Vietnam and the Cold War

Vietnam and the Cold War

The Vietnam war has been the subject of literally hundreds of movies, documentaries, TV series and books; but, why were Americans fighting on the other side of the world? To make sense of the war, we need to go back in time and understand a little of the global politics after the Second World War and more about Vietnam's long history.

Although Soviet Russia, the USA and the UK had been allies in the Second World War against the forces of Fascism, there was no love lost between Stalin, the Soviet Communist leader, and Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister. Churchill, in fact, wished to continue the war by attacking Russia in 1945 and completely destroying Communism. All three countries had nuclear weapons though and, so, a war could easily result in the end of the planet. Academics often talk about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as the policy that saved the world from bloody wars between 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Yet, while there were no wars in Europe, fighting broke out in many other parts of the world: Korea, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Vietnam, Afghanistan and many more, even in Yugoslavia. We often call this period the ‘Cold War’, with fighting and coups d’etat far away from home. Vietnam is the best-remembered example, although it is worth noting that the present difficulties with North Korea also started at this time and as a direct result of the two superpowers’ opposing ideologies.

Vietnam is in a region called Indochina that lies to the east of India and west of China. It includes the modern states of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The words 'Viet Nam' mean 'Southern Kingdom' and the Chinese like to think of Vietnam as the southernmost province of their land. The Vietnamese and Chinese cultures borrow much from each other, but the Vietnamese language is unique as are the food and many aspects of daily life in the land.               

In the last two thousand years, the Chinese had tried many times to conquer Vietnam and make it part of China but the Vietnamese resisted and, though it sometimes took centuries, they always managed to expel the Chinese and rule their own land. The Vietnamese resistance had to fight not only the Chinese but also the small number of Vietnamese who collaborated with the occupier. These Vietnamese were called 'puppets' because they were controlled by the Chinese.

By the 1830s, the Vietnamese had controlled their own land for centuries but, at this time, European merchants and soldiers, especially the French, began to appear in Indochina to do business and to conquer their lands again. In this way, by 1870, all of Vietnam and neighbouring Laos and Cambodia were controlled by the French. This area was called French Indochina. The French allowed in Catholic priests who converted about 10% of the Vietnamese to the Catholic religion (Vietnamese were usually Buddhist). When the Vietnamese rebelled, the French would hang or imprison thousands to keep control of this rich colony.

In 1939, the Second World War started and, by 1940, the Germans had beaten the French, occupied Paris and forced the French Army to side with the Germans, Italians and Japanese. When the Japanese wanted to put airfields in the north of Vietnam and take the plentiful rice crop of the south to feed their soldiers, the French agreed. In exchange, the Japanese did not put them in prison camps as they had with the Dutch, British and Americans in other parts of the Far East.

The Vietnamese saw that the French were afraid of the Japanese and they knew that neither should be masters of their land. They formed an armed resistance, called the 'Viet Minh', led by a Vietnamese patriot and Communist called Ho Chi Minh, and fought against the Japanese. When the War ended, the French wanted to go back to how things had been before and sent soldiers to take control of Vietnam again. The Vietnamese had other ideas and soon they began to fight the French.

The Viet Minh grew in strength and the French struggled to control them until a final, major battle at a place called Dien Bien Phu, where The French were totally defeated and lost all of the north of Vietnam but still, more or less, controlled the South. Peace talks followed. The French agreed to leave; a line was drawn across the middle of Vietnam, at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists controlled the North and pro-American generals controlled the South. At the peace talks, everyone agreed to hold a national election in all Vietnam, north and south, in 1956 to decide the future of the country.

The Americans knew very well that Ho Chi Minh would win the vote and all Vietnam would become a socialist country and an ally of America's enemy, Soviet Russia. To stop this, the Americans cancelled the election, asked one of the generals in the South to form a government to make South Vietnam an independent country. Few Vietnamese wanted this.

The leader of the new 'Republic of South Vietnam', Ngo Dinh Diem, and his government, were so weak, corrupt and unpopular that, by 1964, the US government could see that their creation, South Vietnam, was about to fall to the guerrilla movement. At this time, the US had only a few thousand American soldiers in South Vietnam, all specialists, advisers and technicians, but now they started to send hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to fight the guerrillas and save that country from being taken over by Communist North Vietnam.

The US also began bombing the North to destroy its industry and terrorise its population but the Vietnamese in the North remained steady and continued to supply the guerrillas in the South. With the American invasion of the South, Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, also began to send soldiers from the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to help the southern guerrillas. The war grew rapidly and the Vietnamese knew that the population was the key to the fight: the side with no popular support must lose the war.

The guerrillas and the NVA pretended to attack the border in order to draw the US forces away and so leave the Vietnamese peasants in the heart of the country still under guerrilla control. The top American general, William Westmoreland, fell for the trick and sent his best battalions off to the lightly populated borders to chase shadows. In the meantime, the guerrillas and NVA quietly surrounded the cities of the South.

The Vietnamese celebrate their New Year in January or February by letting off a lot of fireworks. This celebration is called 'Tet'. In January, 1968, the guerrillas used the noise of Tet to attack all the towns and cities at once. The surprise was complete and, in the first three days of the attack, city after city fell to the guerrillas. Even the South's capital, Saigon, nearly fell, and the US Embassy was captured for one day.

Once the Americans had brought their best soldiers back from the borders and recovered from their initial shock, they quickly and brutally took back all they had lost and killed many civilians in the process. But, it was too late: America and the world had seen how weak and unpopular the South Vietnamese government was and how cruel this war was which killed so many innocent people. When the American forces re-took Saigon, the river became so full of Vietnamese dead that even small boats could no longer move along it.

Protest against the war had already been growing in the US and now it became intense. The US government began bringing some soldiers home and the number of US forces started to go down from its 1968 high point of nearly 600,000. Peace talks, secret at first, were begun and the US bombed North Vietnam, on and off, to apply pressure but the Vietnamese did not give up. The US tried invading Vietnam's neighbours: first Cambodia then Laos, to destroy NVA supply bases. Again it made no difference to the war but increased protest in the US and around the world. In 1972, the last American units left Vietnam. The ARVN (South Vietnamese army) tried, half-heartedly, to hold on to the South but, in April of 1975, the guerrillas and NVA took Saigon and Vietnam was united once again under the Communist government in Hanoi.

The main reason that the US had fought so hard to stop Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists from uniting the country was their fear that a communist Vietnam would just be a puppet of communist China or Russia but the Vietnamese had fought too hard for their independence to give it up to any foreign power. The conflict in Indochina had lasted from 1945 until 1975 during which time 50,000 French soldiers, 60,000 US soldiers and as many as 2 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had died.

The conflict and then defeat had changed American society forever. Before the war, very few Americans distrusted their government or questioned the motives of the US military. After it, the US government was viewed with suspicion by many Americans and the idea of forcing young American men into the military to fight in far away countries became unacceptable to the public.

If you want to watch some videos on this topic, you can click on the links to YouTube videos below.

If you want to answer questions on this article to test how much you understand, you can click on the green box: Finished Reading?

Videos :

1. Vietnam War Documentary - Facts & Battle of History (4:56)

2. Vietnam War Explained (2:47)

3. Why did America Fight the Vietnam War? (4:40)

4. Major Cold War Events: the Vietnam War (2:26)