The Failure Of The Easter Offensive In Vietnam

The Easter Offensive By 1972, President Nixon had been in office for four years, dealing with the inherited quagmire that was Vietnam. With both sides tiring of the seemingly endless cycle of successes and setbacks, the North Vietnamese military decided to mount an invasion into South Vietnam commencing on Good Friday of that year. This was done in order to better their position at the Paris Peace accords, which would be closing soon, by gaining control of more land and crippling Nixon’s political power. This essay will address how even after more than two decades at war, the North Vietnamese and the American/South Vietnamese forces alike drastically underestimated their opponents, which resulted in the bloodiest recorded engagement of the war and an ultimately losing outcome
Even though the increase of forces north of the demilitarized zone and movement of tank battalions through Laos and Cambodia was known, it was brushed off by military leaders as insignificant and an impending invasion as “not possible” (Andrade 62). The Southern commander of I Corps was so confident in this assessment that no preparations were made to stave off an attack, and no air support was on hand during a planned rotation of two of the 3rd ARVN’s regiments that inconveniently took place during the early days of April. Yet invade the North did, with startling triumphs in the first couple weeks. In a three-pronged attack, the North Vietnamese army overran the defences around Quang Tri, Kontum, and An Loc. To prevent the complete loss of the cities, Nguyen Van Thieu “was forced to commit most of his reserves to defend the threatened towns” and in doing so allowed “the NLF to take the offensive in the Mekong delta and in the heavily populated regions around Saigon” (Herring