into jungle had not been used before because of the danger of being caught in the 200ft high trees, but the SAS evolved the use of climbing ropes and lowered themselves and their kit down to the ground without coming to any harm. The parachutes had to be left in the trees, but they were surprisingly difficult to spot unless one was directly underneath them and specifically looking for them. Later helicopters were used and greatly improved the flexibility of the operations since they could pick up a patrol from one area and move it to another, whereas previously the parachutists had had to walk out.
The wars in Korea, Malaya and Indo-China were all over by 1955, and from then on there was virtually no use of airborne warfare in the Far East, though the area was far from peaceful. Malaya settled down to build up its rubber and tin trades and take full advantage of the boom times that were foreseen, but had not yet arrived. North and South Korea were left with an uneasy peace and a grumbling border heavily defended and manned, while Indo-China seethed with political unrest under weak government.