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Ripley's Believe It or NotBy Fred L. Borch | Vietnam | Single Page | 3 comments | Print This Post | Email This Post Ripley's Plan to Blow the Bridge Subscribe Today
Ripley's plan was to move the TNT up into the steel "I" beams supporting the bridge and push the explosives about 100 feet out from the south side. The TNT would be used in concert with satchels of C4 plastic explosive. The C4 would cut the girders, and the exploding TNT would lift a section of the 500-foot bridge up and then twist it off its supports, sending it crashing to the water below. Ripley knew more than most Marines about explosives because after his first tour in Vietnam, he had a two-year stint with the Royal Marines in Great Britain, where he received practical instruction in demolitions. He had learned during Ranger training that a so-called "crooked earmuff charge" could be used to cut a steel girder. The technique required explosives be put on both sides of the steel beam—like a pair of earmuffs, but at an angle. If the explosives were placed directly opposite each other, when the two went off, they would cancel each other out. But if they were put on like crooked earmuffs—one forward and one back—the force of the two charges would push right past each other and shear the steel beam, taking out one entire section of the span and making the bridge useless to enemy tanks or troops trying to cross the river at Dong Ha. To get to the bridge, Ripley planned to climb over a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. The Seabees who built the bridge had put up this fence precisely to prevent an enemy saboteur from getting under the bridge and doing precisely what Ripley intended. With Smock depressing the wire, Ripley reached up to the downstream "I" beam girder, grabbed the beam's flanges and began climbing through the wire. After seeing the numerous cuts Ripley was getting across his arms and legs, Smock told him, only half-joking, "Just don't bleed to death before you make it through, Rip!"  Ripley swung his body beneath the girders of the bridge. (U.S.N.A.) He took off the two satchels and then wedged a satchel charge on each side of the first girder—set slightly off like crooked earmuffs. Ripley then inched his way back down the first channel to the south bank of the river to get more explosives. Smock had already lifted up the first two 75-pound boxes of TNT and satchel charges and pushed them through the wire into the channel. Dead-tired but fixated on the task ahead of him, Ripley grabbed the bottom box and began dragging the explosives after him, inch by inch, along the beam to the satchel charges he had already set up. He carefully tucked the boxes of TNT into them. He then dropped down below the channel long enough to grab the flange on the adjacent "I" beam and swing up into the second channel. Guessing the Length of Fuse Cord As soon as his body was exposed, however, the North Vietnamese started firing at him again. Their rifle shots missed, but the ricocheting bullets seemed to go on forever. In the next 90 minutes, Ripley crawled back to the south bank and hauled boxes of TNT into place in each of the five "I" beam channels. The South Vietnamese marines provided some covering fire from the south bank of the river, but the North Vietnamese maintained a constant stream of fire at Ripley from the north bank. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to
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3 Comments to “Ripley's Believe It or Not”
What a fantastic story…I Can't imigine why this brave man was never awaraded the Medal of Honor. If what he did, is not "beyond the call of duty", I don't know what is.
Chuck in Montana
By Chuck on Aug 11, 2009 at 7:13 pm
The article “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in the October 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine repeated the usual litany of myths and half-truths about Captain John Ripley and the bridge at Dong Ha that have come to be accepted as fact. While no one can deny that Ripley was a brave man who performed a daring act of courage at the bridge that day in April 1972, a couple of points should be made.
First, rendering the bridge impassable did not alter the North Vietnamese plans in northern I Corps, nor did it “change the outcome” of the battle as the article claims. The enemy order of battle was oriented from the west, not the north across the DMZ because Hanoi understood that the series of west-to-east flowing rivers in Quang Tri Province would be difficult to cross unopposed. Therefore, the North Vietnamese plan called for only a single regiment to be oriented along Highway 1, with two others to the west and east of the road respectively. The other five regiments, plus the 308th Division headquarters, were far to the west and southwest. Had the North Vietnamese been able to cross the Dong Ha bridge they might have had an easier time of it, but they were in no way thwarted by the loss of the bridge. They understood that the destruction of any of the major bridges would halt them in their tracks. So when the tanks met opposition at Dong Ha they quickly withdrew to the west and crossed there, as the author states. In fact, the tanks were already gone by the time Ripley set the explosives, though some North Vietnamese infantry remained there and were firing at Ripley as he set the charges.
The second issue is how the bridge was actually blown up. Daily journals and other documents indicate that, although the explosives were rigged under the bridge, they probably failed to detonate. At around 1600, elements of the South Vietnamese 1st Armored Brigade, accompanied by U.S. Army adviser Lt. Col. Louis Wagner, pulled up to the south side of bridge and apparently countermanded any orders to blow the bridge. This was six hours after Ripley was preparing to set his explosives (the daily journal at First Regional Assistance Command, the advisory headquarters for I Corps, has the entry “friendly elements are preparing to destroy the bridge” at 0953). Wagner, Ripley, and a handful of others even walked out onto the bridge. Shortly afterward, a Combat Skyspot air strike (an early version of the smart bomb that used laser beams to “guide” the bombs) hit the bridge, cratering its entire length and apparently setting off the explosives set by Ripley on the on the south side. Another armor adviser, Col. Raymond Battreall, recalled “a horrendous damn shrieking, swishing sound came down out of the overcast, and the bridge went sky high.” Colonel Wagner’s report of the incident indicated that “Aircraft began bombing north of the river…. Demolitions on the bridge exploded at this time, dropping a span on the south side. The explosion appeared to be a sympathetic detonation, although it could not be verified whether friendly personnel had blown it deliberately or not.”
The photo on page 51 shows the bridge smoking in a dozen places all along its span (it was made of steel and concrete, not wood, as the caption indicates). How could Ripley’s explosives have done all that? Did he crawl all along the bridge’s underside, a distance of well over a hundred yards? He never made such a claim. In fact, a closer examination reveals that the southernmost span (lower left corner of the photo) dropped cleanly. That was where Ripley set his explosives.
Finally, mostly as an aside, the photo on page 49 of Ripley “narrowly escap[ing] the blast of a mortar round” is hard to believe. The “blast” looks like mud being thrown from the tracks of the M113 behind which he is running. A mortar round that close would certainly have killed or badly wounded Ripley—not to mention the photographer taking the picture from atop the vehicle.
By Dale Andrade on Dec 14, 2009 at 2:04 pm
More on COMBAT SKYSPOT ,which is briefly noted in the article:
http://combat-skyspot.tripod.com/index.htm
By Mike Steeves on Dec 26, 2009 at 3:09 pm