This was a classic World War II amphibious assault, like that on Guadalcanal, Okinawa, or the beaches of Normandy. Indeed, Nam O had been used by the US Marines as a training beach before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Six weeks before, Amphibious Task Force 76 had set sail from Japan. Their arrival in the Bay of Da Nang was supposed to coincide with the end of the monsoon, but the officer commanding, General Frederick J. Karch, himself a veteran of the landings on the Japanese-held islands of Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima during World War II, said that in the last days the Marine assault force spent bobbing up and down in heavy seas off the coast of Vietnam he experienced the worst weather he had ever encountered in the South China Sea. Some 3,500 Marines on board the USS Vancouver, Union, Mount McKinley, and Henrico anxiously awaited the order to make a frontal assault on the undefended beach of a friendly nation. The Leathernecks – as the Marines called themselves – had been drilled from boot camp that there was no such thing as a friendly beach, but the only thing here that was unfriendly was the weather.
