TACTICAL EMPLOYMENT OF INDIGENOUS FORCES
Working Paper
TACTICAL EMPLOYMENT OF INDIGENOUS FORCES
Peter W. Connors, PhD
8165906821
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TACTICAL EMPLOYMENT OF INDIGENOUS FORCES
Contents
(To be completed after insertion of maps and photographs)
Forward…………
Chapter 1. Introduction.………..
Chapter 2. Red Blue Coats: American Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries on the Frontier…
Chapter 3. Ici, C’est la France: Harkis and the Algerian War………..
Chapter 4. ARVN, CIDG, RF/PF, and CAP: Indigenous Forces in the Vietnam War….
Chapter 5. The British Army in Northern Ireland…………
Chapter 6. The French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Vietnamese Indigenous Forces.
List of Suggested Maps and Photographs………….
Bibliography………….
TACTICAL EMPLOYMENT OF INDIGENOUS FORCES
Chapter 1. Introduction
For centuries armies have employed indigenous forces to assist them in battle. Early in the Long War on Terror, the combination of indigenous Afghan Northern Alliance forces, US Special Operations Forces, and US airpower routed the Taliban in short order. During Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, Kurdish Pesh Merga militia from northern Iraq assisted US 10th Special Forces Group and 173d Airborne Brigade Soldiers in the liberation of Kirkuk. The United States military has made use of indigenous/auxiliary forces in all major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
This Long War Occasional Paper will investigate the tactical employment of host nation/friendly indigenous forces in support of US, as well as British and French combat operations. While the organization, staffing, and training of indigenous forces will be described briefly, the primary emphasis of this paper will focus on the missions assigned to these forces (e.g., patrolling, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, policing), and on how the forces were actually used in tactical level operations. Several historic instances of the tactical employment of indigenous forces will be assessed in detail and an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, and challenges will be provided in an effort to identify critical factors for success that may be helpful in planning and conducting future US combat operations involving indigenous forces.
The training of indigenous forces represents a significant component of the US counterinsurgency campaign plans for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) and Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) are large-scale training organizations involving substantial US manpower and funding. The final version of the Department of the Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24 – Counterinsurgency, 15 December 2006 – devotes an entire chapter to developing host nation (HN) security forces, but offers very little regarding the tactical use of such forces, aside from defeating insurgents, providing essential services, and securing the population. FM 3-24 also identifies HN security force development as a logical line of operations for counterinsurgency with an end state of simply establishing an effective and self-sufficient HN force. Specific subject matter emphasized in the HN force counterinsurgency training curriculum includes:
- Intelligence collection
- Day and night patrolling
- Point security
- Cordon and search operations
- Operations with police
- Treatment of detainees and prisoners
- Psychological operations
- Coordinating indirect fires
- Civic action
Once HN force capabilities are deemed adequate, these forces may be expected to conduct limited combat operations, combined action operations accompanied by US Soldiers, and clearing, holding, and internal/external security operations.[i]
Irregular warfare expert and senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, Colonel Robert Cassidy, points out that the 2004 interim FM 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, also stresses the leveraging of indigenous military forces. These native forces should be well trained, clearly visible to the population, and unmistakably engaged in fighting the insurgency. Indigenous forces should operate along side US troops as necessary, but must assume responsibility for the majority of operations as soon as practicable. Also, generating actionable intelligence at the local level is a critical factor for the success of indigenous forces both in securing, protecting, and separating the civilians from the insurgents and in neutralizing and defeating insurgent combatants. Finally, FM 3-07.22 identifies three distinct levels of warfare in which indigenous and auxiliary allied forces might participate:
- Strategically, they serve as the shield for carrying out reform. It is imperative that HN military and police forces protect the populace and defend their own bases while simultaneously fighting and insurgency.
- Operationally, they systematically restore government control.
- Tactically, security forces eliminate insurgent leadership, cadre, and combatants, through death and capture, by co-opting individual members, or by forcing insurgents to leave the area. The local populations are then secure and able to engage in normal activities. The forces also assist with civic action projects that convey to the people a sense of progress and concern by their government.[ii]
Adroitly employing native forces is fundamental to creating a stable HN society that has faith and confidence in its national government to provide enduring safety, security, freedom, and prosperity.
The employment of indigenous and local auxiliary forces by intervention military forces significantly enhances economy-of-force operations, since the number of troops available increases for a wide variety of combat and non-combat missions. Mundane tasks, such as guard duty, transportation, and re-supply, can be assumed by comparatively inexperienced indigenous personnel. Scouting, reconnaissance, trail watching, border surveillance, safe haven identification, and patrolling operations can be expanded using indigenous soldiers, whose knowledge of the local terrain, people, and language is far greater than that of the intervention force. Algerian Harkis, for example, successfully hunted down Armee de Liberation Nationale (ALN) insurgent leaders, since they understood ALN methodology and knew every tail in their respective areas of operation. Indigenous forces can also serve as spies and informants, and pose as insurgents in pseudo operations as they did during the French wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Indigenous forces also function most effectively when integrated into task forces that include intervention military units. Only the most qualified indigenous forces should directly engage conventional insurgent organizations on their own. The principal roles for indigenous forces, however, remain securing the populace, eliminating insurgents and their infrastructure, and assisting in the restoration of HN governance.[iii]
During the American-Vietnam War, indigenous Regional and Popular Forces (RF/PF) conducted the vast majority of district and province pacification operations. The mere presence of RF/PF troops at the provincial and district levels served as a constant reminder to the citizens of the legitimacy of their government – the Government of Vietnam (GVN). Three separate defensive rings were positioned around population centers. The outer and largest ring was manned by US and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Soldiers tasked with the mission of destroying large Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) formations. Regional Forces formed the middle ring and engaged enemy forces that had managed to successfully infiltrate the outer security ring. US advisor Colonel Corbie Truman reported in 1968 “Regional Forces represent the greatest potential for finding and destroying the enemy.”[iv] Limited tactical operations conducted by RF soldiers included local patrols, night maneuvers, and ambushes intended to prevent the enemy from reaching population concentrations. Regional Forces also secured critical provincial facilities and supply routes and provided security details for visiting GVN officials and dignitaries. Finally, Popular Forces in the inner ring tracked down and killed/captured enemy leaders and attempted to destroy VC infrastructure within their respective districts, villages, and hamlets.[v]
Unfortunately, the three-ring security system was disproportionately dependent upon the US units in the outer ring. If US forces redeployed, Regional Forces, on their own, could not contend with the influx of VC insurgents. As a result, Colonel C.E. Jordan suggested that “[US Army and Regional Force units] be integrated for the purpose of accomplishing the common mission.” Provincial senior advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Carl Bernard concurred, reporting that the “operations of the joint US-VN task force in Trang Bang and Cu Chi Districts [consisting of one US company and Regional and Regional Force and Popular Force units] have proven highly successful.”[vi]
This study will investigate the cooperative employment of indigenous/auxiliary forces by the United States, France, and Great Britain in tactical combat operations. An in-depth assessment of the specific tactical operations conducted by indigenous forces will follow a brief discussion of these five conflicts: the Indian Wars on the American frontier, the French-Algerian War, the American-Vietnam War, the British-Northern Ireland Conflict, and the French-Indochina War. Notable successes and shortfalls encountered in the respective indigenous operations will be analyzed with specific problems and solutions identified and discussed. Broad recommendations derived from this analysis of indigenous tactical operations will be presented in the conclusion to the study. This Occasional Paper is intended to be a source of information for planning and implementing future combat operations involving the use of indigenous forces.
Chapter 2 describes the tactical use of friendly Indian scouts and auxiliaries by the US Army on the frontier during the latter half of the 1800s. The eventual commander of the Department of Missouri, Colonel Nelson Miles, noted during the Red River campaign that it was both more efficient and more economical for friendly Indians to track, trail, and discover hostile Indian camps. US Cavalry Soldiers, Miles thought, should be held in reserve, ready to attack hostile Indian bands once allied Indian scouts had found them. Allied scouts knew the local terrain, native languages, and tribal hand signs. They moved forward more rapidly, more continuously, and more surreptitiously than the Soldiers they were supporting.
Scouts maneuvered 12 to 24 hours in advance of the Army’s main body, screened the columns up to fifty miles on either flank, established temporary outposts to guard potential hostile approach routes, and controlled the high ground. Indian allies quickly adopted the guerrilla-type warfare practiced by the renegades and often participated directly in combat operations, typically involving arduous night marches followed by pre-dawn surprise attacks on hostile villages. “These scouts, supported with a small force of cavalry, are exceedingly efficient, and have succeeded, with one or two exceptions, in finding every party of Indians they have gone in pursuit of,” Colonel Augustus Kautz, Commander, Department of Arizona (1875-1878), reported during the Apache campaign.[vii] Indian scout and auxiliary tactics will be analyzed for the Apache campaign, as well as for the Bozeman Trail/Powder River Expedition, and the Southern Plains, Northern Plains, and trans-Mississippi West phases of the Indian Wars in this chapter.
Chapter 3 addresses the tactics utilized by indigenous Muslim Algerians – known as Harkis – during the French-Algerian War. The regular French Army was unaccustomed to guerrilla warfare and the troops were not trained for counterinsurgency operations. As a result, French military commanders hired Harkis to form an auxiliary force to help fight the Armee de Liberation Nationale (ALN) insurgents. France assigned static forces to strategic strongholds and introduced the quadrillage concept under which soldiers deployed in grid patterns and were responsible for suppressing insurgent activity in their respective sectors. Harki auxiliaries provided security and essential services for the local citizens. In 1959, counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism operations increased substantially under newly appointed French Commander-in-Chief for Algeria, General Maurice Challe. Under Challe’s plan, French Commandos de Chasse and Harki tracker units located and pinned down ALN units. Highly mobile French Reserve Generale forces would then strike and decisively defeat the insurgent formations.
Harkis participated in both offensive and defensive operations in support of the French counterinsurgency and deployed in either French-led all-Algerian units or in mixed French-Algerian platoons or squads attached to larger formations. Harki knowledge of the Algerian tribal system and the local terrain significantly improved French intelligence gathering and propaganda operations. Harki combatants also located and attacked ALN lines of communication, conducted long-range and night patrols, set ambushes, and help control the population. The Harki’s role in Operation JUMELLES and the Paris Café War, as well as their ultimate demise, will be described in Chapter 3.
Signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954 officially ended France’s other war – the French-Indochina War. Over the next several years, the United States Military Advisory Assistance Group, Vietnam (MAAG-V) helped the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) train and equip its military forces. Chapter 4 of the Occasional Paper describes the tactics used by the following RVN indigenous and auxiliary military organizations during the American-Vietnam War: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, Regional and Popular Forces (RF/PF), and Combined Action Program (CAP) units. Throughout the early 1960s, Viet Cong enemy activity steadily increased, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to expand US assistance for RVN by ordering air strikes on North Vietnamese cities and military installations and by deploying several hundred thousand US combat troops to South Vietnam.
As the US assumed greater responsibility for the fighting, the role of the ARVN forces diminished. ARVN conventional tactics were unsuited to guerrilla-style warfare. Nevertheless, in I Corps, ARVN units still conducted search and destroy missions against the Viet Cong, but with hard-hitting US Marine Corps units serving as quick reaction and reserve support forces. As Viet Cong infiltration intensified in 1965 and the ARVN suffered a series of minor defeats, Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) commander, General William Westmoreland requested additional US troops to focus on search and destroy missions and relegated ARVN forces to pacification operations. When US forces began to withdraw in 1969, ARVN units once again became slowly involved in combat operations against both the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The 1970 ARVN Cambodian incursion, ARVN joint operations with US forces, the defeat of an ARVN armor/infantry task force during Operation LAM SON 719 in Laos, the NVA Easter Offensive, and the 1975 fall of Saigon will be reviewed in this chapter.
Vietnamese CIDG forces were organized in the early 1960s by the CIA to provide village-by-village local defense against Viet Cong insurgents. Tactically, CIDG members conducted intelligence/counterintelligence operations, border surveillance, long-range reconnaissance patrols, and their own search and destroy missions using hit-and-run guerrilla techniques against Viet Cong/NVA sanctuaries. After MACV assumed responsibility for the program, many CIDG fighters joined Apache pathfinder teams or the MACV mobile strike forces. By the 1970s, CIDG units, comprised at this time of 50,000 tribal militiamen, converted to Vietnamese Ranger battalions or Border Ranger teams.
Indigenous Regional Forces in Vietnam manned military outposts and protected strategic locations, while Popular Forces protected their respective villages and hamlets. Both RFs and PFs were integrally involved in pacification operations. Following the 1968 Tet Offensive and as US forces began to leave Vietnam, RF/PFs increased night operations, ambushes, and patrolling and generally became more involved in actually fighting Viet Cong insurgents. Finally, Chapter 4 will describe the successful tactics utilized in the US Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program in I Corps. CAP was an economy-of- force/pacification measure that combined a 14 man Marine rifle squad with a 30+ member RF/PF platoon. CAP teams lived in the villages that they protected and conducted extensive patrolling and night ambushes in the surrounding countryside to destroy Viet Cong infrastructure. After the Tet Offensive, CAP units became more mobile, remaining on the move continuously within their assigned areas of responsibility. Prior to deactivation of the program in 1971, there were 114 CAP platoons, 2,000 CAP Marines, more than 3,000 CAP RF/PFs, and 800 secured villages in I Corps.
Chapter 5 provides and assessment of tactics used by the British Army, its auxiliaries, and indigenous paramilitary militias during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Ethno-sectarian confrontations between Catholics and Protestants have persisted for centuries in Ireland. In 1801, the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland created the combined United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Dissatisfied Irish Catholic nationalists were desirous of home-rule and complete independence from Britain, while Irish Protestant loyalists supported the union. Eventually, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 sanctioned a partition that granted 26 generally southern counties to the Irish Free State (renamed the Republic of Ireland in 1949) and the six remaining Ulster counties to Northern Ireland.
Tensions continued high for decades until rioting broke out in the late 1960s among Irish nationalists and loyalists in Belfast. Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), could not control the battling crowds. British Army forces were deployed (Operation BANNER) to quell the violence between competing Northern Ireland paramilitary militia groups – the Catholic, nationalist, Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) on the one hand vs. two Protestant, loyalist, organizations, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) on the other. Each of these groups conducted ambushes, bombings, and related terrorist operations.
This chapter will describe the tactics used by these indigenous and auxiliary paramilitary organizations, including those of the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR), a locally recruited force under the control of the British Army General Officer Commanding (GOC), Northern Ireland. Noteworthy engagements and operations, such as the Battle of the Bogside, Bloody Sunday, the Greysteel Massacre, and Operations DEMETRIUS and MOTORMAN, will be assessed for tactical considerations. Unique tactical methodology will also be evaluated, including covert long-term surveillance operations and continuous, systematic, high-profile, patrolling missions, often conducted in parallel for mutual protection. In 1977, the RUC assumed the lead role in the Northern Ireland counterinsurgency campaign, and by the 1980s, the British Army began supporting UDR anti-terrorist operations against the PIRA. Although not strictly tactical techniques, patience and deterrence were critical factors for success in both the British Army’s counterinsurgency efforts and the Northern Ireland peace process.
As was the case with the American-Vietnam War ten years later, several indigenous militias and auxiliary military organizations assisted French forces during the First Indochina War in the 1950s. Chapter 6 will describe the tactics used by these indigenous forces in support of French military operations. France took colonial control of Indochina in the late 1800s, but was driven out by the Japanese in World War II. Following the war, Vietnamese communists – the Vietminh – formed the provisional Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), despite French objections. Subsequently, armed conflict between French regular forces and Vietminh guerrillas broke out in 1946. Unfortunately for the French military, its forces were widely dispersed protecting rural regions, making it nearly impossible to concentrate sufficient numbers to effectively fight the guerrillas. By 1949, the French controlled only Hanoi and Haiphong and a series of defensive outposts scattered throughout the country.
Also in 1949, France formally recognized the State of Vietnam and authorized the formation of the Vietnamese National Army (VNA). Initially the VNA consisted of nine national guard regiments, 11 infantry battalions, and a total of 65,000 poorly trained/equipped soldiers. Nevertheless, VNA troops fought alongside French forces in Operations LE HONG PHONG I and II and TRAN HUNG DAO, and in the Ha Nam Ninh offensive.[viii] By 1951, the VNA auxiliary force had grown to 33 infantry battalions and 90,000 men. These indigenous soldiers began serving in defensive positions and manning fortifications, thus releasing French military personnel for more mobile operations. Despite the increases in VNA strength, French Union forces were still unable to aggressively pursue Vietminh (henceforth referred to as the People’s Army of Vietnam – PAVN) guerrillas or to hold terrain that had been captured. Further VNA expansion was initiated, therefore, in anticipation of VNA forces assuming responsibility for all defensive missions. Although VNA soldiers fought in Operations HIRONDELLE and CAMARQUE and in the evacuation of Na San, the expansion of forces was insufficient to help the French turn back the PAVN attack on Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Chapter 6 will also describe the tactics employed by indigenous soldiers who were integrated into French infantry battalions, company-sized ground and parachute commando units, and the French Union Battle Corps. Missions assigned to local auxiliary fighters, such as screening for main force French units, conducting night reconnaissance operations, and long-range covert surveillance missions behind PAVN lines will be discussed. Finally, the role of Maquis – indigenous militias comprised of tribal Montagnard, Hmong, and Tai fighters – will be reviewed and evaluated.
Chapter 2. Red Blue Coats:
American Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries to the US Army on the Frontier
Historical Perspective
In US Military history, the twenty-five years following the Civil War is typically referred to as the Indian wars period. Although conflicts between white Americans and American Indians began during colonial times, the fighting was limited in that Indian tribes were able to successfully withdraw westward into uninhabited territory. After the Civil War, however, increasingly larger numbers of white Americans also began moving west in search of mineral resources, land, and economic opportunities. As more and more whites encroached on their homeland, Indians were forced to fight to protect their hunting grounds and to preserve their nomadic way of life. The various tribes fought what was essentially a guerrilla war – ambushes, skirmishes, raids, and massacres – throughout the Great Plains, mountains, and deserts of frontier America. The US Army assumed the mission of subduing the hostile Indians and restoring peace to the American West.[ix]
Following the conclusion of the Civil War, more than one million volunteer Soldiers were discharged from the Army, leaving a regular force of approximately 50,000 men. Over the next ten years, political opposition to a large standing army led to a reduction in force that left the Army with less than 30,000 regular Soldiers, spread thinly over a wide variety of missions, such as defending the frontier, occupying southern states, protecting the US-Mexican border, preventing Fenian Brotherhood raids into Canada, and enforcing law and order in the border states. The Army established a series of military outposts to provide protection for the thousands of white citizens moving westward along the network of transcontinental trails. And by 1866, the Army adopted a territorial frontier defense command and control structure consisting of the Division of the Missouri, comprised of the Departments of Arkansas, Missouri, Dakota, and the Platte; the Division of the Pacific, including the Departments of California and the Columbia; and separate Department of the Gulf, which included Texas.[x]
What little experience the Army had in fighting Indians had been lost during the Civil War years. By the late 1860’s, the Plains Indians, nearly all on horseback, were a formidable enemy. In addition, the vast expanse of the frontier west, along with the associated transportation, communications, and logistics requirements, proved problematic for the undermanned Army. In lamenting the constant juggling of resources and requirements during the summer of 1867, Division of Missouri commander, Lieutenant General William T. Sherman wrote:
Were I, or the department commanders, to send guards to every point where they are clamored for, we would need alone on the plains a hundred thousand men, mostly of cavalry. Each spot of every road, and each little settlement along our five thousand miles of frontier, wants its regiment of cavalry or infantry to protect it against the combined power of all the Indians, because of the bare possibility of their being attacked by the combined force of all these Indians.[xi]
Although US President Andrew Johnson authorized the enlistment of one thousand Indian scouts in 1866, General Sherman’s concerns laid the groundwork for the expanded employment of volunteers and Indian scouts/auxiliaries to assist the Army in fighting hostile Indians in the western theater.[xii]
Military historians have typically subdivided the Indian wars of 1865-1890 into a series of campaigns. During the Bozeman Trail/ Powder River Expedition, for example, white fortune hunters sought to establish a more direct route to newly discovered gold deposits in Montana Territory. The new route, however, traversed land reserved by treaty for the Sioux (led by Chief Red Cloud), Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe Indians. Although several noteworthy engagements, including the Lodge Trail Ridge, Hayfield, and Wagon Box Fights, occurred in 1866-1867 between the Indians and the US 18th Infantry, the government abandoned the Bozeman Trail initiative in July 1868, due primarily to an overall lack of forces.[xiii] Meanwhile on the Southern Plains, tribes of Cheyennes (Chief Roman Nose), Sioux, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Comanches, increasingly frustrated with expanding white encroachment, refused reservation confinement. Subsequent battles with Army Soldiers at Washita River in Oklahoma, Beecher’s Island Colorado, and Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle, convinced these restive tribes to grudgingly accept reservation life at Forts Sill and Reno.[xiv]
A third campaign in the Indian Wars took place against the Modocs, Nez Perces (Chief Joseph), and the Utes in the northwestern trans-Mississippi West – present day Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The Modoc tribe surrendered and returned to the Klamath Reservation in 1873 after fighting US Soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Regiment in the Lost River/Lava Beds region along the Oregon-California border.[xv] In 1877, after several battles with Army Soldiers at White Bird Canyon, Clearwater, Big Hole, Canyon Creek, and Bear Paw Mountain in Idaho and Montana, Chief Joseph agreed to “fight no more,” and subsequently removed the remainder of his Nez Perce tribe to the Lapwai Reservation in western Idaho.[xvi] Similarly, the Bannock and Western Shoshone (Sheepeaters) tribes in Idaho and the Utes in Colorado also succumbed to intense pressure in 1878-1879 from the US Army to surrender and relocate to reservations.[xvii]
In the Southwest – Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, and the northern province of Mexico – US Army Lieutenant Colonel George Crook battled hostile Apaches, led initially by Cochise, then later by Victorio and Geronimo, for twenty years following the Civil War.[xviii] Crook’s use of mule pack trains and Indian scouts allowed his highly mobile striking forces to relentlessly pursue the Apaches. Cochise and his band surrendered and moved to the Chiricahua Mountains Reservation in 1872, while Victorio was killed in 1880 by Mexican Army soldiers in Chihuahua. The US Army captured Geronimo and sent him to the San Carlos Reservation in 1877; however, he and 700 Apaches escaped and fled to Mexico in 1881. Geronimo surrendered, then escaped once again, before capitulating for the last time in 1886, thereby ending the Apache campaigns.[xix]
Back on the Northern Plains, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakota Sioux led by Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, angry over increasing white encroachment and broken treaties, abandoned their reservation for the Powder River region of Wyoming and Montana. In late 1875, the Army initiated a campaign to force the Indians back to the Great Sioux Reservation. The subsequent Battle of Rosebud was fought to a draw. However, on 26 June 1876, an overwhelming Indian force of roughly 1,800 warriors killed Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and all of the estimated 230 Soldiers in his immediate command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The devastating defeat drew thousands of additional Soldiers to the region in pursuit of the hostile Indians. In the spring of 1877, Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska, and Sitting Bull, who had escaped with his band to Canada, eventually surrendered to US forces in 1881.[xx]
The final battle of the Indian Wars occurred in 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One hundred-fifty Lakota Sioux from Chief Big Foot’s band were killed in the fighting, along with twenty-five 7th Cavalry Soldiers.[xxi] Indians had encountered US Army Soldiers, scouts, and auxiliaries in more than a thousand skirmishes since the end of the Civil War. After Wounded Knee, however, with their buffalo herds annihilated and faced with ever increasing numbers of white settlements, Indians throughout the frontier finally resigned themselves to life on the reservation.[xxii]
Indian Scouts, Auxiliaries, and Allies
American Indians have served as scouts and auxiliaries for whites since colonial times. Narragansett and Mohegan Indians, for example, joined New England colonist in their 1637 war with Pequots. In 1675, Peqouts and Mohegans assisted the New England Confederation militia during King Philip’s War, fought against the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuck tribes. Both Great Britain and France successfully employed Native American Indian allies from opposing tribes in the French and Indian War. Similarly, during the Revolutionary War, Britain encouraged Indians to fight colonists and the Continental Army along the western frontier, while General George Washington recruited thousands of friendly Indians to assist his forces against British regulars in east. General Anthony Wayne and his Legion of the United States enlisted Choctaw and Chickasaw scouts in the Northwest Indian War against northern tribes that resisted US annexation of their lands. And Choctaw and Cherokee Indians fought alongside Major General Andrew Jackson’s US troops in the victorious Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.[xxiii]
Following the War of 1812, European nations lost interest in colonizing North America, thereby effectively ending Indian involvement in white men’s wars. The US Army, however, solicited Creeks to fight in the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) and members of displaced eastern tribes served as scouts and auxiliaries during the early Plains Wars against hostile Sioux and Cheyennes. In 1846, Delaware Chief Black Beaver commanded an entire company of Indian scouts under General William Harney during the Mexican War. In pre-Civil War Texas, Indians from smaller tribes on the Brazos River Reserve greatly assisted Texas Rangers in their numerous encounters with rampaging Comanches. Finally, Indians from friendly tribes joined both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Regiments consisting entirely of Indians were led by white or mixed blood officers and fought in both full-scale conventional battles and guerrilla-type skirmishes.[xxiv]
Indian scouts on the American Frontier played a vital role in US westward expansion during the later half of the nineteenth century.[xxv] Their extensive knowledge of the geography and the numerous friendly and hostile tribes throughout the plains, mountains, and desert southwest made Indian scouts a nearly indispensable asset to the US Army in gathering valuable intelligence about the western territories. Scouts typically performed reconnaissance missions – locating, tracking, and fixing hostile tribes, estimating the enemy’s strength, and sorting out complicated tribal affiliations. Historian Thomas Dunlay points out a conceptual distinction between Indian scouts and Indian auxiliaries, noting that scouts were intended to gather intelligence, while auxiliaries were to actually engage in combat. In reality, however, scouts often fought the enemy, and in many instances, scouts were the only government troops to participate in skirmishes with hostile tribes. According to Dunlay, the term Indian “allies” offers a more accurate description of those Indians who voluntarily cooperated with and participated with US Army Soldiers in the Indian Wars.[xxvi]
Indian allies – whether scouts, auxiliaries, guides, or translators – proved invaluable to the Frontier Army. This contention is described by Colonel Richard Dodge, a thirty-three year veteran on of Indian Wars, in his 1882 book Our Wild Indians:
The success of every expedition against Indians depends to a degree on the skill, fidelity, and intelligence of the men employed as scouts for not only is the command habitually dependent on them for good routes and comfortable camps, but the officer in command must rely on them almost entirely for his knowledge of the position and movements of the enemy. These they learn by scouting far in advance or on the flanks of the column, and here the knowledge of trailing becomes of the utmost importance.[xxvii]
Following the Civil War, frontier Soldiers continued to follow conventional European style warfighting methodology and doctrine. They were clearly unaccustomed to the guerrilla-type warfare carried out by elusive hostile Indians, who remained on the move, avoided pitched battles, and, if engaged, quickly withdrew. Hostiles would attack, however, if they had the advantage of superior numbers, as was the case at Little Big Horn.
The US Army’s principal strategy, therefore, became demoralizing hostiles and forcing them to consider surrender by attacking their camps and destroying their property, which was left behind as the Indians typically escaped. This strategy was most effective if carried out in winter and the hostile Indians’ food stocks captured or destroyed. Dodge attributes the Army’s expanded use of Indian allies to Lieutenant Colonel George Crook and describes the scouts’ effectiveness in locating hostile Indian camps as follows:
Singly, or in bands of two, three, or more, these sleuth-hounds scatter far and wide, miles in advance and on the flanks of the troops. If a trail or other indication of hostiles is discovered, report is sent back to the commander, and the troops halt until the scouts can work up the position of the camp, when a night march is made and the telling blow struck [often just before dawn].[xxviii]
Crook preferred Indian scouts over white frontier scouts, such as the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger, noting “I always try to get Indian scouts, because with them scouting is the business of their lives. They learn all the signs of a trail as a child learns the alphabet; it becomes an instinct. With a white man, the knowledge is acquired in later life.”[xxix] Experienced white pioneer scouts were difficult to come by and demanded excessively high compensation. Indians scouts, by comparison, agreed to short-term enlistments, were discharged when no longer needed, and received the equivalent of a US Army Private’s pay, plus food, weapons, and uniforms.[xxx] Although Indian scouts participated in hundreds of battles against hostiles, they were erroneously classified as noncombatants and administratively assigned to the US Army Quartermaster’s Department. In acknowledging the fact that scouts were truly willing and courageous fighters, Brigadier General Hugh Scott, an experienced frontier Cavalry Officer and Superintendent of West Point (1906-1910), wrote, “the services of many scouts were more valuable to a commander than a battalion of troops.”[xxxi]
Whenever possible, Lieutenant Colonel Crook chose scouts from the hostile Indian’s own tribe. “To polish a diamond there is nothing like its own dust,” Crook said. “Nothing breaks them [hostile Indians] up like turning their own people against them…put upon their trail an enemy of their own blood…as tireless, foxy, and stealthy as they themselves, and it breaks them all up,” he explained.[xxxii] At a November 1876 encounter between the Cavalry and Cheyenne hostiles in the Bighorn Mountains, Chief Dull Knife yelled out to the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts accompanying the Soldiers – “Go home…you have no business here; we can whip the white Soldiers alone, but can’t fight you too.”[xxxiii]
Hostile tribes often disparaged the fighting abilities of US Army Soldiers. In 1865, in the Powder River region, a company of Pawnee scouts rode two-by-two in pursuit of Northern Cheyenne hostiles. Thinking the scouts were Cavalrymen, the Cheyenne stopped and prepared to fight. According to historian and Native American expert George Grinnell, the Cheyenne’s “hearts became like water, and they turned and fled,” when they realized that the approaching riders were Pawnees.[xxxiv] Their concerns were justified in that the Pawnees caught, killed, and scalped the entire Cheyenne party. Scout and interpreter Frank Grouard credited Crow allies with protecting Lieutenant Colonel Crook’s Soldiers during the Rosebud Battle:
The Indians and the scouts jumped on their horses and just then the Sioux came charging down over the hills. But the troops were not ready to meet the attack, so Crows met the first charge of Indians, and I believe if it had not been for the Crows, Sioux would have killed half of our command before the Soldiers were in a position to meet the attack.[xxxv]
Later, at Little Bighorn, Northern Cheyenne reportedly shouted to the Cavalrymen: “You are only boys…you ought not to be fighting. We whipped you on the Rosebud. You should have brought more Crows and Shoshones with you to do your fighting.”[xxxvi] Custer’s own scout, Half-Yellow Face, had cautioned him not to divide his forces prior to attacking such a large Cheyenne camp. “You do the scouting, and I will attend to the fighting,” Custer angrily replied.[xxxvii] Complimenting Indian allies for their bravery and readiness to risk their lives for the Soldiers they supported, US Secretary of War, William Belknap, noted “they are unequalled as riders, know the country thoroughly, are hardly ever sick, never desert, and are careful of their horses.”[xxxviii]
In 1874 during the Red River campaign, Colonel Nelson Miles, who would later command the Department of the Missouri, recommended that the role of scouting be reserved exclusively for Indian allies. Inconclusive and aimless scouting was demoralizing and tiresome for US Cavalry Soldiers, who should be held in reserve – ready to attack hostile Indian bands once they had been discovered by allied Indian scouts. It was both more effective and more economical, Miles believed, for friendly Indians to track, trail, and discover hostile Indian camps. According to historian and Apache authority Eve Ball, Colonel Miles found Indian allies highly useful in a significant number of varying missions, such as interpreting and translating, gathering intelligence, carrying military dispatches, serving as intermediaries, negotiating with hostiles and convincing them to surrender, escorting paymasters and other visitors to Indian country, patrolling rail lines and guarding railroad construction crews, capturing Army deserters, performing guard duty, and maintaining law and order on Indian reservations.[xxxix]
The Tactics of Indian Scouts, Auxiliaries, and Allies
Frontier scouts typically possessed acute vision and hearing capabilities.[xl] Many scouts were also familiar with the languages and hand signs of hostile Indian tribes. Scouts, riding ponies or mules and often on foot wearing moccasins, would move forward rapidly and continuously, but also secretly and with caution, while living off of the land. Apache scouts on long-range patrols, for example, maneuvered “12 to 24 hours in advance of the Army’s main body, but always in communication…the intention being to determine the whereabouts of the hostiles, but to let the Soldiers do the work of cleaning them out,” explained Captain John Bourke, who served on General George Crook’s staff from 1870 until 1886.[xli] Scouts also screened advancing Army columns up to fifty miles on either flank; and once the command made camp, scouts manned the high ground and established outposts to guard every approach.
On other occasions, scouts, auxiliaries, and allies actually participated in fighting hostile bands. A correspondent for the Sacramento Record described the tactics used by Warm Spring scouts against renegade Modocs in northern California: “When their lines are formed, the extreme right and left end flank men carried a little flag on a pole that their true position could be determined at all times. They fought under cover generally, hunting in twos, one covering the other.”[xlii]
During the Southwest Wars against hostile Apaches in the 1870s, Lieutenant Colonel Crook, who commanded five companies of the 3rd Cavalry, also recruited two companies – Companies A and B – of Indian scouts. Crook’s successor, Colonel Augustus Kautz, subsequently added Companies C and D Indian Scouts later in the decade. Kautz described his satisfaction with the performance of Indian scouts as follows:
These scouts, supported with a small force of cavalry, are exceedingly efficient, and have succeeded, with one or two exceptions, in finding every party of Indians they have gone in pursuit of. They are a great terror to the runaways from the reservation, and for such work, are much more efficient than double the number of Soldiers.[xliii]
During the Tonto Basin Campaign in 1872-1873, for example, Crook’s Soldiers and Apache scouts were arrayed in converging columns and traveled light, using mule trains – rather than cumbersome wagon trains – to move through the rugged territory of central Arizona in pursuit of hostiles. Renegade Apaches were relentlessly tracked down and killed or captured at Skull Cave in Salt River Canyon and at Turret Peak. The demoralized Apaches, including Chiefs Cha-lipan and Delchay, surrendered and returned to the San Carlos Reservation. After his surrender, Chief Delchay acknowledged the effectiveness and persistence of the Company A Indian Scouts, explaining, “that the best trailers from among his own people had followed him day and night.”[xliv] A combined force of Apache scouts, well-armed infantry and cavalry Soldiers, and a pack train of mules had successfully tracked the hostile bands through rugged territory and ultimately compelled their surrender.
Later, in 1877, south of Ralston, NM, Lieutenant John Rucker, along with 34 Company C Indian Scouts and eleven 6th Cavalry Soldiers, conducted an arduous night march through the Leidendorf Mountains and launched a surprise attack on 40 renegade Chiricahua Apaches. Soldiers and scouts killed ten hostile Apaches during the ensuing skirmish.[xlv] Finally, after being captured by US Soldiers and scouts near the Bavispe River in northern Mexico in 1883, Chiricahua Apache Chief Geronimo escaped from the San Carlos Reservation in the spring of 1885. The following year, Geronimo surrendered for the last time to Lieutenant Charles Gatewood of the 6th Cavalry and two Chiricahua Apache scouts in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains south of the US-Mexico border.[xlvi]
The US Army on the Frontier did not readily adapt to “Indian fighting.” Friendly Indian scouts, auxiliaries, and allies took more readily to the guerrilla-type warfare practiced by the hostiles. Since renegade Indians were often armed with weapons comparable to those of the Soldiers – repeating carbines and single-shot, breach loading, carbines – massed charges and frontal assaults, such as those executed at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, fell out of favor. The numbers of skirmishes involving hand-to-hand combat decreased as did the use of cavalry sabers and tomahawks. Surprise attacks on hostile Indian villages, therefore, became the Army’s preferred method of engaging the enemy. Such surprise attacks partially prevented the hostiles from making use of their most advantageous tactics, which involved mobility, cover and concealment, ambush, flexibility, and economy of force.[xlvii] In his memoirs, Brigadier General Randolph Marcy, US Army Inspector-General of the Division of the Missouri 1866-1868, admonished Soldiers to “study [hostile Indian] tactics, and, where they suit our purposes, copy from them…combining discipline with the individuality, self-reliance, and rapidity of locomotion of the savage.”[xlviii] Indian allies, already familiar with, and essentially following many of the hostiles’ tactics, pushed the Army to place greater emphasis on mobility and surprise.
Scouts could estimate the amount of time that had elapsed since a hostile band had passed by assessing the dryness of horse dung. Since Indian women typically rode mares, scouts examined the urine patterns of horses to help determine the number of women in a hostile party. Scouts were often able to identify a particular tribe by moccasin patterns left in footprints. And clearly, scouts were exceptional horsemen. Curiously, however, many scouts were unable to estimate distances in terms of miles, relying instead on describing travel time, which often proved unrealistic to a column of Soldiers. Time and time again during the Indian Wars, scouts, auxiliaries, and allies located hostile Indian villages, led US Cavalry and Infantry on night marches through treacherous terrain, and then participated in the pre-dawn attacks.[xlix]
Following the devastating battle at Wounded Knee in 1890, Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne scouts helped convince the remaining Ghost Dancers to return to the Pine Ridge Agency, thus marking the end of the Indian Wars on the western frontier. The remaining Indian scouts, auxiliaries, and allies were disbursed among the Trans-Mississippi Army Departments, and their unit designation was downgraded from company to detachment status. In 1916, Apache scouts served as guides and couriers in the US Mexican Expedition against Pancho Villa. The last remaining Apache scout detachment was disbanded at Fort Huachuca in 1943.[l]
The Indian scouts, auxiliaries, and allies were much more than hired hands engaged in locating hostiles for the Army to fight. The tracking, trailing, and general reconnaissance function performed by scouts was an essential component of the frontier campaign plan. Most of the decisive battles might never have occurred had the scouts not first found the renegade bands. “For detached service on a small scale, and especially for hunting Indians in the rough country near the Black Hills, Indian scouts are the cheapest and altogether the best Soldiers that can be employed,” Colonel William Carlin, who commanded several Army posts throughout the west, wrote in the 1870s.[li] In numerous skirmishes, Indian auxiliaries fought alongside Soldiers, and on several occasions, Indian allies were the only ones to fight. “General Crook has fought the devil with fire…never before in the history of this country has there been more gallant, more uncomplaining, and more efficient service than that of [our Indian allies],” a retired Army Officer recounted in the St. Louis Republican.[lii] Finally, in their role as intermediaries, scouts, who themselves embodied bona fide proof that Indians could coexist with whites, often convinced hostiles to surrender, thereby limiting further carnage. As Crook made clear in his 1886 Resume of Operations Against Apache Indians, “I assert…without reservation or qualification…that these Chiricahua scouts…did most excellent service and were of more value in hunting down and compelling the surrender of the renegades than all other troops engaged in operations against them, combined.”[liii] The mutually beneficial relationship established between the US Army and its Indian scouts, auxiliaries, and allies in the Trans-Mississippi, therefore, serves as an example of compound warfare as defined by historian and former US Army Combat Studies Institute faculty member, Thomas Huber – “The simultaneous use of a regular or main force and an irregular or guerrilla force against an enemy…[thereby] increasing military leverage by applying both conventional and unconventional force at the same time.”[liv]
Chapter 3. Ici, C’est la France:
Harkis and the Algerian War
France invaded and captured Algiers from the declining Ottoman Empire in 1830. By 1848, the entire territory of Algeria became, not simply a colony, but an integral part of France. Waves of Europeans, referred to as pieds noirs, immigrated to Algeria in search of fertile land. By the twentieth century, the pieds noirs found themselves “demographically swamped” by indigenous Muslim Algerians, who comprised approximately 90% of the total population.[lv] Algerian nationalism gained favor among the majority Muslims. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country…independence is a natural right for every people of the earth,” became the creed of the nationalist movement.[lvi] In 1936, Sheikh Abdul-Hamid Ben Badis, founder of the Muslim Algerian Ulema Association of Islamic scholars, added fuel to the nationalism fires, extolling the emergence of a “ Muslin Algerian nation, which has its culture, its traditions, and its characteristics…this Algerian nation is not France, and does not wish to be France.”[lvii]
France’s international prestige diminished significantly during World War II and was further tarnished with the loss of Indochina to the Viet-Minh in 1954. Seizing on the perception of French weakness, Algerian revolutionaries – Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) – launched a general insurrection in November 1954. Although the Armee de Liberation Nationale (ALN), FLN’s military wing, successfully attacked French military facilities, police stations, and communications installations throughout Algeria, the anticipated insurrection among the general Muslim population failed to materialize. The ALN guerrillas subsequently withdrew to sanctuaries in the imposing Aures Mountains at the far eastern end of the Saharan Atlas Range, roughly 200-300 miles southeast of Algiers. French reaction to the rebellion in Algeria was swift. Premier Pierre Mendes-France denounced the uprising, declaring to the French National Assembly, “The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic…they have been French for a long time and they are irrevocably French…one does not compromise when it comes to the unity and integrity of the Republic…there can be no conceivable secession…never will France yield on this fundamental principal…ici, c’est la France.”[lviii] Minister of Interior, Francois Mitterrand echoed Mendes-France’s condemnation of the FLN in a speech to the Assembly’s Commission de l’Interieur on 5 November 1954. “The only possible negotiation is war,” Mitterrand said, adding, “Algeria is France, who among you, Mesdames and Messieurs, would hesitate to employ every means to preserve France?”[lix]
The NATO-style French Army was unaccustomed to guerrilla warfare and the troops were not trained for counterinsurgency. Tanks and other armored vehicles were unable to operate effectively off-road, making pursuit of ALN insurgents into their mountain retreats nearly impossible. Surviving the grueling winter of 1955 proved difficult for the French infantry. Forced marches and sweeps through the Aures were ineffective as the ALN, relying on warning fires and sentry dogs, easily stayed one step ahead of French patrols. By the summer, the conflict had reached an impasse, until insurgent instigated riots resulted in the deaths of scores of pieds noirs and pro-French Muslims in the coastal city of Philippeville.
Following the Philippeville massacre, France increased its military presence in Algeria and established hundreds of Sections Administratives Specialisees (SAS) offices to help provide essential services for the Algerian people who were undecided as to which camp to support.[lx] The French military also hired local Algerian auxiliary forces – called Harkis – who either served along side French forces in counterinsurgency operations, or provided protection and intelligence for the SAS detachments.[lxi] In the summer of 1956, the ALN initiated an urban terrorism campaign aimed at Algerian cities. Marked by indiscriminate bombings and assassinations, the Battle of Algiers officially ended in the fall of 1957, as French airborne soldiers from the 10e Division de Parachutistes captured, killed, or drove the ALN insurgents from the cities.[lxii]
The French infantry, meanwhile, continued search and destroy operations in Algeria’s rural regions. A new concept, described as quadrillage, was added to the mix of French tactics. To hold and secure strategic locales, strongholds were established and static forces were permanently assigned to specific areas. Soldiers were deployed in grid patterns and were responsible for suppressing insurgent activity and supporting local SAS efforts in their respective sectors. Additional soldiers manned mobile reserve units that operated independently against rebels and reinforced the static forces as necessary.[lxiii] In an overzealous effort to separate ALN insurgents from the general population, French officials relocated several hundred thousands rural citizens to refugee centers – camps de regroupement – and declared the evacuated regions free-fire zones.[lxiv] Finally, French military forces tightened Algeria’s borders with Morocco and Tunisia to prevent the flow of supplies and additional manpower intended for the ALN. The 200-mile long, mined, electrified, and radar controlled Morice Barrage (Morice Line) along the Tunisian frontier was particularly effective in preventing ALN infiltration.[lxv]
Meanwhile, support in continental France for the Algerian War was waning. Retired General Charles de Gaulle helped form a new government – the French Fifth Republic – and was elected its president in 1959. De Gualle appealed directly to the FLN to stop the fighting in Algeria: “Why kill? We must enable people to live. Why destroy? Our duty is to build. Why hate? We must cooperate. Stop the absurd fighting and you will see at once a new blossoming of hope all over the land.”[lxvi] His plea, however, was rejected and de Gaulle vowed to pursue military operations against the FLN/ALN with renewed vigor.
Under newly appointed French Commander-in-Chief for Algeria, General Maurice Challe, counterinsurgency/counter-terrorism operations increased dramatically. “Neither the mountains nor the night must be left to the FLN,” Challe said, adding, “once hit, a rebel unit must be hit again, and remain hit…life must be made enduringly unendurable for the moudjahiddine.”[lxvii] The military component of Plan Challe called for Commandos de Chasse, along with Muslim Harki tracker units, to locate and pin down groups of ALN insurgent forces. The highly mobile, often heliborne, Reserve Generale would then strike the enemy force and continue to pursue rebel formations until they were decisively defeated. Politically, General Challe’s plan involved expanding SAS facilities and employing additional Harki auxiliaries to provide security and essential services for local citizens and to facilitate the presence francaise among the Muslim population.[lxviii]
During 1959, Challe rolled out his plan, moving west to east across northern Algeria. Nearly 4,000 ALN insurgents were killed, captured, or wounded in Operation JUMELLES, which involved more than 25,000 French troops fighting in the Kabylia region – one of the last rebel stronghold in eastern Algeria.[lxix] Battlefield victories, however, could not overcome growing sentiment at home and increasing pressure from the international community to bring the war, which by the 1960s tied up nearly half of France’s military forces, to an honorable conclusion. Although de Gaulle had initially favored preserving Algeria as French – “vive l’Algerie francais,” he proclaimed at Mostaganem in 1958 – by 1959, he concluded that granting Algeria independence and “self-determination” was inevitable.[lxx] In a 1961 referendum, French and Algerian citizens approved Algerian independence. Peace talks with the FLN subsequently resulted in a ceasefire agreement and the drafting of the Evian Accords in March 1962. The Accords were approved in a second referendum, and President de Gaulle declared the Republic of Algeria an independent state in July 1962.
The rights of French citizens in the Algerian European community were guaranteed in the Evian Accords for three years, after which time Europeans could choose between becoming Algerian citizens or being classified as aliens. The FLN also agreed to not discriminate against the Muslin Harkis who had fought alongside French forces during the war. By November 1962, approximately 850,000 Europeans and pro-French Muslims had emigrated from Algeria, with more following in 1963 and 1964. Although French military forces were to withdraw from Algeria within three years, France was permitted to retain the use of its nuclear testing facilities near Reggane, the naval base at Mers-el-Kebir, its Bou Sfer airbase, and access to Algerian oil reserves. The Algerian War was a perplexing conflict involving guerrilla warfare, terrorism against civilians, torture, counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, and civil war that pitted Algerians loyal to France against the Algerian FLN. Twelve thousand regular French troops, along with 2,500 Harki auxiliaries, were killed in the war. Estimates of ALN insurgents killed exceeded 140,000. Finally, despite preventative stipulations in the Evian Accords, thousands of Harkis, who had shed their blood for France were left behind by the French, and were subsequently massacred by their “vengeful Muslim brethren.”[lxxi]
Harki Auxiliaries and Their Tactics
Prior to the Algerian War, Algerian Muslims had served with distinction as infantry and cavalry soldiers in the regular French Army of Africa during numerous conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War, World Wars I and II, and the Indochina War. Concerns of loyalty, however, resulted in the transfer of several Algerian Muslim French Army units to continental France at the onset of the Algerian War. To address the shortfall of soldiers in Algeria, French military officials, on the recommendations of local village mayors, recruited indigenous Muslim Algerians – known as Harkis – to serve as auxiliaries with, and alongside, regular army forces. Estimates of Harki strength during the Algerian War varied between 180,000 to 250,000 men fighting in support of Algerie francais.[lxxii]
Harki units performed both offensive and defensive missions in support of the French counterinsurgency. Armed primarily with shotguns, Harkis were singularly adept at tracking down FLN/ALN insurgents. Intelligence information gathered by Harkis regarding the make up of local populations – often comprised of Algerians with similar tribal/ethnic/language backgrounds as the Harkis – the accessibility of local terrain, and knowledge of specific operating areas was particularly useful. Harkis were also beneficial in the propaganda war, since they outnumbered ALN fighters four-to-one, thereby making the argument that more Algerians favored French rule than independence.[lxxiii] And since most rural Algerians were illiterate, specially trained Harkis brought pro-French propaganda messages back to their respective villages on a regular basis.[lxxiv]
Typically based near their own homes in order to provide protection for their families, Harkis participated in assaults on ALN guerrilla formations, attacked ALN lines of communication, and also occupied and defended numerous strategic garrisons and villages.[lxxv] French Lieutenant Colonel David Galula, who, as a Captain at the time, commanded French soldiers and Harkis in his assigned area of responsibility (referred to as a sous-quartier) east of Algiers in the Kabylia district, wrote that he had “five Harkis from Bou Souar, five from Igonane Ameur, seven from Khelouyene, and eight from Ait Braham.” Often, citizens of one village distrusted Harkis from another. The mayors of Khelouyene and Ait Braham emphatically refused to have Harkis from Bou Souar and Igonane serve as police in their communes, declaring “we have no confidence in these people.”[lxxvi] Nevertheless, from 1957 to 1959, the number of Harki “self-defense” villages increased from 18 to 385.[lxxvii]
Harkis trained rigorously during their first month of service and then deployed in either French-led all-Algerian units, mixed French-Algerian units (such as the Commandoes de Chase), as platoons or squads attached to larger French formations, and in some instances as transport troops, hauling ammunition, food, and radios.[lxxviii] In Galula’s Kabylia district, some Harkis simply served in their own villages under French leadership. They patrolled either on their own or alongside French soldiers, participated in ambushes, guarded key facilities (such as schools), identified and reported strangers, and generally controlled the population.
Additional Harkis served in integrated French companies and took part in operations inside and outside of the sous-quartier. “I used them as scouts,” Galula reported, “a function in which their mountaineering skills, their endurance, and their speed made them invaluable.” “They [Harkis] were also uncanny at finding caches…had a knack for spotting look-out men for the rebels…and were the first in during house searches…since they would immediately notice anything abnormal,” Galula added.[lxxix] When Galula’s area of operations expanded, he dispatched Harkis on 2-3 day long-range patrols to scout-out and report back on the new territory. Harkis on these patrols often dressed as civilians, remained hidden during daylight hours, and conducted ambushes of ALN insurgents at night. On another occasion, Galula sent Harkis, wearing insurgent uniforms, badges, and carrying captured weapons, into the village of Djinet under the ruse of linking-up with local insurgents. Although the villagers were indeed deceived, they nevertheless refused to divulge the location of local guerrillas.[lxxx]
Harkis were motivated to join the French ranks for a variety of reasons, including the opportunity to exact revenge against the FLN, longstanding tribal/clan animosities, pressure from the French military, and decent pay and benefits – Harkis were paid a daily wage and considered by many as day laborers or soldiers of fortune.[lxxxi]
The loyalty of Harki auxiliaries was always a concern for French authorities, and perhaps justifiably so. In one instance, a 1,000 man, heavily armed, Harki unit, known as “Force K,” began conducting a series of highly secretive special operations, code-named OISEAU BLEU. Force K’s efforts proved surprisingly unproductive, and in October 1956, the unit was suspected of ambushing a French patrol. Shortly thereafter the French governor-general received an anonymous note stating “Monsieur le minister, with the Affaire K…you were deceived. Those whom you took for traitors to the Algerian nation were pure patriots…thank you for having procured us arms that will help us liberate our country.”[lxxxii] Operation OISEAU BLEU was immediately terminated, and French paratroopers relentlessly hunted down the Force K auxiliaries, who had been aligned with the FLN all along. Unfortunately, some 600 Force K operatives escaped with their sub-machine guns and sniper rifles and joined the ALN insurgent forces.
By 1959, however, more trustworthy Harki detachments formed the core of General Challe’s Commandoes de Chasse. Commandoes expertly employed guerrilla tactics, much like those used by the insurgents themselves, in pursuit of ALN fighters. According to noted British historian of modern France, Sir Alistair Horne, Harkis under Challe “would strike off into the mountains for days at a time, living off the land and at the same time severing the adversary from his sources of supply, ruthlessly hunting down the hunter.”[lxxxiii] Constant radio communication was maintained with Challe’s command post, and once the enemy was located, helibourne Reserve Generale shock troops would descend on the insurgents from all sides. “Never, declared Philippe Tripier – World War II and Indochina veteran and North African specialist on the French General Staff of National Defense – had the forces in Algeria been so well commanded…never had the military instrument been better adapted to its task…well tuned and animated by ardent and inventive leaders.”[lxxxiv]
Harki auxiliaries similarly distinguished themselves during the so-called Paris Café War, which broke out in 1957 as an intercontinental extension of the Algerian conflict. The FLN and a rival group, the Mouvement Nationaliste Algerienne (MNA), were vying for the allegiance of Paris’ 250,000-member Algerian expatriate community. By 1960, the fighting between these two pro Algerian independence factions escalated with bombings and gangland-style murders occurring in the city’s cafes and with bodies found floating in the Seine or hanging in the Bois de Boulogne. French authorities, who had reluctantly sided with the MNA in hopes of diminishing the influence of the more powerful FLN, initiated a counter offensive using a small group of highly trained Harki auxiliaries flown into the capital from Algeria for the mission. The Harkis mingled easily in the Algerian dominated neighborhoods and quickly tracked down the FLN cadres and their leaders. Firefights broke out periodically between the Harkis and FLN operatives on city streets and underground in the Paris metro system. Although Twenty-four Harkis were killed and another 67 wounded in the Paris fighting, by the following year they had markedly undermined FLN effectiveness and capabilities in the city.[lxxxv]
In March 1961, just as General Challe was about to administer the final coup-de-grace to ALN insurgents, French officials announced commencement of bilateral peace talks at Evian between France and the FLN. President de gaulle had gone back on his word – never to negotiate with the FLN. As a show of good faith, a unilateral truce was declared and French military forces were ordered to curtail all combat operations. Fearing that France had lost its will to fight for Algerie francais, Harkis, who had formed the nucleus of the Challe Plan, deserted en-masse. Challe felt a deep sense of moral responsibility for the Harkis. Only the year before, on President de Gaulle’s instructions, Challe had reassured the Harkis he had recruited that “France will never abandon you.” “We were committed,” he later lamented, “we had given our promises to the Arabs who had worked for us, and we simply could not let them down.”[lxxxvi]
Prior to Algerian independence, all residents of Algeria were considered French citizens and were free to travel unrestrained between Algeria and France. After 3 July 1962, however, all Muslims in Algeria became Algerian citizens. The pieds-noirs – Algerians of European origin – were allowed to freely immigrate to continental France, while Harki immigration was restricted. French authorities disbanded Harki auxiliary units and disarmed the Harkis, gave them a bonus, and sent them home.[lxxxvii] A decree issued in May by the French minister of Algerian affairs forbade the repatriation of all but a few Harkis. Several who had successfully made their way to Marseille were turned back. As the torture and killing of Harkis and their families escalated, French officers offered them safe-harbor on the remaining French military installations or helped smuggle them to France.[lxxxviii]
After Algerian independence appeared inevitable, there was little sympathy within the French government for Harkis. French authorities took a legalistic approach to the Harki dilemma – since Harkis were no longer French citizens, they were of no further interest to the French government.[lxxxix] Seemingly unsympathetic to the Harkis’ fate, President de Gaulle described them as “flotsam and jetsam…who served no purpose and should be got rid of as soon as possible,” adding in an address to the French cabinet, “if the people [of independent Algeria] kill each other, it will be a matter for the new authorities…we cannot accept all Muslims who claim they are not getting along with their government.”[xc] Between 1962 and 1967, twenty-five thousand Harkis were, however, able to relocate to France under a government sponsored repatriation program. An additional sixty-three thousand immigrated to France illegally. Once in France, most Harkis were segregated in refugee camps and former internment facilities, while a few were given public housing near industrial towns. By the 1970s, the vast majority had failed to assimilate into French culture. Of those Harkis left behind in Algeria, an estimated 75,000 to 150,000 were killed by the FLN. Ironically, several hundred died while being forced to clear former French minefields along the Morice Line.[xci]
Chapter 4. ARVN, CIDG, RF/PF, and CAP:
Indigenous Forces in the Vietnam War
The French Indochina War ended in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva Accords, which divided the country along the 17th parallel into communist North Vietnam and pro-western South Vietnam, renamed the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Over the next several years, the United States Military Advisory Assistance Group, Vietnam (MAAG-V) helped the RVN government build the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) by establishing 7 infantry divisions, 4 armor battalions, an airborne brigade, and various naval, air, and marine forces. RVNAF’s principal mission involved defending the RVN against a potential invasion from North Vietnam. When a full-fledged attack from the north failed to materialize, RVNAF was unprepared to deal with the communist-led Viet Cong (VC) insurgency, which developed within RVN in 1959.[xcii]
By 1963, the Viet Cong had gained control of the fertile Mekong Delta. President Lyndon Johnson significantly increased US assistance to RVN by ordering air strikes against North Vietnamese cities and military facilities and by deploying several hundred thousand US combat troops – the number exceeded 500,000 by 1968 – to South Vietnam. As the American public became increasingly disenfranchised with the war after the 1968 North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, newly elected President Richard Nixon began withdrawing US forces and proposed a program of Vietnamization in which RVNAF assumed greater responsibility for further fighting. Eventually, diplomatic efforts resulted in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, signed by the governments of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, the United States, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government that represented indigenous South Vietnamese revolutionaries. The Accords ended US military involvement in Vietnam and called for a cessation of hostilities between the north and south. North Vietnam, however, failed to comply with the agreement and resumed hostilities in early 1975. Without US military assistance, the RVNAF was unable to withstand the subsequent North Vietnamese offensive and Saigon fell on 30 April.[xciii]
Several separate indigenous forces organizations participated in the Vietnam War in support of the Republic of Vietnam, including the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN – established in 1955 after the conclusion of the Indochina War), Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG), Regional Forces and Popular Forces (RF/PF), and Combined Action Program (CAP) forces. During the late 1950s, ARVN soldiers concentrated on defeating communist National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgents, who were attempting to undermine the existing RVN government. The United States provided the ARVN with weapons, funding, and military advisors in support of this endeavor. As the US increased its combat presence in RVN during the 1960s, American Soldiers and ARVN forces occasionally participated together in joint combat operations.[xciv]
Organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1960s, the CIDG provided local, village-by-village, defense against Viet Cong insurgents. Supervised and trained by US Soldiers from the 1st and 5th Special Forces Groups, the CIDG program expanded to 40 villages and grew to more than 35,000 members by 1962. Further expansion occurred in 1963, after the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) assumed responsibility for the CIDG program. The CIDG mission changed as well to include conventional combat operations, primarily along the borders with Laos and Cambodia. By the early 1970s, the majority of CIDG units – comprising approximately 50,000 tribal fighters – converted to Vietnamese Ranger battalions and Border Ranger units.[xcv]
Formerly known as the Civilian Guard and Self Defense Corps, Regional and Popular Forces were militia-like units recruited locally to man outposts and defend strategic facilities. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, RF/PFs assumed greater responsibility for fighting the Viet Cong as US forces began to withdraw from RVN. By 1973, the number of RF/PF fighters had grown to 525,000. They were too lightly armed, however, to forestall the 1975 NVA invasion.[xcvi] Finally, in 1965, US Marines in the I Corps Tactical Area of Responsibility established the CAP program that combined a 14 man Marine rifle squad with a 34 member RF/PF platoon. By 1970, 2,200 Marines were living and working with 114 CAPs deployed throughout five key northern provinces. The lasting relationships established between the Marine squads and the RF/PFs were a critical factor in the success of the program.[xcvii]
ARVN Tactics
The ARVN role in the Vietnam War began to diminish in the 1960’s as the US assumed increasing responsibility for the fighting. The US, however, continued to finance the ARVN effort and to provide them with an array of modern weapons, including M-16 rifles, M-79 grenade launchers, radio equipment, Jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and tanks. The Viet Cong began to attack ARVN units more vigorously in 1962, and at the battle of An Bac, three ARVN battalions, transported by helicopter and armored personnel carriers, surrounded a single VC battalion, but failed to decisively defeat the enemy force. ARVN soldiers showed “a lack of aggressiveness, hesitancy about taking casualties, lack of battlefield leadership, and a non-existent chain of command,” according to New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, who covered the fighting.[xcviii] ARVN units persisted in fighting what was basically a guerrilla war using conventional warfare tactics. Dependence on armored personnel carriers seriously diminished ARVN cross-country mobility. ARVN forces also failed to occupy, consolidate, and protect successfully cleared villages, thus permitting a quick VC return. After skirmishes with VC guerrillas, ARVN units typically withdrew to defensive positions.[xcix]
In March 1965, two reinforced US Marine Corps battalions – 3,500 men – went ashore at Da Nang to defend the airfield. By April, 8,000 Expeditionary Force Marines – supported by artillery, armor, aviation, and Naval gunfire – had reached Da Nang and had begun patrolling operations into VC controlled areas. Shortly thereafter, US Ambassador Maxwell Taylor suggested that Marine units could serve as hard-hitting reserve forces in support of ARVN operations in I Corps. The Viet Cong, however, intensified their campaign and, by mid-1965, were capable of initiating regimental size attacks in all four ARVN corps zones. Four ARVN battalions were badly beaten by VC forces in I and II Corps, while further south the ARVN lost two battalions and an outpost to the VC during the remainder of 1965.[c]
General Westmoreland requested and was granted additional US troops. Westmoreland also reiterated his roles and missions concept whereby US forces would concentrate on search and destroy operations, while the ARVN would focus principally on pacification. By the end of 1966, this strategy appeared to be working. With 350,000 US troops in South Vietnam, ARVN forces – totaling 285,000 – turned increasingly to pacification duties.[ci] By 1969 however, as US forces began to withdraw in accordance with President Nixon’s Vietnamization program, the ARVN once again became the primary force in the fight against the VC and NVA. “US withdrawals were irreversible and the South Vietnamese must do the job,” Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird declared in an official statement of US intentions.[cii]
In 1970, ARVN forces effectively conducted a series of operations, including a successful attack on the town of Krek, during the Cambodian Incursion. The purpose of this joint US/ARVN campaign was to destroy a sizeable NVA/Viet Cong staging area in eastern Cambodia. In some cases, such as Operation TOAN THANG 42, ARVN forces operated independently, conducting basic search and destroy missions. On other occasions, Operations TOAN THANG 43-46 for example, ARVN and US forces formed Task Force Shoemaker for a joint incursion into Cambodia’s Kampong Cham province.[ciii]
US and ARVN units also fought together in northeastern Cambodia during Operation BINH TAY I (Operation TAME THE WEST), but ARVN forces continued the follow-up operations (BINH TAY II-IV, which included the evacuation of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees) on their own.[civ] Additionally, during Operations CUU LONG I, II, and III, ARVN mechanized and armored forces cleared portions of the Mekong River, joined with Cambodian ground troops to regain lost territory, and helped repatriate thousands more ethnic Vietnamese.[cv]
The successful Cambodian incursion effectively bought time for the US to continue withdrawing its forces and to build ARVN combat strength. NVA/Viet Cong losses exceeded 11,000 killed and 2,000 captured. Ten thousand tons of enemy equipment and rations were captured or destroyed – enough rice to feed 25,000 soldiers for a year, enough individual weapons to equip 55 battalions, enough crew-served weapons to equip 33 battalions, and enough mortar, rocket, and recoilless rifle ammunition for nearly 10,000 typical attacks.[cvi]
Unfortunately, the following year, ARVN forces suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the NVA during Operation LAM SON 719 in Laos. The operation, aimed at destroying NVA logistics capabilities along the Ho Chi Minh trail, was a test case to determine if ARVN forces could function effectively by themselves, with only logistical, aviation, and artillery support provided by the US. On 8 February 1971, an ARVN armor/infantry task force crossed into southeastern Laos and proceeded west along Route 9 in the Se Pone River valley. The operational zone stretched 15 miles on both sides of Route 9, with ARVN infantry, airborne, and ranger forces providing cover along the northern and southern flanks of the central column. The ARVN also constructed fire support bases (FSB) along the route-of-march for base camps, artillery placement, and from which patrols emanated.[cvii] Nearly a month later, ARVN troops, resorting to an airborne assault, finally reached their primary objective – the abandoned town of Tchepone.
NVA forces vigorously attacked the ARVN as they began their withdrawal, and the retreat soon collapsed into a rout. Only half of the ARVN task force survived to cross back into Vietnam as LAM SON 719 concluded on 9 April.[cviii] Despite the apparent debacle, President Nixon considered LAM SON 719 a victory and declared in an address to the nation, “tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded.”[cix] After touring the war zone later in the year, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer supported the President’s assessment, concluding that “the South Vietnamese have continued to make excellent progress and the overall military situation in RVN is encouraging.”[cx] The MACV leadership in Saigon was less enthusiastic, however, noting “the projected victory of Lam Son 719 turned out to be a sour defeat, exposing grave deficiencies in planning, organization, leadership, motivation, and operational expertise. The absence of calm reasoned leadership canceled the tactical proficiency and gallant service of some individual ARVN units.”[cxi]
Then, in 1972, the ARVN – numbering roughly one million soldiers at the time and assisted by significant US airpower – successfully turned back the NVA’s first full-scale invasion of South Vietnam. The NVA Easter Offensive was intended to secure as much RVN territory as possible, to destroy ARVN forces, and to discredit the Vietnamization process. Beginning on 30 March, the NVA launched three separate attacks – across the DMZ into I Corps, from Laos into II Corps and Kon Tum in the Central Highlands, and from Cambodia toward An Loc and Saigon in III Corps. Although they initially withdrew and consolidated, the ARVN, supported by US air power, successfully held at Kon Tum and An Loc, and recaptured Quang Tri in the north.[cxii] North Vietnam retained control of portions of four northern provinces, but the Easter Offensive was ultimately a failure, as the NVA sustained 100,000 casualties and lost at least 50% of its artillery and tanks.[cxiii] In a decisive attack three years later, however, the NVA completely routed ARVN forces, as the US had fully withdrawn and had also dramatically cut its funding support for the war effort. Saigon subsequently fell to the advancing NVA in April 1975.[cxiv]
Tactical Use of Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG)
The CIDG concept was developed by the CIA in 1961with the intent of forming a paramilitary force comprised of members from South Vietnamese ethnic minority groups. The force would enhance RVN counterinsurgency efforts and would also provide minorities with a viable alternative to joining the Viet Cong. The village of Buon Enao in the Central Highlands was chosen as the initial CIDG training site. Volunteers were trained by US 1st Special Forces Group (SFG) Soldiers to become either village defenders or members of quick reaction strike force companies. By spring 1962, the CIDG program had expanded to 28 villages, a 1,000-man village defense militia, and 300 strike force fighters. GDIG training shifted to the 5th SFG as overall responsibility for the program transferred to MACV in 1963. CIDG forces – 84 camps and 42,000 militiamen – were transferred to the ARVN in 1969 and became either Vietnamese Ranger companies/battalions or Border Ranger units.[cxv]
CIDG forces performed a wide variety of tactical missions, from civil action and defense of their home bases to counterintelligence and psychological operations, border surveillance, laying mines and booby-traps, capturing/interrogating VC and NVA, tapping enemy communications, rescuing downed aircrews and POWs, and directing air/artillery fire support missions. They often operated in small-unit patrols on long-range reconnaissance missions into remote mountain or jungle areas to collect intelligence. Other CIDG members served as trail watchers who located VC and reported back regarding their movement along the border with Laos. As hunters, CIDG militia also conducted search and destroy missions against small VC concentrations, attacked enemy sanctuaries, operated as mobile guerrilla forces using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, and interdicted enemy infiltration and supply routes. In conjunction with Project Delta, CIDG forces joined with special reconnaissance teams to infiltrate and observe in VC-controlled regions.[cxvi]
With the 1965 build-up of US forces in Vietnam, CIDG militiamen were recruited for Apache units, which were small reconnaissance/pathfinder teams that performed duties similar to those of American Indian scouts in the US Frontier Indian Wars. Apache teams were assigned to main force US combat units to locate the enemy and monitor his movements until the larger and slower American units could mobilize and strike. During subsequent attacks, Apache teams often fought as conventional line infantry.[cxvii] Additional CIDG soldiers formed the core of the MACV Mobile Strike Force – MIKE Force – that performed a mix of unconventional and counterinsurgency warfare, served as a nation-wide quick reaction force, and also functioned in an economy-of-force/force multiplier role.[cxviii] According to Colonel Robert Cassidy, an expert in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, “The CIDG program provided a significant contribution to the war effort. The 2,500 Soldiers assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group raised and led an army of 50,000 tribal fighters to operate in some of the most austere terrain in Vietnam. CIDG patrolling of border infiltration areas also provided reliable tactical intelligence, and the CIDG forces provided a degree of security for populations in areas that might have been otherwise conceded to the enemy.”[cxix]
Regional Forces (RF) and Popular Forces (PF) – Unsung Heroes in the Dirty Little War
Beginning in the early 1960’s RF soldiers manned military outposts and protected strategic locations, while PF militia defended their villages and hamlets from local VC guerrilla attacks 24/7. The outpost system afforded the RVN greater control in rural areas and facilitated improved economic, political, and social development.[cxx] Both organizations were placed under the control of the ARVN joint general staff in 1964.
MACV commander, General William Westmoreland, upgraded RF/PF capabilities in 1967 by assigning more than 350 five-man Military Assistance Teams (MAT) to train and work with RF/PF units. The MATs training involved a wide variety of subjects, including night operations, ambushes, patrols, heavy weapons employment, field fortifications, barrier construction, emergency medical treatment, directing fire support, rehearsing village defense plans, and improving administrative/logistics procedures.[cxxi] After the Tet Offensive the following year, General Westmoreland’s replacement, General Creighton Abrams, emphasized the importance of the RF/PF contribution under his “one war,” combined operations concept, explaining that the “Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces must participate fully with its capabilities in all types of operations…to prepare for the time when it must assume the entire responsibility.”[cxxii] As such, ARVN, RF/PF, and many US combat units worked side-by-side in both combat and pacification operations for the remainder of the war.
By 1969, nearly 50% of the ARVN force structure consisted of RF and PF fighters, whose primary mission was providing security for the overall civilian population in general and specifically in support of the RVN pacification program. The 1969 edition of the MACV RF-PF Handbook for Advisors praises RF/PF capabilities, claiming that the “Regional and Popular Forces have one of the greatest untapped potentials of any armed South Vietnamese unit for destroying local VC units, caches, and infrastructure…they operate at the rice-root level…know of VC movements, meetings, supplies, future operations, and which families have VC relatives…and since they grew up in their operational areas, they know all the trails, streams, hills, forests, and fences.”[cxxiii] A 1970 MACV current combat operations Lessons Learned Report noted that under the operational concept described as mobile defense, two-thirds of the RF/PF units functioned outside their outposts and villages, manning listening posts, conducting ambushes at night, and patrolling by day. “A good VC only has to work about eight hours a week,” the MACV Report stated, “but a good RF/PF soldier must be combat ready 24 hours every day.”[cxxiv]
Regional Forces were recruited at the provincial level, organized into provincial battalions and 100-soldier rifle companies, and served under the provincial chief who typically was an ARVN colonel. RF companies were armed with 60mm and 81mm mortars, .30 caliber Browning air-cooled machine guns, Browning automatic rifles, M1 Garand rifles and M1 carbines, Thompson .45 caliber submachine guns, and .45 caliber pistols. RF Mechanized Platoons initially operated Ford Lynx MK II and GM C15TA armored cars, and subsequently acquired M706 Commando Vehicles in 1971. Additional Regional Force units included RF Intelligence Platoons that conducted reconnaissance and handled informants, and RF River Patrol Companies, which operated LCVP landing craft. Popular Forces were less well trained and equipped. A typical PF self defense platoon number between 25 and 35 soldiers armed with .30 caliber M1 or M2 carbines.[cxxv]
Although on several occasions RF/PF soldiers performed poorly, they more often carried out their duties satisfactorily and fought bravely against enemy forces. In August 1966 in Dinh Tuong province, for example, the 172d RF Company and a platoon of PF security guards successfully defended the Chau Thanh District Headquarters and the village of Trung Luong against an attack by a combined force of local guerrillas and a company of VC soldiers from the 514th Regular Battalion. The RF/PF soldiers had rehearsed for such an attack and had their troops, mortars, armored cars, and machine guns in place and ready. According to Chau Thanh Subsector Advisor, US Army Major Homer Stapleton, after the VC attack began, “the reaction within the compound was swift and well directed…the PF security force manned its positions in the mortar emplacements and along the compound walls…the 60-millimeter crew executed counter- battery fire…the PF crews in the armored cars returned fire with the four mounted .30 caliber machine guns…and PF soldiers in the gun tower poured out .50 caliber machine gun bursts at the enemy.”[cxxvi] The VC were driven off, and an RF quick reaction force pursued them aggressively throughout the following day. The RF/PF’s constant attention to security details and a well-rehearsed defensive plan helped save their district headquarters and Trung Luong village.
As an Infantry Lieutenant, Russell Eno served as an advisor to the 566th and 567th RF Rifle Companies in the Mekong Delta beginning in 1968. In addition to insisting that his RF troops practice strong defensive tactics, techniques, and procedures, Eno also taught them to “keep the enemy guessing.”[cxxvii] The VC had eyes and ears everywhere throughout the Delta, and they thoroughly studied potential attack targets, noting the size and composition of the force, types of weapons, access and egress routes, reinforcement reaction times, and overall daily routines. A detailed plan would then be developed, and the VC would practice the attack in a remote location. Constantly changing the routine at the RF outpost, moving personnel and equipment around internally and externally, and basically becoming unpredictable disrupted VC plans and often caused them to cancel a potential attack. “The VC, while brave and determined to achieve their ends, were not fools,” Eno wrote, “They did not want to be caught halfway through the concertina when an AC-130 gunship showed up… as long as we were unpredictable and varied our techniques, they [VC] were off balance because it reduced their likelihood of success.”[cxxviii]
In another incident, captured enemy documents indicated an imminent VC attack against a district base camp protected by a PF platoon. A PF sentry alerted the base camp commander that the attack was about to begin. Although the VC forces penetrated the camp perimeter, the PF platoon leader quickly established an internal line of defense that contained the enemy advance. He also requested a Night Hawk mission for search light illumination and .50 caliber machinegun support. Shortly after the Night Hawk helicopter arrived, the PF platoon launched a successful counterattack that drove off the VC and restored the perimeter. The District Chief then ordered a block and sweep operation in pursuit of the fleeing enemy force. Eighteen VC were killed in the attack, while the PF platoon sustained one killed and one wounded.[cxxix]
US Marine Corps Combined Action Program – We Are All Alone in Indian Country
In 1965, US Marines in I Corps initiated the Combined Action Program as an economy-of-force measure and a method for maximizing the employment of indigenous forces. Utilizing PF militia for local security seemed reasonable since there were too few Marines to cover and protect the 10,000 square miles, the 2.5 million people, and the five provinces that comprised the I Corps Tactical Zone (CTZ). By yearend, six Combined Action Platoons (CAP) were functioning in the Hue/Phu Bai area, and within a year and a half, 57 CAPs were operational in the CTZ. Each platoon included approximately 35 PF soldiers, a squad of 13 Marines, and a US Navy Hospital Corpsman. In 1967, CAP established a independent chain of command under the newly-appointed Director of Combined Action, Marine Lieutenant Colonel, William Corson, who insisted on mobility in each of his platoons, writing “the platoon must conduct an active, aggressive defense [of its assigned village] to prevent [enemy] incursions and attacks directed at the hamlet residents and officials.[cxxx]
The CAP at Binh Yen No. 1 (Fort Page) about seven miles southwest of the 1st Marine Division Headquarters at Chu Lai, for example, sent out four patrols and ambushes a night. The patrols were small – three Marines and three or four PFs – but heavily armed, since they never knew whether they would encounter a single VC or a whole enemy company. The Marines taught the PFs night-fighting by example, walking the point, setting the pace, insisting on light discipline, and pumping out overwhelming volumes of fire when attacked by VC. PF fighting skills improved immediately and their newly found confidence became infectious. During the summer of 1966, the Binh Yen CAP repelled a Viet Cong attack, killing 31 enemy soldiers including the VC company commander. On their way to the fight, the VC had bragged to the local Vietnamese that they would soundly defeat the Marines and PFs. The villagers were understandably astonished at the subsequent results of the foiled attack – the PF were amazed as well. For the remainder of the year, Binh Yen CAP averaged 11 VC kills per week.[cxxxi]
Unfortunately, not all encounters with the VC ended in favorable outcomes. On Easter Sunday 1967, a 16 man patrol from the CAP at Van Tuong was ambushed and nearly wiped out by a heavily armed VC company. Only one Marine and one PF, both severely wounded, survived the ambush. The VC attacked the CAP patrol with devastating crossfire as the Marines and PF crossed an open rice paddy. An untimely loss of radio contact prevented the patrol from calling for additional fire support, and two 1st Marine Division squads, sent as reinforcements, arrived too late.[cxxxii] During the first six months of 1967, the VC staged 15 all-out attacks on CAP units, four of which sustained heavy casualties.[cxxxiii]
Lieutenant Colonel Corson assisted with refining the CAP mission statement and developing a set of standing operating procedures outlining specific platoon responsibilities:
Combined Action Program Mission Statement
The Combined Action Program involves special units made up of both US Marines and Popular Force personnel. The Combined Action concept was conceived to provide a sufficient force to occupy and control areas uncovered by the forward movement of the US and ARVN units and to assist in Revolutionary Development efforts within these areas. The primary mission of the Combined Action organization is local defense. In this connection, the Popular Force members of the Combined Action unit contribute to the combined effort by their knowledge of the local area, people, customs, government, and Viet Cong activities. Marines contribute to the combined effort by training the PF and increasing the PF’s combat effectiveness in the use of artillery, air strikes, and reinforcements if required. Marine personnel are assigned to these units on a semi-permanent basis to permit sustained operations in a certain area and continued association with a particular group of people. The program is coordinated at all levels by Marine commanders and local Vietnamese officials.[cxxxiv]
Combined Action Program Standard Operating Procedures
1. Destroy the communist infrastructure within the platoon’s area of responsibility.
2. Protect public security; help maintain law and order.
3. Organize local intelligence nets.
4. Participate in civic action and conduct propaganda against the communists.
5. Motivate and instill pride, patriotism, and aggressiveness in the militia.
6. Conduct training for all members of the combined action platoon and increase the proficiency of the militia so it could function effectively without the Marines.[cxxxv]
CAP was a classic hearts and minds civic action program. “With US Marines living and fighting side-by-side with the Vietnamese people,” wrote Marine Captain Keith Kopets, “Cap seemed to represent an effective, long-term, around-the-clock commitment to combating the communists at the grassroots level.”[cxxxvi] Although the MACV leadership favored large-scale search-and-destroy operations, Marines in I Corps were permitted to proceed with CAP and generally followed an enclave strategy involving clear-and-hold or ink-blot tactics built around the deployment of CAP platoons to pacify villages and destroy VC infrastructure. Sealing-off friendly villages from VC infiltration, day by day, month after month, was crucial to effective pacification efforts.[cxxxvii] Marines were convinced that a strong pacification program should complement full-scale combat operations.
Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak pointed out that “it is our conviction that if we can destroy the guerrilla fabric among the people, we will automatically deny the large units the food, taxes, intelligence, and other support they need…the real war is among the people not in the mountains.”[cxxxviii] According to former Marine CAP squad leader James Donovan, Lieutenant General Lewis Walt, Commanding General III Marine Amphibious Force – commander of all the Marines in I Corps – generally agreed, stressing that “one of the objectives of the war was to win the loyalty of the populace for the government, and the only way to achieve that objective was to eradicate the VC in the villages and hamlets.”[cxxxix] Even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara saw the merit in pacification. “The large unit operations war, which we know best how to fight, McNamara wrote, is largely irrelevant to pacification…[which] depends on the interrelated functions of providing physical security, destroying the VC apparatus, motivating the people to cooperate and establishing responsive local government.”[cxl]
Following the 1968 Tet Offensive, CAP units became more mobile. Rather than patrolling from a fixed village enclave, the platoons remained on the move continuously within their respective areas of operation. The increased mobility improved CAP safety and effectiveness, and further complicated VC operational planning efforts. Caps were still able to provide protection for the villages in their tactical areas despite the lack of a constant presence.[cxli] “No village protected by a combined action unit was ever repossessed by the VC,” Lieutenant General Krulak wrote in his 1984 memoir.[cxlii] By 1970, the number of CAP units had reached 114, with more than 2,000 Marines and 3,000 PFs. Approximately 800 villages had been secured and 500,000 Vietnamese civilians had been protected in I Corps under CAP by the time the program was officially deactivated in 1971.[cxliii]
Historian Guenter Lewy, in America in Vietnam, described the Combined Action Program as “one of the most imaginative approached to pacification in Vietnam.”[cxliv] CAP never exceeded the size of two battalions, yet the results of the program far surpassed expectations. Even MACV commander, General William Westmoreland, eventually acknowledged that CAP was one of the more “ingenious innovations developed in South Vietnam.”[cxlv] CAP denied the VC insurgency its lifeblood – the popular support of the people. And as Lieutenant General Walt wrote in 1970 as the US continued to withdraw its forces, “of all our innovations in Vietnam none was as successful, as lasting in effect, or as useful for the future as the Combined Action Program.”[cxlvi]
Chapter 5. The British Army in Northern Ireland:
One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter
During the 17th century, Scottish and English Protestants began settling on confiscated land in Ulster – the nine-county northeastern province of Ireland. A series of rebellions ensued between the native Irish Catholics and the Protestant newcomers, who won both the Irish Confederate and Williamite Wars with British assistance. Although the 1690 Battle of Boyne, in which William of Orange defeated deposed King of England James II, was neither a decisive nor a significant Protestant victory, it is nevertheless commemorated each year in present-day Northern Ireland.[cxlvii]
Ethno-sectarian confrontations between Catholics and Protestants continued throughout the 18th century. Since most land was owned by Anglican Protestants, economic and standard of living disparities increase between the two religious groups. Relations were further exacerbated with the enactment of the Penal Laws, which restricted the civil and religious rights of all residents of Ireland except members of the Anglican Church. Several Catholic Relief Acts passed in the late 1700s removed many of these restrictions.[cxlviii]
In the 1800-1801 Acts of Union, the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland created the combined United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. However, Irish Catholics, many of whom were desirous of complete independence from Great Britain, urged the adoption of home rule legislation. Irish Protestant unionists opposed the home rule movement, fearing becoming an oppressed minority group in a nationalist Catholic-dominated Ireland. Subsequently, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act divided Ireland into two separate political jurisdictions – the southern Irish Free State ruled by a parliament in Dublin and Northern Ireland which was ruled by a parliament in Belfast, but remained part of the United kingdom. While Protestants unionists in Ulster generally supported the terms and conditions of the Government of Ireland Act, Catholic nationalists continued demands for a unified, independent, Ireland. A short period of guerrilla warfare ensued between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British forces, however with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, both sides sanctioned the partition agreement, under which 23 southern counties and three in Ulster became the Irish Free State and the remaining six Ulster counties created Northern Ireland.[cxlix]
“Troubles” in Northern Ireland
A relatively low level of conflict persisted between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland for the next four decades. In the late 1960s, however, rioting broke out in Londonderry and Belfast between Irish nationalists and unionists (referred to at this point as loyalists for their loyalty to British rule). In Derry, at the Battle of the Bogside, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was unable to disperse nationalists who were protesting a loyalist parade. Although British Army forces deployed under Operation BANNER to restore order, fighting continued for the next several years as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA or the Provos) – a more aggressive IRA splinter group – and Protestant paramilitary organizations, such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), carried out ambushes, bombings, and other terrorist operations.[cl]
Conflict and violence continued throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, despite numerous efforts at resolution. British forces remained in Northern Ireland during this period, as the Republic of Ireland (formerly the Irish Free State, renamed in 1949) openly supported the nationalist movement and deployed Irish Army units along its northern border. In 1970 and 1971, British military officials imposed a curfew on nationalist in the Catholic Lower Falls section of Belfast and began the practice of internment without trial. By 1975, more than 2,000 Catholics were confined in high security “H-Blocks,” called the Maze, at the Long Kesk internment camp.[cli] In Derry, on “Bloody Sunday,” 30 January 1972, British soldiers fatally shot 14 unarmed nationalist demonstrators. Provos reciprocated in July – on “Bloody Friday” – by detonating 22 bombs in central Belfast that killed 19 people and injured 130 more.[clii]
Also in 1972, the British government reinstated “direct rule” from London of Northern Ireland. In Belfast and Derry, Catholics and Protestants alike were force to move into segregated neighborhoods. The Sunningdale Agreement, a power sharing covenant for Northern Ireland, collapsed in the wake of a massive general strike by loyalists in 1974. And both loyalists and nationalist conducted bombing attacks on targets outside of Northern Ireland – the UVF car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, and the PIRA public house bombings in Guilford, Woolwich, and Birmingham, England.[cliii] In hopes of enticing a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, the PIRA declared a ceasefire in late 1974 that remained in effect for more than a year. Despite the ceasefire, sectarian killings continued, British forces did not withdraw, and the PIRA subsequently adopted a long war strategy involving a sustained, but less intense, terrorist campaign.[cliv] As the decade ended, English Lord Mountbatten was killed in County Sligo, Republic of Ireland and 18 British Soldiers were killed in County Down in Northern Ireland – both incidents involved PIRA bombing attacks.[clv]
Hunger strikes by nationalists at Maze prison, secret weapons acquisition deals between nationalists and Libya and between loyalists and South Africa, and the PIRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, UK underscored the long war during the 1980s. The IRA bombing of a fish market on Shankill Road in a loyalist area of Belfast and the Greysteel massacre in which eight Irish nationalist were killed in the Rising Sun Bar by UDA loyalists resulted in another ceasefire – this time by both the IRA and loyalists paramilitary groups – in 1994.[clvi]
The IRA violated the truce in 1996 with additional bombings in London’s financial district and in Manchester in 1997, and in the town of Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1998.[clvii] Peace negotiations between loyalists and nationalist continued however, culminating with the signing of the power-sharing Belfast Agreement – known as the Good Friday Agreement – in April 1998. Although sectarian tensions between Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists persisted, the level of violence diminished significantly in Northern Ireland.
The IRA completed disarming by 2005, and the newly elected Northern Ireland Assembly assumed responsibility for the country’s power-sharing, coalition, government in May 2007.[clviii] “While this is a sad day for all of the innocent victims of all the Troubles, yet it is a special day because we are making a new beginning,” said Assembly First Minister, Ian Paisley, adding “I believe we are starting on a road to bring us back to peace and prosperity.”[clix] And speaking at the Northern Ireland executive government swearing-in ceremony, British Prime Minister Tony Blair paid tribute to the historic accomplishment, “look back and we see centuries marked by conflict, hardship, even hatred among the peoples of these islands,” Blair told the crowd, “look forward and we see the chance to shake off those heavy chains of history.”[clx] As described by Celtic scholar Peter Ellis:
The Long War had cost 3,523 deaths and countless injuries. Of these deaths, 1,798 were civilians. The British military had lost 714 service personnel, mainly soldiers, and 307 police, of whom 301 were members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary; 24 prison officers also lost their lives. A further 66 deaths were people who had formerly been in the British military and RUC. The IRA had lost 276 members, and 81 members of republican splinter groups. Additionally, 22 former republican activists had been killed. Loyalist paramilitaries had lost 135, with 13 former members killed. There had also been 58 political activists killed. On the border, 1 soldier of the Irish army and 9 members of the Irish police were killed.[clxi]
Paramilitary Groups and Political Parties in Northern Ireland
Contentious relations between Catholics and Protestants, and the struggle among nationalists and loyalists over British rule, home rule, and Irish independence led to the rise of several opposing political organizations and paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.[clxii] Fighting intensified during the 1960s between Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist paramilitary units, forcing the UK government to deploy British Army forces to Northern Ireland to suppress hostilities in 1969.
The loyalist paramilitary groups – Ulster Defense Association (UDA), and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – were primarily volunteer security forces intent on preventing rebellion and preserving the status quo. Although these groups operated outside the law essentially as pro-state terrorist organizations, their activities were often tolerated by both local government officials and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s police force. The UDA and UFV coordinated activities through the Combined Loyalist Military Command and three hard-line splinter subgroups – the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), the Red Hand Defenders, and the Orange Volunteers – surfaced in the 1990s. From 1968 to 1998, loyalist paramilitary groups were responsible for killing 864 civilians, most of whom were Catholics.[clxiii]
Established in 1971 to improve security in loyalist housing and business sections and to avenge IRA atrocities, the UDA was the larger of the two main loyalist paramilitary groups and consists of a network of local defense associations and vigilante freedom fighters. Many UDA members, who also called themselves Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), believed that the best defense was a strong offense. The association was organized military-style with brigades and companies directed by inner and outer tier leadership councils. Eventually UDA strength reached 40,000 members. UDA was responsible for killing three Catholic funeral attendees during the Belfast Milltown Cemetery attack in 1988, and also carried out the 1993 Castlerock killings and the Greysteel Massacre in which 8 civilians were killed and 19 wounded. Although the UDA agreed to a ceasefire in 1994, the organization did not disengage from paramilitary activities until 2004.[clxiv]
The UVF emerged in 1966, led by Protestant shipyard workers from Belfast’s Shankill Road neighborhood. Although the UVF was more militaristic than the UDA, its strength never reached more than a few hundred members, drawn primarily from urban working class areas. UVF organizers, feeling compelled to both defend themselves against on-going IRA attacks and to do what ever was necessary to prevent loyalist efforts to unite Ireland, issued the following mission statement:
From this day on we declare war against the IRA and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid then more extreme methods will be adopted. We will not tolerate any interference from any source and we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.[clxv]
During 1966, the UVF bombed a Catholic public house in Shankill and shot four Catholics on Malvern Street in Belfast. In March and April 1969, UVF members bombed an electricity substation at Castlereagh, a Belfast water supply facility at Dunadry, County Antrim, and the Silent Valley Reservoir in County Down. The UVF bombing of McGurk’s bar in Belfast killed 15 Catholics in 1971, and the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, carried out inside the Republic of Ireland by UVF operatives killed 33 civilians. In 1975, a UVF team killed three members of the Irish cabaret band, the Miami Showband, after they had stopped at a sham British Army checkpoint on the Northern Ireland border. Occasional fighting continued between the UVF and the IRA until an official ceasefire was declared in 1994.[clxvi]
In contrast to the Protestant loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army was distinctly Catholic, nationalist, opposed to British rule, and supportive of a unified Ireland. The IRA was revolutionary in the sense that it resisted the ruling government in Northern Ireland and conducted an insurgency or asymmetric warfare against loyalist organizations, local police (RUC), and British occupation troops. Organized following the Easter Rebellion in 1916, the IRA became the military wing of the Irish Sinn Fein (“we ourselves”) party, and for several decades waged a low-level civil war – bombings, raids, firefights on both sides of the border – aimed at reuniting Ireland. Tensions rose in the 1960s, and after British troops deployed to Northern Ireland to restore law and order in 1969, the IRA split into the Dublin “officials,” intent on pursuing peaceful unification efforts, and the Belfast “provisionals,” who vowed to use violent means to achieve their objectives.[clxvii]
PIRA sniper attacks, assassinations, and bombings escalated beginning in 1972 following the killing of fourteen Catholics by British forces in Londonderry. The provos subsequently took responsibility for the Bloody Friday bombing spree in Belfast, the 1974 Birmingham public house bombing, the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, the 1984 Brighton Hotel bombing, the London financial district car bombing in 1993, the 10 Downing Street and Heathrow Airport mortar attacks, and a series of smaller assaults on civilian facilities, such as bars, shops, and subway stations, that extended from the 1970s through the 1990s. PIRA’s primary targets, however, were British military forces, police officers, prison guards, judges, and UDA/UVF members. The PIRA declared ceasefires in 1994 and 1997, and finally ended armed conflict in 2005. Since its inception in 1969, the PIRA killed approximately 1,000 British soldiers and more than 700 civilians in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Finally, after PIRA leaders entered into peace negotiations with British authorities, three splinter groups – the Real IRA, the Continuity Irish Republican Army, and the Irish National Liberation Army – arose and proceeded with a limited number of additional attacks intended to derail the peace process.[clxviii]
The principal political parties in Northern Ireland during the Trouble included the loyalist Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and the nationalist-oriented Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein. The two Northern Ireland loyalist parties generally opposed Irish unity, while the nationalist parties favored unification with the Republic of Ireland. The center-right UUP was formed in 1905 in opposition to home rule, controlled Northern Ireland’s parliament from 1921 until 1972, and favored the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The DUP was established in 1971 and took a far-right stance, strongly opposing the Belfast Agreement and refusing to take part in the negotiations. By 2003, the DUP had become Northern Ireland’s largest political party. The nationalist SDLP party began in 1970, supported the concept of majority-rule regarding Irish unification, and agreed with the terms of the Belfast Agreement. Lastly, Sinn Fein, as the political arm of the IRA, participated in the Belfast negotiations and emerged as Northern Ireland’s largest nationalist party in 2003.[clxix]
Auxiliaries - Official Military and Police Organizations in Northern Ireland
During the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was responsible for maintaining law and order in the six counties under its jurisdiction. RUC was established in 1922, with headquarters in Belfast and the dual mission of both providing basic law enforcement services and protecting Northern Ireland from the activities of the paramilitary groups (and their predecessors) described above. Organizationally, the RUC operational command structure included three regional commands, 12 divisional commands, and 39 subdivisions. By the 1980s, RUC strength had reach 8,500 regular police officers, 191 of whom were killed in the line of duty during the Troubles.[clxx] Northern Ireland nationalist regularly accused RUC officers of conspiring with loyalist paramilitary groups. In his 1999 sworn affidavit, former RUC sergeant, John Weir, wrote that confiscated guns “were given out by RUC officers to local members of the Ulster Defense Associations and that many member of his Special Patrol Group unit had loyalist connections and supported the activities of loyalist paramilitaries.”[clxxi] RUC underwent a name change in 2001, becoming the Police Service of Northern Ireland.[clxxii]
The Royal Ulster Constabulary also established a full-time and part-time reserve force, the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, referred to as the B Specials). USC officers operated in all six Northern Ireland counties, guarding key installations, providing security for parades, and serving as a quick reaction force in the event of rioting. Intimate knowledge of their respective operating areas was particularly valuable to USC members in intelligence gathering and in detecting and neutralizing potential nationalist paramilitary operations. Approximately 5,000 reservists were serving in the USC when the organization disbanded in 1970. Many former USC members subsequently joined a newly established RUC reserve force or the Ulster Defense Regiment, a local unit of the British Army in Northern Ireland.[clxxiii]
In the late 1960s, nationalist civil rights activist in Northern Ireland began to seriously question the effectiveness of the RUC and its auxiliary USC force. Most nationalists believed that RUC and USC officers vigorously protected Protestant loyalist interests, while neglecting or repressing those of Catholics. Thus, according to international conflict and terrorism expert, Douglas Woodwell, “the B Specials and the RUC became the Protestant armed wing of the Protestant political establishment.”[clxxiv] Continued growing concerns led the Governor of Northern Ireland to presented to Parliament, the Report of the Advisory Committee on Police in Northern Ireland, which called for (1) changing the RUC and creating of two separate forces to perform those duties at present carried out by the USC, (2) relieving the RUC of all duties of a military nature except for gathering intelligence, protecting important persons, and enforcing relevant laws, and (3) raising a locally recruited part-time force under the control of the British Army General Officer Commanding (GOC), Northern Ireland, supplemented by a new police volunteer reserve, to replace the Ulster Special Constabulary.[clxxv]
The Northern Ireland Parliament accepted the Governor’s recommendations (typically referred to as the Hunt Report) and in 1970 established the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), comprised initially of seven battalions, with four additional battalions added by 1972.[clxxvi] UDR became operational in April 1970, with 2440, mostly part-time, volunteers – 39% of whom were Catholic – and the following mission statement:
The aim of the UDR was to protect Northern Ireland from terrorist attack by the way of guarding key installations and patrolling the country carrying out check points and road blocks as and when required. The UDR was not to take part in public orders duties or serve outside the Province.[clxxvii]
The UDR was called to active duty for the first time in 1971 in support of Operation DEMETRIUS, which was intended to suppress violence that resulted from Northern Ireland’s policy of “internment without trial” of suspected nationalist paramilitary members and sympathizers.[clxxviii]
1972 was a tumultuous year in Northern Ireland. The UK reinstated direct rule from London, internment of nationalists without trial was well underway, British troops killed 13 protesters in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday, and the IRA retaliated with the Bloody Friday bombings in Belfast. The IRA attack on Belfast prompted UK officials to launch Operation MOTORMAN in July 1972. This operation involved nearly 22,000 British Soldiers, 27 infantry battalions, two armored battalions, and 5,300 UDR reservists. British forces utilized bulldozers and Centurion AVREs (Armored Vehicle Royal Engineers) to break through barricades and successfully recapture no-go areas from the IRA in west Belfast, the Bogside, and Londonderry. The IRA could not withstand the overwhelming British force and were unable to hold their ground.[clxxix]
Following Operation MOTORMAN, the UDR manning level was increased to 10,000 and the force was re-equipped with 7.62mm L1A1 Self Loading Rifles (SLR, replaced in 1980 with the 5.56mm Enfield SA80), 7.62mm L4A4 (Bren) Light Machine Guns, 7.62mm L7A2 General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG), 7.62mm L2A1 Sterling submachine guns, and Carl Gustav 84mm grenade launchers (M2).[clxxx] UDR battalions were also provided with ¾ ton Land Rover vehicles, machinegun-equipped Shorland Armored Patrol Vehicles, motorized boats for anti-gunrunning patrols on Northern Ireland lakes and rivers, and search dogs. Westland Lynx troop carrying helicopters from the British Army Air Corps were also used occasionally to transport UDR soldiers in situation requiring rapid deployment.[clxxxi]
By the 1980s, the UDR, now numbering 7,000, had become chiefly a full-time force. Surveillance and intelligence gathering improved as these full-time soldiers went home to their respective communities every evening. The regiment was more involved in front line operations and expanded patrolling to roughly 85% of Northern Ireland. A role reversal slowly evolved such that the British army began supporting UDR anti-terrorist operations targeting the IRA. IRA ambushes and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks killed several UDR soldiers – others were assassinated in their homes while off-duty. In 1992, the UDR combined with the British Royal Irish Rangers to form the Royal Irish Regiment, the largest infantry regiment in the British army.[clxxxii]
The Role of the British Army and Its Auxiliaries in Northern Ireland
Operation BANNER, the British Army campaign in Northern Ireland, lasted from 1969 until 2007. The 38-year uninterrupted commitment became Britain’s longest deployment and involved more than 300,000 soldiers of whom 763 were killed and another 6,116 wounded.[clxxxiii] The mission, which at first appeared simple – “act in aid of the civil power to restore order”, by separating the contentious nationalist Catholic and loyalist Protestant communities and creating conditions for peaceful coexistence – soon evolved into a full-scale counterinsurgency against PIRA paramilitary forces.[clxxxiv] The operation serves as an example of how a minimally armed, yet resilient and adaptive, insurgent force can prolong a violent guerrilla campaign against a superior government backed military over extensive periods of time, often preventing that government from achieving foreign policy goals.[clxxxv] By 1972, at the height of the Troubles, British Army strength in Northern Ireland reached 32,000, with English, Scottish, Welsh, and the locally-recruited Ulster Defense Regiments, 15 battalions stationed in Belfast, and 135 bases/installations scattered throughout the country.[clxxxvi]
Initially, British troops and their auxiliaries – the RUC and UDR – developed an operational framework involving three principles: (1) utilize only minimal force, (2) enforce the rule of law, and (3) maintain neutrality. Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland actually welcomed the British presence at first, erroneously expecting the soldiers to restore law and order. British actions, however, soon alienated nationalists and enhanced the validity of PIRA arguments. The British army, not the RUC, became the symbol of authority. Soldiers found, however, that the mission was more complex than simply separating belligerents and controlling crowds, as the PIRA launched a guerrilla warfare campaign, not just for civil rights, but for complete Irish independence from Great Britain. British soldiers subsequently became the PIRA’s primary target, thus forcing the army to adopt counterinsurgency tactics that required greater army/RUC coordination to control violence and defeat the PIRA insurgency.[clxxxvii]
To counter PIRA efforts, British forces reorganized into a three-tiered structure that included a substantial permanent garrison, a group of battalions that rotated in and out of Northern Ireland on four-month tours, and another group of battalions that performed standby/emergency response duties from their home bases in the UK.[clxxxviii] After regaining control of PIRA no-go areas during Operation MOTORMAN, British troops and RUC police officers placed renewed emphasis on gathering usable intelligence. Company sized units were given greater responsibility for grass-roots intelligence operations in their respective tactical areas. Every soldier was expected to collect information. Covert long-term surveillance missions began, as did the use of clandestine patrols, soldiers wearing plain clothes, and the development of informant and infiltrator networks.[clxxxix] Significant levels of low-grade intelligence emerged from the soldiers’ observations and interactions with the public while on continuous mobile and foot patrols. Detailed local knowledge accumulated over time as every patrol team was thoroughly debriefed for actionable information that was “systematically collated” and “meshed into a constructive and useful pattern.”[cxc]
The British Army also introduced a number of intelligence-oriented technological advancements, such as computer databases for people and vehicles; night vision, signal intelligence, and electronic ground and aerial surveillance equipment; and listening, motion detection, and tracking devices. The Army and RUC eventually appointed an “intelligence supremo” to coordinate, centralize, and enhance joint intelligence gathering activities. Finally, the UK Ministry of Defense conducted a series of in depth studies aimed at developing a better understanding of the goals, objectives, and motives of both the PIRA and the people of Northern Ireland.[cxci]
In 1977, the Ministry of Defense undertook a major strategic shift in Northern Ireland operations by reassigning the RUC to the lead role in the counterinsurgency campaign. Although true unity of command was never attained, the command structure was reorganized to facilitate joint operations and to promote unity of effort. Thus, despite separate chains of command, British Army battalion commanders began working more closely with local RUC division commanders to defeat terrorism and restore law and order in Northern Ireland. To ensure success of this new initiative, the Army revised its mission along the following five lines of operation: framework, covert, reactive, special, static tasks.[cxcii]
Framework tasks involved physical presence, out-in-the-open, tactics such as continuous high-profile patrolling, manning checkpoints, conducting searches, questioning suspects, and performing surveillance to inhibit terrorist activities. The seemingly endless routine of framework missions became a way of life for British soldiers and the RUC auxiliaries during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Although framework tasks were unglamorous and appeared to be a waste of time, they nevertheless disrupted PIRA efforts and compelled the terrorists to adopt more sophisticated, increasingly complex, methods for working around the framework structure.[cxciii]
Covert tasks were typically undertaken by special military and police forces, such as the Special Air Service and the RUC anti-terrorist Special Patrol Group. These operations primarily involved undercover surveillance and the recruitment and handling of informants. Occasionally, however, covert forces engaged in direct action to ambush, capture, or kill insurgents, who at times were channeled into interdiction zones by robust framework operations.[cxciv] Both British army forces and RUC police officers performed reactive tasks, which included immediate responses to PIRA attacks and preplanned missions designed to exploit intelligence-generated targets of opportunity by shortening the transition time from sensing to shooting. Finally, specialist tasks involved British military personnel with particular skills and qualifications, such as Explosive Ordnance Demolition (EOD) experts and aerial reconnaissance data interpreters, while static tasks addressed the protection and maintenance of facilities and infrastructure.[cxcv]
As the conflict in Northern Ireland dragged on for another 20 years, the British military developed a series of Lessons Learned, foremost of which was that armed intervention could not resolve underlying political problems. And although military action lasted longer and was more expensive than originally anticipated, such action did buy time for developing reasonable political solutions. Initially, British doctrine and rules of engagement policies were unsuitable for the Northern Ireland situational environment. Additionally, the joint British army-RUC counterinsurgency campaign demanded extensive coordination among the military, police, and civil agency participants, particularly in the Belfast urban area where responsibilities and authority often overlapped.[cxcvi]
The British Lessons Learned document also stressed the heavy reliance on infantry forces and the importance of continuous, systematic, high-profile, patrolling operations. For mutual protection, patrols often maneuvered in parallel. In other instances, patrols functioned in multiple four-man teams, moving through urban areas in ostensibly random patterns, but in support of each other. PIRA snipers often abandoned potential attacks, as their escape routes were likely to be blocked by the numerous small British-RUC patrols.[cxcvii] Finally, the combination of foot patrols, human intelligence gathered at battalion and company levels, and long-term surveillance from static observation posts proved highly successful in controlling the urban terrain and disrupting PIRA guerrilla operations.[cxcviii]
By the 1990s, the British army had revised its Northern Ireland mission statement and subsequently developed more sophisticated lines of operation:
Mission
Defeat terrorism in support of the RUC by attriting terrorists, deterring terrorist activity, and reassuring the local population.
Lines of operation
- Remove the social and economic causes of the insurgency.
- Work with successive Irish governments to evolve a political framework acceptable to
both nationalist and loyalist populations.
- Create and maintain a legal framework that treats insurgents as criminals; reduce their
legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
- Frustrate the PIRA so that it realizes the futility of the armed struggle.
- Establish and maintain channels of communication with PIRA, whatever the cost.[cxcix]
Decisive combat action was the exception rather than the rule during Britain’s counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. Tactics based on quickly defeating the PIRA through military means proved fruitless. Instead, patience and deterrence played a more critical role in restricting PIRA freedom of movement and disrupting terrorist activities. Extensive army-RUC patrolling did not destroy the PIRA, but it did prevent the PIRA from shaping the environment through violence and helped render the insurgent organization ineffective, unproductive, and more willing to consider peaceful resolutions.[cc]
Chapter 6. The French Far East Expeditionary Corps
and Vietnamese Indigenous Forces in the First Indochina War
Key Aspects of the First Indochina War
France assumed colonial control of Indochina in the late 19th century.[cci] During World War II, the Japanese overran French Indochina, forcing the French out. Following Japan’s capitulation in 1945, Vietnamese communists – the Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh – formed the provisional Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The communist power grab angered the French, who intended to restore colonial rule in French Indochina. In November 1946, armed conflict between French regular forces and Vietminh guerrillas broke out in Haiphong and Hanoi. Several thousand Vietminh soldiers were killed in these initial encounters, and the DRV government subsequently fled Hanoi, retreated to the remote mountain region between the Tonkin Delta and the Chinese border, and began preparations for protracted guerrilla warfare.[ccii]
Military hostilities forced the French to consolidate their forces. Many of France’s 69 battalions that were dispersed among the territorial commands in early 1947 were withdrawn from the countryside in order to concentrate the force for potential battles with the Vietminh. The competing interests of spreading troops out to protect rural regions versus concentrating the same forces for effectively fighting Vietminh guerrillas would be problematic for French military commander throughout the entire campaign.[cciii] The Vietminh refused to fight the French head-on and often retreated to jungle sanctuaries to avoid direct confrontation with French patrols or larger search and destroy expeditions. One exception, however, was the 1947 Battle of Bac Kan (Operation LEA) in which 9,000 Vietminh soldiers were killed by French ground, riverine, and airborne forces.[cciv]
Following Bac Kan, a stalemate ensued, during which the Vietminh regrouped, retrained, and reorganized on the local, regional, and national levels. Local peasants formed irregular guerrilla units and coordinated their activities with regional Vietminh forces and hard-core regular troops who were organized nationally. Occasionally, the three types of organizations combined forces and assisted each other as necessary. The entire Vietminh structural system was both flexible and efficient. Vietminh commanding general, Vo Nguyen Giap subsequently developed a three-point plan to defeat the French that entailed (1) a period of retreat and defense to retrain and consolidate, (2) an equilibrium period to reequip with Chinese communist supplied weapons and to begin attacks on French outposts, and (3) a counteroffensive period to totally vanquish French forces. General Giap, supplied at this point by the Peoples Republic of China, relied on guerrilla warfare – attrition, continuous movement, ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, and immediate disengagement – as a holding tactic to buy time for the Vietminh regular army to build up for counteroffensive operations that included retaking Hanoi.[ccv]
By mid-1949, the Vietminh – referred to now as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) – had expanded to 32 regular battalions and 137 regional battalions. General Giap began converting regional battalions to regular, such that the mix two years later was 117 regular battalions and 37 regional. These battalions were combined to form regiments, brigades, and ultimately 10,000-man divisions. By 1952, Giap had a strong conventional army that included five infantry divisions, a heavy division, and several hundred thousand porters to carry supplies and equipment.[ccvi]
Meanwhile, French forces reorganized as well, bringing in regular and Foreign Legion airborne troops and forming additional riverine naval assault divisions. French infantry soldiers strengthened their static positions by building watchtower fortifications along their lines of communication. Thus, by 1949, the French controlled only the cities and a series of strategic defensive outposts scattered throughout the country.[ccvii] Additionally, French government officials formally recognized the State of Vietnam as an autonomous member of the French Union. Former Emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, was subsequently installed as Head of State. Finally, France allowed the new State of Vietnam to form it’s own army – the Vietnamese National Army (VNA), which was initially controlled by the French, equipped with obsolete weapons, and comprised of 65,000 poorly trained soldiers in 11 infantry battalions and nine national guard regiments.[ccviii]
Beginning in February 1950, the PAVN launched Operations LE HONG PHONG I and II, in which division strength formations, employing “human wave” assualts, attacked the French outposts scattered along Colonial Route 4 south of the Chinese border. One by one, the French garrisons at Lao Cai, Dong Khe, Cao Bang, and Lang Son fell to PAVN forces. French soldiers, retreating south on Route 4, were subjected to a series of deadly PAVN ambushes before reaching their Red River Delta stronghold. The PAVN captured thousands of French weapons, and nearly 5,000 French and VNA soldiers were killed, captured, or declared missing during the Route 4 debacle.[ccix]
Shortly thereafter, French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was dispatched to Indochina to assume the dual role – civilian and military – of High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of French Union Forces (FUF). General de Lattre quickly set about building a “belt” of 900 forts and 2,200 pillboxes stretching from Hanoi to the Gulf of Tonkin – referred to as the De Lattre Line – along potential PAVN approaches to the Red River Delta. De Lattre also increased the VNA auxiliary force to approximately 90,000 soldiers and 33 infantry battalions. These indigenous forces served primarily in defensive positions, manning fortifications, thereby freeing up French soldiers for more mobile operations.[ccx]
Beginning in early 1951, the PAVN initiated a new campaign – Operation TRAN HUNG DAO – to gain control of the Red River Delta and to force the French from northern Vietnam. Twenty-thousand PAVN soldiers from the 308th and 312th divisions attacked the French garrison at Vinh Yen, 30 miles northwest of Hanoi. General de Lattre employed all possible means at his disposal to repulse the PAVN attack, including the extensive use of airpower, artillery support, and committing his reserve forces. Significantly outgunned, the PAVN divisions withdrew to the far northern end of the delta, having sustained casualties of 1,600 killed and 6,000 wounded. General Giap launched a second offensive against the De Lattre Line in March 1951. In an effort to sever French lines of communication, elements of three PAVN divisions attacked the stronghold at Mao Khe located between Hanoi and Haiphong. After several days of fierce fighting, PAVN forces once again retreated, having lost another 3,000 dead or wounded. A third PAVN operation – the Ha Nam Ninh offensive – in May 1951 was similarly unsuccessful. This attack surprised the French since the PAVN had infiltrated two regiments inside the De Lattre Line. Nevertheless, French airpower, reinforcements, and riverine elements cut PAVN supply lines, forcing General Giap to once again withdraw his forces, leaving behind another 10,000 dead. [ccxi]
Henceforth, following the Ha Nam Ninh defeat, General Giap avoided direct confrontation with French Union forces. Ineffective PAVN assaults at Nghia Lo in October 1951 were repulsed by French and VNA defenders. And French soldiers encountered little resistance in capturing the strategic PAVN supply route village of Hao Binh in November. Giap focused PAVN efforts on luring the French into concentrating the majority of their forces in static strongholds while dispersing the remaining French troops into a series of remote outposts. This revised PAVN strategy was intended to take advantage of French Union weaknesses, such as the lack of adequate air power, serious shortcomings in cross-country mobility, and insufficient overall manpower to capitalize on small local victories by aggressively pursuing retreating enemy forces.[ccxii]
Early in 1952, General Giap sent three PAVN divisions, the 304th, 308th, and 312th, to recapture Hao Binh. After three months of ferocious fighting, French and VNA soldiers, led by newly appointed Commander-in-Chief General Raoul Salan, withdrew to previously established positions along the De Lattre Line. For the next several months, PAVN forces harassed French lines of communications with continuous raids and ambushes. In October, Giap attacked the fortified French airbase at Na San and the garrisons at Nghia Lo. In response, General Salan initiated Operation LORRAINE – an all out offensive against the PAVN supply lines along the Red River. With a task force of nearly 30,000 men, the French penetrated 100 miles into PAVN territory and captured enemy supply depots at Phu Tho, Phu Doan, and Phu Yen. However, after little more than two weeks, Salan, sensing that his own supply lines were overextended, cancelled LORRAINE and once again withdrew behind the De Lattre Line. French Union forces could neither aggressively pursue PAVN guerrillas, nor hold critical terrain that they had temporarily gained.[ccxiii] Military historian Colonel Edgar O’Ballance described the French predicament in Indochina as follows:
The French forces were tied down in the defense of a series of fortified positions, whilst the rebels were free to move about the countyside as they liked, often in between the French outposts themselves. The position from December 1952 onward was one of stalemate. The rebels were not able to dislodge the French from their positions, while the French could not bring the rebels to battle in any large numbers.[ccxiv]
In May 1953, General Henri-Eugene Navarre assumed command of French Union forces in Indochina. Navarre soon realized that his forces were overextended and excessively tied to defensive positions. He therefore developed his own military plan that bore his name and called for expansion of the VNA to take over defensive missions, thereby releasing French troops for more mobile offensive operations. For his plan to work, Navarre needed reinforcements from France, additional light mobile battalions, and more US-supplied arms and equipment. While employing offensive anti-guerrilla tactics to hold the Red River Delta and building up his mobile reserve, he intended to avoid large-scale direct confrontation with the PAVN during the remainder of 1953 and for all of 1954, if possible. Once his mobile strike forces were fully assembled, Navarre planned for all out offensive operations in 1955 to decisively defeat PAVN forces.[ccxv]
Specifics of General Navarre’s plan are as follows:
The Navarre Plan – Principles for the Conduct of the War in Indochina
1. To retake the initiative immediately through the carrying out, beginning this summer, of local offensives and by pushing to the utmost commando and guerrilla actions.
2. To take the offensive in the north beginning September 15, in order to forestall enemy attack. To conduct the battle which will take place during the fall and winter of 1953-54 in an offensive manner by attacking the flanks and the rears of the enemy.
3. To recover from areas not directly involved in the battle a maximum number of units. To pacify these regions progressively.
4. To build up progressively a battle corps by grouping battalions into regiments and regiments into divisions and by giving to the units thus created the necessary support (artillery, engineers, armor, communications) taking into account the very special character of the war in Indochina (the terrain, the enemy). To bring about a maximum of cooperation with the Air Force and the Navy.
5. To have a reserve of special type units (armored commandos, light battalions, etc.) designed to adapt the character of the groups and divisions to the nature of the terrain and of the mission assigned.
6. To continue the effort of instructing and organizing the army of the Associated States so as to give them a more and more extensive place – as well as more and more autonomy in the conduct of operations.[ccxvi]
The timeline for implementing General Navarre’s plan was somewhat unclear. According to Lieutenant General John O’Daniel, chief of the US military survey mission in Indochina, Navarre planned to organize three divisions from troops already in Vietnam and request two more French divisions in order to launch decisive offensive operations in the fall of 1953. “Navarre’s idea is to win the war here as soon as possible,” O’Daniel wrote in a top-secret message from Saigon, date 30 June 1953, to then US Commander-in-Chief Pacific, Admiral Arthur Radford. Furthermore, Navarre wanted the VNA to “take over pacification and future actions, to withdraw the bulk of French forces to Europe, [and to establish] arrangements with the Associated States similar to those of the US with the Philippines,” O’Daniel explained.[ccxvii]
By mid-year 1953, French military intelligence believed PAVN strength to be in the range of 350,000 to 400,000 combatants. This estimate included 125,000 PAVN regulars, 75,000 regional fighters, and 150,000 guerrillas. In comparison, combined French Expeditionary Corps and VNA forces numbered 500,000 men, of whom 175,000 were Expeditionary Corps ground forces, 5,000 French Navy, 10,000 French Air Force, 150,000 VNA regulars and 110,000 auxiliaries. The Laotian and Cambodian armies contributed roughly 15,000 and 10,000 more soldiers, respectively. The vast majority of the forces available to General Navarre, however, were either insufficiently mobile or mired in static defensive positions.[ccxviii]
In July, General Navarre launched Operation HIRONDELLE a heavily supported airborne assault on The PAVN supply depot at Lang Son, 150 miles behind enemy lines. Later in the month, French forces conducted Operation CAMARQUE, an extensive air, land, and sea assault on the central Vietnamese coast between Quang Tri and Hue. To bolster his manpower for offensive operations, Navarre next withdrew, by air evacuation, six infantry battalions and an artillery group – 12,000 men – from the air facility at Na San.[ccxix]
At the same time, however, General Giap raised the stakes in the conflict by invading Laos with five divisions. To block the PAVN approaches to Laos, General Navarre initiated Operation CASTOR, in which five parachute battalions were dropped into the valleys surrounding the village of Dien Bien Phu situated along the enemy supply route approximately 200 air miles west of Hanoi. By the end of November 1953, the French had 4,500 men in the valley, all of whom were completely dependent upon aerial re-supply. Navarre intended to rely on French airpower and artillery support to provide protection for the new garrison at Dien Bien Phu, however, he failed to take control of the high-ground encircling the valley. Patrols sent into the hills were ambushed continuously by PAVN forces who could easily observe and monitor French movements in the valley below. General Giap deployed the 304th, 308th, 312th, and 316th divisions to the area and amassed a surprisingly large number of artillery pieces and other heavy weapons, including 105mm and 75mm howitzers, 120mm and 82mm mortars, 37mm anti-aircraft guns, and numerous anti-aircraft machine guns.[ccxx] Describing the tactical situation in early 1954, PAVN Major General Hoang Van Thai noted “At Dien bien Phu our troops [PAVN] still had the enemy [French and VNA] encircled, wearing him down little by little and immobilizing him while preparations were under way for the final assault.”[ccxxi]
The PAVN attack on Dien Bien Phu began on 13 March 1954 with a heavy artillery bombardment and human wave assaults on French strong points. PAVN gunners shot down dozens of French re-supply and aerial evacuation aircraft and destroyed several fighter/bombers on the ground at Dien Bien Phu’s air facility. Even the airdropping of supplies was seriously disrupted by monsoon weather.[ccxxii] By mid-April the cumulative number of French forces at the garrison reached between 16,000 and 17,000 men, with nearly a third being VNA soldiers or tribal Tai fighters. General Giap, however, had assembled a force of nearly 50,000 combat troops in the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu. After weeks of fierce fighting, French forces ultimately surrendered on 7 May, having lost 1,600 killed, 4,800 wounded, and 1,600 missing. By comparison, the victorious PAVN suffered 7,900 dead and 15,000 wounded. A cease-fire agreement was subsequently negotiated during the Geneva Conference, and hostilities in Indochina officially came to an end on 21 July 1954. The ensuing Geneva Accords gave the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam control of all Vietnam territory north of the 17th parallel. Finally, in October, PAVN forces took control of Hanoi as the French withdrew from the city.[ccxxiii]
France’s Use of Indigenous Forces During the First Indochina War
Infantry forces comprised slightly more than 50 percent of the French Expeditionary Corps during the First Indochina War. This made sense, since the enemy – the PAVN – consisted almost entirely of either light infantry or guerrilla forces. French infantry performed security, pacification, and search and destroy missions, manned territorial outposts throughout Indochina, and was best suited for fighting in mountainous jungles, muddy rice paddies, and torrential monsoon rains. Essentially, French Union forces conducted joint military operations in accordance with contemporary US Armed Services doctrine. The four national armies of France, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos made up the French Union ground forces. The combined 250,000 soldiers of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian armies comprised the French Far East Territorial Force. Not all French soldiers, however, were true Frenchmen. The Expeditionary Corps was significantly diversified being composed of Foreign Legionnaires, Morocans, Algerians, Tunisians, Senegalese, and a comparatively low number of continental French volunteers. French military leaders subsequently augmented these Corps units with native Indochinese soldiers, thereby making logistic support and general communication all the more difficult.[ccxxiv]
At the beginning of the First Indochina War, French infantry forces were organized in either Far East Pattern infantry battalions or Parachute Commando battalions.[ccxxv] Although tied to road networks for artillery and logistic support, the Far East configuration facilitated improved overall dismounted infantry capabilities. Parachute Commandos supplemented basic French infantry missions with airborne assaults and operations outside of French controlled areas. Both infantry organizations effectively employed indigenous soldiers. Commando battalions, for example, included three French companies and one indigenous company. After his assumption of command in 1950, General de Lattre authorized the expanded use of indigenous forces in all French infantry units. De Lattre also organized several dozen company-sized ground commando units, with French cadre and indigenous soldiers, to assist in pacifications operations. The Colonial Route 4 debacle in February 1950 prompted French military officials to begin developing a more comprehensive strategy for utilizing all available indigenous personnel, including self-defense forces, auxiliaries, French unit augmentees, and the VNA. [ccxxvi]
Organizational changes occurred once again in 1953, as General Navarre’s plan called for the establishment of a French Union Battle Corps to serve as a strike force. This Corps was to be comprised of four French infantry divisions, one Vietnamese infantry division, and one French airborne division. The ground force component included 13 French and 9 Vietnamese regiments, while two French, and one Vietnamese, airborne regiments formed the airborne division. A number of additional armored, reconnaissance, amphibious, and artillery battalions provided support for the Battle Corps. Navarre also envisioned a force twice this size – more than 200 additional standard and light infantry battalions – to assume responsibility for manning static defensive positions and performing pacification duties, thereby freeing the Battle Corps for independent offensive actions against the PAVN. During the winter of 1954, however, the Battle Corps units were still dispersed throughout the region, with 12 battalions at Dien Bien Phu, 15 in Laos, 25 along the coast north of Nha Trang, and 18 more in the Tonkin Delta protecting French rear-area installations.[ccxxvii]
The French military recognized the benefits of using indigenous self-defense militias early in the Indochina conflict. Vietnamese self-defense organizations were a critical component of the French pacification effort. Self-defense soldiers provided security for the citizens of local hamlets and villages, thereby increasing the availability of French forces for offensive and defensive operations involving the PAVN. Self- defense units, typically commanded by village chiefs, were small, poorly armed, and no match for PAVN regulars. The French, however, continually upgraded self-defense militia capabilities, and eventually formed company-sized units to protect groups of ten villages and regional battalions to reinforce these respective companies.[ccxxviii]
The French military formed alliances in Indochina with additional independent militias called Maquis.[ccxxix] These paramilitary organizations operated primarily in the mountainous northwest regions of Vietnam and were composed of separate ethnic units of tribal Montagnard, Hmong, and Tai fighters. Hmong militia fought along side French counterparts during the Hoa Binh Campaign. The 1st Tai battalion fought bravely during the PAVN assault on Nghia Lo in 1951, and three Tai battalions participated in the 1952 Battle of Na San. At Dien Bien Phu, however, Tai units were seriously deficient. The majority of the 3rd Tai battalion, defending a strongpoint on the Dien Bien Phu perimeter, defected to the PAVN, while the remainder slipped away into the mountains. As the conflict intensified, other Tai soldiers at the main garrison became “internal deserters,” took no part in the fighting, and squirreled away in spider holes along the Nam Yum river.[ccxxx] Maquis operations were nevertheless beneficial to the overall French effort in that they often distracted and tied up PAVN forces. Maquis militias also defended French outposts and helped rescue French soldiers at garrisons that had been attacked or overrun by the PAVN. By the end of the war, combined Maquis strength reached approximately 15,000 combatants.[ccxxxi]
French battalions also formed small companies of local auxiliary fighters. These companies were led by French cadre and typically included up to 100 auxiliaries. At the beginning of the war, auxiliary companies manned defensive positions and performed other low-grade tasks, however their mobility, familiarity with the enemy, and knowledge of the environment enhanced their value to the French as the war progressed. Over time, the expanded role for auxiliaries included screening for main force French units, exploiting victories over PAVN forces, pursuing PAVN in retreat, protecting supply lines, village searches, ambushes, and night reconnaissance missions. By 1954 there were more than 1,000 auxiliary companies supporting French operations in Vietnam. Unfortunately, most auxiliary companies were untrained and unprepared for direct confrontations with PAVN regular forces.[ccxxxii]
The company-sized ground commando unit program previously described was a by-product of the French military’s auxiliary company development effort. Auxiliary commando companies were often regular auxiliary companies, upgraded to carry out more rigorous operations, such as local reconnaissance and patrolling. Other commando companies were attached to French naval units to provide infantry support for amphibious operations, while several elite commando units – shock commandos – conducted raids and long-range covert surveillance missions behind PAVN lines. Occasionally, commandos also undertook so-called pseudo missions, disguised as PAVN soldiers.[ccxxxiii]
French military commanders also recruited indigenous Indochinese civilians directly into the FUF. By the end of the war, presumptive French units were in reality staffed with a significant number of native soldiers. French regiments often had an Indochinese battalion, battalions had an Indochinese company, and companies had Indochinese platoons. The French Union Army, thereby, dramatically increased in size by adding indigenous soldiers familiar with both the terrain and the enemy. Many of the native FUF units were eventually extracted to form the nucleus of the Vietnam National Army.[ccxxxiv] The 1st Vietnamese Parachute Battalion (1st BPVN), for example, was assigned to a French airborne task force and jumped into the Black River region during the Hoa Binh Campaign. The 2nd Foreign Legion Indochinese Parachute Company fought at Nghia Lo, and the 5th Vietnamese Artillery Group provided support during the Battle of Na Son. Finally, at Dien Bien Phu, the 5th BPVN, along with additional French forces, counterattacked PAVN soldiers and recaptured a key perimeter outpost.[ccxxxv] Thousands of French soldiers had been tied up manning defensive outposts scattered throughout Vietnam. Had the VNA developed in strength and capabilities sooner, French commanders might have had the manpower necessary to both defend their garrisons and aggressively pursue PAVN guerrilla forces.
Chapter 7. Conclusion
This Long War Occasional Paper investigated the tactical employment of host nation indigenous forces in support of American, French, and British combat operations. Allied and auxiliary forces tactical participation in the following conflicts was assessed and evaluated – the American Indian Wars, the French-Algerian War, the American War in Vietnam, the British-Northern Ireland conflict, and the French-Indochina War. The involvement/contribution of indigenous armies and militias in both combat operations and other operations in direct support of main force coalition missions were also explored.
Not surprisingly, several types of tactical operations, undertaken by the respective indigenous forces, were similar across all five conflicts examined. Each indigenous group in the five conflicts, for example, performed economy of force missions, either augmenting or supplementing main force units in combat, conducting supporting attacks, serving as quick reaction forces, or defending less-critical installations/terrain. In many instance, indigenous forces were relegated to secondary efforts, thereby allowing primary fighting units to mass at decisive locations elsewhere in a particular area of operations. In other cases, role reversals occurred – main forces served as supporting units, while indigenous units became the supported force. For a short time during the Vietnam War, US Marine Corps air and ground units undertook a back-up reserve mission in support of ARVN search and destroy operations in I Corps. Similarly, beginning in 1977, British military forces served in a secondary reserve role, supporting the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which assumed primary responsibility for the counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland.
In each of the conflicts studied, indigenous forces assisted with counterinsurgency operations, either direct military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, or civic actions taken by the specific host nation government to defeat the insurgency. With the exception of the “Troubles” in Ireland, auxiliary forces also participated, either on their own or jointly alongside coalition units, in conventional combat operations against insurgent combatants. Lieutenant Colonel Crook’s Crow allies at the Battle of Rosebud, General Challe’s Harki Commandoes de Chasse, the ARVN armor/infantry task force in Operation LAM SON 719, and the 5th Vietnamese Parachute Battalion at Dien Bien Phu serve as noteworthy examples. A variety of joint operations involving main force and indigenous troops, such as search and destroy, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, surveillance, and patrolling, was prevalent in all five conflicts assessed.
Additionally, all of the indigenous forces investigated employed guerrilla warfare tactics against insurgents, who were themselves considered guerrilla fighters. The loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), for instance, carried out a widespread bombing campaign in Northern Ireland aimed at Catholic nationalists and Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) members. In Algeria, Harki auxiliaries were far more familiar with guerrilla tactics than were their French leaders. And in Vietnam, US Marines and Popular Force (PF) militia in the Combined Action Program (CAP) proved to be better guerrilla fighters than the Viet Cong guerrillas they faced on a daily basis. Finally on the American western frontier, Indian scouts and allies fought fire with fire, employing guerrilla tactics to relentlessly pursue, track down, and defeat renegade bands. Indian scouts and US Soldiers conducted night marches, closed on hostile camps, and executed pre-dawn surprise attacks, killing or capturing enemy braves, destroying their villages and food stocks, and seizing their horses. Winter attacks were most effective in demoralizing hostile Indians. As Thomas Huber points out, the proficiency of Indian auxiliaries in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of early guerrilla warfare significantly increased the US Army’s leverage by applying both conventional and unconventional force simultaneously.
Tactics related to intelligence operations accounted for a significant proportion of indigenous force activities. Auxiliary force tactical missions often involved trailing, tracking, and hunting down enemy combatants. Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) militiamen, for example, served as trail watchers and pathfinders during the Vietnam War. Indigenous forces’ knowledge of both the enemy and the local terrain far surpassed that of main force intelligence organizations. Reconnaissance, observation, and border surveillance missions, therefore, typically included locally knowledgeable auxiliary personnel.
Indigenous soldiers also served as interpreters and translators. Chiricahua Apache scouts assigned to Lieutenant Charles Gatewood knew the renegade language and hand signs. This knowledge and the ability to readily communicate proved instrumental in the ultimate surrender of Chief Geronimo. Specially trained Harkis brought pro-French propaganda messages to illiterate rural Algerians. Additionally, loyalist auxiliaries in Northern Ireland conducted a variety of covert and clandestine operations against the PIRA and developed networks of sympathetic informants and infiltrators. Harki allies in Algeria, VNA commando units in Indochina, and the RUC in Northern Ireland conducted pseudo operations behind enemy lines disguised as either enemy soldiers or civilians. Harkis were often the first ones in during house searches since they would instantly recognize anything unusual or out of place. And finally, the CIDG engaged in counterintelligence activities during the Vietnam War aimed at destroying VC infrastructure and disrupting VC/NVA intelligence gathering operations.
Mobility was another key factor in the employment of indigenous forces. Due to their knowledge of the local terrain, auxiliaries could often move faster and farther in hostile territory than coalition units. Allied Indian scouts, for example, provided flank security and screened out to 50 miles on either side of Crooks’ infantry/cavalry and maneuvered 12-24 hours ahead of the main party. Patrolling was an essential component of mobility operations in which all of the indigenous forces examined participated.
Following the TeT Offensive, for instance, CAP platoons increased their mobility, remaining on the move continuously and conducting night ambushes in their AOs. CIDG hunters implemented extended patrolling into mountainous and jungle regions to attack VC/NVA sanctuaries and lines of communications. When Captain Galula’s sous-quartier expanded in Algeria, he sent his Harki auxiliaries on 2-3 day long-range patrols to scout and report back on the new territory. Auxiliary commando companies performed local reconnaissance and patrolling missions in and around their hamlets, while elite shock commandoes conducted raids and long-range covert surveillance missions behind PAVN lines in Indochina. Additionally, American Indian allies patrolled and protected the rail lines, located enemy villages, scouted the best route ahead, and recommended potential nightly campsites. And finally, by the 1980s, the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR) had expanded its patrolling efforts sufficiently to cover 85% of Northern Ireland, and British Army-RUC urban patrolling operations in Belfast were continuous, systematic, and high-profile, with multiple formations typically moving in parallel for mutual protection.
Tactics in support of defensive operations were prevalent for all the indigenous forces evaluated. American Indian allies secured the high ground along the Frontier Army’s route of marches, manned outposts, and escorted paymasters and civilian visitors. Harkis, Regional and Popular Forces (RF/PF), the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), and Vietnamese National Army (VNA) soldiers all provided security for their local communities, defended garrisons and key facilities, established checkpoints and road blocks, and served as quick reaction forces. UDR members also utilized armed patrol boats for anti-gunrunning missions aimed at interdicting PIRA weapons shipments on Northern Ireland’s lakes and rivers.
Indigenous forces also participated in pacification efforts. Early in the Vietnam War, ARVN soldiers concentrated primarily on pacification missions, while newly arrived US forces focused on search and destroy operations. US Marine Corps CAP platoons developed the enclave strategy, using clear-and-hold and ink-blot tactics to pacify villages and seal them off from Viet Cong infiltration. During the Indochina War, General De Lattre established dozens of company-sized auxiliary ground commando units to specialize in pacification activities. Indian allies helped maintain law and order on reservations. And, under General Challe’s campaign plan in Algeria, Harki auxiliaries conducted local security operations, helped with population control, and assisted civilian SAS officers in providing essential services. Finally, the RUC, which became the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2001, was primarily responsible for maintaining law and order in the six counties under its jurisdiction.
Collectively, the indigenous forces investigated in this Long War Occasional Paper, participated in the full spectrum of tactical actions/elements that constitute full spectrum operations. In their respective campaigns, auxiliary and allied soldiers were indeed involved in sequentially or simultaneously implementing offensive, defensive, stability, and civil support tactics intended to achieve decisive results and to accomplish missions domestically and abroad. Unfortunately however, in three of the five conflicts evaluated in this paper, indigenous forces and their main force allies were ultimately unable to achieve their desired goals and objectives.[ccxxxvi]
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Ulster Unionist Party Northern Ireland. “History of the Ulster Unionist Party.” 14 November 2010, (accessed 1 March 2011).
USMC CAP. “Combined Action Program Mission Statement.” (accessed 15 February 2011).
Weir, John. “John Weir’s Affidavit.” , signed 3 February 1999, released 1 March 1999, (accessed 2 March 2011).
FIELD MANUALS AND GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS
Glennon, John and Neal Peterson, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954, Volume XIII, Indochina, Part 1. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1982.
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency. Washington, DC, 15 December 2006.
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual Interim (FMI) 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations. Washington, DC, October 2004.
Headquarters, United Kingdom Land Forces, Planning Directive for Northern Ireland Training, G3 Report. August 1992.
Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF-PF Handbook for Advisors. Saigon: MACV, 1969.
Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF/PF Outposts: Lessons Learned No. 81. Saigon: MACV, 1970.
Khuyen, Lieutenant General Dong Van. The RVNAF. Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1980.
Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army. American Military History. Washington, DC: Center of Military History United States Army, 1989.
Trapnell, Major General Thomas former Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Indochina, Debriefing Statement, 3 May 1954, published in US Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, Volume 9. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971.
United Kingdom Ministry of Defense. The Use of Indigenous Security Forces: Ten Case Studies. Report from the Land Warfare Development Group, 2010.
REPORTS
Archick, Kristin, CRS Report to Congress No. RS21333. Northern Ireland: The Peace Process, 28 May 2010.
Commander-in-Chief, French Supreme Command, Far East. “Lessons from the Indochina War, Volume II.” 31 May 1955.
Commander-in-Chief Indochina, Instruction Bureau. “Notes on Combat in Indochina.” 30 March 1954.
Council on Foreign Relations. “Northern Ireland Loyalist Paramilitaries.” Backgrounder, November 2005.
Ehrenreich, Hanah. “In the Spotlight: The Ulster Defense Association (UDA).” The Center for Defense Information, 11 May 2005.
Fletcher, Holly. “IRA Splinter Groups.” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, 21 May 2008.
Goetzke, Colonel Karl. A Review of the Algerian War of National Liberation Using the US Army's Current Counterinsurgency Doctrine. Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2005.
Gregory, Kathryn. “Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, 16 March 2010.
Hunt, Lord Baron, Governor of Northern Ireland Report to Parliament. Report of the Advisory Committee on Police in Northern Ireland. (Belfast: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, October 1969.
Jackson, Major Peter. French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterinsurgency Warfare between 1945 and 1962. Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2005.
Le Page, Jean-Marc. “Le Qoutidien de la Pacification au Tonkin, les Milices d’Autodefense (1952-1954)”, No. 1, 2003.
Miller, Major William. The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations. Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 1992.
Peterson, Major Gregory. The French Experience in Algeria, 1954-1962: Blueprint for US Operations in Iraq. Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 2004.
Phillips, Major Donald. Across the Border: Success and Failures of Operation Rockcrusher. Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 4 June 1999.
Rieper, Lieutenant Colonel William. Irregular Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations: Their Roles and Considerations. Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 2010.
Rose, Lieutenant Commander Robert. Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, 1969-1992. Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 1999.
List of Suggested Maps and Photographs
Cover, Composite – Indian Scout, Harki, RF/PF, RUC, VNA/ARVN
Trans-Mississippi West map, “American Military History,” CMH, p. 303
Forsyth’s Scouts, “US Army Frontier Scouts,” Field, p. 19
Apache Kid, “US Army Frontier Scouts,” Field, p. 50
General Crook, “Gen. Crook in Indian Country,” Bourke, p. 1
Lt. Ross’ Attack, “Gen. Crook in Indian Country,” Bourke, p. 11
Friendly Scout Signaling, “Gen. Crook in Indian Country,” Bourke, p. 35
Geronimo, “A Campaign Against the Apaches,” Maus, p. 10
Geronimo & Warriors, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 240-241
Geronimo & Chiricahuas, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 240-241
Photo of author on Gen. Crook’s Trail
Curly - Custer’s Scout,
Bloody Knife – Custer’s Scout, “Lead the Way,” Plante, p. 7
Apache Scouts at Fort Wingate, “Lead the Way,” Plante, p. 1
Apacheria map, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. ix
Cochise, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 112-113
Victorio, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 112-113
Peaches – Crook’s Scout, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 112-113
Tonto Basin Map, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 219
Crook’s Apache Campaign, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 240-241
Lt. Gatewood & Scouts, “The Conquest of Apacheria,” Thrapp, p. 240-241
Sitting Bull, “Wounded Knee & the Ghost Dance Tragedy,” Utter, p. 11
Wounded Knee Map, “Wounded Knee & the Ghost Dance Tragedy,” Utter, p. 23
French-Algerian War Map,
Commandos de Chasse Algeria,
General Challe,
Harki Soldier,
Cartoon – Vous Avez… “Algeria & France 1800-2000,” Lorcin, p. 174
Vietnam Map, “War in the Shadows,” Asprey, p. 1091
ARVN Troops, “No Simple Solution,” Mil Rev Jul-Aug 2010, Faugstad, p. 33
CAP Insignia,
James Donovan & CAP, “Combined Action Program,” Vietnam Mag 8/04, p. 27
Life Mag Covr, 8/25/67,
Trung Luong Compound, “Setpiece Vietnam, Mil Rev, May 67, Stapleton, p. 40
RF & PF Insignia,
CIDG Soldiers, “The Use of Indigenous Security Forces,” British Army, p. 47
US Advisor & PFs, “The Use of Indigenous Security Forces,” British Army, p. 48
Nixon/Cambodia Attack, p. 5,
ARVN M113, p. 7. ,
Op Lam Son 719 Map, p. 1,
ARVN on Captured Tank, p.15,
Ireland Map, “Northern Ireland: The Peace Process,” CRS, RS21333, p. 2
Northern Ireland Map, “Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare,” Marston, p. 161
British Soldier Belfast, “Brit Experience in N. Ireland,” Mil Rev, J-F 07, Jackson, p. 78
RUC Poster,
Belfast Destruction,
RUC Barracks, p. 5,
UDR Checkpoint, p. 9,
UDR March, p. 12,
UDR Poster, p. 21,
Battle of the Bogside, p. 5,
Loyalist Banner, p. 13,
South Quay Destruction, p. 19,
Loyalist Mural, p. 23,
Indochina Map, p. 8,
Geneva Conference, p. 12,
Indochina Map, “Vietnam,” Tucker, p. 49
Dien Bien Phu Map, “Vietnam,” Tucker, p. 49
Battle of Na San Map, p. 1,
Nghia Lo Map, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” Vietnam Mag, Oct 98, p. 46
Vietnamese & Tai, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” Vietnam Mag, Oct 98, p. 48
Tai Troops, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” Vietnam Mag, Oct 98, p. 50
3rd Viet Paratroopers, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” Vietnam Mag, Oct 98, p. 51
Communist Offensives Map, “Indochina,” Bernard Fall, Mil Rev, Dec 56, p. 51
-----------------------
[i] Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC, 15 December 2006), 5-5, 5-6, 5-13, 5-14, 5-23, 5-25, 6-1, 6-14, 6-15.
[ii] Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual Interim (FMI) 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations (Washington, DC, October 2004), 1-10, 3-8; Colonel Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency,” Parameters, Summer 2006, 48.
[iii] Colonel Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency,” Parameters, Summer 2006, 47-61.
[iv] Colonel Corbie Truman quoted in Second Lieutenant Jesse Faugstad, “No Simple Solution: Regional Force Operations in Hau Nghia, Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2010, 40.
[v] Second Lieutenant Jesse Faugstad, “No Simple Solution: Regional Force Operations in Hau Nghia, Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2010, 34-36.
[vi] Colonel C.E. Jordan quoted in Second Lieutenant Jesse Faugstad, “No Simple Solution: Regional Force Operations in Hau Nghia, Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2010, 41; Lieutenant Colonel Carl Bernard quoted in Second Lieutenant Jesse Faugstad, “No Simple Solution: Regional Force Operations in Hau Nghia, Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2010, 37.
[vii] Colonel Augustus Kautz quoted in Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 45.
[viii] These are the DRV names for the operations and offensives, all of which were initiated by PAVN forces.
[ix] Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History (Washington, DC: Center of Military History United States Army, 1989), 300-301.
[x] Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History, 301-305.
[xi] Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, Headquarters Military Division of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, Correspondence to Colonel George Leet, Assistant Adjutant General, Headquarters Army of the United States, Washington, DC, 1 July 1867, 4, (accessed 27 December 2010).
[xii] Thirty-Ninth US Congress, 1st Session, 1866, 333, (accessed 23 November 2010).
[xiii] Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History, 306-308.
[xiv] Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 19; Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History, 308-311.
[xv] Keith Murray, The Modocs and their War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 81-88, 107, 142, 157, 205, 210, 257.
[xvi] Michael Malone, Richard Roeder, and William Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1991), 138.
[xvii] Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History, 312-313.
[xviii] Following the Civil War, Crook held the permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was promoted directly to Brigadier General in 1872 and retired as a Major General in 1890.
[xix] Dan Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 162-169, 208-209, 358-362.
[xx] Francis Taunton, Army Failures Against the Sioux in 1876 (London: Westerners Publications Limited, 2000), 19-21.
[xxi] Jack Utter, Wounded Knee & the Ghost Dance Tragedy (Salt Lake City, UT: National Woodlands Publishing Company, 1991), 25.
[xxii] Office of the Chief of Military History United States Army, American Military History, 318.
[xxiii] Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 13-15.
[xxiv] Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 15-21.
[xxv] The term “scout” is derived from the French verb “ecouter,” which means “to listen,” see Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 3.
[xxvi] Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 8-9.
[xxvii] Colonel Richard Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West (Hartford, CT: A.D. Worthington Co., 1890), xxxix; Colonel Richard Dodge quoted in David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 1998, 73.
[xxviii] Colonel Richard Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West, 492; Colonel Richard Dodge quoted in David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 75.
[xxix] Major General George Crook, General George Crook: His Autobiography (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946), 213; Major General George Crook quoted in David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 75-76.
[xxx] David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 1998, 76.
[xxxi] Brigadier General Hugh Scott quoted in John Redington, “Service of Scouts and Couriers in the Indian Wars,” in Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars 1865-1890: The Army and the Indian Volume V, ed. Peter Cozzens (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005), 371.
[xxxii] Major General George Crook quoted in Charles Lummis, General Crook and the Apache Wars (Flagstaff, AZ: The Northland Press, 1966), 17; David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 77.
[xxxiii] Chief Dull Knife quoted in Captain John Bourke, On the Border with Crook (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 393.
[xxxiv] George Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 238; In 1867, Department of the Platte commander, Brigadier General Christopher Augur, raised four battalions (more than 1,200 men) of predominantly Pawnees to help protect the Union Pacific railroad and to clear hostiles from the Republican River region, see David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 89.
[xxxv] Frank Grouard quoted in Joe DeBarthe, Life and Adventures of Frank Grouard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 117; David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 1998, 82.
[xxxvi] Recollections of Chief Wooden Leg who fought against the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little bighorn as described in Thomas Marquis, Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1931), 221.
[xxxvii] Lieutenant Colonel George Custer quoted in Frank Linderman, Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1930), 175; David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 91-92.
[xxxviii] William Belknap quoted in Stanley Vestal, Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1934), 185; David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 82.
[xxxix] David Smits, “Fighting Fire with Fire: the Frontier Army’s Use of Indian Scouts and Allies in the Trans-Mississippi Campaigns, 1860-1890,” 85-86.
[xl] Dunlay discredits this notion, explaining that it was more a matter of knowing what to look for and that there must have been considerable individual variation, see Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 79.
[xli] Captain John Bourke, On the Border with Crook (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 185-186.
[xlii] Unidentified correspondent for the Sacramento Record quoted in Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 15.
[xliii] Colonel Augustus Kautz quoted in Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921, 45.
[xliv] Apache Chief Delchay quoted in Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921, 46.
[xlv] Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921, 45.
[xlvi] Captain John Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 484.
[xlvii] Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 69-73.
[xlviii] Brigadier General Randolph Marcy, Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (New York: Harper, 1866), 252; Brigadier General Randolph Marcy quoted in Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 76.
[xlix] Thomas Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90, 78-80, 84-85.
[l] Ron Field, US Army Frontier Scouts 1840-1921, 51-53.
[li] Colonel William Carlin quoted in James Burns, “Indians as Scouts,” in Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars 1865-1890: The Army and the Indian Volume V, ed. Peter Cozzens (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005), 402.
[lii] Unidentified US Army Officer quoted in Captain John Bourke, On the Border with Crook, 468.
[liii] Brigadier General George Crook, Crook’s Resume of Operations Against Apache Indians 1882 to 1886 (West Kingsdown, UK: The English Westerner’s Society, 1999), 23.
[liv] Thomas Huber, “Compound Warfare: A Conceptual Framework,” in Compound Warfare: That Fatal Knot, ed. Thomas Huber (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2002), 1.
[lv] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), 64.
[lvi] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 38.
[lvii] Abdul-Hamid Ben Badis quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 40-41.
[lviii] Pierre Mendes-France quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 98.
[lix] Francois Mitterrand quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 99.
[lx] Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 95.
[lxi] Martin Evans, “The Harkis: The Experience and Memory of France’s Muslim Auxiliaries,” in The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954-1962: Experiences, Images, Testimonies, ed. Martin Alexander, Martin Evans, and J.F.V. Keiger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 117-135.
[lxii] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 183-207.
[lxiii] David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1963), 39
[lxiv] Jo McCormack, “Memory in History, Nation Building, and Identity,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, ed. Patricia Lorcin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 147.
[lxv] Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962, 92.
[lxvi] Charles de Gaulle quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 306
[lxvii] General Maurice Challe quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 332.
[lxviii] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 332.
[lxix] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 335-337.
[lxx] Charles de Gaulle quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 302, 344; William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, ed. Patricia Lorcin (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 165.
[lxxi] Les Accords d’Evian, 18 March 1962, 7, ’Evian.htm (accessed 27 January 2011); Julien Peyron, “Four Decades of French Nuclear Testing,” FRANCE 24, 24 March 2009, 1, (accessed 27 January 2011); Phillip Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Colonization and Transformation (Tallahassee, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 84; Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962, 195, 200-201; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 533.
[lxxii] Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962, 65, 79; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 537.
[lxxiii] William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 164.
[lxxiv] David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 290.
[lxxv] Colonel Karl Goetzke, A Review of the Algerian War of National Liberation Using the US Army's Current Counterinsurgency Doctrine (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2005), 11-12.
[lxxvi] David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 288-289; Mayors Ahmed Asli and Ismail Derradji quoted in David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 289.
[lxxvii] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 255.
[lxxviii] Major Gregory Peterson, The French Experience in Algeria, 1954-1962: Blueprint for US Operations in Iraq (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 2004), 32-33; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 255.
[lxxix] David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 292-293.
[lxxx] David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, 294, 383-384.
[lxxxi] William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 165, 168.
[lxxxii] Anonymous FLN memorandum quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 256.
[lxxxiii] Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 335.
[lxxxiv] Captain Philippe Tripier quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 335.
[lxxxv] Many Harkis remained in France to reinforce the police, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 409-410, 500.
[lxxxvi] General Maurice Challe quoted in Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 443-444.
[lxxxvii] Harkis were actually offered three options: (1) the few Harkis without dependents could join the French army; (2) other could wait and join an unspecified future local defense force, and; (3) Harkis could disarm, take their bonus, and return home. Most Harkis were never fully informed of these options and the majority chose to accept a bonus and go back to their villages, see William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 166.
[lxxxviii] William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 166-167.
[lxxxix] William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 168.
[xc] Charles de Gaulle quoted in William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 168-169.
[xci] William Cohen, “The Harkis: History and Memory,” in Algeria and France 1800-2000, 168-170; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, 537.
[xcii] Robert Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006), 27-28.
[xciii] United Kingdom Ministry of Defense, The Use of Indigenous Security Forces: Ten Case Studies, Report from the Land Warfare Development Group, 2010, 46-47.
[xciv] Lieutenant Colonel William Rieper, Irregular Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations: Their Roles and Considerations (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 2010), 18.
[xcv] Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for counterinsurgency,” Parameters, Summer 2006, 55-59; United Kingdom Ministry of Defense, The Use of Indigenous Security Forces: Ten Case Studies, Report from the Land Warfare Development Group, 2010, 47.
[xcvi] Robert Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador, 30; United Kingdom Ministry of Defense, The Use of Indigenous Security Forces: Ten Case Studies, Report from the Land Warfare Development Group, 2010, 48.
[xcvii] Lieutenant Colonel William Rieper, Irregular Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations: Their Roles and Considerations, 23-24.
[xcviii] David Halberstam quoted in Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Geurrilla in History Volume II (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1975), 1005.
[xcix] Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Geurrilla in History Volume II, 1005, 1101.
[c] Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Geurrilla in History Volume II, 1092, 1100, 1103.
[ci] Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Geurrilla in History Volume II, 1104, 1133.
[cii] Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird quoted in Willard Webb and Walter Poole, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1971-1973 (Washington, DC: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Office of Joint History, 2007), 101.
[ciii] Major Donald Phillips, Across the Border: Success and Failures of Operation Rockcrusher (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 4 June 1999), 68-87.
[civ] Texas Tech University, “Vietnam Operations Table – Binh Tay I (Tame the West),” 3, (accessed 9 February 2011); Donn Starry, Armored Combat in Vietnam (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 179-180.
[cv] Texas Tech University, “Vietnam Operations Table – Cambodian Incursion,” 8, (accessed 9 February 2011).
[cvi] Donn Starry, Armored Combat in Vietnam, 179-180.
[cvii] Dave Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: US-Vietnam in Perspective (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1995), 240; Major General Nguyen Duy Hinh, Indochina Monographs: Lam Son 719 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1979), 33-42; Texas Tech University, “Vietnam Operations Table – Lam Son 719,” 24, (accessed 9 February 2011).
[cviii] Texas Tech University, “Vietnam Operations Table – Lam Son 719,” 24, (accessed 9 February 2011).
[cix] President Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia,” 7 April 1971, 1, (accessed 9 February 2011).
[cx] Admiral Thomas Moorer quoted in Willard Webb and Walter Poole, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1971-1973 (Washington, DC: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Office of Joint History, 2007), 103.
[cxi] Shelby Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army (New York: Dell, 1985), 354-355.
[cxii] Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong, Indochina Monographs: The Easter Offensive of 1972 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1977), 64-74, 78-105, 106-136.
[cxiii] Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong, Indochina Monographs: The Easter Offensive of 1972, 158.
[cxiv] Willard Webb and Walter Poole, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1971-1973, 102.
[cxv] Military Assistance Command Vietnam – Studies and Observation Group, “US Army Special Forces, Vietnam, Provisional 1962-1964,” 1-4, (accessed 11 February 2011).
[cxvi] Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for counterinsurgency,” Parameters, Summer 2006, 58-59.
[cxvii] Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 231.
[cxviii] Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for counterinsurgency,” 58-59; Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 231.
[cxix] Robert Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for counterinsurgency,” 59.
[cxx] Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF/PF Outposts: Lessons Learned No. 81, (Saigon: MACV, 1970), 1.
[cxxi] Robert Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador, 37.
[cxxii] General Creighton Abrams quoted in Robert Ramsey, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador, 30.
[cxxiii] Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF-PF Handbook for Advisors (Saigon: MACV, 1969), i, 1-2; Russell Eno, “Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Observations for the MiTT,” Infantry, November-December 2007, 32.
[cxxiv] Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF/PF Outposts: Lessons Learned No. 81, (Saigon: MACV, 1970), 1, 12.
[cxxv] Russell Eno, “Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Observations for the MiTT,” 32-33; Army Concept Team Vietnam, “Final Report: Armor Organization for Counterinsurgency Operations in Vietnam,” 1966, 1, (accessed 14 February 2011); “ARVN Regional Force Mechanized Platoon, TOE 48-883A” 1 January 1971, 5, (accessed 14 February 2011); “ARVN Regional Force Intelligence Platoon, TOE 48-840,” 1 January 1971, 4, (accessed 14 February 2011); “ARVN Regional Force River Patrol Company, TOE 48-733,” 1 January 1971, 2, (accessed 14 February 2011).
[cxxvi] Major Homer Stapleton, “Trung Luong - Setpiece Vietnam,” Military Review, May 1967, 40-41.
[cxxvii] Russell Eno, “Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Observations for the MiTT,” 35.
[cxxviii] Russell Eno, “Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Observations for the MiTT,” 35.
[cxxix] Headquarters, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, RF/PF Outposts: Lessons Learned No. 81, (Saigon: MACV, 1970), 10-11.
[cxxx] Captain Keith Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2002, 78; Lieutenant Colonel William Corson quoted in Captain Keith Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” Military Review, July-August 2002, 79.
[cxxxi] Captain Francis West, “Fort Page – Second in a Series: Something of Significance,” CAC NEWS, 5 April 1967, 8.
[cxxxii] Sergeant Jerry Simmons, “ 16 Man CAC Patrol Ambushed by VC,” CAC NEWS, 5 April 1967, 5.
[cxxxiii] Don Moser, “Their Mission: Defend, Befriend,” Life, 25 August 1967, 27.
[cxxxiv] USMC CAP, “Combined Action Program Mission Statement,” (accessed 15 February 2011).
[cxxxv] Captain Keith Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” 79.
[cxxxvi] Captain Keith Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” 78.
[cxxxvii] James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” Vietnam, August 2004, 26, 29; T. P. Schwartz, “The Combined Action Program: A Different Perspective,” Marine Corps Gazette, February 1999, 71.
[cxxxviii] Lieutenant General Victor Krulak quoted in James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” 29.
[cxxxix] James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” 30.
[cxl] Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, “Secretary McNamara Opposes Further Escalation,” 1966, (accessed 15 February 2011).
[cxli] James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” 31-32.
[cxlii] Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, First to Fight (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 199.
[cxliii] Captain Keith Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” 78, 80; James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” 32.
[cxliv] Guenter Lewy quoted in James Donovan, “Combined Action Program: Marines’ Alternative to Search and Destroy,” 32.
[cxlv] General William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Dell, 1980), 216.
[cxlvi] Lieutenant General Lewis Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1970), 105.
[cxlvii] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland (Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus Publishing, 2008), 94-99, 110-119.
[cxlviii] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 129-140; Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 133, 148.
[cxlix] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History, 159-160, 205-206, 251-263.
[cl] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 252, 253-255.
[cli] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 258.
[clii] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History, 285-287; Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 263.
[cliii] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 264-275.
[cliv] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History, 281-299.
[clv] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 268.
[clvi] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 285.
[clvii] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 288; Frederick Vandome, Agnes McBrewster, and John Miller, 1996 Manchester Bombing, (Beau Bassin, Mauritius: Alpha Script Publishing, 2010), 1-27; Henry McDonald, “Ulster Carnage as Bomb Blast Targets Shoppers,” Guardian.co.uk, 16 August 1998, 1-3, (accessed 25 February 2011).
[clviii] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History, 297-299.
[clix] Ian Paisley quoted in Allen Cowell and Eamon Quinn, “Power Sharing Begins in Northern Ireland,” New York Times, 8 May 2007, 1.
[clx] Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted in Allen Cowell and Eamon Quinn, “Leaders Sworn In as Home Rule Returns to Belfast,” New York Times, 8 May 2007, 3.
[clxi] Peter Ellis, Eyewitness to Irish History, 299.
[clxii] Nationalist are often referred to as republicans, while loyalists are frequently called unionists.
[clxiii] Council on Foreign Relations, “Northern Ireland Loyalist Paramilitaries,” Backgrounder, November 2005, 1-2.
[clxiv] Lieutenant Commander Robert Rose, Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, 1969-1992, (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 1999), 10-15; Council on Foreign Relations, “Northern Ireland Loyalist Paramilitaries,” Backgrounder, November 2005, 1-2; Hanah Ehrenreich, “In the Spotlight: The Ulster Defense Association (UDA),” The Center for Defense Information, 11 May 2005, 1-3.
[clxv] David Boulton, The UVF 1966-73: An Anatomy of Loyalist Rebellion (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973), 40; Lieutenant Commander Robert Rose, Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, 1969-1992, (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 1999), 12.
[clxvi] Council on Foreign Relations, “Northern Ireland Loyalist Paramilitaries,” Backgrounder, November 2005, 2; Liam Collins, “The Miami Band Lined Up Against the Van, Then They Were Coldly Murdered,” Independent.ie, 17 July 2005, 1-3.
[clxvii] Kathryn Gregory, “Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA),” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, 16 March 2010, 1.
[clxviii] Kristin Archick, CRS Report to Congress No. RS21333, Northern Ireland: The Peace Process, 28 May 2010, 5; Kathryn Gregory, “Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA),” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, 16 March 2010, 2; Holly Fletcher, “”IRA Splinter Groups,” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder, 21 May 2008, 1-2.
[clxix] US Department of State, “Background Note: Ireland,” 20 August 2010, 5; Ulster Unionist Party Northern Ireland, “History of the Ulster Unionist Party,” 14 November 2010, 1, (accessed 1 March 2011); Democratic Unionist Party, Party History 1971 to Present (Belfast: DUP, 2008), 1-12; Social Democratic and Labour Party Headquarters, “Our History: The Party of Principle, The Party of Vision,” 2009, 1, (accessed 1 March 2011); Sinn Fein, “Introduction to Sinn Fein and Irish Republicanism,” 2010, 1-8, (accessed 1 March 2011).
[clxx] George Cross, “History – The Royal Ulster Constabulary,” 2009, 4, (accessed 22 February 2011).
[clxxi] John Weir, “John Weir’s Affidavit,” , signed 3 February 1999, released 1 March 1999, 1-3, (accessed 2 March 2011).
[clxxii] Police Service of Northern Ireland, “A History of Policing in Ireland,” 2008, 3, (accessed 2 March 2011).
[clxxiii] Gordon Lucy, “History of the B Specials,” Orange Order Historical Society, Belfast, 2008, 1-4, (accessed 2 March 2011).
[clxxiv] Douglas Woodwell, “The Troubles of Northern Ireland: Civil Conflict in an Economically Well-Developed State,” in Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis Vol. 2 – Europe, Central Asia, and Other Regions, eds. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005), 164.
[clxxv] Lord Baron Hunt, Governor of Northern Ireland Report to Parliament, Report of the Advisory Committee on Police in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, October 1969), Paragraphs 175 and 183; Subparagraph 47/Paragraph 183.
[clxxvi] Christine Kinealy, A New History of Ireland, 255-256.
[clxxvii] Ulster Defence Regiment, “History: Formation,” 2000, 1-2, (accessed 22 February 2011).
[clxxviii] Paul Malone, “Ireland Revisited – Week Two,” Examiner Newpaper of Crossmaglen, South Armagh, Newry, and Down , 21 September 2010, 1-2, (accessed 3 March 2011).
[clxxix] Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-1984 (London: Methuen LTD, 1985), 114-116; Museum of Free Derry, “Operation MOTORMAN,” 2 September 2007, 1-2, (accessed 3 March 2011); Phillip Johnston, Peter Day, and Sean O’Neill, “1972: The Year of Bloody Sunday, Direct Rule from London, and a Striking Humiliation for Heath,” The Daily Telegraph, 1 January 2003, 6.
[clxxx] Richard Jones and Charles Cutshaw, Jane’s Infantry Weapons, 2005-2006 (Alexandria, VA: Jane’s Information Group, Inc., 2005), 912; Chris Ryder, The Ulster Defense Regiment: An Instrument of Peace (London: Methuen LTD, 1991), 352.
[clxxxi] Ulster Defence Regiment, “History: The Early Years,” 2000, 2, (accessed 22 February 2011).
[clxxxii] Ulster Defence Regiment, “History: Changing Times,” 2000, 1-2, (accessed 22 February 2011); Ulster Defence Regiment, “History: The Final Years,” 2000, 2, (accessed 22 February 2011); The Royal Irish Rangers – 27th (Inniskilling), 83d, and 87th, “Regimental History: The Royal Irish Regiment,” 2008, 1-2, (accessed 4 March 2011).
[clxxxiii] Andrea Webb, “End of an Era,” Soldier, July 2007, 22.
[clxxxiv] Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-1984, 21; Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 1992), 6.
[clxxxv] Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” Military Review, January-February 2007, 74.
[clxxxvi] “MOUT Lessons Learned: Northern Ireland,” Special , 2007, 1, (accessed 27 February 2011); Sinn Fein, “The British Military Garrison in Ireland,” 1994, 1-3, (accessed 22 February 2011).
[clxxxvii] Michael Dewar, Brush Fire Wars: Minor Campaigns of the British Army Since 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 48-52; Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-1984, 21, 32-33; Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 6-9.
[clxxxviii] Michael Dewar, Brush Fire Wars: Minor Campaigns of the British Army Since 1945, 55-56; Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 10-11.
[clxxxix] Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare, eds. Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (Oxford, United Kingdom: Osprey Publishing, 2008), 172-173; Andrew Sanders, “Northern Ireland: The Intelligence War 1969-75,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2010, 8, 14-15.
[cxc] Desmond Hamill quoted in Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 81; Chris Ryder quoted in Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 81; Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 77-78.
[cxci] Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 76, 80; Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969-1984, 122.
[cxcii] Michael Dewar, Brush Fire Wars: Minor Campaigns of the British Army Since 1945, 147-148; Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 13-14.
[cxciii] Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” 167-168.
[cxciv] Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 14-15; Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” 167-168.
[cxcv] Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 14-15; Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 82.
[cxcvi] “MOUT Lessons Learned: Northern Ireland,” Special , 2007, 2-7, (accessed 27 February 2011).
[cxcvii] Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” 166.
[cxcviii] “MOUT Lessons Learned: Northern Ireland,” 8-11.
[cxcix] Headquarters, United Kingdom Land Forces, Planning Directive for Northern Ireland Training, G3 Report, August 1992, 1; Major William Miller, The British Experience in Northern Ireland: A Model for Modern Peacekeeping Operations, 15; Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” 174.
[cc] Brian Jackson, “The British Experience in Northern Ireland,” 82-84; Colonel Richard Iron, “Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland 1967-2007,” 167, 174.
[cci] Indochina extended from China to the Gulf of Siam (Gulf of Thailand) and was bordered on the west by Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. France divided Indochina into five regions: Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. Vietnam was comprised of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China.
[ccii] James Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945 to 1990, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 26.
[cciii] Major Peter Jackson, French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterinsurgency Warfare between 1945 and 1962 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2005), 39.
[cciv] George Herring and Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1961), 28-31.
[ccv] Bert Cooper, John Killigrew, and Norman LaCharite, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Vietnam 1941-1954 (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, The American University, 1964), 94, 98-99.
[ccvi] Spencer Tucker, Vietnam (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 58.
[ccvii] Major Peter Jackson, French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterinsurgency Warfare between 1945 and 1962, 40.
[ccviii] Michael Bo, “Polwar in the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces,” 4th Triennial Vietnam Symposium, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 11-13 April 2002, 2, (accessed 16 March 2011); Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 65.
[ccix] Bert Cooper, John Killigrew, and Norman LaCharite, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Vietnam 1941-1954, 99; C.B. Currey, Victory at any Cost: The Genius of Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap (New York: Brassey’s, Inc., 1996), 167; Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 520-525; George Herring and Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1961), 33.
[ccx] Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 61.
[ccxi] Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 62-63.
[ccxii] Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams: A Political and Military Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1964), 117; George Herring and Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina, 43-47.
[ccxiii] Major Peter Jackson, French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterinsurgency Warfare between 1945 and 1962, 42-43; Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 64-66; Nowfel Leulliot and Daniel O’Hara, “Operation LORRAINE: Salan Strikes at Giap’s Supply Lines,” Indo 1945-1954, 25 May 2007, 1-5, (accessed 19 March 2011).
[ccxiv] Colonel Edgar O’Ballance quoted in Bert Cooper, John Killigrew, and Norman LaCharite, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Vietnam 1941-1954, 101.
[ccxv] Major General George Eckhardt, Vietnam Studies: Command and Control 1950-1969 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1974), 8-9.
[ccxvi] John Glennon and Neal Peterson, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954, Volume XIII, Indochina, Part 1 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1982), 624.
[ccxvii] Lieutenant General John O’Daniel, written message quoted in John Glennon and Neal Peterson, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954, Volume XIII, Indochina, Part 1 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1982), 625.
[ccxviii] Troop strength figures from General Henri Navarre’s memoir – Agonie de l’Indochine – described in Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 68.
[ccxix] Bernard Fall, “Indochina the Last Year of the War: The Navarre Plan,” Military Review, December 1956, 49.
[ccxx] Bert Cooper, John Killigrew, and Norman LaCharite, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Vietnam 1941-1954, 102; Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 69-74; Bernard Fall, “Indochina the Last Year of the War: The Navarre Plan,” 49-52.
[ccxxi] PAVN Major General Hoang Van Thai, “The Lessons of Dien Bien Phu,” Hoc Tap, May 1964, 6, translation by the Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University, (accessed 8 March 2011).
[ccxxii] PAVN forces were effectively re-supplied by a network of tens of thousands of civilian porters, referred to as the “people’s porters” or “coolies.”
[ccxxiii] Bernard Fall, “Indochina the Last Year of the War: The Navarre Plan,” 55; Spencer Tucker, Vietnam, 72-75; Bert Cooper, John Killigrew, and Norman LaCharite, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Vietnam 1941-1954, 102.
[ccxxiv] Major General Thomas Trapnell, former Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Indochina, Debriefing Statement, 3 May 1954, published in US Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, Volume 9 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971), 406-410.
[ccxxv] Parachute Commando battalions were loosely organized initially into an Airborne Joint Commando Group (GCMA) and later into a Joint Intervention Group (GMI), see Commander-in-Chief, French Supreme Command, Far East, “Lessons from the Indochina War, Volume II”, 31 May 1955, 113.
[ccxxvi] Major Peter Jackson, French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterrevolutionary Warfare Between 1945 and 1962, 51-53, 65.
[ccxxvii] Major General Thomas Trapnell, Debriefing Statement, 412-416.
[ccxxviii] Jean-Marc Le Page, “Le Qoutidien de la Pacification au Tonkin, les Milices d’Autodefense (1952-1954)”, No. 1, 2003, 34-42 (translation by the author).
[ccxxix] The name Maquis was first used to describe the rural bands of French resistance fighters (Freedom Fighters) during World War II.
[ccxxx] Shaun Darragh, “The Hoa Binh Campaign,” October 1998, 2-3, (accessed 11 March 2011); Shaun Darragh, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” Vietnam, October 1998, 47-53; Phillip Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio press, 1988), 225, 239.
[ccxxxi] Commander-in-Chief, French Supreme Command, Far East, “Lessons from the Indochina War, Volume II,” 31 May 1955, 111-112.
[ccxxxii] Colonel V. J. Croizat, A Translation from the French: Lessons of the War in Indochina, Volume 2 (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, 1967), 232-236; Major General Thomas Trapnell, Debriefing Statement, 412; Commander-in-Chief, French Supreme Command, Far East, “Lessons from the Indochina War, Volume II,” 31 May 1955, 190; Commander-in-Chief Indochina, Instruction Bureau, “Notes on Combat in Indochina,” 30 March 1954, 84-85.
[ccxxxiii] Major Peter Jackson, French Ground Force Organizational Development for Counterrevolutionary Warfare Between 1945 and 1962, 68-69; Colonel V. J. Croizat, A Translation from the French: Lessons of the War in Indochina, Volume 2, 236-242.
[ccxxxiv] Colonel V. J. Croizat, A Translation from the French: Lessons of the War in Indochina, Volume 2, 59; Lieutenant General Dong Van Khuyen, The RVNAF (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1980), 5.
[ccxxxv] Shaun Darragh, “The Hoa Binh Campaign,” 6; Shaun Darragh, “Viet Minh Attack at Nghia Lo,” 50-51; Phillip Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975, 238, 248.
[ccxxxvi] Full spectrum operations description from Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC, February 2008), 3-1 to 3-21.
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