As the strategic Hamlet programme hadn’t worked the USA decided that they would bomb the north to try and stop the north supplying the VC. Initially the targets were military installations and munitions factories but as the supplies were still getting through the Americans decided to try and persuade the Vietnamese into taking part in peace talks through blanket bombing the north using B52 bombers. The bombing only strengthened the Resolve of the North Vietnamese and the VC were still obtaining supplies from the north Via the Ho Chi Minh trail. The bombing was a failure the VC even made booby traps out of the unexploded shells.
As the US could not break the Vietcong’s will or stop the supplies they decided they would have to kill as many of them as possible. To do this the Americans greatly increased the number of ground troops they had. The USA was now a lot stronger and would have been able to destroy the Vietcong so the VC decided they would avoid US troops where possible. The VC went around in small groups of 3-10 men so that if any of them were captured and interrogated then little information as to there whereabouts was lost. The VC rarely confronted US troops accept in ambushes or where victory was certain. The VC made them selves even harder to locate by wearing the same clothes as the peasants, which meant the US troops found it difficult to tell the difference between friend and foe.
As the VC were trying to avoid combat with US ground troops they made booby traps from unexploded bombs and primitive materials such as bamboo sticks. The traps were designed to severely injure rather than kill to further demoralise and frustrate American soldiers. The VC was also helped by the geography of Vietnam; they knew the areas better than the Americans and they were more used to the climate. They used the jungle to hide in and operated at night.
As a lot of US troops were being killed or wounded by booby traps and no VC were being found or killed as they were hiding in the jungle the Americans decided that it would be a good idea to destroy this jungle and then the VC would be forced out into open warfare. If this happened the Vietcong would easily be defeated by the superior American firepower. The US sprayed defoliants on the jungle to kill off the vegetation so the VC couldn’t hide; it was also sprayed on some crops to cut off the Vietcong’s food supply. The two main defoliants uses were agent orange (chemical) and napalm (Jellied petroleum). This tactic was not a success; the napalm was often dropped on innocent people and it caused 5th degree burns (through to the bone), agent orange was found to contain a dioxin which caused cancer this affected many American handlers.
To avoid the bombs and the defoliants the VC went into underground tunnels. At first these tunnels were simple but they soon became complex. They housed things such as hospitals for the wounded, sleeping chambers, conference rooms and they could also be used to store weapons, equipment and food. Some tunnels even ran under US military bases, the tunnels around Saigon ran for 320km. American soldiers couldn’t really get into the tunnels because the entrances were too small for them. The tunnels also contained booby traps and false tunnels.
The US saw the tunnels as a sign of VC weakness; the VC had retreated into the tunnels because they had lost the will to fight, but if they had known the true extent of the tunnels then they might have been able to see them as a sign of the VC’s determination.
The VC had been hiding in the jungle, the bombing to get rid of the jungle had been a failure, the VC had retreated into the tunnels because of the bombing and become even harder to find. So the Americans decided they would have to try a new tactic to root the VC out, this was Search and Destroy. This entailed going into a village looking for any VC or suspicious equipment and if any equipment was found it and the village were burnt to the ground. If the villages were found with weapons they would be interrogated. Livestock and crops would also be destroyed if the village were believed to be a base of VC operations. Search and destroy was a failure; if the village wasn’t against the Americans before a raid took place it sure was after the raid had finished. Also many villages that weren’t involved in VC activity were also burnt down in the raids. At My Lai 16th/march/1968 American ground troops shot dead over 300 men, woman and children who had nothing to do with the VC. The incident was covered by the US military the secrets of the horrific act did not come to light until eighteen months later.
To hide in the villages from the US soldiers on the search and destroy missions the VC would wear ordinary peasants clothes not a military uniform this meant that the US troops could not distinguish between the VC and the ordinary peasants.
The VC was constantly gaining in strength, size and power. One reason for this was the Ho Chi Minh trail. It was a 1000km rout way, which ran from North to South Vietnam along the mountainous borders of Laos and Cambodia. In some place the trail was 80km wide, it contained refuge spots, also there was a workforce of 40,000 to keep the supplies flowing although conditions on the trail were bad for the workforce and the trail was often bombed by the USAAF planes it was still successful in getting supplies such as heavy guns and surface to air missiles from the Soviet Union and food, ammunition and hand guns from china to the VC.
The VC was also helped by the NVA especially during the TET offensive this began on the 31st/january/1968. Over 100 cities, towns and military installations were attacked by the VC and NVA, this took the American and South Vietnamese troops by surprise as they had assumed that the North would have been celebrating the TET festival. The VC incurred heavy losses in the offensive; the north regarded it as a failure. For American officials it added up to a defeat for the communists. The impression given by the American press was very different, their reporting of the incident gave the impression of an American and South Vietnamese defeat and of a war that America could never win. The TET offensive was an important turning point because it turned public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Johnson knew he would not be re-elected and so he turned down his party’s nomination to run as president. He also knew that peace talks would now have to take place.
In concluding I believe that it was never really possible for the American tactics to succeed the main reason for this is the US needed the South Vietnamese peasants on their side and all their tactics did was hurt them. The strategic Hamlet policy forcefully removed them from their homes and charged for this, the dropping of defoliants gave them horrible burns (napalm) and poisoned them (agent orange) and the search and destroy left them with no homes, livestock or crops. The geography of Vietnam also wasn’t suitable for the main American tactic of open warfare; it suited the VC’s tactic of guerrilla warfare. The Americans were always backing a loser who didn’t have the will to fight its enemy.