Doug McComas Books

American involvement in Vietnam started in 1945, immediately after World War II, and ended with the evacuation of the South Vietnam Embassy in Saigon in 1975. Throughout the thirty years our participation ranged from cautious observer, to arms supplier, to advisors, to active combatants, than back to arms supplier. It started with an ardent determination to stop tumbling dominos and ended with (what I would consider) a numbed indifference.

In the summer of 1945 World War II was winding down. A Vietnamese patriot named Ho Chi Min appealed to the west for independence from France, after quoting part of our Declaration of Independence in a similar document he had drawn up for an independent Vietnam. Trained in Moscow, but beholding to no one, he was rejected. Instead, the free world opted to not interfere with the French reoccupying its Indochinese colonies (consisting of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) following the departure of the defeated Japanese. The west preferred a strong France to counter the growing Soviet threat in Europe. Remembering they were once colonies of an oppressive court, America opted to only provide humanitarian support.

By early 1947 the Truman Doctrine had become the cornerstone of American policy toward the Soviet Union. Its principle tools were propping up anticommunist regimes and strengthening alliances with like-minded countries. In 1948 Mao’s Chinese communists subdued the most populous nation in the world, and America began to reconsider her colonialist phobias. In November of 1950 Mao’s armies attacked US forces in Korea who were mopping up the North Koreans following their invasion of the South. As a result America switched to supplying the French in Indochina with surplus WW II weaponry.

Meanwhile in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants led the Viet Minh revolutionary forces against the French for nine years. The French, too often, lethargically manned forts and stuck to the roads. The Viet Minh moved freely about the countryside.

Unconcerned (as communists always are) with their own losses, Ho fought a war of attrition against his French enemy who tried to keep its national casualties down by sending in generous levies of ruthless troops from its North African Colonies and its famous Foreign Legionnaires. The strategy didn’t work. The French population was tired of war.

Caught in the middle were the Vietnamese peasants. They were roughly handled by both sides, and they considered both sides to be trespassers in their world that centered only on their family and their village. As always, French arrogance in running the war and stabilizing the local government didn’t help. The counter-insurgency war, which had started well for the French, culminated in agonizing defeat. In 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, a place referred to as Hell in a Very Small Place, the French lost the cream of their army. Shortly afterwards, the UN split Indochina into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel. The communists, with their leader Ho Chi Minh, acquired the north. The west, with its leader Ngo Dinh Diem, got the south along with a million, predominantly Catholic, North Vietnamese refugees. The arrogance of high minded politicians in carving up Eastern Europe in the Treaty of Versailles was shown to Indochina. Deeply instilled nationalist traditions and rivalries were snubbed. None realized Ho Chi Minh’s determination to have a united Vietnam.

In step with the Truman Doctrine of containment, America immediately sent advisors (both military and civilian) and material for both military and civil construction projects to bolster their new ally. A war of rhetoric between North Vietnam and South Vietnam immediately erupted. In 1959 North Vietnam switched to using active force against the fledgling and very corrupt Republic of Vietnam. In a few years South Vietnam began to buckle. Aching from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in came America with more military advisors. It would only get worse.

Two lingering misunderstandings from this era would plague American policy until near the end. First, so stunned was America by the Chinese intervention in Korea that fear of it repeating in Vietnam would limit involvement to an unwinnable Strategic Defensive war. Second, the monolith of communism was a myth. A better study of Vietnam’s history would have revealed its intense hatred of the Chinese. This too would be realized, but only after America’s determination had turned to indifference.

With the Eisenhower administration’s mindset of nuclear retaliation being the future (who needs a military-industrial complex when you can just nuke them?) the US Army and Marine Corps were nearly stripped of a mission. Some deemed them anachronisms. Not wanting to risk a war with a world power with such a mindset, the Chinese communists introduced People’s War; the Bolshevik Russians called it Wars of Liberation; the west called it Guerilla Warfare. Stirring up people on nearly every continent against oppressive regimes left over by Western Colonization and greed, and promising a worker’s utopia, the communists went to work.

The Kennedy Administration replaced Eisenhower’s and immediately realized you can’t blow everyone off the map for the slightest provocation. A policy of flexible response was developed, big bombs for big threats, advisors and arms supply (counter-insurgency) for little threats. Unfortunately the conventional warfare end (tanks and artillery) that American ground forces had always excelled at were given second billing. Kennedy’s Ivy-League Best and Brightest told the military to get on the counter-insurgency bandwagon if one wanted to be promoted.

Blind to the enemies predicted response, American policy became confused. Hanoi was out to win and not willing to play along. America wanted a low key guerilla war and the North gave them one, but to keep things off kilter, also gave them a conventional war. America started to meet the challenge but wasted its firepower trying to pacify the countryside. Isolating the battlefield (keeping the North Vietnamese in the north) should have been the goal, and the job of winning hearts and minds should have been left to the Saigon government. The North settled into another decade of warfare by attrition.