'We were as surprised as the enemy were'

The 53-tonne Centurion tanks were smashing their way through the jungle when there was a small ‘puff’ of white smoke, just above ground level.

For a split second, Bruce Cameron was reminded of what can happen when a tank crushes a rock. But then he heard the bang.

“An anti-tank rocket was fired at us, and we suddenly found ourselves facing the enemy,” Bruce said.

“They’d pinned 5 Platoon down, and we’d headed off into the jungle, knowing there was no alternative other than to bash our way through.

“But then we were fired at, and we were as surprised as the enemy were.

“It turned out it was an enormous position. And we were suddenly right in the middle of it.”

It was June 1971, and Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Cameron MC was a young second lieutenant, serving as troop commander with C Squadron, 1st Armoured Regiment, in Vietnam.

He was only 22 years old when the battle of Long Khanh broke out during Operation Overlord.

One of Australia’s last major operations in Vietnam, Overlord was named after the Allied invasion of Normandy.

It began on 5 June 1971, after intelligence suggested the North Vietnamese Army were using a buffer zone on the border of Phuoc Tuy and Long Khanh provinces to train and equip troops.

Australian forces were deployed north, near the Courtenay Rubber Plantation, and into Long Khanh to prevent the enemy from gaining a foothold in Phuoc Tuy Province.

Some of the Australians were worried that the operation’s timing would be compromised, because it was named after the Second World War D-Day landings. They had been scheduled to start on 5 June 1944, but had to be delayed by a day because of bad weather. The fact that the areas of operation for Overlord were named after three Normandy beachheads – Gold, Juno and Omaha – only heightened their concerns. Those concerns seemed to be confirmed when documents, captured in an enemy position only ten kilometres from Overlord’s objective, included part of a book with the story of the Normandy invasion.

After two days of patrolling, B Company, 3RAR, found what they thought was the main enemy position, just across the border in Long Khanh province, late on the afternoon of 6 June 1971.

Early the next morning, 5 Platoon began an assault on the enemy positions.

The platoon hadn’t gone far when they were met by a hail of automatic fire from at least four enemy positions. The Australians were pinned down, unable to move, and had taken several casualties.

Trapped on the edge of what turned out to be a heavily defended and cleverly concealed bunker system, they called for artillery and air support.

“We were in a cut-off position about 1,000 metres away,” Bruce said.

“They’d come across signs of enemy activity, and had heard voices the night before, but it was too late to put in an attack.

“The idea was that the artillery would pound the position during the night, and early in the morning, and then the platoon would move forward and investigate, expecting it to be abandoned. 

“But it wasn’t abandoned. The enemy was still there, and they pinned the platoon down.”

The Centurions had already started up and were preparing to move when the platoon commander, Lieutenant Graham Kells, radioed Bruce.

“For Christ’s sake, mate!” he yelled. “Get down here! We need you!’”

The tanks immediately set off, knowing that there was no alternative other than to bash their way through the jungle.

Then came the bang, and with it, the realisation that the jungle had suddenly changed. There were small patches of cleared vegetation, tracks, and cut saplings.

“We’d discovered all these bunkers, but we had no idea at the time how extensive the bunker system was, or that it was an incredibly big position,” he said.

“It turned out that this position, instead of being confined to where the infantry was, was about a thousand metres, east to west, and seven hundred metres, north to south.

“No one had any idea at the time how extensive the enemy position really was, and it turned out we’d been only fifty to 100 metres from occupied bunkers throughout the previous night.

“It was actually a massive training base, and it would have been surprising if the enemy had not taken advantage of the narrow strip of jungle that had shielded them from us.

“They had assault courses and kitchens and lecture theatres and thatched huts, and I remember seeing this and thinking that it was like something out of World War Two. 

“We engaged the defensive positions, but we didn’t have enough ammunition to keep shooting into all the bunkers – there were just too many of them.

“The best way of neutralising them was to fire a solid shot round into them, and then the percussion effect of that knocks them out, but we didn’t have enough rounds to do that to all of the bunkers.

“And then the bunkers wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the tanks.

“The trick is to drive up on to them, and do a neutral turn, and then the force of the track, moving and rotating, collapses the bunker, but these bunkers were built to withstand B-52 strikes, so they wouldn’t collapse under the 53-tonne weight of the tank.

 “We couldn’t drive past the bunkers without making sure there was nobody in them who was going to pop up behind us, so I said, ‘Okay, we’ll just throw grenades into the openings so that when we go through we’ll know they’ve been neutralised.’

“But nobody had told us about the grenades.

“We’d started to receive ammunition supplies from America, rather than Australia, and the Americans had a little circlip – a safety circlip – that they put on their grenades.

“Australia was apparently offered this device as well, but it was five cents extra or something, so Australia said, ‘No, we won’t have any circlips.’

“When you pull the pin on an Australian grenade, you pull the pin, you drop it, and it goes off. But when you’ve got an American grenade, and you pull the pin, and you drop it, it doesn’t go off because it’s got this circlip on it.

“But we don’t know it has these circlips on it – nobody had told us.

“Fortunately, my troop sergeant had been in the infantry, and he knew about these circlips, so he was able to explain to us why these American grenades weren’t going off.

“But that was a bit of a shock. First, we didn’t have enough rounds, then the bunkers wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the tank, and now the grenades aren’t going off.”

He couldn’t believe it when he heard an American pilot’s voice come through over the radio.

“This helicopter gunship turned up out of the blue, and here’s this American saying to us, ‘I’ve got Cobra gunships, and I’ve got all this ordnance. We’ve got all these rockets, and machine gun ammunition, and other things. Where do you want it?’

“I said, ‘50 metres in front,’ and that was it – down it came.

“It was just amazing. We had all these bunkers in front of us, and we’d just found out the grenades weren’t working, and this voice says, ‘Where do you want it?’

“It was music to our ears.

“He was able to see our tanks, and the direction we were all facing, because we were all lined up, line abreast, to attack.

“And he knew where the infantry were, so he was able to put it all in front of us.

“And that was very, very timely.

“We were very lucky.

“The enemy was as surprised as we were, because the fighting was going on, up where the infantry were, and all of a sudden these Centurion tanks were attacking from the opposite end.

“But they were very brave.

“They were firing their RPGs up into the trees above our turrets to try and get the shrapnel to come down onto the tanks and wound the crews.

“Then, on one occasion, this company commander in a North Vietnamese Army regiment stood up with his AK-47, and shot at the front of our tank, which was an incredibly brave thing to do.

“He fired a long burst, and one of the bullets hit the commander’s machine gun.

“My face was right behind it, so I had lots of shrapnel going back into my face.

“I swore, and I knew that swearing on air was a no-no, so I said, ‘Oh, apologies!’

“It was just instinctive, because of our training. You know you shouldn’t swear on the radio, and that the troop commander should set the example, even though you’ve got lots of shrapnel hitting you in your face.”

Despite his wounds, Bruce pressed on. It wasn’t until after the battle that he realised the North Vietnamese company commander had been trying to distract the tank crew.

“He was trying to take our attention away from an RPG team that was going around behind us,” Bruce said.

“They’d fired an RPG at the back of the tank, which would have gone through easily, because it’s the weakest part of the tank, but we were lucky.

“They were within the minimum firing distance, so the rocket didn’t arm.

“Of course, we didn’t know any of this until after the battle, when we got out of the tank, and we noticed this explosive, all splattered against the turret.

“And then we found the turbine from the RPG. The impact from the rocket blew off our searchlight.

“I knew we’d lost that during the battle, but I didn’t know about the RPG.

“It was only when we found its explosive, and the turbine, that we realised somebody had snuck around the back while this company commander was shooting at us.

“This all happened towards the later part of the battle, and we were ordered to hold, to get an ammunition supply.

“Whilst we were holding, the engineers asked us to back off so they could examine the bunker we were on top of.

“As the tank backed off, the driver called out to the rest of the crew to make sure we were all okay.

“The company commander who had shot at the front of the vehicle had been under one of the tank tracks. The butt of his AK-47 had been torn away by canister pellets.

“We’d moved forward while being fired at, and had no idea what had happened.

“The rounds he had fired were all hollow point, and that’s why they’d splattered so much, into lots of little tiny pieces of shrapnel.

“I’ve still got a piece of shrapnel in my face, just above a tooth, but it’s not worth taking out.”

By the end of the day, Australian troops had endured more than eight hours of intense fighting, including the loss of an Australian Iroquois helicopter, shot down during a resupply mission. Three Australians were killed and numerous others wounded; a further seven Australians were killed five days later.

Bruce Cameron was awarded a Military Cross. His determined leadership and swift action had forced the enemy’s withdrawal from the forward bunkers and contributed greatly to the defeat of the entire enemy force. 

More than 100 bunkers were discovered, and in the following days, the bunker system was explored and subsequently destroyed. One bunker produced a find that would prove to be of great interest to the tank crews – a photocopied page from an old Boys’ Own Journal, or the like, depicting a cross section of a Centurion tank. Arrows with labels in Vietnamese highlighted the different crew positions and how ammunition was stowed above the hull floor.

Today, one of the tanks Bruce commanded in Vietnam in on display at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

He has also written a two-volume box set, Canister! On! FIRE!: Australian Tank Operations in Vietnam, in recognition of the bravery of the tank crews who served there.

“You don’t dwell on things that otherwise might be a bit upsetting,” he said.

“But it’s the bravery of the guys, and the difference that they made, the difference that tank firepower made, that is a story which needs to be told.

“Overlord was one of the greatest examples of infantry/tank cooperation during the Vietnam War, with the infantry pinned down, and the tanks coming in from the other end, attacking at a time when the enemy had no expectation we were there, let alone that we had big guns.

“We were incredibly lucky, and that was because of the element of surprise.

“We were almost as surprised as the enemy, but we had bigger guns, and the shock effect that comes with tanks suddenly running into your forward bunkers, and your defended position … That shock can carry the day, and that’s what happened at Overlord.

“But next time round it was the complete opposite, and we went from six tanks, down to four tanks, down to two.”

Read about Operation Hermit Park here.