Tet Offensive – The victory that seemed like defeat.
The first phase of the assault began on January 30 and 31, when NLF forces simultaneously attacked a number of targets, mostly populated areas and places with heavy U.S. troop presence. The strikes on the major cities of Hu and Saigon had a strong psychological impact, as they showed that the NLF troops were not as weak as the Johnson Administration had previously claimed. The NLF even managed to breach the outer walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Although the first phase of the offensive became the most famous, a second phase also launched simultaneous assaults on smaller cities and towns on May 4 and stretched into June. A third phase began in August and lasted six weeks. In the months that followed, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces retook the towns that the NLF had secured over the course of the offensive, but they incurred heavy military and civilian casualties in the process.
So much has been written about this event I can’t imagine future generations being able to decern what actually did happen. I do not know of a military victory so completely one-sided that ended up giving so much support and comfort to the enemy.
Many call this the “turning point” of the war. It was, in fact, a complete and devastating military defeat of the enemy.
Category: Historical
Giap even said they got their clocked cleaned. It was Walter Kronkite who stabbed the US in the back. The VC were pretty much a non-entity after that. Most of their main force units were annihilated. There has been speculation that was part of the plan Hanoi had in mind. Defeat the US/ARVN forces, have the people rise up and get rid of those pesky Viet Minh holdovers. They weren’t communist enough. After that the NVA took over the brunt of the fighting.
I have heard many say that Giap was a great tactician. My one question would be, Why did he do EXACTLY what Westmoreland wanted? Come out in the open and fight a conventional battle. Didn’t work in 68 and failed in 72.
The VC were pretty much a non-entity after that. Most of their main force units were annihilated. There has been speculation that was part of the plan Hanoi had in mind. Quite possible indeed. Throughout Vietnamese history, along with xenophobia (particularly towards China) another constant has been North/South conflict. I believe you are correct, and one of the North Vietnamese aims in TET was to ensure that the southern Viet Cong bore the brunt of the fighting – and thus took the majority of the casualties. This would go a long way to guarantee that Northerers dominated any eventual unified Communist Vietnam. I have heard many say that Giap was a great tactician. Why did he do EXACTLY what Westmoreland wanted? Come out in the open and fight a conventional battle. I’d say he was a great strategist vice a great tactician. And best evidence now indicates Giap likely wasn’t in favor of Tet, but was overruled by Ho and Dung – likely IMO because Ho was getting quite old and wanted to try and unify Vietnam before he died. Strategy concerns itself with long-term objectives and goals. Both Ho Chi Minh and Giap excelled here. They both realized that Vietnam’s history showed that the Vietnamese people truly would “bear any burden and pay any cost” to reunify the country (they’d been conquered by outsiders numerous times, and had a long history of fighting to reunify afterwards). Indeed, Ho at one point predicted that quite accurately: “You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.” And he was correct. Both Giap and Ho realized that the only possible path North Vietnam had to victory was to outlast the US will to win – just as they’d done in the North during the French Indochina War. To do that, they had to raise the cost of the war to the point that the American public demanded an end to the war. They did that by accepting massive casualties in order to inflict an unacceptable… Read more »
Hondo. Agree with you on much. Especially the VC being almost eliminated in TET. And as you note, the Regular NVA were the main force in the 1972 Easter Offensive. However, your statement, “(virtually all US ground forces had left Vietnam by that point) vice US troops.” is definitely not true at all. Although there were very few U.S. 11B’s left in-country, I was there. In combat. In the Central Highlands. Co. D 1/12th Cav was OPCON to Second Regional Assistance Group (SRAG)/John Paul Vann MR II civilian in charge. We were dispatched in differing elements (Fire Tm, squad, platoon) to various bases and duties all over MR II at differing times and needs. Mostly to augment Advisory Teams who were short on personnel since most of SOG had supposedly officially gone home.(Some SOG personnel just changed to black ball cap types). Bet you didn’t know that elements of the 82nd Abn returned to VN in April of 1972 in several differing task forces. Of course they ripped off their 82nd patches and were designated “Task Force Salvo” of which 12 of us from D 1/12th were dispatched with to Kontum in May of 72 and shot T-54 tanks. A book that finally came out about 2012 by Lt Col Tom McKenna (USA Ret) is named, ‘Kontum, The Battle to Save South Vietnam’.
And even later, elements of D 2/8th Cav who had time to train on the ground/jeep mounted TOW Missile eventually replaced the TOW gunners from the 82nd. And again the 82nd sent another TOW Task Force in August to VN.
Been to several bases under siege delivering ammo, etc. There’s an old saying I once heard… “Ben Het and loving it!”
“Virtually all” was probably a bad choice of words on my part. “Vast majority” would have been a better choice.
The US started 1972 with approx 132k troops still in Vietnam. The 101st Airborne – the last US combat division – was withdrawn prior to the beginning of the Easter Offensive. By 20 Apr (during the Easter Offensive) US forces in Vietnam were down to 69k – a bit more than half of those who’d been there on 1 Jan, and down hugely from a high of roughly 540k 4 years earlier (the maximum authorized number of 549,500 in 1968 was never reached).
Yes, we still had some ground troops in Vietnam during the Easter Offensive, and you were one of them. But the vast majority of US ground combat forces had left Vietnam prior to the beginning of the Easter Offensive.
FWIW: during the Easter Offensive, the US dropped its previous negotiating position that all NVA troops must be withdrawn from the South prior to any peace argeement. I can’t help but wonder if that might have been the North’s actual strategic objective for the Easter Objective itself.
Certainly don’t want to hijack this article on Tet of 68 as it was a challenge for al who were there. One reason caution was suggested in the original Nathan Phillips thread a few days back, was that there is much factual historical data missing or sealed from the waning years in Vietnam. Although Shelby Stanton’s historical work is fairly accurate, he himself is/was a liar, having claimed 2 tours as SF in VN. Stanton supposedly had his home garage full of official records gathered/stolen while he was in Thailand in the final years. The final U.S.draw downs were fast and IMO were a clusterfuck.
Lewis Sorley wrote one of the best researched and definitive books on the last years in VN. It’s titled; ‘A Better War – The Unexamined Victories And Final Tragedy Of America’s Last Years In Vietnam’.
Some may argue that all VN records have been declassified, but Sorely says no. To get to these secure vault records located at Carlisle Barracks and other locations of Gen Creighton Abrams Sorely had to get special permission from the CIA and NSA. And after he took hand notes for over a year, his notes had to again be vetted by those agencies.
The Easter Offensive of 1972 is considered by serious historians to have been the largest battle in the VN War. And it’s been compared to the WW II Battle of Bastogne and the Siege of Stalingrad. – And there are several U.S. infantry units claiming to be the last to leave VN; 196th, 101st, 1st Cav, etc. Most of the last 101st 11B were transferred to the 1st Cav and 196th in early 1972.I guess it’s a matter of when the unit colors were furled and shipped stateside.
Just to add for the record for any future researchers:
From the 2012 VFW Magazine:
“Last Days Of The Infantry In Vietnam, 1972
Richard K. Kolb
http://digitaledition.qwinc.com/article/Last+Days+Of+The+Infantry+In+Vietnam%2C+1972/1112161/118061/article.html
Correction: S/B compared to the WW II Battle of the Bulge.
During the Easter Offensive, junior officers and NCO’s were recruited from the Special Forces Groups to train on the use of the TOW and sent to RVN to purportedly to train ARVN forces to use them. However, I spoke to one of the volunteers from my Group (10th) who went; he said they didn’t have time to train anyone; they actually were used as TOW teams themselves to take out NVA armored vehicles. A 1LT from my Group was KIA in the process.
There is a lot of missing information about the jeep-mounted TOWs during the 1972 Easter Offensive. I have copies of letters from Gen Fredrick Kroesen stating that elements of the 82nd did actually come back again in late ’72 to train ARVN. However, in one instance, when they were at the initial training site a large group of enemy tanks tanks rolled up on them. From a troop of that task force of 82nd personnel he says they actually knocked out every NVA tank.
–As a sad side note, many of the personnel of D 2/8th Cav who had been hand selected for TOW training to replace our group were mostly all killed in a a very suspicious CH-47 crash on 10 May 72. We heard verbally that that that Hook had actually been shot down by a SA 7. Other pilots flying alongside thought so too. Personally, I still have doubts that it was really an accident. Too much political / secret operations were being conducted after Nixon had officially said there were no more combat troops engaged.
The crash data is listed here:
https://www.vhpa.org/KIA/incident/720510031ACD.HTM
Several were friends.
Rgr769, your friend of the 10th may have been part of a group that also went back to Vn in 1973? During the ’72 Easter Offensive U.S. command was very reluctant to arm the ARVN with the TOW. However, some ARVN/Marine units were eventually allowed. In MR 1 many jeep-mounted TOW guns and missiles were captured by the NVA. Not good! It so happened that the Yom Kipper War started in 1973 and our ally Israel needed TOW systems. There weren’t that many available at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
Teams of unknown U.S. personnel were sent to VN in 1973 to procure as many TOW possible for Israel. The TOW was later a big factor in Israel’s defeat of Syria in that war.
Now if you skip forward to the 80’s you’ll remember the Iran/Contra affair concerned TOW systems also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
Now skip to more current years to the Benghazi affair! Well I’ll be damned…
http://www.theforecaster.net/the-right-view-iran-contra-benghazi-and-the-media-matter/
Some of the original TOW systems are still in use today. In the hands of AQ/ISIS, Courtesy of Hitlery and the O.
I am not clear on exactly when they went over. I wasn’t eligible as an O-3, plus I had just completed a fifteen month tour in Oct., 1971. If they were sent in April or May, 1972, I was still going through SFOC at Ft. Bragg.
If you only read ONE book about the Vietnam war, I can’t recommend this one highly enough:
Vietnam at War: 1945 – 1975 by Phillip Davidson.
https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-at-War-History-1946-1975/dp/0195067924
Davidson offers, IMO, the best overall view of the Vietnam war from both the US/SVN side and also from the NVN/VC side.
What Davidson spends a lot of time talking about is that even within North Vietnam and the VC, there was considerable dissention regarding the best way to fight the war. There were those who pushed for a conventional strike from North Vietnam and those who advocated using the VC alone. These factions fought with each other constantly during the war and the various ebbs and flows of the war can often be traced to whichever NVA “faction” was in favor at the time.
Davidson is no lefty intellectual either: He is a retired LTG and was Westmoreland’s G2 (intelligence officer.) His take on the war is that whatever military successes were achieved (and there wre many), as long as the RVN government and army were fraught with corruption and incompetence, there was never a chance of “winning” the war in any conventional sense.
What the North Vietnamese had that the South never did was a clearly identified mission, a goal of taking all of Vietnam, and there was no counterpart to that goal on the part of the Southern government. Preservation of South Vietnam as an independent state was doomed from the start and all the fighting and negotiations did was to postpone the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam by a couple of decades.
I’d recommend a different one if I were to recommend only one, Martinjumpr: H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty.
No, it doesn’t cover the “blow by blow” of much of the Vietnam War itself. But it shows how LBJ – with the willing participation of the JCS – (1) deliberately and deceptively got the US into a major war, (2) in a place where the US had no vital interests at stake, (3) without either public or Congressional debate concering the advisability of going to war. No real discussion began until we already had well over 200,000 troops deployed to Vietnam and had been at war there for well over a year. And the issue really didn’t become widely debated in the US until a year after that.
IMO LBJ did many dirty deeds during his lifetime. But perhaps the worst thing he ever did was to engineer US entry into Vietnam without first engaging Congress and the American public – and making the case of why we needed to go to war in the first place.
Two additional works worth reading IMO are Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History and Harry G. Summers’ On Strategy. The former is a good overall history of US involvement in Vietnam, and includes a longish background section giving a decent overview of Vietnamese history prior to US involvement. That overview is IMO critical in understanding both Vietnam’s North/South dichotomy and the North’s willingness to accept massive casualties for reunification. Summers’ work details the US strategic shortcomings in Vietnam – specifically, we didn’t really have any besides “preserve South Vietnam” – and details one possible US strategy in SEA that might have had a chance for success.
Excellent book. Shows how corrupt Johnson, McNamara were and how they co-opted the JCS into irrelevance.
Hondo, I just received “Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History” from a friend a month or so ago, but haven’t had a chance to read it. Looking forward to cracking it open soon since you recommend it.
As I noted in todays Midweek Open Thread, I just finished reading “Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission” a couple of weeks ago.
“IMO LBJ did many dirty deeds during his lifetime. But perhaps the worst thing he ever did was to engineer US entry into Vietnam without first engaging Congress and the American public – and making the case of why we needed to go to war in the first place.”
Ditto, LBJ and his lackey from Ford, McNamara. IMO Johnson was an absolute failure as a President. I would piss on each of their graves, but don’t like standing in lines. McNamara had several mea culpa moments, perhaps the most telling was this from his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam:
“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” — McNamara, writing in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, on the management of the Vietnam War.
These two have the blood on tens of thousands of mostly young Americans on their hands.
“These two have the blood on tens of thousands of mostly young Americans on their hands.”
Yes they do, IMO. But, LBJ … it is my most sincere hope that he has been entertaining Satan, lo, these many years.
The never to be sufficiently damned to Hell everlasting racist from Texas, LBJ and his wife Ladybird Johnson … the forerunners to Bill and Hillary. All four deserving of damnation for all Eternity. IMO.
I would recommend two books to start with, both by Bernard Fall. “Hell In A Very Small Place: The Siege Of DienBienPhu”, and “Street Without Joy”. In addition to an excellent history of the French war in Indochina and why they lost it you will also get a sense of “deja vu”.
There is also a fictional book, “The Centurions”* by Jean Larteguy, copyrighted in 1960. It is an excellent account of the French experience with revolutionary war in both Indochina and Algeria. The reason I included the copyright date is to show that there was no reason for American leaders to be so effing ignorant about Vietnam. The loathsome McNamara even went so far as to say there was nothing to learn from.
*The movie was lousy.
Thanks for the link, Brother.
” … as long as the RVN government and army were fraught with corruption and incompetence, there was never a chance of “winning” the war in any conventional sense.”
We threw away Iraq, and the ‘Stan is Vietnam 2.0. The whole Middle East is full of corruption, with Israel being a possible exception.
I can remember watching Wally Crankcase declaring the war was now officially unwinnable when Tet Started. There was also a “mini-Tet a year later that failed every bit as much as this one did. About the only thing that went as planned for the North was that the Viet Cong were almost totally wiped out, leaving them less possible opposition when they finally took over RVN.
I had a front row seat for part of Tet68 and didn’t even know it until a few years later. I landed at Tan Son Nhut Feb 9th, 1968 in transit to my ship which was attached to the Mobile Riverine Force at the time. I spent 2.5 weeks in Saigon in a transit “hotel” while they told me they didn’t know where my ship was! The MRF was being moved around the delta a lot and was not easily accessible except by helo.
My first night at the hotel a mortar hit across the street, which was rather rude of Charlie, but gave me the impression there really was a war going on here. A few days later Charlie sent another mortar through the roof of the processing building at Tan Son Nhut, and I remember reading about that in Stars & Stripes.
They finally moved my group to Dong Tam for another 5 days of almost nightly attacks, along with one daytime mortar attack that brought the baseball game to an abrupt halt.
I finally reported aboard ship when the MRF moved back to the river adjacent to Dong Tam. There seemed to be an attack on the MRF river units about once a week until we were finally relieved by one of our sister ships a month later.
I say I didn’t know about the 68 Tet Offense at the time, and that was because we lowly enlisted types didn’t need to know such details. Of course, the brass knew of the sudden increase in countrywide attacks, but since Tet had started a week before I arrived, I had no previous less active period to compare against. I learned of the 68 Tet Offense two or three years later after I returned back home to “the world”. Walter Conkout mentioned the anniversary of the 68 Tet Offense on the news, and I thought to myself I was there then, so it really was news to me that it was an unusual period of the war!
It was the turning point thanks to people like Walter Cronkite.
Yeah, Cronkite didn’t help. But IMO Westmoreland and various LBJ Administration officials (to include LBJ) deserve a big chunk of the blame too, IMO – if not most of it.
For months before TET, Westmoreland and MAC-V had been telling anyone who would listen – to include LBJ administration officials as well as the press – that the war was effectively over, the enemy was beaten, and all was good. Similary, the LBJ administration had been lying through their teeth about what was actually planned for, and going on in, Vietnam for years.
And it wasn’t just TET. The term “Credibility Gap” was coined far before TET; Senator Fullbright was using it regarding Vietnam in 1966 when he couldn’t get any straight answers from LBJ regarding Vietnam. Further, that wasn’t even the first time it was used regarding disparity between reality and Administration claims regarding Vietnam; that occurred in the New York Herald Tribune in 1965.
TET exposed all of that public posturing by both MAC-V and the LBJ administration for what it was: bullsh!t. And thanks to the near-real-time nature of TV, that exposure showed up in US living rooms nationwide on the 6 o’clock news for weeks.
Yeah, Cronkite’s pronouncements on TET probably had an effect. But frankly, his public pronouncements regarding TET were only the most visible mainfestation of something that was probably inevitable. Sooner or later, the true situation in Vietnam was going to smack the LBJ administration – and the American public – solidly in the face. Because the situation in Vietnam in late 1967 was hardly the nice “unicorns and Skittles” picture that both Westmorland and the LBJ Administration had been claiming for months. And it wasn’t going to get better any time soon.
I lasted until Cronkite.
The newsies’ influence on public perceptions of Tet, specifically, and the war, generally, cannot be overstated. War protests were regularly featured and too many people felt justified in putting responsibility for the war on the men who were sent to fight it. It was one phuked-up era. And that’s all I want to say about it.
Tet Offensive…The Victory the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines won that caused the news media and politicians to lose the war.
A number of TAHellcats were there before, during, and after, doing their duty to their mess mates. I watched it on TV and read of it in every newspaper I could get my hands on. A number of my school chums had brothers, uncles, and some fathers there. I knew of 3 personal friends killed and 20 + wounded. Several of my DS from basic and AIT were on a Tour of Duty then.
A very good friend of mine (met in 85) Former Marine Gunnery Sergeant Arthur A. (Tuffy) Slocumb served one of his Tours of Duty during that time frame. Tuffy will be buried this coming Saturday in Jones Co GA. Hart’s Mortuary/www.legacy.com
Stop by there and give my man a BZ. Tuffy was a Marine’s Marine.
According to what I’ve read, studied, and the people I have talked with that were there, if LBJ would’ve let us, we could have finished that whole war by Christmas of ’68. Just my opinion.
No, not just your opinion but that of dozens of guys I have talked with personally who were there.
Way to go, pinko freaks. Never before had such a stunning defeat been snatched from the glorious defeat of an enemy of this country. Turned out that our worst enemies were within.
I got orders to go to RVN in Dec to report to Ft. Lewis in Feb. or March and was home on leave when the Tet offensive started. Kinda took some of the fun out of it, ya know? Oddly enough another guy from my unit in Germany was supposed to report to Ft.Lewis the same day I did. He never showed.
As for finishing the war in ’68, no way. Just wishful thinking. Cronkite was not just right, he was late. The French were laughing at us, and rightly so. As I wrote in a previous comment, the French had quite a bit of experience in that type of warfare and were not hesitant about sharing it. Or attempting to share it, anyway. US leaders did not seem to want to learn from the mistakes of others, preferring to learn by repeating those mistakes themselves.
Winning one battle, no matter how big, does NOT mean the war is won. The French badly defeated the Viet Minh several times, and lost the war. The Germans won numerous battles in Russia and captured *millions* of prisoners in five (5) months in 1941 alone, but lost the war.
As always, politicians not allowing the military to do the job right… happened in WWII, got worse in Korea, and was perfected in Vietnam…My dad made it through Tet (when he was awarded his Bronze Star with V). His opinion of Kronkite, et al was about on a par with his opinion of Hanoi jane, and john Fing kerry… There’s now doubt that the was was won at that point, and the leftists in govt, the media, and society gave it away.. and these are the same assholes that have been indoctrinating our children for decades…
Because it bears repeating:
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Reading a lot of comments here in the same ideology has keep the US in Afghanistan for 18 years. OH WE WERE SO CLOSE, lol
Maybe it’s the same bullshit ROE that’s fucking us over again in the ‘Stan, ever think of that?
Exactly. Hamstring your military into the point that they’re camouflaged police, you can’t expect them to win a war. That whole “hearts and minds” thing is BS. They hate us just as much, if not more, now than they did in Y2K.
Or maybe it’s those same bullshit excuses for losing that our military & political leaders use that fucks us over again.
People rag on Cronkite, and call him a traitor for the protests following Tet, but that’s not exactly accurate. It might be pointed out that, prior to Tet, Cronkite had been a supporter of the war effort. The reason his opinion changed was because he had been lied to and made to look like a fool by MACV and the ARVN.
In the weeks leading up to Tet, MACV was claiming publicly, including to Cronkite, that the little commie bastards had been whipped, and it was all over but for the parade. And where was MACV getting it’s information? Mostly from the ARVN who were not bashful about telling the Americans what they wanted to hear– even if it meant generating a steaming pile of waterboo poo.
In a certain sense, it became like the old Telephone parlor game where a message whispered in a chain of people around a room becomes FUBAR in the transition. And at the risk of mixing a metaphor, Cronkite became the one without a chair when the music stopped.
He may have been. But it was also not his right nor position to become an on air propagandist about us not winning there.He had a responsibility to report the news, FUCK his opinion.
Dunno, Steve. That seems like pretty much a shoot-the-messenger argument to me.
In the Winter of ’71, I was assigned to an advisory team working with the ARVN 23rd Infantry Division. As a general rule, I found the ARVN, for a variety of reasons, to be about as worthless as the tits on a boar. They were doomed, and everybody knew it. A big question we were all asking ourselves at the time was why we GIs should have to spill our blood when the ARVN weren’t willing to spill theirs.
Could the U.S. have won in Viet Nam? My own view was that the Army was a lot like having the meanest junkyard dog imaginable under very tight control. The dog could snap, snarl, and sometimes get a piece of NVA ass, but the dog was never let off the leash. For us to have won would have probably meant cutting the dog loose to the level of kill them all, and let God sort it out.
Personally, I could be sympathetic to those who supported such scorched-earth tactics, but also assumed such a thing was never realistically on the table.
” the dog was never let off the leash”
On the contrary. Away from populated areas, where the NVA hung out, we had carte blanche. If we could find them there were no restrictive ROEs. Except for no nukes. In populated areas where the VC hung out the National Police and ARVN took the lead. At least that was the the way we operated when I was there.
I never had much use for the “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” mentality. It’s only good for recruiting VC and propping up NVA morale.
The only way we could have “won” in Vietnam in a military sense is if we had been willing to commit a sizeable portion of our military to launch a conventional invasion against North Vietnam.
Considering that North Vietnam bordered China, and considering that less than 15 years before this, the specter of US troops near the Chinese border had caused the Chinese to come into the Korean War en masse and push the UN an US forces back South of Seoul, this was not ever seriously considered by anyone.
Not to mention the fact that weakening ourselves in Europe and the rest of the world would have invited the Soviet Union to incite even more mischief than they already did.
But assume arguendo, for a moment, that we could have somehow invaded North Vietnam, taken Hanoi and all of NVN all the way to the Chinese border without getting the Chinese to come into the war, So what?
What would we have “won?” A country full of people pissed off at us and actively planning against us? A nation that we would have had to garrison with hundreds of thousands of troops just to prop up whatever government we installed there?
The French “won” control of Indochina in the late 1940’s but it didn’t keep them from getting their asses handed to them in 1953 and 54.
That right there should show that there was never a chance we would “win” in Vietnam no matter what definition of “win” you use. It simply wasn’t an option.
There was another possible strategy that had prospects for success. Summers discusses it in On Strategy.
Essentially, we’d have had to occupy extreme southern North Vietnam and Laos, then deploy troops there and along the Thai side of the Mekong. We’d have then supplied South Vietnam and told them, “OK, we’ve cut off the NVA and we’ll keep them out. Taking care of the VC is your job.”
Under that strategy, we’d not have had to deploy massive combat troops and logistical formations throughout South Vietnam – or for the most part, USAF forces either (USAF support from Thailand would have taken the place of in-country USAF assets). Summers estimated that around 5 divisions plus normal support assets – or about 150k troops – would have been required.
The strategy had three major advantages. First, it would have cut the vast majority of the flow of both troops and materiel from north to south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A small amount might have still gotten to South Vietnam via sea through Cambodian ports – though without a well-supplied NVA occupying part of his country, Siahnook might have cut that off too. Second, far fewer US troops (and far fewer US casualties) would have been required. And third, we’d not have had the massive effect on the South Vietnamese economy and society that the huge deployments and combat operations between 1965-1971 did.
Dunno if that strategy would have worked or not, and we’ll never know. But it soes seem on the surfact to have merit. And it couldn’t have done any worse than what we actually tried.
If you ever get a chance read Nicholas Warr’s book “Phase Line Green”. It describes really well what a meat grinder the city of Hue was.
The war itself was Lyndon Johnson’s war. He wanted one, Kennedy did not. Kennedy had sent in advisers in 1961. Prior to that, Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was there early in the 1950s. Johnson wanted to escalate it, and sent the Marines in by amphibious landing in March 1965, and the rest followed.
Johnson bit off more than he could chew with what he did and it cost him a lot.
I think you have to look at the greater context of what was happening in American politics at the time. Truman and the democrats were excoriated (pretty unfairly, IMO) for “losing” China in 1949. What followed was a series of events that, although unrelated, made the democrats look “weak” on national defense: The Soviet’s explosion of an A-bomb years before anyone thought they would have one; Revelations of espionage at the highest levels of the Manhattan Project (the Rosenburg trial being the culmination of this); the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, followed by not one but TWO disastrous retreats by US/UN forces (the first in the Summer of 1950 and the second in late 1950 and early 1951 when the Chinese came into the war.) One of the things that is often forgotten about our involvement in Vietnam is why we backed the French in the first place. The French essentially extorted our help by conditioning their support of the fledgling NATO in Europe to our committment to help them reacquire their lost territories in Asia. It was our concerns about Europe and the specter of Soviet domination there that caused us to back the French play in Indochina, and that in turn led to the 1955 ceasefire agreement and the establishment of the divided Vietnams. Which is pretty ironic when you consider that as soon as they had the ability to do so, the French beat feet out of there and left the whole sorry mess in our lap. Ike had been pretty tepid in support of the French during the end of their war in Indochina in 1953 – 54 and later after the RVN was established. He knew that Americans had been growing disillusioned over having military forces in Asian countries for no clear reason (as they had been in Korea) and he wanted no part of increasing US military presence in the RVN. When Kennedy took office, he feared that if it fell to the commies on his watch, then the democrat party would once again be charged with “losing” an asian country… Read more »
Not wanting to see South Vietnam “fall to the Communists” while he was POTUS was part of it. But LBJ also had no qualms about taking the US to war in South Vietnam.
That fact is demonstrated by a quote from LBJ to members of the JCS during late 1963, roughly 11 months before LBJ would stand for re-election. At the time the JCS was recommending the deployment of additional US troops to strengthen South Vietnam. LBJ was unwilling to do so at that time, but only due to concerns about possible impact on his election as POTUS in his own right.
The quote that demonstrates that? LBJ, speaking to one or more members of the JCS: “Just let me get elected. Then you can have your war.”
The quote is documented in Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. Karnow indicated that quote was related to him by the CSA at the time, GEN Harold Johnson (no relation), who personally heard LBJ say it.
I agree with everything you said but I’m not convinced that LBJ was a hawkish “cold warrior” who was eager to fight the commies.
It didn’t hurt that his military advisors were telling him that we were on the brink of victory and just a few more brigades would be enough to push us past the mythical “Crossover point” that would force the North to agree to a ceasefire at which point he could declare victory and bring the troops home.
My impression of LBJ is that his focus was always domestic politics and that his escalation of Vietnam was done so as to get the whole thing over with so he could focus on his domestic “great society” agenda.
And I’m sure that’s why, following the Tet offensive in February 1968, once LBJ realized that whether he liked it or not, the 68 elections would be a referendum on the Vietnam war, he chose not to run for reelection. With Vietnam consuming all the air in the room there was none left for LBJ’s social programs.
*Second paragraph should read: “It didn’t HELP” *
The “just a few more brigades” advice occurred repeatedly, but also occurred well after LBJ and his Administration had engineered America’s stealth entry int Vietnam.
LBJ was willing to go to war in Vietnam shortly after he became POTUS. He intentionally deferred escalation so that Goldwater would appear to be a warmonger – and he would appear to be the “reasonable” choice – during the 1964 Presidential election. His administration was actively looking for an excuse to get Congress – via some incident – to give him authority to do so. Hell, they had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution drafted before the incident occurred and were waiting for sufficient provocation – which they also engineered via Oplan 34A De Soto raids in the area a day or two prior to the indicent. The timining of the initial airstrikes after Tonkin were timed in part based on the daily US news “cycle”. And the orignal announcement of the first major deployment of US troops to Vietnam was made at a time calculated to acquire minimum notice.
Bottom line: the LBJ Administration was fully willing to go to war in Vietnam. And they deliberately engineered US entry into same – via underhanded methods calculated to preclude significant debate either by the public or in Congress.
If you haven’t already, you really need to read McMaster’s book. He lays out a very well-documented case – quite eloquently and IMO accurately – for all of the above.
I read McMaster’s book and had a chance to compare/contrast Vietnam to Iraq- he was my boss when I was a LTC on my way to Iraq for my last tour and he was a lowly 1-Star. It was a bad day for this country when Trump fired him.
There are some additional moving parts:
From the standpoint of the French, they had a legitimate claim after World War II because they had brought to Viet Nam, for better or worse, some of the advantages of western civilization. A lot of the modern infrastructure of the country, including roads, bridges, ports, railroads, and so forth, were the result of French engineering. They were also pretty much cutting edge when it came to tropical medicine. It can be argued that most of the Mekong Delta was uninhabitable before the French arrived. In return, the French got, for example, the benefit of rubber plantations which came in handy if you ever wanted to drive a car from Paris to Lyon.
Unfortunately, the French also implemented a colonial government which favored native officials who were Catholic over the other 80 percent of the population who were Buddhist. This led, after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, to the corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem who, according to Ho Chi Minh and others, pretty much stole the election in ’56. An election which would have reunified the country.
It probably should also be mentioned, as matter of context, that the U.S. was also involved in a major national effort at the time to put people on the moon. Something which would happened in ’69.
Don’t think the Apollo program was that big of a factor, PG.
Total cost of the Apollo program was estimated at about $25B in 1973. In contrast, the total cost of the Vietnam War was around $168B. In terms of a national effort, the Vietnam War dwarfed Apollo.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-landing-45-years-looking-back-at-mankinds-giant-leap
https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/
Hey, guys, I just tried to keep it simple and short. All we ever heard about in school until the mid-1960s was the French Indochina War.
This was during the Eisenhower administration. When the White House changed hands, not too much later, it became Vietnam, and the rest followed.
I’m very aware that there was more to it than my brief take on it. I like to keep it simple.
The myth of Camelot. Oddly enough, though, the same Kennedy advisers (who stayed on to advise Johnson) who oversaw the increase of US involvement to 16,000 men by 1963 did not seem to have any objection to Johnson raising the stakes.
Excellent book. Shows how corrupt Johnson, McNamara were and how they co-opted the JCS into irrelevance.
When Tet started I was sitting on a LZ a mile or two outside of Quang Tri City. Having been in that area only for a couple of weeks everybody simply thought that the area was just more active than where we came from. We knew it was Tet but didn’t make the connection. As far as I could tell most American actions at that time were done in a very “workman like manner” with no panic. As I said “as far as I could tell.”
A while later (I can’t remember when) the word came down from a higher headquarters in the division that conditions were going “stateside” and ordered that we would be doing close order drill (no shit). Apparently somebody had come to the conclusion that the war was over and that we had won. Personally I thought this might have been a little premature. Fortunately I had a good excuse for getting out of drill. But I still have a vivid memory of walking past a group of poor SOBs doing left faces and right faces in the hot morning sun.
You might have noticed that I didn’t mention exactly where the order for the drill came from. This was done on purpose in order to protect the guilty. The only hint I’m going to give is that I’m not an ex-marine.
LZ Betty? Spent a few days there. Mostly at Jane and Nancy, though. Nice and peaceful when I got there, a couple of weeks after Tet was over. Thanks for “prepping” the area for me. ~(:P)
A tactical and strategic defeat for the VC, but a PR defeat for the US.
PR = Political, which is the whole purpose of war. It isn’t ‘cheating’ or irrelevant, as some people seem to think.
Right, another way to say it might be that what we needed to achieve in Vietnam could not be accomplished with military force, no matter how much military force was applied.
“The Harrowing Medal of Honor Stories of 5 Men Who Helped Turn the Tide of Vietnam’s Brutal Battle of Hue City”:
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-medal-of-honor-battle-hue-city-vietnam-war-2019-1
“The Tet Offensive began on January 30 as the North Vietnamese occupied the city of Hue. US Marines spent nearly a month fighting a brutal urban battle to retake the city – which was 80% destroyed by the battle’s end…”
“An estimated 1,800 Americans lost their lives during the battle.”
“But in the midst of the chaos, five men who faced harrowing circumstances risked their lives to save those of their comrades – and earned the nation’s highest award for courage in combat, the Medal of Honor”.
“During one of the ceremonies honoring these heroes, President Richard Nixon remarked on the incredible risks they took.”
“They are men who faced death, and instead of losing courage they gave courage to the men around them,” he said.”
They are:
(1) “Gunnery Sergeant John L. Canley received his award over 50 years after carrying wounded Marines to safety.”
(2) “Chief Warrant Officer Frederick Ferguson flew his helicopter through a barrage of anti-aircraft fire to rescue wounded comrades.”
(3) “Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez”
(4) “Sergeant Joe Hooper is described as the most decorated soldier of the Vietnam War.”
(5) “Staff Sergeant Clifford Sims, once an orphan, flung himself on top of an explosive device to save his platoon.”
Salute. Never Forget.
The least the author can do is spell the major cities correctly. It is Hue, not Hu. I was in Khe Sanh and CaLu MCB in early 68. Glad I missed Hue.