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Despite the intelligence forecasts, the location and timing of the attack caught the military men in Saigon and Washington off guard. When the first North Vietnamese troops appeared below the DMZ, Pentagon experts assumed that it was a feint. The main offensive, they believed, would come in the vulnerable Central Highlands. Not until the eve of Easter Sunday, four days after the beginning of the massive artillery barrage, was it clear that a major assault was under way.
By then, some 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars were driving straight through the DMZ into Quang Tri province to join another 20,000 troops already in the area. By Monday, said one awed CINCPAC officer, "it looked like the Rhine River campaign" of World War II. One column drove south along the beaches of the Tonkin Gulf, despite a heavy barrage laid down by U.S. destroyers offshore. Taking advantage of heavy rains and low clouds, which limited air strikes, other units rolled down French-built Highway 1 aboard Soviet-built tanks and trucks towing antiaircraft or artillery pieces.
General Creighton Abrams, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, who had been spending the holiday in Bangkok with his family, rushed back to Saigon. So did U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who had been in Katmandu with his wife Carol Laise, the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal.
In Washington, Nixon met with his military advisers: Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and his recently named deputy Kenneth Rush. Meanwhile Henry Kissinger convened what would turn out to be the first of almost daily sessions of the WSAG (Washington Special Action Group), which consists of ranking officials of the State and Defense departments and the CIA, who form a sort of foreign policy crisis management team.
Administration spokesmen insisted that the President was "keeping his options open." In fact, the options were limited. Nixon ruled out any pause in troop withdrawals; he will announce the next phase sometime before May 1, when the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam dips below 69,000. The President also directed that the 6,000 U.S. combat troops currently stationed in Viet Nam should not be shifted from their defensive positions around U.S. installations at Danang and in the Saigon area to aid ARVN's fight against the North Vietnamese. To emphasize that it was "their war," it was decided that reporters' inquiries about the South Vietnamese situation would be bucked to the State Department. The President demonstrated his confidence that the situation was under control by leaving for Key Biscayne in midweek.
An Umbrella. The one option that was available was air power, and Nixon made the most of it (see page 39). For the first time since 1968, four aircraft carriers were on station in the Tonkin Gulf; a fifth, the Midway, was on its way. Also sent to the area were a squadron of F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers and about 20 B-52s, which joined the 80 already operating from bases in Thailand and Guam. Later, two squadrons of F-4 Phantoms flew to Danang from bases in Okinawa, Japan and Korea. The additions meant a jump in U.S. air strength in Indochina within a week from 450 to 700 planes.