The Tet Offensive 

Khe Sanh, Hue, My Lai

The Tet Offensive was a massive attack launched by the North Vietnamese in 1968.  Although they were eventually driven back, the Offensive is regarded by many historians as the turning point in the War, the point when the US realised it could not win.  It is therefore famous as the only military action that both sides lost.

1. CAUSES

There are two basic stories of how the Offensive came about:

a. Opportunity

The official Vietnamese account of the decision to launch the Tet offensive presented it as an attempt to win the war, which had ground to a stalemate by 1967.  The North Vietnamese government:

 •  saw that the US had failed to win the war quickly, the US bombing campaign had failed to frighten North Vietnam into surrender, and anti-war sentiment in the US was growing;

 •  hoped that the local people would rise up and overthrow the South Vietnamese government, that the ARVN would collapse and desert, and that the US would realise that it couldn’t win the war and begin to withdraw its forces.

 •  Party propaganda told the soldiers that they were in the verge of a great victory.

b. Despair

Another theory suggests the opposite, that:

 •  by 1967 a stable democratic government was being established in South Vietnam, and US bombing and Search & Destroy tactics had become so effective on the battlefield that Le Duan had ordered the NVA to prepare for a long guerrilla war.

 •  Ho Chi Minh, Giap & the ‘moderates’ had started to advocate negotiations.

 •  faced with this, the Southern-firsters conducted the Anti-Party purge, took over the Politburo, and ordered a full-out attack.

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic accounts from BBC Bitesize

Voices  - IWM

YouTube

Declaration of War

2. WHY THE NVA/VC DID SO WELL AT FIRST

a. Surprise: it was launched during the religious festival of Tet – the Vietnamese New Year. The Americans and South Vietnamese were taken by surprise because President Thieu had declared a 36-hour ceasefire, and half the ARVN were on leave for the Tet holiday.

b. Intensive planning and reconnaissance: the NVA/VC had been building up forces and intelligence since summer 1967.

c. US failings: Although US senior command was aware of the NVA/VC build-up, they did not tell the US officers in Vietnam or the US government in Washington.

d. The NVA/VC soldiers: were now extremely experienced, battle-hardened fighters (unlike the 'cherries' of the US Army).

3. EVENTS

a. On 31 January 1968: 80,000 NVA/VC launched a massive attack on 100 towns and cities in South Vietnam leading to 21 weeks of intense fighting.

b. Saigon: During the Offensive, 35 NVA/VC battalions attacked Saigon, including the US HQ at Long Binh. A 15-man Vietcong suicide squad captured the American embassy in Saigon, and held out for 6 hours. The NVA/VC were not driven out of the Saigon area until April.

c. Mini-Tet and Phase III: The NVA/VC made two further direct military pushes in May (‘Mini-Tet’), and again in August (‘Phase III’).

d. Khe Sanh, 21 January - 5 July 1968

(i)  CAUSES/CONTEXT:

 •  Khe Sanh was the western-most base of the McNamara Line – ie a key strategic target;

 •  it was near to Laos border and unreachable by road – ie very vulnerable;

 •  the attack was a prelude to the Tet offensive, designed to lure US forces away from the Tet attack areas (though General Westmoreland suggested at the time that the Tet attacks were to draw US forces away from Khe Sanh).

(ii)  EVENTS:

 •  On 21 January 1968, a force estimated at 20,000–40,000 NVA besieged the US Marine garrison.

 •  A relief expedition reached the base on 8 April, but fighting went on until July.

 •  Both sides gradually withdrew their troops, and in July General Abrams evacuated the US base.

(iii)  CONSEQUENCES:

 •  Closing down the base was a major strategic success for the NVA – the end of the McNamara Line.

e. Hue, 31 January - 25 February 1968

(i)  CAUSES/CONTEXT:

 •  A main target of the Tet offensive.

 •  Strategically important: Hue was a key port for US Navy supply boats, and Highway 1 – the key link between the South and the McNamara Line – ran through the city.

 •  Politically important: Hue had once been the capital of Vietnam, and it had been the centre of the Buddhist opposition to Diem in 1963.

 •  Many ARVN were on Tet leave.

(ii)  EVENTS:

 •  A six-man VC sapper team captured the Chanh Tay gate, and opened it.

 •  11,000 NVA/VC troops took over the city, including the ancient citadel.

 •  The US attack to re-take the city involved intense urban house-to-house fighting, for which neither side was trained.

 •  It took the US/ARVN until 25 February to re-capture the city.

 •  The NVA/VC executed about 2,800 civilians, including “administrative personnel, policemen, tyrants” and foreign doctors & monks.

(iii)  CONSEQUENCES:

 •  75% of the town houses wrecked – 116,000 civilians lost their homes.

 •  The massacre in Hue was used by the American government as propaganda to persuade the US public that the war had to continue.

e. My Lai, 16 March 1968

(i)  CAUSES/CONTEXT:

 •  Three months into the Tet offensive, as the US forces were still struggling to defeat the NVA/VC.

 •  An attempt in February to drive the NVA/VC out of the area had failed.

 •  The soldiers were young, scared and inexerienced. By 1968, especially with the success of the Tet offensive, US infantry morale was broken, with drugs common and instances of fragging and ‘working it out’.

 •  The soldiers were expecting to engage the VietCong's Local Force 48th Battalion. They had been told to "go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good". They had been told that all the civilians had left and that: "They're all VC, now go and get them".

(ii) EVENTS:

 •  C Company, commanded by Captain Ernest Medina, went into hamlet My Lai 4. 1st Platoon, led by Second Lieutenant William Calley, did not find any Vietcong, and did not come under enemy fire. Instead, it committed the worst reported American atrocity of the war, murdering 347 men, women, children and babies.

 •  Hand grenades were thrown into groups of civilians. Men were thrown down the well, followed by dead animals, to pollute the water. Women were raped, then killed. One soldier admitted killing babies clinging to their mother because, he said, the babies were about to attack.

 •  An American helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who saw the massacre, tried to stop the killing and save the villagers.

 •  Nearby, B Company killed 60 to 155 civilians in the hamlet of My Khe 4.

(iii) CONSEQUENCES:

 •  At first, the government kept the massacre a secret – the official report said that the patrol had killed 90 Vietcong, with one American casualty – a soldier shot in the foot. (This soldier later admitted shooting himself to try to excuse the murders.)

 •  Even when news got out about the massacre 18 months later, little was done. Vietnamese survivors were dispersed around South Vietnam. Only Calley was convicted – of the murder of 22 villagers – and sentenced in 1971 to life imprisonment.

 •  In the short term, US public opinion rallied to the soldiers. In one poll, half the people refused to believe that a massacre had happened at all. Many defended Calley because he was fighting for his country, and a large majority disagreed with his sentence. President Nixon commuted the sentence to house arrest, and Calley was freed in 1975.

 •  In the long term, the massacre smeared US soldiers as ‘baby-killers’, fuelled opposition to the war, and undermined the argument that the US was there to protect the South Vietnamese.

4. WHY THE NVA/VC LOST IN THE END

a. Seeing the NVA/VC build-up, Westmoreland repositioned 15 US Battalions to Saigon – “one of the most critical tactical decisions of the war”.

b. US/ARVN manpower, firepower and resources were simply too much for the NVA/VC.

c. the attack was overambitious. The NVA/VC found themselves fighting a conventional war and forced to hold positions which they couldn’t really defend (in the jungle they would simply have melted away).
Tran Van Tra, a North Vietnamese Politburo member, said in 1983:

“We did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy, did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities, and that our capabilities were limited, and set requirements that were beyond our actual strength”.

d. The South Vietnamese did not revolt, and the ARVN fought well.

5. DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES

“the only military action that both sides lost”

a. for the NVA/VC:

 •  A huge military defeat. Most of the estimated 45,000 North Vietnamese killed were Vietcong, including many of their best guerrilla fighters, and most of their leaders.

 •  This meant the loss of much VC-controlled territory in South Vietnam; new leaders from the NVA had to be sent to the South.

 •  It took the North Vietnamese four years to recover from the Tet Offensive.

 •  In April 1969, the North Vietnamese issued Directive 55: ‘Never again are we going to risk our entire military force.’

 •  The Le Duan faction lost influence and Truong Chinh, who favoured a more cautious, protracted war, took over; he rebuilt the NVA into the force which won the war in 1975.

 •  On 3 April, Hanoi announced that it would conduct negotiations.

b. for the South Vietnamese:

 • The Offensive was also a huge setback for the South Vietnamese – 14,300 civilians killed, 70,000 homes destroyed and 627,000 extra refugees.

 •  Psychologically, it was the first time the war had come to the cities.

 •  At its height, the NVA/VC offensive had captured 80% of all towns and villages.

 •  It was the end of South Vietnam's democratic experiment – President Thieu and the extremist Can Lao Party seized power; Thieu became “the little dictator”.

c. for the Americans:

 •  The Americans lost just 1,500 dead, and the ARVN, 3,000 – one tenth of the losses suffered by the Communists.

 •  But it had showed that the NVA/VC could strike into the heart of US/ARVN-held territory, leading to a collapse of military morale.

 •  The shock of the Tet Offensive, coming so soon after General Westmoreland's ‘End in view’ tour of the US in November 1967, undermined the credibility of Westmoreland and the Johnson administration.  During the fighting, US public opinion rallied behind the government, but over the following months it turned decisively against the war – an attitude grew up in America that the war was unwinnable, leading to pressure on US government to pull out.

 •  A 'credibility gap' grew up between the optimistic reports from the government, and what people were seeing on their TVs – people lost faith in the government's truthfulness; Walter Cronkite, the TV reporter exclaimed:

“What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war”.

 •  Meanwhile the execution on camera of Nguyen Van Lem and the My Lai scandal undermined America’s moral right to be in Vietnam.

 •  A request by General Westmoreland to increase the number of troops was refused; instead Johnson replaced Westmoreland with General Abrams, and US policy moved to ‘Vietnamisation’.

 •  On 29 February 1968, McNamara resigned as Secretary of Defence, speaking of “the crushing futility of the war”.

 •  Then, in March, President Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam, and announced he would not be standing for re-election.

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