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VIETNAM WAR 1959-1975
MAJOR COUNTRIES AND GROUPS INVOLVED
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ABOUT THE WAR
The Vietnam War, for Americans, has held deep controversy. Discussions on whether we should have gotten involved, or not, what we should have done different, and why we lost South Vietnam to the North is still being debated to this day. It was probably a war that was doomed at the beginning because of operations being led politically instead of militarily. On the other hand, if we had rushed in with a huge military force, we would have surely won that war, but might have ignited a far worse conflict with Communist China, or Russians.
From the 1880s until World War II (1939-1945), France
governed Vietnam as part of French Indochina, which also included Cambodia and Laos.
The country was under the nominal control of an emperor, Bao Dai. In 1940 Japanese
troops invaded and occupied French Indochina. In December of that year, Vietnamese
nationalists established the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh,
seeing the turmoil of the war as an opportunity for resistance to French colonial
rule.
The United States demanded that Japan leave Indochina, warning of military action.
The Viet Minh began guerrilla warfare against Japan and entered an effective alliance
with the United States. Viet Minh troops rescued downed U.S. pilots, located Japanese
prison camps, helped U.S. prisoners to escape, and provided valuable intelligence to
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). Ho Chi Minh, the principal leader of the Viet Minh, was even made a
special OSS agent.
When the Japanese signed their formal surrender on September 2, 1945, Ho used the
occasion to declare the independence of Vietnam, which he called the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Emperor Bao Dai had abdicated the throne a week earlier.
The French, however, refused to acknowledge Vietnam's independence, and later that
year drove the Viet Minh into the north of the country.
Ho wrote eight letters to U.S. president Harry Truman, imploring him to recognize
Vietnam's independence. Many OSS agents informed the U.S. administration that despite
being a Communist, Ho Chi Minh was not a puppet of the Communist Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) and that he could potentially become a valued ally in
Asia. Tensions between the United States and the USSR had mounted after World War II,
resulting in the Cold War.
The foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War was driven by a fear of
the spread of Communism. Eastern Europe had fallen under the domination of the
Communist USSR, and Communist ruled China. United States policymakers felt they could
not afford to lose Southeast Asia as well to the Communists. The United States
therefore condemned Ho Chi Minh as an agent of international Communism and offered to
assist the French in recapturing Vietnam.
In 1946 United States warships ferried elite French troops to Vietnam where they
quickly regained control of the major cities, including Hanoi, Haiphong, Ðà Nang,
Hue, and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), while the Viet Minh controlled the
countryside. The Viet Minh had only 2000 troops at the time Vietnam's independence
was declared, but recruiting increased after the arrival of French troops. By the
late 1940s, the Viet Minh had hundreds of thousands of soldiers and were fighting the
French to a draw. In 1949 the French set up a government to rival Ho Chi Minh's,
installing Bao Dai as head of state.
In May 1954 the Viet Minh mounted a massive assault on the French fortress at Dien
Bien, in northwestern Vietnam. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu resulted in perhaps the
most humiliating defeat in French military history. Already tired of the war, the
French public forced their government to reach a peace agreement at the Geneva
Conference.
France asked the other world powers to help draw up a plan for French withdrawal from
the region and for the future of Vietnam. Meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, from May 8
to July 21, 1954, diplomats from France, the United Kingdom, the USSR, China, and the
United States, as well as representatives from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, drafted a
set of agreements called the Geneva Accords. These agreements provided for the
withdrawal of French troops to the south of Vietnam until they could be safely
removed from the country. Viet Minh forces moved into the north. Vietnam was
temporarily divided at the 17th parallel to allow for a cooling-off period and for
warring factions among the Vietnamese to return to their native regions. Ho Chi Minh
maintained control of North Vietnam, or the DRV, while Emperor Bao Dai remained head
of South Vietnam.
Elections were to be held in 1956 throughout the north and south and to be supervised
by an International Control Commission that had been appointed at Geneva and was made
up of representatives from Canada, Poland, and India. Following these elections,
Vietnam was to be reunited under the government chosen by popular vote. The United
States refused to sign the accords, because it did not want to allow the possibility
of Communist control over Vietnam. The U.S. government moved to establish the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional alliance that extended
protection to South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in case of Communist
"subversion." SEATO, which came into force in 1955, became the mechanism by
which Washington justified its support for South Vietnam; this support eventually
became direct involvement of U.S. troops.
Also in 1955, the United States picked Ngo Dinh Diem to replace Bao Dai as head of
the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam. With U.S. encouragement, Diem refused to
participate in the planned national elections, which Ho Chi Minh and the Lao Dong, or
Workers' Party, were favored to win. Instead, Diem held elections only in South
Vietnam, an action that violated the Geneva Accords.
Diem won the elections with 98.2 percent of the vote, but many historians believe
these elections were rigged, since 200,000 more people voted in Saigon than were
registered. Diem then declared South Vietnam to be an independent nation called the
Republic of Vietnam (RVN), with Saigon as its capital. Vietnamese Communists and many
non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists saw the creation of the RVN as an effort by the
United States to interfere with the independence promised at Geneva.
The repressive measures of the Diem government eventually led to increasingly
organized opposition within South Vietnam. Diem's government represented a minority
of Vietnamese who were mostly businessmen, Roman Catholics, large landowners, and
others who had fought with the French against the Viet Minh. The United States
initially backed the South Vietnamese government with military advisers and financial
assistance, but more involvement was needed to keep it from collapsing. The Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution eventually gave President Lyndon B. Johnson permission to escalate
the war in Vietnam.
When Vietnam was divided in 1954, many Viet Minh who had been
born in the southern part of the country returned to their native villages to await
the 1956 elections and the reunification of their nation. When the elections did not
take place as planned, these Viet Minh immediately formed the core of opposition to
Diem's government and sought its overthrow. The Viet Minh were greatly aided in their
efforts to organize resistance in the countryside by Diem's own policies, which
alienated many peasants.
Beginning in 1955, the United States created the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)
in South Vietnam. Using these troops, Diem took land away from peasants and returned
it to former landlords, reversing the land redistribution program implemented by the
Viet Minh. He also forcibly moved many villagers from their ancestral lands to
controlled settlements in an attempt to prevent Communist activity, and he drafted
their sons into the ARVN.
Diem sought to discredit the Viet Minh by contemptuously referring to them as
"Viet Cong" (the Vietnamese equivalent of calling them
"Commies"), yet their influence continued to grow. Most southern Viet Minh
were members of the Lao Dong and were still committed to its program of national
liberation, reunification of Vietnam, and reconstruction of society along socialist
principles. By the late 1950s they were anxious to begin full-scale armed struggle
against Diem but were held in check by the northern branch of the party, which feared
that this would invite the entry of U.S. armed forces. By 1959, however, opposition
to Diem was so widespread in rural areas that the southern Communists formed the
National Liberation Front (NLF), and in 1960 the North Vietnamese government gave its
formal sanction to the organization. The NLF began to train and equip guerrillas,
known as the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF).
Diem's support was concentrated mainly in the cities. Although he had been a
nationalist opposed to French rule, he welcomed into his government those Vietnamese
who had collaborated with the French, and many of these became ARVN officers.
Catholics were a minority throughout Vietnam, amounting to no more than 10 percent of
the population, but they predominated in government positions because Diem himself
was Catholic. Between 1954 and 1955, operatives paid by the CIA spread rumors in
northern Vietnam that Communists were going to launch a persecution of Catholics,
which caused nearly 1 million Catholics to flee to the south. Their resettlement
uprooted Buddhists who already deeply resented Diem's rule because of his severe
discrimination against them.
In May 1963 Buddhists began a series of demonstrations against Diem, and the
demonstrators were fired on by police. At least seven Buddhist monks set themselves
on fire to protest the repression. Diem dismissed these suicides as publicity stunts
and promptly arrested 1400 monks. He then arrested thousands of high school and grade
school students who were involved in protests against the government. After this,
Diem was viewed as an embarrassment both by the United States and by many of his own
generals.
The Saigon government's war against the NLF was also going badly. In January 1963 an
ARVN force of 2000 encountered a group of 350 NLF soldiers at Ap Bac, a village south
of Saigon in the Mekong River Delta. The ARVN troops were equipped with jet fighters,
helicopters, and armored personnel carriers, while the NLF forces had only small
arms. Nonetheless, 61 ARVN soldiers were killed, as were three U.S. military
advisers. By contrast, the NLF forces lost only 12 men. Some U.S. military advisers
began to report that Saigon was losing the war, but the official military and embassy
press officers reported Ap Bac as a significant ARVN victory. Despite this official
account, a handful of U.S. journalists began to report pessimistically about the
future of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, which led to increasing public concern.
President John F. Kennedy still believed that the ARVN could become effective. Some
of his advisers advocated the commitment of U.S. combat forces, but Kennedy decided
to try to increase support for the ARVN among the people of Vietnam through
counterinsurgency. United States Special Forces (Green Berets) would work with ARVN
troops directly in the villages in an effort to match NLF political organizing and to
win over the South Vietnamese people.
To support the U.S. effort, the Diem government developed a "strategic
hamlet" program that was essentially an extension of Diem's earlier relocation
practices. Aimed at cutting the links between villagers and the NLF, the program
removed peasants from their traditional villages, often at gunpoint, and resettled
them in new hamlets fortified to keep the NLF out. Administration was left up to
Diem's brother Nhu, a corrupt official who charged villagers for building materials
that had been donated by the United States. In many cases peasants were forbidden to
leave the hamlets, but many of the young men quickly left anyway and joined the NLF.
Young men who were drafted into the ARVN often also worked secretly for the NLF. The
Kennedy administration concluded that Diem's policies were alienating the peasantry
and contributing significantly to NLF recruitment.
The number of U.S. advisers assigned to the ARVN rose steadily. In January 1961, when
Kennedy took office, there were 800 U.S. advisers in Vietnam; by November 1963 there
were 16,700. American air power was assigned to support ARVN operations; this
included the aerial spraying of herbicides such as Agent Orange, which was intended
to deprive the NLF of food and jungle cover. Despite these measures, the ARVN
continued to lose ground.
As the military situation deteriorated in South Vietnam, the United States sought to
blame it on Diem's incompetence and hoped that changes in his administration would
improve the situation. Nhu's corruption became a principal focus, and Diem was urged
to remove his brother. Many in Diem's military were especially dissatisfied and hoped
for increased U.S. aid. General Duong Van Minh informed the CIA and U.S. ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge of a plot to conduct a coup d'état against Diem. After much
discussion, Kennedy approved support for the coup. He was reportedly dismayed,
however, when the coup resulted in the murder of both Diem and Nhu on November 1,
1963. Far from stabilizing South Vietnam, the assassination of Diem ushered in ten
successive governments within 18 months. Meanwhile, the CIA was forced to admit that
the strength of the NLF was continuing to grow.
Succeeding to the presidency after Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963,
Lyndon B. Johnson felt he had to take a forceful stance on Vietnam so that other
Communist countries would not think that the United States lacked resolve. Kennedy
had begun to consider the possibility of withdrawal from Vietnam and had even ordered
the removal of 1000 advisers shortly before he was assassinated, but Johnson
increased the number of U.S. advisers to 27,000 by mid-1964. Even though intelligence
reports clearly stated that most of the support for the NLF came from the south,
Johnson, like his predecessors, continued to insist that North Vietnam was
orchestrating the southern rebellion. He was determined that he would not be held
responsible for allowing Vietnam to fall to the Communists.
Johnson believed that the key to success in the war in South Vietnam was to frighten
North Vietnam's leaders with the possibility of full-scale U.S. military
intervention. In January 1964 he approved top-secret, covert attacks against North
Vietnamese territory, including commando raids against bridges, railways, and coastal
installations. Johnson also ordered the U.S. Navy to conduct surveillance missions
along the North Vietnamese coast. He increased the secret bombing of territory in
Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a growing network of paths and roads used by the
NLF and the North Vietnamese to transport supplies into South Vietnam. Hanoi
concluded that the United States was preparing to occupy South Vietnam and indicated
that it, too, was preparing for full-scale war.
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese coastal gunboats fired on the destroyer USS
Maddox, which had penetrated North Vietnam's territorial boundaries in the Gulf of
Tonkin. Johnson ordered more ships to the area, and on August 4 both the Maddox and
the USS Turner Joy reported that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired on them.
Johnson then ordered the first air strikes against North Vietnamese territory and
went on television to seek approval from the U.S. public. (Subsequent congressional
investigations would conclude that the August 4 attack almost certainly had never
occurred.) The U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
which effectively handed over war-making powers to Johnson until such time as
"peace and security" had returned to Vietnam.
After the Gulf of Tonkin incident Johnson steadily escalated U.S. bombing of North
Vietnam, which began to dispatch well-trained units of its People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN)
into the south. The NLF guerrillas coordinated their attacks with PAVN forces.
Between February 7 and February 10, 1965, the NLF launched surprise attacks on the
U.S. air base at Pleiku, killing 8 Americans, wounding 126, and destroying 10
aircraft; they struck again at Qui Nhon, killing 23 U.S. servicemen and wounding 21.
Johnson responded by bombing Hanoi at a time when Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin was
visiting, thus pushing the USSR closer to North Vietnam and ensuring future Soviet
arms deliveries to Southeast Asia. Johnson's advisers, chiefly Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, declared that a
full-scale air war against North Vietnam would depress the morale of the NLF. The
bombing did just the opposite, however. The inability of the ARVN to protect U.S. air
bases led Johnson's senior planners to the consensus that U.S. combat forces would be
required. On March 8, 1965, 3500 U.S. Marines landed at Ðà Nang. By the end of
April, 56,000 other combat troops had joined them; by June the number had risen to
74,000.
When some of the soldiers of the U.S. 9th Marine Regiment
landed in Ðà Nang in March 1965, their orders were to protect the U.S. air base,
but the mission was quickly escalated to include search-and-destroy patrols of the
area around the base. This corresponded in miniature to the larger strategy of
General William Westmoreland. Westmoreland, who took over the Military Assistance
Command in Vietnam (MACV) in 1964, advocated establishing a large American force and
then unleashing it in big sweeps. His strategy was that of attrition—eliminating or
wearing down the enemy by inflicting the highest death toll possible. There were
80,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by the end of 1965; by 1969 a peak of 543,000 troops
would be reached.
Having easily pushed aside the ARVN, both the North Vietnamese and the NLF had
anticipated the U.S. escalation. With full-scale movement of U.S. troops onto South
Vietnamese territory, the Communists claimed that the Saigon regime had become a
puppet, not unlike the colonial collaborators with the French. Both the North
Vietnamese and NLF appealed to the nationalism of the Vietnamese to rise up and drive
this new foreign army from their land.
The strategy developed against the United States was the
result of intense debate both within the Lao Dong in the north, and between the
northerners and the NLF. Truong Chinh, the leading southern military figure, argued
that the southern Vietnamese must liberate themselves; Le Duan, secretary general of
the Lao Dong, insisted that Vietnam was one nation and therefore dependent on all
Vietnamese for its independence and reunification. Ho Chi Minh, revered widely
throughout Vietnam as the father of independence, successfully appealed for unity.
The Central Committee Directorate for the South (also known as the Central Office for
South Vietnam, or COSVN), which was composed of DRV and NLF representatives, was then
able to coordinate a unified strategy.
After the United States initiated large-scale bombing against the DRV in 1964, in the
wake of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Hanoi dispatched the first unit of northern-born
regular soldiers to the south. Previously, southern-born Viet Minh, known as
regroupees, had returned to their native regions and joined NLF guerrilla units. Now
PAVN regulars, commanded by generals who had been born in the south, began to set up
bases in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in order to gain strategic position.
Unable to cross the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 17th parallel separating North
from South Vietnam, PAVN regulars moved into South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail through Laos and Cambodia. In use since 1957, the trail was originally a series
of footpaths; by the late 1960s it would become a network of paved highways that
enabled the motor transport of people and equipment. The NLF guerrillas and North
Vietnamese troops were poorly armed compared to the Americans, so once they were in
South Vietnam they avoided open combat. Instead they developed hit-and-run tactics
designed to cause steady casualties among the U.S. troops and to wear down popular
support for the war in the United States.
In June 1964 retired general Maxwell Taylor replaced Henry
Cabot Lodge as ambassador to South Vietnam. A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, the military advisory group to the president, Taylor at first opposed the
introduction of American combat troops, believing that this would make the ARVN quit
fighting altogether. By 1965 he agreed to the request of General Westmoreland for
combat forces. Taylor initially advocated an enclave strategy, where U.S. forces
would seek to preserve areas already considered to be under Saigon's control. This
quickly proved impossible, since NLF strength was considerable virtually everywhere
in South Vietnam.
In October 1965 the newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army fought one of
the largest battles of the Vietnam War in the Ia Drang Valley, inflicting a serious
defeat on North Vietnamese forces. The North Vietnamese and NLF forces changed their
tactics as a result of the battle. From then on both would fight at times of their
choosing, hitting rapidly, with surprise if possible, and then withdrawing just as
quickly to avoid the impact of American firepower. The success of the American
campaign in the Ia Drang Valley convinced Westmoreland that his strategy of attrition
was the key to U.S. victory. He ordered the largest search-and-destroy operations of
the war in the "Iron Triangle," the Communist stronghold northeast of
Saigon. This operation was intended to find and destroy North Vietnam and NLF
military headquarters, but the campaign failed to wipe out Communist forces from the
area.
By 1967 the ground war had reached a stalemate, which led Johnson and McNamara to
increase the ferocity of the air war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had been pressing for
this for some time, but there was already some indication that intensified bombing
would not produce the desired results. In 1966 the bombing of North Vietnam's oil
facilities had destroyed 70 percent of their fuel reserves, but the DRV's ability to
wage the war had not been affected.
Planners wished to avoid populated areas, but when 150,000 sorties per year were
being flown by U.S. warplanes, civilian casualties were inevitable. These casualties
provoked revulsion both in the United States and internationally. In 1967 the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler, declared that no more
"major military targets" were left. Unable to widen the bombing to
population centers for fear of Chinese and Soviet reactions in support of North
Vietnam, the U.S. Department of Defense had to admit stalemate in the air war as
well. The damage that had already been inflicted on
Vietnam's population was enormous.
In 1967 North Vietnam and the NLF decided the time had come
to mount an all-out offensive aimed at inflicting serious losses on both the ARVN and
U.S. forces. They planned the Tet Offensive with the hope that this would
significantly affect the public mood in the United States. In December 1967 North
Vietnamese troops attacked and surrounded the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, placing
it under siege. Westmoreland ordered the outpost held at all costs. To prevent the
Communists from overrunning the base, about 50,000 U.S. Marines and Army troops were
called into the area, thus weakening positions further south.
This concentration of American troops in one spot was exactly what the COSVN
strategists had hoped would happen. The main thrust of the Tet Offensive then began
on January 31, 1968, at the start of Tet, or the Vietnamese lunar new year
celebration, when a lull in fighting traditionally took place. Most ARVN troops had
gone home on leave, and U.S. troops were on stand-down in many areas. Over 85,000 NLF
soldiers simultaneously struck at almost every major city and provincial capital
across South Vietnam, sending their defenders reeling. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon,
previously thought to be invulnerable, was taken over by the NLF, and held for eight
hours before U.S. forces could retake the complex. It took three weeks for U.S.
troops to dislodge 1000 NLF fighters from Saigon.
During the Tet Offensive, the imperial capital of Hue witnessed the bloodiest
fighting of the entire war. Communists assassinated South Vietnamese for
collaborating with Americans; then when the ARVN returned, NLF sympathizers were
murdered. United States Marines and paratroopers were ordered to go from house to
house to find North Vietnamese and NLF soldiers. Virtually indiscriminate shelling
was what killed most civilians, however, and the architectural treasures of Hue were
laid to waste. More than 100,000 residents of the city were left homeless.
The Tet Offensive as a whole lasted into the fall of 1968, and when it was over the
North Vietnamese and the NLF had suffered acute losses. The U.S. Department of
Defense estimated that a total of 45,000 North Vietnamese and NLF soldiers had been
killed, most of them NLF fighters. Although it was covered up for more than a year,
one horrifying event during the Tet Offensive would indelibly affect America's
psyche. In March 1968 elements of the U.S. Army's Americal Division wiped out an
entire hamlet called My Lai, killing 500 unarmed civilians, mostly women and
children.
After Tet, Westmoreland said that the enemy was almost conquered and requested
206,000 more troops to finish the job. Told by succeeding administrations since 1955
that there was "light at the end of the tunnel," that victory in Vietnam
was near, the American public had reached a psychological breaking point. The success
of the NLF in coordinating the Tet Offensive demonstrated both how deeply rooted the
Communist resistance was and how costly it would be for the United States to remain
in Vietnam. After Tet a majority of Americans wanted some closure to the war, with
some favoring an immediate withdrawal while others held out for a negotiated peace.
President Johnson rejected Westmoreland's request for more troops and replaced him as
the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam with Westmoreland's deputy, General Creighton
Abrams. Johnson himself decided not to seek reelection in 1968. Republican Richard
Nixon ran for the presidency declaring that he would bring "peace with
honor" if elected.
Promising an end to the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon won a
narrow victory in the election of 1968. Slightly more than 30,000 young Americans had
been killed in the war when Nixon took office in January 1969. The new president
retained his predecessor's goal of a non-Communist South Vietnam, however, and this
could not be ensured without continuing the war. Nixon's most pressing problem was
how to make peace and war at the same time. His answer was a policy called "Vietnamization."
Under this policy, he would withdraw American troops and the South Vietnamese army
would take over the fighting.
During his campaign for the presidency, Nixon announced that
he had a secret plan to end the war. In July 1969, after he had become president, he
issued what came to be known as the Nixon doctrine, which stated that U.S. troops
would no longer be directly involved in Asian wars. He ordered the withdrawal of
25,000 troops, to be followed by more, and he lowered draft calls. On the other hand,
Nixon also stepped up the Phoenix Program, a secret CIA operation that resulted in
the assassination of 20,000 suspected NLF guerrillas, many of whom were innocent
civilians. The operation increased funding for the ARVN and intensified the bombing
of North Vietnam. Nixon reasoned that to keep the Communists at bay during the U.S.
withdrawal, it was also necessary to bomb their sanctuaries in Cambodia and to
increase air strikes against Laos.
The DRV leadership, however, remained committed to the expulsion of all U.S. troops
from Vietnam and to the overthrow of the Saigon government. As U.S. troop strength
diminished, Hanoi's leaders planned their final offensive. While the ARVN had
increased in size and was better armed than it had been in 1965, it could not hold
its own without the help of heavy U.S. air power.
Johnson had initiated peace negotiations after the first
phase of the Tet Offensive. Beginning in Paris on May 13, 1968, the talks rapidly
broke down over disagreements about the status of the NLF, which the Saigon
government refused to recognize. In October 1968, just before the U.S. presidential
elections, candidate Hubert Humphrey called for a negotiated settlement, but Nixon
secretly persuaded South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to hold out for better
terms under a Nixon administration. Stating that he would never negotiate with
Communists, Thieu caused the Paris talks to collapse and contributed to Humphrey's
defeat as well.
Nixon thus inherited the Paris peace talks, but they continued to remain stalled as
each faction refused to alter its position. Hanoi insisted on the withdrawal of all
U.S. forces, the removal of the Saigon government, and its replacement through free
elections that would include the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), which
the NLF created in June 1969 to take over its governmental role in the south and
serve as a counterpart to the Saigon government. The United States, on the other
hand, insisted that all North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn.
In March 1969 Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. Intended to wipe out
North Vietnamese and NLF base camps along the border with South Vietnam in order to
provide time for the buildup of the ARVN, the campaign failed utterly. The secret
bombing lasted four years and caused great destruction and upheaval in Cambodia, a
land of farmers that had not known war in centuries. Code-named Operation Menu, the
bombing was more intense than that carried out over Vietnam. An estimated 100,000
peasants died in the bombing, while 2 million people were left homeless.
In April 1970 Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia. He argued that this was
necessary to protect the security of American units then in the process of
withdrawing from Vietnam, but he also wanted to buy security for the Saigon regime.
When Nixon announced the invasion, U.S. college campuses erupted in protest, and
one-third of them shut down due to student walkouts. At Kent State University in Ohio
panicky national guardsmen, who had been called up to prevent rioting, killed four
students. Two days later, two students were killed at Jackson State College in
Mississippi. Congress proceeded to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Congress
also passed the Cooper-Church Amendment, which specifically forbade the use of U.S.
troops outside South Vietnam. The measure did not expressly forbid bombing, however,
so Nixon continued the air strikes on Cambodia until 1973.
Three months after committing U.S. forces, Nixon ordered them to withdraw from
Cambodia. The combined effects of the bombing and the invasion, however, had
completely disrupted Cambodian life, driving millions of peasants from their
ancestral lands. The right-wing government then in power in Cambodia was supported by
the United States, and the government was blamed for allowing the bombing to occur.
Farmers who had never concerned themselves with politics now flooded to the Communist
opposition group, the Khmer Rouge. After a gruesome civil war, the Khmer Rouge took
power in 1975 and became one of the bloodiest regimes of the 20th century.
The United States began conducting secret bombing of Laos in
1964, targeting both the North Vietnamese forces along sections of the Ho Chi Minh
Trail and the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas, who controlled the northern part of
the country. Roughly 150,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Plain of Jars in
northern Laos between 1964 and 1969. By 1970 at least one-quarter of the entire
population of Laos were refugees, and about 750,000 Lao had been killed.
Prohibited by the Cooper-Church Amendment from deploying U.S. troops and anxious to
demonstrate the fighting prowess of the improved ARVN, Nixon took the advice of
General Creighton Abrams and attempted to cut vital Communist supply lines along the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. On February 8, 1971, 21,000 ARVN troops, supported by American
B-52 bombers, invaded Laos. Intended to disrupt any North Vietnamese and NLF plans
for offensives and to test the strength of the ARVN, this operation was as much a
failure as the Cambodian invasion. Abrams claimed 14,000 North Vietnamese casualties,
but over 9000 ARVN soldiers were killed or wounded, while the rest were routed and
expelled from Laos.
The success of Vietnamization seemed highly doubtful, since the Communist forces
showed that the new ARVN could be defeated. Instead of inhibiting the Communist
Pathet Lao, the U.S. attacks on Laos promoted their rise. In 1958 the Pathet Lao had
the support of one-third of the population; by 1973 a majority denied the legitimacy
of the U.S.-supported Royal Lao Government. By 1975 a Communist government was
established in Laos.
In the spring of 1972, with only 6000 U.S. combat troops remaining in South Vietnam,
the DRV leadership decided the time had come to crush the ARVN. On March 30 over
30,000 North Vietnamese troops crossed the Demilitarized Zone, along with another
150,000 PRG fighters, and attacked Quang Trí Province, easily scattering ARVN
defenders. The attack, known as the Easter Offensive, could not have come at a worse
time for Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. A military defeat
of the ARVN would leave the United States in a weak position at the Paris peace talks
and would compromise its strategic position globally.
Risking the success of the upcoming Moscow summit, Nixon unleashed the first
sustained bombing of North Vietnam since 1969 and moved quickly to mine the harbor of
Haiphong. Between April and October 1972 the United States conducted 41,000 sorties
over North Vietnam, especially targeting Quang Trí. North Vietnam's Easter Offensive
was crushed. At least 100,000 Communist troops were killed. The ailing Vo Nguyen Giap,
founder of North Vietnam's army, was forced into retirement and succeeded by Van Tien
Dung, who counseled the renewal of negotiations with the United States.
Further negotiations were held in Paris between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who
represented North Vietnam. Seeking an end to the war before the U.S. presidential
elections in November, Kissinger made remarkable concessions. The United States would
withdraw completely, while accepting the presence of 14 North Vietnamese divisions in
South Vietnam and recognizing the political legitimacy of the PRG. Hanoi would drop
its insistence on the resignation of Nguyen van Thieu, who had become president of
South Vietnam in 1967. Kissinger announced on October 27 that "peace was at
hand." Thieu, however, accused the United States of selling him out and Nixon
refused to sign the agreement.
After the 1972 elections, Kissinger attempted to revise the agreements he had already
made. North Vietnam refused to consider these revisions, and Kissinger threatened to
renew air assaults against North Vietnam unless the new conditions were met. Nixon
then unleashed at Christmas the final and most intense bombing of the war over Hanoi
and Haiphong.
While many U.S. officials were convinced that Hanoi was
bombed back to the negotiating table, the final treaty changed nothing significant
from what had already been agreed to by Kissinger and Tho in October. Nixon's
Christmas Bombing was intended to warn Hanoi that American air power remained a
threat, and he secretly promised Thieu that the United States would punish North
Vietnam should they violate the terms of the final settlement. Nixon's political
fortunes were about to decline, however. Although he had won reelection by a
landslide in November 1972, he was suffering from revelations about the Watergate
scandal. The president's campaign officials had orchestrated a burglary at the
Democratic National Committee headquarters, and Nixon had attempted to cover it up by
lying to the American people about his role.
The president made new enemies when the secret bombing of Cambodia was revealed at
last. Congress was threatening a bill of impeachment and in early January 1973
indicated it would cut off all funding for operations in Indochina once U.S. forces
had withdrawn. In mid-January Nixon halted all military actions against North
Vietnam.
On January 27, 1973, all four parties to the Vietnam conflict—the United States,
South Vietnam, the PRG, and North Vietnam—signed the Treaty of Paris. The final
terms provided for the release of all American prisoners of war from North Vietnam;
the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam; the end of all foreign military
operations in Laos and Cambodia; a cease-fire between North and South Vietnam; the
formation of a National Council of Reconciliation to help South Vietnam form a new
government; and continued U.S. military and economic aid to South Vietnam. In a
secret addition to the treaty Nixon also promised $3.25 billion in reparations for
the reconstruction of ravaged North Vietnam, an agreement that Congress ultimately
refused to uphold.
On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. Thieu
quickly showed that he had no desire to honor the terms of the Paris peace treaty,
which he had signed under duress. He issued an order to the ARVN: "If Communists
come into your village, shoot them in the head." Thieu immediately began
offensives against PRG villages, in open violation of the treaty. Thieu believed the
continued presence of North Vietnamese soldiers on South Vietnamese soil threatened
South Vietnam's existence.
North Vietnam and the PRG refrained from taking any action against the ARVN's
provocation, keeping carefully to the treaty terms (except for maintaining troops in
Laos and Cambodia). They insisted that both Saigon and the United States also abide
by the treaty. Not wishing to be caught unprepared by treaty violations, the
Communists concentrated on logistics and infrastructure by building roads to
accommodate the movement of troops.
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of U.S. personnel had resulted in a collapsing economy
throughout South Vietnam. Millions had depended on the money spent by Americans in
Vietnam. Thieu's government was ill-equipped to treat the mass unemployment and
deepening poverty that resulted from the U.S. withdrawal. The ARVN still received
$700 million from the U.S. Congress and was twice the size of the Communist forces,
but morale was collapsing. Over 200,000 ARVN soldiers deserted in 1974 in order to be
with their families.
Having no faith that the Paris treaty would be implemented, the North Vietnamese set
1975 as the year to mount their final offensive. They believed it would take at least
two years; the rapid collapse of the ARVN was therefore a surprise even to them.
After the initial attack by the North Vietnamese in the Central Highlands northeast
of Saigon on January 7, the ARVN immediately began to fall apart. On March 25 the
ancient imperial city of Hue fell; then on March 29, Ðà Nang, the former U.S.
Marine headquarters, was overtaken. On April 20 Thieu resigned, accusing the United
States of betrayal. His successor was Duong Van Minh, who had been among those who
overthrew Diem in 1963. On April 30 Minh issued his unconditional surrender to the
PRG. Almost 30 years after Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence, Vietnam was
finally unified.