The Vietnam War: 1955–1975, the war that changed America

By Khalid Al-Harbi

On April 30, 1975, a helicopter lifted off a rooftop in Saigon as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city below, and the longest war in American history came to its end in defeat and evacuation. The Vietnam War had begun, in one telling, thirty years earlier, when a Vietnamese revolutionary declared independence from France in Hanoi; in another, it began when American advisers arrived to prop up a fragile anti-communist state in the south. It lasted through four American presidencies, killed more than 58,000 Americans and as many as three million Vietnamese, and left a wound in American politics — and in Vietnamese villages — that has never fully healed.

Origins: French Indochina

Vietnam entered the twentieth century as a French colony. France had seized Cochinchina in the south in 1862 and imposed protectorates over Annam and Tonkin by the mid-1880s, folding Vietnam together with Laos and Cambodia into French Indochina. Colonial rule built railways, ports and rubber plantations, and it built resentment: a small French elite presided over a Vietnamese majority that was taxed, conscripted and largely excluded from power. Nationalism took many forms, but the movement that ultimately prevailed was the one led by Ho Chi Minh — born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890, a cook, sailor and political organiser who helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and, in 1941, the Viet Minh, a broad front for independence.

The Second World War broke the colonial order. Japan occupied Indochina from 1940, ruling through the French administration until March 1945, when it seized direct control. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh moved fast: on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh stood in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, quoting the American Declaration of Independence — “All men are created equal” — in an explicit appeal to the United States. The appeal failed. France, determined to reclaim its empire, returned with British and then American backing, and in December 1946 the First Indochina War began. For eight years the Viet Minh, supplied increasingly by Mao’s victorious China after 1949, fought a guerrilla war against a French expeditionary force that was bankrolled, by the end, largely by the United States. Washington saw the conflict through the lens of the Cold War: a communist advance to be stopped, not a colonial war to be ended.

The end came in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. In late 1953, the French commander, Henri Navarre, established a fortified camp in a remote valley near the Laotian border, intending to lure the Viet Minh into a set-piece battle where French artillery and airpower would destroy them. Instead, General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces hauled heavy artillery piece by piece over the surrounding mountains and dug it in on the heights overlooking the camp. The siege began on March 13, 1954; the French garrison, cut off, outgunned and pounded from above, surrendered on May 7, 1954, the day before the Geneva Conference on Indochina opened. The defeat ended French rule in Indochina and set the terms for everything that followed.

Geneva 1954 and two Vietnams

The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel into two regroupment zones: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh in the north, and the State of Vietnam under the former emperor Bao Dai in the south. The division was meant to be temporary. National elections to reunify the country were scheduled for July 1956, and the accords prohibited the introduction of new foreign troops and bases. But the settlement satisfied no one, and its central promise was never kept. In the south, Ngo Dinh Diem — a Catholic, anti-communist nationalist appointed prime minister by Bao Dai — refused to hold the elections, arguing, with American support, that free voting was impossible in the communist north. The United States, which had not signed the accords, backed him.

In October 1955, Diem deposed Bao Dai in a rigged referendum — official results credited him with 98.2 percent of the vote, including more votes than there were registered voters in Saigon — and proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president. Washington embraced the new state as a bulwark against communist expansion in South-East Asia, the domino whose fall, in the prevailing theory, would topple its neighbours. Diem’s rule was corrupt, nepotistic and increasingly repressive: power was concentrated in his family, above all his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s wife; land reform stalled; and the Strategic Hamlet Program, which forcibly relocated peasants into fortified villages to isolate them from the insurgency, alienated the countryside it was meant to protect. By 1959, the communists in the south — the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Viet Cong — were waging an organised insurgency, backed by the north through a network of jungle trails through Laos and Cambodia that became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The United States, which had begun with a few hundred military advisers, was being pulled deeper. President John F. Kennedy, who had campaigned on standing up to communism, increased the advisory presence from under a thousand to more than 16,000 by 1963, even as he resisted sending combat troops. In Saigon, the Diem regime was disintegrating. In June 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire at a busy Saigon intersection to protest Diem’s persecution of Buddhists, and the photograph of his self-immolation became one of the defining images of the century. In November 1963, with American knowledge and tacit approval, South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem; he and Nhu were murdered in the back of an armoured vehicle on November 2. Three weeks later, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The war passed to a new American president, Lyndon Johnson, and a South Vietnam that had lost its government.

The Gulf of Tonkin and the American slide into war

The event that carried the United States into open war remains one of the most contested episodes in American history. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, on an intelligence-gathering patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats; it returned fire with the help of aircraft from the carrier Ticonderoga. Two nights later, on August 4, the Maddox and a second destroyer reported a second attack in rough weather and darkness — an attack that, as later evidence strongly suggested, never happened. The captain of the Maddox himself cabled doubts within hours, and the radar and sonar contacts were later attributed to weather and nervous lookouts. But in Washington, Johnson treated the second incident as real. Within days, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, on August 7, 1964, authorising the president to take “all necessary measures” to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. It passed the House 414 to 0 and the Senate 88 to 2. It became, in effect, the declaration of war that was never declared.

What followed was not a single decision but a slide. In February 1965, after a Viet Cong attack on the American airbase at Pleiku killed eight Americans, the United States began Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would last more than three years. On March 8, 1965, the first American combat troops — 3,500 Marines — waded ashore at Da Nang to guard the airbase there. Their mission crept outward within weeks, and by the end of 1965 there were 184,000 American troops in Vietnam; by the end of 1966, 385,000; by the end of 1967, nearly half a million. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, pursued a strategy of attrition: search-and-destroy operations designed to kill enemy fighters faster than they could be replaced, measured by the grim arithmetic of the “body count.” The strategy assumed the enemy had a breaking point. It did not.

Escalation and the war in the villages

The war the United States fought in Vietnam was unlike any it had fought before. There was no front line. The enemy — a mix of Viet Cong guerrillas in the south and regular North Vietnamese Army units infiltrating from the north — controlled the night, the villages and the jungle. American forces possessed overwhelming firepower: helicopters that could move whole battalions, B-52 bombers that could level square kilometres of jungle, and artillery that could be summoned within minutes. Over the course of the war, the United States dropped more than three times the tonnage of bombs dropped in all of the Second World War, much of it on a country the size of California. The bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail spread the war into Laos and Cambodia, making Laos one of the most heavily bombed countries in history.

The ground war was fought in villages, and it was there that the war was lost politically. American tactics — free-fire zones, defoliation of jungle and crops with herbicides, forced relocation, and the use of massive firepower to protect troops — killed civilians in large numbers and drove the rural population toward the insurgency it was meant to defeat. The most notorious atrocity, the massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968, in which American soldiers killed more than 500 unarmed civilians, was not revealed until late 1969, but it was the extreme end of a continuum of violence that Vietnamese villagers experienced daily. Meanwhile, in the United States, the war was broadcast into living rooms. Television brought the burning of villages and the body bags home every evening, and the gap between official optimism — Westmoreland’s assurances of progress, the “light at the end of the tunnel” — and what Americans could see with their own eyes became the credibility gap that corroded trust in government.

The human machinery of the war deepened its divisions. The draft fell unevenly: young men from poor and working-class families, disproportionately Black and Latino, were far more likely to be sent to Vietnam than the sons of the affluent, who could obtain college deferments. Morale eroded as the war dragged on; by the early 1970s, drug use, racial tension and even attacks on officers — “fragging” — were widespread in American units. The war divided the country along generational, racial and class lines, and the anti-war movement grew from campus protests into one of the largest mass movements in American history.

Tet 1968: the turning point

On January 30, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, more than 80,000 communist troops launched coordinated attacks on over a hundred towns and cities across South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive stunned the United States and South Vietnam: Viet Cong sappers breached the wall of the US embassy in Saigon and held the compound for hours; the ancient imperial capital of Hue fell and was held for nearly a month, in a battle that reduced much of the city to rubble and left thousands of civilians dead, including victims of a communist massacre of suspected collaborators; the American base at Khe Sanh endured a 77-day siege. Militarily, Tet was a disaster for the communists: the Viet Cong, exposed in conventional attacks against superior firepower, lost tens of thousands of fighters and never fully recovered as an independent force. The hoped-for popular uprising in the south did not happen.

But in the United States, Tet was a political catastrophe for the war’s supporters. The American public had been told the enemy was nearly beaten and the war nearly won; the sight of the enemy fighting inside the American embassy proved otherwise. On February 27, 1968, the trusted television anchorman Walter Cronkite closed a special report by saying the war was “mired in stalemate” and that the only rational way out was to negotiate. A month later, on March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced a partial bombing halt and, in a sentence that shocked the nation, declared that he would not seek re-election. The most powerful man in the world had been broken, politically, by a war in a small country on the other side of the earth. Tet did not decide the war on the battlefield. It decided it in American living rooms.

Vietnamization, widening and the road to Paris

Richard Nixon, elected in 1968 on a promise of “peace with honour,” pursued a policy he called Vietnamization: gradually withdrawing American troops while building up the South Vietnamese army to take over the fighting, backed by American airpower and money. American troop levels fell from a peak of about 543,000 in April 1969 to under 70,000 by the end of 1972. But Vietnamization came paired with escalation elsewhere. In April 1970, Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia to destroy communist base camps there, setting off furious protests at home; at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired on student demonstrators on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine. The secret bombing of Cambodia, carried out for years without public knowledge, had already spread the war deeper into a neutral country, with consequences that would soon become a catastrophe of their own.

The peace talks, which had opened in Paris in May 1968, dragged on for years, deadlocked on the shape of the negotiating table and then on the substance: the United States wanted North Vietnamese troops to withdraw from the south; Hanoi refused, insisting that the war was a civil war and that its troops were not foreigners. In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a leaked classified history of American decision-making in Vietnam, which revealed that successive administrations had misled the public about the war’s prospects; the Nixon administration’s attempt to stop publication went to the Supreme Court, which ruled for the press. In March 1972, North Vietnam launched the Easter Offensive, a conventional invasion across the 17th parallel with tanks and artillery; it was blunted by massive American airpower in Operation Linebacker, and the failure of the offensive pushed Hanoi back toward a settlement. In December 1972, after the talks stalled once more, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II — the “Christmas bombing” — eleven days of intense B-52 strikes on Hanoi and Haiphong that killed more than a thousand civilians and brought international condemnation, but also brought Hanoi back to the table.

The Paris Peace Accords and the fall of Saigon

On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Their terms reflected the exhaustion of all sides: a ceasefire in place, the withdrawal of all remaining American forces within sixty days, the return of American prisoners of war — 591 men came home in Operation Homecoming — and the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in the south, which meant, in practice, that the settlement deferred the final outcome rather than deciding it. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, who had resisted the accords, accepted them only under intense American pressure, reassured by Nixon’s private promises of renewed American intervention if Hanoi broke the deal. Those promises proved worthless: Congress, determined never to be drawn back in, cut military aid to Saigon drastically in 1974, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 constrained any president’s ability to send troops back.

The end came fast. In January 1975, North Vietnamese forces took Phuoc Long, a provincial capital near Saigon, and the United States did nothing — the signal Hanoi had been waiting for. In March 1975, a major offensive opened: Ban Me Thuot fell on March 10, Hue on March 25, Da Nang — the second city of the south — on March 30, amid a chaotic retreat in which South Vietnamese forces disintegrated and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled. Thieu resigned on April 21, blaming the United States for abandoning his country. In the final days, American helicopters evacuated thousands of Americans and Vietnamese from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind, while desperate crowds pressed against the gates of the American embassy. On the morning of April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. The war was over. Vietnam would be reunified, under communist rule, on July 2, 1976, as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Key figures

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969)

The founding father of Vietnamese communism and the symbol of Vietnamese independence. Ho led the Viet Minh against France, proclaimed independence in 1945, and presided over the north until his death in 1969. For his enemies he was a communist agent; for millions of Vietnamese he was the embodiment of national liberation — and it was that nationalist appeal, as much as any ideology, that made him so formidable.

Vo Nguyen Giap (1911–2013)

The self-taught general who defeated France at Dien Bien Phu and then commanded the North Vietnamese military effort against the United States. Giap understood, as few of his adversaries did, that the war would be won politically, by outlasting the enemy’s will, not by winning set-piece battles.

Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–1963)

South Vietnam’s first president: a sincere nationalist, a devout Catholic, and a ruler whose repression and nepotism alienated the population he needed. His assassination in November 1963, carried out by his own generals with American acquiescence, left South Vietnam with a succession of unstable military governments.

Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) and Richard Nixon (1913–1994)

Johnson inherited the war and Americanised it, sending half a million troops while insisting he sought no wider war; the war consumed his presidency and his Great Society. Nixon promised peace with honour, withdrew American troops, and bombed and invaded neighbouring countries to buy time — achieving, at Paris, a settlement that lasted two years.

William Westmoreland (1914–2005)

The American commander from 1964 to 1968, architect of the attrition strategy and the public face of official optimism. Westmoreland’s insistence that progress was being made, even as the war stalemated, made him the symbol of the credibility gap.

Le Duan (1907–1986)

The communist party leader who, after Ho’s death, drove the strategy of the war’s final years, overruling Giap’s caution to push for the offensives of 1972 and 1975 that ended the war. Le Duan, more than any other figure, was the architect of the military victory.

Timeline

• September 2, 1945 — Ho Chi Minh proclaims Vietnamese independence in Hanoi.
• December 1946 — The First Indochina War begins between the Viet Minh and France.
• May 7, 1954 — Dien Bien Phu falls; French rule in Indochina ends.
• July 1954 — The Geneva Accords divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel and promise elections in 1956.
• October 1955 — Diem proclaims the Republic of Vietnam in the south; the 1956 elections never take place.
• November 1–2, 1963 — Diem is overthrown and killed in a military coup.
• August 7, 1964 — The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorises American escalation.
• March 8, 1965 — The first American combat troops land at Da Nang; Rolling Thunder begins.
• January 30–31, 1968 — The Tet Offensive shocks the United States.
• March 31, 1968 — Johnson announces a bombing halt and that he will not seek re-election.
• May 4, 1970 — Four students are killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State after the invasion of Cambodia.
• June 1971 — The Pentagon Papers are published by the New York Times.
• January 27, 1973 — The Paris Peace Accords are signed; American forces withdraw.
• April 30, 1975 — Saigon falls; the Vietnam War ends.

The human cost

The human cost of the Vietnam War is staggering and still contested. The Vietnamese government’s official estimate, released in 1995, put total Vietnamese deaths at about 3.1 million — roughly 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, some 2 million civilians, and around 200,000–250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. The United States lost 58,220 servicemen and women, and more than 300,000 were wounded. Laos and Cambodia, drawn into the war by bombing and invasion, suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths, including the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and went on to kill an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people.

The war’s wounds did not end in 1975. After reunification, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps, and hundreds of thousands more fled by boat — the “boat people” — of whom an estimated 800,000 reached safety between 1975 and the mid-1990s, while many others drowned or were attacked by pirates. The United States had sprayed some 19 million gallons of herbicides over Vietnam, including about 11 to 12 million gallons of Agent Orange, a defoliant contaminated with dioxin; millions of Vietnamese were exposed, and the Vietnamese government attributes hundreds of thousands of birth defects and illnesses to it. American veterans, too, suffered: tens of thousands died later by suicide or from Agent Orange-related illness, and the veterans’ struggle for recognition — symbolised by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, inscribed with more than 58,000 names — became a long reckoning with the war’s meaning. Unexploded ordnance still kills and maims people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia every year.

Consequences and legacy

In the United States, the war transformed politics and foreign policy. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973, over Nixon’s veto, to restrain the president’s ability to wage war without congressional approval. The “Vietnam syndrome” — a deep public and military reluctance to commit American troops abroad — shaped American strategy for a generation, and the Powell Doctrine, articulated after the Gulf War, was in large part an answer to Vietnam: never fight without clear objectives, overwhelming force and public support. The war also changed the relationship between the American people and their government: the credibility gap, the Pentagon Papers and the secret bombing of Cambodia left a legacy of distrust that outlasted the war itself, and the treatment of returning veterans — welcomed home by no parades — became a source of national shame and, eventually, of a determined effort to do better.

In Vietnam, the aftermath was long and hard. The unified country faced international isolation, a US trade embargo that lasted until 1994, and a devastated economy; hundreds of thousands fled. But in 1986, Vietnam launched doi moi — “renovation” — market reforms that opened the economy while keeping the Communist Party in power, and the country began a remarkable transformation into one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. The United States and Vietnam normalised relations in July 1995, and the relationship has since deepened into a strategic partnership, driven in part by shared concern over China’s ambitions in the South China Sea. The war that once defined American defeat has become, a half-century later, the foundation of an unlikely partnership.

For the wider world, Vietnam became the archetype of a certain kind of war: the asymmetric conflict in which a local force, sustained by political will and outside support, defeats a great power. Its lessons — about the limits of firepower, the decisive importance of political legitimacy, and the danger of measuring progress by statistics — were studied, and then often forgotten, by every major military that followed. The war also ended the era of American innocence about intervention: never again would an American president be able to send hundreds of thousands of troops to a distant war without the country asking, first, what Vietnam taught us.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Vietnam War (britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War)
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian — The Vietnam War (history.state.gov)
• U.S. National Archives — The Pentagon Papers (archives.gov)
• Library of Congress — Vietnam War research guides (loc.gov)
• Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (vvmf.org)
• Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012)
• Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Viking, 1983)
• Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Random House, 1988)