the South and to try to control the Vietcong, but
although they needed the supplies from the North,
which were passing through the jungle down
the Ho Chi-minh trail just inside the border, the
Vietcong maintained a separate political identity.
In Washington the creation of the National
Liberation Front confirmed the mistaken belief
that the conflict was in reality with communist
North Vietnam, that there was no separate, inter-
nal South Vietnamese struggle. But, faced with
Diem’s embarrassing autocracy and corruption,
disenchantment had set in. Attacks on Buddhist
temples organised by Diem’s brothers and protest
riots in the streets in August 1963 were the last
straw, and Washington withdrew its support from
Diem and his family coterie. A coup by disgrun-
tled generals was in the making. Henry Cabot
Lodge, recently arrived as US ambassador in
Saigon, had foreknowledge of it, and his contacts
with the generals encouraged them in the belief
that Diem’s overthrow would be welcome in
Washington. On 1 November 1963 the officers
went into action and ousted Diem, who fled from
the presidential palace. What the Americans had
not anticipated was Diem’s murder the following
day. The junta of feuding army and air force offi-
cers governed South Vietnam incompetently.
American pressure ensured that some sort of elec-
tions were held, but in the war-torn conditions of
the republic the military ensured that they
retained control.
The Vietcong and Vietminh were getting
stronger and gaining support among the peasants
by means of terror, indoctrination and persuasion.
Confidence in the corrupt South Vietnamese
regime was waning. In the summer of 1965 the
Americanisation of the war began. Within three
years more than half a million young American
combatants were fighting in Vietnam, and thou-
sands had died. American generals more or less
took over the war. In 1967, by counting all the
communists they killed in hundreds of skirmishes
in rice-fields and forests and in attacks on villages
by day which supplied the Vietcong by night,
they thought they were surely winning the war.
But these missions to seek out and kill the enemy
did not bring the conflict to an end. American
tactics proved of no avail in the jungles of
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. A helicopter
gunship was not as effective as tens of thousands
of Vietcong and Vietminh, each armed with a rifle
and able to live on a daily bowl of rice. It was
impossible to kill them all. Casualties would be
replaced with new recruits, increases in American
combat troops with increased numbers of
Vietminh. The Vietcong controlled much of the
southern countryside.
After a decade of these tactics the communists
planned a devastating blow. The Tet offensive,
launched in January 1968 by the Vietcong and
Vietminh against the towns of South Vietnam,
was designed as an all-out effort to impress on the
Americans that the Vietcong were far stronger
than they had supposed. It caught the Americans
and the South Vietnamese completely by surprise,
because Tet was the national New Year holiday
period, during which a truce had always been
observed, and because the towns of South
Vietnam had hitherto been thought secure
against the largely rural Vietcong. In preparation
for Tet, the North Vietnamese had endeavoured
to draw US troops from the towns by a diver-
sionary attack on a northern US base at Khesan.
Then, on 31 January, scores of Vietnamese towns
were assaulted by some 70,000 Vietcong and
Vietminh, who created widespread destruction
and even penetrated the heavily fortified US
Embassy compound in Saigon. The carnage was
worst in the ancient city of Hue in central
Vietnam: there the Vietcong overwhelmed the
South Vietnamese garrison and during their
three-week occupation massacred 3,000 people
and buried them in hastily dug mass graves.
Before American and South Vietnamese troops
regained control, the Tet offensive had caused
them 6,000 combat deaths. Thousands more
Vietnamese civilians died, caught up in the fight-
ing. For the Vietcong, the casualties amounted to
a devastating 50,000. As a fighting force they
never recovered. The weakening of the Vietcong
was not unwelcome in Hanoi. Indeed, in a sense
Tet was a double victory for the North Viet-
namese: it undermined American confidence
that the war would ever be won and it prevented
the independent communists in the South from
being able to challenge the northern communist