by Robert Pisor
“Under such circumstances, I visualize that either tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents would be active candidates for deployment,” Westmoreland told Wheeler.
The highly classified discussion splashed onto the front pages on February 9. Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the foreign relations committee, had asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk about reports that Westmoreland was stockpiling nuclear weapons in South Vietnam for possible use at Khe Sanh—and that four nuclear scientists had recently flown from the United States to Saigon on a secret mission.
Johnson Administration officials flatly denied that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended or requested the use of nuclear weapons, which was an honest evasion of the truth.
Newspaper speculation about nuclear weapons for Vietnam had such profound effects in Congress that General Wheeler called Westmoreland and told him to stop planning for their use at Khe Sanh. COMMUSMACV said he thought it was a mistake, but he disbanded his secret study committee.
The threat in the north consumed Westmoreland.
“It [is] conceivable that the enemy could drive us back in the northern provinces, and it [is] wise to prepare for the worst,” he decided. He set up a staff study of surf conditions on the South Vietnamese coast in April; if he was pushed out of the northern part of I Corps in the coming battle, he planned to recapture the lost ground with an amphibious assault—with the Marines securing the beaches and the Army leap-frogging ahead by helicopter and tank.
• • •
WESTMORELAND WAS BECOMING more attuned to the magnitude of the Tet Offensive. The enemy seemed willing to spend thousands—maybe even tens of thousands—of soldiers. Heavy fighting was continuing in Saigon, and Hue, and several Delta cities.
Despite Westmoreland’s extensive preparations for battle in I Corps in December and January, the situation in the north was worsening.
On January 24, a South Vietnamese military convoy had arrived at Quang Tri City from Saigon—the first through-trip on Route 1 in years. The achievement was announced as an important step in the struggle to secure the roads from Viet Cong interdiction.
At 3 A.M. on January 31, enemy sappers dynamited twenty-five bridges and eleven culverts on Route 1 between Da Nang and Hue. Teams of saboteurs cut an eight-inch pipeline that carried aviation fuel to the thirsty helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division—and torched a tank farm with fifty thousand barrels of fuel.
American forces in the north needed twenty-six hundred tons of supplies every day, not including petroleum, oil, and lubricants, and another one thousand tons a day to prepare for Operation Pegasus—the relief of Khe Sanh. In a single stroke, the daily disgorgement was squeezed off to a trickle.
The logistics situation turned critical almost immediately.
“Achieving a high measure of surprise,” three enemy battalions smashed into Quang Tri City, the capital of South Vietnam’s northernmost province and a key transshipment point for Marine and Army supplies. ARVN troops blunted the badly coordinated enemy attack, but the fate of the city was still in doubt in the early afternoon. Heavy fog, or the need to guard enormous quantities of newly delivered equipment, kept nearby American units from joining the fight.
The only U.S. forces immediately available were the two 1st Air Cav battalions pushing toward Khe Sanh. They shut down the firebases they had built the day before, turned their backs on the combat base, and flew back to Quang Tri City—air-assaulting into intense enemy fire. They routed the attackers, killing 900 North Vietnamese.
The fighting was worst in Hue.
Eight Viet Cong and North Vietnamese battalions—probably 3,000 men, many of them in dark combat fatigues—moved into central Vietnam’s most handsome and historic city without detection. Emperor Gia Long had built a magnificent citadel there in 1802, diverting the waters of the River of Perfumes to fill the moats and erecting great brick walls—ninety feet thick at the main gates—to mark the boundaries of the capital city, the royal city and, in the heart of the fortress, the Forbidden City.
The French colonial governor had made his home in Hue. The city—off-limits to most American servicemen—had retained a French ambiance, with cream-colored buildings and red tile roofs, a large Catholic cathedral, a Jesuit school, nuns in habit in the hospitals and schools, even a sports club on the banks of the river. Sampans still poled its languid lagoons, and on lazy summer mornings it was possible to hear the thock-thock of tennis matches at Le Cercle Sportif.
Westmoreland had cabled Washington January 22 with a warning that the enemy might attempt a multibattalion attack on Hue, but the people of Hue didn’t get the word. U.S. and Vietnamese intelligence officials celebrated Tet with a great feast in the back room of Hue’s best Chinese restaurant, and some Americans were singing college songs and drinking toasts to the New Year as Viet Cong soldiers clambered into boats for an amphibious assault on the citadel.
With crack battalions of the North Vietnamese Army’s 4th and 6th Regiments leading the way, enemy troops overran the city. The headquarters staff of the 1st ARVN division managed to hold out in the Peaceful Royal Library and a small temple in the northwest corner of the citadel, and a U.S. Army detachment on the south side of the Perfume River successfully threw back enemy attacks through the night. But at dawn, flying from the King’s Knight, a 123-foot tower built in 1809 to fly the emperor’s colors, was the red and blue banner of the Liberation Army.
The Viet Cong flag flew for twenty-five hard days.
American commanders misjudged the size and determination of the enemy force in the first days, sending small Marine infantry units into Hue. Stunned by the brutal losses that attended close-range fighting in the middle of a city, but glad for an opportunity to “kick some behinds,” the Marines pushed into the old imperial capital house by house, block by block, street by street. Later, the bombers would come, and huge shells from U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea, and heavy artillery. Tanks maneuvered awkwardly in the streets, offering broad targets for enemy rockets—and answering with pointblank cannon fire. World War II veterans compared the battle of Hue with the worst city fighting in Western Europe.
Whole blocks of the city were pulverized. More than 3,000 civilians died in the shellfire and fighting, and 116,000 fled their homes in panic.
The North Vietnamese commander on the south bank of the Perfume River had been killed in the opening minutes of the attack; then an artillery shell killed the commander of all enemy troops at Hue. His deputy asked for permission to withdraw: casualties were mounting rapidly, and pressure from both American and ARVN troops was getting unbearable.
He was told to hold.
The North Vietnamese were ferrying supplies and replacements to the citadel in steel-bottomed boats, motoring in under the cover of darkness on the Perfume River. They had established two logistics lines to Hue, one from the mountains that reached to within five miles of Hue on the west, and one from the north, down from the DMZ on dirt roads and tracks between Highway 1 and the sea.
Nowhere else in South Vietnam had the Tet Offensive established so spectacular a foothold in a city. Viet Cong political officers moved through Hue’s neighborhoods, with lists of names and addresses, to arrest teachers, clerks, government officials, students, American and German civilians, religious leaders, doctors, politicians, and shopkeepers. More than 2,800 were bound and marched away—to be executed, or buried alive.
Serious logistics problems crippled American response to the enemy capture of Hue. Major General John Tolson, commander of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, complained that fuel shortages had virtually grounded his powerful third brigade. Lieutenant General Creighton Abrams, sent north by Westmoreland to sort out the chaos, immediately limited all incoming supplies to “beans, bullets, and gasoline,” declaring: “Anyone who brings in nonessentials is interfering with the conduct of the war.” A U.S. Army transportation battalion, with Navy Seabees and a Marine logistics unit, finally established an off-loading facility on the beach east of Quang
Tri City, constructed a two-lane road to Highway 1, and began shuttling fuel and supplies and ammunition from ships at sea to the fighting units inland. During the construction of this facility there occurred a military rarity: the logistics lines of two armies at war actually crossed at right angles.
Tolson’s cavalrymen, hampered by foul weather, air-assaulted into positions north and west of Hue in early February to look for enemy troops.
The brigade bumped into “an unusually-large enemy force” as it tried to close the circle on Hue, then battered futilely at North Vietnamese blocking positions for three weeks. The turning point came with the arrival of clearing weather, which gave bombers and gunships room to work, and of two battalions of reinforcements from the 101st Airborne Division. The force that Westmoreland had assembled to invade North Vietnam was now committed to free the city of Hue. The North Vietnamese fought bitterly to buy time for the defenders in the citadel, but on February 21, 22, 23, and 24, four American infantry battalions moved inexorably forward behind naval gunfire, heavy artillery, and tactical air strikes.
On this battlefield U.S. intelligence officers discovered three enemy regiments—close to 5,000 North Vietnamese soldiers—that were thought to be in the ring around Khe Sanh. The 29th Regiment, for example, was marked on Marine maps as part of the 325C Division besieging the hilltops; the 24th Regiment was thought to be near Khe Sanh Village. Somehow these units, and another regiment from one of the North Vietnamese DMZ divisions, had side-slipped through northern I Corps to join the attack on Hue.
“Their presence in the vicinity of Hue had been previously unsuspected,” the deputy U.S. Army commander in I Corps reported.
On February 25, the last enemy position in the citadel was smashed and the Battle of Hue was over. General Westmoreland announced that 8,000 North Vietnamese had died in the twenty-six-day struggle.
• • •
ENEMY FORCES FAILED to establish the same kind of foothold in Saigon, although a thousand Viet Cong were still fighting scattered battles in the capital city on February 7. American bombers and ARVN artillery had leveled parts of some cities in the Delta to drive out the Viet Cong; hundreds of thousands of new refugees were seeking shelter and food. Enemy interdiction of roads and waterways had brought commerce to a halt throughout South Vietnam.
According to prisoners and radio intercepts and captured documents, the enemy forces were preparing for a second wave of attacks.
Whispers of discontent with Westmoreland’s leadership surfaced in the Senate Armed Forces Committee on February 5. General Wheeler told the senators that he knew of no plans to replace Westmoreland, and Defense Secretary McNamara asserted “it is quite unreasonable” to suggest that Westmoreland might be relieved “in the near future.” Wheeler was so concerned that these expressions of doubt might reach Saigon that he cabled Westmoreland: “You should know that all of us, including the Commander in Chief, repose complete confidence in your judgment.”
Through the early days of February, the President prodded the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide whatever support Westmoreland might need, and Wheeler asked Westmoreland almost daily to state his needs clearly. Washington was worried about the still-pending “maximum effort,” and COMMUSMACV was invited to ignore the official limit of 525,000 U.S. soldiers.
“The enemy buildup in the north constitutes the greatest threat,” Westmoreland wrote on February 11. “In view of the widespread, ongoing enemy offensive against provincial capitals, population centers, and key installations in the rest of the country, future deployment of friendly forces out of these areas involves a risk I am not prepared to accept. . . .
“I am expressing a firm request for troops. A setback is fully possible if I am not reinforced, and it is likely that we will lose ground in other areas if I am required to make substantial reinforcement in I Corps.”
One day later Westmoreland cabled Wheeler:
“I desperately need reinforcements. Time is of the essence.”
Wheeler dispatched the 27th Marine Regiment and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. These were among the last combat-ready troops in the national reserve; America’s military cupboard was almost bare.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs flew to Saigon February 23 to speak personally with Westmoreland. General Wheeler was very tired when he arrived, and his face and manner mirrored the gloom that pervaded Washington. Just as Wheeler settled into bed, Viet Cong 122mm rockets pounded the city—one of them striking quite near his guest villa. He hurried out to the airport to the MACV command bunker, where Westmoreland had been sleeping since the start of the enemy offensive.
Wheeler learned in the next few days that “the enemy has the capability—most significantly with the forces he has in the Saigon area—for a second wave of attacks.” A powerful enemy force was threatening Dak To in the Highlands, the 2nd NVA division was still in position to attack Da Nang, fighting continued in Hue, and no one really knew what might be happening in the countryside, abandoned as allied troops fell back on the cities. Most ominously, five NVA divisions were still poised for battle in Quang Tri province.
Westmoreland emphasized that he saw great opportunity in the midst of “heightened risk.” He urged Wheeler to push again for authorization to send American infantry into North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and he asked for 206,000 additional U.S. troops to carry out the attacks. Westmoreland said he needed only 108,000 of these soldiers right away but that he wanted the other 98,000 “in the rack”—that is, drafted, trained, equipped, and readied for shipment to Vietnam if needed.
With substantial reinforcements and permission to pursue across the borders, Westmoreland said, he could confidently meet any new North Vietnamese attacks—and move quickly to exploit the enemy’s terrible losses in the Tet Offensive, which he estimated at 40,000.
General Wheeler drove from the airport to the White House through a dismal, pre-dawn rain to breakfast with the President, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara (in his last day on the job), incoming Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, and the President’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow.
The Tet Offensive had been “a near thing,” Wheeler reported. “And the major, powerful, nationwide assault has . . . by no means run its course. The scope and severity of the enemy’s attacks and the extent of his reinforcements are presenting us with serious and immediate problems.
“We must be prepared to accept some reverses.”
Westmoreland had asked for 206,000 more American troops, Wheeler continued, in the belief he could “destroy the enemy’s will” by pouring in reinforcements now. It would mean calling up the reserves and the National Guard, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs conceded, but he thought the President should “seriously consider” the request.
Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 soldiers for an end-the-war offensive in southeast Asia, relayed by a general worried about American military commitments elsewhere in the world, arrived in a Washington that was still shocked by the Tet Offensive. American death tolls had reached their highest level in the war in the third week of February, 543 dead and 2,547 wounded. The second highest toll came in the final week of February, 470 killed and 2,675 wounded. On the day Wheeler arrived in Saigon, the Selective Service System issued a draft call for 48,000 young men—the highest draft call in a generation. The general’s request was, quite literally, the final straw.
The people of the United States, including some of the highest officials in the Johnson Administration, began a wrenching reassessment of American commitment in Vietnam. It seemed clear now that the United States could not defeat the enemy, and could not even guarantee the security of South Vietnamese cities, without a massive new infusion of troops. New voices joined the chorus of dissent. “A tidal wave of defeatism” was sweeping across the land, lamented S.L.A. Marshall, the military historian.
T
he Tet Offensive would mark the watershed of American involvement in Vietnam. Within thirty days the President would set the nation on a new course.
But this morning, at the White House breakfast, the focus was still on Khe Sanh. President Johnson took General Wheeler to the side as the dishes were cleared.
“What’s happening at the combat base?”
Wheeler told the President that the Marines were tying down two divisions that might otherwise have been thrown into the battles in the cities.
“The North Vietnamese would pay a terrible price to take the outpost,” he assured the President. “And General Westmoreland is confident he can hold.”
8.
BITTER LITTLE BATTLES
The first hours of Tet brought a thick, wet fog to Khe Sanh—but no rockets, no dac cong, no screaming waves of North Vietnamese infantrymen. The sun burned away the mists in the afternoon, but the grey veils began to rise again from the creek beds an hour before the dark.
Colonel Lownds tucked an extra M-16 clip into his shirt pocket, and every marine settled a little deeper in the firing pits and sandbagged trenchlines. Grenades, their pins straightened for quick pulling, were stacked in small piles near at hand. Still, no attack came.
Cries of grief rose from the forward lines held by the 37th ARVN Rangers. Word had arrived that the Rangers’ wives and children were caught in heavy fighting in the town of Phu Loc; until three days ago, the Rangers had been stationed at Phu Loc.
On February 2, an enemy rocket hurtled in from Hill 881 North and plunged through the door of the U.S. Army Signal Corps bunker. The explosion killed four soldiers instantly—and cut the communication link to the outside world. Contact was quickly reestablished, but not before palms went moist in Da Nang and Saigon.
Blinded by the fog, the Marines struggled to make better use of the new sensor devices. The secret sound/tremor detectors had been sown so hurriedly January 18 that their precise location was unknown. Sensor #23, for example, might pick up strange sounds and broadcast them to a circling aircraft for relay to the computers in Thailand, but when the analysis came back—with solid information that the sounds were truck engines, or troop movements, or heavy digging noises—the Air Force intelligence people could not say exactly where to fire for maximum effect.