The resistance and the NVA fought to unify the country while the South sought to establish independence. Since the 19th century, Vietnam had been under the colonial rule. During the second world war, Japan invaded the country. Vietnamese political leader Ho Chi Minh was inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism and formed the League for the Independence of Vietnam Viet Minh with the aim of driving out both the Japanese invaders and the French colonialists. Ho Chi Minh saw an opportunity to seize control and immediately rose up in arms.
We fought to an agreed stalemate. The peace settlement was signed in Paris on 27 January It called for release of all U. The , evacuees in April during the fall of Saigon consisted almost entirely of civilians and Vietnamese military, NOT American military running for their lives. There were almost twice as many casualties in Southeast Asia primarily Cambodia the first two years, after the fall of Saigon in , than there were during the ten years the U.
Thanks for the perceived loss and the countless assassinations and torture visited upon Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians goes mainly to the American media and their undying support-by-misrepresentation of the anti-War movement in the United States. As with much of the Vietnam War, the news media misreported and misinterpreted the Tet Offensive.
It was reported as an overwhelming success for the Communist forces and a decided defeat for the U. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite initial victories by the Communists forces, the Tet Offensive resulted in a major defeat of those forces. Still, militarily, the Tet Offensive was a total defeat of the Communist forces on all fronts.
It resulted in the death of some 45, NVA troops and the complete, if not total destruction of the Viet Cong elements in South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive succeeded on only one front and that was the News front and the political arena. This was another example in the Vietnam War of an inaccuracy becoming the perceived truth.
However, inaccurately reported, the News Media made the Tet Offensive famous. Remember me Log in. Lost your password? Vietnam War Facts, Stats and Myths. Congressman Press Release. Totals 9,, military personnel served on active duty during the official Vietnam era from August 5, to May 7, Five men killed in Vietnam were only 16 years old.
The oldest man killed was 62 years old. 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. On January 31, , some 70, DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive named for the lunar new year , a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than cities and towns in South Vietnam.
Taken by surprise, U. Reports of the Tet Offensive stunned the U. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam though bombings continued in the south and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection. Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the NLF, the dialogue soon reached an impasse, and after a bitter election season marred by violence, Republican Richard M.
Nixon won the presidency. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U. In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.
The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U. After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In and , there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country.
On November 15, , the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D. The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly. It was all over within two months. The North Vietnamese then closed in on Saigon. In the central highlands, Hue, Danang and elsewhere, there were terrible scenes of panic and disorder, of disobedience and desertion, but also hard-fought battles and acts of heroism and sacrifice.
The world gasped. The reporters who had chosen to stay in Saigon were mainly French and Japanese, plus a few British and one or two Americans vaguely pretending to be Canadians. We had reported a war that, while not without its dangers, was in some ways an easy one for journalists. We were ferried around efficiently by US planes and helicopters, and fed, accommodated and protected by US and to a lesser extent South Vietnamese soldiers.
You could be on the edge of a battle in the north, near the ironically named Demilitarised Zone, in the morning, and back in Saigon having a drink after a shower in the early evening.
Now we suddenly found ourselves in limbo. Our life-support system of American pilots and protectors, analysts, Australian embassy military attaches and the like had vanished. Many Vietnamese contacts had left or gone to ground.
Our fixers, assistants, drivers and translators had, too. Some who turned out to have been communist agents did remain, but they had moved up in the world, naturally.
The North Vietnamese had a few sophisticated English- and French-speaking officers who were sometimes helpful, but that was rare. On one such occasion, just after the fall of the city, a North Vietnamese army film unit burst into the offices of CBS and demanded that the bureau hand over its footage of the last real fight of the war, at Newport Bridge just outside the city. They were sweaty and angry — it seemed they had arrived too late at the bridge to get their own film, so they wanted to grab what the US TV crew had shot.
I witnessed the confrontation and shot off to get a suave North Vietnamese colonel we had met earlier. He came, defused the situation and ordered his compatriots to leave. The relieved bureau chief offered him a drink. Perhaps not surprisingly, we never did. We were left to our own meagre devices. We could not file our reports at first, because the post office was closed and all other telexes and phone lines were down.
When we could, we sent reams of copy about the final days that we had been unable to get out at the time. After that, what could we do? We could not do what we had so often done in the past, which was to write critically about US policy and the South Vietnamese government and army.
All that was gone, and our criticisms no longer mattered, if they ever had. A group of us drove along Route 13 toward An Loc, a town north of Saigon that had been under siege during the general offensive. South Vietnamese military tunics were scattered in the ditches on each side. There were similar scenes elsewhere. The explanation was that the North Vietnamese troops had ordered surrendering units to shed their gear. The irony of this sort of sightseeing was obvious.
An Loc had been a South Vietnamese victory, hard fought by airborne troopers and rangers, but clinched by US air power: almost every B in south-east Asia was called in to strike the North Vietnamese attackers. We were, in a sense, reporting the past, because the present was too puzzling. On the way out to An Loc we had passed the British embassy, and I noticed that the squad of soldiers guarding it had taken down the union jack and were using it as an awning to shield themselves from the sun.
Choked — and surprised — by a sudden rage, I got out of the car, marched over to them, and insisted they put it back on its staff. Taking me for a Russian or East German and imagining I had some kind of authority, they at least folded it up.
The soldiers had meant no insult. It was just a piece of cloth, after all. But the truth was that we were all, to one degree or another, still mentally in the old war, and still imbued with a consciousness of western supremacy that events had just contradicted in a most emphatic and dramatic way. And this was so, even though few us had ever been strong supporters of the war. Before the fall of the city, Philip Caputo , an American journalist who had also been a marine officer in Vietnam and had written a brilliant book about his experiences, wondered aloud whether what was happening was akin to the legionnaires withdrawing from the outer reaches of the Roman empire.
Was our western sway over the world, in its final American embodiment, coming to an end? The drawing of such parallels was commonplace — a kind of self-romanticisation that seems distasteful in retrospect. Vietnamese people, North and South, were at an extraordinary moment in their history, and we were sitting around misquoting Edward Gibbon. We also tried, of course, to report what was happening in the new Vietnam.
Some of it was under our noses, in the very hotels in which we were staying, as staff were summoned to various kinds of re-education meetings. Hoc tap , as it was called, would eventually touch almost everyone.
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