Archive Resources on the Tet Offensive

About the Tet Offensive

During the early morning hours of January 31, 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces launched surprise assaults on nearly all of the provincial capitals and urban areas of the Republic of Vietnam in an effort to bring about the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. The attack, which came to be known as the Tet Offensive, became a major turning point in the war, setting the stage for American withdrawal and the eventual downfall of South Vietnam. Militarily, the Tet Offensive was a major disaster for the communists, but politically it became a stunning victory as American will to fight the war began to wane.

About This Subject Guide

This subject guide is meant to give the user a broad overview of the collections most relevant to Tet Offensive research. More collections may be available inside the Virtual Vietnam Archive. Click on the links to the moving images, photographs or oral histories to view the material through the subject guide. Clicking on a finding aid will send you to a document describing an entire collection with either a box or folder level listing of the collection's contents. The finding aid will give you a general idea of what is contained in the collection.

Many of our documents are scanned and available online. You can find the individual documents by searching the virtual archive. Below is a list of keyword combinations that you can use in the Advanced Search module to find individual documents. http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/.

Keywords (use Tet Offensive and one of the following keywords)

• Tet Offensive
• Khe Sanh
• Operation Scotland
• Operation Pegasus
• Border Battles
• Battle of Hue
• Hue Massacre
• Citadel
• Battle of Saigon
• Mini-tet
• Tet Mau Than

Tet Offensive Resources by Media Type

• Introduction Page
• Audio
• Books
• Collection Finding Aids
• Maps
• Moving Images
• Museum Objects (Artifacts)
• Oral Histories
• Still Images