by Max Hastings
In the early hours of 31 January, Hue’s inhabitants were roused by the sights and sounds of columns of Vietcong, accompanied by two NVA battalions in smart new Chinese-made uniforms, wending their way north through the city streets amid a thin, damp mist, towards the gate of the citadel, built in 1802. The ARVN 1st Division, headquartered in its north-east corner, had been alerted two hours earlier, after a patrol reported the enemy’s approach: air-dropped flares were soon drifting over the city, rival green and red tracer arching across the sky. The attackers nonetheless faced no significant resistance. Frank Scotton’s USIA colleague Bob Kelly recorded laconically: ‘Charlie came into town … Unopposed! NVA were escorted in by the local VC. Locals wore white armbands, main force wore red and NVA wore yellow.’
Ngo Thi Bong and her family were asleep at their home, 103 Tran Hung Dao Street, when the communist assault began. They had grown so accustomed to gunfire that they were not especially disturbed until she and her sons came downstairs and glimpsed through their shuttered windows some twenty very young Vietcong. A middle-aged woman who had lost her husband in the French wars, then a son killed with the ARVN in 1966, she said: ‘I knew we would suffer.’ In the battle that began desultorily in the early hours of Wednesday, 31 January, the communists occupied much of Hue city, the massive citadel and palaces within its walls. Critically, however, they failed to secure the 1st Division command post in the Mang Ca sector, or the American advisers’ compound, a mile southward across the Huong River. Many Southern soldiers fled or sought hiding places, enabling the attackers to seize large stocks of weapons and ammunition, some of which were issued to hundreds of VC liberated from the city’s prisons. Sappers blew up a tank park at nearby Tam Thai, and the NVA established a strong blocking position north of the city.
Twenty-six-year-old Lt. Tran Ngoc Hue heard the shooting in Hue city at his home within the citadel wall. He led his parents, wife and daughter into the family bunker, such as all prudent South Vietnamese dug, then set out to bicycle through the darkness in civilian clothes to join his men. Hue commanded the Hac Bao, or Black Panthers, the 1st Division’s rapid-reaction force whose elements were scattered around the city. He suddenly found himself moving among a column of NVA, too intent on their own affairs to notice him. Reaching his depleted company on the little airstrip inside the citadel walls, he was immediately radioed to move to 1st Division’s headquarters. The company reached the CP just before North Vietnamese troops attacked – and were repulsed. One of Hue’s platoon commanders, deployed at the provincial prison south of the river, sent a last message just before it was overrun and he was killed, asking Hue to look after his wife and seven children.
All that day, 31 January, fighting ebbed and flowed around the ARVN command post and the American compound, with communist mortar bombs and 122mm rockets incoming, LAWs outgoing. At one stage communist troops broke into the Southerners’ perimeter; they were expelled only after the defenders called down artillery on their own bunkers. The South Vietnamese position continued to hold out through the days that followed, though the communists established a headquarters in the throne room of the nearby Palace of Perfect Peace, and cadres toured the city in captured jeeps, detaining people of all ages and both sexes who were deemed tainted by association with the regime or Americans.
One in five men of Maj. Pham Van Dinh’s 2/3rd Infantry outside Hue were on Tet leave when the attack came. American adviser Capt. Joe Bolt found himself unable to secure air or fire support. At noon on the 31st Dinh was ordered to move into the city. He and his 260 men reached the Perfume River at mid-afternoon, then became locked in a contest for a marketplace, which cost ten dead and many more wounded. Most of Dinh’s soldiers were desperately apprehensive, because their own families lived in an area now controlled by the communists – he himself learned only much later that his wife and children had escaped as refugees. Early next morning, some of Dinh’s men scaled the citadel’s massive walls, only to fall to communist fire. During the street-fighting that followed, Joe Bolt got through to the American compound, from which he returned with a jeepload of ammunition and rations. He also secured two 106mm recoilless rifles, which proved invaluable for blowing away sniper positions. Every ARVN attempt to push into the citadel failed. The communists and South Vietnamese exchanged abuse across common radio frequencies. Americans who afterwards criticised the performance of Saigon’s troops in Hue were justified in asserting that they had not been effective, but the casualty figures argue that not all were cowardly.
Outside Ngo Thi Bang’s front door lay a wounded, bleeding government soldier whom nobody dared to help. Eventually a communist strolled up to the prostrate figure and put a final bullet into him. Soon afterwards, the enemy entered her house. The Vietcong made no threats – simply stated baldly that since they were winning, it would be wise to help them. Through the hours and days that followed, guerrillas slept and ate there, distributed propaganda leaflets and sang Party songs. Some humble local people – rickshaw-drivers and the like – carried arms and ammunition for them, but such middle-class families as the Ngos did as little as they dared.
The grim, unsmiling occupiers seemed baffled that these Buddhists, who they knew disliked the Saigon regime, appeared equally unenthusiastic about the rival cause. Later communist narratives admitted that ‘if we wanted the masses to rise up, it was essential to deploy strong enough military forces to promise victory’. In other words, revolutionary fervour did not suffice: the people needed also to be confident that Hanoi’s soldiers looked like winners – as still they did not, in the eyes of most citizens of Hue. Terrified refugees thronged churches, university buildings, and soon the hopelessly overcrowded MACV compound, where when water ran short the occupants drank orange soda, which they learned to hate. The running theme of the battle that persisted through February, destroying half the former capital and killing thousands of civilians, was that the communists fought doggedly to hold the ground they had seized during the first night and day, while American and Southern forces dispossessed them only with agonising sluggishness. The first US relief column, dispatched north towards the MACV compound from ‘Task Force X-Ray’ at Phu Bai, blundered into strong North Vietnamese forces, and was mauled. Thereafter a continuing trickle of reinforcements got through to the beleaguered Americans, most of them borne by river transport. Again and again, however, senior officers issued unrealistic orders, such as those to 1st Marines’ CO Lt. Col. Ernie Cheatham from his regimental commander on Saturday, 3 February: ‘I want you to attack through the city and clean the NVA out!’
An initial suicidal attempt to charge north across the Truong Tien bridge into the citadel cost ten dead, fifty-six wounded out of a hundred Marines. They were untrained in street-fighting, a specialised art. Until they learned the hard way through the weeks that followed, they suffered constant casualties from snipers and automatic weapons because they exposed themselves carelessly, advancing headlong up thoroughfares where buildings and soon rubble provided plentiful cover for the enemy. At no time did any American above the rank of colonel grip the battle: generals instead issued impracticable directives respectively from Camp Evans to the north, Phu Bai to the south.
For the first ten days, cultural scruples inhibited air strikes and artillery from hitting the citadel where the NVA were concentrated. In residential streets south of the river, by contrast, massed 106mm recoilless rifle fire was deployed, followed by tear-gas shells and grenades. Within occupied areas, the communists ‘killed tyrants and eliminated wrongdoers’, to use their own parlance for thousands of murders. Electricity and water failed, and the city’s radio station fell silent. By day and night, Hue’s inhabitants fell prey to the sights and sounds of war without mercy.
For most of February, Westmoreland gravely underestimated the scale of the enemy commitment in and around Hue, partly because of his obsession with Khe Sanh, and partly because of a breakdown of American command and control machinery, especially intelligence. Marine and army commanders convin
ced themselves that the communists deployed up there no more than two thousand men, whereas their real strength was five times greater. The Americans thus fed a succession of relatively weak forces into the battle, enabling the communists to engage and mangle these in detail. No small part of the propaganda success of Hanoi’s Tet gambit derived from the protraction of the Hue struggle. And no small part of the anguish of US soldiers and Marines stemmed from having to fight on terms which their enemies locally dictated. For many days the high command fooled itself that Hue represented merely one among the communists’ many Tet failures. In reality, it became by far their biggest success. The NVA and VC were able to forge from it a legend comparable with that of the 1942 American defence of Corregidor – doomed, but heroic.
Capt. Charles Krohn, intelligence officer of the 2/12th Cavalry, compared the fate of his own unit, insouciantly dispatched south towards Hue on the fourth day, with that of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War: ‘We only had to advance two hundred yards or so, but both we and the Light Brigade offered human-wave targets that put the defenders at little risk … There was no satisfactory or compelling reason for a US battalion to assault a fortified North Vietnamese Army force over an open field.’ Krohn wrote of their 4 February encounter at a hamlet four miles north of Hue: ‘Some four hundred of us got up to charge. A few never made it past the first step. By the time we got to the other side of the clearing, nine were dead and forty-eight wounded … We killed only eight NVA (at best) and took four prisoners … We reported higher figures to brigade, based on wishful thinking that made us feel better. But privately we knew that the enemy had scarcely been scratched.’
Krohn watched the body of a medic named Johnny Lau being loaded aboard a dust-off: ‘We had spoken earlier before the attack, and he told me he was from Sacramento, California. He said his family was in the grocery business. We broke off our conversation about the best way to prepare beef with ginger when the attack started but promised each other to pick it up later’ – as they never did. The battalion’s foxhole strength fell in six weeks from five hundred to less than two hundred. Krohn wrote bitterly: ‘The NVA had better senior leadership than we did.’ His battered battalion felt lucky to extricate itself to lick its wounds.
The Tet battles spread progressively down the country, until most of Westmoreland’s battalions were engaged. When it all started, Airborne platoon commander John Harrison was leading a patrol near Nha Trang, thinly disguised as a ‘deer hunt’ out of respect for the Tet truce. A sudden radio warning came through: ‘You are hot. I say again, you are hot. Do you copy?’ The platoon turned around fast and returned to FOB Betty, from whence they were immediately sent forth again to sweep the area for Vietcong. They did not have far to look, surprising a group of guerrillas gathering to attack. One man ran straight towards the Americans, firing a pistol. Harrison’s point man was so surprised by this pathetic, hopeless sally that he did not respond. The lieutenant pumped sixteen rounds into the guerrilla until he fell, dust rather than blood finally spouting out of his wounds.
PoW interrogator Bob Destatte was riding in a jeep with two lieutenants on the road south of Tuy Hoa city. The first he knew of Tet was a file of Vietnamese wearing a ragbag of clothing, some clad only in shorts, crossing the road in front of the vehicle. Some of them started shooting, and Destatte thought angrily, ‘Jesus Christ, if they go on like that they’re going to kill someone!’ Then he realised ‘there were bad guys in town’. The three Americans abandoned their vehicle and lay in cover, thoroughly frightened, until some refugees passed, heading out of town. Destatte spoke to one group in Vietnamese, saying, ‘When you meet government troops, please tell them there are some long-noses in trouble down here.’ A while later, an RF platoon showed up and said, ‘Are you the long-noses looking for help?’ The Americans blessed their good fortune in escaping unscathed.
A navy carrier pilot who had made an emergency landing at Danang was stretched out exhausted on the floor of its operations room when he was shaken awake by a hysterical colonel who demanded, ‘Is that your aircraft out front? You have to get it out of here. I have no revetment for it. It must get out of here.’ The pilot responded with obscenities, concluding, ‘If you want it moved, move it yourself.’ The colonel became even more emotional, shouting that he would bulldoze the plane off the parking area. The pilot wrote later: ‘I realized I was dealing with a madman. He had become unglued.’ Rather than see his ‘beautiful fighter’ bulldozed, he dragged on his G-suit and took off through the darkness, landing two hours later in the Philippines.
At 2100 on 30 January an armed Vietcong was captured in Saigon, who revealed that six hours later multiple objectives would be assaulted in and around the city. Half an hour later another guerrilla was seized, carrying two folding-stock AK-47s. It was too late for the defenders to make significant redeployments, but most units were alerted before the attacks began. Many guerrillas, having never set foot in a town, became lost in Saigon’s maze of streets: local people handed over to police a teenage peasant fighter whom they encountered seated weeping on a kerb, having mislaid his comrades.
Tran Bach Dang, furious in frustration at his battalions’ tardiness, found himself and his men almost running the last miles through the darkness towards Saigon. He laid out maps in a suburban village temple, even as the first rattle of gunfire became audible in the city centre. A battalion commander reported that he had been ordered to attack Nha Be fuel dumps, but had no idea where these were, and his men were exhausted. Yet when Dang tuned into Saigon and ARVN broadcast networks and found both silent, he enjoyed a brief spasm of exultation, assuming that the transmitters were already in communist hands. A stream of local residents visited the temple bringing melons, firecrackers, tea, medicine, Tet cakes. So far, so good.
3 A SYMBOLIC HUMILIATION
At 0130 on 31 January, leading elements of a total force of four thousand Vietcong – the NVA stayed out of the capital – thrust at multiple Saigon targets, of which the first was the presidential palace: this was untenanted, because President Nguyen Van Thieu was holidaying in My Tho. The attackers, thirteen men and one woman, were quickly repulsed, and retreated to a nearby apartment building, where they were progressively killed during a fifteen-hour firefight. Other guerrillas seized the national radio station with the aid of a staff sympathiser who provided keys. They held the building for six hours, but their plans to broadcast propaganda appeals were frustrated by severance of the cables to its transmitter. Communist assaults were also launched at the Newport bridge, in the ethnic Chinese suburb of Cholon, and outlying bases at Long Binh, Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhut. Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky ordered a general civilian curfew, so that anyone seen on the streets of Saigon might be assumed an enemy.
So cynical had Vietnamese become that some who heard Hanoi radio broadcasts announcing that the regime was being overthrown thought Ky must be staging a putsch against Thieu. David and Mai Elliott, overnighting in the RAND compound in Rue Pasteur, were awakened by an immense bang. They switched on lights, earning a bawl from a Marine colonel, ‘Switch ’em off! We’re under attack!’ The Elliotts, too, assumed a coup – exclusively Vietnamese business – and returned to bed. In reality, the explosion was caused by VC sappers blasting a hole in the outer walls of the nearby US embassy, precipitating one of the war’s most dramatic episodes.
Nineteen commandos of the communist C-10 battalion approached in a small Peugeot truck and a taxi, having spent the previous days concealed in a local auto-repair shop. They spilled out of the vehicles and opened fire on two American military policemen, who responded with notable presence of mind, locking the embassy gate and shooting down the VC platoon leader and his assistant. At 0247 they radioed the code for an attack, ‘Signal 300!’ One American added, ‘They’re coming in, they’re coming in! Help me! Help me!’ before being killed. As the embassy’s ARVN guards fled, the rest of the attackers scrambled through the breach made by their fifteen-pound satchel charge. Once inside the compound, however
, the commandos faltered. They fired two rockets at the chancery building which blew the US national seal off the wall, wounded a Marine and put the fear of God into the handful of other occupants, while killing no one. Thereafter they took cover behind the concrete surrounds of some large flowerbeds, and for the next few hours merely exchanged desultory fire with a handful of Marines and MPs in surrounding buildings.
Allan Wendt, a thirty-three-year-old economic specialist who was diplomatic duty officer, was awakened by the thunderous explosion. His first reaction was to dive under the bed, his second to ring down to a Marine on the ground floor, who told him the building was under attack. Black farce followed. There were no weapons in the embassy building save those in the hands of three guards, one of whom was quickly wounded. Wendt saw no reason why the attackers should not storm the place: ‘I thought I was living my last moments.’ He made the first of several telephone calls to MACV from the sanctuary of the armoured cipher room, where he locked himself in. Westmoreland’s staff assured him that help would soon be on the way, but pointed out – somewhat in the spirit of corporate recorded messages asserting ‘Your call is important to us’ – that they were responding to multiple attacks around the Saigon area. Wendt protested, emotionally but entirely accurately: ‘This place is the very symbol of American power in Vietnam.’ A MACV officer promised that an armoured column was on its way – though it was not. The diplomat also took calls from the State Department’s Operations Center and the White House Situation Room, for whom he held up the telephone mouthpiece so they might hear the rattle of gunfire.
The initial Saigon response was even less disciplined than were most of the VC’s attacks. The 716th MP battalion, the only American unit in the city centre, was ordered to send help to the embassy. Its officers declined to move until armour and helicopters were available, and resisted joining a firefight in darkness. One shrugged, ‘The VC are inside the compound. They’re not going anyplace.’ Most of the Americans – Marines and MPs – who progressively eliminated the commandos during the hours that followed were doing their own thing rather than fulfilling orders. They also killed four South Vietnamese embassy drivers, though one of these was probably assisting the attackers.