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Feb 9, 2015 · February 9, 2015. Why Don’t Americans Know What Really Happened in Vietnam? Instead of confronting the truth, we scrubbed the record clean—and we’re still paying for it in Afghanistan and...
Oct 10, 2023 · With the Vietnam War, most of the time it’s portrayed as being between the U.S. and Vietnam. The “Vietnamese” in that sense are de facto the North Vietnamese, or the Communists, whereas the South Vietnamese are shunted to the side. So I examine that overlooked perspective. The research for it is based on my undergraduate research.
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- Overview
- Why did the Vietnam War start?
- Was the Vietnam War technically a war?
- What did Ho Chi Minh accomplish?
- What did Ngo Dinh Diem do?
- How did William Westmoreland influence the outcome of the Vietnam War?
- Did Richard Nixon support the Vietnam War?
- What is Agent Orange?
- Who won the Vietnam War?
- How many people died during the Vietnam War?
The Vietnam War was a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It lasted from 1954 to 1975. The questions and answers in this list are taken from the Top Questions sections of t...
The United States had provided funding, armaments, and training to South Vietnam’s government and military since Vietnam’s partition into the communist North and the democratic South in 1954. Tensions escalated into armed conflict between the two sides, and in 1961 U.S. President John F. Kennedy chose to expand the military aid program. The terms of this expansion included yet more funding and arms, but a key alteration was the commitment of U.S. soldiers to the region. Kennedy’s expansion stemmed in part from Cold War-era fears about the “domino theory”: if communism took hold in Vietnam, it would topple democracies throughout the whole of Southeast Asia, it was thought.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued the work that Kennedy had started. Johnson raised the number of South Vietnam deployments to 23,000 U.S. soldiers by the end of his first year in office. Political turbulence there and two alleged North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. naval vessels spurred Johnson to demand the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. It granted him broad latitude in handling the struggle against communism in Southeast Asia.
By nearly every metric, the Vietnam War was, in the common sense of the word, a war. The United States committed some 550,000 troops to the Vietnam front at the height of the conflict, suffered more than 58,000 casualties, and engaged in battle after battle with communist forces in the region until its withdrawal in 1973. However, from a constituti...
Ho Chi Minh led a long and ultimately successful campaign to make Vietnam independent. He was president of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1969, and he was one of the most influential communist leaders of the 20th century. His seminal role is reflected in the fact that Vietnam’s largest city is named for him.
As president of South Vietnam (1955–63), Ngo Dinh Diem assumed dictatorial powers. Diem’s heavy-handed tactics against the Viet Cong insurgency deepened his government’s unpopularity, and his brutal treatment of the opposition to his regime alienated the South Vietnamese populace, notably Buddhists. In 1963 he was murdered during a coup d’état by s...
As head of U.S. forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland pursued a war of attrition: the number of dead enemy fighters was the key measure of merit. In response to Westmoreland’s requests for more forces, the American presence in Vietnam grew to well over 500,000 troops. Domestic support for the war plunged as U.S. deaths rose.
Richard Nixon, arguably, tried to prolong the Vietnam War during the 1968 presidential campaign in an effort to win the presidency. Once he became president, he sought to establish enough stability in the region for the South Vietnamese government to take over. The result was an expanded U.S. military presence and increased military activity in neu...
Agent Orange is a mixture of herbicides used during the Vietnam War by the U.S. military to defoliate forests and clear other vegetation. This herbicide mix was deployed in urban, agricultural, and forested areas in Vietnam to expose the enemy and destroy crops. Agent Orange was used along with several other herbicides, code-named Agents White, Pur...
The question of who won the Vietnam War has been a subject of debate, and the answer depends on the definition of victory. Those who argue that the United States won the war point to the fact that the U.S. defeated communist forces during most of Vietnam’s major battles. They also assert that the U.S. overall suffered fewer casualties than its opponents. The U.S. military reported 58,220 American casualties. Although North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualty counts vary wildly, it is generally understood that they suffered several times the number of American casualties.
Those who argue that the United States’ opponents won the war cite the United States’ overall objectives and outcomes. The United States entered Vietnam with the principal purpose of preventing a communist takeover of the region. In that respect, it failed: the two Vietnams were united under a communist banner in July 1976. Neighbouring Laos and Cambodia similarly fell to communists. Furthermore, domestic unrest and the financial cost of war made peace—and troop withdrawals—a necessity, not a choice.
In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
May 23, 2016 · CNN — U.S. President Barack Obama is in Vietnam forging stronger ties with a country that was the scene of bitter conflict just over 40 years ago. The war ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall...
- Mackenzie Sigalos
- 2 min
Loading... The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Oct 26, 2017 · Reexamining the Vietnam War, four decades after America’s defeat Arthur Waldron, the Lauder Professor of International Relations, discusses lessons from the war learned and unlearned, the failure of U.S. leadership, and the effects of the war on the Vietnam generation.
