North Vietnam launched the Nguyen Hue Offensive, known in the West as the Easter Offensive, its largest conventional assault of the war. More than 120,000 troops backed by tanks and artillery struck across the Demilitarized Zone and from Cambodia, testing the strategy of 'Vietnamization' as American ground troops had largely withdrawn, leaving South Vietnamese forces to bear the brunt with U.S. air support.
By early 1972, most American combat troops had left Vietnam under President Nixon's Vietnamization policy, leaving South Vietnamese forces increasingly on their own. North Vietnam's leadership, sensing an opportunity before the U.S. presidential election and hoping to shatter Vietnamization's credibility, committed nearly its entire regular army to a conventional invasion rather than the guerrilla tactics that had defined earlier years of the war.
Three divisions rolled across the DMZ into Quang Tri Province while other forces struck from Cambodia toward An Loc and from the Central Highlands toward Kontum. Soviet-supplied T-54 tanks and long-range artillery gave the North Vietnamese Army a firepower advantage rarely seen in the conflict's earlier phases.
The offensive stunned Washington and Saigon, and Quang Tri City fell within weeks. But American B-52 bombers and naval gunfire, unleashed in Operation Linebacker, eventually blunted the advance at Hue, Kontum, and An Loc. By autumn the offensive had cost North Vietnam an estimated 100,000 casualties without achieving its strategic goal of toppling the Saigon government, though it demonstrated that South Vietnam still depended heavily on American airpower to survive.
Key people: Nguyen Van Thieu, Richard Nixon