What was the Vietnam War?
The Vietnam War (1954–75) was fought between the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam (known as the Viet Cong) on one side (with additional backing from China and the Soviet Union), and the government of South Vietnam and its key ally, the United States, on the other.
Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War
The China threat
Though there were Cold War incentives to contain communism, with Senator Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare” having only recently flickered out, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson feared that invading North Vietnam, to defeat the state sponsor of South Vietnam’s Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas, would almost certainly bring in the Chinese again.
Pentagon wargames – designed to simulate a US-led war in Southeast Asia under all contingencies – in 1966 predicted that a US thrust into North Vietnam would trigger an intervention by 35 Chinese divisions, at a time when the US had only six divisions in Vietnam, and scant force in reserve.
China also threatened to contest any American invasions of Laos and Cambodia, where the 12,000 miles of paths, roads and waterways that comprised the war-sustaining Ho Chi Minh Trail travelled through what were called the “communist sanctuaries”.
Why was America interested in Vietnam?
American interests in Vietnam went back over a decade before US President Lyndon B Johnson deployed troops. The rise of communists in North Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, in the 1950s had turned the divided country into a Cold War battleground. As the US believed that if one state fell to communism, others would follow – the ‘Domino Theory’ – they had to get involved (albeit incrementally).
Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War
These areas were “sanctuaries” because, from the American perspective, they were too big for the US and its allies to control. They were filled with communist guerrillas (Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge), and their own militaries were poorly equipped, corrupt and incapable of policing even the narrow border strips colonised by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
The war therefore would have to be waged inside South Vietnam against VC guerrillas and NVA infiltrators. The bombing, the shelling, along with the “search and destroy” sweeps that heaped up most of South Vietnam’s 1.4 million civilian casualties in the war, would have to be inflicted on America’s ally – South Korea – not its enemy.
That disturbing fact alone gave sensible leaders pause. When President Eisenhower was stepping in to take over the faltering French war effort in Indochina in 1954, Senator John F Kennedy observed that: “No amount of military assistance can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an ‘enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”
Who won the Vietnam War?
Certainly not the US, who withdrew in 1973 humiliated, the national psyche and economy in tatters for years to come and more than 58,000 men dead. Vietnam came out even worse as millions perished and the country had been all but destroyed. Yet North Vietnam had stood toe-to-toe against a global superpower and forced them to retreat.
Read more | Your guide to the Vietnam War
Johnson, who succeeded President Kennedy in 1963, was more sanguine than his predecessor. Kennedy saw all the pitfalls in Vietnam. Johnson saw opportunity: to turn America’s massive high-tech arsenal against the forces of North Vietnam, which he called “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country”.
“That bitch of a war”
But like every American president who waged the Vietnam War, Johnson did it reluctantly. He called it “that bitch of a war”. He wanted to focus his energy (and funds) on the Great Society programmes – such as Medicare and Medicaid, which were introduced in 1965 – and tried to hide or deny the costs of Vietnam so that he could do both.
Congress howled at the rising costs of both Vietnam and the Great Society; they had seen the American budget deficit soar from $1 billion in 1965 to $25 billion three years later. Between 1964 and 1967, American spending on education increased from $4 billion to $12 billion annually, on health care from $5 billion to $16 billion. At the same time, spending on Vietnam surged from a few hundred million in 1964 to $25 billion in 1967.
American presidents fought it with limited means and appetite. The North Vietnamese fought it with everything they had
This combination of social and military spending ignited America’s ‘Great Inflation’, which would not be tamed until 1983. US inflation doubled in the mid-1960s and doubled again by 1970. Here was another reason the war was unwinnable. American presidents fought it with limited means and appetite. The North Vietnamese fought it with everything they had.
Of course, “limited means” in the American context were still massive. “We have a $50 billion [defense] budget, and this is our only war,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara chuckled to a general as the war heated up. In McNamara’s view, small increments of American power would suffice to deter or defeat the Vietnamese communists.
This explained the folly of Operation Rolling Thunder, a limited air campaign against North Vietnamese infrastructure waged from 1965 to 1968. Lyndon B Johnson and his advisers assumed that by gradually escalating the air attacks – while keeping well clear of “flashpoints” such as Haiphong harbour or the railways crossing the Chinese border – they would persuade Hanoi’s politburo to cut its support of the VC.
A dream of victory
This also explained the folly of General William “Westy” Westmoreland’s ‘search and destroy’ strategy, which was what the Americans enacted from 1965 to 1969. Westy and the administration believed that it would be sufficient to devastate the NVA and VC with heavy casualties.
Rising “body count,” McNamara and Westy hypothesised, would reach a “crossover point,” where the ascending line on a graph of American-inflicted communist casualties crossed the descending line of communist manpower.
This theory of victory did not reckon with the grim discipline of the North Vietnamese state, where Le Duan was pushing Ho Chi Minh to the sidelines in the mid-1960s, intensifying the war, and vowing that no number of casualties would deter North Vietnam, which fielded an army of 480,000 troops, had 2 million males of military age in reserve, and 120,000 physically fit boys reaching the draft age of 17 every year. In 1967, Hanoi infiltrated 8,500 fresh troops into South Vietnam every month. In 1968, 20,000 a month. These NVA troops joined tens of thousands of VC guerrillas recruited in the South.
No number of casualties would deter North Vietnam
Search and destroy failed utterly. The NVA and VC learned quickly how to thwart or defeat it – usually by hiding or retreating from the big American sweeps, which were always heralded by the construction of new artillery firebases and helicopter landing zones (LZs). Ninety per cent of American operations in the war made no contact with the enemy.
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – South Vietnam’s million-man army – had an even lower contact rate. This was the reason that body counts were notoriously faked: “if he’s dead and Vietnamese he’s VC.” The American and ARVN generals needed to show progress to mollify the president and pad their own performance reports.
Cost of the war
Not contacting the enemy in battle in no way reduced the cost of the war. Casualties mounted from accidents, mines, booby traps, friendly fire, and opportunistic ambushes. Helicopter and fixed-wing loss rates climbed as North Vietnam’s Soviet-supplied air defenses improved. With most of Westy’s troops searching the wilderness areas of South Vietnam for infiltrators, most of the nation’s rural hamlets fell under communist control, providing yet more recruits for the VC. American combat infantry – called “grunts” – were overextended, exhausted and demoralised.
The American military’s heavy reliance on firepower and mechanisation meant that only about 60,000 of the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1969 were grunts in the field. The rest were the “clerks and jerks” who staffed, supplied and supported the overworked combat infantry and their aircraft.
Here was another reason that the war could not be won by thrusting into Laos or Cambodia to “cut” the Ho Chi Minh Trail – as if that were ever possible. There were not enough troops even to pacify South Vietnam, let alone the big neighbours to the west. Nixon’s timid “incursion” into Cambodia in 1970, hedged about with punctilious rules of engagement and a strict timeline for withdrawal, revealed that even the self-styled “madman” knew that invading the vast sanctuaries was a fool’s errand. After the incursion, and after the ARVN’s even less effectual incursion into Laos in 1971, communist supplies resumed bumping down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the amount of 10,000 tons a week, as if the incursions had never happened.
Superpower overstretch ultimately forced the American withdrawal, as early critics of the war had predicted
Superpower overstretch ultimately forced the American withdrawal, as early critics of the war had predicted. To put over 500,000 US troops into Vietnam and pay for a multi-million-man South Vietnamese army and militia, Johnson and Nixon stretched US preparedness for other conflicts to the breaking point. By 1968, the US had only one uncommitted reserve division in the United States. Aircraft, artillery, vehicles, and munitions urgently requested by America’s allies around the world could not be supplied “due to priority requirements for Southeast Asia.” Pentagon Research and Development activities and investment in new technologies – like MIRV warheads and advanced fighter aircraft – had to be continually postponed due to the costs of Vietnam.
Financially, America’s gold reserves plummeted as foreign governments, spooked by the wartime inflation in the US, converted their dollars and treasury bonds to bullion. This threatened a run on the dollar and would lead to Nixon’s devaluation of the currency in 1971. It would also lead to his admission (to Kissinger) long before the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, that there was no conceivable way to win the Vietnam War. “Peace with honor” was what Nixon called America’s defeat.
Dr Geoffrey Wawro is University Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of North Texas and the author of seven books, including The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024)
