A largely forgotten part of the war in South East Asia was the one fought by the U.S. Army’s gun trucks as part of convoy operations through the heart of enemy territory.
While Hollywood would tell you everything moved by chopper in Vietnam, the hard fact of life was that it was truck convoys that schlepped the bulk of the food, fuel and ammo to American and allied units stationed in the countryside. However, these predicable routes became target for enemy ambushes.
One of the worst supply runs was that along Route 19, some 150 miles of winding nowhere that became known as “Ambush Alley” for the motor transportation guys having to make the drive.
The response: hit the scrap piles and, using salvaged steel, sandbags and anything else they could find, up-armor Deuce and a Half and later 5 ton trucks then pile on whatever ordnance they could mount. In some instances, this ran all the way up to entire M113 armored personnel carrier bodies.
More @ Guns
I remember the quad fifties (i.e., four M-2 .50 caliber machine guns mounted on a deuce and half) as being half of a team, with the other half being a "duster" (i.e., track mounted twin .40 mm anti-aircraft guns), which were positioned on camp perimeters.
ReplyDeleteI rode "shotgun" on a convoy ONCE, when I was hitch-hiking from Da Nang to Phu Bai on QL-1, going over the Hai Vanh Pass.
It was the Monsoon, which prevented air cover, so the convoy ahead of us got hit, and the convoy that came after us also got hit.
We didn't get hit, because the clouds cleared away as we went over the pass.
By the time we got to Phu Bai, it was pouring down rain, and a chaplain driving a jeep took me the rest of the way to my unit at Camp Eagle, i.e., the 501st Signal Battalion (Airmobile) of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile).
When we went to watch the annual Bob Hope USO Christmas Show, I remember seeing several gun trucks parked up on the road.
quad fifties
DeleteEasy, but expensive way to clear the underbrush/trees on the perimeter. :)
http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2011/02/major-curry-this-came-in-today-from.html
The Army dredged this idea back out of mothballs for the Iraq occupation. ideally, the Army should be thinking about "what do I need" before they run off and get into trouble. Thus, if there really were a need for gun trucks, the Army should already have a fleet of them ready to go. When we examined using them again, we opted not to. It turns out, that if you design one from scratch to have all the features you want... you end up with an armored personnel carrier. And we already have lots of those. The biggest appeal of the gun trucks in Vietnam is that light units didn't have armored vehicles and couldn't get any. But they did have trucks and could get as much scrap metal and machine guns as they wanted. Even back then, the solution should have been to deploy more armored units and use their vehicles for that duty. But our heavy forces were deployed or held in reserve to fight the Russians in Germany so they were not available.
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