Battle of Hu

Almost uniquely in Viet Nam last week, it was possible to follow clearly the progression of one battle: the block-by-block struggle of the allies to recapture the city of Hue from the North Vietnamese units that swept into it two weeks ago. The North Vietnamese had arrived to stay, and students from the University of Hue acted as their guides, in some cases donning the uniform of Viet Cong regulars. As the ancient capital of Viet Nam, Hue was a prime piece of captured real estate for propaganda purposes, and the NVA fought for every inch of it against ARVN troopers and a battalion-size force of U.S. Marines that moved in from the south.

At first, the Marines found the going not only tough but unfamiliar, since they had to retake the streets almost house by house. "The first two days, it was a matter of learning this sort of thing," said one Marine commander, Colonel Ernest Cheatham. "The Marines haven't fought a fight like this since Seoul, back in 1950." As more and more blocks fell to the Marines, they commandeered brightly colored Honda motorcycles, small buses and cars, to ferry themselves back and forth to the action.

Gradually, the battling turned the once beautiful city into a nightmare. Hue's streets were littered with dead. A black-shirted Communist soldier sprawled dead in the middle of a road, still holding a hand grenade. A woman knelt in death by a wall in the corner of her garden. A child lay on the stairs, crushed by a fallen roof. Many of the bodies had turned black and begun to decompose, and rats gnawed at the exposed flesh.

Predawn Derring-Do. Every so often the Marines came across pockets of American civilians, some of whom had been successfully hiding out for nine days. When they liberated the Thua Thien province headquarters, the Marines tore down the Viet Cong flag, one of dozens the Communists had planted throughout the city, and raised the Stars and Stripes. Their commander had told them to run up the South Vietnamese flag, but two Marines had died and two others had been wounded in taking the building; they were not about to be denied the satisfaction of raising their own flag (though it later had to be lowered to conform with South Vietnamese law).

Meanwhile, the ARVN forces were making slower headway against the NVA defending the thick-walled battlements of the Citadel. They first tried to use armored personnel carriers to spearhead their attack, but the long straight streets of the old quarter enabled Communist gunners to knock them out from half a mile away. With only three of their original twelve APCs still operative, the ARVN troopers started the same house-to-house combat as the Marines on the other side of the fetid Perfume River.

In a predawn bit of derring-do, Communist frogmen swam down the Perfume and neatly dropped the center span of the last remaining bridge over the river, despite the fact that the allies held both bridgeheads. Boats thus became the main means of evacuation and supply, and each boat ran a gauntlet of NVA sniper fire. But at week's end the NVA pockets of resistance were slowly shrinking, and all of the city except a part of the Citadel had been seized by the allies.

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