How useful are sources A to C to explain why the United States became involved in the Vietnam war?

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                                                                                                                    Yasser Awad

How useful are sources A to C to explain why the

United States became involved in the

Vietnam war?

Source A:

Source A is about US fear of communism. The nature of this source is a presidential speech to the US public. It is clear that source A is a primary source as it says on the bottom ‘president Lyndon B Johnson speaking in April 1965.’ That shows that the source is a primary one. There is a great possibility that the US presidential advisors produced this source to give president Lyndon B Johnson a speech to publish in front of the US public, one month after operation ‘Rolling Thunder’, which was a military operation, in which the US forces used massive fire power against North-Vietnamese forces. The aim and purpose of this source is to persuade the US public to back and understand the United States’ violence in Vietnam, and to justify the president’s actions in Vietnam to his nation.

After the Second World War, France found it difficult to maintain control over indo-china. America supplied $1.2 billion of military aid to the French forces but in 1954, after a serious defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French government decided to withdraw from Vietnam. At the Geneva conference, May 1954, it was agreed that elections would be held within two years and that in the meantime Vietnam would be divided into two halves with North Vietnam under the control of communist, Ho Chi Minh. These elections did not take place and the United States continued to supply military aid and advisors to help protect South Vietnam from communist guerrillas (national liberation front).

On August 2nd 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the US destroyer Maddox. The United States government retaliated by bombing North Vietnamese naval bases and oil refineries. In March 1965, president Lyndon B Johnson started sending troops to South Vietnam to protect a government that appeared to be in danger of falling to the national liberation front.

The United States of America always feared the spread of communism. They believed that is South Vietnam had fallen to communist power then all of South East Asia would also fall into communist hands (the domino theory).      

The domino theory:

The theory had a precedent, of sorts: the Eastern Bloc. At the end of World War II, the Stalinist Soviet Union tried to starve West Berlin into submission during the Berlin Blockade, maintained tight control over East Germany, and mentored the rapid rise to power of totalitarian Communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. A totalitarian Communist regime also arose in Albania under Enver Hoxha, but without explicit Soviet assistance.

In Asia, Soviet forces occupied Manchuria at the end of World War II, and then expanded military aid to allow the Communists under Mao Zedong to regain control over China during the final stages of the Chinese Civil War from 1946 to 1949.

On June 25, 1950, Soviet ally Kim Il-Sung of North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea. The United Nations agreed to defend South Korea, and the crisis escalated into an explicit confrontation against the Chinese and Soviet military in the Korean War.

The aggressive momentum of this expansion of Communism in Europe and Asia echoed the swift and steady progress Nazi Germany had achieved just years earlier, first with its conquest of Poland, followed rapidly by conquests of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Moreover, the Soviet Union had armed itself with technical knowledge about the atomic bomb using information from its espionage network that included Klaus Fuchs embedded in the Manhattan Project, Donald Maclean and the Cambridge Five, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb on August 9, 1949, and a Soviet hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953, raised alarms that Soviet expansion and Stalinist-style domination would be unstoppable.

The Domino Theory was first espoused by President Eisenhower in an April 7, 1954 news conference and was originally applied to Indochina, which includes Vietnam. If Communists aided by the Soviet Union succeeded in conquering Indochina, Eisnehower argued, they would then successively conquer Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia. This would give them a geographically strategic advantage, from which they would be able to conquer Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.

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The theory was actively embraced by his successors, presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

The Truman doctrine:

The Truman Doctrine stated that the United States would support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

U.S. President Harry S. Truman made the proclamation in an address to Congress on March 12, 1947 amid the crisis of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). The doctrine was specifically aimed at assisting governments resisting communism. Truman insisted that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid that they needed, they would inevitably ...

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