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Ripley's Believe It or NotBy Fred L. Borch | Vietnam | Single Page | 3 comments | Print This Post | Email This Post Once he got to the nearest box of demolitions, Ripley pulled himself up into the channel and inserted the first cap into the satchel of C4. He did the same with the remaining four caps, spliced their lead wires and then returned—hand over hand—to the south bank of the river. Subscribe Today
Ripley and Smock had realized earlier that, even if they succeeded in destroying the Seabee-built bridge, an old French-built bridge located nearby could possibly be used by the enemy as an alternate means to cross the river. So, while Ripley set the electrical caps in the Route 1 bridge, Smock put a few boxes of TNT under the old bridge in the hope that it would be destroyed by sympathetic detonation when the main Dong Ha bridge blew up. Their rigging missions finally complete, Ripley and Smock sprinted back to friendly lines—to the cheers of the South Vietnamese. Ripley spotted a destroyed jeep and realized that its battery would give him the electrical source needed to detonate the electric caps. When he touched the wire to the battery terminals, however, nothing happened. At that moment, Ripley saw a young Vietnamese girl who had been separated from her mother as they ran for cover along the road. When an enemy mortar round hit right behind the girl, Ripley realized she would never make it to safety on her own. Sprinting to the girl, he scooped her up in his arms and ran with her toward her mother. When he neared the woman, he and the girl were blown off their feet by a massive explosion. The time fuses had worked! As the young girl scrambled to her feet and ran away, a stunned Ripley looked back toward the bridge to see a 100-foot gap between the river's south bank and the rest of the bridge. The wooden timbers of the rest of the bridge were also ablaze, and would continue to burn for five days. Even the adjacent old French bridge had been blown in half. The Bridge Is Down "The bridge is down!" Ripley radioed to Colonel Turley. "I say again, the bridge is down. She's in the river. They won't cross at Dong Ha!" Ripley's daring had literally saved the day—and countless South Vietnamese lives at Dong Ha. After the bridge was blown, the North Vietnamese on the north bank stopped firing their weapons, turned off their tank engines and opened the hatches. Many of them could not escape death, as Ripley now called in naval gunfire from American destroyers on the gun line offshore. The Navy walked its gunfire, with Ripley adjusting, along the north bank of the river, destroying many of the NVA tanks. Ripley never understood why the North Vietnamese had not crossed the bridge during the three-hour period that he and Smock labored to rig it with explosives. "That was one of the most inexplicable parts of the whole affair," he said. While the enemy invasion down Highway 1 had been halted—the North Vietnamese never did cross the Cua Viet River at Dong Ha—things were not going as well for the South Vietnamese to the south and west. Eventually the NVA fought its way across upstream bridges to the west, where it then battled South Vietnamese defenders at My Chanh River, 15 miles south of Cua Viet. But the course of the invasion had been changed dramatically by the destruction of the bridge at Dong Ha, a critical factor in the eventual failure of the entire 1972 North Vietnamese offensive to end the war. It would take another three years before the NVA would be able to mount another offensive on this scale. Ripley's heroic action on Easter Sunday 1972 is perhaps the best example of how an individual can change the outcome of a battle, if not a war. Captain John Ripley was just one man at one bridge on one day near the end of a long war, but what he did will be heralded by warriors for generations to come. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Help 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