Tet Offensive

Strategic context

Prior to 1969 the strategy of North Vietnam and the NLF in South Vietnam had been predicated on developing a social revolution which would begin in the countryside and end in a nationalist urban uprising. This strategy had informed an operational doctrine of gradual intensification of ground warfare, and the development of the PLAF's capacity for operational warfare. With the local RVN-aligned village elite as their primary enemy in a fundamentally social war, early efforts in the south were aimed at villages and large farms. The intent of this strategy was to swing the rural population to supporting the National Front for Liberation, thereby socially isolating the urban elite, and winning leadership of urban discontents. This form of war produced what amounted to a bloody stalemate where neither side was able to gain any real advantage over the other. The reaction of the rural population was often to flee the countryside for the cities as refugees.

The involvement of U.S. ground forces greatly changed the strategy of North Vietnam. Rather than any kind of revolutionary conflict or irregular war, the conflict turned into small-unit battles between regular army units on both sides. Starting in the 1950s, North Vietnam began sending units of its army south. While the fiction of the NLF as an independent organization was maintained in public, the reality was that there was no NLF. On March 8, 1965, 3,500 United States Marines became the first American combat troops to land in South Vietnam, adding to the 25,000 U.S. military advisers already in place, and four days later President Lyndon Johnson announced the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam would be increased from 75,000 to 125,000. The combined arms warfare of U.S. infantry, artillery and air-power inflicted losses on the PLAF but as their losses were consistently made up from North Vietnam, nothing really changed.

From the American perspective, the first several years of the war involved an ever greater commitment of forces in the name of stabilizing the situation in Vietnam. The US Military and Defense Department told the public that the war was a matter of destroying the insurgency in the countryside. The military focused itself on "body counts" as a metric for progress in the destruction of the insurgency. US strategy for dealing with North Vietnam was to use bombing to pressure the country out of the conflict and to draw the North Vietnamese into unequal conventional battles such as Battle of Khe Sanh. ARVN forces were also improving, albeit at a slower rate.

The high level commanders were convinced of their success, and were all too happy to share the opinion with reporters. Throughout 1967 the attitude was one of "containment"; the war would never be ended due to direct military action, but it would be reduced to such a low level that the ARVN could deal with any remaining problems.

By late 1967 the momentum seemed to be with the U.S. Unknown to the leaders in the south, there was a growing body of politicians in the north that shared these views and called for dialog to end the war. This resulted in a massive purge, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of over 200 North Vietnamese officials. The US bombing campaign over North Vietnam had allowed the more extreme elements of the government to both whip up patriotic feeling and to crush even the slightest dissent within the ruling party.

The plan

The evolving situation led North Vietnam to abandon its belief that it would foment a revolution. Additionally the North Vietnamese leader, Hồ Chí Minh, was dying and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) hoped for a significant victory before Ho's death. In this context, the North Vietnamese politburo planned for a nationwide offensive to galvanize an immediate urban revolution in the South. The DRVN leadership had an almost irrational belief that it was popular and had widespread support within the cities of the south. Contributing to their delusions as well was their fanatical belief in the certainty of communist revolutionary principles.

"Giáp became the unrivaled strategist for the North Vietnamese war effort...[and] ironically embraced Thanh’s war strategy after having opposed it for two years; whereas Giáp had previously advocated using primarily guerrilla tactics against the U.S. and South Vietnam, Thanh had advocated general main force action...Now Giáp decided that the time was ripe for a major conventional offensive. Giáp and the North Vietnamese leadership came to this conclusion out of an odd combination of hardheaded realism and Marxist ideology. They thought that the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. presence were so unpopular in the South that a broad-based attack would spark a spontaneous uprising of the South Vietnamese population, which would enable the North to sweep to a quick, decisive victory. This calculation seemed wholly fantastic, and to some it would be considered to be the undoing of the Tết Offensive."[3]

Some question Giáp's account because it is in a sense very self-serving and overly simplistic. It allowed him afterward to claim credit for what went well in Tet while taking away from him all blame for the conception of the plan and its faults.

To this end, a multiphase plan was developed: in the first phase, the PAVN would launch attacks on the border regions of South Vietnam to close those regions to American observation. Following this, a second phase of widely dispersed attacks by the PLAF directly into the major centers of the country would cause the collapse of the government and would prod the civilians into full-fledged revolt, and with the government overthrown, the Americans, Koreans, Australians and other allied forces would have no choice but to evacuate, leading to phase three attacks by the PLAF and PAVN against elements of the isolated foreign forces.

The offensive involved simultaneous military action in most of the major cities in southern Vietnam and attacks on major U.S. bases, the Presidential Palace of South Vietnam, and the United States Embassy. Concurrently, a major assault was launched against the U.S. firebase at Khe Sanh. This assault actually drew North Vietnamese forces away from the planned offensive into the cities. North Vietnam considered the attacks on Khe Sanh necessary so as to protect their supply lines running through Laos.

ARVN and U.S. readiness

Both the ARVN and U.S. military posture immediately preceding the offensive were relaxed.

North Vietnam had announced in October that it would observe a seven-day truce from January 27 to February 3, 1968, in honor of the Tết holiday, and the South Vietnamese army made plans to allow recreational leave for a large part of its force.

U.S. and ARVN military intelligence observed signs of a major military buildup in the months before the Offensive. In addition to captured intelligence, observations of logistics operations were also quite clear: "In October the number of trucks observed heading south on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail jumped from the previous monthly average of 480 to 1,116."[4] In November this number was 3,823 and in December, 6,315.(op.cit.)

U.S. attention was firmly focused on the ongoing battle at Khe Sanh, and concluded it was to be the target. U.S. intelligence identified at least 15,000 PAVN troops in the vicinity, and Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) staff was certain that a decisive clash was imminent. In response the base was reinforced and thousands of unattended ground sensors were scattered in the surrounding jungle in Operation Niagara.

General William C. Westmoreland warned President Johnson of the possibility of a major offensive, probably against Khe Sanh, and considered analogous to the famed Vietnamese attacks at Điện Biên Phủ in the 1950s, which had preceded scheduled negotiations as a means of improving the Communist bargaining position. Despite the expectation of an attack, no public acknowledgment of this was made, later giving the disastrous impression that the U.S. military had been caught totally by surprise. Ironically enough, the U.S. military may have encouraged this impression as part of a plan to encourage North Vietnam to pour troops into what amounted to a well-prepared trap at Khe Sanh.

Attacks and exchanges of artillery fire at Khe Sanh intensified ten days before Tết and the base was cut off from land routes after the loss of two hill positions.[5] The base, in spite of being cut off, was never in danger. The North Vietnamese troops attacking the base suffered enormous losses as was expected. But because of the situation at Khe Sanh, MACV and Washington overlooked or downgraded other intelligence suggesting other attacks were imminent.[6] In their defense, large scale attacks into the heart of the major cities seemed a very unlikely plan for the other side. While MACV saw that offensive operations were being planned, it did not detect that the offensive would be national in scale and aimed at the cities.

Specific operations

Fighting began to the south on January 29 as a number of NLF units attacked prematurely in four provincial towns. The rest of the NLF/PAVN attacks began on the night of January 30–1. All but eight provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, and 58 other major towns were attacked, with major attacks were aimed at Ban Me Thuot, Quảng Nam, Đà Lạt, Mỹ Tho, Cần Thơ, Bến Tre, Nha Trang, and Kontum. It was in Huế, the ancient capital, and Saigon that the PAVN had significant success.

Saigon

Around five battalions of PAVN/NLF had infiltrated the city with a number of separate targets, including the headquarters of the ARVN, the airbase at Bien Hoa, the Presidential Palace, and the American Embassy.[7]

Tân Sơn Nhất airbase, the headquarters of the ARVN and MACV, was attacked by around 700 soldiers and there was heavy fighting but only 110 American casualties. At Bien Hoa airbase twenty aircraft were destroyed. The Communist Vietnamese casualties in these two assaults and other actions in Saigon were over 1,100 soldiers but they temporarily took control of large parts of the city.

Image:Nguyen.jpg

Fighting lasted almost a week and some sections of the city were badly damaged by U.S. retaliatory air strikes and artillery. The suburb of Cholon was very badly damaged with fighting lasting there into mid-February.

U.S. Embassy

The attack against the U.S. Embassy was especially significant although the nineteen NLF commandos were killed within hours, and "the security of the Embassy was not in serious danger after the first few minutes and the damage was slight...this attack on 'American soil' captured the imagination of the media and the battle became symbolic of the Tết Offensive throughout the world."[8]

Adams photograph

The fighting in Saigon also produced one of the Vietnam War's most famous images, photographer Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning image of the summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on February 1.

Nguyen Van Lem was captured by South Vietnamese national police, who identified him as the captain of a Viet Cong assassination and revenge platoon, and accused him of murdering the families of police officers. Allegedly as many as thirty-four bound and murdered civilians were found in a nearby ditch. Brought before Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the national police, who briefly questioned him, he was shot by Gen. Nguyen, who used his personal sidearm. Gen. Nguyen's motives may have been personal; his deputy's wife and children were said to have been among the dead.

Present at the shooting were Adams and a television news crew, and the Adams photo and the silent film clip quickly found their way to international and American media, where they served to solidify opposition to the war. Press coverage at the time, however, provided little context for the gruesome image: only the Associated Press reported Loan’s remark to Adams that "They killed many Americans and many of my men."[9] NBC, which had only a silent film clip because no sound man had accompanied its camera man, went so far as to embellish its TV broadcast of the episode by adding the sound of a gunshot.[10]

Huế

Main article: Battle of Huế

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The city of Huế was attacked by ten PAVN battalions and almost completely overrun. Thousands of civilians believed to be potentially hostile to Communist control, including government officials, religious figures, and expatriate residents, were executed in what became known as the Massacre at Huế. The city was not recaptured by the U.S. and ARVN forces until the end of February. The historical and cultural value of the city meant that the U.S. did not apply air and artillery strikes as widely as in other cities, at least initially. Instead, U.S. Marines of the 1st Marine Division, cleared the city street by street, heading gradually towards the fortified Citadel, the imperial palace, which was recaptured from PAVN troops after four days of struggle. The U.S. and ARVN lost 482 men and according to U.S. estimates the PAVN lost 7,500, though due to the nature of overclaims, the actual figure may be significantly lower.[11] Nonetheless, Huế was perhaps the bloodiest single battle of the Vietnam War. [12] The massacre of civilians, in an area poorly accessible to the media, received comparatively little attention from the press.

The Battle of Huế was dramatized by director Stanley Kubrick in the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket.

Khe Sanh

Main article: Battle of Khe Sanh

As a military action, Khe Sanh was an outright success. The United States claimed 8,000 PAVN dead and considerably more wounded. Beyond that, the formations sent against Khe Sanh were unavailable for other action for a long time after. This was a particularly striking result given the similarities to Điện Biên Phủ.

On a strategic level it unintentionally drew attention away from PAVN buildups elsewhere, although this appears to be true of both sides. As the lead-up to the battle took place over late 1967 and into January 1968, the American military focused on winning the battle. Intelligence suggesting that the PAVN was planning one or more large scale offensives was ignored. This may have been a part of the Khe Sanh plan, distracting the anticommunist forces prior to the surprise Tết Offensive. However, considering the fact that only two Marine regiments were tied down at Khe Sanh compared to several NVA divisions, it may indeed have been a plan to emulate Điện Biên Phủ. General Abrams, MACV leader from mid-1968, has suggested that it would have taken longer to dislodge the Communists at Huế if the NVA committed to Khe Sanh had joined them.

The significance of the battle in terms of its impact on American public opinion continues to be debated. Nearly a quarter of all television news was devoted to covering the battle, and was even higher for others. CBS would devote half of their show to the siege. The intensely televised coverage was one of the hallmarks of Vietnam conflict in general and is a subject of study as a psychological and social phenomenon. The media coverage of the battle tended to make consistent comparisons to Điện Biên Phủ and the American public for weeks on end was given the impression that the effort was failing. Khe Sanh was said time and again to be lost. Even when the U.S. ultimately won the battle, the negative impression associated with the words Khe Sanh was so strong that it meant nothing.

In the end, the battle was a critical part of the war, highlighting the need on both sides for development of new military tactics. Khe Sanh itself was abandoned on June 23, 1968, since it no longer had any military value. Its original military significance was that it presented a threat to the Ho Chi Minh trail that North Vietnam had to respond to. It was abandoned both because it had served its purpose of drawing the North Vietnamese Army into a battle and because the US had abandoned any plan to close the Ho Chi Minh trail by ground force.

Continuance

Despite the failure to hold Huế, and to take or hold Saigon, other operations scheduled as elements of the Tết Offensive continued until 1969. These operations were much smaller, and failed to achieve strategic surprise (though occasionally they achieved operational surprise). None of these continuing offensives met the North Vietnamese goal of producing a southern urban uprising. The massacres in Hue had in fact produced the opposite effect. The urban population was for the rest of the war largely alienated from the communists.

Aftermath

Image:Vietcong2.jpgIn total, the United States estimated that 45,000 PLAF and PAVN soldiers were killed, though this figure may be significantly lower due to the nature of overclaims. About 6,000 were captured, with the number of wounded being unclear. The USA, ARVN, and allied Australian and South Korean forces suffered 4,324 killed, 16,063 wounded, and 598 missing.

Effect on the NLF and DRVN side

The PLAF's operational forces were effectively crippled and the offensive failed to achieve their strategic objectives. It effectively ceased to have any role in the war. The organization was preserved for propaganda purposes and even strengthened, but in practical terms the NLF was finished. The decimated cadres of the PLAF, the military wing of the National Front for Liberation, became largely ineffective for the remaining seven years of the war. Its paper-formations were filled with North Vietnamese replacements. The civil remainder of the NLF formed itself into a so-called Provisional Revolutionary Government which while it generated much publicity and waved many flags, ruled nothing.

Effect on ARVN and American side

That the communists were able to mount a major assault at all was a blow to U.S. hopes of winning the war rapidly, and starkly called into question General Westmoreland's now-infamous public reports of the previous progress in the War: highly fictionalized and exaggerated to appear positive for the American public and often using exaggerated body counts and other inflated numbers.

Developing reports of the Tết Offensive severely undercut the upbeat war propaganda of the Johnson administration and The Pentagon, and served to undermine public support for continuing the war.

Seeing the complete collapse of the PAVN/PLAF offensive, the lopsided casualty ratio, the lack of a popular uprising in support of the attacks, and the failure of the attacking forces to gain and hold significant territorial assets, Westmoreland considered it an appropriate opportunity for a counteroffensive action, and his staff put together a request for 206,000 additional troops to prosecute the war in the wake of the Offensive, a move that would have required mobilization of the U.S. Reserves[13].

While this was being deliberated, the request was leaked to the press and published across three columns of the Sunday edition of the New York Times on March 10, 1968. Then-Lieutenant Colonel Dave Palmer later wrote in Summons of the Trumpet': "Looked upon erroneously but understandably by readers as a desperate move to avert defeat, news of the request for 206,000 men confirmed the suspicions of many that the result of the Tết Offensive had not been depicted accurately by the [P]resident or his spokesmen. If the Communists had suffered such a grievous setback, why would we need to increase our forces by 40 percent?"

Media impact

U.S. media reports of the battles shocked both the American public and its politicians. The effect of the offensive in the U.S. surprised the NLF and DRVN leaderships, particularly as their strategic aims were restricted to effects on the social situation in Vietnam. The role of the U.S. media in forming popular opinion about the results of the Tết Offensive has been most notably explored in Peter Braestrup's book Big Story. Major North Vietnamese figures such as Colonel Bùi Tín have claimed that the Tết Offensive was a military defeat for the PAVN, but it proved to be a political victory, as media support for the war in the U.S. began to erode.

Perhaps the most famous and striking example of this shift in perception was Walter Cronkite's now famous We are Mired in Stalemate report.

Though many blame the media, even the strongest supporters of the war after Tết refused to go along with expanding the war. There was among many a reflexive patriotic reaction that the war could not be lost and must not be lost, but there was absolutely no will on the part of any group in America to pay the higher price that expanding the war would have required. Irrespective of the media, Tet had changed the American viewpoint from winning the war to ending the war in what could be considered an honorable way.

Stephen Hayward noted, "Public opinion about the war held remarkably steady despite the tide of negative press. Although polls found that a rising plurality of Americans had for many months judged that American involvement in the war to have been a "mistake," it is erroneous to suppose that this judgment meant that Americans were increasingly antiwar. What the polls failed to capture was the implicit reproach in the minds of many Americans towards Johnson’s war policy; the center of American opinion held the common sense view that the U.S. should have pursued a policy of "win or get out." This explains why polls during Tết showed declining approval for Johnson at the same time that support for the war remained steady or even rose (in some polls), as is typical in moments of national crisis. Even after the Cronkite broadcast and other negative press, a late February poll still found the antiwar candidacy of Eugene McCarthy attracting only 11 percent of the vote in the upcoming New Hampshire primary (though this poll was stale by the time it was published). It would take yet more self-inflicted wounds to ruin Johnson’s prospects irretrievably."[14]

Opposition to America's involvement in Vietnam continued to increase from that point on. The attempts to stop the release of the Pentagon Papers allowed critics of the war to portray what amounted to a policy study with no unexpected content into a conspiracy with the government "covering-up" various facts about the war. After the Tết Offensive, the main issue of public debate would be "how to securely withdraw" from the war without losing a prestige Cold War battle against the Soviet Union and China. It must be noted that the majority of U.S. voters remained sufficiently supportive of a conservative approach to handling the conflict to elect the noted anticommunist Richard Nixon as President later that year. United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned a month after the start of the Tết Offensive. While Nixon was noted as a rhetorical anti-communist, he had no intention of either expanding the war or attempting to win it. His strategy from the beginning was at best, keep the war going as a perpetual stalemate and at worst, to organize what amounted to a slow withdrawal.

Westmoreland's viewpoint

"I continue to believe that the 'General Uprising' was in reality a feint, a secondary attack...Some have claimed that the enemy instigated a series of border fights, Khe Sanh in particular, to draw my forces away from the cities. I believe the opposite was true. The attack on the cities, and the earlier attacks at Loc Ninh in III Corps in October 1967 and Dak To in II Corps in November 1967 were designed strategically to divert our attention away from the vulnerable northern provinces of I Corps." "As I anticipated, the enemy's main attack was centered on the two northern provinces of South Vietnam. There the two major battles of the Tết Offensive developed, at the old imperial capital at Huế in Thừa Thiên province and at the Marine base at Khe Sanh in Quảng Trị province. . . . Unlike the fighting further south, the enemy reinforced its initial success by committing the NVA 5^th and 324B Divisions into the ensuing battle. A further indication that the northern provinces were the focus of the enemy's main attack was the formation in Huế of a revolutionary government."[General William C. Westmoreland, "Perspectives: What Did the North Vietnamese hope to gain with their 1968 Tết Offensive? Were they after the cities, or more?" Vietnam, Feb 1993, 62-70.]

MACV under Westmoreland disbelieved the Intelligence Community's assessment of the NLF-PAVN Order-of-Battle and profoundly misunderstood the thinking of the leadership in North Vietnam. To MACV, no rational commander or nation would have launched such a futile and self-destructive offensive as Tet. In their defense, the planning on the North Vietnamese side cannot, even today, be justified or explained by those who came up with it. The plan was ultimately a success for all the wrong reasons and reasons that had nothing to do with the plan as developed. In the end, the failure at MACV under Westmoreland was not detecting the scale of the offensive or that it would be directed at the cities. Disputes over the strength of the NLF/PAVN played no real role in events.

This "Order-of-Battle Battle" controversy is vividly described in Samuel A Adams book "War of numbers : an intelligence memoir" / Sam Adams ; introduction by David Hackworth. Publisher South Royalton, Vt. : Steerforth Press, c1994. A controversial Game Theoretic Analysis is presented in Scott A Boorman's book "The protracted game; a wei-ch'i interpretation of Maoist revolutionary strategy", Publisher New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Impact on domestic politics in the United States

Days after the publication of the New York Times story concerning the request for additional troops, President Johnson suffered a staggering setback in the United States Democratic Party New Hampshire Primary, finishing barely ahead of United States Senator Eugene McCarthy. Soon after, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announced he would join the contest for the Democratic nomination, further emphasizing the plummeting support for Johnson's Administration in the wake of Tết. Although some have asserted Johnson's lack of support implied the public sought disengagement from Vietnam, others have suggested it was Johnson's failure to prosecute the war effectively that caused his decline at the polls. On March 31, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection, and announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

Trivia

• The very heavy U.S. shelling of Ben Tre produced the famous pseudo-quote, "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it." The quotation has never been definitively sourced nor has the wording ever been attributed to any person, however. In 2003 columnist Mona Charen and Vietnam war researcher B.G. Burkett concluded that Ben Tre had been destroyed by the retreating Viet Cong. They also identified reporter Peter Arnett as the probable source of the quotation, as the soldier Arnett was most likely paraphrasing remembers saying "It was a shame the town was destroyed."
• In a game in the controversial Conflict series, Conflict Vietnam, players play as an American army regiment that takes a severe blow during the Tet Offensive as their base was destroyed.

External links

• Reader's Companion to American History
• The Press and the Tet Offensive
• The Tet Offensive 1968
• Stephen Hayward article about Tet
• Link to retrospective article by Arnaud de Borchgrave, Chief Correspondant for Newsweek in Vietnam during Tet
• http://www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html Vo Nguyen Giap and Tet Offensive
• War Policy,Public Support,and the Media

References

• Samuel A Adams, "The War of Numbers: an Intelligence Memoir", 1994
• Dave Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: US-Vietnam in Perspective (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1978)
• Scott A Boorman "The protracted game; a wei-chʻi interpretation of Maoist revolutionary strategy", [by] Publisher New York, Oxford University Press, 1969
• James R. Arnold, Tet Offensive 1968, Turning Point in Vietnam; Osprey Campaign Series #4; Osprey Publishing, 1990

• General William C. Westmoreland, "Perspectives: What Did the North Vietnamese hope to gain with their 1968 Tet Offensive? Were they after the cities, or more?" Vietnam, Feb 1993, 62-70.
• Steven Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Liberal Order, 1964-1980. (Prima. 544 pages, October 2001) ISBN 076151337X
• Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994), 471.de:Tet-Offensive