Vietnam War, U.S. Naval Operations in The

Vietnam War, U.S. Naval Operations in The. The U.S. Navy's ability to project its combat power ashore in Southeast Asia, control the coastal waters off Vietnam, and provide logistic support for a major U.S. overseas military commitment mandated its heavy involvement in the Vietnam War. Naval operations took place in the South China Sea, among myriad islands, along the coastline of Vietnam, and on thousands of nautical miles of rivers and canals.

The first significant U.S. naval engagement of the war was the famous Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964. On the afternoon of 2 August, three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats attacked the destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin with gunfire and torpedoes. On the night of 4 August, Maddox and another destroyer, Turner Joy, reported fighting a running battle with hostile patrol craft in the middle of the gulf. Communications intercepts and other relevant information convinced Washington that an attack had taken place. At President Lyndon B. Johnson's direction, on 5 August navy carrier forces bombed North Vietnam. Two days later, the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson thereafter used to wage war in Vietnam.

Even though Washington did not pursue a traditional military victory in the war, the navy made a major effort on the operational and tactical levels. Carrier aircraft of the Seventh Fleet executed round‐the‐clock bombing of enemy logistics facilities, fuel and supply depots, power plants, bridges, and railroads in Laos, North Vietnam, and after 1970, Cambodia. The air campaigns produced no decisive results, and they cost the navy 900 aircraft lost and 881 pilots and other air crew killed or captured. These operations, however, hindered the enemy's resupply efforts and shortened Hanoi's ground offensives in South Vietnam. In addition, the navy–air force bombing and the navy's simultaneous mining of North Vietnam's ports during 1972 and 1973 helped ease the U.S. withdrawal from the conflict.

Navy and Marine Corps aircraft also flew close air support for allied units battling Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces in South Vietnam. Carrier‐based search and rescue helicopters retrieved hundreds of American aviators whose aircraft were shot down ashore or at sea.

The battleship New Jersey and numerous cruisers and destroyers shelled bridges, rail lines, radar sites, artillery batteries, and small vessels along the North Vietnamese coast and Communist troops, fortifications, and supply caches along the coasts and waterways of South Vietnam. During the Communist Easter Offensive of 1972, U.S. naval gunfire devastated enemy armor and infantry units on the northern coast of South Vietnam.

The U.S. Coastal Patrol Force and South Vietnamese naval units mounted Operation Market Time, which limited Communist seaborne infiltration of supplies into South Vietnam. The allied forces destroyed or turned back all but two of the fifty Communist steel‐hulled trawlers discovered heading for the South Vietnamese coast between 1965 and 1972.

Navy–Marine Corps amphibious units exploited the fleet's mobility to carry out assaults from the sea along the coast of South Vietnam. In 1967 and 1968, naval leaders increasingly used the amphibious force as a floating reserve for Marine units fighting near the demilitarized zone.

Commander U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam (COMNAVFORV) also took advantage of the waterways that crisscrossed the Mekong Delta region to deploy combat forces deep into enemy‐controlled territory in South Vietnam. The Swift boats (river patrol craft) and SEAL commandos of COMNAVFORV's River Patrol Force, in Operation Game Warden, disrupted Communist supply traffic on the main rivers. Also important to the inland effort was the army‐navy Mobile Riverine Force of heavily armed and armored monitors. Both forces prompted the Communists to divert their sampans and other supply craft to smaller rivers and canals.

In 1968, an energetic COMNAVFORV, Vice Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., adopted an innovative strategic approach, which he called SEALORDS. In a comprehensive campaign, U.S. and Vietnamese river forces put the enemy on the defensive by setting up patrol boat barriers along the Cambodian border and by penetrating areas deep in the Mekong Delta. Hence, the Communists were unable to mount a major attack there during the Easter Offensive.

The navy also directed the seaborne logistic operation that sustained the American forces and their allies in Southeast Asia. The merchantmen of the navy's Military Sealift Command delivered 95 percent of the vehicles, ammunition, fuel, equipment, and other military supplies that entered the ports of South Vietnam. In addition, navy Seabee construction units developed enormous logistic support bases at Da Nang and Saigon.

The decade of heavy commitment to the war in Southeast Asia, which ended on 30 April 1975, cost the U.S. Navy dearly. Of the 1,842,000 Navy men and women who served in the combat theater, over 2,600 were killed in action and 10,000 were wounded. The navy also had to contend with serious morale, drug abuse, and disciplinary problems. Racial conflict hampered operations on board two Pacific Fleet carriers, Kitty Hawk and Constellation.

Equally serious, the war's high operating costs limited the funds available for needed repairs and for the design and construction of newer and better ships. To help pay for the war, the Ford and Carter administrations reduced the navy's Vietnam era fleet of 769 ships to just over 450.

In some ways, however, the Vietnam experience strengthened the navy. The conflict reaffirmed the critical importance of naval forces to the conduct of warfare in distant waters. Vietnam influenced a whole generation of midlevel naval officers, many of whom rose to prominent command in later years, to recommend to political leaders that they use force judiciously when faced with crises in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East.
[See also Navy, U.S.: 1946 to the Present; Vietnam War: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Edward J. Marolda and and Oscar P. Fitzgerald , From Military Assistance to Combat, 1986.
Thomas J. Cutler , Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam, 1988.
R. L. Schreadley , From the Rivers to the Sea: The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1992.
Edward J. Marolda , By Sea, Air, and Land: An Illustrated History of the U.S. Navy and the War in Southeast Asia, 1994.

Edward J. Marolda