↑The South Vietnamese regime estimated communist forces at 323,000, including 130,000 regulars and 160,000 guerrillas. Hoang, p. 10. MACV estimated that strength at 330,000. The CIA and the U.S. State Department concluded that the communist force level lay somewhere between 435,000 and 595,000. Dougan and Weiss, p. 184.
↑Tổng công kích, Tổng nổi dậy Tết mậu thân 1968 (Tet Offensive 1968) – ARVN's Đại Nam publishing in 1969, p. 35
↑Does not include ARVN or U.S. casualties incurred during the "Border Battles"; ARVN killed, wounded, or missing from Phase III; U.S. wounded from Phase III; or U.S. missing during Phases II and III.
↑Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia. Naval Institute Press, 2008. P 33
↑Includes casualties incurred during the "Border Battles", Tet Mau Than, and the second and third phases of the offensive. General Tran Van Tra claimed that from January through August 1968 the offensive had cost the communists more than 75.000 dead and wounded. This is probably a low estimate. Tran Van Tra, Tet, in Jayne S. Warner and Luu Doan Huynh, eds., The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, pgs. 49 & 50.
↑PAVN's Department of warfare, 124th/TGi, document 1.103 (11-2-1969)
↑Ang, p. 351. Two interpretations of the offensive's goals have continued to dominate Western historical debate. The first maintained that the political consequences of the winter-spring offensive were an intended rather than an unintended consequence. This view was supported by William Westmoreland and his friend Jamie Salt in A Soldier Reports, Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1976, p. 322; Harry G. Summers in On Strategy, Novato CA: Presidio Press, 1982, p. 133; Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam, Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1979, pp. 333–334; and Schmitz p. 90. This thesis appeared logical in hindsight, but it "fails to account for any realistic North Vietnamese military objectives, the logical prerequisite for an effort to influence American opinion." James J. Wirtz in The Tet Offensive, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 18. The second thesis (which was also supported by the majority of contemporary captured VC documents) was that the goal of the offensive was the immediate toppling of the Saigon government or, at the very least, the destruction of the government apparatus, the installation of a coalition government, or the occupation of large tracts of South Vietnamese territory. Historians supporting this view are Stanley Karnow in Vietnam, New York: Viking, 1983, p. 537; U.S. Grant Sharp in Strategy for Defeat, San Rafael CA: Presidio Press, 1978, p. 214; Patrick McGarvey in Visions of Victory, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1969; and Wirtz, p. 60.
