Talk:Battle of Huế/Archive 1

Archive 1

Pictures

There are 4 pictures on this page and all of them are of american marines. ARVN:452 KIA; 2,123 WIA US:216 KIA; 1,584 WIA.

The ARVN deserves at least 50 percent of the pictures since their casualties were way higher than the Americans and there were more ARVN involved in the battle than US troops85.164.12.144 06:49, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

If you have additional information to add then by all means do so.--Looper5920 12:54, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree, the ARVN deserve some credit. But the Americans on here only want to turn everything into an AMERICAN victory.Canpark 03:58, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I hate to have to explain this but the Americans did not take lower casualties than the ARVN except in the literal sense, the Americans sent in twenty five hundred men and and took eighteen hundred casualties exactly. The ARVN sent in the other twenty seven thousand or so and took two thousand five hundred and twenty five casualties. This is the difference between 73 percent casualties and less then 10 percent. Colin 8 16:42, 3 April 2007 (UTC) 16:42, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Again, if you have additional information to add then by all means do so. You can complain about the article as is or do some research and add to it.--Looper5920 04:08, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

The Battle of Hue posted on August 25, 2006.--James L. Burgess 07:54, 25 August 2006 (UTC) I am going to change the title simply to Battle of Hue because its how most other Battles are listed and it will make it easier to find.--Colin 8 18:43, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

"Clearing the way through the city's debris-covered avenues came U.S. tanks. American Skyhawk helicopters dropped bombs and napalm on the Citadel. From a crescent-shaped position along the west wall, the enemy was able to keep a steady stream of supplies and reinforcements flowing into the Citadel."

Skyhawks were American A4 attack aircraft. Furthermorehelicopters didn't engage in the dropping of bombs and naplam on the grounds that bombs would severely interrupt airflow around a helo's rotors as would napalm.

TopGun

TopGun, DON'T f*** up things again - it's their SEPARATE claims to COMBINE - see the globalsecurity.org link, "over 5,000" total; I'm seriously fed up with you reverting my coorections. In case if you are blind or whatever, The allies claimed over 5,000 Communists killed in the city and an estimated 3,000 killed in the fighting in the surrounding area. The ARVN's of 3,000 is overstimate, because their/enemy losses ratio is supposedly better than the Marines' - impossible. --HanzoHattori 10:14, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Crockspot (now you)

You didn't understood. It wasn't "1,500 KIA (according to American sources) [and] 3,000 KIA (according to South Vietnamese sources)", BBC wrote it was 1,500 kills claimed by the Americans and 3,000 kills claimed by the South Vietnamese (the latter number unreliable). See the other sources - the combined Allied claim was over 5,000 (plus 3,000 more outside):

• The allies claimed over 5,000 Communists killed in the city[1]
• Communist casualities were estimated at more than 5000 killed and 98 captured.[2]
• The NVA and Vietcong suffered 5,000 dead[3]
• The battle ended with a devastating North Vietnamese defeat, in which the communists lost more than 5,000 killed [4]

And so on. Learn how to read with understanding (it's not that hard!) and also discuss stuff on the article's talk page. And, really, I know better. It's a hard fact for you, maybe. --HanzoHattori 21:00, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

• Excuse me, but I did not make content edits. I was improving the existing citations. You have removed valid flags on references that DO NOT verify the claims. You are vandalizing this article, please stop now. If you want to make changes, do them right, do not undo my valid work. I don't even know (or care) what you are ranting about. Yes, now me, get used to it, because I am improving all of the Vietnam Battle references, and if you keep reverting my hours of work, I will drag your ass into arbitration. - Crockspot 21:02, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Nope. You want, you put your "valid flags on references" back (I don't even what are you now talking about, but go on if you want - history is ready, so copy/paste). --HanzoHattori 21:09, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

And don't touch my ass, unless you're a hot chick. As you can see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Hue&diff=123633955&oldid=121211150 I probably did much more today than your precious "valid flags on references", whatever you mean (which I don't think is more important than the basic things like how many people were killed, how many fought, and who commanded them, anyway). --HanzoHattori 21:14, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR#User:HanzoHattori reported by User:Crockspot (Result:) - Crockspot 21:22, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
• It's obvious you don't give a rat's ass what work others did. I spent hours looking up new sources, verifying the existing sources, flagging those sources that did not verify, and formatting all the sources. Maybe when you return from your block, you will have a better attitude. Look through my edit history. I would wager that I have done more work on Vietnam articles in the last two weeks than you have ever done. - Crockspot 21:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Combining sources

I left this comment on Hanzo's talk page, so that he could have the opportunity to reply while blocked, but it really should be here too: Combining two different sources to come up with a new number would qualify as original research. If there are discrepancies in the numbers, I think the proper way to present that would be to give both sets of numbers, and note the discrepancy, not synthesize new numbers. I am refraining from editing the article so that I don't violate 3RR myself. I hope that when your block expires, that we can work together, rather than against each other. My goal is to improve and increase the sourcing of these Vietnam Battle articles, particularly with contemporary news reporting. If there are sources that conflict with each other, they should all be presented in a neutral and descriptive way, so that the reader understands that there are discrepancies. In my view, more reliable sources are always better, no matter what their claim is. - Crockspot 14:27, 18 April 2007 (UTC) - Crockspot 14:31, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

---

It's not "combining two different sources". No. Listen. I thought it was clear (I presented you multiple sources for 5,000), but you didn't understand.

Don't you really understand now what the BBC man meant?

To quote directly: "The South Vietnamese claim to have killed nearly 3,000 in the battle for Hue, while the Americans say they have killed 1,500."

I'll quote directly once again still, and I'll highlight to you: The South Vietnamese claim to have killed nearly 3,000 in the battle for Hue, while the Americans say they have killed 1,500.

I'll try this as clear as possible. like to the child:

• It's not "1,500 KIA (according to American sources)" - It's "US command says US soldiers killed 1,500 enemy soldiers".

• It's not "3,000 KIA (according to South Vietnamese sources)" - It's "ARVN command claimed ARVN soldiers killed 3,000 enemy soldiers".

About "original research", this is what you were doing, by misinterpreting one source and ignoring multiple others. --HanzoHattori 20:36, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Dead ehistory links

Don't have time to follow through right now, but I have a lead to replace the dead links that are flagged in the article here. The citations should actually be book citations, with these urls added for convenience. If someone has time to reverify the proper links, I can turn them into book cites later. - Crockspot 19:20, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

"The South Vietnamese Army and three understrength U.S. Marine battalions, consisting of fewer than 2,500 men, attacked and defeated more than 10,000 entrenched North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, taking the city of Huế (pop. 140,000) for South Vietnam.". What the heck? The number of American and ARVN troops I saw in the table was 30000+ (though citation needed). Why the huge gap? And since when has the VC become the "enemy"? I didn't see American and ARVN troops referred as "enemy" anywhere in the article. Has the English wikipedia become a place where the US and allies are the good guys and their rival counterparts on the other side?Hawkie 16:53, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Hue ARVN victory.jpg

Image:Hue ARVN victory.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 02:27, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008

• Ensured that the article is: within project scope, tagged for task forces, and assessed for class.

• The article would benefit from: in-text citations. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:17, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Rewrite the introduction

I don't think the introduction of this article is good. It seems genereric and incomplete. Compare the introduction of this article to the one of the equally important Battle of Khe Sanh one. I think it needs a rewrite. Such as saying when did the 1st Cavalry division troops first got sent into the city to relieve the Marines.--Ace Oliveira (talk) 20:40, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Puzzled

I am in the middle of an extensive copy-edit for this article, but a number of things puzzle me, e.g.

The narrative switches without any warning from 'Captain Christmas' to somebody called 'Cheatham', who-he?
What does 'MAF' stand for? I can find no explanation in the article.
'PF' and 'RF' are red links and it is too late at night to find out why, (they both have their own articles).
In the 'Attack' section, para 3, the first half of the third sentence seems to be contradicted by the second half.

RASAM (talk) 22:39, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Eighty percent of the city was destroyed by American firepower

And collateral killing = NONE? No controversy whatsoever in the article?

• http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/215/2151117022.pdf Bloodbath? (May 1975)
• http://www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html ^Tet Offensive, the battle of Hue (Vets With A Mission - History of Vietnam - Tet Offensive)

Johannjs (talk) 02:24, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

no kidding, this whole page needs to be flagged and probably rewritten for bias.

To remove US-centrism and bias? Yes sir YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 04:31, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Numbers of military killed; and dramatic civilian fatalities: the whodunnit?

As told by those men who lived through the battle, from the inside. QUOTE:<< The fight for Hue ended by February 25th at a cost of 119 Americans and 363 ARVN dead compared to about sixteen times that number of NVA/VC dead.

The dramatic difference in fatalities makes the battle look a one sided affair. But it wasn't! The difference in casuaity figures came largely from the heavy use of artillery and aircraft back-up to devastate NVA/VC positions throughout Hue which reduced large sections of the city to body-laden piles of rubble. Had the commanders decided to preserve the ancient and revered city US/ARVN casualties would have been much higher. American wounded during the battle for Hue came to just under a thousand, compared to slightly over 1,200 ARVN. Nearly 120,000 citizens of Hue were homeless and, of the close to 6,000 civilian dead, many died in the bombing and shell-fire.

Contrary to many reports, large sections of Hue escaped relatively undamaged, but after the battle they were forced to suffer days of looting by soldiers from the original ARVN garrison, who had spent the previous weeks keeping their heads low. Their commander -- who had also sat out the city's Buddhist rebellion against Ky -- was later accused of having known about the coming attack for days beforehand. His defense was that he had allowed the NVA/VC battalions into Hue in order to spring a trap! In the villages outside Hue, the battle went on for another week or so as the retreating NVA/VC took over the villages just long enough for them to be destroyed by bombing and concentrated artillery shelling. Civilian deaths and refugees increased. >>
^ Taken from the Vietnam Experience Ninteen Sixty-Eight. (this note is found at the bottom of the page of this above already mentioned article : http://www.vwam.com/vets/tet/tet.html), which means the article itself is taken from the book "The Vietnam Experience: Nineteen Sixty-Eight", by Stephen Weiss and Clark Dougan, Boston Publishing Company, 1984. Johannjs (talk) 22:42, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Marines threatening to shoot US Army officers, eh?

The Marines objected to this law and threatened to shoot a few American Army officers who were instructed to take down the flag, but eventually took it down themselves under an order from their superior officer. - Marine Corps lore is full of stories about Marines threatening to kill US Army personnel for scant reason, and this allegation, like the others, has no foundation, so I'm removing it. There was no citation which isn't surprising. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.105.96.92 (talk) 08:40, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Use of term "Old Glory"

Why is the U.S. flag called "Old Glory" in this article? This is hardly "neutral".Shemp Howard, Jr. (talk) 20:19, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

That's a standard nickname Americans use for their flag.

I would say it's neutral, but non-encyclopedic to use a nickname that is a little facetious and not understood univerally.

Varlaam (talk) 00:53, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

At least 3 different spellings of Hue in the article

I think it could be uniform.
I think at that time it was commonly/normally spelled Hué to avoid any confusion with "hue". And at that time, no one was all that interested in a correctly accented Vietnamese spelling.
Varlaam (talk) 00:59, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

In the newspapers, it is has always been "Hue", and "Hue" is not "hue". It is true that some English-language books do use the French accent. But at this point, Vietnam has not been a French colony for a very long time, and it has been even longer since French had "international language" status. The Vietnam News Agency uses "Hue," as does Britannica. Vietnamese have no idea where "Hué" is. Kauffner (talk) 03:01, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

I've been to Vietnam; our Vietnamese guide spoke French as well as English. Vietnam is a member of la Francophonie. Literature in French was readily available in Hanoi, where I visited the Hanoi Hilton before it was entirely demolished. The prison was labelled in French over the gateway I was able to squeeze through, since they built it to house Annamese.

Perhaps your statement is a little broad.

If you have full confidence, do you wish to consolidate on "Hue", or shall I?

Varlaam (talk) 14:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Comparable Operations

The section captioned "Comparable Operations" added here by an IP lacks references and appears to contain at least some OR. I tried fixing up the grammar but then realized the bigger problems of lack of references and OR. I think it should be removed unless reliable sources can be provided.--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 18:09, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Results section

I checked the source concerning the "results section" and noticed that it does not reference South Vietnamese troops, only US marines. I also note that the source uses the term "decisive" as an adjective to describe the scope of military victory. I've accordingly made an edit that is more consistent with the utilized source.--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 19:10, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Page XI: The Marines achieved a decisive victory, ultimately crushing a numerically superior enemy.--Jiujitsuguy (talk) 19:24, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

This is one of the worst uses of "decisive" I ever saw. Izraías (talk) 02:15, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Possible plagarism

I'm researching the Battle of Hue for an article that I'm writing. I seem to have stumbled across some plagarized content.

The official US Marine history describes the events in Hue and Phu Bai, and it appears that some of its content has been directly copied to this Wikipedia page. I don't have any idea what Wikipedia's rules about plagarism are, but I suspect it's not allowed.

In the section on US Marines, the following appears to be plagarized:

On the night of January 30 – January 31, the same time the North Vietnamese struck Huế, the Marines faced rocket and mortar fire at the Phú Bài airfield and Communist infantry units hit Marine Combined Action Platoons (CAP) and local Popular Force and Regional Force units in the region including the Truoi River and Phu Loc sectors. At the key Truoi River Bridge, about 04:00 a PAVN company attacked the South Vietnamese bridge security detachment and the nearby CAP H-8. Colonel Hughes ordered Captain G. Ronald Christmas, commander of Company H 2nd Battalion 5th Marines to relieve the embattled CAP unit. The Marines caught the enemy force beginning to withdraw from the CAP enclave and took it under fire. Seeing an opportunity to trap the North Vietnamese, Cheatham reinforced Company H with his Command Group and Company F.[4]:170

This is a verbatim quote of the third paragraph on page 170 (and indeed the link points to that page). Shouldn't this be in quotes?

The following paragraph is also a verbatim quote of page 171.

With his other companies in blocking positions, Cheatham hoped to catch the enemy against the Truoi River. While inflicting casualties, the events in Huế were to interfere with his plans. At 10:30, January 31, Company G departed for Phu Bai as the Task Force reserve. Later that afternoon, the battalion lost operational control of Company F. Captain Downs years later remembered the company "disengaged ... where we had them pinned up against a river, moved to the river and trucked into Phu Bai." With the departure of Company F about 16:30, the PAVN successfully disengaged and Companies H and E took up night defensive positions. 2/5 Marines killed 18 enemy troops, took 1 prisoner, and recovered sundry equipment and weapons including 6 AK-47s, at a cost of three Marines killed and 13 wounded.[4]:171

In fact it appears that much of this section was lifted directly from the Marine Corps history and copied here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Txantimedia (talk • contribs) 20:45, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Abbreviations obfuscate

In the infobox in the casualties and losses section, the following abbreviations are used:

• AVRN
• PAVN
• MACV

These abbreviations are not known to me. The abbreviations can be found in the text of course but the infobox is there to make it easy to get an overview of the data. And it doesn't. Wereldburger758 (talk) 09:58, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

They're commonly used abbreviations known by anyone with any knowledge of the Vietnam War. ARVN and PAVN are each defined in the first para of the page. MACV is already hyperlinked in the infobox but I have moved up the definition within the page. Mztourist (talk) 11:30, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Ah, but I don't have (or didn't have) any knowledge of the Vietnam War. That is why I visited this webpage. I made some internal links for the abbreviations AVRN and PAVN. In this way, the information can be searched immediately and easily. Regards, Wereldburger758 (talk) 11:54, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Results of the Battle

I think its a simplification to just state that the battle was a tactical victory, as there was no intention to militarily conquer the city with just forces alone. The initial strategic-political failure was the failure to spark a general uprising, as was the goal under the original plan for the Tet Offensive. There was no real intention to hold the city for long, and following the initial strategic failure continuing to hold it for as long as they did against a larger, better equipped ARVN/US force that was about to arrive was intended as a political/psychological 'offensive'. This should be covered on page 113 here [5] and I'm sure Mark Bowden's book Hue 1968 although I don't have access to it currently. [6]

The PAVN/VC intended to hold the city permanently. Bowden's book makes it very clear that when the PAVN/VC left their base camps they never intended to return, believing that the General Uprising would take place, the South Vietnamese Government would collapse and that faced with the will of the Vietnamese people the US and other Allies would be forced to leave South Vietnam. If the PAVN/VC changed their objectives because the General Uprising never happened that doesn't detract from the fact that this was a tactical US/ARVN victory. Mztourist (talk) 05:51, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

You should read what I wrote carefully. I neither disputed this as a tactical victory, nor disputed the fact of Bowden. Again, just read before commenting. The battle was an initial strategic failure, but was pro-longed for other reasons other than holding the city permanently, before PAVN forces withdrew, which mark bowden also writes about. A bicyclette (talk) 07:22, 12 June 2018 (UTC)(talk)

Changing the objective to achieve the obvious outcome makes no difference. Clear US/ARVN tactical victory. Mztourist (talk) 07:47, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Correct ending date

The header and infobox say the battle ended on March 3, but the Mopping-up operations and Aftermath sections say it was March 2. --Steverci (talk) 01:21, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

thanks, I fixed it. Mztourist (talk) 03:52, 30 March 2020 (UTC)