The General's Gamble
Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for days, most of South Viet Nam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. Vietnamese soldiers made a special effort to rejoin their families. Relative visited relative, threading through thousands of firecrackers popping and fizzing in the moonless night. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year.
Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death-- and on launching the Year of the Monkey on its malign way before it was many hours old. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out on the ground, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, government buildings, population centers and just plain civilians.
The Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. In peasant pajamas or openly insigniaed NVA uniforms, by stealth or attacks marshaled by bullhorn, the raiders struck at nearly 40 major cities and towns.
They attacked 28 of South Viet Nam's 44 provincial capitals and occupied some, destroyed or damaged beyond repair more than 100 allied planes and helicopters. South Viet Nam's capital, which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered by house-to-house fighting. In Hue, the ancient imperial city of Viet Nam and the architectural and spiritual repository of Vietnamese history, the Communists seized large parts of the city--and only grudgingly yielded them block by block under heavy allied counterattacks at week's end.
A Victory of Sorts. Allied intelligence had predicted that there would be some attempted city attacks during Tet, but the size, the scale and, above all, the careful planning and coordination of the actual assaults took the U.S. and South Vietnamese military by surprise. In that sense, and because they continued after five days of fighting to hang on to some of their targets, the Communists undeniably won a victory of sorts. "This is real fighting on a battlefield," admitted Brigadier General John Chaisson, Westmoreland's combat operations coordinator for South Viet Nam. The Communist attack was, he said, "a very successful offensive. It was surprisingly well coordinated, surprisingly intensive and launched with a surprising amount of audacity." Westmoreland himself called the enemy campaign "a bold one," though marked "by treachery and deceitfulness."
Some psychological success could hardly be denied the attackers. In the raid on the poorly defended U.S. embassy in Saigon, they embarrassed and discomfited the U.S., still coping with the stinging humiliation of the Pueblo incident. They succeeded in demonstrating that, despite nearly three years of steady allied progress in the war, Communist commandos can still strike at will virtually anywhere in the country. Though the smoke must clear before any realistic assessment can be made, the slow process of pacification has probably suffered a major setback on two fronts. The promise of security in a hamlet may not seem so credible to a peasant who has learned that even Saigon and the U.S. embassy are not enemy-proof. And, amid the furor in the cities, no one yet knows how many pacification workers and members of revolutionary development teams have been assassinated out in the countryside. Fourteen American civilians working in the pacification program near Hue alone were killed last week.
Another Price. In the end, however, the Communist victory may be classed as Pyrrhic. The allied command reported nearly 15,000 of the attackers killed. Even if the total is only half that--and some observers think that that may be the case when all the combat reports filed in the swirl of battle are cross-checked--it would still represent a huge bloodletting of the enemy's forces in South Viet Nam. Even the lower estimates leave no doubt about who won the actual battles: U.S. dead numbered 367 and South Vietnamese military dead about 700.
Many of the attacking units, like the one that hit the U.S. embassy, were avowedly suicidal; few of them, even when they did seize towns or installations, managed to hold them for long. Some were promised reinforcements within 48 hours--and never got them--or were given food and ammunition for only five days of foray. Such recklessness of life deprived the Communists of some of their best men, since in many cases the attackers were highly trained demolition experts or battlewise guerrillas.
The Communists also paid another kind of price. By choosing for their attack the time of Tet, the sacred family time of the year for the Vietnamese, they undoubtedly alienated major portions of the population. They also brought bullets and bombs into the very midst of heavily populated areas, causing indiscriminate slaughter of civilians caught in the crossfire and making homeless twice over the refugees who had fled to the cities for safety. Moreover, they totally misjudged the mood of the South Vietnamese. Believing their own propaganda, the Communists called for and expected a popular uprising to welcome the raiders as liberators. Nothing approaching that myth occurred anywhere in Viet Nam, with the possible--and as yet unverified--exception of some residents of Hue.
In its timing and total effect, the Communist offensive changed the rules of the war in a way that will make it more difficult for the enemy in the future. In making a mockery of the Tet truce, proposed in the first instance by the Viet Cong and reluctantly agreed to by the allies, the Communists, as U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker indicated, made it highly unlikely that there would ever be a holiday truce again. By demonstrating their resources of manpower, the resiliency of their communications and command networks and the quality and quantity of their weaponry in the widespread attacks, the Communists also made it highly unlikely, as President Johnson all but said, that there would be any bombing pause over North Viet Nam.
An Impression of Stalemate. There was no doubt about who was the strategist behind the Communists' desperate thrust: North Viet Nam's Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, the charismatic victor over the French at Dienbienphu in 1954 and creator of the North Vietnamese army. In its surprise, its boldness, the sweep of its planning and its split-second orchestration, the general offensive bore all the unmistakable marks of Giap's genius. All the evidence indicated, in fact, that probably for the first time since the war against the French, Giap was personally directing the entire campaign in South Viet Nam.
Giap's precise intention in launching the general offensive remains to be learned. As always in Communist military doctrine, Giap doubtless considered the political effect at least as important as the outcome on the battlefield. "Guerrilla activities and large-scale combat coordinate with each other, help each other and encourage each other to develop," Giap said in a speech last September. "At the same time, they closely coordinate with the political struggle to score great victories in both military and political fields, thus leading the resistance toward final victory."
Some of Giap's political aims were evident: to embarrass the U.S. and undercut the authority of the South Vietnamese government, to frighten urban South Vietnamese and undermine pacification in the countryside, to give the impression to the U.S. public that the war is in a stalemate. Some U.S. officials also see the offensive as a prelude to North Viet Nam's coming to the conference table, aimed at enhancing Hanoi's hand in negotiations.
But both General Westmoreland and President Johnson interpreted Giap's attacks primarily in hard military terms: as a specific effort to draw U.S. troops away from the U.S. Marine base of Khe Sanh, where Giap has assembled some 40,000 men for what could be the largest single battle of the entire war. Not all of Westmoreland's and Johnson's subordinates agree. The dissenters suspect Giap of intending just the opposite--of having created the threat to Khe Sanh as a diversion designed to draw U.S. forces away from cities and towns and thus give him a foothold in the populated areas that has consistently been denied him.
Whatever Giap's immediate aims, it has been clear to Hanoi for some time that something drastic had to be done in South Viet Nam. Captured cadre notes spoke of a "counteroffensive." Depressed by constant defeats on the battlefield and consigned to stay in South Viet Nam until the war was over, the infiltrated North Vietnamese regulars were growing weary and restive. They badly needed a victory to bolster their morale, or at least a major initiative that they could call their own.
The allies had not only dominated the battlefield but had also seized the political initiative with the successful series of elections last year that culminated in the installation of Nguyen Van Thieu as civilian President under a new constitution. Increasingly, the bulk of the war was being fought on South Viet Nam's peripheries, leaving a virtual vacuum in the countryside that allied pacification efforts were moving to fill. A dramatic demonstration of Communist power and prowess was required. To Giap, the countryside general offensive seemed tailormade for the task.
Tour de Force. It was undoubtedly an extraordinary tour de force, unprecedented in modern military annals: the spectacle of an enemy force dispersed and unseen, everywhere hunted unremittingly, suddenly materializing to strike simultaneously in a hundred places throughout a country. Nowhere was the feat more impressive, or its art more instructively displayed, than in the assault on Saigon, the capital city of 2,000,000 people and the core of the allied commands.
Into Saigon in the days just before Tet slipped more than 3,000 Communist soldiers armed with weapons ranging up to machine-gun and bazooka size. Some came openly into the open city, weapons concealed in luggage or under baskets of food, riding buses, taxis and motor scooters, or walking. Others came furtively: some of the Viet Cong who attacked the U.S. embassy had ridden into town concealed in a truckload of flowers. Once in town, they hid their weapons. Only after the attack did Vietnamese intelligence realize that the unusual number of funerals the previous week was no accident: the Viet Cong had buried their weapons in the funeral coffins, dug them up on the night of the assault. They even test-fired their guns during the peak of the Tet celebrations, the sound of the shots mingling with that of the firecrackers going off.
Guerrilla Guides. In the An Quang Buddhist pagoda, the Communists set up a fully equipped command post for the attack. Shortly after midnight, the raiders assembled in units ranging from small suicide squads to well-armed company-size teams, and were led to their targets by local Communist guides. Some were dressed in neat, white button-down shirts and khakis, others in parts of ARVN uniforms or ragtag sports clothes. Dark clouds hung over the city, and only an occasional Jeep moved quickly through the eerie silence. Warned to expect something through captured enemy documents, military police had donned flak jackets and guard duty had been doubled. Saigon was a city waiting for trouble.
It began when a guard in his cement-lined outpost at the side entrance of the Independence Palace saw a distant blur of moving men. There was a shout: "Open the palace gates! We are the Liberation Army!" Then, rockets blazing, the Viet Cong commandos charged. From that moment on, fighting broke out all over the city, to the crack and boom of rockets, mortars and bazookas, the chop of machine-gun fire and the whine of ricocheting bullets. For the would-be liberators of the Independence Palace, the reply was a hail of fire. Retreating across the streets, the Communists took up positions in a half-completed hotel, killed the first two Jeep loads of U.S. MPs who raced to the scene and commandeered their M-60 machine gun. In a pattern of stubborn pocket resistance to be repeated throughout Viet Nam, it took two days to shoot the Viet Cong out of the hotel.
An enemy force of at least 700 men tackled the city's most vital military target: Tan Son Nhut airstrip and its adjoining MACV compound housing Westmoreland's headquarters and the 7th Air Force Command Center, the nerve centers of U.S. command in the war. The Communists breached the immediate base perimeter, slipping past some 150 outposts without a shot being fired, and got within 1,000 feet of the runways before they were halted in eight hours of bloody hand-to-hand combat. All told, the Communists attacked from 18 different points around Tan Son Nhut, getting close enough to MACV to put bullets through Westy's windows. Westmoreland's staff officers were issued weapons and sent out to help sandbag the compound, and Westmoreland moved into his windowless command room in the center of MACV's first floor. Other Communist units raced through the city shooting at U.S. officers' and enlisted men's billets (BOQs and BEQs), Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker's home, Westmoreland's home, the radio and TV stations. Wearing ARVN clothes, raiders seized part of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff Headquarters, turned the defenders' machine guns against helicopters diving in to dislodge them.
Summary Verdict. Other Viet Cong had less militant assignments. Near the Free World Force Headquarters, a score of Viet Cong paraded through the streets singing songs and waving flags and shouting: "This is the Liberation Force come to liberate the city! Please be compatriots! Help us liberate the city!" Two-and three-man teams with the same message went from door to door, like census takers, asking for the names of local police and government officials, the addresses of ARVN and government families. Those they got--or found--they killed on the spot.
In nearby Bien Hoa, Viet Cong took over the town and set up their own roadblocks. When two American G.I.'s were stopped, the Viet Cong hauled them from their car, delivered a "verdict" on them and summarily shot them for the benefit of the gathered townspeople. Some of Saigon's worst fighting took place in Cholon, the Chinese sector and a traditional stronghold of anti-government feeling. As elsewhere in the city, where resistance was heavy in house-to-house fighting, the ARVN warned the civilians out of the area, then called in helicopters to strafe and Skyraiders to dive-bomb.
At week's end, Saigon was still a city shuddering with the roar of bombs and the splat of bullets. After five days of fighting, the stubborn attackers of Tan Son Nhut airstrip were still entrenched near the field as F-100 jets, Skyraiders and helicopters blasted at their positions. Fighting flared in one part of the city and, when troops moved in with air support to damp it down, broke out in another area. Though the allies claimed 2,000 enemy dead in the city, the U.S. command was worried by the presence of a reserve unit of some 1,000 Viet Cong still lurking in Saigon and not yet committed to battle. Allied troops ringed the city to cut off their retreat.
The violence in Saigon was only a small portion of the fighting that raged through the rest of the country. The first attack fell on Danang, site of the giant Marine base, where 300 Viet Cong infiltrated to the boundary of the Danang airfield and the walls of the South Vietnamese I Corps Headquarters before being driven back. Then, in a domino pattern, the attacks moved southward through the coastal cities of Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa and Nha Trang, leapfrogged over into the highland cities of Kontum and Pleiku and continued southward into the Delta--where some of the first attacks came only at week's end. The timing was as sequential as a mammoth string of Tet firecrackers going off one after the other, obviously aimed at tying down allied forces the progressive length of the country.
In Dalat, pleasure spot for South Vietnamese generals and site of the nation's fledgling military academy, the cadets got an early introduction to combat. The Viet Cong seized the highland town, still held it at week's end. On the Bong Son plain, where the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) has so often punished the enemy, the Communists hit an Air Cav base, destroyed two helicopters and penetrated the perimeter before being repulsed. At the Dong Ba Thien airfield just north of Cam Ranh Bay, attackers using satchel charges destroyed nine helicopters. In the Mekong Delta, long a Viet Cong haven, the situation seemed even more serious. The Communists held half the important city of My Tho and parts of several provincial capitals.
Civilian Shields. In the fighting throughout the country, the Communists, as Westmoreland pointed out, showed "a callous disregard for human life," attacking hospitals as well as military compounds, using churches and schools as defense posts and captured civilians as shields. In the highland town of Ban Me Thuot, the Viet Cong killed six American missionaries in a sweep through a leprosarium operated by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, leaving their bodies wired with booby traps.
Such tactics no doubt contributed to the failure of the Vietnamese to heed the call to a "general uprising." No sooner had the general offensive got under way than both the Viet Cong radio and Radio Hanoi began calling for the South Vietnamese to greet the attackers as liberators, for ARVN soldiers to throw in their arms with the Communists and help overthrow the Thieu government. In Hue and Saigon, the Communists announced the formation of revolutionary Committees of the Alliance of National and Peace Forces. But throughout South Viet Nam there were few takers. In Danang, when a Viet Cong rose at a Buddhist Tet service with a pistol in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, bidding the crowd to support the "uprising," the Buddhists seized him and his two comrades and turned them over to the South Vietnamese police.
It was in Hue, sitting on the lush banks of the Perfume River, that the Communists, recognizing both its symbolic importance and the greater likelihood of some support from the population, made a maximum effort. There, for the time being, they enjoyed their most signal success. The seat of South Viet Nam's militant Buddhists and the home of many disaffected university students, Hue has long been South Viet Nam's capital of discontent. Into Hue last week Giap sent elements of five of his North Vietnamese regulars, supported by Viet Cong local soldiers--an estimated 2,000 men in all. They seized the Citadel of the ancient royal palace, dug in and raised the Viet Cong flag atop its crumbling battlements. Then they released from jail some 2,500 prisoners, including 400 Viet Cong.
South Vietnamese infantry units closed in on the city from all sides, and three companies of U.S. Marines, spearheaded by a platoon of army tanks, moved in to rescue a besieged U.S. military advisory unit trapped in its command. That mission accomplished, they turned to aid the South Vietnamese in rooting out the NVA, who reportedly were being guided and fed by Hue students. In the twisting alleyways of the old city, digging out the Communists turned out to be a tough task. After two days of combat, President Thieu phoned ARVN I Corps Commander Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam and demanded that he get Hue back in allied hands--and "get it back fast."
Lam and U.S. Marine Lieut. General Robert E. Cushman Jr. knew how to get it back fast, but only at the cost of reducing it to ruins, and turning much of Viet Nam's heritage to crumbled stone. So the Skyraiders, wheeling and diving over Hue in support of the allied counterattack, at first used only guns and rockets no larger than 2.5 in. in order to protect the city's buildings and royal tombs and monuments. When after four days the Communists still held more than half the city, heritage was reluctantly sacrificed to necessity and the bombs loosed on the Citadel. The U.S., however, insisted that the South Vietnamese do the bombing themselves.
Hue, with Route 1 running through it, lies directly astride the main allied supply line from the Marine bases at Danang and Phu Bai to the encircled outpost of Khe Sanh. There are alternate means of supplying Khe Sanh, but Route 1, which connects with Khe Sanh via Route 9, is the best, and will thus not be left gladly in enemy hands. One of Giap's aims in his general offensive is to stretch U.S. lines--and U.S. troop deployments--as thin and as wide as he can, forcing General Westmoreland to make difficult choices of priority.
Circular Reasoning. Westmoreland sees the assault on Khe Sanh as the capstone of a three-phase campaign devised by Giap last September to win the war. Some captured documents show that Communist cadres in South Viet Nam have been told that the first three months of this year are the crucial period. During this period they are urged to win a decisive victory, which in turn will be followed by a coalition government dictated by the Viet Cong.
The first phase, which produced the battles of Loc Ninh and Dak To along the Cambodian border, was designed to draw American forces away from population centers and rural pacification areas and "force us," as Westmoreland said, "to dissipate our military strength." The second phase erupted in the past week's widespread attacks on population centers and military installations, aimed at rendering impotent for a time the U.S. ability to react quickly to the third-phase "main attack" against the Marines in northern Viet Nam.
The captured enemy documents of recent months are even more explicit in revealing the Communist strategy, and give some remarkable insights into the tunnel vision with which Hanoi views the U.S. and the course of the conflict in South Viet Nam. One says that "the time is ripe for implementation of a general uprising to take over powers in South Viet Nam. The masses are ready for action." The reasons: "Deteriorating morale in the U.S., the conflict between American and 'puppet' authorities, the unpopularity of G-xon (Viet Congese for Johnson) and friction between 'doves' and 'hawks.' "
A Communist circular dated Oct. 3 specified that the general offensive should emphasize "attacks on enemy key units, cities and towns, lines of communication." Another, noting that the U.S. "has proved weak and passive during recent battles at Dak To and Loc Ninh," goes so far overboard in its confidence that it says the Viet Cong revolution will succeed by mid-1968 and that civilians should be advised to expect their Viet Cong and North Vietnamese family members at war to be home around Aug. 5, 1968.
Violating His Own Precepts. Such explicit counsel would seem to run counter to Giap's oft-expressed public warning that North Viet Nam is ready to fight for 5, 10, 15 or 20 years to defeat the U.S. in Viet Nam. And there is also much in Giap's new strategy that flies in the face of his own guerrilla doctrine of warfare. One of his maxims is to fight only when the odds are overwhelmingly in his favor and success is certain, a precept that his troops violated nearly everywhere they struck in the course of his general offensive last week. What lies behind Giap's turnabout, which in its sanction of attacks on cities and towns constitutes the most important change of tactics by either side in the war?
In the argument within the Hanoi hierarchy on how to meet the allies' growing momentum, Giap, true to his own maxims and proven experience against the French, argued for an abandonment of large-scale or big-unit fighting and a return to guerrilla warfare in the south that might last for 10 or 20 years. His chief opponent and longtime rival, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, wanted to stick with big-unit warfare. Thanh had the advantage of being closest to the action as head of all Communist operations in South Viet Nam from his headquarters northwest of Saigon along the Cambodian border, and he prevailed in the Politburo.
Then Thanh died last summer, and no successor appeared in South Viet Nam. Instead, Giap disappeared from Hanoi, even missing the 23rd anniversary party on Dec. 22 of the founding of his own army. The best evidence is that he has set up a headquarters just north of the DMZ, determined, even if it is against his own instincts, to make big-unit war work against the U.S. He has said, in effect, to the Politburo: If this is what you want to do, I'll show you how to do it.
The first phase of his campaign was pure Giap: trying to draw U.S. forces to the periphery of South Viet Nam, into isolated areas where they had little to gain and lives to lose. He did much the same thing to the French in 1952 and 1953. Last week's series of urban attacks was a radical departure, but it has some logic and some advantages. A major element in U.S. strength is mobility in the air; if enough damage could be done to airfields and aircraft, that element would be sharply reduced. Fighting inside cities also nullified much of the U.S. firepower; neither artillery nor heavy bombing could be employed to any widespread degree in allied populated areas.
For the first time since the U.S. committed itself to combat in Viet Nam, the Communist foot soldier was thus able to fight during the week with little fear of shells and bombs, rifleman .o rifleman. Giap knew that he would take huge losses, but he hoped that the cost in allied lives would also be great; he has long since proved that he considers one American life worth five of his own in the campaign to weary the U.S. of the war. That, too, characterized his war against the French, where at Dienbienphu he even budgeted 100% casualties--and took 8,000 dead to wipe out 2,000 of the camp's defenders.
Teak & Mahogany. Those U.S. analysts who believe that Khe Sanh will be attacked are convinced that Giap envisages it as a second Dienbienphu. He is out after a victory that would completely smash the will of the U.S. to continue a hard and dirty war of rising casualties and fitful overall progress in bringing South Viet Nam to where it can defend itself. Around Khe Sanh he has ringed 40,000 troops. Northward is grouped his 325C Division, to the south lies the 304. To the east lies the 324B and another division, and to the southeast there are elements of a fifth division. Across the Laotian border and north of the 17th parallel are Giap's Russian-made 152-mm. howitzers.
Well over 5,000 U.S. Marines oppose Giap in the base camp of Khe Sanh, elbow to elbow in their bunkers and trenches inside a perimeter only half a mile wide. But U.S. units numbering 40,000 men support the Marines within reinforcing range, with all the massed artillery and air power that Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe are needed to defend the Marines. In the past ten days alone, B-52s have averaged four strikes daily on the Red-held hills around Khe Sanh.
It is an imposing setting for a large battle. Around the plateau occupied by the Marine base lie tier after tier of higher ground, mountains ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 feet. Separating the enemy looking down on Khe Sanh lie deep ravines and draws, layered with a triple canopy of foliage on teak and mahogany trees as high as 200 feet. In topography, Khe Sanh looks like a smaller version of Dienbienphu, but the terrain and underbrush are far worse for an attacker. The Communists must go downhill through terrible maneuvering grounds, cross the ravines, then climb the plateau on which Khe Sanh sits--all in the face of intensive artillery fire and air attack that the French at Dienbienphu did not have.
Symbolically Vital. Khe Sanh is eminently worth holding--and defending. It is a major point on the DMZ defense line, the barrier that U.S. forces have sought to string from the sea below the DMZ to the Laotian border. It now blocks off the easiest supply line that Giap has into South Viet Nam. By taking Khe Sanh, the Communists would outflank all the allied forces in Quang Tri province and part of Thua Thien province as well, probably forcing a fallback to a new defense line--perhaps as far back at Hue. As Giap well knows, Khe Sanh has become almost as vital symbolically as it is militarily; a Communist victory there would have immense propaganda and psychological value to Hanoi.
The U.S. is convinced that Khe Sanh cannot only be held, but that Giap will suffer crushing losses in manpower if he tries to take it. Giap's alternatives to a direct attack are either to pull back and miss his chance or to sit in the hills with his mortars and artillery and try to bleed Khe Sanh to death in daily barrages. At week's end Khe Sanh took minor shelling while the two sides waited and carefully watched each other. The U.S., slightly apprehensive, was ready for an attack--and even hopeful that Giap would strike. As for Giap, he no doubt was calculating the gains and losses of his big week in South Viet Nam, deciding whether he could afford another bold venture.
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