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Category: War
Code named Operation Urgent Fury, the United States invasion of Grenada is perceived by some as a minor military engagement during the Cold War. However, the conflict was more important than many people might realize.
What may have also escaped the notice of most Americans was the unexpected aggressiveness that the Cubans displayed with their armored vehicles, resulting in the only American armored engagement in the Western Hemisphere.
The Case for War
“On the small island of Grenada at the southern end of the Caribbean chain, the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building an airfield with a 10,000-foot runway. Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?
“The Caribbean is a very important passageway for our international commerce and military lines of communication.
More than half of all America’s oil imports now pass through the Caribbean. The rapid build-up of Grenada’s military potential is unrelated to any conceivable threat to this island country of under 110,000 people, and totally at odds with the pattern of other Eastern Caribbean States, most of which are unarmed.
“The Soviet and Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as power projection into the region, and it is in this important economic and strategic area that we are trying to help the governments of El Salvadore, Costa Rica, Honduras and others in their struggles for democracy against guerrillas supported through Cuba and Nicaragua.”
— President Ronald Reagan, in a nationally televised speech on March 23, 1983.
Selwyn Strachan, the Grenadian Minister of Mobilization stated publicly in 1981: “that Cuba would eventually use the new airport to supply their troops fighting in Africa, and the Soviets would also find the runway useful because of its strategic location astride the sea lanes and oil transport routes…”
Enemy at the Ready
The U.S. invasion of Grenada had just begun, and it appeared that the assault troops were already in trouble. The Lockheed AC-130 gunships sent to support the United States Army Rangers landing were equipped with low-light TV sensors and these immediately showed that the Point Salines runway had been blocked with boulders, construction vehicles, and a tangle of pipes and cables to prevent aircraft from landing.
The decision was made to drop the Rangers from low altitude, and they jumped from the lead Lockheed MC-130 planes at just 500 feet. Nearly 700 Rangers were floating down in their parachutes while they were engaged by small arms fire from Cuban troops were clearly ready for their arrival. Several ZU-23-2 twin-barreled 23mm anti-aircraft (AA) guns and a ZPU-4 quadruple 14.5mm AA gun, positioned above the Point Salines runway were firing on the MC-130 transports.
The first group of Rangers were scattered along the length of the 10,000-foot runway and while the men struggled to get out of their parachutes, two Soviet-made BTR-60 armored personnel carriers (APCs) appeared at the end of the runway and quickly began to close on the American airhead. The KPV heavy machine guns mounted in the BTRs began to chatter, and soon 14.5mm rounds were splattering off the tarmac among the American troops.
As the People’s Revolutionary Army BTR-60s quickly closed the range, it may have appeared that the Rangers’ drop zone would be overrun.
However, the American Rangers were tougher than the communists expected. When the armored vehicles reached the mid-point of the runway, the BTRs were suddenly struck with hollow-charge anti-tank rounds. Fast-acting Rangers set up M67 recoilless rifles and immediately scored hits with 90mm HEAT rounds. This anti-tank miracle came just in time, as the sky above was filled with the descending parachutes of the next wave of Rangers.
Supported by two AC-130 gunships circling overhead, the second group of Rangers immediately assaulted the 23mm AA guns positions atop a hill near Point Salines airfield. Within 10 minutes, the AA guns were silent too. Most of the American transports had been hit at least once by their fire. This is how the invasion of Grenada began on the morning of October 25, 1983.
American Forces Engaged from Beirut to Grenada
Operation Urgent Fury was already fast and furious as America’s Rapid Deployment Force, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army Delta Force, and the U.S. Navy SEALs, moved to secure the island from revolutionary Grenadian and Cuban communist forces.
President Reagan’s concerns about the communist forces stationed there grew to a point where he directed US forces to Grenada to guarantee the safety of 600 American medical students on the island. The action in Grenada came just two days after the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S.M.C. barracks in Beirut, Lebanon where a suicide truck bomb killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers. The Cold War was quickly escalating to a boiling point.
Order of Battle
Communist forces on Grenada, comprised of the Grenadian “People’s Revolutionary Army” plus more than 700 Cubans (many posing as “engineers”) had no tanks, but they did have other armory vehicles including eight BTR-60 APCs and a pair of BRDM-2 armored cars. The BRDM-2 amphibious armored scout car was armed with a KPVT 14.5mm machine gun and a PKT 7.62mm co-axial machine gun. Its welded steel armor was 14mm at its thickest (in the hull nose), with the turret frontal armor at 10mm.
The BTR-60 armored personnel carrier had the same armament. The BTR-60’s thickest armor is on its turret front at 10mm, and protection on the hull front is 9mm.
American troops were alerted to the presence of wheeled armored fighting vehicles on the island, and the assault troops arrived on Grenada with M72 LAW rockets, M47 Dragon AT missiles, and the venerable M67 90mm recoilless rifle. All would see action during the three-day battle for the island.
Armored Counterattack at Point Salines
By mid-afternoon on the first day, the communist troops regrouped and counter-attacked the American positions near the Point Salines International Airport. Three BTR-60s led the attack, which drove into the Ranger platoon’s forward positions. The Rangers responded with fire from their rifles, M60 machine guns, LAWs, and a 90mm recoilless rifle.
The first two BTRs were hit, with the lead vehicle struck in the turret mantlet. The second BTR crashed into its rear, and both were knocked out of the fight. The third BTR-60 attempted to retreat but was hit in the rear.
An AC-130 gunship was called to the scene and finished off the third BTR.
A Rough Time for SEAL Team 6
During their raid on Radio Free Grenada, SEAL Team 6 fell afoul of a Grenadian force supported by a BRDM-2 armored car.
Caught without anti-tank weapons, the SEALs were forced to retreat after destroying the radio transmitter. They escaped into the ocean and swam to safety aboard the USS Caron (DD-970), a Spruance-class destroyer supporting the combat operations offshore.
During the SEAL’s October 25th mission to rescue Governor Gerald Scoon at his mansion in St. George, the teams again came up against Grenadian armor.
After the SEALs reached the Governor’s residence without opposition, BTR-60s quickly appeared and trapped the operators in the mansion — hammering the building with their 14.5mm KPVT machine guns. Despite several airstrikes the SEALs remained trapped for nearly 24 hours.
U.S. Marines with M60 Tanks
Meanwhile, the Leathernecks of the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit, diverted from a deployment to Lebanon, and landed four M60 main battle tanks at Grand Mal Bay. By the next morning, they had advanced to the Governor’s mansion to relieve the SEALs and rescued Governor Scoon.
Soon after, the fast-moving Marine tankers engaged and knocked out a BRDM-2.
After three days, communist resistance evaporated, and the armored engagements of Grenada were over. They were unique as the only time U.S. forces have engaged enemy armor in this hemisphere.
While the mission was a success, it was not bloodless. Nineteen American troops were killed on Grenada and nearly 120 were wounded. Communist forces lost 5 dead with about 350 wounded. Of the eight enemy armored vehicles on Grenada, Americans destroyed seven of them.
This was the price to halt Soviet and Cuban communist expansion in the Caribbean. The American students on the island were returned safely to the U.S.A.
BTR-60: Unexpected Adversary
While intelligence reports noted the existence of BTR-60 armored personnel carriers on the island, the planners of Urgent Fury certainly did not expect them to be used aggressively (by their Cuban crews) to contest the Rangers’ airhead. Consequently, American troops found themselves in a pitched battle against enemy armored vehicles within the Western Hemisphere.
To provide some background on the BTR-60, the following information comes from a US Army evaluation of the BTR-60 written in 1989:
Versatility, lethality, and deployability of the BTR-60
The BTR is fairly lethal for a wheeled vehicle. It has two of the Soviet Union’s most durable machine guns mounted in the turret. The most powerful of the two is the 14.5mm KPVT. It has an effective range of 2000 meters and can fire at the rate of 600 rounds a minute. The armor-piercing round of the 14.5mm KPVT can penetrate 32mm of armor at a range of 500 meters and 20mm at 1000 meters…
The other machine gun, mounted coaxially, is the 7.62mm PKT. It has an effective range of 1500 meters and can fire 650 rounds per minute. It can penetrate 8mm of armor with its armor-piercing round fired from 500 meters…The BTR has stowage space for two AGS-17 automatic grenade launchers. The AGS-17 can also be mounted on the outside of the vehicle and fired from the inside…
Looking Back on the Danger
Despite the careful preparations made for the attack on Grenada, the aggressive use of the BTR-60 and BRDM-2 armored vehicles could have created a disaster in the landing zone at Point Salines.
Lt. Col. George A. Crocker of the 82nd Airborne Division wrote in Grenada Remembered: A Perspective, A Narrative Essay on Operation Urgent Fury:
“The 82nd has been criticized for being slow to move out of the airhead, and too deliberate in expanding the operational area to take the strategic plum of St George’s city, but let’s review from the worms-eye view:
-The Rangers had incurred unexpected opposition.
-The Frequente arms cache had revealed large amounts of weapons, enough to give credence to some intelligence reports of several thousand enemy.
-The airhead had been counterattacked by armored vehicles.
-The Rangers had lost a gun Jeep and crew to an ambush just east of the airfield.
A Personal Perspective
Operation Urgent Fury has often been passed off as a lesser military engagement, without any particular significance. But the island location of America’s only armored clash in the Western Hemisphere is much more important than just the answer to an AFV trivia question.
The Soviets and their Cuban partners were preparing for major operations in Central and South America, with Grenada as an important base. In the opinion of many, they had to be stopped.
Despite several tense moments, particularly at the beginning of the operation, the communist threat in Grenada was removed. Most of America never heard much about it. Maybe that is for the best, and we can talk about it in detail now, more than forty years later.
I recently lost a dear friend who was with the Marines on Grenada during Urgent Fury. It was just one of many violent places he visited in his long career in the U.S.M.C. We talked about Grenada a couple of times and he’d always say something like: “Hell Lem, we barely had time to break a sweat. It wasn’t much fun, but we’ve seen a lot worse.” True enough, I suppose, but America still needs to know about the sacrifices made there. And to Major Mac, I say farewell and thanks for all the good times. Semper Fi!
I have a great friend named Sario who captured some of the first Kalashnikov rifles encountered in Vietnam. Sario just happened to be a Green Beret. While today he’s a fit, vibrant, jovial man in his 80s, back in 1965, he was a Special Forces advisor running patrols with the Montagnards against the Viet Cong during his first of three combat tours downrange.
On one particularly memorable outing, Sario’s patrol was ambushed. His vicious tribesmen fought their way out of the kill zone and overran the enemy positions. Along the way, they picked up a pair of brand new AK-47 rifles.
AK’s are background clutter nowadays, most anywhere in hot zones where people are trying to kill each other. Back in 1965, however, they were still pretty exotic. So much so that General Westmoreland himself choppered in with his entourage to take possession of the captured weapons. Westmoreland’s aide promised to get the guns back to Sario and his mates. However, as expected, they never heard from them again.
The Guns
The AK-47 came as a shock to American troops in Vietnam. We were accustomed to having the best of everything when it came to combat equipment. However, here we had insurgents packing a select-fire rifle that was hard-hitting, maneuverable and practically unkillable in the field.
At the time, Sario carried either an M2 Carbine or an M3 Grease Gun in action. His Montagnards wielded WWII-surplus weapons as well — Garands and lighter M1 Carbines, mostly. The M16 had not yet made its way out to his Special Forces camp. Those AK-47 rifles were the shape of things to come.
Origin Story
The Russians called it the Avtomat Kalashnikova Model 1947. The Chinese variants most commonly encountered in Vietnam were the Type 56. Over on this side of the pond, we would designate the gun the Type 3 AK-47. Regardless of what you call it, this seminal rifle — the most-produced firearm in human history — will forever be indelibly linked to one man.
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born in 1919. He was the 17th of 19 children in a Russian peasant family. Families were big back then to compensate for the simply breathtaking infant mortality rates. Not all of the Kalashnikov kids survived into adulthood. Apparently, young Mikhail’s dad had run afoul of Stalin at some point, so the young man’s early life was spent struggling to survive in Siberia.
Despite leaving school after seventh grade, Kalashnikov actually aspired to become a poet. He ultimately penned six books of assorted verse. After the family’s deportation to Tomsk Oblast in Siberia, young Mikhail used his father’s rifle to hunt game to help feed his family. Kalashnikov remained an avid hunter well into the 1990s.
World War II meant something entirely different to the Russians than to us. The Western Front was ghastly, but the Eastern Front was unimaginable. By war’s end, one in every seven Russians had been killed. That’s just tough to get your head around. This likely shapes (and distorts) the Russians’ weird geopolitical behavior to this day.
Mikhail Kalashnikov did his bit fighting the Nazis as a tank crewman on a T-34 tank and was badly wounded fighting the Germans during the Battle of Bryansk. While recovering in the hospital, he purportedly heard his wounded infantry counterparts complaining about the ineffectiveness of their small arms. Kalashnikov subsequently devised the design for a new assault rifle to defend Mother Russia. This radical new gun and the comparably radical 7.62x39mm intermediate cartridge it fired would ultimately fundamentally change human civilization.
Particulars
Kalashnikov’s original rifles orbited around a stamped steel receiver. These early guns were deemed to be insufficiently robust, however, so he developed a milled steel receiver version instead. These guns were ridiculously labor-intensive to produce, but the communists had plenty of laborers. The Soviets turned them out by the literal shiploads.
The Soviets and the Red Chinese have always had a strange relationship. Not unlike Sunni and Shia Muslims, they share a common philosophy, but they still don’t always see eye to eye.
During the Cold War, their common hatred of the West made them allies. As a result, in 1956, the Chinese began production of AK rifles themselves. These were the weapons that were most commonly encountered in the latter stages of the Vietnam War.
1956 was a big year for guns in Red China, and they named their weapons based on when they were introduced. As a result, the Chicom SKS, AK and RPD light machinegun were all called the Type 56. Yeah, that’s pretty confusing.
Most of what the world calls an AK-47 is actually an AKM. This modernized stamped steel AK did not enter Soviet service until 1956. Now they’re everywhere. Back during the Vietnam War, however, almost all of the Kalashnikov rifles we encountered in combat were the milled receiver Type 56 sort. It’s easy to tell the difference at a glance.
The machined receivers sported prominent lightening cuts on both sides. The muzzle included a flat muzzle nut rather than the slanted muzzle brake of the later AKM. The rear sling attachment point was located on the left side of the receiver rather than the toe of the stock, and the pressed steel top cover was smooth where that of the AKM was ribbed.
Wartime Chicom Type 56 rifles typically sported hard-chromed bolts and bolt carriers, as well as chrome-lined bores. This contributed substantially to the gun’s legendary reliability in the hot, fetid jungle climate.
Type 56 furniture was cut from Chinese chiu wood stained dark. The wooden pistol grip sported some light cross-hatching not found on the later AKM sort. It was a big larger as well. Additionally, the foregrip on the Type 56 was left smooth, whereas that of the AKM included bilateral palm swells. There were some other minor differences, but those were the big ones. The cleaning kit rode inside the buttstock. These guns fed from pressed steel 30-round box magazines with chromed followers.
The real apex predator among Vietnam AKs was the under folding sort. Originally designed to equip paratroopers, mechanized infantry and the like, they were quite rare in the Vietnam theater. I have been told that these folding-stock AKs were prized among special forces troops and helicopter crews.
The Next Best Thing
Precious few transferable Vietnam bringback AKs made it into the registry before the 1968 cutoff. Possession of one of these vintage guns would be a great start on a decent 401k today. The closest normal people can come to a legit Vietnam-era Chicom AK came from Poly Technologies.
The Chinese firm Poly Technologies made stuff like bicycles back in the 1980s. They also still produced semi-auto versions of Vietnam-standard AK-47 rifles. Their workmanship was frankly amazing, and they were priced accordingly. They were imported under the name Polytech AK47/S Legend.
These guns were made in Factory Number 386 in Long Yan, Fu Jian Province, in Southern China. The number “386” in a circle is stamped into the left side of the receiver. The gun’s milled steel receiver required 105 separate steps to complete. This was the same factory that made these guns during the Vietnam War.
At the time these weapons were being crafted, Factory 386 was a self-sufficient community. The workers lived on the premises, and there were onsite schools for their children. Very little of the plant was automated, so most of these guns were essentially hand built. Children of Factory 386 workers were expected to grow up and work in the plant as well. It was communist China, after all.
Back in the 1980s, Polytech offered these guns in both fixed and folding-stock versions. I’ve read that they only imported about 2,000 copies. They were expensive back then, and they are astronomically expensive today. These can be found for sale online, but expect to pay upwards of $4,000 for one. The folders are even worse. These guns originally came with a 6H2 bayonet, sling, cleaning kit, and three magazines, all in a fitted Styrofoam box.
Denouement
The Viet Cong and NVA used whatever weapons they could scrounge, but the classic AK-47 will forever be associated with that protracted decade-long conflict. Some 58,000 great Americans lost their lives fighting in Vietnam. The war touched most everybody in the country.
Nowadays, if you want a decent rendition of the original Chicom AK-47 you’d best have deep pockets. We’re not on the best of terms with the Chinese, so there will never be any more imported. However, just hefting one of these classic Kalashnikov rifles is akin to touching history. It is a tangible connection to a most remarkable time.