Vietnam War Turning Point Analysis

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Turning Point of the Vietnam War: Tet Offensive [1968] “I have made this statement many times: if I would have to do it over again, I would have made known the forthcoming Tet Offensive.” --General William Westmoreland “We will continue to fight as long as necessary—ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years.” --North Vietnamese Commander Vo Nguyen Giap, 1969 “Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns, or we’re going to bomb them back into the stone age.”…show more content…
It was the American perception that if they kept up on the offensive side of the war, the communist forces would eventually surrender. After Tet, that all changed. The North Vietnamese were masters of guerrilla warfare, spread them out, strike quickly, and run. However, in a dingy auto repair shop, they had stored a secret cache of weapons. Their next step was to attack the U.S. Embassy with about 18-20 secret troops, and catch the American diplomats off guard. The compound was secured within approximately an hour, but the grisly images portrayed by television crews, and news photographers, told a much different story back home. After the images were made public, anti-war sentiments began to increase, and the public perception of the war began to change…show more content…
2010. Oberdorfer, Don. Tet!: Turning Point in the Vietnam War. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Rice, Jr. Earle. The Tet Offensive. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, Inc. 1997. Robbins, James S. This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. New York: Encounter Books. 2010. Schandler, Herbert Y. The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1977. Schmitz, David F. The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2005. Spector, Ronald H. After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. New York: The Free Press. 1993. -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. Don Oberdorfer, Tet! The Turning Point in the Vietnam War, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xv. [ 2 ]. Ibid. [ 3 ]. Ibid., xvi. [ 4 ]. James R. Arnold, Tet Offensive 1968: Turning Point in Vietnam, (London: Reed International Books, 1997), 6. [ 5 ]. The History Channel, Tet Offensive, DVD, Produced by the History Channel (A&E Home Video, 2011). [ 6 ]. Earle Rice, Jr., The Tet Offensive, (San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1997),

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