was the vietnam war necessary

More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. [24], President Thiu, a former general, was fearful that his forces would be cut off in the north by the attacking communists; Thieu ordered a retreat, which soon turned into a bloody rout. The response ranged from horror to anger to disbelief. [221][222][223]:9596 Minh was then escorted to Radio Saigon to announce the surrender declaration (spontaneously written by Tung). A devout Roman Catholic, Dim was fervently anti-communist, nationalist, and socially conservative. The National Security Agency ran a crash program to provide U.S. forces with a family of security equipment, codenamed NESTOR, fielding 17,000 units initially; eventually 30,000 units were produced. He was determined to "draw a line in the sand" and prevent a communist victory in Vietnam. THE MOST IMPORTANT LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT: - War Room [258] According to Rummel, PAVN and Viet Cong troops killed 164,000 civilians in democide between 1954 and 1975 in South Vietnam, from a range of between 106,000 and 227,000 (50,000 of which were reportedly killed by shelling and mortar on ARVN forces during the retreat to Tuy Hoa). The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina. [40]:221 In the same month, Johnson pledged that he was not "committing American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land". For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous. The US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is due to stop in Central Vietnam's port city of Danang in a rare visit by a United States warship to a once wartime enemy . [259]:57 One civilian doctor, Eleanor Ardel Vietti, who was captured by Viet Cong on 30 May 1962, in Bun Ma Thut, remains the only American woman unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. [67][68] The war is widely considered to be a Cold War-era proxy war. March 8, 1965: The first U.S. combat troops arrive in Vietnam. The initial deployment of 20,000 troops was described as military support forces under a change of mission to permit their more active use in Vietnam. [124] Their weapons were principally of Chinese[281] or Soviet manufacture. Fully disillusioned at last, McNamara argued in a 1967 memo to the president that more of the same more troops, more bombing would not win the war. [75]:98 The Viet Minh left roughly 5,000 to 10,000 cadres in the south as a base for future insurgency. [165] In 1971, Australia and New Zealand withdrew their soldiers and U.S. troop count was further reduced to 196,700, with a deadline to remove another 45,000 troops by February 1972. In 1957, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, center, visited San Francisco, arriving on U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhowers private plane. Increasingly, each new regime was viewed by the communists as a puppet of the Americans; whatever the failings of Dim, his credentials as a nationalist (as Robert McNamara later reflected) had been impeccable. Two tanks from the 203rd Tank Brigade of the 2nd Corps crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace and the Viet Cong flag was raised above it at 11:30am local time. Furthermore, throughout the war there was found to be considerable flaws and dishonesty by officers and commanders due to promotions being tied to the body count system touted by Westmoreland and McNamara. They were however criticized for ignoring the political nature of the insurgency. By ignoring ARVN units, the U.S. commitment became open-ended. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong/PRG victory, Total military dead/missing:1,100,000Total military wounded:604,200(excluding GRUNK/Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao). [77], Various names have been applied to the conflict. Ho Chi Minh, pictured in 1962. [100]:575576, Unexploded ordnance, mostly from U.S. bombing, continues to detonate and kill people today and has rendered much land hazardous and impossible to cultivate. [139] Findings from RAND's Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project bolstered his confidence that an air war would weaken the Viet Cong. The Vietnam War - University of Houston Their 7,000 pages chronicled, in cold, bureaucratic language, how the United States got itself mired in a long, costly war in a small Southeast Asian country of questionable strategic importance. In Defense of Unjust WarMises Review 6, No. Others served as nurses and doctors in the battlefield and in military hospitals, or served in South Vietnam or America's intelligence agencies. [170]:104[169]:82 A month later a second offensive known as the May Offensive was launched; although less widespread, it demonstrated the Viet Cong were still capable of carrying out orchestrated nationwide offensives. As the PAVN launched their attack, panic set in, and ARVN resistance withered. [288], The Vietnam War was the first conflict where U.S. forces had secure voice communication equipment available at the tactical level. Agent Orange not only effected Vietcong but also US Infantry so that was more horrid than anything I could think of of. This phase would end when the enemy had been worn down, thrown on the defensive, and driven back from major populated areas. Its not difficult, though, to imagine why he would have ignored it. A top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 was published in the New York Times in 1971shedding light on how the Nixon administration ramped up conflict in Vietnam. Were the Hawks Right About the Vietnam War? - The Atlantic Over time, this policy damaged the public trust in official pronouncements. "In August 1964, the US government received word that two North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin" i've herd that this may not be true, that either the us destroyers attacked the vietnamese boats, or that nothing happened. Living in a male-dominated environment created tensions between the sexes. His successor, Richard Nixon, was even more adamant about the dangers to American power internationally if the Communists won, and 20,000 more Americans died in the failed effort to prevent that outcome after Johnson left office. [176] Public approval of his overall performance dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent, and endorsement for the war effort fell from 40 percent to 26 percent. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation. [363]:376377, On 25 May 2012, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation of the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. "[217], At the start of 1975, the South Vietnamese had three times as much artillery and twice the number of tanks and armoured cars as the PAVN. [350], Estimates of the number of casualties vary, with one source suggesting up to 3.8million violent war deaths in Vietnam for the period 1955 to 2002. If the town could be taken, the provincial capital of Pleiku and the road to the coast would be exposed for a planned campaign in 1976. aid. The Vietnam War has been featured extensively in television, film, video games, music and literature in the participant countries. The treaty also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956. "[140] An undated NSA publication declassified in 2005 revealed that there was no attack on 4 August. 16, 2023, 4:36 PM ET (AP) In South Vietnam, many women voluntarily served in the ARVN's Women's Armed Force Corps (WAFC) and various other Women's corps in the military. [244]:251 A report by Newsweek magazine suggested that at least 5,000 civilians may have been killed during six months of the operation, and there were approximately 748 recovered weapons and an official US military body count of 10,889 enemy combatants killed. If the vietnam war was about the north spreading communism articles say that vietnam battled america instead of saying that the south battled the north alongside america , so is it saying that america fought the whole vietnam gov. The ethnic minority peoples of South Vietnam, like the Montagnards (Degar) in the Central Highlands, the Hindu and Muslim Cham, and the Buddhist Khmer Krom, were actively recruited in the war. "[119][120], Kennedy's policy toward South Vietnam assumed that Dim and his forces had to ultimately defeat the guerrillas on their own. In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper contextas part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. pointed out. The top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, commissioned by the Department of Defense, detailed a long series of public deceptions on the part of the U.S. government. [160]:153156 Despite the continual conductance of major operations, which the Viet Cong and PAVN would typically evade, the war was characterised by smaller-unit contacts or engagements. During the war years, America's leaders insisted that military force was necessary to defend a sovereign nation South Vietnam from external Communist aggression. Some policymakers in Washington began to conclude that Dim was incapable of defeating the communists and might even make a deal with Ho Chi Minh. [180], Johnson declined to run for re-election as his approval rating slumped from 48 to 36 percent. The B-52s literally dropped their payloads in the lake." Learn about the war that enmeshed the United States in a battle against communism in Southeast Asia for more than twenty years. Direct link to Kim Kutz Elliott's post All American men had to r, Posted 2 years ago. Jennifer Rosenberg Updated on September 06, 2021 The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. That answer depends on whom you ask. During the war, more than one million rural people migrated or fled the fighting in the South Vietnamese countryside to the cities, especially Saigon. United States Vietnam Relations, 19451967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, vol. Meanwhile, the political situation in South Vietnam began to stabilise with the coming to power of prime minister Air Marshal Nguyn Cao K and figurehead chief of state, General Nguyn Vn Thiu, in mid-1965 at the head of a military junta. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War. Frequent Wind continued around the clock, as PAVN tanks breached defenses near Saigon. The defeat marked the end of French military involvement in Indochina. Opposition to the Vietnam War tended to unite groups opposed to U.S. anti-communism and imperialism,[228] and for those involved with the New Left, such as the Catholic Worker Movement. "[97]:265), the construction of the Berlin Wall in August, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October. Indeed, there was no longer a 'regime' in the sense of a relatively stable political alliance and functioning bureaucracy. Between 1969 and 1971 the U.S. Army recorded more than 900 attacks by troops on their own officers and NCOs with 99 killed. Communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969). 's for Refusing Orders", "Vietnam: An Infantryman's View of Our Failure", "Facts about the Vietnam Veterans memorial collection", "This Day in History 1974: Thieu announces war has resumed", "Congress Resists U.S. Aid In Evacuating Vietnamese", "Transcript of speech by President Gerald R. Ford - April 23, 1975", "Soldier from Thai Binh who put flag on the roof of Independence Palace", "Reunion of the Veterans organization of Tank Amour force in the South Vietnam", "Vietnam Tries to Create New Image 30 Years After End of War", "CBS News Poll: U.S. involvement in Vietnam", 1969: Millions march in US Vietnam Moratorium, "Russians Acknowledge a Combat Role in Vietnam", "Soviet rocketeer: After our arrival in Vietnam, American pilots refused to fly", "The Soviet-Vietnamese Intelligence Relationship during the Vietnam War: Cooperation and Conflict", "Torture: What the Vietcong Learned and the CIA Didn't", "The last missing woman from the Vietnam War", "Fact Check: Why Are So Few Women's Names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall? Her diaries were later published in Vietnam as ng Thy Trm's Diary (Last Night I Dreamed of Peace), where it became a best-seller and was later made into a film Don't Burn (ng t). But was he correct in his dire assessment of the stakes in Vietnam? While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The United States had provided funding, armaments, and training to South Vietnams government and military since Vietnams partition into the communist North and the democratic South in 1954. Nixon appealed to the "silent majority" of Americans who he said supported the war without showing it in public. By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s. [145] Between March 1965 and November 1968, Rolling Thunder deluged the north with a million tons of missiles, rockets and bombs. [97]:468. Johnson was furious and soon approved increasing the U.S. troop commitment to nearly 550,000. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. ", "Environmental Warfare and Ecocide Facts, Appraisal, and Proposals", "Industrial disasters from Bhopal to present day: why the proposal to make 'ecocide' an international offence is persuasive The Leaflet", "Ecocide: From the Vietnam War to International Criminal Jurisdiction? Of the war crimes reported to military authorities, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports indicated that 320 incidents had a factual basis. 2144, Combat Area Casualty File, November 1993. Direct link to Carla Cristina Almeida's post I have a question about t, Posted 6 years ago. As Robert F. Kennedy noted, "Dim wouldn't make even the slightest concessions. See the Vietnam War unfold through the gripping firsthand accounts of 13 brave men and women forever changed by their experiences. It was additionally aimed at bolstering the morale of the South Vietnamese. [40]:714 After having appealed unsuccessfully to Congress for $722 million in emergency aid for South Vietnam, President Ford had given a televised speech on 23 April, declaring an end to the Vietnam War and all U.S. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Second Indochina War" redirects here. "[100]:575 An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He created a research team to assemble and analyze Defense Department decision-making dating back to 1945. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 19751976 dry season. [97]:341 There was also persistent instability in the military, however, as several coupsnot all successfuloccurred in a short period of time. Was The Vietnam War Necessary Or Pointless? - A Bus On a Dusty Road Dim refused to make concessions to the Buddhist majority or take responsibility for the deaths. [24] Many songwriters and musicians supported the anti-war movement, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Barbara Dane, The Critics Group, Phil Ochs, John Lennon, John Fogerty, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Tom Paxton, Jimmy Cliff and Arlo Guthrie. Once again, Hanoi was surprised by the speed of their success. Map showing the division between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. [343] Meta-analyses of the most current studies on the association between Agent Orange and birth defects have found a statistically significant correlation such that having a parent who was exposed to Agent Orange at any point in their life will increase one's likelihood of either possessing or acting as a genetic carrier of birth defects. [174][175] By then it had become the bloodiest year of the war up to that point. [335][336] The environmental destruction caused by this defoliation has been described by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, lawyers, historians and other academics as an ecocide. [34]:270279, Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Hu[256] during the Tet Offensive and the killing of 252 civilians during the k Sn massacre. [188] In the two-year period following Tet, the PAVN had begun its transformation from a fine light-infantry, limited mobility force into a high-mobile and mechanised combined arms force. US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan to make port call in Vietnam Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the Vietnam issue fell to President Johnson. [40]:693694, On 20 March, Thieu reversed himself and ordered Hu, Vietnam's third-largest city, be held at all costs, and then changed his policy several times. Since the Eisenhower years, leaders had justified their decisions to escalate American involvement in Vietnam in part on the supposition that its alliances could unravel and Communist challenges to American interests could multiply if other nations had reason to question Washingtons resolve when it confronted challenges. [331] In 1977, United States president Jimmy Carter granted a full and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers with Proclamation 4483. Direct link to William H's post At the time of Vietnam th, Posted 7 years ago. [334] They were used to defoliate large parts of the countryside to prevent the Viet Cong from being able to hide weaponry and encampments under the foliage, and to deprive them of food. As he spoke to his national television audience, President Lyndon Johnson sought to bolster flagging public support for the Vietnam War by highlighting the calamities that might befall the United States if the Communists prevailed. It granted him broad latitude in handling the struggle against communism in Southeast Asia. In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there. Daniel Ellsberg, the government analyst and whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, has died at 92, Pop Quiz: 19 Things to Know About the Vietnam War, De-escalation, negotiation, and Vietnamization, The United States negotiates a withdrawal, 9 Questions About the Vietnam War Answered, https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War, Vietnam War - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11), Vietnam War - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers exposing Vietnam War secrets, dies at 92.

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