Two platoons from B Company had already tried to knock out the machine gun. Both had been driven back by heavy fire. When 5 Platoon's turn came, Lance Cpl. Kerry Rooney led his section straight at the position, throwing grenades before being cut down.
It was the afternoon of Feb. 17, 1967, near the abandoned hamlet of Ap My An in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam.
The 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, had deployed to the area expecting to intercept retreating Viet Cong. Instead, they found a hardened defensive network manned by fighters who held their ground against overwhelming firepower.
When Operation Bribie ended, eight Australians were dead and 27 were wounded. The men who survived were divided over whether to call it a battle or a beating. It was one of the deadliest days of the Vietnam War for Australian forces.
The Australians returned to the battlefield the next morning and found a message written in blood on the side of a destroyed M113 armored personnel carrier. It read "Du Me Uc Dai Loi." The translation is roughly "Get fucked, Australians."
Australia's War in Phuoc Tuy
Australia's military commitment to South Vietnam grew from a small advisory team in the early 1960s to a full task force by 1966. In April of that year, the 1st Australian Task Force established its base at Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy Province, roughly 70 kilometers southeast of Saigon.
The Australians operated with independence from American command, pursuing counter-insurgency tactics built on population control, cordon-and-search operations and intelligence-driven patrolling. That approach put them at sustained odds with Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam commander.
Westmoreland had pressed Maj. Gen. Tim Vincent, Commander Australian Forces Vietnam, to adopt a more aggressive posture. The friction was a defining tension of the Australian effort through early 1967.
By that point the task force was comprised of two infantry battalions. The 5th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, operated under Lt. Col. John Warr. The 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, served under Lt. Col. Colin Townsend. Total Australian strength in-country stood at roughly 6,300 men.
Their primary adversary in Phuoc Tuy was D445 Battalion, a provincial Viet Cong unit that had fought the Australians at Long Tan in August 1966 and continued operating in the province afterward.
When Brig. Stuart Graham replaced Brig. David Jackson as 1 ATF commander on Jan. 7, 1967, he backed Warr's proposal to focus on cordon-and-search operations. In the six days before Bribie, 5 RAR had captured 40 Viet Cong. Then D445 launched a new offensive.
The Night Before
In the early hours of Feb. 17, 1967, a Viet Cong force from D445 attacked a South Vietnamese Regional Force compound near the coastal village of Lang Phuoc Hai, roughly 15 kilometers southeast of Nui Dat. The compound was held by the 612 Regional Force Company.
The attack continued through the night. South Vietnamese troops pushed the attackers back by morning.
Lt. Col. Jack Gilham, the senior American advisor in Phuoc Tuy, notified 1 ATF before dawn. By around 5 a.m., he was reporting the enemy strength had grown to an estimated two companies.
Maj. Gordon Murphy, commanding A Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, was woken and told to ready his M113 armored personnel carriers for a potential reaction mission.
About two hours after the fighting at Lang Phuoc Hai ended, aerial reconnaissance reported something unexpected. A Viet Cong company had stopped and formed a perimeter in the dense jungle roughly two kilometers north of the village, near Ap My An. The enemy was not withdrawing.
Graham and Townsend saw an opportunity. Every previous encounter with D445 had ended with the unit breaking contact and pulling back into the jungle. They anticipated the same and planned to insert 6 RAR behind the Viet Cong to cut off its withdrawal route before it could disappear.
A Company Walks Into a Trap
At 1:45 p.m., A Company, 6 RAR, conducted an airmobile assault into a landing zone near Ap My An. The soldiers entered the tree line and had covered fewer than 200 meters when the Viet Cong opened fire.
Machine guns fired from multiple directions. Snipers engaged from concealed positions. Six men from 2 Platoon were killed or wounded within the first minute of contact.
The Viet Cong had constructed a U-shaped defensive network across the undergrowth, with camouflaged fighting positions arranged to deliver fire from the front and both flanks at once. Visibility through the dense jungle was just a few meters. The enemy was nearly invisible.
A Company's lead platoons were pinned down for roughly 20 minutes under sustained fire, unable to advance. Some soldiers pulled casualties out under fire.
The Australians had landed nearly on top of the Viet Cong rather than behind them, turning the planned intercept into a frontal engagement with no time to reorganize or coordinate.
B Company, under Maj. Ian Mackay arrived under fire and pushed toward the contact. C Company was transported in by APCs. D Company landed by helicopter shortly after.
What had been designed as a blocking operation had become a battalion-sized engagement assembled in pieces, with no coordinated assault plan. Townsend had been ordered not to become too heavily engaged and to return before nightfall, leaving every commander with almost no time to plan.
The Australians were in a massive fight that they had not anticipated.
Bayonets at Ap My An
With all companies committed, Townsend ordered a full frontal attack. The Australians pushed forward through vegetation so thick that enemy positions could not be identified until fire was already coming from them. The Australians were unable to accurately return fire through the dense brush without being on top of the positions.
B Company's 6 Platoon received orders to destroy one of the machine guns that had stopped the advance. They fixed bayonets and charged through the vegetation toward the enemy. VC fire halted the assault and drove the platoon back. The gun kept firing, causing even more casualties.
5 Platoon received the order to attack the same position. They were to advance from a different direction and try to outflank it. Second Lt. John O'Halloran gave the command to move.
O'Halloran later described what followed. "On my order to assault, the platoon as one arose and ran forward, yelling and screaming."
Rooney led his section right at the position, threw grenades and charged in with his bayonet. He was killed before he reached it. The assault stalled.
The survivors were pushed back and forced to find cover as the commanders tried to decide what to do next. Most of the men were pinned down and in serious danger of being overrun by VC forces.
By the time B Company's assault collapsed, the company had seven killed and 19 wounded. Townsend asked Murphy whether the APCs could push around the right flank. A creek made the ground too wet and muddy to cross safely.
The APC Assault
The armored personnel carriers had been withheld based on a judgment that the dense undergrowth made the area unsuitable for vehicles. That assumption proved to be wrong.
When the APCs finally pushed into the jungle to evacuate the casualties, the crews had difficulty locating B Company through smoke rising from fires burning across the forest floor. The confusion cost time the wounded could not spare.
Once contact was established, the soldiers loaded casualties aboard the vehicles under continuing enemy fire. A Viet Cong gunner then put a 75mm recoilless rifle round through the open cargo hatch of one M113.
The round killed the driver and wounded the vehicle commander. Soldiers in the back, some already wounded from earlier in the fight, were hit again. A second round struck the same M113 as the survivors bailed out.
Unable to move the vehicle, the Australians destroyed it to prevent the Viet Cong from salvaging usable parts. The remaining APCs suppressed the enemy positions until the infantry could break contact and fall back to the landing zone.
The fighting ended just before 7:30 p.m. Eight Australians were dead, and 27 were wounded. The engagement had lasted just over five hours. Though small in overall scale, it had become one of the costliest engagements involving Australian forces in the entire war.
The End of the Battle
That night, artillery and air strikes hit the Viet Cong positions. Napalm burned across the jungle floor. When 6 RAR returned to the battlefield on Feb. 18, D445 was gone.
Eight enemy bodies were recovered. It was clear many more had been removed overnight. Fresh graves were later found along the Viet Cong withdrawal route. Australian intelligence assessed total enemy killed at between 50 and 70.
D445 had held its ground, absorbed a full battalion assault, taken its dead and withdrawn before dawn. The unit could not mount a full battalion-strength operation for the rest of 1967. Its losses were increasingly backfilled by North Vietnamese regulars rather than local recruits.
The Australians would continue to face D445 throughout the rest of the Vietnam War.
No Clean Verdict
Both sides declared victory. Hanoi announced a decisive Viet Cong triumph. Graham countered that the enemy had "got a thrashing," a position supported by intelligence showing D445's degraded operational capacity for the rest of the year.
The soldiers who had fought the battle saw it differently. Private Robin Harris of 5 Platoon was direct about the result. "I think that on this occasion, Charlie's losses were overstated. It was us who had copped a hiding."
APC commander David Clifton offered no qualification. "We had been soundly thrashed on Operation Bribie," he said.
Mackay, whose B Company had borne the worst of the fighting, later tried to account for both sides honestly. The truth of Operation Bribie, he wrote, was that the two forces had "thoroughly belted each other."
In terms of enemy bodies recovered against Australian losses, it was the worst exchange ratio the task force had seen in Vietnam. D445 had not been destroyed; their losses were minimal, while Australian losses were massive compared to previous engagements.
The Aftermath of Operation Bribie
The battle exposed a series of compounding failures. Intelligence misidentified the Viet Cong position as a camp rather than a prepared defensive network. Armor was excluded from a terrain assessment that proved incorrect.
The order not to become heavily engaged forced piecemeal decisions once A Company made contact. Companies were fed into the fight one at a time against a position that required a deliberate, coordinated assault with proper fire support.
Cpl. Robin William Jones and Pvt. Richard Beverley Odendahl both received the Military Medal for their actions during the fighting. O'Halloran was Mentioned in Dispatches.
During February 1967, 1 ATF lost 16 killed and 55 wounded in a single week, the heaviest casualty toll of the war to that point. For the first time in nine months of operations, the kill ratio had reversed against the Australians.
Graham concluded the battle proved the need for a physical barrier to restrict Viet Cong movement through Phuoc Tuy. He pressed harder for a third infantry battalion and armored support, both of which Australian counter-insurgency doctrine had long deprioritized.
A squadron of Centurion tanks arrived in late 1967. A third battalion reached the task force in December of that year. The sudden announcement of even more Australian forces being sent to the war led to an increase in anti-war demonstrations back home.
Australian forces fought countless engagements throughout the rest of the war before withdrawing alongside American troops in 1971 and 1972. Their contributions to the war alongside U.S. forces are often forgotten.
Each year, veterans of the battle gather at Bribie Island in Queensland, the island the operation was named for, to honor the eight men who did not come back from Ap My An.
Sources: "Operation Bribie"; Anzac Portal, Department of Veterans' Affairs, "Australians in Operation Bribie 17 February 1967"; Australian War Memorial, collection records C291842 and LIB47974; Vietnam Veterans Museum of Australia, "Operation Bribie" (vwma.org.au); Royal Australian Regiment Association, "Proud Memories: The Battle of Bribie"; Ian McNeill, "Vietnam 1967: Operation Bribie," AWM collection LIB47974; Ian Mackay, "Phantoms of Bribie," via booksonwaraustralia.com; Infogalactic, "Operation Bribie"; "Australia in the Vietnam War"; "6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment"; "Battle of Long Tan"
