January 30
1968 Tet Offensive begins
At dawn on the first day of the Tet holiday truce, Viet Cong
forces--supported by large numbers of North Vietnamese troops--launch the
largest and best coordinated offensive of the war, drivingg into the center
of South Vietnam's seven largest cities and attacking 30 provincial capitals
from the Delta to the DMZ.
Among the cities taken during the first four days of the offensive were Hue,
Dalat, Kontum, and Quang Tri; in the north, all five provincial capitals
were overrun. At the same time, enemy forces shelled numerous Allied
airfields and bases. In Saigon, a 19-man Viet Cong suicide squad seized the
U.S. Embassy and held it for six hours until an assault force of U.S.
paratroopers landed by helicopter on the building's roof and routed them.
Nearly 1,000 Viet Cong were believed to have infiltrated Saigon, and it took
a week of intense fighting by an estimated 11,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese
troops to dislodge them.
By February 10, the offensive was largely crushed, but with heavy casualties
on both sides. The former Imperial capital of Hue took almost a month of
savage house-to-house combat to regain. Efforts to assess the offensive's
impact began well before the fighting ended. On February 2, President
Johnson announced that the Viet Cong had suffered complete military defeat.
General Westmoreland echoed that appraisal four days later in a statement
declaring that Allied forces had killed more enemy troops in the previous
seven days than the United States had lost in the entire war.
Militarily, Tet was decidedly an Allied victory, but psychologically and
politically, it was a disaster. The offensive was a crushing military defeat
for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, but the size and scope of the
communist attacks caught the American and South Vietnamese allies by
surprise. The early reporting of a smashing communist victory went largely
uncorrected in the media and led to a psychological victory for the
communists.
Everette