At first, it was like numerous post-1945 ‘small wars’ waged by Western powers trying to cling onto empire in a changing world. They may have been viewed through a Cold War lens and sold to a sceptical public as wars against ‘the spread of Communism’. But ‘the domino theory’ did not alter the basic truth: these were colonial wars against people fighting for national independence, social reform, and human dignity.
There were dozens of them – in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, across Asia as a whole. But a few swelled into major insurgencies that sent shockwaves back into the imperial heartlands. Algeria was one: the blowback caused France’s Fourth Republic to collapse in 1958. Angola was another: military defeat in the bush triggered revolution back in Lisbon in 1974.
But Vietnam was in a category of its own. This war, once one among many, became the war – the war that divided the world’s greatest superpower, set the rest of the world afire, and shaped an entire generation of radicals.
The Vietnamese are an ancient people with a long history and a rich culture. They had been colonised by the French in 1887 and then occupied by the Japanese in 1940. By the end of the war, they had built a national liberation movement – led by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party – and, as the Viet Minh, were waging guerrilla war against the Japanese.
When the French attempted to restore colonial rule after 1945, the Viet Minh resumed the fight for national independence against a new enemy, finally winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
But Vietnam’s agony did not end. The country was partitioned. The Communist-led nationalists were granted the North. A pro-Western dictatorship was installed in the South.
The promise was that there would soon be an election to decide the future of the South. But this never took place. The outcome was too easy to predict. Instead, US funds, arms, and ‘advisors’ flowed in to sustain the dictatorship against a growing rural insurgency.
What followed was one of the 20th century’s great tragedies. The Saigon dictatorship had the backing of the landlords. Ho Chi Minh had the support of the peasants. So the dictatorship eventually came to depend on the presence of half a million US soldiers in the South and on the US carpet-bombing of the North.
Even that was not enough. The combined forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong – essentially the armed wing of the South Vietnamese peasantry – proved unbeatable.
Not only was the United States defeated and the Saigon dictatorship overthrown, but the brutal reality of a war that pitted helicopter gunships, heavy bombers, and napalm against villages of rice farmers evoked revulsion across America. Hundreds of thousands refused the draft, joined mass protests, and battled the police in the streets of US cities.
The war came home. When that happened, it had to end. It had cost the lives of 58,000 Americans and at least 2 million Vietnamese; and it had generated the greatest political crisis inside America since the Civil War. Fifty years on, the issues remain raw, the controversies live, the legacy contested.
We mark the launch of Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s new documentary detailing the war with a special in which Vietnam veteran, military historian, and TV consultant James H Willbanks provides an overview of the conflict; while MHM Editor Neil Faulkner analyses how the Viet Cong won.
The long view
The war in Vietnam was the second longest war in the history of the United States and one of the most contentious. The fighting between the US and the government of South Vietnam on one side and North Vietnam and the Viet Cong (VC) on the other lasted from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, and spread into Laos and Cambodia.
The genesis of US involvement in Vietnam lies in the confrontation between East and West following the end of World War II. The US’s earliest engagement with the country came in 1950, when it began supporting France’s effort to defend its colonial presence in Vietnam.
With the development of the Cold War, the US adopted a policy of containment to counter what was perceived as the spread of Communism. Support for the French was seen as a way to contain Communism in South-east Asia, while the United States dealt with the Communists in Korea.
Despite more than $2.6 billion in American military aid, the French were eventually defeated by the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. The subsequent Geneva Conference in 1954 resulted in the temporary partition of Vietnam along the 17th Parallel, essentially establishing two Vietnams, with Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) holding sway in the north, and the non-Communist Republic of Vietnam in the south under Emperor Bao Dai.
Partition
Partition triggered the second phase of the war, in which, for the better part of the next ten years, the US supported the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, Bao Dai’s prime minister and the man who succeeded him in 1955 (after a questionable national election).
President Dwight D Eisenhower and his successor, John F Kennedy, threw their support behind Diem in the hope that he and the Republic of Vietnam would act as a counterweight to the Communist-controlled North.
Diem’s corrupt and unpopular regime was unable to deal with the insurgency that developed in the South after he refused to hold the elections in 1956 that had been called for by the Geneva Accords. The reason was simple: he expected to lose, with some estimates putting support for Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader, at 80% across South Vietnam. The US supported Diem in this decision and mounted a major effort to build up the South Vietnamese military.
Diem launched a military campaign against the former Viet Minh cadres left in the South. The Communist Party in Hanoi, focused on rebuilding the war-torn North, initially favoured political campaigning rather than military action in the South, hoping to cause the collapse of the Diem regime by increasing internal pressure.
Nevertheless, fighting broke out in 1957 when Diem sent his troops into several Communist strongholds. Throughout the rest of 1957 and into 1958, Diem’s forces were successful in these operations, killing or capturing large numbers of suspected Communists.
Faced with the failure of purely political means to bring down the Diem government, the Communist Party Central Committee in Hanoi made a momentous decision. At the 15th Party Plenum in January 1959, a secret resolution was signed, authorising the use of revolutionary violence to complement the political struggle, both focused on overthrowing the government in the South. Hanoi began to send equipment and personnel southwards along what would become known as ‘the Ho Chi Minh Trail’ to join in the fight.
National Liberation Front
Scattered and sporadic acts of terror evolved into a sustained campaign fostered in part by Northerners who had infiltrated back into South Vietnam to take leading positions in the growing insurgency. To direct this effort, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) was founded on 20 December 1960.
The NLF was a classic united-front organisation, which included participation by non-Communist nationalists, who joined the NLF to defeat the US-backed Diem government in Saigon. Despite protestations to the contrary during the war, Hanoi later admitted that it had controlled the NLF and directed virtually every aspect of the war in the South.
In 1961, in response to the rapid growth of the insurgency, and based on the recommendations of a team sent to Vietnam to report on the conditions and assess future American aid requirements, President Kennedy decided to increase US support for the Diem regime, signing a military and economic aid treaty with the Republic of Vietnam.
Some $65 million in military equipment and $136 million in economic aid were delivered that year. By the end of 1961, the number of US military advisors had increased to over 3,200. These advisors, who had previously been involved only in training and high-level staff work, were now advising South Vietnamese ground combat units in the field at battalion and regimental levels. To coordinate all US military support activities in South Vietnam, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), was established in Saigon in 1962.
Growing insurgency
As the externally supported insurgency grew, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) proved increasingly unable to handle the expanding threat. In 1961, all Communist units in the South had been unified into a single People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF).
This force, which became popularly known as Viet Cong (VC), a derogatory slang expression for ‘Vietnamese Communists’, numbered about 15,000. But it would grow rapidly as more and more North Vietnamese soldiers flowed down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to join the fight in the South, and as ever more Southern peasants joined the struggle against the Saigon dictatorship and its US backers. By the end of 1962, the NLF, including both political and armed elements, had grown to an estimated 300,000 members.
The ARVN
Meanwhile, the ARVN continued to experience severe internal problems, including rampant corruption and poor leadership, and remained largely ineffective in combating the rapidly growing insurgency. This was demonstrated only too clearly at the Battle of Ap Bac on 2 January 1963.
Although the battle was reported as a great victory for the ARVN because the Viet Cong quit the battlefield after the fighting, the outcome had been just the opposite – in reality, a small VC force had soundly defeated a much larger force from the 7th ARVN Division before withdrawing from the area in good order.
While his military forces struggled to combat the insurgents in the field, Diem and his regime became less and less popular as he adopted ever more repressive measures in an attempt to crush internal dissent within South Vietnamese society.
Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, head of the secret police, identified militant Buddhists as a source of trouble for the regime. Charging them with harbouring Communists and supporting anti-Diem forces, Nhu launched a campaign to bring them under control.
The situation came to a head in May 1963, when ARVN troops fired into a crowd of Buddhist demonstrators in Hué who had taken to the streets to protest against Diem’s discriminatory policies.
This was followed in June by the self- immolation of a Buddhist monk, who set himself on fire at a Saigon intersection, an act that made headlines around the world and caused maximum consternation in Washington.
When Nhu sent his special forces into several Buddhist monasteries, resulting in the killing of several monks and the arrest of many others, a wave of student protests followed in Hué and Saigon, during which 4,000 students were rounded up by government troops. The Communists seized the opportunity to fuel anti-Diem sentiment.
Coups and assassinations
The Kennedy administration lost faith in Diem and gave tacit approval for a coup led by a group of South Vietnamese generals. During the course of the coup, in early November 1963, Diem and his brother were assassinated.
Barely three weeks later, President Kennedy himself was assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson became president, inheriting the worsening situation in Vietnam, where the war was going badly for the South Vietnamese and their now 16,000 American advisors.
In Saigon, the coup, which resulted in General Duong Van Minh taking control of the government, ushered in a tumultuous year marked by successive coups and increasing political instability.
By mid-1964, the VC forces in the South, now including 35,000 guerrillas and 80,000 irregulars, were routinely defeating the ARVN in battle. President Johnson was caught in a quandary: he could not afford to be seen as ‘soft on Communism’ in Vietnam, but he did not want to widen the war and risk bringing the Chinese into the conflict – as had happened in Korea.
The President was also concerned that a larger war effort might result in a domestic backlash and threaten his ‘Great Society’ domestic welfare programmes. Hoping to keep the war limited, he wanted to send a message to Ho Chi Minh and the Hanoi leadership to discourage them from escalating the war in the South.
The Gulf of Tonkin
Johnson got that opportunity on 2 August 1964, when North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the US destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. After Johnson asserted that there had been a second attack on 4 August – a claim that later proved to be false – he sought a Congressional resolution authorising him to respond to the provocation.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed both the House and the Senate with only two dissenting votes, authorising the President to take ‘all necessary measures to repel attacks… and prevent further aggression’.
This resolution effectively gave the President complete authority for full-scale US intervention in the Vietnam War. Johnson responded to the Gulf of Tonkin incident by ordering retaliatory air-strikes against North Vietnam.
Concurrently, Hanoi began to send regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA, as the People’s Army of Vietnam or PAVN were more popularly known) units down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos to join the insurgents fighting in the South.
Before this, North Vietnamese troops had gone south as fillers for the Viet Cong. The arrival of NVA main-force units on the battlefield represented a major change in the nature of the war. The ARVN had been unable to stem the tide of the insurgency, and now they were also faced with an invasion of regular troops from the North.
In the latter months of 1964, the Communists stepped up their attacks, hitting Bien Hoa air base, bombing an American officers’ quarters in Saigon, attacking an ARVN outpost in Tay Ninh province on the Cambodian border, and occupying most of Binh Dinh province on the north-central coast. In January 1965, when the VC struck the US base at Pleiku, Johnson again ordered retaliatory air-strikes against the North.
Rolling Thunder
By this time, the President and his advisors had come to the conclusion that American intervention was necessary to keep the Saigon government from collapsing. Johnson, still wanting to keep the conflict limited and hoping to get his message through to Hanoi, ordered a sustained bombing campaign against targets in North Vietnam in what became known as Operation Rolling Thunder.
Johnson hoped massed aerial bombing would cause Ho and his advisors to abandon the war in the South. It began in February 1965 and would continue in fits and starts for the next three years. It would be hampered by restrictions imposed by the White House and by a complicated command-and-control arrangement. In the end, Rolling Thunder would prove to be one of the most ineffective air campaigns in history.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the ARVN continued to reel under the Communist onslaught. In addition to its combat ineffectiveness, the South Vietnamese forces were beset by widespread corruption and desertion – 113,000 ARVN soldiers would have deserted by the end of the 1965.
Boots on the ground
In March 1965, with the ARVN on the verge of collapse, US involvement escalated when Johnson began sending American ground combat troops to Vietnam. Ostensibly, these troops were to protect American airfields in South Vietnam; the first two US Marine battalions landed near Da Nang and began conducting defensive operations around the huge US base there.
General William Westmoreland, MACV commander, believing that the VC were making preparations for a major offensive, and convinced that the South Vietnamese could not handle the new level of fighting, requested additional US troops. The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed and began to send more men; the plan was that the American units would guard US military enclaves.
Under this plan, the US troops were to be limited to operations within a 50-mile radius of their bases. As more American units arrived, however, they soon moved from defensive to offensive operations. The first Marine battalions would eventually be followed by seven US Army divisions, two US Marine divisions, and four separate US Army brigade-sized units.
The first major battle between US troops and North Vietnamese regulars was fought in November 1965 in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. For Westmoreland, the outcome of the battle validated the concept of air-mobility and led directly to the adoption of enemy ‘body-count’ as a measurement of battlefield progress.
By the end of 1965, US ground troops in South Vietnam numbered 180,000; by mid-1966, the number had increased to 350,000.
Search and destroy
In the wake of the Battle of the Ia Drang, Westmoreland launched a series of large- scale ‘search-and-destroy’ operations to find and eliminate enemy forces. Meanwhile, the Communists, directed by Hanoi, had settled in for a protracted war designed to exhaust the American will to fight. The result was a bloody war of attrition that caused heavy casualties on both sides.
This – war that was both protracted and bloody – had major implications on the home front, where Vietnam caused wide divisions in the United States and contributed to the social upheaval of the 1960s. The failure to achieve any meaningful progress against the VC and North Vietnamese, the spread of the anti-establishment counterculture, the graphic coverage of the fighting by the media, and the credibility gap that developed between successive presidential administrations and the American public seriously undermined support for the war.
By late 1967, there were nearly 500,000 American troops in South Vietnam and the US forces had dealt serious blows to the Communists, but bitter fighting continued to rage all over the country. In order to bolster public support for his administration’s handling of the war, President Johnson launched a public relations campaign emphasising that progress was being made. In fact, the war had devolved into a bloody stalemate, and LBJ’s claim that the US was winning the war was destined to backfire disastrously.
Tet
In Hanoi, the North Vietnamese leaders decided to launch a major new offensive. On the eve of the Tet Lunar New Year at the end of January 1968, Communist forces numbering over 80,000 launched near simultaneous attacks that ranged from the Demilitarised Zone in the north to the Ca Mau Peninsula far to the south. These attacks achieved a stunning level of surprise, but after a quick recovery, the US and allied forces responded effectively, winning every battle. That was not enough.
Although the offensive resulted in a significant defeat for the Communists at the tactical level, the shock and scope of the attacks stunned the American public and convinced a demoralised Johnson not to run for re-election. The Tet Offensive proved to be a great psychological victory that changed the nature of the US commitment in Vietnam and ushered in the next phase of the war.
Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, largely because he promised to end the war and achieve ‘peace with honour’. To do this, he announced that he would ‘Vietnamise’ the war, and American objectives shifted from winning the war to a prolonged disengagement, during which US forces were gradually withdrawn and responsibility for the fighting was shifted to the South Vietnamese.
While this was being done, the fighting continued at full intensity. But neither massive bombing of both South and North Vietnam, nor the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, brought the war any closer to an end.
Dissatisfied with the bloody stalemate, North Vietnam launched an all-out invasion of the South in the spring of 1972. Although initially successful, North Vietnamese forces were eventually turned back by a massive application of American air-power.
In the wake of the offensive, Nixon proclaimed Vietnamisation a success. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been conducting secret peace negotiations with Communist representatives in Paris. By October 1972, Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, had forged a tentative peace agreement.
However, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam voiced violent opposition to the terms and demanded 69 amendments to the agreement. The North Vietnamese angrily walked out of the negotiations, returning to Hanoi for consultation.
Nixon ordered a massive bombing campaign against Hanoi and Haiphong to bring the North Vietnamese negotiators back to the table in Paris. After 11 days, the North Vietnamese agreed to resume negotiations, but the agreement worked out was not substantially different from that agreed in October.
Peace
The Paris Peace Accords were signed on 27 January 1973. The terms of the agreement called for an in-place ceasefire and the withdrawal of all US troops by March 1973. There was no mention of the North Vietnamese troops still in South Vietnam when the cease-fire went into effect, but Nixon promised Thieu that the United States would support South Vietnam if Hanoi violated the terms of the ceasefire.
The signing of the accords signalled the end of the war for the US, but only began a new phase of the war for the Vietnamese. Nixon continued to make promises to Thieu, but he was being engulfed by the Watergate Scandal.
In early August 1974, Nixon resigned and, subsequently, Congress reduced military aid to Vietnam. In December 1974, Hanoi launched a final offensive in the South. The South Vietnamese forces fell back in disarray as the North Vietnamese marched inexorably southward. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and South Vietnam surrendered unconditionally.
Although US forces, which had not been defeated on the battlefield, had been gone for two years when Saigon fell, the North Vietnamese triumph represented the first time that the United States had lost a war. More than 58,000 Americans had been killed and over 300,000 been wounded. South Vietnam had fallen to the Communists. The war had sharply divided American society and made Americans question the integrity of their own governmental institutions. The legacies of the war are with us still. •
James H Willbanks is General of the Army George C Marshall Chair of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College, and a consultant to Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War (2017).
Photos: PBS / NARA
