The second major reason for the failure to predict the size and scope of the coming offensive was the focus on Khe Sanh. Therefore, Westmoreland, his headquarters, and the White House turned their focus on Khe Sanh and the northernmost provinces. On 21 January, the North Vietnamese Army began the first large-scale shelling of Khe Sanh, which was followed by renewed heavy fighting in the hills surrounding the Marine base.
He was sure that this was the opening salvo of the anticipated enemy offensive. The fact that the Khe Sanh situation looked hauntingly similar to that which the French had faced when they were decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu in only added increased urgency to the events unfolding there.
Accordingly, Westmoreland ordered the commencement of Operation Niagara, a massive bombing campaign focused on suspected enemy positions around Khe Sanh.
Additionally, he ordered the 1st Cavalry Division from the Central Highlands to Phu Bai just south of Hue and one brigade of the st Airborne Division to I Corps to strengthen the defenses of the northernmost provinces. For the reasons just stated, when the Communists launched the Tet Offensive, they achieved almost total surprise. It could have been worse—due to a failure in coordination, a number of enemy attacks were launched prematurely in the Central Highlands and the adjacent coastal plains, during the early morning hours of 30 Jan—this was due to the fact that they were using a different lunar calendar than the main force, which was off by 24 hours.
These premature attacks provided at least some warning for U. In the early morning hours of 31 January, the combined forces of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, a total of over 84, troops, struck with a fury that was breathtaking in both its scope and suddenness.
Some of the bitterest fighting was in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. Far to the north, VC and North Vietnamese soldiers overran and occupied Hue, the ancient imperial capital.
Marines and ARVN soldiers had to be sent in to retake the city in almost a month of bitter house-to-house fighting. The attacks of the Tet Offensive that raged up and down the length and breadth of South Vietnam were unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity and the reports streaming in from Saigon portrayed the bitter fighting in near real-time on the evening news on the three TV networks.
In truth, the Tet Offensive, as it unfolded during the next weeks and months, turned out to be a disaster for the Communists, at least at the tactical level. While the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong enjoyed initial successes with their surprise attacks, allied forces quickly overcame their initial shock and responded rapidly and forcefully, driving back the enemy in most areas.
The first surge of the initial phase of the offensive was over by the end of February and most of these battles were over in a few days. There were, however, a few notable exceptions—fighting continued to rage in the Chinese section of Saigon, at Hue, and also at Khe Sanh—battles in which the allies eventually prevailed as well. He was required to move to the headquarters of the American military assistance command because his own residence remained insecure.
That first day, the senior generals assembled in a makeshift dining room for the evening meal. The mood was grim, even despondent. It appeared that all that had been achieved over the years had been for nothing. The gloom was made complete when a stray bullet smashed through the window in the room where the generals were eating. With as much dignity as possible these senior officers had to evacuate themselves to a safer part of the building.
He was directing a cleanup operation by some of his uniformed and heavily armed police units, and stopped to chat with the newsmen. General Loan had friends in Washington. President Johnson, at the White House meeting where he first learned of the Tet Offensive, was urged to make sure General Loan kept his job as national police chief, despite criticism from American officials in Saigon who had previously sparred with him over security issues and his heavy-handed behavior.
He should not be removed, as some of our people in the State Department are recommending. At least until we find someone better. He has cleaned up Saigon well. Standing alongside General Loan in the late morning heat on a street empty of traffic and civilians, as gunfire echoed around the silent buildings, Adams saw a group of helmeted police talking loudly as they approached with a handcuffed Vietnamese man in civilian clothes in their midst.
They placed him in front of the general who questioned him briefly. Adams saw that the police chief was holding a. He snapped a picture as General Loan murdered the prisoner standing in front of him with a single shot to the head. The NBC crew, camera rolling, caught the whole sequence of events on film. I was at the Saigon AP bureau when Adams returned with his film. He was pale-faced, wide-eyed.
The victim was later identified as Nguyen Van Lem, said to be the leader of a clandestine Vietcong execution squad that was targeting Saigon government officials. Many thousands of communist soldiers were killed in the first month of the offensive, with the Saigon government and the American command claiming a decisive victory based on the body-count formula that was in use to chart the progress of the war.
But allied casualties were also high. In this image of the cover of Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett's book "We're Taking Fire," an AP photo captures the moment as a bomb explodes near a helicopter landing zone in Cholon district of Saigon, May Harry McPherson was a special counsel for President Johnson who served in his administration from to and was with him in the White House as the Tet Offensive ran its course.
He reflected on the rapidly growing controversies in the early days of the Tet Offensive battle, in an interview for the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. They lost an enormous number of people including some of their best people. They surfaced a lot of assets, to use a military phrase. A lot of people who were in the infrastructure in South Vietnam and living apparently normal lives while being VC agents came out into the open and were either killed, captured or at least identified and chased out of their villages.
They the enemy lost a lot; they did not achieve what they expected to achieve or hoped to achieve at the outset. The South Vietnamese did get a momentary shot in the arm; they did work harder.
When it was over they got together more effectively. A number of citizens efforts were begun for the first time. All of this was a plus. The negative was essentially here in this country. It was the feeling on the part of vast numbers of Americans, particularly after Westmoreland and Bunker had come back in the fall of the previous year and said things were just looking really good.
That they were able to hold Hue for a long time while the U. Marines encircled them. They were able to get into Saigon and terrorize the population, all that, and the awful picture you may remember of General Loan, the national police chief, executing a VC on the street.
By The Associated Press. Jan 31, As the country celebrated Lunar New Year after midnight on Jan. More In News. Congress looks to improve military vehicle safety Michael McDowell, an advocate for increased training safety in the military, said he has worked with Congress to get six amendments added to the National Defense Authorization Act to improve training safety and hopefully save lives. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
The pressure grew so intense that at times I felt the government might come apart at its seams. Leadership was fraying at its very center—something very rare in a nation with so stable a government structure. By the time that Tet ended, Johnson was left with a massive credibility gap that overshadowed everything he had done on domestic policy. By March, when anti-war Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy performed unexpectedly well in the New Hampshire primary, the polls had really turned on the president and the war.
An initial spike in public support from Tet in February, with a notable increase in hawkish sentiment about Vietnam, turned hard against the administration in March. Only 35 percent believed that it would end within the next two years. His overall approval ratings for handling the war fell to a meager 26 percent. On the last day of the month, with his support plummeting, Johnson shocked the nation by going on television to announce that he would not run for reelection.
When rumors circulated that Westmoreland had asked for , more troops in response to Tet, Americans were outraged and the apparent blindness of the people in power. The Democratic Convention in was a disaster, as liberal Democrats and the anti-war movement opened up a civil war. Ironically, the person to reap the most benefits from the war was Richard Nixon, the next president of the United States, who lied and deceived the public about Vietnam in ways that even Johnson could not have imagined.
Besides the damage that Tet imposed on Johnson, the surprise attack and the revelation that the administration had vastly oversold the prospects for success were a severe blow to public confidence in American government leaders to tell the truth and to do the right thing. The right also took its own lessons from Tet and other parts of the increasingly critical wartime coverage, namely that the media could not be trusted. As reporters focused on Tet as evidence of failure, hawkish Democrats and Republicans were quick to note, rightly so, that the U.
Though U. Despite heavy casualties, North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from the region. As the celebration of the lunar new year, the Tet holiday is the most important holiday on the Vietnamese calendar. In previous years, the holiday had been the occasion for an informal truce in the Vietnam War between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and their communist allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong.
In early , however, the North Vietnamese military commander General Vo Nguyen Giap chose January 31 as the occasion for a coordinated offensive of surprise attacks aimed at breaking the stalemate in Vietnam. Furthermore, Giap believed the alliance between South Vietnam and the United States was unstable—he hoped the offensive would drive the final wedge between them and convince American leaders to give up their defense of South Vietnam.
As President Lyndon B. On the early morning of January 30, , Viet Cong forces attacked 13 cities in central South Vietnam, just as many families began their observances of the lunar new year. In a particularly bold attack on the U. The audacious attack on the U. Embassy, and its initial success, stunned American and international observers, who saw images of the carnage broadcast on television as it occurred.
Though Giap had succeeded in achieving surprise, his forces were spread too thin in the ambitious offensive, and U.
Particularly intense fighting took place in the city of Hue, located on the Perfume River some 50 miles south of the border between North and South Vietnam.
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