'I need to know everything about the Vietnam War by Thursday!' (the homework FAQ)
You're writing a paper about Vietnam? Well, you have a problem, because very likely most of what your teacher believes about the Vietnam War is wrong. Not many older teachers served in Vietnam, and few of the younger ones studied under professors who did. There was a wall between those who served in Vietnam and those who formed public opinion about the war, and for the most part that wall still exists. You'll have to decide for yourself whether you should trim your homework to suit the probable prejudices of your teacher.When was the Vietnam War?
Oh gosh, there never was a declaration of war, so it's impossible to put a beginning to it ... and even harder to date the end of it. But the first American soldier to die in South Vietnam was Captain Harry Cramer on October 21, 1957. And at least four Americans were killed the the day Saigon fell and the South Vietnamese government ceased to exist: April 29, 1975. Those can serve as the outside dates of the war from the point of view of Americans who fought in it. (A few Americans were actually killed by hostile fire in Southeast Asia after the war was over, but that is true of many wars.)Narrowly defined, the war was considerably shorter. The first American combat unit splashed ashore in South Vietnam on March 8, 1965. That was the U.S. Marines, dispatched to protect the airbase there. Just over eight years later, on March 29, 1973, the last American combat troops left the country. That's the narrow definition of the war: 1965-1973.
The U.S. government, naturally, has its own bureaucratic definition: for the purpose of qualifying for wartime benefits, the "Vietnam era" began on August 5, 1964, and ended on May 7, 1975.
Of course, if you were Vietnamese, you would have an entirely
different view of the matter. See below.
On the communist side, as many as 22,000 Russians served
in Vietnam as advisors. Most were air-defense personnel, but 885 were
pilots who may well have engaged Americans in combat. One source
says that 18 Russians were killed in action. China sent more than
320,000 troops, who mostly filled defense and logistical roles,
displacing Vietnamese soldiers who could be sent south. About 1,100
Chinese soldiers lost their lives in Vietnam and 4,200 more were wounded.
Smaller contingents from Czechoslovakia,
East Germany, and Poland also served in some capacity in Vietnam.
France tried to assimilate its colonies to the home culture,
but didn't do a particularly good job of it. The top layer of
Indochinese society studied in French schools, many Indochinese
worshipped in French Catholic churches, and the opportunists of
course did business with the French. As a result, as a French
admiral put it, with only a bit of exaggeration: "On our side, we
have only Christians and crooks." Much later, the Americans would
find themselves in the same position.
After the Germans occupied France in 1940, the
Japanese moved into French Indochina as a base for
their war against China. And in December 1941, the
Japanese used Indochina to launch its attack on the British
colonies of Singapore and Malaya (now called Malaysia).
President Franklin Roosevelt didn't like the idea of colonial
governments in Asia, and he especially disliked the French colonial
government of Indochina, which collaborated with the Japanese
through most of the war. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services
(forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) cooperated
instead with the Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh. With
their help, Ho declared the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam in August 1945, within days of the Japanese surrender. It
was the second communist state in Asia, and the first communist
state anywhere not to have a common border with the Soviet Union.
(Ho's birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. The Vietnamese put the
family name first, but almost always call an individual by his
given name--the last in the series. Ho is the exception because
his chosen name is a political statement--roughly, "Bringer of
Light." He was "Uncle Ho" to his followers and, later, to the
anti-war movement in the United States.)
Elsewhere, the country was ruled by the Viet Minh, as
Ho's forces were called. (The full name was the Vietnam Doc Lap
Dong Minh, meaning Vietnam Independence League.) The two sides
began a long, seesaw battle for control of the countryside. The
tide turned against the French in 1949, when the Chinese communists
under Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.
Finally Ho Chi Minh shared a border with another communist state.
Then, in June 1950, communist North Korea invaded pro-western
South Korea. The United States sent troops in a successful effort
to evict the North Koreans from the south, followed by a
disastrously unsuccessful attempt to chase them to the Yalu
River--the Chinese border. This brought China into the Korean
War, which changed everything in Vietnam as well. The
United States began to pay most of the costs of the French effort
to crush the Viet Minh. It also sent military aid, including U.S.
Air Force transports flown by American civilian pilots to support
the French Expeditionary Force.
When the Korean War ended, huge quantities of captured
American military equipment were funneled to the Viet Minh by the
Chinese. Some of it was used to defeat the French
garrison in 1954 at Dienbienphu, on the Vietnam-Laotian border.
After Dienbienphu, France wanted nothing more to do with its
long-running disaster in Vietnam. At a peace conference in
Geneva, Switzerland, it gave up its "Indochinese" colonies.
Cambodia and Laos became independent countries. Vietnam was
divided into two nations, a communist north under Ho Chi Minh and
a pro-western south under the emperor Bao Dai. The promise, never
kept, was that the two halves of Vietnam would decide on a common
government in 1956. South Vietnam, backed by the United States,
reneged on the election because it would inevitably have led to a
communist state: Ho could have turned out virtually 100 percent
of northern voters, while the vote in the south would have been
divided. Instead, a western-style government was established in
Saigon under President Ngo Dinh Diem.
So Vietnam followed the pattern earlier established in Germany
and Korea, divided into one half supported by the communist bloc
and another supported by the west and especially the United
States. About a million northerners "voted with their feet" and
relocated to South Vietnam. Many were Catholics who feared for
their future under communism, and who in the south became a hard
core of support for Diem, himself a Catholic.
Those of you who know Russia only as a crime-ridden
third-world country may have a hard time understanding how
powerful it was in the years following World War II, both as a
military force and as the home of the communist ideology. In the
1950s, communism was on the march around the world. Eastern
Europe had been occupied and communized by the Soviet Union in
1944-45. China went communist in 1949. The Korean War was fought
to a draw in 1950-1953, and the communists successfully won half
of Vietnam from the French in 1955. The Soviet Union acquired
American nuclear technology, then leapt ahead of the U.S. in
heavy-lift missile technology, making a Russian the first man in
space. Fidel Castro established a communist state in Cuba, 90
miles off the American coast. The Cold War was a reality, a hot
war seemed entirely possible, and American victory in those
conflicts was by no means guaranteed.
John Kennedy became president in 1961, promising to "pay any
price, bear any burden" to defend the free world against
communism. He built the American military presence in South
Vietnam to 16,000 men (and a few women, mostly nurses). They
served as advisers to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,
typically a captain and a sergeant with each ARVN battalion of
about 500 men. They operated helicopter units in direct support
of Vietnamese military operations, and secretly flew armed
trainers and World War II bombers on combat operations. And the
Green Berets set up "Strike Force" encampments along the
Cambodian border to stop the infiltration of soldiers and
equipment from North Vietnam.
The anti-communist war was not going well in 1963, and Kennedy
approved a coup in which Diem was murdered by the South
Vietnamese generals. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy himself was
murdered. These two killings, of all the millions of deaths
associated with the Vietnam War, were hugely important in setting
the United States and South Vietnam on a course that ended in
disaster.
Kennedy might have stopped there, with an advisory effort, but
the new president Lyndon Johnson didn't have that option, or
didn't think he did. Rather than betray Kennedy's legacy, Johnson
escalated the war in the hope that American pilots and ground
troops would be able to accomplish what the South Vietnamese
military had not. Following a probably phony attack by North
Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf of
Tonkin in August 1964, Johnson ordered "retaliation" strikes
against the patrol-boat bases--the first military action against
North Vietnam. The U.S. Senate voted a "war powers resolution"
with only two dissenting votes. So when you read, as you will,
that the great American mistake in Vietnam was waging war without
a declaration of war, remember that Lyndon Johnson believed that
the Senate had indeed given him "the functional equivalent of a
declaration of war," and that it passed with only one less
dissenting vote than our declaration of war against Japan in
December 1941.
Shortly thereafter, U.S. Marines were landed to guard an
airfield near Danang. And in 1965, the first American combat
troops were fighting North Vietnamese regulars on the ground. The
U.S. advisory effort had morphed into a war very like the earlier
one in Korea, fought mostly by American troops with the help of
the local army and a few detachments from friendly nations.
For more about American thinking when escalation began, see
the State Department White Paper on
this site.
Whose soldiers were fighting there?
Well, the Vietnamese, of course. In addition to the United States, with
more than 500,000 troops in the country at the height of the war, the
following nations sent significant combat forces to South Vietnam:
Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines.
There were small contingents (up to 30 men) from Taiwan and Spain,
and 34 other nations provided non-combat support. As individuals, many
Canadians enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in Vietnam.
How did it come about?
In the years leading up to World War II--fought by "the greatest
generation" that everyone now gets soppy about, perhaps because
it's an easy way to lay more blame on the generation that planned
and fought the Vietnam War--Vietnam was ruled by the French. The
colony was known as French Indochina, and it consisted of five
smaller colonies:
So what was so bad about communists in Vietnam?
The western Allies handled the liberated Japanese territories in
various ways. Their solution for "French Indochina" was to let
the Chinese occupy the north, while British Commonwealth troops
occupied the south. As colonialists themselves, the British were
sympathetic to the French, and it was in Saigon that French
"paras" (airborne soldiers), Legionnaires, and civilians evicted
Ho's representatives and raised the French flag. In the winter of
1945-46, the French re-established their control over southern
Vietnam, and in February 1946 they began to move north. Not one
nation had recognized Ho's government, and over
time the French army--including the Foreign Legion (postwar, many
of its soldiers were German), the Moroccan Legion (black troops
from North Africa), and native units with French officers--took
control of the north. But, like the Americans after them, they
controlled only the roads and the population centers.
How did the United States get involved?
President Dwight Eisenhower was the first to meddle in Vietnam,
sending a military mission to help the new South Vietnamese
government build an army able to prevent a North Vietnamese
invasion across the 17th parallel, Korea-style. The first
American soldier killed by hostile action in Vietnam was Captain
Harry Cramer, part of a group of U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green
Berets") who were training the Vietnamese in guerrilla warfare.
At the graduation ceremony on October 21, 1957, communist
guerrillas dropped mortar shells on the training site near Nha
Trang. Cramer was killed, an American sergeant lost an arm, and
there were several Vietnamese casualties as well. Because the
United States didn't recognize a combat situation in Vietnam,
Cramer's death was officially listed as the result of a
accidental explosion, and his name wasn't entered on the Vietnam
Wall war memorial until 1983.
