Perspectives Tet Offensive

THE TET OFFENSIVE

by Kevin Murphy

In the early morning hours of January 30, 1968, the war-torn nations of North and South Vietnam

celebrated Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and America entered a new phase in its understanding

of itself as a world power.

For nearly three years prior, United States troops had defended the fledgling nation of South

Vietnam from its northern Communist neighbor, and it seemed to most Western observers both

that the war was going well and eventual American victory was all but inevitable. But that fateful

morning, the North Vietnamese army (NVA) – along with their Southern allies in the National

Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong – suddenly unleashed a devastating series of raids throughout South Vietnam, attacking at once 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of the six largest cities, one-

fourth of the nation’s district towns, and – most shockingly – Saigon itself. By the time the Tet

Offensive was over, forty-four thousand NVA and NLF troops were dead, as were 3,400 US and

South Vietnamese troops and over 14,000 civilians. And while most of the assaults were beaten

back relatively quickly – and NVA/NLF suffered severe losses from which they never fully recovered

– American optimism about the conflict in Vietnam was irrevocably shaken by the onslaught. From

that moment on, Americans learned to look at modern warfare, and professions of military victory

by the U.S. government, quite differently.

One reason Tet proved such a shock to Americans was that all reports before the offensive seemed to indicate that the US, unlike the French before them, was winning the war in Southeast

Asia. “It is significant that the enemy has not won a major battle in more than a year,” General

William Westmoreland had told the press in November of 1967. “His guerrilla force is declining at a

steady rate…We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” Vice-

President Hubert Humphrey echoed the sentiments on Meet the Press that same month. “We are

beginning to win this struggle,” Humphrey declared. “We are on the offensive. Territory is being

Page 1 © M.E. Sharpe, 2008

gained. We are making steady progress.” And President Lyndon Johnson had said much the same

about the war earlier that year: “We are very sure that we are on the right track.”

The North Vietnamese thought differently. And, taking advantage of American misunderstandings

about both the weakness of the enemy and the nature of the conflict, NVA General Vo Nguyen

Giap began the Tet offensive with a clever feint. In 1954, Vietnamese forces had ultimately routed

the French by besieging a forward air base at Dien Bien Phu, and Giap, who had orchestrated that

victory thirteen years earlier, now looked to be repeating himself when he began, late in 1967, to

bombard the marine stronghold at Khe Sanh. Sensing an obvious historical parallel between Dien

Bien Phu and Khe Sanh, American political and military leaders focused their efforts on defending

the marine base in northwestern Vietnam. “We are not, repeat not, going to be defeated at Khe

Sanh,” General Westmoreland announced, and he began transferring American troops from the South to reinforce the region.

But General Giap had set a trap. “Khe Sanh was not that important to us,” he said later, “or it was

only to the extent that it was to the Americans.” And while Giap’s army suffered major losses at

Khe Sanh, his larger objective was achieved – many of the cities in the South were now only

protected by South Vietnamese forces (ARVN), and thus ripe for an insurgents’ assault. In focusing

so narrowly on Khe Sanh, American military leaders were, as it’s said, “fighting the last war.” They

believed they were conducting a traditional campaign against a large, conventional army, the type

of conflict the United States was almost assured to win. Recognizing this, Giap aimed instead to

teach America a lesson about guerilla warfare and the hidden power of insurgency. And on the morning of the lunar new year, the NVA and NLF leapt into action, with shocking results.

Perhaps the most devastating consequences of the offensive that ensued were felt in Hue, the old

Imperial capital of Vietnam. Recaptured on Tet, Hue was held by the NVA and NLF for over three

weeks. During this time, in a horrible reminder of the civil war within South Vietnam, anywhere from

several hundred to several thousand civilians were executed by the Vietcong for cooperating with

US or ARVN forces in the past. And, amid the 26-day battle to retake the city, over half of Hue’s

buildings were completely leveled. “Nothing I saw during the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War so

far,” wrote journalist Robert Shaplen after the battle, “has been as terrible, in terms of destruction

and despair, as what I saw in Hue.”


Sadly, Hue was not alone as a witness to devastation. As NVA/NLF and US/ARVN troops clashed

all across the country for control, towns and villages were destroyed and 627,000 Vietnamese were displaced. “We had to destroy the town to save it,” an American officer memorably told

journalists of the battle for Ben Tre, a provincial capital in the far South. Not even the American

embassy in Saigon, the seat of US power in Vietnam, was spared the carnage -- five U.S. soldiers

were killed there repulsing the NLF’s failed attack. And it was in Saigon too that, in a moment that

left American television audiences aghast and was reprinted in newspapers worldwide, police chief

Nguyen Ngoc Loan walked up to a Vietcong prisoner and calmly shot him in the head, an indelible,

enduring image of the violence and terror of Tet.

In terms of American public opinion, the results of Tet were catastrophic. “What the hell is going

on?” exclaimed influential television anchor Walter Cronkite, upon hearing of the offensive, “I thought we were winning this war.” “This is very bad,” said President Johnson, when informed of

the attacks. “This looks like where we came in.” The public agreed. One poll taken after Tet

showed that 78% of Americans thought the US was not making progress in Vietnam. Another

showed that support from the war had dropped from 50% in 1967 to 33% after the offensive. Said

the staid Wall Street Journal: “The American people should be getting ready to accept…the

prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.”

The disastrous public relations fallout of Tet was made manifest in the New Hampshire Democratic

primary, which pitted the incumbent president against an anti-war longshot, Senator Eugene

McCarthy of Minnesota. After the Offensive, Sen. McCarthy redoubled his criticism of the Johnson administration. “In 1963, we were told that we were winning the war,” he told a NH audience. “In

1964, we were told we were winning the war. In 1965, we were told the enemy was being brought

to its knees. In 1966, in 1967, and now again in 1968, we hear the same hollow claims of

programs and victory…Only a few months ago we were told that 65 per cent of the population was

secure. Now we know that even the American Embassy is not secure.”

McCarthy clearly stuck a chord. On March 12, Johnson won the New Hampshire primary by only

230 votes, a stunning almost-defeat for the president. Taking advantage of this anti-war surge, the

popular Senator from New York, Robert Kennedy, entered the race four days later. And, by the end

of the month, Tet had claimed one more victim. “We can rightly judge,” Lyndon Johnson told a nationally televised audience on March 31, 1968, “– as responsible Southeast Asians themselves


do--that the progress of the past 3 years would have been far less likely – if not completely

impossible – if America's sons and others had not made their stand in Vietnam.” Nonetheless, as national unity behind the war effort was now needed more than ever, Johnson concluded, he

would not run for reelection in 1968.

In the weeks and months after Tet, General Westmoreland and other military leaders would attempt

to portray the offensive as a significant victory for American forces, and a crippling defeat for the

NVA. And on purely military terms this is correct. The Tet Offensive was rolled back everywhere

within weeks of the attacks. The NVA and NLF lost ten times as many soldiers as the US and

ARVN, and the Vietcong in the South never recovered from the devastating losses it suffered. But,

as later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted, Tet exposed the “internal contradictions of the

American position” and represented a significant “political defeat” for the U.S. Indeed, one could even say that, thanks in part to both American military misunderstanding of the enemy and overly

optimistic predictions of easy victory by the Pentagon and White House, North Vietnam lost the

battles of Tet and yet won the war. It is a lesson later adversaries of America would try to repeat.


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Perspectives Tet Offensive