Air power, to be sure, could further that pursuit and proved invaluable in support of our boats when they were caught up in a fire fight, but a lesson that was learned in the Indochina War and which was re-learned in the Vietnam War, is that air power has only limited effectiveness in a counterinsurgency war and in the interdiction of enemy lines of communication through difficult and largely trackless terrain. The increase in Vietnamese naval manpower, a modest sign of change at best, is a typical example of the handicaps suffered by the program. In March 1962 Headquarters, U.S. Army, Pacific, removed the "provisional" designation from the U.S. Army Support Group, Vietnam, attached it to U.S. Army, Ryukyu Islands, for administrative and logistical support, and made its commanding officer the deputy Army component commander under MACV. Commander, Naval Forces Vietnam - Wikipedia In December the first baby, a little girl, was born on Sea Float to the obvious delight of every sailor on board. In a series of graduated increases, the Junk Force was authorized an increase to 644 motorized junks less than two years later. There were other reasons as well which argued strongly in that direction. Edit: not mirrored, onset of Vietnam when UDT teams became SEALs. The fallacy of "the numbers game, the seeming preoccupation with body count, Communist "structures destroyed, and even, in some quarters, with bomb and ammunition expenditure reports was driven home with a vengeance when the communists unleashed their Tet offensive, for while it was true that the "cream" of the enemy's forces was destroyed in that offensive, it was also undeniable that the South Vietnamese people and the credibility of the U. S. and the Government of Vietnam's political and military effort in the war had suffered grievous setbacks, from which they were a long time recovering. Thus, the American sailors who realized that a member of their "team" was going to be replaced in a short time could be expected to see to it that the new replacement really did know how to operate, for example, the after machine gun. Attempts were made to coordinate their operations with TF 116 and TF 117 units with widely varying success depending upon the areas and personalities concerned. 4 Operational Control is the authority to direct forces assigned. It recommended the development of a mobile patrol force along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. The code name Market Time was assigned to the operation on 24 March. Its conclusions were that infiltration from the North existed on a scale sufficient to support the expanded level of operations by the enemy in South Vietnam, and that only nominal resistance to that infiltration was being made. The facilities at Cua Viet were almost constantly subject to enemy artillery and rocket attack, and the pressures and rigors of life at this exposed forward base were extreme. At this time a message was received, its origin unclear, which postponed the scheduled landing. Early effort notwithstanding, the Viet Cong successfully mined one ship each in 1965 and 1966 (the SS Eastern Mariner and the SS Baton Rouge Victory respectively). Many long-standing deficiencies were corrected and the worst of the factionalism rapidly disappeared. In the fall of 1968 our naval advisory effort in Vietnam was entering its nineteenth year. These and subsequent operations in the Nam Can during the first half of 1969 relied heavily on offshore support ships (primarily LSTs and ARLs), which, because of very shallow water, had to anchor about five miles off the Ca Mau peninsula. At the end of 1963, the Junk Force consisted of 632 junks, 400 VNN officers and men, and 3,700 civilian irregulars. Power saws and modern lumbering techniques have not yet been introduced in the Nam Can. The structure of the enemy force responsible for the attacks on Long Tau shipping was rather well known. The old Navy section of MAAG became the Naval Advisory Group, Vietnam, and by the end of 1964 there were 235 naval . This ushered in nearly three years of turmoil in the senior Vietnamese Navy leadership. For this reason, the MAAG was retained as a separate headquarters. The Rung Sat was the one area where the Navy had, so to speak, a piece of the ground war (responsibility for military operations there rested with the Vietnamese Navy), and as Senior Advisor to the Vietnamese Navy the Admiral considered his position to be somewhat analogous to that of a Senior Advisor to one of the Combat Tactical Zones. Contact with a generally elusive enemy was established on seven occasions. By the middle of June, Task Force 117 had received all 68 of its programmed converted LCMs. These units got underway each morning from Sea Float and returned each night. The Vietnamese supply system seemingly could not or would not work, though many studies had demonstrated its theoretical excellence. [3]:601 It supported the combat signal battalions of the divisions and field forces in each corps area. There were four flag officers either on hand or with orders to Vietnam at the time of Vice Admiral Zumwalts assumption of commandComNavForV, Deputy ComNavForV, Commander U. S. Naval Support Activity, Da Nang, and the Officer in Charge of Construction. In September 1966, Captain Phan was removed from his post, and command of the Navy passed to Lieutenant General Cao Van Vien of the Vietnamese Army. With the arrival of the second APB, the USS Colleton (APB-36), in early May, plans were made to move all these units of the Mobile Riverine Base to Dong Tam. All of these programs hoped to bring about permanent and self-sustaining projects, which would survive the eventual conclusion of the Vietnamization process. When the III Marine Amphibious Force moved to Da Nang on 6 May 1965, its commanding general, Major General William R. Collins, was designated MACV's naval component commander. The swampy Rung Sat controls the waterways connecting Saigon with the sea. The Naval Support Activity, Da Nang had grown to become the Navys largest overseas shore command. They were given hot meals, small gifts, and services which ran the gamut from sampan motor repair to the grinding of woodcutters axes on a wheel specially acquired for that purpose in Nha Trang, and shipped to Sea Float by CTF 115. The Communists merely moved to smaller waterways when they were forced off the large rivers. No opposing fire was experienced and after extensively shooting up the area, the ships withdrew. In April, Operation Silver Mace II was launched with combined U. S. Navy, U. S. Air Force, Vietnamese Army, Navy, and Marine Corps units. If you have a conquering spirit and are not afraid of even the most complex problems, apply now to Naval Group! Personal possessions representing the savings of a lifetime were hawked fruitlessly from door to door. The feeble political position of the Vietnamese Navy in the General Staff organization made it almost totally subservient to Army control, and to commanders who were often ignorant of how to exploit Navy capabilities. Navy Vietnam Patches - US Navy Patches - Naval Station Patches, Ship Patches, Submarine patches and Navy Fleet Patches - Flying Tigers Surplus. In the United States, "Project Buddy Base was launched to encourage U. S. Navy bases to provide equipment, material, encouragement and advice to Vietnamese Navy bases in the overall effort to raise the standard of living of VNN personnel and their dependents. By the fall of 1968, on the eve of the introduction of the U. S. naval command's Accelerated Turnover (ACTOV) Program, the personnel strength of the Vietnamese Navy was more than 17,500. The primary mission of Market Time at this period was "to conduct surveillance, gunfire support, visit and search, and other operations as directed along the coast of the Republic of Vietnam in order to assist the Republic of Vietnam in detection and prevention of Communist infiltration from the sea." [2]:59. Access: Open but with some access limitations. In a departure from the planning conference recommendation of the preceding month, the decision was taken to introduce U.S. PCFS (Swifts) for close inshore patrolling. Construction of a block plant at Cam Ranh Bay. The Interdiction Barriers. A brigade of the 25th Infantry Division arrived in late 1965, with the 4th Infantry Division deploying between August and November 1966. Until 1960 the Vietnamese Navy experienced a period of modest growth and modernization, assisted by a Navy Section of the U. S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), which, in July of that year, had increased to 60 officers and men. The Naval Forces Vietnam command had its origins in the Navy Section of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Indochina, which was established in 1950 to provide supplies and equipment to the French. Overall Market Time operations were controlled from the Surveillance Operations Center located at the Naval Advisory Group Headquarters in Saigon. The second task was to wrest the initiative from the enemy in the Rung Sat Special Zone through aggressive military and psychological campaigns in order to secure the vital Long Tau shipping channel to Saigon. Citation 26 - The Mobile Riverine Force Association - MRFA During this same period, civilians residing in either zone were to be allowed complete freedom to move to the other zone. At the urging of American advisors the Junk Force was absorbed into the Vietnamese Navy in 1965. As was proven time and time again in Brown Water Nan operations in Vietnam, cooperation with trained and aggressive ground forces was the real key to success. [11]:52 The DAO was activated on 28 January 1973 with United States Army Major General John E. Murray, formerly MACV director of logistics, as the Defense Attach and United States Air Force Brigadier General Ralph J. Maglione, formerly the MACV J-1 (Director for Manpower and Personnel), as deputy Defense Attach. On 15 July the Commander of River Patrol Section 512 reported that heavy seas and high winds were restricting PBR operations almost 50 per cent of the time. See if you can find any more photos for positive ID. All of these operations used U. S. Navy and Vietnamese Navy forces as a blocking force while a combination of Australian, Thai, and Vietnamese troops methodically swept the area around the guerrilla group's base camp. The howitzers were towed along with the base, or positioned in advance of operations. The Ammis were fitted out at Nha Be. By Commander R. L. Schreadley, U. S. Navy, CNO Naval History - Midshipmen and Cadets, CNO Naval History - Professional Historian. Hundreds of sampans of all sizes, hundreds of thousands of bamboo rafts crossed rapids and cascades to supply the front. In the North, warnings were scrawled on the walls of public buildings, urging the populace to flee in advance of the Viet Minh Army. [7] COMUSMACV was in one sense the top person in charge of the U.S. military on the Indochinese peninsula; however, in reality, the CINCPAC and the U.S. ambassadors to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia also had "top person in charge" status with regard to various aspects of the war's strategy. The U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the proposed operating concept on 16 March, and on that very day the first U. S. Navy ships reported for duty, the destroyers Higbee (DD-806) and Black (DD-666). If you served in USMC Advisory Team Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), Naval Advisory Group Vietnam, Join TWS for free to . USMC Advisory Team Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), Naval Advisory Group Minimum training requirements for the buildup were estimated to be: (1) Recruit training increased by a factor of four; (2) The Vietnam Navys advanced school capacity tripled; (3) A four-fold increase in offshore training; and (4) English language training expanded by almost thirty times. January 28, 1969 (38 years old) Distinguished Flying Cross, Operational loss, Vietnam, 559th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Fixed Wing, USNA 22nd Company. For the most part the records of the latter organization contain documentation on U. S. Naval operations. Other parts of the U. S. Navy family came to his assistance. Such a conception is of course largely romantic. 3 Operational Command is the authority to assign missions or forces. Stripped of its top leadership, and its remaining officers in a state of high excitement and confusion, the Vietnamese Navy careened along an uncertain path. Washington: GPO, 1986. Four specially outfitted LSTs, scheduled to arrive by September 1966, would replace the original support ships. Navy Naval Advisory Group Vietnam | Navy Veteran Locator - togetherweserved In mid-1970 cyclo drivers in Saigon were earning more than Vietnamese Navy Lieutenants, and it was not at all uncommon to encounter beggars in uniform on the streets of the capital city. "Doctors and Dentists, Nurses and Corpsmen in Vietnam, by Commander F. O. McClendon, Jr., Medical Service Corps, U. S. Navy, in Naval Review 1970. Hard intelligence had repeatedly confirmed that the bulk of enemy war material for the III and IV Corps areas entered Cambodia from the sea, in Communist Chinese and Eastern Bloc ships, primarily through the port of Sihanoukville. Light sniper fire was taken, but by mid-afternoon the immediate area near the sunken trawler was secured and the LDNN began salvage operations. The combined operation, called Sea Float by the U. S. Navy and Tran Hung Dao III by the Vietnamese, began with the towing of the first Ammis up the river to the vicinity of Old Nam Can on 25 June 1969 by U. S. Navy YFUs. A Naval Advisory Group was established and the Commanding General, 2nd Air Division, became MACV's Air Force component commander. Advisory Team 143, Naval Advisory Group Vietnam - Navy Unit Directory . On 25 February, an additional responsibility was assigned to maintain the lines of communication on the Cua Viet River, just south of the Demilitarized Zone. At about this same time, a personal friend and confidant of Diem, Lieutenant Commander Le Quang My, was appointed to the important post of Naval Deputy to the Vietnamese Armed Forces General Staff. The 1st Signal Brigade operated the many elements of the Defense Communications System in South Vietnam. At 0215 the next morning, however, message orders were received to do so immediately. The Coastal Surveillance Force (it had moved its headquarters to Cam Ranh Bay in July 1967) employed 1051 officers and men, exclusive of those attached to Seventh Fleet units temporarily assigned to the task force. of Defense in South Vietnam (1962-73), U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Combined operations in November and December 1968 cleared the important Cho Gao Canal and swept through the Can Tho Crossing corridor and the Dung Island complex in the Bassac River. The task force was organized into two groups, the Hue River Security Group and the Dong Ha River Security Group. Photograph taken from USS Maddox. [10]:400. On 1 June the transit was made. As Vietnamese sailors replaced American sailors on the rivers, and as other American sailors became available from the gradual phasing out of Navy responsibilities in I Corps, Naval Construction Action Teams (NAVCATS) were formed and young and sometimes bewildered U. S. Navy sailors, under Seabee supervision, became laborers, hod carriers, masons and carpenters in the dependents shelter project. In recognition of the expanding U. S. role, Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was established in February 1962, and the Headquarters Support Activity was commissioned on 1 July. The Special Forces company commander displayed great reluctance to use his men to assist in moving the remaining cache material to the beach and refused to order an end to the looting of medical supplies, which took place on a large scale. The first capture of infiltrators by a U. S. Navy ship occurred late in May, when the USS Back (DD-761) boarded a junk near the seventeenth parallel. (3) That NavForV not include III MAF, which would continue under the operational command of CinCPacFlt and operational control of ComUSMACV. On November 15, 1969, he was a crew member of a Grumman Mohawk Aircraft (OV-1C) on a visual reconnaissance mission, when his aircraft was hit by hostile ground fire and crashed 20 miles southeast of Tra Vinh, Vinh Binh Province, South Vietnam. It spread its roots through virtually every sector of Vietnamese society. The objective of the raiders was "to stir up the enemy and keep him off-balance," but other dividends were soon realized in terms of enemy equipment destroyed, and in the increased commitments he was forced to make in defense of his well entrenched position in the Nam Can. Particularly in the years following 1964, enormous sums of money and huge quantities of material and equipment were transferred. The Navy section of MAAG Indochina was thus intimately concerned with the training and logistic support required to use the material we were then furnishing the French. Once U. S. involvement in the war terminated in 1973 it became clear a more useable arrangement of the records was necessary. This had been largely accomplished with river patrols, drastic defoliation, mine sweeping, and by hunting the enemy on land. Task Force Clearwater. An old Vietnamese woodcutter, captured and abused by the Viet Cong, escaped to tell Vietnamese interrogators that his captors had boasted that they would "visit" Sea Float someday. When the work at Nha Be was completed, the Ammis were carried to the mouth of the Cua Lon River by Seventh Fleet LSDs. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was alerted for assignment to Southeast Asia on 11 March 1966. It was the opinion of the conference that "the best tactic to interdict coastal traffic infiltration would be to assist and inspire the Vietnamese Navy to increase the quality and quantity of its searches., With regard to the second category of infiltration, it was recommended that a conventional patrol be established by U. S. Navy ships and aircraft. On 1 January 1966, the following recommendations were submitted: (1) That a Naval Force, Vietnam (NavForV), Command be established as the Naval Component Command in Vietnam under the operational command of CinCPacFlt,3 and operational control of ComUSMACV.4. The irregulars were ordinarily recruited from the population in the vicinity of each coastal group. Drawn carefully on a map, the Rung Sat Special Zone looks curiously like a human brain, its convolutions etched by numberless rivers and streams. The shift to "stage three of the insurgency, with its attendant pitched battles involving large units, forced Hanoi to make an important decision concerning the continued supply of Communist forces in the South. A region of ragged forests, thick mangrove swamps, barren mud flats, and interlacing rivers and canals whose waters churn to vicious tidal currents, it is not readily apparent why anyone would choose to live there. The mission of the two-week operation was "to seek and destroy all enemy units and their logistic support in the AO (area of operations)." In April 1967, General Westmoreland, who had arrived in June 1964 as Commander of MACV, organized a division-sized blocking force along the border between North and South Vietnam. It took a great deal of persuasion and strong representations at the highest level, before the shotgun wedding was brought off. On 1 September 1966, the first administrative unit of the future Mobile Riverine Force, River Assault Flotilla One, was commissioned at the Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, California, with Captain W. C. Wells, U. S. Navy, as its Commander. What had been conceived and organized as an advisers job, no longer fit the changing nature of growing operational command. MACV was first implemented to assist the Military Assistance Advisory Group(MAAG) Vietnam, controlling every advisory and assistance effort in Vietnam. The LCUs usually had chiefs or first class petty officers as captains. It was believed to consist of either nine or ten elements (Doi) of between 30 and 55 men each. The military decisions that were taken at this time were not, nor could they be, based solely on our operational experience in the war. Permission to conduct these operations was granted. LSM 405 landed a company of Vietnamese Army troops at 1830 to assist with the handling of this material, but an hour later, in spite of heated argument by the American advisors, both companies were embarked in LSM 405, although large quantities of arms and munitions remained on the beach. They recommended that, since there was no apparent threat to the French in Indochina from the sea, the American naval aid program should be concentrated on a build-up of river and coastal forces of employment against the Viet Minh insurgents. As a final step in the ACTOV program, the advisory effort would be phased out. Find USMC Advisory Team Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), Naval Advisory Group Vietnam unit information, patches, operation history, veteran photos and more on TogetherWeServed.com. The conference requested by General Westmoreland met on 3 March 1965, and in the following week the basic concepts of the combined patrol operation were worked out. It was obvious, however, that what Naval Forces Vietnam and the Vietnamese Navy actually faced was a gigantic boot-strap operation which had to be carried out concurrently with the prosecution of the war. Naval Advisory Group Naval Forces Vietnam Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer National Police Field Force North Vietnamese Army Patrol Boat, River vii . The motivation of the men concerned was expected to be high. "Fighting Boats of the United States, by Captain Richards T. Miller, U. S. Navy, in Naval Review 1968. A joint organization, it contained an Army, Navy, and Air Force section, each responsible for advising its counterpart in the Vietnamese armed forces and for * In a third category are the divisional records of particular offices (i.e., Assistant Chief of Staff for Plans, Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations). In essence, the early planning envisioned a highly mobile force of river assault craft and embarked troops capable of sustained search and destroy missions in the Delta. The Naval Advisory Group was a division of the MACV staff organization and Chief, Naval Advisory Group was therefore without command authority, including disciplinary authority, over any naval personnel in-country. SEALS were used on special warfare and intelligence missions. Such patrols were considered tiresome, time consuming, and virtually devoid of the tangible results obtainable from "search and destroy operations. Estimates of the areas population have varied from 5,000 to 13,000. Vice Admiral Zumwalt decided to concentrate his efforts on three principal tasks. Naval Logistic Support, Qui Nhon to Phu Quoc, by Captain Herbert T. King, U. S. Navy, in Naval Review 1969. Thanks VetFriends. (6) That ComNavForV administer all naval construction in Vietnam. The deep seated economic ills of the Republic of Vietnam, exemplified by a roaring inflation, drove the Vietnamese serviceman up against the wall. The period after World War II saw a number of associated Marine Corps formed in the republics of China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.