IGCSE History

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• Introduction to IGCSE
• The Road to Affluence: USA 1917 - 1941 (A9)
  • 1917 - 1929
    • The impact of the First World War
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    • The Stock Market Boom
  • 1929 - 1941
    • The Wall Street Crash
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    • Reactions to the New Deal
• International Relations 1919-1939 (A8)
  • Collective Security
    • The Versailles Settlement
    • The Foundation of the League of Nations
    • Strengths and weaknesses of the League of Nations
    • Successes and failures of the League of Nations
    • Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact
  • Appeasement
    • Manchuria
    • The Disarmament Conference
    • Abyssinia
    • Hitler and the League
    • Appeasement in action
• Revolution in China 1949 - 1996 (A14)
  • 1949 - 1976
    • China under Mao
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    • The reasons for the Cultural Revolution
    • The impact of the Cultural Revolution
    • China 1971 - 1976
  • 1976 - 1996
    • The defeat of the Gang of Four
    • China under Deng Xiaoping
    • Reforms of the economy
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    • China in the 1990s
• South-East Asia 1945 - 1900 (A15)
  • Indo-China
    • The end of the French Empire
    • Vietnam 1954 - 1965
    • US involvement in Vietnam
    • The unification of Vietnam
    • Laos and Cambodia
  • South-East Asia
    • The struggle for control of Malaya
    • The creation of Malaysia
    • Singapore
    • Suharto and Indonesia
    • Sukarno and Pancasila
• Conflict and Crisis is the Middle East 1946 - 1996 (A16)
  • Unit overview
  • 1946 - 1967
    • The creation of Israel
    • The impact of the war of 1948 - 1949
    • The Suez Crisis
    • Superpower involvement in the Middle East
    • The Six Day War
  • 1967 - 1996
    • International terrorism
    • The war of Yom Kippur
    • The Palestinian Liberation Organisation
    • Lebanon and the occupied territories
    • Successes and failures from Camp David to Oslo
• The First World War (B4)
  • The Schlieffen Plan
  • Deadlock on the Western Front
  • Gallipoli
  • The Somme and Passchendaele
  • The War at Sea
  • The defeat of Germany
• The USA 1917-1929 (B7)
  • The Roaring Twenties
  • Advertising and consumerism
  • New forms of entertainment
  • Prohibition
  • Gangsterism
  • Hollywood
• China under Mao Zedong 1949 - 1959 (B10)
  • The creation of the Communist State
  • Land Reform
  • Communist society
  • The First Five Year Pan
  • The 100 Flowers
  • The Great Leap Forward
• The Changing Nature of Warfare (C3)
  • Unit overview
  • Warfare at the beginning of the 20th Century
  • Land warfare
  • Sea and aerial warfare
  • Atomic and nuclear weapons
  • Warfare at the end of the 20th Century
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The US involvement in Vietnam

Operation Rolling Thunder led to heavy bombing of North Vietnam that was far worse than anything that had been seen during the Second World War. The aim was to destroy military bases and equipment in North Vietnam and to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The US forces also attempted to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the South Vietnamese by special projects. But these were usually resented as foreign interference.

Much of Vietnam was forest; this made finding the Viet Cong very difficult they could move about virtually undetected. Jungle fighting proved very difficult, especially as US forces increasingly were made up of inexperienced draftees, whose average age was nineteen. The US troops were inexperienced and increasingly unwilling to fight. They spent a year in Vietnam and then returned home.

The US Air Force began to use defoliants like ‘Agent Orange’ and Napalm. These stripped leaves from trees. Napalm was also used to burn villages to force Viet Cong out into the open. Both of these could be dropped from planes. ‘Agent Blue’ was used to destroy crops. Bombs were used that also contained petrol and chemicals.

As the Vietcong usually avoided pitched battles and used guerrilla tactics, ‘Search and Destroy’ missions began to be sent into the jungle. Their success was based on the body count; the number of dead Vietnamese brought back. But it was often impossible to tell which side they had been on. Consequently US tactics sometimes did more harm than good.

The North Vietnamese tactics

The North Vietnamese army, the NLF or Vietcong, very rarely fought pitched battles. They used guerrilla tactics. Therefore, it was impossible to identify Viet Cong soldiers, because as they did not wear uniform. After a fight they would scatter and it would be impossible to find them. The Vietcong could hide in villages, towns or even the capital Saigon, and attack without warning. This meant that there was nowhere safe. At any moment US forces could be attacked without warning, sometimes by children. Many South Vietnamese peasants supported the Viet Cong, because the South Vietnamese government was very unpopular. Corruption was widespread and there was little sympathy for the plight of the peasants outside of the cities.

To hide in the jungle, the Vietcong built thousands of miles of tunnels, with whole camps underground, so that they could hide. When the US forces found the tunnels they were often heavily booby-trapped. The Viet Cong became experts at building booby traps, using pits, sharpened sticks and mines. These underground camps had to be captured very slowly and with great care. Many US troops were killed or seriously wounded when they tried to enter them.

The Vietcong were supplied from the north by the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran through Laos and Cambodia. As US support grew for the South, the Vietcong began to receive more supplies from China and the Soviet Union. At the height of the war the Soviet Union and China sent up to 6,000 tonnes of supplies a day.

The impact of the war upon the peoples of the USA and Vietnam

The most important event in the war in changing US opinion is now believed to have been the Tet Offensive. This was a massive attack by the Vietcong upon South Vietnam, which began on 30 January 1968. All the major cities of South Vietnam were attacked, including Saigon. In Saigon the US embassy was seized by a suicide squad, which was only driven out by paratroops. It took 11,000 troops a week to drive the Vietcong out of Saigon. Eventually the US forces managed to beat of the Viet Cong and killed 80,000 of them.

The Tet Offensive showed that the Viet Cong could strike anywhere and at any time and that there was nothing that the Americans could do about it. It made it clear that the war in Vietnam could not be won. It persuaded Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate in the 1968 presidential election that US forces must be withdrawn from Vietnam.

In the USA, a more immediate effect of the war was the rising numbers of US casualties. By 1967, 160 soldiers were being killed each week. These returned to the USA in body bags. In that year support for the war began to fall and widespread protests developed for the first time. There was increasing opposition in the USA by Civil Rights’ leaders, because the war led to money being withdrawn from the ‘Great Society’.

From 1968 there was a wave of protests across the USA, particularly at universities. Some students were shot when the National Guard was called in to end the unrest. Draft-dodging became common as students tried to avoid being sent to Vietnam. News filtered back to the USA of the fighting in Vietnam, each soldier served for one year and more than 3,000,000 Americans altogether served in Vietnam.

But by far and away the most important factor was television. This was the first war to be shown live on television and in colour. In 1965 viewers saw a GI set fire to a peasant’s hut with his cigarette lighter. In 1968 they watched as a Vietcong prisoner was shot dead. In 1969 the truth about the My Lai massacre was revealed along with the army film which showed South Vietnamese women and children being stripped and murdered by GIs. Television also showed GIs being torn apart and shot to pieces. Altogether 58,000 US troops were killed.

The appalling conditions that the troops faced led to low morale and indiscipline. Amongst the troops in Vietnam, drug taking became increasingly common. ‘Fragging’, killing or wounding officers with fragmentation grenades began in 1969. Desertion became common. More than half a million US soldiers deserted out of 10,000,000 drafted.

Richard Nixon’s policies

In 1969 Nixon began peace talks, and started the withdrawal of US forces, but at the same time stepped up attacks on North Vietnam. Nixon also announced the policy of Vietnamisation. Making sure that the ARVN could defend the country on its own.
Nixon began to withdraw US forces in 1969, but he did not want to reveal that to the North. To cover the withdrawal he stepped up Operation Rolling Thunder, one air-raid on Hanoi lasted for seven days and killed 2,000 people. US forces also invaded Laos and Cambodia and bombed both countries and increased the use of defoliants to uncover Viet Cong supply lines. These were all attempts to try to stop the Viet Cong infiltrating the South.

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