On the 17th of August, 1966, the Viet Cong mortared the Australian base at Nui Dat. 24 men wounded, tents burning. The message was clear. This province belongs to us.  24 hours later, 108 Australians from D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, walked into a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province and met somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 of them.

Three and a half hours of fighting in monsoon rain, visibility 50 m. By nightfall, 18 Australians were dead. 245 Viet Cong lay on the battlefield. Intelligence later assessed the real number between 500 and 800. The difference between annihilation and the most lopsided infantry victory of Australia’s Vietnam War came down to one New Zealand artillery officer, a mud-caked map, and 24 guns firing so close to friendly positions that the shells were landing 30 m from the men they were trying to save.

The 1st Australian Task Force had been at Nui Dat for 3 months. Two infantry battalions, 5 RAR and 6 RAR, one artillery regiment, and a perimeter carved out of rubber and jungle in Phuoc Tuy Province. Beyond the wire, the 5th Viet Cong Division moved freely. Australian signals intelligence had been tracking the 275th VC Main Force Regiment’s radio since late July.

 Direction-finding plots showed it closing on Nui Dat at roughly 1 km per day. By the 13th of August, it was practically on the doorstep. But knowledge of that picture was restricted to Brigadier Oliver David Jackson, two intelligence officers, one hospitalized, one about to be evacuated with hepatitis, and [music] the Task Force Operations Officer.

Neither battalion commander was cleared. Major Harry Smith, commanding D company 6 RAR, was sent east on the 18th of August with no idea what was waiting for him. At 02:43 on the 17th, the VC had announced themselves. A 22-minute bombardment of Nui Dat with 82-mm mortars and 75-mm recoilless rifles. 24 Australians wounded, tents shredded, vehicles burning.

B company swept the firing positions that day. D company took over the search at midday on the 18th, a routine follow-up, nothing more. Back at base, a Colonel Joy and Little Patti concert was setting up for the afternoon show. D company’s 108 men entered the long tan rubber plantation at 15:15. They had no idea the 275th Regiment, reinforced by D445 Provincial Mobile Battalion, over 1,500 men under the direction of Colonel Nguyen Thanh Hong of the 5th VC Division, was already in the trees. But the men Smith had, and

the fire support behind them, would turn what should have been an annihilation into the defining Australian battle of the Vietnam War. Four men made that possible. Major Harry Smith, Hobart-born Malayan Emergency veteran with 2 RAR, a hard-nosed professional whose fire support call would enter Australian military folklore.

 Drop 50, danger close. He would spend the next 50 years fighting for his men’s honors. The decision-maker. Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, 11 Platoon, 21 years old from Tamworth, New South Wales, a national serviceman commanding 28 men. Sharp would direct artillery fire standing upright in monsoon rain to observe the fall of shot.

 He would be dead within 30 minutes of first contact, a sniper round through the neck. Warrant Officer Class 2 Jack Kirby, Company sergeant major, Lewisham, age 31, another Malaya veteran. The man who moved through fire distributing ammunition, silenced an enemy machine gun at 50 m,  and told a rattled soldier, “Get a grip on yourself, son.

 You’re paid to kill these people, and here’s your chance to earn your money.” And Captain Maurice Stanley of 161 Battery, Royal New Zealand Artillery, the forward observer with a mud-caked map and a radio controlling 24 guns. His job was to watch high explosive shells to within 50 m of his own company without killing them. Stanley is the hinge of everything that follows.

Behind them sat the firepower that would decide the battle. Three batteries [music] of six 105 mm pack howitzers, New Zealand 161 Battery, Australian 103 and 105 field batteries, plus six American 155 mm self-propelled howitzers from A Battery, second of the 35th Artillery. 24 guns total. They would sustain six to eight rounds per minute per gun, two above the official intense rate, until clerks and drivers were pulled off their jobs and onto the gun line just to keep feeding the breeches.

More than 4,000 rounds in 3 and 1/2 hours. More than 60 fire missions called by one New Zealander in the mud. On the morning of the 19th of August, D Company would walk back into that rubber and find 11 of Sharp’s men exactly where they fell, facing the enemy, rifles forward. Two [music] were still alive. That story is coming.

At 1540, Sergeant Bob Buick’s lead section from 11 Platoon hit a six-to-eight-man VC patrol on a track through the rubber.  One enemy killed, an AK-47 captured. 28 minutes later, the war changed.  At 16:08, 11 Platoon’s forward section walked into heavy machine gun fire from at least two positions.

Four Australians killed in the opening burst. A monsoon broke at the same moment. Rain so heavy that visibility collapsed to 50 m. White latex bled from bullet holes in rubber trees. DC tracer rounds tore through the gray-green gloom. Smith would later describe them as supersonic fireflies. Sharp called for artillery.

 Stanley brought 161 battery onto the target within 4 minutes. By 16:22, all 24 guns were firing. A fire mission regiment order that put every barrel at Nui Dat onto a grid reference in the rubber east of the base. At approximately 16:33, Sharp, still standing to observe the fall of shot, was hit in the neck and killed.

 He was 21. Sergeant Buick took over. Moments later, 11 Platoon’s radio aerial was shot away. What followed was 2 hours of close-range fighting in monsoon rain with a platoon cut to 10 men still able to fight against a regiment trying to overrun them from three sides. Buick, desperate, requested fire directly onto his own position.

Stanley professionally ignored the request. He walked the rounds in to 50 m instead, then 30. One man on a radio, threading 4,000 lb of high explosive per minute between his own soldiers and the encircling enemy at a distance shorter than a football pitch. That geometry, that judgment sustained under fire for over 2 hours, is the spine of the Battle of Long Tan.

By 1800, D Company was running out of ammunition. Two number nine squadron RAAF UH-1B Iroquois, captained by Flight Lieutenant Frank Riley and Flight Lieutenant Cliff Dole, launched from Vung Tau into torrential rain. Treetop height, near zero visibility. Group Captain Peter Raw initially refused permission to fly.

Brigadier Jackson overruled him. The possible loss of a couple of helicopters hardly seemed to matter against the likely loss of an entire company of 100 men. The aircraft kicked out ammunition boxes wrapped in blankets.  They landed beside Kirby. The final act came at 1825. Three troop, first APC squadron under Lieutenant Adrian Roberts, 10 M113 armored personnel carriers, only three fitted with gun shields, carrying Captain Charles Mollison’s A Company 6 RAR, crossed the flooded Suoi Da Bong River. Most of the APCs swam the creek.

On the far side, they drove straight into a VC blocking force forming up behind D Company. Corporal Peter Clements, manning an unshielded .50 caliber on the left flank, was mortally wounded. Corporal John Carter’s .50 jammed. He killed a recoilless rifle crew with an Owen submachine gun. The APCs reached D Company at approximately 1855.

Smith’s account is the epitaph of the battle. All firing ceased as though the tap was turned off. The 275th Regiment was commanded by Senior Captain Nguyen Toi Bong, later Lieutenant General and Deputy Defense Minister of Vietnam. Colonel Hong, directing the operation from 5th Division Headquarters, told Australian historian Ian McNeill in 1988, “How can you claim a victory when you allowed yourselves to walk into a trap that we had set?” Most modern scholarship agrees.

 The 5th division intended an ambush, but D Company’s contact came before the trap was fully set. The casualty dispute remains unresolved. Vietnamese published histories record only 30 to 47 killed, but Brigadier Ernie Chamberlain, an Australian linguist intelligence officer and Vietnamese language specialist, reconstructed losses from a captured 275th Regiment Quartermaster’s notebook seized during Operation Coburg in February 1968.

It showed the regiment dropping roughly 852 men in strength between the 9th and 20th of August. Chamberlain separately documented 190 named dead from Vietnamese death certificates. The most honest reckoning came from Nguyen Minh Ninh, former vice commander of D445, on Australia’s 60 Minutes in 2006. Tactically and militarily, you won, but politically, we won.

And not everything worked. Smith was sent into the rubber without the signals intelligence picture that showed a regiment closing on his position. Jackson held the APC relief force for over an hour, weighing the possibility that Long Tan was a faint designed to strip Nui Dat’s defenses. The 274th Regiment was suspected en route to to the west.

11 Platoon’s antenna was shot away. 10 Platoon’s radio was destroyed by a round that passed through the operator’s shoulder. Private William Yank Akell ran a replacement set forward through enemy fire. He received a mention in dispatches. On the morning of the 19th of August, D Company walked back into the rubber.

 11 of Sharp’s 28 men lay where they had fallen, facing the enemy, rifles forward.  Private Jim Richmond, shot twice through the chest, was found alive after 12 hours. So was Private Barry Miller. 13 of the 18 Australians killed at Long Tan were from 11 platoon. 11 of the 18 dead were national servicemen.

Their average age was 21. The Long Tan Cross, built by 6 RAR’s Assault Pioneer Platoon under Sergeant Allan McLean, was helicoptered onto the battle site on the 3rd anniversary, the 18th of August, 1969. It remains one of only two memorials to foreign forces officially permitted in Vietnam. In 1987, Prime Minister Bob Hawke designated the 18th of August as Vietnam Veterans Day.

Smith spent 50 years campaigning for his men’s honors. His Star of Gallantry came in 2008. D Company’s unit citation followed in 2009. A final tranche of gallantry awards was granted in 2016. The Defence Honours Tribunal declined a posthumous Victoria Cross for Jack Kirby. 108 men, 3 and 1/2 hours, a rubber plantation in the rain.

The Viet Cong brought a regiment. The Australians brought 24 guns and the men who would not break. Kirby was killed 5 months later, misdirected New Zealand artillery during a routine patrol.  He was 31. His Victoria Cross was never awarded, but every 18th of August they remember.