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. Early in their occupation of Hue, Viet Cong soldiers conducted house-to-house searches, arresting civil servants, religious leaders, teachers and other civilians connected with American forces or with the South Vietnamese regime.
They executed these so-called counter-revolutionaries and buried their bodies in mass graves. The toughest fighting in Hue occurred at the ancient citadel, which the North Vietnamese struggled fiercely to hold against superior U. In scenes of carnage recorded on film by numerous television crews on the scene, nearly U.
Marines were killed in the Battle of Hue, along with some South Vietnamese troops. On the North Vietnamese side, an estimated 5, soldiers were killed, most of them hit by American air and artillery strikes.
Despite its heavy casualty toll, and its failure to inspire widespread rebellion among the South Vietnamese, the Tet Offensive proved to be a strategic success for the North Vietnamese.
Before Tet, Westmoreland and other representatives of the Johnson administration had been claiming that the end of the war was in sight; now, it was clear that a long struggle still lay ahead, shaking their confidence in their ability to win the Cold War. Westmoreland requested more than , new troops in order to mount an effective counteroffensive, an escalation that many Americans saw as an act of desperation.
On March 31, a beleaguered President Johnson declared that he was limiting the bombing of North Vietnam to the area below the 20th parallel thus sparing 90 percent of communist-held territory and calling for negotiations to end the war. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, popular U. Also called "the country. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Both examples use symbols to represent strength and a sense of urgency as they encourage United States citizens to join the war effort. Many among the rural population remained committed to the communist cause. Saigon was hardly the lifeless puppet that communist propagandists painted it to be.
Westmoreland welcomed the news. True, the enemy had targeted provinces adjacent to North Vietnam and his own staging areas in Laos. But the American command had engaged in a form of mirror-imaging.
Its leaders and intelligence analysts were making assumptions about the enemy based on the belief that the communists thought and thus behaved like the Americans themselves.
The White House drew similar parallels. But there was more to the flawed intelligence picture. Throughout the latter part of , MACV headquarters and the CIA battled over enemy strength estimates, with the military headquarters reaching more bullish conclusions about enemy attrition than the intelligence analysts had. With the Tet holiday nearing, Hanoi similarly saw what it wanted to see when it looked southward.
Yet the coordination of such an ambitious nationwide offensive misfired and some units attacked a day early, providing MACV with a crucial warning of the impending assault.
Still, the offensive brought destruction to areas previously unscathed by war. While the attack on the U. In the imperial city of Hue, hit hard by the communists, official estimates after the battle reckoned that 80 percent of the houses and buildings there were destroyed or damaged.
Suggestions that he and, to a lesser extent, U. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker focused on the tactical battle ranging around Khe Sanh at the expense of other military and political crises wrought by the enemy offensive are misplaced. Such indeed was the case as casualty rates on both sides spiked as the allies regained their footing and went on the counterattack.
Westmoreland pushed South Vietnamese forces into the countryside to regain lost territory while U. Senior officials in the White House, however, were asking their own sets of questions. Among them was Clark Clifford , the new secretary of defense who had replaced Robert S. McNamara while the Tet fighting raged on. How was it possible the enemy could launch such a wide-ranging offensive? Was the ongoing fighting in Vietnam actually weakening the United States, both at home and abroad?
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