Describe the military tactics used by both the USA and the Vietcong forces in Vietnam in the 1960’s.

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David Gray Vietnam Coursework: task 2

Describe the military tactics used by both the USA and the Vietcong forces in Vietnam in the 1960's.

The military tactics used by the USA and the Vietcong forces in Vietnam in the 1960's were very different. The USA with its modern fighting equipment believed it could win the war against the Vietcong whose Guerrilla tactics had been used to defeat both the Japanese and the French and could now be used effectively against the USA. The Americans regarded the Vietnamese as poor and backward peasants, underestimating the idealism of people who were fighting to defend their homeland. The Vietcong could not have succeeded in expelling the American forces without support from the USSR and China. The Cold War confrontation continued in Vietnam, a civil war hijacked by the USA, China and the USSR.

The military tactics used by the USA in Vietnam can be defined by: -

'The art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation to secure the objectives of natural policy by the application of force, or the threat of force.'

(Col Harry Summers, the Vietnam War Almanac).

American tactics at the beginning of the offensive were: attrition, bombing, the use of strategic hamlets, defoliation and search and destroy. These tactics were chosen because of the successes which the USA had fighting against Germany and Japan in World War 2 and against North Korea and China during the Korean War. These tactics optimised America's material and technological strengths and their perception that as a 'superpower', the heavy use of superior and sophisticated weapons would win the war.

'The USA had never lost a war and it seemed that we were ordained to play cop to the communist robber and spread our political ideas around the world.'

(Source C Edexcel booklet).

Attrition, a traditional method of warfare was one of the first tactics used by the USA. The aim was to wear down the enemy by killing so many of its soldiers, that it could not carry on effective resistance. General Westmoreland (USA military commander) believed that conventional, overwhelming US firepower would succeed in destroying the Vietcong. The problem with this tactic was although great suffering was inflicted on the Vietcong it was never enough to make them concede. The Vietcong were fighting to expel the 'American Imperialists' and their war was a total one. 'For the Americans, the war was intense but nonetheless a limited one, far from home.'
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(PT Riddick, Modern History review, 1992.) During the war the South Vietnamese lost between six hundred thousand and one million people, about three per cent of their population. Attrition did not seem to be achieving the aim of making the enemy concede, the fighting was escalated and resulted in the use of yet more force.

The Tonkin resolution enabled the US to commit forces directly to the fighting. An intensive bombing campaign started. More bombs were dropped by the US on Vietnam than on the whole of Europe during WW2. The tactic was to locate the ...

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