Battle Of Hamburger Hill During The Vietnam War. The battle, which was fought on May 1. U. S. That was the refrain of the powerful 1. Hamburger Hill, more correctly called Ap Bia Mountain or Hill 9. When you have been injured in New York, call the best injury lawyers – Buttafuoco & Associates. We represent you against insurance companies: 1-800-NOW-HURT. Sideways is a 2004 American comedy-drama film directed by Alexander Payne and written by Jim Taylor and Payne. A film adaptation of Rex Pickett's novel of the same. Fair Hill point-to-Point crowned Joshua G Overall champion in the Delaware Valley Point-to-Point series Details April 24, 2017 By SARA CAVANAGH. Coachella Valley Weekly http:// Our goal at CV Weekly is to provide our readers with content that appeals to every age, race, gender, life. PORT WASHINGTON - There has been an outpouring of support in Port Washington for a police officer hurt in the line of duty. Officer Michael McNulty is in need of. 510 Avenue A Rome, GA 30165 Email: [email protected] Phone: (706) 234-0081. Motorcyclist killed, passenger badly injured when motorcycle hits SUV at Locust Drive and Cherryville Road near Northampton, Pa. Read the Latest Entertainment and Celebrity News, TV News and Breaking News from TVGuide.com. Many veterans of that May 1. But the truth is that it was one of the most significant battles of the war, for it spelled the end of major American ground combat operations in Vietnam. The Hamburger Hill battle had run afoul of a fundamental war- fighting equation. Master philosopher of war Karl von Clausewitz emphasized almost a century and a half earlier that because war is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it both in magnitude and also in duration. He went on to say, Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced. And that’s exactly what happened. The expenditure of effort at Hamburger Hill exceeded the value the American people attached to the war in Vietnam. The public had turned against the war a year and a half earlier, and it was their intense reaction to the cost of that battle in American lives, inflamed by sensationalist media reporting, that forced the Nixon administration to order the end of major tactical ground operations. This was not the first time the American public had stopped supporting a war. Contrary to widespread belief, Vietnam is not the most unpopular war in American history. The Mexican War in 1. Korea. The majority of Americans supported the war in Vietnam from the landing of the Marines in Da Nang in March 1. U. S. Those 3. 0 months equaled the period of time the American people supported the ground war in Europe in World War II, from the landing of U. S. Public opinion had turned–not on ideological grounds, as the anti- war movement would claim, but for pragmatic reasons. Either win the damn thing or get the hell out! The war became stalemated after the U. S. Eighth Army’s defeat of the 2. Chinese Spring Offensive in April 1. Vietnam with the defeat of the enemy’s 1. Tet Offensive), degenerating into a series of bloody outpost skirmishes. The last of those skirmishes was the battle for Pork Chop Hill between July 6 and 1. Officially Hill 2. Pork Chop Hill because of its geographic shape. One of a series of outposted hills along the Iron Triangle in the western sector of the line of contact, it had long been contested by the enemy. Earlier, in November 1. U. S. 2nd Infantry Division’s Thailand Battalion had come under heavy Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) attack there, but the assault was beaten back. On March 1, 1. 95. Infantry Division’s 3. Infantry Regiment, Pork Chop Hill came under an 8,0. CCF artillery barrage. Then on March 2. 3, the CCF 6. Division, under cover of an intense mortar and artillery barrage, made a ground attack on Pork Chop Hill. After some initial gains they were beaten back, only to resume the attack on April 1. Once again they were beaten back by counterattacks from the 3. Infantry, reinforced by a battalion from the 7th Infantry Division’s 1. Infantry Regiment. But it was artillery that made the difference, as the 7th Infantry Division massed the guns of nine artillery battalions and fired 7. On July 6, 1. 95. CCF made yet another attempt to capture Pork Chop Hill. This time they gained a foothold on a portion of the crest. After repeated attempts to dislodge them were repulsed, General Maxwell D. Taylor, the Eighth U. S. Army commander, ordered the hill to be abandoned on July 1. Two weeks later, with the signing of the armistice agreement at Panmunjom on July 2. North and South Korea. Ever the politician (as he would prove to be again in the Vietnam War), General Taylor had made his decision based on his perception of American public and political reactions to the high numbers of U. S. During the month of July 1. United States and its allies along the line of contact, including Pork Chop Hill, had suffered 2. CCF artillery barrage. Chinese and North Korean casualties were estimated at 7. The battle for Hamburger Hill, like the Vietnam War itself, was less intense than the battle for Pork Chop Hill in Korea. A body count confirmed that 6. NVA soldiers had died in the battle, but as Samuel Zaffiri noted in his definitive history of the fight: There is no telling how many other NVA soldiers were killed and wounded and carried into Laos. No telling how many were buried alive in bunkers and tunnels on the mountain or ended up in forgotten graves in the draws or along the many ridges. Final U. S. While these losses were high, Hamburger Hill was not the bloodiest fight of the war, even for the 1. Airborne Division. In the earlier November 1. Dak To in the Central Highlands, 2. U. S. Later, during the week of February 1. Tet Offensive, 5. Americans were killed in action and another 2,5. American public. The Hamburger Hill losses were much smaller, but they set off a firestorm of protest back home. The American people were growing more weary of the war. A February 1. 96. Vietnam had been a mistake. Politicians were quick to seek advantage in those numbers. Most prominent was Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose brother John F. Kennedy had been the architect of America’s Vietnam involvement. As Zaffiri related: In the early afternoon of May 2. American boys are too valuable to be sacrificed to a false sense of military pride.’Kennedy would escalate his attack on May 2. New Democratic Coalition in Washington, referring to the battle as nothing but cruelty and savagery, as well as saying that the Vietnam War was unjustified and immoral. He was soon joined by other senators, including South Dakota’s George S. Mc. Govern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, and Ohio’s Stephen M. Young, an infantryman in World War I and an Army staff officer in World War II, who carried the attack to a new level. In a lengthy speech on May 2. Zaffiri: Young described how during the Civil War the Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee attacked the Union forces at Chancellorsville from the rear and flanks simultaneously and routed them. Instead of seeking to surround the enemy and seeking to assault the hill from the sides and the front simultaneously, there was one frontal assault after another, killing our boys who went up Hamburger Hill.’What set off this wave of criticism was a May 1. Associated Press war correspondent Jay Sharbutt. While reports of the Hamburger Hill battle had been appearing in newspapers since May 1. But Sharbutt’s dispatch struck a nerve: The paratroopers came down the mountain, their green shirts darkened with sweat, their weapons gone, their bandages stained brown and red–with mud and blood. Many cursed Lt. Weldon Honeycutt, who sent three companies Sunday to take this 3,0. Laos and overlooking the shell- pocked A Shau Valley. They failed and they suffered. Honeycutt’s radio call sign. But that victory was short- lived, for on June 5 the decision was made to abandon the hill to the enemy, further exacerbating public outrage. Adding fuel to the fire, the June 2. Life magazine featured photographs of the 2. Vietnam the previous week, including the five who had been killed in the assault on Hamburger Hill. The feature was titled, The Faces of the Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll, and it was prefaced by a quote from a letter written by one of those five soldiers during a break in the fighting. You may not be able to read this, it said. I am writing in a hurry. I see death coming up the hill. The erroneous impression was thus created that all 2. Hamburger Hill assault, increasing public disgust over what appeared to be a senseless loss of life. Underlying that disgust was the fact that the war in Vietnam did not fit the model of war that was fixed in most American minds. Except for the 1. Indian wars on the Western plains, most of America’s wars had fixed geographic boundaries, and progress could be measured by movement on the map. But Vietnam was different. As MACV commander General Creighton Abrams tried to explain: We are not fighting for terrain as such. We are going after the enemy. At a news conference following Hamburger Hill’s capture, the 1. Airborne Division’s commander, Maj. Melvin Zais, reinforced General Abrams’ words. The hill was in my area of operations, Zaffiri quoted Zais as saying. That was where the enemy was, and that was where I attacked him. If I find the enemy on any other hills in the A Shau, I assure you I’ll attack him there also. Asked why he had not relied on Boeing B- 5. I don’t know how many wars we have to go through to convince people that aerial bombardment alone cannot do the job. When criticized for the high number of casualties involved, Zais testily replied: It’s a myth somebody perpetuated that if we don’t do anything, nothing will happen to us. If we pulled back, and were quiet, they’d kill us in the night. They’d come on and crawl under the wire, and they’d drop satchel charges on our bunkers, and they’d mangle and maim and kill our men. The only way I can in good conscience lead my men is to insure that they’re not caught in that kind of situation. Zais was reiterating a truth that military commanders throughout history have known–offense is the very best defense. But war is first and foremost a political act, and in the view of politicians in Washington the 1. Airborne Division’s assault on Hamburger Hill had been a disaster. As Hedrick Smith reported in the May 2. New York Times, a number of civilian officials in the Nixon administration were afraid such Pyrrhic victories would undermine public support for the war and thus shorten the administration’s time for successful negotiations in Paris. As one official privately told Smith: Now clearly the greatest limitation is the reaction of the American public. They react to the casualty lists. I don’t understand why the military doesn’t get the picture. The military is defeating the very thing it most wants–more time to gain a stronger hand.
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