Operation Smithfield

Operation Smithfield is the company patrol that later turned out to be a battalion search and destroy operation that many of you will know as the Battle of Long Tan this year made even more famous with the release of the move Danger Close.

The battle took place Aug '66.

Their is an AAR written Dec 66 and a review written Mar 67 and both have been scanned to PDF by the Australian War Memorial (AWM).

AAR: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Review: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The maps referred to in the review appear to the maps in the AAR starting on page 33.

Both documents are a great source of data for either a company(+) battle or some of the platoon actions could be used for smaller skirmish sized encounter type scenarios.

Again, the commentary on the weapons in use and the uniforms, equipment and tactics of the NLF units make great reading for anyone writing rules for the Vietnam war.

Just to help clarify one point, there is constant reference to "Núi Đất", I am not sure I have the correct Vietnamese characters but maybe OTB can help on that.

There were actually two such hills in the province, literally 500m apart.  They were regularly referred to as Núi Đất 1 and Núi Đất 2.  #1 was the 1 ATF camp.  The second had a spur running North-south that ran from the summit south into the AO in which the battle was fought.  Below is a map I put together (I had to cut and stitch from 2 real maps as the battle area just happened to be on the junction of the two 1:50,000 maps.  The red area to the left is the 1 ATF camp.  The red area to the right is the "other Núi Đất" and the area in green a 200m x 200m block is the area of the battle.



These PDF's are a good easy read, typical military format and language, both scans of the original typed documents. It is interesting to see the "inline" grammar and spelling fixes.

Good stuff - yes "Núi Đất" is correct. It actually means "dirt hill" in Vietnamese.