thumbs up here also

God Bless all the allied combat vets --

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Hell yeah! Just watched this over the w/e on Amazon Prime. Enjoyed it very much.

Im a big fan of all things FAL-related so it was nice to see so many SLRs (Aussie pattern FAL).

Love the exchange between the CO and a soldier about the soldier preferring to carry an M-16 "She's lighter than the SLR, doesnt hit as hard, and she jams a lot."

Loved the inclusion of the Owen guns. It's a lesser-known but great Aussie 9mm SMG that soldiered on from WW2 through Korea, Malaya, and Vietnam. You don't often see them on screen.

(Despite its wonky looks, the Owen was the best Allied 9mm SMG of WW2, and one of the Top 3 9mm SMGs overall in WW2, alongside the Finnish Suomi and Italian Beretta M1938.)

quote:

Originally posted by Jimbo Jones:
Hell yeah! Just watched this over the w/e on Amazon Prime. Enjoyed it very much.

Im a big fan of all things FAL-related so it was nice to see so many SLRs (Aussie pattern FAL).

Love the exchange between the CO and a soldier about the soldier preferring to carry an M-16 "She's lighter than the SLR, doesnt hit as hard, and she jams a lot."

My wife pulled this movie up from Prime the other day and we watched it. Not too shabby. The closing of the movie where it talked about how long it took for those guys to be recognized for that battle.. very disappointing to learn of that, but not surprised by it, either.

Another cool historical touch: While most of the enemy soldiers are armed with AKs or SKSs, at roughly 1:27:40 the camera lingers on an enemy soldier firing a WW2 era StG44.

This is actually historically correct, as the VC received large amounts of captured German small arms provided to them by the Soviets, including K98ks, MP40s, MG34s, P38s, FG42s, and StG44s. They also provided them with a small number of captured German Pak 40 antitank guns.

Well done movie, well worth the watch.

The ending is a nice touch where they show the actors next to actual photos of the soldiers they portrayed, along with a good bit of B&W movies of the company and what I imagine is the aftermath of the battle.

I saw that too RogueJSK with the STG44. Another time a bit earlier there was a VC/NVA with a SLR (assuming they picked it up off a dead / wounded Aussie soldier).

Question for our members with infantry experience...

At one point early on in the patrol into the rubber plantation, one unit realizes another unit is in contact, the officer orders them to drop packs, and they hustle off towards the unit in contact with just their belt kit.

I'm familiar with this idea of dropping the non-combat-necessary packs in order to move faster and fight better, but my question is this:

What's the procedure for this pile of packs? Do one or two members of the unit remain behind to provide security for the packs? Do they abandon them and make a note of the location on their map to come back whenever they can and collect them? Or do they just wait until the current situation is resolved and then hope they can recall well enough to find their way back to wherever they dropped their packs?

(I don't have any military experience myself, but I've been a student of military history for several decades, and I've never seen this aspect addressed or explained, even in discussions of infantry small unit patrol tactics.)

I just watched Danger Close on Prime. I have no idea how authentic the film is, but it must have been a desperate battle. I'm left feeling really grateful that my military experience didn't include combat.

The link has a photo showing their rifles.

https://nationalinterest.org/b...ght-viet-cong-147736

Aussies Victorious: How This Small Number of Soldiers Fought off the Viet Cong

A heroic effort.

by Michael Peck
April 26, 2020

Key point: They were outnumbered, yet they fought very well. This is the story of their impressive success.

America didn’t fight the Vietnam War alone. Though we tend to think that the United States did all the fighting, there were other nations as well.

Australia was one of them. Some sixty thousand Australians served in Vietnam, in what the Australian government—though not Australian antiwar protesters—saw as a necessary struggle to keep Communism from invading the Land Down Under.

The epic battle of Battle of Long Tan, where one hundred Australians defeated as many as 2,500 Viet Cong, is to Australia what Khe Sanh and Ia Drang are to America. The story began in the spring of 1966, when the First Australian Task Force, composed of Australian and New Zealand troops, set up a base at Nui Dat, southeast of Saigon. After the Viet Cong mortared the base on August 17, 1966, the First ATF dispatched a force to locate the weapons. The 105 soldiers of D Company, Sixth Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, backed by a three-man New Zealand forward observer team to call in artillery, were dismayed to learn that they would be missing a concert at the base. What they didn’t know was that Australian signals intelligence had been intercepting radio signals from a Viet Cong regiment that appeared to be headed toward their patrol area.

Music would soon be the least of the Australians’ worries. On the afternoon of August 18, as they arrived at the Long Tan rubber plantation, D Company was hit by the entire Viet Cong 275th Regiment. The attackers were no ragged band of part-time insurgents: the 275th was a Viet Cong Main Force unit of well-armed, full-time guerrillas in uniform. These VC knew their business: pouncing on an exposed and outnumbered enemy column was a tactic they excelled at.

It was just after 4 p.m. when one of D Company’s platoons was ambushed, killing or wounding one third of its men. D Company commander Maj. Harry Smith and his soldiers soon realized this wasn’t a hit-and-run guerrilla attack, but an all-out assault by regular soldiers. As if being outnumbered twenty-five to one wasn’t bad enough, monsoon weather grounded any air support.

According to one account of the battle,

Major Smith managed to draw his platoons together and organise his force into a defensive perimeter around the company headquarters. Soldiers went to ground there and withstood repeated enemy attacks, including massed human-wave assaults. They held firm and controlled their fire, taking a steady toll of the assaulting enemy. Any movement by the Australians drew a furious hail of automatic weapons fire from enemy assault rifles and machine-guns and enemy sniper fire from the trees. The thunderstorm added to the deafening din of the battle, making all communication difficult.

D Company couldn’t call in air support, but it could call in artillery. Without the firepower of the eighteen guns at Nui Dat, which pumped out a combined a hundred rounds a minute, the outnumbered Australians would almost certainly have been overrun.

As it was, D Company found itself on the brink of annihilation as ammunition ran low and the VC kept coming in what seemed to be human wave assaults. As one Australian survivor described it:

A solid line of them—it looked like hundreds—would suddenly rush us. The artillery would burst right in the middle of them and there would be bodies all over the place. The survivors would dive for cover beside these bodies, wait for the next attacking line, get up and leap over the dead to resume the rush. They were inching forward all the time over their piles of dead.

Two daring Australian helicopter crews flew their Hueys through the monsoon to drop ammunition through the trees. Nonetheless, as darkness began to fall at 6 p.m., D Company began to fear that just one more enemy assault would overrun them. But then an hour later, the VC were hit by a relief force of Australian infantry in M-113 armored personnel carriers that tore through the Communist lines. Suddenly, as so often in Vietnam, the enemy suddenly disappeared.

The stunned and battered Australians were convinced they had lost the battle, which had cost them eighteen dead and twenty-four wounded. But as they searched the battlefield, they found 245 Viet Cong dead. Given that the Communists always tried to conceal the true losses by removing their dead from the battlefield, VC casualties must have been far higher.

Australia and the United States both heralded Long Tan as a major victory in an otherwise frustrating and inconclusive war, with D Company being awarded a U.S. Presidential Unit Citation. For their part, Communist leaflets and radio broadcasts claimed to have almost wiped out the Australians. Hanoi’s propaganda was a gem of misinformation:

The Australian mercenaries, who are no less husky and beefy than their allies, the US aggressors, have proved as good fresh targets for the South Vietnam Liberation Fighters… [who] put out of action 400 Australian mercenaries, thus annihilating two full-sized companies, heavily decimated another, set a fire three M113 armoured cars, downed one US jet fighter and captured a great quantity of arms and munitions.

…The day before, 17 August, the LAF in the same province wiped out over 100 Australian mercenaries. For these victories the South Vietnam LAF Command had decided to award a Liberation Military Exploit Order Third Class to the victorious units.

Unfortunately, the survivors of Long Tan went home to face the same problems that confronted American GIs. Though the Australian public initially supported military intervention, antiwar protests became widespread by 1967. As in America, the Australian draft (many of D Company’s soldiers had been conscripts) sparked opposition. Perhaps more painful was that some veterans’ groups, made up of Australians who served in World War II, excluded returning soldiers on the grounds that Vietnam was not a “real war.”

Australia suffered 521 dead and three thousand wounded in Vietnam. Their only monument in the nation of Vietnam today is at Long Tan.

Recommended movie: The Odd Angry Shot, an Australian film about Australian troops in Vietnam. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079652/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1


Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest.

Just watched this last night. Great to see a Vietnam movie from another perspective. Very cool to see the SLR and Owens as mentioned previously.

I guess Australia uses the AUG now.

Special mention on the director/writers using the German STG44.

Great to read in the closing captions that the Americans gave Delta Company the Presidential Unit Citation, definitely well deserved.

HK Ag

quote:

Originally posted by HK Ag:
I guess Australia uses the AUG now.

Yep, since 1988. And will continue for the foreseeable future. They just finished rolling out an updated version to their troops.

I saw this on Prime, it is a good war movie.

Watched last night and enjoyed it. Good flick!

yes AUS has had the AUG for a long time

deployed there back in '92 and they had them then

as I recall they weren't generally thrilled by them but that may have changed...

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