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INTRODUCTION
At noon local time on March 30, 1972 the North Vietnamese Army launched a three-pronged full-scale traditional attack against the military forces of South Vietnam. This is now known as the Easter Offensive. By this time all ground combat had been turned over to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) with only about 6,000 US troops still in country and most of these distributed through ARVN units as advisors. Only the US Air Force, operating from bases in Guam and Thailand, and the US Navy had any significant offensive capability in the region. The North Vietnamese had walked away from peace talks in Paris prior to this date and obviously though they could gain through military aggression what they didn’t seem to be achieving at the negotiating table.
Over the next several months South Vietnamese forces supported by US naval and air forces were able to first stop and then push back the North’s attack. A significant portion of the US support came in the form of attacks against targets located in North Vietnam. Nearly every history of this phase of the war agrees that these attacks helped degrade the North’s ability to conduct offensive operations and forced the negotiators back to the peace table. But the descriptions of the operations focus almost exclusively on the aerial bombing campaign. If naval operations are mentioned at all, other than the fleet’s share of the bombing it is the mining of Haiphong harbor, which was done with aircraft.
What isn’t being explored by these histories is the role that naval surface combatants played in this phase of the war. The largest redeployment of naval combatants since the Korean War occurred in April 1972. The operations these ships engaged in represented a transition from older forms of strike warfare, bombardment of targets with large caliber guns, to the tactics of the future, striking inland targets with missiles launched from ships off the coast. There are stories here to be told and the purpose of this web site is to seek them out and tell them.
Scope
The scope of this site is fairly well set out in the brief introduction above. It will focus on naval surface combat missions between March 30, 1972 and January 28, 1973 (this is the date of the cease fire <http://www.nichecom.com/~vfw/ss/ss1.html>). Since the mining of the harbors was conducted by aircraft it will be excluded from this site, as will other naval aviation missions. While the primary focus will be on the combat missions operations of the mobile logistics support force to keep the combatants supplied with food fuel and ammunition will be considered.
The site will also concentrate of first person recollection of these operations. Official histories and operational records will be used to evaluate the content of the narratives collected however the goal is to tell this story using the words of the actual participants as much as possible.
Genre
The genre of this site is a cross between essay and research tool. One section will be the narrative of the naval surface actions supported by maps and photographs where possible. This section will have the dual goal of tell the story of these ships and their crews and in so doing encourage the second goal which is to solicit readers who have stories to tell to participate in the survey and oral history sections of the site. The second primary section is the research tools, which will use on-line survey and oral history interviews to collect additional stories or comments on existing stories.
Content
The site will contain narratives of each of the missions or events during the period under review. These narratives will be supplemented with maps, photographs, and other graphic material. The good news is that content is already available on that web. Several of the ship association sites have history or story sections where members have posted their recollections of significant events. Two examples are the story of the Battle off Dong Hoi that appears on the USS Higbee site <http://www.usshigbee.com/Dong_Hoi/subic.html> (I was on the USS Oklahoma City during this battle) and the narrative of the Battle of Brandon Bay <http://www.nichecom.com/~vfw/ss/ss3.html> that is on one of the USS Turner Joy sites.
The bad news about these narratives is one they are scattered all over the web. What this proposed site will do is collect them in one location. A second problem is that they may not be around after a few years. The USS Higbee site is an excellent example. The text and photographs on web page referenced above first started in 1998 and then went off the web in 2001 for whatever reason. A new site was started just six weeks ago and fortunately the Webmaster was able to these items and put then up again. Also because the page has really been around a while is why the responses from other veterans are appended to the bottom of the original text.
A final problem is that there are often conflicting recollections of events. The USS Sterret site has what has been known since April 19, 1972 as the Sterret version of the events off Dong Hoi <http://www.sterett.org/battle.htm>. For any history site to have a claim of legitimacy some effort must be expended in validating the sources. There is probably a good technical explanation as to why the electronic sensors on the Sterret caused her crew to believe they were under attack by missiles that the North Vietnamese were known then and now not to have. They really did fire that missile and it really did enter a cloud and then explode in mid-air. Validating the sources and answering questions like these are among the thing I hope this site will be able to do.
There will also be a survey database that will serve as the research collection tool. The narratives will be accessible to the public, as will the submission forms for the surveys and interviews. The survey and interview submissions will not be universally accessible. Only those submissions that have been incorporated into one of the narratives will be accessible for general viewing.
As should be obvious there is some material available right now that could be converted into content for this site. All that is required is to contact the individuals who provided the stories and the Webmasters of the sites currently displaying the material to obtain permission to use it on this site.
Audience
The audience for this site will initially be naval Vietnam War veterans. They are the ones with the stories. As the site becomes populated with more narratives it is anticipated that individuals with a general interest in the history of the war will come to site. The site does have an educational functional after all even though it is not designed as a teaching site.