G.C.S.E History coursework
Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam in the 1950’s and 60’s?
Before 1950, the Japanese had taken Vietnam from French rule, and subsequently the Vietnamese started to form resistance groups in southern China. They practiced guerilla tactics and called themselves the Vietminh, and were led by Ho Chi Minh, a leading Vietnamese Communist. Their main objective was essentially nationalist, to achieve independence. They soon became Communist so that they could fund the resistance of France and Japan, and Ho was later reported to say that “it was patriotism and not Communism that originally inspired me.” The USA sympathized with the Vietnamese at this stage, as they did not want to see old colonial powers back in charge.
By 1950 the USA’s view had completely changed due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which declared that America would now take a major role in world affairs. The USA was to send money, weapons and advisors to any country, anywhere in the world that was fighting Communism, as by this time, America was scared that the Soviet Union wanted to take over the world, and that Vietnam was just a ‘domino’ in the sequence, with China being at the start of the ‘Communist chain’ in 1949. The ‘Domino Theory’ reasoned that if one country fell to Communism, then every country in South East Asia would. President Eisenhower believed that “The loss of any country in South East Asia (to communism) could lead to the loss of all Asia, then India and Japan, finally endangering the security of Europe.” This was a policy known as ‘containment’. Up until this time, America had shown little interest in European affairs, and was, in my opinion just acting as the ‘world’s policeman’, because US morale was high after WWII, and they were an undefeated superpower. The French asked Eisenhower for backup, but America had just come out of the Korean War with a heavy loss of 40,000 American soldiers and was not prepared to see more Americans die over what they saw as an insignificant country that could easily be crushed. Instead, in 1949, the first physical American intervention took place, as the new Communist China under Mao was supplying Minh with weapons, so they decided to supply France with money, weaponry and clothing. But the more the French intervened, the more hated they became.
