I got to be involved in one more amphibious landing before we returned to the USA. This one was a little bit further south. It looked like someone poked a finger at the map and said “We need another airfield about here”.
The place did not have a prior name. It was just an open sandy beach with a place suitable for an airfield just a short distance further inland. There is a story, probably true, that when the planning staff selected the site someone mentioned that it wasn’t named on the map. General Krulak, the marine commander, marked it with the first two characters of his name in Chinese to settle the argument. In Vietnamese it was pronounced Chu Lai.
We loaded in Okinawa. As a combat cargo ship they filled us with drummed gasoline, bombs, and pierced steel Marston matting to be used for making the airstrip. The only combat equipment we carried for this landing was a handful of marine anti-tank vehicles called “Ontos”. Ontos was about the size of a jeep, and carried a battery of 6 105mm recoil-less rifles. It was tracked, and I remember watching one of them racing down the sandy beach while I was observing from the bridge of the ship.
The beach area was a confused scene. Everyone wanted to unload everything at once so we could begin to prepare to go home. These pictures give a bit of an idea of what was happening on the beach.
The pictures give some idea of what it was like to unload cargo without trucks, cranes, or similar equipment. The most used thing was muscle power.
Despite all the minor problems Chu Lai was the biggest US amphibious operation since the Inchon landings in Korea in 1950.
Wetherhorn 