Vietnam

An American Ordeal

George Donelson Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000284270
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Guerra del Vietnam

Now in its 7th edition, Vietnam: An American Ordeal continues to provide a thorough account of the failed American effort to create a viable, non-Communist state in Southern Vietnam.

Unlike most general histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which are either conventional diplomatic or military histories, this volume synthesizes the perspectives to explore both dimensions of the struggle in greater depth, elucidating more of the complexities of the U.S.-Vietnam entanglement. It explains why Americans tried so hard for so long to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina and why they failed. In this new edition, George Donelson Moss expands and refines key moments of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, including the strategic and diplomatic background for United States' involvement in Indochina during World War II; how the French, with British and American support, regained control in southern Vietnam, Saigon, and the vicinity, in the fall, 1945; the account for the formation of SEATO; and the account of the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. The text has also been revised and updated to align with recently published monographic literature on the time period. The accessible writing will enable students to gain a solid understanding of how and why the United States went to war against The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and why it lost the long, bitter conflict.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of American history, the history of foreign relations, and the Vietnam War itself.

1 Origins of American Interventions in Southeast Asia

The Japanese Occupy Indochina

World War II marked a rapid expansion of the power and influence of the United States everywhere in the world, including Southeast Asia. Long before the 1940s, the United States had acquired major economic, political, and strategic interests in Southeast Asia. The United States became an imperial power with important colonial possessions in that region when it wrested the Philippine archipelago and the island of Guam from the Spanish following the Spanish-American War. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the United States developed a thriving trade with the Southeast Asian colonies of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. From Malaya came tin and rubber, from the Dutch East Indies came rubber and oil, and from Vietnam came rubber. During the early 1940s, the exigencies of world war thrust America into more prominent roles in the political affairs of this vital region. These wartime experiences confirmed the American sense of Vietnam’s significance as a source of foodstuffs and raw materials and as a strategic location astride major shipping lanes linking India, China, Japan, and the islands of Southeast Asia.

The fall of France in June 1940 created serious diplomatic problems for the United States. President Franklin Roosevelt despised the collaborationist government the Germans allowed the French to establish at Vichy. However, he granted it diplomatic recognition to forestall German occupation of the French colonies in North Africa and—unsuccessfully—the Japanese occupation of Indochina. The U.S. officials were angered by French acquiescence in the Japanese penetration of Vietnam. From their perspective, it appeared that French officials made little effort to resist Japanese demands and settled rather comfortably into a joint occupation with them. The U.S. officials also perceived that possession of Indochina gave the Japanese strategic leverage in Southeast Asia for its continuing war with China. They later attributed many of the Japanese successes in conquering Southeast Asian territories, including the Philippines during 1941–42, to their use of Indochina as a base of operations.

It was the Japanese move into all of Indochina in the summer of 1941 that probably made war between the United States and Japan inevitable. Roosevelt viewed Japanese entry into that strategic region as a clear sign that the Japanese planned further moves into the southeast Pacific region. The U.S. response to Japan’s takeover of Indochina was to cut off Japan’s supply of oil. The oil cutoff created a crisis for the Japanese leaders. With only six weeks of oil reserves on hand, the Japanese would have to get the oil embargo rescinded quickly or find a new source of supply to prevent their war machine and industrial economy from grinding to a halt. The U.S. and Japanese negotiators met through the summer and fall of 1941 to try to resolve their conflicts. As the price for restoring Japan’s oil supplies and other trade goods that had been embargoed, Washington demanded that the Japanese get out of China and Indochina. These terms proved unacceptable to Japan, who would not consider abandoning their expansionist ambitions. They opted for war with the United States rather than surrender their imperial ambitions. The Japanese response came on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the Asian war. Soon afterward, the Japanese, using Vietnam as a staging area, occupied the East Indies and began extracting oil from the former Dutch colony. The Japanese also made use of Vietnamese ports as depots for the resources they were getting from their newly conquered empire in Southeast Asia.

The Japanese move into Indochina brought the first U.S. military intervention into Vietnam in early 1942, about a month after America had entered the war. Cutting the Japanese lifeline from Southeast Asia and denying the Japanese use of air bases in Vietnam for continuing attacks on China became major objectives of the American Volunteer Group, famed as the “Flying Tigers,” under the command of General Claire L. Chennault. Flying out of bases in southern China, the Flying Tigers, in early 1942, began attacking Japanese airfields in northern Vietnam.¹

As the war progressed, the wartime allies understood that they had to be concerned about the future political status of Indochina, which connected with a larger issue, the postwar fate of the European Asian empires. On the one hand, the U.S. officials, faithful to Atlantic Charter war aims, firmly opposed the restoration of colonial imperialism in Asia. Roosevelt understood that the collapse of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia had created a power vacuum, and he was openly hostile to British, Dutch, and French colonialism returning to those regions. He also sensed that the days of Western imperialism in Asia were ending. He wanted to make use of a historic opportunity to liquidate French imperialism in Southeast Asia and align the U.S. foreign policy with the forces of Asian nationalism.

The end of colonialism in Asia would liberate subject peoples, open markets to the U.S. exports, and bring stability to turbulent regions. At an inter-Allied meeting at Tehran in November 1943, Roosevelt told Joseph Stalin that he wanted to prevent a French return to Indochina. The Soviet leader heartily concurred. In early 1944, in a private conversation with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Roosevelt described the kind of future he envisioned for Indochina:

France has had the country—30 million inhabitants—for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. . . . France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.²

On the other hand, President Roosevelt had an understanding with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to British colonial possessions, particularly India. Charles De Gaulle, the leader of the Free French government-in-exile, joined with Churchill in an effort to thwart Roosevelt and forestall the loss of Indochina after the war. Churchill, linking De Gaulle’s attempts to retain France’s Asian colonies with his own efforts to cling to empire, supported De Gaulle.

The colonial issue created fissures in the wartime alliance’s conduct of the war in Southeast Asia. The British tried to claim wartime jurisdiction of Indochina, which the Americans had assigned to the China Theater. Roosevelt, perceiving Churchill’s strategy, forbade the British to conduct military operations in the region without clearance from the U.S.-China command.³

Pursuing efforts to prevent a return of French colonialism in Vietnam, Roosevelt asked Jiang Jieshi, the nationalist leader of China, if he wanted to govern Indochina. The answer he received was an emphatic, “No!” Jiang, aware of Vietnam’s long history of resistance to Chinese colonialism, told Roosevelt that the Vietnamese were not Chinese. They would not assimilate into the Chinese people.⁴ Following Jiang’s rejection, Roosevelt proposed the creation of an international trusteeship for Indochina until the people were ready for a restoration of sovereignty.⁵

Although Roosevelt sympathized with the plight of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese, the war took a course that made French cooperation increasingly important. As the Allies invaded northwestern Europe and restored a French government under De Gaulle in August 1944, their resources were stretched thin. The reconstituted French army suddenly became the largest untapped pool of Allied manpower. Looming ahead was an invasion of Japan and De Gaulle committed an expeditionary force to the war against Japan.

The Vietminh Revolution, August 1945

For decades, various nationalistic groups had actively resisted French colonial domination and exploitation. The Indochinese Communist Party, founded in 1929, led several revolts during the 1930s, all of which were suppressed by French security forces. After the Japanese moved into Southeast Asia in 1941, they pursued a policy of encouraging selected Asian nationalists to offset the European colonialists. The French also granted concessions to some of the Vietnamese nationalist groups in order to preserve influence in the face of the Japanese occupation.

Taking advantage of the French concessions, the Indochinese Communist Party, led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, emerged as the leader of the rising forces of Vietnamese nationalism. Moving back and forth across the Chinese border, they established bases in the northern Vietnamese mountains and built networks throughout the country. In 1941, they created the Vietminh (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), a united front group, which disguised Communist Party dominance and appealed broadly to all Vietnamese nationalists seeking independence from France and ridding their country of the Japanese.

In December 1944, in the Cao Bang province, Ho Chi Minh ordered the creation of a military division of the Vietminh, the Vietnamese Liberation Army. During the winter of 1944–45, under the leadership of Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietminh guerrillas gained control of three northern provinces and engaged Japanese forces in sporadic combat.⁶

Beginning in the spring of 1945, the Vietminh received support from an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) contingent operating out of the U.S. China Mission at Kunming. The Americans entered northern Vietnam to gather intelligence on the Japanese, make contact with French officials, and set up rescue operations for downed pilots.

The Vietminh and OSS units collaborated to hasten the defeat of the Japanese. The Vietminh helped OSS commandos rescue downed U.S. pilots and escaped prisoners, accompanied them on sabotage missions, and provided them with information on Japanese troop movements in Vietnam. The OSS in return provided the Vietminh with radios, small arms, and ammunition.

The American OSS officers came to know many of the Vietminh leaders and assisted them in their struggle for national independence. For their part, the Vietminh leaders viewed this small group of Americans working with them to defeat the Japanese as a symbol of liberation, not only from the Japanese occupation but also from 80 years of French colonial rule.

The OSS officers who knew Ho Chi Minh viewed him as a Vietnamese patriot who would subordinate his Leninist revolutionary principles to the larger cause of national liberation. At one point, the Vietnamese leader became seriously ill. An OSS medic, PFC Paul Hoagland, probably saved Ho Chi Minh’s life.⁷

By early 1945, the U.S. and British forces had reclaimed many of Japan’s wartime Southeast Asian conquests. They had liberated important territories, including the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and the Philippine archipelago. Confronted with their rapidly shrinking assets in Southeast Asia, Japan made a determined effort to hold its vital Indochina positions. Aircraft operating from carriers of the U.S. Third Fleet, including the famed Task Force 38 under the command of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, in the Gulf of Tonkin began attacking Japanese shipping. Army Air Corps bombers from Clark Field in the Philippines carried out raids on Saigon and Da Nang, destroying Japanese warships and freighters. Within a few months, American planes had closed Japanese supply lines from Vietnam to China and their home islands. The U.S. bombers knocked out all railway linkages between Vietnam and China. Indochina was cut off from the remaining Japanese theaters of war.

These U.S. air raids signaled that the end of the Japanese presence in Indochina was fast approaching. Many of the French in Vietnam, who had collaborated with the Axis for years, prepared to join the fight for Vietnam’s liberation from Japan. Sensing the changed French attitudes, the Japanese moved to prevent French action against them. On March 9, 1945, the Japanese abruptly brought the 80-year-old French rule over t...