by Max Hastings
The Marines started working towards the base of the tower that was their objective, halfway down the western side. A tank rumbled forward, commanded by a young lieutenant named Morris, which started shooting in support: ‘He was superb.’ A black Marine ran up to Harrington and said in mock-exultation, ‘I just got my third Purple Heart!’ The captain said, ‘It was only a nick on his chest, so I made him my runner, and he took ammunition to the guys fighting up on the wall. I still didn’t know the names of most of my men, living or dead. I just had to order them to go towards death. The stench of death was horrible, and it was everywhere. When you were eating your rations, it was like eating death.’
There was a bizarre moment in the midst of the carnage: a young lieutenant named Joe Allen ran under fire to Harrington, announced himself as a replacement, and blurted out, ‘Captain, I saw your wife and daughter a week ago.’ Amidst the detonations and bursts of small arms, Harrington said,‘It took my breath away. I was forced to think outside the battle, and that’s a bad idea.’ It was late afternoon before more men got up onto the high wall of the citadel, led by Corp. Bob Thoms, a formidable warrior whose fatigues were in rags. By 1630 the area had been secured, at a cost of six killed and forty wounded among the hundred-odd Marines with whom the captain had started the day. At 0400 next morning, the 16th, the NVA counter-attacked. There were more fierce exchanges of fire before the tower was again secure: twenty-four enemy dead were found in its ruins.
Harrington had thirty-nine men left, who were immediately committed to slow, painful, nerve-racking house-clearing. ‘The enemy had had two weeks to prepare positions. We were reaching a point where we were almost ineffective, when you don’t care if you live or die. We were mentally wiped-out. Nobody had any appreciation of what was going on. Higher headquarters kept asking: “Why is it taking you so long to knock out a few NVA?”’ Their commanding officer, Maj. Bob Thompson, incurred the wrath of Creighton Abrams for his unit’s slow progress, and was indeed sacked before senior Marines got the order countermanded. Harrington felt overwhelmed when he heard that he himself had been awarded the Navy Cross: ‘I didn’t feel I was worth it.’ Others did.
At 0630 on 22 February, the remaining NVA trapped in the citadel staged a suicidal rush. Some South Vietnamese troops broke and fled, ignoring their lieutenant’s threats to shoot them. The Hac Bao Black Panthers finally raised their own flag on the Imperial Palace, lowering that of the NLF, at 0500 on the 23rd. As they did so, an almost naked figure emerged from the ornamental lake – a South Vietnamese soldier who had remained concealed for twenty days, creeping out at night to forage: he proved to be the elder brother of Capt. Pham Van Dinh. The ARVN lost 458 dead in Hue, and more than a thousand wounded: some, at least, must have put up a respectable fight. The US Army lost seventy-four dead and 507 wounded, the Marine Corps 142 killed and 857 wounded. An estimated six thousand civilians died, a substantial proportion by ‘friendly fire’.
The day after the citadel was secured, Bob Kelly of USIA wrote to Frank Scotton: ‘South of the river every house is shot up. Burned cars, tanks and trees litter the streets. Rocket and 8˝ [artillery] holes are all over the place … All of the houses and shops around the big market, where the sampans were always parked, are destroyed. Napalm, CS, 8˝ [shells] and 500-pounder [bombs] are used every day. Those bastards in Saigon have no idea of the magnitude of the problem … What makes me so mad is those fuckin’ generals of ours who say “We knew it was coming,” as though they let it happen. And now, with a stunning defeat on their hands, are claiming a body count victory.’ Kelly’s anger was increased by having witnessed the flight of many South Vietnamese officials as well as soldiers.
A journalist described Hue’s residential and commercial area as resembling something out of Goya: ‘whole streets were laid waste. Rubble choked the sidewalk, there were bomb craters in the tarmac and the blackened shells of burned-out cars. A truck was embedded in a wall. The stench of the dead was overpowering … That day Hue was no more the city I had known and loved than a friend lying in the street, charred and ripped by a bomb, is the human being one had once talked or made love to. Between them the communists and the US high command have killed the flower of Vietnamese cities.’ A local onlooker pointed to a heap of rubble: ‘The man who lived there was shot by the Viet Cong. Now his house is destroyed by the Americans. Curious, eh?’ Rats and dogs feasted on the corpses.
The communists lost somewhere between 2,500 and five thousand dead – they have never revealed credible figures – but in the last days of February their survivors withdrew westwards unmolested, a measure of American and ARVN disarray. The battle had been small by 1939–45 standards, but proved the bloodiest single action of the Second Indochina War. On 26 February the first of several mass graves were discovered in Hue: during the NLF’s short rule, its cadres had systematically murdered every government official and supporter, intellectual, bourgeois and ‘enemy of the people’ whom they could identify, together with their families. Albeit on a lesser scale, similar killings took place elsewhere. A communist attempted to justify the atrocities: ‘The people so hated those despots that they treated them as they would have done poisonous snakes – which had to be destroyed to prevent them striking again.’
Among the victims were fifty-three-year-old Nguyen Tat Thong, the government’s director of social services, who had come to celebrate the holiday with family – together with six of his relations, including two teenage student brothers. Also murdered was a forty-eight-year-old widow named Nguyen Thi Lao, a street cigarette-seller, as well as Catholic priests and American civilians. Hundreds were liquidated whose only offence was to appear on a list of supposed government sympathisers. Some 2,810 bodies were eventually found, and the real total of victims was almost certainly higher. Capt. Denis Campbell, an Australian adviser, wrote: ‘One can understand the hate that lets [the communists] strangle military types with wire and decorate the walls with the bodies, but to bury alive whole families including the children on no stronger pretext than that they refused to take up arms defies the imagination. I have always had a grudging admiration for the VC … but that has now gone.’
The killings mock the pretensions of Vietnam’s communists to represent forces morally superior to the Saigon regime. The media, however, were slow to report the story, partly because MACV announced the discovery of the mass graves only on 9 March, by which time its own credibility was in tatters. Westmoreland was privately critical of the Marines, whom he believed had made a mess of the battle for Hue. So they had, but the blame attaching to senior officers, who repeatedly invited their men to attempt tactically impossible tasks, rightfully extended to MACV’s chief. For weeks the entire US command misjudged the situation, committing sorely inadequate resources.
In the last days of February and first of March, remaining pockets of communist resistance were cleared from South Vietnam’s cities. There were now 636 accredited correspondents in the traumatised country, for whom Tet had provided a banquet. Some reporters filed dispatches and delivered broadcasts in a tone close to hysteria. Others displayed notable courage, and produced some of the most vivid prose of the war. The general tone expressed awe at the communists’ achievements, and made little of what soldiers saw as the central reality – that the enemy lost. William Hammond’s account of the media in the US Army’s official history of the war is a model of even-handedness, yet he wrote: ‘They yielded far too readily to the pressures of their profession. Competing with one another for every scrap of news, under the compulsion of headlines at home, sacrificing depth and analysis to colour, they created news where none existed.’
But Hammond also observes, in a devastating passage that almost negates his strictures above: ‘It is undeniable … that press reports were still often more accurate than the public statements of the administration.’ He may have been thinking of the Tet dispatches of the New York Times’s Gene Roberts. For much of February the newsman, only recently arrived, assessed the condition of America
n arms in Hue better than any higher commander in the northern battle zone. Here was impressive mitigation for media shortcomings, and an indictment of US Army and Marine leadership.
2 SURRENDER OF A PRESIDENT
In the aftermath of Tet, morale slumped among the NVA and Vietcong, who acknowledged a military defeat that cost them around twenty thousand dead. Hanoi’s official history concedes that ‘the battlefield had temporarily turned in favour of the enemy … Our posture and strength were seriously weakened.’ By the communists’ own estimates, exposure to US firepower had cost some guerrilla units 60–70 per cent of their strength. Long An’s VC commander wrote: ‘There was no time in my whole military career when I felt as confused and ineffective as I did during this period … I still cannot fully explain the events.’ In truth, history shows that citizen uprisings almost invariably fail – consider Warsaw 1944, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 – unless there is a collapse of will by the ruling regime and its forces. An NVA colonel said, ‘We learned that a general insurrection was impossible.’ Some South Vietnamese might have rallied to the insurgents’ cause had they looked like winners, but this was never the case. He described the initial penetrations of the US embassy and several urban centres as ‘a tremendous victory’. The mistake, he conceded, was to seek thereafter to hold them: ‘It would have been best to have withdrawn to consolidate our grip on the countryside.’ Some American officers wholeheartedly concurred, that going head to head with large forces of enemy suited MACV far better than fighting guerrillas. A divisional commander said a few months later: ‘The only thing that saves us is that COSVN is a bunch of militaristic goddam army officers who want to win the war in big battles.’
Despondent communist survivors returned to bases where they had left behind personal effects, to find most unclaimed and never destined to be. They understood that the offensive had been deplorably planned. VC leader Tran Do said, ‘Tet clearly changed the entire nature of the war … It was a “go for broke” attack. We set inappropriate, unattainable goals … The words “finish them off” sounded so wonderful. We lapsed into a period of tremendous difficulties in 1969, 1970, 1971. When we were asked what proportion of the population we controlled, we said “most”, yet in truth we had lost practically all.’ Do nursed lasting bitterness towards COSVN and Hanoi for the cynicism with which they had exploited the will for sacrifice of their most devoted supporters.
The NVA’s Col. An wrote: ‘Many of our people lost heart … They believed that the enemy was now on top.’ Vietcong losses increased further, to around fifty thousand dead, during spectacularly unsuccessful second and third ‘mini-Tets’ in May and August 1968. The NLF’s armed forces were reduced to their old condition of local guerrilla groups; thereafter the war’s burden fell overwhelmingly upon the NVA.
Countrywide, the Americans lost around four thousand dead at Tet, the South Vietnamese military nearer six thousand, but the outcome – a dramatic decline in rural violence – prompted a surge of optimism among the soldiers. Fred Weyand said: ‘We had made great progress. People were driving at night. Assassinations were rare.’ Creighton Abrams mocked the enemy: ‘Look at Khe Sanh. Poor old Giap – and I’m really convinced of this – poor old Giap. I really feel sorry for him. He kept at that thing, kept at that thing, and chewed those divisions up so there wasn’t a damn thing left. And yet, if he’d been the brilliant tactical commander the US press says – and strategist – if he had moved one or both of those divisions down on the coast, I just don’t know how the hell we’d ever have gotten them out of there!’ Marine Jeff Anthony, one of Khe Sanh’s garrison, said, ‘After Tet, we felt we could crawl all over these guys.’
Robert McNamara, in his last days at the Pentagon, suggested that an obvious lesson was that South Vietnam’s troops should henceforward fight under direct US command. Westmoreland was sensitive enough to veto this proposal, observing that it would be a gift to communist propagandists. The general told Washington he now saw great opportunities: he was encouraged by JCS chairman Earle Wheeler to urge that his command should be massively reinforced. On 10 March the New York Times revealed a military demand for a further 206,000 men, requiring a call-up of reservists. This was later described as the most damaging leak of the Johnson presidency, for which the odium and even ridicule fell upon Westmoreland. That same month he was informed that he would be replaced by Creighton Abrams, and three months later was shuffled home and upstairs to become army chief of staff. His eclipse was partly a reflection of perceived failures of war-making, but more importantly derived from the collapse of his credibility. He had publicly predicted imminent victory, then instead come close to perceived – though never actual – defeat.
Tet imposed dreadful devastation, destroying forty-eight thousand Vietnamese homes and creating almost half a million new refugees. The quotation attributed by a journalist to an unnamed US officer in those days – ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’ – is now believed to have been invented; yet the phrase seemed accurately to reflect the ghastly contradiction about America’s war ‘to preserve South Vietnamese freedom’. Weyand spoke with pride to Abrams of the ‘successful defence’ of the capital, but as the latter flew away from Weyand’s headquarters he saw that ‘smoke was billowing up in Saigon, flames shooting up in the air. I have estimated that we can successfully defend Saigon seven more times, and then we’re going to be faced with the embarrassment that there’s no city left.’
The battles caused many previously stalwart domestic supporters to sicken. The Wall Street Journal declared: ‘American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.’ An NBC pundit said: ‘We must decide whether destroying Vietnam to save it is justified.’ Many Americans on the battlefield were as appalled by the carnage as TV viewers at home. Jerry Dodson of CORDS wrote to Frank Scotton on 20 February: ‘The ball game is over and we might as well throw in the towel. I was in Kontum and Ban Me Thuot a couple of days ago. Kontum is 20 per cent destroyed and BMT 55 per cent after our air strikes and artillery were called in to drive out the VC. Destruction is extensive in I Corps and the delta. For those who love Vietnam, withdrawal is the only solution.’ Scotton said: ‘At great cost, the North had demonstrated that they would never quit.’ In the Senate the Fulbright committee came close to saying that Congress and the American people had been tricked into war under false pretences through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which indeed they had. Almost Clark Clifford’s first act on replacing McNamara as defense secretary was to issue an edict to the military: there were to be no more forecasts of imminent victory.
A devastating intervention came from CBS’s Walter Cronkite, a World War II veteran who was the nation’s favourite uncle. In February he visited Hue, then told Fred Weyand: ‘I’ve seen those thousands of bodies. And I have decided that … I’m going to do everything possible in this war to bring it to an end.’ The general said: ‘It was particularly troubling … because of the incredible respect Walter had from the American people.’ Weyand was disgusted that Cronkite spoke as if the Americans and South Vietnamese had been responsible for the Hue massacres: ‘I can see where a person might say, “Well, this war is so ghastly, it must end.” But how you could turn it and make it seem that the North Vietnamese should be permitted to win is beyond me.’
Weyand had a fair point, but on 27 February Cronkite told his millions of viewers: ‘To say we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence … optimists who have been wrong … To say we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic yet unsatisfactory conclusion … It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out is to negotiate – not as victims, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to victory and democracy and did the best they could.’ Cronkite’s words represented wisdom, and no member of his vast audience was more stunned by them than Lyndon Johnson. There is dispute whether the president uttered the response often afterwards att
ributed to him: ‘If I’ve lost Walter, I’ve lost middle America,’ but the words accurately reflected the pall of gloom that descended upon the White House.
In the immediate wake of Tet, Americans rallied around the flag. A Louis Harris poll showed a fall in support for a bombing halt, from 26 per cent in October to 15 per cent in February. Some 74 per cent of respondents expressed continuing faith. Just 3 per cent believed that America would lose in Vietnam, while 39 per cent expected stalemate and 43 per cent thought the US could still win. Yet beneath this veneer of staunchness, even patriots were tiring of a thankless foreign adventure. In Washington, more and more thoughtful decision-makers acknowledged the mismatch in Indochina between the communists – willing to stake everything, including unlimited numbers of their own people’s lives – and the US, whose real national interest seemed to shrivel by the day. On 1 March infantryman Gary Young received a letter from his parents which reflected widespread sentiment at home: ‘Dear Son, No sense telling us not to worry, we’re only human you know and I realize what’s going on over there … Cathy is all excited about getting to the Cotton Blossom dance at the high school tomorrow night … People in this country are fed up with the dilly-dallying we are getting about Vietnam. It seems like a senseless waste of life. I’d better not get started on that subject or I’ll never stop. Take care of yourself, if that’s possible, we all send our love and hope that all of our boys will soon be home, Love Mom, Dad and girls.’
