Why did America lose the War in Vietnam?
![Authors Avatar]()
by
vdshjffjdhgdfh (student)
Why did America lose the War in Vietnam
In America, the Tet Offensive was deemed a huge success in preventing the Vietnamese from rising up in 1968. However, within five years, President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he was withdrawing from Vietnam and would not stand for re-election. This stark reversal in fate could have been caused by a number of reasons; the most important being that the Americans did not succeed politically or militarily in Vietnam. The reason for this was both the internal and external cost the war had on America. The internal elements are to do with the fact that the United States lost the public support for the war because of the number of casualties, mistaken government policies and the activist of the anti-war movement. The external costs have to do with the nature of the war itself which required guerrilla tactics which the soldiers were not trained in and the mistaken assumptions that the United States carried into the war. These assumptions included the American notion that they were fighting against Communism, obeying the idea of the domino theory, rather that the independent struggle by the Vietnamese which it actually was, and it was for this reason that America lost the war in Vietnam.
One reason why America lost the war was that the soldiers carried with them strong preconceptions on how to fight; fierce head on battles with a clear definition of who the enemy were, as all their previous battles had been. America had very high morale before this war as they had intervened in both the two World Wars and the Korean war, and this continued America’s reputation of never having been defeated militarily. So when America thought that Vietnam might become communist (the domino effect), they thought that they could repeat their previous victories and liberate the South from the communist North. However, in Vietnam there was Guerrilla warfare, in which the soldiers had no training. This caused fatal flaws in both the strategy and policy. The nature of the American army was very ineffective because of the terrible morale, horrific conditions and heavy drug-taking which occurred. Also vastly unreported was the frequent ‘fragging’ of officers which caused heavy unrest. The one-year tour of duty deprived units of experienced leadership. As one observer noted "we were not in Vietnam for 10 years, but for one year 10 times."
The Americans found it very difficult to fight in Vietnam as despite the fact that they outnumbered the Vietnamese (both the Vietcong and NVA) by at least 3:1, they did not know who they were fighting against as there was no way to distinguish between a civilian and a soldier. While the North Vietnamese fought in the more conventional manner, the South Vietnamese, in order to overcome this great disadvantage, stayed invisible, hiding in the trees and only appearing to fight against small groups of soldiers. They also deployed booby traps to injure and sometimes kill soldiers without ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
The Americans found it very difficult to fight in Vietnam as despite the fact that they outnumbered the Vietnamese (both the Vietcong and NVA) by at least 3:1, they did not know who they were fighting against as there was no way to distinguish between a civilian and a soldier. While the North Vietnamese fought in the more conventional manner, the South Vietnamese, in order to overcome this great disadvantage, stayed invisible, hiding in the trees and only appearing to fight against small groups of soldiers. They also deployed booby traps to injure and sometimes kill soldiers without even seeing the enemy. This made the Americans lose morale and feel frustrated, as it was very hard to fight an enemy which couldn’t be found and who masqueraded as civilians. The Vietnamese also used their local knowledge to great advantage. In order to provide the Vietcong with supplies and men, the North Vietnamese constructed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, consisting of a network of 15,000 kilometres of roads through jungles and mountains through neutral Laos and Cambodia. There could be as many as ten different routes between two points and so if one was bombed, the trail still remained intact. This prompted the tactic of “Search and Destroy” which resulted in the death of vast numbers of civilians and alienated the South Vietnamese rather that win over their ‘Hearts and Minds’.
A further reason why America lost the Vietnam War was that their tactics were completely wrong. The forces relied on air superiority, overwhelming firepower and brute force to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery and indiscriminate airstrikes. America also totally underestimated both the strength of the Vietnamese and how long it would take to defeat them. In 1965, “Operation Rolling Thunder” was launched, which entailed heavy bombing on strategic locations in North Vietnam and whose aim was to damage the economy in the North. This operation was only meant to last for eight weeks, however it continued for three and a half years and eight million tons of bombs were dropped; more than the number dropped by both sides during World War One and Two. Napalm was used to clear large areas of forest in order to find the enemy and chemical defoliants such as ‘Agent Orange’ were used to destroy crops and kill forests. These chemicals were, however, later found to be carcinogenic and caused terrible deformations in children, the people who the Americans were meant to be improving living conditions for.
General Westmoreland’s tactic “search and destroy”, whose aim was to try and root out the North Vietnamese Army operating in the South, leaving the South Vietnamese troops to deal with the less well-trained Vietcong, was completely flawed and resulted in vast collateral damage and turned the South Vietnamese against America, a reason for America’s eventual loss. The idea behind this was “not to win ground or seize positions but simply to kill. To kill communists and kill as many of them as possible”, however the Americans did not know who the enemy were. The Vietcong did not wear uniforms; pretending to be civilians, so the Americans did not know who to kill. In order to overcome this, the soldiers killed everyone including women and children in ‘Zippo’ raids, on the off-chance that Vietcong might be hiding there. An example of such an atrocity was the massacre of My Lai. The soldiers of Charlie Company killed and raped as many as 504 Vietnamese civilians in three hours, despite there being no males of fighting age. Attacks like this were not unusual however most were covered up. However in this case the media back at home reported the massacre even after the initial cover up, which gave the US public an insight into the cruelty of their country. This lowered the US public opinion and support and the American people started to question whether they were fighting for a good cause. This also lowered the support for the US and made the Vietnamese respect the soldiers even less.
The media (and in particular news reports at first) back in the US was a large reason for the eventual defeat in Vietnam and for this reason it is regarded as the ‘first TV war’. The media had anti-war tendencies, being generally left wing and used the relatively new technology to present immediate photographs from the battlefront, without any official attempts to censor that we have nowadays. For the first time the public could see exactly what was happening and when the distressing and gruesome pictures came back, showing the Americans as bloodthirsty and unnecessary killers, the American people could not handle the horrific reality of the war that they were fighting and started to protest the war.
The significance of media coverage in public perception of the war is very obvious in the Tet offensive and was incredibly damaging to the war effort in Vietnam. The offensive had some initial successes for the Vietnamese because American intelligence failed to detect the build-up of enemy troops. One of the most famous events during this offensive was the infiltration of the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital Saigon by a 15-man suicide squad, all of whom were easily killed. A reporter at the time in the embassy which was regarded as the safest place in Vietnam saw this as it was happening and this crisis was viewed by millions around the globe. After confident predictions of an imminent victory many Americans were shocked to see footage of Communist fighters in the grounds of the American embassy which created a ‘credibility gap’ between the official message and what was seen happening on television. Famously Walter Cronkite, the most influential US anchorman said “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war”. This also shows that the Vietnamese learn many lessons during the war, such as using guerrilla raids and ambushes to prevent the number of casualties, making them a much harder opponent to fight against.
The rationale for going to war with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism and to unify the South Vietnamese from the North, however in this was all America did was to alienate the South Vietnamese and turn those against Communism into sympathisers, thinking that it has to be better than the violence displayed by the Americans. Instead of fighting them, the Americans needed to persuade the Vietnamese to think like the US and win over their ‘hearts and minds’. In order to have won in Vietnam, the Americans would have had to kill all the guerrilla insurgents, and because some remained, the Americans lost. The Americans lose if they do not win, whereas the Vietnamese win if they do not loose - all they needed to do was survive to win. The most powerful reason for America losing was the media. If the people at home are not happy to fight, a country will never win. The power and danger of the media was shown with the Wikileaks scandal, showing that there is a need to not have everything out in the public.
