Posted on 01/27/2018 4:35:10 AM PST by C19fan
Hastings has a rep as an excellent military historian. I have read most all of his work and left right rarely comes through. In this article there is nothing I could find that is not objectively true.
The Pentagon recognized Tet as a major blow to the U.S. because it rendered false official assurances that the enemy was on the way to being defeated. In addition, it showed US intelligence was unreliable as to enemy capabilities and intentions. The result was a collapse in domestic support for the war. Americans no longer trusted their military and political leaders. Even if Tet was credited as a U.S. military victory, there was no clear reason for the American public to think that their leaders knew how to win the war.
Sacrificing your life for your friends is the greatest love and holding the line against evil in this world is viewed eternally because one day (and I believe it will be in one day) all the enemy will be destroyed (by each other no less) and after that, no new veterans. Peace on earth and good will towards men will come to pass.
Look at your life through heaven’s eyes. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG0a9WFkgzU
And nobody is ever held accountable for such failures.
Came across this site on the Tet Offensive a few weeks ago. Has the AAR of the unit involved, along with a bunch of great pix:
http://signal439.tripod.com/redcatcher199lib/tet.html
Red Max celebrates Jane Fonda’s birthday.
Except the Viet Cong wasn’t a viable force afterwards.
And then came the biggest media deceit of all. That Vietnam was “Nixon’s War”, instead of it being “LBJ’s War”.
Ask the average person today, about who was responsible for Vietnam, and odds are they’ll say it was Nixon.
Funny thing, is if you go to Vietnam today, you’d think we did win, outside of the occasional Ho Chi Minh statue.
Most Vietnamese don’t care about the war or for Communism, in fact, they are probably today one of the most Capitalist countries on the planet, albeit with a corrupt government, but of course, government corruption isn’t limited to just “Communist” countries.
A disaster for the North, it eliminated the VC from the battlefield. Vietnam was the only war where every battle was won and the war lost. Thanks media, communists in the streets, Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
I was there. The US troops were not permitted to win.
Exactly right.
A good read is “Hue 1968” by Mark Bowden who wrote “Balchawk Down”.
Blackhawk... duh....
Which is what the liberal media would never admit. From the source:
Yet the irony was that the Tet offensive was a military failure. It petered out during the spring, with the Communists expelled from every one of the places they had briefly occupied. They had suffered 20,000 killed, far more than the Americans and South Vietnamese. The Viet Cong, who had hitherto borne the brunt of the war, were shattered as a fighting force.
During their occupation of the city of Hue, the Viet Cong had murdered in cold blood more than 3,000 men, women and children, alleged supporters of the Saigon government. Yet it was to be that the death of just one man received far more world attention than the mass murders — because it was recorded on film.
In Saigon, Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem had personally cut the throats of captured South Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, his wife, six children and 80-year-old mother.
On February 1, Lem himself was taken prisoner and brought before Saigon’s police chief, Brigadier Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a friend of the dead colonel. Loan drew a Smith & Wesson and shot Lem in the head. The murders committed by the Communist justified his execution. Nonetheless, the Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams’s now-famous image of Loan shooting Lem — which won Adams a Pulitzer prize — cost the Americans a heavy price in propaganda.,,
in the immediate wake of the battles, the Viet Cong felt like the losers. Their military chief Tran Do said: ‘Tet was a “go for broke” attack. We set inappropriate, unattainable goals . . . because the words “finish them off” sounded so wonderful. We lapsed into a period of tremendous difficulties.’
He frankly admitted that the guerillas forfeited control of most of the country.
In a free society, North Vietnam’s leader Le Duan would have been disgraced and discredited by the abysmal failure of his great gamble at Tet. Instead, its biggest political victim proved to be U.S. president Lyndon Johnson.
Indeed: The Vietnam War, in which America was the victor in military battles, is perhaps the most manifest modern example of how propaganda affected the outcome of a war, with much of the mainstream media being an all too willing instrument of such, especially CBS News with Walter Cronkite.
In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."[28]
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[29] British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent's own side.[30]
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."[31] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[32]
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[33] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called "the living room war."
The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to Cronkite's biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[34] - http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War
There's a lot of truth in what you said. The proposed edits are an addition, not a correction.
True enough, but Gen. Abrams deserves much of the credit in that he prevented the VC from reconstructing themselves after their losses during Tet.
Winning the war is much easier than winning the peace.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.