3 JUL THU 2014 -- TRUTHS, Not Book/Hollywood/Media reports: -- The Battle Of Tet -- THE MOST APPALLING DEFEAT IN THE HISTORY OF WAR FOR HANOI -- an unmitigated military disaster. « The watershed event came with the so-called Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968, when the Viet Cong attacked multiple targets throughout the South. VC troops even reached the U.S. embassy in Saigon, where they (contrary to popular movie renditions) were killed to a man. They stormed the old capital of Hue and surrounded the U.S. base at Khe Sanh. They made spectacular gains but at great cost: for every American soldier or Marine killed at Khe Sanh, FIFTY North Vietnamese died, a ratio approaching the horrendous slaughter . . . between the Spaniards and Aztecs in Mexico or British and Zulus in southern Africa. At Hue the surprised and outnumbered U.S. Marines evicted 10,000 Viet Cong and Vietnamese regulars from a fortified city in less than three weeks and at a loss of only 150 dead. From that point on, any pretense that Vietnam was a civil war was over. The only hope the communists had to win had to come from direct, and heavy infusions of troops and supplies from Hanoi, Moscow, and Peking [BEIJING TODAY]. At Khe Sanh, nearly 25,000 air sorties subjected the seasoned North Vietnamese attackers to a merciless bombardment, killing 10,000 communists compared to 205 Americans. One senior American general called Khe Sanh the first major ground battle won entirely by air power. A U.S. military historian, Robert Leckie, referred to Tet as the most appalling defeat in the history of the war FOR HANOI -- an unmitigated military disaster. . . . Yet the very FAILURE OF THE COMMUNISTS Tet Offensive illustrated the flawed nature of U.S. strategy. Here, in a single battle, Americans had achieved a FIFTY-TO-ONE KILL RATIO, and yet the media reported this as a communist victory. EMBASSY IN SAIGON CAPTURED! read one erroneous headline. Television repeatedly showed a photograph of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a man in the head, claiming the man was a Vietcong suspect. In fact, the man was a Viet Cong colonel in civilian clothes -- a man Loan knew personally -- and by the rules of war, a spy. Andrew Jackson had done almost exactly the same thing to British agents more than 120 years earlier. But Jackson did not have to deal with the power of television or the impact of the camera. Scenes were cut and spliced in the studios into thirty-second clips of Marines and body bags, with an accompanying text, American troops mauled. After Tet, the most trusted man in America, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, told his viewers the war was unwinnable, at which point [PRESIDENT] Johnson reportedly said that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, hed lost the American people. Even NEWSWEEK -- hardly an objective, patriotic source -- admitted that for the first time in history the American press was more friendly to its countrys enemies than to the United States. Ironically, the polls showed Johnson consistently drew higher support when he turned up the pressure and when he restarted the bombing of the North. Before the 1968 election, polls showed that no more than 20 percent supported withdrawal, and some of that 20 percent represented hawks who were dissatisfied with the apparent lack of conviction in the strategy. » - A PATRIOTS HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 2004 by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen pages 694-695 (First Edition, hardback)
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:29:42 +0000