VIETNAM WAR
US military struggle fought primarily in South Vietnam from 1959 to 1975. It began as an attempt by Communist guerrillas (the so-called Vietcong) in the South, backed by Communist North Vietnam, to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. The struggle widened into a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and ultimately into a limited international conflict. The U.S. and some 40 other countries supported South Vietnam by supplying troops and munitions, and the USSR and the People's Republic of China furnished munitions to North Vietnam and the Vietcong. On both sides, however, the burden fell mainly on the civilians. The war also engulfed Laos, where the Communist Pathet Lao fought the government from 1965 to 1973 and succeeded in abolishing the monarchy in 1975; and Cambodia, where the government surrendered in 1973 to the Communist Khmer Rouge.
Vietnam
(1945–54). The war developed as a sequel to the struggle (1946–54) between the French, who were the rulers of Indochina before World War II, and the Communist-led Viet Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam, founded and headed by the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. Having emerged as the strongest of the nationalist groups that fought the Japanese occupation of French Indochina during World War II, the league was determined to resist the reestablishment of French colonial rule and to implement political and social changes.
Following the surrender of Japan to the Allies in August 1945, Viet Minh guerrillas seized the capital city of Hanoi and forced the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai. On September 2 they declared Vietnam to be independent and announced the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, commonly called North Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh as president. France officially recognized the new state, but the subsequent inability of the Viet Minh and France to reach satisfactory political and economic agreements led to armed conflict beginning in December 1946. With French backing Bao Dai set up the state of Vietnam, commonly called South Vietnam, on July 1, 1949, and established a new capital at Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).
The following year, the U.S. officially recognized the Saigon government, and to assist it, U.S. President Harry S. Truman dispatched a military assistance advisory group to train South Vietnam in the use of U.S. weapons. In the meantime, the two main adversaries in Vietnam—France and the Viet Minh—were steadily building up their forces. The decisive battle of the war developed in the spring of 1954 as the Viet Minh attacked the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam. On May 8, 1954, after a 55-day siege, the French surrendered.
On the same day, both North and South Vietnamese delegates met with those of France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the U.S., Communist China, and the two other Indochinese states, Laos and Cambodia, in Geneva, to discuss the future of all of Indochina. Under accords drawn up at the conference, France and North Vietnam agreed to a truce. It was further agreed to partition the country temporarily along the 17th parallel, with the north going to the Communists and the south placed under the control of the Saigon government. The agreement stipulated that elections for reunification of the country would be held in 1956.
Neither the U.S. nor the Saigon government agreed to the Geneva accords, but the U.S. announced it would do nothing to undermine the agreement. Once the French had withdrawn from Vietnam, the U.S. moved to bolster the Saigon government militarily and, as asserted by some observers, engaged in covert activities against the Hanoi government. On Oct. 24, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered South Vietnam direct economic aid, and the following February, U.S. military advisers were dispatched to train South Vietnamese forces. American support for the Saigon government continued even after Bao Dai was deposed, in a referendum on Oct. 23, 1955, and South Vietnam was made a republic, with Ngo Dinh Diem as president. One of Diem's first acts was to announce that his government would refuse to hold reunification elections, on the grounds that the people of North Vietnam would not be free to express their will and because of the probability of falsified votes (although Diem and other South Vietnamese officials were also accused of fraudulent election practices).
The New War Begins.
The position taken by Diem won the backing of the U.S. The Communist government in Hanoi, however, indicated its determination to reunify the nation under Hanoi. The truce arranged at Geneva began to crumble and by January 1957, the International Control Commission set up to implement the Geneva accords was reporting armistice violations by both North and South Vietnam. Throughout the rest of the year, Communist sympathizers who had gone north after partition began returning south in increasing numbers. Called Vietcong, they began launching attacks on U.S. military installations that had been established, and in 1959 began their guerrilla attacks on the Diem government.
The attacks were intensified in 1960, the year in which North Vietnam proclaimed its intention “to liberate South Vietnam from the ruling yoke of the U.S. imperialists and their henchmen.” The statement served to reinforce the belief that the Vietcong were being directed by Hanoi. On November 10, the Saigon government charged that regular North Vietnamese troops were taking a direct part in Vietcong attacks in South Vietnam. To show that the guerrilla movement was independent, the Vietcong set up their own political arm, known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), with its headquarters in Hanoi.
Social and Political Turbulence in South Vietnam.
In the face of the deteriorating situation, the U.S. restated its support for Saigon. In April 1961, a treaty of amity and economic relations was signed with South Vietnam, and in December, President John F. Kennedy pledged to help South Vietnam maintain its independence. Subsequently, U.S. economic and military assistance to the Diem government increased significantly. In December 1961, the first U.S. troops, consisting of 400 uniformed army personnel, arrived in Saigon in order to operate two helicopter companies; the U.S. proclaimed, however, that the troops were not combat units as such. A year later, U.S. military strength in Vietnam stood at 11,200.
The Diem government, meanwhile, proved unable to defeat the Communists or to cope with growing unrest among South Vietnamese Buddhists and other religious groups. Antigovernment agitation among the Buddhists was especially strong, with many burning themselves to death as a sign of protest. Still others were placed under arrest, the government charging that the Buddhist groups had become infiltrated by politically hostile persons, including Communists. Although this contention was supported by outside observers, including a U.S. fact-finding team, religious friction between the Buddhists and the Catholic-led government was at least as powerful a force as political conflict.
On Nov. 1, 1963, the Diem regime was overthrown in a military coup. Diem and his brother and political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu (1910–63), were executed. The circumstances surrounding the coup were not fully clear at the time. In the summer of 1971, however, with the publication by the U.S. press of a secret Pentagon study of the war (see Controversy in the U.S. below), it was revealed that the coup had been known to be imminent and that the U.S. was prepared to support a successor government.
The government that replaced the Diem regime was a revolutionary council headed by Brigadier Gen. Duong Van Minh (1916–2001). A series of other coups followed, and in the 18 months after Diem's overthrow South Vietnam had ten different governments. None of these proved capable of dealing effectively with the country's military situation. A military council under Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu and Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky (1930–) was finally created in 1965, and it restored basic political order. Later, in September 1967, elections were held and Thieu became president of South Vietnam.
Deepening U.S. Involvement.
Unlike conventional wars, the war in Vietnam had no defined front lines. Much of it consisted of hit-and-run attacks, with the guerrillas striking at government outposts and retreating into the jungle. In the early 1960s some North Vietnamese troops, however, began to infiltrate into South Vietnam to help the Vietcong, and supplies sent to Hanoi from the USSR and China were sent south down the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. The war began to escalate in the first week of August 1964, when North Vietnamese torpedo boats were reported to have attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Acting on the resolution passed on August 7 by the U.S. Senate (the so-called Tonkin Gulf Resolution), authorizing increased military involvement, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered jets to South Vietnam and the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. From 1964 to 1968 Gen. William C. Westmoreland (1914–) was commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam; he was replaced in 1968 by Gen. Creighton Abrams (1914–74).
In February 1965, U.S. planes began regular bombing raids over North Vietnam. A halt was ordered in May in the hope of initiating peace talks, but when North Vietnam rejected all negotiations, the bombings were resumed. In the meantime, the U.S. continued to build up its troop strength in South Vietnam. On March 6, 1965, a brigade of American marines landed at Da Nang, south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that had originally been set up at the time of partition. The marines, the first U.S. combat ground-force units to serve in the country, brought the number in the U.S. military forces in Vietnam to some 27,000. By year's end American combat strength was nearly 200,000.
While continuing the military buildup in Vietnam, the U.S. made another attempt to end the war. In December 1965, President Johnson again halted the bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to achieve a peaceful settlement. Again he was unsuccessful, and the raids were resumed. In June 1966, U.S. planes began bombing major installations near Hanoi and the neighboring port of Haiphong, both of which had heretofore been spared.
In October 1966, government representatives from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines—all of which had contributed troops to South Vietnam—met in Manila and pledged their withdrawal within six months after North Vietnam abandoned the war. The offer was rejected by North Vietnam. In June 1967, President Johnson met with Soviet Premier Aleksey N. Kosygin in Glassboro, N.J., and sought his help in bringing Hanoi to the peace table. The war, however, dragged on.
Two months after the Glassboro meeting, President Johnson announced that U.S. forces in Vietnam would be further increased to 525,000 by 1968. At the same time, U.S. planes extended their bombings of North Vietnam to within 16 km (10 mi) of the Chinese border. Shortly thereafter, President Johnson again offered to stop the bombardment of North Vietnam provided peace talks would follow. As in the past, Hanoi rejected the offer.
The war continued, and casualty figures rose. In November 1967, the Pentagon announced that total U.S. casualties in Vietnam since the beginning of 1961 had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. The mounting toll was accompanied by a growing sentiment within the U.S. for an end to the war, the cost of which, apart from the loss of life, was estimated by the president at $25 billion per year. The demand for peace became increasingly vocal in many segments of American society.
The Tet Offensive.
From February 1965 to the end of all-out U.S. involvement in 1973, South Vietnamese forces mainly fought against the Vietcong guerrillas, while U.S. and allied troops fought the North Vietnamese in a war of attrition marked by battles in such places as the Ia Dang Valley, Dak To, Loc Ninh, and Khe Sanh—all victories for the non-Communist forces. During his 1967–68 campaign, the North Vietnamese strategist, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, launched the famous Tet offensive (from the name of the Vietnamese lunar new year in mid-February), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 urban targets. Despite its devastating psychological effect, the campaign, which Giap hoped would be decisive, failed, and Vietcong forces were ultimately driven back from most of the positions they had gained. In the fighting, North Vietnam lost 85,000 of its best troops.
In spite of this U.S. victory, however, by the early spring of 1968 much of the American public had concluded that the war was unwinnable. On March 31 President Johnson announced a halt in U.S. bombings over North Vietnam. The announcement, intended as a new peace gesture, evoked a positive response from Hanoi, and in May peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris. Later in the year, the talks were expanded to include South Vietnam and the Vietcong NLF. The talks, however, made no progress despite the fact that U.S. raids on North Vietnam were completely halted in November.
Vietnamization of the War
(1969–71). In 1969, within a few months after taking office, Johnson's successor, President Richard M. Nixon, announced that 25,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by August 1969. Another cut of 65,000 troops was ordered by the end of the year. The program, known as Vietnamization of the war, came into effect, as President Nixon emphasized additional responsibilities of the South Vietnamese. Neither the U.S. troop reduction nor the death of North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, on Sept. 3, served to break the stalemate in Paris; the North Vietnamese delegates insisted upon complete U.S. withdrawal as a condition for peace.