In the early hours of 21 November 1970, 56 US Army Special Forces soldiers landed by helicopter at the Son Tay prison camp near Hanoi to rescue American prisoners believed to be held there. The raid went almost exactly to plan and no raider was killed, but the camp was empty: the prisoners had been moved in July.
Months of planning
In May 1970 US reconnaissance photographs revealed a prison camp near the town of Son Tay, and intelligence came to believe that American prisoners were held there. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved planning for a raid in July. Air Force Brigadier General LeRoy Manor was named mission commander and Army Colonel Arthur D. "Bull" Simons his deputy, who would lead the raiders on the ground. The raiders trained at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on a full-size mock-up of the camp.1
The force moved to Thailand in mid-November. From the hundred soldiers who had deployed, Simons picked 56 for the assault.2
Half an hour on the ground
Over Son Tay at 2:18 a.m. the lead MC-130 dropped flares, and an HH-3 helicopter set down on purpose inside the prison walls with the assault team, while Navy aircraft from three carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin flew a diversion.3
The helicopter carrying Simons landed by mistake about 400 meters to the south, beside a compound marked on the maps as a "secondary school", which held enemy troops; the raiders fought them before flying on to the prison. John Correll, writing in Air & Space Forces Magazine, judges the mistake extremely fortunate, since those troops might otherwise have caught the raiders at the prison by surprise. Inside the prison the search found no one, and the team radioed the code words "negative items". The raiders were on the ground for about half an hour; none was killed, and one was wounded by a bullet.4
An empty camp
The prisoners had been taken out of Son Tay in July, while the raid was still being planned. The raid was carried out almost exactly as planned, but it failed in its purpose: it rescued no one.5
