Vietnam (16 page)

But peace was the last thing on Hanoi's mind. A massive offensive was planned for Tet, the Vietnamese new year festival which lasts for the first seven days of the lunar new year. In the first years of the war, Tet had been marked by a truce. For Westmoreland an attack during Tet was unthinkable. It would be like mounting an attack at Christmas and he did not think that the Communists would risk alienating the populace by violating their sacred holiday. But like most Americans, the general was unfamiliar with Vietnam's history: in 1789 the Vietnamese had claimed one of their greatest victories during Tet, when the Emperor Quang Trung had routed the occupying Chinese army.

During the 1968 Tet Offensive, the whole of the South erupted. This took the US and the South Vietnamese completely by surprise. According to a West Point textbook published later, it was an 'intelligence failure ranking with Pearl Harbor'. American intelligence had its problems. MACV Combined Intelligence Center received around three million pages of captured documents every month, along with enormous quantities from electronic surveillance, intercepted signals, and information from prisoners, defectors and agents, far too much to evaluate. The attacks at Khe Sanh, Con Thien, Loc Ninh and other places along the DMZ had encouraged Westmoreland to send his forces north. Indeed, Westmoreland considered the Tet Offensive a diversion. As far as he was concerned, the battle for Khe Sanh was the real thing. Meanwhile, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu had furloughed most of his troops for the holiday. Thieu himself was vacationing at his wife's family home in the Mekong Delta. Even those at the State Department Vietnam desk in Washington, DC, had taken the opportunity to go skiing in New Hampshire or Vermont. However the Communists had been planning their offensive since July 1967, with top-level planning conferences being held in Hanoi, chaired by Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. They told the world that the offensive was to 'punish the US aggressors'. Their aim was to fatally weaken the South Vietnamese army and with it the Saigon government. They hoped to provoke a spontaneous uprising and the installation of a neutralist government run by Communist agents. Failing that, they hoped to drive a wedge between the US and the Saigon government. Offering peace talks with the US was part of this strategy: Thieu lived in constant fear that the US would abandon South Vietnam.

In 1967, the North Vietnamese strategist General Giap, like his American counterparts, felt that the war on the battlefield was deadlocked. The Communists did not have the strength to overcome America's superior firepower, but the Americans were dispersed too thinly across the country to deliver the final blow to the elusive Communist forces. However this deadlock favoured the Communists. America could not commit more men and matériel to Vietnam without reducing its global defence commitments and damaging its social and economic programmes at home. So the Communists could continue to bleed the US until it was forced to meet Hanoi's terms at the negotiating table. Giap could lose every battle and still win the war.

Until January 1968 the fighting in Vietnam had taken place in the countryside. The Communists would now take it to the cities. Tet was the perfect time to do this as it was a time when Vietnamese people honoured their ancestors and many people travelled to visit their families. It would not be unusual for city hotels to be full of people from the countryside and it was easy to infiltrate guerrillas. The Vietnamese also took their dead home to be buried in ancestral plots and arms were smuggled into the cities in coffins. On the evening of 31 January 1968, some 84,000 Vietcong and NVA troops suddenly emerged in more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns, including the capital Saigon. Da Nang, Hoi An, and Qui Nhon, coastal enclaves thought to be beyond the reach of the Communists, came under attack. They even rocketed the well-defended US Navy base at Cam Ranh Bay. Thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals were hit and the mountain resort of Dalat, previously spared by tacit agreement, was stormed.

The start of the uprising in Saigon was masked by the firecrackers set off to welcome the Year of the Monkey. But when the racket continued and people realised that it was the sound of small-arms they were hearing, they imagined that the fighting heralded a palace coup with Vice President Ky finally moving against President Thieu, though Thieu was more than 60 miles away in My Tho. In fact, Saigon was under attack by more than 4,000 Communists deployed in small teams. In the early hours of 31 January they hit their first target, the Presidential Palace. Other public buildings came under attack and the Vietcong swept through the Chinese quarter of Cholon. At 0300hrs a nineteen-man VC suicide squad seized the compound of the US Embassy with the aid of a chauffeur nicknamed Satchmo who had worked for the US mission for years. They arrived in a truck and a taxi, blasted their way through the compound wall, killed five GIs on guard there, and held the compound for six and a half hours, to the consternation of the American public who saw the battle for the Embassy on TV. By the end of the battle the beautiful white walls of the six-storey Embassy building – a symbol of American power and prestige which dominated downtown Saigon – were riddled with bullet holes. Its green manicured lawns were stained red with blood, and its flower beds piled with corpses.

A second suicide squad took over Saigon's radio station. But the plug was pulled on them so they could not broadcast the propaganda tapes they had brought with them. When they ran out of ammunition, they blew up the building. American TV audiences saw grinning South Vietnamese soldiers searching their bodies for valuables. They were also shocked to see chief of police General Nguyen Ngoc Loan casually blow the brains out of a bound Vietcong suspect in the streets of Saigon.

No planes could take off or land at the Bien Hoa air base for 48 hours and the Communists held some areas of the city for ten days. For the first couple of days, US forces were confined to barracks in case the street fighting in Saigon was part of a popular uprising. But the ARVN were supplied with M16 automatic rifles for the first time. Eleven thousand ground troops were committed to fight just 1,000 VC on the streets of Saigon. The ARVN fought well, but the VC proved hard to dislodge, so the US Marines were brought in to blast the place. They brought in helicopter gunships, firing rockets that demolished whole rows of houses. Recoilless rifles took out houses where the VC were holed up. Civilians were killed and streets set ablaze. The homeless were forced to seek shelter in shanty towns made out of packing cases and drainage pipes.

In most places the offensive was quickly put down, but often at massive cost. The provincial town of Ben Tre was reduced to rubble and ashes. 'It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it,' a US spokesman explained.

Some of the worst damage occurred in the old imperial capital of Hué, where the Communists held out for twenty-five days. The battle for the Citadel there was one of the bitterest, and the city suffered one of the worst atrocities of the war. During the early hours of 31 January, Communist forces had poured into the city, meeting little resistance. They ran up the Vietcong flag on top of the Citadel, the ancient fortress in the centre. Armed with lists drawn up months before, the Communists began a house-to-house search of the city, rounding up government employees, however minor, along with merchants, teachers, doctors, clergymen, and foreigners. Around 3,000 people were shot, clubbed to death, or buried alive in mass graves. A janitor who worked part-time in a government office was shot with his two children; a cigarette vendor was executed because her sister worked for the government. The dead included three German doctors, two French missionaries, and Stephen Miller of the US Information Service.

Over the next 25 days, US Marines and ARVN troops fought their way back into the city, street by street, inflicting terrible damage. Nearly 150 Marines were killed, along with 400 South Vietnamese and an estimated 5,000 Communists. During the battle the 1st Air Cavalry prevented the infiltration of three fresh NVA regiments. But the Communist troops inside the city did not melt away as before. Despite their reluctance to use huge firepower inside the historic city, the Marines eventually deployed their deadly Ontos. The city was also hit by 5,191 naval rounds,18,091 artillery rounds and 290,877 pounds of bombs, including 500-pound napalm canisters and 250-pound 'Snakeye' bombs. As a result, nearly three-quarters of the city was destroyed, including many of the former royal buildings, museums, libraries, and Buddhist shrines, most notably, the Temple of Heaven.

During Tet some 2,000 Americans lost their lives, along with 4,000 ARVN and maybe as many as 50,000 NVA and VC. The massive Allied response had also wreaked havoc among the non-combatants, leaving 14,000 civilians dead, 24,000 injured, and 800,000 homeless. Nevertheless, the US considered Tet a military victory. Most of the Communist gains had been quickly reversed. Westmoreland even began to consider the Communists a spent force, while the ARVN had acquitted itself well. However, the Hanoi government had something to celebrate too. The Tet Offensive killed off much of the South Vietnamese component of the Vietcong, regarded by Hanoi as unreliable, picking up their news from the BBC World Service instead of Radio Hanoi or Radio Moscow. The resulting decimation of the Vietcong allowed Northerners to take total control when Saigon eventually fell.

Tet had not finished off the ARVN, as Hanoi had been hoping, nor had it destabilised the South Vietnamese regime. But it had been an astonishing propaganda victory. Until the Tet Offensive no one in America had thought that the Communists were capable of staging a coordinated attack across the country on such a scale. Back home many people concluded that, after three years of fighting, if the US could not hold its own Embassy it could not hold the country. One of those to voice their disquiet was influential CBS TV news anchor Walter Cronkite. A Missouri boy and a former World War II war correspondent, Cronkite was one of the most trusted men in America, who, according to one politician, could change the way thousands of Americans voted 'by a mere inflection of his deep baritone voice, or by a lifting of his well-known bushy eyebrows'.

From 1965 to 1968, he was evenhanded in his coverage of the war, reflecting the networks' caution not to show the Johnson administration's handling of the war in a bad light. But when news of the Vietcong's assault on the US embassy in Saigon reached New York just before the evening news, Cronkite exploded.

'What the hell's going on?' he yelled. 'I thought we were winning this war!'

When, on 2 February President Johnson announced that the Tet Offensive was 'a complete failure', the veteran newsman decided to go to Vietnam to see for himself. This was his first visit since 1965. On 27 February, 1968 he made a rare personal report on CBS, saying that it was now 'more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate'. He saw just one way out: negotiations with Hanoi, and he said so. Johnson, who was watching the broadcast, turned to an aide and said, 'If I've lost Walter, I've lost Mr Average Citizen'.

But Cronkite was merely reflecting public opinion rather than leading it. On 20 February the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had begun televised hearings which were openly critical of the war. Two days later, the US military authorities in Vietnam released the weekly total of combat deaths – 543, the highest yet. Public opinion would not stand for that rate of loss when the American people had been told that their technologically superior army was only facing a bunch of poorly-armed peasants.

Worse was to come. On 12 March the peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy, a virtual unknown, took 42 per cent of the poll in the New Hampshire primary with only 300 votes less than Johnson, the incumbent. Four days later, Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, entered the race for the presidential nomination, also on a peace platform. On 18 March 139 Congressmen – including 41 Democrats – sponsored a resolution calling for an immediate congressional review of the administration's Vietnam policy. Johnson's approval rating plummeted from 48 per cent to 36 per cent. In a dramatic TV broadcast on 31 March, Johnson announced a limitation of air strikes against the North to below the 20th parallel, stopping the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong and limiting it to the border region, and he offered peace talks. Although this seemed like a magnanimous gesture, Johnson was in fact caving into the Communists' strategy. Johnson then dropped the bombshell:

'I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,' he said. Instead he would 'rise above partisan divisions' and devote himself to the pursuit of an honourable peace.

Cronkite was invited to visit Hanoi, but declined in case it was perceived as a reward for his criticism of the war. Another seasoned CBS correspondent, Charles Collingwood, went instead. In an interview with Collingwood on 5 April, North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh formally agreed to open talks and on 3 May Paris was chosen as the venue.