Introduction
The Tet Offensive is the first large-scale offensive by communist forces during the Vietnam War in 1968. It was the war’s turning point, after which public opinion in the United States lost faith in the possibility of victory in Vietnam. In the country, Tet is the main holiday of the year; it has a long history and is associated with deceased ancestors’ worship, whose memory is especially revered by the Vietnamese.
Tet is celebrated with the new year’s onset according to the lunar calendar, so every year, its date is different and falls at the end of January or February. In 1968, the Tet holiday began on January 31. By this time, a fierce civil war had been going on in South Vietnam for almost a decade. The United States directly intervened in 1965, sending a large military contingent to the country, reaching 500 thousand people by the end of 1967 (Định, 2018).
During the Vietnam War, The Viet Cong, also known as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, annually declared a unilateral truce on the Tet holiday; the South Vietnamese government and the American command did the same (Định, 2018). Numerous armed incidents accompanied the ceasefire, but neither side conducted primary operations at this time.
Composition
In early 1968, the American and the South Vietnamese armed forces outnumbered The North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) by a significant margin. PAVN consisted of 58,000 fighters, 10% of whom were instructors from the ranks of the Viet Cong (VC) (Moïse, 2017). VC troops are difficult to estimate; according to the US, it consisted of 300,000 people (Moïse, 2017). In 1962, President John F. Kennedy decided to send troops to South Vietnam in more than 16 thousand (Moïse, 2017).
Kennedy’s successor – President Lyndon B. Johnson – was steadily increasing the contingent to continue the mission called Search and Destroy, an operation conducted by the US Army in rural Vietnam that killed thousands and destroyed hundreds of villages. The United States, by 1968, brought the number of its forces in Vietnam to 480 thousand fighters (Moïse, 2017).
Besides, small contingents of Australian and South Korean troops participated in the war and the army of South Vietnam itself. However, the Americans themselves recognized half of the divisions as unreliable and poorly trained. The total number of defenders of the Saigon regime exceeded one million people. The military commanders and the US public expected the imminent end of the war.
Leadership
General William Westmoreland commanded the American forces. From mid-1952 to mid-1953, Westmoreland fought in the Korean War as a commander. After the Korean War had ended, he spent the next five years as a staff member at the Pentagon. Westmoreland’s offensive strategy to wage war in South Vietnam was a war of attrition (Rabel, 2018).
It was supposed to inflict losses on the enemy that he would not have time to replenish with reinforcements from North Vietnam or recruiting the local population. The tactic for achieving this result was named “search and destroy” (Định, 2018). South Vietnamese’ leaders were Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Cao Văn Viên.
Hồ Chí Minh was the chairman of the Communist Party of North Vietnam. General Võ Nguyên Giáp – Minister of Defense of North Vietnam – led the offensive in January 1968. He took part in the first Indochina and Vietnam wars. Võ Nguyên Giáp was directly involved in South Vietnam’s military operations, where regiments and divisions of the North Vietnamese army were covertly sent along the Ho Chi Minh trail (Định, 2018). During the Vietnam war, Võ Nguyên Giáp defended the need for a protracted guerrilla war to exhaust the enemy.
Mission
The Tet offensive pursued several goals; from a military point of view, it was supposed to inflict as crushing blows on the Americans as possible and lead to the defeat of their South Vietnamese enemies. Politically, Hanoi and the Viet Cong admitted and counted on the possibility of a general uprising. On January 31, Radio Hanoi announced a call on Saigon’s entire population and revolutionary forces to resist decisively and attack the enemy relentlessly to ensure complete victory (Moïse, 2017).
The rebel committee called on compatriots from the regions temporarily controlled by Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to fight terrorism firmly and vigorously, to help the revolutionary forces form patriotic and neutral forces to help liberate the city.
As in previous years, both sides announced a truce in advance at Tet 1968. According to Moïse (2017), however, since mid-1967, the leadership of North Vietnam was developing a plan for a large-scale offensive in the South, which, as expected, would lead to a popular uprising against the unpopular regime of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. The overthrow of the Thiệu regime would practically be a victory in the war, followed by the unification of the two parts of Vietnam into a single country under the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, a communist platform.
The offensive consisted of a series of strikes against densely populated areas to establish control over major cities, including Saigon and Hue’s strategically important town. To divert the American command’s attention from these areas, in the fall of 1967, North Vietnamese troops initiated the so-called border battles (Moïse, 2017). Many American units were deployed to border areas far from the country’s main cities to stop the enemy operating there. US intelligence warned of an impending major offensive but did not have information about the possible start time and scale.
Area
The battles were carried out simultaneously in several cities, which produced a surprise effect. According to Rabel (2018), the partisans lined up in a chain, and each held a mortar mine in the hands. Then the partisan ran up to the mortar, lowered his mine into the barrel, and rushed to the attack – the advancing infantrymen appeared at the enemy’s positions almost simultaneously with the mines’ explosions. Mortar and rocket fire struck targets, after which assault groups, with the support of sappers, broke through the defensive barriers.
On the attacked bases, the aluminum armor of burning light armored vehicles melted and leaked. Through the streets of the city Hue, about 10 thousand fighters were moving; the US Marine Corps initially went to fight. Nevertheless, advancing with a battle through the old city’s narrow streets was unsuccessful (Rabel, 2018). Actions for each house brought heavy losses and ended for parts of the United States only on February 23.
Major Phases
The main strikes during the Tet offensive were delivered by the National Liberation Front units of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army received a combat mission only near Hue. The offensive in the northern part of South Vietnam began a day earlier than the planned time – on the night of January 30, 1968, due to which the factor of surprise was partially lost (Định, 2018). After the first attacks, the American command announced the ceasefire’s cancellation, and increased combat readiness was reported in all US units in South Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the South Vietnamese army was not ready for battle, since many soldiers were on holiday leave and did not manage to return to their units before starting the offensive’s main phase. The most famous action of the NLF in Saigon was the attack on the US embassy. It failed since, in the very first minutes, the embassy guards managed to kill both commanders of the attacking group (Định, 2018). After the surviving partisans, who were not previously familiar with the plan of action, took up defensive positions in the courtyard and fired back before American reinforcements arrived.
The first attacks stunned the Americans and the South Vietnamese. The attackers achieved the only major success in Hue. Large forces of the North Vietnamese army held the city for about three weeks until they were driven out of there by the joint efforts of the US Marine Corps and the South Vietnamese army. During its northerners’ occupation, approximately three thousand people were killed, called the Massacre at Huế (Rabel, 2018).
However, there were no other towns that were captured, although, in some places, the clashes took on a fierce character. Damage from shelling and ground attacks on American bases was significant, especially in fighting around the US military base in Khe Sanh, but no base was captured. Street clashes continued in Saigon for about a month. Elsewhere in South Vietnam, all attacks were repelled in the first few days. On February 17-18, a second, smaller series of attacks were carried out.
Outcomes
The losses of the sides during the Tet offensive are challenging to assess. Only in the zone III corps for the period from January 29 to February, about 20 thousand soldiers of South Vietnam, its allies, and 15 thousand soldiers of the PAVN were killed (Hanson, 2017). By the beginning of March, the Tet offensive was over.
There was no popular uprising in South Vietnam; the Thieu regime was not overthrown. Moreover, it became more consolidated in power, taking advantage of the nation’s rallying in the face of the enemy attack, breaking the truce during the holy holiday for the Vietnamese (Hanson, 2017). Faced with American troops’ superiority in firepower, the PAVN suffered significant losses that, according to American experts, did not play a vital role until the end of the war, having ceded it to the North Vietnamese army.
Militarily, the Tet Offensive was a significant defeat for the communist forces, but politically the propaganda effect they achieved was enormous. By the end of 1967, anti-war sentiments began to predominate in American society as there was no apparent progress (Hanson, 2017). President Johnson and the commander of the troops in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, were forced to make statements that the enemy was exhausted.
According to Hanson (2017), against such information’s backdrop, the unexpected offensive of partisans and soldiers of the North Vietnamese army throughout South Vietnam came as a shock to the American public. Live TV coverage from the battlefields in the early days of the offensive showed that the government and US forces had no control over the situation. The middle class of American society has concluded that the war cannot be won, and therefore, it is necessary to end US participation in it.
References
Định, T. T. (2018). The impact of Tet 1968 Offensive on reshaping US war strategy: A view from the other side’s generals and researchers. Hue University Journal of Science: Social Sciences and Humanities, 127(6B), 29-37.
Hanson, V. D. (2017). The meaning of Tet. In J. H. Willbanks (Ed.), The Vietnam War (pp. 257-268). Routledge.
Moïse, E. E. (2017). The myths of Tet: The most misunderstood event of the Vietnam War. University Press of Kansas.
Rabel, R. (2018). Tet, 1968: Roberto Rabel looks back at the critical turning point in the Vietnam War. New Zealand International Review, 43(3), 24.