On March 29, 1973, the United States confirmed the end of its military operations in Vietnam after several years of war against the communist guerrillas of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. This conflict was Washington’s biggest defeat in the Cold War because, despite the fact that she intervened in this country to help South Vietnam and prevent the spread of communism, she could not prevent it. In addition, his tactics on the ground and the number of deaths caused a great deal of controversy within the United States and in the Western bloc.
The origin of the Vietnam War dates back to 1946, long before the United States entered fully. After World War II, France tried to retake its control over the colony of Indochina despite the independence aspirations of its peoples. Under the orders of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh guerrillas fought against the colonial troops until 1954 when Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam achieved independence.
The problem is that Vietnam was split in two, since a communist government was created to the north of the 17th parallel and a pro-Western one to the south. A division that had already happened in other nations, such as Korea, and that was a product of the Cold War.
A country divided between the communist north and the capitalist south
The initial agreement was that, one year after the division, the Vietnamese had to organize a referendum to vote if they wanted reunification or maintain the separation of the two nations governed by different systems. But, fearing that the union would triumph and communism would prevail, the United States and the anti-communist sectors of South Vietnam refused to do so.
It should be remembered that although North Vietnam was a communist regime led by Ho Chi Minh, South Vietnam was not a democracy either. This nation was built around a military command and a structure that did not hesitate to use repression against dissidents and where corruption operated with impunity.
This led to a direct confrontation between the South Vietnamese communist guerrillas, called the Viet Cong, and the government, which from 1959 turned into a civil war.
The Viet Cong enlisted the help of North Vietnam to obtain supplies via the well-known Ho Chi Minh Trail. This network of roads and tunnels created during World War II, and expanded by the guerrillas, crossed Laos and Cambodia until it reached South Vietnam and would be essential in the course of the war. Thanks to this, the Viet Cong came to control about 60% of South Vietnam.
At this point, the United States had been giving military and economic aid to South Vietnam for years, but the extreme situation forced him to intervene directly from 1964.
The United States enters the war to prevent the advance of the Viet Cong
The intervention was made after the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, an alleged attack on a US ship that could never be proven. The United States began sending tens of thousands of troops to Vietnam, reaching a peak of 539,000 in 1968.
The superiority of the United States meant that, in a short time, a good part of the territory occupied by the Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army was recovered. However, these soldiers were not prepared to suffer the war of attrition that the Viet Cong would pose in a terrain as hostile as the Vietnamese jungle.
The communist guerrillas maintained a high popularity in rural areas through an intense campaign of propaganda and terror and increased their power thanks to the military support of China and the Soviet Union.
In addition, it avoided any type of direct confrontation with the Americans and took advantage of the network of tunnels and roads to carry out surprise attacks that left as many victims as possible. The dead numbered in the thousands, and as paranoia grew among the US military, the high costs of the invasion made the war unpopular.
A costly war that was increasingly unpopular
In this he had a lot to do with watching television. This conflict was the first to be broadcast almost entirely to millions of people around the planet, who could see how the United States bombarded entire jungles with napalm and used chemical weapons such as Agent Orange against the population.
Iconic images such as that of the Vietnamese girl who cried after being burned by napalm shocked the world and went down in history. The response to this was the creation of a pacifist movement that staged unprecedented demonstrations in the United States and was led by progressive sectors and hippies.
Around the end of the conflict, the political, social and cultural claim that shook the history of the United States was created. By the end of the 1960s, millions of young people advocated withdrawal and expressed it in massive protests and in songs that went around the world.
Something that forced former President Nixon to propose the progressive withdrawal from 1969. This is how he addressed the nation on November 3 of that same year, with the aim of defending a progressive exit:
My fellow Americans, I’m sure you can recognize from what I’ve said that we really only have two options open if we want to end this war. I can order an immediate and precipitous withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action, or we can persist in our pursuit of a just peace through a negotiated settlement, if possible.
Expansion of the war to Laos and Cambodia and end of the conflict
Despite this message, Nixon set out to end the Ho Chi Minh Trail and undertook a secret massive bombing campaign against Laos and Cambodia.
The conflict spread to two hitherto neutral neighbors and Laos, for example, became the most bombed nation in history, surpassing World War II quotas. Something that did not improve things, since the Ho Chi Minh route continued to operate and in both Cambodia and Laos communist forces took power: the Khmer Rouge and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party respectively.
At this point, the United States was only interested in South Vietnam resisting as long as possible through economic and weapons aid, which is why it signed the Paris Peace Accords to make its exit official in 1973. However, this was a sentence of death for the Government of Saigon, which found itself unable to resist the offensives of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The lack of discipline and morale among the South Vietnamese ranks meant that the war barely lasted two more years, until on April 30, 1975, when communist forces arrived in Saigon.
That day there were chaotic scenes in the capital of South Vietnam. The fall occurred suddenly and quickly and forced the United States to carry out a humiliating evacuation of the remaining personnel in the country, even taking helicopters to its embassy. After this, Vietnam was unified in a country under communist control and the United States suffered its biggest military setback in the Cold War and one of the biggest in its history, causing Washington to retreat on the international scene for several years.
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