The Huế massacre (, or , ) was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.
The Battle of Huế began on 31 January 1968, and lasted for 26 days. During the months and years that followed, dozens of mass graves were discovered in and around Huế. The estimated death toll was between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war, or 5–10% of the total population of Huế. The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) released a list of 4,062 victims identified as having been either murdered or abducted. Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes buried alive. Many victims were also clubbed to death.
A number of U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities as well as a number of journalists and historians who investigated the events took the discoveries, along with other evidence, as proof that a large-scale atrocity had been carried out in and around Huế during its four-week occupation. The killings were perceived as part of a large-scale purge of a whole social stratum, including anyone friendly to American forces in the region. Opposing press reports alleged that South Vietnamese "revenge squads" had executed communist sympathizers in the aftermath of the occupation. Ben Kiernan has described the Huế massacre as "possibly the largest atrocity of the war." Cadres called out the names on their lists over loudspeakers, ordering them to report to a local school. Those who did not report voluntarily were hunted down.
Communist preliminary occupation plans and orders
thumb|Burial of 300 unidentified victims
The communists' actions were based on a series of orders issued by the High Command and the PRG. In a document issued on 26 January 1968, by the Trị-Thiên-Huế Political Directorate, the political cadres were given specific instructions: "Operating in close support of the regular military and guerrilla elements, the political cadre were to: destroy and disorganize the Republic of Viet Nam's (RVN's) administrative machinery 'from province and district levels to the city wards, streets, and wharves;' motivate the people of Huế to take up arms, pursue the enemy, seize power, and establish a revolutionary government; motivate (recruit) local citizens for military and 'security' forces... transportation and supply activities, and to serve wounded soldiers...;" "pursue to the end (and) punish spies, reactionaries, and 'tyrants' and 'maintain order and security in the city.'"
Another section, dealing with Target Area 1 ("the Phu Ninh ward") read: "Annihilate all spies, reactionaries, and foreign teachers (such as Americans and Germans) in the area. Break open prisons. Investigate cadre, soldiers and receptive civilians imprisoned by the enemy. Search for tyrants and reactionaries who are receiving treatment in hospitals."
Within days of the capture, US Marine Corps (USMC), US Army, and ARVN units were dispatched to counterattack and recapture the city after weeks of fierce fighting during which the city and its outlying areas were exposed to repeated shelling and bombing. It was reported that during the attack by USMC and ARVN, North Vietnam's forces had rounded up the individuals whose names it had previously collected and had them executed or sent North for "reeducation."
Many people had taken sanctuary from the battle in a local church. Several hundred of them were ordered out to undergo indoctrination in the "liberated area" and told that they would be allowed to return home. After marching the group south 9 km, 20 of the people were separated, tried in a kangaroo court, found guilty, executed and buried. The others were taken across the river and turned over to a local communist unit in an exchange that even included written receipts. Douglas Pike noted "It is probable that the Commissar intended that their prisoners should be reeducated and returned, but with the turnover, matters passed from his control." Sometime in the following several weeks, the communists decided to kill the individuals under their control.
Eyewitness accounts
thumb|Searching – Bits of tattered clothing, sandals and slippers are examined by South Vietnamese women who lost relatives in the 1968 Tet massacre. The latest mass grave discovered in Huế yielded remains of 250 victims
Nguyễn Công Minh, the daughter of the Deputy Mayor of Huế, reported that her father, who was of old age, was arrested at his home in the beginning of the communist occupation three days after he ordered his children (including herself) and his wife to flee via the back of their house when communist troops first came knocking at their home. Upon telling the troops that he was Deputy Mayor of Huế and was set to retire in one year (1969), he was ordered to report to a camp for reeducation and to pack clothing and food sufficient for 10 days. He was never seen again, and his remains were never recovered. She recalled that in the search of her father's remains, she witnessed that many of the bodies she came across in the mass graves were found to be in a fetal position, with their hands tied behind their backs, and the back of the heads/skulls were smashed, indicating that they knelt on the ground prior to their deaths and they died due to blunt-force trauma to their heads.
In 1971, the journalist Don Oberdorfer's book, Tet!, documented some eyewitness accounts of what happened in Huế during the occupation. Pham Van Tuong, a part-time janitor for the Huế government information office who made it on the Vietcong list of "reactionaries" for working there, was hiding with his family as it hunted for him. When he was found with his 3-year-old daughter, 5-year-old son and two nephews, the Vietcong immediately gunned them all down, leaving their bodies on the street for the rest of the family to see.
Two French priests, Fathers Urbain and Guy, were seen being led away and suffered a similar fate. Urbain's body was found buried alive, bound hand and foot. Guy, who was 48, was stripped of his cassock and forced to kneel down on the ground, where he was shot in the back of the head. He was in the same grave with Father Urbain and 18 others.
Captured in the home of Vietnamese friends, Stephen Miller of the U.S. Information Service was bound and shot in a field behind a Catholic seminary. Courtney Niles, an American civilian working for NBC International, was killed during an attack by communist forces while in the presence of U.S. soldiers.
Alje Vennema, a Dutch-Canadian doctor who lived in Huế and witnessed the battle and the massacre, wrote The Viet Cong Massacre at Huế
Some graves were found purely by accident. A farmer working in his field tripped on a wire sticking out of the ground. He pulled on it to remove it and a skeletal hand popped out of the ground. Other graves were found when people noticed suspiciously green grass in sandy areas. The Da Mai Creek massacre was discovered after three Vietcong defected and told authorities about the murders. An ARVN soldier on patrol south of Huế noticed a wire sticking out of the ground. Thinking it was a booby trap, he very carefully worked to uncover it. He discovered the body of an old man, his hands tied together with the wire. Two days later, 130 bodies had been uncovered.
In another case,
<blockquote>...a squad with a death order entered the home of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son and daughter-in-law, his young unmarried daughter, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled; the family dog was clubbed to death; the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed on the floor. When the Communists left, no life remained in the house.</blockquote>
An eyewitness, Nguyen Tan Chau, recounted how he was captured by communist troops and marched south with 29 other prisoners bound together, in three groups of ten. Chau managed to escape and hide in the darkness just before the others were executed. From there, he witnessed what happened next. The larger prisoners were separated into pairs, tied together back to back, and shot. The others were shot singly. All were dumped into two shallow graves, including those who had been wounded but were not dead.
When Trương Như Tảng was appointed as Vietcong justice minister soon after Huế, he understood it to be a critical position because the massacre had "left us with a special need to address fears among the Southern people that a revolutionary victory would bring with it a bloodbath or reign of terror." That was because "large numbers of people had been executed" including "captured American soldiers and several other international people who were not combatants." According to Trạng, "discipline in Huế was seriously inadequate" and "fanatic young soldiers had indiscriminately shot people, and angry local citizens who supported the revolution had on various occasions taken justice into their own hands...."</blockquote>
The same document contained a passage that read:
<blockquote>The people joined our soldiers in their search for tyrants, reactionaries and spies. For instance, Mrs. Xuan followed our soldiers to show the houses of the tyrants she knew, although she had only six days before given birth to a child.</blockquote>
In March 1968, in the official Hanoi press, the North reported:
<blockquote>Actively combining their efforts with those of the People's Liberation Armed Forces and population, other self-defense and armed units of the city of Huế arrested and called to surrender the surviving functionaries of the puppet administration and officers and men of the puppet army who were skulking. Die-hard cruel agents were punished.
<blockquote>Ho Ty was arrested by the government police on Sept. 4 this year. At the time of his arrest, he was party secretary for a section of Huế city...Ho Ty reported that the part of the plan from higher headquarters was to destroy the government machinery of Huế and the people who made it work.... He said the killings were planned and executed by a separate group in charge of security.</blockquote>
In 1987, at a Hanoi conference to discuss the history of the Tet offensive, Colonel General Tran Van Quang, one of the commanders of the Huế operation, assessed the strengths and weaknesses of his forces and cited as one of their strengths:
<blockquote>We resolutely carried out the orders and fulfilled the requirements set out for us by the High Command. We motivated our cadre, soldiers, and the civilian population through the use of the slogans, 'Tri-Thien fights for Tri-Thien and for the entire nation,' and 'Heroically and resolutely conduct attacks and uprisings.'</blockquote>
In February 1988, Vietnamese communist leaders admitted "mistakes" were made in Huế. Col Nguyen Quoc Khanh, commander of part of the forces that took over Huế stated, "There was no case of killing civilians purposefully.... Those civilians who were killed were killed accidentally, in cross fire." However, he admitted "some rank and file soldiers may have committed individual mistakes." However, in an internal document discussing the 1968 Tet offensive in Hue, General (Tổng) Hồ Trung wrote, referring to the Giá Hơi section: "These forces hunted down and killed enemy thugs, reactionaries, and puppet policemen" and that they "cleaned out.... nests of Catholic reactionaries." Tin explained that over 10,000 prisoners were taken at Huế, with the most important of them sent to North Vietnam for imprisonment. When U.S. Marines launched their counterattack to retake the city, communist troops were instructed to move the prisoners with the retreating troops. According to Tín, in the "panic of retreat," the company and battalion commanders shot their prisoners "to ensure the safety of the retreat."
Ngo Vinh Long claims that 710 people were killed by the communists. In an interview he stated, "Yeah, there was a total of 710 persons killed in the Huế area, from my research, not as many as five thousand, six thousand, or whatever the Americans claimed at that time, and not as few as four hundred as people like some of the people in the peace movement here claim...."
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci reported, "In the last few days the Vietcong lost their heads and did nothing but make reprisals, kill, punish". However, citing a French priest to whom she spoke in Huế, she also claimed that the death toll of up to 8,000 included deaths by American bombardment, and at least 200 people, and perhaps as many as 1,100, who were killed following the liberation of Huế by the US and ARVN forces. Stanley Karnow wrote that the bodies of those executed by South Vietnamese teams were thrown into common graves.
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, the historian Gareth Porter, who is also known for his Cambodian genocide denial, stated that there was little evidence that the communists carried out more than "several hundred" political executions and revenge killings in Huế, while the U.S. official estimate maintains that over 2,800 bodies were "victims of Communist executions." He alleged that the site of one set of mass graves was also the site of a major battle in which some 250 communist troops were reported killed in U.S air strikes and that Saigon's minister of health, after visiting burial sites, said the bodies could have been communist soldiers killed in battle. He dismissed Pike's claim that there were communist blacklists of students and intellectuals to be killed as unsupported by interviews and captured communist documents.
The historian James Willbanks concluded, "We may never know what really happened at Huế, but it is clear that mass executions did occur." Ben Kiernan's 2017 history of Vietnam states that "thousands" were killed at Huế in "possibly the largest atrocity of the war."
Legacy
Reports of the massacre had a profound impact on the South Vietnamese for many years after the Tet Offensive, with an anticipation of a bloodbath following any North Vietnamese takeover, like the one in Huế. Novelist James Jones, in a New York Times article wrote, "Whatever else they accomplished, the Huế massacres effectively turned the bulk of the South Vietnamese against the Northern Communists. In South Vietnam, wherever one went, from Can Tho in the delta to Tay Ninh to Kontum in the north, and of course in Huế, the 1968 Tet massacres were still being talked about in 1973." For their part, left-leaning scholars have since commented that the massacre was a rare propaganda coup during the unpopular war in Vietnam, especially as it allowed Richard Nixon's government to counteract the public outrage derived from the American-perpetrated Mỹ Lai massacre that would take place a few weeks later during that same year.
Anticipation of a bloodbath was a major factor in the widespread panic and chaos across South Vietnam when North Vietnam executed their 1975 Spring Offensive, and the panic culminated in the disintegration and defeat of South Vietnamese military forces, and the fall of the Republic of Vietnam on 30 April 1975.