By Design or Accident: Reflections on Asian Security

36. Turning Point in the Vietnam War

36 turning Point in the Vietnam War Forty years ago, on 31 January and 1 February 1968, Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet (Lunar New Year) offensive in cities and towns across South Vietnam. It was the first, and most dramatic, part of a three phase campaign. Fierce fighting raged in most of the provincial capitals as well as the national capital Saigon during early February. The onslaught was intended to break the stalemate in the Vietnam war and stymie the mounting pressure from American forces by bringing about a “general uprising” in the South that would topple the Saigon government or at least result in negotiations to end the war on terms favourable to Hanoi. But the offensive was repelled with heavy losses for the communists. They could not take any important town, except parts of Hue from which they were later ousted. The Vietcong in particular suffered such grievous losses that the war in the South was henceforth waged mainly by the North Vietnamese. The communist leaders had underestimated the mobility of American forces and misread the mood of the people. The general uprising they expected failed to materialize. 150 By Design or Accident Yet the Tet offensive brought the communists success thousands of miles away from the battlefield, in Washington. Evidence from communist documents and post-war interviews with North Vietnamese commanders suggest that Tet’s big impact on US domestic opinion was unexpected. Of course, when it did occur, Hanoi capitalized on it. The offensive came as a shock to the American public because it had been led to believe that the war was being won and the communist side was progressively weakening. TheAmerican commanders had not understood the nature of the enemy they were pitted against and had underestimated his capabilities. The anti-war movement already had significant traction among young Americans before Tet occurred. Now it received a big boost. Diverse interest groups joined forces with college students and pacifists to oppose the war. Most of the media too turned against it. Indeed this was the first “television war” in which stark images of battlefield scenes invaded American homes via TV cameras. The change in US policy came with the realisation among policy-makers that the war could not be won, at least not within the self-imposed confines of a “limited war”. (For instance policy-makers had ruled out an invasion of North Vietnam.) Any continuation of attempts to win would have entailed further sacrifices that the American people would not have been prepared to accept. It was clear by then that Hanoi’s perspective on the level of pain and losses that it could absorb were quite different from Washington’s. On 31 March 1968 US President Lyndon Johnson announced a suspension of American bombing above 20 degrees north latitude — which meant most of North Vietnam Turning Point in the Vietnam War 151 — and offered to open negotiations. He also announced that he would not seek re-election as president. It would take his successor four more years to gradually wind down American involvement in the war. The Vietnam war was part civil war, part ideological conflict, and part a proxy war between the main protagonists in the Cold War. It also had a dimension of Sino-Soviet rivalry which came out more openly in Southeast Asia after its end. It was a hugely destructive war. More than a million North Vietnamese and Vietcong military personnel were killed or missing in action from 1960 to 1975; over 600,000 were wounded. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese troops died. Estimates of civilian deaths in both Vietnams have ranged from half a million to a few million. There was a huge destruction of physical infrastructure from which Vietnam has yet to fully recover. After its victory in 1975, Hanoi was soon embroiled in conflict in Cambodia. The net result of its various wars was that Vietnam had thirty years of catching up to do with the ASEAN-5 in terms of economic development. On the American side, nearly 60,000 troops died and over 300,000 were wounded. Policy-makers realized that, in the age of television and instant communications, an open democracy like America could not fight a protracted war in a distant land if there was no clear and immediate threat to American security, and certainly not with a conscript army. Perhaps historians are still too close...