On August 2, 1964, the destroyer
It was tantamount to a declaration of war, but it was based on a lie. After decades of public skepticism and government secrecy, the truth finally came out: In the early 2000s, nearly 200 documents were declassified and released by the National Security Agency (NSA). They showed that there was no attack on August 4.
On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox (DD-731) while the destroyer was in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. There is no doubting that fact.
In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina.
The Gulf of Tonkin act became more controversial as opposition to the war mounted. A Senate investigation revealed that the Maddox had been on an intelligence mission in Tonkin Gulf, contradicting Johnson's denial of U.S. Navy support of such missions.
He asserts "I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about US destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin." White continued his whistleblowing activities in the 1968 documentary In the Year of the Pig.
Gulf of Tonkin incident, complex naval event in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam, that was presented to the U.S. Congress on August 5, 1964, as two unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and that led to the Gulf of Tonkin ...
During the war years, America's leaders insisted that military force was necessary to defend a sovereign nation — South Vietnam — from external Communist aggression. As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1965, “The first reality is that North Vietnam has attacked the independent nation of South Vietnam.
The justifications for the Vietnam War were seriously flawed. The Central Intelligence Agency had repeatedly informed the Johnson administration that most Southeast Asian countries were not in danger of falling like dominos to communism, even if North Vietnam won. The credibility theory was also exaggerated.
The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.
In particular, heavy machine guns were valued for defense against American helicopters. For destroying armored vehicles or bunkers, the Vietcong had highly effective rocket propelled grenades and recoilless rifles. Mortars were also available in large numbers and had the advantage of being very easy to transport.
US officials believed that if South Vietnam fell to communism, so would the surrounding countries of Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia.
In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters.
"Tonkin" is a Western rendition of 東京 Đông Kinh, meaning 'Eastern Capital'. This was the name of the capital of the Lê dynasty (present-day Hanoi). Locally, Tonkin is nowadays known as miền Bắc, or Bắc Bộ (北部), meaning 'Northern Region'.
Jan 30, 1968 CE: Tet Offensive. On January 30, 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnamese and United States targets. The Tet Offensive became a major turning point in the Vietnam War.
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was driven largely by the rise of communism in Southeast Asia after World War II, and the fear of its spread, which developed in Australia during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Nixon's plan worked and in early January 1973, the Americans and North Vietnamese ironed out the last details of the settlement. All parties to the conflict, including South Vietnam, signed the final agreement in Paris on January 27. As it turned out, only America honored the cease-fire.
According to John Kerry's testimony, Vietnamese civilians were often subjected to shocking violence. Soldiers raped, mutilated, shot at, and brutally murdered civilians. Troops also intentionally destroyed Vietnamese villages, well beyond the destruction typically wrought by war.
The active ingredient of Agent Orange was an equal mixture of two phenoxy herbicides – 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T) – in iso-octyl ester form, which contained traces of the dioxin 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD).
The US army had superior conventional weapons but they were ineffective against a country that was not industrialized and an army which employed guerrilla tactics and used the dense jungle as cover.
The Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War) broke out between the communists which included the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and the anti-communists which included the United States, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and their allies, such as ...
Sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail still exist today, and parts of it have been incorporated into the Ho Chi Minh Highway, a paved road that connects the north and south regions of Vietnam.
The Viet Cong (VC), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of the north, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces (ARVN).
Having rebuilt their forces and upgraded their logistics system, North Vietnamese forces triggered a major offensive in the Central Highlands in March 1975. On April 30, 1975, NVA tanks rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, effectively ending the war.