page_title: Tet Offensive
section_title: North Vietnam
hierarchical_section_title: Tet Offensive / Aftermath / North Vietnam
caption_attribution_description: English: "Youthful hard-core Viet Cong, heavily guarded, awaits interrogation following capture in the attacks on the capital city during the festive Tet holiday period." 1968. http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/thumbnail471.html Credit: National Archives and Records Administration
context_page_description: The Tet Offensive, or officially called The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968 was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. It was launched on January 30, 1968 by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the United States Armed Forces and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name of the offensive comes from the Tết holiday, the Vietnamese New Year, when the first major attacks took place.
  The offensive was launched prematurely in the late night hours of 30 January in the I and II Corps Tactical Zones of South Vietnam. This early attack allowed allied forces some time to prepare defensive measures. When the main operation began the next morning, the offensive was countrywide and well coordinated; eventually more than 80,000 PAVN/VC troops struck more than 100 towns and cities, including 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 72 of 245 district towns, and the southern capital.
context_section_description: The leadership in Hanoi was despondent at the outcome of their offensive.  Their first and most ambitious goal, producing a general uprising, had ended in a dismal failure. In total, about 85,000–100,000 PAVN/VC troops had participated in the initial onslaught and in the follow-up phases. Overall, during the "Border Battles" of 1967 and the nine-month winter-spring campaign, 45,267 PAVN/VC troops had been killed in action.
  Hanoi had underestimated the strategic mobility of the allied forces, which allowed them to redeploy at will to threatened areas; their battle plan was too complex and difficult to coordinate, which was amply demonstrated by the 30 January attacks; their violation of the principle of mass, attacking everywhere instead of concentrating their forces on a few specific targets, allowed their forces to be defeated piecemeal; the launching of massed attacks headlong into the teeth of vastly superior firepower; and last, but not least, the incorrect assumptions upon which the entire campaign was based. According to General Tran Van Tra: "We did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy, did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities, and that our capabilities were limited, and set requirements that were beyond our actual strength.
  The PAVN/VC effort to regain control of the countryside was somewhat more successful. According to the U.S. State Department the VC "made pacification virtually inoperative. In the Mekong Delta the Viet Cong was stronger now than ever and in other regions the countryside belongs to the VC." General Wheeler reported that the offensive had brought counterinsurgency programs to a halt and "that to a large extent, the VC now controlled the countryside". This state of affairs did not last; heavy casualties and the backlash of the South Vietnamese and Americans resulted in more territorial losses and heavy casualties.
  The heavy losses inflicted on VC units struck into the heart of the infrastructure that had been built up for over a decade. MACV estimated that 181,149 PAVN/VC troops had been killed during 1968. According to General Tran Van Tra, 45,267 PAVN/VC troops had been killed during 1968 From this point forward, Hanoi was forced to fill nearly 70% of the VC's ranks with PAVN regulars. PRG Justice Minister Trương Như Tảng said that the Tet Offensive had wiped out half of the VC's strength, while the official Vietnamese war history notes that by 1969, very little communist-held territory ("liberated zones") existed in South Vietnam. Following the Tet Offensive and subsequent U.S.-South Vietnamese "search and hold" operations in the countryside throughout the rest of 1968, the VC's recruiting base was more or less wiped out; the official Vietnamese war history later noted that "we could not maintain the level of local recruitment we had maintained in previous years. In 1969 we were only able to recruit 1,700 new soldiers in Region 5 (compared with 8,000 in 1968), and in the lowlands of Cochin China we recruited only 100 new soldiers (compared with 16,000 in 1968)." As also noted by the official history, "because our armed local forces had suffered severe losses, guerrilla operations had declined." However, this change had little effect on the overall result of the war, since in contrast to the VC, the PAVN had little difficulty making up the casualties inflicted by the offensive. Some Western historians have come to believe that one insidious ulterior motive for the campaign was the elimination of competing southern members of the Party, thereby allowing the northerners more control once the war was won.
  It was not until after the conclusion of the first phase of the offensive that Hanoi realized that its sacrifices might not have been in vain. General Tran Do, PAVN commander at the battle of Huế, gave some insight into how defeat was translated into victory:
  In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective, which was to spur uprisings throughout the South. Still, we inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans a
caption: A Viet Cong guerrilla awaits interrogation following his capture in the attacks on Saigon.
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