The Battle of Long Tan

The battle

On 18 August 1966, D Company of the 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment was engaged in one of Australia’s heaviest actions of the Vietnam War, in a rubber plantation near the village of Long Tan in Phuoc Tuy Province.

The 108 soldiers of D Company held off a far larger enemy force for over three hours in a tropical downpour. They were assisted by a timely ammunition resupply by Royal Australian Air Force helicopters, close fire support from artillery, and the arrival of armoured personnel carriers with reinforcements from the rest of the battalion. Seventeen Australians were killed and twenty-five wounded; one of the wounded died several days later.

In 1968 D Company was awarded the United States Presidential Unit Citation, the highest unit award in the American honours system.

Ian Campbell

Ian Martin Campbell was born in Brisbane on 9 June 1945. He enlisted for national service on 30 June 1965, and after recruit and infantry training was posted to 6 RAR. He arrived in Vietnam on 8 June 1966, a twenty-year-old private in 10 Platoon, D Company. On the day of the battle he was his section’s M60 machine gunner.

About an hour after the first contact, the forward platoon — 11 Platoon — was under heavy attack, and 10 Platoon was ordered forward to help them withdraw. It came under small arms, machine gun and mortar fire, took casualties, and was ordered back to company headquarters.

Campbell was the last man to withdraw. He fired on an enemy force of fifty to seventy men in depth, kneeling and lying in the mud to strip and clear his gun as it jammed again and again on old tracer ammunition and mud in the belts. Several times he stood up, to see over the mist and the cordite smoke, turning to fire from the hip. He did that for several minutes.

His section commander, Bill Roche, told the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal fifty years later:

Kevin Sharpley

Kevin Sharpley joined the Air Force in 1958 and was awarded his wings the following year. He flew fixed wing until 1964, then put in for helicopters and was on the first course of its kind run in Australia. When Australia committed to Vietnam in 1966 it was decided that, like the Americans, the helicopters would fly with two pilots — and there were not enough pilots to go round. The squadron at Butterworth in Malaya was handed over to the Royal Air Force, and its crews were given a choice: home, or straight to Vietnam.

He volunteered to go straight there, and arrived in June 1966. Most of them, he says, had joined to do a job if it ever came, and here it was.

He describes the flying without ornament:

The eighteenth of August

Campbell had landed at Vung Tau three days after flying in, and was not unimpressed with the place.

Helicopters took them up to the new task force base at Nui Dat. On the night of 17 August the base was shelled; twenty-three soldiers were wounded and one of them died the next day. The counter-battery radar gave a rough bearing, and D Company was sent out to find where the fire had come from. At about two in the afternoon of the eighteenth they walked into the Long Tan rubber plantation, 10 Platoon leading.

11 Platoon, out on the right, met the enemy first and lost six men in moments. Artillery was called in from six thousand metres away, and brought down so close that the shells were landing twenty-five metres in front of 11 Platoon’s position. Then the storm broke. The plantation was red soil, and the ground turned to mud; visibility closed to ten or fifteen metres.

10 Platoon was ordered back. Campbell describes, in one sentence, the job the Tribunal would recognise fifty years later:

The gun kept jamming, dragging mud up into the feed plate. The company sergeant major — Jack Kirby, a man of eighteen or nineteen stone, who was walking the perimeter breaking open the ammunition boxes that had just been kicked out of the helicopters — threw him a spare barrel for the M60. “I could have kissed him,” Campbell says. It was Kirby who, days afterwards, put Campbell’s name in front of Harry Smith.

Of the crews who flew that ammunition in through the rain, Campbell says simply: “How they ever did it, I’ll never ever know.”

That night

A few miles away, Sharpley and the other crews spent the afternoon sitting on the ground with no information at all, listening to the guns.

Those two helicopters were the ammunition run. It was only afterwards, he says, that they understood how lucky those crews had been to find the company at all, and not to be shot down — they carried no armour; the heavy rain was the only thing protecting them.

Then it went dark, and it went quiet, and the medevac crews were sent in. D Company had pulled back to open ground, and the aircraft had to put down beside the armoured personnel carriers in the pitch dark. Landing there, Sharpley says, was difficult. Someone worked out that opening the hatch let out just enough light from the instruments to see by, and they lowered themselves in on that.

He flew four trips to the hospital at Vung Tau that night, and by his own account did not know what he was carrying.

The dead were brought out later in the night. It was not until he was doing those runs, he says, that he grasped how serious the day had been.

The next afternoon

The company spent the night in the open, wet and cold, listening to the wounded out in the plantation. Campbell’s M60 had stopped firing altogether and he had taken somebody else’s rifle. “We were all like stunned mullets,” he says. “We were wet and cold and muddy. Half our weapons wouldn’t work.”

They went back in late the following afternoon, and found the men of 11 Platoon lying alongside one another.

Fifty years

The first Long Tan gallantry awards were announced on 21 December 1966. To some of those who had been there, including the company commander, Major Harry Smith, they seemed fewer in number and lower in standing than the men had earned.

Thirty years later the files were opened to public access. In 1996 Smith read them, and found that for some of his recommendations there was no paperwork at all, and that others had been downgraded. He began to lobby, and did not stop. There were reviews between 2004 and 2009. He put submissions to the Tribunal’s inquiry into unresolved acts of gallantry in 2011. In November 2014 the Chief of Army rejected them.

On 3 April 2015, by then Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith SG MC (Retd), he lodged an application with the Tribunal on behalf of Private Ian Martin Campbell. Campbell had received nothing in 1966; Smith’s recollection was that he had written a recommendation for a Mention in Despatches on 22 August 1966, put forward not by Campbell’s platoon commander but by the company sergeant major, Jack Kirby. No record of that recommendation has ever been found. Campbell is not named in the official history of the war, nor in any of the published accounts of the battle.

The Tribunal sat on 1, 2 and 3 March 2016. On 1 August 2016 it set aside the Chief of Army’s refusal and recommended that Private Ian Martin Campbell receive the Commendation for Gallantry. He was invested that November, fifty years after the battle. He had earlier received South Vietnam’s Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, in 2004.

Harry Smith died on 20 August 2023, aged ninety — two days after the fifty-seventh anniversary of Long Tan. He had spent the better part of thirty years getting his soldiers what he believed they were owed.

We will remember them.
Lest we forget.

Sources

The films were recorded by the Murwillumbah RSL Sub-Branch, and the words quoted above are Ian Campbell’s and Kevin Sharpley’s own, taken from them. Quotations have been lightly tidied for reading, and place names set as they are spelt in the record — Enoggera, Tan Son Nhut, Vung Tau, Nui Dat.

The account of the battle and of Private Campbell’s actions also follows the decision of the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal in Smith and the Department of Defence Re: Campbell [2016] DHAAT 18, of 1 August 2016, including the evidence given to it by Mr Bill Roche and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith.