Vietnam War ????? info?

Question

I have to do a presentation in class on this. Any helpfull websites or info?

I basically just have to answer.... who what when where how??

thanks

Answer 1

I am assuming you are referring to the "Second Indochina War" in which the US was fighting alongside the "South Vietnamese Government" against the National Liberation Army of South Vietnam (Viet Cong).

To understand some of the causes etc, you need to go further back in history to WW-2. Japan occupied Vietnam during WW-2 and the Viet Minh, a anti-French nationalist group, started fighting against the Japanese and were given assistance from 1944 by the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA). The OSS were standing alongside Ho Chi Minh when he declared independence in September 1945 in Hanoi, and incorporated the US Declaration of Independence as part of the Vietnamese declaration.

Ho Chi Minh asked the US to recognise the Vietnamese independence, but members of the US State Department were strongly anti-communist and Ho Chi Minh was a communist as well as being a Nationalist, so they did not recognise the Vietnamese independence, but assisted the French re-establish their control of Vietnam as a colony. Despite discussions between the French and the Viet Minh, the French would not give independence, so in 1947 the Viet Minh started a war of Independence against the French and were given a large amount of military assistance by the US. This is called the "First Indochinese War".

The French were defeated at a major battle at Dien Bien Phu in Northwestern Vietnam near the Laotian border and this led to the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina being signed in May 1954. The US stated that they would not sign the agreements, but they would abide by them.

The agreements stated that the nation would be divided into two MILITARY demarcation areas with the Viet Minh to move to the north and the French to move to the south. This division at the 17th parallel was NEVER top be taken as a national or international boundary. It also stated that no military buildup was to take place in either region and that elections throughout the entire country were to take place NO LATER than 1956.

The US sent CIA operatives into the north to blow up railway stations and other infrastructure, to spread rumours about that the communist would persecute Catholics causing a mass migration to the south along with putting President Diem into power.. He was a Catholic seminary student in the US at the time. The US also started re-arming the south and illegally declared the south as the "Republic of South Vietnam". They also refused to allow National elections to take place saying, "If we allow national elections to take place, Ho Chi Minh would win".

Diem started prosecuting dissenters and Buddhists (85 percent of the country are Buddhist) and in 1958 some former members of the Viet Minh that had not gone to the north started small battles with the Diem police and troops. In December 1959, just outside of Saigon, a conference took place of a number of dissident groups, Buddhists, Trade Unionists, Nationalists etc. From this conference the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed and from early 1960 they started fighting against the illegal South Vietnamese Government and increasing their activities as they grew stronger.

The US had advisors in Vietnam since 1954 and these were increased along with more arms etc. In 1964/65 President Lyndon Johnson sent in the US Marines and from then onwards increased the US military involvement to a point where there were over 680,000 US military personnel in Vietnam. The government in the north only started sending former Viet Minh troops back into the south when the US marines entered southern Vietnam. Initially these Viet Minh were former southerners, but as the US built up its military personnel, the north started to send send northerners and regular soldiers of the Peoples Army of Vietnam (PLAV or what the US called them, NVA).

The US started to pull out in late 1972/early 1973 although there were troops still there until the fall in May 1975.

Intially the majority of people in the US were for the war in Vietnam, but as the number of US servicemen returning in coffins increased the country started to turn against the war. One of the major catalysts to this change was the 1968 TET offensive by the NLF where they attacked every main township throughout the south and even managed to enter the US embassy in Saigon. Shortly after that TET offensive, Walter Cronkite, a very conservative news anchorman on CBS visited Vietnam and changed his views. His views were strong in changing the attitudes of other Americans

Answer 2

use the wikipedia it has everything