It was in such an atmosphere that the forces that made the US withdraw from Vietnam, where the war was increasingly becoming a stalemate as the US forces expected that their superior firepower would easily win against a third world power that lacked its resources. There were very real differences in the character of the two forces fighting the war. The American Army was composed of young draftees usually aged around nineteen and tended to be from blue collar or ethnic minority groups. They were often very reluctant to be involved. At this time there was a revolution in the youth culture throughout the world, which was very strong in the US. It was the height of the ‘hippie’ age and there was a very strong anti-war movement. This lead to an increasing group of draft dodgers. The soldiers that were drafted turned to drugs and there were high incidences of suicide and mental illness among the troops. The Vietcong had very strong morale in contrast. They were fighting for their own country. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese army were effective, motivated and committed to their cause. They also developed Guerrilla raids and ambushes which were effective against the USA. They were fighting for their own country. They also tried to stay close to the US troops so that the US Air Force could not bomb their lines without endangering the US troops. They had a strong charismatic leader in Ho Chi Minh, who was a national hero after the Second World War and was leading a government that was giving land to the peasants as opposed to the South Vietnamese who were following a more capitalist agenda.
The tactics used by both sides merely showed the inability of the US to fight a war where it did not dictate the manner in which it would be fought. Vietnam was an agricultural country in the third world and the terrain meant that the war could not be fought with pitched battles which the US was used to. The North Vietnamese fought a war which suited the terrain and relied on surprise small scale attacks using long tunnels to attack the US troops and the ARVN. The Vietcong could then melt back into the Vietnamese peasant farms. When the TET Offensive of 1968 became bogged down the inability of the US to commit itself to a full scale war and to also pursue the Vietcong into the deep forest became clear. ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ started in February 1965 and was to last eight weeks and instead lasted for more than three and a half years. It was finally realised that there was nothing to really bomb except for forests in the hope that Vietcong supply routes would be broken but the country was so large that it could not work. Whilst there were Human Rights abuses on both sides, the US seemed to be committing them regularly. These were publicised all over the world. These showed the US soldiers committing atrocities such as the My Lai Incident in 1968 and made the public realise it was not a war being fairly fought. The world also saw the Chief of the Saigon police shot a Vietcong suspect in the head in the street without a trial and obviously not in self-defence. All these efforts to bring a small third world country to surrender proved futile and were counter productive in the USA.
President Nixon decided to seek peace with North Vietnam at the Paris peace talks in May 1968 but the South Vietnamese President Thieu would not agree and these failed.
At home in the USA, the population became increasingly critical of the war, how it was being run and were fully against any war being waged in a foreign country. There was a shift in public opinion and by 1968 the Americans were opposed to the war. The tactics of the US army, such as during the TET Offensive, My Lai, the use of chemical weapons on the forest with napalm and Agent Orange and the US army’s failure to make significant gains, were being openly shown on television and the media. This was the first war where there was full media coverage with almost instantaneous broadcasting of the events. This alone made the public uneasy. The public became dissatisfied with the use of their taxes to fight such a war. This coincided with a radical shift in popular culture in the US. There was a strong youth movement represented by the hippies, and this was shown to involve the learned of the US when there were large antiwar movements and protests in the USA and all over the world. This was lead by a strong intellectual group in Europe, such as in England and France. The government in France was crippled by a general strike in 1968 and whilst it was not aimed at the US, there was a strong link to it and support for the indigenous of the community in North Vietnam. This reinforced the opinion of the US public that it was not a war that was supported worldwide and that it stood alone.
During this time there was growing unrest about the accountability of the leaders to their citizens and that their power went unchecked. There was also a growing fight for civil rights in the US by Afro-Americans which showed that the black population supplied a larger proportion of the drafted recruits for the war than other groups. These protest groups were lead by charismatic leaders such as Bob Dylan in music and Martin Luther King, who was a civil rights leader and a religious leader. The attempt to draft Mohammed Ali showed the US population the dept of feeling in the black community and that there was something radically wrong with race relations in the USA and that the pursuit of the war merely antagonised these more. The war was bought home to the US population when in May 1970 four students were shot dead at Kent State University. In March 1968 President Johnson had not sought re-election because he thought the war had ruined his chances of winning and now President Nixon began to seek peace and to hand the conduct of the war over to the South Vietnamese in a policy of ‘Vietnamization’ or ‘de-Americanization’. The effects of the war on the US population were dividing it into different groups and it was becoming more unstable. There was an opinion that this was too high a price to pay for a war that it realised now that it could not win.
It was a change in US foreign policy that lead to the USA to withdraw from Vietnam. This change in policy was prompted by the lack of success in the war, the growing unrest at home and around the world and a realisation that different tactics had to be used to prevent the spread of communism. It was decided that the USA would not commit itself to full scale war again abroad. Instead it would fund anti-communists in their own countries and that the USA would not become involved with its own troops. This is seen in President Nixon’s policy of ‘Vietnamization’, where the South Vietnamese population were to do their own fighting with US advisers. This was consolidated eventually in 1973 by Congress when it passed ‘The War Powers’ Act that limited the President’s power to wage a war outside the USA. It was seen by the US population and especially the US government that it had been given a ‘bloody nose’ and it had been humiliated in the eyes of the world and it had to extract itself from the mess. Nixon opened secret talks with the North Vietnamese and in 1975 Saigon eventually fell to the North Vietnamese because they lacked the support of the USA.
It was the combination and the interaction between the different tactics of the armies, the media coverage, and the questioning of the war in the USA that led the USA to withdraw its troops from Vietnam. The change in approach to foreign policies and war by the USA meant that it no longer wished to become embroiled in such a war. This was to last until after September eleventh when it began an aggressive foreign policy but it has been careful not to become fully engaged in foreign countries for long periods because of the humiliation it suffered in withdrawing from Vietnam
