key events

 In point form



military

Almost 1,400,000 North and South Vietnamese were killed in action.

To this we must add 2,100,000 wounded. It was one of the bloodiest wars in history, 

and one that took a particularly high toll of civilian lives.

During the operation "rolling thunder" 
 The number of bombs dropped over Vietnam in this campaign alone was greater than the total dropped during the entire Second World War

The Tet Offensive actually began in late 1967—during the dry season in Vietnam—when the North Vietnamese and the NLF launched military feints to draw American military forces away from the major cities. ---- (IS) Khe Sanh, a base of little strategic value, revealed how much they were misreading the battlefield.  In January, tens of thousands of NLF troops moved into the larger provincial towns and cities. They smuggled weapons and explosives in coffins, burying them in cemeteries for future use. As one American journalist observed, once in the cities “the Viet Cong were absorbed into the population by the urban underground like out of town relatives attending a family reunion.” --- (IS) (It is a testament to the deep roots and widespread sympathy for the Vietnamese nationalist movement that no one tipped off the Saigon government or the Americans that such a large military build-up was taking place) On the night of January 29–30, the main part of the offensive began, when 70,000 NVA/NLF soldiers attacked thirty-four of forty-four provincial capitals, sixty-four district capitals, and many military installations. More than 100 targets were hit all over South Vietnam, including the American embassy in Saigon. Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam, fell to the combined forces of the NVA and the NLF. “The feat stunned U.S. and world opinion,” according to liberal anticommunist historian Stanley Karnow. In Saigon, 1,000 NLF troops took the city and managed to hold it for three weeks against a combined force of more than 11,000 U.S. After the first reports of the attacks on Saigon and other cities, Westmoreland still thought them diversionary to what he considered the main enemy effort at Khe Sanh! The U.S. responded with what one reporter called “the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen,” particularly air power. “The Viet Cong had the government by the throat in those provincial towns,” explained one U.S. military adviser. “Ordinary methods would have never gotten them out, and the government did not have enough troops to do the job, so firepower was substituted.” The American and South Vietnamese response to Tet forever altered the American public’s perception of the war in Vietnam. It is now reminiscent of one of those “dirty colonial wars” fought by one of the declining European imperial powers (like the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya) trying to hold on at all cost against the wishes of the subjugated population. It was clear from the scope of the Tet Offensive that the mass of the South Vietnamese people were opposed to the Americans and in support of the NLF, the complete opposite of what the American public had been told for years. The destruction U.S. forces wreaked on South Vietnam shocked many back home and the Orwellian thinking to justify the violence made it even worse. Ben Tre in Kien Hoa Province was obliterated by U.S. firepower. “We had to destroy the town to save it,” the commanding officer in charge of recapturing Ben Tre told reporters—“coining one of the most notorious phrases of the war and a fitting motto for the U.S. counterattack against the Tet offensive,” writes Hunt

political
The origins of the Vietnam War were rooted in the long and bitter struggle of the Vietnamese people against French colonial rule.
 Ho Chi Minh and his followers set up the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930
 Japan's move into southern part of Vietnam in July 1941 sparked an oil boycott by the U.S. and Great Britain. resulted in pearl harbor and declaration of war against japan by US.
After the japanese defeat, the french reclaimed there old colonies.
Ho Chi Minh established the Viet Minh, a guerrilla army, which overthrew Bao Dai in a general uprising. On September 2, 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent after 80 years of colonialism under French rule and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi
In the end of the offensive, the U.S. was bearing half of the cost of France's war effort in Vietnam.


Large Gap

The effect of Tet on domestic U.S. politics was swift and dramatic. Walter Cronkite, the anchor of “CBS Evening News” and considered the most respected figure in television journalism, was apparently furious when he heard about the Tet Offensive. “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” he is reported to have said. Cronkite went to Vietnam in late February and then in front of millions of American viewers said: “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people…[who] did the best they could.”  Johnson’s personal popularity had been declining for two years. Tet decimated his credibility with the American public. Six weeks after the Tet Offensive began, “public approval of [Johnson’s] overall performance dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent The final blow to Johnson came from the very same people who had just recently endorsed his war policies, the U.S. State Department’s Senior Informal Advisory Group—popularly known as the “wise men.” The wise men were a group of the most senior advisers on foreign policy in the United States, many of whom were architects of the postwar world, including Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, John J. McCloy, former American high commissioner for occupied Germany, and many others. They met with Johnson on March 18 and told him that his policies were in shambles and that U.S. interests demanded that the troops begin withdrawing from Vietnam. Johnson was stunned. He addressed the nation on March 31 and announced that he would not seek reelection as president. The presidential race was now wide open. The antiwar movement began to surge in the U.S. and American politics was dominated by the question of withdrawal from Vietnam. In November 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency over Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, by almost the same margin he had lost eight years earlier against Kennedy. Nixon won largely due to the impression given by his campaign that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.  The Tet Offensive was only the opening shot of a year in which the U.S. ruling class and its allies around the world faced the greatest challenges to its rule in a generation. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and 100 cities rose in rebellion. In May, a student rebellion in Paris ignited a general strike by French workers, the largest in that country’s history, putting back on the agenda the possibility of a workers’ revolution in an advanced industrial country. . Mayor Daley’s cops’ brutal attack on antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago drew the world’s attention to political repression in America, while the Democrats, ignoring the wishes of their primary voters, nominated Johnson’s prowar vice president Hubert Humphrey as the presidential nominee of their party.  These brutal and treacherous events (all related in some way to the war in Vietnam) convinced a substantial number of political activists to embrace one form or another of revolutionary politics in order to change the world. Meanwhile in Vietnam, the U.S. military started to report major disciplinary problems with its troops that marked the beginning of a soldiers’ rebellion. What do the events of four decades ago mean for antiwar activists today? The greatest lesson of Tet is the importance of the resistance of the victims of U.S. imperialism in bringing about the end of the war. The Vietnamese have a long and proud tradition of resistance to foreign domination from a thousand-year resistance to the Chinese to the defeat of the Japanese and the French during and after the Second World War. This tradition enabled them to withstand the American military onslaught, while the Tet Offensive broke the will of the United States government to continue the war.

media

The French newspaperLe Monde reported in January 1968 that a “sustained and general offensive” had the Americans pinned back in defensive positions. The American press by and large reported uncritically on Westmoreland’s upbeat accounts of the war and seemed to ignore what the French press and others saw happening around them --- (IS)

In his 1971 book, TET! The Turning Point in the Vietnam War, investigative reporter Dan Oberdorfer explained the reasons behind the failure of U.S. forces to anticipate the scale and character of the coming attack The NLF flag flew over the citadel in Hue for the next three weeks. “Joking and laughing, the soldiers walk in the streets and gardens without showing any fear.... Numerous civilians brought them great quantities of food. It didn’t seem that these residents were being coerced in any way,” according to a dispatch by Agence France-Presse correspondent Francois Mazure. While American firepower pushed back the Tet Offensive, the costs were high. During the offensive South Vietnamese forces were severely mauled at the hands of the NVA and the NLF. The Americans suffered nearly 4,000 casualties between January 30 and March 31, 1968. American military forces were clearly demoralized after Tet, beginning the process of decay and rebellion that would reach crisis proportions in the remaining years of the war. A March 3 State Department report dismally concluded: We know that despite a massive influx of 500,000 U.S. troops, 1.2 million tons of bombs, 400,000 sorties per year, 200,000 KIA [killed in action] in three years, 20,000 U.S. KIA, etc., our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban levels is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels. We have achieved a stalemate at a high commitment. Yet it should be noted that Tet was also extremely costly for the Vietnamese nationalist forces, especially for the NLF. The anticipated urban uprisings that the attacks were meant to inspire did not happen. Moreover, in addition to the tremendous casualties they suffered in the attempt to take and hold cities (around 40,000, according to one estimate), the absence of NLF fighters in the villages exposed their rural bases to attack.  Through the publication of several shocking war phtographs on U.S soil, the american perception and support for war was altered drastically. The pursuance of conquering the south in coordination with the north raised the question of whether it was right to support a democratic movement that seemed more and more dictatorial.