Vietnam War Flashcards
Vietnamese Nationalism and the First Indochina War: 1900–1954
Events
1919 France ignores Ho Chi Minh’s demands at Versailles Peace Conference
1926 Bao Dai becomes last Vietnamese emperor
1930 Ho founds Indochinese Communist Party
1940 Japan occupies Vietnam
1941 Ho founds Viet Minh
1945 Viet Minh takes Hanoi in August Revolution Ho takes power, establishes Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) Truman rejects DRV’s request for formal recognition
1946 First Indochina War begins
1954 Viet Minh defeat French at Dien Bien Phu
French Colonialism
France invaded Vietnam in attempt to out do each other in wrath and power. After forcing a peace treaty in 1862, the French established a colonial government for Vietnam in the form of a protectorate that the French called Cochin China. Saigon was established as the capital. In 1893 the French combined all their Vietnamese and Cambodian protectorates with the territory of Laos to form French Indochina.
The Geneva Conference
The defeat at Dien Bien Phu humiliated the French and turned the tide of French public opinion against the war. The French government, wanting to end the fighting, organized the Geneva Conference, which lasted until July 1954. At the conference, diplomats from France, Vietnam, the United States, the USSR, Britain, China, Laos, and Cambodia declared a cease-fire and decided to split Vietnam officially at the 17th parallel, into Communist-controlled North Vietnam (under Ho and the Viet Minh) and South Vietnam (under Bao Dai).
The Geneva Accords, as these agreements were called, also required French withdrawal from North Vietnam and Viet Minh withdrawal from South Vietnam. The accords also promised reunification of Vietnam after free elections, which were to be to be held by July 1956. As it turned out, these elections were never held.
U.S. Involvement and the Cold War Context: 1947–1955
Events
Containment doctrine begins to influence U.S. foreign policy
1948 USSR blockades Berlin; United States responds with Berlin airlift
1949 USSR conducts first successful atomic bomb test China falls to Communist rebels under Mao Zedong
1954 Eisenhower articulates domino theory
1955 U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem ousts Bao Dai from power in South Vietnam
George F. Kennan
U.S. State Department analyst who developed influential policy of containment in 1947
Harry S Truman
33rd U.S. president; adopted containment as a major part of U.S. foreign policy
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th U.S. president; modified containment policy with more pessimistic domino theory
Ngo Dinh Diem
U.S.–backed leader of South Vietnam; took power in fraudulent elections in 1955
Origins of the Cold War
Tension was high after WW2 between the USA and USSR. Winston Churchill stated an ‘iron curtain’ had fallen due to the secrecy between the nations.
Containment
This policy of containment became extraordinarily influential in the U.S. government and became the basis of U.S. policy for much of the Cold War.
Escalation
Three major events in 1948 and 1949 brought the American fear of Communism to a fever pitch.
• First, the USSR, which controlled East Germany, attempted to drive U.S., British, and French forces out of West Berlin by cutting off all outside access to the city. The United States responded to this blockade with the Berlin airlift over the winter of 1948–1949, dropping crucial supplies into West Berlin until the Soviet Union relented.
• Then, in August 1949, the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb.
• Finally, in October 1949, after years of civil war, the Nationalist government of China fell to the Communist forces of Mao Zedong.
The combined force of these three events plunged the United States into a deep paranoia and fear that Communists would take over the world and might even be plotting secret operations in the United States.
NSC-68
In this environment of alarm, national security advisors of U.S. president Harry S Truman wrote an influential memo called NSC-68 , which advocated a tremendous increase in military spending to finance a massive military buildup, hoping to deter Soviet aggression. Following the policy outlined by this document, the United States became increasingly concerned with Communist expansion anywhere, not just at the critical points that Kennan had identified. Combined with the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, NSC-68 encouraged President Truman to begin a rapid buildup of the U.S. military.
Domino Theory
After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave a speech that would soon become famous and important as an outline of U.S. Cold War policy. In the speech, Eisenhower drew on Kennan’s previously articulated containment policy but went a step further in describing what became known as the domino theory. Eisenhower stated that the United States needed not only to contain the USSR at critical locations but in all locations, for if one nation became Communist, its neighbors were likely to turn Communist as well, falling like a row of dominoes.
If Vietnam became Communist, domino-theory logic held that all of Indochina, and perhaps even all of Southeast Asia, might become Communist. Well aware of the popularity of Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh associates in both North and South Vietnam, U.S. leaders feared that the free elections promised at the Geneva Conference, which were scheduled to occur in 1956, would result in a unified, Communist Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem
Committed to the logic of the domino theory, U.S. leaders sought to forestall the elections in Vietnam. The United States thus threw its support behind the politician Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese nationalist and Catholic who emphasized Confucian values of loyalty and tradition and opposed the overthrow of old Vietnamese social structures—a move that the revolutionary Vietnamese Communists advocated.
The Republic of Vietnam
In 1955, with U.S. support, Diem rejected the prospect of Vietnam-wide elections as specified by the Geneva Accords and instead held a referendum limited to the southern half of the country. Using fraud and intimidation, Diem won over 98 percent of the vote, removed the feeble Bao Dai from power, and proclaimed South Vietnam to be the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). A CIA operative working in Saigon, Edward Lansdale, was installed as an advisor to Diem. The United States then helped Diem organize the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to control his new state.
Diem and the Republic of Vietnam: 1955–1960
Events
1955 Diem initiates ARVN-enforced land redistribution
1959 Diem regime passes Law 10/59 to root out Communists
1960 South Vietnamese Communists form National Liberation Front
Catholicism and Nepotism
Diem’s government was also unpopular because it had an overwhelming Catholic bias and contained several unpopular, key figures who were members of Diem’s own family, the Ngo family. Although Catholics made up less than a tenth of the Vietnamese population, Diem himself was Catholic, as were all his other family members in the government. Diem’s government engaged in often vicious persecution of Buddhists, who made up the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese citizens, particularly peasants. Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, the influential Catholic archbishop of Hue, in particular came into conflict with Buddhists.
Diem continued his nepotistic trend by installing his youngest brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, as the leader of the government’s secret police organization, the Can Lao. Moreover, because Diem himself was not married, his sister-in-law, Nhu’s wildly unpopular, Francophile wife, Madame Nhu, became South Vietnam’s de facto first lady. In the years that followed, Madame Nhu would emerge as a notorious figure in Vietnam and on the world stage; arrogant, extravagant, and prone to nasty, on-the-record comments, she created one public relations disaster after another for the U.S.-backed Diem government.
Diem’s Crackdown on Communism
In general, Diem’s repressive policies between 1955 and 1959, though designed to root out Communists from South Vietnam, actually increased sympathy for Communists in the South and swelled the ranks of the southern Viet Minh. Although the southern Viet Minh were anxious to revolt against Diem, Viet Minh leaders in the North held back their southern forces because they feared that the United States might get involved in the conflict.
In May 1959, Diem passed Law 10/59 , establishing military tribunals to search out Communists in South Vietnam, whom he derisively referred to as Viet Cong. These tribunals were unconcerned with justice, and Law 10/59 was brutal in its application.
Diem’s Regime
Although the Ngo family was universally hated in South Vietnam, Diem, despite his Catholic faith and dictatorial tendencies, had been widely respected as a sincere nationalist in the years before he came to power. Indeed, he was in many respects just as nationalistic as Ho Chi Minh. It was for these reasons that the United States felt that Diem represented the best hope for a strong South Vietnamese government that could resist Communist influence.
As it turned out, Diem’s regime was undemocratic, corrupt, and extreme from the beginning, and, as evidenced by the formation of ARVN, dependent on U.S. strength. Though Diem was popular among Catholics and had some influence in South Vietnam’s cities, his regime was universally hated in rural areas, which proved a perfect hiding and training ground for Communist forces. And in a nation as undeveloped as Vietnam was at the time, power in the cities meant far less than it would have in a developed country.
Indeed, though the United States established Diem as leader to halt Communist expansion, his repressive techniques, corrupt government, and inept public relations—such as his decision to grant his hated sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, a public stage—had the opposite effect. Under Diem, the number of active southern Communists increased dramatically. To the United States, operating under the domino theory, this Communist expansion posed a massive threat.
Kennedy and the First U.S. Involvement: 1961–1963
Events
1960 USSR begins airlifting to Communist Pathet Lao forces in Laos
1961 Kennedy takes office
1962 United States (MACV); sends first “military advisors” to Vietnam Cuban Missile Crisis increases Cold War tensions
1963 Battle of Ap Bac sees Viet Cong forces rout ARVN Buddhist monk immolates himself in protest of Diem’s policies Diem overthrown in U.S.-backed coup Kennedy assassinated; Johnson becomes president
The Kennedy Administration
In November 1960, the young Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy was elected U.S. president. When he took office in January 1961, his administration portrayed itself as a break from the older traditions and as the “best and brightest,” with former Rhodes Scholar Dean Rusk as secretary of state, renowned businessman Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense, and academic McGeorge Bundy as national security advisor. The president also appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general. This group would remain Kennedy’s key advisors, especially in matters relating to Vietnam, throughout his entire time in office.
Despite Kennedy’s attempts to appear tough on Communism, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev suspected that the young president would be more easily intimated than his predecessor, Eisenhower, who had been one of the major Allied military commanders in World War II. In the young and inexperienced Kennedy, Khrushchev saw an opportunity to press for strategic gains.
Laos and Cuba
In 1960, the Soviet Union began airlifting supplies to the Pathet Lao, a Communist-led group of guerrilla insurgents fighting against the French in Vietnam’s neighboring country, Laos. U.S. policy makers worried that the first domino in Indochina was about to fall, and for a brief time, small, landlocked Laos became an important locale in the global Cold War confrontation between the world’s two superpowers.
Then, in 1962, Khrushchev upped the stakes even further by placing Soviet nuclear warheads on the Communist-governed island of Cuba, just ninety miles from the United States. Kennedy, proving himself a master of brinkmanship, ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade Cuba and refused to back down. Ultimately, it was Khrushchev himself who backed down, removing the missiles in exchange for U.S. concessions. Although the Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully, it brought tensions to the highest point yet seen in the Cold War.
Military Advisors
Within this context of increased conflict, the United States in 1962 established the Military Assistance Command of Vietnam (MACV), which provided American personnel to help train the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN, in its growing conflicts with Communist guerrillas. Under the auspices of the MACV, the United States sent thousands of “military advisors” to South Vietnam; within a year, the American presence rose from around 1,000 men to over 15,000. Although the U.S. government maintained that these “military advisors” were not “military forces” per se, the line quickly became quite blurred.
Moreover, in a major embarrassment for the United States, many of the 250,000 weapons that the MACV distributed to the ARVN that year likely ended up in the hands of the Viet Cong. In fact, many ARVN soldiers who had been drafted from the ranks of the peasants were also secretly members of the National Liberation Front at the same time. In short, the MACV not only drastically escalated the U.S. presence in Vietnam but also spent a good deal of time and money training the enemy.
Media Coverage
The year 1963 marked a turning point, both because the first clashes of the nascent war emerged and because American news coverage of Vietnam began to slip toward pessimism. Unlike prior coverage, which had come largely in the form of positive “headway reports,” media coverage in 1963 began to reveal serious problems to the American public.
At one of the first major battles between ARVN and Viet Cong forces, the Battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, a vastly outnumbered and outgunned Viet Cong force nonetheless inflicted more casualties on the ARVN than vice versa. The official U.S. report claimed that the battle was an important victory for the anti-Communist forces, but two American journalists on the scene reported that the battle was a rout against the ARVN and postulated that U.S. involvement in Vietnam might quickly become a quagmire. As it turned out, the journalists’ words were prophetic, and the battle itself was emblematic of the way much of the war would go.
