1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry in the Battle of Hoa Hoi

 | Vietnam  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Lieutenant Robert Lewis, Blue Team platoon leader from the A Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry (Aerial Reconnaissance, 1/9) of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), was elated with the order. It said, in essence, to get the hell out of there. Lewis and his men, having suffered three dead and three wounded, were happy to comply. Sent into the village of Hoa Hoi to mop up the remnants of a Viet Cong platoon, they had stumbled into two North Vietnamese Army battalions. As the Blues backed out, 12 UH-1 Huey helicopters carrying the lead elements of the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry (1/12), arrived. Hoa Hoi was now their problem.

Hoa Hoi was located at the base of the Hung Lac Peninsula between the Mieu Mountains and the South China Sea. Sweeping toward the South China Sea, in an effort to pacify Binh Dinh province, was the 1st Cavalry Division. By October 1, 1966, the Cav’s 1st Brigade was north of Hoa Hoi, fanned out across the coastal corridor between Highway 1 and the South China Sea. To the west of the village, generally along the highway, was the 3rd Brigade. Inside the cordon were assorted local VC elements and the 18th NVA Regiment, believed to be in the Mieu Mountains.

On October 2, the Cav moved to shrink the cordon. The 3rd Brigade airlifted two battalions forward about seven kilometers. At the same time, the 1st Brigade airlifted two of its battalions to locations south and east of the Mieu Mountains. A third battalion, 1/12, remained in the north until the rest of the brigade had been ferried into their objectives. Screening in front of both brigades were the 1/9’s reconnaissance helicopters.

At about 7:30 a.m. on the 2nd, their OH-13 scouts and Huey gunships spotted and engaged several small clusters of what appeared to be both NVA and VC troops. When seven enemy soldiers in Hoa Hoi were killed by a gunship, Lt. Col. George McIlwain, the 1/9 commander, ordered his A Troop’s ground force into action–an infantry platoon known as the Blue Team, designed for close-up work. McIlwain told his Blue Team platoon leader, Lieutenant Lewis, that the village contained an enemy platoon and that the Blues were to cut through the middle of the village and then head south.

Lewis and his Blues landed at 8:30 a.m. on the beach east of the village and started toward it. They made it to an outer trench line surrounding the village. There the enemy ‘platoon’ turned out to be a trench full of soldiers with enough firepower to kill three Americans, wound three more, and knock out three helicopters. Lewis and his men spent the next hour on their bellies.

Monitoring the Hoa Hoi fight was Colonel Archie Hyle, commander of the 1st Brigade. As it became clear that reinforcements would be necessary, Hyle went looking for a battalion to handle the mission. His initial choice was the 8th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion, which had just air-assaulted into a position about 2,000 meters overland northeast of Hoa Hoi. But Lt. Col. James T. Root, Sr., commander of the 1/12, pointed out that he could get there faster with his B Company, instead of standing by for a 12:30 p.m. air assault into an objective south of the village. Hyle gave the nod to Root’s battalion.

In October 1966, the 1/12, like most of the 1st Cav, was a fresh unit. Due to the one-year rotation schedule, nearly everyone who had deployed to Vietnam with the Cav in the summer of 1965 had already departed, causing an almost complete turnover in battalion personnel. Root had taken command in July along with three of his four company commanders. His operations officer and the fourth company’s commander were replaced in August. Collectively, the battalion learned air assault techniques on the job, but ground combat tactics had not changed significantly since Root’s enlistment in 1941.

Root saw the combatants in Vietnam as equals in virtually every respect but firepower. The edge, as he saw it, was in the use of artillery, which he made sure could always support his wide-ranging units. However, he noticed that when his units made contact, typically with small enemy delaying forces, his leaders halted and wasted precious minutes waiting for artillery fire to be adjusted. By the time the infantry started moving again, the enemy was gone. To counter this problem and still retain the advantage of artillery, Root developed two procedures. First, units had the supporting artillery elements fire a marking round at regular intervals to confirm their location and to facilitate rapid calls for fire. Second, he insisted that his subordinates immediately execute fire-and-maneuver tactics as they had been taught.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.