The Vietnam War was the largest and longest-running local war since World War II, and for the United States: it was also the most numerous and expensive war to fight. The war lasted from 1955 to 1975, a full two decades in which the United States invested 650,000 people in the Vietnam battlefield, killing 58,202 people, wounding 303616, missing 2,500 people, losing 8,612 aircraft, and costing $250 billion. The U.S. allies who participated in the war also suffered losses of varying degrees.
Among them, South Korea died 5,099 people, injured 10,962, and missed 4 people; Australia died 474 people and injured 4,307 people; New Zealand died 37 people and injured 187 people; Thailand killed 1,351 people and injured 5,000 people; Taiwan's Kuomintang authorities died 1; and South Vietnamese authorities conservatively estimated that at least 220357 people died and 1,170,000 people were injured. After paying heavy losses, the United States eventually had to withdraw from Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese regime supported by the United States could not escape the fate of collapse, so the Vietnam War was regarded as a rare defeat in the history of the US military.
The Vietnam War, like the Korean War, was seen by the United States as a wrong war fought in the wrong place at the wrong time. So why should the United States fight such a wrong war? In fact, the outbreak of the Vietnam War was also related to the Korean War: after the Korean War, the United States was forced to sign an armistice that it failed to win. America's greatest losses in the Korean War came not from the material level, but from the strong sense of spiritual frustration. This frustration has had a certain impact on The global hegemony of the United States.
On July 1, 1944, the economic envoys of 44 countries or governments held the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, which determined the international monetary system after World War II, the Bretton Woods System. Under this system, the US dollar is directly pegged to gold, other currencies in the world are pegged to the US dollar, and the US dollar is used as the settlement currency for international transactions. This has laid the hegemonic position of the US dollar in the world economic structure and the monopoly position of the United States in the field of international trade finance.
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the United States successfully conducted the world's first nuclear test in a vast, barren area in New Mexico, 50 miles from Alagó. In this way, the United States became the country that held global financial hegemony and the first country in the world to possess nuclear weapons. At the same time, the United States began to be regarded as an ally of the capitalist countries of the West, thus building a system of alliances with itself as the core. At this time, the only person in the world who could compete with the United States was the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.
Since the end of World War II, the two camps, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, have fought openly and secretly for global hegemony: on the one hand, the two sides have tried to consolidate their camps, and on the other hand, they have tried to win over the vast number of third world countries. The defeat of the United States in the Korean battlefield, which is regarded as the ally of the capitalist camp, was seen by many younger brothers and the vast number of third world countries. If the United States wants to maintain its global hegemony, it is necessary to re-establish its authority before the whole world. The United States began to look to Southeast Asia to make up for the authority lost in the Korean War.
Before World War II, Southeast Asia was a colony of Britain, France, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries, and only Thailand maintained its status as an independent country in name, until Japan occupied all of Southeast Asia after the outbreak of the Pacific War. Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia has two sides: on the one hand, the Japanese colonists replaced the European and American colonists as the new rulers, predators, and oppressors in Southeast Asia; on the other hand, the arrival of the Japanese also destroyed the colonial system previously built by the European and American colonists in Southeast Asia. After Japan's defeat and surrender, movements for national independence broke out in Southeast Asian countries.
Vietnam is a relatively special country among Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam is a Southeast Asian country in terms of geographical location, but Vietnam has obvious East Asian characteristics because of its influence from China. Ancient Vietnam, like Korea and Japan, was regarded as a member of the East Asian Chinese character cultural circle. Vietnam was under the jurisdiction of counties and counties of the ancient Chinese dynasty for thousands of years in its early history, and it was not until the five dynasties of the late Tang Dynasty that it developed into an independent country in a state of chaos in the Central Plains.
The Song Dynasty, which ended the chaos of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, officially crowned the Vietnamese monarch after the defeat of the Southern Expedition, and Vietnam was no longer subordinate to Chinese counties, but maintained tributary relations with China. This state of affairs continued until the arrival of modern Western colonialists: after the end of the Sino-French War in 1885, France demanded in the Sino-French New Covenant that the Qing government give up its suzerainty over Vietnam, after which Vietnam had effectively become a French colony, and France further integrated Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia into the French Indochina colony.
Since the French Governor-General of the Federation of Indochina was stationed in Saigon (changed to Hanoi after 1902), Vietnam became the de facto center of French Indochina. In the early 1930s, national independence activists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia established the Communist Party of Indochina with the help of Domestic International to overthrow French colonial rule, and during this period, the Vietnamese national independence activists with Ho Chi Minh as the core became the de facto controllers of the Indochina Communist Party, and Vietnam became the center of the indochina independence movement.
During World War II, France was quickly defeated and surrendered by Germany in the European theater, and Japan, as an ally of Germany, took advantage of the opportunity to enter French Indochina. At this time, Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader of Vietnam and the founder of the future Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was participating in the anti-Japanese salvation movement of the Eighth Route Army led by the Communist Party of China in China, and he also published an article entitled "The Vietnamese People and The Chinese Newspaper" in the Chinese "Salvation Daily", in which he stated that "the Vietnamese people's liberation movement was an ally of China's War of Resistance Against Japan, and China's War of Resistance Against Japan was closely related to the Vietnamese liberation movement."
At the call of the Viet Cong with Ho Chi Minh at its core, the Vietnamese people set off a revolutionary upsurge against the Japanese invaders, so the people of the Bac Son region of Vietnam seized the weapons of the fleeing French army under the leadership of the local party organization of the Viet Cong and staged an armed uprising. In the following two months, the people of Gaoling, Jiading, Vinh Long, Bo Su and other places in southern Vietnam revolted and established revolutionary regimes in some townships and counties. On January 13, 1941, soldiers revolted in southern Vietnam, but these uprisings were invariably suppressed.
Although Japan was able to successfully suppress the uprisings launched by the people of Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, it could not reverse its unfavorable situation in the entire war: on the one hand, a large number of japanese forces were held back in the Chinese battlefield, and on the other hand, the US military continued to promote its own island-hopping tactics in the Pacific theater. The Japanese Emperor surrendered on August 15, 1945, as a result of a series of factors, including the dropping of atomic bombs on the United States and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war. The day after the Japanese Emperor announced his surrender, the Vietnamese People's Liberation Army captured Taiyuan (a Vietnamese province, not Taiyuan, Shanxi).
The historical prelude to the August Revolution in Vietnam was thus unveiled: on August 19, the people of Hanoi revolted and seized power. On August 23, the hue uprising in the ancient capital of central China and the uprising in the large southern city of Saigon were won on the 25th. From August 17 to 28, 60 provinces and cities in Vietnam revolted and established a new regime from south to north. On September 2, ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh(i.e., later the Communist Party of Vietnam) proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the form of the Declaration of Independence in Hanoi, North Vietnam. Although the Vietnamese had declared independence, the French did not want to lose their colonies in Southeast Asia.
On September 23, 1945, the French colonial army made a comeback to invade Saigon and supported the Viet Minh Led by the last Emperor of Vietnam, Bao Datong, in South Vietnam, and the Vietnamese people launched a nine-year war of national liberation against France. The revolutionary situation in Vietnam also inspired the national independence movements in Laos and Cambodia: on October 12, 1945 Laos declared independence and established the Ishara Front. In 1946, Sisawon Von unified Laos and established the Kingdom of Laos. On November 9, 1953, Cambodia officially declared its independence.
On the afternoon of March 13, 1954, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu broke out between the North Vietnamese regime under the leadership of the Viet Minh Andi and the French colonial army, which ended with the victory of north Vietnam on May 7 of that year. On July 21, 1954, Vietnam forced France to sign the Geneva Accords on the indochina issue that ended the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia: Vietnam temporarily divided north and south along the 17th parallel – the north was led by the Viet Minh League with Ho Chi Minh as the core, and the south was led by the last French-backed Vietnamese emperor, Nguyen Phuc Huong.
The agreement also stipulated that an election aimed at the reunification of Vietnam would be held in July 1956, but this election was not held, and the division of the North and the South and the adoption of different ideologies and political systems became a fait accompli. Since the partition of the North and the South, both the North and the South have been trying to complete the reunification of the country. At that time, the North Vietnamese regime under the leadership of the Viet Minh was established in a protracted war, so it achieved a total suppression of the South Vietnamese regime supported by the French in terms of combat effectiveness. Guerrillas under the leadership of the Viet Minh carried out frequent operations in South Vietnam.
At the same time, viet Minh, as the de facto leader of the three-nation revolution in Indochina, also had considerable influence in Laos and Cambodia. After the defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, France carried out a comprehensive strategic contraction throughout Indochina, and the Vietnamese Alliance began to expand rapidly in South Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, which aroused the high vigilance of the United States. Since the founding of New China in 1949, the United States has been wary of the expansion of socialism in Asia, so the United States has actively supported Japan on the one hand to curb socialist expansion in Asia, and at the same time strengthened its military strength on the Korean Peninsula and Indochina.
Under the pattern of the Cold War confrontation between the East and the West at that time, the United States believed that the victory of socialism in Vietnam would lead to the gradual expansion of socialism throughout Southeast Asia, thereby weakening the strategic advantage of the capitalist camp led by the United States - this is the "domino effect" proposed in the Kennedy era: if the "red wave" overwhelms Vietnam, then the security of Southeast Asian countries and even India and Japan will be seriously threatened. With the conclusion of the Korean Armistice Agreement, the United States began to shift its strategic focus to indochina, including Vietnam.
The most fundamental reason for the United States to launch the Vietnam War was to curb the spread of the socialist revolution in Southeast Asia and compete with the Red Soviet Union for strategic space. In addition, the United States also wants to profit from the arms dealer group at home through war. The influence of the US government and media on interest groups and lobbies is actually very far-reaching. The election of the president of the United States and congressmen is quite expensive, which means that they need the support of a wealthy consortium. Among them, the arms dealer group is an important force that can influence the US political arena.
During World War II, the United States established the world's largest arms factory. The weapons and equipment produced by American arms factories every year can arm half the world. Of course, such a large military production output could not be stopped after the end of World War II - after all, the profit-seeking nature of capital determined that arms dealers would do everything possible to expand sales. Bush's launch of the Iraq War was supported by domestic arms dealers, and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had the same reason. In fact, the U.S. military used more bombs during the Vietnam War than in World War II as a whole.
At first, the United States tried to contain the development of North Vietnam by supporting the South Vietnamese regime: on October 26, 1955, the united States's selected agent, Ngo Dinh Yan, organized a referendum, and 98% of the people supported the abolition of the monarchy, so the last emperor of Vietnam, Nguyen Phuc Huong, was deposed, and the Republic of Vietnam was established in South Vietnam. Under the cold war between the East and the West at that time, South Vietnam had the support of the United States, France, Britain and the Taiwan authorities since its founding, while North Vietnam was supported by socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
However, because the South Vietnamese regime was so corrupt that it was repeatedly defeated by the North Vietnamese, this forced the United States to intervene in the war as it had in the Korean War: in 1961, the United States formally intervened in the Vietnam War in a coalition with South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. To say that the South Vietnamese regime supported by the United States can really be regarded as a mud that cannot be lifted to the wall: South Vietnamese lost and lost in the battle against North Vietnam, and eventually involved the United States in the war, which had tried to reap the benefits of proxies.
Some people may think that the performance of South Vietnam in the Vietnam War is comparable to the performance of South Korea in the Korean War, and in fact it is true to some extent. However, if it is really worse than rotten, then South Vietnam is afraid that even South Korea is not as good as South Korea: although the South Korean army in the Korean War is about to collapse, the South Korean army's will to fight is still relatively tenacious, so that in the early stage of the rok army in the face of T-34 tanks helpless, South Korean soldiers often held explosive packages and tanks and died together. The phenomenon of South Korean troops being completely annihilated or surrendered on a large scale before the US military intervened in the Korean War is still relatively rare.
In contrast, South Vietnam's performance in the Vietnam War was simply a mountain of defeat and a surrender. Don't look at the south Vietnamese combat effectiveness is not good, but can engage in internal political struggles and corruption and wealth accumulation is a master, for a time the South Vietnamese people are extremely disappointed in the government. At the same time, americans were deeply disappointed in the South Vietnamese authorities—the U.S. government and soldiers began to ponder the question of whether what they were trying to protect was a corrupt government that had no fighting power to speak of, and was unpopular when they spent a lot of money on it, even at the expense of war.
More and more American soldiers began to question the government's war propaganda, and began to wonder what the fallen comrades were fighting for. Vietnam's jungle is dense, the climate is humid and hot, for the U.S. troops who come from afar, the first enemy they face is not the Vietnamese army, but poisonous insects, snakes, ants and humid and hot weather, due to the large number of non-combat attrition caused by the water and soil insecurity, the VETERANS still remember it vividly. For those who lived through the war, it was such a nightmare memory that a large number of Vietnam Veterans chose to commit suicide after returning home, which even coined a proper term for medicine, "Vietnam War Trauma Syndrome".
In contrast, the strength of North Vietnam as an opponent should not be underestimated - since the 1940s, Vietnam has been in a long and continuous state of war: first anti-Japanese, then anti-French, then anti-American, in a long-term state of war Vietnam has accumulated rich practical combat experience. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese authorities had about 1.1 million regular troops and about 2 million "militia backbones," including more than 300,000 highly trained combat veterans. During the War of Resistance Against France, General Tan Geng helped train the North Vietnamese army.
At the same time, General Wu Yuanjia of North Vietnam also systematically specialized in Chairman Mao Zedong's military thinking, drawing on the experience of guerrilla warfare of the Chinese army and carrying out guerrilla warfare, trench warfare, mine warfare, mountain blockade warfare, night raid warfare, sabotage traffic warfare, and jungle warfare with the French and US troops in accordance with local conditions in accordance with Vietnam's terrain and climatic characteristics, and at the same time fully mobilized the masses of the people to support the front. Especially at this time, the Vietnamese military and civilians have mastered a set of guerrilla warfare methods adapted to jungle and mountain warfare, and they are obviously more adapted to the climate and terrain in local combat, so they occupy the right time and place.
The Vietnamese always appeared in front of the American army. The U.S. military's mechanized forces are often constrained by complex terrain and unable to penetrate deep into the theater. There is no doubt about people and aspects – the unity within North Vietnam is clearly unmatched by the chaotic South Vietnamese and its American allies. Moreover, the Vietnam War was not just a war between the United States and Vietnam, but was regarded as a war between the two camps of socialism and capitalism under the Cold War pattern at that time, so Vietnam received strong support and assistance from socialist countries such as China and the Soviet Union.
Laos and Cambodia allowed Vietnam to build about 20,000 kilometers of supply routes through their own territory, the Ho Chi Minh Trail; Cuba sent troops to coordinate with north Vietnamese troops to fight in South Vietnam; North Korea provided intelligence support to the North Vietnamese authorities; East Germany provided weapons and equipment for the Vietnamese communist forces; and the Soviet Union sent advisers to help train the Vietnamese communist forces. In contrast, China, which is directly adjacent to Vietnam, has helped Vietnam even more: It has provided Vietnam with enough light and heavy weapons, ammunition and other military materiel to equip more than 2 million people, including army, navy and air force.
In addition to directly providing weapons and other military materials, China has also provided Vietnam with hundreds of production enterprises and maintenance plants, more than 200 million meters of cloth, more than 30,000 cars, more than 500,000 tons of grain, more than 2 million tons of gasoline, and 635 million cash exchanges; helped Vietnam build hundreds of kilometers of railways and more than 3,000 kilometers of tubing; China also allowed Vietnamese officers and soldiers to enter China for training, while 1,146 Chinese martyrs who aided Vietnam were buried on Vietnamese soil. In addition to aid from the state level, Vietnam even has the support of left-wing socialists from capitalist countries, including the United States and Japan.
In the spring of 1971, the U.S. Air Force's 1021st Detachment reported that there were 16 "red" volunteers from Western countries in the 3001st Vietcong Battalion in Longcheon, An Giang Province. The U.S. army that crossed the ocean had to face the Vietnamese army that had received the strong support of the entire socialist camp to fight on its own to wait for work, and in the end, the strong dragon failed to suppress the ground snake. Moreover, the United States itself is not firm in its own will to fight— from the very beginning it has tried to limit the war to a certain scale, to avoid making it an all-out confrontation between the entire capitalist and socialist camps.
In order to avoid provoking Vietnam's northern neighbors to get involved in the war and thus plunging themselves into the second "War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea", the US ground forces have been trying their best to avoid taking action north of the 17th parallel. Although the U.S. Air Force once sent a large number of aircraft to bomb NATO, this time is not like the future Gulf War period - relying solely on air superiority and lacking the cooperation of ground forces is difficult to expand the results. Over time, the North Vietnamese side also came up with a set of effective ways to deal with U.S. air strikes, so the role of U.S. air strikes became smaller and smaller.
At the same time, the anti-Vietnam War in the United States has intensified: the severity of the Vietnam War has caused many families in the United States to suffer from the sequelae of the Vietnam War. At the same time, Americans are also extremely disappointed in the dictatorship and corruption of the South Vietnamese regime that their country has fostered, and they cannot accept the reality that they have made great sacrifices to defend a dictatorial and corrupt regime, so since 1961, the major media in the United States have launched an anti-Vietnam War movement. In particular, we need to take into account the reality that the Vietnam War was the first large-scale overseas war for the United States since the spread of television.
The bloody casualties on television are even more shocking than the monotonous casualty figures reported. At the same time, the Vietnam War became a bottomless pit of depleting U.S. financial resources: during the war, U.S. foreign trade gradually weakened, and dollar crises occurred frequently, directly leading to the end of the 25-year economic boom in the United States since the end of World War II. At the same time, the Vietnam War also exacerbated racial and civil rights problems in the United States, leaving the country extremely divided: as early as 1965, anti-war groups in the United States organized the "National Armistice Commission for Vietnam".
In April 1967, a peaceful march of 300,000 people broke out in New York. In 1968, anti-war calls in the United States were even louder, and the American people were equally disgusted by the unwinnable war. In 1969, the United States fell into the fifth economic crisis, and the Vietnam War deepened the political crisis in the United States, and the anti-war movement was at an all-time high. Eventually, the U.S. government had to end the costly war in the face of rising public opinion at home: by April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese side was no longer able to organize resistance, and the U.S. Embassy had begun to burn classified documents and prepare for evacuation.
At 7:53 a.m. on the same day, the last group of Marines remaining at the U.S. Embassy slowly lowered the American flag and then moved by helicopter to the aircraft carrier USS Midway cruising in Vietnamese territorial waters, during which two members of the team were killed by mortar shells that landed in the courtyard of the embassy, becoming the last two american casualties in the Vietnam War. Five hours later North Vietnamese tanks roared into the South Vietnamese presidential palace. Acting President Yang Wenming of South Vietnam immediately announced his surrender. On July 2, 1976, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam re-established the name of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam after the unification of the Republic of Vietnam.