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An Australian sapper inspects a Viet Cong tunnel discovered during Operation Crimp, South Vietnam 1966.
Episode 2485 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature Operation Crimp in the Ho Bo Woods. Professor Kenneth R. Olson’s excellent paper titled, Saigon River Valley: A Navigation, Trade, Mitigation, Invasion, Liberation, and Unification Pathway has been featured in several previous episodes of this podcast.
In his paper, Professor Olson discussed the soils of the area between Saigon and Tay Ninh. In describing those soils, he devoted many lines to the tunnels in that soil that were utilized by the VC and NVA to combat the Americans.
According to the Professor, Four major efforts were made by the US Army to locate and destroy these tunnels. These included Operation Crimp, a search and destroy mission, which began in 1966, and a geological and soil survey approach was used to detect NVA and VC tunnels.
Operation Crimp took place on January 8–14, 1966. It was also known as the Battle of the Ho Bo Woods and was a joint US-Australian military operation during the Vietnam War, which took place 12 miles north of Cu Chi in Binh Duong Province, South Vietnam. The operation targeted a key Viet Cong headquarters that was believed to be concealed underground, and involved two brigades under the command of the US 1st Infantry Division, including the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1 RAR) which was attached to the US 173rd Airborne Brigade.
Bill Giles served in the Australian 1RAR and was in the Operation. He stated this about the event, Operation Crimp was a very successful offensive action – The complex was searched; cleared of the enemy where found; and, thousands of pages of documents of intelligence value were seized. Numerous weapons and ammunition of various calibers from rifles to heavy machine guns were captured over a period of seven days.
Listen to episode 2485 and discover more about Operation Crimp in the Ho Bo Woods.
