Difference between revisions of "Vietnam War"

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-{{rewrite|Doesn't give the origin of the war, what it was fought about, and what the sides were. See [[Talk:Vietnam War/draft]]}}
+Page corrected by Anon.
-[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
-The '''Vietnam War'''  was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers.  American troops first intervened in 1965, not counting "military advisers."  The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.
-The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945.  [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1945 until his loss of power in the late 1950s. He remained a figurehead--and was a popular icon of the New Left around the world, until his death in 1969.
-==Prelude==
-During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognize the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor [[Bao Dai]] and Ho began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force.  France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States.  Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force.  The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]:  [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]].  North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a Communist nation, while the South was run based on the Western model.  Ho expected the two entities to merge as one nation in a vote.  The United States did not sign on in agreement and the time period came and passed with the United States taking the official position that there could not be a fair election in North Vietnam.  The start of the campaign by the North to take over the South was underway.
-==The War==
-The war was characterized for the ensuing twenty years by the efforts of North Vietnam to take over the South.  Rather than play to the strength of the Americans by launching a conventional war like North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had, Ho chose political subversion of the South as his strategy, using as his tools the National Liberation Front and its non-uniformed guerrilla wing, the Viet Cong.  The communist resistance movement against the French had previously been known as the Vietminh.  The South Vietnamese, under various military governments following the overthrow of their last civilian leader Ngo Dinh Diem in early November 1963, similarly tried to subvert Ho's government in North Vietnam, but with much less success.  U. S. forces supported these operations, leading to the Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, when at least one U. S. destroyer was fired on by North Vietnamese forces as it operated close to their waters.  The United States responded first with air attacks that became known as Operation Rolling Thunder and later with ground troops.
-===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
-Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.
-James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>
-Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by [[General Westmoreland]], who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}
-America at first operated on the assumption that [[victory by body count]] was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table.  There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight.  It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.
-==Fall of South Vietnam==
-Accordingly, after U.S. troops had withdrawn, they renewed their offensive in 1975 and took over the former South Vietnamese capital of [[Saigon]], renaming it "Ho Chi Minh City."
-==Cost of the War==
-Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths.  3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969.  The North Vietnamese are estimated to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway,  a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>
-==Aftermath==
-Today Vietnam has a communist government.  Many people from the former area of South Vietnam fled in the years directly afterwards by taking to sea in crafts that were overcrowded and barely seaworthy.  Many of these "boat people" would be picked up and taken to the United States where they excelled with many of the young going on to not only learn English, but become top students and valedictorians of their class.
-==Controversies about the War==
-[[Max Boot]] wrote:
-Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His boox] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
-Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.''  He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>
-==Media Bias==
-Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref>  who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>
-The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)
-British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
-For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
-Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there."  In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
-What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>
-''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations  commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief.  What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]]. <ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref>  Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."
-The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.
-Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,
-The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
-==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
-The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''[[The Green Berets]]'', ''[[The Deer Hunter]]'', ''[[Platoon (film)|Platoon]]'', ''[[Hamburger Hill]]'', and ''[[We Were Soldiers]]''.
-The TV series ''[[Tour of Duty (television series)|Tour of Duty]]'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]].  The series ''[[Magnum, P.I]]'', ''[[Night Court]]'', ''[[Airwolf]]'', and ''[[Area 88]]'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters.  In the military drama series ''[[JAG (TV series|JAG]],'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.
-==References==
-<references/>
-==Further reading==
-* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages,
-==External links==
-* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
-*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
-*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
-*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
-*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
-*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
-[[Category:United States History]]
-[[Category:Vietnam War]]
-[[category:Cold War]]

Difference between revisions of "Vietnam War"

Revision as of 14:11, January 24, 2010

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