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Tet Offensive

The Tet Offensive[17] was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched a surprise attack on January 30, 1968 against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed Forces and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam.[18] The name is the truncated version of the Lunar New Year festival name in Vietnamese, Tết Nguyên Đán, with the offense chosen during a holiday period as most ARVN personnel were on leave.[19] The purpose of the wide-scale offensive by the Hanoi Politburo was to trigger political instability in a belief that mass armed assault on urban centers would trigger defections and rebellions.

The offensive was launched prematurely in the early morning hours of 30 January in large parts of the I and II Corps Tactical Zones of South Vietnam. This early attack allowed allied forces some time to prepare defensive measures. When the main operation began during the early morning hours of 31 January, the offensive was countrywide; eventually more than 80,000 PAVN/VC troops struck more than 100 towns and cities, including 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 72 of 245 district towns and the southern capital.[20] The offensive was the largest military operation conducted by either side up to that point in the war.


Hanoi had launched the offensive in the belief that it would trigger a popular uprising leading to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. Although the initial attacks stunned the allies, causing them to lose control of several cities temporarily, they quickly regrouped, repelled the attacks and inflicted heavy casualties on PAVN/VC forces. The popular uprising anticipated by Hanoi never materialized. During the Battle of Huế, intense fighting lasted for a month, resulting in the destruction of the city. During its occupation, the PAVN/VC executed thousands of people in the Massacre at Huế. Around the American combat base at Khe Sanh, fighting continued for two more months.


The offensive was a military defeat for North Vietnam, as neither uprisings nor ARVN unit defections occurred in South Vietnam. However, this offensive had far-reaching consequences for its effect on the views of the Vietnam War by the American public and the world broadly. General Westmoreland reported that defeating the PAVN/VC would require 200,000 more American soldiers and activation of the reserves, prompting even loyal supporters of the war to admit that the current war strategy required reevaluation.[21] The offensive had a strong effect on the U.S. government and shocked the American public, which had been led to believe by its political and military leaders that the North Vietnamese were being defeated and incapable of launching such an ambitious military operation. American public support for the war declined as a result of the Tet casualties and the escalation of draft calls.[22] Subsequently, the Johnson Administration sought negotiations to end the war. Shortly before the 1968 United States presidential election, Republican candidate and former vice president Richard Nixon encouraged South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to become publicly uncooperative in the negotiations, casting doubt on Johnson's ability to bring peace.[23]


The term "Tet offensive" usually refers to the January–February 1968 offensive, but it can also include the so-called "Mini-Tet" offensive that took place in May and the Phase III offensive in August, or the 21 weeks of unusually intense combat that followed the initial attacks in January.[24]

Background[edit]

South Vietnam political context[edit]

Leading up to the Tet Offensive were years of marked political instability and a series of coups after the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. In 1966, the leadership in South Vietnam, represented by the Head of State Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ were persuaded to commit to democratic reforms in an effort to stabilize the political situation at a conference in Honolulu. Prior to 1967, the South Vietnamese constituent assembly was in the process of drafting a new constitution and eventual elections.[25] The political situation in South Vietnam, after the 1967 South Vietnamese presidential election, looked increasingly stable. Rivalries between South Vietnam's generals were becoming less chaotic, and Thiệu and Kỳ formed a joint ticket for the election. Despite efforts by North Vietnam to disrupt elections, higher than usual turnouts saw a political turning point towards a more democratic structure and ushered in a period of political stability after a series of coups had characterized the preceding years.[26]


Protests, campaigning and the atmosphere of elections had been interpreted by the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam and Lê Duẩn as signs that the population would embrace a 'general uprising' against the government of South Vietnam. The Politburo sought to exploit perceived instability and maintain political weakness in South Vietnam.[27]

North Vietnam[edit]

Party politics[edit]

Planning in Hanoi for a winter-spring offensive during 1968 had begun in early 1967 and continued until early the following year. According to American sources, there has been an extreme reluctance among Vietnamese historians to discuss the decision-making process that led to the general offensive and uprising, even decades after the event.[44] In official Vietnamese literature, the decision to launch the Tet offensive was usually presented as the result of a perceived U.S. failure to win the war quickly, the failure of the American bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and the anti-war sentiment that pervaded the population of the U.S.[45] The decision to launch the general offensive, however, was much more complicated.


The decision signaled the end of a bitter, decade-long debate within the North Vietnamese Government between first two, and then three factions. The moderates believed that the economic viability of North Vietnam should come before support of a massive and conventional southern war and they generally followed the Soviet line of peaceful coexistence by reunifying Vietnam through political means. Heading this faction were party theorist Trường Chinh and Minister of Defense Võ Nguyên Giáp. The militant faction, on the other hand, tended to follow the foreign policy line of the People's Republic of China and called for the reunification of the nation by military means and that no negotiations should be undertaken with the Americans. This group was led by Communist Party First Secretary Lê Duẩn and Lê Đức Thọ (no relation). From the early to mid-1960s, the militants had dictated the direction of the war in South Vietnam.[46] General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, the head of Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), headquarters for the South, was another prominent militant. The followers of the Chinese line centered their strategy against the U.S. and its allies on large-scale, main force actions rather than the protracted guerrilla war espoused by Mao Zedong.[47]


By 1966–1967, however, after suffering massive casualties, stalemate on the battlefield, and destruction of the northern economy by U.S. aerial bombing, there was a dawning realization that if current trends continued, Hanoi would eventually lack the resources necessary to affect the military situation in the South.[48] As a result, there were more strident calls by the moderates for negotiations and a revision of strategy. They felt that a return to guerrilla tactics was more appropriate since the U.S. could not be defeated conventionally. They also complained that the policy of rejecting negotiations was in error.[49] The Americans could only be worn down in a war of wills during a period of "fighting while talking". During 1967 things had become so bad on the battlefield that Lê Duẩn ordered Thanh to incorporate aspects of protracted guerrilla warfare into his strategy.[50]


During the same period, a counter-attack was launched by a new, third grouping (the centrists) led by President Hồ Chí Minh, Lê Đức Thọ, and Foreign Minister Nguyễn Duy Trinh, who called for negotiations.[51] From October 1966 through April 1967, a very public debate over military strategy took place in print and via radio between Thanh and his rival for military power, Giáp.[52] Giáp had advocated a defensive, primarily guerrilla strategy against the U.S. and South Vietnam.[53] Thanh's position was that Giáp and his adherents were centered on their experiences during the First Indochina War and that they were too "conservative and captive to old methods and past experience... mechanically repeating the past."[54]


The arguments over domestic and military strategy also carried a foreign policy element, as North Vietnam, like South Vietnam, was largely dependent on outside military and economic aid. The vast majority of North Vietnam's military equipment was provided by either the Soviet Union or China. Beijing advocated that North Vietnam conduct a protracted war on the Maoist model, fearing that a conventional conflict might draw China in, as had happened in the Korean War. They also resisted the idea of negotiating with the allies. Moscow, on the other hand, advocated negotiations, but simultaneously armed Hanoi's forces to conduct a conventional war on the Soviet model. North Vietnamese foreign policy therefore consisted of maintaining a critical balance between war policy, internal and external policies, domestic adversaries, and foreign allies with "self-serving agendas."[55]


To "break the will of their domestic opponents and reaffirm their autonomy vis-à-vis their foreign allies", hundreds of pro-Soviet, party moderates, military officers, and intelligentsia were arrested on 27 July 1967, during what came to be called the Revisionist Anti-Party Affair.[56] All of the arrests were based on the individual's stance on the Politburo's choice of tactics and strategy for the proposed general offensive.[57] This move cemented the position of the militants as Hanoi's strategy: the rejection of negotiations, the abandonment of protracted warfare, and the focus on the offensive in the towns and cities of South Vietnam. More arrests followed in November and December.

U.S. unpreparedness[edit]

Suspicions and diversions[edit]

Signs of impending communist action were noticed among the allied intelligence collection apparatus in Saigon. During the late summer and fall of 1967 both South Vietnamese and U.S. intelligence agencies collected clues that indicated a significant shift in communist strategic planning. By mid-December, mounting evidence convinced many in Washington and Saigon that something big was underway. During the last three months of the year intelligence agencies had observed signs of a major North Vietnamese military buildup. In addition to captured documents (a copy of Resolution 13, for example, was captured by early October), observations of enemy logistical operations were also quite clear: in October, the number of trucks observed heading south through Laos on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail jumped from the previous monthly average of 480 to 1,116. By November this total reached 3,823 and, in December, 6,315.[74] On 20 December, Westmoreland cabled Washington that he expected the PAVN/VC "to undertake an intensified countrywide effort, perhaps a maximum effort, over a relatively short period of time."[75]

Tet 1969

after Tet

VC and PAVN battle tactics

(#68)

Westmoreland request for troops Feb 12

General notes by O.Khiara