Today marks the 50th anniversary of the 26-day long Battle of Coral-Balmoral and coincides with the latest push for a joint unit citation to recognise the gallantry of the diggers who held off, and finally repulsed a numerically superior North Vietnamese regular army force in some of the fiercest fighting of the "10,000 day war".
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While the battle is rightly celebrated as a significant Australian military victory, it also represents a lesser-known triumph.
Even after almost four weeks of intense fighting, which had resulted in some of the worst Australian losses of the war, the diggers were still able to discover a common humanity when they came face-to-face with their wounded and captured North Vietnamese Army (NVA) opponents.
The battle itself was a series of engagements involving a combined force of between 2500 and 3000 Australians and New Zealanders from May 12 to June 6, 1968.
Fought just 45km north of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, and 60km north west of the Australian task force base at Nui Dat, it was the deadliest, most protracted and fiercely contested episode involving diggers during the war.
Coral-Balmoral was also, according to Major General (Ret’d) Peter Phillips MC, then a Major commanding D Company of 3 Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), marked by some of the bloodiest fighting Australians had seen since the end of World War II.
The 83-year-old Duntroon graduate now lives in Canberra’s south.
He, like many of his mates, was appalled by the senseless waste of North Vietnamese lives that marked the culmination of the fighting.
“I never saw the grey eminences who were directing them; we only saw the young kids,” General Phillips said. “They didn’t mind losing people which always horrified me afterwards.”
Some of the worst carnage was inflicted on the night of May 28 during the second assault on Fire Support and Patrol Base Balmoral (FSPB) by thousands of North Vietnamese troops advancing in human waves. The attacks were repulsed by the men of 3 RAR who had aerial, artillery and armoured unit support.
“On the morning after the attack on Balmoral on May 28 there were 42 enemy dead on the wire in front of 2nd Lieutenant Mark Johns’s platoon,” General Phillips said. “We rounded them up and buried them in a bomb crater. In subsequent days patrols went out and they found a lot of other wounded and damaged Vietnamese soldiers. I couldn’t get over the fact these were youngsters who had been thrown into battle with very little experience.
“We saw them wasted on a political exercise just to give some strength to the North Vietnamese hand at the Paris peace talks.”
Over almost four weeks of fighting the Australians had come to respect their enemies who, far from being faceless, were not afraid to stand and fight.
“We didn’t hate the guys; it wasn’t like the war against the Japs. These were an honorable enemy even if they were a bit politically misguided,” Major Phillips said. “My abiding memory is of our fellows picking the maggots out of the wounds of these guys that we found and binding them up.”
National Service platoon commander, 2nd Lieutenant Norm Peatling, was present when one of the wounded NVA soldiers was found.
“We did a sweep the morning after the attack,” he said. “We were with either a Centurion or the Armoured Recovery Vehicle when we found an NVA guy sitting in a pit. His heel had been blown off (sometime before) and the maggots were into his flesh.”
The young North Vietnamese conscript did not display either pain or fear.
“He didn’t whimper; he didn’t say anything,” Mr Peatling said. “We put him on the vehicle and he was taken back to the base for treatment while we pressed on with the patrol. All the wounded that I saw (after the battle) received the appropriate level of respect and care.”
While the NVA troops had no air support or armour they were very well armed by the standards of the day.
“Have no doubt that the NVA were very well equipped, courageous and professional soldiers,” Mr Peatling said.
“They used RPG 2s, RPG 7s (rocket propelled grenade launchers), 60mm and 80mm mortars, grenades, Bangalore torpedoes, heavy and light machine guns as well as the usual AK47s and a variety of other small arms.”
The RPGs and the 57mm recoilless rifles used by some of the soldiers could pose a serious threat to the Centurions.
General Phillips was not the only Australian moved by the waste of young lives.
“One of our National Servicemen, a fellow called Brian Cleaver, I think he was in Mark Johns’ platoon, gave up his retirement to try and find the 42 enemy dead we buried in the bloody bomb crater,” he said. “He never successfully found them”.
That was hardly surprising given the fire power the Australians had assembled. At the time of the second assault on Balmoral on May 28, 1968, 3 RAR could call down fire from the heavens from “Spooky” Douglas C-47 aircraft equipped with rapid-firing General Electric miniguns and F-4 Phantom fighter bombers.
The well dug in infantry were directly supported by 105mm howitzers, 155mm howitzers from a U.S. Artillery battery, heavy machine guns and a troop of four of the 10 Centurion tanks called up to FSB Coral at the request of acting task force commander and future South Australian Governor, Donald Beaumont Dunstan.
The tanks and the howitzers engaged the assaulting waves of NVA with deadly “splintex” anti-personnel rounds at point-blank range. The effects of the aerial and artillery bombardment on the advancing Vietnamese was devastating.
“A memory that will never leave me is that of taking a clearing patrol the morning after the last attack at Balmoral (May 29) and witnessing the twisted and grotesque bodies of the enemy dead, with ample evidence of human body parts everywhere, an unforgettable and horrific scene,” Mr Peatling said.
It was little wonder that when Brian Cleaver returned many years later only one complete set of remains could be found in the burial crater.
Coral and Balmoral were the names of two Australian Fire Support and Patrol Bases (FSPBs) set up in a zone referred to by the Americans as “the catcher’s mitt”. They, along with FSPB Coogee, had been established as part of Operation Toan Thang, the US-led response to the communist Second General Offensive or “Mini Tet”.
The Americans lost 652 killed and 2225 wounded during just one week of repelling the attack on Saigon; their worst seven days of the war. The North Vietnamese are believed to have lost about 7600 killed during the campaign and its aftermath.
Twenty-six Australians were killed and 99 were wounded during the operations around Coral and Balmoral. While the known North Vietnamese and Viet Cong losses were 276 killed, nine wounded and 11 captured, Australian War Memorial Military History head, Ashley Ekins, believes they would have been higher.
The Vietnamese used to carry the bodies of their dead off the battlefield to conceal their losses. Many men went into action with straps around their legs so they could be dragged away.
“The Vietnamese rarely acknowledged the scale of their own losses and vastly exaggerated ours in their propaganda,” Mr Ekins said. “Their records are often unreliable in that they are still trapped by the propaganda statements they made at the time.”
The Australians, drawn from 1 Battalion and 3 Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment; A Squadron, 3 Cavalry Regiment; C Squadron, 1 Armoured Regiment and 12 Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery were part of a joint Australian-New Zealand force.
The New Zealanders were the gunners of 161 Field Battery of the Royal New Zealand Artillery.
The “catcher’s mitt” was the principal infiltration route used by North Vietnamese Army forces en route to Saigon.
Vietnamese forces had entered the southern capital in strength as part of “Mini Tet” only a week before the Australians established FSPB Coral on May 12, shelling the city and threatening to launch 100 rockets a day for 100 days.
“Today you would call it 'terror warfare’,” Mr Ekins said.
The attacks were intended to strengthen their hand at the Paris peace talks that had formally commenced on May 12, 1968.
“In the perverse dialectic that now bound Hanoi and Washington, 'peace’ meant ratcheting up the slaughter… the few old men in Hanoi had to show they meant what they said,” journalist and historian Peter Ham wrote in “Vietnam: The Australian War”.
“They were quite prepared to toss a generation of Vietnamese boys and girls… at southern cities in order to entrench their psychological advantage at Paris”.
General Phillips remembers the first 24 hours at FSB Coral as a confused shambles that almost saw the Australian position overrun during the attack that began at about 3.30am on May 13.
In an ideal world a fire support patrol base was, according to “The Nasho’s War” author, Mark Dapin, “a fortress without walls, an artillery battery in a circle pocked with gun pits and ringed with barbed wire and Claymore mines”.
Coral fell far short of this mark initially. The Australians, handicapped by poor preliminary reconnaissance, a lack of intelligence on the scale of the enemy presence, and a late arrival at the site, did not have time to set up their full defensive perimeter before the enemy attacked in battalion strength.
Lieutenant Tony Jensen, the second in command of 1 RAR’s Mortar Platoon, found his small force was facing almost certain annihilation when he made the desperate decision to call fire from the anti-tank platoon’s 90mm recoilless rifles down onto his own position.
“Stay down, Splintex coming in,” he ordered as thousands of deadly anti-personnel flechettes swept above the Australian firing pits and “shell scrapes” before wreaking havoc on the advancing NVA troops.
A howitzer belonging to 102 Field battery was briefly captured by the enemy and then reclaimed during fierce hand-to-hand fighting and by 4.30am the main NVA attack was beginning to falter.
The aerial cavalry, in the form of helicopter gunships, a circling C-47 “Spooky” aircraft which lit up the field of battle with flares before raking the enemy positions with devastating fire from its deadly mini-guns and F-4 Phantoms, had made all the difference.
In his official history account, the Australian War Memorial’s Ashley Ekins records the last enemy soldier was found and killed in the Number 6 gun emplacement shortly after 6.10am.
The Australians had lost 11 men. Another 28 were wounded. Six of the dead were Regular Army and five were National Servicemen, a distinction General Phillips said made no difference in the heat of battle or even during ordinary service.
“Operations continued in the area for almost four weeks as the Australians fought some of their largest and most sustained battles of the Vietnam War,” Mr Ekins said.
“In further actions around Coral, and the nearby Fire Support Base Balmoral, they accounted for over 300 enemy soldiers killed. 26 Australians died and over 100 were wounded.”
The outcome could have been very different.
“Every indication was that the Australians would be overrun that first night,” Mr Ekins said. “I believe it was an attempt by the NVA at an annihilation ambush. Their own losses didn’t matter to them. They wanted to overrun and destroy the base at any cost. There is no public opinion in a totalitarian state.
“It was only the Australian soldiers’ training, their bravery - the men did not buckle under the most extreme circumstances, some very determined leadership and a degree of luck that saved Coral and the Australians on May 12 and 13.”
While that first night was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw”, once the Australians were established in the “catcher's mitt” the end was inevitable given their superior training, equipment and sheer firepower.
While Coral-Balmoral was a complete success for the Australians who had been sent into harm’s way to draw out NVA troops returning from Saigon and reinforcements heading south, winning the battle was a far cry from winning the war.
Through their willingness to sacrifice thousands of lives in “human wave” attacks during “Tet” and “Mini Tet” the North Vietnamese were able to inflict a level of casualties that made American and Australian voters sit up and take notice and brought grief to families on the home front.
While the professionalism, courage and sheer grit displayed by the Australians at Coral-Balmoral cannot be faulted, the same is also true of their opponents.
It was, as Ho Chi Minh had predicted in 1946, the willingness of the North Vietnamese to die en masse for their cause that made the defeat of the south, and its American and Australian allies, inevitable.
A commemorative service marking the 50th anniversary of the battles of Coral-Balmoral is to be held at the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial on Anzac Parade in Canberra at 11am on Sunday, May 13. All are welcome to attend.
