“Shoot ‘Em Up”: Operation Lion’s Den, 27 August 1972

“Another experience as Command of Seventh Fleet was the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, probably due to some urging by our admirals back in Washington, decided that this was a great opportunity to show the capabilities of our ships to provide gunfire support.” Leaning back against his chair with the first button of his finely-pressed collared shirt undone, the spry ninety-year-old Admiral James Lemuel “Jim” Holloway, III (ret.) smiled as he spoke with historians to record his experiences leading Operation Lion’s Den during the war in Vietnam.[1]

Discussing the context surrounding the shore bombardment mission that took place on the night of 27 August 1972, he recalled his disbelief when he “got a message from the Commander in Chief of the Pacific saying, ‘In a week or so, as part of Operation Linebacker II,’—which Henry Kissinger and the President . . . said [was] going to bring the North Vietnamese to their knees—‘we would like to see a gunfire strike against Haiphong Harbor installations.’”[2] Haiphong Harbor was arguably the most important port in North Vietnam because it received almost 85 percent of all North Vietnamese imports and it was the primary location for war supplies delivered by Soviet and Chinese cargo ships. Indeed, until 1972, the U.S. avoided attacking the harbor directly because of the frequent presence of those Chinese and Soviet ships. Any aggression exhibited toward these vessels, even if unintentional, could have escalated the war.

In May of 1972, as the temperate spring shifted to a sticky miserable summer, Navy A-6s laid 1,000-pound MK-52 magnetic mines while A-7s dropped 500-pound MK-36 acoustic mines along the shoreline of Haiphong Harbor as part of Operation Pocket Money. Dropped by parachute, the mines lurked silently along the 10-meter curve of the harbor until a passing ship caused their detonation.[3] Both Pocket Money and the later surface incursion into the harbor were integral Navy contributions to Operation Linebacker.

North Vietnamese Army (NVA) defenses at Haiphong included air search and detection radars, surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, and fire control direction centers. Unconcerned by the danger imposed by North Vietnamese shore batteries, officers of the Seventh Fleet knew their adversary’s weapons were field artillery pieces that were incapable of tracking a moving target, let alone a target operating under the cover of night.[4] Thus, an American surface operation against Haiphong would not run great risks. Holloway summarized the rationale of Pacific Fleet Commander (COMPACFLT) Bernard A. Clarey to oral historians: “It would be great if we could show the world that our ships can go in there and shoot ‘em up.” COMPACFLT’s argument went, “It’s not so much what we do, it’s how we do it and doing it with cruisers and destroyers is very important.”[5] For Clarey and Holloway, the operation would demonstrate to the North Vietnamese that the U.S. Navy could operate in their territorial waters with relative impunity.

The purpose of this new operation was to knock out North Vietnamese coastal defenses and SAM facilities in the Cat Ba archipelago, coined the “Lion’s Den” by Holloway. U.S. aerial photographic intelligence indicated that fast-paced Soviet-manufactured P-6 torpedo patrol (PT) boats had been absent from the archipelago for several months. Coastal artillery, therefore, served as “the only real threat to the bombardment group.”[6] As the participants of the raid soon witnessed, that was not entirely true.
 
          According to the operational summary authored by the National Military Command Center (NMCC), filed seven days after the raid, Task Unit 77.1.2—composed of cruisers USS Newport News (CA 148) and USS Providence (CLG 6) and destroyers USS Rowan (DD 782) and USS Robison (DDG 12)—struck several targets in the Do Son-Haiphong area on the night of August 27, 1972. These targets included “AAA [antiaircraft artillery] sites, coastal defense positions, the Do Son barracks, the Cat Ba vehicle storage area, and POL [petroleum, oil, and lubricants] storage areas.” The North Vietnamese managed to engage the task force with approximately 295 rounds from almost two dozen shore batteries, according the NMCC summary. Enemy fire bracketed Newport News, showering the decks with shrapnel. Miraculously, the vessel took no serious damage and each ship of the task unit reported no injuries.[7] A member of the Rowan crew, third-class signalman Dana Perkins, manned his GQ station on the signal bridge during the raid. He described the rain of NV shells to Holloway thusly:

At one time I remember counting about twenty-two shore batteries rapid firing at the squadron. The shells were dropping all around us, leaving thunderous columns of white spray as they splashed into the ocean. Some of the shells were proximity and burst in the air. I remember one shell passed over the Rowan and burst in the air, causing the shrapnel to hit the side of the ship. I think it put some heavy-duty dents on the starboard side of the ship along the upper outer passageway. Luckily no one was hit!

[8]
 
The ships engaged in this operation “stayed well outside the mined areas” as the destroyers’ five-inch guns had a maximum range of five miles and the cruisers’ six-inch guns had a range of 12 to 15 miles. A Navy spokesperson in Saigon reported to Reuters that U.S. ships came between nine and ten miles of the shore. Navy officials further confided that “they knew of no special reason for the attack by the two cruisers and two destroyers except that they hit valid military targets.”[9]

As the warships withdrew from the area, they detected several fast-moving surface returns, tracked the contacts as they emerged from the Bach Long Vi (Grand Norway Island), and immediately opened fire.[10] Newport News quickly destroyed one of the North Vietnamese 85-foot PT boats with a direct hit and Rowan set another aflame, which a Navy attack plane later destroyed, the Express News reported three days later.[11] It remains unclear if three or four PT boats engaged the task unit, but the NV survivors nonetheless retired without inflicting any damage. An after action report, delivered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff immediately after the raid, listed three while the Rowan command history, written eight months after the engagement, reported four.[12]

Holloway, then a Vice Admiral and Seventh Fleet commander, sailed with Newport News on the night of the raid and announced to all present within earshot that the operation was a “daring raid . . . proving the Navy’s capability to strike the enemy anywhere it pleases at any time.”[13] Holloway later provided a more muted analysis of Lion’s Den in his 2007 publication of Aircraft Carriers at War. As he lamented that no photographic gun-damage assessment was possible immediately following the bombardment, Holloway counted three secondary explosions from the shoreline as the task unit withdrew from the harbor. Surely “the pumping of 710 rounds of 5-inch, 6-inch, and 8-inch high-explosive projectiles into a crowded area of lucrative military and logistics installations” in thirty-three minutes “must have done psychological as well as military damage to the North Vietnamese war effort.”[14]

Although Task Unit 77.1.2 disestablished, its role in incapacitating Haiphong Harbor, the port through which the majority of supplies routed inland, cannot be understated. Operation Lion’s Den was a rare naval offensive in hostile North Vietnamese waters at a time when the broad American policy in Vietnam trended toward de-escalation. Although there was a substantial drawdown of troops—only 37,700 at the time of the raid—the bombardment was also a demonstration to the North Vietnamese and their allies that the U.S. continued to support South Vietnam.[15] Such a show-of-force operation put the enemy logistics center at Haiphong Harbor out of commission in the immediate while also reducing North Vietnamese naval capability in the long-term.