Initially the Truman administration perceived events in Vietnam as a colonial war in which France was trying to reassert its sovereignty. But because France might undermine the containment policy in Europe if the Americans refused to help it in Indochina, the U.S. supported the war effort even though many officials understood that the vast majority of Vietnamese favored Ho and that his movement contained both Communists and non-Communists. After the Korean War erupted, the U.S. commitment to France intensified, since the Indochinese and Korean battlefields seemed to be essential in stopping Chinese Communism.
After eight years of war, in 1954 France appealed to Eisenhower to save its beleaguered garrison at Dien Bien Phu, but he declined. The U.S. was not eager to undertake another Asian land war so soon after Korea. The JCS presented a foreboding picture of how difficult the task would be, and the British and other allies rebuffed the administration’s effort to create a multinational rescue force. The Geneva Conference ratified France’s defeat even though it gave the Viet Minh less than a complete victory. In part the Viet Minh were eager to settle the war because war-weariness afflicted their country. And China and the Soviet Union pressured them to accept a compromise because they wanted to lessen great power tensions and deprive the U.S. of an excuse to intervene more directly in Southeast Asia. The Viet Minh agreed to a temporary partition of their country along the 17th Parallel that allowed their military forces to regroup northward, with French units regrouping to the south. (Thousands of southern Viet Minh, however, did not regroup to the North, but instead stayed in the South.) The conference’s Final Declaration decreed this demarcation line was not a political or territorial boundary, and it promised that Vietnam would be reunified through a nationwide election in 1956, which nearly everyone assumed Ho would win.
Viewing the prospect of Communist domination of Indochina as a disaster, Eisenhower sought to convert Vietnam’s southern half into a non-Communist nation. One step toward establishing “South Vietnam” was SEATO, which Eisenhower hoped would deter Communist expansion despite its defects: Some of the region’s foremost nations—India, Burma, Indonesia—refused to join, and it only required signatories to consult, not necessarily act, in case of aggression. Although the Geneva Accords barred Laos, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam from joining alliances, SEATO extended protection to them, providing a diplomatic façade behind which a non-Communist South Vietnam might emerge. Another important step was to nurture a South Vietnamese leader who could become his country’s George Washington. Onto the stage stepped Ngo Dinh Diem, who became president of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in 1955, after a rigged election in which he received 98.2 percent of the vote.
Diem was a courageous, selfless, and fervent anti-Communist and he knew many influential Americans, including John F. Kennedy, a Catholic senator, and Cardinal Francis Spellman, the nation’s leading Catholic spokesman. Like Kennedy and Spellman, Diem was a Catholic, but he ruled a predominantly Buddhist country. Moreover, he had not fought either Japan or France, which made his nationalist credentials suspect compared to Ho’s. Ideologically, South Vietnam was no match for the Viet Minh, who practically monopolized the nationalist mantle, vowing to rid Vietnam of European imperialists and their clones, and promising a new economic and political order based on redistributing wealth and power. An autocrat, Diem also blocked reforms urged on him by the U.S., such as opening the government to dissenting views.
Eisenhower not only increased financial aid to South Vietnam but also provided military support. The U.S. established a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). As the French withdrew, MAAG assumed responsibility for equipping and training the Vietnamese National Army, which became the nucleus for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Violating the Geneva-established limits on foreign troops, the number of American advisers reached 700 by the late 1950s. Encouraged by Eisenhower, Diem refused to participate in the elections scheduled for 1956, which were never held, and imposed a measure of stability on his country, in part through authoritarian methods. Diem believed dictatorial leadership was necessary to prevent his fledgling nation from disintegrating under the stresses of its social, religious, and ethnic factionalism and the Viet Minh’s potential threat. While repressing political opponents, Diem’s army defeated the Binh Xuyen, Saigon’s foremost criminal organization, which maintained its own pseudo-military force. Through military campaigns and CIA-financed bribery, he also vanquished or co-opted the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai, powerful religious sects that fielded their own armies.
Only then did he turn against his most dangerous adversary, those Viet Minh who had not regrouped to the North after Geneva. In 1955 the Communist Party had 60,000 members in the Mekong Delta and the Saigon region, but by the end of 1958 that number was a mere 5,000. However, suppression of the Viet Minh was successful primarily because Ho’s Hanoi-based government urged southerners to engage only in political organization. Facing severe reconstruction problems after the First Indochina War, Communist leaders hoped to complete the Geneva process peacefully and wanted to avoid provoking the Americans into greater involvement. Suffering severe repression, the southern Viet Minh became restless with the North’s passivity, and in 1956–1957 they began fighting back against the South Vietnamese police and military forces. Still, the battle remained unequal and some Communists feared the South’s revolutionary flame might be extinguished.
In 1959 Ho Chi Minh and his inner circle sanctioned the use of armed force in pursuit of national liberation and unification, returned a small number of Viet Minh (known as “regroupees”) who had regrouped to the north after Geneva, and established Group 559 to shuttle men and equipment along the Ho Chi Minh Trail running from North Vietnam through eastern Laos and northeastern Cambodia. In 1961 the North created the National Liberation Front (NLF), designed to attract all groups in the South but that was Communist-dominated, and organized all southern military units into the People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF, also called the Viet Cong—which was short for Vietnamese Communist—or, more simply, the VC). To command the VC, North Vietnam established the Trung Uong Cuc Mien Nam (Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN). General Tran Van Tra commanded COSVN’s Regional Military Headquarters, and in late 1963 or early 1964 Senior General Nguyen Chi Thanh, a member of the North’s Politboro, became its foremost political officer and its dominant figure until his death in the summer of 1967. Although U.S. political and military leaders thought COSVN was a fixed headquarters with a Pentagon-like bureaucratic structure that could be located and destroyed, in reality it was simply a mobile, forward command post consisting of a few senior officers.
In taking these measures the North’s leadership walked a tightrope. While supporting the VC, it did not want to alienate the Soviet Union, which was following a policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West; or the Chinese, who were still recovering from their civil war and Korea. Many officials also worried that the escalating conflict detracted from rebuilding the war-torn North, and they feared a full-scale war with the U.S.
The Advisory Years in Vietnam
By the time Kennedy assumed the presidency, what had been a “problem” for Eisenhower was becoming a crisis. As the insurgency grew more aggressive, Kennedy intervened more dramatically, waging what the Communists called a “special war”—a U.S. sponsored war, but fought primarily by ARVN without direct large-scale American combat involvement. The number of advisers increased from fewer than 1,000 to 16,000 (some undertook limited combat roles) and ARVN received new weapons, including napalm, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and armored personnel carriers. To oversee military activities in Vietnam, in 1962 the U.S. established Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), which absorbed MAAG. The Air Force began Operation RANCH HAND, an aerial herbicide-spraying program to deny the VC cover and to kill their crops. The U.S. also nurtured various CIA counterinsurgency initiatives, including helping the Special Forces organize Montagnards into Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, which ultimately numbered 45,000 men who defended
South Vietnam’s western border in the Highlands.
Equally important, the U.S. supported the Strategic Hamlet Program, a “pacification” plan South Vietnam launched in late 1961. Pacification entailed winning the peasants’ “hearts and minds” by separating them from the guerrillas, providing security from VC attacks, and improving living conditions through social, economic, and political reforms. Doing all three tasks well proved a challenge throughout the war. Diem’s program compelled peasants to move from scattered villages into hamlets surrounded by moats and barbed wire and, in theory, protected by local defense forces. Once inside a strategic hamlet, occupants supposedly benefited from fair elections, improved medical care, and land reform. But people resented being forced to leave ancestral lands to move into stockades; training and weaponry for local militias were rarely sufficient; promised reforms remained unfulfilled; and many officials were incompetent and corrupt. Still, strategic hamlets created problems for the VC by preventing them from having an overt presence in some hamlets and villages.
The infusion of advisers and new weapons, combined with the success of some strategic hamlets, stopped the hemorrhaging that characterized Diem’s war effort from 1960 through mid-1962. Neither combatant foresaw imminent victory. ARVN won a few battles and lost others, most notably at Ap Bac in January 1963, when outnumbered VC fighting with small arms defeated ARVN forces equipped with helicopters and armored personnel carriers. MACV commander General Paul Harkins, exuding overoptimism, proclaimed Ap Bac an ARVN victory. Like his successors, he often failed to assess the battlefield accurately.
Whatever was happening on the battlefield, many U.S. leaders feared Diem would ultimately fail because they believed political and economic reforms were more important than battles. The Army’s Operations Against Irregular Forces manual maintained that an insurgency was the “outward manifestation” of popular discontent with social and political conditions. An important corollary was that repression alone would not suffice; the only permanent solution was to rectify the underlying conditions that produced the insurgency. From the perspective of many Americans, Diem relied too heavily on repression and too little on reform. True, some officials supported Diem because, if nothing else, he imposed stability on his fractious population. But others wanted an “Americanized” South Vietnamese government, one that conducted free elections, tolerated public dissent, and adopted liberal reforms. However, in 1963 when Buddhists protested against religious restrictions, the regime responded with force, which in turn sparked widespread rioting. In one particularly gruesome incident, Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who commanded both ARVN’s special forces and the South’s secret police, ordered a raid on the Xa Loi pagoda in Saigon that resulted in the death of more than thirty monks.
Convinced that authoritarianism foreclosed success, the Kennedy administration sanctioned a coup, which resulted in Diem’s murder in early November 1963. The U.S. hoped new leadership would follow American guidance about democratic reforms and inspire more vigorous efforts on the battlefield and in pacification. Instead, seven more coups wracked the nation during the next year. From 1963 until 1966, Saigon’s political machinations virtually paralyzed ARVN, severely hindering the war effort. With increasing support from Hanoi, the VC began making impressive gains. Sensing the demise of America’s “special war,” in December 1963 North Vietnam’s 9th Party Plenum not only stepped up the political struggle but also ordered the insurgency to go on the offensive, hoping to win a swift victory and thereby preempting a protracted war involving the U.S. By 1964 the Communist leadership had returned approximately 44,000 regroupees to the South. In part because of a dwindling supply of regroupees, the first complete unit of northern-born regulars from the People’s Army of North Vietnam (PAVN, also known as the North Vietnamese Army or NVA) entered the South in very late 1964. However, the North had refrained from interjecting large numbers of PAVN regulars into the conflict for fear of unduly provoking the Americans. By mid-1966, when approximately 267,500 U.S. military personnel were serving in South Vietnam, only an estimated 46,300 NVA were south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which divided North and South Vietnam.
The assassin’s bullet that killed Kennedy just three weeks after Diem’s death left the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to try to salvage the war. Knowing the U.S. had no commitment to fight in Vietnam and hoping to avoid getting “tied down in a Third World War or another Korean action,” he initially followed Kennedy’s policy of providing money, advice, training, and equipment so the South Vietnamese could fight their own war. By early 1964 this approach was failing, and to avoid imminent defeat Johnson began “Americanizing” the war. In March 1964 he approved National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 288, which stated that while the U.S. hoped to maintain a non-Communist South Vietnam without using American combat forces, it was vital to take “every reasonable measure to assure success in South Vietnam.” Among those measures was increasing the number of advisers to more than 23,000 and authorizing OPLAN 34A, a covert sabotage program against North Vietnam that utilized intelligence collected by destroyers on the Navy’s DESOTO patrols off North Vietnam’s coast. Johnson replaced Harkins as MACV commander with General William C. Westmoreland, who had held many of the Army’s most visible positions, including command of the 101st Airborne Division and superintendent of West Point. Finally, the administration drafted a resolution saying the country would “use all measures, including the commitment of armed forces” to preserve South Vietnam. Given a suitable pretext, it would introduce the resolution into Congress.
Events in the Gulf of Tonkin provided the pretext. According to administration spokesmen, North Vietnam launched unprovoked assaults in international waters against the destroyer Maddox on August 2, and against Maddox and another destroyer, C. Turner Joy, on August 4. The administration was being deceptive: Johnson knew the first attack was a response to recent OPLAN 34A operations. And he had reason to suspect the second attack never occurred, since the initial reports were confusing and contradictory. In fact, no attack occurred on August 4; jittery sailors had misconstrued radar and sonar readings as torpedoes.
While misleading the American public, the administration threatened North Vietnam, telling Hanoi that it assumed the first attack was a mistake and so did not respond, but the second was “obviously deliberate and planned and ordered in advance,” designed either to reveal the U.S. as a paper tiger or provoke it into a wider war. The North, knowing the August 2 attack was a response to sabotage operations and the second attack was fanciful, concluded the U.S. was looking for an excuse to escalate. Aside from Democratic senators Wayne Morse and Earnest Gruening, no members of Congress ferreted out the administration’s fabrications. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which permitted the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression,” passed the House of Representatives 416–0 and the Senate 88–2 (only Morse and Gruening dissented).
Johnson soon invoked this resolution to justify a larger war, though he was invariably less than candid about the escalatory steps he sanctioned. “Everything that we do in public, whatever we say in public, is just for the public,” he told South Vietnam’s president. “Together we’ll make the important decisions, things that we don’t want the public to know.”
Bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnam
Rather than withdraw life support from a dying patient and accept defeat in South Vietnam, Johnson resorted to aggressive life-saving measures because the president believed in the domino theory, wanted to maintain international credibility, fretted about a new McCarthyism, and, being a proud Texan, was not about to back down from a fight. Between late 1964 and early 1968 the U.S. waged a progressively larger, more Americanized war on five fronts: an aerial campaign to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail; an air war against North Vietnam; a ground war (primarily against PAVN) with an accompanying air war inside South Vietnam; a naval war; and a pacification campaign
against the VC.
The air war against the Ho Chi Minh Trail and another against North Vietnam began almost simultaneously. In December 1964 a joint Air Force-Navy operation, codenamed BARREL ROLL, began attacks in the Laotian panhandle to hinder infiltration of men and supplies. However, after the spring of 1965 aircraft involved in BARREL ROLL supported anti-Communist ground forces in northern Laos, while a new operation, STEEL TIGER, targeted the trail. Beginning in 1968 another new operation, COMMANDO HUNT, superceded STEEL TIGER. Before the war ended the U.S. had dropped 3 million tons of bombs on Laos, which was about twice the tonnage dropped on Germany during World War II.
Meanwhile the air war over North Vietnam began with Operation PIERCE ARROW, a retaliatory strike following the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Two more retaliatory strikes (FLAMING DART and FLAMING DART II) occurred in February 1965, but by then the administration had approved Operation ROLLING THUNDER, a sustained bombing campaign against the North that commenced on March 2, 1965. The codename came from a line in Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage: “The battle roar settled to a rolling thunder, which was a single, long explosion.”
The rationale for bombing the North was to raise South Vietnam’s morale, compel Hanoi to abandon the VC, and interdict the flow of men and supplies moving toward South Vietnam. While the rationale was clear, how to conduct the bombing generated an intense debate. Most civilian advisers preferred a gradual approach, which could become more intense if North Vietnam persisted in supporting the war. On the other hand, the armed forces preferred to hit the enemy immediately and hard. Harkening back to the bombing campaigns against Germany, the Air Force proposed a 94-target plan to destroy the North’s economic centers in just sixteen days. Several assumptions, all of which proved faulty, lay behind the plan. One was that the VC could not survive without the North’s substantial support, and another was that North Vietnam’s fledgling industrial facilities were a treasured asset.
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