Vietnam War

THE VIETNAM WAR WAS a protracted struggle between communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam and an important aspect of the global struggle between the communist world and the free world, known as the Cold War. Direct involvement of the naval and military forces of the United States of America failed to stem the communist onslaught.

Before World War II, Vietnam had been a French colony. In 1945, the French attempted to regain control of their former colony of Vietnam. French efforts were opposed by a broad range of interests; particularly effective were the communists in the country, led by nationalist and communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Viet Minh and French forces fought a long war that resulted in French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Shortly thereafter, the French withdrew and the Geneva Conference agreements partitioned Vietnam into a communist North and noncommunist South.

Communist efforts to gain control of all of Vietnam continued. In the early 1960s, the United States began to provide military aid to South Vietnam. U.S. policy makers hoped to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, continuing the policy of containment employed by the United States since the early days of the Cold War. Also, conservatives in particular feared that if South Vietnam fell, then the rest of Indochina would come under communist dominion as well, a school of thought known as the Domino Theory. At first, aid came in the form of U.S. Special Forces advisors; after the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution by the U.S. Senate, the United States deployed vastly larger numbers of troops to Vietnam. By 1969, the number of American troops in Vietnam would exceed half a million.

U.S. forces fought against both North Vietnamese regular army (NVA) units and communist guerrillas in the south, known as the Viet Cong. Despite overwhelming technological superiority U.S. forces rarely initiated contact with their opponents. Although U.S. forces managed to kill a relatively high number of their enemy for every soldier lost, the United States lacked both an overall strategy and the will to win the war. Bloody, indecisive fighting demoralized the home front and left soldiers with low morale. The replacement policy adopted by the U.S. military proved corrosive to soldiers' morale as well. Rather than deploy large units in which soldiers had long trained and served together, the United States transferred replacements individually into units already in theater, which all too often prevented the development of unit cohesion so necessary to success in battle.

Because of Cold War constraints, fearing that China or the Soviet Union might become directly involved in the war, U.S. troops did not invade and conquer [Page 938]North Vietnam, the most direct road to victory. Instead, most of the war on the ground was fought in the South. An air campaign known as “Rolling Thunder” did strike targets in North Vietnam, but as part of a strategy of graduated pressure, in which U.S. policymakers sought to “communicate” with their opponents rather than inflict upon North Vietnam the level of destruction visited upon Germany and Japan by U.S. air power in World War II. Conservatives decried this kind of approach as ineffective. In addition, America rejected conservative leadership at home and in the global struggle against communism, by choosing liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson as president in 1964 rather than Republican Barry Goldwater.

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