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The Military Thread
- Thread starter The Human Q-Tip
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An abject lesson in how not to fight with armor.
Germany’s Leopard 2 Tank Was Considered One of the Best (Until It Went to Syria)
Germany’s Leopard 2 main battle tank has a reputation as one of the finest in the world, competing for that distinction with proven designs such as the American M1 Abrams and the British Challenger 2. However, that reputation for nigh-invincibility has faced setbacks on Syrian battlefields, and placed Berlin in a uniquely awkward national-level dispute with Turkey, its fellow NATO member.
Ankara had offered to release a German political prisoner in exchange for Germany upgrading the Turkish Army’s older-model Leopard 2A4 tank, which had proven embarrassingly vulnerable in combat. However, on January 24, public outrage over reports that Turkey was using its Leopard 2s to kill Kurdish fighters in the Syrian enclaves of Afrin and Manbij forced Berlin to freeze the hostage-for-tanks deal.
The Leopard 2 is often compared to its near contemporary, the M1 Abrams: in truth the two designs share broadly similar characteristics, including a scale-tipping weight of well over sixty tons of advanced composite armor, 1,500 horsepower engines allowing speeds over forty miles per hour and, for certain models, the same forty-four-caliber 120-millimeter main gun produced by Rheinmetall.
Both types can easily destroy most Russian-built tanks at medium and long ranges, at which they are unlikely to be penetrated by return fire from standard 125-millimeter guns. Furthermore, they have better sights with superior thermal imagers and magnification, that make them more likely to detect and hit the enemy first—historically, an even greater determinant of the victor in armored warfare than sheer firepower. A Greek trial found that moving Leopard 2s and Abramses hit a 2.3-meter target nineteen and twenty times out of twenty, respectively, while a Soviet T-80 scored only eleven hits.
The modest differences between the two Western tanks reveal different national philosophies. The Abrams has a noisy 1,500-horsepower gas-guzzling turbine, which starts up more rapidly, while the Leopard 2’s diesel motor grants it greater range before refueling. The Abrams has achieved some of its extraordinary offensive and defensive capabilities through use of depleted uranium ammunition and armor packages—technologies politically unacceptable to the Germans. Therefore, later models of the Leopard 2A6 now mount a higher-velocity fifty-five-caliber gun to make up the difference in penetrating power, while the 2A5 Leopard introduced an extra wedge of spaced armor on the turret to better absorb enemy fire.
German scruples also extend to arms exports, with Berlin imposing more extensive restrictions on which countries it is willing to sell weapons to—at least in comparison to France, the United States or Russia. While the Leopard 2 is in service with eighteen countries, including many NATO members, a lucrative Saudi bid for between four hundred and eight hundred Leopard 2s was rejected by Berlin because of the Middle Eastern country’s human-rights records, and its bloody war in Yemen in particular. The Saudis instead ordered additional Abramses to their fleet of around four hundred.
This bring us to Turkey, a NATO country with which Berlin has important historical and economic ties, but which also has had bouts of military government and waged a controversial counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists for decades. In the early 2000s, under a more favorable political climate, Berlin sold 354 of its retired Leopard 2A4 tanks to Ankara. These represented a major upgrade over the less well protected M60 Patton tanks that make up the bulk of Turkey’s armored forces.
However, the rumor has long persisted that Berlin agreed to the sale under the condition that the German tanks not be used in Turkey’s counterinsurgency operations against the Kurds. Whether such an understanding ever existed is hotly contested, but the fact remains that the Leopard 2 was kept well away from the Kurdish conflict and instead deployed in northern Turkey, opposite Russia.
However, in the fall of 2016, Turkish Leopard 2s of the Second Armored Brigade finally deployed to the Syrian border to support Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkey’s intervention against ISIS. Prior to the Leopard’s arrival, around a dozen Turkish Patton tanks were destroyed by both ISIS and Kurdish missiles. Turkish defense commentators expressed the hope that the tougher Leopard would fare better.
The 2A4 model was the last of the Cold War–era Leopard 2s, which were designed to fight in relatively concentrated units in a fast-paced defensive war against Soviet tank columns, not to survive IEDs and missiles fired by ambushing insurgents in long-term counterinsurgency campaigns where every single loss was a political issue. The 2A4 retains an older boxy turret configurations which affords less protection from modern antitank missiles, especially to the generally more vulnerable rear and side armor, which is a bigger problem in a counterinsurgency environment, where an attack may come from any direction.
This was shockingly illustrated in December 2016 when evidence emerged that numerous Leopard 2s had been destroyed in intense fighting over ISIS-held Al-Bab—a fight that Turkish military leaders described as a “trauma,” according to Der Spiegel. A document published online listed ISIS as apparently having destroyed tenof the supposedly invincible Leopard 2s; five reportedly by antitank missiles, two by mines or IEDs, one to rocket or mortar fire, and the others to more ambiguous causes.
These photos confirm the destruction of at least eight. One shows a Leopard 2 apparently knocked out by a suicide VBIED—an armored kamikaze truck packed with explosives. Another had its turret blown clean off. Three Leopard wrecks can be seen around the same hospital near Al-Bab, along with several other Turkish armored vehicles. It appears the vehicles were mostly struck the more lightly protected belly and side armor by IEDs and AT-7 Metis and AT-5 Konkurs antitank missiles.
Undoubtedly, the manner in which the Turkish Army employed the German tanks likely contributed to the losses. Rather than using them in a combined arms force alongside mutually supporting infantry, they were deployed to the rear as long-range fire-support weapons while Turkish-allied Syrian militias stiffened with Turkish special forces led the assaults. Isolated on exposed firing positions without adequate nearby infantry to form a good defensive perimeter, the Turkish Leopards were vulnerable to ambushes. The same poor tactics have led to the loss of numerous Saudi Abrams tanks in Yemen, as you can see in this video.
By contrast, more modern Leopard 2s have seen quite a bit of action in Afghanistan combating Taliban insurgents in the service of the Canadian 2A6Ms (with enhanced protection against mines and even floating “safety seats”) and Danish 2A5s. Though a few were damaged by mines, all were put back into service, though a Danish Leopard 2 crew member was mortally injured by an IED attack in 2008. In return, the tanks were praised by field commanders for their mobility and providing accurate and timely fire support during major combat operations in southern Afghanistan.
In 2017, Germany began rebuilding its tank fleet, building an even beefier Leopard 2A7V model more likely to survive in a counterinsurgency environment. Now Ankara is pressing Berlin to upgrade the defense on its Leopard 2 tanks, especially as the domestically produced Altay tank has been repeatedly delayed.
The Turkish military not only wants additional belly armor to protect against IEDs, but the addition of an Active Protection System (APS) that can detect incoming missiles and their point of origin, and jam or even shoot them down. The U.S. Army recently authorized the installation of Israeli Trophy APS on a brigade of M1 Abrams tanks, a type that has proven effective in combat. Meanwhile, Leopard 2 manufacturer Rheinmetall has unveiled its own ADATS APS, which supposedly poses a lesser risk of harming friendly troops with its defensive countermeasure missiles.
However, German-Turkish relations deteriorated sharply, especially after Erdogan initiated a prolonged crackdown on thousands of supposed conspirators after a failed military coup attempt in August 2016. In February 2017, German-Turkish dual-citizen Deniz Yücel, a correspondent for periodical Die Welt, was arrested by Turkish authorities, ostensibly for being a pro-Kurdish spy. His detention caused outrage in Germany.
Ankara pointedly let it be known that if a Leopard 2 upgrade were allowed to proceed, Yücel would be released back to Germany. Though Berlin publicly insisted it would never agree to such a quid pro quo, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel quietly began moving towards authorizing the upgrade in a bid to improve relations in the face of what looks suspiciously like tank-based blackmail. Gabriel presented the deal as a measure to protect Turkish soldiers’ lives from ISIS.
However, in mid-January 2018, Turkey launched an offensive against the Kurdish enclaves of Afrin and Manbij in northwestern Syria. The attack was precipitated generally by Turkish fears that effective Kurdish control of the Syrian border would lead to a de facto state that would expand into Turkish territory, and proximately by an announcement by the Pentagon that it was recruiting the Kurds to form a “border security force” to continue the fight against ISIS.
However, photos on social media soon emerged showing that Leopard 2 tanks were being employed to blast Kurdish positions in Afrin, where there have several dozen civilian casualties have been reported. Furthermore, on January 21, the Kurdish YPG published a YouTube video depicting a Turkish Leopard 2 being struck by a Konkurs antitank missiles. However, it is not possible to tell if the tank was knocked out; the missile may have struck the Leopard 2’s front armor, which is rated as equivalent to 590 to 690 millimeters of rolled homogenous armor on the 2A4, while the two types of Konkurs missiles can penetrate six or eight hundred millimeters of RHA.
In any event, parliamentarians both from German left-wing parties and Merkel’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union reacted with outrage, with a member of the latter describing the Turkish offensive as a violation of international law. On January 25, the Merkel administration was forced to announce that an upgrade to the Leopard 2 was off the table, at least for now. Ankara views the deal as merely postponed, and cagey rhetoric from Berlin suggests it may return to the deal at a more politically opportune time.
@jking948
Germany’s Leopard 2 Tank Was Considered One of the Best (Until It Went to Syria)
Germany’s Leopard 2 main battle tank has a reputation as one of the finest in the world, competing for that distinction with proven designs such as the American M1 Abrams and the British Challenger 2. However, that reputation for nigh-invincibility has faced setbacks on Syrian battlefields, and placed Berlin in a uniquely awkward national-level dispute with Turkey, its fellow NATO member.
Ankara had offered to release a German political prisoner in exchange for Germany upgrading the Turkish Army’s older-model Leopard 2A4 tank, which had proven embarrassingly vulnerable in combat. However, on January 24, public outrage over reports that Turkey was using its Leopard 2s to kill Kurdish fighters in the Syrian enclaves of Afrin and Manbij forced Berlin to freeze the hostage-for-tanks deal.
The Leopard 2 is often compared to its near contemporary, the M1 Abrams: in truth the two designs share broadly similar characteristics, including a scale-tipping weight of well over sixty tons of advanced composite armor, 1,500 horsepower engines allowing speeds over forty miles per hour and, for certain models, the same forty-four-caliber 120-millimeter main gun produced by Rheinmetall.
Both types can easily destroy most Russian-built tanks at medium and long ranges, at which they are unlikely to be penetrated by return fire from standard 125-millimeter guns. Furthermore, they have better sights with superior thermal imagers and magnification, that make them more likely to detect and hit the enemy first—historically, an even greater determinant of the victor in armored warfare than sheer firepower. A Greek trial found that moving Leopard 2s and Abramses hit a 2.3-meter target nineteen and twenty times out of twenty, respectively, while a Soviet T-80 scored only eleven hits.
The modest differences between the two Western tanks reveal different national philosophies. The Abrams has a noisy 1,500-horsepower gas-guzzling turbine, which starts up more rapidly, while the Leopard 2’s diesel motor grants it greater range before refueling. The Abrams has achieved some of its extraordinary offensive and defensive capabilities through use of depleted uranium ammunition and armor packages—technologies politically unacceptable to the Germans. Therefore, later models of the Leopard 2A6 now mount a higher-velocity fifty-five-caliber gun to make up the difference in penetrating power, while the 2A5 Leopard introduced an extra wedge of spaced armor on the turret to better absorb enemy fire.
German scruples also extend to arms exports, with Berlin imposing more extensive restrictions on which countries it is willing to sell weapons to—at least in comparison to France, the United States or Russia. While the Leopard 2 is in service with eighteen countries, including many NATO members, a lucrative Saudi bid for between four hundred and eight hundred Leopard 2s was rejected by Berlin because of the Middle Eastern country’s human-rights records, and its bloody war in Yemen in particular. The Saudis instead ordered additional Abramses to their fleet of around four hundred.
This bring us to Turkey, a NATO country with which Berlin has important historical and economic ties, but which also has had bouts of military government and waged a controversial counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists for decades. In the early 2000s, under a more favorable political climate, Berlin sold 354 of its retired Leopard 2A4 tanks to Ankara. These represented a major upgrade over the less well protected M60 Patton tanks that make up the bulk of Turkey’s armored forces.
However, the rumor has long persisted that Berlin agreed to the sale under the condition that the German tanks not be used in Turkey’s counterinsurgency operations against the Kurds. Whether such an understanding ever existed is hotly contested, but the fact remains that the Leopard 2 was kept well away from the Kurdish conflict and instead deployed in northern Turkey, opposite Russia.
However, in the fall of 2016, Turkish Leopard 2s of the Second Armored Brigade finally deployed to the Syrian border to support Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkey’s intervention against ISIS. Prior to the Leopard’s arrival, around a dozen Turkish Patton tanks were destroyed by both ISIS and Kurdish missiles. Turkish defense commentators expressed the hope that the tougher Leopard would fare better.
The 2A4 model was the last of the Cold War–era Leopard 2s, which were designed to fight in relatively concentrated units in a fast-paced defensive war against Soviet tank columns, not to survive IEDs and missiles fired by ambushing insurgents in long-term counterinsurgency campaigns where every single loss was a political issue. The 2A4 retains an older boxy turret configurations which affords less protection from modern antitank missiles, especially to the generally more vulnerable rear and side armor, which is a bigger problem in a counterinsurgency environment, where an attack may come from any direction.
This was shockingly illustrated in December 2016 when evidence emerged that numerous Leopard 2s had been destroyed in intense fighting over ISIS-held Al-Bab—a fight that Turkish military leaders described as a “trauma,” according to Der Spiegel. A document published online listed ISIS as apparently having destroyed tenof the supposedly invincible Leopard 2s; five reportedly by antitank missiles, two by mines or IEDs, one to rocket or mortar fire, and the others to more ambiguous causes.
These photos confirm the destruction of at least eight. One shows a Leopard 2 apparently knocked out by a suicide VBIED—an armored kamikaze truck packed with explosives. Another had its turret blown clean off. Three Leopard wrecks can be seen around the same hospital near Al-Bab, along with several other Turkish armored vehicles. It appears the vehicles were mostly struck the more lightly protected belly and side armor by IEDs and AT-7 Metis and AT-5 Konkurs antitank missiles.
Undoubtedly, the manner in which the Turkish Army employed the German tanks likely contributed to the losses. Rather than using them in a combined arms force alongside mutually supporting infantry, they were deployed to the rear as long-range fire-support weapons while Turkish-allied Syrian militias stiffened with Turkish special forces led the assaults. Isolated on exposed firing positions without adequate nearby infantry to form a good defensive perimeter, the Turkish Leopards were vulnerable to ambushes. The same poor tactics have led to the loss of numerous Saudi Abrams tanks in Yemen, as you can see in this video.
By contrast, more modern Leopard 2s have seen quite a bit of action in Afghanistan combating Taliban insurgents in the service of the Canadian 2A6Ms (with enhanced protection against mines and even floating “safety seats”) and Danish 2A5s. Though a few were damaged by mines, all were put back into service, though a Danish Leopard 2 crew member was mortally injured by an IED attack in 2008. In return, the tanks were praised by field commanders for their mobility and providing accurate and timely fire support during major combat operations in southern Afghanistan.
In 2017, Germany began rebuilding its tank fleet, building an even beefier Leopard 2A7V model more likely to survive in a counterinsurgency environment. Now Ankara is pressing Berlin to upgrade the defense on its Leopard 2 tanks, especially as the domestically produced Altay tank has been repeatedly delayed.
The Turkish military not only wants additional belly armor to protect against IEDs, but the addition of an Active Protection System (APS) that can detect incoming missiles and their point of origin, and jam or even shoot them down. The U.S. Army recently authorized the installation of Israeli Trophy APS on a brigade of M1 Abrams tanks, a type that has proven effective in combat. Meanwhile, Leopard 2 manufacturer Rheinmetall has unveiled its own ADATS APS, which supposedly poses a lesser risk of harming friendly troops with its defensive countermeasure missiles.
However, German-Turkish relations deteriorated sharply, especially after Erdogan initiated a prolonged crackdown on thousands of supposed conspirators after a failed military coup attempt in August 2016. In February 2017, German-Turkish dual-citizen Deniz Yücel, a correspondent for periodical Die Welt, was arrested by Turkish authorities, ostensibly for being a pro-Kurdish spy. His detention caused outrage in Germany.
Ankara pointedly let it be known that if a Leopard 2 upgrade were allowed to proceed, Yücel would be released back to Germany. Though Berlin publicly insisted it would never agree to such a quid pro quo, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel quietly began moving towards authorizing the upgrade in a bid to improve relations in the face of what looks suspiciously like tank-based blackmail. Gabriel presented the deal as a measure to protect Turkish soldiers’ lives from ISIS.
However, in mid-January 2018, Turkey launched an offensive against the Kurdish enclaves of Afrin and Manbij in northwestern Syria. The attack was precipitated generally by Turkish fears that effective Kurdish control of the Syrian border would lead to a de facto state that would expand into Turkish territory, and proximately by an announcement by the Pentagon that it was recruiting the Kurds to form a “border security force” to continue the fight against ISIS.
However, photos on social media soon emerged showing that Leopard 2 tanks were being employed to blast Kurdish positions in Afrin, where there have several dozen civilian casualties have been reported. Furthermore, on January 21, the Kurdish YPG published a YouTube video depicting a Turkish Leopard 2 being struck by a Konkurs antitank missiles. However, it is not possible to tell if the tank was knocked out; the missile may have struck the Leopard 2’s front armor, which is rated as equivalent to 590 to 690 millimeters of rolled homogenous armor on the 2A4, while the two types of Konkurs missiles can penetrate six or eight hundred millimeters of RHA.
In any event, parliamentarians both from German left-wing parties and Merkel’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union reacted with outrage, with a member of the latter describing the Turkish offensive as a violation of international law. On January 25, the Merkel administration was forced to announce that an upgrade to the Leopard 2 was off the table, at least for now. Ankara views the deal as merely postponed, and cagey rhetoric from Berlin suggests it may return to the deal at a more politically opportune time.
@jking948
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Nope.
Turkey has gotten away with more genocide and ethnic cleansing than any other nation because of NATO and their control of the Straits.
They were murdering and displacing Greeks and Armenians as recently as the early 2000s.
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But Prince, a young Army officer fighting at Hue, said Westmoreland had it backward: Khe Sanh was the diversion. "Westmoreland and his staff, the people who were advising him, became fixated on Khe Sanh," says Prince, "to the point where they simply were not capable of entertaining other information." Others were willing to entertain the importance of the Tet Offensive. Among them was Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor who arrived in Hue and quickly realized he had been deceived by his official sources back in Washington.
What Cronkite saw on the ground led him to go on TV and say it was time for the U.S. to end the war. "The only rational way out then," Cronkite said to a national audience, "will be to negotiate not as victims but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could." Johnson is said to have told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Something US policy makers still struggle with is that it takes more than winning battles to emerge victorious from a conflict. Sometimes you can't kill your way out of a situation. One would think after 16 years in Afghanistan that we might decide to change things up.
Military Victory But Political Defeat: The Tet Offensive 50 Years Later
A unit of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, rests alongside a battered wall of Hue's imperial palace after a battle for the citadel in February 1968, during the Tet Offensive.
Looking back a half-century, to when they were young officers, their memories of the Battle of Hue are still fresh.
"What I saw was probably the most intense ground fighting on a sustained basis over several days of any other period during the war," says Howard Prince, an Army captain who worked with South Vietnamese forces. "We were under fire, under heavy fire," says Jim Coolican, a Marine captain. Mike Downs, another Marine captain, recalls, "We didn't know where the enemy was, in which direction even."
The enemy forces were everywhere. Inside houses and tunnels and in the sewer system, and they captured the citadel, a massive castlelike expanse in this city that was once the imperial capital, north of Saigon. It was the bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive and also the entire war — and it all took American officials completely by surprise, says author Mark Bowden.
"You had the incredible rose-colored reports coming from Gen. William Westmoreland, who was the American commander in Vietnam," says Bowden, who wrote the recent book Hue 1968. "[He was] assuring the American people that the end was near, that the enemy was really only capable of small kinds of ambushes in the far reaches of the country."
Two U.S. military policemen aid a wounded fellow MP during fighting in the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive. A Viet Cong suicide squad seized control of part of the compound and held it for about six hours before being killed or captured.
But then came Tet. North Vietnamese troops and their Viet Cong allies swept throughout cities and towns, into military bases, even breaching the walls of the U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon. Back in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson called his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and asked for an explanation. McNamara told him that the American people would realize that the enemy forces were stronger than they had been told, that the Pentagon was searching for targets but the Vietnamese enemies were still a "substantial force." A substantial force. But just six weeks earlier, a top White House official had told New York Times reporter Gene Roberts the war was already over.
Roberts was heading off to Vietnam, so national security adviser Walt Rostow gave him a story idea. He told Roberts about a new U.S. agricultural program, Roberts recalls, "which would double the rice yields in Vietnam and would win the peace now that Americans had won the war."
Keeping his head low against North Vietnamese snipers, a medical corpsman scurries to help a U.S. Marine in Hue street fighting during the Tet Offensive.
The Battle for Hue
Far from winning, the Americans were barely holding on in Hue. Roberts saw terrified refugees, wounded Marines and heavy gunfire. His first story said the Marines controlled just two blocks of the city. Reinforcements were needed — not just troops but artillery. That was slow in coming. Coolican, the Marine captain, said his own military superiors didn't understand how desperate the Marines were. The Americans were badly outnumbered. "The reaction we got — and I'm paraphrasing now, but the reaction we got was that we were overreacting. It isn't that bad," remembers Coolican. More reporters showed up at Hue, including some from NBC. The pictures showed a desperate scene, talking to a Marine under fire who said he just wanted to go home.
Still, Westmoreland downplayed the situation, telling reporters the real enemy objective was a large and remote Marine base at Khe Sanh. "In my opinion," Westmoreland told reporters, "this is diversionary to [the enemy's] main effort, which he had planned to take place in Quang Tri Province, from Laos toward Khe Sanh and across the demilitarized zone."
A U.S. Marine carries a 155 mm shell at Khe Sanh in January 1968. North Vietnamese troops attacked the remote outpost to serve as a diversion in the leadup to the Tet Offensive.
But Prince, a young Army officer fighting at Hue, said Westmoreland had it backward: Khe Sanh was the diversion. "Westmoreland and his staff, the people who were advising him, became fixated on Khe Sanh," says Prince, "to the point where they simply were not capable of entertaining other information." Others were willing to entertain the importance of the Tet Offensive. Among them was Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor who arrived in Hue and quickly realized he had been deceived by his official sources back in Washington.
What Cronkite saw on the ground led him to go on TV and say it was time for the U.S. to end the war. "The only rational way out then," Cronkite said to a national audience, "will be to negotiate not as victims but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could." Johnson is said to have told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." And maybe more than that. Bowden says Tet spurred not just a lack of trust about Vietnam policy but a more general disregard for government officials that continues to this day.
"On the heels of Hue," says Bowden, "on the heels of Tet then came the Pentagon Papers, came the Watergate break-in, a series of kind of catastrophic events in terms of the public's perception of its own leaders." A month after the Tet Offensive, Johnson went on TV and said he would press for peace, stop the bombing in North Vietnam. Then, he dropped his own bombshell: He would not seek another term as president.
Members of Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, raise the U.S. flag on the south wall of the citadel in Hue after weeks of fierce fighting and heavy casualties.
Prince watched it from his hospital bed in Texas, recovering from wounds he suffered at Hue. "I was ready to throw a bedpan at the television set," he recalls, "because to me what that was was an admission of defeat and a denial of the sacrifice that all those young men had made and that I had made."
The Tet Offensive was an American military victory, says Prince. And Johnson should have taken the fight to North Vietnam and gone after the enemy's safe havens in Laos and Cambodia. "We're doing the same thing today with the Taliban in Afghanistan," Prince says. "We're allowing you to run over into the borderlands in Pakistan and do the same thing."
Bowden agrees that even today, there are military parallels to the Vietnam War. "We often find ourselves mired in situations where we don't have the cultural understanding, we don't have the historical understanding," Bowden says. "We can't gain the support of the people whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it stems from a kind of an arrogance and a general ignorance."
For his part, Downs, another young Marine officer, will say only that he and his men did their best. This week Downs will remember those from Fox Company who were killed or wounded. Their names are carefully written in a small notebook he carried during those days a half-century ago. And he begins to read the names. "The killed were, I think he was a [private first class], Stanley Murdock. D.I. Collins. A corpsman by the name of Gosselin, Doc Gosselin. Cristobal Figueroa-Perez."
And Downs says they were killed in just the first few hours of the Battle of Hue, which would last for weeks. During that time the casualty rate for his company reached around 60 percent killed or wounded, a rate similar to the D-Day landings at Normandy during World War II.
What Cronkite saw on the ground led him to go on TV and say it was time for the U.S. to end the war. "The only rational way out then," Cronkite said to a national audience, "will be to negotiate not as victims but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could." Johnson is said to have told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Something US policy makers still struggle with is that it takes more than winning battles to emerge victorious from a conflict. Sometimes you can't kill your way out of a situation. One would think after 16 years in Afghanistan that we might decide to change things up.
Military Victory But Political Defeat: The Tet Offensive 50 Years Later
A unit of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, rests alongside a battered wall of Hue's imperial palace after a battle for the citadel in February 1968, during the Tet Offensive.
Looking back a half-century, to when they were young officers, their memories of the Battle of Hue are still fresh.
"What I saw was probably the most intense ground fighting on a sustained basis over several days of any other period during the war," says Howard Prince, an Army captain who worked with South Vietnamese forces. "We were under fire, under heavy fire," says Jim Coolican, a Marine captain. Mike Downs, another Marine captain, recalls, "We didn't know where the enemy was, in which direction even."
The enemy forces were everywhere. Inside houses and tunnels and in the sewer system, and they captured the citadel, a massive castlelike expanse in this city that was once the imperial capital, north of Saigon. It was the bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive and also the entire war — and it all took American officials completely by surprise, says author Mark Bowden.
"You had the incredible rose-colored reports coming from Gen. William Westmoreland, who was the American commander in Vietnam," says Bowden, who wrote the recent book Hue 1968. "[He was] assuring the American people that the end was near, that the enemy was really only capable of small kinds of ambushes in the far reaches of the country."
Two U.S. military policemen aid a wounded fellow MP during fighting in the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive. A Viet Cong suicide squad seized control of part of the compound and held it for about six hours before being killed or captured.
But then came Tet. North Vietnamese troops and their Viet Cong allies swept throughout cities and towns, into military bases, even breaching the walls of the U.S. Embassy grounds in Saigon. Back in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson called his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and asked for an explanation. McNamara told him that the American people would realize that the enemy forces were stronger than they had been told, that the Pentagon was searching for targets but the Vietnamese enemies were still a "substantial force." A substantial force. But just six weeks earlier, a top White House official had told New York Times reporter Gene Roberts the war was already over.
Roberts was heading off to Vietnam, so national security adviser Walt Rostow gave him a story idea. He told Roberts about a new U.S. agricultural program, Roberts recalls, "which would double the rice yields in Vietnam and would win the peace now that Americans had won the war."
Keeping his head low against North Vietnamese snipers, a medical corpsman scurries to help a U.S. Marine in Hue street fighting during the Tet Offensive.
The Battle for Hue
Far from winning, the Americans were barely holding on in Hue. Roberts saw terrified refugees, wounded Marines and heavy gunfire. His first story said the Marines controlled just two blocks of the city. Reinforcements were needed — not just troops but artillery. That was slow in coming. Coolican, the Marine captain, said his own military superiors didn't understand how desperate the Marines were. The Americans were badly outnumbered. "The reaction we got — and I'm paraphrasing now, but the reaction we got was that we were overreacting. It isn't that bad," remembers Coolican. More reporters showed up at Hue, including some from NBC. The pictures showed a desperate scene, talking to a Marine under fire who said he just wanted to go home.
Still, Westmoreland downplayed the situation, telling reporters the real enemy objective was a large and remote Marine base at Khe Sanh. "In my opinion," Westmoreland told reporters, "this is diversionary to [the enemy's] main effort, which he had planned to take place in Quang Tri Province, from Laos toward Khe Sanh and across the demilitarized zone."
A U.S. Marine carries a 155 mm shell at Khe Sanh in January 1968. North Vietnamese troops attacked the remote outpost to serve as a diversion in the leadup to the Tet Offensive.
But Prince, a young Army officer fighting at Hue, said Westmoreland had it backward: Khe Sanh was the diversion. "Westmoreland and his staff, the people who were advising him, became fixated on Khe Sanh," says Prince, "to the point where they simply were not capable of entertaining other information." Others were willing to entertain the importance of the Tet Offensive. Among them was Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor who arrived in Hue and quickly realized he had been deceived by his official sources back in Washington.
What Cronkite saw on the ground led him to go on TV and say it was time for the U.S. to end the war. "The only rational way out then," Cronkite said to a national audience, "will be to negotiate not as victims but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could." Johnson is said to have told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." And maybe more than that. Bowden says Tet spurred not just a lack of trust about Vietnam policy but a more general disregard for government officials that continues to this day.
"On the heels of Hue," says Bowden, "on the heels of Tet then came the Pentagon Papers, came the Watergate break-in, a series of kind of catastrophic events in terms of the public's perception of its own leaders." A month after the Tet Offensive, Johnson went on TV and said he would press for peace, stop the bombing in North Vietnam. Then, he dropped his own bombshell: He would not seek another term as president.
Members of Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, raise the U.S. flag on the south wall of the citadel in Hue after weeks of fierce fighting and heavy casualties.
Prince watched it from his hospital bed in Texas, recovering from wounds he suffered at Hue. "I was ready to throw a bedpan at the television set," he recalls, "because to me what that was was an admission of defeat and a denial of the sacrifice that all those young men had made and that I had made."
The Tet Offensive was an American military victory, says Prince. And Johnson should have taken the fight to North Vietnam and gone after the enemy's safe havens in Laos and Cambodia. "We're doing the same thing today with the Taliban in Afghanistan," Prince says. "We're allowing you to run over into the borderlands in Pakistan and do the same thing."
Bowden agrees that even today, there are military parallels to the Vietnam War. "We often find ourselves mired in situations where we don't have the cultural understanding, we don't have the historical understanding," Bowden says. "We can't gain the support of the people whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it stems from a kind of an arrogance and a general ignorance."
For his part, Downs, another young Marine officer, will say only that he and his men did their best. This week Downs will remember those from Fox Company who were killed or wounded. Their names are carefully written in a small notebook he carried during those days a half-century ago. And he begins to read the names. "The killed were, I think he was a [private first class], Stanley Murdock. D.I. Collins. A corpsman by the name of Gosselin, Doc Gosselin. Cristobal Figueroa-Perez."
And Downs says they were killed in just the first few hours of the Battle of Hue, which would last for weeks. During that time the casualty rate for his company reached around 60 percent killed or wounded, a rate similar to the D-Day landings at Normandy during World War II.
Hurl Bruce
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I think what the military needs is to have a big ol' parade to show the world how awesome it is.
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Heh -- guess the script has flipped, huh?
I hate this idea. Other than a victory parade which is essentially thanking those returning home, these things are a gigantic waste of time and effort. Dog and pony shows on steroids. Time that would otherwise be spent on training, or maintenance, or just giving an overworked force a bit of a lull, are instead spent with everyone trying to ensure that everyone is picture perfect for the big stage.
It's not the parade itself that is the problem -- it's all the logistics and preparation that go into it. Huge pain in the ass that serves no useful military purpose.
BMAN
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I feel like it's just a waste of money too
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You know, you're right. 100% correct.
Parades are a pain in the ass and everyone hates being in them. Unless it were a victory parade. A parade of this size takes weeks of training; useless training that doesn't improve readiness.
Let the French have their 14 Juli parade. The units that take part in that parade are largely ceremonial and stationed around Paris. They are used to it and not going through deployment cycles.
AZ_
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Well, they got clobbered by the Prussians in 1871 and had to give up a bunch of territory. Then their army mutinied in 1917 and wouldn't engage in any offensive operations until nearly a year later. The Brits and Americans bailed them out there. We all know about WW2. Then post World War 2, they got clobbered in a major set-piece battle by the Viet Minh.
They did do well during the era of Napoleon, but he wasn't (strictly speaking) French. And they only found victory in the 100 Years War after a girl took over.
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We always considered it a point of pride that the Woops (West Pointers) marched better than we did. Used to piss off the Officers in Charge, especially the Marines.