Losing the battle, winning the war

Ho Chi Minh's Tet offensive--begun on this day 40 years ago-- was a fiasco for the Communists. But that's not how many of us remember it

They came in the night, by the tens of thousands. In the first hours of Jan. 31, 1968 -- one day into the Vietnamese lunar New Year, or "Tet" --Communist fighters invaded over a hundred towns and cities of what was then South Vietnam. Forty years later, the Tet Offensive (as it came to be called) still ranks as one of the great surprise attacks suffered by the United States. Marked by atrocity and odd twists of fate, it set America on the road to defeat in Vietnam.

Prior to 1968, history already lay heavily on the Vietnam War. The war partly continued an earlier conflict, the doomed effort by the French during 1945-1954 to maintain Vietnam as an imperial possession. The French were defeated by a Communist insurgency led by one Ho Chi Minh, but the eventual peace agreement turned over only the northern half of the country to Ho, who took control in the main city, Hanoi. In the South, a separate, U.S.-backed state came into existence, with its capital at Saigon.

By the start of the 1960s, renewed guerrilla war flared in the South under the banner of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The NLF was dominated by Communists supported by North Vietnam, and its members were often called "Viet Cong" (Vietnamese Communists). To counter the VC, the U.S. supplied the South with arms and advisers, but felt compelled to commit major combat formations in 1965. North Vietnam kept up with the escalatory spiral and put its own troops in the South, in growing numbers.

On the eve of Tet, according to journalist Don Oberdorfer, the United States had 492,000 military personnel in place, while the South Vietnamese deployed (at least on paper) 626,000 regulars and militia members. VC and North Vietnamese numbers seem unknown outside of Hanoi, where archives are tightly controlled. (One was opened in 1998, but it contained no military material.) Historian James Wirtz has noted estimates of Communist strength ranging from about 236,000 to 580,000 but himself opts for about 300,000. How many of them took part in the attacks is also unclear, with guesses straddling 58,000-85,000.

What Hanoi intended to achieve in the Tet Offensive is likewise murky. Western writers have often assumed that the maximum goal was to capture urban centres and cause the Saigon government to collapse. By contrast, military historian Cecil Currey has argued that the head of the North Vietnamese military, General Vo Nguyen Giap, hated the whole plan and was forced into carrying it out by Ho Chi Minh and others. Ang Cheng Guan, a Singaporean scholar, claimed in a 2002 book that much of the North Vietnamese military dismissed the belief of many Communist party officials that a popular revolt could be sparked in towns and cities. Ang also pointed out that Ho Chi Minh was visibly fading by 1968 (he died in 1969), leaving the possibility that the offensive was just one big, last show for the old man.

Whatever the aims, the result was a bloodbath for the attackers, despite the element of surprise. The U.S. military claimed 32,000 enemy dead and almost 6,000 captured in less than two weeks. Stanley Karnow, who interviewed several embittered VC veterans in Vietnam, confirmed that the losses were huge. (In 1982, Vietnamese General Tran Van Tra issued a book criticizing the offensive, and Hanoi quickly banned it.) In the same period, the defenders suffered only about 3,000 deaths, including 1,000 Americans.

Because the fighting occurred in dense, residential areas, civilian losses were great: over 12,000 dead, 22,000 injured and nearly a million homeless.

In only one case did the Communists seize an entire city, and that was at Hue. During the month-long battle to retake that place, U.S. Marines discovered an open pit containing the bodies of about a hundred civilians who seemed to have been executed. In the months to come, 18 more mass graves would be found, and the toll would reach some 2,800 confirmed dead by 1970.

From the beginning, there was no doubt that the Viet Cong in Hue had slaughtered anyone they did not like, but denial set in among their apologists. In 1969, for instance, an article by D. Gareth Porter and Len Ackland argued that whatever murders occurred were just the result of a last-minute loss of discipline before the VC were ejected from the city. A decade later, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman reiterated the Porter-Ackland thesis, and grudgingly conceded only 700 killings.

The apologists have no grounds. Oberdorfer conducted many interviews in Hue for his 1971 book on Tet, and came away with a thorough account of deliberate executions that went on for weeks. Years later, Karnow was so convinced by the available evidence that he declared, "Balanced accounts have made it clear that the Communist butchery in Hue did take place -- perhaps on an even larger scale than reported during the war."

Both Oberdorfer and Karnow contend that South Vietnamese death squads were also active at Hue, eliminating anyone who collaborated with the VC during the occupation. Details like that bring us to the best-known killing of the entire offensive: the summary execution on a Saigon street of a non-uniformed VC suspect by the chief of the South Vietnamese national police, Brigadier-General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.

Loan shot his captive in the presence of an Associated Press photographer, Eddie Adams, and an NBC-TV camera team, so his act became infamous. The executed man has never been identified for certain. Loan later told journalist Tom Buckley, "His name was Nguyen Tan Dat, alias Han Son," a VC commando. Buckley also heard, however, a claim from South Vietnamese vice-president Nguyen Cao Ky that the dead man was actually "civilian, a political officer" of the VC and "a very high-ranking" figure. (Ky did not name him.)

With horrors on all sides, and Communists attacking everywhere, the American public actually rallied a bit. Karnow and Robert Dallek, a biographer of then-U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, have each noted that U.S. polling during the offensive registered a brief uptick in the hither-to-declining support for the war. Over half of respondents wanted to see greater military action, even at the risk of confronting China and Russia.

Karnow portrays the White House in early 1968 as a place where various officials tugged Johnson back and forth over Vietnam. Those who disliked the war, he contends, won. Dallek, however, depicts Johnson as a man so sick of the war that he could no longer sleep at night, and even cried during at least one meeting.

Johnson, Dallek thinks, already wanted out. Even before the Tet Offensive, in November, 1967, he announced the impending replacement of his defence secretary, Robert McNamara. Clark Clifford, the man who took over at the end of February, 1968, was known to have turned against the war. Then, on March 23, Johnson replaced the U.S. military commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland. Finally, on March 31, he declared he would suspend air raids against most of North Vietnam, open peace talks with Hanoi and not seek re-election (1968 being an election year).

Fighting would drag on for years, but the U.S. role in the war gradually dwindled. And by the time the Communists took Saigon in 1975, their defeat at Tet instead came to be seen as step on the path to ultimate victory.

The article doesn’t mention Walter Cronkite’s role.

He called this an American defeat.

At the time, I considered the Tet offensive to be a significant victory for the US and its South Vietnamese allies. However, I was reading the straight news stories and not listening to Cronkite.

"But that did not happen, and the reason why is unclear."

The reason why is patently obvious to any who care to look. A traitorous Congress full of Democrats and RINOs who lacked will to carry the battle forward, a traitorous MSM who supported the communists and opposed America, and a bunch of spoiled upper-middle class college students who had been brainwashed into believing that capitalism was immoral.

Pretty much the same thing we are facing now.

5 posted on 01/31/2008 6:29:42 AM PST by Sudetenland (Mike Huckabee=Bill Clinton. Can we afford another Clinton in the White House...from either party?)

The "schwerpunkt" of the communist offensive may have been US public opinion, but what Hanoi actually did was defeat LBJ mentally. LBJ couldn't hold a single objective above all others when it came to Vietnam. Just look at his speaches on the subject. He was all over the map: victory one week, reconciliation the next, musings over "what they want", etc.

I think US public opinion would not have shifted so drastically if LBJ had simply articulated a clear strategy instead of jumping between several options without giving any a chance to succeed or fail.

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