Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (29 page)

By the time the South Vietnamese flag went up on the Imperial Palace of Peace within the citadel’s grounds on February 25, 150 Marines had died, and 800 had been wounded, while Giap’s forces had suffered perhaps 5,000 troops killed in action. In one of the most savage acts of a savage war, the short-lived NLF government in Hue executed some 2,800 “traitors and reactionaries” who had served or supported the GVN. The GVN had initially prohibited air strikes and artillery in order to preserve the beautiful architecture of the city and to limit civilian casualties, but in the end, the
progress was so slow that the Marines were granted permission to unleash heavy supporting fire. More than half the city was in ruins by battle’s end.

Searing images of the desperate fighting in Hue were broadcast on American television each night, reinforcing the initial shock of the Tet attacks in Saigon and widening further still the “credibility gap”—the disparity between the Johnson administration’s sunny reports of progress and the public’s growing perception of the war as futile and misconceived. The fighting during Tet, particularly the Battle of Hue, went a long way toward exploiting the “political contradictions” inherent in American war strategy even as the Americans and South Vietnamese were taking back the ground they had lost.

THE DIVERSIONARY CAMPAIGN AT KHE SANH

In classic Giapian fashion, the Tet attacks beginning in late January 1968 had been prefaced in late 1967 by a series of diversionary campaigns near the DMZ at Con Thien and Khe Sanh, in the Central Highlands, and north of Saigon. Far and away the most important of these diversionary operations was the dramatic siege of the Khe Sanh Marine combat base (January 21 to April 1, 1968). Khe Sanh was the westernmost combat base of US forces just below the DMZ, just six miles from the Laotian border. As elements of three PAVN divisions closed in on the 6,000-man Marine garrison, the Marine brass wanted to withdraw to the comparative safety of less isolated strongpoints to the east. They saw no good strategic purpose in remaining at Khe Sanh.

Westmoreland would have none of it. Khe Sanh figured prominently in his future war plans in several ways. It could serve as a jumping-off point for special operations reconnaissance forays into Laos and North Vietnam. It might also function as the staging area for an invasion into Laos that he hoped to convince a skeptical Johnson administration to approve. Westmoreland also described Khe Sanh as the “anchor” of the McNamara Line, protecting its left flank from an invasion by North Vietnam. Finally, the American field commander believed there was a good chance Giap was preparing to engage in something like Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh and seizing the northern provinces. If this was indeed Giap’s intention, MACV’s commander welcomed it. He was confident that, relying heavily on airpower, he could inflict a devastating defeat on the Communists.

Neither Johnson nor the civilian planners in the Pentagon were quite so sure. As PAVN forces closed in and cut Route 9, the only ground road leading to the base, the Marines had to be supplied entirely by air. After Giap launched the first of several ground attacks on the hill outposts outside the base on January 21, Khe Sanh became something of an obsession for Johnson personally. He went so far as to have a detailed replica of the base built in the White House basement for personal daily briefings. Khe Sanh was the object of intense media scrutiny as well. Could the Marines hold? Everywhere, American troops talked of the possibility of another Dien Bien Phu, and copies of Bernard Fall’s masterful account of that battle were widely read by correspondents and American officers alike.

Just as Westmoreland misunderstood the main object of the Vietnam War as a whole, mistaking the destruction of Giap’s main-force units for the war’s true center of gravity—gaining the loyalty of the people of South Vietnam and isolating them from PLAF guerrillas and political cadres—so he misread Giap’s intentions at Khe Sanh. The PAVN commander never once made a serious effort to overrun the base. Khe Sanh’s similarities to Dien Bien Phu were far less significant than its differences, all of which boded poorly for Communist success in overrunning the Marines.

Giap’s Khe Sanh campaign was intended as a ruse, a diversion (albeit a costly one) to draw off US mobile forces to the northern border region, thereby paving the way for the Tet attacks. It may also have been meant to test Westmoreland’s reactions to a serious threat near the DMZ—would such a threat prompt him to invade North Vietnam, landing troops behind Giap’s forces in the North Vietnamese panhandle? As we have seen, the possibility of an invasion of North Vietnam had been one of Giap’s abiding preoccupations since the outset of the American War.

In any case, instead of launching a massive attack on the base itself, the PAVN bombarded the Marines with as many as 1,300 shells a day, much of the fire originating in the mountains of Laos, out of reach of US counter-battery fire. Giap did launch several battalion-sized attacks on the hills protecting the base, but succeeded in overrunning only one hill strongpoint, and that was quickly retaken. In the broad scheme of things, the failure of these ground thrusts mattered little. They succeeded in keeping alive the notion at MACV headquarters that the Big Attack was in the offing at Khe Sanh, and as usual, Giap’s heavy casualties had no significant bearing on his ability to wage the campaign in a manner of his choosing.

Another action near the Marine Khe Sanh base that shook MACV and enhanced the believability of Giap’s ruse occurred on February 6, when elements of at least two PAVN regiments supported by tanks—their first appearance of the war—overran a Special Forces base, killing most of its Montagnard garrison and a handful of American Green Berets. According to the official history of the PAVN, the Lang Vei attack was “the first combined arms operation that succeeded in destroying an enemy battalion defending a heavily fortified position” in the American War. It “marked a new stage forward in the growth of the combat capabilities of our mobile main force troops.”
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Gradually, very gradually, in the midst of the heaviest combat of the war, Giap’s army’s capabilities continued to develop.

Did Giap intend to attack the combat base with tanks? Johnson, Westmoreland, and the American people looked on with grave concern and wondered. Khe Sanh was one of the mysteries complicating the larger story of the Tet Offensive. Westmoreland did everything he could to protect the Marines hunkered down in its bunkers. Some 75,000 tons of bombs fell on suspected PAVN positions around the base. There is no question that the siege of Khe Sanh was a costly ruse for the PAVN. American estimates place Communist casualties somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 in total. Yet the PAVN’s ability to bottle up the Marines and inflict such punishment on the garrison for so long tended to reinforce the American public’s growing disillusionment with a war that seemed both interminable and futile. Giap welcomed the American high command’s intense focus on the Marine base. It fit snugly into his broader campaign plan.

PLANNING TET

We do not know anywhere nearly as much as we would like to about the origins and evolution of the plan for the Tet Offensive. As far back as 1963, the Central Committee of the Politburo had decreed that a general offensive–general uprising (GOGU) would be “the necessary direction of development for the South Vietnamese revolution to achieve victory.”
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The Central Committee and the Central Military Party Committee, Hanoi’s two most powerful strategy-making bodies, still believed in the efficacy of the GOGU in January 1967, when the Central Committee’s thirteenth plenum called on the PAVN to begin to plan for “a decisive victory in a relatively short period of time.”
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A couple of months later, the Central Committee agreed
to launch the GOGU sometime in 1968. General Tran Van Tra, a key figure in the extended planning process and the commander of all forces in the attacks on Saigon, summarized the context of the decision to launch the operation: Hanoi was well aware that

President Johnson had to make a definite and important decision: either yield to the military and escalate the war, expanding it to the whole of Indochina (including an invasion of North Vietnam) or listen to McNamara and several high-level civilian officials and de-escalate the war and negotiate with Hanoi and the Viet Cong. He could no longer afford to stay at the crossroads any longer. . . . The United States could not help but sicken of the deadlock in South Vietnam and the fact that the heavy losses in the air war over North Vietnam were not compensated by any tangible political or military results.
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A Central Committee resolution issued in mid-1967 makes it clear that Hanoi thought an offensive on an unprecedented scale had a far greater chance of resulting in the latter than the former decision. The same resolution enumerated various objectives, some of which were clearly decisions more realistic than others in the eyes of the operation’s architects—a point that appears to be lost on an influential school of American analysts that emerged after the war. (More on this issue follows.) The objectives were summarized by PAVN General Tran Van Tra as follows:

To break down the bulk of the South Vietnamese army, topple the puppet administration at all levels, and take power into the hands of the people.

To destroy the major part of US forces . . . and render them incapable of fulfilling their duties in Vietnam.

To break the will of U.S. aggression, force it to accept defeat in the South and put an end to all acts of war against the North.
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Sorting out who provided the initial inspiration for Tet and how the plan evolved throughout 1967 until the final operation was formally approved in early January 1968 remains a tricky and speculative enterprise. We may never have a clear understanding of the process, as written documents do not take note of internal debates, and after-the-fact recollections are invariably politically biased. Virtually all reliable sources credit General Nguyen Chi Thanh with presenting the first draft of a plan during the spring 1967,
after he visited key commands throughout the South and discussed the strategic situation with his regional commanders there. Thanh may very well have been selected over Giap by the Central Committee to oversee planning in the summer and fall, and even slated to command the entire operation from his headquarters at COSVN.

This is the most likely scenario for three reasons: First, Giap had initially argued against the consensus opinion on the issue of timing. He called for delaying the offensive until late 1968, or even early 1969, fearing that Communist forces would not be sufficiently well prepared by early 1968. Second, Thanh enjoyed the firm support of Le Duan, the most powerful figure sitting on the Politburo at the time. Le Duan had often clashed with Giap over issues of strategic priorities and the timing of military initiatives. Third, Thanh had greater familiarity than Giap did with the conditions of the fighting in the South generally. Be that as it may, after Thanh died in July 1967, “direct responsibility for overseeing the General offensive-General uprising was assumed by Defence Minister Vo Nguyen Giap.”
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It was on Giap’s watch that the offensive took on its distinctive characteristic as a series of “violent surges,” beginning with scores of widespread assaults, including attacks on targets of great symbolic significance for the American people. Hanoi deemed it important to launch these attacks at the opening of the American presidential campaign, with a view to sparking divisiveness during the escalation year of 1968.

Two additional offensives were envisaged in May and September—“mini-Tets,” as they are described by American historians—to confirm the continued resolve of the revolutionary forces and provide additional incentives for the United States to see that its best course of action would be to pursue negotiations rather than military victory.
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In thinking about what Tet could be expected to accomplish, Giap was keenly attentive to “the unpredictability of the Revolutionary process and to the explosive character of popular discontent” in South Vietnam.
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Another factor heightened the operation’s unpredictable outcome: From a strictly military point of view, Tet was radically unconventional, and unconventionality means enhanced risk. No army in twentieth-century history had attempted to conduct simultaneous assaults against so many targets across such a large swath of territory. Tet violated a fundamental precept of offensive doctrine: the need to concentrate forces against a limited number of critical objectives. According to “the book,” an offensive should consist of a
“main effort” attack, usually supported by diversions or secondary attacks. In Tet, there was no “main effort” in the traditional military sense of the term. The attacks on Saigon were only symbolically more important than the others. Communist forces went after everything, everywhere: cities, towns, rural districts, airfields, and military camps defended in many cases by a mere company or two.

Once the date and provisional plan were approved in October 1967, the PAVN general staff liaised with COSVN as well as the regional and provincial commands, refining and coordinating scores of detailed plans for the attacks on the major cities and towns, while regional military commanders and political cadres worked out the details for secondary and diversionary operations.

Preparations for the big attacks of January 31 at both the national and regional levels were painstaking and laborious to say the least. Infiltration rates throughout 1967 proceeded at a robust pace despite the lavish resources devoted to the American air interdiction and detection. About 75,000 main-force troops made the trek down the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the year, more than in any previous year. Sapper and special attack forces, recently established as a separate branch within the PAVN, were prominently represented among the new arrivals. As General Tran Van Tra recalled,

different military forces had to be formed to suit different targets. . . . Therefore, it was of the utmost importance that, at a very early stage, we build special mobile attack units and on-the-spot sapper units and pre-assign them to each and every target. . . . Shock battalions of the regular army and local battalions, which were thoroughly familiar with the local terrain and situation—and had their guerrilla bases in the vicinity of their targets—were assigned to approach each main target and provide timely support of the special attack and sapper forces, regular and local. Next in line [i.e., the initial reserve forces] were the regional and main force regiments and divisions which would stand ready to move in to destroy the enemy resistance and repulse any counterattacks.
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