Trucks in the Open – 1967 TET Truce
By 1967,
unrestricted logistical operations in the daytime had become a thing of the
past along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. However,
the TET Truce allowed the North Vietnamese to return to open movement of
trucks and supplies in North Vietnam for five days and eighteen hours.
It is unquestionably more efficient to leave scores of fuel drums or
bundles of supplies along the edge of the road than to disperse and camouflage
them at a safe distance from the road.
During the first
three days of the truce, 2:359 vehicles were sighted in Route Package I.
(During the bombing halt of Dec 65/Jan 66, truck sightings in all of North
Vietnam totaled 1,600 during the entire month of January 1966.) The daily
average of truck sightings was 785. (An average of twenty-five trucks per day
had been sighted in North Vietnam in the six months preceding TET.) Assuming
that similar activity levels were maintained during the portion of the truce
when weather precluded observations, one study estimated that between 5,700
and 8,700 tons of supplies were moved through the panhandle of North Vietnam.
Using rates of 5.57 tons/day for an NVA division or 1.57 tons/day for a Viet
Cong division (based on fighting at the rate of one day out of thirty.). that
volume of supplies would last a long time. The four and a third North
Vietnamese divisions in the south would be sustained for eight to twelve
months. The same total of supplies were estimated to meet the equivalent Viet
Cong requirements for twenty-eight to forty-two months.
Though the accuracy of the estimates and assumptions could be debated,
it should be obvious that the North Vietnamese
gained extensive benefits from the halt in bombing.
The Johnson Administration called truces in a hope to
bring meaningful peace talks. The
North Vietnamese used truces to help them win the war. Many of us who fought during the Vietnam War still have
contempt for the incompetent policies put down from President Johnson through
Secretary of Defense McNamara because such policies routinely aided the enemy
we were fighting.
