Tet Offensive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tet Offensive began in the early hours of the 30th of January 1968, when North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces struck more than a hundred towns and cities across South Vietnam in a single coordinated wave. More than 77,000 troops hit 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of six autonomous cities, and the capital Saigon itself, making it the largest military operation either side had conducted in the entire war. On the evening before the attacks, roughly 200 American intelligence officers gathered at a pool party at their Saigon quarters, none of them suspecting a thing. One analyst summed it up plainly: "I had no conception Tet was coming, absolutely zero." How did the most ambitious communist offensive of the Vietnam War catch a superpower by surprise? And why, despite ending in military defeat for Hanoi, did it shake the United States so deeply that it changed the course of the war and the presidency itself?

• 2. The Success Offensive

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  General William C. Westmoreland stood at the National Press Club podium on the 21st of November 1967 and told his audience that as of the end of that year, the communists were "unable to mount a major offensive... I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing." It was the peak of what the Johnson administration privately called its "success offensive" - a deliberate campaign to alter the widespread public perception that the war had stalled. Under National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow, the news media was inundated with statistical indicators of progress: kill ratios, body counts, and village pacification figures. Vice President Hubert Humphrey told the NBC Today show in mid-November, "We are beginning to win this struggle. We are on the offensive." Public opinion polls told a different story. The percentage of Americans who believed sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake had risen from 25 percent in 1965 to 45 percent by December 1967. A separate poll from November found 55 percent wanted a tougher war policy, reflecting a public mood the administration summed up as: "it was an error to get involved, but now that we're there, let's win or get out." By year's end the administration's approval rating had crept up eight percent, but a January Gallup poll still showed 47 percent disapproving of the President's handling of the war. Meanwhile, a classified dispute was playing out between MACV intelligence and the CIA over how many enemy fighters were actually in South Vietnam. The CIA believed the figure could be as high as 430,000; MACV insisted it was no more than 300,000. General Joseph McChristian, MACV's chief of intelligence, warned that higher numbers "would create a political bombshell." The compromise struck in September 1967 excluded VC militias from the official tally, keeping the count lower and the public message intact. That inflated confidence would cost the allies dearly when Westmoreland, having shifted nearly half his maneuver battalions north to I Corps in anticipation of a major push at Khe Sanh, left the cities of South Vietnam with thinned defenses.

• 3. Hanoi's Bitter Debate

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  Planning for a winter-spring offensive had begun in Hanoi as early as 1967, the product of a decade-long argument between competing factions inside the North Vietnamese government. The moderates, led by party theorist Trường Chinh and Defense Minister Võ Nguyên Giáp, believed North Vietnam's economic survival should take priority over a massive conventional war, and favored reunification through political means. The militants, headed by Communist Party First Secretary Lê Duẩn and Lê Đức Thọ, followed the Chinese line and demanded military reunification with no negotiations. From the early to mid-1960s the militants had controlled the direction of the war. By 1966-1967, after staggering battlefield losses and the destruction of northern infrastructure by U.S. air strikes, even Lê Duẩn had to acknowledge that current trends pointed toward Hanoi eventually running out of resources. To silence opposition before it could block the offensive, the 27th of July 1967 saw hundreds of pro-Soviet party moderates, military officers, and intellectuals arrested in what became known as the Revisionist Anti-Party Affair. A second wave of arrests followed in November and December. The architect of the offensive's original operational plan was General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, head of the southern headquarters at COSVN. In July 1967 he briefed the Politburo in Hanoi; that same evening, after receiving permission to begin preparations, he attended a party and died of a heart attack after drinking too much. A competing account holds that he died of wounds from a U.S. bombing raid on COSVN. Either way, planning passed to a committee under Thanh's deputy, Phạm Hùng, and then to Giáp himself, who worked, according to the source, "reluctantly, under duress." Giáp's contribution was to combine guerrilla operations into a conventional assault and to shift the responsibility for triggering the anticipated popular uprising onto the Viet Cong.

• 4. The Trap Is Set

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  In October 1967 the truck count heading south through Laos on the Ho Chi Minh trail jumped from a monthly average of 480 to 1,116. By November the figure was 3,823; by December it had reached 6,315. Intelligence analysts saw the numbers. A copy of Resolution 13 was captured by early October. By mid-December many in Washington and Saigon knew something large was coming. What they failed to grasp was what kind of attack, or where. The North Vietnamese plan was built around a preliminary phase of border provocations designed to pull American attention and forces toward the remote highlands and away from the populated coastal cities. Between April and November 1967, a series of engagements - Khe Sanh in April, the siege of Con Thien starting in September, then a ten-day battle at Lộc Ninh where 800 PAVN troops died, and finally the 22-day clash at Dak To in Kontum Province where between 1,200 and 1,600 PAVN and 262 Americans were killed - had exactly the effect Hanoi intended. Westmoreland remained convinced that Khe Sanh, where on the 21st of January 1968 some 20,000-40,000 PAVN troops had surrounded 6,000 U.S. Marines and Army soldiers, was the real target. He deployed 250,000 men, including half of MACV's maneuver battalions, to I Corps. Only Lieutenant General Frederick Weyand, a former intelligence officer commanding forces in III Corps around Saigon, noticed a suspicious pattern in communist activity near the capital. He told Westmoreland on the 10th of January that he believed something was wrong. Westmoreland agreed and ordered 15 U.S. battalions to pull back toward Saigon, a redeployment later credited as one of the most consequential tactical decisions of the entire war. To complete the deception, Hanoi launched a diplomatic signal: Foreign Minister Nguyễn Duy Trinh announced on the 30th of December that North Vietnam would open negotiations if the U.S. ended its bombing campaign. The announcement flooded the last weeks of 1967 with diplomatic activity that kept Western attention focused on a peace overture rather than the 81,000 tons of supplies and 200,000 troops that were already moving south.

• 5. Crack the Sky, Shake the Earth

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  Nha Trang, headquarters of the U.S. I Field Force, was the first city hit, struck in the early hours of the 30th of January. The main offensive was supposed to begin simultaneously across the country on the 31st, but coordination broke down and five provincial capitals and Da Nang were attacked a day early, giving allied forces a few hours' warning. General Phillip B. Davidson, the new MACV chief of intelligence, told Westmoreland bluntly: "This is going to happen in the rest of the country tonight and tomorrow morning." All U.S. forces were placed on maximum alert. At 03:00 on the 31st of January, the countrywide surge began in earnest. At the U.S. Embassy in Saigon - a six-floor building inside a four-acre compound - a 19-man sapper team blew a hole in the 8-foot wall at 02:45. Their officers were killed almost immediately, and by 09:20 the compound had been retaken by U.S. reinforcements, at a cost of five American lives. At Radio Saigon, a PAVN squad seized the building for six hours carrying a tape recording of Hồ Chi Minh announcing the liberation of Saigon and calling for a general uprising. They could not broadcast: the audio lines from the studio to the tower had been cut the moment the building fell. Running out of ammunition, the last eight attackers destroyed the building and killed themselves with explosive charges. On the 1st of February, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of the National Police, shot a captured VC officer named Nguyễn Văn Lém on a Saigon street. Photographer Eddie Adams caught the moment. The image, titled Saigon Execution, won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and would be called by some observers "the picture that lost the war" for the effect it had on American public opinion. By dawn on the 31st, most attacks within Saigon's city center had been repelled. But in the Chinese district of Cholon, around the Phú Thọ racetrack being used as a PAVN/VC command center, house-to-house fighting erupted that was not extinguished until the 7th of March. In towns across South Vietnam, the outcome depended largely on local commanders: some responded with skill, some did not. Through it all, no South Vietnamese military unit broke or defected to the communists.

• 6. Hue: City of Graves

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  At 03:40 on the 31st of January, Huế was hit by mortar and rocket fire, followed by a ground assault that included two battalions of the PAVN 6th Regiment. The target was the Citadel, a three-square-mile complex of palaces, parks, and residences ringed by a moat and a massive masonry fortress. Westmoreland initially informed the Joint Chiefs that "the enemy has approximately three companies in the Huế Citadel and the marines have sent a battalion into the area to clear them out." The real figure, eventually confirmed, was at least eight PAVN/VC battalions of the 6th Regiment alone, with a further 8,000-11,000 men involved in the city or its approaches. What followed lasted 25 days. U.S. Marines of the 1st Marine Division and soldiers of the 1st ARVN Division cleared the city block by block in a form of urban combat the American military had not conducted since the Battle of Seoul during the Korean War. Because of the city's cultural and historical significance, American air and artillery strikes were initially held back more than in other cities. The city was finally declared secured on the 25th of February, when members of the ARVN 2nd Battalion, 3rd Regiment raised the South Vietnamese flag over the Palace of Perfect Peace. The human toll was staggering. More than 5,800 civilians died during the battle and 116,000 were left homeless out of an original population of 140,000. Forty to 50 percent of Huế was destroyed. In the aftermath, allied forces uncovered mass graves - the last found as late as 1970 - containing the bodies of South Vietnamese civilians who had been executed during the PAVN occupation. Historian Gunther Lewy cited a captured VC document stating the communists had "eliminated 1,892 administrative personnel, 38 policemen, 790 tyrants." The victims had been clubbed, shot, or buried alive. PAVN officer Bùi Tín later acknowledged that forces had rounded up "reactionary" captives, explaining that local commanders had ordered their execution under battlefield conditions.

• 7. Collapse of the Credibility Gap

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  The American public had been told repeatedly through late 1967 that the enemy was losing and incapable of mounting a major offensive. When 77,000 troops struck more than a hundred cities on a single night, the gap between what the government had been saying and what was actually happening became impossible to bridge. Public support for the war fell sharply. The Johnson administration, which had built its "success offensive" on statistical optimism, moved toward seeking negotiations to end the conflict. Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate in the approaching 1968 election, made his own intervention. Shortly before November's vote, Nixon encouraged South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to adopt a publicly uncooperative stance in the peace negotiations, casting doubt on President Johnson's ability to deliver a settlement. General Tran Do, the PAVN commander at the Battle of Huế, was candid about what the offensive had actually accomplished: "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective, which was to spur uprisings throughout the South. Still, we inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans and their puppets, and this was a big gain for us. As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention - but it turned out to be a fortunate result." Inside Hanoi, the reckoning was sharp. On the 5th of May, Trường Chinh rose before a congress of Party members and delivered what the source describes as a "faction-bashing" tirade against the militants and their failed bid for quick victory. The debate that followed lasted four months. In August, Chinh's report was accepted in full, published, and broadcast via Radio Hanoi, a single act that restored him to prominence and displaced the Lê Duẩn faction in favor of a strategy of longer, more patient warfare. On the 5th of April 1969, COSVN Directive 55 formalized the shift: "Never again and under no circumstances are we going to risk our entire military force for just such an offensive."