JOHN L. CANLEY
The expected holiday truce was suddenly shattered. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong insurgents launched attacks across South Vietnam in the predawn hours of 31 January 1968.
The communist onslaught coincided with Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration, and has become known to history as the Tet Offensive – a turning point in the Vietnam War. A focus of the coordinated enemy attacks was the provincial capital city of Hue in central Vietnam on the banks of the Perfume River. A cultural centre, Hue was well known for its 19th-century walled citadel and moat, which surrounded the Imperial City and its cluster of palaces and shrines.
When the storm of the Tet Offensive broke, the communists seized Hue and immediately began slaughtering local officials, members of the intelligentsia, and even women and children. Estimates of the death toll perpetrated during the massacre have reached 6,000. ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam)
