Vietnam War

The Vietnam War a struggle between the Communist Party of Vietnam, on the one hand, and South Vietnam, the United States and, depending on when it is thought to have begun, France. It is usually spoken of in English-speaking circles began in 1954 or 1959 and ended in 1975. Nevertheless, the following article follows a common usage by historians, to cover a two-part conflict that began in 1945 and ended in 1975. From the perspective of the Vietnamese, the war was the military effort of the Communist Party of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh to defeat France (1946-54), and the same party, now in control of North Vietnam, to overthrow the government of South Vietnam (1958-75) and take control of the whole country, in the face of military intervention by the United States (1964-72).

Summary

Name

In terms of terminology, over 90% of civilian and military writers and analysts use "Vietnam War" but some use "First Indochina War" (for 1946-54, when the French played a major role) and "Second Indochina War" (for 1954-75, when the U.S. played a major role).

Expelling the French

The first stage, 1946-1954, or First Indochina War involved driving out the French colonial power. During that period, the Communist-dominated military wing of the anticolonialist force was called the Viet Minh, which had earlier fought the Japanese who had invaded in 1941. The U.S. became deeply involved from 1950, and soon was paying for 90% of the French effort.

In 1954 Vietnam was split into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (Communist North Vietnam}, and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) (South Vietnam, supported by the United States). The U.S. its first military advisers to train the South's army (ARVN) in 1955.

War between North and South began in the late 1950s when the Communists used supporters in the South, officially called the "National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam" or "National Liberation Front" (NLF) (the term "Viet Cong" was widely used but considered derogatory by the NLF) to destabilize and overthrow the government. For a time, the NLF did have noncommunist leadership, primarily as figureheads. The term VC, however, most precisely referred to the military wing of the NLF, a common practice in insurgencies, as with, the somewhat oversimplified example of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army

In South Vietnam, there was a gradual evolution from early military advice, trying to build a conventional military rather like that of South Korea, and then various kinds of counterinsurgency advice and assistance. In Vietnam proper, American advisors began accompanying RVN troops into battle in 1962-1963, most visibly at the Battle of Ap Bac in January 1963. U.S. began to bring in combat troops with a limited mission of protecting advisors. While there had been covert operations against North Vietnam well before, the first overt attack by U.S. air came in August 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. By 1965, U.S. combat aircraft were in the RVN, with battalion-strength units providing ground security. Larger units began operations in mid-1965.

The U.S. moved from financial aid and advice (before 1964), to large scale military involvement, beginning 1965, to save the government in the South in order to maintain the credibility of its Cold War policy of containment. After 1965, large scale antiwar protests inside the U.S. weakened the Democratic party of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The U.S. sent in over 500,000 troops (about a fifth in combat roles, the rest in support roles), in addition to many others at airbases in Thailand and elsewhere. Over 2.5 million Americans rotated through Vietnam, usually on a strict 365-day policy.

1968-75

Massive American firepower significantly weakened the NLF, which in the "Tet Offensive" February 1968 made an all-out effort to attack government offices throughtout the South. The NFL was beaten back everywhere, and virtually destroyed as an operating unit. From then on Hanoi used it own PAVN regular soldiers. The North was aided by China and the Soviet Union; the South was aided by the U.S., South Korea, Australia and other countries. Thailand and the Philippines provided major American air bases.

Tet had a devastating impact on U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had tried to keep the war quiet so it would not interfere with the Great Society domestic programs. Anti-war protests, led by university students, escalated in the U.S. and worldwide, reaching a climax in 1968. Republican Richard Nixon was elected president and in 1969 he began to "Vietnamize" the war by turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese military, and systematically withdrew American forces. Virtually all U.S. soldiers were gone by 1971, but the U.S. Air Force played a major role in 1972 in stopping a large-scale Communist invasion from North Vietnam, and in bombing campaigns against Hanoi. After years of negotiations in Paris, peace was signed in January 1973. All the American POW's were released, and all American forces removed from Vietnam, although large-scale shipment of military supplies continued.

In 1975 the North Vietnamese army invaded and conquered South Vietnam. The U.S. did not intervene, but did rescue many Vietnamese supporters. The conquest was a major defeat for the American Cold War policy of containment of Communist expansion, but under Nixon and his top adviser Henry Kissinger the U.S. had turned away from containment toward détente with China and the Soviet Union.

Estimates of total casualties, 1960-75, vary widely. Of the Americans, 31,000 died in combat (not counting accidents), of whom 66% were from the Army, 26% Marines, 4% Navy, and 4% Air Force. South Vietnam suffered at least 110,000 soldiers killed in action, plus at least 400,000 civilians. 4400 soldiers from South Korea were killed, along with 423 from Australia, 351 from Thailand, and 83 from New Zealand. Estimates of the deaths of Communist soldiers have run from 670,000 to 1.1 million.

After the defeat of the South in 1975 a million Vietnam refugees fled to the U.S. The war spilled over into Laos and Cambodia, which came under Communist control in 1975. Otherwise, the long-feared "domino effect" whereby other countries in the region would turn Communist, did not happen.

Nixon shifted American foreign policy away from containment to détente with China and the Soviet Union, and they in turn reduced their support for the North. Vietnam was united under Communist control but in 1979 China and Vietnam fought a border war. In the U.S., bitter, even violent debates inside the Democratic Party cost it the presidency. The war, deeply impressed upon the American psyche, became a defining moment for American politics, diplomacy, military policy and popular culture.

American perspective

Psychologically, the Vietnam War was almost as traumatic as the Civil War. It is still a painful memory and the subject of ill-tempered debates regarding victory and defeat, imperialism and Communism, good intentions and limited resources, deceit and patriotism. Misinformation abounds on the topic — many have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet Cong guerrilla force — something that definitely did not happen.

Several other factors were important in the formation of public opinion. This was the first war to have near-real-time battle footage televised to the American public. It was also a time of much general social change, from the civil rights movement to increased drug use to "free love" to the assassination of several charismatic leaders. A social revolution saw many people (especially blacks, students and feminists) in revolt against tight restrictive rules and roles that confined individuals into boxes of race, gender, age and class. Favorite targets of the revolt included all traditional sources of order, discipline and hierarchy, such as the police, the military, and the government itself. The social revolt of the 1960s was by no means limited to the US--parallel upheavals took place in Europe, Japan, and even China.

While the United States lost none of the battles, it lost the war as it had completely lost sight that winning wars is ultimately political. From 1964 to 1972 debate raged between "doves" (who wanted the US to cut its losses and get out) and "hawks" (who wanted to win, for some definition of "win"). From 1945 to 1964, people with expertise in the area, but with no special ornithological definition, argued about the proper role of the United States in the region. Speaking of wars in general,

Nothing is more divisive for a government than having to make peace at the price of major concessions. The proces of ending a war almost inevitably invokes an intense internal struggle if it means abandoning an ally or giving up popularly accepted objectives...the power structure of a government is not made of one piece — even in dictatorships. Political factions contend for influence, government agencies and military service maintain their own separate loyalties and pursue partisan objectives, and popular support keeps shifting. — Fred Charles Iklé, pp. 59-60

Many believe victory, although the criteria for "victory" were never clearly defined, was thrown away because, as General Hamilton H. Howze said when Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975, "America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and the press began their program of vilification." Howze's rhetoric says more about the military's role in society and its own battered self image than it does about Vietnam. Much of the intensity of the debate during the 1960s sprang not from what was happening in Asia, but what was happening on the home front.

A comment from one mid-level soldier, to become an apparently victorious commander in a later war, may be illustrative. A lieutenant colonel hospitalized for back surgery at the time, wrote (his emphasis)

I hated what Vietnam was doing to the United States and I hated what it was doing to the Army. It was a nightmare that the American public had withdrawn its support: our troops in World War I and World War II had never had to doubt for one minute that the people on the home front were fully behind them. We in the military hadn't chosen the enemy or written the orders — our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. — H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., , p. 181

COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a strategic analyst and author, observed that the protest movement was directed not at the civilian makers of policy, but at the uniformed executors of policy. Other soldiers, however, have described the U.S. involvement as essentially in support of U.S. domestic political agendas, starting from a reflexive, Eisenhower-Dulles militant anticommunism.

The Vietnam War inevitably became the target of opportunity. The history of the small war is unusually complicated because it lasted so long, involved so many twists and turns of policy and strategy. The turnover of Americans was unusually high (2.5 million were stationed there), so that the many veterans each have a different story to tell.

Origins

To appreciate the complexity it is necessary to start with French colonialism in the 19th century, or, quite possibly, to go to Vietnamese drives for independence in the 1st century, with the Trung Sisters' revolt against the Chinese; the citation here mentions the 1968th anniversary of their actions.

French Indochina Background

In the late 19th century the French expanded their global empire to southeast Asia, by acquiring control of Vietnam, and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos. The Chinese war lords who had been in charge were expelled, replaced by a French governor supported by rotating units of the French army and several thousand French civil servants. Few Frenchmen permanently settled in Indochina. Below the top layer of imperial control, the civil service comprised French-speaking Catholic Vietnamese; a nominal "Emperor" resided in Hue. Paris had hoped to make a profit from its empire, but instead the expenses of building roads, railroads, ports, utilities, schools and other infrastructure, not to mention the military and civil service salaries, far outpaced the modest profits from rice and rubber exports. Little industry developed and 80% of the population lived in villages of about 2000 population; they depended on rice growing. Most were nominally Buddhist; about 10% were Catholic. Minorities included the Chinese merchants who controlled most of the commerce, and Montagnard tribesmen in the thinly populated Central Highlands. Vietnam was a relatively peaceful colony; sporadic independence movements were quickly suppressed by the efficient French secret police.

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) and fellow students founded the Vietnamese Communist Party party in Paris in 1929, but it was of marginal importance until World War II. In 1940 and 1941 the Vichy regime yielded control of Vietnam to the Japanese, and Ho returned to lead an underground independence movement (which received a little assistance from the O.S.S., the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (in office 1933-45) detested French colonialism, but Harry S. Truman (in office 1945-53) was more interested in helping restore French prestige in Europe, so he helped them to return in 1946. In contrast with other Asian colonies like India, Burma, the Philippines and Korea, Vietnam was not given its independence after the war. As in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies), an indigenous rebellion demanded independence. While the Netherlands was too weak to resist the Indonesians, the French were strong enough to just barely hold on. As a result Ho and his Viet Minh launched a guerrilla campaign, using Communist China as a sanctuary when French pursuit became hot. When the Korean War erupted in 1950, and NSC-68 redefined American objectives, Washington saw Vietnam as another target of Communist expansion, and began to fund about three-fourths of the French military efforts. However, the goals of Washington and Paris were incompatible. Washington wanted a democratic Vietnam independent of both France and Communism, while Paris was more interested in restoring its old empire than in fighting Communism. In 1950 the U.S. officially recognized the theoretical independence of the "State of Vietnam," even though Paris kept control of its foreign and military policy.

Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords, 1954

To cut Viet Minh supply lines from China, the French built a fort at remote Dien Bien Phu. In 1954, 12,000 defenders were surrounded and battered by General Vo Nguyen Giap (1911- ), who were surprised by the enemy's artillery, supplied by China but carried by human porters over seemingly impassible terrain. Paris begged Washington for air strikes. The US Navy wanted to send its aircraft carriers into action but the US Army demurred, arguing it would be "a dangerous strategic diversion of limited U.S. military capabilities... [to] a non-decisive theatre." For the Army, containment meant holding back the Russian divisions in central Europe, not chasing guerrillas in Asian jungles. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953-61), the man who led the war against Germany in 1944-45 and who commanded NATO in 1950, agreed with the Army. With the Korean stalemate resolved only a few months earlier, he rejected the advice of hawkish aides (including Vice President Richard Nixon) and refused to fight another land war in Asia.

Dien Bien Phu surrendered, the French government collapsed, and a Socialist government with Communist support came to power in Paris, pledged to get out of Vietnam in 30 days. The American policy of bankrolling the French had failed. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, the French signed agreements with the Viet Minh that amounted to a surrender; the French did not consult the government in Saigon. Because of American pressure, however, Paris did not give Ho Chi Minh all he demanded (he demanded all of Vietnam). A permanent cease fire was promised, and the country was split along the 17th parallel, with the north turned over to Ho's Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The French promised to leave the southern half, which for the time being would continue as the independent State of Vietnam with the Emperor as head of state and a Catholic anti-communist as premier. The Geneva Accords called for "free general elections by secret ballot" in 1956 to unify the country. Washington and Saigon both rejected the Geneva Accords: they were both determined to build an independent, anti-Communist South Vietnam, but, in the militant anticommunism of the time, a democratic Vietnam was not a priority.

Some observers thought Ho was so popular for having driven the French out that he might have won a free election in the South in 1956. Antiwar critics years later said that the South Vietnam regime was inherently illegitimate because it did not abide by the election clause in the Accords. These critics said that since Ho Chi Minh “might” have won a hypothetical free election, therefore he represented true democracy.

What the critics missed was that these hypothetical free elections were quite impossible in 1954, or 1956 or any other time, because the Communists would never permit free campaigning against Communism, and the southern leader, Ngo Dinh Diem (1901-63) refused to hold free and honest elections in the Republic of Vietnam. Neither side holding power was interested in democratic reform.

Ho's DRV was totally controlled by Communist cadres which systematically tracked down and imprisoned or executed all its critics, village by village, street by street. In 1956 instead of holding an election in the North, Ho used his army to suppress peasants who protested "land reform"; thousands were shot.

Diem demonstrated no real understanding of democracy, and kept power with the Catholic minority. Increasingly bitter interactions with a Buddhist opposition led to a crisis in 1963, with iconic images of monks burning themselves alive in protest. Eventually, Diem was overthrown by a military coup, but, while there was a parliament, general democratic governement never emerged. Neither Diem nor DRV never intended to hold free elections in 1956, and never before or since has held any.

Promoting the Diem Regime, 1954-63

The United States rejected the Geneva Accords as a violation of the principles of self determination and containment. It worked to build up the new, independent nation of South Vietnam (SVN), by funding local and national economic and administrative infrastructures. In July 1954 Ngo Dinh Diem became premier in Saigon.

Diem and his powerful brothers were nationalists who were both anti-French, of an authoritarian Mandarin/Confucianist ethos and anticommunist. As leaders of the Catholic minority, they won considerable sympathy and support in the Catholic anticommunist circles in the US, notably from Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and the Kennedy family. As soon as the Communists came to power in the North, some 800,000 refugees (mostly Catholic) fled to South Vietnam. They provided most of the leadership and support for its government (GVN) and its army (ARVN), in part because the Diem government discriminated against mainstream Buddhists and various Vietnamese sects, such as the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. American financial aid and military advisors replaced the French, and SVN under Diem took its place among the world's newly independent nations.

The Eisenhower Administration, eager to formalize the containment system by treaty, in 1954 set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The US promised to aid SEATO signatories that were attacked by a Communist power. The French (still committed to the Geneva Accords) vetoed membership for SVN. To get around this French veto, Washington had inserted in the Treaty a vague protocol that seemed to give Saigon some sort of guarantee, even though it was not allowed to sign the Treaty or become part of SEATO. Furthermore, Eisenhower decided not to sign a mutual defense treaty with SVN in order to avoid over-commitment. Instead the US relied on the highly ambiguous SEATO Treaty, which was ratified by the Senate with little discussion of Vietnam. By default it became the chief legal base for US involvement in Vietnam, until the subsequent Congressional resolution granted to Lyndon Johnson in response to the claim that the North Vietnamese had attacked U.S. Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

In 1960, Eisenhower had 900 American advisors in SVN to bring its army up to what were perceived as basic standards, against the sort of conventional invasion launched by North Korea in 1950. That same year Hanoi's ruling Politburo established the "National Liberation Front" (NLF) as its political arm in the South, and the "Viet Cong" as the military arm. The rank and file were southerners, the leadership was northern. The Viet Cong tactics were based on guerrilla strikes that would assassinate local officials and village leaders favorable to Saigon, occasionally attack an isolated ARVN detachment, and when needed seize ("tax") village food stocks or kidnap ("draft") young men. The Communist goal was "liberation" of the South from capitalism and westernism. The NLF had a few shadow formations in the cities, where it did poorly; the leadership of the Johnson Administration was baffled why it did so well in the countryside.

Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara (in office 1961-68) told President John F. Kennedy (in office 1961-63) in 1961 it was "absurd to think that a nation of 20 million people can be subverted by 15-20 thousand active guerrillas if the government and the people of that country do not wish to be subverted." McNamara, a manufacturing executive and expert in statistical management, had no background in guerilla warfare, and rejected advice from area specialists and military officers, preferring to consult with his personal team, often called the "Whiz Kids". His key foreign policy advisor was a law professor, John McNaughton, while economist Alain Enthoven was perhaps his closest colleague.

Weaknesses of South Vietnam

Just as Diem's government (GVN) was factionalized and inefficient, its army, the ARVN, was a typical third world operation based on patronage, favoritism, and corruption. Commands and promotions went to political insiders, regardless of their competence or (more often) incompetence. Food, uniforms, munitions and information were sold for cash. Intrigue was the game, and the generals usually spent most of their time on politics rather than command. Few senior officers had any real military training. Draftees did not want to fight any more than their officers did. Although hardware was abundant and of good quality, training was mediocre, food and pay were unattractive, and morale was poor. Desertion rates were high (home was nearby); this hardly upset the officers because they kept the absent soldiers on the rolls and pocketed their paychecks.

Diem (and his successors) were primarily interested in using the ARVN as a device to secure power, rather than as a tool to unify the nation and defeat its enemies. Despite monumental American efforts from 1960 through 1972, the situation never decisively improved. Saigon would ultimately lose the war because its large and very well equipped army lacked spirit, motivation and patriotism.

Viet Cong guerrillas and regular North Vietnam Army

The North on the other hand, fine tuned its military forces into a powerful political instrument, as well as developing military capabilities appropriate to the particular time. In the Maoist doctrine of protracted war, somewhat ironically, the final "Phase III" offensive was by conventional forces, the sort that the U.S. had tried to build a defense against when the threat was from guerrillas. T-54 tanks that broke down the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon were not driven by ragged guerrillas.

In the Viet Cong, and in the North Vietnam regular army (PAVN), every unit down to the company level had a cadre of political officers who monitored ideological correctness on a daily basis. Insubordination was impossible. The Viet Cong had many unwilling draftees of its own; tens of thousands deserted to the government, which promised them protection. The Viet Cong executed deserters if it could, and threatened their families, all the while closely monitoring the ranks for any sign of defeatism or deviation from the party line. In December 1963, a decisive meeting of the Communist Party (VWF) Central Committee in Hanoi set basic policy. Le Duan (1907-86) was in full control. Overruling Giap (who wanted to build up the regular army), and Ho (who, like the Soviets, did not want to antagonize the U.S.), Le Duan and the new leadership decided that the government of South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse. They escalated NLF attacks, but did not send regular troops. At thes time the Soviet Union and China were bitterly contesting control of the Communist movement worldwide. Hanoi's decision marked a decisive break with the Soviets, who had recommended that instead of overthrowing the South and risking a major war with the U.S., it was better to concentrate on rapid development of the poverty-striken economy of North Vietnam.

From 1959 to the end of 1963, more than 40,000 PAVN troops, primarily soldiers born in South Vietnam who had gone north, were sent back to South Vietnam. Included were 2,000 senior and midlevel officers (field grade and above) and technical personnel. As of 1963, they constituted, half the full-time soldiers and 80% of the officers and technical cadres in command and leadership organizations of the Communist army in South Vietnam. To provide logistic support from 1961 through 1963, Group 559 (the Ho Chi Minh Trail command] transported to the South 165,600 weapons of all types, including artillery, mortars, and anti-aircraft machine guns. In addition in 1962-63, Sea Infiltration Group 759, using transport vessels camouflaged as fishing junks, delivered 25 shiploads totaling 1,430 tons of weapons and ammunition to covert docks and landing sites in the Mekong Delta and in the coastal provinces east of Saigon.

U.S. takes military control

The Johnson Administration always insisted that aggression was organized and directed by Hanoi; it rejected arguments by opponents of intervention in Vietnam that Hanoi was innocent, or intermediate positions that there were southern dissidents used by the North. U.S. opposition had no single cause, but one theme was that it was extremely unwise to become involved in a land war in Asia, with no critical U.S. interests at stake. Others, perhaps more naive, saw it as purely a civil war.

Kennedy's Containment Policy

The Kennedy Administration came to power in 1961 committed to containing Communist expansion (whether Russian, Chinese, Laotian, Cuban or Vietnamese), to demonstrating the will of America to be number one in the world, to upgrading the mission of the Army, to defeating Communist-led wars of liberation, and to helping South Vietnam survive. It was opposed to rollback because war with Moscow would be catastrophic. As a senator, Kennedy had empathized with the fate of his fellow Catholics in Vietnam. As President, however, he showed less empathy with the sufferings in Vietnam and more concern with containment of Moscow and Beijing. Kennedy was impatient with Eisenhower's cutbacks in the defense budget, his many legalistic treaties, and his threats of massive nuclear retaliation in case Russia took the initiative in going to war.

Kennedy lived in a constant swirl of activity and sought proactive foreign policy. Kennedy agreed with General Maxwell Taylor (1901-87), an outspoken critic of massive retaliation, that the Army could be used as a precision instrument of foreign policy. They both believed that a "flexible response" could win guerrilla wars (sometimes called "low intensity conflict"). The challenge to containment was not so much a full-scale Soviet invasion of western Europe, but a slice-by-slice subversion of small countries. Kennedy (and other liberals) believed poverty caused people to accept Communism. The antidote was American money, technology and advice to promote economic modernization and nation-building, coupled with military protection during the vital early stages.

Trumpeting the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as a personal triumph, and armed with a new military doctrine that seemed well-tailored to the situation, Kennedy moved confidently into Southeast Asia, continuing Eisenhower Administration activities in Laos. Dean Rusk (in office 1961-69), the Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, meanwhile was reliving the Korean war (when he had been in charge of the East Asian desk); he repeatedly warned of the specter of Red China conquering the rest of Asia. Rusk considered Hanoi to be Peking's puppet, despite the long-standing animosity between the Vietnamese and the Chinese. He paid little attention to the "Cultural Revolution" which from 1966 to 1971 ripped China apart and paralyzed its military capability. Although China eventually sent 50,000 air defense soldiers to help protect Hanoi, it lacked the military capability and the unified leadership necessary to counter an American invasion of North Vietnam.

The U.S. made no serious plans to invade the North, with a total lack of political support for that idea.Indeed, the Johnson Administration would not follow the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommendations for an intensive air campaign against 93 Northern targets. Following the attempted prisoner rescue at Son Tay on November 21, 1970, North Vietnam did massively increase internal security. While U.S. special operations personnel argued for raids after Son Tay, none were attempted; earlier attempts to infiltrate guerillas had failed in that police state.

Fear of China

Rusk worried that a Communist victory in Vietnam would cause neighboring countries to fall like dominoes to pro-Chinese Communists. The threat was greatest in Indonesia, an island nation with a large population, significant oil wealth, and an active Communist movement. Rusk was concerned about what was called the "falling domino" effect; he thought the fall of neighboring states would be rapid, but others looked for great damage in slow motion, as in a a 1964 CIA estimate:

We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of other states of Southeast Asia. Instead of a shock wave passing from one to the next, there would be a simultaneous, direct effect on all Far Eastern countries. With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation of the area would quickly succumb to communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam. Further, a spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread that would happen would take time — time in which the situation might change in any of a number of ways unfavorable to the Communist cause....The loss of South Vietnam and Laos to the Communists would be profoundly damaging to the US position in the Far East, most especially because the US has committed itself persistently, emphatically, and publicly to preventing Communist takeover of the two countries.

In 1965, however, the anti-communist army seized power and totally destroyed the Communist movement in Indonesia with wholesale arrests and executions. This was a surprise to the U.S., which was giving covert aid to some anti-communist factions, but the Army action followed Communist killing of several generals.

The "falling domino" threat was greatest in Laos, where a low-intensity civil war gave the Communist Pathet Lao control of much of that remote land. Hanoi made systematic use of Laotian and Cambodian jungle trails as supply routes to the Viet Cong--the "Ho Chi Minh Trail." Cambodia's leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk repeatedly denied the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and denounced pursuit of Viet Cong across his border. In fact, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese created an elaborate infrastructure in his supposedly neutral country.

B-52 bombing in Vietnam

In 1969, Nixon ordered B-52 strikes against PAVN supply routes in Cambodia. While the U.S. bombing of Cambodia is sometimes called "secret", it might be observed that each B-52 normally dropped 42,000 pounds of bombs, typically flying in groups of 3 or 6. Surviving personnel in the target area were apt to know they had been bombed, and, since the U.S. had the only aircraft capable of that volume, would know the U.S. had done it. The "secrecy" may have been meant to be face-saving for Sihanouk, but there is substantial reason to believe that the secrecy, in U.S. military channels, was to keep knowledge of the bombing from the U.S. Congress and public. Actually, a reasonable case could be made that the bombing fell under the "hot pursuit" doctrine of international law, where if a neutral (Sihanouk) could not stop one country from attacking another from the neutral sanctuary, the attacked country(ies) had every right to counterattack.

When he ordered a joint US-Vietnamese ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970, many of these events first became known in the U.S., and there were intense protests, including deaths in a confrontation between rock-throwing protesters and poorly-trained National Guardsmen at Kent State University.

Escalation by Viet Cong

In the early 1960s the Viet Cong escalated its attacks; the Diem regime lost ground every month. In 1961 the Viet Cong had 25,000 regular soldiers and 17,000 underground operatives. The NLF controlled villages containing about a fifth of the rural population of ten million (six million people lived in SVN's cities and towns, where the NLF remained weak.) American observers reported that the Saigon regime lacked legitimacy in the villages. The GVN never generated spontaneous support or a sense of patriotism because it was too much like the French system: too autocratic, too urban, Catholic, aloof, corrupt, arrogant, inefficient, self-indulgent and predatory. The challenge was not to restore legitimacy but get it in the first place.

By contrast, peasants at first found the NLF appeared to be honest, caring and basically like themselves. It had considerable support--it especially appealed to idealistic youth, and in any case was always feared by the villagers who knew the assassination squads would eliminate any dissent. From 1957 through 1972, the Viet Cong Security Service carried out 37,000 assassinations of government officials, religious and civic leaders, teachers, informers, landowners, and moneylenders. The only effective government response was to hunt the guerrillas down, or target their leaders, but that was too dangerous for the dispirited ARVN. Instead Diem's defensive strategy was the "strategic hamlet" program. Millions of villagers were relocated into new hamlets that the ARVN and local militia forces could defend. The villagers resented the dislocation and the central government's replacement of local leaders.

In January 1963, an apparently overwhelming ARVN force, with armored vehicles, artillery and air support, and U.S. advisors including John Paul Vann went confidently against an inferior force at the Battle of Ap Bac, and were routed. . This has been considered the triggered for an increasingly skeptical, although small, American press corps in Vietnam.

By October, 1963, Kennedy had sent 16,000 advisors who were working feverishly to shape up the ARVN; 100 had already been killed. The U.S. Air Force began training pilots; the Army sent in helicopter transports. The choppers terrorized the Viet Cong, until they figured out how to ambush them when they landed. After 9,000 combat sorties, 21 airplanes and 13 helicopters had been shot down. Viet Cong influence had been pushed back, but the NLF still controlled a tenth of the rural villages.

Weak Diem regime

The biggest problem was the Diem regime itself-- militarily ineffective and politically unpopular. It tried to suppress the non-Communist opposition by large-scale arrests. Its downfall came when it bungled the demands of organized Buddhist monks for a larger voice in political affairs. The multiple interest groups and centers of power in the nation had become alienated from Diem, and gave him no support as he raided the pagodas and arrested demonstrators. Furthermore, he increasingly rejected American demands for political and economic reforms. Washington sadly concluded that Diem had outlived his usefulness, so it stood silent during a military coup on November 1, 1963, that assassinated Diem and installed the first of a long series of unstable governments. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later, and Lyndon Johnson (in office 1963-69) took charge. Diem's death led to chaos; the strategic hamlet program collapsed, and the Viet Cong recouped their losses and pressed forward across the countryside. ARVN battalions one after another crumbled under intense local attacks. The CIA gave GVN only an "even chance" of surviving.

Lyndon Johnson's War, 1963-65

Johnson would have to do something unless he wanted to be known as the Democrat who "lost Vietnam." As a believer in the "domino theory," he worried that other countries in Southeast would fall to Communism if the line was not held. The only alternative to containment, he believed, was rollback as advocated by Barry Goldwater. "Why Not Victory?" Goldwater asked; because it means nuclear war, Johnson retorted, as he used the rollback issue to overwhelm Goldwater in the 1964 election. (Whereupon the Air Force revised its manual of air doctrine, to state that "total victory in some situations would be an unreasonable goal."

Domestic politics

Equally important to Johnson than what happened in Asia was what was happening at home, especially in the minds of the voters. Vietnam was a "political war" only in the sense of U.S. domestic politics, not a political settlement for the Vietnamese.

The President always put domestic politics first, especially his far-reaching reform progran called the Great Society. Having been a Democratic Senate leader in the early 1950s who had to defend against Republican charges that the Democrats had "lost" China and failed in Korea, Johnson was determined that a similar political disaster had to be avoided at all costs.

"I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he vowed.

He tried several different strategies, but running through them all was a policy of controlling popular perceptions. In plain words, deception.

The American people were never to become alarmed at the magnitude of the problem; White House policy was to keep reassuring the nation that everything was going fine in Vietnam, and that LBJ could be trusted to handle the situation in his own way. This was the only war in American history in which Washington did not try to rouse patriotic fervor behind the cause; indeed, Johnson tried to subdue any spontaneous outpourings of patriotism. The reason was that a surge of patriotism would lead to demands for victory and rollback--Goldwaterism--and risk nuclear destruction from Russian missiles. Even if the nation escaped nuclear war, a frenzy of pro-war patriotism would doom funding for Johnson's domestic programs, his "The Great Society". The Johnson solution was to keep the war quiet.

On the other hand, allowing the Communists to take over a U.S. client was unacceptable to Johnson; as shown in the McNaughton Memo, the key position was avoiding a decisive blow to Johnson's deep commitment to containment. "The central lesson of our time," Johnson told a John Hopkins audience in April 1965, "is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next." He continued, We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" Privately he felt that if he lost Vietnam to the communists, everything he wanted to work for at home--civil rights, the War on Poverty, and his Great Society--would also be lost.

"I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression," he explained years later, and "there would follow in this country an endless national debate--a mean and destructive debate--that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."

Johnson's plan to settle war

Johnson did have a plan for settling the conflict, one that conformed to containment policy, and to New Deal liberalism. Johnson believed that all disputes arose out of mutual misunderstandings, and could be resolved through negotiation. His strategy was to offer Hanoi billions of dollars in foreign aid if they would play along, or else bomb them into negotiations, from which a permanent peace would result that allowed South Vietnam to continue as an independent nation. Johnson did not reject the possibility that the Communists could become part of some sort of coalition government. Neither side in Vietnam thought a coalition government of Communists and anti-Communists was viable.

The military, which saw its mission in terms of winning wars, not facilitators for negotiations, never agreed with Johnson, or, perhaps more to the point, with McNamara. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s the generals repeatedly warned that Vietnam was probably a losing cause and they advised against intervention. The President responded by picking new generals who would play along, and by closely monitored them to make sure that he would never encounter another MacArthur-type insubordinate commander.

The result was yes-men who deferred to the White House and to the all-powerful Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara; no matter how wrong the brass thought Johnson was, they would never resign in protest. Perhaps the most telling document of the lack of strategic vision of McNamara and his staff was a 1965 memorandum from McNaughton, attempting to define goals. McNaughton defined the U.S. aims as:

• "70%--To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
• 20%--To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
• 10%--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. Also-To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. Not--To "help a friend," although it would be hard to stay if asked out."

Note that generic anticommunism was not an objective, and the welfare of South Vietnam was low on the list. McNaughton's emphasis on Chinese domination ignored a history of Vietnamese enmity to the Chinese, going back to the revolt of the Two Trung Sisters in the first century A.D. North Vietnam was Stalinist, not Maoist, and far more a Soviet than Chinese client.

Congress

With the Pentagon under control, Johnson kept Congress out of the policy making process, and Congress did not assert its authority over the making of war. He ignored antiwar "doves" like Senator William Fulbright, the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. More of a political threat were "hawks" like GOP Senator Barry Goldwater, articulate spokesman for the nascent conservative movement, and Democratic Senator John Stennis, the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee. Johnson feared that if Congress had a voice it would push for a more aggressive, expensive war that would sabotage his high- spending low-tax "Great Society" domestic program. War taxes would be politically disastrous in the next election. Even worse, Congress might reject his forced-negotiations strategy and insist upon a roll-back strategy aiming at the defeat and conquest of North Vietnam. The surest lesson Johnson and the liberals had learned in Korea was that MacArthur's roll-back strategy had led to Chinese intervention and humiliation. Under no circumstances would they accept a roll-back policy.

Containment had to work. Johnson therefore refused to pull out. The South Vietnamese clearly were unable to save themselves with just American advice; Johnson made the fateful decision to rescue them with US combat troops. He planned to first rescue GVN (Government of South Vietnam) from imminent collapse by guerrilla attacks, then negotiate a settlement with Hanoi that would allow it to survive. He vetoed two other options: US command and control of the ARVN (unwise because GVN would never learn to defend itself) and invasion of North Vietnam to strike the threat at its source. In mid-1964, LBJ assembled a new team. Looking for a yes-man, he passed over 43 more senior generals to promote Harold Johnson (1912-83) to Chief of Staff of the Army. Maxwell Taylor left the chairmanship of the JCS to became ambassador, with authority over all diplomatic, CIA and military operations in Vietnam. General Earle Wheeler (1908-75) replaced Taylor at JCS; his mission was to keep the senior commanders loyal to the White House.

General William Westmoreland (1914-2005) became head of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), with authority over US Army and Marine ground operations, and some naval and tactical air operations. He was one of the few senior officers since 1940 not to have attended the military's internal school system, especially the command and general staff college and the various war colleges. However he had studied at Harvard Business School, and his freedom from standard doctrine and his interest in quantification attracted him to McNamara.

Admiral Ulysses Sharp (1906-2001) at Pearl Harbor, became head of all US forces in the Pacific. He had charge of the naval blockade that kept Hanoi from running supplies by sea, and most importantly, of strategic bombing operations over North Vietnam (which were launched from Sharp's four aircraft carriers or from Air Force B-52 bases in Thailand and Guam). Nominally Westmoreland reported to Taylor, Sharp, Harold Johnson and Wheeler; in practice he dealt directly with McNamara or LBJ. Westmoreland could always be counted upon for a public statement exuding optimism; he reassured LBJ that the war would be won in time for the 1968 elections. The intricate division of responsibility was set up so that there would be no powerful theater commander like MacArthur; it also guaranteed a steady flow of disputes that could only be resolved by McNamara or the president. The military thus never had control of the war it was called upon to fight, or of the tactics to use.

Gulf of Tonkin incident: 1964

In early August 1964 Johnson seized on an ambiguous incident in which North Vietnamese PT boats reportedly fired on a US destroyer; this became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The public message was that the destroyer was on general patrol.

Less well known, however, were that simultaneous covert attacks on the North Vietnamese coast, coordinated by MACV-SOG operating under Operations Plan (OPPLAN) 34A, and the North Vietnamese were on high alert. The destroyer was actually collecting signals intelligence under a program called the DESOTO patrol, and tecently declassified National Security Agency signals intelligence reports indicate that the U.S. commanders knew that the North Vietnamese were uncertain if the destroyers were part of the same attacks as 34A. There has never been clear-cut sonar or SIGINT information that the North Vietnamese initiated an attack on the destroyer patrol, although one of the destroyers may have fired warning shots.

Although there was no immediate and continuing threat to U.S. forces, Johnson ordered retaliatory airstrikes on the North. His television address to the U.S. public, explaining he had ordered it under his authority as commander-in-chief, was delivered while the strikes were still inbound and the North Vietnamese air defenses not yet alerted. According to McMaster, Johnson insisted on an early announcement so that he would be sure to make the late evening news, as well as the deadline for morning newspapers.

However, the North Vietnamese had indeed sunk an American ship in May, and had begun to kill American advisors; they were clearly testing Washington. He immediately rammed the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" through Congress, saying it would deter Hanoi. The Resolution was itself vague, endorsing the Commander-in-Chief's right to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack...and to prevent further aggression." Not only did the Resolution give Johnson a boost during his heated 1964 reelection campaign, it also provided just enough legality for him to avoid going back to Congress. In the election Johnson battled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, warning vehemently that Goldwater's "Why Not Victory" rollback strategy would produce a nuclear war with the Soviets. Surprisingly little discussion of Vietnam took place. Virtually all the information and advice that reached Johnson and McNamara in 1963-65 was deeply pessimistic: the consensus was that the South Vietnam government was too corrupt, and its army was too inefficient, to withstand the Communists. The only chance for containment--a slim one--was to have American soldiers take command of the war and defeat the Viet Cong forces on the ground, while hurting North Vietnam just enough to convince them to negotiate.

Escalation 1965

Immediately after his triumphant landslide, Johnson made his move. The NLF was on the verge of announcing a provisional government in the northernmost six provinces; three elite regiments from the North Vietnamese Main Force moved into South Vietnam. Hanoi thought it could win quickly and that America was a paper tiger. It was a tragic miscalculation that would bring endless misery to the Vietnamese. Johnson sent in the first American combat troops in March, 1965, to protect the air bases. Rejecting the Air Force's strategy of strategic bombing against 94 critical targets in the North, Johnson and McNamara instead launched an alternative air power strategy called "Rolling Thunder." It entailed retaliatory bombing anytime Communists struck at American forces, together with a gradual buildup of 22 bombing attacks against small military targets in the North. There was to be no bombing of cities or villages, and no attacks on the ships bringing Russian and Chinese arms to the port of Haiphong. To reverse the downhill slide in the villages, Westmoreland called for 24 more maneuver battalions (of approximately 800-1000 men each) added to the 20 he had, plus more artillery, aviation (helicopters), and support units; McNamara rounded the total to 175,000 troops, with 27 more maneuver battalions to come in 1966. Westmoreland's "ultimate aim" was:

"To pacify the Republic of [South] Vietnam by destroying the VC—his forces, organization, terrorists, agents, and propagandists—while at the same time reestablishing the government apparatus, strengthening GVN military forces, rebuilding the administrative machinery, and re-instituting the services of the Government. During this process security must be provided to all of the people on a progressive basis."

Westmoreland complained that, "we are not engaging the VC with sufficient frequency or effectiveness to win the war in Vietnam." He said that American troops had shown themselves to be superb soldiers, adept at carrying out attacks against base areas and mounting sustained operations in populated areas. Yet, the operational initiative— decisions to engage and disengage—continued to be with the enemy. He told American commanders to use better intelligence to find better ways to take the fight to the enemy. Only by doing so could U.S. forces make the best use of America's twin advantages of firepower and mobility. Westmoreland's strategy was to hunt down and attack enemy infantry formations.

Simple search and destroy approach that consisted of attacking and blocking forces would not work in Vietnam's jungles because the VC had the uncanny the ability to "slip out from between the hammer and the anvil" in these operations. Thus, the Americans needed to cover all likely escape routes. He rejected the Marine Corps alternative program of building up a close rapport with the peasant and defending their villages. McNamara realized that Westmoreland's search and destroy plan would be costly, with perhaps 500 Americans killed every month. Washington having explicitly rejected rollback and victory had a goal of containment that would allow South Vietnam to continue to exist as a non-Communist state.

Antiwar movement

While Washington tried to keep the war quiet, radical college students in the US launched a noisy antiwar protest movement with teach-ins and rallies. Their efforts were counterproductive, because they forced millions of Americans who might have had doubts about the war to support the Administration for patriotic reasons.

The antiwar credo focused on the illegality and immorality of American action, and praised the heroic peasants fighting western imperialism. Much was made of napalm and forced resettlement, to create a sense of American guilt rather than reflect empathy with the Vietnamese. After the war, protesters maintained the guilt theme, but forgot about the Vietnamese. Senator Fulbright, the most prominent dove, lacked empathy with the Vietnamese. As a believer in white supremacy, he believed white Americans should not die to save an inferior colored race. The most prominent military "dove" was retired Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup. He argued in 1967 that Americans should ignore the issue of freedom in Asia because, "I don't think the whole of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life and limb of a single American." The Vietnamese, he added, "have no idea of our meaning of freedom." Until Tet in early 1968, the clear majority of Americans (including students) took a "hawkish" stance on the war.

By the end of 1965 there were 184,000 Americans inside Vietnam, plus 22,400 Allies (from Korea, Australia and New Zealand). Having quietly become so deeply involved, meant the US could no longer easily back out; the war had become a quagmire. On the other hand it had to be kept low key lest it interfere with Johnson's domestic goals, and the geostrategic goals became increasingly vague.

Rolling Thunder: The Failure of Strategic Bombing

Johnson had to prove that containment was a viable project, and that American power could deter an invasion and protect a friend without the necessity of widening the war and invading the enemy. The operation had to be an object lesson to Moscow and Peking to not try anything like this anywhere else in the world ever again. The Joint Chiefs who wanted to win quickly and get out were echoing a roll-back strategy that Johnson was committed to refute. Roll-back meant Douglas MacArthur, Barry Goldwater, John Stennis, and defeat for LBJ and his Great Society--and it could well mean nuclear missiles raining down on American cities. At all costs Johnson felt compelled to make his policy work.

Johnson and McNamara adopted a three-tier strategy to save SVN. First they sent in Army and Marine infantry to protect US bases and repel enemy ground attacks. Second, they used air power to blast away at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Third they began Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam. The latter had a triple purpose: to boost Saigon's morale, weaken Hanoi's war- making capabilities, and force them to the bargaining table. Bombing seemed a cheap solution: the Air Force and Navy had plenty of air power to spare, and the raids would cause few American casualties. The targets were primarily transportation lines, bridges, railway yards, storage dumps, and oil tanks; civilian areas were to be avoided. The raids were closely controlled by the White House, which saw them as "signals" in a negotiating process with Hanoi. Raids were calibrated so that each month they became more punitive. The theory was that sooner or later Hanoi's pain threshold would be crossed and they would agree to negotiate a plan that would allow SVN to survive.

In line with a "signaling" model proposed by Harvard strategist Thomas Schelling, LBJ refused to allow the most valuable installations, those around Hanoi and Haiphong, to be attacked. The idea was that damage future was more harrowing than damage present. In practice, the slow escalation gave Hanoi time to camouflage and decentralize its installations, and thus minimize the damage.

Historians (on all sides) are quite unanimous that Rolling Thunder was a total failure. North Vietnam was a very poor agricultural country with few likely targets in the first place. Unlike Germany and Japan in World War Two, it did not manufacture its own munitions, but imported them from China and Russia. LBJ vetoed plans to mine Haiphong harbor and cut the railroad lines at the Chinese border. Johnson, who had been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1950, vividly remembered the Chinese intervention in Korea that year, and refused to permit any military action that might somehow trigger another intervention. In striking contrast to the attacks on Berlin, Tokyo and a hundred other World War Two targets, the vast majority of bombs landed on empty jungle.

Vietnamese jungle caused much military difficulty. In the 1964 election, Barry Goldwater never recovered from speculation about possibility of using low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate infiltration routes in Vietnam, he never actually advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese. Nevertheless, the Democrats easily painted Goldwater as a warmonger who would drop atomic bombs on Hanoi.

Under Operation RANCH HAND, the U.S. military sprayed large areas with a defoliant called Agent Orange. While Agent Orange itself was considered nontoxic to humans, and was primarily composed of herbicides known as 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T), many batches had an exceptionally toxic byproduct of the manufacturing process, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (which can also be abbreviated as 2,3,7,8-TCDD), caused significant contamination, and long-term health consequences, including defects, on both Vietnamese and Americans. This was also used by Canadian Forcss in Canada, who documented the later-understood health effects.

As in the schoolboy joke about making your head feel good by stopping the hammer blows, Johnson from time to time experimented with bombing pauses that would make Hanoi eager to come to terms. They never did. It cost the US a billion dollars a year to destroy $100 million in PAVN supplies--but Washington had the tens of billions and Hanoi did not have the tens of millions. It did have friends, however, and Moscow and Peking doubled their shipments of munitions. Moscow sent in sophisticated air defense systems; 922 planes went down. Rolling Thunder dropped 640,000 tons of bombs, but pilots protested angrily that political restrictions radically reduced their effectiveness. As one Navy flier growled in his diary:

We fly a limited aircraft, drop limited ordnance, on rare targets in a severely limited amount of time. Worst of all we do this in a limited and highly unpopular war....What I've got is personal pride pushing against a tangled web of frustration.

Rolling Thunder did reduce the southward flow of arms somewhat, and definitely forced Hanoi to divert more and more of its resources to logistics, air defense and rebuilding. More than half of the North's electric power, oil storage, bridges and railroad yards had to be rebuilt. Supplies were hidden in small caches or buried underground, which further attenuated Hanoi's logistics capability. The raids made it quite impossible for PAVN to send large units or tanks into the south. The suffering of its people held a lower priority for the Politburo than its quest for victory, so it simply ignored the "signals" that Rolling Thunder was supposed to be sending. An unexpected denouement for McNamara and other civilians who had placed blind trust in the invincibility of air power was a growing sense of frustration and defeatism. McNamara himself concluded the bombing was a failure, and that therefore the whole war was doomed. The President, however, more empathy with the South Vietnamese than his advisors (perhaps because he was highly sensitive to the plight of nonwhites.) He pushed on.

Westmoreland's Attrition Strategy

Westmoreland in 1965 got 175,000 of the best soldiers in the world. MACV was delighted that the skills and esprit of the American troops were outstanding. The most ambitious young officers and the most experienced NCOs volunteered at once. Despite some shortages, the US Army had never been in nearly as good shape at the start of a war. The basic infantry unit was the rifle platoon of 41 men commanded by a lieutenant. It was subdivided into three rifle squads (commanded by sergeants), and a weapons squad carrying two excellent M60 light machine guns. The company, commanded by captain, had three rifle platoons and a mortar platoon that provided on-the-spot light artillery. The infantry maneuver battalion, about 1,000 men strong and commanded by a lieutenant colonel, had five companies. At peak Westmoreland had 100 infantry battalions, the main maneuver and fighting unit of the war. Routinely it received 500 hours a month of helicopter support from corps' command. Above the battalion were brigades and divisions; in this war they handled paperwork, letting the battalions do the fighting. Overall, 20% of the soldiers were in "teeth" (combat) roles; the rest were "tail," assigned to advisory missions, logistics, maintenance, construction, medicine and administration.

Westmoreland's first challenge was figuring out a strategy to defeat the Viet Cong.

• Phase I: stabilize the situation (by the end of 1965)
• Phase II: (scheduled for 1966-67) would push the enemy back in key areas
• Phase III: total victory (1968).

Marine plan

The Marines, with responsibility for "I Corps," the northern third of the country, had a plan for Phase I. It reflected their historic experience in pacification programs in Haiti and Nicaragua early in the century. Noting that 80% of the population lived in 10% of the land, they proposed to separate the Viet Cong from the populace. It was a major challenge, since the NLF controlled the great majority of villages in I Corps. Working outward from Da Nang and two other enclaves, 25,000 Marines of the III Marine Amphibious Force systematically eliminated Viet Cong soldiers and guerrilla forces, and sought to weed out NLF cadres from the villages. The main device was the Combined Action Platoon, with a 15-man rifle squad and 34 local militia. It would "capture and hold" hamlets and villages. The Marines put heavy stress on honesty in local government, land reform (giving more to the peasants) and MEDCAP patrols that offered immediate medical assistance to villagers. The official slogan about "winning hearts and minds" gave way to the more informal "Get the people by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow." Ambassador Taylor welcomed the Marine strategy as the best solution for a basically political problem; it would also minimize American casualties.

Westmoreland distrusted the Marine village-oriented policy as too defensive for Phase II--only offense can win a war, he insisted. Indeed, the tensions were high between the Army (which was in charge) and the Marines. Soldiers complained that the Marines were poorly trained, allowed too much authority to their NCOs, learned too little too late, and were too enamored of beach landings and frontal assaults. The Army was also jealous that the Marines had their own fixed-wing fighters that were under the control of ground commanders, giving them twice as much close air support as the Army got from the Air Force.

In 1968, Westmoreland sent his deputy Creighton Abrams to take command of I Corps, and gave his Air Force commander control of Marine aviation. The Marines protested vehemently but were rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Westmoreland vs. Taylor

Taylor's strategy was to use superior American mobility and firepower to locate, attack and destroy the Viet Cong main forces. Once they were destroyed, he reasoned, the villages would be easy to pacify. Westmoreland proposed instead a "search and destroy" strategy that would win the war by attrition. The idea was to track down and fight the larger Viet Cong units, hoping to grind them down faster than they could be replaced. The measure of success in a war of attrition was not battles won or territory held or villages pacified, it was the body count of dead enemy soldiers. (The body counts were wild guesses, since the enemy made a special effort to remove bodies, but MACV's analysts and McNamara's computers gobbled them up regardless.) A number of field commanders and CIA analysts found that a much better predictor was the number of weapons recovered from a battlefield.

Westmoreland promised his three phase strategy could get the job done--whereas the defensive enclaves would prolong the conflict indefinitely into the future. Johnson could not wait forever, so he bought Westmoreland's plan and removed Taylor. The Marines stayed, but the Army never trusted them. The complaint was that the Marines were poorly trained, allowed too much authority to their NCOs, learned too little too late, and were too enamored of beach landings and frontal assaults. The Army was also jealous that the Marines had their own fixed-wing fighters that were under the control of ground commanders, giving them twice as much close air support as the Army got from the Air Force. In 1968, Westmoreland sent his deputy Creighton Abrams to take command of I Corps, and gave his Air Force commander control of Marine aviation. The Marines protested vehemently but were rebuffed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Johnson had quietly committed the United States to a major venture. Containment was the original goal, but with the commitment itself came another goal--the nation's honor and credibility now had to be preserved.

Hanoi was stunned by Westmoreland's highly effective strategy. Once so close to easy victory, now it had to fall back and rethink strategy and tactics. General Vo Nguyen Giap, head of the PAVN since 1946, rushed fresh 500-man battalions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail before the full force of the US mobilization could take effect. The flow rose from 3,000 a month in 1965 to 8,000 a month throughout 1966 and 1967, and then 10,000 in 1968. By November 1965 the enemy had 110 battalions in the field, with 64,000 combat troops, 17,000 in combat support, and 54,000 part- time militia. It was too little too late.

First Divisional-strength Battle: Ia Drang, 1965

See also: [[:Battle of the Ia Drang|Battle of the Ia Drang]]

At Ia Drang (river Drang) in late 1965 the first major confrontation shaped up between Giap and Westmoreland. Giap wanted to continue his successful guerrilla war, but was overruled by the Politburo; they demanded victory in a hurry. The new plan was for Giap to use his conventional divisions to slice across the neck of SVN, cutting the country in two. Armed with only light weapons (especially the Chinese-made Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, mortars, hand grenades, and mines), and travelling on foot, the regular PAVN units had no hope of matching the Americans in firepower or mobility. Instead they substituted stealth.

The Americans arrived in big noisy helicopters that could be spotted (and counted) miles away. It should be noted that this was realized by Harold Moore, promoted to brigade command after leading a battalion in the Ia Drang. In the larger Battle of Bong Son approximately a month later, Moore used obvious helicopters to cause the PAVN to retreat onto very reasonable paths to break away from the Americans -- but different Americans had silently set ambushes, earlier, across those escape routes.

Giap's well-camouflaged soldiers snuck in silently, carrying their meager supplies, hiding from reconnaissance aircraft during the day. They contested the helicopter landing zones, but never tried to hold ground; pitched battles were avoided, unless they could not break contact. In that case, it is true they did not try to hold ground, but they did try to kill as many Americans as possible, with seemingly little concern about their own losses.

As is classic for guerilla warfare, the PAVN, because whenever the Americans were hit they regrouped and called in heavy firepower; they did not pursue.

The PAVN preferred hit-and-run ambushes, or what they called "catch and grab." When their retreat was blocked, their next tactic was called "hugging the belt" the Americans would not dare calling in artillery and gunships because of the risk of friendly fire casualties. The surprise attack would give a short window of opportunity before superior American mobility could be brought to bear. The disadvantages Giap faced should not be underestimated. His tactics risked very high casualties, and necessitated intense political indoctrination and control of troops, and very light supply needs.

Hanoi had to accept far more casualties than Washington. North Vietnam was a very poor country that got poorer during the 1960s; all it could produce was manpower. Its weapons had to be captured or imported from Russia and China. Its transportation system was so bad that a large fraction of its military effort had to be devoted to getting a few rounds of ammunition or a few small caliber weapons to the front.

Westmoreland had a surprise for Giap: he rushed the new 1st Cavalry Division into battle, where it showed off its new airmobile tactics under fire. American intelligence was good this time: the 1st Cavalry quickly discovered two elite PAVN regiments. PAVN launched a series of violent attacks against the Americans, who clustered around their landing zones. In a war without fixed lines the choppers multiplied the strength of American infantry and provided a new magnitude of mobility that frustrated Giap's tactics. Only four choppers were shot down. Heavy doses of tactical air power, including area. then radar-controlled saturation bombing from B-52s, overwhelmed the PAVN. The invasion was stopped; the survivors fled back into their Cambodian sanctuaries. "By God, they sent us over here to kill Communists and that's what we're doing!" exulted one battalion commander. Giap excused his failure by saying he only wanted to discover the American's tactics; he convinced the Politburo that it was necessary to return to low-level guerrilla tactics (force the Yankees to "eat rice with chopsticks") because he could not beat the Americans in battle. Other Army and Marine divisions copied the airborne concept. The tide had turned, and Westmoreland called for more troops and helicopters to enlarge the search and destroy operation across the country. McNamara and LBJ agreed, doubling the number of infantry maneuver battalions from 35 in October 1965 (22 Army, 13 Marines) to 70 a year later (50 and 20). The number of artillery battalions also doubled to 79. By the end of 1966 the US Army had 244,000 personnel in Vietnam, the Marines 69,000, Air Force 57,000 and Navy 25,000, a total of 395,000. They faced 100,000 enemy riflemen in 152 combat battalions and two hundred separate companies. The doubling of combat forces, Washington realized, would entail a doubling of US losses from 400 deaths a month to 800.

Infantry Patrol in a Clearing, U.S. Army combat painting by Roger Blum, 1966

Most of the fighting in Vietnam was done by companies that deliberately went in harms way for a couple days at a time-- into the jungles of the Central Highlands, or the rice paddies of the heavily populated lowlands. As Marine Lt. Philip Caputo observed, "There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place."

Of two million small unit operations, 99% never encountered the enemy. (They did encounter booby traps and land mines, which together caused a third of the American deaths.) The war was fought out in the other one percent, and most of the time combat was initiated by "Charlie" (the Viet Cong). The "hot landing zone" (enemy attacking choppers as they landed) accounted for 13% of the fights. American platoons on patrol were hit by ambush in 23% of the engagements, and their camps were hit by rocket or grenade attacks in 30%. In 27% of the battles the Americans took the initiative, including 9% ambushes, 5% planned attacks on known positions, and 13% attacks on unsuspected enemy positions. In 7% of the engagements both sides were surprised as they stumbled upon each other in the jungle.

The casualties mounted. By the end of the war, 30,600 soldiers and 12,900 Marines had been killed in combat (together with 1,400 sailors and Navy pilots, and 1,000 Air Force fliers.) Nine times out of ten the enemy took heavier casualties and retreated, especially when gunships showed up. They could not win, they could scarcely replace their losses, yet the kept trudging down the Ho Chi Minh Trail day after day.

The enemy, however, was willing to accept those casualties. McNamara was insistent that the enemy would comply with his concepts of cost-effectiveness, of which Ho and Giap were unaware. They were, however, quite familiar with attritional strategies. While they were not politically Maoist, they were also well versed in Mao's concepts of protracted war (see insurgency).

Helicopters and Air Mobility

See also: Air Assault

The ability to move quickly into battle, during battle, and away from battle has always been a critical advantage in warfare. Once, troops on horses had an immense mobility advantage over those who did not. Later, motorized (truck-borne) and mechanized (in tracked, often armored, fighting vehicles) demonstrated advantages over horse cavalry, although motorized forces were restricted to roads, and, while horses sometimes could graze, far more grass grows than does petroleum.

Using helicopters and light aircraft for tactical troop movement was inspired by the Korean War, but first used, in moderate strength, in the 1950s by the French in Algeria. The U.S. military had been studying the concept, but, justas the traditional horse cavalry had resisted armored cavalry, it made limited headway.

Chinook CH-47 delivering 105mm howitzer and ammunition

When the Kennedy Administration took office, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara made exploration of new ways of mobility a high priority. In 1962, he expressed dissatisfaction with Army conservative, and created a well-funded research organization to evaluate extensive air mobility. While it had a formal name, it was generally called the Howze Board after its chief, Hamilton H. Howze.

With McNamara's support, the Board revised its recommendations to create a helicopter-borne combat unit of division size. Large-scale field tests proved it could be effective in battle, and the 1st Cavalry Division (1st Cav) was redesignated the 1st Cavalry Division (airmobile) and sent to Vietnam in July 1965. There had been moderately successful tests in Vietnam by the 173rd Airborne Brigade, arriving in May and first fighting in June, but it became clear that the approach used by the 173rd, attaching helicopters for each mission, was not nearly as effective as a unit that had infantry and helicopters training together as a team. This teaming was a basic aspect of the 1st Cav, which first went into combat in the Battle of the Ia Drang in October 1965.

In the 1st Cav, there were scouts in very light observation helicopters (OH-6), light "Huey" helicopters (UH-1) that could carry 10-12 soldiers into battle or deliver machine gun and rocket fire in direct support, and medium (CH-47) and large (CH-54) helicopters that could lift artillery into firebases supporting the heliborne infantry.

Using scouts and infantry to locate the enemy, and call in artillery and air strikes, was one airmobile tactic. Another was to harass and attrit the enemy with a series of stinging ambushes and raids, using a doctrine now considered swarming. In these and other cases, however, the division name was appropriately chosen -- these were more classically cavalry rather than infantry missions.

UH–1 Hueys pick up soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division during operations on the Bong Son Plain in 1966

Depending on the tactical situation, a LZ might be prepared by artillery, air strikes, or escorting armed helicopters. Since the suppressive fire did not always drive off defenders, there was a balance of stealth vs. fire; small insertions sometimes had the helicopters make several decoy landings, silently landing a team at one quick stop. the first infantry companies landed in "slicks." These were unarmed Bell UH-1D "Hueys" that could carry 12 men and their gear.

Fire bases were set up with medium Boeing CH-47 "Chinook" helicopters, which could transport the 2-ton 105mm light howitzers, light vehicles, and ammunition; the larger CH-54 Tarhe ("the hook") lifted the larger 8-ton 155mm medium howitzers that gave the firebase enormous killing power. Generally, the greater mobility of the 105, and the quick availability of armed helicopters and jet fighter-bombers, made 155s and heavier howitzers less important, unless they were already in a semipermanent base.

Command and control could be very good or very bad. Company-sized forces would often land with their commanding captains, and, as with Moore at X-Ray, sometimes with more senior officers. When the levels of command did not micromanage, a battalion commander (lieutenant colonel) or higher commander could keep an overview of the engagement, and bring in reinforcements, as well as air and artillery strikes, as appropriate.

A battery of 105-mm. howitzers from the 25th Infantry Division uses high-angle fire in the western highlands

There were times, however, where the captain might stay airborne, the lieutenant colonel a bit higher, the colonel commanding the brigade at the next altitude, and possibly the major general division commander and lieutenant general corps commander in their own command and control helicopters. When this turned into micromanagement, it was said, ruefully, "never, in the course of human events, have so many, been so supervised, by so few."

Meanwhile the whole operation was covered by helicopter gunships--"Hueys" equipped with rockets, grenade launchers and door-mounted machine guns. Although its maximum speed was only 127 mph, the Huey could dart and dive and swerve with enough agility to evade most ground fire. Close air support from fixed-wing fighter-bombers was readily available.

Individual equipment

Equipment for the individual soldier changed. For some time, there had been an international debate over conventional rather than "assault" rifles. The conventional rifle, such as the M-1 Garand, fired a high-power bullet, had a relatively small magazine, and was best for carefully aimed fire. Assault rifles were an evolution of the less than successful submachine guns of WWII, which fired a low-power pistol bullet, continuously or in bursts. Assault rifles, such as the U.S. M-16 or Soviet AK-47 fired an intermediate power bullet from a large magazine, sometimes in continuous bursts.

A consideration for the U.S. was that the M-14 rifle, which had replaced the M-1, was too heavy for many of the smaller Vietnamese allies. The M-16's smaller (5.56mm vs. 7.62mm) bullet allowed a soldier to carry more ammunition, and the trend had been away from carefully aimed fire to suppressive fire that froze the enemy until air and artillery could hit him.

The new M-16 rifle was a shorter, lighter and more versatile assault weapon than the old M-1 or its replacement the M-14. It fired a light bullet at high muzzle velocity, which gave great killing power at ranges under 400 yards. Its rapid fire made it ideal in ambushes, although variations from the designed ammunition, as well as training problems and some mechanical problems, made early versions less reliable than the Communist AK-47. Both the AK-47 and M-16 had advantages and disadvantages; neither was the ideal infantry rifle. The 5.56mm bullet did not always penetrate jungle.

New M79 grenade launchers that could send explosives farther than they could be thrown, M60 machine guns, and M18 Claymore electrically controlled fragmentation weapons, gave the "grunts" much better equipment than Charlie. When the firebase had served its mission, another covey of choppers would move in and ferry all the men and equipment back to battalion base.

Heavy weapons

Beyond what was available from armed helicopters and from fighter-bombers, fire from 105mm howitzers, relatively easy for medium helicopters to lift, was invaluable. 155mm howitzers could be lifted by the heaviest helicopters, but were more likely to be moved, by ground, to a firebase. The long-range 8" howitzer and 175mm gun were only road-mobile, but had sufficient range that their presence did not alert the enemy to impending operations in a specific area.

Especially for night defense of fixed positions such as Special Forces/CIDG camps, fixed-wing gunships, originally "Puff, the Magic Dragon," an Air Force AC-47 transport fitted with three miniguns firing 100 bullets per second, provided critical illumination, as well as an ability to deliver massive amounts of machine gun fire. The fixed-wing gunship idea worked well and continued to improve; the first versions of the modern AC-130 were later deployed in Vietnam. AC-130 aircraft were used, most heavily, against the Ho Chi Minh trail. Fire control methods of the time made use of the fixed-wing gunships dangerous in close proximity to friendly forces at location that was not precisely known; Special Forces camps' position was known.

Airmobile operations

In mid-1965, the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), the experimental force in AIR ASSAULT II, was reflagged as the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and sent to Vietnam. Their first assignment was to crush Giap's buildup around the Ia Drang river; there are indications that Giap intended to meet the 1st Cav and learn techniques to fight the airmobile forces. LTG (ret) Hal Moore, then commanding 1/7 Cavalry (the Custer squadron) at a place called Landing Zone XRay, took and gave heavy casualties, and considers the engagement a draw. Nevertheless, the overall Ia Drang operation stopped what appeared to be a division-sized operation to take control of an important area of the Central Highlands.

The 1st Cav learned lessons in the Ia Drang in October and November 1965, and refined its techniques at the Battle of Bong Son in December through February.

Well handled airmobile forces could dominate at the tactical and operational levels, but neither they nor the United States Air Force could hold ground. While U.S. forces could deliver massive casualties, Giap was quite prepared to fight an attritional strategy, aimed at U.S. opinion. COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a U.S. Army historian and strategist, is said to have said to a North Vietnamese counterpart during talks, "We never lost a battle." The DRV colonel said "true, but irrelevant."

By 1968 infantry divisions routinely used 200 choppers, and could call on Corps headquarters for more as needed. The Air Force watched nervously as the Army experimented with its new doctrine and deployed 3,600 choppers to Vietnam. The Air Force ridiculed helicopters as low performance, high-risk machines that were excessively vulnerable to ground fire, and hopelessly inferior to its own fixed-wing jet fighters. Most of all it hated having the Army building up its own air power, which it had fought at the 1948 Key West Agreement (see Air Assault). Helicopters flew over 20 million combat and 30 million non-combat sorties, and proved the single most useful weapons system of the war.

Military aircraft are inherently dangerous, especially at low altitude where helicopters often operated. Most jet aircraft have the gliding performance of a brick when they lose power. A helicopter that loses power, but maintains the integrity of its rotors, is at a few thousand feet of altitude, and has a competent pilot, can "autorotate" to a landing, the airflow of the fall spinning the rotors and generating lift. At low altitude, there is no time to generate that lift. Jet fighters do have ejection seats to blast pilots clear of an impending crash, where helicopter crews have neither ejection seats nor parachutes.

8,000 went down during the war, killing 3,000 in combat operations and another 2,200 in accidents. (Most of the casualties were passengers; 700 pilots were killed.)

Medical support

Immense improvements over even Korean War field medicine, of M*A*S*H fame, were a great morale factor. They involved several key factors:

1. Rapid helicopter evacuation, with more advanced medical technicians, from the battlefield
2. Mobile trauma hospitals a short distance from the battlefield
3. Improved medical understanding of trauma management, especially aggressive prevention of shock and related respiratory conditions, rather than treating those often-lethal complications once they had developed.

"Dust Off" medical evacuation UH-1 Huey helicopters. promptly removed the wounded from the battlefield, and to an advanced trauma hospital system. Medevac runs had the highest priority, and were unusually dangerous. Two medevac pilots won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their heroism. It took on average 100 minutes to rush a casualty to the nearest field hospital. 390,000 American and ARVN casualties were medevaced. Thanks to quick hospitalization and aggressive prevention of traumatic shock and the acute respiratory distress syndrome, 82% of the seriously wounded who arrived at hospitals survived, a sharp improvement over previous wars due to helicopters, as well as significant advances in trauma management.

Ground war 1966-68

Westmoreland's tactics worked in terms of defeating the military threat to South Vietnam, but at a very high cost in lives. With the US increasing the pace of search and destroy (and the ARVN avoiding combat), the NLF was systematically pushed back. "Search and Destroy" gave way after 1968 to new tactics.

The Viet Cong was forced to disperse into smaller and smaller units, and so too did the US forces, until they were running platoon and even squad operations that blanketed far more of the countryside, chasing the fragmented enemy back into remote, uninhabited areas or out of the South altogether. Not only low-level NLF sympathizers but even Viet Cong officers and NLF political cadres started to surrender, accepting the generous resettlement terms offered by the GVN. At the end of 1964, the Pentagon estimated that only 42% of the South Vietnamese people lived in cities or villages that were securely under GVN control. (20% were in villages controlled by the NLF, and 37% were in contested zones.) At the end of 1967, 67% of the population was "secure," and only a few remote villages with less than 2% of the population were still ruled by the NLF. Hanoi seemed to believe that the rugged Central Highlands region, which contained a third of the area but only 7% of SVN's people, would make a good base for guerrilla warfare. The US Army "Special Forces" ("Green Berets") contested their strategy by systematically arming the Montagnard tribesmen against the Communists.

In 1967, the Saigon political scene stabilized, as the Buddhist and student protesters ran out of steam and General Nguyen Van Thieu (1923-2001), a competent, fiercely anti-Communist Catholic, became president (in office 1967-75). The NLF failed to disrupt the national legislative election of 1966, or the presidential elections of 1967, which consolidated Thieu-ARVN control over GVN. Thieu failed to eliminate the systematic politicization, corruption, time-serving and favoritism in the ARVN. Nervous about spies in ARVN, the MACV kept it at arms length and never exercised direct control. ARVN and MACV operated two different wars. MACV advisors did work closely with 900,000 local GVN officials in a well-organized pacification program called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.) It stressed technical aid, local self government, and land distribution to peasant farmers. A majority of tenant farmers received title to their own land in one of the most successful transfer projects in any nation. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of peasants entered squalid refugee camps when CORDS moved them out of villages that could not be protected. In the Phoenix Program (part of CORDS with a strong CIA component) GVN police identified and arrested (and sometimes killed) the NLF secret police agents engaged in assassination.

The more the American soldiers worked in the hamlets, the more they came to despise the corruption, inefficiency and even cowardice of GVN and ARVN. The basic problem was that despite the decline of the NLF, the GVN still failed to pick up popular support. Most peasants, refugees and city people remained alienated and skeptical. The superior motivation of the enemy troubled the Americans (especially in contrast with South Koreans, who fought fiercely for their independence.) "Why can't our Vietnamese do as well as Ho's?" Soldiers resented the peasants (ridiculing them as "gooks") who seemed sullen, unappreciative, unpatriotic and untrustworthy. The Viet Cong resorted more and more to booby-traps that (during the whole war) killed about 4,000 Americans and injured perhaps 30,000 (and killed or injured many thousands of peasants.)

It became more and more likely that after an ambush or boobytrap angry GIs would take out their frustrations against the nearest Vietnamese they perceived as potential enemies. MACV did not appreciate the danger that atrocities might be committed by Americans. In March 1968, just after the Tet offensive, one Army company massacred several hundred women and children at the hamlet of My Lai. High ranking American officers wre not charged, but the company captain was tried and acquitted. Platoon commander Lt. William Calley (a junior college dropout who was rushed through OCS) was sentenced to life imprisonment by a 1971 court martial. His sentence was reduced and he was released in 1975. The case became a focus of national guilt and self-doubt, with antiwar leaders alleging there were many atrocities that had been successfully covered up.

Tet Offensive, 1968

The climactic moment of the war came in February 1968 during the truce usually observed during the "Tet" holiday season. Hanoi used its NLF and Viet Cong forces to destroy the government of South Vietnam an incite a popular uprising. It was decisively defeated. After Tet the insurgency was in desperate shape, defeated on the battlefields and pushed out of most of the villages it once controlled. Meanwhile in the north the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign had destroyed much of the infrastructure and ruined practically the entire economy above the level of the rice paddies. However, the Tet Offensive had a devastating impact on Johnson's political position in the U.S., and in that sense was a strategic victory for the Communists.

The "tail" of the PAVN had grown as its teeth receded, for the bombing had made resupply extraordinarily difficult. The solution was the "Tet offensive," an all-out effort, aimed especially at a new target, the GVN bureaus and ARVN complexes in the cities. The Politburo theorized that the GVN was a hollow shell held together only by American firepower. They truly believed the proletariat in the cities would rise up and throw off the puppets once the tocsin was sounded; indeed, the very legitimacy of their enterprise hinged on the premise that the people of South Vietnam hated their government and really wanted Communist control. As a preliminary diversion, PAVN sent two of its divisions to surround an isolated Marine outpost at Khe Sanh, near the border. Johnson personally took control of the defense. When the media back home warned darkly of another disaster like Dien Bien Phu, LBJ made his generals swear they would never surrender Khe Sanh. They committed 5% of their ground strength to the outpost (about 6,000 men) and held another 15-20% in reserve just in case. The enemy was blasted with 22,000 airstrikes and massive artillery bombardments. When the siege was lifted, the Marines had lost 205 killed, the PAVN probably 10,000.

Hoping that Khe Sanh had tied down Westmoreland, the PAVN and Viet Cong struck on January 31, throwing 100,000 regular and militia troops against 36 of 44 provincial capitals and 5 of 6 major cities. They avoided American strongholds and targeted GVN government offices and ARVN installations. The ARVN recoiled in shock, then fought bravely and fiercely. American television viewers watched in utter disbelief as MPs fought to recapture the courtyard of the embassy in Saigon, which had been seized by 15 Viet Cong sappers. The harshest fighting came in the old imperial capital of Hue. The city fell to the PAVN, which immediately set out to identify and execute thousands of government supporters among the civilian population. The allies fought back fiercely, with all the firepower at their command (including the big guns of naval ships in the harbor). House to house fighting recaptured Hue on February 24. Five thousand enemy bodies were recovered (the US lost 216 dead, and ARVN 384). Nationwide, the enemy lost tens of thousands killed, and many more who were wounded or totally demoralized. US lost 1,100 dead, ARVN 2,300. The people of South Vietnam did not rise up; the NLF tocsin fell on deaf ears. However, the pacification program temporarily collapsed in half the country, and a half million more people became refugees. Despite the enormous damage done to the GVN at all levels, the NLF was in even worse shape, and it never recovered.

ABout 40,000 Communist soldiers in the South--probably about half--were killed in 1968; many others deserted to the GVN. By sending its main force into the cities during Tet, the NLF left a vacuum in the countryside that GVN and US pacification agents could fill.

By the end of 1968 the Saigon had pulled itself together and restored GVN authority in every province. By 1969 Saigon forces were able to sustain the pressure on the NLF and Viet Cong and dramatically expand their control over both population and territory. Indeed, for the first time GVN found itself in control of more than 90% of the population. "The Tet objectives were beyond our strength," concluded Tran Van Tra, the commander of Vietcong forces in the South. "They were based on the subjective desires of the people who made the plan. Hence our losses were large, in material and manpower, and we were not able to retain the gains we had already made."

Nixon and Vietnamization

1971-72

During the quiet year 1971 that saw the removal of nearly all American ground forces, Hanoi was building up forces for a full scale invasion of the South. In late March 1972, the PAVN launched a major cross-border conventional surprise attack on the South. They expected the peasants to rise up and overthrow the government; they did not. They expected the South's army to collapse; instead the ARVN fought very well indeed. They did not expect heavy US bombing, which disrupted their plans and forced a retreat.

In 1971 Nixon sent massive quantities of hardware to the ARVN, and gave Thieu a personal pledge to send air power if Hanoi invaded. The NLF and Viet Cong had largely disappeared. They controlled a few remote villages, and contested a few more, but the Pentagon estimated that 93% of the South's population now lived under secure GVN control. The guerrilla war had been decisively won by GVN. The year 1971 was eerily quiet, with no large campaigns, apart from a brief ARVN foray into Laos to which was routed by the PAVN.

Giap decided that since the Americans were gone he could invade in conventional fashion and whip the cowardly ARVN. His assumption that Vietnamization had failed was soon proven wrong. Saigon had started to exert itself; new draft laws produced over one million well-armed regular soldiers, and another four million in part-time, lightly armed self-defense militia. In March, 1972 Hanoi invaded at three points from north and west with 120,000 PAVN regulars spearheaded by tanks. This was conventional old- fashioned warfare, reminiscent of North Korea's invasion in 1950. The outcome was quite different however. Nixon ordered LINEBACKER I, with 42,000 bombing sorties over North Vietnam. Hanoi was evacuated. Nixon also ordered the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, a stroke LBJ had always vetoed for fear of Soviet or Chinese involvement, But thanks to detente the Societs and Chinese held quiet. The ARVN, its morale stiffened by American resolve, rose to the occasion. With massive tactical air support from the US, it held the line. As in Tet, the peasants refused to rise up against the GVN. "By God, the South Vietnamese can hack it!" exclaimed a pleasantly surprised General Abrams. Since the PAVN's conventional forces required continuous resupply in large quantities, the air campaign broke the back of the invasion and the PAVN forces retreated north. However they did did retain control of a slice of territory south of the DMZ. There the NLF, renamed the "Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam" (PRG) was established; it welcomed diplomats from the Communist world, including Fidel Castro, and served as one of the launch points of the 1975 invasion.

After the failed Easter Offensive the Thieu government made a fatal strategic mistake. Overconfident of its military prowess, it adopted a policy of static defense that made its units vulnerable; worse, it failed to use the breathing space to reorganize and rebuilt its faulty command structure. The departure of American forces and American money lowered morale in both military and civilian South Vietnam. Desertions rose as military performance indicators sank, and no longer was the US looking over the shoulder demanding improvement. Politics, not military need, still ruled the South Vietnamese Army. On other side, the PAVN had been badly mauled--the difference was that it knew it and it was determined to rebuild. Discarding guerrilla tactics, Giap three years to rebuild his forces into a strong conventional army. Without constant American bombing it was possible to solve the logistics problem by modernizing the Ho Chi Minh trail with 12,000 more miles or raods. Brazenly, he even constructed a pipeline along the Trail to bring in gasoline for the next invasion.

LINEBACKER II 1972

Late in 1972 election peace negotiations bogged down; Thieu demanded concrete evidence of Nixon's promises to Saignon. Nixon thereupon unleashed the full fury of air power to force Hanoi to come to terms. Operation LINEBACKER II, in 12 days smashed many targets in North Vietnam cities that had always been sacrosanct. 59 railroad yards, warehouses, radar stations, electric power plants, and airfields were blasted with laser- guided "smart bombs." US policy was to try to avoid residential areas; the Politburo had already evacuated civilians not engaged in essential war work. The Soviets had sold Hanoi 1,200 SAM surface-to-air missiles that proved effective against the B-52s for the first three days. In a remarkable display of flexibility, the Air Force radically changed its bomber formations overnight--and Hanoi ran out of SAMs. An American negotiator in Paris observed that:

Prior to LINEBACKER II, the North Vietnamese were intransigent... After LINEBACKER II, they were shaken, demoralized, and anxious to talk about anything. Beijing and Moscow advised Hanoi to agree to the peace accords;they did so on January, 23, 1973. The Air Force interpreted the quick settlement as proof unrestricted bombing of the sort they had wanted to do for eight years had finally broken Hanoi's will to fight; other analysts said Hanoi had not changed at all.

Peace and after, 1973-75

Peace accords were finally signed on 27 January 1973, in Paris. There would be an immediate in-place permanent cease-fire. The U.S. agreed to withdraw all its troops in 60 days (but could continue to send military supplies); North Vietnam was allowed to keep its 200,000 troops in the South but was not allowed to send new ones. Prisoners were exchanged. South Vietnam and the PRG was to start negotiations on free elections. Although a low-intensity war continued, the world rejoiced. In February 591 surviving POWs (mostly pilots) came home to a joyous welcome. All American military now departed Vietnam, including advisors to ARVN. The war seemed to be over--with vague guarantees by Hanoi not to attack the South, and Nixon's personal assurance that if peace held the US would eventually give Hanoi billions of dollars for rebuilding. Hanoi kept large forces in the unpopulated SVN's Central Highlands. The NLF and Viet Cong were ciphers by this time, and nearly all the population in the South was under GVN control. With Nixon wounded by Watergate, Congress forbad American military activity anywhere in Indochina.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, the US was legally unable and psychologically unwilling to fight in Indochina. The 1973 Peace Agreement, instead of ending a war made continuation inevitable, for it allowed North Vietnam to keep troops in the South. The North, badly damaged by the bombings of 1972, recovered quickly and remained committed to the destruction of its rival. The main reason for the fall of South Vietnam in 1973 was the continued failure of the Saigon government to run an effective administration. Its weaknesses were compounded by exaggerated confidence that the U.S. would return if and when needed.Although it had plenty of weapons available--its 2100 modern aircraft comprised the fourth largest air force in the world--the ARVN had never mastered high tech and lost confidence in its capabilities when US advisers departed. Saigon felt betrayed.

Invasion and the fall of the south, 1975

North invades South, 1975, using bases in Cambodia and Laos, and across DMZ

In March, 1975, Hanoi invaded again, in conventional fashion with marching armies spearheaded by 600 Russian-built tanks and 400 pieces of heavy artillery. ARVN still had a 2-1 advantage in combat soldiers and 3-1 in artillery, but it misused its resources badly. Some ARVN units fought well; most collapsed under the 16-division onslaught. The North Vietnamese regular army, the PAVN, began a full-scale offensive in December, 1974 by seizing Phuoc Long Province. In March, 1975, they continued their offensive campaigns by conducting diversionary attacks in the north threatening Pleiku and then attacking the lightly defended South Vietnamese rear area. The PAVN quickly captured the Central Highlands and then raced to the sea to divide the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). The PAVN blocked the South Vietnamese attempt to retrograde from the Central Highlands and destroyed the ARVN II corps. ARVN resistance was sometimes heroic, but it kept losing battles and territories. The PAVN then concentrated combat power to destroy the South Vietnamese six divisions isolated in the north. After destroying these divisions, the PAVN seized Saigon on April 30, ending the war.

No American military units had been involved until the final days, when an emergency rescue operation was launched to evacuate Americans and 60,000 senior Vietnamese government and military officials, and employees of the U.S. Vietnam was unified under Communist rule, as nearly a million refugees escaped by boat. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers who committed themselves to the anticommunist cause were rounded up by the new rulers and sent to "reeducation" camps.