From: flyn3nvt@adelphia.net
Date: Sun Jan 22 2006 - 16:11:31 PST
--Welcome home to all that were there!!!
Jeff Houghton
1951 M37
1953 M62
1968 M52A2
1969 M54A2C
1970 M35A2C
1971 M35A2
1972 M35A2
---- Everette <194cbteng@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
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