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Tet Offensive

The attacks by Communist forces inside South Vietnam's major cities and towns that began around the Vietnamese New Year (“Tet”) of 1 February 1968 were the peak of an offensive that took place over a period of several months during the Vietnam War. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, believed the attacks to be a last “throw of the dice” by the losing side. The attacks that Americans dubbed the “Tet Offensive” were just part of what the Communists called a “General Offensive and Uprising,” designed to jolt the war into a new phase. The offensive ultimately achieved the Communists' aim, but at a price many of them thought excessive.

The offensive had long‐term conceptual origins in Vietnam's August Revolution of 1945, in which the Communist‐led Viet Minh had instigated popular uprisings in the cities to seize power from a puppet government Japan had installed before its defeat. Two decades later, as American commitment to the anti‐Communist government in Saigon deepened in the early 1960s, the Communists looked to that earlier event for inspiration. Lacking the military power to inflict outright defeat on the American military, the Communists had somehow to destroy American confidence that “limited war” could eventually bring victory for the United States. By sending armed forces directly into the South's cities and fomenting rebellion there, the Communists hoped to pull down the Saigon government or facilitate the rise to power of neutralists who would demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Even if the offensive did not bring immediate victory, the Communists calculated it would allow rural forces to disrupt the pacification program, destroy the American illusion of success, and induce the United States to enter negotiations in which Hanoi could bargain from a position of strength.

The plan formally approved by the Communist Party political bureau in Hanoi in July 1967 recognized that American, allied, and Saigon forces constituted...