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This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive
Most of what Americans know about the Tet Offensive is wrong. The brief 1968 battle during the Vietnam conflict marked the dividing line between gradual progress towards an ill-defined victory, and slow descent to a humiliating defeat. The fact that the enemy was, in fact, handily defeated on the ground was immaterial; that they could mount an attack at all was deemed a military triumph for the Vietcong. At least this is the received wisdom of Tet.
In This Time We Win, James S. Robbins at last provides an antidote to the flawed Tet mythology that continues to shape the perceptions of American military conflicts against unconventional enemies and haunt our troops in combat. Indeed, America’s enemies recognize and find inspiration in the prevailing Tet narrative.
In his thorough re-examination of the Tet Offensive, Robbins examines the battle in the familiar frameworks of terrorism, war crimes, intelligence failure, troop surges, leadership breakdown, and media bias. The result is an explosion of the conventional wisdom on this infamous battle, one that offers real lessons for today’s unconventional wars. Without a clear understanding of these lessons, we will find ourselves reliving the Tet Offensive again and again.
In This Time We Win, James S. Robbins at last provides an antidote to the flawed Tet mythology that continues to shape the perceptions of American military conflicts against unconventional enemies and haunt our troops in combat. Indeed, America’s enemies recognize and find inspiration in the prevailing Tet narrative.
In his thorough re-examination of the Tet Offensive, Robbins examines the battle in the familiar frameworks of terrorism, war crimes, intelligence failure, troop surges, leadership breakdown, and media bias. The result is an explosion of the conventional wisdom on this infamous battle, one that offers real lessons for today’s unconventional wars. Without a clear understanding of these lessons, we will find ourselves reliving the Tet Offensive again and again.
364 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
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June 10, 2022
In his book, James S. Robbins argues that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was essentially a military victory for America and that the Johnson and Nixon administrations' gradually giving up on the war effort and withdrawing from Vietnam was a huge mistake that cost Washington and Saigon a victory in the Vietnam conflict.
I agree with the first part of Robbins's argument – the Tet Offensive was a victory for the Americans and the South Vietnamese. It was not a victory in the sense that the American Army and Marine Corps were well prepared for it or performed brilliantly in terms of tactics, no. But it undeniably was a victory in the sense that the Communists lost the battles that they fought. Let's analyze the two most famous ones: the battle for Hue and the attack on the American Embassy in Saigon.
Launching a surprise attack on Hue, the North Vietnamese units and the Viet Cong cadres definitely caught the few American military units and the MACV compound off-guard. This allowed them to capture a considerable part of the city, including the historical Citadel, the old imperial capital, which impacted the morale of the citizens of Hue and the American and ARVN men negatively. The violence that the Communists unleashed afterwards and the suffering they caused further contributed to the confusion and chaos that reigned in the city. This disastrous state of events notwithstanding, the Marines managed to mobilize quickly enough not to be crushed by the enemy's assault. The rest of the American supply and command chain also recovered from the unpleasant surprise relatively quickly and jumped into action. The Marines received reinforcements in the form of people, equipment, and artillery, and together with the Army forces and the ARVN, managed to recapture the city of Hue after weeks of intense fighting. Even the achievement of complete surprise on January 31, 1968 did not help the Communist forces withstand the American counterattack and maintain their control over Hue. The battle of Hue was a sound military defeat for the Communists.
Another famous episode of the Tet Offensive was the Biet Dong attack on the building of the American Embassy in Saigon. The Biet Dong were elite units, part of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Michael Robert Dedrick has written a brilliant book about them – Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front. As he narrates in it, all but one of the Biet Dong cadres who participated in the assault on the embassy were killed that day. While their daring action might have carried a symbolic meaning, it was by far not a military triumph.
Both the attack on Hue and the one on Saigon and the American Embassy there were tactically and strategically fruitless and amounted to little more than the spending of men and resources.
I also agree with the author on that to assume that the Communists had launched the Tet Offensive specifically to achieve a political, rather than military, victory and thus discourage the Americans from fighting is to ignore much evidence that proves the contrary. Hanoi committed way too many resources and men from both North Vietnam and the NLF to the Lunar New Year attacks for them to be battles deliberately lost for the sake of political triumph. Although some North Vietnamese commanders later claimed that everything had gone according to Hanoi's plan during the Tet Offensive, this is just post-war propaganda. For Hanoi, the Tet Offensive of 1968, which was planned as early as 1965, was a genuine attempt to win the Vietnam conflict with one all-out attack that would expel the Americans from their country.
I disagree with the second part of Robbins's argument – the American government's decision to begin a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam was not a mistake. While the Tet Offensive was not the disastrous military defeat for the Americans that the media made it look like, it still exposed the fact that victory was not at all as close and easy to achieve as the Johnson administration claimed. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had successfully launched a major offensive, which the American public did not suspect they were capable of, and it took the American forces a lot of men and resources to prevail over them. The cost in dead and wounded was unacceptably high. Indeed, if the American government had kept pouring soldiers and budget into Vietnam, the American-South Vietnamese alliance could have eventually achieved a military victory. However, as the Tet Offensive demonstrated, this would have happened at a cost that the American society was not prepared to and was not obliged to tolerate.
THIS TIME WE WIN is a work that I have mixed feelings about because I both agree and disagree with Robbins's main point. I find the author's views on the wisdom of withdrawing from Vietnam not well thought through. My disagreement with the author's conclusions notwithstanding, I was pleasantly impressed by the fact that he did not gloss over the atrocities that the Communists committed in Hue. This book is not perfect, but there are sections that make reading it worthwhile. For instance, the actual story of Bay Lop, the Viet Cong who was shot in a Saigon street by General Loan – a moment captured by photojournalist Eddie Adams on a photograph that would achieve an iconic status as proof of American brutality in Vietnam – became for me one of the most memorable depictions in Robbins's work. Although Americans were guilty of many atrocities against innocent Vietnamese people, the killing of Bay Lop was not such a case. As the author explains, Bay Lop ran a death squad and had killed more than twenty family members of Saigon police officers. Furthermore, he had taken hostage the South Vietnamese army's tank training school, and when the commander there refused to teach the Viet Cong how to start tanks, Bay Lop murdered him and his whole family. If this is indeed so, Eddie Adams's iconic photograph acquires a new, different meaning.
I agree with the first part of Robbins's argument – the Tet Offensive was a victory for the Americans and the South Vietnamese. It was not a victory in the sense that the American Army and Marine Corps were well prepared for it or performed brilliantly in terms of tactics, no. But it undeniably was a victory in the sense that the Communists lost the battles that they fought. Let's analyze the two most famous ones: the battle for Hue and the attack on the American Embassy in Saigon.
Launching a surprise attack on Hue, the North Vietnamese units and the Viet Cong cadres definitely caught the few American military units and the MACV compound off-guard. This allowed them to capture a considerable part of the city, including the historical Citadel, the old imperial capital, which impacted the morale of the citizens of Hue and the American and ARVN men negatively. The violence that the Communists unleashed afterwards and the suffering they caused further contributed to the confusion and chaos that reigned in the city. This disastrous state of events notwithstanding, the Marines managed to mobilize quickly enough not to be crushed by the enemy's assault. The rest of the American supply and command chain also recovered from the unpleasant surprise relatively quickly and jumped into action. The Marines received reinforcements in the form of people, equipment, and artillery, and together with the Army forces and the ARVN, managed to recapture the city of Hue after weeks of intense fighting. Even the achievement of complete surprise on January 31, 1968 did not help the Communist forces withstand the American counterattack and maintain their control over Hue. The battle of Hue was a sound military defeat for the Communists.
Another famous episode of the Tet Offensive was the Biet Dong attack on the building of the American Embassy in Saigon. The Biet Dong were elite units, part of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Michael Robert Dedrick has written a brilliant book about them – Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front. As he narrates in it, all but one of the Biet Dong cadres who participated in the assault on the embassy were killed that day. While their daring action might have carried a symbolic meaning, it was by far not a military triumph.
Both the attack on Hue and the one on Saigon and the American Embassy there were tactically and strategically fruitless and amounted to little more than the spending of men and resources.
I also agree with the author on that to assume that the Communists had launched the Tet Offensive specifically to achieve a political, rather than military, victory and thus discourage the Americans from fighting is to ignore much evidence that proves the contrary. Hanoi committed way too many resources and men from both North Vietnam and the NLF to the Lunar New Year attacks for them to be battles deliberately lost for the sake of political triumph. Although some North Vietnamese commanders later claimed that everything had gone according to Hanoi's plan during the Tet Offensive, this is just post-war propaganda. For Hanoi, the Tet Offensive of 1968, which was planned as early as 1965, was a genuine attempt to win the Vietnam conflict with one all-out attack that would expel the Americans from their country.
I disagree with the second part of Robbins's argument – the American government's decision to begin a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam was not a mistake. While the Tet Offensive was not the disastrous military defeat for the Americans that the media made it look like, it still exposed the fact that victory was not at all as close and easy to achieve as the Johnson administration claimed. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had successfully launched a major offensive, which the American public did not suspect they were capable of, and it took the American forces a lot of men and resources to prevail over them. The cost in dead and wounded was unacceptably high. Indeed, if the American government had kept pouring soldiers and budget into Vietnam, the American-South Vietnamese alliance could have eventually achieved a military victory. However, as the Tet Offensive demonstrated, this would have happened at a cost that the American society was not prepared to and was not obliged to tolerate.
THIS TIME WE WIN is a work that I have mixed feelings about because I both agree and disagree with Robbins's main point. I find the author's views on the wisdom of withdrawing from Vietnam not well thought through. My disagreement with the author's conclusions notwithstanding, I was pleasantly impressed by the fact that he did not gloss over the atrocities that the Communists committed in Hue. This book is not perfect, but there are sections that make reading it worthwhile. For instance, the actual story of Bay Lop, the Viet Cong who was shot in a Saigon street by General Loan – a moment captured by photojournalist Eddie Adams on a photograph that would achieve an iconic status as proof of American brutality in Vietnam – became for me one of the most memorable depictions in Robbins's work. Although Americans were guilty of many atrocities against innocent Vietnamese people, the killing of Bay Lop was not such a case. As the author explains, Bay Lop ran a death squad and had killed more than twenty family members of Saigon police officers. Furthermore, he had taken hostage the South Vietnamese army's tank training school, and when the commander there refused to teach the Viet Cong how to start tanks, Bay Lop murdered him and his whole family. If this is indeed so, Eddie Adams's iconic photograph acquires a new, different meaning.
December 9, 2016
I found this book to be a well researched and written about a hard time in US history. Robbins looked into many US sources and Vietnamese as well to tell story of a battle the US won on the field but lost in the news at home. It was curious to find that President Johnson was one of the biggest roadblocks to winning there because he didn't want to fight, just negotiate a settlement, while the polls showed most Americans wanted to win until the Tet.
May 1, 2013
The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive at the Lunar New Year in 1968, in January and February of that year, marks a convenient benchmark in the war. It was roughly about the midpoint of our active involvement in the Vietnam War. And for many it seems a seismic event after which American military fortunes and public attitudes took a negative turn. But the latter is only one of the misperceptions James Robbins writes about in This Time We Win.
The sensational title is unfortunate. Robbins explains he uses it because he's frequently urged to set the war's record straight. The book he's written attempts to do that. It centers around the Communist Tet Offensive of early 1968 but his concerns are encompassing enough to cover the entire war and, indeed, to touch bases in Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's not a narrative history of the battle but an analysis which mostly addresses and tries to correct misperceptions. Perhaps the most glaring of those is that the U. S. and South Vietnamese allies were defeated. In fact, the opposite was the case. The NVA/NLF goal was to strike at many targets country-wide expecting the populace to rise up and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As we know, an uprising was never even a realistic possibility. In the end the enemy was rather handily beaten back, and the NLF itself was destroyed as a field force and were never effective in large units again. He explains that the allies weren't surprised by the Tet attacks, as was widely reported. They'd known the enemy was going to attack during Tet and had even repositioned some units and made other preparations to meet the threat. Interestingly, Robbins writes that the plan of a popular uprising to overthrow the government and to force the U. S. out of the country was so outlandish and unrealistic that the Allies didn't quite believe it represented a true operational plan, and therein lies the surprise of the offensive. He addresses the widely-held belief that the Tet Offensive turned the American public against the war, brought about by the carnage and ferocity so visible on television, by negative press coverage which emphasized our having been taken by surprise and our desperate situation. Robbins shows through a detailed analysis of the polls that public opinion had shifted sharply against the war a year prior to Tet, in early 1967. In fact, as often happens during wartime, the fact of a resurgent and more dangerous enemy during Tet didn't discourage at all but made the public more belligerent and supportive of the war. In Robbins' analysis of the polls, public disapproval of the war came about as a result of dissatisfaction with the way Lyndon Johnson was conducting the war. They would have preferred a more aggressive and decisive administration.
Robbins is the first historian I've read who lays defeat in Vietnam on the president. Having blunted the offensive, having sharply defeated the enemy, indeed, destroyed him, despite the military's urgings to strike back boldly while the North was on their heels, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and then push with major combat units into North Vietnam, Johnson elected to stay on the strategic defensive, urging and hoping for negotiations. He surrendered by bowing to the rising tide of negative public opinion and announcing he would not be a candidate for re-election.
That asymmetry of national goals is one of the key elements of the war. Hanoi fought to win, fought for regime change and defeat of the South while we fought for a stalemate. From Korea we took the lesson that successfully defending the status quo is victory. Johnson believed it. In the end we couldn't win. We sent no signals to Hanoi that we were going to defeat them, that they would suffer terribly as a society and a political entity if they persisted in their aggression in the South. We didn't threaten to destroy North Vietnam or occupy portions of it. We did not do those things we needed to do in order to win.
Following the news reports during those years you would think the U. S. was being defeated in the field. Robbins spends considerable time writing about the negative reporting engaged in by the press corps during the war, especially after Tet. His analysis of why and how the press got on a different page than the military and the administration makes for some of the most interesting reading in the book. It's well-argued and convincing.
In addressing Tet, the wider war, and the lessons learned, Robbins makes his claim that the old arguments about the war are too simplistic. This is perhaps the book which best gets to the heart of the entire American involvement in the war, even though its core is about a battle in 1968 lasting a couple of months. I think this history is wise in its assessments. I think it tells truths about Tet, about our country, about our leadership of the war, and about the nature of war itself.
The sensational title is unfortunate. Robbins explains he uses it because he's frequently urged to set the war's record straight. The book he's written attempts to do that. It centers around the Communist Tet Offensive of early 1968 but his concerns are encompassing enough to cover the entire war and, indeed, to touch bases in Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's not a narrative history of the battle but an analysis which mostly addresses and tries to correct misperceptions. Perhaps the most glaring of those is that the U. S. and South Vietnamese allies were defeated. In fact, the opposite was the case. The NVA/NLF goal was to strike at many targets country-wide expecting the populace to rise up and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As we know, an uprising was never even a realistic possibility. In the end the enemy was rather handily beaten back, and the NLF itself was destroyed as a field force and were never effective in large units again. He explains that the allies weren't surprised by the Tet attacks, as was widely reported. They'd known the enemy was going to attack during Tet and had even repositioned some units and made other preparations to meet the threat. Interestingly, Robbins writes that the plan of a popular uprising to overthrow the government and to force the U. S. out of the country was so outlandish and unrealistic that the Allies didn't quite believe it represented a true operational plan, and therein lies the surprise of the offensive. He addresses the widely-held belief that the Tet Offensive turned the American public against the war, brought about by the carnage and ferocity so visible on television, by negative press coverage which emphasized our having been taken by surprise and our desperate situation. Robbins shows through a detailed analysis of the polls that public opinion had shifted sharply against the war a year prior to Tet, in early 1967. In fact, as often happens during wartime, the fact of a resurgent and more dangerous enemy during Tet didn't discourage at all but made the public more belligerent and supportive of the war. In Robbins' analysis of the polls, public disapproval of the war came about as a result of dissatisfaction with the way Lyndon Johnson was conducting the war. They would have preferred a more aggressive and decisive administration.
Robbins is the first historian I've read who lays defeat in Vietnam on the president. Having blunted the offensive, having sharply defeated the enemy, indeed, destroyed him, despite the military's urgings to strike back boldly while the North was on their heels, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and then push with major combat units into North Vietnam, Johnson elected to stay on the strategic defensive, urging and hoping for negotiations. He surrendered by bowing to the rising tide of negative public opinion and announcing he would not be a candidate for re-election.
That asymmetry of national goals is one of the key elements of the war. Hanoi fought to win, fought for regime change and defeat of the South while we fought for a stalemate. From Korea we took the lesson that successfully defending the status quo is victory. Johnson believed it. In the end we couldn't win. We sent no signals to Hanoi that we were going to defeat them, that they would suffer terribly as a society and a political entity if they persisted in their aggression in the South. We didn't threaten to destroy North Vietnam or occupy portions of it. We did not do those things we needed to do in order to win.
Following the news reports during those years you would think the U. S. was being defeated in the field. Robbins spends considerable time writing about the negative reporting engaged in by the press corps during the war, especially after Tet. His analysis of why and how the press got on a different page than the military and the administration makes for some of the most interesting reading in the book. It's well-argued and convincing.
In addressing Tet, the wider war, and the lessons learned, Robbins makes his claim that the old arguments about the war are too simplistic. This is perhaps the book which best gets to the heart of the entire American involvement in the war, even though its core is about a battle in 1968 lasting a couple of months. I think this history is wise in its assessments. I think it tells truths about Tet, about our country, about our leadership of the war, and about the nature of war itself.
January 11, 2012
A wonderfully eye-opening account of the history that led up to the battle, the facts of the event, and a detailed analysis of what resulted.
Read
August 5, 2011The true history, devoid of conventional wisdom and political agenda, is beginning to be written - this is an excellent and invaluable contribution to the historical record.
January 7, 2014
This is not the military history book I was expecting. It turned out to be an examination on the use of the press as a weapon and how ineffective leadership can cripple powerful armed forces. A clear warning about treating enemies as moral equivalents is stated repeatedly. That seems to be a lesson politicians are incapable of learning.
I didn't really like reading all the poll and survey results but they were necessary to the narrative.
I didn't really like reading all the poll and survey results but they were necessary to the narrative.
May 15, 2015
I think that the book is very informative. It is a nonfiction that covers every topic about Vietnam and tells information that makes readers question what they know about the war.
October 27, 2014
The author debunks conventional wisdom about the Tet Offensive in particular and the Vietnamese War in general. He credits the final North Vietnamese victory to a lack of will in the United States to win, beginning with Johnson's asymmetrical goals compared to the N. Vietnamese. From the beginning, their goal was to win at any cost. The USA's goal was to force a negotiated settlement. The final N. Vietnamese win was the result of the Democratic Congress cutting aid to the south in 1974.
He foreshadows the final outcome of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He foreshadows the final outcome of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
July 6, 2012
Enjoyable and informative. Lots of details brought together to get better historical insight to the realities of not only the war, but the realities of the political and true social environment of the time.
December 16, 2014
DNF Lost interest.
March 23, 2013
An intelligent, insightful look at our country's involvement in the Vietnam War and the meddling that caused us to leave the job unfinished. This Time We Win is how it should have been.
December 2, 2013
A good read if you like history . This book tells about the flubs that the U.S,. government did again it seems we repeat mistakes a lot when it comes to military decisions.
May 26, 2015
This book helped me out the most with my research paper.
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