CHAPTER 16

Helicopter Operations and New Technology, 1970-1971

Improving Helicopter Support of the 1st Marine Division — Helicopter Operations New Ordnance and Aircraft—Aviation Achievements and Costs

Improving Helicopter Support of the 1st Marine Division

During the last year and a half of combat, Gener­als Thrash and Armstrong devoted much time and ef­fort to improving helicopter support of ground operations. The wing commanders acted against a background of mutual recrimination between aviation and ground Marines. This quarrel had reached a cli­max in 1969* when the wing, with not enough helicopters, was trying to support two reinforced Ma­rine divisions. Ground commanders complained that Marine helicopters were unresponsive to their require­ments, and many looked with increasing favor to the Army system of attaching helicopters directly to in­dividual divisions and brigades. Lieutenant Colonel James W. Rider, who flew AH-lG Cobra gunships with VMO-2 and HML-367 in 1969-1970, was sympathetic in recalling criticism from the infantry: 'The Marine command and control system required that all helicop­ters be requested at least one day in advance with ex­ception of emergency missions. This did not afford Marine ground commanders the flexibility that their Army ground colleagues had-'1 Other Marine aviators declared that their ground counterparts made unrealis­tic demands and refused to appreciate the limitations and difficulties of rotary-wing operations. These ar­guments spread from Vietnam throughout the Ma­rine Corps, raising doubts about the validity of the Marine system of helicopter command and control and, indeed, about the solidarity of the air-ground team as a whole. General Chapman, in a Green Let­ter to all general officers issued on 4 November 1969, acknowledged that 'unfortunately, air-ground rela­tionships are not all they could and must be.'2

Even as Chapman wrote, efforts to remedy the sit­uation were under way. During 1969, two separate Ma­rine study groups investigated helicopter usage, and command and control. In Vietnam, Lieutenant Gener­al Nickerson convened a board of III MAF officers, headed by Major General Carl A. Youngdale, the MAP deputy commanding general, which thoroughly reviewed the conduct of 1st MAW helicopter opera­tions. At Quantico, a study group at the Marine Corps Development Center, then commanded by Major General Armstrong, who shortly afterward took over the 1st MAW, examined air-ground relations in gener­al. This group also concentrated on helicopter pro­blems as the major area of friction.

Both investigations reached similar conclusions. The boards reaffirmed the validity of basic Marine Corps principles of air and ground organization and helicop­ter command and control. Both declared that most of the air-ground difficulties in Vietnam had result­ed from a shortage of helicopters and from the fact that one wing had had to work with two widely sepa­rated divisions. The investigative boards, nevertheless, also uncovered remediable failings in the application of Marine Corps doctrine. They emphasized training deficiencies, which had left many air and ground com­manders ignorant of the fundamentals of each other's specialties. While they rejected the Army system of permanently attaching helicopters to ground units, both study groups recommended strengthening the authority of the DASCs, located with the divisions and which controlled both helicopter and fixed-wing sup­port, to speed the exchange of information between the divisions and the wing, and to permit more rapid reassignment of helicopters in response to tactical emergencies. To improve support of the 3d Marine Di­vision, the Youngdale Board advocated establishment of a 1st MAW auxiliary wing headquarters, which would be commanded by a brigadier general assistant wing commander and located at 3d Division Head­quarters in Quang Tri. Lieutenant General Nickerson promptly implemented this recommendation with beneficial results.3*

The withdrawal of the 3d Marine Division from Vietnam during the second half of 1969 reduced III MAF to a single Marine division paired with a single wing, both located in the Da Nang area. To support the 1st Marine Division, at the beginning of 1970 the 1st MAW had available 52 UH-lEs, about half of them armed, 28 AH-1Gs, 117 CH-46Ds, and 20 CH-53Ds. This represented an abundance of helicopters never

* Earlier, Provisional MAG-39 had been set up at Quang Tri in an effort to coordinate helicopter support of the 3d Marine Division.