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History |

The Tet Offensive

On January 21, 1968, around forty thousand NVA troops laid siege to a remote American military base at Khe Sanh, near the Lao border northwest of Hué. Wary that the confrontation might become an American Dien Bien Phu – an analogy that in reality held no water, given the US’s superior air power – America responded, to borrow the military jargon of the day, “with extreme prejudice”, notching up a Communist body count of over ten thousand in a carpet-bombing campaign graphically labelled “Niagara”. However, such losses were seen as a necessary evil by the Communists, for whom Khe Sanh was primarily a decoy to steer US troops and attention away from the Tet Offensive that exploded a week later. In the early hours of January 31, a combined force of seventy thousand Communists (most of them Viet Cong) violated a New Year truce to launch offensives on over a hundred urban centres across the South. The campaign failed to achieve its objective of imposing Viet Cong representation in the Southern government; only in Hué did Viet Cong forces manage to hold out for more than a few days.

But success did register across the Pacific, where the offensive caused a sea change in popular perceptions of the war. Thus far, Washington’s propaganda machine had largely convinced the public that the war in Vietnam was under control; events in 1968 flew in the face of this charade. Around two thousand American GIs had died during the Tet Offensive; but symbolically more damaging was the audacious assault mounted, on the first day of the offensive, by a crack Viet Cong commando team on the compound of the US Embassy in Saigon. The Communists had pierced the underbelly of the American presence in Vietnam: by the time the compound had been secured over six hours later, five Americans had died – and with them the popular conviction that the war was being won.

This shift in attitude was soon reflected in President Johnson’s vetoing of requests for a massive troop expansion. On March 31, he announced a virtual cessation of bombing; a month later, the first bout of diplomatic sparring that was to grind on for five years was held in Paris; and, before the year was out, a full end to bombing had been declared.

History |

Nixon’s presidency

Richard Nixon’s ill-starred term of office commenced in January 1969, on the back of a campaign in which he promised to “end the war and win the peace”. His quest for a solution that would facilitate an American pull-out without tarnishing its image led Nixon to pursue the strategy of ”Vietnamization”, a gradual US withdrawal coupled with a stiffening of ARVN forces and hardware. Though the number of US troops in Vietnam reached an all-time peak of 540,000 early on in 1969, sixty thousand of these were home for Christmas, and by the end of 1970 only 280,000 remained. Over the same time period, ARVN numbers almost doubled, from 640,000 to well over a million.

However, the NVA had for several years been stockpiling both men and supplies in Cambodia, and in March 1969 US covert bombing of these targets commenced. Code-named Operation Menu, it lasted for fourteen months, yet elicited no outcry from Hanoi since they had no right to be in neutral Cambodia in the first place. The following spring, an American-backed coup replaced Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia with Lon Nol and thus eased access for US troops, and a task force of twenty thousand soldiers advanced on Communist installations there. The American public was outraged: dismayed that Nixon, far from closing down the war, was in fact widening the conflict, they rallied at mass anti-war demonstrations.

After Ho Chi Minh’s death on September 2, 1969, the stop-start peace talks in Paris dragged along with Le Duc Tho representing the North, and Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger at the American helm. Two stumbling blocks hindered any advancement: the North’s insistence on a coalition government in the South with