Week of March 22

Week of March 22

At the end of March 1968, the Tet Offensive, which served as the opening salvo in the Vietnamese Communists’ new strategy titled “general offensive, general uprising,” came to a close. American and South Vietnamese forces repulsed over one hundred insurgent attacks against government and military assets and recaptured the city of Hue. Many accounts have cited President Lyndon Johnson’s 31 March public address, in which the president announced a reduction to Operation ROLLING THUNDER, offered to renew peace talks with Hanoi, and disclosed his decision to not seek reelection in 1968, as the beginning of the United States’ slow withdrawal from the Vietnam War. But these authors’ works viewed the Tet Offensive (and the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia as a whole) through the prism of the inconclusive Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and the fall of Saigon in 1975. Although we would be remiss to overlook the fact that the Communists’ first attempt at “general offensive, general uprising” resulted in immediate disappointments—the insurgent and conventional attacks failed everywhere and the population of South Vietnam did not rise up against the Saigon government—the newest historical scholarship emphasizes that General William Westmoreland erred when he told journalist Mike Wallace that the Viet Cong were “virtually destroyed as an effective force” at Tet.¹ In the larger context, the year 1968 was the bloodiest year for the United States during the Vietnam War, and it is more appropriate to view the Tet Offensive as the first campaign in a year-long escalation of the war in South Vietnam.

The United States, startled by the ferocity of the enemy attacks and higher number of casualties during Tet, met the Communist challenge by escalating the war in Vietnam. In late February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler requested an additional 206,000 men from President Johnson, and MACV planners even initiated a program called “Fracture Jaw” that considered drafting plans to use tactical nuclear weapons in South Vietnam. Washington refused to pursue these maximal options, but President Johnson dispatched an additional 22,000 troops immediately following the 31 March address. American troop numbers continued to increase throughout 1968 and hit their peak in April 1969. Furthermore, Johnson’s decision to limit ROLLING THUNDER did not leave bombers idle on the tarmac while soldiers had to fend for themselves on the battlefield. Instead, the changes to ROLLING THUNDER meant the United States shifted its bombing priorities from industrial sites around Hanoi and Haiphong to more immediate targets in South Vietnam, staging areas in North Vietnam near the DMZ, and the supply routes that made up the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. In fact, during the 12 months following the Tet Offensive (April 1968 – March 1969), the United States dropped 47% more bomb tonnage in Indochina than during the 12 months before the Tet Offensive. Ordnance dropped on North Vietnam decreased by 15 percent, but it increased in South Vietnam by 64 percent and Laos by 102 percent. According to one metric, the American military involvement in Vietnam reached its apogee in March-April 1969, when bomb tonnage and troop numbers plateaued.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong, damaged but far from annihilated, reverted to conducting small-scale insurgent attacks against allied forces throughout South Vietnam. Still, Le Duan, the leader of North Vietnam, refused to accept that South Vietnam was not ripe for revolution and persisted with the “general offensive, general uprising” strategy. Unlike President Johnson, who felt growing pressure from lawmakers on both the left and right to deliver a victory or disengage from the war, Le Duan faced no internal opposition to his military policies due to the general secretary’s elimination of most political rivals during the “Party Affair” of 1967. Therefore, the Communists’ only limiting constraints were the numbers of cadres in their ranks and the motivation of these individuals to continue the war effort. Propaganda efforts succeeded at motivating large numbers of North Vietnamese to travel south to serve as replacements in Viet Cong units. Furthermore, the violence that the Communists unleashed during the Tet Offensive dislocated millions of South Vietnamese civilians from their villages, and Hanoi perceived this social disarray as a sign that South Vietnam was on the brink of revolution.

In order to take advantage of the turmoil in the south, the Vietnamese Communists renewed the offensive in early May 1968 with an operation known as “Mini-Tet.” Again, Viet Cong units entered battles against allied forces across South Vietnam without sufficient preparation, necessary equipment, or even defined objectives. MACV and the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to play down the scale of the fighting during “Mini-Tet,” characterizing the attacks as nothing more than rocket and mortar strikes against fixed positions; however, the United States suffered 562 soldiers killed during the week of 5-11 May and 549 killed during 12-18 May, numbers that made this period the two bloodiest weeks of the entire Vietnam War for American servicemembers. In August 1968, the Vietnamese Communists launched another series of attacks against military and civilian targets in South Vietnam. The third campaign raised the monthly total of American casualties above the numbers from the same months in 1967, and this offensive proved to be the most costly for the Viet Cong. Fighting subsided in the last three months of 1968, but the Communists commenced a fourth offensive on 22 February 1969. This pattern of operations indicates that, while combat operations in 1968 had certainly weakened the Communists, the enemy maintained the capacity and motivation to deliver punishing attacks in the face of superior allied forces for over a year following the Tet Offensive.

Only in 1969, after this year-long series of defeats and the entry of hawkish Richard Nixon to the White House in January, a president who initially proclaimed himself to be unafraid of expanding the war, did Communist aggression in Vietnam temporarily lose its fury. Meanwhile, a year of heavy casualties had driven more of the American public and, more critically, segments of Congress and the Pentagon to welcome disengagement from the conflict. Nixon called for a Vietnamization of the war effort and took advantage of the lull in fighting in August 1969 to reduce bombing missions and withdraw large numbers of American troops from Southeast Asia. At this time, the Vietnam War entered a new period, different from the thirteen-month-long Communist escalation.

So why did the Tet Offensive leave such an impression on the memory of the Vietnam War, especially if “Mini-Tet” in May was more costly for American servicemembers and the August offensive was a greater failure for the Viet Cong? Firstly, the Tet Offensive was a surprise attack and marked the beginning of a prolonged escalation of the war in South Vietnam. MACV generals and Washington policymakers initially were startled that the Viet Cong possessed the capacity to launch coordinated assaults throughout South Vietnam; they were aghast that the Communists used the customary truce during the Tet holiday as timing for the campaign; and they were galled by the ferocity of the attackers. Secondly, the Tet Offensive prompted Walter Cronkite to give an on-air address on 27 February that cast doubt on the United States’ military policies in Vietnam and, more importantly, drove Lyndon Johnson on 31 March to declare on television that he would not seek reelection in the forthcoming presidential election. The latter event unnerved the American public as much as the television coverage of the Tet Offensive. Lastly, the Tet Offensive produced iconic images and possessed an easily-recognizable name. Reporters at the time did not know that the Communists renamed their war strategy “general offensive, general uprising,” and the press likely would have refused to use this label since the uprising component of the plan failed completely. The titles “Mini-Tet” and “Tet 1969” derived from the initial name, and the August offensive lacked a common designation altogether. In sum, it is important to remember how the Tet Offensive occurred within the larger context of the Vietnam War: This campaign marked the beginning of an exhausting, thirteen-month-long escalation of the war.²

Text of President Lyndon Johnson’s 31 March 1968 address to the nation (University of California, Santa Barbara)

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28772

Video of the speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFyhAcp2DG4

¹Edwin E. Moïse, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017), 160.

²Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in the Vietnam War (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 142-183, 311-320; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 110-152; Edwin E. Moïse, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017), 1-9, 156-77, 190-212.