This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive

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This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive

4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 · rating details · 19 ratings · 5 reviews

Most of what Americans know about the Tet Offensive is wrong. The brief 1968 battle during the Vietnam conflict marked the dividing line between gradual progress towards an ill-defined victory, and slow descent to a humiliating defeat. The fact that the enemy was, in fact, handily defeated on the ground was immaterial; that they could mount an attack at all was deemed a mi...more

Hardcover, 364 pages

Published September 14th 2010 by Encounter Books (first published August 31st 2010)

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Apr 30, 2013 James Murphy rated it 5 of 5 stars

The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive at the Lunar New Year in 1968, in January and February of that year, marks a convenient benchmark in the war. It was roughly about the midpoint of our active involvement in the Vietnam War. And for many it seems a seismic event after which American military fortunes and public attitudes took a negative turn. But the latter is only one of the misperceptions James Robbins writes about in This Time We Win.

The sensational title is unfortunate. Robbins explains he u...more The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive at the Lunar New Year in 1968, in January and February of that year, marks a convenient benchmark in the war. It was roughly about the midpoint of our active involvement in the Vietnam War. And for many it seems a seismic event after which American military fortunes and public attitudes took a negative turn. But the latter is only one of the misperceptions James Robbins writes about in This Time We Win.

The sensational title is unfortunate. Robbins explains he uses it because he's frequently urged to set the war's record straight. The book he's written attempts to do that. It centers around the Communist Tet Offensive of early 1968 but his concerns are encompassing enough to cover the entire war and, indeed, to touch bases in Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's not a narrative history of the battle but an analysis which mostly addresses and tries to correct misperceptions. Perhaps the most glaring of those is that the U. S. and South Vietnamese allies were defeated. In fact, the opposite was the case. The NVA/NLF goal was to strike at many targets country-wide expecting the populace to rise up and overthrow the South Vietnamese government. As we know, an uprising was never even a realistic possibility. In the end the enemy was rather handily beaten back, and the NLF itself was destroyed as a field force and were never effective in large units again. He explains that the allies weren't surprised by the Tet attacks, as was widely reported. They'd known the enemy was going to attack during Tet and had even repositioned some units and made other preparations to meet the threat. Interestingly, Robbins writes that the plan of a popular uprising to overthrow the government and to force the U. S. out of the country was so outlandish and unrealistic that the Allies didn't quite believe it represented a true operational plan, and therein lies the surprise of the offensive. He addresses the widely-held belief that the Tet Offensive turned the American public against the war, brought about by the carnage and ferocity so visible on television, by negative press coverage which emphasized our having been taken by surprise and our desperate situation. Robbins shows through a detailed analysis of the polls that public opinion had shifted sharply against the war a year prior to Tet, in early 1967. In fact, as often happens during wartime, the fact of a resurgent and more dangerous enemy during Tet didn't discourage at all but made the public more belligerent and supportive of the war. In Robbins' analysis of the polls, public disapproval of the war came about as a result of dissatisfaction with the way Lyndon Johnson was conducting the war. They would have preferred a more aggressive and decisive administration.

Robbins is the first historian I've read who lays defeat in Vietnam on the president. Having blunted the offensive, having sharply defeated the enemy, indeed, destroyed him, despite the military's urgings to strike back boldly while the North was on their heels, to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and then push with major combat units into North Vietnam, Johnson elected to stay on the strategic defensive, urging and hoping for negotiations. He surrendered by bowing to the rising tide of negative public opinion and announcing he would not be a candidate for re-election.

That asymmetry of national goals is one of the key elements of the war. Hanoi fought to win, fought for regime change and defeat of the South while we fought for a stalemate. From Korea we took the lesson that successfully defending the status quo is victory. Johnson believed it. In the end we couldn't win. We sent no signals to Hanoi that we were going to defeat them, that they would suffer terribly as a society and a political entity if they persisted in their aggression in the South. We didn't threaten to destroy North Vietnam or occupy portions of it. We did not do those things we needed to do in order to win.

Following the news reports during those years you would think the U. S. was being defeated in the field. Robbins spends considerable time writing about the negative reporting engaged in by the press corps during the war, especially after Tet. His analysis of why and how the press got on a different page than the military and the administration makes for some of the most interesting reading in the book. It's well-argued and convincing.

In addressing Tet, the wider war, and the lessons learned, Robbins makes his claim that the old arguments about the war are too simplistic. This is perhaps the book which best gets to the heart of the entire American involvement in the war, even though its core is about a battle in 1968 lasting a couple of months. I think this history is wise in its assessments. I think it tells truths about Tet, about our country, about our leadership of the war, and about the nature of war itself. (less)

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Jul 05, 2012 Hahleq Hahleq rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Enjoyable and informative. Lots of details brought together to get better historical insight to the realities of not only the war, but the realities of the political and true social environment of the time.

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Mar 22, 2013 Samantha Gluck rated it 5 of 5 stars

An intelligent, insightful look at our country's involvement in the Vietnam War and the meddling that caused us to leave the job unfinished. This Time We Win is how it should have been.

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Aug 05, 2011 Urey Patrick added it

The true history, devoid of conventional wisdom and political agenda, is beginning to be written - this is an excellent and invaluable contribution to the historical record.

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Jan 11, 2012 Greyweather rated it 5 of 5 stars

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A wonderfully eye-opening account of the history that led up to the battle, the facts of the event, and a detailed analysis of what resulted.

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Jun 01, 2013 Cornelius Blignaut rated it 4 of 5 stars

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