battle of khe sanh casualties

The attacks hindered the advancement of the McNamara Line, and as the fighting around Khe Sanh intensified, vital equipment including sensors and other hardware had to be diverted from elsewhere to meet the needs of the US garrison at Khe Sanh. If a battle tallied a sufficiently favorable body count ratio, American commanders declared victory, as they did after Khe Sanh. [74], During January, the recently installed electronic sensors of Operation Muscle Shoals (later renamed "Igloo White"), which were undergoing test and evaluation in southeastern Laos, were alerted by a flurry of PAVN activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail opposite the northwestern corner of South Vietnam. McNamara wrote: "because of terrain and other conditions peculiar to our operations in South Vietnam, it is inconceivable that the use of nuclear weapons would be recommended there against either Viet Cong or North Vietnamese forces". As journalist Robert Pisor pointed out in his 1982 book, The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh, no other battle of the entire war produced a better body count or kill ratio than that claimed by the Americans at Khe Sanh. [58] The USAF delivered 14,356 tons of supplies to Khe Sanh by air (8,120 tons by paradrop). [66] Hours after the bombardment ceased, the base was still in danger. The Marines withdrew all salvageable material and destroyed everything else. [128] They also reported 1,436 wounded before mid-March, of which 484 men returned to their units, while 396 were sent up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to hospitals in the north. Both sides have published official histories of the battle, and while these histories agree the fighting took place at Khe Sanh, they disagree on virtually every other aspect of it. [126], On 30 March, Bravo Company, 26th Marines, launched an attack toward the location of the ambush that had claimed so many of their comrades on 25 February. There are still debates about the true number of casualties, but estimates range that 1,000 to 3,500 US soldiers died, and a secret report from the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,. [164] He cited the fact that it would have taken longer to dislodge the North Vietnamese at Hue if the PAVN had committed the three divisions at Khe Sanh to the battle there instead of dividing its forces. If that failed, and it did, they hoped to attack American reinforcements along Route 9 between Khe Sanh and Laos. [108] The most dramatic supply delivery system used at Khe Sanh was the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System, in which palletized supplies were pulled out of the cargo bay of a low-flying transport aircraft by means of an attached parachute. Construction on the line was ultimately abandoned and resources were later diverted towards implementing a more mobile strategy. The battalion was assaulted on the night of 23 January by three PAVN battalions supported by seven tanks. The Marines pursued three enemy scouts, who led them into an ambush. The Marine garrison was also reinforced, and on November 1, 1967, Operation Scotland began. In fact, neither side won a resounding victory. [41], To prevent PAVN observation of the main base at the airfield and their possible use as firebases, the hills of the surrounding Khe Sanh Valley had to be continuously occupied and defended by separate Marine elements. by John Prados. [88] Westmoreland was so obsessed with the tactical situation that he threatened to resign if his wishes were not obeyed. This, however, did not prevent the Marine tanks within the perimeter from training their guns on the SOG camp. By the middle of January 1968, some 6,000 Marines and Army troops occupied the Khe Sanh Combat Base and its surrounding positions. A decision then had to be made by the American high command to commit more of the limited manpower in I Corps to the defense of Khe Sanh or to abandon the base. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. "[103] The Bru were excluded from evacuation from the highlands by an order from the ARVN I Corps commander, who ruled that no Bru be allowed to move into the lowlands.

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