From: Jon Shoop (shoop19@brick.net)
Date: Mon Jan 23 2006 - 20:24:32 PST
Albin Irzyk, commander of the MP detail that fought off the attack on the
American Embassy.
Jon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick v100" <rickv100@yahoo.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 22, 2006 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] history, a few days early. some of us were there - 1968
Tet Offensive begins
> 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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>
>
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