By late 1967, the M50 Ontos was nearly phased out of navy service. The Army had rejected it again in 1953, calling it too cramped, too calmly armored and too awkward to reload. Solely the Marine Corps needed it. Initially, they’d no thought what to name the ugly machine. The navy feared that giving it a standard title of a well-known normal would offend somebody.
The troops started referring to it as Ontos, Greek for “The Factor.” However after years of fight in Vietnam, the Marines had been nearly carried out with it. Components had been exhausting to search out, and the treads wore out quicker than they could possibly be changed. The few remaining automobiles had been being cannibalized to maintain different platforms working.
In December of 1967, the first and third Anti-Tank Battalions had been decommissioned. The few remaining Ontos automobiles had been despatched to assist Marine Corps armor battalions elsewhere. Little did anybody know that the defining battle for the Marine Corps in Vietnam was about to start.
By the tip of the Battle of Hue two months later, Col. Stanley S. Hughes referred to as the Factor “the best of all Marine supporting arms.”
The Fall of Hue
On Jan. 30, 1968, eight battalions of the North Vietnamese Army infantry infiltrated Hue as a part of the Tet Offensive. The assault caught American and South Vietnamese forces off guard in the course of the Lunar New 12 months ceasefire.
Town was the cultural coronary heart of Vietnam, house to the imperial palace and the seat of the Nguyen dynasty for over a century. For the NVA, taking Hue meant greater than a navy victory. It meant seizing the soul of Vietnam.
The sixth NVA Regiment seized the Citadel, an 18th-century walled fortress on the north financial institution of the Fragrance River. The partitions stretched 2 miles on all sides, 16 toes excessive, and as much as 60 toes thick on the base. The 4th NVA Regiment took the southern half of town.
Inside hours, the enemy managed almost all of Hue besides for 2 compounds: the South Vietnamese Army’s 1st Division headquarters contained in the Citadel and the U.S. Navy Help Command Vietnam compound south of the river.
Marine reinforcements arrived, anticipating to rapidly push out the enemy pressure. As an alternative, they discovered themselves preventing in among the most vicious city fight in American navy historical past.
Road by Road
The NVA had turned Hue’s concrete buildings into bunkers. They occupied higher flooring and basements, reduce firing holes by partitions, and linked positions by mouseholes knocked between rooms. Snipers coated each strategy. Machine weapons created interlocking fields of fireside down each avenue. Each intersection grew to become a kill zone.
The Marines had no doctrine for conducting large-scale city fight. In response to the Marine Corps Vietnam Tankers Historic Basis, tankers “had basically no prior coaching or sensible expertise in the usage of their ‘crew-served weapon’ in city house-to-house, block-by-block, street-by-street preventing.”
Neither did the infantry. The final time Individuals fought in a metropolis like this was in Seoul in 1950.
Air assist and artillery had been initially restricted to guard the civilians and historic websites. The Marines tried frontal assaults throughout open streets. They took heavy casualties and gained little floor. They wanted one thing that would knock down partitions at shut vary with out leveling the whole metropolis.
The Ontos Arrives
Ontos platoons and tanks from the first Tank Battalion reached Hue within the first days of February. The M48 Patton tanks weighed 50 tons and struggled in Hue’s slim streets. The Ontos weighed 9 tons. It may go the place the Pattons couldn’t, together with cramped alleyways and over slim bridges.
The Ontos mounted six 106mm recoilless rifles on a tracked chassis. The rifles vented their backblast out the rear, eliminating recoil and permitting the sunshine automobile to hold firepower usually reserved for a lot heavier platforms. The automobile was initially designed as a lightweight and maneuverable tank-hunter meant to deal with Soviet tanks in central Europe.
Nonetheless, at ranges of 300 to 500 yards, these rifles may additionally punch 4-square-meter holes by masonry or knock down partitions solely. Whereas the Pattons struggled to maneuver in some areas, the Ontos’ high-explosive rounds proved good for aiding the infantry of their assaults on fortified positions.
The Ontos additionally carried beehive rounds. Every spherical contained 9,600 flechettes, 2-inch metal darts with stabilizing fins that unfold in a cone when fired. The darts made a terrifyingly distinctive buzzing sound as they shredded every thing of their path.
Capt. Collin Casey commanded A Firm, 1st Tanks at Hue. He described how the automobiles labored collectively.
“The Ontos was primarily used as a backup for the tank. We primarily used them in a hit-and-run kind of factor,” Casey stated. “Whereas they’d nice firepower, their armor was skinny and could possibly be penetrated fairly simply by the NVA’s weapons, so the Ontos was finest employed by defending them. It was primarily a constructing buster.”
As an alternative of advancing down streets coated by NVA machine weapons, the Marines used the Ontos to blast holes by compound and constructing partitions. The infantry then entered the buildings with out exposing themselves to crossfire.
If enemy snipers or machine weapons halted the advance, the Marines had been fast to name up an Ontos, which may rapidly throw six projectiles into the enemy place. The stalemate started to interrupt because the Marines slowly regained management over town.
The Factor
Capt. Dale Dye, a adorned Vietnam veteran who later grew to become a Hollywood navy advisor, was at Hue in the course of the preventing. In an account printed in The Armory Life, he described watching Lt. Col. Ernest Cheatham, commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, fifth Marines, direct Ontos hearth towards the Citadel.
“I distinctly recall watching (from deep cowl) as Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham ground-guided an Ontos proper as much as the riverbank and pointed at a spot on the Citadel partitions that was hitting his Marines with flanking hearth from throughout the river,” Dye wrote. “There was some fiddling for place, then two spotter rounds, adopted by ripple hearth from a pair of 106s. A big chunk of wall fell into the moat surrounding the Citadel, and harassing hearth from that course ceased completely.”
Dye additionally witnessed the braveness of Ontos crews. The automobile’s six rifles needed to be reloaded from exterior, one 38-pound spherical at a time, exposing the loader to enemy hearth. The loader labored from a compartment within the again with simply 18 rounds of prepared ammunition. After a number of salvos, somebody needed to go exterior.
“One of many bravest guys I ever noticed in fight was a thin little PFC from Kansas,” Dye wrote. “He was the loader on an Ontos, and several other instances within the preventing for Hue Metropolis throughout Tet 68, I noticed him bolt out of his cubby gap behind that automobile, ignoring incoming rounds pinging off the armor, to calmly reload.”
The NVA realized to concern the Ontos. The backblast alone swept streets with mud, rocks, and particles that grew to become lethal shrapnel. Survivors of the southside preventing had seen what six recoilless rifles may do to a fortified place. Phrase unfold among the many defenders.
Dye described what occurred when Marines from Delta Firm, 1st Battalion, fifth Marines had been pinned contained in the Citadel by an NVA platoon.
“They could not transfer ahead or sideways, and going again was not an possibility,” Dye wrote. “So an Ontos rolled up, threw ONE tracer from its .50 caliber recognizing rifle right into a window the place a lot of the hearth was concentrated, and the NVA deserted it, scattering like cockroaches. The Ontos by no means even needed to hearth its 106’s.”
A single tracer spherical from a recognizing rifle cleared a complete enemy place. The NVA knew what got here subsequent in the event that they remained. The flechette rounds had been particularly feared by communist troops within the metropolis.
“Apparently, the phrase had unfold from NVA survivors of the southside preventing to their buddies on the northside,” Dye wrote. “When The Factor rolls up in your place, it is time to un-ass the realm.”
Studying Beneath Hearth
The Marines developed their techniques night time by night time. Patton and Ontos crews returned every night to the South Vietnamese Army compound. They met with infantry squad leaders who had served as their eyes and ears in the course of the day’s preventing, offering safety and guiding the armor by streets they might barely see from inside their automobiles.
The crews critiqued what labored and what failed, then deliberate the following day’s assault. In response to the MCVTHF, “After the night meal, the following day’s plan of assault was labored out for the staff.”
Col. Bob Thompson, commanding officer of 1/5, watched the armor crews return from fight every day.
“They jogged my memory of knights returning to the citadel after preventing the dragon,” Thompson stated.
When requested what he would have carried out with out the tanks and Ontos, Thompson was blunt: “Oh, we might have gained; it might have taken us longer, and we’d have sustained better casualties, better than the 60 % we did.”
Over the course of the battle, Ontos and Patton tanks proved important to retaking the southern half of town and serving to the Marines and ARVN forces in capturing the Citadel.
Whereas the Marines took Hue and suffered heavy casualties in doing so, the infantry had been without end grateful for the ugly tank-hunter that struck concern into the hearts of each communist within the metropolis.
The Value
The armor crews paid a heavy worth for his or her efforts in Hue. The Ontos’ skinny armor normally stopped small arms hearth and grenade fragments however provided little safety towards RPGs and B-40 rockets.
Cpl. Mario Tamez, a Patton tank commander who fought alongside Ontos crews in North Hue, estimated his platoon took greater than 63 RPG and B-40 rocket hits throughout their 9 days contained in the Citadel.
On Feb. 6, an Ontos moved ahead to blast an entry into the Provincial Headquarters. A B-40 rocket disabled it earlier than it may hearth. The following day, one other Ontos was knocked out whereas supporting 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. The driving force was killed as the remainder of the crew bailed out.
Ammunition was a continuing downside. Every Ontos carried solely 18 rounds. “Marines needed to maintain up their advance infrequently for lack of 90mm tank and 106mm Ontos ammunition,” in response to the MCVTHF.
Resupplying the automobiles by the contested streets was harmful and sluggish. Loaders had been normally focused. At instances, Marine Corps infantry had been tasked with changing the excessive losses suffered by Ontos crews.
By Feb. 25, the battle was over. The Marines had retaken Hue at the price of over 200 Individuals killed and greater than 1,500 wounded. ARVN forces misplaced over 400 killed and over 1,000 wounded.
Estimates of NVA lifeless vary from 5,000 to eight,000 whole. Fifty % of town was in ruins, and a lot of the inhabitants was left homeless, with 1000’s lifeless, wounded, or lacking.
The Factor’s Legacy
Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-35.3, the official doctrine for Navy Operations on Urbanized Terrain, makes use of Hue as its major case research. It outright states, “The Marines’ simplest weapons in the course of the battle had been the M48A1 Patton tank and the M-50 Ontos.”
Cheatham later referred to as the Ontos “as large a assist as any merchandise of substances we had that was not natural to the battalion.”
The Marine Corps lastly withdrew the Ontos from service in 1969. The automobile had by no means been used for its supposed goal. Designed to destroy Soviet tanks on European battlefields, it discovered its calling as an infantry assist weapon within the streets of Hue.
Whereas it proved its value in Hue, Marine Corps doctrine and leaders didn’t anticipate preventing comparable battles sooner or later. The Ontos had earned its place in Marine Corps historical past, however its transient service was carried out.
Of the 297 M50 automobiles produced, most had been scrapped shortly after the warfare. A number of automobiles now relaxation in museums all over the world. The Nationwide Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, has one on show, as does the Nationwide Navy Automobiles Museum in Dubois, Wyoming.
In Nicholas Warr’s “Part Line Inexperienced,” a firsthand account by a platoon commander with 1st Battalion, fifth Marines at Hue, Marine squaddies greeted every Ontos salvo with cheers of “Get some!”
The M50 Ontos was short-lived and noticed restricted fight throughout its service. At Hue, it proved a formidable force-multiplier within the bloody city fight. It stays probably the most distinctive automobiles the Marine Corps has ever fielded. For the Marines who fought in Hue and the NVA who confronted it, the Ontos is an unforgettable beast.
