The heavy losses inflicted on VC units struck into the heart of the infrastructure that had been built up for over a decade. MACV estimated that 181,149 PAVN/VC troops had been killed during 1968. According to General Tran Van Tra, 45,267 PAVN/VC troops had been killed during 1968 From this point forward, Hanoi was forced to fill nearly 70% of the VC's ranks with PAVN regulars. PRG Justice Minister Trương Như Tảng said that the Tet Offensive had wiped out half of the VC's strength, while the official Vietnamese war history notes that by 1969, very little communist-held territory ("liberated zones") existed in South Vietnam. Following the Tet Offensive and subsequent U.S.-South Vietnamese "search and hold" operations in the countryside throughout the rest of 1968, the VC's recruiting base was more or less wiped out; the official Vietnamese war history later noted that "we could not maintain the level of local recruitment we had maintained in previous years. In 1969 we were only able to recruit 1,700 new soldiers in Region 5 (compared with 8,000 in 1968), and in the lowlands of Cochin China we recruited only 100 new soldiers (compared with 16,000 in 1968)." As also noted by the official history, "because our armed local forces had suffered severe losses, guerrilla operations had declined." However, this change had little effect on the overall result of the war, since in contrast to the VC, the PAVN had little difficulty making up the casualties inflicted by the offensive. Some Western historians have come to believe that one insidious ulterior motive for the campaign was the elimination of competing southern members of the Party, thereby allowing the northerners more control once the war was won.