VIETNAM WAR.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, ranks among the longest, bloodiest, and most controversial of the many conflicts that erupted in formerly colonized parts of the world during the second half of the twentieth century. Most historians agree that the struggle was fundamentally a civil war among Vietnamese with different visions of their country's postcolonial political order. But from its outset the fighting drew in the Cold War superpowers, which saw global interests at stake and placed massive resources at the disposal of their Vietnamese allies. Full-scale American intervention led to enormous destruction in Vietnam and a scarring defeat for the United States.

FRENCH COLONIALISM AND THE FIRST INDOCHINA WAR

The Vietnam War had its roots in the late nineteenth century, when France established colonial control over the Indochinese territories of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. French efforts to exploit Indochina economically disrupted traditional patterns of political participation and land ownership in Vietnam, generating powerful grievances among large segments of the population. Those grievances, along with a growing nationalist consciousness, gave rise to an assertive anticolonial movement in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Second World War created a golden opportunity for the nationalists to assert themselves and initiated more than three decades of conflict in the country. Germany's crushing victory over France badly weakened French power around the world. When Japanese forces overthrew the French administration in Vietnam in March 1945, the era of French colonialism appeared to be at an end. When the Allies in turn defeated Japan a few months later, the Vietminh movement led by Ho Chi Minh stepped into the void and declared a new state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, on 2 September 1945.

The renascent French government refused to accept Vietnamese independence, however, and quickly regained a domineering presence in Indochina. French and Vietnamese negotiators attempted to reach a compromise recognizing Vietnamese autonomy within a French imperial confederation. But at the end of 1946, hawks on both sides provoked a war that would last for the next eight years.

This First Indochina War pulled the United States deeply into Vietnam for the first time. For many months, the Truman administration attempted to stay on the sidelines of what most U.S. officials viewed as a colonial conflict. As the Cold War unfolded between 1947 and 1950, however, Washington increasingly sided with France. The prevalence of communists within the Vietnamese leadership led U.S. officials to worry that Vietnamese successes would serve the interests of the Soviet Union. They also feared that a French defeat in Vietnam would encourage instability across Southeast Asia, a part of the world crucial to the economic health of key U.S. allies, including Japan and Britain. In 1950 the United States began sending military and economic assistance to support the French. Four years later, Washington bore 80 percent of the costs of the war.

This massive infusion of American resources failed to turn the tide of the war, however, and the Vietnamese forces, now strongly supported by China, dealt the French military a devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. A few weeks later in Geneva, the great powers settled the war through a complicated formula that divided Vietnam into two parts. The accord stipulated that the communists regroup in the north and prepare for national elections to be held in 1956 to reunify the country, while Western-oriented Vietnamese did the same in the south. The unwillingness of southern leaders to hold elections torpedoed the process, however, and North and South Vietnam gradually became separate states during the 1950s.

INCREASING AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT

While Ho Chi Minh's government consolidated its control in the North, the United States established a close relationship with the new South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and replaced France as the major Western power shaping Vietnamese affairs. U.S. officials exuded confidence that their country's material prowess and its freedom from any taint of colonialism would enable them to succeed where the French had failed. Washington supplied large amounts of economic and military assistance for the new state and increasingly regarded it as a key Western stronghold in Southeast Asia. American officials therefore grew alarmed in 1959 and 1960 as a new communist-tinged insurgency erupted in South Vietnam.

That rebellion—the start of the Second Indochina War—began as a spontaneous groundswell against a South Vietnamese regime widely criticized as repressive and subservient to a new foreign master. Before long, however, the insurgents, led by the National Liberation Front, enjoyed the support of North Vietnam and indirectly of the Soviet Union and China. As the fighting mounted, the United States pumped more aid into South Vietnam and demanded that Ngo Dinh Diem enact reforms to win support for his regime. When Diem refused to act as the United States wished, Washington assented to a coup by South Vietnamese military officers on 1 November 1963. Diem's assassination left the United States more deeply implicated than ever in South Vietnamese affairs.

The administration of John F. Kennedy sharply increased U.S. military support for the beleaguered South Vietnamese regime but resisted proposals to introduce American troops. President Lyndon B. Johnson, however, took that step in early 1965—a move that historians have explained in various ways. Some have emphasized that earlier decisions to escalate the American commitment to South Vietnam made Johnson's choice practically inevitable. Other scholars have stressed Johnson's fear of his conservative political opponents if he failed to act boldly in a part of the world where U.S. interests seemed to be threatened. Still others have emphasized the president's determination to uphold his personal reputation for toughness.

Whatever the motives, U.S. military operations escalated rapidly from 1965 to 1968. Under the rubric of Operation Rolling Thunder, U.S. war-planes intensively bombed North Vietnam in an attempt to disrupt the flow of supplies sustaining the insurgency in the South and to intimidate the Hanoi government into negotiating on American terms. Meanwhile, U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam, numbering more than half a million by mid-1968, undertook major operations with the aim of locating and destroying units of "Vietcong" insurgents and North Vietnamese troops.

U.S. officials quickly discovered various problems that would plague their efforts throughout the war. The bombing campaign in the North produced no appreciable results, while frustrated ground forces, despite tactical victories and vast amounts of firepower, failed to defeat an elusive and highly motivated enemy. Within the United States, an increasingly robust antiwar movement challenged administration policy as misguided and immoral. In the diplomatic arena, strenuous U.S. efforts failed to attract political or military support from the West European allies. The British, French, and West German governments, preferring to avoid any public rift with Washington, generally remained quiet about the war, but in private they criticized the American effort.

U.S. problems mounted dramatically on 31 January 1968, when Vietcong guerrillas launched bold and coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive provoked an outpouring of pessimism about the U.S. war effort even though U.S. forces repelled the offensive and scored their biggest victories of the war. Under intense criticism, Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, scaled back the bombing campaign, and opened negotiations to end the war.

Richard Nixon won the presidency partly on the strength of promises to end the war quickly, but he wound up presiding over another four years of bloody fighting in a quest for an agreement on American terms. Invoking the need to preserve America's credibility around the world, Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, even expanded the war, launching invasions of Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971 in an attempt to destroy communist bases in those countries. The operations failed to change the overall military situation, however, while setting off new explosions of opposition around the world. By the end of 1972, the Nixon administration was prepared to ease its negotiating demands in order to end the war. On 27 January 1973, U.S. and North Vietnamese leaders signed a deal that embodied major concessions to Hanoi but enabled Washington to withdraw its troops from Indochina.

AFTERMATH

For Vietnam, the fighting continued for two more years—a bloody coda to a war that cost an estimated three million Vietnamese deaths. Finally on 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon, ending the war and dealing Washington its final defeat. Americans paid little attention, however, as Vietnam was reunified under communist rule. Stung by defeat and sharply divided over the U.S. role in the war, Americans recognized new limits on their nation's power and turned to a less assertive foreign policy. Only with the election of a tough-talking new president, Ronald Reagan, in 1980 did the United States return to its accustomed activism around the world.

Even so, the legacy of the war persisted in many ways. Vietnam continued to wrestle with enormous human loss and ecological damage caused by the war. In the United States, the war helped sow a lasting distrust of government. Meanwhile, Americans continued well into the twenty-first century to debate the lessons of the Vietnam War. Some, claiming that the principal failure in Vietnam lay in a failure to apply sufficient force to achieve U.S. objectives, argued for greater determination whenever Washington used force abroad. Others contended that the Vietnam experience showed the hazards of becoming embroiled in distant, unfamiliar parts of the world and counseled caution about undertaking such commitments again.

See alsoCold War; France; French Empire; Indochina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daum, Andreas W., Lloyd C. Garner, and Wilfred Mausbach, eds. America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives. Cambridge, U.K., 2003. A useful overview of European and other "third-country" perspectives on the war.

Duiker, William J. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. 2nd ed. Boulder, Colo., 1996. A survey of the decision making on the communist side of the war.

Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. 4th ed. Boston, 2002. An authoritative general survey of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley, Calif., 2005. An analysis of the beginnings of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, with emphasis on European policies.

Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley, Calif., 1999. A standard account of U.S. decision making that sets U.S. behavior against an international context.

Neu, Charles E., ed. After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War. Baltimore, Md., 2000. Insightful essays on various legacies of the war in the United States and Vietnam.

Mark Atwood Lawrence