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Before the likes of the cancel culture rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, it is important to remember that US and South Vietnamese forces won virtually every major battle during the war, including the 1968 Tet Offensive, which wiped out the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force, but which the pro-Communist Walter Cronkite (and others) spun as a “strategic American defeat” to American television audiences. An excellent discussion of how Tet was falsely spun by the North Vietnamese Communists and their sycophants in the American media and anti-war movement (which was possibly the most successful information operation in history) can be found here entitled “Tet Declassified.” That Communist info op convinced Americans that the war was lost, which led to the “Vietnamization” of the war effort, to the Paris Peace Accords, to the American withdrawal from Vietnam, and ultimately to Operation Frequent Wind.
Why was the war lost? A tragedy of bad decisions and strategic errors. That the US evolved ridiculous Rules of Engagement but no mission success criteria doomed the American effort to failure. Body counts, aircraft sorties and bombs dropped, artillery rounds fired, etc. The US “counterinsurgency strategy” was completely wrong, given the overwhelming military superiority of the US versus the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. And LBJ’s management of the war effort from the Oval Office severely constrained commanders in the field. Allowing unfettered access by the American news media to unit-level operations was a strategic mistake, which led to the likes of Cronkite falsely spinning the reality on the ground to Americans watching the “television war.”
By 1971 or 1972, the war was essentially won in South Vietnam, and after the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December of 1972, North Vietnam’s will to continue had been broken. However, it was the Democrat majority in the US Congress who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and who deliberately forfeited the war after all US forces were withdrawn for US political reasons, as well as suspended military aid to the South Vietnamese. That latter perfidious act was the coup de grâce. Funny how nobody mentions that these days as the DC Democrats push their Communist agenda down our throats. Some things never change. //
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tet-offensive-halted
https://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-terrible-truth-about-walter-cronkite/
