In 1949 the Communists took over China and began supporting the Vietminh by training guerrillas and supplying them with modern weapons. The French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and agreed to peace talks with the Vietminh and agreed to most of the demands. The Geneva agreement meant that France would grant independence to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam would be split in half along the 17th parallel 17 North, the strip of land between North and South Vietnam would become demilitarised and free elections would be held in 1956. Emperor Bao Dai was in control of the South and appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as Prime Minister, a year later Diem ousted Dai and turned the South into a Republic with him a President. Diem then refused to hold the elections, saying that the Communists wouldn’t allow free elections in the North. The US government supported him as well as the US public, but this was a breech of the Geneva Peace Agreement that the Americans promised to support and defend.
In 1954 Eisenhower gave 17 officers sealed order sending them to Saigon, by 1961 the number of ‘advisors’ had grown to 685. These men weren’t sent to fight, but to train the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) with modern weapons to fight the suspected invasion from the North.
President Eisenhower sent economic aid, including weapons and military equipment to support the South Vietnamese and military advisors. When President Kennedy took over he secretly increased the number of advisors to help combat the Vietcong (20,000 in 1961) as well as more equipment. Diem set up the strategic hamlets to place selected villages into; these were heavily fortified against VC infiltration. This didn’t work 1 in 8 were judged safe and the villagers that were placed in them lost the land they had gained under the Vietminh. Diem also continued to favour Catholics over Buddhists, which lowered his public opinion even more as a lot of the South Vietnamese people were Buddhist. The Vietcong were gaining support and popularity though Diem’s mistakes. The South Vietnamese and the US disliked Diem’s corrupt regime more and more even though they had supported him in the beginning. ARVN officers who were afraid that the US would withdraw their support in 1963 assassinated Diem and his brother. Kennedy knew about this but did nothing to stop it, but 3 weeks later, ironically Kennedy was assassinated himself in Dallas.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) came to office in November 1963 he decided to continue the policy to maintain advisors in Vietnam (now 16,000). But by May 1964 he came to the conclusion that Vietnam was “the biggest damm mess I ever saw”. In the following months he took America into the first war it ever lost, the beginning of it erupted onto newspapers on 5 August 1964. A US destroyer was attacked by North Vietnamese Torpedo Boats whilst it was spying on North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tongking (the Gulf of Tongking incident). This was exaggerated by Johnson to help persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tongking Resolution, this would give him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression”. Johnson moved carefully, he wanted the full support of the US public before he would go for the Vietcong or North Vietnamese Army. But in December 1964 he agreed to allow the USAF to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail (a secret route though the western hills) in Laos, but not North Vietnam before he felt he could justify it to the American people. Another reason is that he thought that this would cause tension between the US and the USSR. On the 6-7 of February 1965 the US base at Pleiku was mortared by Vietcong guerrillas, 8 US ‘advisors’ were killed over a hundred injured and ten aircraft were destroyed.
The US public was outraged; Johnson had all the excuse he needed to call in the troops and bomb North Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder began on 11 February 1965 with bombing attacks by both the US and the ARVN warplanes, they were aloud to bomb key military and industrial targets. Johnson gave 3 reasons for bombing North Vietnam, “To increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam, to convince the leader of North Vietnam that we will not be defeated, and to reduce the flow of men and supplies from the North.” Johnson used the air force as his main weapon to force the North Vietnamese into peace talks, he didn’t realise that bombing a people doesn’t work (the bombing of London in WW2), if it does anything it increases the resolve of the bombed people to fight back. Also 3,500 American Marines were sent into Danang to protect it from guerrilla attacks like the one on Pleiku, this time there was no deception of calling them ‘advisors’ they were sent to fight. Lieutenant-General William Westmoreland was put in charge of the military operations in Vietnam. In December 1964 there were 16,000 US servicemen in Vietnam by the end of 1965 there were 50,000 and it peaked at over 500,000 in 1968. Most of the troops were American but some were from Australia and New Zealand (members of SEATO). Even with the American forces in South Vietnam Johnson still supplied South Vietnam with equipment and trained more ARVN soldiers.
