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The Only Tank Battle of The Vietnam War
The jungle wasn’t conducive to tank warfare
For all of its infamy and years of bloody fighting, the Vietnam War featured precious few engagements that involved tanks and armored vehicles. The vast majority of the fighting took place in far flung hamlets and flooded rice paddies far from the major population centers. Ambushes in the jungles were far more common than fighting on paved streets. All of this added up to a theater that was openly hostile to armored combat.
While tanks patrolled the streets of Saigon and patrolled the well-developed roads of the coast the Viet Cong did their best to avoid such positions of strength. The North Vietnam Army only encountered Western tanks on rare occasions and rarely did they have armor of their own when they did.
The communists were fighting a war of attrition and were engaged in asymmetrical warfare. That meant avoiding American tanks rather than engaging them.
The result was, even after almost a decade of heavy fighting, the war only featured one true tank battle. That being, a battle that pitted tanks from both sides against each other and resulted in losses.
The rare instance took place on March 3rd, 1969 when a North Vietnamese armored column advanced against a US firebase home to tanks of their own.
The Battle of Ben Het
Late in the evening on March 3rd, 1969, a camp by the name of Ben Het came under intense fire. The area was shelled by heavy mortars and peppered by explosive recoilless rifle fire. The Americans scrambled to locate the source of the incoming fire. Initially, in the darkness, they could not make out what kind of force was coming their way.
Finally, after intense artillery bombardment an anti-tank mine exploded on the outskirts of the camp. The resulting fireball illuminated the scene and revealed a number of PT-76 light tanks rumbling their direction.
The soldiers began loading their weapons with High-explosive Anti-tank (HEAT) rounds to prepare to repel incoming enemy armor.
