vietnam war

By this time, anti-Diem groups had banded together to form the Viet Cong, a group against which the U.S. centered a major strategic policy program. The Viet Cong, by 1960, had evolved into the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Since guerrilla warfare, propaganda, and recruiting were the Viet Cong’s tactics, American strategists devised "strategic hamlets," relocation sites designed to keep Vietnamese isolated from Viet Cong influence. However, this plan backfired as the relocated Vietnamese became disgruntled, rebelled from the hamlets, and eventually joined the Viet Cong in droves.

vietnam war

The Vietnam War was a long, bloody conflict that ended with the United States’ first major military upset. It had huge ramifications, nationally and globally. The French had occupied Indochina since the 1800s. At the First Indochinese War, which lasted from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s, Communist forces defeated American-aided French troops in Vietnam. President Eisenhower, reacting to the Communist show of might, tried to establish an anti-Communist government just south of the seventeenth parallel.

vietnam war

The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam and part of their wider strategy of containment, The North Vietnamese government viewed the war as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state. U.S. military advisors arrived beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with U.S. troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962.

vietnam war

From 1968 to 1973 efforts were made to end the conflict through diplomacy. In January 1973, an agreement reached and U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam and U.S. prisoners of war were released.  In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was reunited.

vietnam war

The 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese turned many Americans against the war. The next president, Richard Nixon, advocated Vietnamization, withdrawing American troops and giving South Vietnam greater responsibility for fighting the war. His attempt to slow the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam by sending American forces to destroy Communist supply bases in Cambodia in 1970 in violation of Cambodian neutrality provoked antiwar protests on the nation’s college campuses.

vietnam war

The military condition deteriorated, and by 1963 South Vietnam had lost the fertile Mekong Delta to the Vietcong.  In 1965, Johnson escalated the war, commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and committing ground forces, which numbered 536,000 in 1968. 

vietnam war

In 1956, South Vietnam, with American backing, refused to hold the unification elections. By 1958, Communist-led guerrillas known as the Viet Cong had begun to battle the South Vietnamese government. To support the South’s government, the United States sent in 2,000 military advisors, a number that grew to 16,300 in 1963.