After several futile and deadly days, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham would finally come up with a strategy to retake the city, block by block and building by building, in some of the most intense urban combat since World War II. Captain Chuck Meadows was ordered to lead his 160-marine Golf Company against thousands of enemy troops in the first attempt to reenter Huế later that day. The commanders in country and politicians in Washington refused to believe the size and scope of the Front's presence. By morning, all of Huế was in Front hands save for two small military outposts. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front troops descended from hidden camps and surged across the city of 140,000. Part military action and part popular uprising, the Tet Offensive included attacks across South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful would be the capture of Huế, the country's cultural capital. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke. The North Vietnamese had different ideas. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". His most ambitious work yet, Huế 1968, is the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam.īy January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Not since his New York Times best seller Black Hawk Down has Mark Bowden written a book about a battle.
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