ABSTRACT
No period of the war since the rapid expansion of the revolutionary movement in the Con certed Uprising of 1959-60 saw as dramatic a reversal of fortune as the three years following the Tet Offensive. In early 1968, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN) was reeling from the unexpected scope and intensity of the general offensive, but by the middle of the year the Saigon government had taken the counteroffensive and the outer layers of revo lutionary support mobilized at Tet began to fall away. By the end of 1968 and throughout 1969 the war reached its peak intensity, as “accelerated pacification" operations by U.S. and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units hammered the revolutionary forces and reversed the gains they had made at Tet. These operations pushed back the concentrated units, forced them to split up, and made it possible for the GVN to reestablish an increasingly numerous and effective network of small military posts, manned by province and district militia, in areas where they had been forced to withdraw by the Tet Offensive and also in areas where, before Tet, small militia groups were too vulnerable to the big revolutionary units to operate. Despite the eventual withdrawal of the U.S. Ninth Division, whose effective but destructive operations had been largely responsible for the turn of the tide in My Tho, most of My Tho province and the Mekong Delta was under predominant GVN control by 1970, and the revolution reached its lowest ebb in the conflict in 1971.
