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The Tet Offensive

January 30 to February 1968

Background

By late 1967, American officials were telling the public that the war was being won. On January 21, 1968, North Vietnamese forces began a heavy artillery bombardment of the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, which drew the attention of President Lyndon Johnson and General William Westmoreland while the main offensive was prepared.

What happened

On January 30, 1968, during the Tet holiday truce, communist forces attacked cities and towns across South Vietnam. Within about a day there were more than 100 attacks, including strikes on Saigon and the ancient capital of Hue.

U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held off most of the attacks and inflicted heavy losses on the Viet Cong. Hue was the longest and bloodiest fight. It took more than three weeks to retake the city. Afterward, searchers found more than 2,800 bodies of people who had been executed, and about 3,000 residents were missing. Nearly 150 U.S. Marines and about 400 South Vietnamese troops were killed in the battle, along with an estimated 5,000 North Vietnamese soldiers.

No single casualty total for the whole offensive is universally accepted, so be careful with any overall figure you find.

Military result versus political result

Militarily, the offensive was a costly setback for the communist forces, and it did not produce the popular uprising its planners hoped for. Politically, it had the opposite effect in the United States. The scale of the attacks contradicted official claims of progress.

In February 1968, the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite said on air that the war seemed headed toward stalemate. President Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” That quote is secondhand, so historians treat it with some caution. General Westmoreland reportedly asked for more than 200,000 additional troops.

Aftermath

On March 31, 1968, Johnson limited the bombing of North Vietnam, called for negotiations, and announced that he would not seek reelection. Peace talks began, but the fighting continued for years, and more Americans died after Tet than before it.

Questions for discussion

1. Why can an event be a military failure for one side and a political success for it at the same time?
2. How did the gap between official statements and what Americans saw on television shape public trust?
3. What does the Hue battle show about the cost of the war to civilians?

Sources

• History.com, The Tet Offensive
• Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. VI, Vietnam

Accounts of these events vary, and estimates are given as ranges where sources disagree. See something to correct? Email us.

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