Week of February 1

Week of February 1

On January 30, 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year celebrations known as Tet—customarily a ceasefire period observed by both sides—Communist forces launched what became known as the Tet Offensive. Approximately 84,000 Communist troops, mostly Viet Cong forces, launched coordinated attacks on virtually every urban area of South Vietnam, as well as on U.S. military bases and a number of smaller towns and villages. The Tet Offensive was undoubtedly the pivotal event of the Vietnam War. It was also one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century.

U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam had long known a major offensive was in the offing at the start of 1968, but American leaders had assumed, despite some contrary intelligence clues, that it would take the form of a conventional invasion by the North Vietnamese Army. Indeed, they believed the recent major assault on the northern Marine Corps outpost at Khe Sanh was the opening salvo in this invasion. In fact, Communist leaders had instructed nearly every Viet Cong soldier capable of fighting to infiltrate cities and towns throughout South Vietnam dressed as civilians and smuggling in arms and ammunition. At the appointed hour, their orders were to launch the “general” offensive from inside urban and suburban centers. Their objective was to overwhelm the South Vietnamese Army (which primarily guarded South Vietnam’s population centers) and rapidly seize control of the country’s cities. The main architect of the Tet Offensive, Communist Party leader Le Duan, felt sure that once this was accomplished—before, he hoped, the U.S. military could effectively coordinate a counteroffensive—the people of South Vietnam would rise up and unite with the Communists.

Leaders in Hanoi attempted to keep their Tet plans a closely guarded secret for as long as possible. U.S. intelligence agents later learned that only the most senior officers were told of the full scope of the offensive, and in most cases, no orders were distributed until less than three days before the attacks were to begin.

The attacks, all launched virtually simultaneously, spanned the length and breadth of South Vietnam and included the capitals of 36 provinces, 64 district towns, and countless villages, hamlets, military bases, and other facilities. Large drawn-out battles took place in the cities of Hue—the only large urban center that the Viet Cong were able to occupy for a significant length of time—and Saigon. The fighting caused widespread destruction and resulted in many dead civilians and homeless refugees.

Despite the advantage of surprise, the bold nature of the attacks, and the scale of the troop commitment, Hanoi’s general offensive was quickly and soundly defeated nearly everywhere. The U.S. military response was relatively swift and overwhelming, and American and South Vietnamese forces decimated the ranks of the Viet Cong in the process. Most of the offensive was defeated by February, and the remaining Communist holdouts, like in Hue, lasted only until March. Roughly 50,000 of the 84,000 Communist forces who participated were killed. The offensive achieved none of its objectives. Casualties for the Viet Cong were ruinous; so much so that it effectively ceased to be a major combat force for the remainder of the war.

About 2,100 American service people and 4,000 South Vietnamese troops were killed during Tet—losses that, though dwarfed by the number of Communist casualties, were nonetheless painful. Officials estimated that 12,500 civilians were also killed in the fighting, much of which was bitter house-to-house urban combat. At least half a million South Vietnamese became homeless refugees.

Tet stunned many people in the United States. U.S. senior commanders argued that the offensive had represented a last-ditch effort on the part of North Vietnam to alter the course of the war, and that it had been soundly defeated. But MACV Commander William Westmoreland, President Lyndon Johnson, and many others had spent much of the end of 1967 asserting to the American people that the enemy was steadily losing ground and that the United States could finally see the “light at the end of the tunnel.” While such assertions were neither proved correct or incorrect by Tet, the scale and ferocity of the offensive—punctuated by vivid images of firefights in ostensible U.S. strongholds on the nightly news—surprised Americans and sowed new doubts about the prospects of an American victory in Southeast Asia after four years of fighting. Frustration with what many viewed as the lack of progress increased. The antiwar movement grew louder and expanded. Mounting American and Vietnamese casualty numbers appeared to be evidence of a resurgent foe. Some began voicing the opinion that it was time to think less of winning and more of ending the war on the most favorable terms possible.

Historians overwhelmingly agree that the Tet Offensive and its aftermath was the pivotal event of the Vietnam War. It eventually led to the end of U.S. troop increases, helped turn the majority of Americans against continued U.S. participation in the war for the first time, and resulted in a tacit admission from numerous American leaders that a total military victory in Vietnam was not possible. Much of the historical debate surrounding Tet lies in different interpretations of what led to the offensive, how it was subsequently portrayed by journalists and American leaders, and the ways it was perceived by the American public. As one historian has put it, the Tet Offensive “remains a mirror for restating opposed preconceptions and validating contending ideological biases” regarding the Vietnam War. We will be exploring many of these aspects of Tet in more detail in upcoming “This Week in History” entries.

While the historical debates remain complex and nuanced, in the main, “orthodox” interpretations posit that the Tet Offensive was a well-planned attack that, though it cost Communist forces crippling numbers of casualties, successfully forced the United States into negotiations and put a stop to the bombing of most of the North. Thus, while it did not achieve its explicit objective of winning the war in one stroke, North Vietnam nonetheless accomplished its implicit goal of finally breaking American public enthusiasm for continuing the war. This school of thought also posits that the Tet Offensive demonstrated conclusively that there was no way for the United States to achieve a military victory in Vietnam and highlighted the futility of arguments to the contrary.

The “revisionist” historiography disputes the idea that there was no military path forward in light of Tet, as well as the notion that North Vietnam foresaw the “strategic victory” of shattered American morale that came in the wake of the offensive. In this interpretation, Tet represented a desperate gamble and a last gasp that utterly failed in its intended goals. The fighting arm of the Viet Cong insurgency was effectively annihilated, and Hanoi pursued a new strategy of “fighting while negotiating” after 1968 precisely because its fighting capabilities were severely compromised. Thus, these historians argue, the United States missed a golden opportunity to press Communist forces when they were at their most vulnerable.

A third historical position is that it remains unclear exactly what Hanoi believed the offensive could achieve. Some in the leadership may have truly thought they could crush the South Vietnamese Army and the Saigon government in one sweeping action, while others may have had more modest goals of disrupting the allied war effort and demoralizing the American public. Some assert that Hanoi launched the offensive in desperation due to overwhelming military casualties between 1965 and 1967—the very losses that were frequently touted by the Johnson administration as evidence of “light at the end of the tunnel.” Others argue that, far from desperate, Hanoi was actually optimistic about their chances for victory in the war and that the offensive would force the United States to the bargaining table. Thus, Communist leaders viewed Tet as part of a pre-planned, long-term strategy they termed “fighting while negotiating.”

Recent research from a few scholars examining Tet from the North Vietnamese perspective suggests that the Tet “strategic” victory—in terms of political shifts and declining American morale—was indeed an unexpected outcome for Hanoi. Newly surfaced evidence suggests that the decision whether to go ahead with such a massive offensive was greatly controversial within the Vietnamese Communist Party. The ascendant North Vietnamese leader in 1967 and 1968, Le Duan, was only able to go ahead with the plan after he and his allies had purged or sidelined all of his significant political rivals, including Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. Then, once the attack date was set, the Vietnamese Communists put the best part of their resources and manpower into the offensive, suggesting they expected more than just a pyrrhic victory over American morale. The vast majority of those resources were destroyed in a matter of weeks. Moreover, some writers point out evidence suggesting that morale inside the ranks of the Viet Cong hit an all-time low immediately after their Tet losses. At least one historian has argued that these losses, combined with the subsequent “thawing” of Cold War relations between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, forced Hanoi to the negotiation table every bit as much as Tet forced the U.S. into peace talks. The Vietnamese Communists were thus unable to follow up and exploit any accidental strategic advantage they may have gained.¹

¹Graham A. Cosmas, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Withdrawal, 1968–1973, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2006), 21–54, 58–60, 71, 226; George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (4th edition; New York and other cities: McGraw Hill, 2002), 225–30, 231–33, 241-45; Spencer C. Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History (2nd edition; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 1102–3, 1106–7; James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jack Shulimson, et. al., The Defining Year, 1968, U.S. Marines in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Marine Corps History and Museums Division, 1997), 164–66, 171–74, 175, 177–79, 185–86, 192, 204, 213, 214–16, 223–32; William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1996); William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968, The U.S. Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1990); James H. Willbanks, The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), xv–xvii, 89–115; Daniel C. Hallin, “The Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Paul Elliott, Vietnam: Conflict and Controversy (London, Eng.: Arms and Amour Press, 1998); David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Jake Blood, The Tet Effect: Intelligence and the Public Perception of War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Edwin E. Moise, “The Myths of the Tet Offensive,” in Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall, eds., New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, 2011); T. Louise Brown, War and Aftermath in Vietnam (New York: Routledge, 1991); Chester J. Pach, Jr., “And That’s The Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News,” in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996), 24–29; Mark W. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army (New York: Presidio Press, 1999), 54–78; Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Dumbrell, Rethinking the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: The International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 87–150; Dale Anderson, The Tet Offensive: Turning Point of the Vietnam War (Minneapolis, MN: Compass Point Books, 2006), 76; Don Oberdorfer, Tet!: The Turning Point of the Vietnam War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Gregory A. Daddis, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143.

This map shows the locations of the largest Tet Offensive attacks in South Vietnam on January 30, 1968. Notice the simultaneous attacks stretching from the Demilitarized Zone all the way south to the Mekong Delta. (Center of Military History)