Re: history, a few days early. some of us were there - 1968 Tet Offensive begins

From: Rick v100 (rickv100@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jan 22 2006 - 16:49:44 PST

Most of the early fighting in Saigon fell upon the
716th Military Police. I have copies of the final
after action report after the Tet Offensive.

Rick

--- 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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