The peasants wanted communism and supported the Vietminh and the NLF. After this, there was no strong capitalist government in control of the South. This incident gave the USA the excuse it needed to escalate the war. The first major contingent of US Marines arrived in For the next ten years the USA's involvement increased. The elections were never held and the country remained divided: North Vietnam was a communist republic led by Ho Chi Minh.
South Vietnam was a capitalist republic led by Ngo Dinh Diem. Reason two - Civil war. Ho Chi Minh. Some 80, Vietnamese from the south had moved to the north after the Geneva Agreements were signed. Ten times as many Vietnamese had fled the north, where the Communist Party was killing off its rivals, seizing property, and oppressing the large Catholic population.
A cadre was drawn from those who went north; they were trained, equipped and sent back to the south to aid in organizing and guiding the insurgency. Some in the North Vietnamese government thought the course of war in the south was unwise, but they were overruled. Although publicly the war in the south was described as a civil war within South Vietnam, it was guided, equipped and reinforced by the communist leadership in Hanoi.
S—feared communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia. The Central Intelligence Agency CIA advised that was not the case—America had a strong military presence in the Pacific that would serve as a deterrent. A different feeling prevailed among many within the U. The communist takeover of China and subsequent war in Korea against North Korean and Chinese troops had focused a great deal of attention on Southeast Asia as a place to take a strong stand against the spread of communism.
Fitzgibbon, Jr. They were the only father-son pair to die in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had been educated in Paris. There is considerable debate over whether he was primarily nationalist or communist, but he was not especially anti-Western. Ho attempted to contact Eisenhower to discuss Vietnam but received no answer. That would have made any negotiation with Ho politically ticklish. A lingering question of the war is what might have happened if Eisenhower and Ho had arranged a meeting; possibly, an accord could have been reached, or possibly Ho was simply seeking to limit American involvement, in order to more easily depose the Diem government.
American involvement began to escalate under President John F. North Vietnam, had by then established a presence in Laos and developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail through that country in order to resupply and reinforce its forces in South Vietnam.
Kennedy saw American efforts in Southeast Asia almost as a crusade and believed increasing the military advisor program, coupled with political reform in South Vietnam, would strengthen the south and bring peace.
Two U. The peasants resented being forced from their ancestral lands, and consolidating them gave the VC better targets. The program, which had been poorly managed, was abandoned after about two years, following the coup that deposed Diem. Marines landing at Da Nang area beach. Marine Corps. Diem fell from favor with his American patrons, partly over disagreements in how to handle the war against the VC and partly because of his unpopular suppression of religious sects and anyone he feared threatened his regime.
He, in turn, called the Buddhists VC sympathizers. Two younger monks poured a mix of gasoline and jet fuel over him and, as the three had planned, set fire to him. Seven more such immolations occurred that year. To make matters worse, Diem responded by sending troops to raid pagodas. The administration was caught by surprise, however, when Diem was murdered during the coup, which was led by General Duong Van Minh. This began a series of destabilizing changes in government leadership.
That same month, Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas , Texas. His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, inherited the Vietnam situation. His political party, the Democrats, had been blamed for China falling to communism; withdrawing from Vietnam could hurt them in the elections. On the other hand, Congress had never declared war and so the president was limited in what he could do in Southeast Asia.
That changed in August The pilot of an F-8E Crusader did not see any ships in the area where the enemy was reported, and years later crew members said they never saw attacking craft. Congress swiftly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that removed most restrictions from the president in regards to Vietnam. Though a congressional investigative committee the previous year had warned that America could find itself slipping into in a morass that would require more and more military participation in Vietnam, Johnson began a steady escalation of the war, hoping to bring it to a quick conclusion.
Ironically, the leadership of North Vietnam came to a similar conclusion: they had to inflict enough casualties on Americans to end support for the war on the U. On September 30, , the first large-scale antiwar demonstration took place in America, on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The war became the central rallying point of a burgeoning youth counterculture, and the coming years would see many such demonstrations, dividing generations and families..
This would be a war without a front or a rear; it would involve full-scale combat units and individuals carrying out terrorist activities such as the Brink Hotel bombing.
In previous war, progress and setbacks could be shown on maps; large enemy units could be engaged and destroyed. Guerrilla warfare asymmetrical warfare does not permit such clear-cut data. Westmoreland with a thorny challenge: how to show the American people progress was being made. Westmoreland adopted a search-and-destroy policy to find and engage the enemy and use superior firepower to destroy him.
A top-secret Department of Defense study of U. The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U.
In January , the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. In , Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in , the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital.
Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U. In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper.
The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians and its supporters who saw them as having lost the war , along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange , millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.
On it were inscribed the names of 57, American men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Vietnam War started in the s, according to most historians, though the conflict in Southeast Asia had its roots in the French colonial period of the s. Vietnam War protests began small among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses but gained national prominence in , after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest.
Anti-war marches and other protests, such as the ones organized by Of the nearly 1 million Americans who served on active duty in the U. Armed Forces during the Vietnam War era , many were or went on to become famous in diverse fields such as politics, entertainment, sports and journalism. The young Navy pilot John McCain, son of a Vietnamization was a strategy that aimed to reduce American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam.
The increasingly unpopular war had created deep rifts in American society. President Nixon believed his Vietnamization The United States and many other countries intervened, propping up both sides—but especially South Vietnam—with troops, weapons and From air power to infantry to chemicals, the weapons used in the Vietnam War were more devastating than those of any previous conflict. United States and South Vietnamese forces relied heavily on their superior air power, including B bombers and other aircraft that dropped Women in the Vietnam War served as soldiers, health workers, and in news-gathering capacities.
The bloody conflict had its roots in French colonial rule and an independence movement driven by communist leader Ho Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Vietnam War: The Fall of Saigon. Vietnam: Anti-War Protests.
Vietnam War: Tet Offensive.
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