Patrick Walters, National security editor | April 30, 2009
Article from: The Australian
LATE in the afternoon of August 18, 1966, as the Battle of Long Tan raged at a nearby rubber plantation, Australian commander Brigadier David Jackson grew more agitated by the minute at his headquarters at Nui Dat.
A few kilometres from the Australian base, 120 men from Delta company, 6th battalion Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR), pinned down, were fighting for survival. They were about to run out of ammunition and in grave danger of being overrun by a 2000-strong force that included Vietcong fighters and a crack North Vietnamese army battalion.
"I am about to lose an entire company. What the hell's a couple of choppers and a few more pilots?" an angry Jackson shouted at the RAAF's taskforce air commander, Group Captain Peter Raw. Because of a heavy tropical downpour over the area, Raw had demurred when Jackson requested an urgent ammunition resupply operation using two helicopters from 9Squadron RAAF. He was worried not just about the weather but about the potential risk to his pilots.
While the Battle of Long Tan hung in the balance and Raw hesitated, a young Australian flight lieutenant, the RAAF's most experienced Bell UH-1B Iroquois pilot, Bruce Lane, took the initiative.
"I said, 'Well, I am going anyway.' I wasn't captain of the aircraft. But I probably had more time on Iroquois than anyone else. I would have flown on my own," Lane told The Australian this week. "It was a very heavy thunderstorm, poor visibility with low cloud."
Raw then reluctantly authorised the mission and Lane and his fellow pilots went off to load the precious ammunition. Lane was sure the RAAF would lose at least one Iroquois and insisted that both helicopters be loaded with ammunition, just in case.
Just before 6pm the two Iroquois were airborne, the first piloted by Flight Lieutenant Frank Riley with co-pilot Bob Grandin and the second by flight lieutenants Cliff Dohle and Lane. Lane's machine, laden with nearly half a tonne of ammunition, was the first to drop its precious cargo to Harry Smith's Delta company in the fading light just five minutes' flying time from Nui Dat.
"We flew at 30 feet and after about five minutes we came to a hover. People in the back just pushed the ammunition out. We were as low as comfortable," Lane recalls.
The ammunition arrived in the nick of time, saving Delta company from annihilation. Riley was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission but Lane's initiative and courage, like those of so many of Smith's troops on the ground, went unrecognised by officialdom. Nearly 43 years later, the story of the Long Tan resupply mission and the saga surrounding the RAAF Iroquois squadron's role in supporting the Australian Army in Vietnam still stir passionate debate among army and air force veterans as well as war historians.
The story has had profound consequences for the RAAF and the army: consequences that are still unfolding and will continue to resonate for years. Arguments over how well prepared RAAF units were for war in 1966 echo the ones about the preparedness of army and RAAF aviation assets, including helicopters, for combat operations in Afghanistan.
Views of the RAAF's battlefield helicopter experience in Vietnam, however distorted, have also shaped perceptions in US military circles about the appetite of the RAAF to engage fully in wartime combat operations.
Exactly 20 years after Long Tan, in 1986, Australia's army chiefs succeeded in wresting ownership of the battlefield helicopter fleet from the air force. That was a bitterly contested decision strongly opposed by RAAF chiefs. The army's view is that it needed to integrate the helicopters into its order of battle as an essential element of evolving land warfare doctrine.
Historians agree the army's view about controlling battlefield helicopters was directly influenced by its experiences in Vietnam with RAAF and US Army helicopter pilots.
For the RAAF and its helicopter crews who fought in Vietnam, it is the pervasive myth fashioned largely out of the events surrounding Long Tan in August 1966 that has been most hurtful. The rumour, first aired at the time, that 9 Squadron had refused to fly in support of Smith's D company has proved impossible to dispel.
RAAF 9 Squadron veterans also take issue with recently published Vietnam War histories, including Paul Ham's 2007 bestseller Vietnam: The Australian War. "Accustomed to US pilots swinging in to help on call, the Australian infantry at first maligned the RAAF pilots as cowards," Ham writes. Acknowledging the many courageous missions flown by 9Squadron, Ham says the RAAF's alleged reluctance to undertake certain missions "became an instant part of army lore".
Ray Scott, 9 Squadron's commanding officer in Vietnam during 1966, says the squadron never refused to carry out a mission requested by the Australian taskforce HQ during the time he was in command.
"The lie that No9 Squadron would not operate in insecure LZs (landing zones) and lacked courage is particularly galling. Some members of the squadron gave their lives attempting to support army personnel in insecure areas," Scott says.
Scott has pointed out that 9 Squadron had to scramble to adapt to the rigours of fighting in Vietnam. Only 12 weeks elapsed between the announced deployment of the Australian taskforce to Nui Dat and the arrival of the squadron. Essential equipment had to be scrounged and initially crews were inadequately protected from close ground fire.
In all, 9 Squadron flew 237,424 missions in Vietnam between June 1966 and November 1971. Through a combination of professionalism and good luck, the squadron only suffered four combat deaths, the first of which occurred in July 1970, fours years after the initial deployment. A total of seven aircraft were lost.
The unit carried 414,818 personnel and 4357 men were medivaced. Only three army personnel died while flying with the RAAF during its five-year deployment in Vietnam.
Another former 9Squadron officer, Hedley Thomas, says Ham and other writers have overlooked his unit's critical role in inserting and extracting Special Air Service troops in covert operations.
"There was an exceptionally strong bond between the men of the SAS and the air crews of the squadron, and it exists to this day," Thomas observes. "We always got them out, night or day, regardless of the diabolical situations they were often in. I estimate that about 200 or so extractions were performed while the SAS (was) in contact with the enemy. On each one, the pilots knew before starting their approach they would be under fire while on the ground or in the hover. Cowards do not deliberately fly into hot areas."
Retired defence force and army chief General Peter Gration, who served in Vietnam, says there was a policy, "rightly or wrongly", that 9 Squadron would handle its helicopters differently from the US Army, which lost 4000 machines in Vietnam. They "were employed in a different way. This is not to cast aspersions on their bravery or anything like that," he says.
Veterans of 9 Squadron maintain to this day that with their relatively tiny force they had to adopt different operational procedures from the Americans, half of whose helicopter losses in Vietnam were in accidents.
Gration recalls a night operation in the village of Dat Do in late 1969 when his patrol requested a medical evacuation. "We couldn't get the American dust-off choppers. We had a 9 Squadron helicopter that came and he stayed overhead for 20-25 minutes. I was a lieutenant-colonel at the time, trying to get him to land. But he wouldn't do it and eventually he went back to his base. He thought it was too insecure. That sort of thing does make an impression. I am sure a lot of Australian Army people who have served in Vietnam were aware that for most of our hot insertions into tactically dangerous situations and casevacs (casualty evacuations), we used the Americans."
The fairest and most judicious account of the controversy comes from the RAAF's official historian Alan Stephens.
"While No.9 Squadron was to return to Australia after six years with the highest of reputations for its combat record, its experience during the first three months was an inter-service disaster," Stephens writes in Going Solo: The Royal Australian Air Force 1946-1971, published in 1995.
Stephens notes that when 9 Squadron arrived in Vietnam in June 1966, just eight weeks before Long Tan, it was not prepared for war. Only two of its eight Iroquois were fitted with armoured seats, none had door gun mounts and the aircrew did not have chest protectors. The friction between the army and the air force over helicopter missions started right then, with the army quickly growing impatient with the RAAF. Soon after 9Squadron's arrival, Jackson even tried to dictate the composition of crew for some missions.
"The most unfortunate aspect of the whole business was that from Long Tan onwards, No.9 Squadron provided the taskforce with exemplary support, unquestionably flying to higher standards and achieving better results than any comparable unit in the country," Stephens says. "Such was No.9 Squadron's skill, the SAS would not work with other (American) Iroquois units."
Scott says one of the main reasons why 9 Squadron was "not ready for war" was that the Defence Department had insisted the squadron would be given 10 years' notice before being sent into a conflict but, for Vietnam, it had only 12 weeks' notice.
By the end of the war, the squadron was widely regarded as the best Iroquois unit in Vietnam. Some American units came to Vung Tau to learn how the Australians managed to achieve such high mission availability from their helicopters, he says.
Stephens has no doubt that the seeds of the 1986 decision to transfer the battlefield helicopters to the army were sown in the tumult of mid-1966, when Australians based at Nui Dat became used to hearing shouting matches between Jackson and Raw.
"As a consequence of the RAAF's perceived reluctance to provide the service they wanted, a group of army officers resolved eventually to gain control of the helicopters. It is questionable whether those officers understood either the full implications of their subsequent campaign or the proper use of air power, and an argument could be made that they were motivated primarily by prejudice and ignorance," he says.
In November 1986 the defence chief, General Phillip Bennett, supported by Gration, then army chief, and navy chief Vice-Admiral Michael Hudson, determined that the army should take over the battlefield helicopters.
At the time Gration argued that the army needed the authority to organise, train and equip battlefield helicopters in peacetime. The army argued that in operations the helicopters must be under full army control: they were not merely a transport vehicle but a combat arm.
Gration denies Long Tan was the catalyst for the change of ownership in 1986. "The central reason was by that time in sophisticated armies around the world the helicopter had become a vital part of the tactical land battle," he tells The Australian.
"The helicopters were one of the elements of the manoeuvre land battle. That's the principal reason that we argued they ought to come to the army."
Some former air force chiefs and former flyers with 9 Squadron strongly disagree with Gration, arguing that the past two decades have proved the handover was not a sound strategic move. They argue the army has struggled to develop the flow of highly trained pilots, the technical know-how and the complex logistics and maintenance back-up needed to operate a new generation of battlefield helicopters, including the Tiger armed reconnaissance machines.
"I don't think the army (has) yet advanced to the stage where they are totally familiar with battlefield helicopters' operations," says former air force chief David Evans.
Evans, who has written extensively on the subject, admits there is still lingering rancour in the RAAF about the 1986 decision. "It was a very foolish thing to do and it's proven to be that way since. We can't afford to have three air forces, but that's what we have now got."
Present defence chief, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a highly trained and decorated helicopter pilot, has no qualms about the army's ownership of battlefield helicopters.
In 1987-89, when he was the CO of 9Squadron, Houston, in a masterly feat of inter-service diplomacy, oversaw the transfer of the helicopters to the army's Aviation Regiment. Houston told The Australian yesterday that there was no chance the decision would be revisited and praised the performance of the 5th Aviation Regiment Black Hawks in a string of complex operations during the past decade.
RAAF experts continue to argue that the combat effectiveness of the ADF has suffered from the decision taken way back in 1986.
They point to allied air forces such as Britain's, in which the battlefield helicopters are a combat arm jointly owned and operated by the Royal Air Force and the army, as a more appropriate model for Australia.