Vietnam War: summary, reasons and participants

THE Vietnam War, which took place between 1955 and 1975, was a conflict between the United States and North Vietnam, the latter supported by the Soviet Union.

Combat is part of the Cold War context, when the United States and the Soviet Union did not face each other directly, but intervened in territories that could become future allies.

Vietnam War Combatants

With a strong ideological motivation, the war represented the military confrontation between capitalism and socialism. It also spread across a large part of Southeast Asia between 1955 and 1975, reaching Laos and Cambodia.

Let's look at the two sides that fought:

  • capitalists: Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), ruled by dictator Ngo Dinh-Diem. Supported by the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
  • socialists: Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), ruled by Ho Chi Minh. Its allies were the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (FNL) in the south of the country, the Soviet Union, China and North Korea.

Vietnam War Summary

Vietnam war map
The territories that formed the two countries were separated by the 17th parallel which was a demilitarized zone

From Indochina to Vietnam

The territory comprising Vietnam was part of Indochina, a French colony since the 18th century.

However, in 1930 the League for Vietnam Independence (1930), led by Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969). With the beginning of World War II, the Japanese invaded the territory and France saw its influence diminish.

At the end of the international conflict, France regains Indochina, but the desire for local independence was stronger.

In this way, the French and independence struggled for eight years of war. Only in the 1950s did they withdraw from the area. In 1954, they sign the Geneva Agreement, which creates four distinct countries: Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam (communist) and South Vietnam (capitalist).

North Vietnam and South Vietnam

The government of North Vietnam has always expressed its desire to reunify the country's two territories and has encouraged South Vietnam Nationalist Liberation Front.

To avoid a conflict, the population would decide, through a referendum, the direction of the unification of Vietnam in 1956. Everything pointed that this one would be defeated by the communist faction.

Against this background, the prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem (1901-1963), supported by the USA, applied a military coup in 1955, causing a civil war between the forces of the South and the North.

US entry into the Vietnam War

Later, in 1959, Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regular army attack a US base in South Vietnam. Later, in 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem is murdered.

Faced with this attack, the president John Kennedy (1917-1963) begins to send the first troops to the country.

However, the United States was hesitant to engage in a conflict in a region so distant after the American military failure during the Cuban revolution.

In August 1964, however, the American secret services forge an incident between their ships and an alleged North Vietnamese vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. This causes President Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973) to send 500,000 troops to fight in the Asian country, despite not having obtained the support of Congress to do so.

Tet Offensive

The "Tet offensive" was an invasion from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. In this operation, the North Vietnamese army simultaneously attacks more than thirty cities in that territory, seizing the US embassy in Saigon.

This incursion humiliated the United States, which already had a contingent of more than 500,000 men in Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh, a communist leader, dies in 1969, but attacks by the North Vietnamese army continue until 1973. Pressured by public opinion and Congress, the president Richard Nixon begins to withdraw American troops from the country and signs the Paris Agreement.

In 1976, the South is taken and Vietnam is unified under the name Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Strategies in the Vietnam War

American Soldiers in the Vietnam War
Helicopters were very important in moving American troops across Vietnamese territory

On the North American side, the main military strategy consisted of bombing with chemical weapons, including some banned by the Geneva conventions. Napalm would be one of the symbols of this conflict.

Furthermore, to withstand the harsh conditions of the battles, American soldiers drugged themselves with LSD and other substances.

The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, on the other hand, practiced guerrilla tactics, including sabotage, traps and ambushes in the rear of the combat fronts.

As they knew the terrain very well, they were able to make the most of the geographic advantages of the dense rainforests.

Likewise, the motivation of each army weighed on the troops' morale. While the Vietnamese were fighting for something concrete, the Americans were fighting for something far, like stopping the advance of communism.

These factors, combined with the North American antipathy among the Vietnamese, provoked by their military actions, culminated in the US defeat.

Vietnam war and the media

The Vietnam War received extensive media coverage. These worldwide publicized barbarities such as attacks with chemical agents, construction and incarceration in concentration camps, as well as the indiscriminate massacre of civilians.

This huge publicity around the war, as well as the lack of international support for the victims of the conflict, has led to the emergence of various peace movements.

In the United States, the return of mutilated and traumatized soldiers only reinforced the perception of American public opinion against the conflict.

For this reason, pacifist demonstrations took to the streets of the USA and other parts of the world. With protests, the crowds pressured to end the conflicts and withdraw the troops.

Vietnam War numbers

Mortal victims:

  • 4 million Vietnamese,
  • 2 million Cambodians and Laotians
  • more than 60,000 US soldiers.

An estimated 2 million Vietnamese fled to other countries.

In this campaign, more than 3 million US military personnel served in Vietnam. It is estimated that the military action cost more than 123 billion dollars, between the costs of the war and investments in South Vietnam.

Movies about the Vietnam War

There are a number of American films that dealt with the Vietnam War. From those who exalted Americans with heroic characters like the rambo, by Sylvester Stallone or the badrock, by Chuck Norris, to the most critical as Apocalypse Now.

Check out the list:

  • Apocalypse Now, 1979
  • hair, 1979
  • Platoon, 1986
  • Born to Kill, 1987
  • good morning, vietnam, 1987
  • Born July 4th, 1989
  • Air American, 1990

Curiosities

  • Each country calls war by different names. While in the United States the conflict is known as the Vietnam War, in the Asian country it is called the United States War.
  • This was the longest and bloodiest armed conflict after World War II.

read more:

  • Missile Crisis
  • Cold War
  • Cold War Conflicts
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