Vietnam War

Untitled Slide

Untitled Slide

Early History

• Vietnam means non-Chinese people of the south.
• Ruled by Chinese empire until 938 A.D.
• 1600s: French missionaries arrived.
• 1847: French troops sent to protect Catholics.
• 1868: Vietnam surrendered under peace treaty to become part of French empire.
• 1893: Laos and Cambodia added to the French empire.

Ho Chi Minh

• Ho Chi Minh questioned French rule.
• 1924: Visited Soviet Union
• Ho wrote to a friend: All communists must “make contact with the masses to awaken, organize, unite and train them, and lead them to fight for freedom and independence.”
• Stayed in China to organize nationalists into the on the Vietnam border into the Vietnam Revolutionary League (Vietminh).

World War II and Aftermath

• 1945: Ho announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
• Allied Powers had decided that country would be divided into two: the northern half under the control of the Chinese and the southern half under the British.
• France attempted to reestablish control and refused to recognize Ho’s regime.
• 1949: Fighting broke out between the Vietminh and the French troops.
• 1954: French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu.

U.S. Involvement

• 1950-53: US had lost 142,000 soldiers in Korea in an attempt to stop Communism in South Korea.
• 1954: President Eisenhower sent a small group of military advisors into South Vietnam.
• Ngo Dinh Diem elected president of South Vietnam with US aid.
• Diem imprisoned opponents and did not call general election.

Domino Theory

• Kennedy accepted theory that if the domino of Vietnam fell, other countries would turn to Communism.
• The National Liberation Front, the Vietcong, had grown to 17,000 in the South and controlled more than one-fifth of the villages.
• 1962: Kennedy had 12,000 support troops in Vietnam.

Gulf of Tonkin

• August 1964: U.S. Destroyer Maddox was fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin.
• Congress approved Johnson's decision to bomb North Vietnam and passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to take all necessary measures against North Vietnam.

Bombing

• 1964: LBJ launched Operation Rolling Thunder of air raids.
• Plan was to destroy the North Vietnam economy and to force her to stop helping the guerrilla fighters in the south.
• Bombing was also directed against territory controlled by the NLF in South Vietnam.
• The plan was for Operation Rolling Thunder to last for eight weeks, but it lasted for the next three years.
• In that time, the U.S. dropped one million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

Search and Destroy

• 1965: Gen. William Westmoreland developed the aggressive strategy of "search and destroy."
• The objective was to find and then kill members of the NLF.

Tet Offensive

• January 1968: The Tet Offensive proved to be a turning point in the war.
• In military terms it was a victory for the U.S. forces. An estimated 37,000 NLF soldiers were killed compared to 2,500 Americans.
• Proved that the NLF appeared to have men and women willing to fight for the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government
• 1968: President Johnson was told by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the U.S. could not win the Vietnam War and recommended a negotiated withdrawal.

Politics

• 1968: LBJ announced he would not run
• Growing opposition to the war during this war with marches of up to one million people, including many veterans.
• 1975: End of U.S. involvement in Vietnam
• 1976: Communist governments set up in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.