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The Vietnam War was a war fought between 1957
and 1975 on the ground in South Vietnam and bordering areas of Cambodia and
Laos (see Secret War) and in the
strategic bombing (see Operation Rolling Thunder) of North Vietnam. In Vietnam, the conflict is known as the American War (Vietnamese Chiến Tranh Chống Mỹ Cứu Nước, which literally
means "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation"). For more details of the events during the war, see: Timeline of the Vietnam War.
Fighting on one side was a coalition of forces including the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam or the "RVN"), the United States,
South Korea, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the
Philippines. Participation by the South Korean military was financed by the United
States, but Australia and New
Zealand fully funded their own involvement. Other countries normally allied with the United States in the Cold War, including the United Kingdom and Canada, refused to
participate in the coalition, although a few of their citizens volunteered to join the US forces.
Fighting on the other side was a coalition of forces including the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the National Liberation
Front, a South Vietnamese opposition movement with a guerrilla militia known
in the Western world as the "Viet Cong". The USSR provided military and financial aid along with
diplomatic support to the North Vietnamese and to the NLF, partly as support
against the U.S. and South Vietnamese government and partly as a counter to Chinese influence in the region.
Prosecution of the war by the United States transformed it into a larger regional conflict involving the neighbouring
countries of Cambodia and Laos, known as the
Second Indochina War. Many experts consider the war to be a battle in the then-ongoing Cold War.
Origins
The Vietnam War was the latter stage of the Indochina War and was, in
many ways a direct successor to the French Indochina War in
which the French, with the financial and logistical support of the United States,
fought a losing effort to maintain control of their former colony of French Indochina.
France had gained control of Indochina in a series of colonial wars beginning in the 1840s and lasting until the 1880s. During World War II, Vichy France had collaborated with the
occupying Imperial Japanese forces. Vietnam was under effective Imperial Japanese control, as well as de facto Japanese
administrative control, although the Vichy French continued to serve as the official administrators. After the Japanese
surrender, the French fought to retain control of their former colony against the Viet Minh independence movement, led by Communist Party leader Ho
Chi Minh. After the Viet Minh defeated the French colonial army at the
Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French withdrew, and the colony was granted independence.
According to the ensuing Geneva Conference,
Vietnam was partitioned, ostensibly temporarily, into a Northern and a Southern zone of Viet-Nam. The former was to be ruled by
Ho Chi Minh, while the latter would be under the control of Emperor Bao Dai. In 1955,
the South Vietnamese monarchy was abolished and Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem became President of a new South Vietnamese republic.
The Geneva Conference of 1954 specified that
elections to unify the country would be scheduled to take place in July,
1956, but such elections were never held. In the context of the Cold War, the United States
(under Eisenhower) had begun to view Southeast Asia as a potential key battleground in the
greater Cold War, and American policymakers feared that democratic elections would simply lead to communist influence into the
South Vietnam's government.
Diem's RVN government had gained the support of the US to circumvent the scheduled democratic elections, and under Diem's
dictatorship, South Vietnam would be free of both a repressive communist
oligarchy, and a democratic process that threatened to irreversibly install it. The North Vietnamese had been winning the public
relations battle; it had implemented a massive agricultural reform program which distributed land to peasant farmers, and the
people of the South took notice. President Eisenhower noted
in his memoirs that if a nation-wide election had been held, the communists would have won. Also, it was said to have been
unlikely that the Northern Communists would allow a free election in their half of Vietnam. In the end, neither the US nor the
two Vietnams had signed the election clause in the accord. Initially, it appeared as if a partitioned Vietnam would become the
norm, similar in nature to the partitioned Korea created years earlier.
The NLF led the popular insurgency against the South Vietnamese government. (The RVN and the US referred to the NLF as Viet
Cong, short for Viet Nam Cong San (VN:Việt Nam Cộng Sản), or "Vietnamese Communist". The NLF itself
never called itself by this name.)
In June 1961, John F.
Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, where Khrushchev sought to bully the young American President into conceding to the Soviets certain
key contests, notably Berlin, where large numbers of skilled workers had been escaping
to the West. Kennedy left the meeting agitated, and quickly determined that Khrushchev's attitude towards him would make an armed
conflict virtually unavoidable in the near future. Kennedy and his advisers soon decided that any such conflicts had better
follow the Korea model, being confined to conventional weaponry, through proxy parties, as a way to mitigate the threat of direct
nuclear war between the two superpowers. It was decided that the most likely theatre for such a conflict would be in Southeast Asia. By the
political calculations of his administration, the U.S. had to work quickly to create a "valve" to release any built-up political pressures.
The North, along with its Soviet backers knew well that the South was prepared to vote for a communist government. The U.S.
cared little for Diem, but forged its alliance with his government out of fear that an easy communist victory would only bolster
the perceived bravado that Khrushchev had shown to Kennedy at Vienna. The U.S.
fatefully decided that an immediate stand against Soviet expansion was both prudent and necessary, regardless of the human cost
(The Red Scare).
On December 11, 1961, the United States sent 900 military advisors, and after began to
clandestinely send more, both to give temporary support to the South's Diem RVN regime, and to engage in terrorism against both North and South Vietnam. Some of these bombing attacks were
designed to inflame and exacerbate both the civil war in the South and to exacerbate the impression of a greater conflict with
the North.
The local strategy was to create the impression that a "legitimate" government was being overrun by "hostile Communist
forces," though this was while the "Communist forces" were limited to a rising insurgency among the South Vietnamese. At the
time, this insurgency was mostly inspired, not directed, by the North, and as such the definition of an "enemy" by philosophical
and political grounds would prove to be fateful for U.S. soldiers ordered to make life-and-death choices on the ground. To US
planners, however, these distinctions were neither forseeable nor did they matter as much as the creation of a greater conflict
itself. The "impossibile task" of defining who "the enemy" was would lead directly to the general quagmire and the human rights atrocities for which the Vietnam War is widely known.
The greater overall strategy was simple; to deliberately create a more desirable conventional conflict with the
Soviet Union, through the two Vietnamese proxies, rather than to allow nuclear conflict to erupt elsewhere, as was greatly
feared at the time. Cuba, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea were
known hotspots that were feared could get out of control, should there be no pressure valve. Because the majority of the South
was sympathetic to the North's communist ideology, the U.S. strategy was designed to artificially exacerbate the divide between
North and South, along lines which could be reported to the American people as ideological. The so-called ideological divide has
little meaning among the Vietnamese, who well understand the beginnings of its civil conflict as being ethnic in origin; and for
their own particular reasons, different outside parties took sides, and desired influence.
Backed by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, North Vietnam began supporting the NLF with arms and supplies,
advisors, and regular units of the North Vietnamese Army,
which were transported via an extensive network of trails and roads through the neutral nation of Laos, which became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. The
stage was set for the escalation to come, wherin a civil war between Vietnamese farmers seeking to overthrow a puppet despot
would find themselves pawns in a larger proxy war between the competing
expansionist systems of U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism.
Combatants in the war
In major combat there were, depending upon one's point of view, two to four major combatant organizations; the four being the
United States Armed Forces and allied forces; the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN—the South Vietnamese Army,
pronounced Arvin); the NLF, a group of indigenous South Vietnamese guerilla fighters; and the People's Army of Viet Nam
(PAVN—the North Vietnamese Army, pronounced Pahvin).
Arguments over which of these four were the actual combatants was a major political focus of the war. The U.S. sought to
depict the war as one between ARVN defenders with U.S. help against PAVN forces, thus depicting the NLF a puppet or shadow army
and the war as a South Vietnamese defense against North Vietnamese aggression.
The North Vietnamese portrayed the conflict as one between the indigenous South Vietnamese NLF and the United States, with the
noncombat support of North Vietnam and its allies. This view held ARVN to be a puppet of the U.S.
These conflicting propaganda stances were later played out in early peace talks in which arguments were made over "the shape
of the [negotiating] table" in which each side sought to depict itself as two distinct entities opposing a single entity,
ignoring its "puppet".
Legal status in the US: "war" or "conflict"
Though almost universally described as the Vietnam War today, in the United States it was commonly referred to as
the Vietnam Conflict contemporaneously. This reflected the concept that being undeclared, the war was an action of a
lesser or different nature, continuing a post-World War II trend of casting war in a new context, as in the Korean War, described as a police action under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Law of Land Warfare, the compilation of treaties as
expressed by tradition and practice, including the various Geneva
Conventions and Hague
Conventions, requires that hostilities must not commence without a Declaration of War.
- The Contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit
warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war. (Hague
Convention III, article 1, October 18, 1907)
The United States Constitution specifies the
power to declare war:
- The Congress shall have power: [...] To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning
captures on land and water[...] (Article 1, section 8)
No such declaration being either asked of or granted by the Congress, President Johnson relied on his power as Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as justification for escalation of the conflict.
Proponents of the war argued that the conflict was something less than a formal war, that the U.S. was assisting a properly
engaged ally in defending itself and that the lack of a declaration was a formality. Opponents said that, in addition to other
arguments, the lack of declaration made Vietnam an illegal war. The Supreme Court of the United States probably could have settled the issue, but no
case was ever taken up by the Court.
Escalation
U.S. involvement in the war was eventually called escalation, using the analogy of an escalator rising slowly but steadily to increase war
pressure on the enemy, as opposed to the traditional declaration of
war with the usual massive attack using all available means to secure victory.
Under escalation, U.S. involvement increased over a period of years, beginning with the deployment of non-combatant military
advisors to the South Vietnamese army, to use of special forces for commando-style
operations, to introduction of regular troops whose purpose was to be defensive only, to using regular troops in offensive
combat. Once U.S. troops were engaged in active combat, escalation shifted to the addition of increasing numbers of U.S.
troops.
The policy of escalation helped complicate the ambiguous legal status for the war. Since the U.S. had pre-existing treaty
agreements with the Republic of Viet Nam, each escalation was presented as simply another step in helping an ally resist what the
U.S. portrayed as a Communist invasion. The U.S. Congress continued to vote appropriations for war operations, and the Johnson
Administration claimed these actions as a proxy, along with Tonkin, for the Constitutionally mandated requirement that Congress retain war power.
In U.S. political debate, the advantage of escalation to those who wanted to be engaged in the war was that no individual
instance of escalation dramatically increased the level of U.S. involvement. The U.S. populace was led to believe that the most
recent escalation would be sufficient to "win the war" and therefore would be the last. This theory, combined with ready
availability of conscripted troops, reduced grassroots political opposition
to the war until 1968, when the Johnson Administration proposed increasing the troop levels
from approximately 550,000 in-country to about 700,000. This was the "straw" that broke the back of escalation and widespread
U.S. support for the war. The troop increase was abandoned and by the end of 1969, under
the new administration of Richard M. Nixon, U.S. troop levels had
been reduced by 60,000 from their wartime peak.
Increasing US involvement to 1964
US involvement in the war was a gradual process, with combat personnel arriving in 1950. Its military involvement increased
over the years under three U.S. presidents, both Democrat and Republican (successively Eisenhower-R, Kennedy-D and Johnson-D, and was sustained for additional years in the administration of
Richard Nixon-R), despite warnings by the US military leadership against
a major ground war in Asia. Though actions under the administrations of Eisenhower and
Kennedy are considered to have cast the die for the future conflict, it was Johnson who expanded and transformed the engagement
into a distinctly U.S. operation, a policy which eventually led to opposition within his own party that convinced him not to seek
a second term in 1968 after internal polling showed the depth of public doubt and
anger.
There was never a formal declaration of war but there were a series of presidential decisions that increased the number of
"military advisors" and then active combatants in the region.
In the campaign for the presidency in 1960, the perceived Soviet threat and slippage in U.S. standing in the world was a
prominent issue and Kennedy made erosion of the U.S. position in the world a major campaign issue. The Pentagon Papers
(Chapter I, "The Kennedy Commitments and Programs, 1961,") elaborated on this point.
- A further element of the Soviet problem impinged directly on Vietnam. The new Administration, even before taking office,
was inclined to believe that unconventional warfare was likely to be terrifically important in the 1960s. In January 1961,
Khrushchev seconded that view with his speech pledging Soviet
support to "wars of national liberation". Vietnam was where such a war was actually going on. Indeed, since the war in Laos had
moved far beyond the insurgency stage, Vietnam was the only place in the world where the Administration faced a well-developed
Communist effort to topple a pro-Western government with an externally-aided pro-communist insurgency.
The prominent anti-war critic Noam Chomsky claims that Kennedy ordered
the US Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam as early as 1962, using South Vietnamese aircraft markings, to disguise US involvement. He also accuses Kennedy
of authorizing the use of napalm, along with other crop destruction programs at this
earlier date, rather than as a later part of the larger war. The traditional view claims that "actual increased U.S. involvement
in the Vietnam War" didn't occur until 1964.
The program of covert GVN (South Vietnamese) operations was designed to impose "progressively escalating pressure" upon the
North, and initiated on a small and essentially ineffective scale in February 1964,
according to standard sources. The active U.S. role in the few covert operations that were carried out was limited essentially to
planning, equipping, and training of the GVN forces involved, but U.S. responsibility for the launching and conduct of these
activities was unequivocal and carried with it an implicit symbolic and psychological intensification of the U.S. commitment.
Kennedy and South Vietnam
The Kennedy administration efforts to contain North Vietnam occurred simultaneously with an effort to modernize the regime of
the South. Kennedy strongly believed that if South Vietnam was a stable and democratic country, it would largely discredit the
North and its Communist rhetoric. Aid to the South was often made on the condition that the government would undertake certain
political reforms. Soon, US Government advisors were playing a prominent role in every level of South Vietnam's government. South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem had little time for these reforms, and
was quite uncooperative. He would often go through the motions of these US-prescribed reforms, but in very superficial ways that
ended up quite embarrassing for the US. For example, when he ran for election, only one opposition candidate was allowed, and
there were widespread allegations of vote-rigging. Diem did not believe
that US ideas of democracy were applicable to his government, since the country was still so young and unstable. Kennedy was
accused of being overly naive and utopian in his belief that US values could be instantly imported into any country, no matter
what their culture or history.
Eventually, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly frustrated with Diem. In an embarrassing incident that was widely
reported in the US press, Diem's forces launched a violent crackdown on Buddhist
monks. Since Vietnam was a predominantly Buddhist nation while Diem and much of the ruling structure of South Vietnam was
Roman Catholic, this action was viewed as further proof that Diem was
completely out of touch with his people. US messages were sent to South Vietnamese generals encouraging them to act against
Diem's excesses. Though there is some debate as to whether or not this was Kennedy's intention, the South Vietnamese military
interpreted these messages as a call to arms, and staged a violent coup
d'état, overthrowing and killing Diem on November 1, 1963.
Far from uniting the country under new leadership, the death of Diem made the South even more unstable. The new military
rulers were very inexperienced in political matters, and were unable to provide
the strong central authority of Diem's rule. Coups and counter-coups plagued the country, which in turn served as a great
inspiration to the efforts of the North.
Three weeks after Diem's death, Kennedy himself was assassinated, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was suddenly thrust into the war's leadership role. Newly sworn-in President Johnson
confirmed on November 24, 1963 that the
United States intended to continue supporting South Vietnam militarily
and economically.
Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin
Johnson raised the level of U.S. involvement on July 27, 1964 when 5,000 additional US military advisors were ordered to South Vietnam which brought the total number of
US forces in Vietnam to 21,000.
On July 31, 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox, continued a
reconnaissance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin that had been suspended for six months. The purpose of the mission was to provoke a
reaction from North Vietnamese coastal defense forces as a pretext for a wider war. Responding to a claimed attack, and with the
help of air support from the nearby carrier USS Ticonderoga,
Maddox destroyed one North Vietnamese torpedo-boat and damaged two others. Maddox, suffering only superficial
damage by a single 14.5-millimeter machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters, where she was joined by USS C. Turner Joy.
On August 3, GVN again attacked North Vietnam; the Rhon River estuary and the Vinh Sonh radar installation were bombarded
under cover of darkness.
On August 4, a new DESOTO patrol to the
North Vietnam coast was launched, with Maddox and C. Turner Joy. The latter got radar signals later claimed to be
another attack by the North Vietnamese. For some two hours the ships fired on radar targets and maneuvered vigorously amid
electronic and visual reports of torpedoes. Later, Captain John J. Herrick admitted that it was nothing more than an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing
ship's own propeller beat". This was not, however, clear at the time.
The U.S. Senate then approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 August 1964, which gave broad support to President Johnson to escalate U.S. involvement in the war "as the
President shall determine". In a televised address Johnson claimed that "the challenge that we face in South-East Asia today is
the same challenge that we have faced with courage and that we have met with strength in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin and Korea,
in Lebanon and in Cuba," a dangerous misreading of the politics of the Vietnamese conflict. National Security Council
members, including Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and Maxwell Taylor agreed on November 28, 1964 to recommend that President
Johnson adopt a plan for a two-stage escalation of bombing in North Vietnam.
On March 8, 1965, 3,500 United States Marines became the first American combat troops to
land in South Vietnam, adding to the 25,000 US military advisers already in place. The air war escalated as well; on July 24, 1965, four F-4C Phantoms escorting a bombing raid at Kang Chi became the targets of antiaircraft missiles in the first such attack against American planes in the war. One plane was shot
down and the other three sustained damage. Four days later Johnson announced another order that increased the number of US troops
in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000. The day after that, July 29, the first 4,000
101st Airborne Division paratroopers arrived in
Vietnam, landing at Cam Ranh Bay.
Then on August 18, 1965, Operation Starlite began as the first major American ground battle of the war when 5,500 US Marines
destroyed a NLF stronghold on the Van
Tuong peninsula in Quang Ngai Province. The Marines were tipped-off by a NLF deserter who said that there was an attack
planned against the US base at Chu Lai. The
NVA learned from their defeat and tried to avoid fighting a US-style war from then on.
The Pentagon told President Johnson on November 27, 1965 that if planned major sweep operations needed to neutralize NLF forces during the next
year were to succeed, the number of American troops in Vietnam needed to be increased from 120,000 to 400,000. By the end of 1965
184,000 US troops were in Vietnam. In February 1966 there was a meeting between the commander of the U.S. effort, head of the
Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam General William Westmoreland and Johnson in
Honolulu. Westmoreland argued that the US presence had prevented a defeat but that
more troops were needed to take the offensive, he claimed that an immediate increase could lead to the "cross-over point" in
Vietcong and NVA casualties being reached in early 1967. Johnson authorised an increase in troop numbers to 429,000 by August
1966.
On 12 October 1967 US Secretary of
State Dean Rusk stated during a news conference that proposals by the U.S. Congress for peace initiatives were futile
because of North Vietnam's opposition. Johnson then held a secret meeting with a group of the nation's most prestigious leaders
("the Wise Men") on November 2 and asked them to suggest ways to unite the
American people behind the war effort. They concluded that the American people should be given more optimistic reports on the
progress of the war. Then based on reports he was given on November 13,
Johnson told his nation on November 17 that, while much remained to be done,
"We are inflicting greater losses than we're taking...We are making progress." Following up on this, General William Westmoreland on November 21 told news reporters: "I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he
is certainly losing." Two months later the Tet Offensive made both men
regret their words.
Continued escalation of American military involvement came as the Johnson administration and Westmoreland repeatedly assured
the American public that the next round of troop increases would bring victory. The American public's faith in the "light at the
end of the tunnel" was shattered, however, on January 30, 1968, when the enemy, supposedly on the verge of collapse, mounted the Tet Offensive (named after Tet Nguyen Dan, the
lunar new year festival which is the most important Vietnamese holiday) in South Vietnam, in which nearly every major city in South Vietnam was attacked. Although neither of these offensives
accomplished any military objectives, the surprising capacity of an enemy that was supposedly on the verge of collapse to even
launch such an offensive convinced many Americans that victory was impossible. There was an increasing sense among many people
that the government was misleading the American people about a war without a clear beginning or end. When General Westmoreland
called for still more troops to be sent to Vietnam, Clark Clifford, a
member of Johnson's own cabinet, came out against the war.
Soon after Tet, Westmoreland was replaced by his deputy, General Creighton W. Abrams. Abrams pursued a very different approach to Westmoreland, favouring more openness
with the media, less indiscriminate use of airstrikes and heavy artillery, elimination of bodycount as the key indicator of
battlefield succss, and more meaningful co-operation with ARVN forces. His strategy, although yielding positive results, came too
late to sway a domestic US public opinion that was already solidifying against the war.
Facing a troop shortage, on October 14, 1968 the United States Department of Defense
announced that the United States Army and Marines would be
sending about 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours. Two weeks later on October 31, citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President
Lyndon B. Johnson announced to his nation that he had ordered a
complete cessation of "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North
Vietnam" effective November 1. Peace talks eventually broke down, however,
and one year later, on November 3, 1969,
then President Richard M. Nixon addressed the nation on television and radio asking the "silent
majority" to join him in solidarity on the Vietnam War effort and to support his policies.
The credibility of the government suffered when the New York Times, and later the Washington Post and other newspapers,
published the Pentagon Papers. It was a top-secret historical study,
contracted by the Pentagon, about the war, that showed how the government was misleading the US public, in all stages of the war,
including the secret support of the French in the first Vietnam War.
Operation Rolling Thunder
Operation Rolling Thunder was the code name for the non-stop, but often interrupted bombing raids in North Vietnam conducted
by the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War. Its purpose was to destroy the will of the North Vietnamese to fight,
to destroy industrial bases and air defenses (SAMs), and to stop the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Beginning in the early 1960s, communist North Vietnam (The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) began sending arms and
reinforcements to the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (NLF) fighting a war of reunification in South Vietnam. To
combat the NLF and shore up the regime in the south, the United States sent advisors, supplies and combat troops. A war escalated
that would see American soldiers engaging NLF insurgents and North Vietnamese regular troops in the field.
The supply lines for the war ran south across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam, or via Laos and
Cambodia along the infamous ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’. The source of these supplies was the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet
Union. The road and rail network of the north was vital for transshipping materiel south. The hub of this network was the
national capital, Hanoi.
In August 1964, the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’, a skirmish between DRV and United States Navy ships, gave the US a
pretext to launch air strikes against the North. The objective, outlined by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was to discourage
further "Communist aggression" by launching punitive attacks against the DRV.
In late 1964 the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up a list of targets to be destroyed as part of a coordinated interdiction air
campaign against the North’s supply network. Bridges, rail yards, docks, barracks and supply dumps would be targeted.
However, President Johnson feared that direct intervention by the Chinese or Russians could trigger a world war and refused to
authorize an unrestricted bombing campaign. Instead, the attacks would be limited to targets cleared by the President and his
Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara.
Beginning in 1965 Rolling Thunder was a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Early missions were against the
south of the DRV, where the bulk of ground forces and supply dumps were located. Large-scale air strikes were launched on depots,
bases and supply targets, but the majority of operations were “armed reconnaissance” missions in which small
formations of aircraft patrolled highways and railroads and rivers, attacking targets of opportunity.
Afraid the war might escalate out of hand, Johnson and McNamara micromanaged the bombing campaign from Washington. Rules of
Engagement were imposed to limit civilian casualties or attacks on other nationals, such as the Eastern Bloc-crewed supply ships
in Haiphong harbor or the Soviet and Chinese advisors helping train the Vietnamese military.
However, the American policy of ‘graduated response’ – slowly ramping up pressure on the DRV leadership
– meant that more targets became available to airmen to bomb. The bombing moved progressively northwards toward Hanoi.
Exclusion zones were maintained around Hanoi and Haiphong to keep bombers away from the population centers, but eventually raids
would be authorized even into these sanctuaries.
To keep the United States Air Force and Navy out of each other’s way the DRV was divided into air zones called
‘Route Packages’ (RPs), each assigned to a service. The area around Hanoi included Route Packages 5 and 6a (the
USAF’s responsibility) and 4 and 6b (the USN’s). Strikes into RP 6a or 6b were reckoned to be the toughest of all.
The Vietnamese, with Soviet and Chinese help, had built a formidable air defense system there. Initially this consisted of
anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and MiG fighter jets, but from mid-1965 this was supplemented
by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). A radar net now
covered the country that could track incoming US raids and allocate SAMs or MiGs to attack them.
To survive in this lethal air defense zone the Americans adopted special tactics. Large-scale raids were assigned support
aircraft to keep the bombers safe. These would include fighters to keep the MiGs away, jamming aircraft to degrade enemy radars,
and ‘Iron Hand’ fighter-bombers to hunt down SAMs and suppress AAA. New electronics countermeasures devices were
hurriedly deployed to protect aircraft from missile attacks.
By 1966 the air war in the higher Route Packages was getting hotter. Though most of the casualties came from AAA, there were
an increasing number of encounters with SAMs and MiGs. MiGs were a particular problem because the Americans’ poor radar
coverage of the Hanoi region allowed obsolete jets such as the MiG-17 to get the jump
on them. Airborne Early Warning aircraft had great trouble detecting MiGs at very low altitude.
Most of the USAF raids against the North came out of bases in Thailand. They
would refuel over Laos before flying onto their targets. Sometimes the Americans would fly low and use prominent terrain features
such as Thud Ridge to mask them from radar as they approached. After attacking the target – usually by dive-bombing –
the raid would either head directly back to Thailand or exit over the relatively safe waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
Navy raids would be launched from TaskForce 77’s carriers cruising on Yankee
Station. The complement of a carrier air wing was needed to form an ‘Alpha Strike’. The Navy aircraft would
usually take the shortest way into and out from the target.
Bombing halts became a feature of the war. Some of these were politically enforced, as President Johnson tried a ‘carrot
and stick’ approach to coax the DRV into a peace agreement. Others were the fault of the weather that for six months a year
made bombing near impossible. Attempts were made to overcome the weather by developing blind bombing techniques using radar or
radio navigation systems, but at best they generated mediocre results and were often useless. 1967 saw America’s most
intense and sustained attempt to force the Vietnamese into peace talks. Almost all the Joint Chiefs’ target list was made
available to be attacked, and even airfields – previously off-limits – came in for a pasting. Only the center of
Hanoi (nicknamed ‘Downtown’ after the Petula Clark song) and
Haiphong harbor remained safe from harm. The Vietnamese reacted by becoming more aggressive with their MiGs and using AAA and SAM
to rack up an impressive tally of US aircraft.
After two years of bombardment the Vietnamese were well equipped to handle US raids, having dispersed their supplies and
developed the means to repair and rebuild the supply network after the raids had passed. Their strategy was longsighted. They
didn’t have to defeat the Americans, merely absorb the punishment and outlast them.
By 1968 McNamara had become convinced that airpower could not win the war. In spite of the air campaign the Tet New Year
holiday saw Hanoi and the NLF mount an offensive in the south. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the North and their
NLF allies, but it still broke the will of the American leadership. Hoping that Hanoi would enter into peace talks, President
Johnson offered a bombing halt. The communists, licking their wounds after Tet, agreed to talks and the Rolling Thunder campaign
came to an end.
Opposition to the war
Small scale opposition to the war began in 1964 on college campuses. This was happening
during a time of unprecedented leftist student activism, and of the arrival at college age of the demographically significant
Baby Boomers. Growing opposition to the war is attributable in part to the
much greater access to information about the war available to college age Americans compared with previous generations because of
extensive television news coverage.
Thousands of young American men chose exile in Canada or Sweden rather than risk conscription. At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually
conscripted; and most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote or drink in most states, the Selective Service System office ("Draft Board") in each
locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption. The charges
of unfairness led to the institution of a draft lottery for the year 1970 in which a young
man's birthday determined his relative risk of being drafted (September 14
was the birthday at the top of the draft list for 1970; the following year July 9 held this distinction). The image of young people being forced to risk their lives in
the military but not allowed to vote or drink also successfully pressured legislators to lower the voting age nationally and the
drinking age in many states.
In order to gain an exemption or deferment many men obtained student deferments by attending college, though they would have
to remain in college until their 26th birthday to be certain of avoiding the draft. Some got married, which remained an exemption
throughout the war. Some men found sympathetic doctors who would claim a medical basis for applying for a 4F (medically unfit)
exemption, though Army doctors could and did make their own judgments. Still others joined the National Guard or entered the Peace Corps as a way of avoiding Vietnam. All of these issues raised concerns about
the fairness of who got selected for involuntary service, since it was often the poor or those without connections who were
drafted. Ironically, in light of modern political issues, a certain exemption was a convincing claim of homosexuality, but very few men attempted this because of the stigma
involved.
The draft itself also initiated protests when on October 15, 1965 the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam
staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. The first draft lottery since World War II in the United
States was held on 1 December 1969 and
was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy; statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries
unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays. [1] (http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v5n2/datasets.starr.html) This issue was treated at
length in a 4 January 1970 New York Times article titled "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not
Random".
Even many of those who never received a deferment or exemption never served, simply because the pool of eligible men was so
huge compared to the number required for service, that the draft boards never got around to drafting them when a new crop of men
became available (until 1969) or because they had high lottery numbers (1970 and later).
The U.S. people became polarized over the war. Many supporters of the war argued for what was known as the Domino Theory, which held that if the South fell to communist guerillas, other
nations, primarily in Southeast Asia, would succumb in short succession, much like falling dominoes. Military critics of the war
pointed out that the conflict was political and that the military mission lacked clear objectives. Civilian critics of the war
argued that the government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy, or that support for the war was immoral. President
Johnson's undersecretary of state, George Ball, was one of the lone voices in
his administration advising against war in Vietnam.
Gruesome images of two anti-war activists that set themselves on fire in November 1965 provided iconic images of how strongly
some people felt that the war was immoral. On November 2 32-year-old Quaker member Norman Morrison set
himself on fire in front of The Pentagon and on November 9 22-year old Catholic Worker member
Roger Allen LaPorte did the same thing in front of the
United Nations building. Both protests were conscious imitations of
earlier (and ongoing) Buddhist protests in South Vietnam itself.
The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the US government. On August 16,
1966 the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigations of Americans who were
suspected of aiding the NLF, with the intent to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators
disrupted the meeting and 50 were arrested.
On 1 February 1968, a suspected NLF
officer was summarily executed by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot the
suspect in the head on a public street in front of journalists. The execution was filmed and photographed and provided another
iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.
On 15 October 1969, hundreds of
thousands of people took part in National Moratorium antiwar demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations prompted many
workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents nationwide engaged in truancy
from school - although the proportion of individuals doing either who actually participated in the demonstrations is in doubt. A
second round of "Moratorium" demonstrations was held on November 15, but was
less well-attended.
The U.S. realized that the South Vietnamese government needed a solid base of popular support if it was to survive the
insurgency. In order to pursue this goal of "winning the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, units of the United States Army, referred to as "Civil
Affairs" units, were extensively utilized for the first time for this purpose since World War II.
Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what
came to be known as "nation building": constructing (or reconstructing) schools, public buildings, roads and other physical
infrastructure; conducting medical programs for civilians who had no access to medical facilities; facilitating cooperation among
local civilian leaders; conducting hygiene and other training for civilians; and similar activities.
This policy of attempting to win the "Hearts and Minds" of the
Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects of the war which served to antagonize many Vietnamese civilians.
These policies included the emphasis on "body count" as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, the bombing of
villages (symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett's famous quote, "it was
necessary to destroy the village in order to save it"), and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In 1974 the
documentary "Hearts and Minds" sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people, and won an
Academy Award for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The
South Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its suppression of political opposition, through such
measures as holding large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and holding a one-man election for
President in 1971.
Despite the increasingly depressing news on the war, many Americans continued to support President Johnson's endeavors. Aside
from the domino theory mentioned above, there was a feeling that the goal of preventing a communist takeover of a pro-Western government in South Vietnam was a noble objective. Many Americans were also
concerned about saving face in the event of disengaging from the war or, as President Richard M. Nixon later put it, "achieving Peace with Honor". In addition, instances of Viet Cong
atrocities were widely reported, most notably in an article that appeared in Reader's Digest in 1968 entitled The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi
Minh.
However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, seeing it as a destructive war
against Vietnamese independence, or as intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear
objectives and appeared to be unwinnable. Some anti-war activists were themselves Vietnam Veterans, as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Some of the Americans opposed to the Vietnam War, as for
instance Jane Fonda, stressed their support for ordinary Vietnamese civilians
struck by a war beyond their influence. The anti-war sentiments gave reason to a perception among returning soldiers of being spat on.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson began his re-election campaign. A member of
his own party, Eugene McCarthy, ran against him for the nomination on
an antiwar platform. McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New
Hampshire, but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, taken together with
other factors, led the President to make a surprise announcement in a March 31 televised speech that he |
