The Ia Drang Battlefield

The Ia Drang Battlefield The Ia Drang is a river in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It is part of a river system draining into the Mekong River in Cambodia from the highlands around Pleiku. The river valley itself is flat and wide at around 6 miles (10 km) across. The valley floor sits around 200m (650 ft) above sea level. The mountains on either side rise dramatically from the valley floor to about 500m (1640 ft), with the peaks around 800m (2600 ft). From the air, the valley appears to be a sea of trees interspersed with clearings that could be used as landing zones.

However, the view from the ground can be quite different. While there are areas of dense tropical forest, a lot of the valley is covered in more open woods with little undergrowth. In the dry season the stream beds are dry (although in the Monsoon they frequently burst their banks). The valley is not entirely flat. There are plenty of knolls, rises, and even small hills scattered about. This makes for an interesting variety of terrain to model. Clearings Easily the most important terrain feature in any battle featuring the Air Cavalry is a clearing. Without a clearing, they cannot land. You need to arrange your terrain to have a large irregular clearing 16” to 24” by 8” to 16” (40cm to 60cm by 20cm to 40cm) in a suitable location for the landing zone. You should also have one or two smaller clearings that can be used as alternate landing zones.

Tropical Forest The tropical forest is often quite dense and even tanks had difficulty making their way through the worst areas. Use your normal woods (rated as Difficult Going) for these. The trees are mostly tall and spreading, so any trees except pines and firs (and even them at a pinch) would be perfect.   Open Woods Much of the rest of the area is covered in open woods. During the playtesting and terrain development for Ia Drang we utilised two different methods for representing open woods on the battlefield.

The first method simply declares the entire table, except where there is other terrain, to be open woods. This requires you to show your clearings as a patch of terrain. You can model a clearing base, use a patch of yellowish felt to represent the dry grass, or outline the edges of the clearing with trees and bushes, or a combination of these as suits your tastes and terrain collection. Scatter trees and scrub bases around the rest of the table to show that the whole area is lightly wooded. The second method is shown in the accompanying photographs. Place your woods and forests as normal, but then surround each with a belt of scrub and open woods. This extends 4”/10cm from the woods and can be shown on the table by placing patches of elephant grass, bamboo, scrub, or trees around the woods.

Make sure you have your woods far enough from the clearings that there is room for the belt of open woods as well. Whichever way you show your open woods, use the Open Woods rules on page 246 of the Flames Of War rulebook for them. Open Woods are like normal woods, except that trees are dispersed enough that teams inside can see and be seen at 12”/30cm and fire artillery bombardments from inside it or over it unhindered. The general lack of undergrowth means that Vietnamese Open Woods should probably be rated as Cross-country Easy Going, rather than Difficult Going.

Dry Stream Bed A dry stream bed ran along the western part of the landing zone. Moore used it to establish his defensive line as it offered cover from enemy fire. This is where a good portion of the fighting took place. Treat the dry stream bed as Difficult Going that offers Concealment and Bulletproof Cover from incoming shooting to teams in it.

Chu Pong Massif The Chu Pong Massif provided both the rationale and the backdrop for the battle of Ia Drang. As it turned out, the fighting only took place on a low spur of the mountain, so you could represent it with a ridge or hill in the corner of the table or leave it out altogether, but it is such a visual feature that we just had to have it on our battlefield! The lower slopes of the mountain and the finger or spur running towards the clearing are much the same as the surrounding terrain and are treated as Open Woods. The steeper slopes are almost impassable and are treated as Very Difficult Going.

Knolls & Low Rises One knoll in particular played an important part in the battle, sheltering the cut-off platoon for most of the battle. There were other knolls and rises scattered across the battlefield. These are easily represented by low, flat hills. The knolls tend to have more undergrowth than the flatter parts, so treat them as woods or forests and add some tree or scrub bases to represent this.

Visuals You can find Joe Galloway’s excellent photographs of the battlefield taken during and after the battle on both the We Were Soldiers (http://www.weweresoldiers.net/campaign.htm ) and LZ X-ray (http://www.lzxray.com/index.htm ) websites. The movie We Were Soldiers is also a great resource as they spent a lot of effort to make the set look like the battlefield.