Vietnam War

• 'Rolling Thunder' was designed to force the North Vietnamese into stopping the infiltration of troops and supplies into South Vietnam and into peace negotiations.

• The operation was split up into 5 stages;1. In 1964 & 1965, bombing was limited to North Vietnam's industrial economy2. May 1965, bombing commenced against air defences and transportation,

railways, roads and airfields.3. Aug 1965 - winter 1966/67, air power was used to limit infiltration from the

north of men an supplies to the NLF and the PAVN divisions operating in the south. Attacks against petroleum refineries began. Most of the operations were concentrated at the DMZ and into North Vietnam.

4. 1967 - April 1968, attacks in & around Hanoi, Haiphong the main North Vietnamese port and the buffer zone along the Chinese border involved the highly controversial bombing of civilians in the major northern cities.

5. April - Nov 1968, there was a de-escalation of bombing as Johnson had begun talks in Paris with the DRV. Bombing was now focused around the DMZ line and in the northern parts of South Vietnam.

• The bombing is estimated to have done $600mllion of damage in the north, but at a cost of lost aircraft alone of $6billion.

• The number of bombs dropped in the war links to the rolling sound of the continuous ‘boom boom boom’ as it echoed around the mountains & hills around Vietnam.

• Bomb tonnage rose from 63,000 in 1965 to 136,000 in 1966 to 226,000 in 1967.• The average weekly bombing sorties also rose from 883 in 1965 to 3150 in April-

June 1967.• It was estimated that between 1965-67, South Vietnamese and U.S. air personnel

dropped over 1million tons of bombs were dropped on South Vietnam, double that dropped on North Vietnam.

• Throughout the duration of the war, 1965 – 1973, eight million tons of bombs were dropped over Vietnam; this was more than three times the amount used in WWII.

This B-52 bomber was one of the aircraft used to drop bombs on Vietnam.

• Search and destroy patrols went out looking for the Vietcong. It became an offensive tool, crucial to General William Westmoreland’s second phase. – In his three phase strategy, the first consisted of slowing down the VC Forces– The second was to resume the offensive and destroy the enemy – The third was to restore the area under South Vietnamese government control.

• The offensive began with Operation Junction City, where the American units assigned had destroyed hundreds of tons of rice, killed 720 guerrillas, and captured 213 prisoners.

• In Operation Junction City, reports also state that 282 U.S. soldiers were killed while the VC lost 1,728 guerrillas.

• The patrols were very visible, and easy to ambush. • This led to violence such as "Zippo raids" in 1967 to burn villages with US

Zippo lighters, and the uncalled-for massacre of peaceful villagers at My Lai in 1968.

Troops of "A" Company, 1st Air Cavalry Division, checking house during patrol.

Agent Orange• An estimated 11½-11¾ million gallons of Agent

Orange was used to spray millions of hectares of Vietnamese forest.

• Agents Green, Pink & Purple were used until 1964 when they were replaced by the more efficient ‘Agent Orange’.

• It was given its name from the colour of the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped, and was by far the most widely used of the so-called "Rainbow Herbicides“

• The middle picture shows what happened when someone was exposed to dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange and it causes serious health problems as well as the severe aliments to his skin.

• The Vietnam Red Cross reported as many as 3 million Vietnamese people have been affected by Agent Orange with an estimated 1million people being left disabled and a further 500,000 children were born with defects.

Napalm• Used by the U.S. Army from about 1965 to 1972

in the Vietnam War• This mixture creates a jelly-like substance that,

when ignited, sticks to practically anything and burns up to ten minutes.

• “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can ever imagine” said Kim Phúc, a survivor from a napalm bombing. (Pictured bottom right wearing no clothes)

• “Water boils at 212°F. Napalm generates temperatures 1,500°F to 2,200°F.” Kim Phúc sustained third degree burns to portions of her body. She was one of the only survivors of such extreme measures.

• Air raids that used napalm were much more devastating than flamethrowers (Top right); a single bomb was capable of destroying areas up to 2,500 square yards.

• The Phoenix Program was a program whose main objective was to tear the Viet Cong infrastructure apart. Although it was contradictory, the Phoenix Program used many of the same tactics as the program which it was trying to destroy.

• Ran by the CIA – Central Intelligence Agency

• Initially named the Phuong Hoang Operation (named after a mythical Vietnamese bird of prey)

• Program resulted in the arrest, detention, brutal interrogation and execution of thousands of VC fighters and sympathizers at the hands of the South Vietnam police and intelligence agencies.

• This was done in an attempt to cripple or eliminate South Vietnamese communist guerrilla resistance to both the U.S. forces and the U.S. backed government of South Vietnam.

This picture shows an Operation Phoenix mission being conducted by US soldiers. Because the US didn’t know who the VC were, they could have potentially been torturing innocent people and

loosing their Hearts & Minds.

• On the morning of the 16th March 1968, 3 companies of American troops were sent into the My Son area near Quang Ngai. One of them was ‘Charlie Company’

• Their job was to seek out the enemy (V.C) and kill them.

• There was no resistance where they landed because they landed at the wrong village.

• My Lai was full of women and kids, but no young men. This meant that their fathers were away fighting. They must be VC.

• Patrols were reporting nonexistent contacts and officers were inflating body counts until no one in the Pentagon or the US government had any idea what was really going on.

• Only 3 weapons were being shared between 141 enemy soldiers. This should have alerted someone that something was wrong.

– It shows that the US didn’t know who the VC were or what they were fighting against.

– It was just another day in Vietnam.

• As the war grew unpopular, the numbers joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps at universities and colleges declined rapidly. This shows a change in public opinion as people saw more of what was actually happening in Vietnam.

Photo taken by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on 16th March 1968 in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road.

• The Vietnamese people didn’t care about democracy or totalitarianism, capitalism, or Communism. They just wanted to be left alone. By not doing this the US was loosing the hearts & minds battle.

• The My Lai Massacre neatly summed up what was wrong in Vietnam. The war that had begun with a lie continued with lies.

• The U.S. chose to fight a conventional war in Vietnam believing the superiority of their armed forces would eventually wear down the VC and the PLAF.

• CIA officer William Colby, founder of the program, told a Congressional committee in 1971 that the Phoenix operation had killed 20,587 VC suspects in 2 years.

• The Truncheon & electric shock method of interrogation were in widespread use in Vietnam.– Almost all US advisers turned their backs on this method.

• Carefully disguised programs that use American funding and training to employ local police in torture, death squads and mass detention had continued under US sponsorship in Vietnam.

• In Iraq the top counterinsurgency advisor suggested that using a “global Phoenix programme,” may help America win the war. – Phoenix was used in South Vietnam by the CIA and there is evidence of its use in Iraq, as

there is torture being practiced on Iraqi fighters. – The New York Times reported that there were as many as 10 secret prisons under the

Interior Ministry in Baghdad and the Los Angeles Times has said that the same Ministry is funded by America.

– This suggests that Americans still use Phoenix and are trying to revive it, even though it completely failed to win the Hearts and Minds of the Vietnamese people because the American soldiers couldn’t tell who was VC and who was innocent.

• CORDS: Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support• Formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs.• CORDS pulled together all the various US military & civilian agencies

involved in the pacification effort, including the State Department, the AID, the USIA & the CIA.

• The first and most basic requirement for pacification had to be security, because the rural population had to be kept safe from the main enemy forces. – The US wanted to developed programs to win over the people’s sympathy for

the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. forces.`

• CORDS was eventually taken over by the military. This gave them the financial support that they needed, providing resources for the civilian pacification programs. CORDS was established in May 1967 to advise and support the Government of Vietnam’s pacification efforts such as Phoenix operation.

• CORDS civilian & military advisory teams were dispatched throughout South Vietnam’s 44 provinces and 250 districts.

• They went to South Vietnam to help the government fight Communism, although the US didn’t help them as well as they should have.

• In the 1950’s, after Vietnam was divided into North & South, the Eisenhower administration sought to create an economically viable and democratic nation of South Vietnam. US presidential administrators and Diem proclaimed to be backing the will of the people of South Vietnam

• However by not truly enacting policies towards this goal, rebellion in the form of Buddhist uprisings where they burnt themselves in the streets to protest about the worsening corruption of the Diem regime. This rebellion reached its height in the summer of 1963. this was because, for the most part, the US chose to ‘ignore the situation’ and allowed it to worsen to a point where it was pushing the Vietnamese people towards Ho Chi Minh.

• All of these tactics the Americans used in Vietnam all link to their failure to capture the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

– Tactics like ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ and ‘Search and Destroy missions’ killed many innocent people and pushed the Vietnamese people to Ho Chi Minh and the communists because they were seen to be nationalist and not kill their own people.

– America never understood the South Vietnamese people or Vietnam as a country, they couldn’t speak Vietnamese so the Operation Phoenix missions would never work because the people would not be able to understand them.

– By using chemical weapons such as Napalm and Agent Orange to destroy the VC hiding cover meant they were harming and killing innocent people without even realising it; as well as destroying their homeland and food supply.

• But the main reason why the US lost the hearts & minds of the Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War was because they didn’t apply the failings of the French, and followed along the same path towards defeat.

– It shows that the French lost the hearts & minds of the Vietnamese people but the US only made things worse by using much more destructive tactics.

This image shows a Buddhist monk burning in the streets of Saigon in 1963

in protest of Diem’s corrupt regime.