Compared to today’s electronic situation displays it was primitive, but at least it displayed virtually the entire situation in Southeast Asia in a single graphic presentation. The brief would consist first of an operations overview in which the young officer would not be permitted to read from a piece of paper. Using a pointer he would walk around the chart and with the pointer indicate the ships or units that he wished to discuss covering such events as downed aircraft, a crash at sea, or a ship with an engineering casualty. Initially the briefers were terrified at the thought of not having a piece of paper to read. But when they were required as part of their duty to maintain the graphic display throughout the day as changes occurred, they grew familiar with the status of the forces in the fleet and became articulate in describing the current situation. The operations brief was followed by an intelligence rundown, and for this purpose a large screen had been rigged with a viewgraph to be used as the intelligence briefer wished. This was also available for any of the briefers. I insisted that there be no fancy slides. My point was it was time-consuming and manpower-extravagant to make fancy graphics with photographs when they would be used only once or twice. Instead I required the briefer to either write or sketch out what he wanted presented with a grease pencil on a clear sheet of acetate. One of my main objections to prepared slides is that they usually took eighteen to twenty-four hours to prepare, and by that time, they were often out of date in the fast-moving panorama of the war.
COMMAND RELATIONSHIPS
The command relationships among all of the military components engaged in Southeast Asia were extraordinarily complex and had to be meticulously defined and observed. To the uninitiated it might seem to be a superficial hierarchy to protect the turf of the several services and the many flag commands involved. However, a detailed command and control concept had to be put in place because of the disparate components involved, some of which were not amenable to the military communications, command, and control doctrine. There were the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, foreign allies (South Vietnam), the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Strategic Air Command (SAC was separate from the Air Force). Furthermore, we were engaged in more than a single war: the Cold War with the Soviet Union (involving NATO and nuclear readiness), the guerrilla war with the Vietcong, the limited war against North Vietnam, and the threat of a war with the People’s Republic of China, which was shooting down U.S. military aircraft that strayed into Chinese airspace.
The operational chain of command for combat activities within the Republic of Vietnam emanated from the National Command Authority, the president and the secretary of defense; to commander in chief, Pacific, the theater commander; and then to Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, who further delegated operational authority to his subordinate service commanders. In the case of naval forces in country, these were under commander, U.S. Naval Forces Vietnam. They were mainly military assistance people and the riverine forces. There were no naval major combatants assigned to Naval Forces Vietnam.
CARRIER WARFARE
By far, the most important single contribution of the U.S. Navy to the conflict in Southeast Asia in 1972 was the carriers. Except for advisory people, U.S. ground troops were being or had been withdrawn from combat in Vietnam. U.S. combat involvement was now limited to the U.S. air components: the Air Force, Navy, Marines, and SAC. The predominant scope of the naval air effort can be measured by the fact that over the period of the conflict, more than half of the combat sorties against North Vietnam were flown by naval aircraft.
The aircraft carriers and their task forces came under a different chain of command, originating with the NCA through CinCPac but then via Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet; Commander, Seventh Fleet; and Commander, Task Force 77, the Carrier Striking Forces. The rationale for this separate chain of command was that Commander, Seventh Fleet had broad area responsibilities throughout the western Pacific, which included the command of major naval forces in employment plans and war plans covering a wide array of contingencies outside of the Vietnam conflict, as well as the responsibility for the planning and the conduct of a general war with the Soviet Union, including the fleet’s nuclear capability. The doctrine of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had for years included a provision for such a chain of command for naval forces, in consideration of their mobile character and the wide range of their responsibilities from contingency operations to general war plans. Under the JCS doctrine, naval forces in the Seventh Fleet operated “in support” of USMACV.
Task Force 77 included all of the carriers and major combatants assigned to the carriers in a support role. The major surface combatants — cruisers, destroyers, and frigates — were transferred from their administrative commands in the continental U.S. (e.g. Cruiser Force Atlantic or Pacific Fleet) to Task Force 75, Surface Warfare Force, Seventh Fleet. These units were operationally assigned to Task Force 77 in order to constitute the carrier task groups that were the basic tactical entities for carrier strike operations. A typical carrier task group would consist of one carrier, several destroyers, and three or four frigates. Occasionally a cruiser would be assigned to a carrier task group when it was not committed to gunfire support or other independent operations.
The major surface combatants rotated in and out of the carrier task groups to other duties such as gunfire support (shore bombardment) and the escort of the underway replenishment groups. The carrier task groups always remained about the same in numbers and types, but the identity of the surface combatants in the group was constantly changing.
I had delegated operational control of the carrier task group to Commander, Task Force 77 (an aviation vice admiral) and his staff, who did most of the tactical planning for the carrier air operations. In particular, Commander, TF 77 was responsible for the coordination of carrier air operations with land-based tactical air operations of U.S. Air Force units based in both Vietnam and Thailand. For this purpose, TF 77 had a permanent representative at the USMACV headquarters in Saigon, usually a senior Navy captain. Commander, TF 77, and his staff were always embarked in a carrier. There were no operational or administrative spaces ashore. As the carriers rotated in and out of the Seventh Fleet on six- or seven-month deployments, the commander was continually shifting his flag. This also meant that when the commander’s carrier flagship went into port after thirty days on the line for a week of maintenance, replenishment, and R&R, the commander and his staff were absent from the Gulf of Tonkin.
To cover these absences, the position of Commander, Task Group 77.0 was created. This was an aviation two-star flag officer, one of the several carrier division commanders constantly being rotated to the Seventh Fleet on six- or seven-month deployments from Naval Air Forces Atlantic and Pacific, respectively, based in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego. CTG 77.0 was always on the scene in the Gulf of Tonkin and was assigned operational control of all of the carrier task groups in the gulf. The carrier task groups in the Seventh Fleet — and there could be as many as six — were assigned designations of CTG 77.1 through CTG 77.6.