The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chi?n tranh Vi?t Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chi?n ch?ng M?) or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. The war is considered a Cold War-era proxy war by some US perspectives. The majority of Americans believe the war was unjustified. The war would last roughly 19 years and would also form the Laotian Civil War as well as the Cambodian Civil War, which resulted in all three countries becoming communist states in 1975.
There are several competing views on the conflict. Some on the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front side view the struggle against U.S. forces as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States, especially in light of the failed 1954 Geneva Conference calls for elections. Other interpretations of the North Vietnamese side include viewing it as a civil war, especially in the early and later phases following the U.S. interlude between 1965 and 1970, as well as a war of liberation. In the perspective of some, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, the successor to the Vi?t C?ng, was motivated in part by significant social changes in the post-World War II Vietnam, and had initially seen it as a revolutionary war supported by Hanoi. The pro-government side in South Vietnam viewed it as a civil war, a defensive war against communism, or were motivated to fight to defend their homes and families. The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of the domino theory of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism.
Beginning in 1950, American military advisors arrived in what was then French Indochina. Most of the funding for the French war effort was provided by the U.S. The Vi?t C?ng, also known as Front national de libération du Sud-Viêt Nam or FNL (the National Liberation Front), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region, while the People's Army of Vietnam, also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare, and had launched armed struggles from 1959 onward. U.S. involvement escalated in 1960 under President John F. Kennedy, with troop levels gradually surging under the MAAG program from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963.
By 1964 there were already 23,000 U.S. troops involved, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. This was followed by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying for the first time ground combat units and increasing troop levels to 184,000. Every year onward there was significant build-up despite little progress, with Robert McNamara, one of the principal architects of the war, begin to express doubts of victory by the end of 1966. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. In the course of the war, the U.S. conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Following the T?t Offensive, U.S. forces begun withdrawal under the Vietnamization phase, while Army of the Republic of Vietnam unconventional and conventional capabilities increased following a period of neglect and became modeled on heavy fire-power focused doctrines modeled after US forces. Operations crossed international borders: bordering areas of Laos and Cambodia were used by North Vietnam as supply routes and were heavily bombed by U.S. forces.
Gradual withdrawal of U.S. ground forces began as part of "Vietnamization", which aimed to end American involvement in the war while transferring the task of fighting the communists to the South Vietnamese themselves and begun the task of modernising their armed forces. Morale declined significantly among U.S. forces during the wind-down period and incidents of fragging, drug-use and insubordination increased with General Creighton Abrams remarking "I need to get this army home to save it". From 1969 onwards the military actions of the Vi?t C?ng insurgency decreased as the role and engagement of the NVA grew. Initially fielding less conventional and poorer weaponry, from 1970 onward the People's Army of Vietnam and its branch People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam had increasingly became mechanised and armoured, capable of modernised combined arms and mobile warfare and begun to widely deploy newer, untested weapons. These two sides would see significant, rapid changes throughout its lifetime from their original post-colonial armies, and by mid-1970s the ARVN became the fourth largest army with the PAVN became the fifth largest army in the world in two countries with a population of roughly 20 million each.
Despite the Paris Peace Accord, which was signed by all parties in January 1973, the fighting continued in the "war-of-the-flags" period in which both Saigon and Hanoi attempted to take territory before and after the accord and the ceasefire was broken just days after its signing. In the U.S. and the Western world, a large anti-Vietnam War movement developed as part of a larger counterculture, the largest such anti-war movement up to that point in history. The war changed the dynamics between the Eastern and Western Blocs, and altered North-South relations, and had significantly influenced the political landscape in the United States, across much of Western Europe and U.S. ground-force intervention spurred the rise of transnational political movements and campaigning.
Direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case-Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 275,000-310,000 Cambodians, 20,000-62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action. The Sino-Soviet split re-emerged following the lull during the Vietnam War and ties between the DRV and its Cambodian allies in the Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea, the newly-formed Democratic Kampuchea begun almost immediately in a series of border raids by the Khmer Rouge and erupted into the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, with Chinese forces directly intervening in the Sino-Vietnamese War. The end of the war and resumption of the Third Indochina War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the bigger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw an estimated 250,000 people perish at sea.
Video Vietnam War
Names for the war
Various names have been applied to the conflict. Vietnam War is the most commonly used name in English. It has also been called the Second Indochina War and the Vietnam Conflict.
As there have been several conflicts in Indochina, this particular conflict is known by the names of its primary protagonists to distinguish it from others. In Vietnamese, the war is generally known as Kháng chi?n ch?ng M? (Resistance War Against America), but less formally as 'Cu?c chi?n tranh M?' (The American War). It is also called Chi?n tranh Vi?t Nam (The Vietnam War).
Maps Vietnam War
Background
The primary military organizations involved in the war were, on one side, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the United States armed forces, and, on the other side, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) (more commonly called the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, in English-language sources), and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, more commonly known as the Viet Cong in English language sources), a South Vietnamese communist guerrilla force.
Daniel Ellsberg contends that U.S. participation in Vietnam had begun in 1945 when it gave support to a French effort to reconquer its colony in Vietnam, a nation which had just declared independence in August 1945.
Indochina was a French colony during the 19th century. When the Japanese invaded during World War II, the Viet Minh opposed them with support from the US, the Soviet Union and China. They received some Japanese arms when Japan surrendered. The Viet Minh, a Communist-led common front under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, then initiated an insurgency against French rule. Hostilities escalated into the First Indochina War (beginning in December 1946). By the 1950s, the conflict had become entwined with the Cold War. In January 1950, China and the Soviet Union recognized the Viet Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam, based in Hanoi, as the legitimate government of Vietnam. The following month the United States and Great Britain recognized the French-backed State of Vietnam in Saigon, led by former Emperor B?o ??i, as the legitimate Vietnamese government. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced many Washington policymakers that the war in Indochina was an example of communist expansionism directed by the Soviet Union.
Military advisors from the People's Republic of China (PRC) began assisting the Viet Minh in July 1950. PRC weapons, expertise, and laborers transformed the Viet Minh from a guerrilla force into a regular army. In September 1950, the United States created a Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) to screen French requests for aid, advise on strategy, and train Vietnamese soldiers. By 1954, the United States had spent US$1 billion in support of the French military effort, shouldering 80 percent of the cost of the war.
During the Battle of Dien Bien Phu U.S. carriers sailed to the Gulf of Tonkin and the U.S. conducted reconnaissance flights. There were also talks between the French and Americans in which the possible use of three tactical nuclear weapons was considered, though reports of how seriously this was considered and by whom are vague and contradictory. According to U.S. Vice-President Richard Nixon, the plan involved the Joint Chiefs of Staff drawing up plans to use three small tactical nuclear weapons in support of the French. Nixon, a so-called "hawk" on Vietnam, suggested that the United States might have to "put American boys in". U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower made American participation contingent on British support, but the British were opposed. Eisenhower decided against U.S. military intervention, being wary of getting the United States involved in a land war in Asia. Throughout the conflict, U.S. intelligence estimates remained skeptical of French chances of success.
On 7 May 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The defeat marked the end of French military involvement in Indochina. At the Geneva Conference, the French negotiated a ceasefire agreement with the Viet Minh, and independence was granted to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
Transition period
At the 1954 Geneva peace conference, Vietnam was temporarily partitioned at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh had wished to continue the war in the south, but was restrained by his Chinese allies who convinced him that he could win control by electoral means. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords, civilians were to be given the opportunity to move freely between the two provisional states for a 300-day period. Elections throughout the country were to be held in 1956 to establish a unified government. Around one million northerners, mainly minority Catholics, fled south, fearing persecution by the communists. This followed an American psychological warfare campaign, designed by Edward Lansdale for the CIA, which exaggerated anti-Catholic sentiment among the Viet Minh and which falsely claimed the US was about to drop atomic bombs on Hanoi. The exodus was coordinated by a U.S.-funded $93 million relocation program, which included the use of the Seventh Fleet to ferry refugees. The northern, mainly Catholic refugees gave the later Ngô ?ình Di?m regime a strong anti-communist constituency. Di?m staffed his government's key posts mostly with northern and central Catholics.
In addition to the Catholics flowing south, up to 130,000 "Revolutionary Regroupees" went to the north for "regroupment", expecting to return to the south within two years. The Viet Minh left roughly 5,000 to 10,000 cadres in the south as a "politico-military substructure within the object of its irredentism." The last French soldiers were to leave Vietnam in April 1956. The PRC completed its withdrawal from North Vietnam at around the same time. Around 52,000 Vietnamese civilians moved from south to north.
Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform", which resulted in significant political oppression. During the land reform, testimony from North Vietnamese witnesses suggested a ratio of one execution for every 160 village residents, which extrapolated nationwide would indicate nearly 100,000 executions. Because the campaign was concentrated mainly in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions became widely accepted by scholars at the time. However, declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate that the number of executions was much lower than reported at the time, although likely greater than 13,500. In 1956, leaders in Hanoi admitted to "excesses" in implementing this program and restored a large amount of the land to the original owners.
The south, meanwhile, constituted the State of Vietnam, with B?o ??i as Emperor and Ngô ?ình Di?m (appointed in July 1954) as his prime minister. Neither the United States government nor Ngô ?ình Di?m's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Viet Minh delegate Ph?m V?n ??ng, who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions". The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan", with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom. It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation. The United States said, "With respect to the statement made by the representative of the State of Vietnam, the United States reiterates its traditional position that peoples are entitled to determine their own future and that it will not join in any arrangement which would hinder this". U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in 1954,
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State B?o ??i. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of B?o ??i was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for.
According to the Pentagon Papers, however, from 1954 to 1956 "Ngô ?ình Di?m really did accomplish miracles" in South Vietnam: "It is almost certain that by 1956 the proportion which might have voted for Ho--in a free election against Di?m--would have been much smaller than eighty percent." In 1957, independent observers from India, Poland, and Canada representing the International Control Commission (ICC) stated that fair, unbiased elections were not possible, with the ICC reporting that neither South nor North Vietnam had honored the armistice agreement.
From April to June 1955, Di?m eliminated any political opposition in the south by launching military operations against two religious groups: the Cao ?ài and Hòa H?o of Ba C?t. The campaign also focused on the Bình Xuyên organized crime group, which was allied with members of the communist party secret police and had some military elements. As broad-based opposition to his harsh tactics mounted, Di?m increasingly sought to blame the communists.
In a referendum on the future of the State of Vietnam on 23 October 1955, Di?m rigged the poll supervised by his brother Ngô ?ình Nhu and was credited with 98.2 percent of the vote, including 133% in Saigon. His American advisors had recommended a more modest winning margin of "60 to 70 percent." Di?m, however, viewed the election as a test of authority. Three days later, he declared South Vietnam to be an independent state under the name Republic of Vietnam (ROV), with himself as president. Likewise, Ho Chi Minh and other communist officials always won at least 99% of the vote in North Vietnamese "elections".
The domino theory, which argued that if one country fell to communism, then all of the surrounding countries would follow, was first proposed as policy by the Eisenhower administration. John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. Senator, said in a speech to the American Friends of Vietnam: "Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam."
Di?m era, 1954-63
Rule
A devout Roman Catholic, Di?m was fervently anti-communist, nationalist, and socially conservative. Historian Luu Doan Huynh notes that "Di?m represented narrow and extremist nationalism coupled with autocracy and nepotism." The majority of Vietnamese people were Buddhist, and were alarmed by actions such as Di?m's dedication of the country to the Virgin Mary.
Beginning in the summer of 1955, Di?m launched the "Denounce the Communists" campaign, during which communists and other anti-government elements were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or executed. He instituted the death penalty against any activity deemed communist in August 1956. According to Gabriel Kolko about 12,000 suspected opponents of Di?m were killed between 1955 and 1957 and by the end of 1958 an estimated 40,000 political prisoners had been jailed.
In May 1957, Di?m undertook a ten-day state visit to the United States. President Eisenhower pledged his continued support, and a parade was held in Di?m's honor in New York City. Although Di?m was publicly praised, in private Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Di?m had been selected because there were no better alternatives.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote in Argument Without End (1999) that the new American patrons of the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) were almost completely ignorant of Vietnamese culture. They knew little of the language or long history of the country. There was a tendency to assign American motives to Vietnamese actions, though Di?m warned that it was an illusion to believe that blindly copying Western methods would solve Vietnamese problems.
Insurgency in the South, 1954-60
Between 1954 and 1957 there was large-scale but disorganized dissidence in the countryside which the Di?m government succeeded in quelling. In early 1957 South Vietnam enjoyed its first peace in over a decade. Incidents of political violence began to occur in mid-1957, but the government "did not construe it as a campaign, considering the disorders too diffuse to warrant committing major GVN [Government of Vietnam] resources." By early 1959, however, Di?m had come to regard the (increasingly frequent) disorders as an organized campaign and implemented Law 10/59, which made political violence punishable by death and property confiscation. There had been some division among former Viet Minh whose main goal was to hold the elections promised in the Geneva Accords, leading to "wildcat" activities separate from the other communists and anti-GVN activists.
In December 1960, the National Liberation Front (NLF, a.k.a. the Viet Cong) was formally created with the intent of uniting all anti-GVN activists, including non-communists. It was formed in Memot, Cambodia, and directed through a central office known as COSVN. According to the Pentagon Papers, the Viet Cong "placed heavy emphasis on the withdrawal of American advisors and influence, on land reform and liberalization of the GVN, on coalition government and the neutralization of Vietnam." Often the leaders of the organization were kept secret.
Support for the NLF was driven by peasant resentment of Diem's reversal of land reforms in the countryside. The vast majority of the population lived in villages in the countryside, where a key demand was for land reform. In areas they controlled, the Viet Minh had confiscated large private landholdings, reduced rents and debts, and leased communal lands, mostly to the poorer peasants. Diem brought the landlords back to the villages. People who were farming land they had held for years now had to return it to landlords and pay years of back rent. This rent collection was enforced by the South Vietnamese army. The divisions within villages reproduced those that had existed against the French: "75 percent support for the NLF, 20 percent trying to remain neutral and 5 percent firmly pro-government".
North Vietnamese involvement
Sources disagree on whether North Vietnam played a direct role in aiding and organizing South Vietnamese rebels prior to 1960. Kahin and Lewis assert:
Contrary to United States policy assumptions, all available evidence shows that the revival of the civil war in the South in 1958 was undertaken by Southerners at their own--not Hanoi's--initiative...Insurgency activity against the Saigon government began in the South under Southern leadership not as a consequence of any dictate from Hanoi, but contrary to Hanoi's injunctions.
Similarly, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. states that "it was not until September, 1960 that the Communist Party of North Vietnam bestowed its formal blessing and called for the liberation of the south from American imperialism".
By contrast, James Olson and Randy Roberts assert that North Vietnam authorized a low-level insurgency in December 1956. To counter the accusation that North Vietnam was violating the Geneva Accord, the independence of the Viet Cong was stressed in communist propaganda.
In March 1956, southern communist leader Lê Du?n presented a plan to revive the insurgency entitled "The Road to the South" to the other members of the Politburo in Hanoi, but as both China and the Soviets opposed confrontation at this time, Lê Du?n's plan was rejected. However the North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency in December 1956. Communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958. The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a "people's war" on the South at a session in January 1959 and in May, Group 559 was established to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh trail, at this time a six-month mountain trek through Laos. About 500 of the "regroupees" of 1954 were sent south on the trail during its first year of operation. The first arms delivery via the trail was completed in August 1959. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated into the south from 1961 to 1963.
Kennedy's escalation, 1961-63
In the 1960 U.S. presidential election, Senator John F. Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon. Although Eisenhower warned Kennedy about Laos and Vietnam, Europe and Latin America "loomed larger than Asia on his sights." In his inaugural address, Kennedy made the ambitious pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty." In June 1961, he bitterly disagreed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when they met in Vienna to discuss key U.S.-Soviet issues. Only 16 months later, the Cuban Missile Crisis (16-28 October 1962) played out on television worldwide. It was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war, and the U.S. raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command (SAC) forces to DEFCON 2.
The Kennedy administration remained essentially committed to the Cold War foreign policy inherited from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1961, the U.S. had 50,000 troops based in South Korea, and Kennedy faced a three-part crisis--the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and a negotiated settlement between the pro-Western government of Laos and the Pathet Lao communist movement. These crises made Kennedy believe that another failure on the part of the United States to gain control and stop communist expansion would fatally damage U.S. credibility with its allies and his own reputation. Kennedy was thus determined to "draw a line in the sand" and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam. He told James Reston of The New York Times immediately after his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place."
Kennedy's policy toward South Vietnam rested on the assumption that Di?m and his forces had to ultimately defeat the guerrillas on their own. He was against the deployment of American combat troops and observed that "to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences." The quality of the South Vietnamese military, however, remained poor. Poor leadership, corruption, and political promotions all played a part in weakening the South Vietnamese Army (formally Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN). The frequency of guerrilla attacks rose as the insurgency gathered steam. While Hanoi's support for the Viet Cong played a role, South Vietnamese governmental incompetence was at the core of the crisis.
One major issue Kennedy raised was whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the United States. Although Kennedy stressed long-range missile parity with the Soviets, he was also interested in using special forces for counterinsurgency warfare in Third World countries threatened by communist insurgencies. Although they were originally intended for use behind front lines after a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe, Kennedy believed that the guerrilla tactics employed by special forces such as the Green Berets would be effective in a "brush fire" war in Vietnam.
Kennedy advisors Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow recommended that U.S. troops be sent to South Vietnam disguised as flood relief workers. Kennedy rejected the idea but increased military assistance yet again. In April 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith warned Kennedy of the "danger we shall replace the French as a colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did." By November 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower's 900 advisors.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was initiated in late 1961. This joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program attempted to resettle the rural population into fortified camps. It was implemented in early 1962 and involved some forced relocation, village internment, and segregation of rural South Vietnamese into new communities where the peasantry would be isolated from Communist insurgents. It was hoped these new communities would provide security for the peasants and strengthen the tie between them and the central government. However, by November 1963 the program had waned, and it officially ended in 1964.
On 23 July 1962, fourteen nations, including China, South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and the United States, signed an agreement promising to respect the neutrality of Laos.
Ousting and assassination of Ngô ?ình Di?m
The inept performance of the South Vietnamese army was exemplified by failed actions such as the Battle of Ap Bac on 2 January 1963, in which a small band of Viet Cong won a battle against a much larger and better-equipped South Vietnamese force, many of whose officers seemed reluctant even to engage in combat.
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam forces were led in that battle by Di?m's most trusted general, Hu?nh V?n Cao, commander of the IV Corps. Cao was a Catholic who had been promoted due to religion and fidelity rather than skill, and his main job was to preserve his forces to stave off coups; he had earlier vomited during a communist attack. Some policymakers in Washington began to conclude that Di?m was incapable of defeating the communists and might even make a deal with Ho Chi Minh. He seemed concerned only with fending off coups, and had become more paranoid after attempts in 1960 and 1962, which he partly attributed to U.S. encouragement. As Robert F. Kennedy noted, "Di?m wouldn't make even the slightest concessions. He was difficult to reason with ..."
As historian James Gibson summed up the situation:
Strategic hamlets had failed ... The South Vietnamese regime was incapable of winning the peasantry because of its class base among landlords. Indeed, there was no longer a 'regime' in the sense of a relatively stable political alliance and functioning bureaucracy. Instead, civil government and military operations had virtually ceased. The National Liberation Front had made great progress and was close to declaring provisional revolutionary governments in large areas.
Discontent with Di?m's policies exploded following the Hu? Ph?t ??n shootings of nine majority Buddhists who were protesting against the ban on the Buddhist flag on Vesak, the Buddha's birthday. This resulted in mass protests against discriminatory policies that gave privileges to the Catholic Church and its adherents. Di?m's elder brother Ngô ?ình Th?c was the Archbishop of Hu? and aggressively blurred the separation between church and state. Thuc's anniversary celebrations shortly before Vesak had been bankrolled by the government, and Vatican flags were displayed prominently. There had also been reports of Buddhist pagodas being demolished by Catholic paramilitaries throughout Di?m's rule. Di?m refused to make concessions to the Buddhist majority or take responsibility for the deaths. On 21 August 1963, the ARVN Special Forces of Colonel Lê Quang Tung, loyal to Di?m's younger brother Ngô ?ình Nhu, raided pagodas across Vietnam, causing widespread damage and destruction and leaving a death toll estimated to range into the hundreds.
U.S. officials began discussing the possibility of a regime change during the middle of 1963. The United States Department of State was generally in favor of encouraging a coup, while the Defense Department favored Di?m. Chief among the proposed changes was the removal of Di?m's younger brother Nhu, who controlled the secret police and special forces and was seen as the man behind the Buddhist repression and more generally the architect of the Ngô family's rule. This proposal was conveyed to the U.S. embassy in Saigon in Cable 243.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was in contact with generals planning to remove Di?m. They were told that the United States would not oppose such a move nor punish the generals by cutting off aid. President Di?m was overthrown and executed, along with his brother, on 2 November 1963. When Kennedy was informed, Maxwell Taylor remembered that he "rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face." He had not anticipated Di?m's murder. The U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, invited the coup leaders to the embassy and congratulated them. Ambassador Lodge informed Kennedy that "the prospects now are for a shorter war". Kennedy wrote Lodge a letter congratulating him for "a fine job".
Following the coup, chaos ensued. Hanoi took advantage of the situation and increased its support for the guerrillas. South Vietnam entered a period of extreme political instability, as one military government toppled another in quick succession. Increasingly, each new regime was viewed by the communists as a puppet of the Americans; whatever the failings of Di?m, his credentials as a nationalist (as Robert McNamara later reflected) had been impeccable.
U.S. military advisors were embedded at every level of the South Vietnamese armed forces. They were however criticized for ignoring the political nature of the insurgency. The Kennedy administration sought to refocus U.S. efforts on pacification and "winning over the hearts and minds" of the population. The military leadership in Washington, however, was hostile to any role for U.S. advisors other than conventional troop training. General Paul Harkins, the commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, confidently predicted victory by Christmas 1963. The CIA was less optimistic, however, warning that "the Viet Cong by and large retain de facto control of much of the countryside and have steadily increased the overall intensity of the effort".
Paramilitary officers from the CIA's Special Activities Division trained and led Hmong tribesmen in Laos and into Vietnam. The indigenous forces numbered in the tens of thousands and they conducted direct action missions, led by paramilitary officers, against the Communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese supporters. The CIA also ran the Phoenix Program and participated in Military Assistance Command, Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group (MAC-V SOG), which was originally named the Special Operations Group, but was changed for cover purposes.
Johnson's escalation, 1963-69
At the time Lyndon B. Johnson took over the presidency after the death of Kennedy, he had not been heavily involved with policy toward Vietnam. Upon becoming president, however, Johnson immediately focused on the war: on 24 November 1963, he said, "the battle against communism ... must be joined ... with strength and determination." However, Johnson knew that he had inherited a rapidly deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, believing in the widely accepted arguments that were used for defending the South: Should they retreat or appease, either action would imperil other nations beyond the conflict.
The military revolutionary council, meeting in lieu of a strong South Vietnamese leader, was made up of 12 members headed by General D??ng V?n Minh--whom Stanley Karnow, a journalist on the ground, later recalled as "a model of lethargy". Lodge, frustrated by the end of the year, cabled home about Minh: "Will he be strong enough to get on top of things?" His regime was overthrown in January 1964 by General Nguy?n Khánh. However, there was persistent instability in the military as several coups--not all successful--occurred in a short period of time.
In a statement similar to that made to the French almost two decades earlier, Ho Chi Minh warned that if the Americans "want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea." Some have argued that the policy of North Vietnam was not to topple other non-communist governments in South East Asia.
Gulf of Tonkin incident
On 2 August 1964, the USS Maddox, on an intelligence mission along North Vietnam's coast, allegedly fired upon and damaged several torpedo boats that had been stalking it in the Gulf of Tonkin. A second attack was reported two days later on the USS Turner Joy and Maddox in the same area. The circumstances of the attack were murky. Lyndon Johnson commented to Undersecretary of State George Ball that "those sailors out there may have been shooting at flying fish."
An undated NSA publication declassified in 2005 revealed that there was no attack on 4 August.
The second "attack" led to retaliatory air strikes, and prompted Congress to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964, Although most Congressmen at the time denied that this was a full-scale war declaration, the Tonkin Resolution granted the president unilateral power to launch any military actions he deemed necessary. In the same month, Johnson pledged that he was not "committing American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land".
The National Security Council recommended a three-stage escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam. On 7 February 1965 following an attack on a U.S. Army base in Pleiku, Operation Flaming Dart (initiated when Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin was on a state visit to North Vietnam), Operation Rolling Thunder and Operation Arc Light commenced. The bombing campaign, which ultimately lasted three years, was intended to force North Vietnam to cease its support for the Viet Cong by threatening to destroy North Vietnam's air defenses and industrial infrastructure. As well, it was aimed at bolstering the morale of the South Vietnamese. Between March 1965 and November 1968, "Rolling Thunder" deluged the north with a million tons of missiles, rockets and bombs.
Bombing of Laos
Bombing was not restricted to North Vietnam. Other aerial campaigns, such as Operation Barrel Roll, targeted different parts of the Viet Cong and NVA infrastructure. These included the Ho Chi Minh trail supply route, which ran through Laos and Cambodia. The ostensibly neutral Laos had become the scene of a civil war, pitting the Laotian government backed by the US against the Pathet Lao and its North Vietnamese allies.
Massive aerial bombardment against the Pathet Lao and People's Army of Vietnam forces were carried out by the US to prevent the collapse of the Royal central government, and to deny the use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos, nearly equal to the 2.1 million tons of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II, making Laos the most heavily bombed country in history relative to the size of its population.
The objective of stopping North Vietnam and the Viet Cong was never reached. The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Curtis LeMay, however, had long advocated saturation bombing in Vietnam and wrote of the communists that "we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age".
The 1964 Offensive
Following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Hanoi had anticipated the arrival of US troops and begun expanding the Viet Cong as well as sending increasing numbers of North Vietnamese personnel southwards, and at this phase equipping and standardising the equipment of the Viet Cong forces with AK-47 rifles and other supplies as well as forming the 9th Division. "From a strength of approximately 5,000 at the start of 1959 the Viet Cong's ranks grew to about 100,000 at the end of 1964 ... Between 1961 and 1964 the Army's strength rose from about 850,000 to nearly a million men." The numbers for U.S. troops deployed to Vietnam during the same period were quite different; 2,000 in 1961, rising rapidly to 16,500 in 1964. During this phase, the use of captured equipment decreased while greater numbers of ammunition and supplies were required to maintained regular units, and Group 559 was tasked with expanding the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in light of the near constant bombardment by US warplanes. The war had begun to shift into the final, conventional warfare phase of Hanoi's three-stage protracted warfare model, in which they were tasked with destroying the ARVN and capturing and holding areas, however the Viet Cong were not yet strong enough to assault major towns and cities.
In December 1964, ARVN forces had suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Bình Giã, in a battle that both sides viewed as a watershed. Previously, communist forces had utilised hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. However, at Binh Gia, they had defeated a strong ARVN force in a conventional battle and remained in the field for four days. Tellingly, South Vietnamese forces were again defeated in June 1965 at the Battle of ??ng Xoài.
American ground war
On 8 March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam, unilaterally and without the consultation of the South Vietnamese government. This marked the beginning of the American ground war. U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly supported the deployment. The Marines' initial assignment was defensive. The first deployment of 3,500 in March 1965 was increased to nearly 200,000 by December. The U.S. military had long been schooled in offensive warfare. Regardless of political policies, U.S. commanders were institutionally and psychologically unsuited to a defensive mission.
General William Westmoreland informed Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp Jr., commander of U.S. Pacific forces, that the situation was critical. He said, "I am convinced that U.S. troops with their energy, mobility, and firepower can successfully take the fight to the NLF(Viet Cong)". With this recommendation, Westmoreland was advocating an aggressive departure from America's defensive posture and the sidelining of the South Vietnamese. By ignoring ARVN units, the U.S. commitment became open-ended. Westmoreland outlined a three-point plan to win the war:
- Phase 1. Commitment of U.S. (and other free world) forces necessary to halt the losing trend by the end of 1965.
- Phase 2. U.S. and allied forces mount major offensive actions to seize the initiative to destroy guerrilla and organized enemy forces. This phase would end when the enemy had been worn down, thrown on the defensive, and driven back from major populated areas.
- Phase 3. If the enemy persisted, a period of twelve to eighteen months following Phase 2 would be required for the final destruction of enemy forces remaining in remote base areas.
The plan was approved by Johnson and marked a profound departure from the previous administration's insistence that the government of South Vietnam was responsible for defeating the guerrillas. Westmoreland predicted victory by the end of 1967. Johnson did not, however, communicate this change in strategy to the media. Instead he emphasized continuity. The change in U.S. policy depended on matching the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in a contest of attrition and morale. The opponents were locked in a cycle of escalation. The idea that the government of South Vietnam could manage its own affairs was shelved. Westmoreland and McNamara furthermore touted the body count system for gauging victory, a metric that would later prove to be flawed.
The one-year tour of duty of American soldiers deprived units of experienced leadership. As one observer noted "we were not in Vietnam for 10 years, but for one year 10 times." As a result, training programs were shortened.
South Vietnam was inundated with manufactured goods. As Stanley Karnow writes, "the main PX [Post Exchange], located in the Saigon suburb of Cholon, was only slightly smaller than the New York Bloomingdale's ..." The American buildup transformed the economy and had a profound effect on South Vietnamese society. A huge surge in corruption was witnessed.
Washington encouraged its SEATO allies to contribute troops. Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines all agreed to send troops. South Korea would later ask to join the Many Flags program in return for economic compensation. Major allies, however, notably NATO nations Canada and the United Kingdom, declined Washington's troop requests. The U.S. and its allies mounted complex operations, such as operations Masher, Attleboro, Cedar Falls, and Junction City. However, the communist insurgents remained elusive and demonstrated great tactical flexibility. By 1967, these operations had generated large-scale internal refugees, numbering nearly 2.1 million in South Vietnam with 125,000 people evacuated and rendered homeless during Operation Masher, which was the largest search-and-destroy operation in the war up to that point. Operation Masher would have negligible impact as the PAVN/VC returned to the province just four months after the operation ended. Despite the continual conductance of major operations, in which the Viet Cong would typically evade, the war was characterised by smaller-unit, contacts or engagements. Up to the war's end, the Viet Cong and NVA would initiate 90% of large firefights of which 80% were clear and well-planned operations and thus the NVA/Viet Cong would retain strategic Initiative despite overwhelming US force and fire-power deployment. The PAVN/NLF had furthermore developed strategies capable of countering U.S. military doctrines and tactics, see NLF and PAVN battle tactics.
Meanwhile, the political situation in South Vietnam began to stabilise with the coming to power of prime minister Air Marshal Nguy?n Cao K? and figurehead Chief of State, General Nguy?n V?n Thi?u, in mid-1965 at the head of a military junta. This ended a series of coups that had happened more than once a year. In 1967, Thieu became president with Ky as his deputy, after rigged elections. Although they were nominally a civilian government, Ky was supposed to maintain real power through a behind-the-scenes military body. However, Thieu outmanoeuvred and sidelined Ky by filling the ranks with generals from his faction. Thieu was also accused of murdering Ky loyalists through contrived military accidents. Thieu, mistrustful and indecisive, remained president until 1975, having won a one-candidate election in 1971.
The Johnson administration employed a "policy of minimum candor" in its dealings with the media. Military information officers sought to manage media coverage by emphasizing stories that portrayed progress in the war. Over time, this policy damaged the public trust in official pronouncements. As the media's coverage of the war and that of the Pentagon diverged, a so-called credibility gap developed. Despite Johnson and Westmoreland publicly proclaiming victory was being achieved, with Westmoreland divulging that the "end is coming into view" internal reports in the Pentagon Papers indicate that Viet Cong forces still retained strategic initiative, being able to control their losses widely, with 30% of all engagements being Viet Cong attacks against static US positions, 23% being a VC/NVA ambush and encirclement, and just 5% of engagements being US forces attacking a Viet Cong emplacement and 9% being a US ambush against Viet Cong/NVA forces.
Tet Offensive
In late 1967 the PAVN lured American forces into the hinterlands at ??k Tô and at the Marine Khe Sanh combat base in Qu?ng Tr? Province where the United States had engaged, in a series of battles known as The Hill Fights. Part of this would form a diversionary strategy that was meant to draw US forces towards the Central Highlands. Preparation for the General Offensive, General Uprising, known as Tet Mau Than, or the Tet Offensive was prepared, with the intention by V?n Ti?n D?ng for forces to launch "direct attacks on the American and puppet nerve centers--Saigon, Hue, Danang, all the cities, towns and main bases.." Hanoi sought to placate critics of the ongoing stalemate and had sought a decisive victory. They had reasoned this could be achieved through sparking a general uprising within the towns and cities and mass-defections among ARVN units, who were on holiday leave, during the period truce. Over 100 cities were attacked by over 85,000 enemy troops including assaults on key military installations, headquarters, and government buildings and offices, including the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were initially shocked by the scale, intensity and deliberative planning of the urban offensive, as infiltration of personnel and weapons into the cities were done in intense covertness, and the offensive constituted an intelligence failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor. Most cities were recaptured within weeks except the former capital city of Hu? in which NVA and Viet Cong troops captured most of the city and citadel except the headquarters of the 1st Division and held on in the fighting for 26 days. During that time, they had executed approximately 2,800 unarmed Hu? civilians and foreigners they considered to be enemy's spies. In the following Battle of Hu? American forces employed massive firepower that left 80 percent of the city in ruins. Further north, at Qu?ng Tr? City, the ARVN Airborne Division, the 1st Division and a regiment of the US 1st Cavalry Division had managed to hold out and overcome an assault intended to capture the city. In Saigon, Viet Cong/NVA fighters had captured areas in and around the city, attacking key installations and the neighbourhood of Cholon before members of the ARVN Rangers dislodged them after three weeks. During one battle, Peter Arnett, had reported an infantry commander saying of B?n Tre (laid to rubble by U.S. attacks) that "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."
During the first month of the offensive, 1,100 Americans and other allied troops, 2,100 ARVN, 14,000 civilians, were killed By the end of the first offensive, after two months, nearly 5,000 ARVN were killed, over 4,000 U.S. forces were killed, with total including wounded being 45,820 and an unknown number of PAVN/NLF casualties, with some U.S. authors claiming the NVA and Viet Cong suffered 17,000 KIA and 32,000 total casualties including wounded. A month later a second offensive known as the Phase II/May Offensive was launched, although less widespread, it had still demonstrated the Viet Cong were still capable of carrying out nationally orchestrated nationwide offensives. Two months following the May Offensive, a third offensive was launched, the Phase III/August Offensive. The PAVN's own official records of their losses across all three offensives was 45,267 killed and 111,179 total casualties. By then it had become the bloodiest year of the war up to that point. The failure to spark a general uprising, and the fact that no units within the ARVN defected meant both war goals of Hanoi had fallen flat at enormous costs.
Prior to Tet in November 1967, Westmoreland had spearheaded a public relations drive for the Johnson administration to bolster flagging public support. In a speech before the National Press Club he had said a point in the war had been reached "where the end comes into view." Thus, the public was shocked and confused when Westmoreland's predictions were trumped by Tet. For General Westmoreland, public approval of his overall performance dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent--and endorsement for his war effort fell from 40 percent to 26 percent." The American public and media begun to turn against Johnson as the three offensives had contradicted claims of progress made by the Johnson administration and the military. Westmoreland's later request for 200,000 additional troops had been leaked to the media and the subsequent fallout combined with the intelligence failure caused him to be removed from command on March 1968, succeeded by his deputy Creighton Abrams
On 10 May 1968, peace talks began between the United States and North Vietnam in Paris. Negotiations stagnated for five months, until Johnson gave orders to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. At the same time, Hanoi realising it could not achieve a "total victory" employed a strategy known as "talking while fighting, fighting while talking", in which military offensives would occur concurrently with negotiations.
President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to run for re-election as his approval rating slumped from 48 to 36 percent. LBJ's escalation of the war in Vietnam divided Americans into warring camps, cost 30,000 American lives by that point and was regarded to have destroyed his presidency. Refusal to send more U.S. troops to Vietnam was also seen as Johnson's admission that the war was lost. As Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted, "the dangerous illusion of victory by the United States was therefore dead."
Vietnam was a major political issue during the United States presidential election in 1968. The election was won by Republican party candidate Richard Nixon.
Nixon Doctrine and Vietnamization, 1969-72
Nuclear threats and diplomacy
U.S. President Richard Nixon began troop withdrawals in 1969. His plan, called the Nixon Doctrine, was to build up the ARVN, so it could take over the defense of South Vietnam. The policy became known as "Vietnamization". Theater commander Creighton Abrams shifted to smaller operations, aimed at disrupting logistics, with better use of firepower and more cooperation with the ARVN. On 27 October 1969, Nixon had ordered a squadron of 18 B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons to race to the border of Soviet airspace to convince the Soviet Union, in accord with the madman theory, that he was capable of anything to end the Vietnam War ("Operation Giant Lance"). Nixon had also sought détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China which decreased global tensions and led to nuclear arms reduction on the part of both superpowers, however there was disappointed when both sides continued to supply the North Vietnamese with aid.
Hanoi's war strategy
In September 1969, Ho Chi Minh died at age seventy-nine. The failure of Tet in sparking a popular uprising caused a shift in Hanoi's war strategy and the Giáp-Chinh "Northern-First" faction had regained control over military affairs from the Lê Du?n-Hoàng V?n Thái "Southern-First" faction. An unconventional victory was sidelined for a strategy built on conventional victory through conquest. Large-scale offensives were rolled back in favour of small-unit and sapper attacks as well as targeting the pacification and Vietnamization strategy. In the two-year period following Tet, the PAVN had begun its transformation from a fine light-infantry, limited mobility force into a high-mobile and mechanised combined arms force.
U.S. domestic controversies
The anti-war movement was gaining strength in the United States. Nixon appealed to the "silent majority" of Americans who he said supported the war without showing it in public. But revelations of the My Lai Massacre, in which a U.S. Army platoon raped and killed civilians, and the 1969 "Green Beret Affair" where eight Special Forces soldiers, including the 5th Special Forces Group Commander, were arrested for the murder of a suspected double agent provoked national and international outrage.
In 1971 the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times. The top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, commissioned by the Department of Defense, detailed a long series of public deceptions on the part of the U.S. government. The Supreme Court ruled that its publication was legal.
Collapsing U.S. morale
Following the Tet Offensive and the U.S. public beginning to publicly turn against the war, U.S. forces begun a period of morale collapse, disillusionment and disobedience. At home, desertion rates quadrupled from 1966 levels. Among enlisted only 2.5% chose infantry combat positions in 1969-1970. ROTC enrollment decreased from 191,749 in 1966 to 72,459 by 1971 and reaching an all-time low of 33,220 in 1974, depriving U.S. forces of much-needed military leadership.
Open refusal of engaging in patrols, carrying out orders and disobedience begun to emerge during this period as well with notable case of an entire company refusing orders to engage or carry out operations. Unit cohesion begun to dissipate, and focused on minimising contact with Viet Cong and NVA troops. A practice known as "sand-bagging" started occurring, were units ordered to go on patrol would go into the country-side, find a site out of view from superiors and rest while radioing in false coordinates and unit reports. Drug usage increased rapidly among U.S. forces during this period, as 30% of U.S. troops engaged in regular usage of marijuana while a House subcommittee found 10-15% of U.S. troops in Vietnam regularly used high-grade heroin. From 1969 on-ward search-and-destroy operations started to become referred to as "search and evade" or "search and avoid" operations, falsifying battle reports while avoiding guerrilla fighters. A total of 900 fragging and suspected fragging incidents were investigated, most occurring between 1969 and 1971. In 1969 field-performance of the U.S. Forces was characterised by lowered morale, lack of motivation, and poor leadership. One battle which is used by historians to high-light the significant decline in U.S. morale was the Battle of FSB Mary Ann, one of the final engagements in which a sapper attack had rampaged and destroyed the base, relatively unchallenged. William Westmoreland, no-longer in command but tasked with its investigation cited a clear dereliction of duty, lax defensive postures and lack of officers being in charged as the reason.
On the collapse of U.S. morale, historian Shelby Stanton wrote:
In the last years of the Army's retreat, its remaining forces were relegated to static security. The American Army's decline was readily apparent in this final stage. Racial incidents, drug abuse, combat disobedience, and crime reflected growing idleness, resentment, and frustration... the fatal handicaps of faulty campaign strategy, incomplete wartime preparation, and the tardy, superficial attempts at Vietnamization. An entire American army was sacrificed on the battlefield of Vietnam.
ARVN taking the lead and U.S. ground-force withdrawal
Beginning in 1970, American troops were withdrawn from border areas where most of the fighting took place, instead redeployed along the coast and interior, and US casualties in 1970 were less than half of 1969 casualties after being relegated to less active combat. At the same time that US forces were deployed, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam took over combat operations throughout the country, with casualties doubled US casualties in 1969, and more than tripled US ones in 1970. The post-Tet environment saw a rise in membership in Regional Force and Popular Force militias, now more capable of providing village security which the Americans could not under Westmoreland. In 1970 Nixon announced the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 American troops, reducing the number of Americans to 265,500. By 1970 the Viet Cong forces were no-longer southern-majority, and nearly 70% of units were northerners. Between 1969 and 1971 the Viet Cong and some PAVN units had reverted to small unit tactics typical of 1967 and prior instead of nationwide grand offensives. In 1971 Australia and New Zealand withdrew their soldiers and U.S. troop count was further reduced to 196,700, with a deadline to remove another 45,000 troops by February 1972. The United States also reduced support troops and in March 1971 the 5th Special Forces Group, the first American unit deployed to South Vietnam, withdrew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Cambodia
Prince Norodom Sihanouk had proclaimed Cambodia neutral since 1955, but permitted the PAVN/NLF to use Cambodia as a staging ground for the Sihanouk Trail. Nixon had by then launched a massive bombing campaign, called Operation Menu, against communist sanctuaries along the Cambodia/Vietnam border. Only five high-ranking Congressional officials were informed of Operation Menu.
In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by his pro-American prime minister Lon Nol. North Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1970 at the request of Khmer Rouge deputy leader Nuon Chea. A series of military operations in Cambodia by the South Vietnamese alongside Lon Nol's FANK was the closest that the entire leadership of the Viet Cong came to being captured. This was a goal that US/RVN Intelligence failed to achieve for nearly a decade. Lon Nol had also started rounding up Vietnamese civilians in Cambodia into internment camps and begun massacring them, provoking harsh reactions from both the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese government. A month after COSVN's escape, U.S. and ARVN forces launched a second invasion into Cambodia to attack NVA and Viet Cong bases. A counter-offensive later that year as part of Operation Chenla II by the PAVN would recapture most of the border areas and decimate most of Lon Nol's forces.
This invasion sparked nationwide U.S. protests as Nixon had promised to deescalate the American involvement. Four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University during a protest in Ohio, which provoked further public outrage in the United States. The reaction to the incident by the Nixon administration was seen as callous and indifferent, providing additional impetus for the anti-war movement. The U.S. Air Force continued to heavily bomb Cambodia in support of the Cambodian government as part of Operation Freedom Deal.
Laos
Building up on the success of ARVN units in Cambodia, and further testing the Vietnamization program, the ARVN were tasked to launch Operation Lam Son 719 in February 1971, the first major operation aimed directly at occupying the Ho Chi Minh trail by attacking the major crossroad of Tchperone. This offensive would also be the first time the PAVN would field-test its combined arms force. The first few days were considered a success but the momentum had slowed after fierce resistance. Nguy?n V?n Thi?u had halted the general advance, leaving armoured divisions able to surround them. Thieu had ordered air assault troops to capture Tchepone and withdraw, despite facing four-times larger numbers. During the withdrawal the PAVN counterattack had forced a panicked rout. Half of the ARVN troops involved were either captured or killed, half of the ARVN/US support helicopters were downed by AA and the operation was considered a fiasco, demonstrating operational deficiencies still present within the ARVN. Richard Nixon and President Thieu had sought to use this event to show-case victory simply by capturing Tchepone, and it was spun off as an "operational success".
Easter Offensive and Paris Peace Accords, 1972
Vietnamization was again tested by the Easter Offensive of 1972, a massive conventional NVA invasion of South Vietnam. The NVA and Viet Cong quickly overran the northern provinces and in coordination with other forces attacked from Cambodia, threatening to cut the country in half. U.S. troop withdrawals continued. American airpower responded, beginning Operation Linebacker, and the offensive was halted.
The war was central to the 1972 U.S. presidential election as Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, campaigned on immediate withdrawal. Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger had continued secret negotiations with North Vietnam's Lê ??c Th? and on October 1972 reached an agreement. President Thieu demanded changes to the peace accord upon its discovery and when North Vietnam went public with the agreement's details, the Nixon administration claimed they were attempting to embarrass the president. The negotiations became deadlocked when Hanoi demanded new changes. To show his support for South Vietnam and force Hanoi back to the negotiating table, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, a massive bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong 18-29 December 1972. Nixon pressured Thieu to accept the terms of the agreement, threatening to conclude a bilateral peace deal and cut off American aid while promising an air-response in case of invasion.
On 15 January, all U.S. combat activities was suspended. Lê ??c Th? and Henry Kissinger, along with the Provisional Revolutionary Government - PRG (Viet Cong's government) Foreign Minister Nguy?n Th? Bình and a reluctant President Thi?u signed the Paris Peace Accords on 27 January 1973. This officially ended direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, created a ceasefire between North Vietnam/PRG and South Vietnam, guaranteed the territorial integrity of Vietnam under the Geneva Conference of 1954, called for elections or a political settlement between the Provisional Revolutionary Government and South Vietnam and allowed 200,000 communist troops to remain in the south, alongside a POW exchange. There was a sixty-day period for the total withdrawal of U.S. forces. "This article", noted Peter Church, "proved... to be the only one of the Paris Agreements which was fully carried out." All US forces personnel were completely withdrawn by March 1973.
U.S. exit and final campaigns, 1973-75
In the lead-up to the ceasefire on 28 January, both sides attempted to maximize the land and population under their control in a campaign known as the War of the flags, fighting continued after the ceasefire, this time without US participation and continued throughout the year. North Vietnam was allowed to continue supplying troops in the South but only to the extent of replacing expended material. Later that year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kissinger and Th?, but the Vietnamese negotiator declined it saying that a true peace did not yet exist.
On 15 March 1973, Nixon implied the US would intervene again militarily if the North launched a full offensive and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger during his June 1973 confirmation hearings re-affirmed this. Public and congressional reaction to Nixon's statement was unfavourable which prompted the U.S. Senate to pass the Case-Church Amendment to prohibit an intervention.
PAVN/VC leaders expected the ceasefire terms would favor their side but Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Viet Cong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tr?n V?n Trà. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for 1975-76 dry season. Tra calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained. The Viet Cong resumed offensive operations when the dry season begun in 1973, and by January 1974, recaptured territory it lost during the previous dry season.
Within South Vietnam, there was increasing chaos as the departure of the US military and the global recession that followed the Arab oil embargo compromised an economy partly dependent on U.S. financial support and troop presence. After two clashes that left 55 South Vietnamese soldiers dead, President Thieu announced on 4 January 1974, that the war had restarted and that the Paris Peace Accord was no longer in effect. This was despite there being over 25,000 South Vietnamese casualties during the ceasefire period.
The success of the 1973-74 dry season offensive inspired Trà to return to Hanoi in October 1974 and plead for a larger offensive the next dry season. This time, Trà could travel on a drivable highway with regular fueling stops, a vast change from the days when the Ho Chi Minh trail was a dangerous mountain trek. Giáp, the North Vietnamese defence minister, was reluctant to approve of Trà's plan since a larger offensive might provoke U.S. reaction and interfere with the big push planned for 1976. Trà appealed over Giáp's head to first secretary Lê Du?n, who approved of the operation. Trà's plan called for a limited offensive from Cambodia into Ph??c Long Province. The strike was designed to solve local logistical problems, gauge the reaction of South Vietnamese forces, and determine whether U.S. would return.
At the start of 1975, the South Vietnamese had three times as much artillery and twice the number of tanks and armoured cars as the opposition. They also had 1,400 aircraft and a two-to-one numerical superiority in combat troops over their Communist enemies. However, the rising oil prices meant that much of this could not be used, and the rushed nature of Vietnamization, intended to cover the US retreat, saw a lack of spare parts, ground-crew and maintenance personnel, rendering most of the equipment given inoperable. Gerald Ford took over as U.S. president on 9 August 1974 after President Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal and Congress cut financial aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion a year to $700 million. Congress also voted in further restrictions on funding to be phased in through 1975 and to culminate in a total cutoff in 1976.
On 13 December 1974, North Vietnamese forces attacked Route 14 in Ph??c Long Province. Phuoc Binh, the provincial capital, fell on 6 January 1975. Ford desperately asked Congress for funds to assist and re-supply the South before it was overrun. Congress refused. The fall of Phuoc Binh and the lack of an American response left the South Vietnamese elite demoralized.
The speed of this success led the Politburo to reassess its strategy. It was decided that operations in the Central Highlands would be turned over to General V?n Ti?n D?ng and that Pleiku should be seized, if possible. Before he left for the South, D?ng was addressed by Lê Du?n: "Never have we had military and political conditions so perfect or a strategic advantage as great as we have now."
Campaign 275
On 10 March 1975, General Dung launched Campaign 275, a limited offensive into the Central Highlands, supported by tanks and heavy artillery. The target was Buôn Ma Thu?t, in ??k L?k Province. If the town could be taken, the provincial capital of Pleiku and the road to the coast would be exposed for a planned campaign in 1976. The ARVN proved incapable of resisting the onslaught, and its forces collapsed on 11 March. Once again, Hanoi was surprised by the speed of their success. Dung now urged the Politburo to allow him to seize Pleiku immediately and then turn his attention to Kon Tum. He argued that with two months of good weather remaining until the onset of the monsoon, it would be irresponsible to not take advantage of the situation.
President Nguy?n V?n Thi?u, a former general, was fearful that his forces would be cut off in the north by the attacking communists; Thieu ordered a retreat, which soon turned into a bloody rout. While the bulk of ARVN forces attempted to flee, isolated units fought desperately. ARVN General Phu abandoned Pleiku and Kon Tum and retreated toward the coast, in what became known as the "column of tears".
On 20 March, Thieu reversed himself and ordered Hu?, Vietnam's third-largest city, be held at all costs, and then changed his policy several times. As the North Vietnamese launched their attack, panic set in, and ARVN resistance withered. On 22 March, the NVA opened the siege of Hu?. Civilians flooded the airport and the docks hoping for any mode of escape. As resistance in Hu? collapsed, North Vietnamese rockets rained down on Da Nang and its airport. By 28 March 35,000 VPA troops were poised to attack the suburbs. By 30 March 100,000 leaderless ARVN troops surrendered as the NVA marched victoriously through Da Nang. With the fall of the city, the defense of the Central Highlands and Northern provinces came to an end.
Final North Vietnamese offensive
With the northern half of the country under their control, the Politburo ordered General Dung to launch the final offensive against Saigon. The operational plan for the Ho Chi Minh Campaign called for the capture of Saigon before 1 May. Hanoi wished to avoid the coming monsoon and prevent any redeployment of ARVN forces defending the capital. Northern forces, their morale boosted by their recent victories, rolled on, taking Nha Trang, Cam Ranh, and Da Lat.
On 7 April, three North Vietnamese divisions attacked Xuân L?c, 40 miles (64 km) east of Saigon. For two bloody weeks, severe fighting raged as the ARVN defenders made a last stand to try to block the North Vietnamese advance. By 21 April, however, the exhausted garrison were ordered to withdraw towards Saigon. An embittered and tearful president Thieu resigned on the same day, declaring that the United States betrayed South Vietnam. In a scathing attack, he suggested U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had tricked him into signing the Paris peace agreement two years earlier, promising military aid that failed to materialize. Having transferred power to Tr?n V?n H??ng, he left for Taiwan on 25 April.
By the end of April, the ARVN collapsed on all fronts except in the Mekong Delta. Thousands of refugees streamed southward, ahead of the main communist onslaught. On 27 April 100,000 North Vietnamese troops encircled Saigon. The city was defended by about 30,000 ARVN troops. To hasten a collapse and foment panic, the NVA shelled the airport and forced its closure. With the air exit closed, large numbers of civilians found that they had no way out.
Fall of Saigon
Chaos, unrest, and panic broke out as hysterical South Vietnamese officials and civilians scrambled to leave Saigon. Martial law was declared. American helicopters began evacuating South Vietnamese, U.S., and foreign nationals from various parts of the city and from the U.S. embassy compound. Operation Frequent Wind had been delayed until the last possible moment, because of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin's belief that Saigon could be held and that a political settlement could be reached.
Schlesinger announced early in the morning of 29 April 1975 the evacuation from Saigon by helicopter of the last U.S. diplomatic, military, and civilian personnel. Frequent Wind was arguably the largest helicopter evacuation in history. It began on 29 April, in an atmosphere of desperation, as hysterical crowds of Vietnamese vied for limited space. Martin pleaded with Washington to dispatch $700 million in emergency aid to bolster the regime and help it mobilize fresh military reserves. But American public opinion had soured on this conflict.
President Gerald Ford had given a televised speech on 23 April, declaring an end to the Vietnam War and all U.S. aid. Frequent Wind continued around the clock, as North Vietnamese tanks breached defenses on the outskirts of Saigon. In the early morning hours of 30 April, the last U.S. Marines evacuated the embassy by helicopter, as civilians swamped the perimeter and poured into the grounds. Many of them had been employed by the Americans and were left to their fate.
On 30 April 1975, NVA troops entered the city of Saigon and quickly overcame all resistance, capturing key buildings and installations. A tank from the 324th Division crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace at 11:30 am local time and the Viet Cong flag was raised above it. President D??ng V?n Minh, who had succeeded Huong two days earlier, surrendered to Colonel Bùi Tín.
Opposition to U.S. involvement in the war, 1964-73
During the course of the Vietnam War a large segment of the American population came to be opposed to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Public opinion steadily turned against the war following 1967 and by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam. Nearly a third of the American population were strongly against the war, a position which lasted through subsequent decades.
Early opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam drew its inspiration from the Geneva Conference of 1954. American support of Di?m in refusing elections was seen as thwarting the democracy America claimed to support. John F. Kennedy, while Senator, opposed involvement in Vietnam. Nonetheless, it is possible to specify certain groups who led the anti-war movement at its peak in the late 1960s and the reasons why. Many young people protested because they were the ones being drafted while others were against the war because the anti-war movement grew increasingly popular among the counterculture. Some advocates within the peace movement advocated a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. Opposition to the Vietnam War tended to unite groups opposed to U.S. anti-communism and imperialism and, for those involved with the New Left such as the Catholic Worker Movement. Others, such as Stephen Spiro opposed the war based on the theory of Just War. Some wanted to show solidarity with the people of Vietnam, such as Norman Morrison emulating the self-immolation of Thích Qu?ng ??c.
High-profile opposition to the Vietnam War increasingly turned to mass protests in an effort to shift U.S. public opinion. Riots broke out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention during protests against the war. After news reports of American military abuses such as the 1968 My Lai Massacre, brought new attention and support to the anti-war movement, some veterans joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. On 15 October 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium attracted millions of Americans. The fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University in 1970 led to nationwide university protests. Anti-war protests declined with the final withdrawal of troops after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973.
Involvement of other countries
Pro-Hanoi
2,000 years of Chinese-Vietnamese enmity and hundreds of years of Chinese and Russian mutual suspicions were suspended when they united against us in Vietnam.
China
In 1950, China extended diplomatic recognition to the Viet Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam and sent heavy weapons, as well as military advisers led by Luo Guibo to assist the Viet Minh in its war with the French (1946-1954). The first draft of the 1954 Geneva Accords was negotiated by French prime minister Pierre Mendès France and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai who, seeing U.S. intervention coming, urged the Viet Minh to accept a partition at the 17th parallel.
China's support for North Vietnam when the U.S. started to intervene included both financial aid and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of military personnel in support roles. In the summer of 1962, Mao Zedong agreed to supply Hanoi with 90,000 rifles and guns free of charge. Starting in 1965, China sent anti-aircraft units and engineering battalions to North Vietnam to repair the damage caused by American bombing, man anti-aircraft batteries, rebuild roads and railroads, transport supplies, and perform other engineering works. This freed North Vietnamese army units for combat in the South. China sent 320,000 troops and annual arms shipments worth $180 million. The Chinese military claims to have caused 38% of American air losses in the war. China claimed that its military and economic aid to North Vietnam and the Viet Cong totaled $20 billion (approx. $143 billion adjusted for inflation in 2015) during the Vietnam War. Included in that aid were donations of 5 million tons of food to North Vietnam (equivalent to NV food production in a single year), accounting for 10-15% of the North Vietnamese food supply by the 1970s.
Sino-Soviet relations soured after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In October, the Chinese demanded North Vietnam cut relations with Moscow, but Hanoi refused. The Chinese began to withdraw in November 1968 in preparation for a clash with the Soviets, which occurred at Zhenbao Island in March 1969. The Chinese also began financing the Khmer Rouge as a counterweight to the Vietnamese communists at this time.
China "armed and trained" the Khmer Rouge during the civil war and continued to aid them for years afterward.
The Khmer Rouge launched ferocious raids into Vietnam in 1975-1978. When Vietnam responded with an invasion that toppled the Khmer Rouge, China launched a brief, punitive invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
Soviet Union
Soviet ships in the South China Sea gave vital early warnings to Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam. The Soviet intelligence ships would pick up American B-52 bombers flying from Okinawa and Guam. Their airspeed and direction would be noted and then relayed to COSVN, North Vietnam's southern headquarters. Using airspeed and direction, COSVN analysts would calculate the bombing target and tell any assets to move "perpendicularly to the attack trajectory." These advance warning gave them time to move out of the way of the bombers, and, while the bombing runs caused extensive damage, because of the early warnings from 1968 to 1970 they did not kill a single military or civilian leader in the headquarters complexes.
The Soviet Union supplied North Vietnam with medical supplies, arms, tanks, planes, helicopters, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles and other military equipment. Soviet crews fired Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles at U.S. F-4 Phantoms, which were shot down over Thanh Hóa in 1965. Over a dozen Soviet citizens lost their lives in this conflict. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian officials acknowledged that the Soviet Union had stationed up to 3,000 troops in Vietnam during the war.
Some Russian sources give more specific numbers: Between 1953 and 1991, the hardware donated by the Soviet Union included 2,000 tanks, 1,700 APCs, 7,000 artillery guns, over 5,000 anti-aircraft guns, 158 surface-to-air missile launchers, 120 helicopters. During the war, the Soviets sent North Vietnam annual arms shipments worth $450 million. From July 1965 to the end of 1974, fighting in Vietnam was observed by some 6,500 officers and generals, as well as more than 4,500 soldiers and sergeants of the Soviet Armed Forces. In addition, Soviet military schools and academies began training Vietnamese soldiers--in all more than 10,000 military personnel.
The KGB had also helped developed the signals intelligence capabilities of the North Vietnamese, through an operation known as Vostok (also known as Ph??ng ?ông, meaning "Orient" and named after the Vostok 1). The Vostok program was a counterintelligence and espionage program. These programs helped proved pivotal in detecting and defeating CIA and South Vietnamese commando teams sent into North Vietnam, as they were detected and captured. Soviet-assistance had helped the Ministry of Public Security come into its own as it had recruited foreigners within high-level diplomatic circles among the Western-allies of the US, under a clandestine program known as "B12,MM" which produced thousands of high-level documents for nearly a decade, including targets of B-52 strikes. In 1975, the SIGINT services had broken information from Western US-allies in Saigon, determining that the US would not intervene to save South Vietnam from collapse.
Czechoslovakia
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was a member of the Warsaw Pact whom had sent significant aid to North Vietnam, both prior to and after the Prague Spring. The Czechoslovakian government created committees which sought to not only promote and establish peace, but also to promote victory for Viet Cong and Viet Minh forces. In the wake of the Prague Spring uprising, Czechoslovakia saw increasing parallels between its own conflict with the Soviet Union, and North Vietnam's increasing conflict with the United States. Czech-made equipment and military aid would increase significantly following the Prague Spring. Czechoslovakian weapons created by ?eská zbrojovka Uherský Brod with the Vz. 58 being alleged to be highly valued among People's Army of Vietnam forces, and Czechoslovakia continued to send tens of thousands of Czech-made rifles alongside mortar and artillery throughout the war. In general, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic were quite aligned with European leftist movements, and there were simultaneous protests ongoing demonstrating against both the Soviet-intervention in Prague as well as the US intervention in Vietnam.
Cooperation between North Vietnam and Czechoslovakia on the development of its air capabilities begun as early as 1956. Czechoslovak instructors and trainers had instructed the North Vietnam Air Force in China and had helped them develop a modernised airforce, with the Czech-built Aero Ae-45 and Aero L-29 Delfín alongside Zlín Z 26 aircraft utilised significantly for training, and regarded as preferential to Soviet-built Yakovlev Yak-3 as training aircraft.
North Korea
As a result of a decision of the Korean Workers' Party in October 1966, in early 1967 North Korea sent a fighter squadron to North Vietnam to back up the North Vietnamese 921st and 923rd fighter squadrons defending Hanoi. They stayed through 1968, and 200 pilots were reported to have served. In addition, at least two anti-aircraft artillery regiments were sent as well.
Cuba
The contribution to North Vietnam by the Republic of Cuba, under Fidel Castro have been recognized several times by representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Fidel Castro mentioned in his discourses the Batallón Girón (Giron Battalion) as comprising the Cuban contingent that served as military advisors during the war. In this battalion, alongside the Cubans, fought Nguy?n Th? ??nh, founding member of the Viet Cong, who later became the first female Major General in the North Vietnamese Army.
There are numerous allegations by former U.S. prisoners of war that Cuban military personnel were present at North Vietnamese prison facilities during the war and that they participated in torture activities. Witnesses to this include Senator John McCain, 2008 U.S. Presidential candidate and former Vietnam prisoner of war, according to his 1999 book Faith of My Fathers.
East Germany
German Democratic Republic. The Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam (B? Công An) states there was special interest towards the Stasi in establishing an intelligence and security apparatus, particularly since the Stasi was well-regarded, considered "industrial, modern, and (with a) scientific working-style". In official Vietnamese language histories on the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, the assistance provided by the Soviet and East German intelligence services to Vietnam is usually rated as the most important within the socialist bloc. East Germany had also provided a substantive aid in helping North Vietnam duplicate "Green Dragon" identity cards, which were difficult to duplicate identity cards created by Saigon in order to identify North Vietnamese combatants.
East German authorities had also begun providing material and technical aid to help develop and modernise the North Vietnamese economy and military. Alongside providing military and economic aid, East Germany had also vigorously denounced the US war effort, and had reaped significant international and diplomatic standing as a result of its anti-war campaigns.
Poland
The Polish People's Republic had played a substantive role in brokering and serving as an intermediary for peace-talks between Hanoi and Saigon, as part of a delegation under the International Control Commission alongside Western European nations. Recent evidence has emerged that Poland played an early role in attempting to broker talks between Ngô ?ình Nhu and the Diem regime and Hanoi in 1963 in an effort to prevent the expansion of the war, given that Polish representatives were the only communist nation present in Saigon and had acted as a broker and representative on behalf of Hanoi.
Pro-Saigon
South Korea
On the anti-communist side, South Korea (a.k.a. the Republic of Korea, ROK) had the second-largest contingent of foreign troops in South Vietnam after the United States. In November 1961, President Park Chung-hee proposed South Korean participation in the war to John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy disagreed. On 1 May 1964 Lyndon Johnson requested South Korean participation. The first South Korean troops began arriving in 1964 and large combat formations began arriving a year later. The ROK Marine Corps dispatched their 2nd Marine Brigade while the ROK Army sent the Capital Division and later the 9th Infantry Division. In August 1966 after the arrival of the 9th Division the Koreans established a corps command, the Republic of Korea Forces Vietnam Field Command, near I Field Force, Vietnam at Nha Trang.
Official records are vindictive of the role of ROK Forces in the war, as State Department reports publicly questioned their usefulness in the conflict, as they have "appeared to have been reluctant to undertake offensive operations, and are only useful in guarding a small sector of the populated area". State department reports furthermore state that ROK forces engaged in systemic, well-organised corruption in diverting US-equipment, and that actual security has often been provided by ARVN Territorial Forces whom lacked organic firepower and heavy artillery but served as a buffer between Korean units and the North Vietnamese Army. In addition, a RAND author conducting studies in South Vietnam in 1970 alleges that ROK forces had a "deliberate, systematic policy of committing atrocities" prompting civilians to leave ROK-controlled sectors. The conduct of ROK forces often emboldened and strengthened the Viet Cong, adding ranks from an otherwise neutral population and undermining efforts to defeat the insurgency overall.
Approximately 320,000 South Korean soldiers were sent to Vietnam, each serving a one-year tour of duty. Maximum troop levels peaked at 50,000 in 1968, however all were withdrawn by 1973. About 5,099 South Koreans were killed and 10,962 wounded during the war. South Korea claimed to have killed 41,000 Viet Cong. An unknown percentage of 'enemy combatants' may have been unarmed civilians, as ROK Forces were estimated to have deliberately killed at least 9,000 civilians. The United States paid South Korean soldiers 236 million dollars for their efforts in Vietnam, and South Korean GNP increased five-fold during the war.
Thailand
Thai Army formations, including the Royal Thai Volunteer Regiment (Queen's Cobras) and later the Royal Thai Army Expeditionary Division (Black Panthers), saw action in South Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Thai forces saw much more action in the covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1972, though Thai regular formations there were heavily outnumbered by the irregular "volunteers" of the CIA-sponsored Police Aerial Reconnaissance Units or PARU, who carried out reconnaissance activities on the western side of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Australia and New Zealand
Australia and New Zealand, close allies of the United States and members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the ANZUS military co-operation treaty, sent ground troops to Vietnam. Both nations had gained experience in counterinsurgency and jungle warfare during the Malayan Emergency and World War II. Their governments subscribed to the Domino theory. New Zealand was however a reluctant participant. Officials prophetically expected a foreign intervention to fail, were concerned that they would be supporting a corrupt regime and didn't want to further stretch their country's small military (which was already deployed to Malaysia). In the end though, a desire to prove their commitment to the ANZUS alliance and discourage an American withdrawal from Southeast Asia necessitated a military commitment. Australia began by sending advisors to Vietnam in 1962, and combat troops were committed in 1965. New Zealand began by sending a detachment of engineers and an artillery battery, and then started sending special forces and regular infantry which were attached to Australian formations. Australia's peak commitment was 7,672 combat troops and New Zealand's 552. More than 60,000 Australian personnel were involved during the course of the war, of which 521 were killed and more than 3,000 wounded. Approximately 3,500 New Zealanders served in Vietnam, with 37 killed and 187 wounded. Most Australians and New Zealanders served in the 1st Australian Task Force in Ph??c Tuy Province.
Australia's decades of experience from both the Malayan Emergency and its AATTV role in 1962 saw a recognised need for true counter-insurgency which relied on providing village-level security, establishing civilian trust and economic incentives and improving ARVN capabilities. This had brought Australian commanders to conflict with William Westmoreland's conventional attrition warfare approach since Australian ground forces were required to follow US doctrine. Nevertheless, Australian forces and experience were generally the most capable at the approach of COIN and had helped to train Regional Forces despite being under significant doctrinal constraints.
Philippines
Some 10,450 Filipino troops were dispatched to South Vietnam. They were primarily engaged in medical and other civilian pacification projects. These forces operated under the designation PHLCAG-V or Philippine Civic Action Group-Vietnam. More noteworthy was the fact that the naval base in Subic Bay was used for the U.S. Seventh Fleet from 1964 till the end of the war in 1975. The Navy base in Subic bay and the Air force base at Clark achieved maximum functionality during the war and supported an estimated 80,000 locals in allied tertiary businesses from shoe making to prostitution.
Taiwan
Since November 1967, Taiwan secretly operated a cargo transport detachment to assist the United States and South Vietnam. Taiwan also provided military training units for the South Vietnamese diving units, later known as the Lien Doi Nguoi Nhai (LDMN) or "Frogman unit" in English. Military commandos from Taiwan were captured by North Vietnamese forces three times trying to infiltrate North Vietnam.
Brazil
Brazil, under a U.S.-backed military regime, officially supported the United States's position in South Vietnam and contributed a medical team and supplies to the country--the only Latin American country to do so.
Neutral and non-belligerent nations
Canada and the ICC
Canada, India and Poland constituted the International Control Commission, which was supposed to monitor the 1954 ceasefire agreement. Officially, Canada did not have partisan involvement in the Vietnam War and diplomatically it was "non-belligerent" though there is evidence to the contrary. The Vietnam War entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia asserts plainly that Canada's record on the truce commissions was a pro-Saigon partisan one.
United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO)
The ethnic minority peoples of South Vietnam like the Montagnards (Degar) in the Central Highlands, Hindu and Muslim Cham and the Buddhist Khmer Krom were actively recruited in the war. There was an active strategy of recruitment and favorable treatment of Montagnard tribes for the Viet Cong, as they were pivotal for control of infiltration routes. Some groups had split off and formed together the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (French: Front Uni de Lutte des Races Opprimées, acronym: FULRO) to fight for autonomy or independence. FULRO fought against both the anti-Communist South Vietnamese and the Communist Viet Cong, and then FULRO proceeded to fight against the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam after the fall of South Vietnam.
During the war, the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem began a program to settle ethnic Vietnamese Kinh on Montagnard lands in the Central Highlands region. This provoked a backlash from the Montagnards, some joining the NLF as a result. The Cambodians under both the pro-China King Sihanouk and the pro-American Lon Nol supported their fellow co-ethnic Khmer Krom in South Vietnam, following an anti-ethnic Vietnamese policy. Following Vietnamization many Montagnard groups and fighters were incorporated into the Vietnamese Rangers as border sentries.
War crimes
A large number of war crimes took place during the Vietnam War. War crimes were committed by both sides during the conflict and included rape, massacres of civilians, bombings of civilian targets, terrorism, the widespread use of torture and the murder of prisoners of war. Additional common crimes included theft, arson, and the destruction of property not warranted by military necessity.
Allied war crimes
In 1968, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG) was established by the Pentagon task force set up in the wake of the My Lai Massacre, to attempt to ascertain the veracity of emerging claims of war crimes by U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War period. A probable war-crime which was neither investigated or brought to charge was the Thuy Bo massacre while the Son Thang massacre was one that warranted investigation with its perpetrators court-martial and serving less than a year of prison.
Of the portion of war-crimes which were reported to military authorities, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports indicated that 320 war-crimes incidents had a factual basis. The substantiated cases included 7 massacres between 1967 and 1971 in which at least 137 civilians were killed; seventy eight further attacks targeting non-combatants resulting in at least 57 deaths, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted; one hundred and forty-one cases of U.S. soldiers torturing civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock. Journalism in the ensuing years has documented large numbers of overlooked and uninvestigated war crimes involving every army division that was active in Vietnam, with one prominent non-investigated war-crime being the Tiger Force atrocities. Rummel estimated that American forces committed around 5,500 intentional democidal killings between 1960 and 1972, from a range of between 4,000 and 10,000 killed.
The establishment of numerous free-fire zones by U.S. forces as a tactic to prevent Viet Cong fighters from sheltering in South Vietnamese villages. Such practice, which involved the assumption that any individual appearing in the designated zones was an enemy combatant that could be freely targeted by weapons, is regarded by journalist Lewis M. Simons as "a severe violation of the laws of war". Nick Turse, in his 2013 book, Kill Anything that Moves, argues that a relentless drive toward higher body counts, a widespread use of free-fire zones, rules of engagement where civilians who ran from soldiers or helicopters could be viewed as Viet Cong, and a widespread disdain for Vietnamese civilians led to massive civilian casualties and endemic war crimes inflicted by U.S. troops. One example cited by Turse is Operation Speedy Express, an operation by the 9th Infantry Division, which was described by John Paul Vann as, in effect, "many My Lais". A report by Newsweek magazine suggested that at minimum 5,000 civilians may have been killed during six months of the operation, as there was around 748 recovered weapons.
R.J. Rummel estimated that 39,000 were killed by South Vietnam during the Diem-era in democide from a range of between 16,000 and 167,000 South Vietnamese civilians; for 1964 to 1975, Rummel estimated a total of 50,000 killed in democide, from a range of between 42,000 and 128,000. Thus, the total for 1954 to 1975 is 81,000, from a range of between 57,000 and 284,000 deaths caused by South Vietnam. Benjamin Valentino attributes possibly 110,000-310,000 "counter-guerrilla mass killings" of non-combatants to U.S. and South Vietnamese forces during the war. An estimated 26,000 to 41,000 civilian members of the PRG/NLF termed "VC Infrastructure" were killed during the Phoenix Program, by US and South Vietnamese intelligence and security, with an unknown number being innocent civilians.
Torture and ill-treatment were frequently applied by the South Vietnamese to POWs as well as civilian prisoners. During their visit to the Con Son Prison in 1970, U.S. Congressmen Augustus F. Hawkins and William R. Anderson witnessed detainees either confined in minute "tiger cages" or chained to their cells, and provided with poor-quality food. A group of American doctors inspecting the prison in the same year found many inmates suffering symptoms resulting from forced immobility and torture. During their visits to transit detention facilities under American administration in 1968 and 1969, the International Red Cross recorded many cases of torture and inhumane treatment before the captives were handed over to South Vietnamese authorities. Torture was conducted by the South Vietnamese government in collusion with the CIA.
South Korean forces were also accused of war crimes as well. One documented event was the Phong Nh? and Phong Nh?t massacre where the 2nd Marine Brigade of the South Korean Army reportedly killed 69-79 civilians on 12 February 1968 in Phong Nh? and Phong Nh?t village, ?i?n Bàn District of Qu?ng Nam Province in South Vietnam. South Korean forces are also accused of perpetrating other massacres, namely: Bình Hòa massacre, Binh Tai Massacre and Hà My massacre alongside the Bình An/Tây Vinh massacre.
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong war crimes
Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Viet Cong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century", based on the definition of terrorists as a non-state actor, and examining targeted killings and civilian deaths which are estimated at over 18,000 from 1966 to 1969. The US Department of Defense estimates the VC/NVA had conducted 36,000 murders and almost 58,000 kidnappings from 1967 to 1972, c. 1973. Statistics for 1968-72 suggest that "about 80 percent of the terrorist victims were ordinary civilians and only about 20 percent were government officials, policemen, members of the self-defence forces or pacification cadres." Benjamin Valentino attributes 45,000-80,000 "terrorist mass killings" of non-combatants to the Viet Cong during the war. Viet Cong tactics included the frequent mortaring of civilians in refugee camps, and the placing of mines on highways frequented by villagers taking their goods to urban markets. Some mines were set only to go off after heavy vehicle passage, causing extensive slaughter aboard packed civilian buses.
Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Hu? during the Tet Offensive and the killing of 252 civilians during the ??k S?n massacre. 155,000 refugees fleeing the final North Vietnamese Spring Offensive were reported to have been killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hòa in 1975. According to Rummel, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops killed 164,000 civilians in democide between 1954 and 1975 in South Vietnam, from a range of between 106,000 and 227,000 (50,000 of which were reportedly killed by shelling and mortar on ARVN forces during the retreat to Tuy Hoa). North Vietnam was also known for its abusive treatment of American POWs, most notably in H?a Lò Prison (aka the Hanoi Hilton), where torture was employed to extract confessions.
Women in the Vietnam War
American nurses
During the Vietnam War, American women served on active duty doing a variety of jobs. Early in 1963, the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) launched Operation Nightingale, an intensive effort to recruit nurses to serve in Vietnam. First Lieutenant Sharon Lane was the only female military nurse to be killed by enemy gunfire during the war, on 8 June 1969. One civilian doctor, Eleanor Ardel Vietti, who was captured by Viet Cong on May 30, 1962, in Buôn Ma Thu?t, remains the only American woman unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.
Although a small number of women were assigned to combat zones, they were never allowed directly in the field of battle. The women who served in the military were solely volunteers. They faced a plethora of challenges, one of which was the relatively small number of female soldiers. Living in a male-dominated environment created tensions between the sexes. By 1973, approximately 7,500 women had served in Vietnam in the Southeast Asian theater. American women serving in Vietnam were subject to societal stereotypes. To address this problem, the ANC released advertisements portraying women in the ANC as "proper, professional and well protected." This effort to highlight the positive aspects of a nursing career reflected the feminism of the 1960s-1970s in the United States. Although female military nurses lived in a heavily male environment, very few cases of sexual harassment were ever reported.
Vietnamese women
Unlike the American women who went to Vietnam, both South and North Vietnamese women were enlisted and fought in the combat zone. Women were enlisted in both the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong guerrilla insurgent force in South Vietnam, many joining due to the promises of female equality and a greater social role within society. Some women also served for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong intelligence services. The deputy military commander of the PLAF, the armed wing of the Viet Cong, was a female general Nguy?n Th? ??nh. All female units were present throughout the entirety of the war, ranging from front-line combat troops to anti-air units, scout and reconnaissance units and others providing intelligence. There was female combat squads present at the Cu Chi theatre. alongside the Battle of Hue. Large numbers of women volunteered in addition throughout North Vietnam, manning anti-aircraft batteries, providing village security as well as serving in logistics on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Many more women would be embedded with troops on the front-line, serving as doctors and medical personnel. ??ng Thùy Trâm became renown after her diary was published following her death. The Foreign Minister for the National Liberation Front and later the PRG was also a woman, Nguy?n Th? Bình.
In South Vietnam, many women voluntarily served in the ARVN's Women's Armed Force Corps (WAFC) and various other Women's corps in the military. Some, like in the WAFC, fought in combat with other soldiers. Others served as nurses and doctors in the battlefield and in military hospitals, or served in South Vietnam or America's intelligence agencies. During Di?m's presidency, Madame Nhu was the commander of the WAFC. Many women joined provincial and voluntary village-level militia in the People's Self Defense Force as part of the South Vietnamese Popular Force especially during the ARVN expansions later in the war.
The war saw more than one million rural people migrate or flee the fighting in the South Vietnamese countryside to the cities, especially Saigon. Among the internal refugees were many young women who became the ubiquitous "bargirls" of wartime South Vietnam "hawking her wares--be that cigarettes, liquor, or herself" to American and allied soldiers. American bases were ringed by bars and brothels.
8,040 Vietnamese women came to the United States as war brides between 1964 and 1975. Many mixed-blood Amerasian children were left behind when their American fathers returned to the United States after their tour of duty in South Vietnam. 26,000 of them were permitted to immigrate to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
Female journalists
The Vietnam War also saw women play a prominent role as front-line reporters in the conflict, directly reporting on the conflict as it occurred. A number of women volunteered on the North Vietnamese side as embedded journalists including author Lê Minh Khuê embedded with PAVN forces, including on the Ho Chi Minh trail as well as on combat fronts. A number of prominent Western journalists were also involved in covering the war, with Dickey Chapelle being among the first as well as the first American female reporter killed in a war. The French-speaking Australian journalist Kate Webb was captured alongside a photographer and others by the Viet Cong in Cambodia and travelled into Laos with them, released back into Cambodia afterwards after 23 days of captivity. She would be the first Western journalist to be captured and released, as well as cover the perspective of the Viet Cong in her memoir On The Other Side. Another French-speaking journalist Catherine Leroy was briefly captured and released by North Vietnamese forces during the Battle of Hu?, capturing some of the famous photos from the battles that would appear on the cover of Life Magazine.
Black servicemen in Vietnam
The experience of American military personnel of African origin during the Vietnam War had received significant attention. For example, the website "African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War" compiles examples of such coverage, as does the print and broadcast work of journalist Wallace Terry.
Terry's book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984), includes observations about the impact of the war on the black community in general and on black servicemen specifically. Points he makes on the latter topic include: the higher proportion of combat casualties in Vietnam among African American servicemen than among American soldiers of other races, the shift toward and different attitudes of black military careerists versus black draftees, the discrimination encountered by black servicemen "on the battlefield in decorations, promotion and duty assignments" as well as their having to endure "the racial insults, cross-burnings and Confederate flags of their white comrades"--and the experiences faced by black soldiers stateside, during the war and after America's withdrawal. Civil rights leaders protested the disproportionate casualties and the over-representation in hazardous duty and combat roles experienced by African American servicemen, prompting reforms that were implemented beginning in 1967-68. As a result, by the war's completion in 1975, black casualties had declined to 12.5% of US combat deaths, approximately equal to percentage of draft-eligible black men, though still slightly higher than the 10% who served in the military.
Weapons
During the early stages of their insurgency, the Viet Cong mainly sustained itself with captured arms (often of American manufacture) or crude, self-made weapons (e.g. copies of the US Thompson submachine gun and shotguns made of galvanized pipes). Most arms were captured from poorly defended ARVN militia outposts.
In the summer and fall of 1967, all Viet Cong battalions were reequipped with arms of Soviet design such as the AK-47 assault rifle and the RPG-2 anti-tank weapon. Their weapons were principally of Chinese or Soviet manufacture. The period up to the conventional phase in the 1970, the Viet Cong and NVA were primarily limited to mortars 81-mm mortars, recoil-less rifles and small-arms and had significantly lighter equipment and firepower in comparison with the US arsenal, relying on ambushes alongside superior stealth, planning, marksmanship and small-unit tactics to face the disproportionate US technological advantage.
Many divisions within the NVA would incorporate armoured and mechanised battalions including the Type 59 tank., BTR-60, Type 60 artillery and rapidly altered and integrated new war doctrines following the Tet Offensive into a mobile combined-arms force. The North Vietnamese had both amphibious tanks (such as the PT-76) and light tanks (such the Type 62) used during the conventional phase. Experimental Soviet equipment started being used against ARVN forces at the same time, including MANPADS 9K32 Strela-2, and anti-tank missiles including the 9M14 Malyutka. By 1975 they had fully transformed from the strategy of mobile light-infantry and using the people's war concept used against the United States.
The US service rifle was initially the M14 (though some units were still using the WWII-era M1 Garand for a lack of M14s). Found to be unsuitable for jungle warfare, the M14 was replaced by M16 which was more accurate and lighter than the AK-47. For a period, the gun suffered from a jamming flaw. According to a congressional report, the jamming was due to inadequate testing and reflected a decision for which the safety of soldiers was a secondary consideration. That issue was solved in early 1968 with the issuance of the M16A1 that featured a chrome plated bore.
The M60 machine gun GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun) was the main machine gun of the US army at the time and many of them were put on helicopters, to provide suppressive fire when landing in hostile regions. The MAC-10 machine pistol was supplied to many special forces troops in the midpoint of the war. It also armed many CIA agents in the field.
Two aircraft which were prominent in the war were the AC-130 "Spectre" Gunship and the UH-1 "Huey" gunship. The AC-130 was a heavily armed ground-attack aircraft variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane; it was used to provide close air support, air interdiction and force protection. The AC-130H "Spectre" was armed with two 20 mm M61 Vulcan cannons, one Bofors 40mm autocannon, and one 105 mm M102 howitzer. The Huey is a military helicopter powered by a single, turboshaft engine, and approximately 7,000 UH-1 aircraft saw service in Vietnam.The US' heavily armored, 90 mm M48A3 Patton tank saw extensive action during the Vietnam War and over 600 were deployed with US Forces. At their disposal ground forces had access to B-52 and F-4 Phantom II and others to launch napalm, white phosphorus, tear gas and chemical weapons as well.
The Claymore M18A1, an anti-personnel mine was widely used, and is command-detonated and directional shooting 700 steel pellets in the kill zone. The aircraft ordnance used during the war included precision-guided munition, cluster bombs, a thickening/gelling agent generally mixed with petroleum or a similar fuel for use in an incendiary device, initially against buildings and later primarily as an anti-personnel weapon that sticks to skin and can burn down to the bone.
Radio communications
The Vietnam War was the first conflict where U.S. forces had secure voice communication equipment available at the tactical level. The National Security Agency ran a crash program to provide U.S. forces with a family of security equipment code named NESTOR, fielding 17,000 units initially. Eventually 30,000 units were produced. However limitations of the units, including poor voice quality, reduced range, annoying time delays and logistical support issues led to only one unit in ten being used. While many in the U.S. military believed that the Viet Cong and NVA would not be able to exploit insecure communications, interrogation of captured communication intelligence units showed they were able to understand the jargon and codes used in realtime and were often able to warn their side of impending U.S. actions.
Extent of U.S. bombings
The U.S. dropped over 7 million tons of bombs on Indochina during the war--more than triple the 2.1 million tons of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II, and more than ten times the amount dropped by the U.S. during the Korean War. 500 thousand tons were dropped on Cambodia, 1 million tons were dropped on North Vietnam, and 4 million tons were dropped on South Vietnam. On a per capita basis, the 2 million tons dropped on Laos make it the most heavily bombed country in history; The New York Times noted this was "nearly a ton for every person in Laos." Due to the particularly heavy impact of cluster bombs during this war, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the weapons, and was host to the First Meeting of States Parties to the convention in November 2010.
Former U.S. Air Force official Earl Tilford has recounted "repeated bombing runs of a lake in central Cambodia. The B-52s literally dropped their payloads in the lake": The Air Force ran many missions of this kind for the purpose of securing additional funding during budget negotiations, so the amount of tonnage expended does not directly correlate with the resulting damage.
Aftermath
Events in Southeast Asia
On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite speculation that the victorious North Vietnamese would, in President Nixon's words, "massacre the civilians there [South Vietnam] by the millions," there is a widespread consensus that no mass executions in fact took place. However, in the years following the war, a vast number of South Vietnamese was sent to re-education camps where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor. According to Amnesty International Report 1979, this figure varied considerably depend on different observers: "[...] included such figures as "50,000 to 80,000" (Le Monde, 19 April 1978), "150,000" (Reuter from Bien Hoa, 2 November 1977), "150,000 to 200,000" (Washington Post, 20 December 1978), and "300,000" (Agence France Presse from Hanoi, 12 February 1978)." These large variation may be due to "Some estimates may include not only detainees but also people sent from the cities to the countryside." According to a native observer, there were 443.360 people who had to register for a period in re-education camps in Saigon alone, some of them were released after a few days, while others stayed there for more than a decade.
Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winner writer, described South Vietnam as a "False paradise" after the war, when he visited this country in 1980: "The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculous and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to completely rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South." The US used its security council veto to block Vietnam's recognition by the United Nations three times, an obstacle to the country receiving international aid.
By 1975, the Viet Minh had lost influence over the Cambodian communists. Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge would eventually kill 1-3 million Cambodians out of a population of around 8 million, in one of the bloodiest genocides in history.
The relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia, then ruled by the Khmer Rouge communist party, escalated right after the end of the war, April 1975. In response to the Khmer Rouge taking over Phu Quoc on 17 April and Tho Chu on 4 May 1975, and was thought to be their responsibility for the disappearance of 500 Vietnamese natives on Tho Chu, Vietnam launched a counterattack to take back these islands. After several failed attempt to negotiate from both sides, in 1978, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) and outed the Khmer Rouge, who were being supported by China, in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. In response, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Sino-Vietnamese War. From 1978 to 1979, some 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam by boat as refugees or were expelled.
The Pathet Lao overthrew the monarchy of Laos in December 1975, establishing the Lao People's Democratic Republic under the leadership of a member of the royal family, Souphanouvong. The change in regime was "quite peaceful, a sort of Asiatic 'velvet revolution'"--although 30,000 former officials were sent to reeducation camps, often enduring harsh conditions for several years. The conflict between Hmong rebels and the Pathet Lao continued in isolated pockets.
The millions of cluster bombs the US dropped on Southeast Asia rendered the landscape hazardous. In Laos alone, some 80 million bombs failed to explode and remain scattered throughout the country, rendering vast swathes of land impossible to cultivate and killing or maiming 50 Laotians every year. It is estimated that the explosive that still remains buried in the ground will not be removed entirely until the next few centuries. Over 3 million people left Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the Indochina refugee crisis. Most Asian countries were unwilling to accept these refugees, many of whom fled by boat and were known as boat people. Between 1975 and 1998, an estimated 1.2 million refugees from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries resettled in the United States, while Canada, Australia, and France resettled over 500,000. China accepted 250,000 people. Of all the countries of Indochina, Laos experienced the largest refugee flight in proportional terms, as 300,000 people out of a total population of 3 million crossed the border into Thailand. Included among their ranks were "about 90 percent" of Laos's "intellectuals, technicians, and officials." An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Agent Orange and similar chemical substances used by the U.S. have also caused a considerable number of deaths and injuries in the intervening years, including among the US Air Force crew that handled them. Scientific reports have concluded that refugees exposed to chemical sprays while in South Vietnam continued to experience pain in the eyes and skin as well as gastrointestinal upsets. In one study, ninety-two percent of participants suffered incessant fatigue; others reported monstrous births. Meta-analyses of the most current studies on the association between Agent Orange and birth defects have concluded that there is a statistically significant correlation such that having a parent who was exposed to Agent Orange at any point in their life will increase one's likelihood of either possessing or acting as a genetic carrier of birth defects. The most common deformation appears to be spina bifida. There is substantial evidence that the birth defects carry on for three generations or more. In 2012, the United States and Vietnam began a cooperative cleaning up of the toxic chemical on part of Danang International Airport, marking the first time Washington has been involved in cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Effect on the United States
Views on the war
In the post-war era, Americans struggled to absorb the lessons of the military intervention. As General Maxwell Taylor, one of the principal architects of the war, noted, "First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought that we were going into another Korean War, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies... And we knew less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this kind of dirty business. It's very dangerous." President Ronald Reagan coined the term "Vietnam Syndrome" to describe the reluctance of the American public and politicians to support further international interventions after Vietnam. According to a 2004 Gallup poll, 62 percent of Americans believed it was an unjust war. US public polling in 1978 reveal nearly 72% of Americans believing the war was "fundamentally wrong and immoral", nearly a decade later the number reduced to 66% and by 1985 to 2000 surveys consistently show 34-35% believing the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral. Nearly a third of Americans believed the war was a noble cause when surveyed in 2000.
Failure of the war is often placed at different institutions and levels. Some have suggested that the failure of the war was due to political failures of U.S. leadership. The official history of the United States Army noted that "tactics have often seemed to exist apart from larger issues, strategies, and objectives. Yet in Vietnam the Army experienced tactical success and strategic failure... success rests not only on military progress but on correctly analysing the nature of the particular conflict, understanding the enemy's strategy, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of allies. A new humility and a new sophistication may form the best parts of a complex heritage left to the Army by the long, bitter war in Vietnam."
Others point to a failure of U.S. military doctrine. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that "the achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion." The inability to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table by bombing also illustrated another U.S. miscalculation, and demonstrated the limitations of U.S. military abilities in achieving political goals. As Army Chief of Staff Harold Keith Johnson noted, "if anything came out of Vietnam, it was that air power couldn't do the job." Even General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective. As he remarked, "I still doubt that the North Vietnamese would have relented." U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that "in terms of military tactics, we cannot help draw the conclusion that our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail."
Hanoi had persistently sought unification of the country since the Geneva Accords, and the effects of U.S. bombings had negligible diplomatic impacts on the goals of the North Vietnamese government. The effects of U.S. bombing campaigns had mobilised the people throughout North Vietnam and mobilised international support for North Vietnam due to the perception of a super-power attempting to bomb a significantly smaller, agrarian society into submission.
The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, concerning the fate of U.S. service personnel listed as missing in action, persisted for many years after the war's conclusion. The costs of the war loom large in American popular consciousness; a 1990 poll showed that the public incorrectly believed that more Americans lost their lives in Vietnam than in World War II.
Cost of the war
Between 1953 and 1975, the United States was estimated to have spent $168 billion on the war ($1.02 trillion in FY2015 dollars). This resulted in a large federal budget deficit. Other figures point to $138.9 billion from 1965 to 1974 (not inflation-adjusted), ten times the amount of support for all education spending in the US and 50 times more than housing and community development spending within that time period. General record-keeping was reported to have been sloppy for government spending during the war. It was stated that war-spending could have paid off every mortgage in the US at that time, with money leftover.
More than 3 million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5 million of whom actually saw combat in Vietnam. James E. Westheider wrote that "At the height of American involvement in 1968, for example, there were 543,000 American military personnel in Vietnam, but only 80,000 were considered combat troops." Conscription in the United States had been controlled by the president since World War II, but ended in 1973.
As of 2013, the U.S. government is paying Vietnam veterans and their families or survivors more than $22 billion a year in war-related claims.
Impact on the U.S. military
By war's end, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed, more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled. The average age of the U.S. troops killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years. According to Dale Kueter, "Of those killed in combat, 86.3 percent were white, 12.5 percent were black and the remainder from other races." Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered some degree of posttraumatic stress disorder. An estimated 125,000 Americans left for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, and approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted. In 1977, United States president Jimmy Carter granted a full and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers.
As the Vietnam War continued inconclusively and became more unpopular with the American public, morale declined and disciplinary problems grew among American enlisted men and junior, non-career officers. Drug use, racial tensions, and the growing incidence of fragging--attempting to kill unpopular officers and non-commissioned officers with grenades or other weapons--created severe problems for the U.S. military and impacted its capability of undertaking combat operations. By 1971, a U.S. Army colonel writing in the Armed Forces Journal declared: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous....The morale, discipline, and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States." Between 1969 and 1971 the U.S. Army recorded more than 700 attacks by troops on their own officers. Eighty-three officers were killed and almost 650 were injured.
The Vietnam War called into question the U.S. Army doctrine. Marine Corps General Victor H. Krulak heavily criticised Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it "wasteful of American lives... with small likelihood of a successful outcome." In addition, doubts surfaced about the ability of the military to train foreign forces. Furthermore, throughout the war there was found to be considerable flaws and dishonesty by officers and commanders due to promotions being tied to the body count system touted by Westmoreland and McNamara.
Ron Milam has questioned the severity of the "breakdown" of the U.S. armed forces, especially among combat troops, as reflecting the opinions of "angry colonels" who deplored the erosion of traditional military values during the Vietnam War. Although acknowledging serious problems, he questions the alleged "near mutinous" conduct of junior officers and enlisted men in combat. Investigating one combat refusal incident, a journalist declared, "A certain sense of independence, a reluctance to behave according to the military's insistence on obedience, like pawns or puppets...The grunts [infantrymen] were determined to survive...they insisted of having something to say about the making of decisions that determined whether they might live or die." The morale and discipline problems and resistance to conscription (the draft) were important factors leading to the creation of an all-volunteer military force by the United States and the termination of conscription. The last conscript was inducted into the army in 1973. The all-volunteer military moderated some of the coercive methods of discipline previously used to maintain order in military ranks.
Effects of U.S. chemical defoliation
One of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. military effort in Southeast Asia was the widespread use of chemical defoliants between 1961 and 1971. They were used to defoliate large parts of the countryside to prevent the Viet Cong from being able to hide their weapons and encampments under the foliage. These chemicals continue to change the landscape, cause diseases and birth defects, and poison the food chain.
Early in the American military effort, it was decided that since the enemy were hiding their activities under triple-canopy jungle, a useful first step might be to defoliate certain areas. This was especially true of growth surrounding bases (both large and small) in what became known as Operation Ranch Hand. Corporations like Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto were given the task of developing herbicides for this purpose. American officials also pointed out that the British had previously used 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D (virtually identical to America's use in Vietnam) on a large scale throughout the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s in order to destroy bushes, crops, and trees in effort to deny communist insurgents the concealment they needed to ambush passing convoys. Indeed, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told President John F. Kennedy on 24 November 1961, that "[t]he use of defoliant does not violate any rule of international law concerning the conduct of chemical warfare and is an accepted tactic of war. Precedent has been established by the British during the emergency in Malaya in their use of aircraft for destroying crops by chemical spraying."
The defoliants, which were distributed in drums marked with color-coded bands, included the "Rainbow Herbicides"--Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent Purple, Agent Blue, Agent White, and most famously, Agent Orange, which included dioxin as a byproduct of its manufacture. About 11-12 million gallons (41.6-45.4 million L) of Agent Orange were sprayed over southern Vietnam between 1961 and 1971. A prime area of Ranch Hand operations was in the Mekong Delta, where the U.S. Navy patrol boats were vulnerable to attack from the undergrowth at the water's edge.
In 1961 and 1962, the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops. Between 1961 and 1967, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million U.S. gallons (75,700,000 L) of concentrated herbicides over 6 million acres (24,000 km2) of crops and trees, affecting an estimated 13% of South Vietnam's land. In 1965, 42% of all herbicide was sprayed over food crops. Another purpose of herbicide use was to drive civilian populations into RVN-controlled areas.
Vietnamese victims affected by Agent Orange attempted a class action lawsuit against Dow Chemical and other U.S. chemical manufacturers, but District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein dismissed their case. They appealed, but the dismissal was cemented in February 2008 by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. As of 2006, the Vietnamese government estimates that there are over 4,000,000 victims of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam, although the United States government denies any conclusive scientific links between Agent Orange and the Vietnamese victims of dioxin poisoning. In some areas of southern Vietnam, dioxin levels remain at over 100 times the accepted international standard.
In 2006, Anh Duc Ngo and colleagues of the University of Texas Health Science Center published a meta-analysis that exposed a large amount of heterogeneity (different findings) between studies, a finding consistent with a lack of consensus on the issue on the effect of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Despite this, statistical analysis of the studies they examined resulted in data that the increase in birth defects/relative risk (RR) from exposure to agent orange/dioxin "appears" to be on the order of 3 in Vietnamese-funded studies, but 1.29 in the rest of the world. There is data near the threshold of statistical significance suggesting Agent Orange contributes to still-births, cleft palate, and neural tube defects, with spina bifida being the most statistically significant defect. The large discrepancy in RR between Vietnamese studies and those in the rest of the world has been ascribed to bias in the Vietnamese studies.
The US Veterans Administration has listed prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, multiple myeloma, Diabetes mellitus type 2, B-cell lymphomas, soft-tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyria cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy, and spina bifida in children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange.
Casualties
Estimates of the number of casualties vary, with one source suggesting up to 3.8 million violent war deaths in Vietnam for the period 1955 to 2002. A detailed demographic study calculated 791,000-1,141,000 war-related deaths during the war for all of Vietnam, for both military and civilians. Between 195,000 and 430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Extrapolating from a 1969 US intelligence report, Guenter Lewy estimated 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by American bombing of North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder range from 30,000 to 182,000. A 1974 US Senate subcommittee estimates nearly 1.4 million civilians killed and wounded between 1965 and 1974, and attributed over half as resulting from US and South Vietnamese military action.
The military forces of South Vietnam suffered an estimated 254,256 killed between 1960 and 1974 and additional deaths from 1954 to 1959 and in 1975. Other estimates point to higher figures of 313,000 casualties. The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 PAVN/NLF forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of PAVN/PLAF military forces was probably closer to 444,000.
According to figures from internal PAVN/PLAF figures released by the Vietnamese government there was 849,018 military deaths on the PAVN/NLF side during the war. The Vietnamese government released its estimate of war deaths for the more lengthy period of 1955 to 1975. This figure includes battle deaths of Vietnamese soldiers in Laotian Civil War and Cambodian Civil War in which the PAVN was a major participant and 30-40% of the figure are non-combat deaths, but does not include deaths of South Vietnamese and allied soldiers.
US reports of "enemy KIA", referred to as body count were thought to have been subject to "falsification and glorification", and a true estimate of PAVN/NLF combat deaths may be difficult to assess, as US victories were assessed by having a "greater kill ratio". It was difficult to distinguish between civilians and military personnel on the Viet Cong side as many persons were part-time guerrillas or impressed labourers who did not wear uniforms and civilians actually killed were oftentimes written off as enemy KIA.
Between 275,000 and 310,000 Cambodians were estimated to have died during the war including between 40,000 and 150,000 combatants and civilians from US bombings. 20,000-62,000 Laotians also died, and 58,318 U.S. military personnel were killed, of which 1,598 are still listed as missing as of 2018.
Unexploded ordnance, mostly from U.S. bombing, continue to detonate and kill people today. According to the Vietnamese government, ordnance has killed some 42,000 people since the war officially ended. According to the government of Laos, unexploded ordnance has killed or injured over 20,000 Laotians since the end of the war. Casualties from Agent Orange exposure is not known currently.
In popular culture
The Vietnam War has been featured extensively in television, film, video games, music and literature in the participant countries. In Vietnam, one notable film set during Operation Linebacker II was the film Girl from Hanoi (1975) depicting war-time life in Hanoi. Another notable work was the diary of ??ng Thùy Trâm, a Vietnamese doctor who enlisted in the Southern battlefield, and was killed at the age of 27 by US forces near Qu?ng Ngãi. Her diaries were later published in Vietnam as ??ng Thùy Trâm's Diary (Last Night I Dreamed Of Peace), where it had become a best-seller and was later made into a film Don't Burn (??ng ??t). In Vietnam the diary has often been compared to The Diary of Anne Frank and both are used in literary education. Another Vietnamese film produced was The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (Cánh ??ng hoang) in 1979 which weaves the narrative of living on the ground in a US "free-fire zone" as well as perspectives from US helicopters.
In American popular culture, the "Crazy Vietnam Veteran", who was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, became a common stock character after the war.
One of the first major films based on the Vietnam War was John Wayne's pro-war film, The Green Berets (1968). Further cinematic representations were released during the 1970s and 1980s, including Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) - based on his service in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Casualties of War (1989). Later films would include We Were Soldiers (2002) and Rescue Dawn (2007).
The war also influenced a generation of musicians and songwriters in Vietnam and the United States, both anti-war and pro/anti-communist. The band Country Joe and the Fish recorded "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" / The "Fish" Cheer in 1965, and it became one of the most influential anti-Vietnam protest anthems. Many songwriters and musicians supported the anti-war movement, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Barbara Dane, The Critics Group, Phil Ochs, John Lennon, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Tom Paxton, Jimmy Cliff and Arlo Guthrie.
The war is also depicted in popular video games, especially in first-person shooter war genre, such as Line of Sight: Vietnam (2003), Vietcong (2003), Battlefield Vietnam (2004), Vietcong: Fist Alpha (2004), Elite Warriors: Vietnam (2005), The Hell in Vietnam (2008), Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam (2010), Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified (2012), Rising Storm 2: Vietnam (2017), and in Far Cry 5 (2018) as an additional content. The war also saw depiction in another genre, in the form of third-person shooter, MMORPG, real-time strategy and role-playing, such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Caliber .50 (1989), Vietcong 2 (2005), Made Man (2006), Gunboat (1990) and Strike Fighters 2: Vietnam (2009).
Commemoration
On May 25, 2012, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation of the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. On November 10, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an additional proclamation commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War.
See also
General:
- History of Cambodia
- History of Laos
- History of Vietnam
- List of conflicts in Asia
Annotations
Notes
References
Secondary sources
Primary sources
Historiography
External links
- A Vietnam Diary's Homecoming Video produced by the PBS Series History Detectives
- Detailed bibliography of Vietnam War
- Documents Relating to American Foreign Policy-Vietnam primary sources on U.S. involvement
- Fallout of the War from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives
- Glossary of Military Terms & Slang from the Vietnam War
- Impressions of Vietnam and descriptions of the daily life of a soldier from the oral history of Elliott Gardner, U.S. Army
- Stephen H. Warner Southeast Asia Photograph Collection at Gettysburg College
- Timeline US - Vietnam (1947-2001) in Open-Content project
- The U.S. Army in Vietnam the official history of the United States Army
- The Vietnam War at The History Channel
- UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project: Anti-Vietnam War Protests
- Vietnam war timeline comprehensive timeline of the Vietnam War
- Virtual Vietnam Archive - Texas Tech University
- 1965-1975 Another Vietnam; Unseen images of the war from the winning side - Mashable
- Archival collections about the Vietnam War, University Archives and Special Collections, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston
Source of article : Wikipedia
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