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North Vietnam's 1972 Easter Offensive: Hanoi's Gamble (Cold War, 1945–1991) Kindle Edition

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 14 ratings

A history of the military campaign that set the stage for the end of the Vietnam War.
 
By the end of 1971, in what Hanoi called the American War and at the height of the Cold War, the fighting had dragged on for eight years with neither side gaining a decisive advantage on the battlefield and talks in Paris to the end the war were going nowhere. While the United States was steadily drawing down its ground forces in South Vietnam, Washington was also engaging in a grand effort to build up and strengthen Saigon’s armed forces to the point of self-sufficiency. Not only had the ranks of Saigon’s forces swelled in recent years, but they were now being equipped and trained to use the latest American military equipment. Perhaps now was the time for Hanoi to take one last gamble before it was too late.
 
With the rumble of men and mechanized equipment breaking the early morning silence, some 40,000 North Vietnamese troops advanced across the demilitarized zone into South Vietnam on March 30, 1972, in what would become the largest conventional attack of the war. Ill-prepared and poorly led, South Vietnamese troops in the far north were quickly routed in the face of the ensuing onslaught. Likewise, coordinated attacks across the Cambodian border northwest of Saigon and into the central highlands in the coming weeks gained steam and in due course as many as 200,000 men along with T-54/55 main battle tanks, 130mm towed artillery, ZSU-57 self-propelled ant-aircraft guns, and hundreds of trucks and armored personnel carriers were engaged across three battlefronts. Soon Saigon’s beleaguered forces were being pushed to the brink of defeat in what appeared to be the end for the Thieu government. Ultimately, however, the timely and massive intervention by U.S. and South Vietnamese air power, along with the bravery of some South Vietnamese commanders and their American advisers saved the day. Hanoi’s gamble had failed and, in its wake, lay up to 100,000 dead and South Vietnamese roads littered with the smoldering wrecks of North Vietnamese military equipment. Moreover, it would be another three years before the North had recovered enough to try again.
 
“Informatively presents an episode of the Vietnam War that has otherwise lapsed into obscurity, crowed out of the history books by North Vietnam’s ultimate victory against the U.S. and South Vietnamese military.” —Midwest Book Review
 
“The lessons from Hanoi’s military victory, which are discussed in this book, still echo in today’s U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, so this book’s account is especially pertinent in understanding the current predicaments facing the U.S. in that troubled country.” —Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The lessons from Hanoi’s military victory, which are discussed in this book, still echo in today’s U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, so this book’s account is especially pertinent in understanding the current predicaments facing the U.S. in that troubled country."
Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International

"...informatively presents an episode of the Vietnam War that has otherwise lapsed into obscurity, crowed out of the history books by North Vietnam's ultimate victory against the U.S. and South Vietnamese military."
Midwest Book Review

"....an excellent summation of an averted disaster....[The]collection of images ranks among the best I have seen in a Vietnam War book."
The VVA Veteran

About the Author

Stephen Emerson was born in San Diego, California into a U.S. Navy family: his father was a career naval aviator and his mother a former Navy nurse. Steve grew up on various Navy bases during the Vietnam War. His father served two combat tours as an attack pilot in Vietnam flying the A-4 Skyhawk in Operation Rolling Thunder while flying off the USS Midway in 1965 with VA-22 and later as commanding officer of VA-146 flying the A-7 Corsair II while embarked on the USS Enterprise in 1969. Steve worked as intelligence analyst covering political-military affairs in Africa and the Middle East. He served as Security Studies Chair at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies and previously as an associate professor of National Security Decision-making at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. As the author of more than 100 classified and unclassified publications, Steve has written widely on subjects from American national security affairs and political instability to terrorism, African conflicts, and counter-insurgency. Chief among these are his critical assessment of U.S. counter-terrorism policy in Africa, ‘The Battle for Africa’s Hearts and Minds’, and his comprehensive military history of the Mozambican civil war in The Battle for Mozambique. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations/Comparative Politics from the University of Florida and currently resides in Orlando, Florida.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B086XKXJ67
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pen & Sword Military (April 30, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 30, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 51.2 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 127 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 14 ratings

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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2020
    As a veteran of the US effort to help South Vietnam withstand the 1972 invasion by North Vietnam, I was interested in learning about the big picture events surrounding the carnage I witnessed. This book largely delivers. North Vietnam, impatient with the results of peace negotiations in Paris, mounted a massive invasion of the South to forcibly improve the Communist position. With nearly all US troops withdrawn, the invasion nearly succeeded. Emerson explains how heavy sacrifices by South Vietnam’s people plus massive intervention by American air and naval forces turned the tide. This victory set the stage for the end of the war-“Peace with Honor.” Against this backdrop, the eventual collapse of South Vietnam doesn’t seem as inevitable as now generally accepted.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2020
    The genius of Emerson in this work, as in his others on the Vietnam War, is evidenced in his ability to reconstruct battlefield scenes with such granularity that they come alive on the pages, and one is left to admire the scale and depth of the research that went into work. Although the book has an American point of view, the analyses of the advances and reverses of military engagements such as Operation Lam Son 719, and the sieges of Quang Tri, Hue, An Loc, and Kontum, are convincingly dispassionate. Emerson ungrudgingly credits the North Vietnamese forces with the type of determination and tenacity that the US-backed defenders lacked. That the North Vietnamese forces failed in achieving their battlefield objectives and the concomitant bargaining strength at the peace talks with the Americans was owing to American air power, which finally brought back the North Vietnamese leaders to the negotiations that eventuated in an agreement.

    Together with his other works on the Vietnam War, North Vietnam’s 1972 Easter Offensive, represents a major contribution to the historiography on the Vietnam War.

    Chaitram Singh
    Award-Winning Author
    The Flour Convoy
    The February 23rd Coup
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2021
    This is another excellent volume from the Cold War Series. In recent years there has been a flurry of new books about the Easter offensive, but many cover only smaller aspects of the campaign. None has offered a comprehensive and complete account as author Dale Andrade’s Trial by Fire - America's Last Vietnam Battle, published in 1994. But this volume offers a very good, concise narrative of the campaign.

    President Nixon’s Vietnamization program implemented in 1969 was seen as a means by which the US military was disengaging and withdrawing from the war. By 1972, only 50,000 American military remained in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese leadership had been planning for a nationwide offensive since 1970 to test and discredit the Vietnamization program. However, the Cambodia Incursion of 1970 and the Invasion of Laos in 1971 delayed their plans. While the Laos operation, Lam Son 719, was a logistics setback for North Vietnam it encouraged them in believing that the ARVN could be decisively defeated on the battlefield and maybe prompt a collapse of the South Vietnamese Government. Using most of 1971 to stock pile supplies and stage troops, they patiently waited until the last of the US ground forces were withdrawn. The North Vietnamese leadership gambled that the offensive would severely damage the ARVN or at least destroy their creditability as a fighting force and gain territory. They believed the U.S. had become so disengaged from the war they would do little to assist the RVN.

    The offensive should have really come as no surprise as many publications and commentators have asserted. There were signs of the impending attack months in advance. Aerial reconnaissance of North Vietnam detected a buildup of armor forces in the Southern Panhandle. A fuel pipeline had been built that ran from North Vietnam into Laos and back into South Vietnam near Khe Sanh. Intelligence reports tracked the movement of NVA units in the Central Highlands that were targeted by ARC Light sorties as early as February, 1972. This was no secret. Even newspapers in the U.S. openly discussed the possibility of a widespread attack ala the Tet Offensive. However, in testimony before Congress in January 1972, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird dismissed the possibility of a widespread attack stating there was only a possibility of local attacks in the Central Highland. So, the initial attack across the DMZ on 30 March came somewhat as a surprise.

    Though the headlines concentrated on the fighting in Northern I Corps, the Central Highlands and An Loc, the North Vietnamese had planned for five separate but coordinated assaults that were designed to draw away or pin down South Vietnam’s military forces. The initial attack across the DMZ drew away the nation's strategic reserves - the Vietnamese Marine Division and heavy armor forces. This assault was followed three weeks later by an attack out of Laos into the strategic Ben Het-Dak To-Tanh Canh region of the Central Highlands that, without reinforcement, quickly collapsed. While Allied forces concentrated on stopping both attacks, the NVA struck out of Cambodia at Loc Ninh in May in an attempt to drive toward Saigon. In mid-May, lesser but equally damaging attacks were launched on the central coastal region around the Bong Song Plain and in the Mekong Delta, the twin bread baskets for South Vietnam Another attack force emerged from the A Shau Valley toward Hue.

    The initial assaults were successful. The provincial capital of Quang Tri was taken, a huge chunk of the Central Highlands fell and the Provincial capital of Kontum was threatened. And the much contested district town of Loc Ninh on the road to Saigon was over run. Though much maligned by the U.S. media, the ARVN and South Vietnam's military were eventually successful in responding to these attacks. Despite poor senior leadership, bad decisions, heavy casualties and serious loss of territory, South Vietnam's armed forces supported by their U.S. advisors and remaining US Army Air Cav and Aviation units rallied to stop these attacks cold with the support of massive US air and naval firepower. Though some units collapsed early in the campaign, the ARVN acquitted themselves at An Loc, Kontum, Firebase Bastogne and Quang Tri.

    While, the attacks on the coastal plain in Binh Dinh Province were initially successful when they seized three district capitals, they were eventually stopped and by July the Communists were pushed back into the mountains of the Central Highlands again. The attacks in the Delta were equally unsuccessful because they were poorly coordinated and resourced. And this is the untold success by the ARVN during the offensive. Because Saigon's regular forces were committed, the fighting in these backwater areas were successfully shouldered by the Regional and local Popular Forces - the “Ruff-Puffs" - who were well equipped and trained to take on NVA regulars in open battle and defeat them. The same story played out in III Corps and the Delta where Popular Forces stood their ground and successfully defended their towns and villages.

    The North Vietnamese not only underestimated the capabilities and tenacity of the South Vietnamese, but also the willingness of the U.S. to continue support for their ally. They expected a US response, but nothing like what they received. Furious at the audacity of the Communists to launch such an offensive, President Nixon not only committed air and naval units from around the world to support the South, but also resumed the bombing of North Vietnam. The renewed bombing, initially called Freedom Train and then Linebacker I, was an air-sea campaign that US military leaders could only dream of during the earlier Rolling Thunder Campaign (1965-1968). With an array of USAF, USN and USMC air units hastily deployed from around the world equipped with newer and more capable aircraft and a new generation of air munitions, the renewed campaign punished the North like it had never been before. US Forces mined all of the North's ports and a US Naval task force even entered Haiphong Harbor to destroy port facilities. Linebacker II later pushed the North to the negotiation table and the cease fire the ended the war for the US in 1973.

    Equally shocking to the North Vietnamese was the unwillingness of their East Bloc sponsors to help them. Unlike during Rolling Thunder, neither the Soviets nor the Red Chinese were willing to intervene to provide newer weapons and other military support. Wishing to continue improving relations with the US, the Chinese declined to send troops as they did in 1966. It just so happened that the Soviets were going to summit with President Nixon in May. Not willing to risk the summit, the Soviet leadership mildly chastised the President over the bombings, and then got down to super power business.

    Eventually, the North’s munitions and supplies ran short and by September the Easter Offensive was decisively defeated with the North suffering over 100,000 casualties and very heavy equipment losses. South Vietnam’s losses were about 43,000 and American casualties included 641 KIA and MIA. Quang Tri was retaken and the sieges at An Loc and Kontum were broken. However, the North seized and held two-thirds of Kontum Province and the western half of northern I Corps. The North’s leadership began to negotiate in earnest for a cease fire and by late October, a cease fire was imminent and the war began to wind down.

    The offensive provided valuable lessons learned for both sides. Though the US military had exercised for decades the ability to deploy combat power to any place in the world, the deployment of air and naval units to SEA to immediately employ it was decisive in stopping the offensive. As the author puts it, the US response was “timely, forceful and decisive”. The massive airlift to replace of South Vietnam's equipment losses by the USAF's Military Airlift Command was a dress rehearsal for a more important effort in support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The US proved a new generation of smart munitions, TOW anti-tank weapons and more capable aircraft such as the F111. The North learned some hard lessons too. They made good on their inept employment of combined arms - tanks, infantry and air defense - and their failure to exploit battlefield successes. They also failed to sustain a logistics network to supply a 200,000 man conventional army on the battlefield. These were lessons they put into action in the final 1975 Offensive that ended the war.

    Though decisively defeated with very heavy casualties and equipment losses, the North accomplished their goal of seizing key territory and enhancing their ability to negotiate an agreement in Paris that allowed themselves to finish off South Vietnam three years later in 1975. They quickly exploited their territorial gains to position themselves for that final offensive. The US efforts to stop the Easter Offensive merely bought time for the South Vietnamese. And the offensive revealed serious flaws in ARVN leadership, organization, command and control that the South Vietnamese President was unable or unwilling to fix.

    I highly recommend this book. The author provides a great overview that touches on just about every aspect of the campaign. Even the sideshow battles get a mention. He provides a great perspective from U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese side as well as the geo-political view. He goes to great length to credit U.S. air and naval power for making the difference in defeating the attack. As the author puts it, the US response was “massive and destructive” on a scale the North Vietnamese leadership never imagined. However, he also credits the capability and willingness of the ARVN to keep up the fight. He details North Vietnam’s preparation and order of battle that shows the offensive was as conventional a battle as Vietnam ever got. Though they did not employ air support, they did use armor, mechanized infantry, air defense, heavy artillery and rockets to support their attacks. The image of black pajama clad guerillas frequently pushed by liberal historians and journalists do not apply here. There are some useful graphs and charts as well as many photos throughout the book, many that I have never seen before. My only complaint is that there are too few maps and none that captures all of the flashpoints of the offensive.

    Today, the offensive is long forgotten by the public and media. Its significance and accomplishments are always overlooked or briefly mentioned in documentaries or written histories of the war. Only those who were there still remember. Having lived through those times, I personally remember it as a war that just would not end. I remember hearing over the radio on 27 Jan 1973 that the peace agreement was signed. The announcer concluded his news brief by saying, “you can hear the sigh of relief across our land tonight.” That is exactly how we felt when the war finally ended.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2020
    As an intelligence analyst present and reporting the events of the NVA units before and during the Easter Offensive of 1972, I found so many errors regarding the war in I Corps (FRAC) that there are too many to enumerate. For instance, there was no 204th Tank Regiment, but there was a 202nd attached to the 308th Infantry Division, no mention of the 126th Water Sapper Regiment, etc.
    One of the problems seems to be that the author used LTG Truong as a main source, though he did not assume command of I Corps until a month AFTER the invasion started. His account differs greatly with the facts during this period.
    W.R. Baker
    571st MI Detachment, 525th MI Group
    US Army, Da Nang, RVN, 1971-72
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