When The Tet Offesive Began, US Soldiers Realized Nothing Was Under Control

Saigon. January 31st, 1968. 7 minutes to 3:00 in the morning. At the vehicle gate of the American embassy, a military policeman named Charles Daniel keys his radio and shouts the last words anyone will hear from him. 10 weeks earlier, the general commanding half a million Americans in Vietnam had stood in Washington and told the country the end of the war was coming into view.

That was November 1967. Tonight, the enemy that was supposedly finished is blowing holes in the embassy wall. More than 100 cities and bases are under attack at the same time. And from the privates at the gates to the generals above them, the same realization is landing on everyone [music] at once.

 Nobody is in control of anything. This is the story of the night that broke America’s war. Not because the attack succeeded, because of what it revealed. Washington, DC. November 21st, 1967. General William Westland tells the National Press Club that the enemy is losing. His exact words. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.

 Quick correction, because half the documentaries on this platform get it wrong. West Morland never publicly said light at the end of the tunnel. That line belonged to other officials and he denied under oath ever saying it in public. What he did say was arguably more dangerous because it was specific. The end coming into view.

Washington celebrated. It shouldn’t have. The White House had spent that entire autumn running what reporters called the success offensive. a coordinated campaign to convince Americans the war was being won. And the strange part is that real warnings were piling up underneath it the whole time. In December, West Morland cabled Washington to expect a maximum enemy effort.

 In late January, the NSA published a report titled, and this is the actual title, Coordinated Vietnamese Communist Offensive Evidenced in South Vietnam. One commander, General Fred Wand, trusted his gut about the quiet around the capital and pulled more than a dozen American combat battalions back towards Saigon. Nobody knew it yet, but that single decision would save the city.

3 days before the attack, South Vietnamese forces even captured 11 Vietkong carrying pre-recorded tapes that announced the liberation of cities. cities nobody had attacked yet. Plenty of people did say something. The warnings just never became belief. On the night of January 30th, the intelligence analysts at West Merlin’s own headquarters threw a pool party.

 One of them, James Meechum, put it bluntly afterwards. [snorts] I had no conception TET was coming. Absolutely zero. 200 officers at that party. And by his account, not one of them knew. The clock was already ticking. Nobody at that pool could hear it. And the enemy had already tipped their hand. Just after midnight on January 30th, communist units in the central provinces attacked a full day early.

 Naha, [music] Trang, Banme, Thwart, Pleu, Daong, Quon. Roughly 10 cities and bases hit on the wrong night because part of the attacking force was working off a different calendar. Headquarters went to maximum alert. Across most of the country, the alert either never arrived or was never believed. What comes next is the part that still doesn’t make sense.

 Not because it was hidden, because it was enormous and almost everyone saw it late. For a few hours after that false start, things actually seemed [music] calm. Fireworks over Saigon, holiday traffic, half the South Vietnamese army home on leave for the new year. That didn’t last. Around 3:00 in the morning on January 31st, roughly 80,000 communist soldiers attacked everywhere at once.

 [snorts] 36 of South Vietnam’s 44 provincial capitals, five of its six major cities. Over a hundred towns and district centers, plus almost every major American base in the country, all hit inside the same hour. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted in the war. And here was the problem in the capital. The defense of Saigon had been handed over to the South Vietnamese 6 weeks earlier.

 The only American fighting force inside the city that night was about,00 military policemen, cooks, clerks, drivers, and military police. That was the line. At 2:47 a.m., 19 sappers from the Vietkong’s C10 battalion blew a hole through the embassy’s perimeter wall and came through it, firing. Specialist Charles Daniel and Private First Class William C.

 fast, killed the first two men through the breach, the team’s leaders, and then died at their posts. Inside the chancery, Marine Sergeant Ronald Harper sprinted through the lobby, pulled a Vietnamese watchman in behind him, and bolted the heavy teak doors seconds before a rocket slammed into them. Those doors held all night. Two more MPs, Johnny Thomas and Owen Mabust, drove toward Daniel’s last radio call and were killed on the way in.

 So was Marine Corporal James Marshall, the first Marine security guard ever to die defending an American embassy. It took 6 hours, a helicopter assault by the 100 first airborne landing troops on the chancerey roof and the death or capture of all 19 sappers before the compound was declared secure.

 And here is the myth you have probably heard that the Vietkong got inside the embassy building itself. They never did. Early wire reports claimed it, television repeated it, and AI written documentaries still say it today. The attackers held the courtyard, not the chancery. Five Americans died keeping it that way.

 Across the city, the same script was playing out. Sappers hit the presidential palace and got pinned down in a building across the street. A Vietkong team seized the national radio station carrying a tape of Hochi Min announcing the Great Uprising. and a South Vietnamese technician cut the line to the transmitter, so the message never aired.

Rockets and infantry hit the Navy headquarters, the officer billets, the joint general staff compound. That was only round one. The heaviest blow fell on Tan Sun Nut. At that moment, the busiest airfield in the world and home to West Morland’s own headquarters. Three enemy battalions came through the western perimeter.

 The men scraped together to stop them were military police, Air Force ground crews, and a cavalry squadron of the 25th Infantry Division that raced down the highway in the dark toward a fight nobody had described to them honestly. One of the tankers in that column was a 20-year-old Cherokee soldier named Dwight Birdwell.

 Listen to how much the men driving into that battle actually knew. >> When we got there, we didn’t really know what was going on. We were told there was a squad of BC trying to break into the wire. There was a textile plant that had been taken over for the North Vietnamese and Vietkong to use as a headquarters. We moved past that building under fire and what the enemy did was allow essentially move into a horseshoe.

There were hundreds, thousands of North Vietnamese waiting for us and we just essentially drove right into it. All hell broke loose. >> Told it was a squad of enemy soldiers probing the wire. It was three battalions. Birdwell pulled his wounded tank commander out of the hatch under fire, took his position, and fought until the ammunition ran out, then kept fighting with machine guns salvaged from a [music] downed helicopter.

 Shrapnel to the face, neck, and chest. He refused evacuation and went back in. 54 years later, that morning earned him the Medal of Honor. Most people never heard about this part. At Long Bin and Ben Hoa, northeast of the capital, an entire Vietkong division hit the biggest logistics complex in Vietnam, and the first line of defense was headquarter staff.

 Clerks, cooks, and mechanics were handed rifles and pointed at the wire. Some of them fought all night. If this kind of [music] sourced, myth checked history is why you’re here, subscribe. There’s a lot more of that night left, and the worst of it hadn’t even started. While Saigon was fighting street by street, something worse had already happened.

 600 km north in Hugh, the old Imperial capital, close to 8,000 North Vietnamese and Vietkong soldiers walked into the city in the dark and simply took it. By dawn, their flag was flying from the Citadel Tower. Out of the whole city, exactly two Allied positions were still holding. A compound of roughly 200 American and Australian advisers south of the river and the headquarters of the first South Vietnamese division inside the Citadel, whose troops were mostly home on holiday leave.

 And this is where nothing was under control stops being a solders’s problem and becomes a general’s problem. West Morland reported to Washington that the enemy had about three companies inside the Hugh Citadel. Three companies is maybe 400 men. The real number was around 20 times that. Somewhere between the street and the map room, the problem kept shrinking.

 So the response was built on the smaller [music] imaginary battle. One marine company, Alpha 111, about 160 men, was sent up the highway to clean it up. They were ambushed before they even reached the bridge. Their commander, Captain Gordon Bachelor, went down badly [music] wounded, and a gunnery sergeant named John Canley took over, standing upright in machine gun fire again and again to drag wounded men out.

 One of his Marines, John Legato, said most of them were 18 and 19-year old privates and put their survival in five words. The Gunny kept us alive. A second company was fed in behind them and fought its way to the advisers compound by midafternoon. And then that same day, both companies were ordered to attack across the river into the Citadel into a fortress held by thousands.

 Their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Gravel, called the order illconceived. He was right. Golf Company crossed with around 150 Marines and took roughly 50 casualties in a few hours before gravel pulled the survivors back. It would take 26 days and some of the most brutal urban combat in American history to take Hugh back.

And we are not retelling that whole battle here. What matters for this story is day one. The third largest city in South Vietnam fell in a single night and the men sent to fix it were sent in blind in company strength against a dugin force the size of a division. This is the part where the numbers stop being abstract.

 For 3 years, the American story of this war had been progress. On the morning of January 31st, that flipped in front of the cameras. At about 9:20 a.m., West Morland arrived at the embassy in pressed fatigues, stepped past the bodies on the lawn, and told reporters the enemy had never entered the building, and that this was quote, “a relatively small incident.

” On the raw military facts, he was even mostly right. But one of the reporters [music] standing there, Dawn North, remembered thinking. I couldn’t believe it. Westy was still saying everything was just fine. That gap between what commanders kept saying and what everyone could see burning behind them is where the war was actually lost.

 And the costs were not small. January 31st, 1968 remains the single deadliest day of the entire Vietnam War for American forces. 246 Americans killed in 24 hours. That’s not a typo, by the way. 3 weeks later, the week ending February 18th recorded 543 Americans killed. The worst week of the entire war. Part of why the cities were thinly defended is that West Morland was staring somewhere else entirely.

 6,000 Marines were surrounded at a mountain outpost called Kesan. And even while Saigon and Hugh burned, he told reporters the countrywide attacks were a diversion from the real blow still coming there. Historians still argue about which attack was the faint. We made a full video on that siege and it connects [music] directly to this one.

More on that in a minute. Then television finished what the embassy lawn started. Walter Konite, the most trusted broadcaster in America, flew to Vietnam, walked the rubble of Hugh, and on February 27th told the country the war was, in his words, [music] mired in stalemate, and that negotiation was the only rational way out.

 You probably heard that President Johnson then said, “If I’ve lost Kronite, I’ve lost middle [music] America.” Careful with that one. The quote comes from a single aid. Historians can’t verify the wording, and Johnson likely never even watched the [music] broadcast live. What actually moved was slower and bigger. Polling on the war kept sliding all spring.

Johnson’s approval on Vietnam [music] collapsed toward the 20s, and 5 weeks after Kronite’s broadcast, the president of the United States went on television and announced he would not run for reelection. So, back to the question in the title. Were the soldiers right that nothing was under control? On the night itself, completely for hours in dozens of cities at once, there was no front line, no reliable picture, and no plan that survived contact.

 The men at the top had warnings they failed to turn into action. The men on the ground had almost nothing at all. That is the true part. And no amount of afteraction spin changes it. But widen the lens and the picture inverts. The general uprising the plan depended on never happened. Not one city rose to join the attackers. Within days, everything except Hugh was retaken, and the Vietkong’s veteran [music] cadres had been fed into a meat grinder they never recovered from.

 Be careful with the numbers here because this channel doesn’t do bare body counts. American estimates of communists dead in the first phase run from around 17,000 up past 45,000 depending on the window you measure and the counting itself was notoriously inflated. What no serious historian disputes is the direction.

 It was a catastrophe for the attackers. It was also a catastrophe for civilians. In Hugh alone, mass graves later gave up around 2,800 bodies of people executed under the occupation from a South Vietnamese list of over 4,000 named victims with estimates ranging higher and the full scale still debated. One more correction while we’re here because the content farms get this wrong constantly.

 The mastermind of Tet was not General Guap. Modern scholarship led by historian Lee Hang Ninguan working from Hanoi’s own archives shows the offensive was driven by first secretary Lewan over Gap’s objections. Gap was sidelined. And no, West Morland was not fired for Tet either. 5 months later, he was promoted to Army Chief of Staff, which tells you everything about how Washington handles a general whose war has just publicly stopped making sense.

So hold both truths at once because both are real. Tet was a military defeat for the men who launched it and a political catastrophe for the men who repelled it. Control of the ground was restored within weeks. Control of the story was never restored at all. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.

West Morland turned out to be right in a way he never intended. The end did come into view that night through a hole in an embassy wall on live television in the voice of a military policeman screaming into a radio. Just not the end he was promising. And through all of it, West Merlin stayed convinced the real blow was still coming at a remote mountain base where 6,000 Marines sat surrounded by two North Vietnamese divisions.

 Was he wrong about that, too? We took apart the whole siege of Kissan piece by piece and it’s on screen