Tet Offensive

During the Lunar New Year holiday of 1968, North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas launched coordinated surprise attacks on cities, towns and military bases across South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive, which began on 30–31 January, was the largest operation either side had mounted up to that point in the Vietnam War. On the battlefield it ended in defeat for the attackers, but it badly shook American confidence in the war and pushed Washington towards negotiations.

By late 1967 Americans were questioning whether their strategy of attrition was working, even as General William Westmoreland insisted the communists were losing. In Hanoi, the party leadership around Lê Duẩn planned a "general offensive and uprising": mass attacks on South Vietnam's towns that, they hoped, would spark a popular revolt and defections from the South Vietnamese army, and bring down the Saigon government. The attacks were timed for Tet, the Lunar New Year holiday, when many South Vietnamese soldiers were on leave. In the months before, a series of "border battles" in remote areas, at places such as Dak To and Khe Sanh, puzzled the American command.

Some units struck prematurely in the early hours of 30 January, giving the defenders a little warning. The main blow fell early on 31 January, when some 77,000 troops attacked more than 100 towns and cities, including 36 of the 44 provincial capitals and the capital, Saigon. In Saigon a 19-man sapper team blasted through the wall of the US Embassy compound and occupied its grounds until American reinforcements secured the compound that morning. On 1 February the South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shot a captured Viet Cong officer in the street in front of a photographer; Eddie Adams's picture of the killing became one of the defining images of the war.

Most attacks were beaten off within days, and no uprising took place. The exception was the old imperial city of Huế, where North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces overran most of the city, including most of the old Citadel. American Marines and South Vietnamese troops retook it street by street in the kind of urban fighting the US military had not seen since the Korean War, and the city was not declared secure until 25 February. Much of it was destroyed. Mass graves found afterwards held civilians who, according to the allied account and most later evidence, had been executed by the occupiers; the allied account put the number executed at as many as 2,800. Around Khe Sanh, fighting went on for two more months.

According to American and South Vietnamese claims, more than 45,000 attackers were killed in the first phase. In the same period South Vietnamese forces reported 4,954 dead, and US and other allied forces 4,124. Some 14,300 civilians were killed and about 630,000 became refugees. Further waves of attacks followed in May and in August–September 1968.

For the United States, the shock was political. Americans had been told that the enemy was close to defeat. On 27 February the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite told viewers that "we are mired in a stalemate". Westmoreland's request for some 200,000 more troops prompted a full policy review, and senior advisers known as the "Wise Men" urged disengagement. On 31 March 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and declared that he would not seek re-election. Days later Hanoi agreed to talks. Historians still debate how far the media shaped the public reaction, but after Tet American policy turned from seeking victory towards a negotiated settlement.

Our 1960 map shows Vietnam divided into North and South, the situation in which the offensive was fought.