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";s:4:"text";s:28728:"The Tet Offensive also had a major impact on Lyndon Johnson, who was visibly shaken by the turn of events. or But when I got to Laos, a British doctor told me that "the Vietcong have taken over the U.S. Embassy in Saigon" (news that was a gross exaggeration). As a result, public opinion in the U.S. believed that all was lost in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese began to lose influence as Viet Cong guerrillas infiltrated rural areas formerly held by the South Vietnamese government. In the late evening hours of January 30, 1968, the Vietnamese New Year began. In fact, in strictly military terms, the two-month struggle known as the Tet Offensive was a disaster for the attackers. The Tet Offensive was an American military victory, says Prince. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries sustained heavy losses before finally repelling the communist assault. The Tet Offensive was one of the first battles to be aired on television. In late January 1968 the VC launched the Tet Offensive attacking U.S. and South Vietnamese positions across South Vietnam.. Saigon was the main focal point of the offensive, but a total takeover of the capital was not intended or feasible. From a military standpoint, who won the Tet offensive? In fact, the losses were brief – within days, the two allies had regrouped and responded to the surprise attack. This annual celebratory event, known as Tet, signaled the coming of more than just a new year and a new beginning for the people of Vietnam. I disagree. Over the course of the two months that followed, which are considered part of the Tet Offensive operation, the North Vietnamese were stripped of all that they gained in the first hours of January 30. Although the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces retook control of all that was attacked by the North, those listening and watching reports from oceans away did not know that these forces saw success – they did not hear how, though losses occurred, the militaries were quick to regain it all. North Vietnamese leaders believed they could not sustain the heavy losses inflicted by the Americans indefinitely and had to win … The Vietnam War was an incredibly contentious time in both American and Vietnamese histories, and the Tet Offensive adds only further complications to the stories and moments of the war. Stanley Karnowclaims he confirmed this figure in Hanoi in 1981. By the Offensive’s end, the North Vietnamese were expelled from the strongholds in the South, left holding none of the landmarks and locales they initially invaded. Yet because public opinion proved to be the final nail in the coffin for American forces, causing the U.S. leadership to begin its efforts to remove troops from South Vietnam, it can be said that the North Vietnamese won. Richard Nixon, Johnson's successor, won the election by promising "peace with honor." From the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, President Johnson declared that the war would continue "not many more nights." Who won the Tet Offensive? (As a correspondent for the Knight newspapers during Tet and author of a book on the subject, I was invited to participate.). The dramatic developments set in train during Tet led eventually to the withdrawal of American forces and the collapse of South Vietnam. It ended with the expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army and the southern-based insurgent troops, known in the West as Vietcong, from each place they invaded. The following month the Politburo approved a plan for simultaneous surprise attacks on Saigon and other urban areas of the South. Had the Tet Offensive not proved so emotionally polarizing in the U.S., the war itself may have continued to drag on for innumerous days and months. The forces developed a defensive strategy quickly, fighting back against ARVN and inflicting many casualties upon their opponent. The Tet Offensive played an important role in weakening U.S. public support for the war in Vietnam. The Communist forces also suffered very heavy losses (an estimated 45,000 killed). Many high-level military officials shared Braestrup's view, stimulating efforts by the post-Vietnam Pentagon to restrict press coverage of military operations. However, it… The Tet Offensive was a major, large-scale offensive undertaken by the North Vietnamese PAVN and its Viet Cong guerrilla allies into South Vietnam during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tet) celebrations. By then, the city was filled with the odor of rotting garbage and, here and there, the stench of the dead. It was considered to be a turning point in the Vietnam War . The detrimental effects were immediate: as the operation kicked into its full scale on the morning on January 31, the U.S. and South Vietnamese were unable to establish a widespread defense, and the People’s Army of (North) Vietnam (ARVN) launched 80,000 troops into over 100 towns. Today, the Tet Offensive of early 1968 is known as one of the largest military efforts of the Vietnam War, a successful surprise attack conducted by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam. In This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, author James S. Robbins offers a revision of the famous Viet Cong, NVA surprise offensive of 1968, a battle which supposedly uncovered the impossibility of winning the war in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and leaders in Hanoi planned the Tet Offensive in the hopes of achieving a decisive victory that would end the grinding conflict that frustrated military leaders on both sides. Advertising Notice Instead, media outlets in America reported success only of the North Vietnamese forces, relaying scenes of burned encampments, destruction in cities, and an embassy in ruins. The offensive struck almost every city in South Vietnam, but it was repulsed with heavy losses. After the Tet offensive, the VC were no longer an effective independent military force and ended up being secondary to the NVA from then on. Though the U.S. military command had ordered American forces on "maximum alert" on the eve of the holiday, many officers did not take the threat seriously. On February 27th 1968, with the Tet Offensive a month old, US news anchor Walter Cronkite appeared on television and delivered an editorial claiming that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate”: “Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Estimates for communist losses ran as high as 40,000. Thus we are sure to win in the end." In October 1967, according to the official history published in Hanoi, the Politburo decided that the attacks would begin during the Tet holiday, then only three months away. And this time, China, which had pushed the Vietnamese Communists to partition their country into North and South to end the first Indochina War in 1954, was fully on their side, as was the Soviet Union. In fact, it is often credited with turning the war in their favor. This news, just two days before the March 12 presidential election primary in New Hampshire, further eroded Johnson's already dwindling credibility. Terms of Use So, who is to take the title of the victor in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive? After arriving in Saigon on January 1, 1968, for my third extended visit to the war zone, I made plans to go at the end of the month to neighboring Laos in order to escape the journalistic void that would likely envelop Vietnam during Tet, the Lunar New Year and by far the most important national and family holiday for Vietnamese. Historians typically argue that the Tet Offensive was a tactical victory for the US but a strategic defeat. The element of surprise was truly used to great advantage in the Tet Offensive. Yet still today, four long decades after the last troops pulled out of Vietnam and left the southern half of the nation to its own devices, the world is still divided: who truly can be considered the victor of the Tet Offensive? ", In this context, the Tet attacks came as a particular shock. Despite a nagging inability to win the war, the American government still projected a confident and optimistic façade to the American people. At the time of the Tet Offensive, I had been covering the Vietnam War for three years, ever since Johnson dramatically raised the U.S. stake in the war by sending in ground combat troops. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon actually distributed a translation of the Vietnamese document 25 days before the embassy was attacked; it was widely discounted. The U.S. estimated that during the first phase (30 January – 8 April) approximately 45,000 PAVN/VC soldiers were killed and an unknown number were wounded. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine Still today, there is debate as to which army truly won the attack, and which side took control once the surprise wore off. Why was the American public so surprised at the Tet Offensive? Tet Offensive. Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. Though the Politburo in Hanoi achieved neither the decisive victory on the battlefields nor the uprising by the Vietnamese people they had hoped for, they were able, as North Vietnamese Communist Party chief Le Duan had forecast in a letter to his southern fighters, to "shake the aggressive will of U.S. imperialism, compel it to change its strategy and de-escalate the war.". It was that perception, that harmful presentation of the Tet Offensive, that ultimately led the American leadership to withdraw its forces and leave South Vietnam to fall on its own. Though the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies were temporarily stunned into immobility and inaction, their defeat was not as imminent as many believe. Did the American press misreport a U.S. victory as a defeat? 32,000. Although a military loss, the Tet Offensive was a stunning propaganda victory for the communists. In retrospect, some of my own reporting was too pessimistic, partly because I was misled by a CIA official who was trying to claim control of the delta for his agency. Except at Huế and mopping-up operations in and around Saigon, the first surge of the offensive was over by the second week of February. US. This annual celebratory event, known as Tet, signaled the coming of more. The Tet Offensive was a series of surprise attacks by the Vietcong (rebel forces sponsored by North Vietnam) and North Vietnamese forces, on scores of cities, towns, and hamlets throughout South Vietnam. Tet was a historical anomaly: a battlefield defeat that ultimately yielded victory. Privacy Statement The Tet offensive was a military failure for the Viet Cong and the NVA since every attack was contained and eventually defeated. We ask who won the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. ", Nearly four decades after the battle, Tet still provokes sharp debate. Continue Once in office, Nixon was able to sustain support for the war only by withdrawing increments of American troops every few months, and then negotiating a peace agreement that required full U.S. withdrawal. Updated: Feb 22, 2019 Original: Jan 25, 2018 How the Tet Offensive Shocked Americans into Questioning if the Vietnam War Could be Won Not long after his poor showing in New Hampshire, the president announced that he would not seek a second full term. Responding to the fighting, General William Westmoreland, commanding US and ARVN forces, directed reinforcements north as he was concerned the North … The Tet Offensive 287 Afterward, he stayed on as a member of the joint American-French Training Rela-tions and Instructions Mission, or TRIM, which had been created in 1955 to transfer responsibility for the organization and training of the South Vietnamese armed forces from the … Such questions drew more than three dozen historians, some unborn when the battle took place, to reassess the Tet Offensive at this year's meeting of the Society for Military History in Bethesda, Maryland. This political cartoon depicts the common public opinion that the Vietnam war is "dirty" and want the war to end. Part II: Tet and the Counterculture. We ask who won the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. Most tellingly, Gen. William Westmoreland, the handsome, square-jawed commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, said before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.: "With 1968, a new phase is now starting. The Tet Offensive (1968)In late 1967 and early 1968, after three years of bloody war, the U.S. government repeatedly told the American public that the U.S. military was on the verge of victory in Vietnam. According to history, this sudden surprise attack did not make a difference in battle – the North Vietnamese ultimately paid a high price in both casualties and gained territories by the end of the Tet Offensive. A little over 3,000. Who won the battles from a psychological and political standpoint? Though the Communists failed to achieve their tactical and operational objectives, James Willbanks claims Hanoi won a strategic victory. Any combat soldier will tell you no plan goes perfect, and he explains. Nearly everywhere I went, the lack of preparedness for the extraordinary attacks was an important part of the story. We did not know then—and only learned with publication in 1988 of historical documents in Hanoi—that the North Vietnamese Politburo had decided as early as June 1967 to aim for a decisive battlefield victory in 1968, a U.S. presidential election year. Today there have been a great number of writings about this event. Every year on the last day of January, the Vietnamese pay tribute to their ancestors. How many soldiers did the Vietcong lose? Background. And faced with a flare-up of attacks in Iraq this past June, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer that he had no doubt the insurgents had "read about Tet and the fact that if they make a big enough splash, even though they get a lot of people killed and we pound them, they end up winning psychologically. Although General Westmoreland rightfully claimed a great victory in the heavy fighting that continued into the fall of 1968, Johnson, like the American people, was stunned by the ability of the Communists to launch such wide-spread attacks. The North Vietnamese attacked with zero expectations, and zero warning, awarding them the freedom to inflict great damage and significant terror before their enemies could respond. Why did the attack come as such a surprise? This annual celebratory event, known as Tet, signaled the coming of more than just a new year and a new beginning for the people of Vietnam. 18th Annual Photo Contest Winners and Finalists Announced! When the North Vietnamese began planning their attack, their goal was to force the American military to change its strategy, to de-escalate their war efforts and give up hope. |. In my view, the story of the Vietnam War can be summed up in an observation made by North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh's close aide and successor, to French war historian Bernard Fall in 1962, three years before the massive U.S. intervention and nearly six years before Tet: "Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars—and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war. This presaged a siege and battle that would last for seventy-seven days and would see 6,000 Marines hold off 20,000 North Vietnamese. But press reports were not the fundamental cause of the loss of domestic support for the war. Had the Tet Offensive not proved so emotionally polarizing in the U.S., the war itself may have continued to drag on for innumerous days and months. The purpose of the 68’ Tet Offensive was to win the war. The Tet New Year is a very important day for the Vietnamese and nearly all-normal day-to-day activities stop to allow those who can the opportunity to celebrate the lives of their ancestors. Brought into the living rooms of Americans by new communications satellites over the Pacific, scenes of the carnage, particularly at the embassy, severely damaged national confidence in the war policies of President Lyndon Johnson, who was already under fire from a frustrated citizenry in a presidential election year. One of the great ironies of the war was the fact that the Tet Offensive was actually a resounding tactical victory for the United States. Within just a few hours, the Vietcong forces laid siege to countless Southern strongholds – all of which were weakly defended at the time. Robbins writes many things that make sense: Tet was a … James J. Wirtz, a historian at the Naval War College who has closely studied the 1968 offensive, declared at the Bethesda conference that Tet was "an earth-shattering, mind-shattering event that changed the course of the war." Unquestionably, there was misreporting of Tet, especially in the confusing and uncertain days following the attacks. 73. As the Communists prepared their attacks, the White House was setting itself up for a political disaster with a misguided "success offensive," claiming that victory was in sight. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view. But the public didn't hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late. America? The "general offensive and general uprising" of the north marked the sharp turn of the Vietnam War. The NVA gained no territory for more than a brief period, while 40,000 Vietnamese Communist troops died compared to about 3,000 Americans and South Vietnamese combined. Instead, ARVN and the leaders of North Vietnam discovered that their sneaky and strong surprise attack spelled something of a disaster in the later months. What impact did the Tet offensive have on America? Did the North Vietnamese exact the damage and destruction they hoped? As soldiers descended on U.S. encampments, bombs and gunfire rained down upon the American Embassy, and countless members of the military were taken prisoner or gunned down, the Tet Offensive … However, this New Year’s strike was not as effective as it appeared; though the initial attack lasted six hours, it ultimately proved inconsequential in terms of military advantage in the larger scope of the Vietnam War. Despite the heavy Communist losses, Tet dramatically reinforced the view that there was no end in sight. However, they did make gains in one particular area: the will of the U.S. and its people. The North Vietnamese and their southern comrades were willing to fight to the death against the United States and the government it had installed, just as they did against the colonial French, who had tired of fighting and sued for peace. California Do Not Sell My Info This remarkable result accounts for Tet's resonance whenever U.S. military forces meet even temporary reverses. The Maus Tank – An Crazy Invention, But Would It Have Been Effective Enough To Change The Outcome Of WWII? Cookie Policy The Tet Offensive - The Fighting: On January 21, 1968, an intense barrage of artillery hit Khe Sanh. In late January, 1968, during the lunar new year (or “Tet”) holiday, North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated attack against a number of targets in South Vietnam. And Johnson should have taken the fight to North Vietnam and gone after the … In fact, the very night the Tet attacks began, some 200 U.S. colonels, all assigned to the intelligence branch of the U.S. command, went to a party in downtown Saigon. Although the Communists tried to keep the offensive a secret, such an audacious project—67,000 troops attacking more than 100 targets—was bound to leak out. In the theater of public opinion in the United States, however, the attacks were a great success for the North Vietnamese. It was in Ben Tre, a provincial capital in the Mekong Delta I visited on February 7, that an unnamed U.S. major famously told Peter Arnett of the Associated Press that "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it." The Tet Offensive was more than a battlefield tactic; it was a psychological one that paid off greatly. As American historian James J. Wirtz remarks of the Tet Offensive, this moment in the Vietnam War was “an earth-shattering, mind-shattering event that changed the course of the war.”. The Tet Offensive was more than a battlefield tactic; it was a psychological one that paid off greatly. In the late evening hours of January 30, 1968, the Vietnamese New Year began. Westmoreland himself clai… In fact, it is often credited with turning the war in their favor. Although the Tet Offensive began with the start of the Vietnamese New Year, the military effort lasted well beyond a single evening. But on January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong guerrillas (small groups of fighters who launch surprise attacks) launched the Tet Offensive. Seven years after the ill-fated Vietnamese sappers attacked the U.S. Embassy on Tet, the last Americans, and some of their Vietnamese allies, departed Saigon by helicopter from the building's roof on April 30, 1975. 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