The DEVASTATING Marine Victory That Didn't Last

[00:00:00]In the mountains southwest of Anor, there was a stretch of jungle the Marines had learned to hate. They could not see into it. They could rarely hold it. And every few weeks, the enemy came out of it to strike the lands and then vanished back inside. On the map, it was just a labeled box, base area 112. But on the ground, it was a fortress made of terrain. And by the winter of 1968, the First Marine Division had decided it was time to go in and take the whole thing apart. What that decision cost and what it proved about the war is a story worth telling in full.

[00:00:40]The operation was called Taylor Common [music] and the force built to fight it was an ad hoc formation. The first marine division assembled for this one job and designated task force Yankee. It was assembled around the fifth marine regiment and grew as the fight grew, drawing in additional battalions, artillery, [music] and engineers until it was a multi-regiment command operating far from its permanent bases with the South Vietnamese Army holding the ground behind it while the Marines turned toward the mountains. The task force was formed and first commanded by one of the division's assistant commanders, Brigadier General Ross Dwire, who ran it until the middle of February when Brigadier General Samuel Jasilka [music] took over. The fifth Marines were under Colonel James or the deepest [music] and most dangerous part of the operation.

[00:01:31]The actual penetration of the enemy base [music] was handed to Colonel Michael Spark's third marines. A regiment [music] brought south from Quanktree Province in the north especially for the task. Taylor Common was the largest operation the division [music] mounted that winter and everything about it followed from the nature of the target.

[00:01:50]Base area 112 was defended not by men in fixed positions, but by [music] distance and jungle, a rugged mountain region southwest of the Arizona territory in Quang Nam Province. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops sheltered beneath its dense canopy, and the base gave them everything a hidden army needs. Bunkers, hospitals, supply caches, and a steady flow of replacements coming down the corridors from Laos. From there, they could descend into the coastal lands, strike, and pull back into the hills faster than the Marines could follow. As long as the base area worked, the threat kept [music] renewing itself, and clearing it for good was the whole point of the operation. For most of the war, the American answer to a place like this had been the raid. Lift the troops in, search the ground, fight whatever turns up, then leave, at which point the enemy [music] comes back. This time the division tried something more ambitious.

[00:02:47]Rather than raid the sanctuary and withdraw, it would move into it, build permanent artillery positions inside it, and keep infantry patrolling under the umbrella of those guns until the base area became more trouble to hold than it was worth. The weakness in that idea was there from the start, [music] and everyone knew it. Guns and men planted inside a sanctuary cannot stay forever.

[00:03:10]And the moment they leave, the thing that made the ground valuable to the enemy comes straight back. The plan could take a sanctuary apart. Whether it could keep it apart was never a question the division had the power to answer.

[00:03:23]The plan was methodical. First, secure the land basin around Anhoa as a safe base. Then push into the sanctuary itself and build a chain of fire support bases inside it. artillery positions from which patrols could hunt the enemy without ever moving beyond the reach of their own guns. Finally, drive west [music] across the base area and destroy whatever was left. It was a deliberate engineering-minded approach to a problem that had usually been met with a single violent lunge. And underneath all of it sat one unspoken assumption, the one that mattered most, that the enemy would stand and fight for the ground the Marines had come to take. He did not.

[00:04:05]and the shape of the entire operation follows from that. Taylor Common began the moment another operation ended. To free the fifth Marines for the task, the first marine division closed out operation Henderson Hill at midnight on the 6th of December 1968. And exactly 1 minute later, Taylor Common was underway. [music] At 8 that morning, Marine helicopters lifted the second battalion, seventh Marines, into the Arizona territory to act as a blocking force for the Arvin Rangers. Other units were already in the field. To the men around Anoa, the change of operational name made little difference at first because their mission had not changed.

[00:04:45]Two battalions of the fifth marines, the second and the third, had just come off operation me, a costly cordon battle in the lands and were sweeping from the Liberty Bridge into the hills southwest of Anhoa. These were not fresh troops going into the mountains. They were being fed straight from one hard operation into another without the rest and reconstitution doctrine would have preferred. And the men who would spend the winter clearing base area 112 began the job already tired. Sparks regiment did not simply appear. General Kushman had ordered it south from Quang Tree. A move made possible only because General Raymond Davis had cut the Third Marine Division's need for fixed garrisons in the north by fighting Moa. Spark's command group reached Anoa on the 9th of December ahead of its battalions.

[00:05:35]Because the enemy situation around Anoa did not call for a full regiment to guard the base, DW placed elements of the fifth marines under Spark's control, freeing his third marines for the penetration itself. A regiment pulled the length of the northern provinces to reinforce an operation in these mountains tells you how seriously the division took the job of taking the base area apart. Building the fire bases was the operation's real innovation, and it consumed its second phase. Each one was a small artillery fortress carved out of jungle that had never held one, sighted so its guns overlapped with the next, so that no patrol working into the sanctuary would ever move beyond supporting fire. Lieutenant Colonel Harry Atinson's third battalion, Third Marines, reported on the 11th of December and became the first unit to penetrate base Area 112. That same morning, artillery and aircraft blasted and bombed Hill 575 about 8 kilometers southwest of Anhoa, trying to tear a landing zone out of the heavily forested slope. When the fires lifted, trees still stood. So, engineers of Company B, Third Engineer Battalion, and a platoon from Company K, Fifth Marines, repelled in from helicopters to finish clearing it by hand. The rest of company K landed and the hilltop became Firebase Lance. 2 days later, near the southwest corner of the Arizona territory, the same method built Firebase Pike. In both landings, there was no enemy resistance at all. The jungle itself was the harder enemy, and the way the Marines tried to beat it says everything about the terrain. In places, the canopy stood 70 ft thick, and there was simply nowhere to put a helicopter down. So, Task Force Yankee reached for a new weapon. The M121 combat trap was a 10,000lb bomb dropped from high altitude by Air Force C30s and fused to burst above the treetops, blowing the forest flat without cratering the ground. General Dwire directed the experiment personally from a helicopter overhead, and the explosive power impressed him. It looked, in his words, like a mini nuclear burst. the concussion rocking the aircraft as it flattened the high canopy below. What it lacked was precision. The near misses left ground that was only marginally usable, and Dwire concluded the technique was of little use where accuracy mattered. The task force went back to the proven method, low-flying attack aircraft with heavy ordinance, followed by engineers with chainsaws and explosives to finish the job by hand.

[00:08:17]Even the largest conventional bomb in the infantry, it turned out, could not do the work of a man with a saw. On the 15th of December, the first battalion, third Marines landed unopposed at top hill 558, 4 km west of Lance on ground left a wash in splintered timber by those same near misses, [music] and built firebased spear. 3 days later, the third battalion, third marines air assaulted onto hill 375 to the south scored yet another unopposed landing and established a combat operations base called Mace. The chain of positions was the strategy made physical, an attempt to impose permanence on ground the enemy had always treated as temporary. With four rifle battalions dug in across the eastern half of the sanctuary, the search began in earnest. And what the Marines found was revealing precisely because of what it lacked. Throughout the second half of December, they worked the ground and turned up the enemy's infrastructure everywhere. Scores of rest camps, kitchens, small unit headquarters, surgical facilities, even apparent prisons or holding areas. They found graves, caches of food, weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, documents.

[00:09:32]Nearly all of it was abandoned. The enemy had gone west ahead of the advance, and only rarely did a patrol catch even a small group of him. He was not holding a line. He was trading ground for time, exactly as he did whenever the alternative was a decisive battle he had not chosen. The second phase closed with 1968 on New Year's Eve with a great deal of captured infrastructure and very little fighting to show for it. The character of the fighting is worth understanding on its own terms because the terrain dictated all of it. Most of the Marines committed to Taylor Common had spent their war in the lands and had never operated in mountainous triple canopy jungle. The country was steep, wet, and choked with vegetation. Movement was slow and exhausting. Visibility ran to a few meters, and every halt invited a sniper round. One rifleman later described the woods as thick and nagging and tiresome to work in with everything about the place set against the man trying to move through it. This was not the war of the rice patties. It was a war against the ground itself and the ground did not surrender. The new year brought the final phase and the hardest fighting. On the 1st of January 1969, the third battalion, Fifth Marines, was landed at a combat operations base called Javelin at the western edge of base area 112 and turned toward the high ground beyond. An attempt to bombard and seize Hill 58 ran into fire heavy enough to prevent a landing outright. The third battalion, third marines, was then put down on a neighboring height and made to fight its way across, taking hill 58 by the 15th and establishing Firebase Maxwell on its crest. From there, the Marines pressed into the western reaches of the sanctuary, uncovering more camps and stores as they went. [music] The deeper they pushed, the more clearly the base area's true extent came into view, and the more it resembled a logistical city hidden under the trees. It was here, on the day Firebase Maxwell was established, that the operation took its most conspicuous loss. Colonel Spark, directing the deepest penetration of the base area, boarded an army helicopter near the firebase. As it climbed away, a machine gun hidden in the jungle opened up and the aircraft came apart in the air and fell into the trees, killing Spark and everyone aboard. A regimental commander with artillery ranged across the valley and jets on call was dead in seconds to a single gun he never saw. It was a blunt lesson in the kind of ground this was. There was no safe rear here and no altitude at which the terrain stopped mattering. Withdrawing was not the same as conceding and the enemy set about proving it. Late in January, First Battalion, Seventh Marines positioned on Goi Island observed a force of roughly 300 North Vietnamese crossing the Song Lamb. Artillery was brought down on them and as they tried to break west, they ran into a marine company. The fighting went on through the night before the enemy broke contact, leaving 72 dead behind by morning. It was one of the few times in the whole operation that a substantial enemy force was caught in the open and made to pay for it. And it happened not deep in the sanctuary, but back down in the lands the Marines had supposedly already secured. In early February, the operation drew in fresh strength. A battalion landing team built around the third battalion, 26th Marines, came ashore and was committed to the Arizona territory where it fought a running series of small engagements against an enemy who preferred the sniper and the ambush to the setpiece battle. From the moment these Marines landed, they were tracked and harassed.

[00:13:21]Every pause in their advance answered by rifle fire and the occasional grenade.

[00:13:27]Not until the 26th of February did they corner a substantial piece of the force that had been tormenting them. A company trapped a platoon of North Vietnamese in an abandoned hamlet. And although the enemy fought back with a pair of heavy machine guns, marine phantom jets put high explosive bombs onto the position and shattered it. The Marines went through what was left and counted 75 enemy dead across the area. Within this grinding pattern of small actions came the single individual act for which the operation is most remembered and it is worth telling plainly.

[00:14:02]On the 9th of February, Lance Corporal William Prom, a 20-year-old machine gun squad leader from Pittsburgh serving with Company 1, Third Battalion, Third Marines, was moving with two platoon returning from a reconnaissance patrol when they were caught in intense automatic weapons and grenade fire from a well-conceeded fortified North Vietnamese position. With the lead element cut off and several marines already down, Prom took control of one of his machine guns and pushed forward to cover the wounded while they were treated. Understanding that the enemy guns had to be silenced before anyone could be evacuated, he deliberately drew their fire onto himself to mark them for his marines. He was killed doing it.

[00:14:45]Prom received the operation's only medal of honor postumously, and he died near the Anoa combat base. The whole campaign had been mounted to protect. By the middle of February, the division assessed that base area 112 had been neutralized. The camps had been found, the stores destroyed, the sanctuary stripped of the infrastructure that made it useful, and at almost exactly that moment, the strategic ground shifted underneath the operation. The battalions committed to Taylor Common were needed to the north in the demilitarized zone area where the borrowed regiments belonged. What had been a deliberate dismantling of a base area now collided with the fact that the forces doing the dismantling could not stay. The operation began to wind down, not because the job was finished in any lasting sense, but because the troops had somewhere else to be. The withdrawal ran in stages through the second half of February. The third battalion, third marines, and the regimental command group pulled out on the 16th and moved north to Dong Ha, followed the next day by the first battalion, Third Marines.

[00:15:51]And as the Marines thinned out, the enemy did what he always did when American [music] pressure relaxed. In the early hours of the 23rd of February, North Vietnamese mortars struck the Anhoa combat base, setting off its ammunition dumps, and a sapper attack came in behind the barrage before being driven off by gunships and artillery.

[00:16:10]The same night, the western firebases Maxwell and Tomahawk were hit as well.

[00:16:15]The symbolism was hard to miss. The base area had been declared neutralized. The operation was ending in success, and the enemy was at that moment striking the very installation. and the operation had been built to defend. The closing days brought a last reminder of the cost of giving ground back. With the decision made to abandon the western fire bases, the units began to pull out and the enemy pressed them as they went. On the 3rd of March, a patrol from the third battalion, Fifth Marines, was ambushed near Firebase Maxwell. Three Marines were killed, and in the confusion of the withdrawal, two of the bodies were left behind. The company recovered one the next day and when it tried to reach the last body the day after that it was ambushed again and lost two more men whose bodies also could not be brought out. A third attempt on the 6th of March was driven back. The remains were finally recovered by a reconnaissance team. Firebase Tomahawk closed on the 5th of March, Maxwell on the 7th and the operation formally ended on the 8th. The accounting when it was tallied was substantial on every line. Marine losses came to 183 killed and 1,487 wounded. The Arvin, whose contribution the record should not let disappear, lost 100 killed and 378 wounded. The Marines reported 1,398 North Vietnamese killed and took 29 prisoner. By its own metrics, the operation had succeeded. A sanctuary long beyond reach had been penetrated, its infrastructure torn out, and the base area declared neutralized. But the enemy had only stepped back into the hills.