Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (30 page)

American and South Vietnamese intelligence organizations were able to penetrate the planning process, but only at the local level. MACV never seriously entertained the idea that the attacks might be countrywide. That the Communists managed to maintain secrecy concerning the basic design of the offensive seems a remarkable feat when one considers the resources
of US intelligence in Vietnam and the volume of Communist communications and logistical activity during the preparation phase. Certainly, American intelligence in late 1967 strongly suspected that a major operation was in the works, but MACV was predisposed to believe the offensive would be a conventional one in which Giap would strike very hard against one or perhaps two strategic targets.

AFTER TET

The Communists suffered ghastly casualties in the general fighting in February and March. About 45,000 of the 80,000 troops in the first waves were killed or badly wounded within that time frame. The PLAF guerrilla units had spearheaded the attacks on the cities, where resistance was far stronger than in the hinterlands. So badly were these units mauled that many were never reconstituted. Other PLAF battalions and regiments took on large numbers of replacements, but they were usually North Vietnamese troops, and the fighting for the remainder of the war would be dominated by regular PAVN units trained and equipped in the North.

The infrastructure in the South was badly damaged, but not irretrievably so. The Communists failed to hold on to any of their early territorial gains, largely because once American ground commanders recovered from the shock, they were able to drive comparatively lightly armed, widely dispersed Communist units from their positions with superior numbers of infantry and massive firepower. The South Vietnamese army suffered heavy casualties, though nowhere near as heavy as those suffered by the PLAF, but the people of South Vietnam failed to rise up en masse against the Saigon government, as some of the PAVN and PLAF senior commanders in the field and members of the senior leadership in Hanoi had fervently hoped.

If the allies had more than held their own in the offensive in a tactical sense, beating back Communist forces expeditiously and putting Giap on the defensive militarily, it was equally clear that Tet was a stunning strategic victory for the Communists, and the war’s critical turning point. It clearly set into motion a series of events that would lead to the abandonment of America’s long quest for military victory and a decision by LBJ to de-escalate the conflict. Week after week following the launching of the offensive, as Johnson and his advisers weighed their policy options, the
gruesome images of the fighting in Hue flickered across American television screens. The tenacity of the enemy belied Westmoreland’s sunny reports of Hanoi’s imminent demise. Public pressure on the Johnson administration to change course escalated sharply, as more and more American opinion makers—national newscasters, business leaders, and academics—joined the ranks of the doubters, and in some cases, the protestors in the streets.

Shortly after the offensive commenced, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attempted to pressure Johnson to call up the reserves to meet worldwide strategic obligations and to send a large number of reinforcements—about 100,000 in all—to Westmoreland in Vietnam, hinting obliquely that if he failed to do so, the United States might soon be faced with a military catastrophe. Wheeler’s assessment was disingenuous and manipulative. In no sense was South Vietnam on the verge of collapse, not with half a million American troops spread all around the country, and Wheeler knew it. A public furor erupted when the story of the request for the call-up of 200,000 troops was leaked to the
New York Times
in early March, fueling an already acrimonious debate within the administration over war strategy.

Johnson by this point was agonizing over Vietnam and, according to some accounts, exhausted, on the brink of collapse. Each day it seemed there were new outbursts of public dissent and criticism from the media, the doves in Congress, and the burgeoning antiwar movement. Under growing pressure from all sides, Johnson instructed his new secretary of defense, the urbane moderate Clark Clifford, to undertake a searching re-examination of options in Vietnam. An influential coterie of civilian defense analysts in the Pentagon had already produced a series of trenchant reports and memos, arguing that further escalations were likely to produce more casualties and more public dissent, but no decisive results in Vietnam. One of the most influential of these documents focused on the nub of the problem: “The enemy can control his casualty rate, at least to a great extent, by controlling the number, size and intensity of combat engagements. If he so chooses, he can limit his casualties to a rate that he is able to bear indefinitely. Therefore the notion that we can ‘win’ this war by driving the VC and NVA from the country or by inflicting an unacceptable rate of casualties on them is false.”
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By the end of March, Clifford had consulted at length with “the wise men,” a group of distinguished American generals and statesmen, including
Omar Bradley, Dean Acheson, and Averill Harriman. After considerable reflection and debate, Clifford and the wise men reached a consensus. The US strategy in Vietnam was not working. The United States could not impose a military solution on the Communists, “at least not in any time the American people will permit,” opined Acheson, who served as the group’s spokesman.
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Expanding the war with additional forces would only result in needless death and destruction.

What, then, should be done? The only prudent option, they explained, was to extend an overture to Hanoi to seek negotiations, to begin to draw down US forces, and to gradually shift the burden of fighting over to the South Vietnamese.

Two months after the offensive began, the Johnson administration abandoned an attrition strategy that sought victory through the destruction of Giap’s military forces and kicked Westmoreland upstairs to become the Army’s chief of staff. Search-and-destroy operations would continue for some time under the command of Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton Abrams, but they would no longer be a core element of US strategy. In a dramatic address on March 31, Johnson spoke in measured tones of “peace in Vietnam.” He would take the “first steps to deescalate the conflict” and was prepared to “move toward peace through negotiation.” To encourage compromise on the part of Hanoi, he had ordered a bombing halt over all of North Vietnam except for its panhandle, the staging area for infiltration of PAVN forces into South Vietnam. He went on to remark that the “main burden” of defending South Vietnam “must be carried out” by the South Vietnamese themselves. Then came the shocker: he “should not permit the Presidency to become involved in partisan divisions” then enveloping the country, nor would he seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.
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Although seldom mentioned in histories of the Vietnam War written by Americans, Giap did in fact launch two more offensives in 1968, just as his 1967 plan had called for. The attacks in the later offensives of May and September were far fewer in number than in Tet, but generally involved stronger forces. In the northernmost five provinces, the fighting was particularly intense. Here more than half of all American combat forces—fifty-four battalions—squared off against PAVN forces of the same strength in a series of extended, inconclusive engagements. In eastern Quang Tri, the Marines and the PAVN fought throughout the month of May in a brutal
engagement around Dong Ha that cost the Americans about 1,900 casualties and Giap’s forces 3,600.
¹⁴
In total, US forces suffered more men killed in action in May than in February.
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The second and third offensives reinforced the (correct) impression that Hanoi remained militarily strong enough to carry on fighting, its resolve unbroken by casualty rates that dwarfed those of the Americans. In November 1968 Johnson called a halt to the bombing of
all
North Vietnam, and for the first time the American president indicated that he would be willing to grant the NLF its own seat at the negotiations table, joining Hanoi’s, Saigon’s, and Washington’s delegations. The war was about to enter the “fight and talk” phase the Communists had long sought.

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

While there is a clear consensus among serious students of the conflict that Tet was a conventional military defeat but a strategic victory for the Communists, they disagree passionately as to whether its outcome was the result of Giap’s brilliance as a strategist, or a misinterpretation of the offensive’s results and a regrettable lack of willpower on the part of the United States. The “stab-in-the-back” school is loath to give any credit at all to Giap (and by extension, Hanoi) for America’s strategic defeat. The origins of this school lie with General Westmoreland, who would claim as the fighting came to an end in Hue that the Communists had “used up their military chips” in a last “throw of the dice.”
¹⁶
Westmoreland thought the offensive had been a devastating failure that should have led to a decisive US-GVN counteroffensive, including an “amphibious hook” by US forces into North Vietnam’s panhandle to crush Giap’s divisions near the DMZ and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He also envisioned thrusts into the sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Instead of pressing on with an aggressive counteroffensive that could very well break the Communists’ back once and for all, Washington and the American people lost their nerve.

The media deserved a great deal of the blame, as Westmoreland would explain years after the war had ended, in its biased obsession with the egregiously low estimates by MACV of Communist military strength, and the failure of the attrition strategy implied by the very launching of the Communist offensive. Liberal reporters and editors had distorted the meaning of the offensive, playing up the shocking ferocity of Giap’s audacious
attacks and MACV’s failure to anticipate the scope of the Communist initiative.

In the 1980s and 1990s a number of respected analysts, notably Harry Summers and Lewis Sorley, put forward more nuanced variations of this interpretation, focusing attention not so much on the media, but on the Johnson administration’s misreading of what really happened on the ground and on the opportunities the offensive opened up for US military operations. It was not the audacity and superior strategic understanding of the Communist leadership that led to strategic victory, but misperception on the part of the policymakers in Washington and generals in Saigon. Summers believed the United States should have spent less time and effort in pacification and anti-guerrilla actions and instead made a full-bore effort to isolate the PAVN from the battlefields of South Vietnam, causing the Communist forces to wither and die in big-unit battles.
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In
A Better War,
Sorely presents the Tet Offensive as a failure for the Communists, for it demonstrated that the people of South Vietnam by and large did not support the revolution’s quest for reunification. Quite the reverse, he claims: “One of the great, if unremarked ironies of the war was that the enemy’s ‘General Offensive/General Uprising’ provoked not the anticipated uprising of the population in support of the invaders, but just the opposite—general mobilization in support of the government.”
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Both Sorley and Summers see Giap as having cynically sacrificed PLAF units, holding back North Vietnamese divisions, presumably to enhance the power of Hanoi at the expense of the NLF in the revolutionary enterprise. In their reading, the decimation of the Vietcong exposed the illegitimacy of Hanoi’s leadership rather than its audacity or resolve. Phillip Davidson, another prominent historian of the conflict, suggests that Giap launched the offensive not so much after a careful and accurate assessment of the political and military state of play in Vietnam, but because he had to do so. American battlefield successes had forced him to abandon protracted war in favor of “an all-out drive for victory at one stroke.”
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Lingering beneath the surface of these interpretations, one detects a strong current of hurt pride and humiliation over what transpired in the hellish early months of 1968. (Summers, Sorley, and Davidson all fought in Vietnam as US Army officers.) Davidson, and to a lesser degree Sorley and Summers, seem determined to denigrate the Communist victory because it was won not on the battlefield, but in the living rooms of the
American people and in a series of agonizing conferences over scores of position papers filed by civilian “experts.” How could the Communists be said to have won when so many of the objectives they presented to their own soldiers and civilians failed to materialize? Yet, was it not true that what Giap’s forces did on the battlefield served as the catalyst for political defeat? Surely it was.

The release of classified documents on both sides since war’s end, as well as our growing understanding of Giap’s way of war, have gone far in exposing fatal weaknesses in the “stab-in-the-back” school and its variants. While there is no denying that the South Vietnamese people failed to rally in droves to the Communists, which was one of Giap’s stated objectives, Sorley’s assertion that the people of South Vietnam rushed to mobilize behind the government is wishful thinking, plain and simple. The evidence suggests that the civilian population of South Vietnam hardly rose up in passionate defense of their government in Saigon. Rather, they were traumatized by the heavy combat and, in classic Vietnamese fashion, “sat on the fence,” not wanting to attach themselves to one side or the other while the issue was in doubt.

In a sense, the fury of the military action all over the country forced them to do so. Their first concern was to stay alive, and Tet’s main effect on civilians was to deepen their despair and war-weariness. The offensive produced over half a million new refugees, mostly the result of the destructiveness of American supporting arms. Never at any phase of the American War in Vietnam did the government of the Republic of South Vietnam enjoy strong support among its own people. True loyalty to Saigon among the South Vietnamese was in as short supply as the belief that the regime had a coherent vision for a brighter future for its peasantry.