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Vietnam War History Site - Support Our Troops and Veterans
Here you will find memories of the War in Vietnam brought to you by a Veteran of that war.
Reflections, Memories, and Images of Vietnam Past
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina
War, and in Vietnam as the American War, occurred from 1959 to April 30, 1975. The term Vietnam Conflict is often used to
refer to events which took place between 1959 and April 30, 1975. The war was fought between the communist Democratic Republic
of Vietnam and its communist allies and the US supported Republic of Vietnam. It concluded with the defeat and dissolution
of South Vietnam. For the United States, the war ended with the withdrawal of American troops and failure of its foreign policy
in Vietnam.
Over 1.4 million military personnel were killed in the war only 6% were members of the United States armed
forces), while estimates of civilian fatalities range up to 2 million. On April 30, 1975, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon
fell to the communist forces of North Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War.
Various names have been applied
to the conflict, and these have shifted over time, although Vietnam War is the most commonly used title in English. It has
been variously called the Second Indochina War, the Vietnam Conflict, the Vietnam War, and, in Vietnamese, Chin tranh Vit
Nam (The Vietnam War), Kháng chin chng M (Resistance War against America) or The American War.
As dictated by the Geneva Conference of 1954, the
partition of Vietnam was meant to be only temporary, pending national elections on July 20, 1956. Much like Korea, the agreement
stipulated that the two military zones were to be separated by a temporary demarcation line (known as the Demilitarized Zone
or DMZ). The United States, alone among the great powers, refused to sign the Geneva agreement. The President of South Vietnam,
Ngo Dinh Diem, declined to hold elections. This called into question the United States' commitment to democracy in the
region, but also raised questions about the legitimacy of any election held in the communist-run North. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower expressed U.S. fears when he wrote that, in 1954,80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist
Ho Chi Minh over Emperor Bao Dai. However, this wide popularity was expressed before Ho's disastrous land reform program
and a peasant revolt in Ho's home province which had to be bloodily suppressed.
In June 1961, John F. Kennedy bitterly disagreed
with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev when they met in Vienna over key U.S.-Soviet issues. Cold war strategists concluded
Southeast Asia would be one of the testing grounds where Soviet forces would test the USA's containment policy - begun
during the Truman Administration and solidified by the stalemate resulting from the Korean War.
Although Kennedy stressed long-range missile parity
with the Soviets, he was also interested in using special forces for counter insurgency warfare in Third World countries threatened
by communist insurgencies. Originally intended for use behind front lines after a conventional 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. He saw British success in using such forces in Malaya as a strategic template.
On August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox, on an intelligence
mission along North Vietnam's coast, started a gunfight with torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. However, the Maddox
claimed that it was attacked. 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 Under-secretary of State George Ball that "those
sailors out there may have been shooting at flying fish." The second attack led to retaliatory air strikes, prompted
Congress to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and gave the president power to conduct military operations in South East
Asia without declaring war. 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."
Escalation of the Vietnam War officially started
on the morning of January 31, 1965 when orders were cut and issued to mobilize the 18th TAC Fighter Squadron from Okinawa
to Danang air force base (AFB). A red alert alarm to scramble was sounded at Kadena AFB at 3:00 a.m. F-105's, pilots and
support were deployed from Okinawa and landed in Vietnam that afternoon to join up with other smaller units who had already
arrived weeks earlier. Preparations were under way for the first step of Operation Flaming Dart. The mission of Operation
Flaming Dart, to cross the Seventeenth Parallel into North Vietnam, was already planned and in place before the attack on
Pleiku. The attack on Pleiku occurred on February 6, 1965. On February 7, 1965 forty nine F-105 Thunderchiefs flew out of
Danang AFB to targets located in North Vietnam. From this day forward the war was no longer confined to South Vietnam. It
took almost an hour to get all forty nine of the F-105's in the air. On that morning, the continuous loud roar of the
F-105 engines going down the runway, one following another, was described by the ground crew as a "rolling thunder".
At this time the Marines had not landed and Danang AFB was unprotected.
After several attacks, it was decided that U.S.
Air Force bases needed more protection. The South Vietnamese military seemed incapable of providing security. On March 8,
1965, 3,500 United States Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam. This marked the beginning of the American ground war.
U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly supported the deployment. Public opinion, however, was based on the premise that Vietnam
was part of a global struggle against communism. 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." As former First Deputy Foreign Minister
Tran Quang Co noted, the primary goal of the war was to reunify Vietnam and secure its independence. The policy of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was not to topple other non-communist governments in South East Asia.
During the 1968
presidential election, Richard M. Nixon promised "peace with honor". His plan was to build up the ARVN, so that
they could take over the defence of South Vietnam (the Nixon Doctrine). The policy became known as "Vietnamization",
a term criticized by Robert K. Brigham for implying that, to that date, only Americans had been dying in the conflict. Vietnamization
had much in common with the policies of the Kennedy administration. One important difference, however, remained. While Kennedy
insisted that the South Vietnamese fight the war themselves, he attempted to limit the scope of the conflict. In pursuit of
a withdrawal strategy, Richard Nixon was prepared to employ a variety of tactics, including widening the war.
The Paris Peace Accord, agreed between communist
Le Duc Tho, Henry Kissinger and reluctantly signed in January 1973 by President Thieu, produced a ceasefire and allowed for
the exchange of prisoners of war. Later that year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho but
the Vietnamese negotiator declined it saying that a true peace did not yet exist in Vietnam. Gerald Ford took over in 1974
after President Nixon, who resigned the presidency on August 9 due to the Watergate scandal.
The U.S. midterm
elections in 1974 brought in a new Congress dominated by Democrats who were much more willing to confront the President on
the war. Congress immediately voted in restrictions on funding and military activities to be phased in through 1975 and to
culminate in a total cutoff of funding in 1976. On December 13, 1974, North Vietnam violated the Paris peace treaty by attacking
into the South. When North Vietnam violated the 1973 cease-fire agreement and invaded the South again in 1975, Ford desperately
asked Congress for funds to assist and re-supply the South before it was overrun. Congress refused. The U.S. had promised
Thieu that it would use airpower to support his government. But, having been forbidden by law to assist South Vietnam, Ford
was unable to act. The balance of power thus shifted decisively in North Vietnam's favor.
On April 30, 1975, VPA troops overcame all
resistance, quickly capturing key buildings and installations. A tank crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace
and at 11:30 a.m. local time with the NLF flag raised above it. Thieu's successor, President Duong Van Minh, attempted
to surrender, but VPA Colonel Bui Quang Than informed him that he had nothing left to surrender. Minh then issued his last
command, ordering all South Vietnamese troops to lay down their arms.
The Communists had attained their goal: they had
toppled the Saigon regime. But the cost of victory was high. In the past decade alone, one Vietnamese in every ten had been
a casualty of war. Nearly a million and a half killed, three million wounded. Vietnam had been a tormented land, and its ordeal
was not over.
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World History - History
of War ThemePak CD
In 1950, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and
China recognized each other diplomatically. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit. U.S. President Harry S. Truman countered
by recognizing the French puppet government of Vietnam. Washington feared that Hanoi was a pawn of Communist China and, by
extension, Moscow. This flew in the face of the long historical antipathy between the two nations, of which the U.S. seems
to have been completely ignorant. As Doan Huynh commented,Vietnam a part of the Chinese expansionist game in Asia? For anyone
who knows the history of Indochina, this is incomprehensible.Nevertheless, Chinese support was very important to the Viet
Minh's success, and China largely supported the Vietnamese Communists through the end of the war.
The outbreak
of the Korean War in 1950 marked a decisive turning point. From the perspective of many in Washington, D.C., what had been
a colonial war in Indochina was transformed into another example of communist expansionism directed by the Kremlin.
In 1956 one of the leading communists in the south,
Le Duan, returned to Hanoi to urge the Vietnam Workers' Party to take a firmer stand on the reunification of Vietnam under
Communist leadership. But Hanoi (then in a severe economic crisis) hesitated in launching a full-scale military struggle.
The northern Communists feared U.S. intervention and believed that conditions in South Vietnam were not yet ripe for a people's
revolution. However, in December 1956, Ho Chi Minh authorized the Viet Minh cadres still in South Vietnam to begin a low level
insurgency. In North Vietnamese political theory, the action was a subset of "political struggle" called "armed
propaganda," and consisted mostly in kidnappings and terrorist attacks.
Four hundred government officials were assassinated
in 1957 alone, and the violence gradually increased. While the terror was originally aimed at local government officials,
it soon broadened to include other symbols of the status quo, such as school teachers, health workers, agricultural officials,
etc. One estimate purports that by 1958, 20% of South Vietnam's village chiefs had been murdered by the insurgents. What
was sought was a method of completely destroying government control in South Vietnam's rural villages in order to be replaced
by an NLF shadow government. Finally, in January 1959, under pressure from southern cadres who were being targeted by Diem's
secret police, the north's Central Committee issued a secret resolution authorizing an "armed struggle." This
authorized the southern Viet Minh to begin large scale operations against the South Vietnamese military. In response, Diem
enacted tough new anti-communist laws. However, North Vietnam supplied troops and supplies in earnest, and the infiltration
of men and weapons from the north began along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Kennedy administration remained essentially
committed to the Cold War foreign policy inherited from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1961, 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 made Kennedy believe 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 determined to 'draw a line in the sand' and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam
saying, "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place" to James Reston of the
New York Times (immediately after meeting Khrushchev in Vienna)
The National Security Council recommended a three-stage
escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam. On March 2, 1965, following an attack on a U.S. Marine barracks at Pleiku, Operation
Flaming Dart and Operation Rolling Thunder commenced. The bombing campaign, which ultimately lasted three years, was intended
to force North Vietnam to cease its support for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) 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 was not restricted to North Vietnam. Other aerial campaigns, such as Operation
Commando Hunt, targeted different parts of the NLF and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) infrastructure. These included
the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through Laos and Cambodia. The objective of forcing North Vietnam to stop its support for
the NLF, however, was never reached. As one officer noted "this is a political war and it calls for discriminate killing.
The best weapon would be a knife The worst is an airplane." 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 anti-war movement was gaining strength in the
United States. Nixon appealed to the "Silent Majority" of Americans to support the war. But revelations of the My
Lai Massacre, in which U.S. forces went on a rampage and killed civilians, including women and children, provoked national
and international outrage.
The civilian cost of the war was again questioned,
when the U.S concluded operation Speedy Express with a claimed bodycount of 10,889 NLF (vietcong) guerillas with only 40 U.S
losses, Kevin Buckley writing in newsweek estimated that perhaps 5,000 were civilians.
The invasion
of Cambodia sparked nationwide U.S. protests. Four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University during
a protest in Ohio, which provoked 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.
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. The Supreme Court ruled that its publication was legal.
The ARVN launched Operation Lam Son 719,
aimed at cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. The offensive was a clear violation of Laotian neutrality,[104] which neither
side respected in any event. Laos had long been the scene of a Secret War. After meeting resistance, ARVN forces retreated
in a confused rout. They fled along roads littered with their own dead. When they ran out of fuel, soldiers abandoned their
vehicles and attempted to barge their way on to American helicopters sent to evacuate the wounded. Many ARVN soldiers clung
to helicopter skids in a desperate attempt to save themselves. U.S. aircraft had to destroy abandoned equipment, including
tanks, to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.
Chaos, unrest, and panic ensued 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. "Frequent Wind" was arguably the largest
helicopter evacuation in history. It began on April 29, in an atmosphere of desperation, as hysterical crowds of Vietnamese
vied for limited seats. 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 long soured on this conflict halfway around the
world.
In the U.S., South Vietnam was perceived as doomed. President Gerald Ford gave a televised speech on April
23, 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. The song "White Christmas" was broadcast, as the final signal
for withdrawal. In the early morning hours of April 30, 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.
The Soviet Union was responsible for supplying North
Vietnam with military apparatus – in the form of tanks, helicopters, planes, arms and artillery. They also provided
medical supplies. The Soviet union suffered minimally, in terms of human life, when compared with other countries that played
a role in the conflict. It's estimated that the number of deaths of Soviet Union citizens would have been in the single
digits. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian government officials made a statement acknowledging that 3,000 troops were
stationed in Vietnam during the conflict.
China
China's interests in the Vietnam War began in the
late 1940's when the communists managed to gain control. The CPC, which stands for the Communist Party of China, assisted
Vietnam communists through providing materials and support because of the similar political beliefs that they felt they had.
In 1962 their somewhat intangible assistance changed shape when they provided ninety thousand guns and rifles to Hanoi –
this was done without charge. China also played a role in rebuilding and defending the infrastructure of North Vietnam, opting
to provide anti-aircraft and engineering resources. They repaired roads, railways and undertook other engineering initiatives.
In doing this, it is said they freed up troops to pursue the conflict in the South. Over the duration of the war around one
third of a million Chinese troops served in Vietnam of which, it's estimated, 1,500 died.
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