I just thought of something after reading this thread that for some reason never occurred to me before. In the two decades that Vietnam was partitioned were civillians able to cross the border? In other divided countries (such as Germany) you hear a lot about people missing relatives that are stuck on the other side of the border, but I’ve never heard that about Vietnam. I’m guessing people were too preoccupied with staying alive.
Tet was the turning point but it’s a little more nuanced than just casualties among the Viet Cong. Prior to Tet South Vietnam faced a hybrid threat to it’s existence. There was both a domestic insurgency and regular forces from the neighboring nation trying to conquer/annex it. Tet produced huge casualties among the Viet Cong which helped end that threat. Actions during the offensive, like intentional and targeted killing of civilians, swung popular support from the insurgents to the South Vietnamese government. Finally US forces had been gradually learning and implementing sound counter insurgency steps. Abrams replaced Westmoreland 6 months before Tet and had shifted focus from search and destroy measured in body counts. Between heavy casualties, losing popular support, and security forces actually using effective COIN tactics for a change, the insurgency shriveled quickly post Tet. It wasn’t just casualties though.
Marginalizing the Viet Cong also had some other effects on the final outcome. The Viet Cong, and the people who supported them, weren’t all Communists. Some of them were more upset with their government and outside forces in Vietnam than supportive of the North or Communism. The defeat of the insurgency effectively minimized any role they may have had opposing or influencing the North during the end game and after the conquest of South Vietnam.
They had huge equipment issues. A lack of spare parts plagued the AVRN, and an oil crisis put their vehicular usage to severe limits. Near the final offensive they lacked things as simple as barbed wire and sand bag bags. A lot of this was due to internal corruption, however.
The ARVN had some serious motivation issues, but they could fight at times.
When you’re fighting an ongoing war, having an army that can only fight at times is a serious problem.
This is vastly overstating things as phrased, so much so that the only realistic answer is no. The Viet Cong was far from being essentially destroyed as an effective fighting force by Tet. Want evidence? See the May Offensive, AKA mini-Tet:
What it did do is start shifting a heavier part of the burden of the fighting towards regular NVA Army units infiltrated south. The Viet Cong itself included “North” Vietnamese who infiltrated south. Militarily the VC was divided into Mobile Forces and Local Forces units. Mobile Forces were full time guerillas, and as the name implies would move all about South Vietnam. Local Forces units were more akin to militias who generally stuck to their day job apart from laying booby-traps or lobbing the odd mortar bomb at night but kept their heads low unless there were Mobile Forces in the area they were supporting. The Local Forces were heavily committed in Tet; there apparently was the belief that it would spark a general uprising. The NLF also included the political apparatus, the Viet Cong shadow government which kept on functioning just fine after Tet.
Again, it’s so much for the most part that its no. I have heard your theory before apparently as being held by some former VC officers, but it strikes me as being far too conspiratorial and coming from the same emotions that drove Pickett to say “That man murdered my division” of Lee after the Civil War. Why would the communists shoot themselves in the foot in the middle of the war by weakening themselves militarily while the VC political apparatus remained intact? Why not just do what communists normally do and have a purge after winning the war?
There are no facts to support the “stab in the back” narrative that it was the US media that lost the war. Read the Pentagon Papers; the US military had already concluded that the war was unwinnable. McNamara, who is roasting in hell if there is any justice, stepped down from office on Feb 28 convinced that the war that he had orchestrated could not be won, though he would not publicly say so until the 1980s. Continuing to prop up the South Vietnamese government was going to mean 10,000 or 15,000 dead Americans a year, every year, with no end in sight. This was not a price the US public was willing to pay forever, and the idea that the communists had a breaking point and could be brought to the negotiating table by simply killing x number of them had already proven itself to be an illusion.
Because the central purpose of the Viet Cong was that it was an underground organization that could hide from the government. Why would the Hanoi government be anymore able to purge the Viet Cong than the Saigon government was?
If North Vietnam wanted to eliminate the Viet Cong as a potential rival it needed to get them to come out in the open. So have them come out and fight American and South Vietnamese forces in open battle.
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This is vastly overstating things as phrased, so much so that the only realistic answer is no. The Viet Cong was far from being essentially destroyed as an effective fighting force by Tet. Want evidence? See the May Offensive, AKA mini-Tet:
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No, I don’t think it’s vastly overstating things and I don’t see how your cite shows differently. For all intents and purposes the VC were taken off the board as an effective fighting force following Tet. It was a major TACTICAL defeat for them and one they never were able to recover from. It was the main NVA that did the bulk of the fighting from there on out. Your own cite shows that the VC were hardly able to put much into the field and that what they did was pretty easily handled and they were easily defeated in this little ‘Little Tet’.
Basically, Tet was the case of a tactical defeat for the VC but a strategic victory, since the perception of the battle was so negative in the US where, for years, the public had been told that victory was just around the corner but then they were shocked in their homes by images of fighting throughout the South and by US news reporters saying there was no path to victory. Ironic, since the VC were decimated in the battle and were pretty much taken off the board as a major fighting force from then on out.
I don’t think this was a ‘stab in the back’ or whatever…I think the media simply couldn’t put the actual military results into context. In addition, the American people HAD been lied to for years by the government and the military. Finally, we really shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place…this was France’s problem and when they folded that should have been it. We should have supported the original re-unification VOTE that the North wanted and let the chips fall as they might. If the people had voted for reunification based on the South THEN maybe we could or even should have gotten involved, but not as we did when it was so evident that the vote would have gone to the North.
Same could have been said in WWII with the battle of the bulge. The Germans launched a massive counteroffensive and it might have been viewable from the outside as showing that Germany was really as strong as ever rather than it being a signal that the German army was on the verge of collapse.
Yes, but the military wasn’t lying to the citizens about the progress of the war. We were pushing the Nazis back across the Western Front. The Russkis were pushing the Nazis back across the Eastern Front. Yeah, the Germans staged a counteroffensive. And then we crushed the counteroffensive and kept moving.
The Vietnam war was completely different. What objectives were we taking? What territory were we liberating? How did we measure our progress? What was victory supposed to look like?
In Vietnam the war goals were: stay there and prop up South Vietnam until there’s no more fighting. It wasn’t the case that every VC killed was one step closer to victory, because where do these VC come from? How many of them are there? We could try killing them all, but that would require killing lots of people that we’re supposedly saving from the communists.
The Tet Offensive just revealed the facts, that our only strategy was to keep fighting in Vietnam indefinitely, that there was no military solution to the problem. If we wanted to keep South Vietnam in existence as an independent country the only solution was more of the same, forever.
And it wasn’t like the day after the Tet Offensive we gave up and came back home. We were there for five more years. So if Tet was just a minor setback on the road to victory, if only those hippies back home don’t lose their nerve, how come we didn’t win the war soon after? How many more years were we supposed to fight? The Battle of the Bulge started Dec 1944. Five months later was VE day. So if Westmoreland had wrapped up Vietnam in 1969 I think we would have forgiven him.
Well, you said it yourself…it wasn’t about going into North Vietnam and taking their capital and forcing them to surrender. Yet your last paragraph seems to imply that’s what we were doing and we failed to achieve the goal. You can’t have it both ways here. You are right…we were just trying to maintain the status quo. Tet was important tactically, and was a ‘win’ for the US because it crippled the VC…but it didn’t win the war because the VC were only a part of what was going on. Essentially, Tet was a strategic victory for NORTH VIETNAM and a strategic loss for the US since it was a body blow to the American public and put us on the road to eventually withdrawing.
No, I’m saying that the message before Tet was “We’re winning the war”. After Tet it was clear, that whatever was happening it wasn’t anything like “winning”. It was “more of the same for the indefinite future”. And of course Westmoreland wasn’t going to wrap up the war in 1969, that’s why comparisons to the Battle of the Bulge are silly. We weren’t marching to victory, with the Tet Offensive as a temporary setback until the hippies stabbed us in the back. We had another 5 years after Tet and at no time was victory on the table. Yeah, we could have stayed, but how many more years of inconclusive results were we supposed to accept?
From the Battle of the Bulge to VE day was 5 months. From Tet to the American withdrawal was 5 years. I think we had a really good long run searching for a military solution to the problem, how much longer was it going to take?
It was never in the cards that North Vietnamese troops were going to invade South Vietnam, and drive the Americans into the sea, like at Dunkirk. So we had the option of staying and occupying and propping up South Vietnam as long as we were willing to pay the price. When the American public believed that although it was costly we were on the path to victory they mostly supported the war. When the American public believed that we had paid the price but the only future was more of the same they stopped supporting the war.
If WWII had bogged down into a stalemate somewhere in Western Europe, and five years after D-Day we were still engaged in a bloody inconclusive stalemate with the Nazis then I suppose the American public might have gotten tired of WWII as well. But that didn’t happen. If we were somehow able to march into Hanoi and get the surviving North Vietnamese officials to surrender 5 months after the Tet Offensive, then the momentary setback of Tet would be as irrelevant as the Battle of the Bulge. But we couldn’t, so we didn’t, so it isn’t.
Hanoi had much better information about the insurgency. Some of that comes from having open lines of communication to coordinate operations and share intelligence. Some of that came from coordinating logistics shipments. The North Vietnamese had also openly infiltrated the VC broadly and deeply with cadre sent from their army to assist. Hanoi was in much better position to interdict the shipments supplying the insurgency …since they were the middle man. 
It wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the insurgency from continuing if they retained popular support against the Hanoi government and were motivated enough. Hanoi was in a much better position than Saigon though.