The Battle of Ia Drang was the first major battle of the Vietnam War between the United States Army and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
On November 14, 1965, the 1st battalion of the 7th Cavalry was ordered to the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam with a simple mission - engage the enemy. Helicopter air mobility tactics were only recently developed, and the 7th Cavalry actually derived from the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) formed for the specific purpose of testing and developing these tactics. The approach called for battallion sized forces to be delivered into, supplied, and extracted from an area of action using helicopters. The 450 man battalion, led by (then) Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, later reinforced by elements of the 7th Cavalry's 2nd battalion and a battalion from the 5th Cavalry, were pitted against over 2000 North Vietnamese regulars of the 33rd, 66th, and 320th regiments as well as Viet Cong of the H15 battallion. The objective of the North Vietnamese forces was to lure the Americans into battle with a series of smaller engagements and learn to defeat the new tactics and technology the Americans were bringing into the war. There was a lack of reliable roads into the area, making it an ideal place for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces to base and for U.S. forces to test their new air mobility tactics. Companies of the battalion were flown in and out on Huey helicopters. The soldiers deployed at a clearing designated Landing Zone X-Ray. The Hueys were also used to bring in ammunition and extract the wounded and dead.
The battle lasted November 14 - 17. The initial engagement ended when PAVN and Viet Cong forces withdrew from X-Ray. U.S. forces relieving the 1/7 at X-Ray withdrew overland shortly thereafter to allow high altitude B-52 bombers to attack the area surrounding X-Ray. The relief forces were nearly annihilated by remaining PAVN forces between X-Ray and the smaller nearby landing zone Albany. Elements of the 2/7 were later actually sent back in to rescue the survivors of forces that relieved them only the day before. The U.S. lost 234 Soldiers with 242 wounded. The PAVN lost 1037 fighters with an estimated 1365 wounded.
The battle served as a microcosm for the war itself. The combination of air mobility and firepower, the latter provided both by air and artillery, proved to be an extremely effective means for the Americans to accomplish tactical objectives. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces learned that by engaging American forces at very close range, they could mitigate the effectiveness of that firepower. The North Vietnamese would later refine this tactic and refer to it as "getting between the enemy and his belt". With it they would achieve a ratio of attrition that the Americans would find politically unsustainable in the long term. The battle would also set a grisly tone for the character of a war where victory was not measured in terms of the movement of battle lines or conquest of territory. The objective of both sides at Ia Drang was not control of a bridge, city, or airbase. It was simply to kill the enemy.
While an American victory in the arithmetic sense, Moore considers the battle to have been a draw.
The battle was the subject of the film We Were Soldiers (2002) which was based on Moore's book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young. The book was co-written by Joseph L. Galloway , the only reporter on the field during the battle.
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