US Policy towards Vietnam 1960-73

CONFLICT IN INDOCHINA-HAND IN ASSESSMENT

1. Critically analyse the nature & impact of US policy towards Vietnam between 1960 & 1973.

In 1960 John F Kennedy won the presidential election. His new administration had inherited the anti-communist, cold war stance of his predecessors Truman & Eisenhower. Eisenhower had theorized that if one Asian nation were to fall to communism another would soon follow and the cycle would continue, this theory came to be known as the ‘domino theory’.

In South-east Asia the Kennedy administration became increasingly aware of the growing Communist ‘threat’ to the capitalist South Vietnamese government, in his first speech to the American public as their President, Kennedy made it clear that he intended to continue Eisenhower's policy of supporting the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem.

Diem was a fierce nationalist and anti-communist, the US government hoped that Diem would help to rally support against North Vietnam’s leader Ho Chi Minh. Through the CIA Diem was installed as President. Diem however resorted to force to reform his country. He soon took control of the armed forces to eliminate rival military groups.

Kennedy had a good relationship with Diem, and in 1961 he arranged for him to receive the money necessary to increase his army from 150,000 to 170,000. He also agreed to send another 100 military advisors to Vietnam to help train the South Vietnamese Army. As this decision broke the terms of the Geneva Agreement, it was kept from the American public.

In 1962 Kennedy introduced the Strategic Hamlet Programme. For a time the governments of South Vietnam and the United States had been concerned about the influence of the National Liberation Front on Vietnamese peasants. In an attempt to prevent this they transported peasants into new villages in areas under the control of the South Vietnamese Army. A fence was built around the village and these were then patrolled by armed guards.

This strategy provided no relief and some observers’ claim that it actually increased the number of peasants joining the NLF. As one pointed out: "Peasants resented working without pay to dig moats, implant bamboo stakes, and erect fences against an enemy that did not threaten them but directed its sights against government officials".

In the majority of cases the peasants did not want to move so the South Vietnamese Army often applied force. This increased the resentment of the peasants towards Diem & his government.

Kennedy was worried, as even after the introduction of the SHP, membership for the NLF had risen by at least 300 per cent, with members now numbering 17,000 and controlling a fifth of all South Vietnamese villages.

These details were used to pressure Kennedy into supplying more military advisors to the south. He conceded to do so and by the end of 1962 there were 12,000 American advisors in Vietnam. Kennedy also made the decision to supply South Vietnam with 300 helicopters. Their American pilots were told not to become "engaged in combat" but this became an order that was difficult to obey. Although Kennedy denied it at the time, American soldiers were becoming increasingly involved in the fighting in Vietnam.

In 1963, a sixty-six year old monk in Vietnam sat down in the middle of a main Saigon road. He then was surrounded by a group of Buddhist monks and nuns who poured petrol over his head and then set fire to him. While this elderly monk was burning to death, the monks and nuns gave out leaflets calling for Diem's government to show "charity and compassion " to all religions.

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The government's response to this protest-suicide was to arrest thousands of Buddhists. Many disappeared and were never seen again. By August another five monks had committed suicide by setting fire to themselves. One member of the South Vietnamese government responded to these tragedies by telling a newspaper they would supply Buddhists who wanted to commit suicide with the petrol necessary.

These events convinced Kennedy that Diem would never be successful in uniting the South Vietnamese against communism. Several attempts had already been made to overthrow Diem but Kennedy had always instructed the CIA and the US military forces to protect him. In order to obtain a more popular leader of South Vietnam, Kennedy agreed to a coup. A CIA operative provided a group of South Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out a coup d’état with the promise that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diem, In November of 1963, President Diem was overthrown by the military coup d'état. After the generals had Diem overthrown they killed him.

Kennedy was doubtful about US Involvement in Vietnam now and was even considering withdrawing support & aid. However before any of these plans could come to fruition, on the 22nd November 1963 Kennedy whilst visiting Dallas was assassinated. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president.

Kennedy was seen by fellow politicians as young and naïve, he felt pressured to achieve in Vietnam so as not to appear ‘soft’. His policy of ‘incremental escalation’ whilst not officially ,

Johnson was a strong supporter of the Domino Theory and believed that the prevention of an NLF victory in South Vietnam was vital to the defence of the United States: "If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco".

Johnson, like Kennedy before him, came under pressure from his military advisors to take more 'forceful' action against North Vietnam and the NLF. The overthrow of Diem had not resulted in preventing the growth of the NLF. The new leader of South Vietnam, General Khanh, was doubtful that his own army was strong enough to prevent a communist victory.

Johnson was eager to do all he could to prevent an NLF victory in South Vietnam but was unwilling to take unpopular measures like sending troops to fight in a foreign war. For a while Intelligence officers working in Vietnam assumed that without the support of the Hanoi government the NFL would crumble, they consequently backed up bombing Hanoi to cut off supplies to the NFL. However it was claimed a better strategy would be to bomb selected targets such as military bases and fuel depots. Johnson was in favour of the idea but he felt that the American public would not support him without some sort of justification. He therefore gave permission for a plan to be put into operation that he gathered would eventually enable him to carry out the bombing raids on North Vietnam.

The plan known as Operation Plan 34A, the flagship of this operation was the USS Maddox. Plans were compromised when a N. Vietnamese patrol boat confronted the Maddox, now inside North Vietnamese waters, and open fired, to avoid embarrassment Johnson reacted in two ways, first he ordered the Maddox & a companion ship the Turner Joy to return to patrol in International Waters, second Johnson reported to Congress that North Vietnam had deliberately attacked a US ship. On the 4th August 1964 both the Maddox & companion ship reported ‘hostile attacks’. One day later Johnson submitted a resolution to Congress asking for ‘unlimited support to stop North Vietnamese aggression towards US ships. Congress approved what immediately became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in simple terms, it had two parts;
1. The US military could use ‘any and all resources against North Vietnam.
2. The United States could provide ‘direct combat support’ to any member of the South East Asia Treaty Organization. As South Vietnam was a member of SEATO, and now was ‘threatened’ by North Vietnam the US could justify its position.
i.e. Johnson was given complete control over military matters in the Vietnams.

Three months after being voted president, Johnson commenced Operation Rolling Thunder. Unlike a single bombing raid, the raids were to take place on a regular basis. The plan was to destroy the North Vietnamese economy and to force her to stop assisting guerrilla fighters in the south. Bombing was also directed at territory controlled by the NLF in South Vietnam. The plan was to last initially for eight weeks but it lasted for the next three years. In that time, the US dropped 1 million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

Chemicals were also sprayed on crops & deep jungle. Between 1962 and 1969, 688,000 acres of farmland were sprayed with a chemical called 'Agent Blue'. The aim of this exercise was to deny food to the NLF. However, there is that research suggests that the civilian population suffered most from the poor rice harvests that followed the spraying.

On 8th March, US marines, the first ‘official’ arrived in South Vietnam. This unexpected escalation of the war was presented to the American public as being short-term and did not cause much criticism at the time. A public opinion poll carried out that year indicated that nearly 80 per cent of the American public supported the bombing raids and the sending of combat troops to Vietnam.

In 1965, General William Westmoreland developed the aggressive strategy of 'search and destroy'. The objective was to find and then kill members of the NLF. The US soldiers found this difficult. As one marine captain explained: "You never knew who was the enemy and who was the friend. They all looked alike. They all dressed alike." Innocent civilians were often killed by mistake. As one Marine officer admitted they "were usually counted as enemy dead, under the unwritten rule 'If he's dead and Vietnamese, he's VC'."

“Its (National Liberation Front) goal is to conquer the south, to defeat American power and to extend the Asiatic domination of Communism ... Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Vietnam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise or protection. . We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else”. Johnson and many others at the time of the cold war saw communism as one entity not realizing Ho Chi Minh was a communist because he was a nationalist.

The overall strategy of Guerrilla Warfare is to involve the enemy in a drawn out war. The aim is to wear down gradually the much larger and stronger enemy. It is only when all the rural areas are under their control and they are convinced that they outnumber the opposition, that the guerrillas come out into the open and take part in conventional warfare. Therefore the NLF, who were based in thick forests, began taking control of rural villages. As their strength grew and the enemy retreated, they began to take the smaller towns.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a complex web of different jungle paths that enabled communist troops to travel from North Vietnam to areas close to Saigon. It has been estimated that the NLF received large amounts of aid from this route.

At regular intervals along the route the NLF built base camps. As well as providing a place for them to rest, the base camps provided medical treatment for those who had been injured or had fallen ill on the journey.

In September 1967, the NLF launched a number of attacks on American garrisons. General Westmoreland, the commander of US troops in Vietnam, was happy that the NLF was now engaging in open combat. At the end of 1967, Westmoreland was able to report that the NLF had lost 90,000 men. He told Johnson that the NLF would be unable to replace such numbers and that the end of the war was in sight.

On the 31st January,1968, 70,000 members of the NLF launched a surprise attack on more than a hundred cities and towns in Vietnam. It was now clear that the purpose of the attacks on the US garrisons in September had been to draw out troops from the cities.

The NLF even managed to attack the US Embassy in Saigon. Although they managed to enter the Embassy grounds and kill five US marines, the NLF was unable to take the building. However, they had more success with Saigon's main radio station. They captured the building and although they only held it for a few hours, the event shocked the self-confidence of the Americans. In recent months they had been told that the NLF was close to defeat and now they were strong enough to take important buildings in the capital of South Vietnam. Another disturbing factor was that even with the large losses of 1967, the NLF could still send 70,000 men into battle.

The Tet Offensive proved to be a turning point in the war. In military terms it was a victory for the US forces. An estimated 37,000 NLF soldiers were killed compared to 2,500 Americans. However, it illustrated that the NLF had unlimited supplies of men and women willing to fight for freedom. In March 1968, President Johnson was told by his Secretary of Defence that in his opinion the US could not win the Vietnam War and recommended a negotiated withdrawal. Later that month, President Johnson told the American people on national television that he was reducing the air-raids on North Vietnam and intended to seek a negotiated peace. However Johnson desperately did not want to be the president who ‘lost the war’.

By 1968, the Vietnam War was costing 66 million dollars a day. As a result. Johnson increased income taxes and cut back on his programme to deal with poverty. The American public were now becoming increasingly weary of the war, media coverage was phenomenal and spawned various atrocity stories making people doubt the war even more, protests were widespread with Vietnam veterans attending and burning the medals they had received.

On the 31st March 1968 Johnson told the American public he would not run for a second term in office, this decision was probably made due to the growing disdain of the war.

Richard Nixon won the election in 1968. During the presidential campaign Nixon promised to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War. However, negotiations with North Vietnam at the Paris peace talks were unproductive and Nixon decided to escalate the war by bombing NLF bases in Cambodia.

Soon after taking office. Nixon introduced his policy of "vietnamization". The plan was to encourage the South Vietnamese to take more responsibility for fighting the war. It was hoped that this policy would eventually enable the United States to withdraw gradually all their soldiers from Vietnam.

In June 1969, Nixon announced the first of the US troop withdrawals. The 540,000 US troops were to be reduced by 25,000. Another 60,000 were to leave the following December.

By 1972 Nixon was convinced that a victory in Vietnam was unobtainable. In October, 1972, Henry Kissinger, advisor on National Security Affairs came close to agreeing to a formula to end the war. The plan was that US troops would withdraw from Vietnam in exchange for a cease-fire and the return of 566 American prisoners held in Hanoi. It was also agreed that the governments in North and South Vietnam would remain in power until new elections could be arranged to unite the whole country. However the US effectively left S. Vietnam to fight by itself after so many years of aid and support.

The US left a significant mark on Vietnam, the ‘rainbow herbicides’ used to deforest the jungles had left many peasants poisoned, chemicals such as napalm left many scarred for life & there were many illegitimate children born with American fathers, not to mention that S. Vietnam was now fighting a war which it was not prepared for.

BIBLIOGRAPHY-
BOOKS-
Cantwell, Thomas, Contested Spaces, Conflict in Indochina (Sydney, McGraw Hill 2005)
Ringer, Ron, Excel HSC, Modern History (Sydney, Pascal, 2006)
Logevall, Fredrik, Origins of the Vietnam War, (Harlow, Pearson Ed., 2001)

WEBSITES-

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/timeline/
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/