Other units stationed at Ben Het included:įollowing the departure of the U.S.
Warrant Officer Class Two Keith Payne of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions that day. On, the PAVN ambushed the 212th Company of the 1st Mobile Strike Force Battalion near Ben Het. The PAVN 28th and 66th Regiments continued to besiege the base from May to June 1969. : 151–3 ĬO of Team A-244, watches as members of 3rd Battery, 14th Artillery perform a fire mission, 4 November 1969 Intelligence later revealed that the main object of the attack was to destroy the M107 guns. At daybreak, the battlefield revealed the wreckage of two PT-76s and one BTR-50 armored personnel carrier but no PAVN dead. Another M48, using the same technique, destroyed a PT-76 with their second shot. Flares were sent up, exposing the attacking tanks, but by sighting in on muzzle flashes, one PT-76 scored a direct hit on the turret of an M48, killing two crewmen and wounding the other two. A PT-76 of the PAVN 16th Company, 4th Battalion, 202nd Armored Regiment detonated an antitank mine 1,100 meters to the southwest of the base, which alerted the camp and lit up the other PT-76s attacking the base. The shelling decreased at the beginning of March, but at 21:00 on 3 March the PAVN shelling began again and men of the 1/69th Armor heard the sound of tank engines coming from the west. Throughout February the PAVN attacked the camp by fire. Three of the four tanks took up dug-in positions on a hill facing west towards Cambodia, while the last tank occupied a firing position in the main camp overlooking the resupply route. To counter a buildup of PAVN forces in the area, a unit of the 1st Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, equipped with four M48 Patton tanks was sent to reinforce the camp. M48 Pattons from the 1/69th Armor on 3 March 1969īy early 1969, there were 12 Special Forces advisers and three companies of Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) numbering 400 men in total, with two M42A1 Duster self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and an artillery battery of M107 self-propelled guns. One of two PT-76s from the PAVN 202nd Armored Regiment, destroyed by U.S. 4th Infantry Division had other reports of PAVN tanks in the area.
In November 1968, a helicopter pilot from the 7th Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment reported four unidentified tanks west of the camp, but the report was never confirmed.
: 322–3 The 299th Battalion later improved Route 512 from Đắk Tô Base Camp to Ben Het and expanded the airfield to accommodate C-130s. forces during the Battle of Dak To, with several battalions of the 173rd Airborne Brigade deploying there. : 326 The camp was used to support the buildup of U.S. In October 1967 Company C, 299th Engineer Battalion moved to Ben Het to build a C-7 capable airfield, with provision for expansion to accommodate the C-130. The base was located approximately 13 km from the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia tri-border area, 15 km northwest of Đắk Tô and 53 km northwest of Kon Tum. The 5th Special Forces Group Detachment A-244 first established a base at Ben Het, then a hill tribe village, in the early 1960s to monitor North Vietnamese infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
0 kommentar(er)
