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. Sherry Buchananwas the editorial page features editor of theWall Street Journal Europein Brussels and a columnist with theInternational Herald Tribunein Paris, London and Hong Kong. What are the Dholera SIR development status and future planning development? The won the war against South Vietnam supported directly by the U.S. By the end of 1967, there were 540,000 American troops in Vietnam, and the military draft was set to call up 302,000 young men in the coming year, an increase of 72,000 over 1967. It divided the nation more than any other issue since the civil war, and destroyed its overwhelming sense of supremacy. Ruling out an invasion of North Vietnam assured that a purely military victory would not be possible, a fact that was at odds with many Americans expectations for the war. How much is a 1928 series b red seal five dollar bill worth? Subsequently, Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel, and a referendum was planned in the next three years to ask the Vietnamese people whether they wanted to reunify the country. Women fighters in North Vietnam played a key role in stopping the most intense bombing in modern times. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. The Vietnam War is remembered in the United States as a macho war foughtmainly by men. In 1973 the United States finally withdrew from Vietnam under immense public pressure, leaving a highly vulnerable South Vietnamese government to defend itself against an increasingly strong North Vietnamese army. Therefore it is clear that the North Vietnamese had won the war in a military sense, however assessing the impact of the war on Vietnam, as well as how the victors have ruled in the past 25 years make it a bit less clear as to who the real victors (if indeed there are any) of the Vietnam War are. In South Vietnam, women helped defeat of U.S. and South Vietnamese ground and air forces. They are outrageous! More than four million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians on both sides roughly ten per cent of the population were killed or wounded during the thirty years of conflict, while roughly 25 per cent of farmland and 15 per cent of forests in the country were destroyed by US bombing. In July 1959, North Vietnams leaders passed an ordinance called for continued socialist revolution in the north and a simultaneous revolution in South Vietnam. In previous war, progress and setbacks could be shown on maps; large enemy units could be engaged and destroyed. The Tet Offensive shocked Americans at home, who thought the war was nearing victory. So, it came to be that after losing thousands of soldiers and a ton of cash half a world away on a war for one of the most insignificant places on Earth (in terms of resources and size), the United States of America withdrew its men in uniform because its people said so. Yet, even women soldiers who were allies in our twentieth century wars have only recently joined the pantheon of history. Frances military involvement in Vietnam began when it sent warships in 1847, ostensibly to protect Christians from the ruling emperor Gia Long. Of course, that's not the reason the U.S. lost the war. 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. A further 1.7 million women over 24 joined Womens Union militias to defend their homes, villages, and towns. Some 80,000 Vietnamese from the south had moved to the north after the Geneva Agreements were signed. (Allied forces against communist Vietnam were: As for the Tet offensive, it is considered a military failure by the North, but it was a massive political victory which directly contributed Westmoreland's fall, and subsequently, Nixon's rise to presidency and his "Vietnamization" plan. Both sides were fighting a war of attrition, so communist commanders sent Hanoi battle reports that often were pure fantasy. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. Vietnam had been a part of French Indochina prior to World War II, and was occupied by the Japanese during the war. On the other side, the same thing was occurring, with even more inflated numbersvastly more. How One Epic Document Exposed the Secrets of the Vietnam Usually it refers to the period when the United States and other members of the SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) joined the forces with the Republic of South Vietnam to contest communist forces, comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and regular-force units, generally known as Viet Cong (VC), and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). NLF forces were fighting against U.S. and South Vietnamese government forces opposed to the reunification of the country promised in the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended the First Indochina War (19461954). Question 1: "did it seem like an utter waste of time and resources?" Every branch of the U.S. military is struggling to meet its 2022 166864 views The South Vietnamese government they attempted to bolster through vast amounts of aid, clearly lacked leadership and commitment of their troops and almost inevitably seemed doomed to lose against their northern countrymen. This prohibited US troops from being involved in any more fighting. They helped defeat two superpowersthe French in 1954 and the Americans in 1975whose armed forces were made up primarily of men. An electrical storm was interfering with the ships radar and may have given the impression of approaching attack boats. Clearly, the reluctance of the US to continue fighting the Vietnam War played right into the hands of the Communist forces, as they knew how weak and unstable the South Vietnamese regime was. The first American fatality was Air Force Technical Sergeant Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., killed June 8, 1956. Two U.S. helicopter units arrived in Saigon in 1961. The US did not know the terrain in the Vietnam. The US lost the American Public and therefore the Vietnam War. The Gold and Dollar 1968 Economic Crisis contributed to the US losing the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War saw a Severely Limited Bombing Campaign. Losing the Hearts and Minds caused the Vietnam War to fail. Over 1 million wounded, 50,000 plus civilian Following the Tet Offensive of 1968, the NVA had to assume the major combat role because the VC was decimated during the offensive. In the First Major Offensive of the Vietnam War, Both Sides Claimed Victory. American involvement began to escalate under President John F. Kennedys administration (January 1961November 1963). I have a Master's degree in military history from King's College, London and my cornucopia of interests include: World War II, World War II, and World War II. The question of who won the Vietnam War is a contentious and emotional one, because opinions in the United States were so divided while the war was happening. South Korea: 50,000 Originally, Vietnam ended at the 17th parallel, but it gradually conquered all the area southward along the coastline of the South China Sea and west to Cambodia. Nixon realised this, and as he was not keen on becoming the first American President to lose a war, he compensated for the removal of US troops by stiffening the South Vietnamese army with advisors, equipment and air support. (LogOut/ The American public was outraged that its soldiers were dying, and for what? It was anything but. Westmoreland adopted a search-and-destroy policy to find and engage the enemy and use superior firepower to destroy him. American helicopters rescued members of its embassy and flew some South Vietnamese to safety, but most were left behind. Where is the tallest General Electric Building located? The administration was caught by surprise, however, when Diem was murdered during the coup, which was led by General Duong Van Minh. The ceasefire had left many areas under North Vietnamese control, and they sought to consolidate this control while constructing the infrastructure that would be required to fight a conventional style war to topple the Saigon government. Thus encouraged, the North again attacked and by 1975 had defeated the South, murdering many of the people who supported the South or the U.S. She is a regular commentator on global affairs. The U.S. suffered over 47,000 killed in action plus another 11,000 non-combat deaths; over 150,000 were wounded and 10,000 missing. Similarly, casualty totals among the VC and NVA and the number of dead and wounded civilians in North Vietnam cannot be determined exactly. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) advised that was not the caseAmerica had a strong military presence in the Pacific that would serve as a deterrent. However, the economic performance of Vietnam since reunification has been poor, and the country remains one of the poorest in the world as the result of the destruction caused by the war, and subsequent economic sanctions placed against the Communist nation. However, the war did not progress as the Americans expected. Jamieson, Neil. Johnson wanted to focus on instituting Great Society programs at home, but Vietnam was a snake he did not dare let go of. United States: 540,000 The Vietnam War is the commonly used name for the Second Indochina War, 19541975. Who won the Vietnam War? | Britannica He had been a war correspondent during World War II and had reported from Vietnam during Americas early involvement. To its own surprise, Hanoi found its forces advancing rapidly toward Saigon, realized victory was at hand, and renamed the operation the Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Supported financially by the US, France fought a war against the Vietnamese from 1946-1954, where they lost a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu. On 24 November 1963, he said, "the battle against communism must be joined with strength and determination." On January 27, 1973, peace accords were signed between North Vietnam and the U.S. In November, a coup deposed Diem, with the blessing of Kennedys administration, which had quietly assured South Vietnams military leaders it was not adverse to a change in leadership and military aid would continue. Thayer, Thomas. WebThe United States committed some 550,000 troops to the Vietnam front at the height of the conflict, suffered more than 58,000 casualties, and engaged in battle after battle with The Trail was the military supply route ferrying fighters, weapons and rice from Hanoi to communist supporters in South Vietnam. In a spirit of reconciliation, forty years on, I had traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to explore not only the other side of the war, but its gendered side. On July 9, 1964, China had announced it would step in if the U.S. attacked North Vietnam, as China had done in the Korean War. North Vietnam (supported lightly by China and the Soviet Union) To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. An air war was the most that could be done north of the 17th parallel, because the use of ground troops had been ruled out. They detonated the explosives at close range without the benefit of remote controls. Funds, commodities and technicians were poured into South Vietnam during the early 1960s, in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the [South Vietnamese] people. In 1965, US president Lyndon Johnson escalated the war; by introducing US combat troops to counter the advance of Communist forces. We tend to record and reward frontline combat for the number of Killed in Action (KIAs) or its equivalent. Lowe, Peter. What U.S. wartime intelligence agency was assisted by the Vietminh? The necessities of war had justified the peoples immense sacrifices; the necessities of peace, more difficult to determine, could prove harder to accept.. During the Second World War, Vichy France could do little to protect its colony from Japanese occupation. Marinesnear Van Truong, from the VC point of view. Both the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) and the VC used torture, to extract information or to cowl opposition. Undoubtedly, news media played an important role in Americans saying, Enough. Indeed, Vo Nyugen Giap had always envisioned using media as one of his spear points for victory. The government claimed that it was building democracy and infrastructure for South Vietnam. Explanation: The U.S. Army reported 58, 177 losses in Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. He said the military has not had such a hard time signing recruits since 1973, the year the U.S. left Vietnam and the draft officially ended. Vietnam has a long history of being ruled by foreign powers, and this led many Vietnamese to see the United States involvement in their country as neo-colonialism. Vietnam: A History of America's Controversial War They transported ammunition between Trail stations and they served in the Peoples Armys anti-air defense units posted along the Trail. She is anindependent publisherand aUniversity of Chicago Pressauthorof books on the Vietnam War includingVietnam Zippos: American Soldiers Engravings and Stories 19641973(2007),Mekong Diaries(2008) andOn The Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Blood Road, The Women Who Defended It, The Legacy(2021). Process of transferring data to a storage medium? Under those agreements, Cambodia and Laoswhich had been part of the French colonyreceived their independence. Why did Martin Luther King believe the Vietnam War was morally wrong? Why did President Eisenhower support the new anticommunist government of South Vietnam. This grew into the operation known as Rolling Thunder that began on March 2, 1965, and continued to November 2, 1968. And please explain to us why McDonalds, Coke machines, ect have ANYTHING to do with the Vietnam war. News footage showed the fighting in Saigon and Hue. (Part 2, by WilliamMiles), http://portal.jarbury.net/essay/vietnam.html. In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won a struggle between victims. On September 30, 1964, the first large-scale antiwar demonstration took place in America, on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Through their huge technical advantage, the US expected to be able to beat the Communists easily. 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. WebThe Vietnam War was a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the For the first time, MACV worked with South Vietnams government to create annual plans. The photo of the South Vietnamese police chief, for example, cannot by itself explain he had just seen the dead body of a close friend minutes before; even Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who snapped the photo felt it unfairly maligned Lt. Col. Loan. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); How did Idi Amin Dada lead a successful coup in 1971? Never before or since have journalists been given such complete access to cover a war. WebThe question of who won the Vietnam War has been a subject of debate, and the answer depends on the definition of victory. Who won the war in Vietnam? Who lost? - Quora He, in turn, called the Buddhists VC sympathizers. In retaliation for the invasion, and in hopes of forcing Hanoi to negotiate in good faith, Nixon ordered Haiphong harbor in North Vietnam to be mined and he intensified bombing of North Vietnam. Civilian deaths during that time period were estimated at 2 million, but the U.S. estimate of civilians killed in the north at 30,000. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. Based on a program the British had employed successfully against insurgents in Malaya, it didnt work in Vietnam. In the First Major Offensive of the Vietnam War, Both Party officials have never understood the need for rational development. The Tet Offensive consisted of Since 1941 Congress has declared war only six times, all during World War II. Nguyn Th Kim Hu remembered the April 1966 bombing when more than half her team perished. No. WebThe Vietnam War lasted about 40 years and involved several countries. If the U.S. was trying to build a new Vietnam, why was it, at the same time, destroying it? From 4000 US advisors in Vietnam in 1960, the presence increased to 11,300 by the end of 1962, and 16,000 by 1963. The most important reason why the USA withdrew from Vietnam was the Tet Offensive. Youth Volunteer brigades were in charge of decommissioning unexploded bombs to keep the truck convoys moving south. The following February a strategic hamlet program began; it forcibly relocated South Vietnamese peasants to fortified strategic hamlets. It was a direct result of the First Indochina War (19461954) between France, which claimed Vietnam as a colony, and the communist forces then known as Viet Minh. If you Americans keep being so arrogant and willingly turn a blind eye to your past faults and mistakes, somebody, whether Russian, Chinese, Iraqi, or whoever, will take advantage of it and you will pay dearly. The timing and scale of the offensive caught ARVN, the U.S. and other SEATO troops by surprise, however. Because the U.S. failed to achieve a military victory and the Republic of South Vietnam was ultimately taken over by North Vietnam, the Vietnam experience became known as the only war America ever lost. It remains a very controversial topic that continues to affect political and military decisions today. The Civil Rights Movement had produced significant victories, but many blacks had come to describe Vietnam as a white mans war, a black mans fight. Between 1961 and 1966, black males accounted for about 13 percent of the U.S. population and less than 10 percent of military personnel but almost 20 percent of all combat-related deaths. Even though they were once enemy combatants, North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese women veterans deserve an important place in our history of the Vietnam War. (First published in Russian in 1985, it appeared in English translation thirty years later in 2015.). The U.S. Constitution grants Congress sole authority to issue declarations of war. A month after she enlisted in 1965, the U.S. unleashed Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam intended to interdict transportation routes and stop the spread of communism. Ho Chi Minh had been educated in Paris. But as the Vietnam War dragged on, those arguments lost their allure until, in retrospect, they would sound absurd. Antiwar protests at home began to spread to the battlefield, with some US troops wearing peace symbols as they became increasingly perplexed and dispirited by the war. American drawdown continued, with only 43,000 personnel left in-country by mid-August. Karnow, Stanley. The U.S., possessing the largest foreign military presence, essentiallydirected the war from 1965 to 1968. In terms of body count, the U.S. and South Vietnam won a clear victory. President Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. U.S. popular culture did even worse. The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990, New York, 1991. They built trenches, repaired bombed roads, transported ammunition, and shot down U.S. planes bombing bridges, roads, and towns. For this reason, in Vietnam today it is known as the American War. After a few days, we sniffed the soil. The fact that we as a world were able to get past this war without a nuclear exchange between several countries is a victory for the world. Aged between 17 and 24, the all-female and mixed-sex units were stationed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to defend the military supply route against the U.S. air war. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. As we grow our technologies we have to become more careful how we handle conflicts. He closed by saying: To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers revealing that four successive U.S. presidents misled the public died on June 16. What did the Tet Offensive show the American people? The Communists were fanatical in their resolve the reunify the country as quickly as possible. Some antiwar protestors blamed the men and women who served in Vietnam, taunting them and spitting on them when they came home. Before the 1880s, the French controlled Vietnam. And they were prepared to accept unlimited losses to achieve their sacred objective., The North Vietnamese quickly realised that they did not have the military strength to drive the US from Vietnam; instead they sought to break the will of the US government to continue the conflict. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. Ho Chi Minh, Stalin and Churchill introduced the draft for women only when they were needed to replace men fighting on the frontlines. What is the main reason for delay in marriage? What was the role of the U.S. in the Vietnam Conflict? 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. We used shovels because I was afraid a digger would cut [my teammates] bodies into pieces. A different feeling prevailed among many within the U.S. government. Nguyn Th Kim Hu was one of one hundred and thirty eight thousand Youth Volunteers. How is it possible for mantle rock to flow? Tet Offensive, attacks staged by North Vietnamese forces beginning in the early hours of January 31, 1968, during the Vietnam War.
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