VIETNAM: Tet offensive remembered forty years on
Updated
Forty years ago, Vietnamese Communist forces launched a massive surprise attack against South Vietnamese and foreign forces. The year was 1968 and the the Tet offensive was to turn the tide of Australian and US public sentiment against the war.
Presenter: Adam Connors
Speakers: Bao Vu, Radio Australia journalist and Survivor of Vietnam's Tet Offensive; Paul Ham, author of Vietnam: The Australian War, Dr Milam is now the director of Texas Tech's Centre for War and Diplomacy in the Post-Vietnam War Era.
BAO: First I heard very big boom, boom like that. But I thought, oh like many other people in Saigon at the time it's the firecrackers. But after that I saw people burning and then I asked them what's happened there? And they say Viet Cong came, Viet Cong came, and after that especially during the night we were … it was hiding, we all lied on the floor.
CONNORS: Bao Vu was fifteen years old in the southern Vietnamese city of Saigon when the New Year's festival, Tet, signalled the start of a massive surprise attack by the Communist North and the southern guerillas, the National Liberation Front -- or Viet Cong.
BAO: The day after I saw lots of bodies and that's the first time in my life I can't remember how many bodies, but I knew there were lots of bodies around me and houses burning.
NEWS: An Australian military policeman was standing guard firing warning shots to keep the street clear.
CONNORS: As CBS news broadcasts from the days following the Tet Offensive show, Australian troops were in the thick of the fighting to repel the more than 100 simultaneous attacks on towns and cities across the south.
Paul Ham, author of Vietnam: The Australian War, says Australia's intervention in Vietnam, up to this point, was popular.
HAM: The frontline in defence of Australia was effectively the 17th parallel dividing north and south Vietnam, and that was the policy at the time. The Australian people by and large welcomed fighting a war to contain communist aggression at a distant frontline, this was seen as … which was sensible.
CONNORS: But as television images and news reports showed South Vietnamese forces, their cities, and their half-million-strong foreign defenders being roundly attacked by 80-thousand Communist troops, the sentiment changed.
HAM: The National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong was soundly defeated during Tet, but it was certainly not seen the way in Australia and America when we saw General Westmoreland standing in rubble in Saigon protesting that in fact the attack on the city had been repelled. He was correct as it turned out but it didn't look that way.
NEWS: General how would you assess yesterday's activities and todays? What is the enemy doing, are these major attacks? How would you assess the enemy's purposes yesterday and today?
GENERAL: The enemy very deceitfully has taken advantage of the Tet truce.
CONNORS: Ron Milam was at grad school in the United States and had just signed-up for a tour of Vietnam.
MILAM: Well it was such a shock because we had watched General Westmoreland tour the United States essentially talking about how well we were doing there. So when you had this, all of these cities under siege by Viet Cong and NVA, so from a prospective draftee or an enlistee's state you knew that it would probably be worse than it was prior to the Tet offensive.
CONNORS: Dr Milam is now the director of Texas Tech's Centre for War and Diplomacy in the Post-Vietnam War Era.
He says it was not only his fear that arose seeing the Tet Offensive playing out on television, but the nation' s.
MILAM: We have been lied to by our leaders; they have been overestimating the support. It was a military victory but I'm not sure that we knew that at the time. I think that took a while to figure out. On the other hand from the standpoint of someone watching it on television they started to question whether there was any accuracy at all in what the military was saying.
CONNORS: Paul Ham certainly sees it as the turning point in public opinion.
HAM: Ho Chi Minh famously said he may not have won the hearts and minds of South Vietnam, but he certainly won the hearts and minds of the west, and this began with Tet.
CONNORS: Bao Vu, who was fifteen at the time in Saigon and is now a Radio Australia journalist in Melbourne, sees this talk of wins and losses in a different way.
BAO: I don't think anything about that, who win or who lose, something like that. What they want is peace, nothing else. I'm not saying on the behalf of the southerners, but I think that many people agree with me that they don't care who run the country, peace is enough.
