Post by MARIO on Sept 18, 2006 6:30:12 GMT -8
The Meaning of Tet
1968 Tet Offensive, Vietnam War
Victor Davis Hanson
American Heritage
A historian argues that in Vietnam America's cause was just, its arms effective, and its efforts undermined by critics back home -- and that this is how things must work in a free society
MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS AGO, THUCYDIDES wrote in his history The Peloponnesian War a passage about the Athenian campaign in Sicily that summarizes not only the conflict between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C. but the war between the United States and Vietnam from A.D. 1965 to 1973. "The expedition to Sicily was not so much a mistake in judgment, considering the enemy they went against, as much as a case of mismanagement on the part of the planners, who did not afterwards take the necessary measures to support these first troops they sent out. Instead, they turned to personal rivalries over the leadership of the people, and consequently not only conducted the war in the field half-heartedly, but also brought civil discord for the first time to the home front.... And yet they did not fail until they at last turned on each other and fell into private quarrels that brought their ruin."
The significance of this extends beyond historical consonance; between Athens and America runs an unbroken strand of tradition that might be called the Western Way of War. It has a curious strength--curious because this legacy of dissent can at once seemingly weaken and actually empower. It reflects how free societies wage war against those that are not free.
With America's experience in Vietnam, the tradition's weaknesses might seem immediately apparent. But inside that lost war are hidden victories, and one of the most impressive is the Tet Offensive.
The American military liked to boast that it had not suffered a single major defeat by enemy forces during the fighting in Vietnam, and the brag is largely valid. Although various episodes of the Tet Offensive of January 1968 would drag on for weeks, the first stage of the fighting in Saigon was essentially over in less than a month. By the end of February, Hue had been freed, and Khe Sanh was relieved in early April. Smaller cities were secure by the end of the first week of the assaults.
Despite the sensational media coverage of the offensive, public opinion polls continued to suggest that a majority of U.S. citizens--perhaps 70 percent--supported involvement throughout Tet. Walter Cronkite may have returned from Vietnam to announce to an audience of millions that our military was mired in stalemate and that "the only rational way out ... will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people," but most Americans in 1968 were willing to support a war they thought could be won. The military's problem in Vietnam, at least in the short term, was not an absence of an approving majority back home but the growth of a vocal, influential, and highly sophisticated minority of critics, activists who cared much more deeply about abruptly ending American involvement than did the majority of supporters about maintaining it.
The reverses of Tet hardly lay in defeat; the disaster in the narrow tactical sense was that in the wake of victory the Americans failed to capitalize on the communist disarray but instead halted the bombing and began a radical retrenchment. The great buildup of 1965-67, soon to peak at 543,000 troops on April 4, 1968, would abruptly decline to less than 30,000 soldiers by December 1, 1972--and essentially none after the cease-fire of 1973.
Yet nearly 40,000 Vietcong and NVA regular troops had been killed in a few weeks. More of the enemy were to die during the single year 1968 than all the Americans lost during the entire decade of U.S. involvement. The communist strategy of bringing local cadres into the streets proved an unmitigated disaster for that side. Far from igniting a general insurrection, it only ended in a bloodbath, destroying the Vietcong infrastructure in the South. After Tet, there was no effective military arm of the National Liberation Front left. It had to be rebuilt from scratch. Such were the costs of the North Vietnamese's misunderstanding of the lethality of American airpower, the discipline of its troops, and the overwhelming superiority of its supply train, factors that on a battlefield could trump for a while longer the disadvantages of surprise, poor generalship, and social unrest back home. But if the North Vietnamese knew they had lost the Tet Offensive, why did most Western observers believe that the enemy had in fact triumphed?
Much of the perception grew out of raised expectations prior to the offensive. The U.S. military, stung by the antiwar movement, had recently assured the public that the war was winding down in an American victory, while at the same time acknowledging that it was no longer enough to defeat the enemy outright on the battlefield. By 1968 pressure at home had made it crucial for the military to achieve at least three other objectives: prove that after four years of intense ground fighting the North Vietnamese were close to capitulation; present hard evidence that the South Vietnamese were at last ready to shoulder the majority of their defense obligations; and give persuasive assurance that America could achieve rapid withdrawal with a minimum of casualties.
Tet, a clear American victory, paradoxically dashed those pretensions. As long as the North Vietnamese were willing to suffer thousands of dead for a chance to kill Americans, time was on the communists' side. As long as the Soviets and the Chinese supplied good weaponry, as long as the Vietcong could pose to influential American journalists, academics, and pacifists as liberationists and patriots, and as long as the American military tried to fight a conventional war under absurdly confined rules of engagement and over corpses counted rather than ground taken and held, the North Vietnamese would recruit ample fresh manpower on the promise of a free nation to come--and always add some Americans to the terrible arithmetic of relative body counts. The American political establishment may have believed that Vietnam was a proxy war in an ongoing global struggle already 25 years old against communist tyranny, but the American people grew to doubt the need to give up their treasure and their sons so far away when Chinese and Russian troops were unlikely to reach U.S. shores through Vietnam.
The record keeping of the U.S. military in Vietnam was notoriously inexact in assessing enemy dead, but it was mostly accurate in reporting American fatalities. Thus, most observers believed that Tet cost somewhere between one and two thousand American dead. The public cared little that its soldiers were killing the enemy at unheard-of ratios of 30 and 40 for each GI lost. American generals never fully grasped, or never successfully transmitted to the political leadership in Washington, the simple fact that the number of enemy killed meant little in and of itself if the land of South Vietnam was not secured and held and the antagonist North Vietnam not invaded, humiliated, or rendered impotent.
The American objectives, both local and geopolitical, were clear from the start: the security of an independent Vietnamese state in the South and with it an end to general communist aggression in Southeast Asia. But the methods of achieving those seemingly moral goals were far less apparent. Ideally, it was believed in the early 1960s, the Americans would train a sophisticated army of resistance, in which a grateful Vietnamese populace, delighting in its newly democratic government, would willingly enlist to save the country from communism.
READ THE REST:
www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson050001.html
1968 Tet Offensive, Vietnam War
Victor Davis Hanson
American Heritage
A historian argues that in Vietnam America's cause was just, its arms effective, and its efforts undermined by critics back home -- and that this is how things must work in a free society
MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS AGO, THUCYDIDES wrote in his history The Peloponnesian War a passage about the Athenian campaign in Sicily that summarizes not only the conflict between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C. but the war between the United States and Vietnam from A.D. 1965 to 1973. "The expedition to Sicily was not so much a mistake in judgment, considering the enemy they went against, as much as a case of mismanagement on the part of the planners, who did not afterwards take the necessary measures to support these first troops they sent out. Instead, they turned to personal rivalries over the leadership of the people, and consequently not only conducted the war in the field half-heartedly, but also brought civil discord for the first time to the home front.... And yet they did not fail until they at last turned on each other and fell into private quarrels that brought their ruin."
The significance of this extends beyond historical consonance; between Athens and America runs an unbroken strand of tradition that might be called the Western Way of War. It has a curious strength--curious because this legacy of dissent can at once seemingly weaken and actually empower. It reflects how free societies wage war against those that are not free.
With America's experience in Vietnam, the tradition's weaknesses might seem immediately apparent. But inside that lost war are hidden victories, and one of the most impressive is the Tet Offensive.
The American military liked to boast that it had not suffered a single major defeat by enemy forces during the fighting in Vietnam, and the brag is largely valid. Although various episodes of the Tet Offensive of January 1968 would drag on for weeks, the first stage of the fighting in Saigon was essentially over in less than a month. By the end of February, Hue had been freed, and Khe Sanh was relieved in early April. Smaller cities were secure by the end of the first week of the assaults.
Despite the sensational media coverage of the offensive, public opinion polls continued to suggest that a majority of U.S. citizens--perhaps 70 percent--supported involvement throughout Tet. Walter Cronkite may have returned from Vietnam to announce to an audience of millions that our military was mired in stalemate and that "the only rational way out ... will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people," but most Americans in 1968 were willing to support a war they thought could be won. The military's problem in Vietnam, at least in the short term, was not an absence of an approving majority back home but the growth of a vocal, influential, and highly sophisticated minority of critics, activists who cared much more deeply about abruptly ending American involvement than did the majority of supporters about maintaining it.
The reverses of Tet hardly lay in defeat; the disaster in the narrow tactical sense was that in the wake of victory the Americans failed to capitalize on the communist disarray but instead halted the bombing and began a radical retrenchment. The great buildup of 1965-67, soon to peak at 543,000 troops on April 4, 1968, would abruptly decline to less than 30,000 soldiers by December 1, 1972--and essentially none after the cease-fire of 1973.
Yet nearly 40,000 Vietcong and NVA regular troops had been killed in a few weeks. More of the enemy were to die during the single year 1968 than all the Americans lost during the entire decade of U.S. involvement. The communist strategy of bringing local cadres into the streets proved an unmitigated disaster for that side. Far from igniting a general insurrection, it only ended in a bloodbath, destroying the Vietcong infrastructure in the South. After Tet, there was no effective military arm of the National Liberation Front left. It had to be rebuilt from scratch. Such were the costs of the North Vietnamese's misunderstanding of the lethality of American airpower, the discipline of its troops, and the overwhelming superiority of its supply train, factors that on a battlefield could trump for a while longer the disadvantages of surprise, poor generalship, and social unrest back home. But if the North Vietnamese knew they had lost the Tet Offensive, why did most Western observers believe that the enemy had in fact triumphed?
Much of the perception grew out of raised expectations prior to the offensive. The U.S. military, stung by the antiwar movement, had recently assured the public that the war was winding down in an American victory, while at the same time acknowledging that it was no longer enough to defeat the enemy outright on the battlefield. By 1968 pressure at home had made it crucial for the military to achieve at least three other objectives: prove that after four years of intense ground fighting the North Vietnamese were close to capitulation; present hard evidence that the South Vietnamese were at last ready to shoulder the majority of their defense obligations; and give persuasive assurance that America could achieve rapid withdrawal with a minimum of casualties.
Tet, a clear American victory, paradoxically dashed those pretensions. As long as the North Vietnamese were willing to suffer thousands of dead for a chance to kill Americans, time was on the communists' side. As long as the Soviets and the Chinese supplied good weaponry, as long as the Vietcong could pose to influential American journalists, academics, and pacifists as liberationists and patriots, and as long as the American military tried to fight a conventional war under absurdly confined rules of engagement and over corpses counted rather than ground taken and held, the North Vietnamese would recruit ample fresh manpower on the promise of a free nation to come--and always add some Americans to the terrible arithmetic of relative body counts. The American political establishment may have believed that Vietnam was a proxy war in an ongoing global struggle already 25 years old against communist tyranny, but the American people grew to doubt the need to give up their treasure and their sons so far away when Chinese and Russian troops were unlikely to reach U.S. shores through Vietnam.
The record keeping of the U.S. military in Vietnam was notoriously inexact in assessing enemy dead, but it was mostly accurate in reporting American fatalities. Thus, most observers believed that Tet cost somewhere between one and two thousand American dead. The public cared little that its soldiers were killing the enemy at unheard-of ratios of 30 and 40 for each GI lost. American generals never fully grasped, or never successfully transmitted to the political leadership in Washington, the simple fact that the number of enemy killed meant little in and of itself if the land of South Vietnam was not secured and held and the antagonist North Vietnam not invaded, humiliated, or rendered impotent.
The American objectives, both local and geopolitical, were clear from the start: the security of an independent Vietnamese state in the South and with it an end to general communist aggression in Southeast Asia. But the methods of achieving those seemingly moral goals were far less apparent. Ideally, it was believed in the early 1960s, the Americans would train a sophisticated army of resistance, in which a grateful Vietnamese populace, delighting in its newly democratic government, would willingly enlist to save the country from communism.
READ THE REST:
www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson050001.html
