Vietnamese Resistance War Against the United States (1955-1975)

A Vietnamese Resistance War Against the United States (1955-1975) is a U.S.A. war that is a Vietnam war.

• AKA: Vietnam War.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • U.S.A. / Japan War.
  • Korean War.
  • Vietnam / Cambodia War.
• See: Watergate Scandal, Indochina War, Cold War, Battle of Saigon (1968), Tet Offensive, Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Quảng Trị, Easter Offensive.

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References

2022

• (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War Retrieved:2022-11-24.
  • The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The war is widely considered to be a Cold War-era proxy war. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973. The conflict also spilled over into neighboring states, exacerbating the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries becoming communist states by 1975. After the French military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 – following their defeat in the First Indochina War – the Viet Minh took control of the North Vietnam and the U.S. assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Viet Cong (VC), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces (ARVN). North Vietnam had also invaded Laos in 1958 in support of insurgents, establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply and reinforce the Viet Cong. By 1963, the North Vietnamese had sent 40,000 soldiers to fight in the south.U.S. involvement increased under President John F. Kennedy, from just under a thousand military advisors in 1959 to 23,000 in 1964. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam, without a formal declaration of war. Johnson ordered the deployment of combat units for the first time, and dramatically increased the number of U.S. troops to 184,000. U.S. and South Vietnam forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. The U.S. also conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Despite little progress, the U.S. continued a significant build-up of forces. The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive throughout 1968 caused U.S. domestic support for the war to fade. Despite this, VC sustained heavy losses during the Offensive and subsequent U.S.-ARVN operations,and by the end of the year, the VC insurgents held almost no territory in South Vietnam.In 1969, North Vietnam declared a Provisional Revolutionary Government (the PRG) in the south to give the reduced VC a more international stature, but from then on, they were sidelined, as PAVN forces began more conventional combined arms warfare. Operations crossed national borders, and the U.S. bombed North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia beginning in 1964 and 1969, respectively. The deposing of the Cambodian monarch, Norodom Sihanouk, resulted in a PAVN invasion of the country at the request of the Khmer Rouge, escalating the Cambodian Civil War and resulting in a U.S.-ARVN counter-invasion. In 1969, following the election of Richard Nixon, a policy of “Vietnamization” began, which saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN, with U.S. forces sidelined and increasingly demoralized by widespread domestic opposition and reduced recruitment. U.S. ground forces had largely withdrawn by early 1972 and their operations were limited to air support, artillery support, advisors, and materiel shipments. The ARVN, with U.S. support, stopped a large PAVN offensive during the Easter Offensive of 1972. The offensive failed to subdue South Vietnam, but the ARVN itself failed to recapture all lost territory, leaving its military situation difficult. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 saw all U.S. forces withdrawn; the Peace Accords were broken almost immediately, and fighting continued for two more years. Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975, while the 1975 Spring Offensive saw the Fall of Saigon to the PAVN on 30 April; this marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted an enormous human cost: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action. The end of the Vietnam War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions of refugees leave Indochina, an estimated 250,000 of whom perished at sea. Once in power, the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, while conflict between them and the unified Vietnam would eventually escalating into the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, which toppled the Khmer Rouge government in 1979. In response, China invaded Vietnam, with subsequent border conflicts lasting until 1991. Within the United States, the war gave rise to what was referred to as Vietnam Syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvements, which, together with the Watergate scandal contributed to the crisis of confidence that affected America throughout the 1970s.

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