The Huế massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế, lit. 'Tết Offensive massacre in Huế') 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.
Executions
The Vietcong set up provisional authorities shortly after it had captured Huế in the early hours of 31 January 1968. They were charged with removing the existing government administration from power in the city and replacing it with a "revolutionary administration". Working from lists of "cruel tyrants and reactionary elements" previously developed by Vietcong intelligence officers, many people were to be rounded up following the initial hours of the attack. These included Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, civil servants, political party members, local religious leaders, schoolteachers, American civilians, and other international people. 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
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." The orders for Target Area 2 ("the Phu Vinh ward") were similar: "Annihilate the enemy in the area.... Rally the Buddhist force to advance the isolation of reactionaries who exploit the Catholics of Phu Cam." The orders for Target Area 3 ("the wharves along the An Cuu River and from Truong Sung to the Kho Ren Bridge") followed the same pattern: "Search for and pursue spies, tyrants and reactionaries hiding near the wharf.... Motivate the people in the areas along the River to annihilate the enemy." For Target Area 4 (the district including Phu Cam and the Binh Anh, Truong Giang, Truong Cuu and An Lang sections) the orders were "Search for and pursue spies and reactionaries in the area.... Destroy the power and influence of reactionary leaders...." For Area 1, Cell 3 was assigned the job of "Annihilation of tyrants and the elimination of traitors".
In June 1968, the American 1st Cavalry troops captured PAVN documents that included a directive written two days before the battle began. It included these instructions: "For the purpose of a lengthy occupation of Huế, we should immediately liberate the rural areas and annihilate the wicked GVN administrative personnel.
Specific Mission.... We must attack the enemy key agencies, economic installations, and lines of communications. We must also annihilate the enemy mobile troops, reactionary elements and tyrants."
On 1 February, the provincial administration, having taken control of Huế, issued a directive that ordered the troops, in part, "To wipe out all puppet administrative organs of the puppet Thiệu-Kỳ clique at all levels in the province, city and town down to every single hamlet."
On the same day, the Liberation Front radio announced, "We tell our compatriots that we are determined to topple the regime of the traitorous Thiệu-Kỳ clique and to punish and annihilate those who have been massacring and oppressing our compatriots... we ask our compatriots to... help us arrest all the cruel U.S. puppets."
Occupation
Foreign Service Officer Douglas Pike wrote that according to Vietcong documents captured during and after the siege, members of the provincial administration were to be taken out of the city, held, and punished for their "crimes against the Vietnamese people". The disposition of those who were previously in control of the city was carefully laid out, and the lists were detailed and extensive. Those in the Saigon-based-state police apparatus at all levels were to be rounded up and held outside the city. High civilian and military officials were also removed from the city to await the study of their individual cases.
Ordinary civil servants who worked for "the Saigon enemy" out of necessity but did not oppose the communists were destined for reeducation and later employment. Low-level civil servants who had at some point been involved in paramilitary activities were to be held for reeducation but not employed. There are documented cases of individuals who were executed by the Vietcong when they tried to hide or otherwise resisted during the early stages of Huế's occupation.
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
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.
Oberdorfer spent five days in late 1969 with Paul Vogle, an American professor of English at Huế University, to go through Huế to interview witnesses of the occupation. Oberdorfer classified all the killings into two categories: the planned execution of government officials and their families, political and civil servants, and collaborators with Americans, and those civilians not connected to the government who ran from questioning, who spoke harshly about the occupation, or who the occupiers believed "displayed a bad attitude" towards the occupiers.
Oberdorfer reported that on the fifth day of the Viet Cong occupation in the Catholic district of Huế, Phủ Cam, all able-bodied males over 15, approximately 400 boys and men, who took refuge in Phủ Cam Cathedral were taken away and killed. Some had been on the Vietcong's blacklist, some were of military age and some just looked prosperous. Oberdorfer interviewed Ho Ty, a Vietcong commander who took part in the advanced planning of a general uprising. He reported that Ty recounted that the Communist party "was particularly anxious to get those people at Phủ Cam.... The Catholics were considered particular enemies of ours." It was apparently that group whose remains were later found in the Da Mai Creek bed. The murders of 500 people at Da Mai were authorized by PRG command "on grounds that the victims had been traitors to the revolution."
Three professors, Professor Horst-Günther Krainick, Dr. Alois Alteköster, and Dr. Raimund Discher, who taught at the Huế University's Faculty of Medicine and were members of the West German Cultural Mission, along with Mrs. Elisabeth Krainick, were arrested and executed by North Vietnamese troops during their invasion of Huế in February 1968. On 5 April 1968, the bodies of the executed professors along with many Vietnamese civilians also executed, were discovered in mass graves near Huế.
Philip W. Manhard, a U.S. senior advisor in Huế province, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp by the PAVN and held until 1973. Manhard recounted that during the PAVN's withdrawal from Huế, they summarily executed anyone in their custody who resisted being taken out of the city or who was too old, young, or frail to make the journey to the camp.
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 in 1976. He recounts numerous stories of murders. A 48-year-old street vendor, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Lao, was "arrested on the main street. Her body was found at the school. Her arms had been bound and a rag stuffed into her mouth; there were no wounds to the body. She was probably buried alive." A 44-year-old bricklayer, Mr. Nguyen Ty, was "seized on February 2, 1968.... His body was found on March 1st; his hands were tied, and he had a bullet wound through his neck which had come out through the mouth." At Ap Dong Gi Tay "110 bodies were uncovered; again most had their hands tied and rags stuffed in their mouth. All of them were men, among them fifteen students, several military men, and civil servants, young and old." "Sometimes a whole family was eliminated, as was the case with the merchant, Mr. Nam Long, who together with his wife and five children was shot at home." "Mr. Phan Van Tuong, a laborer at the province headquarters, suffered a similar fate by being shot outside his house with four of his children."