Street by Street: The Battle of Hue

At 3:40 in the morning on January 31, 1968, the people of Hue woke up to something that shouldn’t have been possible.

The gold-starred banner of the National Liberation Front was flying from the top of the 120-foot Citadel flag tower. The ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, a city that had functioned as something of an informal demilitarized zone for most of the war, had been seized overnight by a North Vietnamese force numbering in the thousands. And the Americans who were supposed to know about it had no idea it was coming.

What followed was 26 days of the most grueling urban combat American forces had seen since the Pacific. By the time it was over, Hue was in ruins, thousands of civilians were dead, and the Johnson administration’s carefully maintained story about winning the war had collapsed with the walls of the Imperial Palace.

The military won the battle. The country lost the war because of it. Understanding how that happened is the whole point.

To understand Hue, you have to understand the deception that made it possible.

Through the fall of 1967, General Vo Nguyen Giap had been running a series of bloody engagements near the Demilitarized Zone. The most famous of these was the siege of Khe Sanh, a remote Marine outpost that had General William Westmoreland and MACV headquarters thoroughly fixated. Westmoreland was convinced that Khe Sanh was going to be the decisive engagement of the war—a Vietnamese Dien Bien Phu where he could use American firepower to shatter the North Vietnamese army in the open.

That was exactly what Giap wanted him to think.

While American attention was pointed northwest at Khe Sanh, North Vietnamese political cadres and Viet Cong operatives were quietly preparing something on a scale that American intelligence had declared impossible. Weapons were smuggled into cities aboard river junks with false bottoms. Ammunition was hidden in wrapped Tet holiday gifts and agricultural carts. A network of 325 underground “loyal families” inside Hue was activated and tasked with billeting incoming troops and securing supply caches near their target buildings. By the eve of the Tet holiday, the logistics for a simultaneous offensive against dozens of South Vietnamese cities were already in place, right under everyone’s noses.

The intelligence failure was total. American estimates placed enemy strength in the Hue area at a fraction of actual numbers. When the attack hit, MACV was facing a combined force of over 10,000 troops across 15 to 18 battalions. The relief force they sent to respond was two companies.

Hue in 1968 was, by Vietnamese standards, an unusual place to fight.

Most of the country had been chewed up by years of guerrilla warfare. Hue had been largely left alone. It was the former imperial capital, home to the Citadel—a three-square-mile fortress enclosed by walls built in 1802 that were 30 feet high and up to 90 feet thick. At the center of the Citadel sat the Forbidden Purple City, the ornate former residence of the Nguyen emperors, a UNESCO World Heritage Site by any reasonable measure even before UNESCO had gotten around to designating it one.

The city was split in half by the Perfume River. North of the river was the old city, the Citadel, dense residential blocks of single-story masonry homes with thick walls and narrow alleys. South of the river was the modern city—university buildings, government offices, the MACV compound housing around 200 American and Australian advisors.

On paper, Hue had fewer than 1,000 South Vietnamese troops on active duty in the greater metropolitan area the night the attack began. For a city of 140,000 people with walls built for exactly this situation, that number is remarkable.

The fighting in the southern city produced one of the most documented acts of valor in the battle.

On February 3, during the assault on the heavily fortified Treasury Building, Sergeant Alfredo Cantu Gonzalez’s Marines were caught in a brutal crossfire from a machine gun bunker. Gonzalez crawled to a dike, stood up under direct fire, and neutralized the bunker with hand grenades. He kept attacking. Over the following days he repeatedly exposed himself to direct fire to move wounded Marines and suppress enemy positions. He was killed on February 4.

He was 21 years old. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Urban warfare eats ammunition at a rate that has to be seen to be believed. The North Vietnamese offensive had cut Highway 1, the main road in from Da Nang. The Allied forces inside Hue were running out of supplies.

The Navy’s answer was the Perfume River. Task Force Clearwater, officially established February 24, ran a riverine supply chain from the coastal approaches up through the city, running convoys of landing craft under fire from PAVN positions on both banks. During February alone, enemy forces struck 44 of the smaller naval craft. A B-40 RPG hit one landing craft loaded with explosives and destroyed it outright. Seven sailors were killed. Forty-seven more were wounded.

The river convoys kept the battle alive. Without them, the infantry ran out of the ammunition needed to take the next building.

The battle for Hue had two simultaneous stories running, and the military fight was only one of them.

The Communist forces arrived with lists. Detailed dossiers compiled by intelligence networks that had been operating inside the city for years, identifying South Vietnamese government officials, ARVN officers, National Police, civil servants, teachers, professors, Catholic priests, Buddhist leaders, and foreign nationals. In the first days of the occupation, political cadres walked through the streets with loudspeakers, reading names and ordering people to report to local schools and pagodas for “re-education.”

The people who reported were taken to holding facilities, subjected to brief interrogations, marched out to sites in and around the city, and shot. Or worse. Forensic examination of the mass graves found many victims with hands bound behind them with wire. A significant number had not been shot at all.

The full scope of what happened only emerged in the aftermath, as search teams and families spent months finding the graves. Over 70 bodies came out of a schoolyard. Hundreds more were found on the sandy beaches south of the city. In September 1969, acting on the confessions of three North Vietnamese defectors, soldiers from the 101st Airborne located a mass grave at Da Mai Creek, roughly 10 miles south of Hue, where a death march had ended.

Final counts range from 2,800 to 6,000 executed. Total civilian deaths, including those caught in the combat, ran as high as 8,000. Of a city population of 140,000, approximately 116,000 were left homeless.

The Hue Massacre was not a breakdown of discipline. It was a policy.

By every tactical measure, the United States and South Vietnam won the Battle of Hue. They retook the city. They destroyed most of the attacking force. They held.

It didn’t matter.

The Johnson administration had spent the better part of 1967 telling the American public that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” General Westmoreland had gone on television to announce that the enemy was being attrited toward irrelevance. Then 10,000 North Vietnamese troops appeared inside an ancient walled city 90 miles from the nearest major American base, flying their flag from a tower visible for miles.

Walter Cronkite, then the most trusted news anchor in America, flew to Vietnam to see it himself. On February 27, 1968, he delivered a rare on-air editorial. He said the war appeared to be mired in stalemate. He said negotiation, not victory, was the rational way out. President Johnson reportedly told his press secretary after watching the broadcast: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

By the time the battle ended, 78 percent of the American public believed the U.S. was making no progress in the war. Johnson’s approval rating for his handling of the conflict had fallen to 26 percent. Within a month, he announced he would not seek re-election.

The North Vietnamese lost Hue. They won the war in the American living room.