Could The A-10 Warthog Have Won The 1965 Battle Of Ia Drang, Vietnam? | (WarGames 11) | DCS

this video is sponsored by wing-wing technology your ultimate flight sim hardware solution featuring the orion hotas current and future configurations hello valued viewers i hope you're all doing very well today we're answering a question that has been asked by mankind from the dawn of time how effective would the a-10 warthog have been in the vietnam war the battle we've chosen to look at is the battle of erdrang 1965. the format of today's video is we'll look at the battle as a whole then we'll look at the particular fight we're doing and then we'll go and answer the question so the battle of er slash ayadrang november 14 to 19 1965. the result both the americans and the north vietnamese claimed victory this would be a really good one it's one of the most famous battles of vietnam and had an ambiguous outcome american air cavalry pushed into the eardrang valley and were very quickly surrounded and attacked by the nba units involved so the united states had 1st battalion 7th cavalry 2nd battalion 7th cavalry as well as second battalion fifth cavalry also artillery which we're not going to be simulating today also two battalions of southern vietnamese forces giving a total of about 1 000 u.s air cavalry troops and about 900 southern vietnamese troops nva 33rd regiment 1st and 3rd battalions 66th regiment 7th 8th and 9th battalions about 2 and a half thousand troops and some small mortars and anti-aircraft guns not simulated this battle is noted for being incredibly bloody huge losses so united states air cav 237 killed 258 wounded four missing that's around 50 percent casualty rate and casualties on the vietnamese side 350 about 40 percent nva very ambiguous us claimed killed 1100 to 1700 which is a vast amount north vietnamese reported 550 killed and around 660 wounded so depending on who you believe anywhere between 50 and 80 casualty rate massive casualty rates on both sides the battle of eardrang valley was made up of several fights the fight we're going to be looking at is the defense of lz x-ray on the 15th of november by 7th cavalry i've used the following sources to set the battle up note probably most of the casualties of the nba were caused by airstrikes and again airstrikes is what we're going to be doing today they had super sabers dropping high explosive and napalm they had sky raiders they also had arc light attacks from b52s you can see grid square removal picture here our fight lz x-ray is there you see grid adjacent 17 and 18 removed on the 17th and the 18th by arclight let's have a look at our interpretation of the battle on the 15th so here we have our interpretation of lc x-ray based on the topography that i can find note i've had to twist everything clockwise about 50 degrees and therefore you see the north arrow is thus here is lz x-ray roughly about the same size and topography about right the road running down here is the dried riverbed that they were up against roughly in the right positions were the following companies c company here first battalion seventh cavalry a company here b company here b company here second battalion seventh and d company here first of the seventh the commander of this fight is hal moore he's positioned in the hq here the hostiles on the 15th were the 9th battalion 66th regiment attacking with around 500 nva troops we've got simulated here all 500 nva troops fully rendered fully ready to fight the actual positions i didn't really know so i've scattered them roughly along the southern and western front hooking around the north as they did in real life in terms of ranges i've put danger close at 600 feet in real life it would probably be a lot closer than the 600 feet but to make this doable 600 feet is danger close and up to about one mile away from the front lines each one of the fire teams that you can see is a 10-man fire team or small platoon and that's how you get your 500. note that not all of the seventh cav are modeled i've just modeled three per company and that's because we want to save on system resources obviously we've got to model 500 guys here so each one of these guys in the seventh cave is representing what about 30 men or something a company is about 100 and the reason they're there they're not actually going to be fighting but they're going to be there to act as test dummies to make sure that our bombs don't go in too close so if you kill one of these guys by accident you're killing about 30 u.s troops so bear that in mind like we said the real battle was fought by the companies of infantry keeping the nva at bay using artillery to take out the nva using super sabres dropping ordnance using skyraiders i think they even had to puff the magic dragon in there at some point and using arclight for further out strikes today we're going to see how effective one large flight of a10 warthogs would be with one run let's imagine they came from a long long way away so they only had time to do one run how many of these troops could we destroy the role play guys is we will fly from 40 miles away once we get within two miles of the position hal moore is going to send up five smoke signals where we've got trigger zone one two three four five showing the theoretical southern and western flank of the base those smokes will stay for three to five minutes only at which point you will not get any more smokes so it's important as the real aircraft had to do to learn the position of the base by eye as soon as you can and memorize it the smokes are representing the forward air controllers in the hq calling you onto target once you've zeroed in those positions with the smokes you may begin attacking your job at that point is to do one thing and one thing only kill as many nva troops as you possibly can and very importantly without killing any of the seventh air cav again for every one of these guys you take down you're taking about 30 or so real guys down if you do take one of these guys down it will lead to a serious reprimand and a red mark on your career later on and we will be able to track who does the friendly fire so be super careful and we'll talk about how we're going to try and avoid that later on guys you will have rough maps of the situation supplied to you as well so that you can study the maps all hostiles are hiding in trees you're never going to see any hostiles out in the open or very rarely so everything will be bombing based on the forward air commander's smoke signals once you've released your weapons you will rtb but you will not be able to come back because we're simulating you flying from pretty much the other side of vietnam it's kind of similar to an arc light or long range mission as well as that we're going to simulate some of the aircraft helicopters we're going to have mike here who's respawning in a fictitious space here five miles away he's going to stimulate lots of new troops coming in he'll be bringing his troops in in a uh-1 huey in and out and in and out from the northeast as they did in real life he is not going to play a part other than he's going to be another thing for you guys to worry about to not hit we must not hit the hueys by accident in terms of successful failure what we'll do is after the attack after the last attacks have finished we will count the score and see how many each of us have killed we'll add that up and then we'll know how effective the a-10s have been against the nva could we kill 50 could we get 100 could we kill all 500 i don't know from that we can extrapolate how effective in a defense type situation the a10s could have been with rough talk on to target okay guys let's look at today's combatants we've got one two three four five six eight nc twos and two a10 a's first we've got an a10a on hex now we've been discussing how we can do this mission best not just to kill baddies it's not just about killing baddies in a certain time it's about avoiding friendly losses as it would be in real life and if you go and read the books and watch the movies you'll see there were friendly fires so we've gone for hex in an a10a he's taking a very sparse loadout three sorry four pods of hydro rockets high explosive and six pinpoint optically guided uh mavericks agm-65 here and he's got the gau-8 avenger 30 mike mike cannon next viper a10a different loadout four pods of hydro rockets again but for the bombs he's gone for the cpu87 now this is something that wasn't available in 1965 and said they were dropping ideally napalm nasty stuff um or high explosive now we've got something i don't wanna say more humane but maybe more effective a cpu 87 with 202 bomblets per canister designed literally for taking down troops he's got five of those and we'll see how they do next a10c2 uh is me i've got a hell of a load of rockets uh 90 or so rockets again hydra unguided high explosive i've gone for a different loadout i've gone for seven cpu 97s these have 40 bomblets total they're actually semi intelligent munitions they're heat seeking and i'm being today's test donkey to see if we can get the heat seeking bomblets to attack infantry it might work and it might not so we're going to see how that works either way i'm going to be dropping them nowhere near the front line because of the spread and the danger close andres a10c2 he's got a really interesting loadout he knows what he's doing obviously he's got four times gb 54 bravo laser j down 500 pounds blast frag again got to keep him way away from the front line because the kill radius of a bomb like this is hundreds of feet for infantry he's got six mavericks optically guided and two cpu 87 anti-infantry with about 400 bomblets total pimp six rocket pods actually guided hydras but probably won't guide them we'll see how he goes cbu87s which we've talked about he's got one gpu-12 similar to the gbu-54 and a teapot and two cpu87s i should say as well valley do this as per real life there was no air threat at this point armchair pilots with a hell of a bunch of rockets non-guided high explosive and all of the cbu87s anti-infantry cj is in today loads of cb 87's and those rockets uh everyone has the gun with high explosive rounds today simba will be leading us today he's got an a10 c2 he has got a 90 year old rockets cbu a7s and interestingly he's gone for um some ripple bombing of high drag mark 82 500 pounders again not to be used anywhere near the front line but again if you've got a blast radius for several hundred feet that could potentially take out a lot of nva so we'll see how that goes and we've just had it added in ricky bobby he wants a hell of a load of rockets and loads of high drag low altitude 500 pounders so we're going to take that again critical not to put explosive bombs near the front line guys because you killed all of hal helmhole's guys and then we're in for a real looking that's it in terms of predictions and tactics i'll say my bit first guys we're going to get in as a group we're going to orbit we're going to wait for more smoke signals which will only last for a few minutes so memorize them get them marked down in your map whatever your tactic is use your low blast area weapons for the front lines as you can see here and make sure that you can see where the front lines are in relation to the smoke so don't go in any further than the smoke use your high blast radio stuff for you know a thousand feet and further back and we're going all the way back about a mile and a half at the most any questions on tactics or anything to add guys uh you know about how to set the height of function on the cpu so you can reduce their blast radius i don't you just set it up once we're in there i'll walk you through it real quick watch out then on the left hand side you see hof height of function you can change that i set mine to 500 right uh load or load symmetrical uh that one's just a single since it's in the middle so you do load and when you're doing the other ones that are you know copied on each wing you do load symmetrical roger roger right my height function adjusted okay god willing we are going to get there do some damage and not kill any friendlies because then they will be shouting can we oh and even if you do something weird and crash please don't rage quit because it gets rid of the score and then makes the whole waste of a day simba take us out sir uh go slow cause it'll take us a while to take off and rude big old cure hogs look at us getting airborne without crashing well down boys so ready for that air show take off uh if you want you're not responding so don't mess it up uh 80 throttle and uh everyone try and catch up with symbol wimba does anyone know which one is simba i guess that's the first thing and we have flares or a wing waggle there he is there he is moving to formation okay uh you can go not not wet but you can step it up a little bit together ninety percent simba some of us will be more dragging than you say copy ninety percent so are we passing by it on our left roger guys how close we roughly simba i believe it's off our left wing right cap's uh taking the lead and break formation get ready for combat guys remember sensible shooting once you've identified the bounds friendly fire must not happen at any point kept going for a bit of altitude i'm looking for target now i think i see the drive river beds huey you should be taking the other side of this class last mound yep looking tally tally tally i've got e-p-l-r-s um a house position moore's position which is a bit unrealistic but that's the way it goes guys if you do die or run out of equipment you can become a jtac at hal's hq and called on all in attacks that's something you can do you'll see them as crosses on the ground okay smokes are up guys that triggers yourself uh your south and west attacks make use of your maps that have been provided are we going to get called on or note me go straight in i'm running in now along the southern front guys the southern front see what this a10 can do [Music] remember no ordinance on or in those smokes run again buckets away damage but no kills okay okay recording kills now don't get too low as well we don't want to be hit by small arms fire even if we are tough some uh rolling in 200 yards from the line good rockets by someone main thing is to memorize that topography guys i'm joe running in the cpus roger good cpuing good we're done oh my sake someone just bombed hal moore's base how old could you do that someone just put bombs in helmholtz hq the only thing you did weren't supposed to do oh oh give up well we've killed the commander of blue four so we've lost the mission but i guess we carry on or was that you crashing the kiwi was that you crashed me kiwi mike unfortunately oh it was just a huey crashing oh thank god carry on guys coast alarm can we get another one mike [Music] you didn't take more out did you no you didn't i see them all right i'm gonna take rockets in on the front line roger i'm not getting any kills from the front line anymore i wonder if we've killed them all i had multiple kills along the south cbs rogers extraordinary from south yeah biz on both of you and i will be five hundred multiple kills multiple kills yes nice i just killed loads guys right i'm happy top scorer is armchair wow you're on fire man well done yeah good work keep it going keep it going but just keep it safe cap winchester rockets going in with bombs smokes are out okay the smokes are down guys it's now all about learning your topography and your memory if you're unsure follow someone else in or hold fire oh i've lost the target i have lost the frigging target without the smokes tree line about a hundred yards in yeah got it got it running in oh the lag guys the lag so many cpu is gonna go from the north come on server hold up baby hold up one two three cbu's out [Music] drops were good drops were clean no kills no kill yes kills get some baby oh look at all the beautiful kills cb 97 is doing a good job girls can you tell how many cpus you've got left armchairs one chest around cvs rockets have you got gone yes sir take time line up those targets we've got time destroy the cluster up beautiful are you attacking the west or the south side uh west side roger no east side story east side story and dropping in one two three four five i think that's all my bombs out now got one more get ready for big bomb shacks and associated lag there they go oh look at that that's a lot killed guys i got them right on their face just outside danger zone as well i'll take it i will take it [Music] fuel er oh my god the fuel is low how much fuel you guys got got two thousand three how much is two thousand in an eighteen is a lot isn't it doesn't matter yeah just reading it wrong then you're not reading it right i desperately want the fps to clear up if you're tracking from the west make sure you're on the outside of that uh road simulating a dry dry riverbed oh my gum paper's not working right all right check out the whole cluster of them there it is we're done guns not firing god damn it always something wrong in this aeroplane right what could i possibly have done wrong this time that sorry it's working i didn't have the gun pack turned on i thought i could do it without a gun pack and i couldn't you you just have to change to a different cross good job all right let's go again roger you're not allowed to take off again so once you're down there stay on the runway and do not log out come on a little bit of lags just a little bit lag that's all it is guys throw me up one kills with the gun kills with the gun nice i'll take it to anybody gci can see what's left last i check looking at f10 there's a lot it's all still there it's all still there kill check we've got wow 65 kills cap how about that still compared to what i thought we would get it shows how hard this is you can't see those targets it's incredibly difficult and just imagine how hard it would be flying a difficult to fly plane like a super saver shows what a hard job they had to do in real life are they still in southwestern tree line they are they are they're in the southwest i'm on the west now i'm finding the west uh slightly more lucrative now now that you know what this cloud really doesn't help either basically all the pilot is doing is operating off of topography and right to remarks to be able to stop at that point they're not looking for individual soldiers i don't think uh especially then the sights are too perfect carefully winchester heading home that was hardcore guys make sure you don't leave the server do not leave the server whatever happens yes kills with my last run jesus a cbu just went right in front of my face and almost hit me that was scary right i'm gonna get snapshot the kills now before we uh in case we crash the server or something that is the kill so far it's nothing like i thought it would be and it shows the real difficulty of doing this it's one chester or two big see back there guys x's winchester rtb those are actually kills remember if we've damaged their life bar they're casualties as well all these guys with damaged life bars but they're not kills but you know that guy's not going to be fighting anymore so they will be casualties and we'll have to go and add them all up we will uh yeah we'll be doing more a10 in the future because it's just a very useful plane because as long as you've got air superiority let me do spirit like this it's a very useful plane it feels like a different plane when it's got no load on it doesn't it feels like a fight look at this i'm a fighter i'm a fighter see we made 400 knots rip the wings off there we are two more kills hold on so your base altitude oops i've left breaking a little bit late drink these is that you coming over the mountaintops yep now that's aerodynamic braking boys altitude altitude and it's like a war bird landed at 90 knots that dope head coming in on final fantasy like a big glider all right i'll park at the off end of the runway please guys welcome back mr pimp build another cluster hacks on a five-mile final all right guys i'm going to start adding up the scores as you guys come back actual full kills are 66 plus 12 174 that's not too bad 174 that's full of kills now let's see who is combat ineffective and as a casualty which is all that really matters anyone with red health basically is a combat casualty one two three 33 are counted there so i'll be able to get out of your way feedly be free and it's gonna look sexy and thing cat welcome back boys come and park we use 9a10 c's and a's total hostile kills as in completely killed and wiped off the map were all of those added together which is 174 there were 33 critically wounded guys which are guys in red which are basically laying you know prone and can't get up there are 70 wounded which are kind of about half life which i don't know if they're considered casualties of not so casualties of the 9th battalion 66 regiment mva were either 207 or 277 depending on what level of wounded that you declare one way or another that's about 40 or 50 percent of the battalion ineffective is that a success or not i don't know we're just here to get the numbers i suppose as well as that we did take out one unit of c company i think it was on the south i think doing the maths that is 30 men were taken out so we killed 174 baddies but we accidentally killed about 30 goodies which probably the real ratios might not have been that actually dissimilar to the friendly fire i don't know let me know what you think my guys what do you think about that do you think the a10 would have been a game changer based on those stats um or do you think it was a failure how do you feel about that i think the a10 itself would have been a well forced multiplier in my hands oh my god i yeah i need to do a lot better i only got 30 25 kills something like that i think in the hands of a real-life a10 pilot they would have been able to wipe everyone out it's not necessarily true though guys the reason i say that is because we've got nothing to aim for i don't like you i mean in terms of who got a lot of kills i think it was almost blind luck i never aimed for anything i aimed for a sort of groups of trees sort of based on smoke positions whether those bombs actually hit anything i mean an a10 pilot if he can see the baddies he's going to kill him all because that's what he's trained to do you know we i don't know you guys i almost never drive this plane but in terms of dropping bombs as probably in real life they were just dropping bombs on areas based on their forward air controller that obviously was laggy as well but it was hard to hit things wasn't it i found it very hard to hit things that was the biggest problem was trying to find the targets after the smokes were gone too how close dare you go to that riverbed how you know i'm in real life i suppose you get training you know put this bomb only this close to to friendly units how close can you put your bombs to them i don't know it's nice so if i was a jtac what i would be calling out was landmarks right so i see we have like a c-shaped kind of tree line around them right so we knew we know where north is as a pilot we know where east west south is based on that relative function so all we have to do is put our our mind our mind's eye in the center of that valley and say wood line north 100 meters inside woodline and it's a pretty easy thing for a pilot to see 100 or 200 yards inside of a wood line drop a bomb there they're not looking for targets they're just looking for specific uh areas where they're being called out well interesting thing about that damp is nothing's changed that's still being done well not now but you know i was gonna say in afghanistan that's pretty much how they're doing it wasn't it that is absolutely how they still do it there would also probably be more methods of marking targets like smoke mortars yeah that's a good point yeah good point yeah and when we call it when we call in the uh uh was it the seven line or nine line it's a nine line call for fire uh go ahead and look that up cap if you want to you can do that and see yeah i don't know about them but the there's oh it's difficult isn't it guys so you'd have a full air controller on the front lines calling in the fire for each group of hostiles presumably then i want bombs over here based on this nightmare yeah and those guys are like some of the most highly trained guys as far as calling in an accurate fight i'm not mistaking cap uh they used to have a they used to have a cessna a guy owner says now drawing now so a guy on a light aircraft throwing out smokes and then then putting napalm on that smoke that's interesting isn't it that's kind of scary for this for the for the uh that's the cessna pilot because i mean even an ak could take that thing out also what stops the nva throwing the same color smoke grenade into the friendliest positions that's why i always worry about smoke so when you call for fire you identify the smoke color you see as the person attacking and then confirm that with the person who deployed it okay and then if it's the same smoke color if it's the same smoke color and i see two different smokes i see red smoke in woodline or red smoke in the clearing and they they would clarify red smoke uh woodline okay well great guys a great bear in mind you know none of this was practiced none of this is trained for uh it didn't go too badly let me know your thoughts valid viewers because you are the um the smartest guys out there um how effective based on that did you think the a-10 would be and let us know other ways that in vietnam they would have marked targets for us and maybe we'll revisit at some point uh maybe some more systematic forward air controlling if we could identify how that was done i think that would be interesting i hope you enjoyed that and i'll see you later

Channel: Grim Reapers

Views: 77,302

Keywords: DCS, DCS World, IL-2, Sturmovik, Arma 3, GR

Id: ipiGGACJMT8

Length: 39min 16sec (2356 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022