Battlefield Vietnam (1998) Discovery Channel

Countdown to Tet (1/6)

Review by Amazon.com

By Charles Ashbacher (cashbacher@yahoo.com) Marion, Iowa USA - TOP 50 REVIEWER

The major offensive in the Vietnamese war known as the Tet offensive was a victory disguised as a defeat for the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces. It took place in the early part of 1968, after what appeared to be a string of American successes. The mood among the American political and military commanders was that the war was being won and the opposition was reaching the point where they could no longer sustain their military activity. It was a time when, "the light at the end of the tunnel" seemed to be all too true, an optimism, albeit false that was almost pervasive.

In terms of losses on the battlefield, the Tet offensive was a major defeat for the North Vietnamese and Vietcong units. In particular, the Vietcong forces in the south suffered losses that were so severe that they were significant years later when Vietnam was united. With the communist leadership in the south essentially destroyed, the vacuum was filled by people from the north, which led to strains in the social structure of the united country.

However, the shock of seeing battles in the streets of Saigon and even in the American embassy was so great in the United States that support for the war among the American public plummeted. It, more than anything else, galvanized and coalesced the anti-war movement into a force that drove Lyndon Johnson from office.

This tape is not about the actual battles themselves, as the title suggests, it is about the prelude to the offensive from both sides. All aspects are covered, from the morale in the South Vietnamese forces to the thinking of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese leadership to the statements of the political and military officials in the United States. In retrospect, it is astonishing that the preparations for such a major offensive in the entire area of South Vietnam could have been so well hidden. In many ways, the level of surprise was greater than that of Pearl Harbor, for in that situation only a fleet needed to move undetected in a vast ocean in an era before sophisticated reconnaissance. However, in the case of the preparation for the Tet offensive, enormous numbers of people and supplies had to be secretly transported to countless locations across an entire country.

If you watch this tape with that in mind, then it should be clear to you why the United States could never have "won" the war in Vietnam. The Army of South Vietnam was riddled with corruption and was a weak force and the Vietcong was capable of great discipline and possessed a level of determination no other force in the conflict possessed. When arrayed against that, no amount of firepower that could be employed by the United States could ever stamp out such a fire.

Features twelve episodes exploring the events of the Vietnam conflict from a military perspective. Twelve Classic One-Hour Episodes From The Acclaimed TV Series Devoted To Vietnam's Key Battles. Judgement of the Vietnam war has been clouded by issues which occurred away from Vietnam: the campus protests, the controversial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, the agonised arguments over MIAs and POWs and the tormented veterans of that war. For so many people, the Vietnam War brings to mind events in America, not in Vietnam. When thoughts turn to Vietnam, attention focuses on a young girl burned by the napalm, piles of bodies at My Lai and the summary execution of a Viet Cong insurgent on the streets of Saigon. Those events are important, but they do not shed a great deal of light on the military realities of the conflict. Battlefield Series Three: Vietnam was the first definitive documentary of the Vietnam War as a war. It will intentionally avoid the subsidiary issues which cloud judgement of the war, so that a clearer picture of what actually happened on the ground and in the air will emerge.