APUSH Lesson #26: Vietnam War (Period 8)
Vietnam War (1964-1975)
Contextualization
Vietnam is located in Southeast Asia.
The French controlled Vietnam since the 19th century.
After World War II, Ho Chi Minh led a communist revolt against the French.
In 1946, Ho Chi Minh called on all Vietnamese people to fight against the French colonialists.
After nine years of fighting, the French were defeated.
In 1954, the Vietnamese signed the Geneva Accords, which split Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
Communist North under Ho Chi Minh.
Democratic South under President Ngo Dinh Diem.
A nationwide election was supposed to occur after two years to unite the two countries.
The U.S. did not want to see a united communist Vietnam because they believed the Communists would win the election.
The United States told South Vietnam not to honor the Geneva Accords and to remain their own separate country.
The North began waging war against the South when no nationwide election took place.
Vietnam War
DVR: Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam)
Leader: Ho Chi Minh (Communist)
Army: Viet Minh
Viet Cong: Southern supporters of the North
GVN: Government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam)
Leader: Ngo Dinh Diem (Anti-Communist)
Army: United States troops/anti-communist Vietnamese
Diem Takes Questionable Actions to Stop Communists
In late 1957, Diem began to counterattack the North with American military aid.
He used the help of the American CIA to identify those who wanted to bring his government down.
He arrested thousands and became a dictator.
Buddhist monks and nuns, students, business people, intellectuals, and peasants protested the corrupt rule of Diem.
Massive protests on the streets of Saigon led Buddhist monks to self-immolation (set themselves on fire).
The Kennedy administration seemed split on how peaceful or democratic the Diem regime really was.
From 1956-1960, the Communist Party of Vietnam wanted to reunify the country through political means alone.
The Communist Party tried unsuccessfully to cause Diem’s collapse by using internal political pressure.
After Diem’s attacks on suspected communists in the South, southern Communists convinced the Party to adopt more violent tactics to guarantee Diem’s downfall.
The result was the creation of a united front to help organize southerners in opposition to South Vietnam.
Presidential Theories/Decisions About Getting Involved
1) President Eisenhower (1953-1961) and the “Domino Theory”
President Eisenhower created the “Domino Theory” for Southeast Asia.
If one of the countries there fell, all of them would fall.
Eisenhower's Domino Theory: “Indochina produces materials that the world needs, such as tin and rubber. Then you have the possibility that many human beings would be controlled by a dictatorship that is unfriendly to the free world (China and North Korea). Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to Communist dictatorships. You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and the last one will certainly fall very quickly…”
2) President Kennedy (1961-1963)
President Kennedy wanted to take a stand against communism.
The Vietnamese communists in the North were supporting guerilla (rebel) communists in the South known as the Vietcong.
These Vietcong were waging war against Diem’s government.
Kennedy sent millions of dollars and 16,000 military and CIA advisors to train the South Vietnamese army and help fight with them.
The more money and men Kennedy sent, the more he committed America to Vietnam.
In 1961, President Kennedy sent a team to Vietnam to report conditions in the South and to assess future American aid.
The report became known as the “December 1961 White Paper”.
It argued for an increase in military, technical, and economic aid to help stabilize the Diem regime.
JFK’s advisors urged him to withdraw from Vietnam altogether.
Kennedy chose the middle ground, gradually helping the South with supplies.
With Washington and JFK’s approval, on November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother were captured and later killed.
3) President Johnson (1963-1969)
After JFK was assassinated, President Johnson felt compelled to fight the Communists in Vietnam or else South Vietnam would become Communist too.
On August 2 and August 4, 1964, the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy were supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin; these events were known as The Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
The American ships were not damaged in either incident, and there is evidence that they might not even have been threatened by the North Vietnamese.
Johnson proceeded with that intel, and went to Congress with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – asking for permission to send soldiers to Vietnam.
Congress approved, and in 1965, America began its 10-year war in Vietnam.
Johnson’s reasons for the Vietnam War “Why are we in South Vietnam? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has of ered support to the people of South Vietnam…We have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence. And I intend to keep our promise…To leave Vietnam alone would result in increased unrest and instability. ” –President Lyndon Johnson, 1965
Warfare Tactics and Criticisms
The U.S. sprayed 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange on the jungles and fields of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
They sought to defoliate the trees and bushes, so that enemy soldiers would be exposed.
They also wanted to kill off the agricultural crops that fed the Viet Cong (and local civilians).
Over 3,000 villages were in the spray zone.
The chemical leached into people's bodies, their food, and the groundwater.
In an underground aquifer, the toxin can remain stable for at least 100 years.
Even decades later, the chemical continues to cause health problems and birth defects for Vietnamese people in the sprayed area.
The Vietnamese government estimates that about 400,000 people have died from Agent Orange poisoning, and about half a million children have been born with birth defects.
Victims' groups from Vietnam, Korea, and other places where napalm and Agent Orange were used have sued the primary manufacturers of these chemical weapons, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, on several occasions.
In 2006, the companies were ordered to pay US $63 million in damages.
Despite having no aircraft, tanks or artillery of their own, the Viet Cong managed to hold out against the Americans until the US left Vietnam in the 1970s.
The Viet Cong used guerrilla warfare.
Guerrilla warfare is the art of using knowledge of the landscape to avoid open battle with the enemy and to launch raids and surprise attacks, before vanishing back into the undergrowth.
The Viet Cong had experience doing this while fighting the Japanese and the French after World War Two.
They were very familiar with the terrain and the climate.
They used the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which stretched from North Vietnam to the South, to keep their forces supplied.
Guerrilla tactics are based on sabotage and rely on the element of surprise with the ultimate objective being to destabilize an enemy through long, low-intensity confrontation.
Guerrillas are often not recognized as enemies because they are outnumbered and may take off their uniforms to blend in with the local population.
Guerrillas usually control rural areas with many places to hide, such as forests and mountains, and often rely on a friendly population to provide supplies and intelligence.
In 1965, the Pentagon approved a small company called Dow Chemical that made napalm which had horrific human consequences to combat guerillas.
A bit of liquid fire, a sort of jellied gasoline, napalm clung to human skin on contact and melted off the flesh.
Witnesses to napalm's impact described eyelids so burned they could not be shut and flesh that looked like "swollen, raw meat."
Tet Offensive and LBJ Withdraws
On January 31, 1968 the first day of the celebration of the Lunar New Year – Vietnam’s most important holiday, the North Vietnamese launched a major surprise attack throughout South Vietnam.
It took weeks for U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to retake all of the captured cities, including the former imperial capital of Hue.
Although the offensive was not militarily successful for the Vietnamese Communists, it was a political and psychological victory for them.
It dramatically contradicted optimistic claims by the U.S. government that the war had already been won.
The destruction viewed by millions on the TV news appeared a colossal setback for President Johnson’s Vietnam policy.
It demoralized an already increasingly antiwar public.
On March 31, 1968, President Johnson went on television and shocked everyone by announcing that he would not run again for president.
Peace Talks, Bombing Attacks, and Armistice
In his January 1969 inaugural address, President Richard Nixon promised to bring Americans together after the turmoil of the 1960s.
When Nixon took office, more than half a million U.S. troops were still in Vietnam.
His principal objective was to find a way to reduce U.S. involvement in the war while avoiding the appearance of conceding defeat.
After diplomatic meetings failed, Nixon ordered massive bombing of North Vietnam to force a settlement.
The North Vietnamese agreed to an armistice, in which the U.S. would withdraw the last of its troops and get back over 500 prisoners of war (POWs).
The armistice finally allowed the U.S. to extricate itself from a war that had claimed over 58,000 American lives.
The spent on the war began the inflationary cycle that racked the U.S. economy for years afterward.
Active U.S. involvement in the conflict ended in 1973 with a cease-fire agreement between the parties, but fighting continued between North and South Vietnam.
On April 30, 1975, Saigon, capital of the Republic of Vietnam, fell to Communist troops from North Vietnam, marking the end of the Vietnam War.