After World War II, the United States established itself as the premier world superpower. Then came Vietnam, which humbled the nation and forced it to face its supposed infallibility. The Tet Offensive had a lot to do with that.
The irony of the Vietnam War is that while America was supposedly protecting the world from a communist takeover, it was fighting a people who were fighting for their independence, much like America did pre-1776. The war, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, was one of the most divisive periods in the country during the late ’60s and early ’70s, with young men being drafted to fight and die in a war that the government secretly knew couldn’t be won.
The conflict centered around North Vietnam, and the North Vietnam Army and Viet Cong, versus the more democratic leaning (but corrupt) South Vietnam. The war started slowly, with America initially only providing “military advisers” and weapons, but eventually ground troops were deployed. America bombed North Vietnam mercilessly and had what amounted to the most advanced military force in the world at the time, with air support for troops and heavy use of helicopters to ferry troops in and out of the war zone.
As the war dragged on, protests in America became increasingly violent. Once the North ran the Tet Offensive in 1968, Americans saw firsthand just how determined the North was to win its country back. No amount of bombing or technology could prevent that.
What was the Tet Offensive?
The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a very coordinated group of attacks by the North on more than 100 targets in South Vietnam. The North knew it could not win with its forces alone but banked on the fact that the South Vietnamese people would revolt and join the revolution. This didn’t turn out quite the way they hoped, and the war would continue to crawl along for another seven years.
News footage from the offensive shocked Americans and support for the war eroded quickly, as the government had kept telling people that the war was months from being won. While it was unsuccessful in the initial thrust of the offensive, the North won both a strategic and public relations victory with the offensive.
It’s called Tet after one of Vietnam’s most important holidays: the lunar new year. Orchestrated by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap and President Ho Chi Minh, the offensive hinged on a faulty premise: that the South Vietnamese would turn on the Americans. Giap felt that America’s alliance with the South was tenuous at best. This turned out to be a deadly miscalculation.
Leading up to the attacks, Giap’s People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) started attacking more isolated American bases near the Cambodian and Laotian borders. By late January of 1968, PAVN attacked the U.S. military base at Khe Sanh, meant to distract the Americans and obfuscate the PAVN’s true intentions.
Tet began in earnest on January 30, 1968, with a simultaneous attack on 13 southern cities. The North wanted to end the war once and for all, and had been planning the attacks for many months. In just 24 hours, the Viet Cong and the NVA led more than 120 attacks. One of the most brazen assaults was on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where a contingent of Viet Cong soldiers got inside the compound before they were killed.
Another huge Tet battle happened in Hue, a city 50 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the north and south of the country. Forces from the North captured the city and systematically executed people it thought were enemies. When Americans finally wrested the city back, they found some 2,800 people had been killed, with an additional 3,000 people missing. About 5,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed, mostly from artillery.
While it didn’t turn the South against the U.S. or win the war for good, the Tet Offensive destroyed the notion that the United States was winning in Vietnam. It became increasingly clear that there was a long, long road to victory, if that road even existed. This was a win for the North, as it shook the confidence of Americans and forced them to reassess what was happening on the ground there.
In an act that many read as desperate, General William Westmoreland asked for 200,000 more troops. Up to that point, Westmoreland had been telling the American people that the enemy was only capable of attacking remote bases at the far ends of the country.
What’s interesting about the whole thing is that the United States tried to spin the offensive as a victory. The military, along with South Vietnamese forces, got back all of the territory they lost during the attacks, but the North made it very clear that the war was not close to being won by any metric at all.
President Lyndon Johnson was forced to reckon with this new reality, and talks of de-escalation started in earnest by his administration. He placed a limit on the troops being sent into the country and stopped bombing the North above the 20th parallel. On March 31, 1968, barely two months after Tet, Johnson told the American public that he wouldn’t seek a second term for the presidency. That meant that the problem of pulling America out of the war would fall on the shoulders of the next U.S. president. That turned out to be Richard Nixon.
The Tet Offensive marked a new phase in the Vietnam War, and even though it wouldn’t end for another seven years it is widely seen as the very beginning of the end of the war. Unfortunately, a lot of people had to die to get there.