Battle for Hamburger Hill During the Vietnam War

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On July 6, 1953, the CCF made yet another attempt to capture Pork Chop Hill. This time they gained a foothold on a portion of the crest. After repeated attempts to dislodge them were repulsed, General Maxwell D. Taylor, the Eighth U.S. Army commander, ordered the hill to be abandoned on July 11, 1953. Two weeks later, with the signing of the armistice agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, the hill became part of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Ever the politician (as he would prove to be again in the Vietnam War), General Taylor had made his decision based on his perception of American public and political reactions to the high numbers of U.S. casualties. During the month of July 1953 alone, the United States and its allies along the line of contact, including Pork Chop Hill, had suffered 29,629 casualties both from enemy ground attacks and a record 375,565-round CCF artillery barrage. Chinese and North Korean casualties were estimated at 72,112, most from allied airstrikes and a 2-million-round artillery barrage.

The battle for Hamburger Hill, like the Vietnam War itself, was less intense than the battle for Pork Chop Hill in Korea. A body count confirmed that 633 NVA soldiers had died in the battle, but as Samuel Zaffiri noted in his definitive history of the fight: There is no telling how many other NVA soldiers were killed and wounded and carried into Laos. No telling how many were buried alive in bunkers and tunnels on the mountain or ended up in forgotten graves in the draws or along the many ridges.

Final U.S. casualties were 46 dead and 400 wounded. While these losses were high, Hamburger Hill was not the bloodiest fight of the war, even for the 101st Airborne Division. In the earlier November 1967 battle of Dak To in the Central Highlands, 289 U.S. soldiers were killed in action and an estimated 1,644 NVA soldiers also perished, victims of the 170,000 rounds of artillery, the 2,100 tactical airstrikes and the 228 Boeing B-52 sorties that supported the operation. Later, during the week of February 10-17, 1968, in the midst of the Tet Offensive, 543 Americans were killed in action and another 2,547 wounded without causing any outcry from the American public.

The Hamburger Hill losses were much smaller, but they set off a firestorm of protest back home. The American people were growing more weary of the war. A February 1969 poll revealed that only 39 percent still supported the war, while 52 percent believed sending troops to fight in Vietnam had been a mistake.

Politicians were quick to seek advantage in those numbers. Most prominent was Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose brother John F. Kennedy had been the architect of America’s Vietnam involvement. As Zaffiri related: In the early afternoon of May 29 [1969]…Senator Kennedy [who had served as a draftee military policeman in Paris during the Korean War] stood up on the Senate floor and angrily denounced the attack on Dong Ap Bia, calling it’senseless and irresponsible…madness…sympathetic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention. American boys are too valuable to be sacrificed to a false sense of military pride.’

Kennedy would escalate his attack on May 24 in a speech to the New Democratic Coalition in Washington, referring to the battle as nothing but cruelty and savagery, as well as saying that the Vietnam War was unjustified and immoral. He was soon joined by other senators, including South Dakota’s George S. McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, and Ohio’s Stephen M. Young, an infantryman in World War I and an Army staff officer in World War II, who carried the attack to a new level.

In a lengthy speech on May 29, noted Zaffiri: Young described how during the Civil War the Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee attacked the Union forces at Chancellorsville from the rear and flanks simultaneously and routed them. ‘Our generals in Vietnam acted as if they had never studied Lee and Jackson’s strategy,’ Young concluded. ‘Instead, they fling our paratroopers piecemeal in frontal assaults. Instead of seeking to surround the enemy and seeking to assault the hill from the sides and the front simultaneously, there was one frontal assault after another, killing our boys who went up Hamburger Hill.’

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

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