WI US/South Vietnamese prepare for Tet?

Say that, in the weeks leading up to Tet, an NVA officer is captured, interrogated, and reveals the plans to launch a massive offensive on the Tet New Year. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese promptly organise to be ready for the assault.

How does this affect the Tet Offensive, and the Vietnam War as a whole? What sort of reprecussions are there in terms of the Home Front in the U.S.?
 
The Tet Offensive was bad in OTL. It pretty much wasted the Vietcong. Only the NVA was pretty much left. It was a political defeat.
 
I'm not saying the Tet Offensive was good OTL. I'm asking how it would differ if the U.S. and South Vietnamese had prepared for it.
 
I'm not saying the Tet Offensive was good OTL. I'm asking how it would differ if the U.S. and South Vietnamese had prepared for it.

by virtue of the fact that it happened at all it was a success. It was the perception that the war was far from over that led to a drop in support for the war effort in the US.

I think the only way you could really reduce its effects would be to have the US and South Vietnamese figure out ahead of time and take down a bunch of the VC cells so as to make the offensive collapse before it gets off the ground. Though I'm not sure how plausible such a large scale takedown by the US and SV would be though.
 
Then you would probably have more dedicated sweeps in the preceding weeks, Phoenix goes into overdrive, security is stepped up. You won't have the scenes of VC being mowed down in front of the Embassy gates in downtown Saigon for one thing, nor the image of Loan popping the spy (which was perfectly legal under Geneva, not that the media mentioned that inconvenient detail) in front of Eddie Fisher. Then you publish the entire plan in the media, which forces NV to call off their plans, somewhat like what happened when the German plans were seized in Belgium in 1940.

Politically: support for the war stabilizes and it turns into Iraq c. 2006 as was the case during Nixon's first term IOTL, but it is far too late to save LBJ's presidency. The presidential race will focus less on Vietnam than it will on domestic issues, which deals a severe blow to McCarthy's candidacy. Democrats will have a bitterly polarized knife fight between Humphrey and Kennedy (aka New Deal v. DLC, which riles the lefties), Nixon wins the GOP nomination. Kennedy is in a much better tactical position, for he can say "Nixon can deal with the symptoms of crime but not their causes, while Humphrey can deal with the causes but not the symptoms. I can do both." If he gets the nomination the Dems have a much better shot at winning, but if Humphrey wins he goes down hard when Nixon paints him as a LBJ proxy, which was largely the case IOTL.
 

Cook

Banned
The ARVN were prepared. Leave had been cancelled following intelligence indicating that a major offensive was imminent.

The only success was in Hue, there the NVA held the city for 25 days and massacred anyone of significance, city administrators, teachers, doctors etc.

The American public saw tv footage of marines firing into the US embassy compound, no realising that the compound was designed as a killing ground for any attacker trying to get into the compound and were told “It’s all over, we’re losing and this war is unwinnable…”
 

pnyckqx

Banned
Say that, in the weeks leading up to Tet, an NVA officer is captured, interrogated, and reveals the plans to launch a massive offensive on the Tet New Year. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese promptly organise to be ready for the assault.

How does this affect the Tet Offensive, and the Vietnam War as a whole? What sort of reprecussions are there in terms of the Home Front in the U.S.?
Tet was a military disaster for the Viet Cong OTL.

Much of your senerio did come to pass.

John Paul Vann had discovered intelligence and operational patterns that were indicative of a massive assault by the Viet Cong. He relayed that information to II Field Force Commander (and later COMUSMACV) Lt. Gen Fred C. Weyand.

Weyand's response was to get Westmoreland to allow Weyand to pull his forces back from search and destroy missions near the Cambodian Border. It was that pull back that destroyed the VC during Tet68.

The only victory for the Communists was political when Walter Cronkite spoke out against the war in light of the media distortions of Tet.
 
Say that, in the weeks leading up to Tet, an NVA officer is captured, interrogated, and reveals the plans to launch a massive offensive on the Tet New Year. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese promptly organise to be ready for the assault.

How does this affect the Tet Offensive, and the Vietnam War as a whole? What sort of reprecussions are there in terms of the Home Front in the U.S.?

By prepared, you mean SEATO broke up or flipped some or all of the VC cells operating in the cities, eliminating most of the Saigon carnage, etc... plus having ambush forces in place to trap and destroy/force a surrender of NVA forces attacking Khe Sahn and Hue, etc..., turning it into a full blown catastrophe, both operationally AND in the public perception?

If the SEATO forces just mop the floor with both the NVA and VC, U.S. public opinion would actually be strengthened. Rather than an obscured view of a victory, they'd be watching an ass kicking of the North live on national TV. With a clear end in sight, a major push to land a "knock out blow" might gain momentum in the U.S. and the north would be in rough shape to take it.

Won't save Johnson though.

Johnson simply would not do what was necessary to exploit such a victory: Linebacker style air campaigns to force the north to the table for a concrete peace.

He'd just stick with Rolling Thunder and if he runs, he loses when the north, even with a crippling military defeat in the south to swallow would still have absolutely no motivation to negotiate terms for a lasting peace.

Opens the door for a GOP challenger willing to go with a Linebacker/Linebacker 2 style campaign against the north to bring the conflict to an end.

Probably still get Nixon in '68. Linebacker in '69. Linbacker 2 in '70 if the north still won't negotiate and a formal peace between north and south Vietnam by '71 or '72.

There's way too many butterflies in the political realm to address here though if Tet gets squashed badly though. LBJ running for another term alone probably keeps RFK from running until '72 (thus butterflying his assassination, probably) at the earliest, with '76 being more likely.

That's just one possibility of many.
 
LBJ is not running for another term, he made the decision in the summer of 1967. It was to be originally dropped as a bombshell in that year's SOTU. Ironically RFK made the entry decision that same summer.
 

pnyckqx

Banned
Which is what I said but I used a colour people could read.
:p
By now it should be self evident to you that i'm not about to change just because you disapprove of dark green, or dark green and this particular font, or dark green and this particular size of the font or... Somebody else might not like what i changed into and eventually i'll have to draw a line. i chose to draw it here.

You can always chose to ignore any posts that i make, it will not offend me.


 
Then you would probably have more dedicated sweeps in the preceding weeks, Phoenix goes into overdrive, security is stepped up. You won't have the scenes of VC being mowed down in front of the Embassy gates in downtown Saigon for one thing,

thanks for letting me tell my favorite Vietnam story, the VC got into the Embassy as a matter of fact, one of them got into the ambassador's office, so the ambassador is in his inner office which has a window, but is on the 3rd floor, the head of the guard is under the window, the ambassador tells him whats going on, and tells him to give him a gun, the head of the guard throws his side arm straight up in the air, the ambassador grabs it and goes and greases the VC.
 
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