The effective, bloody attacks shock U. The massacre happens amid a campaign of U. Facing backlash about the war, Johnson announces he will not run for reelection. Nixon wins the U. B bombers target suspected communist base camps and supply zones in Cambodia. The bombings are kept under wraps by Nixon and his administration since Cambodia is officially neutral in the war, although The New York Times would reveal the operation on May 9, They are forced to retreat and suffer heavy losses.
The report reveals the U. The attacks, concentrated between Hanoi and Haiphong, drop roughly 20, tons of bombs over densely populated regions. The North Vietnamese accept a cease fire. But as U. Gerald R. Ford becomes president. Marine and Air Force helicopters transport more than 1, American civilians and nearly 7, South Vietnamese refugees out of Saigon in an hour mass evacuation effort.
Vietnam would later release estimates that 1. Buddhists — The Crisis, GlobalSecurity. The Vietnam War. Statistical information about casualties of the Vietnam War, U. National Archives.
Department of State, Office of the Historian. In March the fall of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia destroyed the fragile neutrality of that state, as his successor Lon Nol demanded the North Vietnamese withdraw from their base camps along the South Vietnamese border.
The North Vietnamese reacted by extending their presence toward the west. Limited by Nixon to a kilometer strip along the border, and limited in time to the end of June, this action sparked violent protests on campuses across the United States. These culminated in the deaths of four students at Kent State University on May 4. The incursion into the North Vietnamese Army NVA base camps yielded a great quantity of rice, weapons, and ammunition, and disrupted the North Vietnamese command and logistics structures for months, buying time for Vietnamization and further U.
The following spring, Nixon ordered a theater-wide offensive, seeking to seize the initiative in the war. South Vietnamese forces crossed into Cambodia and Laos in early February The North Vietnamese had anticipated the incursion into Laos, known as Lam Son , and massed their forces in an attempt to annihilate the South Vietnamese.
The South Vietnamese withdrawal disintegrated into a disorderly retreat. There is considerable debate over whether he was primarily nationalist or communist, but he was not especially anti-Western. Ho attempted to contact Eisenhower to discuss Vietnam but received no answer. That would have made any negotiation with Ho politically ticklish. A lingering question of the war is what might have happened if Eisenhower and Ho had arranged a meeting; possibly, an accord could have been reached, or possibly Ho was simply seeking to limit American involvement, in order to more easily depose the Diem government.
American involvement began to escalate under President John F. North Vietnam, had by then established a presence in Laos and developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail through that country in order to resupply and reinforce its forces in South Vietnam. Kennedy saw American efforts in Southeast Asia almost as a crusade and believed increasing the military advisor program, coupled with political reform in South Vietnam, would strengthen the south and bring peace.
Two U. The peasants resented being forced from their ancestral lands, and consolidating them gave the VC better targets. The program, which had been poorly managed, was abandoned after about two years, following the coup that deposed Diem. Marines landing at Da Nang area beach. Marine Corps. Diem fell from favor with his American patrons, partly over disagreements in how to handle the war against the VC and partly because of his unpopular suppression of religious sects and anyone he feared threatened his regime.
He, in turn, called the Buddhists VC sympathizers. Two younger monks poured a mix of gasoline and jet fuel over him and, as the three had planned, set fire to him.
Seven more such immolations occurred that year. To make matters worse, Diem responded by sending troops to raid pagodas. The administration was caught by surprise, however, when Diem was murdered during the coup, which was led by General Duong Van Minh. This began a series of destabilizing changes in government leadership.
That same month, Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas , Texas. His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, inherited the Vietnam situation. His political party, the Democrats, had been blamed for China falling to communism; withdrawing from Vietnam could hurt them in the elections.
On the other hand, Congress had never declared war and so the president was limited in what he could do in Southeast Asia. That changed in August The pilot of an F-8E Crusader did not see any ships in the area where the enemy was reported, and years later crew members said they never saw attacking craft. Congress swiftly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that removed most restrictions from the president in regards to Vietnam.
Though a congressional investigative committee the previous year had warned that America could find itself slipping into in a morass that would require more and more military participation in Vietnam, Johnson began a steady escalation of the war, hoping to bring it to a quick conclusion. Ironically, the leadership of North Vietnam came to a similar conclusion: they had to inflict enough casualties on Americans to end support for the war on the U.
On September 30, , the first large-scale antiwar demonstration took place in America, on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The war became the central rallying point of a burgeoning youth counterculture, and the coming years would see many such demonstrations, dividing generations and families.. This would be a war without a front or a rear; it would involve full-scale combat units and individuals carrying out terrorist activities such as the Brink Hotel bombing.
In previous war, progress and setbacks could be shown on maps; large enemy units could be engaged and destroyed. Guerrilla warfare asymmetrical warfare does not permit such clear-cut data. Westmoreland with a thorny challenge: how to show the American people progress was being made.
Westmoreland adopted a search-and-destroy policy to find and engage the enemy and use superior firepower to destroy him. The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina. The subsequent treaty signed in July at a Geneva conference split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th Parallel 17 degrees north latitude , with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South.
The treaty also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were not communists, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi. A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build-up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help Diem confront the Viet Cong threat.
By , the U. A coup by some of his own generals succeeded in toppling and killing Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, in November , three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution , which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U. The bombing campaign was meant to disrupt the flow of supplies across the Ho Chi Minh trail into Vietnam and to prevent the rise of the Pathet Lao, or Lao communist forces.
The U. In March , Johnson made the decision—with solid support from the American public—to send U. By June, 82, combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and military leaders were calling for , more by the end of to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army.
Despite the concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort amid a growing anti-war movement , Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of , troops at the end of July and another , in In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.
Westmoreland pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory. Heavy bombing by B aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities.
Even as the enemy body count at times exaggerated by U. Additionally, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses. By November , the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching ,, and U. The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers—both volunteers and draftees—including drug use , post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD , mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.
Between July and December , more than , U. Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October , some 35, demonstrators staged a massive Vietnam War protest outside the Pentagon. Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.
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