Indochina was part of France’s colonial empire but the Vietnamese defeat of French forces in 1954 led to the Geneva Accords, which recognized the three separate countries of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The latter was to be divided, temporarily, between North and South at the 17th parallel, pending elections. North Vietnam was ruled by the communists, under Ho Chi Minh, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south by Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by the USA. Eisenhower feared if Indochina fell to communism, the whole of South-east Asia could fall, the ‘domino effect’, as he called it.
In North Vietnam the Viet Cong, communist guerrillas, redistributed land to the peasants, evicting and brutalizing the landlords, many of whom fled to the south. Kennedy sent military advisers to South Vietnam but soon decided that Diem, a Catholic whose religious intolerance of Buddhism led many monks to self-immolate in protest, had to removed. On 2 November 1963, a coup ousted Diem, who was captured and killed. Three weeks later, in Dallas, Kennedy was also assassinated.
In August 1964 a skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin between the North Vietnamese and US ships gave Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, the pretext to bomb Hanoi and North Vietnam. Over the coming decade the USA were to drop more bombs in Vietnam than in all operations during the whole of the Second World War. US planes dropped the deadly napalm and also herbicides to denude the forests used by the Viet Cong to hide and launch guerrilla attacks. US troops deployed ‘search and destroy’ missions against the Viet Cong. But nervous and inexperienced US troops, unable to differentiate between enemy and civilian, killed too many innocents. As the bombings intensified, the North received military aid from both the Soviet Union and China.
In January 1968, North Vietnam launched its Tet Offensive, which destroyed many South Vietnamese cities and captured several US targets, including, most alarmingly for Washington, the US embassy in Saigon. By now the war was seen as unjust and ‘unwinnable’, as the financial costs, which were damaging social reform programmes at home, and casualty rates escalated. In March 1968 Johnson, increasingly unpopular and unable to find a way out without the USA losing face, declared he wouldn’t be standing for re-election at the presidential elections later that year.