Should the war have been fought and how could U.S or South Vietnam not have won?
HISTORY
ESSAY QNS: Should the war have been fought and how could U.S or South
Vietnam not have won?
A lot of people have individual opinions about the Vietnam war. Ones views on the war can come from different sides. Like a huge tree, there are many vessel-like branches and they more or less can represent the various sides from where overviews and opinions on the war have been made. Many accounts and conclusions about the war in Vietnam are told through the eyes of the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the United States(U.S) military soldiers, power figureheads of the involved countries, as well as views from around the world. The list of groups can go on. For this obvious reason, one cannot make a concrete judgement based on this widely debated historical event. Historians however, if I could take you back to the metaphor of the tree are like its bark. Historians are the bark that holds up and represents the overviews based on the compilation of facts, research of accounts from the various sources and their conclusions derived from those sources are neutral and not one-sided. Therefore, as a history student, I will be writing the next few paragraphs with the guide of the facts I have studied and an open mind, ending with a personal logical conclusion about the war which lasted mainly ten years(1965-1975) in a divided country that to begin with was struggling for unification since the end of World War II(1945).
The possibility of war was precedent probably as early as 1945. It was the end of World War II and U.S was promoting democracy and trying to abolish colonialism around the world. Colonised by the French for a century, Vietnam was fighting for independence. It took them until 1954 to rid a century of colonial rule when communist forces defeated French troops. Communism was strong in the North and South Vietnam had a majority of anti-communism habitants. The Communists from the North along with the help of small pro-communist groups in the South, believed that they were better organized to take on southern Vietnam and succeed in unification. The Geneva Peace Accords was the hopeful settlement for Vietnam with France but foreign communist superpowers like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were interfering. Obviously, North Vietnam’s strong communistic views and possible allies ion with the two giants of communism alarmed the U.S with fear of a ‘domino effect’ on Southeast Asia. Another cause for U.S intervention would probably be because of the 1947 “Truman Doctrine” where President Truman states that ‘it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. North Vietnam was aware of this and also of the fact that France had U.S as a powerful ally. By 1959, military struggle against South Vietnam by the Vietcong(North Vietnamese) was escalating and a full-blown war was inevitable in the near future. 1965, the month of March, American military troops landed in Danang and this was the start of U.S intervention in a reunification struggle for Vietnam.
