The South China Sea (14 page)

We now know that the operation had been planned for some time. An official history of the Chinese Navy published in Beijing in 1987 tells us that the order came from the very top: it was issued by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1973. The man they put in charge was Deng Xiaoping, later to be the country's de facto leader but who, at that time, had only just been recalled to the capital after six years in political disgrace. Preparations were kept highly secret but we know from a declassified US military document later written by Gerald Kosh that the Chinese military began training for some kind of operation around September 1973. American intelligence had a source in the Chinese port of Beihai who reported a tightening of security around this time – although the connection to what subsequently happened would only be made later. From mid-December onwards, hundreds of Chinese commandos were observed leaving the port each day on six fishing trawlers and returning each evening. This continued for around ten days. They were ready for action by early January.
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As Vietnamese made preparations for the Tet festival, news reached Saigon of strange boats appearing around the Paracels. A Vietnamese Navy ship was despatched to find out what was happening. On Monday, 14 January the high command's fears were confirmed. Two Chinese trawlers lay at anchor 300 metres off Robert Island. Suddenly the navy had to switch gear. More used to supporting army manoeuvres on land or patrolling the waterways of the Mekong Delta, it now faced the possibility of a battle at sea. At the same time the admirals couldn't rule out the chance that the Chinese operation was merely a distraction to allow Communist forces to make a breakthrough on land.

It was clear that alarm was spreading. On Tuesday, 15 January, President Thieu himself made a special visit to the Navy HQ in Danang.
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And sometime that day Jerry Scott of the American Consulate in Danang contacted
the regional naval commander, his good friend Commodore Ho Van Ky Thoai, with a special request. Could one of his staff, a Regional Liaison Officer called Gerald Kosh, board one of the ships about to depart for the Paracels? It was quickly agreed and Kosh joined the crew of HQ–16.
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The ship was one of seven former US Coastguard cutters that had been given to Vietnam in the early 1970s. Although built in the Second World War, their 5-inch guns made them the most heavily armed vessels in the Vietnamese Navy.

The next day, HQ–16 delivered 14 members of the Vietnamese SEAL naval commando unit to guard Robert Island. But when they reached Drummond and Duncan islands they discovered they were too late. Chinese troops were already onshore with support vessels nearby. All this was urgently reported back to Danang. That evening Vietnam's foreign minister publicly condemned the Chinese occupation of the islands and reserved the right to take all appropriate means to deal with the situation.
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Behind the scenes there was panic. The navy's third highest-ranking officer, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Kiem Do, was urging a swift and determined response. ‘If we act now, we can retake the islands,’ he recalls urging his overall commander, Admiral Tran Van Chon.
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Instead, in Kiem's account, Chon dithered, demanding proof of Vietnam's historical claims to the islands. While the hours slipped away Kiem was reduced to searching the navy's library and filing cabinets to find the appropriate documents. At the same time, through his official American liaison officer, Kiem formally requested the US 7th Fleet to form an interdiction line to block the Chinese Navy from reaching the islands. Nothing was done. The Vietnamese were on their own.

On Thursday, 17 January, 15 SEALS were landed on Money Island. Of the seven islands in the Crescent group, three were now occupied by Vietnamese forces and two by Chinese. Three more ships were hurriedly despatched to the Paracels: HQ–5 (another ex-US Coastguard cutter), HQ–4 (the former USS
Forster
, a destroyer armed with 3-inch guns) and HQ–10 (the former minesweeper USS
Serene
, now a patrol craft). By the morning of Friday, 18 January, all four were on station in the islands and the flotilla's commander, Captain Ha Van Ngac, decided to stage a show of strength and attempt to land SEALS on Duncan Island. While four
other Chinese ships stood by, two Chinese corvettes (Russian-built submarine chasers constructed in the 1950s) manoeuvred in front. Using signal lamps, they started a historical argument in English. ‘These islands belong to China since the Ming Dynasty. Nobody can deny,’ they flashed. The Vietnamese replied with the less erudite ‘please leave our territorial waters immediately’. This went on for several minutes until the Chinese corvettes stopped the history lesson and began a game of ‘chicken’, steaming into the path of the Vietnamese vessels. Ngac decided not to play and aborted the landing. First round to the Chinese.

At 8 p.m. that Friday, Kosh was called across to the HQ–5 to meet Ngac, along with a group of Vietnamese Army combat engineers who'd also been sent out with the flotilla. Ngac told him that since combat was imminent all the non-sailors should go ashore. Kosh and the engineers were delivered to Pattle Island, along with some provisions and ten boxes of Capstan cigarettes, to wait out the battle with the meteorologists and their guards. While they were bedding down for the night in the weather station, a coded message was being transmitted to Ngac from Danang. The order was contradictory: repossess Duncan Island peacefully. Quite how the four-ship flotilla and its small complement of SEALS were going to persuade the larger fleet of Chinese vessels, and their entrenched ground forces, to depart was not specified. Ngac decided to make a landing the following morning, Saturday, 19 January. At 8 a.m., 20 SEALS climbed down into two inflatables and sped towards the shore with a mission to talk to the Chinese and ask them to leave. At 8.29 a.m. they beached. As they waded through the surf, the Chinese opened fire, killing one of the SEALS. A second man was killed while trying to retrieve the body. The SEALS retreated.

Ngac radioed for orders. In Navy HQ in Saigon, Kiem Do looked for Admiral Chon. He'd disappeared. An assistant told him Chon had boarded a flight to Danang. Kiem called up Chon's deputy in Danang. He'd disappeared too: gone to the airport to pick up Chon. At the very moment when the fate of the islands hung in the balance, the South Vietnamese Navy's two most senior officers had both made themselves unavailable. In the end, it was Kiem himself who had to give the order to shoot. He also put in a second request for assistance from the US 7th Fleet. Again, nothing came of it.

So, at 10.29 a.m., two hours after the SEALS had been killed, the four Vietnamese ships opened fire on the six Chinese vessels. They were just a mile away from each other. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the forward gun on HQ–4 wasn't working and the ship was quickly hit by one of the Chinese corvettes. HQ–5 seriously damaged the other corvette but was then hit itself. Then, 15 minutes later, HQ–5 managed to accidentally hit HQ–16. The shell smashed into the engine room below the waterline. HQ–16 quickly lost electrical power and started listing 20 degrees. Then HQ–5 was hit again, losing its gun turret and radio. Finally, HQ–10, the smallest vessel of the four, was hit by a Chinese rocket-propelled grenade, which destroyed its bridge and killed the captain. Within half an hour, although they'd seriously damaged two of the Chinese ships, the Vietnamese flotilla was totally out of action. HQ–10 sank and the other three limped back to Danang. By any independent assessment the encounter was disastrous but the sailors returned to a heroes’ welcome. Vietnamese media had been told that they'd sunk two Chinese ships and seen off a much larger Chinese fleet. It was spun as a good news story, just in time for the Tet celebrations.

Meanwhile Gerald Kosh, and the others on the three remaining Vietnamese-controlled islands, could only await their fate. The two groups of SEALS on Money and Robert were battle-hardened veterans. On Pattle, the meteorologists and their guards were not. Only Kosh knew what combat felt like. They didn't have long to wait. Kosh watched the professionalism of the Chinese invasion with admiration, particularly in comparison with the incompetence of the Vietnamese defence. He watched as they prepared to land on Robert Island, two miles away. At 9 a.m., three Chinese gunboats took up positions offshore and an hour later started to systematically shell the island. Half an hour after that, two fishing trawlers arrived. Their numbers revealed them to be the same boats that had been observed training out of Beihai a month before.

At least 100 soldiers then appeared on the deck of each trawler and offloaded dark grey rubber rafts. As Kosh sat in his vantage point, viewing the activity through his binoculars, six to eight soldiers climbed down rope ladders into each raft. By the time they were done, 30 rafts had assumed an attack formation and paddled off. As they passed over the coral reef, one of the rafts fired a red flare and the ships stopped their
shelling and moved off towards Pattle Island. The landing force carried on towards the beach, remaining in close formation. The SEALS opened fire but didn't cause any casualties. Outnumbered more than ten to one, it wasn't long before they surrendered. Unknown to Kosh, the 15 SEALS on Money Island had worked out what was coming. They took to the water before they could be captured. After nine days drifting for 200 miles on a rubber raft, fishermen eventually rescued them 35 miles off the Vietnamese coast.

Kosh's respect for the Chinese assault became even stronger when they turned their attention to Pattle. Again, the island was swept with artillery. Kosh and the Vietnamese had to take shelter around the weather station for nearly an hour as the shells came down. Fortunately, none of them was hit. Then two more trawlers arrived and another set of rafts landed another 200 or so Chinese troops. Kosh remained hidden while observing how they systematically swept across the island with each unit focused on particular objectives. Within an hour the operation was complete. Communist China's first foreign seaborne invasion had been successful.

For Kosh, though, the situation looked dark. He was going to have a hard time explaining why he was in the Paracels. The Chinese were bound to assume he was a spy and treat him accordingly. Two CIA officers, John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, shot down while trying to re-supply anti-Communist rebels in China in 1952, had only just been released after spending 20 years in jail. He told the Chinese he was a civilian, an observer, and he'd only come to the islands to assess what the engineers were planning to do. They transferred him to Hainan and then to the Chinese mainland.

Meanwhile, in both Vietnam and the US, officials scrambled to find out what had happened to him. Aware of the urgency of the situation, Henry Kissinger invited the acting Chinese ‘deputy ambassador’ in Washington for a chat on 23 January. According to the declassified minutes of the meeting, Kosh was the first item on the agenda. Kissinger made plain that the US took no position at all on the rights and wrongs of the Paracels dispute but urged that Kosh be released very soon, ‘and that would certainly defuse the situation as far as the United States is concerned’, he told the quasi-ambassador.
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Kosh spent almost a week in jail before Kissinger's urging had the desired effect. On 29 January he walked across the border into Hong Kong (then a British colony) with four of the Vietnamese prisoners. US officials went to great lengths to keep questions at bay. Journalists were told he had hepatitis and needed to be quarantined. He was helicoptered to the airport, flown immediately to Clark airbase in the Philippines and then back to Philadelphia Naval Hospital in the US. He gave no interviews. Instead he seems to have put his energies into drafting an assessment of the Chinese assault for the army's Special Research Detachment, a report that was declassified 20 years later.

Kosh was far from beaten. Just a month after arriving at the Naval Hospital, he was back at his post in Vietnam. Then, after his assignment ended there, he worked as a civilian contractor with the UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai and then in other overseas jobs where, presumably, he maintained his reporting activities. But tragically for him and his family, Gerald Kosh was not to enjoy a long and happy retirement full of the world's best war stories. The man who had dedicated his life to the service of his country and who had, in a way, fought the war in Vietnam almost to its very end would eventually become a casualty of it. During those long-range patrols as a Green Beret he had been soaked in Agent Orange – the herbicide sprayed by American planes in order to destroy the jungle vegetation and expose the enemy hiding within it. Contaminated with dioxin, Agent Orange was highly toxic. In 2002, at the age of 56, Gerald Kosh was killed by chemicals sprayed from an American plane 30 years before.

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Mao Zedong's vision for the islands came to nothing. No oil has yet been found around the Paracels and their strategic value remains unproven. The occupation of the Crescent group certainly didn't prevent the Soviet Navy using the harbour at Cam Ranh Bay on the Vietnamese coast after Hanoi had won the war, just as Beijing had feared. Tiny bases such as those on Woody and Pattle islands are almost impossible to defend anyway. That was the Royal Navy's view as far back as the 1940s and it's been the US Navy's view since. But such doubts haven't stopped further occupations. In the wake of the Paracels invasion, the RVN government rushed to reinforce
its garrisons in the Spratlys. At least 120 troops were despatched and five islands occupied. But China made no moves in that direction. In fact it did the opposite and de-escalated the conflict, releasing all the prisoners from the Paracels within a few weeks and silencing the nationalist rhetoric. But the Communist North Vietnamese leadership (which had been publicly silent about the battle) was convinced that Beijing intended to take over more islands. In April 1975, three weeks before the fall of Saigon, Hanoi seized six of the Spratly Islands from the RVN to ensure they didn't fall into Chinese hands. The lieutenant in charge of the South Vietnamese garrison on Southwest Cay (known to Vietnamese as Dao Song Tu Tay) chose to swim the 3 kilometres to the Philippine-occupied Northeast Cay (known to Filipinos as Parola Island) rather than be captured.