In his fiery speeches to troops during World War II, General George S Patton used to declare: ‘The Americans love a winner… That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.’ It was just as well that General Patton did not live to the 1960s and 1970s, because there was no way that anyone could say the Americans won the war in Vietnam.
The Vietnam conflict effectively began soon after the end of the Second World War. Initially, the Communist nationalists, led by the wily Ho Chi Minh, fought the French, who sought to restore their colonial authority in what they called Indochina. After a massive defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the French withdrew and Vietnam was divided along the 17th Parallel. The North became a Communist state led by Ho, and the South became a supposedly free but in reality deeply corrupt republic led by Ngo Dinh Diem and members of his close family.
Ho Chi Minh then sought to reunite the country under Communist rule. The Americans looked on, and President Eisenhower feared that if South Vietnam went Communist then all of South-east Asia would fall quickly, ‘like a row of dominoes’. Amid the intense rivalry of the Cold War, it would represent a huge defeat if Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, and possibly even India fell into the Communist camp.
When President John F Kennedy moved into the White House in January 1961, Vietnam was a low priority. Supporting a corrupt and repressive regime in Saigon was not a popular option, but Communist guerrillas, known as the Viet Cong, were now actively backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China. Rapidly infiltrating the South, they threatened to undermine Diem’s government. Kennedy authorised economic aid for the South, and sent a few thousand military ‘advisers’ to help in the struggle with the Viet Cong.
At the beginning of November 1963, Diem was murdered in a coup that had been encouraged by the Americans, and the South became even more unstable. Three weeks later, Kennedy himself was assassinated in Texas. At this point, US policy towards Vietnam could have gone either way – towards full-scale war, or a quiet withdrawal.
Two days after being sworn in as the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson told a group of advisers that he was not going ‘to lose Vietnam’. Johnson was determined to take a hard line in South-east Asia. But his administration was split. General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advised bombing the North. On the other hand, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recommended that, unless the South was politically stable, it would not be worth sending in more ‘advisers’.
What if?
It is one of the great questions of recent US history. What if President Kennedy had not been assassinated in November 1963, and had gone on to win a second term as president from 1964 to 1968? Would he have allowed the war in Vietnam to escalate in the way that it did?
Many of those who were part of Kennedy’s administration have said there was no way he would have let the US get sucked into the Vietnam quagmire. Kennedy would have prevented that war from escalating, just as he prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating into a full-scale nuclear conflict by agreeing to trade the US missiles in Turkey for the Soviet withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba.
It certainly seems unlikely that Kennedy would have permitted the growth of US troop numbers in South-east Asia in the way that his successor Lyndon Johnson did. Kennedy had seen the horrors of war first-hand, in the US Navy in the Pacific. Although he was resolute about preventing Soviet expansion in Europe, as evidenced in his wholehearted defence of Berlin, would he really have committed tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of ground troops in a war in Asia?
Had he not done so, the division in the US from 1967 onwards might have been far less extreme, and billions of dollars could have been made available for domestic welfare that in reality were spent in Vietnam. What a different country America might have become.
Gulf of Tonkin
It was in this context that an incident took place in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. Claiming that two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, had been attacked in what were regarded as international waters off North Vietnam, an outraged Johnson went to Congress and won overwhelming support for what was effectively a declaration of war. From this point, the ‘advisers’ became fully equipped ground troops prepared to fight the Communist insurgents, and simultaneously the strategic bombing of the North began.
In the asymmetric war that followed, the United States, with all its military might, found itself fighting a primitive militia-type force. While America used massive B-52 bombers supported by fighter jets to achieve air superiority, and heavily armed soldiers with overwhelming firepower, the peasants of the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of North Vietnam carried supplies on their backs or on bicycles through tunnels that had been dug to infiltrate and supply the conflict in the South. The North Vietnamese pursued guerrilla tactics, avoiding major battles and slipping away into the jungle in order to elude enemy forces.
The Americans built up a series of major bases in the South, and the field commander General William Westmoreland adopted a policy of ‘offense is the best form of defense’. Search-and-destroy patrols were sent out to areas where the Viet Cong were reported to be, and the scale of these escalated as the Americans used helicopter gunships to carry patrols into an area and then, after their mission, to take them back out.
The Bell ‘Huey’ helicopter, often equipped with machine-guns or rockets, became the iconic machine of the Vietnam War. It was immortalised in many films, but never so powerfully as in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic Apocalypse Now, when a cavalry officer played by Robert Duvall led a Huey attack on a Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.
The area that Westmoreland had to clear was so vast that he was constantly calling for more troops to get the job done. In July 1965, he requested an additional 100,000 men. McNamara calculated he would soon need yet another 100,000. But President Johnson told Westmoreland he would get what he needed, and publicly announced that ‘We will stand in Vietnam’. As America got sucked further and further into the war, it increasingly became an issue of national prestige. Withdrawal would have looked like weakness and hinted at defeat.
Proxy wars
During the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union brought the prospect of total destruction of life on earth. Even those who survived the blast from megatons of nuclear explosives would probably have died of radiation sickness, or been blighted by the so-called ‘nuclear winter’, when the amount of dust in the atmosphere would have prevented plants from growing for years to come.
To avoid the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon, the two superpowers therefore confronted each other instead through a series of ‘proxy wars’. The most obvious of these were fought in the Middle East, where the US backed Israel, and the Soviet Union backed Egypt, Syria, and the Arab countries; and in Latin America, where the Soviets backed Fidel Castro in Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and revolutionary groups across the region, while the US supported the regularly corrupt but supposedly democratic regimes often closely tied up with the interests of US big business. Frequently, this brought frustration to US policymakers, who found themselves supporting unpopular leaders. It was a situation perhaps best encapsulated in an earlier comment, allegedly made by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 about the head of Nicaragua’s Somoza family: ‘I know he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’
The war in Vietnam was a proxy war, with the Soviet Union and China both backing the North, and the US backing the South. What made it different was the involvement of more than half a million American ground troops in combat action. This continuously created the possibility of a superpower escalation. (In the Korean War, for instance, Chinese troops fought and initially routed US soldiers in combat, prompting the field commander, General Douglas MacArthur, to threaten to use nuclear weapons.) China and the USSR chose to avoid direct involvement in ground or air fighting in Vietnam, but both gave military and financial assistance to the North.
Communist resilience
The Communist forces proved remarkably resilient to American firepower. And unable to distinguish between genuine Viet Cong and local farmers going about their business, the Americans grew increasingly frustrated and would sometimes fire at anyone who looked suspicious. To many, the policy seemed to be shoot first and hope no one asked any questions later. There were several atrocities, of which the massacre of up to 500 civilians at My Lai in March 1968 was the best known, simply because it resulted in the public court-martial of several of the American soldiers who had taken part in the incident. But extreme violence was also a tactic used by the Viet Cong, and it is estimated that they murdered about 40,000 South Vietnamese civilians.
In an attempt to prevent the Viet Cong from taking advantage of the jungle to camouflage its penetration of the South, the US began to use a chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange. This contained a highly toxic dioxin poison which got into the rivers and water supply, resulting in an estimated 1 million Vietnamese suffering from health problems and a high rate of cancer among American veterans who handled the agent. More than 30,000 square kilometres of forest were destroyed, and it has taken decades for the fragile ecosystem to recover.
American commanders insisted they were winning the war and killing large numbers of Viet Cong. However, in a major assault in January 1968, the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong launched attacks in every city in the South. In Saigon, a commando unit even penetrated the US embassy compound and had to be flushed out man by man, all in front of television cameras sending pictures around the world.
Fighting in the ancient capital of Hue was particularly intense, and went on for some weeks. The Tet Offensive cost the Viet Cong dearly, but nothing showed more spectacularly how they were able to strike at the very heart of the South almost at will.
During the heavy bombing of the North, called Operation Rolling Thunder, the US dropped thousands of tons of high explosives, napalm, and cluster bombs. Over an eight-year period, the US dropped more tons of explosives on North Vietnam than had been dropped by all parties in the whole of World War II. But the bombing never brought the North to a complete standstill, nor did it prevent supplies getting through. In the end, the bombing became a political tactic: Washington would offer to ease up to try to force Hanoi to the negotiating table. But this rarely worked.
Protest
The war provoked intense protest in the US and around much of the Western world. American society was deeply divided between the silent majority who supported the war as a necessary stand against Communism, and the vocal minority of students and others who came on to the streets in massive demonstrations that frequently ended in violence.
The anti-war movement brought together a range of groups opposed to American society, including those demanding civil rights, left- wing student radicals, and the hippie movement, uniting floral peaceniks with urban guerrillas.
In October 1967, some 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, and after the main demonstration was over many of them marched on the Pentagon. This protest provided photos of demonstrators putting flowers down the rifle barrels of the National Guard. But that evening troopers kicked and clubbed demonstrators to disperse them, and audiences worldwide witnessed the violence on their television screens. America seemed more divided than at any point in the previous hundred years. Meanwhile, Johnson was deeply upset by the protestors, who would stand outside the White House chanting: ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?’
Attempts to negotiate a ceasefire had begun as early as Christmas 1965, when McNamara persuaded Johnson to extend the Christmas bombing truce so peace talks could begin. But they soon floundered, and the bombing was restarted. During 1967, there were several separate strands of negotiations. Johnson met Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin and offered to stop the bombing if the North ceased its infiltration of the South. But nothing came of this or the other negotiations, such as when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson proposed another approach to Moscow about peace talks.
In May 1968, formal peace negotiations began in Paris, but proceeded incredibly slowly. The South refused to sit down with the Viet Cong. The US refused to halt the bombing. Vietnam became a major issue in the presidential elections of that year, and part of the reason for Richard Nixon’s victory was that he appeared to offer the prospect of peace.
The final capitulation, 1975
For two years after the US military withdrawal in 1973, the fighting in Vietnam continued. But the momentum was clearly on the side of the North. Nixon became increasingly embroiled in the Watergate scandal that undermined and finally destroyed his presidency. US aid to the South slowly dried up. Massive inflation and further corruption sapped the will of many in the South to fight on. After another major offensive in early 1975, the North took control of the Central Highlands along with the cities of Hue and Da Nang. The military rout led to a political collapse as the People’s Army of North Vietnam encircled Saigon and President Thieu fled. The flood of refugees trying to evacuate turned into a panic exodus, as many feared the Communist forces would carry out vicious reprisals against those who had supported the Americans.
Some of the most-famous scenes of the conflict came on 29/30 April 1975, as American helicopters were filmed taking the last Americans and pro-American Vietnamese from the roof of the US Embassy to vessels of the US Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea. Ambassador Graham Martin was one of the last to be evacuated. It was the final humiliation for the Americans, and the end of a war that had stretched across almost 30 years. Vietnam was reunified as a Socialist Republic. And Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
Détente
But the fighting dragged on, and in 1971 Nixon escalated the war into neighbouring Cambodia in an attempt to destroy the Viet Cong supply routes. Thousands more were killed in an increasingly messy conflict, and it became clear to most Americans that the war could not be won. The numbers of American military in Vietnam started to decline as the US tried to hand over the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, were playing the big game of international diplomacy, appearing to unite with China against the Soviet Union. The Kremlin pushed ahead with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), determined not to be marginalised.
Over Easter 1972, the Viet Cong launched another huge assault, and it looked as if the South would be overwhelmed. But one month later, the US and the Soviet Union signed the SALT treaty. In a new era of détente between the superpowers, the Soviet Union and China both put pressure on Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger had been in secret talks with the North Vietnamese for a couple of years and a treaty was agreed. It looked like Kissinger had brought Nixon a great diplomatic victory. But President Thieu of South Vietnam refused to sign it. Nixon was re-elected with a landslide in the autumn of that year, but the killing in Vietnam continued. In response, the president ordered the heaviest bombing yet of the North over Christmas 1972.
In the early months of the following year, an agreement was finally signed: the Paris Peace Accords. The US agreed to withdraw its troops and prisoners of war were released by both sides. But the Viet Cong were allowed to remain in the South. President Thieu objected fiercely but was ignored. Nixon offered South Vietnam US economic aid. He called the final agreement ‘peace with honour’, but to most people it looked like a humiliating climbdown and recognition that the war could never be won and probably should never have been started.
On 29 March 1973, the last US soldiers left Vietnam. But the fighting between North and South would continue for another two years.
Vietnam by numbers
The numbers of Americans involved in fighting the Communists in Vietnam, as reported at the end of each of the years, is listed as follows:
1961 – about 3,000 ‘advisers’
1962 – about 11,500 ‘advisers’
1963 – about 20,300 ‘advisers’
1964 – 23,000 military personnel
1965 – 183,000 military personnel
1966 – 385,000 military personnel
1967 – 485,000 military personnel
1968 – 535,000 military personnel
The presence of US military personnel in Vietnam peaked in 1968. Overall, some 58,000 US soldiers were killed during the war. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese civilians from the North and South who died vary from 600,000 to two million.
Taylor Downing is a historian, best-selling author, and award-winning television producer. His latest book is 1942: Britain at the brink. You can read his regular ‘War on Film’ article on p.68.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
