Who won the Battle of Hue?
South Vietnam and the United States won. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops seized most of Hue on 31 January 1968; South Vietnamese troops and US Marines retook it street by street, raising the South Vietnamese flag over the Citadel on 24 February. The fighting destroyed much of the city and killed thousands of civilians.1
Hue was the old imperial capital of Vietnam and its cultural heart, a city of about 140,000 people on the Perfume River that the war had largely passed by. In the Tet Offensive of 1968 it became the scene of the longest battle of the offensive and, as the Army historian Erik Villard notes, the costliest single engagement of the Vietnam War up to that time. It was also the only city where the communists held ground for weeks and set up their own administration. It was fought at the same time as the siege of Khe Sanh, and it shaped how Americans saw the war at home; for the wider story, see the military history of the United States.2
Why did North Vietnam attack Hue?
In 1967 the leaders in Hanoi decided to break the stalemate with a single great blow, the General Offensive and General Uprising. Coordinated attacks on the cities of South Vietnam at the lunar new year were meant to spark a popular revolt that would bring down President Nguyen Van Thieu's government, or at least convince the United States that it could not win. Hue was an obvious prize: the seat of the Nguyen emperors, a center of Buddhist learning and the capital of Thua Thien Province.3
Hanoi also had reasons to expect an easy victory there. The city had a long tradition of dissent: its monks, students and professors had led the Buddhist protests of 1963 and the Struggle Movement of 1966 against the generals in Saigon, and many of them distrusted both sides. Saigon kept heavy weapons out of the city to preserve its monuments, and the communists had largely spared it too, so Hue enjoyed a kind of unspoken truce.4
Communist scouts reported that Hue was “nearly unprotected” and its defenders demoralized, according to captured records quoted by Villard. A new headquarters, the Hue City Front, gathered a strike force of at least 14 battalions, including the 4th, 5th and 6th PAVN Regiments, sappers and Viet Cong local units, while agents smuggled weapons into the city and drew up lists of targets. Political officers told the troops that the people of Hue would greet them as liberators, and Villard writes that some soldiers planned to wear their best uniforms for the victory march.5
What happened when the attack began on 31 January?
At 0333 on 31 January 1968 by the Army history's account (the Marine Corps history gives 0233), a signal flare rose over the city. Sappers dressed as South Vietnamese soldiers killed the guards at the western gates of the Citadel, the old walled city on the north bank, and North Vietnamese battalions poured through. A rocket barrage struck the city a few minutes later. By morning the attackers held most of the Citadel, including the Imperial Palace, and at 0800 they raised the red and blue Viet Cong banner with its gold star over the Citadel's flag tower.6
South of the river the southern wing, battalions of the 4th and 5th Regiments with sappers, overran most of the modern city, its government offices, treasury and radio station. They failed in two things that mattered. They could not take the compound of the American advisers to the 1st ARVN Division, and their sappers did not destroy the An Cuu bridge on Route 1, the road from the Marine base at Phu Bai. That gap let the Marines into the city.7
How did the South Vietnamese hold on in the Citadel?
The man who saved the allied foothold was Brigadier General Ngo Quang Truong, commander of the 1st ARVN Division. Uneasy as the holiday began, he canceled leave on 30 January after attacks elsewhere broke the Tet truce, but most of his men were already at home. His headquarters, the Mang Ca compound in the northern corner of the Citadel, had only staff officers, clerks and support troops when the 802nd Battalion attacked it. An improvised force of about 200 of them held the perimeter, and Truong called in his elite reaction force, the Hac Bao or Black Panther Company, from the Tay Loc airfield to reinforce them.8
Over the following days Truong brought in everything he could reach: the battalions of his 3rd Regiment from the countryside, airborne battalions from outside the city, armored cavalry, and units flown in by Marine helicopters or ferried by river. His troops retook the Tay Loc airfield and the northwestern part of the Citadel within days. Their losses were heavy, food and ammunition ran short, and some battalions were down to fewer than 200 effective soldiers.9
American assessments after the battle praised the 1st ARVN Division, the Hac Bao Company and the airborne troops for fighting with skill against North Vietnamese regulars who often outgunned them; Britannica notes that South Vietnamese soldiers fought with bravery and tenacity at Hue. Not every South Vietnamese official measured up. The province chief, Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Khoa, went into hiding and stayed there until Americans found him days later.10
How did the US Marines retake the south bank?
The first Americans sent to help knew almost nothing about the size of the enemy force. On the morning of 31 January a single Marine company left Phu Bai by truck, picked up four tanks on the road, and fought for hours to reach the advisers' compound. Ordered to push on across the river to Truong's headquarters, a small Marine force tried to cross the main bridge toward the Citadel and was driven back with heavy losses.11
The battle south of the river belonged to the Marines of Task Force X-Ray: two understrength battalions, the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines and the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, under Colonel Stanley Hughes of the 1st Marines from 3 February. It was street fighting of a kind the Marines had not trained for in Vietnam. They cleared the city building by building and room by room, measuring progress in yards. Rain, fog and a cloud ceiling that often sat at a few hundred feet kept air support away, and at first restrictions on heavy weapons protected the city's buildings.12
The Marines improvised. They blasted walls with 106mm recoilless rifles, tank guns and the six-barreled Ontos, and they used tear gas to drive defenders out of thick-walled buildings. On 6 February they took the province headquarters and the prison; in the courtyard they hauled down the Viet Cong banner and raised the Stars and Stripes as a television crew filmed it. On 7 February sappers dropped the main bridge across the Perfume River, and by 10 February major resistance in southern Hue had ended.13
How was the Citadel retaken?
The Citadel was harder. Inside its high walls the North Vietnamese had turned stone houses, hedgerows and the old ramparts into linked strongpoints, and every night fresh troops and supplies came in from the west through Thon La Chu, a fortified village that served as the Hue City Front's base. Some of the reinforcements had marched from the siege of Khe Sanh. The US Army's 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, sent to cut that route, was stopped short of the village in early February and fought there for weeks.14
On 13 February the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines under Major Robert Thompson entered the Citadel to take over the eastern sector and ran straight into North Vietnamese troops who had reoccupied blocks the departing South Vietnamese paratroopers had left. It took three days and repeated bombardment to capture the tower over the Dong Ba Gate on 15 February. Vietnamese Marines who joined the attack in the southwest advanced less than 400 meters in their first two days.15
The North Vietnamese were determined to make the allied victory as costly as possible. When their commander in the Citadel was killed by shellfire on 16 February, his successor asked to withdraw; South Vietnamese radio operators intercepted the reply ordering him to keep fighting. Hanoi even sent aircraft. Villard, drawing on the history of the North Vietnamese 371st Air Division, writes that Il-14 transports dropped supplies near Hue on 7 February but that the bombers sent against Truong's headquarters never found it in the fog. The Marine Corps historians quote a regional Vietnamese history claiming further airdrops from 20 to 23 February and say they know of no source that confirms them.16
The end came quickly once the supply line was cut. Before dawn on 21 February a Marine platoon slipped into buildings the defenders left empty at night, and the same morning the 1st Cavalry Division's battalions broke into Thon La Chu. On 22 February the Marines reached the Citadel's southeastern wall, and the Hue City Front ordered its troops to withdraw. Before dawn on 24 February South Vietnamese soldiers retook the Southern Gate of the Imperial Palace and pulled down the Viet Cong flag, and troops of the 3rd ARVN Regiment raised the flag of South Vietnam over the Citadel; the last organized resistance in the Citadel was crushed on 25 February. The Marine Corps closed Operation Hue City on 2 March.17
What happened to the civilians of Hue?
For the people of Hue the battle was a catastrophe. American and South Vietnamese reports estimated that about three quarters of the city's houses were damaged or destroyed; Britannica gives an estimate that only 7,000 of Hue's 17,000 homes were left standing. Some 115,000 to 116,000 of about 140,000 inhabitants were left homeless, and the Vietnam Center counts about 100,000 refugees.18
The darkest part of the story came to light after the fighting. Communist forces had entered the city with lists of political leaders, officials, intellectuals, teachers, religious leaders and foreigners, and their cadres rounded people up. After the battle South Vietnamese authorities exhumed mass graves; the Marine Corps history says they recovered some 3,000 bodies, “in all probability” victims of those roundups. The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech says at least 3,000 were shot or buried alive and at least 2,000 more were never accounted for.19
Villard counts more than 4,000 confirmed civilian deaths in the battle: about 1,200 from errant bombs and bullets, and the rest at the hands of communist cadres who had orders to execute officials and sympathizers. He cites a captured document of April 1968 that reported the “elimination” of nearly 3,000 “tyrants and puppet administrative personnel,” and another showing that some cadres in the province thought the mass killings broke Viet Cong policy.20
Hanoi's position was different. North Vietnam admitted punishing what it called “hoodlum ringleaders” but blamed most civilian deaths on the fighting, on allied action or on South Vietnamese exaggeration, according to the Marine Corps historians, and Villard notes that it never publicly admitted killing more than a small number. Some Western scholars also dispute the scale. The historian Scott Laderman argues that the figure of about 3,000 rests on poor evidence; he writes that the most reliable counts of those executed range from 300 or 400, a figure going back to interviews by Gareth Porter and Len Ackland in 1969, to 710, the count of the historian Ngo Vinh Long. Laderman accepts that the Front did kill noncombatants; the dispute is over how many and why. Porter and Ackland, and later Ngo Vinh Long, argue that most killings came at the end, as the Front's cadres retreated and feared exposure, which is not how the conventional account explains them.21
How many people died in the Battle of Hue?
The Marine Corps history counts 142 Marines killed and close to 1,100 wounded, 333 ARVN soldiers killed, 1,773 wounded and 30 missing, and 88 Vietnamese Marines killed and 350 wounded. The 1st Cavalry Division reported 68 killed and 453 wounded, and the 101st Airborne Division 6 killed and 56 wounded: more than 600 allied dead in all. Villard gives the same figures. The Vietnam Center gives rounder totals of nearly 400 ARVN and over 200 US Marines killed.22
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong losses are less certain. Allied estimates of their dead ranged from 2,500 to 5,000, and the Vietnam Center puts the figure at about 5,100. Captured communist documents, according to the South Vietnamese, admitted 1,042 killed. Villard writes that some North Vietnamese battalions were reduced to about 100 men out of nearly 400 and needed months to recover.23
Who won the Battle of Hue, and why did it matter?
On the battlefield, Hue was a defeat for Hanoi. The city was retaken, the communist regiments were badly mauled, and the general uprising never came: few civilians helped the attackers, and Villard writes that the attack and the killings hardened opinion in Hue against the communists, including among the once neutral monks. Across South Vietnam, Britannica notes, the people rejected the call to rebellion, and most cities were cleared within days; Hue was the exception.24
Villard also calls Hue the enemy's most successful operation of the offensive. Two divisions' worth of troops had reached the gates of the city unnoticed and held part of it for nearly a month. He argues that the siege of Khe Sanh, meant to draw American forces into the hills, backfired here, because it brought the 1st Cavalry Division north early enough to help save Hue.25
The political result went the other way. Television coverage of the fighting in Saigon and Hue convinced many Americans that victory was not near, and support for the war weakened. On 31 March 1968 President Lyndon Johnson limited the bombing of North Vietnam and announced that he would not seek reelection. For the course of the war after Hue, read our guide to the Vietnam War, the earlier Battle of Ia Drang and the fall of Saigon in 1975.26
Where is Hue?
Hue lies in central Vietnam, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) from the South China Sea, on the Perfume (Huong) River; in 1968 it lay in the northern part of South Vietnam. The Citadel, built for the Nguyen dynasty in the early nineteenth century and modeled on Beijing's Forbidden City, covers several square kilometers on the north bank; the modern city lies to the south. Damaged in 1968, the monuments have since been restored and are a UNESCO World Heritage site.27
Read more about the dates of the battle in 31 January in history and 24 February in history.
