Now let’s get some facts straight about the Tet Offensive. Tet provides us with perhaps the best example of (1) the news media’s misleading and distorted reporting on the war, and (2) the equally misleading and distorted version of the war given by liberal scholars.
Imagine how ludicrous it would have been if, four days after the desperate German gamble of the Battle of the Bulge ended, Walter Cronkite and other liberals had declared that the war in Europe was a stalemate and was unwinnable. Imagine if they had lamented, “What’s going on? We thought we were winning the war. How could the Germans have mounted such a powerful offensive if we are winning the war? Surely our government has been lying to us about the war.”
The Tet Offensive was a desperate gamble that was done because Hanoi realized they had to abandon their prolonged-war strategy and go for a decisive victory to end the war. Why? Because the NVA and VC were suffering increasing casualties and because LBJ had finally lifted enough of the air-power restrictions that, by the spring of 1967, our bombing was destroying more war material than Hanoi could replace (Leonard Scruggs,
Lessons from the Vietnam War, pp. 85-90). Vietnam War scholar Leonard Scruggs:
By mid-1967 the NVA’s escalating casualties and tightening logistical circumstances convinced the leaders of North Vietnam that they could not sustain a protracted war against the U.S. Time, they thought, was no longer on their side. They decided to abandon their protracted-war strategy and go for a swift and decisive victory that would quickly collapse the government in Saigon and result in a humiliating U.S. withdrawal. (Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 90)
Historian Arthur Hermann:
By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.
Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.
It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. (“The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie,” Hudson Institute, January 30, 2018, The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media’s Big Lie - by Arthur Herman)
The after-action report of the U.S. Army II Field Force gives us a good idea of some of the developments that led Hanoi to conclude that they had to gamble on a major offensive to win the war quickly:
By November 1967 the operations of II FFORCEV and III Corps within III CTZ had succeeded in driving the bulk of the VC/NVA main forces away from the more heavily populated areas into the sparsely settled border regions. A captured document showed that the VC in MRIV - the region around Saigon - had suffered three times the losses in 1967 as in 1966.
The threat in Gia Dinh Province surrounding Saigon was reduced to the point that the 199th Lt Inf Bde was able to phase out Op FAIRFAX, and to move into War Zone D, leaving to the 5th ARVN Ranger Group primary tactical responsibility for the security of the Capital Military District.
The VC were in serious straits in Phouc Tuy and Long Khanh Province where allied pressure had broken down their supply system. The VC in western Hau Nghia Province had been reduced to the point that the 25th US Div was able to shift its brigade forces to operations northwest of Cu Chi; while the 25th ARVN Div continued pacifying Hau Nghia.
The 1st Inf Div had been successful in opening and holding open Highway 13 to Quan Loi, splitting War Zone C from D, as well as facilitating civil and military movement north of Saigon. v/ The 9th Inf Div had commenced clearing Highway 1 from Saigon to the II-III Corps boundary turning it over progressively to the 18th ARVN Div.
The 9th Div was also able to draw down on forces in the northeastern portion of its TAOI while concentrating on expanding Mobile Riverine Force operations in IV CTZ in the Delta.
The Revolutionary Development program was accelerating. Public administration training was underway in all Provinces. Economic activity was improving, partly as a result of the opening of many road LOCs particularly in Hau Nghia and Binh Duong Province.
There was ample evidence that . . . the VC political infrastructure was losing its influence over key sectors of the population. (TET Offensive II Field Force Vietnam After Action Report, Defense Technical Information Center, 1 March 1968, pp. 1-2, DTIC ADA534568: TET Offensive II Field Force Vietnam After Action Report 31 January - 18 February 1968 : Defense Technical Information Center : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive)
The Tet Offensive was a botched invasion that incurred staggering losses. Several North Vietnamese sources describe those enormous losses. The offensive started badly when, due to confusion in the chains of command, some NVA and VC units attacked prematurely, squandering the element of surprise against most targets. The NVA/VC failed to take most of their objectives, and in a matter of hours or days they lost most of the objectives that they did take. Only in Hue and in a sector of Saigon did they manage to hold on for about four weeks, before being mauled by ARVN and American forces. Much to the Communists’ surprise, many ARVN units fought well, and very few South Vietnamese welcomed the NVA as liberators. And, NVA and VC atrocities during the offensive caused most South Vietnamese to more strongly support the Saigon government.
However, this is not the story that the American people were told by the news media. In his massive study
Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Yale University Press, 1978, abridged edition), Vietnam War correspondent Peter Braestrup documents the countless erroneous, misleading reports that journalists and major news outlets gave about Tet. For example, Braestrup notes that the news media reported that VC fighters had occupied the first few floors of the American Embassy in Saigon, when in fact they never got inside the building and were killed in the embassy compound within six hours. Some reporters in Vietnam did file accurate reports on Tet, but the major news outlets in the U.S. ignored them.
Uwe Simeon-Netto, who witnessed Tet as the Far East correspondent for the German newspaper group Axel Springer, sheds light on the subject:
Forty years ago today, I witnessed the start of the most perplexing development in the 20th century – America's self-betrayal during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
The reason why I have never ceased wrestling with this event is this: On the one hand, Tet ended in a clear military victory for the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, who killed 45,000 communist soldiers and destroyed their infrastructure.
On the other hand, the major U.S. media persuaded Americans that Tet was a huge setback for their country. . . .
At 3 a.m. on Jan. 31, I stood opposite the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, watching a fierce firefight between Marines and Viet Cong attackers. . . .
Some days later, I was in the company of Marines fighting their way into communist-occupied Hué, Vietnam's former imperial capital. We found its streets strewn with the corpses of hundreds of women, children and old men, all shot execution-style by North Vietnamese invaders.
I made my way to Hué's university apartments to obtain news about friends of mine, German professors at the medical school. I learned that their names had been on lists containing some 1,800 Hué residents singled out for liquidation. . . .
Then, enormous mass graves of women and children were found. Most had been clubbed to death, some buried alive; you could tell from the beautifully manicured hands of women who had tried to claw out of their burial place.
As we stood at one such site, correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American T.V. cameraman, "Why don't you film this?" He answered, "I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda."
Many reporters accompanying U.S. and South Vietnamese forces realized and reported that the fortunes of war and the public mood had changed in their favor, principally because of the war crimes committed by the communists, especially in Hue, where 6,000-10,000 residents were slaughtered.
But the major media gave the Tet story an entirely different spin. (“The Tet Offensive and the Media,” Vietnamese and American Veterans of the Vietnam War, The Tet Offensive and the Media - Americans were told that a U.S. military victory was a defeat).
David Henard, a former Army chopper pilot who served in South Vietnam during Tet:
Terrified reporters crouched behind the cover of the high wall that surrounded the embassy compound. . . . They nonetheless filed colorful, wildly inaccurate, and totally fabricated stories, claiming that the Vietcong had occupied the first five floors of the American Embassy. This claim was made despite the fact that the Vietcong failed to even enter the building. They reported too quickly before they had the facts and misled the American public. (Victory Stolen, LitFire Publishing, 2018 edition, pp. 110-111)
We now know that General Giap strongly opposed launching the Tet Offensive, fearing that if the NVA and VC left their safe areas in large numbers, they would be decimated. But Giap was overruled by the fanatics in the Politburo who truly believed that ARVN would quickly crumble and that most South Vietnamese would embrace the invaders as liberators. When Tet ended up being a horrendous military disaster, Giap was so upset that he left North Vietnam for a while.
Hanoi’s leaders were so shocked by the scale of the defeat that they considered halting the war effort for a few years (Scruggs,
Lessons from the Vietnam War, p. 101; Dave Palmer,
Summons of the Trumpet, Presidio Press, 1978, pp. 208-210)—and they may well have done so if they had not realized that the American news media was turning their severe defeat into a shocking political victory.
Liberal scholars usually understate the degree of decimation that the NVA and the VC suffered in the Tet Offensive, and they describe Tet as a “monumental intelligence failure.”
“Monumental intelligence failure”? Westmoreland, his staff, and senior field commanders concluded from U.S. intelligence and field reports that the Communists were going to carry out a major assault around the time of the Tet holiday. However, they believed the attack would come after the holiday, and they underestimated the scale of the assault because they did not believe the NVA and the VC would be foolish enough to come out in large numbers far from their sanctuaries. We had always
wanted them to do this, but they had not obliged.
Westmoreland and his staff believed the attack would come sometime after the Tet holiday because Hanoi had announced weeks earlier that they would once again honor the usual Tet ceasefire. The Communists had made similar Tet ceasefire announcements in the past and had always refrained from any major military actions during Tet, so we assumed they would do the same thing this time.
So, yes, Tet was an intelligence failure, but not in the usual sense of the term. In the weeks before Tet, Westmoreland informed numerous officials, and even some journalists, that he believed a major NVA/VC attack would soon occur. He was so convinced of this that, two weeks before Tet began, he wisely moved 15 battalions from outlying areas to positions near Saigon, a move that proved crucial during the offensive.
If our news media had covered Tet with honesty, balance, and perspective, they would have reported that the offensive was an enormous blunder by North Vietnam and a resounding victory for America. The Tet Offensive was only a “political victory” for North Vietnam because our news media made it into one. The 11th Armored Cavalry Vietnam veterans’ website sums up the situation well:
The 1968 Tet offensive was a total and complete military disaster for the North Vietnamese Communists no matter how you look at it. If you measure victory by territory gained or enemy killed, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong failed dismally in their attacks.
The NVA and VC had counted on a "People's Uprising" to carry them to victory; however, there was no such uprising. They did exactly what the American military wanted them to do. They massed in large formations that were incredibly vulnerable to the awesome fire support the U.S. military was able to bring to bear on them in a coordinated and devastating manner.
The NVA and VC attacked only ARVN installations with the exception of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Despite reports to the contrary by all major television news networks and the print media, the VC sapper team never entered the Embassy’s chancery building and all 15 VC were dead within 6 hours of the attack.
In the first week of the attack, the NVA/VC lost 32,204 confirmed killed, and 5,803 captured. U.S. losses were 1,015 KHA, while ARVN losses were 2,819 killed.
Casualties among the people whom the NVA/VC claimed to be "liberating" were in excess of 7,000, with an additional 5,000 tortured and murdered by the NVA/VC in Hue and elsewhere. In Hue alone, allied forces discovered over 2,800 burial sites containing the mutilated bodies of local Vietnamese teachers, doctors, and political leaders.
Only the news media seemed to believe that in some way the Communists had achieved a "victory.” To put this in perspective, the news media would have reported the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's last-ditch attempt to stop the Allied forces in Europe, as a "disaster" for the Allies. They would have said that "despite Allied efforts, the enemy still has the means to mount a major offensive, and therefore the war in Europe is unwinnable." Sound goofy? Well, that is exactly what Walter Cronkite said on national TV after the 1968 Tet Offensive. (“Myth: The Tet Offensive Was a Communist Victory,” Myth The Tet Offensive Was a Communist Victory)
