why was the tet offensive important

Tet, for many, crystallized the wars costsmoral, strategic, in lives lost, dollars wasted. To distract attention from their preparations and attract U.S. forces away from the large cities, the communists launched diversionary attacks in October 1967 against the important but isolated town of Dak To in the . And that's what I think Walter Cronkite reacted to, in part. If the United States let communists grab control of South Vietnam, official doctrine held, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall with domino-like precision. He has said the C.I.A. The Battle of Hue Impact of the Tet Offensive Antiwar Movement Grows Sources The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than 100 cities and outposts. On January 31, 1968, the Vietnamese New Year, North Vietnamese forces launched an all-out invasion on nearly every major city and military base in South Vietnam. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion, he said on his broadcast. Matthew Dallek, professor at George Washington Universitys Graduate School of Political Management, is author of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security. Theres a second, more powerful message implicit in Kennedys candidacy: a profound undercurrent of discontent with a party that is losing touch with its once-powerful, even dominant, populist roots. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. killed his uncle and possibly his father, Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci self-enrichment scheme. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), Johnson announced he would not run for re-election, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive. For the North Vietnamese government, the best result would be a galvanizing of discontent in the South that would, in turn, force the collapse of the government and army of South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu. What I saw was probably the most intense ground fighting on a sustained basis over several days of any other period during the war, Howard Prince, a U.S. Army captain, later told NPR. Yet Hanois assumptions misread the reality of a political community whose fortunes had improved, if only ever so slightly, in the aftermath of the 1967 presidential elections. What exactly had happened and what it meant tooksome time to sort out. On Jan. 30, 1968, in a wave of coordinated surprise attacks, Ho Chi Minh sent 70,000 of his troops and members of the Viet Cong guerilla allies from the south to overrun military bases, towns and cities in South Vietnam, including the capital, Saigon. The offensive was preceded by broadcasts from the clandestine Liberation Radio network, in which the Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forcesan urban front group established by the Viet Congexhorted the South Vietnamese people to rise in open revolt against the Saigon government. And Johnson should have taken the fight to North Vietnam and gone after the enemy's safe havens in Laos and Cambodia. By August 1968, 53 percent thought sending troops was a mistake, versus 35 percent who said it wasnt. Further reason: We arent living in 1968, or even 1967. Get HISTORYs most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week. Le Duans hopes in late 1967 and early 1968 offer us important perspective on strategy at its core, strategy is an aspirational art. The Vietnamese had a long history of resisting outside forcesmost recently French colonials. Despite these advance warnings, when the North Vietnamese offensive began in the early morning hours of January 3031, 1968, it was larger and more intense than U.S. intelligence had anticipated. Answer (1 of 8): Tet is the lunar new years celebration; the most important holiday in Vietnam. Tet was one big factor that had swayed hearts and minds. How can we possibly win and survive as a nation and have to fight the presss lies? In January, LBJ had appointed Washington insider Clark Clifford, a longtime supporter of the war, to replace Robert McNamara as secretary of defense. North Vietnamese units in Cho Lon, a historically Chinese district west of Saigon, were blasted out in prolonged fighting that demolished large portions of the area. The communists proved their ability to keep fighting The US ended the involvement in the Vietnam war because_____ The fallings of Vietnamization and growing dissent in US The high point of President Nixons foreign policy efforts was_________ You cannot download interactives. For four-and-a-half years, LBJ had waged war and sought peace in Vietnam, without success on either score. Meanwhile, the Defense Department fed the public artificial, often inflated tallies of weekly enemy casualties. As President Lyndon B. Johnson and General William Westmoreland focused their attention on the defense of Khe Sanh, Giaps 70,000 poised to begin their true objective: the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive showed that Johnson and Westmoreland were lying about having "reached an important point where the end begins to come into view," as Westmoreland famously had said. Ultimately, it triggered a series of forces and events that gradually led to the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam by 1975. Was it true, as Clifford recalled, that the price was no longer commensurate with the goal? Thus began the Tet Offensive, in which thousands of communist-backed Viet Cong fighters waged a series of major assaults on big cities, provincial hamlets and regional capitals across U.S.-backed South Vietnammore than 100 locations in the first 24 hour alone. Twenty-four hours later, PAVN and Viet Cong forces struck a number of other targets throughout South Vietnam, including cities, towns, government buildings and U.S. or ARVN military bases throughout South Vietnam, in a total of more than 120 attacks. Also, the prospect of Donald Trump back in the White House focuses the mind in a way not even the prospect of a Nixon presidency did. The offensive derives its name from the Vietnamese New Year holiday, during which the attacks occurred. In addition to the bloody fighting in the Embassy courtyard, they waged fierce attacks on strategic targets such as the presidential palace, Saigons Tan Son Nhut Airport and the city of Hue, once a seat of emperors. A communist assessment that March acknowledged that organized popular forces were not broad and strong enough and a post-mortem after the war noted that the Politburo had been subjective in our assessment of the situation, especially in assessing the strength of the mass political forces in the urban areas. Moreover, Hanois flawed assumption that the ARVN would collapse if hit hard enough led to catastrophic losses among the outmatched communist forces that exposed themselves in the offensive, ensuring that years of hard fighting lay ahead. All Rights Reserved. The Tet Offensive consisted of simultaneous attacks by some 85,000 troops under the direction of the North Vietnamese government. In typical fashion, Johnson lashed out at the press, telling a reporter that the press islying like drunken sailors every day. Public support for his handling of the war crateredand with it, his hopes for a second term. By the time Viet Cong combatants took up positions in the American embassy courtyard, Vietnam had become a test case of Americas resolve in waging the Cold War. Suddenly, you turn around and we've got a half million people out there and more on the way. The U.S. military, however, had grown more optimistic following the Tet Offensive. This is the party whose base has substantially shifted from the high school- to the college-educated; from factory floors and service jobs to breakout rooms on Zoom; from champions of free speech to promoters of speech codes and trigger warnings; from questioning authority (including scientific authority) to offering and demanding unblinking fidelity to it. Itshocked the American publicinto reality about theescalating conflict and led to President Johnsons decision not to seek re-election. Many veterans and particularly senior officers found solace in a storyline highlighting military successes, of a forsaken triumph that ensured the U.S. armed forces could still take credit for their battlefield acumen. But we cant do it without you: Our fiscal year ends on June 30, and we need your help to reach our funding goal to ensure we can continue our work. All Rights Reserved. Antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy fell just a few hundred votes shy of defeating the sitting president in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in early March. The North Vietnamese armys 77-day bombardment and siege of Khe Sanh, a five-square-mile Marine garrison, beginning January 21, 1968, riveted much of Americas attention and became an obsession for Johnson, who insisted the fort couldnt be lost. That front page of The Washington Post in the morning, with the pictures of the American Embassy the symbol of everything, not destroyed, but pretty well damaged and dead people all around that had to be one of the great, great shocks and traumatic events in Washington., Sam Adams, a CIA analyst who was stationed in Vietnam at the time, believes Hanois chief objective was to jolt American public opinion right before the American elections. Never before had the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong suffered such casualties. A strategist might be able to calculate, rather precisely, the resources available, but setting overarching goals requires delineating certain expectations. The offensive sowed profound doubts about the wars courseexposing the truth that, in spite of the presence of some 500,000 American military personnel in Vietnam, three years of fighting and heavy casualties had yielded nothing more than a protracted, bloody stalemate. Although U.S. commanders generally held a low opinion of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN), South Vietnamese soldiers fought with bravery and tenacity during the Tet Offensive. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. And yet the subsequent U.S.-backed regimes there were corrupt, repressive and lacking in popular support, since South Vietnamese leaders suppressed Buddhist religious worship, rounded up anti-government critics and enriched themselves. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops occupied the walled fortress of Hue, Vietnams ancient capital, until they were finally driven out by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces on February 24. Instead, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong advance was checked by surprisingly resilient ARVN defenders, and most citieswith the notable exception of Huewere liberated within days of the initial attack. The offensive frayed the relationship between the South Vietnamese and the United States.Theconsequences of the Tet Offensiveextended to the United States. That feeling of just the quagmire, that there was no end to it.. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Then came Tet, a turning point in public opinion about the war, and a political disaster for PresidentLyndon Johnson's administration. They had hoped people in S Vietnam would rise up and join them, but they didn't They lost about 10,000 experienced fighters and so were badly weakened What was the US's response to the Tet Offensive? Now that hes running, the safe call seems to be to rally behind him, lest a challenger help sink his chances. The Tet Offensive was an American military victory, says Prince. LBJ's War is a new, limited-edition podcast that unearths previously unheard audio that helps us better understand the course of the Vietnam War and how Lyndon Johnson found himself where he did. Yet he also responded quickly, moving his forces to parry the enemys assaults and prepare for his own counterattack. These numbers are terrible and thats despite declining inflation and rock-bottom unemployment. Saigon was hardly the lifeless puppet that communist propagandists painted it to be. Sharp not incidentally, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 1964 to 1968 pilloried the handwringers who had taken center stage and the anti-war elements who were in full cry. And, more recently, one popular editorial writer, James Robbins, has suggested a more basic, American-centric point: We lost the Vietnam War by choice., A better reading of the 1968 Tet offensive, especially for civilian policymakers and military strategists, would include a more thoughtful dissection of what we expect to accomplish through war, how we understand the mechanism through which violence is meant to effect political change, and why our unblemished faith in the general political efficacy of force persists. Some may know the Tet Offensive had something to do with Vietnam, but that's about it. Updated: December 12, 2022 | Original: October 29, 2009. On February 27, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, a pillar of respectability and hardly an antiwar radical, solemnly informed millions of viewers that after his recent visit to the battlefields of Vietnam, it was unclear who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities. But, he added, It seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate., The medias coverage of Tet overallhonest, fair-minded, unflinchingshaped Americans evolving views that the Vietnam War simply couldnt be won by any conventional military standard. Id push them down here and theyd pop up there, and Id go home at night and be uneasy and disturbed and then we'd start again the next day and wed grind through this business.. National Geographic Headquarters 1145 17th Street NW Washington, DC 20036. History Reads features the work of prominent authors and historians. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and questioned for 11 hours. killed his uncle and possibly his father, that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election, and that Covid vaccines are a Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci self-enrichment scheme. More than 670,000 people were declared refugees, raising the total number of internally displaced persons in South Vietnam to some 1.5 million. From the time U.S. combat troops began shipping over to Vietnam in 1965 to fight the spread of communism, Americans werent quite sure what to make of the war playing out in jungles and rice paddies halfway across the world. His supporters may be doing just the opposite: taking him seriously for being the voice of revolt, irrespective of how they feel about his specific views. A U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules takes off from Khe Sanh, Vietnam, in 1968. Some seeking lessons from that conflict saw Tet as a fateful lost opportunity to convert military success into meaningful political gain. Esteemed historian George Herring, for his part, goes further, arguing that Tet represented the high-water mark of post-World War II American hegemony, that point at which the nations establishment came to recognize that its international commitments had begun to exceed its ability to pay for them.. And I don't think anybody but a goddamn communist admits it.. The Tet Offensive was one of the largestmilitaryoperationsof the Vietnam War, and became a key turning point in theconflict.The Tet Offensive was a surprise series of attacks launched during Tet, the Vietnamese New Yearfestival. And far too often in the planning process, those expectations are based on unexamined or unrealistic assumptions rather than considered reasoning. The image, The New York Times later reflected, sparked an immediate revulsion at a seemingly gratuitous act of savagery that was widely seen as emblematic of a seemingly gratuitous war.. At the same time, Johnson announced he would not run for re-election that November. De-escalation began. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. On March 22 Johnson approved only a small increase of troops. The Tet Offensive was an operation launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in South Vietnam in late January 1968. I don't anticipate that we will hit them so hard that they'll be knocked out.. There are dangers when we assume, as an article of faith, that the merits of employing military power always outweigh the limits of that power. According to this narrative, Westmorelands successor, Creighton Abrams, presided over the consolidation of the Tet military victory and brought the allies even closer to winning the war. See how the North Vietnamese-backed Viet Cong launched surprise attacks across South Vietnam. Silent Majority Vietnam War Ends Sources Vietnam War protests began among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses, but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United. 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. Abramss ascension to MACV command in the spring of 1968, though, came at a time when Hanoi already had decided to reinforce the fighting in South Vietnam. Many South Vietnamese troops were on holiday when the attacks began, and the military was caught off guard. We could just be there year after year after year, sacrificing 10,000 American boys a year, and it just didn't add up.. The Tet Offensive began in stealth 50 years ago in Vietnam, but it ended up splashed on television sets all over America, helping to bring down the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. North Vietnamese leaders believed they could not sustain the heavy . The Tet Offensive 1968 General Vo Nguyen Giap. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. In 1968, the Vietcong used the cover of the Vietnamese New Year (known as Tet) celebrations to change tactics and launch a massive attack on US-held areas across South Vietnam, . Though peace talks would drag on for another five yearsduring which more American soldiers were killed than in the previous years of the conflictJohnsons decision to halt escalation after the Tet Offensive marked a crucial turning point in American participation in the war in Vietnam. The near upset by McCarthy, a Minnesota progressive, helped convince Johnson that he should not run for re-election, opening the way for Robert F. Kennedy. Why did the domino theory led to the Tet Offensive? Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington Universitys Graduate School of Political Management and author of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security. Americans watched the Tet Offensive unfold in real time. John Chancellor, who covered the White House for NBC News and would later anchor its nightly broadcast for a dozen years, believes Johnson would not have been forced into the unhappy decision not to run again if the country had been better prepared, if the country had understood what he was doing in Vietnam., The one great disadvantage Lyndon Johnson had in running this country is that the people didn't quite trust him, Chancellor says.

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