However these world issues were not the only things causing the US to become more involved in Vietnam but also what was happening in Vietnam itself. We have to remember that the war that America involved itself in was actually a civil war in which they had no right to interfere. The problem that started it off was Ho Chi Minh (bringer of light). Ho Chi Minh was the leader in Vietnam. He studied in Paris and the USSR and learnt communist tactics and politics. He then returned to Vietnam and brought together its communist groups as the Indo-Chinese communist party. Then in 1939 he helped the US to defeat the Japanese by using US weapons and strategies to defeat them. However after the war the victorious countries (one of which being America) didn’t help Ho Chi Minh to gain independence from French rule. In fact the US gave munitions to the French to help them to win. This caused a major rift between the North and the US which deepened them further in the Vietnam crisis. Then the battle of Dien Bien Phu came where the French took a sufficient battering at the hands of Ho Chi Minh and the North. This caused the French to move back and loose more of Vietnamese territory to the North. The significance of this was the fact that a small South East Asian country had defeated a huge European nation. Then at the Geneva Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, it was decided that the French had to slowly reduce the number of troops it had in Vietnam and then in two years time there was to be a national election (which never took place) to unite the two halves after at the conference it was decided that Vietnam should be divided into two (North and South) along the 17th parallel. Then North however still provided support to communist groups in the south.
The US then further involved them in Vietnam by appointing a corrupt puppet government to take control of the south. By doing this they would have an active part in the running of the south of Vietnam which would be allowing them to take shots at Russia to give them yet another further advantage in the cold war. The president of this corrupt government was a man named Ngo Ding Diem. This caused problems mainly because he was a catholic and the majority religion in Vietnam is Buddhist. He oppressed the Buddhists by not allowing them to celebrate Buddha’s Birthday which caused Buddhist Monks the most famous of which is Quang Duc to Burn themselves in the streets as a form of protest. Then he came up with the bright idea (with US help) of creating strategic hamlets. These were villages set out in the countryside near the 17th parallel that were bordered off by fences. Diem thought that this would stop a guerrilla advance into the jungle but he was wrong. When the war came this allowed the fighters to gain access by working in the day and fighting at night. This also made Diem more unpopular due to the fact that people in the hamlets couldn’t leave and do normal things such as go to the temple or visit their ancestors graves. He also became more unpopular due to corruption in government. This was the fact that all governmental jobs and jobs in high authority positions went to his family or close friends who were also catholic. This ment that the voice of the majority was not being heard and this made him more unpopular on an international level. The US could see that this was making them unpopular on a international level also which is the reason that they allowed Diem’s own army generals to assassinate him in November 1963 just one month after president John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. After Diem was assassinated a whole string of puppet governments working for the US was introduced. However this allowed the north to gain more territory and more of a tactical advantage in the south because they were all as corrupt and as useless as the government in place before them. This was a civil war and the US had no right to be involved but they were to gain an advantage over Russia in the Cold War.
John F Kennedy was the US president when the build up to this conflict started. He was known as a ‘Dove’. This is the political term for a person who does not like to become involved in conflict with other countries when it could potentially put the safety of his own country at risk. JFK tried to solve the war by providing the south with military and economic advisers. His policy was to ‘Vietnamise’ not ‘Americanise’ the war. This was evidence of President Truman’s doctrine being put into play without using excessive force or involving military action and un-necessarily jeopardizing American lives. This was not involving the US in affairs with Vietnam as to get at the Russians in the Cold War as much as in the past. However JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in November 1963 which made way for a new president. Lyndon Baines Johnson.
LBJ was the newly appointed president after JFK. LBJ was known as a ‘Hawk’. This is the political term for a person who thinks that only excessive force from the military of his country can solve the problems of the world. In this case it was to defeat the Vietcong and to stop the spread of communism through the domino theory. He was willing to increase us involvement to win the war over communism and also to add another ‘victory’ over Russia in the Cold War to the statistics.
LBJ now started to completely increase US involvement in the war. This was started by the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. This was when the US ship the Maddox was allegedly attacked in the Gulf by North Vietnamese patrols. However this was never proven and therefore is seen as a false reason for the US to start ‘scoring points’ against the Russians in the Cold War. Then to add further involvement the US government passed the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution. This law gave LBJ a ‘blank cheque’ and allowed him to wage an all out war against North Vietnam. Then LBJ went all out to ‘Americanise’ the war. He sent 500,000 US troops to replace the South Vietnamese army in fighting the war against the North. Then he provided the ‘icing on the cake’ by launching operation ‘Rolling Thunder’. This was when the US sent bombers to drop a blanket of bombs on North Vietnam to try to gain an advantage. It didn’t work.
LBJ wanted to end this, what he famously called ‘A Bitch of a War’, quickly so that he could focus governmental money on building his ‘Great Society’. This was his plan to solve racism, poverty and poor education in the USA. He also wanted to end the war quickly so that the USA could ‘Keep Face’ and not loose their title as a super power due to loosing to such a small and underdeveloped country such as Vietnam. What LBJ didn’t realise is that increasing US involvement due to the Cold War conflict between themselves and Russia was not a good idea.
In the end the US lost to the North Vietnamese and looked like fools. They had wasted thousands of men’s lives due to a point scoring contest in the cold war with Russia. They lost the war because they could only win a conventional war. What made them look even worse was the fact that the great nation of America had lost to a group of untrained, unprepared and inexperienced South-East Asian people. The north and south then united as one communist state and then the domino theory was proved wrong. After Vietnam fell communist not on other country around it fell communist after it. In the end it was just on big contest with the Russians in the Cold War and the Americans had lost terribly.