Tet 1968

Understanding the Surprise

Captain Ronnie E. Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136301155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This book brings to light many aspects of the Tet offensive of 1968, an event acknowledged as the turning-point of the Vietnam War. Using previously unseen Communist Vietnamese documents combined with sources of Western origin, the author provides a more accurate version of the events, their significance, and reveals the crucial role played by US intelligence.

Part One
WHAT WE MISSED

1

The Vietnamese Conclusion to People’s War

Our troops concentrate rapidly and actively launch planned lightning attacks on the cities and enemy positions to encircle and annihilate them.

Truong Chinh, 1947

Before the Tet Offensive, the General Offensive (Tong Cong Kich) combined with the General Uprising (Tong Khoi Nghia), was both an event long awaited and a proud piece of Vietnamese history. To the Communists it symbolized the strong nationalistic spirit of a people who had been invaded and ruled by various foreign powers for over a thousand years, but had never given up the struggle for sovereignty. It was at the same time legend and a source of hope.

The Party had called for a General Uprising in August 1945, days after the Japanese sued for peace. Communist Viet Minh cadres were quick to lead meetings and demonstrations as ‘representatives of all nationalists and patriots’. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh guerrillas marched into Hanoi and seized power between the time the Japanese fled, their puppet emperor Bao Dai abdicated and the French could return.¹

The Vietminh held people’s trials and executed Japanese collaborators who were dragged out of their homes by the long oppressed people of Hanoi.² While not quite what the Western observer would envision in something called a General Uprising, the legend was formed in the minds of the Vietnamese to whom the myth may be more important than the facts of history.³

In 1947, Party Secretary Truong Chinh, outlined the Vietnamese version of People’s War in a tract called The Resistance Will Win.⁴ It clearly defined the General Offensive/General Uprising as the Vietnamese conclusion to the classic Maoist three-phased People’s War. The first phase would entail withdrawing forces to the countryside to organize and gain strength. The second phase would see the force become capable of guerrilla and small unit operations. During this phase, the enemy would be forced to stretch his forces thin in pursuit, thereby becoming vulnerable himself. The third phase, distinguishable by large unit operations, was called the General Offensive, or General Counter-Offensive.

The Maoist version envisioned the third phase, or the General Offensive, as being a long process. The Vietnamese version of the third phase on the other hand, speeded up the process by including a General Uprising (khoi nghia), and sudden attacks on the cities.⁵ The Vietnamese recognized that their own version was possible because of geographic and cultural differences unique to Vietnam.⁶

The generic meaning of the word uprising in Vietnamese is a determined militant political action. The Vietnamese have three forms of uprising. There is the concerted uprising (dong khoi), the least significant, involving an orchestrated effort over a fairly large area. There is the military offensive and uprising which is more ambitious and engulfs an entire region. And, finally, there is the general uprising (khoi-nghia). Douglas Pike discusses the idea:

In all forms of uprising, there is a dual image. It is pictured both as spontaneous by people no longer able to contain their spirit of revolution, and is considered to be a deliberate strategy, the culmination of systematic, intensive organizational and motivational work. In khoi nghia the revolutionary consciousness of the people has been gradually raised through the use of the dau tranh strategy (the two pronged Vietnamese concept of simultaneous military and political struggle) to the point where it explodes in a great human spontaneous combustion, which, like a forest fire, consumes all before it. The people rise up energized. The enemy’s army shatters. The old society crumbles. The people seize power. The khoi nghia is a social myth in the Sorelian sense of that term, clearly traceable to Sorel’s myth of a General Strike….[The] social myth does not contain falsity; rather it means a belief that may or may not be true, the important thing being that people are willing to act out their lives on the basis of it. His primary example of a social myth was the second coming of Christ, which so motivated early Christians.⁷

Truong Chinh’s 1947 blueprint for assaulting the cities during the third phase of the First Indochina War, culminating in a victory over the French, became firmly embedded in Communist Vietnamese theory:⁸

Our troops concentrate rapidly and actively launch planned attacks on the cities and enemy positions to encircle and annihilate them. In brief, we throw all our forces throughout the country into the battle to crush the enemy completely and win back the whole of our territory! The machinery of the enemy rule temporarily set up in our country is smashed to pieces by our army and people. And at the bottom of the scrap-heap of that machinery are the rotten corpses of the puppet traitors. This third stage of war is relatively the shortest, but is also the most victorious and valiant.⁹

The Vietnamese realized that the First Indochina War did not end in the cities. The French lost the war at Dien Bien Phu not because of any military ineptness on the part of the French but because the people and government of France had become convinced that they could not win. The Vietnamese called this phenomenon a ‘decisive victory’.¹⁰ It is a victory that stems not merely from military success, but more from the psychological and diplomatic consequences involved which ‘decide’ the issue. These two Vietnamese concepts, the ‘General Uprising’ and the ‘Decisive Victory’, became a part of Communist Vietnamese military theory.¹¹

Following the Geneva accords that separated North and South Vietnam with the promise of elections in the South, North Vietnam based its policy goals on the ultimate reunification of Vietnam. When it became obvious that there would be no elections, and that the Diem regime was stabilizing, Hanoi became more aggressive. Many Lao Dong/ex-Vietminh cadres of southern origin who had been regrouped to the North following the war with the French, infiltrated back to the South. They made alliances with other dissident elements in South Vietnam and began the formation of a ‘Southern’ resistance.¹²

On 20 December 1960, the National Liberation Front (Mat Tran Dan Toc Giai Phong Mien Nam Viet Nam), commonly called the NLF, or Viet Cong, was born. The switch to armed struggle and the second phase of a people’s war was officially recognized in Hanoi.¹³

In the North, the decision to switch to armed struggle in the South had been reached only after bitter factional disputes which had been raging since 1954. This political in fighting led Ho Chi Minh to reshuffle areas of responsibility and political favor within the leadership. This involved two factions in Hanoi that had developed over the issue of reunification. The ‘North Vietnam Firsters’ were Vo Nguyen Giap, Truong Chin, and Pham Van Dong. These men were all of Northern birth and had led the fight in the North against the French. The ‘South Vietnam Firsters’ were Le Duan, who had directed the Vietminh in the South against the French, Le Duc Tho, who had been Le Duan’s deputy, and Nguyen Chi Thanh, who had begun his wartime career as Party secretary in Thua Thien Province of South Vietnam during the war. These Politburo members were all born south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).¹⁴

The ‘Northern’ faction favored a people’s war and a gradual, political struggle in the South while the economic needs of the new nation of North Vietnam were tended to. The ‘Southern’ faction wanted to speed up the process of reunification by making the switch to armed struggle in the South and, if needed, sending People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) regular units to reinforce the war in the South.¹⁵

In 1954 Ho Chi Minh had leaned in favor of his Northern faction. The new nation had other problems to deal with then, and the resistance infrastructure in the South was too weak anyway. But Ho Chi Minh had asked Le Duan to remain in the South to cultivate revolution.¹⁶

In 1957 when Diem began to deal harshly with dissidents in the South, Le Duan returned to the North calling for military action to back up the political action.¹⁷ Le Duan soon replaced Truong Chinh as the number two man behind Ho Chi Minh. By 1958 the Southern faction was running the Politburo. In May 1959, the 15th Plenum of the Central Committee adopted the policy of switching to armed struggle in the South. In September 1960, Hanoi announced its full support for the insurgency in the South.¹⁸

A casualty of this power shift was General Vo Nguyen Giap. Because he was adamantly opposed to using Northern manpower in the South, he was relieved of his duties as commander of the Southern Theater, and replaced by General Nguyen Chi Thanh, who was promoted to Giap’s equivalent, Senior General. At this time Giap retired from the primary scene in Hanoi for ‘medical treatment’.¹⁹ Giap kept his position as Defense Minister.

The resistance movement in the South had grown out of the oppression of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, but was organized and led from Hanoi from the start.²⁰ Until January 1962 the Communist Party in Vietnam was known as the Dang Lao Dong (Workers’ Party). At that time the Lao Dong Politburo in Hanoi decided to dissolve the party’s Southern branch, and create an ostensibly autonomous new entity, the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) to lead the liberation struggle in the South. According to former members of the movement, this was done for two reasons: first, the mission in the North was to build socialism and then communism, while the party task in the South was to liberate South Vietnam and it was felt that entirely different types of organization were required for the two missions; and second, establishing the PRP as an entity seemingly independent from the Lao Dong would not give the government of South Vietnam (GVN) reason to attack the North. The PRP acknowledged being Marxist-Leninist, but claimed Southern origin.²¹

This decision ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Foreword by General W. C. Westmoreland
• Foreword by George W. Allen
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Vietnamese Translations
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Introduction: Why Tet is Important
• Part I: What we Missed
• Part II: Why we Missed it
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Annexes
• Index