North Vietnamese Easter Offensive

The North Vietnamese launch the Nguyen Hue Campaign, also known as the Easter Offensive, with a multipronged attack across the DMZ and the Laotian and Cambodian borders into multiple regions of South Vietnam. The attacking forces are well equipped: armed with new weapons, heavy artillery, and tanks from the Soviet Union and China. It is the largest offensive launched by the North Vietnamese Army in the war. There are fewer than 70,000 U.S. troops left in Vietnam.

U.S. military advisers play a crucial role rallying South Vietnamese units in retreat. After suffering heavy losses, the South Vietnamese army—with ample help from U.S. air support—slows and reverses the offensive by the end of the summer. They stabilize the front in Quang Tri Province and successfully hold out against attacks around Hue, Kontum, and Saigon.

The North Vietnamese lose much of their armor and equipment and as many as 100,000 troops. South Vietnamese casualties are approximately 43,000, including 10,000 killed. The Easter Offensive also results in the deaths of about 25,000 Vietnamese civilians and leaves almost one million homeless.¹

One historical debate surrounding the Easter Offensive has been whether the South Vietnamese military’s performance during this campaign revealed that President Nixon’s Vietnamization policies were working to produce a stable and secure South Vietnam. One group of historians maintains that, given the circumstances, the South Vietnamese armed forces performed fairly well against North Vietnamese conventional forces outfitted with advanced Soviet and Chinese heavy weapons. This combat performance indicated that South Vietnam’s capacity to defend itself from Communist threats was growing by 1972. These scholars assert that South Vietnamese soldiers fought tenaciously in the face of great odds during the Easter Offensive, and their successes raised the prestige of the Saigon government in the eyes of the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese, with their military and industrial capacity greatly damaged by the failed invasion and American LINEBACKER bombing campaigns, had to accept President Nixon’s peace terms in 1973.  In the years that followed the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, these historians stress that the United States left South Vietnam in a nearly impossible position by withdrawing its military forces too quickly and refusing to provide air support to interdict North Vietnam’s invasion in 1975.

Another group of historians, emphasizing the critical role U.S. airpower and advisers played in defeating the Easter Offensive, believe South Vietnam could not have survived the attack without significant American assistance. These authors claim that Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commander, made a crucial error in 1972 by invading South Vietnam using conventional forces, initiating the type of war that the United States was better prepared and equipped to fight. American B-52s decimated North Vietnamese armies caught in the open, while a variety of strike aircraft halted supplies moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nixon renewed strategic bombing of industrial sites in North Vietnam with the LINEBACKER campaigns, which prevented the Communists from producing the munitions and war materials needed for the invasion. Without American involvement, these scholars believe, the Easter Offensive would have defeated South Vietnam in 1972. Additionally, even though the Easter Offensive failed to topple the regime in Saigon, the Communists occupied significant portions of territory in South Vietnam after the campaign, giving Hanoi a stronger bargaining position at the peace talks in Paris. Following the Easter Offensive, the Communists temporarily recommitted to a strategy of guerrilla insurgency in South Vietnam. Ultimately, the United States withdrew all of its military forces from South Vietnam in 1973, and North Vietnam initiated another large-scale invasion shortly thereafter that easily overran the country in 1975.

Davidson, Philip B. Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hess, Gary R. Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Lewy, Guenter. America In Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Willbanks, James H. Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Willbanks, James H. The Battle of An Loc. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Sorley, Lewis. A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999.