Vietnam War

Vietnam War. In its entirety, the Vietnam War lasted for nearly three decades (1946–1975), and its American phase, officially dated from 1964 to 1973, was longer and more divisive than any other war in which the United States has participated. Enormously costly and destructive, the war had a profound impact in very different ways on the nations that waged it.

Causes.

The conflict originated from the interaction of two major phenomena of the post–World War II Era: the dissolution of colonial empires and the Cold War. The rise of nationalism in the colonial areas and the weakness of the war‐torn European powers in 1945 combined to destroy a colonial system that had been an established feature of world politics for centuries.

In some areas this transformation occurred peacefully, but in French Indochina it provoked war. Since the late nineteenth century, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had comprised the French colony of Indochina. After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, the Japanese had established a protectorate over Vietnam, and in a March 1945 coup d'état they assumed direct control. In the meantime, a veteran communist agitator and ardent Vietnamese nationalist named Ho Chi Minh capitalized on French weakness and the rising nationalism of his people to launch a revolution. Exploiting the vacuum left by the surrender of Japan in August 1945, Ho's Vietminh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) on 2 September 1945 declared Vietnam independent. Determined to retain their overseas empire, the French refused to relinquish their colony. In November 1946, after more than a year of futile negotiations, the two sides went to war.

As the Vietminh launched a bloody anticolonial war with France, the Cold War was taking form, and at least from 1949 on, Americans viewed the struggle in Indochina largely in terms of their conflict with the Soviet Union. They saw Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh as instruments of the Soviet drive for world domination. After the “loss” of China to communism in 1949, they also concluded that the fall of Vietnam would endanger interests deemed vital. The Harry S. Truman administration's National Security Council Document #68 (1950) posited that the Soviet Union, “animated by a new fanatical faith,” was “seeking to impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world.” In the frantic milieu of the day, U.S. policy‐makers concluded that any “substantial further extension of the area under the control of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled.” In this context of a world divided into two hostile power blocs engaged in a zero‐sum game in which a gain for one side was a loss for the other, areas such as Vietnam, previously of marginal importance, took on great significance. The Truman administration thus extended to East Asia a policy of containment originally applied in Europe. The first commitment to Vietnam, designed to assist the French in putting down the Vietminh revolution, was part of a broader effort to contain communist expansion in Asia.

There were other reasons why Americans after 1950 attached growing significance to Vietnam. The first, usually called the domino theory, held that the fall of Vietnam could cause the fall of all Indochina and then the rest of Southeast Asia, with repercussions extending west to India and east to Japan and the Philippines. The loss of Southeast Asia would deprive the “free world” of important naval bases and raw materials and threaten its strategic position. The lessons of history, in particular the so‐called Munich analogy, stressed that the failure of the Western democracies to stand firm against German and Japanese aggression had encouraged further aggression, leading to World War II. The rancorous debate that followed the “loss” of China in 1949 and the Republican party's exploitation of it at the polls led to the conclusion that no administration, especially a Democratic one, could survive politically the loss of Vietnam.

Operating on the basis of these assumptions, Washington gradually expanded the U.S. stake in Vietnam. Until 1950, the United States maintained a pro‐French “neutrality” in the First Indochina War. After 1950, the United States supported France, eventually paying up to 80 percent of the cost of the war. When France was defeated in 1954 following the climatic battle of Dien Bien Phu and agreed to negotiations at Geneva, Switzerland, the United States first sought to keep the war going and then to limit Vietminh gains at the conference table. The Geneva Accords, to which the United States was not a party, called for the temporary division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel pending national elections.

Between 1954 and 1961, the First Indochina War gave way to the Second. In the aftermath of the Geneva Accords, the United States eased the French out of Vietnam and set out to build in the southern half of a temporarily divided nation an independent, noncommunist government that could stand as a bulwark against further communist gains in the region. Washington provided billions of dollars in military and economic aid and sent hundreds of advisers to assist the fledgling government of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. With American support, Diem refused to conduct the national elections called for by the Geneva Accords and launched a campaign to eliminate those Vietminh who remained in the South. Frustrated by their failure to establish an independent, unified Vietnam, despite their victory over the French, southern Vietminh began a revolt against the Diem regime in 1957. The communist government of North Vietnam came to their aid with men and supplies in May 1959. The United States in turn increased its aid to South Vietnam.

Between 1961 and 1965, the insurgency against Diem grew into full‐scale war. Exploiting growing discontent with the authoritarian Diem regime, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) combined political agitation, terrorism, and military operations to threaten the increasingly embattled Saigon government. North Vietnam expanded its support, sending thousands of soldiers and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Frustrated with its ally in Saigon, the administration of President John F. Kennedy expanded the number and role of U.S. advisers and in late 1963 authorized the overthrow of Diem by dissident army officers. Designed to permit more effective conduct of the war, the coup (in which Diem was murdered) had the opposite results, leading to political decay and rampant instability. Exploiting the chaos in South Vietnam, the NLF stepped up its operations and North Vietnam again expanded its support. Facing the possible collapse of South Vietnam, Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, in February 1965 initiated the bombing of North Vietnam and in July 1965 committed U.S. combat troops to the war.

The open‐ended Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress by an 88–2 vote in the Senate and a unanimous vote in the House in August 1964 at the request of the Johnson administration after a supposed North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. gunboat, authorized “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the armed forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” and thus provided the sole legal foundation for the conflict; there was never a formal declaration of war. Among the war's chief architects were Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; national security advisers McGeorge Bundy (1961–1966) and Walt W. Rostow (1966–1969); and the “Wise Men,” an informal advisory group headed unofficially by Dean Acheson that Johnson assembled periodically.

Course of the War, 1965–1972.

After July 1965, the war escalated into a major international conflict. Thousands of North Vietnamese regulars supported NLF main‐force units estimated at 80,000. American forces expanded incrementally from around 6,000 in June 1965 to more than 536,000 in 1968 and were supplemented by 800,000 South Vietnamese troops and 68,000 provided by other countries.

Each side's strategy sought to capitalize on its strengths. America possessed great national wealth, modern weaponry, and a highly professional military force under the command of General William C. Westmoreland (1914– ). It sought through gradually expanded and tightly controlled bombing of North Vietnam and through “search and destroy” operations in South Vietnam to inflict sufficiently heavy losses to compel the North Vietnamese and NLF to stop trying to destroy the Saigon government. It did not seek to defeat North Vietnam militarily. Remembering the “lessons” of the Korean War, it scrupulously avoided any step that might provoke war with the Soviet Union or China.

In contrast, the NLF and North Vietnam, under the overall direction of Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, pursued a defensive strategy. Lightly armed and equipped, their forces relied on stealth and mobility. Recognizing that as long as they did not lose, they won, they avoided set‐piece battles where America's superior firepower could be decisive. They sought to wear down the adversary through harassing actions and protracted conflict. They had the advantages of infinite patience, the strategic initiative, a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of manpower, knowledge of the terrain, and support from the Soviet Union and China.

Between 1965 and 1967, the two sides fought to a bloody stalemate. The United States expanded the bombing of North Vietnam from 63,000 tons in 1965 to 226,000 in 1967, inflicting an estimated $600 million damage on a still primitive economy. But the North Vietnamese successfully dispersed and concealed their most vital resources, and aid from their allies helped make up the losses. As a result, the bombing did not decisively affect North Vietnam's will to resist or its capacity to move men and supplies into South Vietnam. The American ground strategy also failed to produce clear‐cut results. When the U.S. Army or Marines actually engaged enemy forces in battle, they usually prevailed. But North Vietnam could replace its losses and to some extent control them by retreating into sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and across the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Vietnam. The Americanization of the war proved counterproductive in terms of building a stable government in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army (ARVN), relegated to pacification duty, did not receive the training or experience to prepare it to assume the burden of the fighting. The firepower unleashed by the United States devastated much of the South Vietnamese countryside and made refugees of as many as one‐third of the population. The infusion of hundreds of thousands of men and billions of dollars into a small, backward country had a profoundly destabilizing effect, and corruption flourished.

As the war dragged on, opposition in the United States increased dramatically. While “hawks” protested Johnson's policy of gradual escalation, urging full mobilization and a knockout blow against North Vietnam, a diverse and heterogeneous group of “doves” increasingly questioned the war's wisdom and morality. Antiwar activists conducted teach‐ins on college campuses and organized mass protests in Washington and other major cities. They openly encouraged draft resistance and sponsored efforts to disrupt the war effort. In October 1967, some fifty‐thousand opponents of the war marched on the Pentagon. Nonetheless, the war's mounting cost was probably more important than the antiwar movement in generating public uneasiness. Increased casualties, indications that more troops might be required, and Johnson's request for new taxes combined in late 1967 to produce growing signs of impatience. Polls indicated a sharp decline in support for the war and Johnson's handling of it. The press increasingly questioned America's goals and methods in Vietnam, and leading Democratic and Republican members of Congress abandoned the president. Doubts arose even within Johnson's inner circle. Defense Secretary McNamara, deeply disillusioned by the war, departed in February 1968. A major public‐relations campaign by the administration in late 1967 reversed the trend only temporarily.

The North Vietnamese–NLF Tet Offensive of 1968 initiated a new phase of the war. In late 1967, the North Vietnamese launched operations in remote areas, drawing U.S. forces away from the cities. On 31 January 1968, the NLF launched massive attacks on previously secure urban areas, striking thirty‐six provincial capitals, five of South Vietnam's six major cities, and sixty‐four district capitals. The NLF besieged the U.S. embassy in Saigon for a time and held the imperial city of Hue for several weeks. In a strictly military sense, the Tet Offensive failed. The United States and South Vietnam quickly recovered from the initial shock and inflicted huge casualties on exposed enemy forces. But the offensive had a profound psychological impact domestically. Coming in the wake of official year‐end reports of progress, it further undermined the administration's credibility and raised even more urgent questions as to whether the mounting toll in Vietnam was worth the cost. In Washington, Tet forced basic changes in policy. Johnson rejected the military's request for 206,000 additional forces and for expansion of the war, thus terminating the policy of gradual escalation. He cut back the bombing of North Vietnam to the area below the twentieth parallel (and subsequently stopped it entirely); offered another plea for negotiations; and, most dramatically, withdrew from the 1968 presidential race. Bloodied from the battles of Tet and anxious for some relief from the bombing, North Vietnam agreed to negotiate, and peace talks opened in Paris in May 1968.

Neither side had entirely abandoned its goals, however, and when the peace talks failed to produce a settlement, Johnson's successor, the Republican Richard M. Nixon, proclaimed a new policy called Vietnamization. Recognizing that public impatience required a scaled‐down American involvement, Nixon initiated the phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. At the same time, he expanded assistance to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu and enlarged training programs for its army in the expectation that it would take over the fighting.

To disrupt North Vietnam's offensive capabilities until Vietnamization could progress further, Nixon expanded the war into neutral Cambodia. In early 1969, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnamese base areas in Cambodia, keeping the decision secret from the press and indeed from much of his own government. Going public in the spring of 1970, he ordered U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to invade enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. Significant stocks of weapons were captured, and the enemy's timetable for a new offensive may have been set back, but the Cambodian incursion also aroused a storm of protest at home. The domestic backlash assumed ominous and unprecedented proportions when National Guardsmen and police killed six students during protests at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi. Congress responded by setting a date for the removal of U.S. troops from Cambodia.

Domestic opposition to the war escalated in the Nixon years. After the Cambodian “incursion,” Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf resolution and debated proposals setting strict timetables for ending military operations. A huge demonstration in the spring of 1971 produced momentary chaos in Washington, D.C. The trial of Lieutenant William Calley, commander of a unit that carried out the 1968 murder of some 500 South Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, raised in the starkest form the fundamental moral issues of the war. Publication of the so‐called Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and other newspapers in the summer of 1971 deepened public distrust in the government. By 1971, more than 70 percent of those polled thought the United States had erred in sending troops to Vietnam.

During 1972–1973, the American phase of the war ended. In the spring of 1972, North Vietnam launched a massive, conventional invasion of South Vietnam, hoping to exploit the obvious weaknesses of Vietnamization and, as in 1968, take advantage of the presidential election in the United States. To Hanoi's surprise, Nixon responded forcefully, resuming the bombing of North Vietnam, mining Haiphong harbor, and unleashing U.S. airpower against enemy forces in the South. Nixon's moves blunted a North Vietnamese drive that had penetrated deep into South Vietnam. The failure of the so‐called Easter Offensive, along with a major American concession to permit North Vietnamese forces to remain in the South after a cease‐fire, led to the negotiation in October 1972 of preliminary peace terms. South Vietnamese president Thieu rejected the agreement Nixon's national security adviser Henry Kissinger had negotiated with Le Duc Tho, and when Nixon agreed to some of Thieu's reservations, the North Vietnamese issued new demands. Final agreement was reached only in January 1973, and only after American B‐52s, in what became known as the Christmas Bombing, unleashed a final attack on North Vietnam, producing pressures on both sides to end the war.

Outcome and Significance.

The agreement signed in Paris on 27 January 1973 fell short of the peace with honor that Nixon had promised. It permitted the extrication of U.S. military forces from Vietnam and provided for the return of American prisoners of war, but left unresolved the fundamental issues over which the conflict had been fought. North Vietnam was permitted to leave some 150,000 troops in the South, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) that had been formed by the NLF was accorded a measure of political status. The future of South Vietnam was to be determined by political mechanisms that were never established and likely would not have worked.

Predictably, the issues were resolved by force. Negotiations between the two sides in Vietnam quickly broke down. The Thieu government and the PRG, each supported by its allies, launched land‐grabbing operations to improve their positions. Nixon apparently hoped to enforce the peace agreement by keeping alive the threat of U.S. military intervention, but his ability to do so was increasingly limited. In 1973, a war‐weary Congress, reflecting the mood of the nation, cut off funds for air operations in Indochina. A year later, Congress drastically reduced military and economic aid to South Vietnam. Nixon, increasingly paralyzed by the Watergate investigations of abuses of power in the executive branch, resigned in August 1974.

Ever diminishing American support demoralized South Vietnam and encouraged North Vietnam to challenge a precarious status quo. In late 1974, the North Vietnamese seized Phuoc Long northeast of Saigon. Encouraged by this success and America's failure to respond, they struck the Central Highlands in March 1975. When Thieu ordered an ill‐considered withdrawal, panic ensued. Much of the South Vietnamese army was captured or destroyed, and thousands of civilians perished in what became known as the “convoy of tears.” Hanoi next struck Hue and Danang, duplicating its smashing success in the Highlands. Congress rejected President Gerald Ford's request for $722 million in aid for South Vietnam, providing only $300 million in emergency aid to evacuate the remaining American personnel and some 150,000 South Vietnamese supporters. This was narrowly accomplished, concluding with panicky helicopter evacuations from the embassy roof, as Saigon fell on 1 May 1975.

The war's human and material costs were huge. South Vietnamese battle deaths exceeded 350,000, and estimates of North Vietnamese losses range between 500,000 and 1 million. Civilian deaths ran into the millions. The bombing destroyed much of North Vietnam's rudimentary industrial base and infrastructure. In the South, bombing and artillery fire destroyed an area roughly the size of Massachusetts and left an estimated 21 million craters. Unexploded bombs and mines remained a hazard to Vietnamese peasants for years. The use of defoliants such as Agent Orange and various herbicides scarred the landscape and caused untold human costs.

Although the United States emerged from the war physically unscathed, it, too, paid a heavy cost. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the names of more than 58,000 American dead or missing. Some 300,00 U.S. troops were injured. The estimated economic cost, in excess of $167 billion, does not begin to measure the full impact. The war triggered inflation that at least temporarily undermined America's position in the world. Along with Watergate, it deepened popular suspicion of government, leaders, and institutions. It discredited the military, at least for a time, and estranged the United States from much of the rest of the world.

The war also destroyed the foreign‐policy consensus that had existed since the late 1940s, leaving Americans confused and deeply divided on the goals to be pursued and the methods used. From the Angolan crisis of the mid‐1970s through the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the Balkan and Somalian interventions of the 1990s, foreign policy issues were debated in the context of the Vietnam trauma.

Much like World War I for the Europeans, Vietnam's greatest impact in the United States was in the realm of the spirit. As no other event in the nation's history, it challenged some of Americans' most basic beliefs about themselves, including the conviction of their generally benevolent relations with other peoples and the idea that nothing the nation sought to achieve was beyond reach. The war played a fundamental role in a larger crisis of the spirit that began in the 1970s, raising profound questions about America's history and its values. Its deep wounds festered for decades among some of its 2.7 million veterans.

By the turn of the century, the United States had recovered from the tangible effects of Vietnam, emerging in the post–Cold War Era as the world's greatest economic and military power. The Vietnam War was the defining event for a generation of Americans, however, and its psychological effects seemed likely to persist, its scars remaining until the passing of the generation that fought the war and protested against it.
See also Antiwar Movements; Democratic Party; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Foreign Relations; Kent State and Jackson State; Military, The; National Security Council; Sixties, The; Students for a Democratic Society.

Bibliography

Larry Berman , Planning a Tragedy, 1983.
Bruce Palmer , The Twenty‐five Year War, 1984.
George Mc T. Kahin , Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam, 1986.
Gabriel Kolko , Anatomy of a War, 1986.
Lloyd C. Gardner , Approaching Vietnam: From World War II to Dienbienphu, 1988.
Mark Clodfelter , The Limits of Air Power, 1989.
Eric Bergerud , The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province, 1991.
David Levy , The Debate over Vietnam, 1991.
Ronald Spector , After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam, 1993.
Tom Wells , The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam, 1994.
Lloyd C. Gardner , Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, 1995.
George C. Herring , America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 1996.

George C. Herring