Fighting an Urban War

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in front of a sign proclaiming “mission accomplished”, celebrating what seemed to be the apparent victory in Iraq. Five years on, we now know he made a terrible mistake. The initial invasion went well. But then the US got bogged down in a vicious guerrilla war, not least in the cities like Baghdad.

I have just been reading a book on an earlier war in which the US suddenly got involved in an urban struggle. Veteran US military historian Eric Hammel has produced a wonderfully illustrated book “Marines in Hue City: A Portrait of Urban Combat, Tet 1968”. The book is published by Zenith Press, USA (and is available from all good Australian bookstores, with wholesale enquiries going to Capricorn Link, Windsor, NSW).

Tet 1968 (the Chinese lunar New Year in late January) was supposed to be the final offensive by the National Liberation Front/ Viet Front and North Vietnam to drive the US (and Australia) out of South Vietnam. Under the guise of the ceasefire for the New Year celebrations, the military infiltrated the cities and there was a well- co-ordinated uprising. But the US and South Vietnamese managed to hold on and so avoid defeat. The end was not to come until April 30 1975.

Hue was the former capital. Vietnam is said to be in three parts: Hanoi (in the north) is the “brain”, Hue (in the centre, that is, formerly the northern part of the short-lived South Vietnam) was the “heart”, while Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) is the “stomach”, well known for its food.

Hue received special attention from the National Liberation Front/ Viet Cong. It was well known in Vietnamese history and a defeat there (even if the offensive went badly elsewhere) would be a major psychological blow to South Vietnam and its allies. The US Marines managed to save the city but terrible damage was done to it.

I was in Hue six years later. It was still a wreck. Even more significant was the role of death squads to track down and execute a number of the city’s leading citizens. At least 2,000 business people, government employees, theologians, and foreign missionaries were among those executed. Some of the city’s best people were killed.

The link with Iraq today is partly the urban nature of the fighting. Hammel (who makes no reference to Iraq in his book) points out that the first time modern US Marines fought in an urban landscape was on Saipan in mid-1944. The Marine Corps had no manuals, no doctrine, no plan and provided no training for urban fighting. But they failed to hold a post-mortem on what had happened. No lessons were recorded and no time was spent on developing new skills and equipment.

The next time the Marines were in urban combat was the Korean War (1950-3) and again the Marines failed to take stock of what had been learned through their rugged experience. They were not involved again in any urban battles until 1968. Many of the experienced veterans had by now retired.

The book is partly a survey of how Marines had to learn on the job during the Hue offensive. For example tanks are a mixed blessing in urban settings. On the one hand, they can wade through fragile urban buildings. But they can be heard a long way off and they tend to attract a lot of defensive fire.

A US Marine serving in Iraq today would feel at home with this book. The conditions are very similar.

The US saved Hue in 1968 but ultimately lost the Vietnam War in 1975. It remains to be seen how the US will fare in Iraq.