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 "'You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,' said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. 'That may be so,' he replied, 'but it is also irrelevant.'"
World War I aside, the Indo-Chinese conflicts were the most controversial and divisive conflicts that the Anglosphere has ever been a part of, and are second only to Algeria in the Francosphere. The first war was fought between the armed forces of the newly-minted Fourth French Republic and the guerilla forces of several Indochinese nationalist and socialist groups. Post-independence, the second war was fought by the USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, several Southeast-Asian countries and the forces of South Vietnam to prop up the latter's dictatorship as a bulwark against communism. Against them were arrayed the Soviet- and somewhat Chinese-backed (with some assistance from Cuba and North Korea—it's complicated) forces of the communist dictatorship of North Vietnam, and the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (better known as the Viet Cong)—a communist guerrilla force operating in South Vietnam. The third Indo-Chinese war was a series of conflicts from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War, including a war between Vietnam and anti-Vietnamese factions in Cambodia, and a short "punitive war" started by China against Vietnam followed by a decade-long border skirmish. But first, some simplified background details.
Part I: Decolonisation
Vietnam was no longer a tributary of the Empire of the Qing, and soon integrated into French Indochine, after the conclusion of the (small-scale) Sino-French war of 1884-85 in France's favour. The Kingdom of Siam was preserved as a neutral buffer state between Indochine and the British Raj, which was being extended into modern-day Burma, though both sides shaved off ever-increasing strips of Siamese territory as desired. Dissatisfaction with French rule was long and hardly unjustified - though ostensibly there for the Viet people's benefit, the Third Republic and its entrepreneurs proved rather more interested in developing the region's economic potential (mines, rubber and tropical hardwood plantations, and general agricultural products) than educating the locals or providing healthcare and other public works for them.
As early as the end of World War One a formal request was made for self-government by the Indochinese, with increasingly informal and sporadic violent resistance breaking out here and there. Ironically, it was during the Treaty of Versailles negotiations that a young Vietnamese waiter approached President Woodrow Wilson (of the USA) to ask for help in negotiating with the French on behalf of Vietnam and the rest of French Indochina. Wilson—due to a combination of racism and having bigger fish to fry that entailed complex negotiations with the French, not to mention the British and the Japanese—refused. The Viet's name was Ho Chi Minh, who went away from the meeting much disillusioned and went to study in Moscow. He ended up spending several years as a lecturer on socialist ideology atGuangzhou's Whampoa Military Academy under Academy Director Chiang what's-his-name. There he helped lead a cadre of Vietnamese expatriots who shared his views on effecting political change in his homeland by means of direct action.
When France surrendered to Nazi Germany Indochina was occupied by the Japanese military as part of their 'blockade' strategy for cutting the Guomindang off from critically-needed sources of arms and equipment from the outside world. The USA used the occupation of Indochina as a pretext for embargoing Japan in the hope that this would bring Japan to the negotiating table... but anyhow, the amazingly successful Japanese offensive into South-East Asia which followed - launched to seize strategic resources that the embargo had denied them - was a catalyst for nationalism in the region and worldwide, since it conclusively proved that a) the European Colonial Powers could be defeated in decisive battles by non-Europeans, and b) non-European powers could be bastards too, if not even bigger ones. When the Japanese realized that they were losing the war, they went about fostering nationalism and training militia and guerrilla forces in earnest throughout occupied Asia—partly as a final 'screw you' to the Allies, but also because they genuinely believed in pan-Asian anti-European solidarity on some level.
This all came to a head when the French puppet regime—which had nominally continued to run Indochina up 'til that point—were ousted on March 11, 1945. The Việt Minh, a party of Vietnamese Marxist-Nationalists, modeled off and led by people associated with the early Guomindang of China, had successfully played the French and Japanese off against each other—and the various opposition groups against themselves (up to and including selling one of the early leaders of the Anti-French resistance out to the French) before seizing the day and trying to take both major powers out while trying to bring the other resistance groups under its' wing. The day the War formally ended - September 2 1945 - they declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, an independent and sovereign nation with its capital at Hanoi.
Of course, the French were not to be so quickly denied. Sino-Anglo-Indian forces had just months before broken the three-year deadlock in Burma, and were at that time marching into (formerly Japanese-Allied) Siam. When the Japanese surrendered the Anglo-Indian army pressed on into Indochina and aided French forces in restoring French control by the end of the month. France recognised the prevailing mood could not be denied entirely and created a French-associated government in Saigon - the 'State of Vietnam' - to rival the Việt Minh and their contemporaries. The State of Vietnam was led by former emperor Bảo Đại, who had abdicated his throne August 25, 1945.
For a while, an uneasy peace punctuated by low level fighting endured while talks were conducted between the two sides to try resolving the issue peacefully, before the Viet Minh seized the initiative and launched another surprise offensive. The French fought back, hard, and the story of the First Indochina War (December 19, 1946 - August 1, 1954) was one of ever-escalating and intensifying conflict. When the Chinese Communists won their Civil War against the Guomindang on the Chinese mainland, they too committed forces (off the books) to supplement the USSR's (covert) aid to the Việt Minh. The Việt Minh were not the only ones stirring up trouble, either; several large left-wing nationalist (Pathet Lao, Khmer Issarak, United Issarak Front) groups entered the fight alongside the Việt Minh, alongside many smaller groups. Initially the French States of Indochina held their own, but increasingly they had to be propped up by direct intervention from France's government and military.
The result was a bloody, brutal war that led to an exhausted France - faced with a divided West and a United States whose somewhat sympathetic opinion stopped far short of directly intervening to support the government - withdrawing from Indochina after the bloody last stand at Dien Bien Phu.
Part II: Partition
After the Geneva Accords, Vietnam was partitioned into two countries: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), and the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which became the Republic of Vietnam after a 1955 referendum, amidst claims of widespread electoral fraud on both sides, with the Communists accusing the Saigon government of cooking the books to retain power and partition the country and the Saigon government justifying partition because of Communist subversion attempts. As a result, the referendum was eventually scrapped, and open war broke out almost instantly thereafter. The United States replaced the French as political/military backing for the South Vietnamese regime after the French withdrawal, while the North Vietnamese regime was backed by the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and North Korea. However, Chinese support soon dropped off after the Sino-Soviet pact went bad in c.1960 and got worse, to the point that a war between the USSR and PRC certainly looked possible if not likely. With North Vietnam choosing the Soviet camp relations between the two countries soon soured over, among other things, their differing interpretations of Socialist Ideology.
Relations in the South were dominated by the South Vietnam President Ngô Đình Diệm's increasingly repressive dictatorship and the rise of the Viet Cong (officially the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, which was largely a Southern auxiliary of the PVA). Which led to which (if either) is the subject of much controversy, but they would both go on to terrorize South Vietnam in the latter half of the Fifties. On November 2, 1963, the corrupt and increasingly unpopular President Ngô was overthrown and assassinated with the approval of the CIA.
Part III: Escalation
American involvement was initially in the form of equipment, money and "advisors", but by the 1960s, these "advisors" were many thousands. Foreign countries began actively fighting on both sides of the conflict (most on the side of South Vietnam). American ships were supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese ones in 1964note , and so President Lyndon Johnson ordered a massive military presence in Vietnam to "protect the freedom" of South-East Asia and curtail the advance of Communism. In strictly legal terms, the United States didn't enter a war, as Congress never wrote a declaration of war; the entire conflict was essentially an executive order. If you go into any U.S.-government-funded library, you'll likely have to search under "Vietnam Conflict". The Korean Conflict and the Overseas Contingency Operation are likewise not officially wars.
The United States COIN (counter-insurgency) methods left much to be desired initially. The frequent tactic, mostly in the 1966-7 period, is known as "search and destroy". This would involve forces entering hostile territory, destroying an enemy force, then leaving. However, these missions usually involved destroying houses and rice paddies, causing a considerable number of civilian deaths. The resulting destruction made the US forces unpopular. Many neutrals and even friendlies switched sides to the NLF. The US forces eventually switched towards a program of "winning hearts and minds", but the damage had already been done.*
Although the Vietnam War is primarily portrayed as an "American conflict," and occupies a unique place in American culture and national memory, the USA and Vietnamese were not the only participants: South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand also fought in support of Saigon. Despite some excellent battlefield performances, South Korea's involvement also included a spate of very nasty massacres. Similarly, SASR units were greatly feared by the Vietnamese and respected by the US. Notably, and despite enormous pressure from the US, British prime minister Harold Wilson refused to countenance UK involvement, for a number of reasons. The British had already spent years putting down a communist uprising in Malaya in similar circumstances, the War was deeply unpopular in the UK, Wilson himself was bitterly opposed, Britain couldn't afford it, and the general (and ultimately accurate) opinion of the UK's Defence Staff was that the war could not be won. For the other side, the Soviet Union provided arms, training, materiel and (allegedly) covert special operations troops. China provided anti-aircraft troops and logistical support, such as engineering battalions. North Korea sent over 200 pilots, two fighter squadrons, and an anti-air battalion to defend Hanoi, and Cuba sent some lovely torture technicians. Amusingly, as Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated the latter soon stopped sending arms shipments to Vietnam by rail because the Chinese had started pinching it for themselves.
The Anti-War Movement
Back in the United States, the population was becoming increasingly unhappy with the conduct of the war, and even the war itself. The war was broadcast, uncensored, on US TV every night. It generally looked bad. The military would trumpet the "body count" (the number of insurgents they had killed), but these figures were subject to manipulation by both sides.
The nub of the issue came to be national service, a.k.a. 'The Draft'. Selective Service (to give it the proper title), done on a lottery system, had been around in the past — Elvis Presley was famously drafted for two years in the 1950s. The draft had some exemptions. You would not be drafted if you were in college. Since poor people couldn't afford college, you can guess how that went. This was changed at the end of the war. Being married meant you were not drafted. Later, they changed the rule so you needed to have a child.
There were also many who protested the war because they wanted the North Vietnamese to win and were communist sympathisers if not communists themselves. This included groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen Underground, the former also often chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. NLF is gonna win." during their Anti-War protests, which are in reference to the leader of the North Vietnamese (the communists) and the Viet Cong/National Liberation Front, respectively.
In any case, this meant that poor Americans were being sent off to South-East Asia for a cause many of them didn't understand. Some within the country thought the US just as bad as, if not worse than, the the Soviet Union. The latter had in living memory helped Communist Hungary to suppress a revolution (in 1956) and invaded Czechoslovakia (in 1968) to topple its socialist-ically-unorthodox government, doing so in much the same way that the US had been intervening in Latin America - as per the Monroe Doctrine - for the better part of a century. A large-scale anti-war movement came to the fore, one that engaged in civil disobedience, sit-ins, and peace rallies. There were also violent demonstrations, such as the activities of The Weather Underground. Many burned their draft cards in public. One of the most infamous events on the Union's 'home-front' was the Kent State Shootings. On 4 May 1970 the US' National Guard (an army-reservist citizen militia) opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters at Kent State University in Ohio for reasons we're still not sure of. 4 people were killed and 9 wounded. It is worth noting that two of the 4 killed were not part of the protest but were merely innocent passersby (in a tragic case of irony, one was also in the ROTC [(Military) Reserve Officer Training Corps]) trying to avoid being tardy for their next classes.
Jane Fonda, a major anti-war activist, went to North Vietnam and was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, an act she later apologised for. It severely damaged her career,note and the undying hatred of more than a few. This hatred led to a rumour that Jane Fonda also delivered a letter to the Viet Cong prison camp commander about the terrible conditions of the Viet Cong camp that an American prisoner entrusted to her to give to his American superiors that inevitably made the situation far worse for the soldier and his fellow prisoners. To this day, at the U.S. Naval Academy, when a plebe shouts out "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!", the entire company will reply "Goodnight, bitch!"
The majority of those who were sent to Indochina were volunteers of one shade or another, and the war was not *entirely* responsible for the draft, but as a way to make manpower ends meet when faced with the "long night" of Soviet supremacy following 1954 and especially 1956. Most draftees were sent abroad to places other than Vietnam both because it got to a point that the military viewed them as unreliable liabilities and the fact that the manpower crunch was that severe. However, the draft remained a dark symbol and a rallying cry against the war.
Live Reports for the first time sending home a more complete view of warfare were sent home for the first time, horrifying the populace as they became aware of the atrocities and violence necessary in combat, the War Is Glorious Mentality faded from the mind of much of the populace, leading to several iconic photographs [of varying accuracy] of these scenes.
Part IV: Endgame
Despite winning every major battle, the American-led Western Allies never seemed to make much progress in the war. As the war dragged on and graphic new reports appeared on TV, the war grew increasingly unpopular among Americans at home, giving rise to Nixon's ordering of massive bombing campaigns to force the North to the peace table. Ironically, the final straw for the American populace regarding the progress of the Vietnam War was also the decisive battle that led to American victory, the Tet Offensive, which thanks to reporting from Walter Cronkite giving American viewers a look at the guerrilla fighting close up and some allege he made it seem as though the Americans lost the battle in a bloodbath. Some modern analysts even argued that the Tet Offensive, being pointless from pure tactical point of viewnote , strategically was planned exactly as media-bomb aimed to convince American voters the war was unwinnable. If this to be true, Ho Chi Minh sure did his research on American society.
In the end, there was a tentative deal reached with the North for American forces to withdraw as the South Vietnamese government would bolster its' forces. This backfired, as when the North invaded, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam crumbled without support in the face of an onslaught by the North's Vietnam People's Army.
The war ended April 30, 1975 with the PVA rolling into Saigon, forming the new South Vietnamese government, which unified with North Vietnam the following year. It should be noted, however, that some sources state that America had effectively won the war by that point, as the bombing raids issued by Nixon had actually sealed the coffin on North Vietnam, and the only reason why the South Vietnamese lost and was overwhelmed is because certain members of Congress deliberately held back relief aid efforts to the South Vietnamese.
Part V: The War After The War
Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol's government in neighboring Cambodia on April 17, 1975. Despite that both Vietnam and Cambodia (called "Democratic Kampuchea" by 1976) were socialist countries, they soon had a falling-out due to unresolved disputes over maritime borders and refugees fleeing into Vietnam from Pol Pot's genocide. The year 1977 saw some border clashes between the two countries; the Khmer Rouge massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a cross-border attack on September 24, and Vietnam responded with an offensive into Cambodia's eastern regions in December.
The Third Indochina War began on December 1978 when Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia, which deposed the Khmer Rouge and set up a puppet government called the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The war lasted throughout the 1980s as anti-Vietnamese factions (including the Khmer Rouge) in Cambodia carried on fighting a bitter guerrilla war, with the Vietnamese Army launching large offensives to destroy guerrilla camps in western Cambodia and across the border into Thailand; the latter would bring Vietnamese forces into battle against the Thai Army.
The Cold War continued to have a significant influence in the region; Vietnam signed a security treaty with the Soviet Union in 1978 while China secretly supported the Khmer Rouge with military aid. After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, both China and the West would support Thailand and the anti-Vietnamese Cambodian factions. China would carry out a punitive attack of its own "to teach a lesson to Vietnam" on February 1979, starting the short Sino-Vietnamese War.
During the three weeks of intense fighting, China deployed over 250,000 men and managed to occupy three provincial capitals before withdrawing in March. Both sides suffered heavy casualties. In any case, the war was something of a draw - both sides claimed victory, but the Chinese had taken heavy numbers of casualties in the process as the military had been weakened due to Mao's Cultural Revolution.
The Sino-Vietnamese War was fought for reasons which are still somewhat unclear - both countries haven't exactly been very forthright about the matter as both countries want to avoid harming current relations. What is known is that China was unhappy with Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia. Why the Chinese leadership thought that a limited war wherein they would sustain heavy casualties - in what would only be the first and most difficult phase of a proper war in which they would almost certainly go on to break the back of Vietnamese resistance - is anyone's guess. To most outsiders, it seemed that China had ended up worst off after the war as they failed to force Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. More recently, historians pointed out that the purpose of the war was for Deng Xiaoping to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was incapable of militarily supporting Vietnam in case of an attack; to show that China was capable as an ally of the United States; and to use the Sino-Vietnamese War experience as a "lessons learned" platform for the Chinese military leadership to reform the armed forces.
After the 1979 war a constant conflict occurred along the Sino-Vietnamese border through the 1980s; the biggest clashes since 1979 occurred in 1981 in Lang Son and the Yunnan-Ha Tuyen border; in 1984 at Friendship Pass in Lang Son and at Laoshan/Vi Xuyen; and in 1987 in Laoshan/Vi Xuyen again. The fighting consisted of sporadic artillery duels, squad-level raids, and division-sized assaults to seize hills on both sides of the border; both sides' outposts and trenches were often only a few yards away from each other. In 1988, several islands in the South China Sea were secured for China after a naval battle there. As China and Vietnam began to normalize relations by the end of the 1980s, Chinese forces withdrew from their border positions beginning in 1989 and the last combat troops left the border zone in 1992.
The Third Indochina War ended in the late 1980s as the end of the Cold War allowed the belligerents to settle on a peace agreement, which led to the establishment of a United Nations nation-building mission in the early 1990s to found a new Cambodian state.
The War in Popular Culture
It was a very popular area for war films from the late '70s to the early '90s. American films may show the war from an exclusively American perspective (or at least an exclusively Hollywood perspective). Many American films are opposed to the war, with John Wayne's The Green Berets being the only real exception.
Expect a bunch of drugged-up draftees (which wasn't actually the case for everyone, since 2/3s of the American soldiers were volunteers, including three future major party US presidential nominees) who will shoot anyone who looks South-East Asian, whether they are the enemy, their own side, or civilians. Also expect an emphasis on American casualties, even though 5,000,000 civilians died compared to 58,000 American soldiers. Expect incompetent officers, stuffed-up academy cadets being "fragged" (killed with grenades) by their own soldiers, various wanton atrocities, and even Catch Twenty Two explanations about "having to destroy the village in order to save it".
According to Hollywood, Vietnam Veterans tend to be oldnote , grizzled, and broken from their experience. But in reality, things are more complicated. Many people believed they were doing their patriotic duty to stop the Communist MenaceTM, especially in the early years of the war. It wasn't until 1968 that public opinion, or at least media opinion, started turning against the war in large numbers, although the majority of civilians nonetheless felt that regardless of whether they liked it, they should vote for the war to continue.
National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam insurgents (known as Vietcong — a derogatory term meaning "Vietnamese Communist", VC, Victor Charlie, or just Charlie) and NVA soldiers don't feature very much, except as sources of weapons fire, evil torturers, punji trap layers or occasionally corpses. But of course, all of these are reversed in their war movies... when produced in Vietnam itself, given rather iron-fisted censorship that would not cop well to voicing the complaints the South and other non-Communist Vietnamese had.
Expect much use of napalm, because it smells like the victory the Americans allegedly never got. It's worth noting, however, the North Vietnamese forces never won a major battle themselves — in the Tet Offensive, a military campaign by the Viet Cong, the VC actually took so many losses they played no further major part in the war. Their secret is in part that no matter what the Americans threw at them, the North Vietnamese took the blows willingly as part of the price to pay for the cause and just kept coming; they wanted to win more than the Americans wanted them to lose. This is the only way insurgencies are ever resolved.
This is also the first American war (the French first used them to great effect in Algeria) to feature helicopters as a weapon and primary transport; in Korea they were very small, and limited to recon and light medical evacuation. The UH-1 Huey, with both side doors open, flying low over the canopy of a jungle with a grizzled soldier manning the door gun is one of the war's most enduring images.
Someone will use the word "klick" at some point, meaning a kilometre.
Finally, most importantly, and probably most accurately, there is the music. The Hollywood-Approved SoundtrackTM to the Vietnam War (and probably anything relating to the social culture of the sixties) is Creedence Clearwater Revival. "Fortunate Son" is the most popular, but "Who'll Stop the Rain," "Run Through the Jungle," "Have You Ever Seen The Rain," and "Suzie Q" will also show up. One has to wonder what CCR's legacy would be without Vietnam-Era films. The Rolling Stones and The Doors will also occasionally play. In terms of other songs, expect Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"note and Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" to play somewhere. If it's a protest movie, also expect "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Garfunkel, Oates, and Cher. The song is about four students that were killed by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam War protest on the campus of Kent State in Ohio, and is the go-to song to highlight how divisive the war was back in America. On the other hand, if you see choppers, expect "Ride of the Valkyries", because you're probably watching Apocalypse Now or something making a homage to it.
To the popular mind, The Sixties or anything about it was the war, the Hippies, the Civil Rights Movement, and The Beatles or protest song-based Psychedelic Rock. Remember that.
Because this was both an insurgency and a conventional war, you can also set air combat stories here. The F-4 Phantom II, the MiG-17 and the MiG-21 feature heavily here, with the war also seeing major use of the S-25/SA-2 "Guideline" SAM (although the bulk of shoot-down were due to conventional AAA fire).
If the work involves secret operations, expect to become familiar with MAC-V SOG (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, Special Operations Group, later Studies and Observations Group) and Project Phoenix (an assassination campaign aimed at killing civilians that supported the NVA). Both were black ops run by the CIA, and kept very secret since the Phoenix Program was illegal in international law, and the Studies and Observations Group really didn't just study and observe.
The Vietnam War has also provided the backstory for a number of other works of fiction, including The A-Team, Airwolf, Magnum, P.I., Rambo, Taxi Driver, The Bourne Series and Jon Sable Freelance. Leo McGarry in The West Wing was a Vietnam vet.
In fact, any grizzled action hero during The Eighties has a fair chance of being a Vietnam veteran — it became such a common source of angst that some movie reviewers took to abbreviating it to "Vietvet."
Compare Holiday in Cambodia.
Important Note: As if you couldn't tell by this article, this war and its outcome is still a very strong point of contention in America over 40 years later, even among people who weren't alive at the time. Along with hippies, Watergate, and all the lingering cultural debates of The Sixties and The Seventies, it was one of the key base breakers in modern American politics. Liberals still consider the war a Senseless Waste Of Human Life and point to My Lai, Diem's dictatorial rule and Operation Phoenix as evidence that there wasn't much difference between the "good guys" and the Dirty Communists, while conservatives still hold that the West — first with France and then with the US — was not "allowed" to win, that the Banana Republic of South Vietnam was still A Lighter Shade of Grey than its Communist counterpart, and that the following massacres that ensued after the collapse of the former — most infamously in Cambodia — could have been avoided if they had "stayed the course." To not get into it in much detail, most of the above points have at least some semblance of truth. All in all, it was a war fought between a corrupt kleptocracy and a Communist dictatorship. In short, the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement applies in the non-YMMV discussions.
For Vietnam the country, click here.
—Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. and Colonel Tu, April 1975, described in the book On Strategy.
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alternative title(s): Vietnam War; The Vietnam War
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