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The Fall of Saigon and the End of the Vietnam War

cease-fire which had been planned for the Tet period in the northern provinces, and to trim the ceasefire to a mere 24 hours everywhere else. Because neither he nor his senior subordinates could state with any accuracy the places and timing of the Communist effort, Westmoreland did not consider it worthwhile to alert the U.S. media and thus the American public; the closest he came to this was in a TV interview in which he said that the Communists were planning “a major effort to win a spectacular battlefield success along the eve of Tet.” Weyand also issued a similar warning, informing one journalist that the Communists seemed to be on the verge of undertaking “critical – perhaps spectacular – moves.” In Washington, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wheeler, stated publicly that “there may be a Communist thrust similar to the desperate effort of the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.” Strangely enough, none of these individually limited but collectively significant intimations of major

Qui Nhon and other cities during the Tet period, and that the tapes were propaganda messages to be broadcast over the air as soon as the government radio station had been taken. The MACV’s most senior intelligence officer, Major General Phillip B. Davidson, another of the senior U.S. officers who appreciated that the Communist forces might be preparing to unleash a “make or break” offensive, canceled the period of leave he had planned to take, and warned Westmoreland in explicit terms that the intelligence branch of the MACV expected major attacks all over South Vietnam. What Davidson could not provide, however, was a precise date on which the Communists were going to target urban areas. On January 20, 1968, 10 days before the start of the traditional Tet truce period, Westmoreland reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington that the “enemy is presently developing a threatening posture in several areas in order to seek victories essential to achieving prestige and bargaining power. He may exercise his initiative prior to, during, or after Tet.” By this time the situation had become so critical, and so threatening to the allied cause in South Vietnam, that Westmoreland persuaded President Thieu to cancel the

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