Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Even though Rolling Thunder was intensified in 1967, the North Vietnamese were repeatedly offered an end to the bombing, if they would come to the conference table. They insisted that the bombing must end first. On 13 January, the US had to temporarily halt the bombing unilaterally during a controversy over civilian deaths following an air raid on the Yenvien marshalling yard. Nevertheless, after a truce for Tet, the lunar New Year, the US escalated the war yet again by permitting artillery bombardments of North Vietnamese territory and dropping mines in Northern rivers. In March, the USAF destroyed a steel works forty miles from Hanoi and the Thai government gave permission for B-52s to fly from their air bases, instead of coming all the way from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam in the Mariana Islands, a twelve-hour round trip. Even so, at a conference in Guam, Ky criticised US restraint, asking Johnson, 'How long can Hanoi enjoy the advantage of restricted bombing of military targets?'

  In the South, nearly 180 fighter-bombers supported the US forces in Operation Junction City. In the battle at Ap Gu on 2 April, the Vietcong claimed to have downed twenty-two of them.

  On 20 April, the port at Haiphong was bombed for the first time, while US Secretary of State Dean Rusk expressed 'regret' that civilian casualties might occur as a result of raids on 'essential military targets'. Five days later, US planes hit the British freighter Dartford in Haiphong harbor. But this did nothing to check the Pentagon's relentless escalation of the bombing. On 19 May central Hanoi was hit for the first time in an effort to take out the largest power plant in North Vietnam.

  In August, President Johnson dropped most of the remaining restrictions on the bombing of the North, and North Vietnam became, essentially, a free-fire zone. US planes began bombing road and rail links in the Hanoi-Haiphong area and raids attacked targets just ten miles from the Chinese border. One Democrat congressman asked how the US would react to a Chinese bombing raid on Mexico that hit targets ten miles from the Rio Grande. Despite this Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, complained that too many 'qualified targets' were off-limits to bombing. Meanwhile, the USAF Chief of Staff General John P. McConnell told a Senate Committee that the graduated escalation of the bombing begun in 1965 was a mistake. Rather they should have taken out ninety-four key targets in the first sixteen days in one massive blow. Three days later, McNamara admitted that bombing the North had not materially affected the Communist's fighting capability, though Admiral Sharp claimed that it was causing Hanoi 'mounting logistic, management, and morale problems'. General Giap had his say in a Communist newspaper, declaring that President Johnson was using 'backward logic' if he thought that bombing the North would ease the pressure on the South. Nevertheless, the Senate Committee called for massive bombing raids on Haiphong. Renewed raids were mounted on Hanoi and Haiphong, and on the dock area of Cam Pha. But by then the North Vietnamese MiGs were airborne again, this time flying from airfields in China and out of bounds to US air raids. Between 23 and 30 October, during heavy attacks on bridges, airfields and power plants in the Hanoi-Haiphong region thirteen US aircraft were shot down.

  While Rolling Thunder was escalating, a huge tonnage of bombs was being dropped on South Vietnam. The statistics looked impressive. The US won numerous victories on the battlefield, inflicting huge losses on the enemy. In Operation Wheeler/Wallowa, the American Infantry Division claimed a body count of 8,188. But somehow this did not sap the Communists' will to fight. Meanwhile, US casualties continued to mount. On 11 December 1967, Johnson declared that 'our statesmen will press the search for peace to the corners of the earth' and suggested that peace talks be held on board a neutral ship at sea. Hanoi rejected this idea four days later.

  However, the Christmas truce brought a ray of hope. The North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Du Trinh announced that North Vietnam was willing to open talks if the US halted the bombing. But this was a ruse to lull the US authorities into a false sense of security. The Hanoi government was already planning the biggest offensive in the war so far – the offensive that would finally convince the American people that the war was unwinnable.

  Walter Cronkite testifies on freedom of the press before a Senate subcommittee in Washington, 30 September 1971.

  6

  THE UNWINNABLE WAR

  AS 1967 DREW TO A CLOSE, the American people were told they were winning the war. On 17 November President Johnson told the television audience, 'We are inflicting greater losses than we're taking... We are making progress'.

  Four days later, General Westmoreland told the press, 'I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing'.

  However, there was one man who was not convinced. His name was Robert McNamara, and as Secretary of Defense, he was well placed to judge: even a cursory look at the war would have shown that the US was in trouble. Despite repeated escalations in the American commitment, men and matériel continued to flow down the Ho Chi Minh trail. The Communists seemingly suffered no shortage of weapons or ammunition. The Vietcong mounted attacks throughout the country, seemingly at will. They even attacked well-protected air bases and destroyed planes. The NVA fought massed engagements, then withdrew and reformed. American forces made repeated sweeps through hostile areas, only to find them reoccupied by the VC as soon as they were gone. With no front lines, no territory was being taken. American forces seemed to be committed to an endless round of piecemeal battles that never proved to be big enough to be decisive.

  As Secretary of Defense in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, McNamara was one of the most relentless advocates of the war. It was McNamara who had presented the evidence of North Vietnamese aggression to Congress after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964. In February 1965, he backed the National Security Council's proposal for 'retaliatory' air strikes against the North and backed Westmoreland's repeated demands for more troops. But in October 1966, McNamara went to Vietnam. It was his eighth trip, but the first for over a year. On 14 October, he sent a memorandum to President Johnson suggesting 'stabilising' the bombing campaign. In McNamara's opinion it had been a costly failure. Millions of tons of bombs had been dropped with no marked effect on the economy of the North, Hanoi's commitment to the war, or the infiltration into the South. The hi-tech McNamara Line was to be the alternative to bombing to prevent infiltration. He also recommended that there should be no further increase in troops and a greater commitment to 'pacification'. Only his idea for the McNamara Line – which soon proved to be another costly failure – was accepted. His other views found no support outside the State Department. But again in March 1967, he suggested limiting bombing to staging areas and infiltration routes.

  McNamara was an alumnus of Harvard Business School. Regarded as a 'whizz kid', he was hired by the Ford Motor Company, where he set about the institution of strict cost-accounting methods and rose to become the first person outside the family to become the company's president, quitting after a month to join the Kennedy administration as Secretary of Defense. With his business school background, he had been taught to analyse problems dispassionately and follow the conclusion no matter where it led. In May 1967, the Department of Defense's Systems Analysis Office did the figures on the war and realised that the Communists were controlling the frequency, number, size, length and intensity of engagements. That way they controlled their casualties, which they were keeping just below their birth rate. This was a winning strategy. According to the DoD's report:

  The VC and NVA started the shooting in over 90 per cent of company-sized firefights. Over 80 per cent began with a well-organised enemy attack. Since their losses rise – as in the first quarter of 1967 – and fall – as they have done since – with their choice of whether or not to fight, they can probably hold their losses to about two thousand a week regardless of our force levels. If their strategy is to wait us out, they will control their losses to a level low enough to be sustained indefinitely, but high enough to tempt us to increase our forces to the point of US rejection of the war.


  As long as the North Vietnamese government maintained their people's will to fight – and there were no signs of a crack in the Communists' morale – this strategy meant they could fight forever. The same could not be said of America. Public opinion, although hugely in favour of the war at the outset, was now fragmenting. Huge anti-war demonstrations were taking place across America. Even in Congress things were looking bad. The influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, who had initially been a keen supporter of the war, had turned fervently against it, advocating talks between Saigon and the Vietcong.

  To McNamara the war now seemed unwinnable. As it dragged on it was bound to become increasingly unpopular. In June 1967, he instituted a study of 'The History of the US Decision Making Process in Vietnam' – which would be leaked to the newspapers as the 'Pentagon Papers' – and in August he outlined his increasingly dovish views to the hawkish Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who strongly favoured a further escalation in the bombing.

  In a Draft Presidential Memorandum of 17 November 1967, McNamara recommended curtailment of the war rather than escalation. In his conclusion, he wrote, 'The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed is not a pretty one'. This could have come straight from an anti-war pamphlet. It was a final break with Johnson's hardline policy. Close to a nervous breakdown, McNamara tendered his resignation in November 1967. After waiting for a suitable interval to elapse before leaving the administration, on 29 February, 1968 he quit to become president of the World Bank. The official line was still that the war could be won, if Westmoreland was given enough men. By the end of 1967 there were half-a-million American troops in Vietnam and Senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would run for the presidency on an anti-war ticket. But neither the hawks or the doves predicted what would happen next.

  They did know that something was going to happen though. For six months there had been reports that Hanoi was planning a major offensive in the South. The truce for Christmas and New Year was punctuated by frequent outbreaks of violence and Ho Chi Minh announced that the forthcoming year would bring great victories for the Communist cause.

  On 21 January 1968, four North Vietnamese Army infantry divisions, supported by two armoured regiments and two artillery regiments – 40,000 men in all – began converging on Khe Sanh, a US Marine Corps base just south of the DMZ. Westmoreland believed that the North Vietnamese intended to grab the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, prior to opening peace negotiations – just as they had moved against the French at Dien Bien Phu to buttress their bargaining position at the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954. Peace feelers were out at that time. At a reception in Hanoi on 30 December 1967, less than a month earlier, North Vietnam's Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh dropped most of North Vietnam's preconditions on talks and said that Hanoi would enter peace talks with the US if the bombing was halted.

  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.

  THE TET OFFENSIVE: 1968

  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 Ame
rican 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.