President Kennedy came to power in 1961 and by this stage whole areas of South Vietnam were in open rebellion, he was very concerned that American money and arms had not saved the South Vietnamese government so he began to send advisers to Vietnam. These advisers were highly skilled and they trained the South Vietnamese army to use the weapons and taught them how to fight a war, many of the advisers could even speak Vietnamese and by 1963 there was 10,000 of them in Vietnam. The USA agreed to equip 20,000 soldiers in the S.Vietnam army and they continued to give money, in 1961 the USA spent $270 million on support of South Vietnam. Kennedy also used the tactic of strategic hamlets; he knew that South Vietnams peasants supported the communist group the NLF so advisers thought that the US had a better chance of winning if they stopped the peasants making contact with the NLF. They took the peasants out of their villages and put them in the strategic hamlets that were surrounded by barbed wire and were controlled by Americans, around 40% of the Vietnamese population was moved in this way.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and he was replaced by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson decided to escalate US involvement in South Vietnam, when a US ship was attacked in the gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese in 1964 he used this as his excuse to launch a full scale war on Vietnam. This was called the Tonkin Resolution. Johnson’s tactic was to use bombs; he believed he had to stop the North Vietnamese getting supplies to the NLF so the air force bombed strategic targets in North Vietnam such as army bases and bridges. The Americans could not see who was supplying the NLF because the jungle was so thick and they weren’t familiar with the jungles so they dropped chemical bombs to destroy the trees. The napalm that was used to clear the undergrowth also stuck to human flesh and burned away the flesh. Johnson brought the biggest increase in US involvement, during his years in power he dramatically increased the number of troops in Vietnam, when he took over power just 15,000 troops were in Vietnam and when he left in 1968 there was 535,000 soldiers. He also spent more on the war on Vietnam than on Education and Welfare.
The war had left Johnson so unpopular he didn’t even stand for election again, Richard Nixon replaced him as president and he began to decrease America’s involvement in Vietnam. Nixon started to remove US troops but he continued to supply the South Vietnamese with money and arms, but he decided to let the South Vietnamese themselves do the fighting, this policy was called Vietnamisation. Nixon didn’t want the communists to win so he continued to bomb North Vietnam, America were also bombing Laos and Cambodia secretly; he wanted ‘peace with honour’.
An armistice was finally signed in 1973 at Paris and the American soldiers went home. An agreement had been made but fighting dragged on for another 2 years with the communists winning and in 1975 the NLF captured the Southern capital Saigon and renamed it after their leader Ho Chi Minh who died in 1969. The US had to change their tactics so often because they couldn’t deal with the North Vietnamese, they were unable to catch them with their use of hit and run style guerilla tactics, the Vietnamese had the advantage of knowledge of the local area and they could mingle in with the peasants because they had no uniform.
