This caused the US army to have many disadvantages even though they had the best equipment in the world. The Vietcong looked the same as everyone else they were not like the US they did not wear uniforms and so they could easily blend into the crowd of people around them.
The Vietcong also used Guerrilla Warfare, which the US soldiers were not taught to counter against in military training and the Vietcong used what they had very well by creating booby traps, and creating small tunnels to hide from American soldiers. So the American soldiers were always fighting an uphill battle.
US soldiers also had a big problem with drugs; drugs were used frequently among young American soldiers, this meant that a lot of the time the soldiers became paranoid (after taking drugs like LSD) and couldn’t see the enemy that they were fighting. Because of all of the problems the Americans had they had to use many different weapons.
The US army had among the best weapons and counter weapons in the world. One of the most common weapons that the US army used in the Vietnam War was bombs. From the years 1965-1973 8 million bombs were dropped on North Vietnam. Inevitably South Vietnamese civilians were killed and villages were destroyed. The main objective of these bombs was to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail. Another weapon that had a devastating effect on the Vietnam War was napalm. These were bombs containing an inflammable jelly, which sticks to human beings. Again, inevitably, civilians were sometimes horribly burnt and killed. Another weapon that the US used during the war was defoliant. The US developed chemical defoliant sprays, like Agent Orange, to remove the leaves form jungle trees. This was depriving the Vietcong of cover.
Another defoliant was Agent Blue this defoliant killed crops this was so the Vietcong would have nothing to eat. In the Vietnam War the defoliant affected 688,000 acres of farming land. The Vietcong didn’t have to use as many weapons because of the advantages they had.
The Vietcong only had quite a few weapons and they were not as advanced as the American weapons. They had mines, grenades, rifles and unexploded bombs; they also were masters at setting up ‘booby traps’, the ‘booby traps’ consisted of heavy swinging balls, poisonous bamboo shoots, hole with sharp sticks in them and trip wires. The most deadly weapon that the Vietcong had in their arsenal was the mine. There were two types of mine the fragment mine and ‘Bouncing Betty’ antipersonnel mine with two charges: the first propels the explosive charge upward, and the other is set to explode at about waist level.
These type of weapons and Guerrilla tactics caused the American army to always be worrying what attack was going to come next so they had to use many different types of tactics to counter the Vietcong attacks.
In 1962 the USA’s first tactic was to set up ‘Strategic Hamlets’. These hamlets were set up to protect South Vietnamese peasants from the Vietcong. However this tactic didn’t quite work because South Vietnamese people told the Vietcong where these hamlets were and they were soon overrun by the Vietcong, this got them extra supplies in munitions. The next tactic the USA tried was called ‘Winning the Hearts and Minds’. This tactic was aimed at the peasant’s of South Vietnam this was an operation to show the people that the US were the good guys. To prove this they gave the people free medical care and helping them improve crop growth by giving them free advice. These two tactics did not quite work the way the US intended to so, so they started using different types of tactics.
In 1964 the US changed tactics and set up an offensive response, the operation was called ‘Rolling Thunder’, this was an operation to bomb North Vietnam. This operation lasted three years with over 1 million tonnes of bombs dropped.
In 1965 the US set up a more aggressive campaign called ‘Search and Destroy’, they did this because they could find no way of beating the Vietcong. So they wanted to destroy their hideouts and ‘neutralise’ anyone who was associated with the NLF. This was not as successful as the US had wanted it to be they killed hundreds of innocent people and burnt down villages. However they did manage to dispose of some Vietcong and their associates and burn down some Vietcong hideouts. An example of the mistakes that the US made in this type of operation was the ‘My Lai massacre’. This happened in 1968 and was where US soldiers killed three to four hundred innocent people including women, children and old men and burnt down houses and some even raped the women.
August 17th 1965 after a deserter from the 1st Vietcong regiment revealed that an attack was imminent against the U.S. Marine base at Chu Lai, the American army launched Operation Starlite. In this, the first major battle of the Vietnam War, the United States scored a resounding victory. Ground forces, artillery from Chu Lai, ships and air support combine to kill nearly 700 Vietcong soldiers. U.S. forces sustained 45 dead and more than 200 wounded.
September 14th 1966 in a new mission code-named Operation Attleboro, the U.S. 196th Brigade and 22,000 South Vietnamese troops began aggressive ‘search and destroy’ sweeps through Tay Ninh Province. Almost immediately, huge caches of supplies belonging to the NLF 9th Division were discovered, but again, there was no head-to-head conflict. The mission ended after six weeks, with more than 1,000 Vietcong and 150 Americans killed.
By 1966 the US were now in all out warfare this was demonstrated by their war with the Vietcong army at Hamburger Hill (also known as Operation Apache Snow). This was one of the biggest mistakes made by the USA throughout the whole war. For ten days 600 US soldiers battled with the Vietcong, 476 US troops were killed or wounded. The US eventually captured the land but a day after doing so they realised that they did not need that territory, and left. So it was a pointless loss of nearly 500 men.
In 1968 the ‘Phoenix Program’ (also known as Phuong Hoang) was set up. This was a program set up by the CIA to train Vietnamese people in the art of espionage to identify suspected Vietcong and communist sympathisers. The suspected people were then sent to ‘Death Camps’ and death squads would eliminate them. In the end 40,974 suspects were killed by way of this brutal tactic.
In January 1969 Operation Bold Mariner was set up, 12,000 peasants from the Batangan Peninsula were taken to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over whose guarded gate floated a banner saying,
‘We thank you for liberating us from communist terror.’
These people had been given an hour to get out before the USS New Jersey, began to shell their homes. After eight weeks of imprisonment they were ferried back to what was left of their villages, given a few sheets of corrugated metal and told to fend for themselves. When asked what they would live on until new crops could be raised, the Vietnamese camp commander said,
‘Maybe they can fish’.
The following Vietcong tactics countered these tactics. February 7th 1965 a U.S. helicopter base and advisory compound in the central highlands of South Vietnam was attacked by NLF commandos. Nine Americans were killed and more than 70 were wounded. They did this because they knew if they took out the air bases the Americans would find it hard to get men in and out and they would not be able to launch aerial attacks on the Vietcong. Two years later in 1967 the Vietcong started to concentrate on taking over the small towns but their next main attack was the TET offensive in 1968.
On 31 January 1968 combat erupted throughout the entire country in the TET (New Year) Offensive. Thirty-six of 44 provincial capitals and 64 of 242 district towns were attacked. The Vietcong even struck at the American embassy in the capital, Saigon. Once the shock and confusion wore off, most attacks were crushed within a few days. During those few days, however, the fighting was some of the most violent ever seen in South Vietnam. Fifty thousand Communist soldiers were killed during the TET offensive. Fourteen thousand South Vietnamese soldiers were killed. And two thousand American soldiers were killed. Thousands of Vietnamese civilians were killed, too. However the Vietcong still managed to prevail and win the war.
