The medias handling of the Tet Offensive prompted President Johnson to bow to increased pressure from dovish critics and some civilian officials in his administration. He announced a new halt to the bombardments and once again invited the North Vietnamese to negotiate. To add weight to his initiativ
The soldiers themselves were not immune to the contagion. The Chairman of the Combined Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wheeler, returning from Saigon (where his quarters had been subjected to enemy bombardment), appeared deeply concerned. Westmoreland himself, although he was optimistic about the out
In Khe Sanh, journalists created the Dien Bien Phu syndrome ”, constantly predicting a terrible fate for the garrison of American Marines and South Vietnamese Rangers; they even accused the American command of staying there and fighting there! In reality, at Khe Sanh, 6,000 American and South Vietna
During the first fortnight of the offensive, the Communists suffered heavy losses:approximately 32,000 dead, plus 5,800 prisoners, or nearly half of the troops actively engaged. The ARVN lost only 2,800 men, the Americans a thousand. It was only at Huê that the attackers occupied their objectives fo
One of the very first attacks, and one of the most small, carried out by a suicide squad of only 15 Vietcong sappers, was to take on an importance out of proportion to its size. It hit the American embassy in Saigon, a few blocks from the presidential palace and downtown hotels where American report
By late 1967, part of the ruse had been staged:the border battles of Song Be, Loc Ninh and Dak To. By mid-January 1968, guns and men were in place to deploy another centerpiece of the deception:the diversion of Khe Sanh. The operation began on January 21 with the intensive bombardment of the America
An additional problem faced the Communists:completing the final concentrations without provoking an American bombardment. Ideally, the air attacks had to stop. So, at a diplomatic reception in Hanoi in late 1967, and elsewhere at other diplomatic posts, North Vietnamese officials gently hinted that
It is (...) a very real question, that to know if it will be possible to continue our efforts in South Vietnam for the time necessary to achieve our objectives there. This is what Secretary of Defense McNamara wrote to President Johnson as 1967 drew to a close. Fearing that neither a large increase
In 1970, the United States thought it was in sight of victory. The meaning of the war had been spelled out in a clear manner, and apparently the people of South Vietnam understood and approved of it. The economy had been revived. The army had become formidable. A state-of-the-art air force had been
At the end of January 1968, the Communists launched the great Tet offensive (the Lunar New Year). But the air supply allowed the marines, surrounded at Khe Sanh, to hold - although a large third of the dropped supply was recovered by the enemy! The American forces continued to fight against their go
The attacks on North Vietnam proved so ineffective, mainly because of political restrictions, that in 1968, after three years of offensive, and at the urging of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, the U.S. Navy returned to service the battleship Missouri equipped with 405 mm guns. The operation cost the
In 1967, the first OV-10As — from the COIN program — were delivered to the Marine Corps and the USAF in Vietnam. Despite its modest performance, this aircraft, much appreciated by pilots, does a considerable job, especially in the armed missions of FAC. At the Pentagon, during this time, data was fi
The RC-47 was not the only version of the extraordinary Dakota to be used in Vietnam, more than 30 years after the aircrafts first prototype flew. There was especially the AC - 47 attack, nicknamed Puff, the Magic Dragon (title of an American song). It carried very effective armament consisting of t
The refuges offered by forests and jungles posed a serious problem. We sought to perfect the methods of detecting troops, metal objects, or any suspicious material. As these studies began to bear fruit, defoliants came into play on a massive scale; planes such as the C-123 Provider or helicopters sp
The logistical supply from the United States was provided by freighters, and by the Military Airlift Comma (MAC) fleet composed mainly of C-141 Star lifters; the C-130s provided most tactical transport operations, showed a rare efficiency in this work. A considerable fleet of helicopters, especially
These planes first used their onboard weapons, when they had them, and normal bombs called iron bombs (undirected fall). Most of this equipment was old. Dropping bombs at very high speeds presented real dangers:armed in three seconds, they could collide with each other, explode, or hit the plane tha
Things went from bad to worse. In 1963 Diem was assassinated, giving way to the Khanh regime. The territory effectively governed by Saigon was reduced to cities, the rest being left to the Vietcong. The Civil Defense Corps and the Civil Guard were often frowned upon by the population. The Viet Cong
Efforts were made to adapt the aircraft to COIN requirements. The A1 Skyraider proved to be perfect:this indestructible veteran was still in service with the Navy and Marines and was adopted by the USAF and the South Vietnamese Air Force. The Douglas B26 invader also proved to be very well suited to
There was no war in Vietnam — officially. None of the countless attempts at peace, however, could stop the long and bloody series of skirmishes, raids, ambushes, guerrillas, and finally pitched battles that ravaged Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. These unusual conditions for a “war” does not only belong
The Siege of Khe Sanh is a battle of the Vietnam War which opposed the American army to the Vietnamese Peoples Army and the troops of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet Cong). It took place at the beginning of 1968, during the famous Tết offensive. It began on January 21, and laste
A priori It might seem that a place as remote as the Aleutian archipelago was of no interest to World War II fighters. However, the possession of that insular territory was revealed as a fundamental strategic objective both by its owners, the United States, and by its Japanese enemies and, in fact,
The Battle of Hastings took place on October 14, 1066 about ten kilometers north of the town of Hastings, in East Sussex. It opposes the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson, to Duke William of Normandy, and ends in a decisive victory for the latter. Hastings is part of the succession
The Risala by Ibn Fadlan It is not very prodigal in fantastic stories and not at all prone to supernatural explanations of what is observed. What the Muslim sage is describing in this passage are the northern lights that he observed on his trip to Russia, on the banks of the Volga, in the middle of
Although the most famous natural disaster in the Aegean Sea was probably the brutal eruption of the Tera volcano in the middle of the second millennium BC, as a result of which the island of Santorini has remained and whose effects are theorized to have caused a tsunami large enough to arrive in Egy