Vietnam War
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Vietnam War
(Chi?n tranh Vi?t Nam)
Part of the Indochina Wars and the Cold War
Clockwise, from top left: U.S. combat operations in Ia Drang, ARVN Rangers defending Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive, two Douglas A-4C Skyhawks enroute for airstrikes against North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, ARVN recapture Qu?ng Tr? during the 1972 Easter Offensive, civilians fleeing the 1972 Battle of Qu?ng Tr?, burial of 300 victims of the 1968 Hu? Massacre.
Date
1 November 1955 (1955-11-01) – 30 April 1975 (1975-04-30)
(19 years, 5 months, 4 weeks and 1 day)
Location
South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos
Result
North Vietnamese victory* Withdrawal of American-led forces* Communist governments take power in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia* South Vietnam is annexed by North Vietnam
Territorial
changes
Reunification of North and South Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Belligerents
Anti-communist forces: South Vietnam
United States
South Korea
Australia
Thailand
New Zealand
Khmer Republic
Kingdom of LaosSupported by:
Philippines
Taiwan
Canada
West Germany
United Kingdom
Iran
Spain
Communist forces: North Vietnam
Viet Cong
Khmer Rouge
Pathet LaoSupported by:
China
Soviet Union
Cuba
North Korea
Czechoslovakia
Bulgaria
Commanders and leaders
Ngô Ðình Di?m †
Nguy?n Van Thi?u
Nguy?n Cao K?
Cao Van Viên
Ngô Quang Tru?ng
John F. Kennedy †
Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard Nixon
Robert McNamara
William Westmoreland
Creighton Abrams
Park Chung-hee
Chae Myung-shin
Robert Menzies
Harold Holt
Keith Holyoake
Thanom Kittikachorn
...and others
Ho Chi Minh
Lê Du?n
Võ Nguyên Giáp
Van Ti?n Dung
Lê Tr?ng T?n
Ph?m Van Ð?ng
Hoàng Van Thái
Tr?n Van Trà
Nguy?n Van Linh
Nguy?n H?u Th?
...and others
Strength
~1,830,000 (1968)
South Vietnam: 850,000 (1968)
1,500,000 (1974–5)
United States: 536,100 (1968)
Free World Military Forces: 65,000
South Korea: 50,000
Australia: 7,672
Thailand, Philippines: 10,450
New Zealand: 552
~461,000
North Vietnam: 287,465 (January 1968)
China: 170,000 (in 1965-69)
Soviet Union: 3,000
North Korea: 300–600
Casualties and losses
South Vietnam
195,000–430,000 civilian dead
220,357–313,000 military dead
1,170,000 wounded
United States
58,220 dead; 303,644 wounded
South Korea
5,099 dead; 10,962 wounded; 4 missing
Australia
500 dead; 3,129 wounded
New Zealand
37 dead; 187 wounded
Thailand
351 dead;1,358 wounded
Philippines
9 deadTotal dead: 480,538–807,564
Total wounded: ~1,490,000+
North Vietnam & Viet Cong
50,000–65,000 civilian dead
400,000–1,100,000 military dead or missing
600,000+ wounded
China
~1,100 dead and 4,200 wounded
Soviet Union
16 deadTotal dead: 455,462–1,170,462
Total wounded: ~608,200
Vietnamese civilian dead: 245,000–2,000,000
Cambodian Civil War dead: 200,000–300,000*
Laotian Civil War dead: 20,000–200,000*
Total civilian dead: 465,000–2,500,000**
Total dead: 1,102,000–3,886,026Aircraft losses
* indicates approximations, see Casualties below
For more information see Vietnam War casualties
** This figure includes all of the dead from the Laotian and Cambodian civil wars.
v
t
e
1945–46
First
Second
Laotian Civil War
Cambodian Civil War
Cambodian-Vietnamese
border conflicts
Sino-Vietnamese
border conflicts
v
t
e
Military engagements
of the Vietnam War
Guerrilla Phase
Laos
Sunrise
1st Ap Bac
Go Cong
Hiep Hoa
Chà Là
34A
Long Dinh
Kien Long
Quyet Thang 202
USNS Card
Nam Dong
An Lão
Bình Gia
Camp Holloway
Song Be
Ba Gia
Ð?ng Xoài
Ka Nak
Deo Nhong
American Intervention
Nui Thanh
Chu Lai
Starlite
Plei Me
Minh Thanh
Hump
Gang Toi
1st Bau Bang
Ia Drang Valley
Crimp
Masher/White Wing
Suoi Bong Trang
Cu Nghi
Kim Son Valley
A Shau
Birmingham
Xa Cam My
1st Dong Ha
Wahiawa
Hastings
Minh Thanh Road
Prairie
Ð?c Co
Long Tan
Beaver Cage
Attleboro
Bong Son
Tân Son Nh?t airbase
Lam Son II
LZ Bird
SS Baton Rouge Victory
Cedar Falls
Tuscaloosa
Tra Binh Dong
Bribie
Junction City
Ap Gu
Suoi Tre
2nd Bau Bang
Francis Marion
Union
Hill 881
2nd Ap Bac
1st Con Thien
Malheur I and Malheur II
Baker
Nine Days in May
Union II
Vinh Huy
Buffalo
2nd Con Thien
Hong Kil Dong
Suoi Chau Pha
Swift
Dong Son
Wheeler/Wallowa
3rd Con Thien
Medina
Ông Thanh
1st Loc Ninh
Kingfisher
Kentucky
1st Dak To
Mekong Delta
Tam Quan
Thom Tham Khe
Phoenix
Coburg
Vuon Dieu - Bau Nau
1968 Offensives
New Year's Day Battle of 1968
Khe Sanh
1st Tet
1st Saigon
Hu?
1st Qu?ng Tr?
Ban Houei Sane
Lang Vei
Lima Site 85
Toan Thang I
Delaware
2nd Dong Ha
May '68
Kham Duc
Coral–Balmoral
Hoa Da – Song Mao
Duc Lap
Speedy Express
Drawdown 1968–71
Dewey Canyon
Taylor Common
2nd Tet
Apache Snow
Hamburger Hill
Twinkletoes
Binh Ba
Pat To
LZ Kate
Bu Prang
Kent State
Texas Star
Chicago Peak
Khe Gio Bridge
FSB Ripcord
1st Cambodia
Kompong Speu
Prey Veng
2nd Cambodia
Snuol
Tailwind
Jefferson Glenn
Hat Dich
Lam Son 719
Ban Dong
Hill 723
Son Tay Raid
Chenla I
Chenla II
FSB Mary Ann
Long Khanh
Nui Le
Easter Offensive
2nd Qu?ng Tr?
3rd Qu?ng Tr?
2nd Loc Ninh
An L?c
3rd Dong Ha
2nd Dak To
Kontum
Thunderhead
Post-Paris Peace Accords (1973–1974)
Ap Da Bien
Svay Rieng
Iron Triangle
Spring '75
Phuoc Long
Ban Me Thuot
Hue–Da Nang
Phan Rang
Xuân L?c
Newport Bridge
Rach Chiec Bridge
2nd Saigon
Air operations
Farm Gate
Chopper
Ranch Hand
Pierce Arrow
Barrel Roll
Pony Express
Flaming Dart
Iron Hand
Rolling Thunder
Steel Tiger
Arc Light
Tiger Hound
Shed Light
Thanh Hóa
Bolo
Popeye
Yen Vien
Niagara
Niagara II
1st Do Luong
2nd Do Luong
Igloo White
Giant Lance
Commando Hunt
Menu
Patio
Freedom Deal
Linebacker I
Enhance Plus
Linebacker II
Homecoming
Tan Son Nhut Air Base
Babylift
New Life
Eagle Pull
Frequent Wind
Naval operations
Yankee & Dixie Stations
Gulf of Tonkin
Market Time
Vung Rô Bay
Game Warden
Double Eagle
Sea Dragon
Deckhouse Five
Bo De River, Nha Trang, Tha Cau River
Sealords
Hai Phong Harbor
Ð?ng H?i
Pocket Money
Custom Tailor
End Sweep
Paracel Islands
East Sea
Mayaguez
The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chi?n tranh Vi?t Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, and also known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War (1946–54) and was fought between North Vietnam—supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies—and the government of South Vietnam—supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The People's Army of Vietnam (also known as the North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units to battle.As the war wore on, the part of the Viet Cong in the fighting decreased as the role of the NVA grew. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. In the course of the war, the U.S. conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and over time the North Vietnamese airspace became the most heavily defended in the world.The U.S. government viewed American involvement in the war as a way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of a wider containment strategy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism. According to the U.S. domino theory, if one state went Communist, other states in the region would follow, and U.S. policy thus held that Communist rule over all of Vietnam was unacceptable. The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against forces from France and then America, as France was backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state.Beginning in 1950, American military advisors arrived in what was then French Indochina. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with troop levels tripling in 1961 and again in 1962. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft, which was followed by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the U.S. president authorization to increase U.S. military presence. Regular U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations crossed international borders: bordering areas of Laos and Cambodia were heavily bombed by U.S. forces as American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, the same year that the communist side launched the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive failed in its goal of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government but became the turning point in the war, as it persuaded a large segment of the United States population that its government's claims of progress toward winning the war were illusory despite many years of massive U.S. military aid to South Vietnam.Disillusionment with the war by the U.S. led to the gradual withdrawal of U.S. ground forces as part of a policy known as Vietnamization, which aimed to end American involvement in the war while transferring the task of fighting the Communists to the South Vietnamese themselves. Despite the Paris Peace Accord, which was signed by all parties in January 1973, the fighting continued.In the U.S. and the Western world, a large anti-Vietnam War movement developed. This movement was part of a larger Counterculture of the 1960s.Direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case–Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese service members and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million. Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–200,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.
Cite error: There are tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=A}} template (see the help page).
^ a b c d e f g "ALLIES OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM". Retrieved 24 September 2011.
^ The Cuban Military Under Castro, 1989. Page 76
^ Cuba in the World, 1979. Page 66
^ "Cesky a slovensky svet". Svet.czsk.net. Retrieved 2014-02-24.
^ "Bilaterální vztahy Ceské republiky a Vietnamské socialistické republiky | Mezinárodní vztahy | e-Polis – Internetový politologický casopis". E-polis.cz. Retrieved 2014-02-24.
^ "Foreign Affairs in the 1960s and 1970s". Bulgaria Country Study. Library of Congress. 1992. "Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bulgaria gave official military support to many national liberation causes, most notably in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, (North Vietnam)..."
^ Le Gro, p. 28.
^ "Vietnam War : US Troop Strength". Historycentral.com. Retrieved 17 October 2009.
^ "Facts about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection". nps.gov. (citing The first American ground combat troops landed in South Vietnam during March 1965, specifically the U.S. Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, deployed to Vietnam from Okinawa to defend the Da Nang, Vietnam, airfield. During the height of U.S. military involvement, 31 December 1968, the breakdown of allied forces were as follows: 536,100 U.S. military personnel, with 30,610 U.S. military having been killed to date; 65,000 Free World Forces personnel; 820,000 South Vietnam Armed Forces (SVNAF) with 88,343 having been killed to date. At the war's end, there were approximately 2,200 U.S. missing in action (MIA) and prisoners of war (POW). Source: Harry G. Summers, Jr. Vietnam War Almanac, Facts on File Publishing, 1985.)
^ Vietnam Marines 1965–73. Osprey Publishing. 8 March 1965. Retrieved 29 April 2011.
^ Vietnam War After Action Reports, BACM Research, 2009, page 430
^ "China admits 320,000 troops fought in Vietnam". Toledo Blade. Reuters. 16 May 1989. Retrieved 24 December 2013.
^ Roy, Denny (1998). China's Foreign Relations. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 27. ISBN 978-0847690138.
^ a b China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry. Cambridge University Press 2006. Brantly Womack. P. 176
^ a b c Lewy 1978, pp. 450–3.
^ Thayer 1985, chap. 12.
^ a b Aaron Ulrich (editor); Edward FeuerHerd (producer and director) (2005 & 2006). Heart of Darkness: The Vietnam War Chronicles 1945–1975 (Box set, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Dolby, Vision Software|format= requires |url= (help)) (Documentary). Koch Vision. Event occurs at 321 minutes. ISBN 1-4172-2920-9. Check date values in: |date= (help)
^ Rummel, R.J (1997), "Table 6.1A. Vietnam Democide : Estimates, Sources, and Calculations," (GIF), Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War, University of Hawaii System
^ "Australian casualties in the Vietnam War, 1962–72 | Australian War Memorial". Awm.gov.au. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
^ "Overview of the war in Vietnam | VietnamWar.govt.nz, New Zealand and the Vietnam War". Vietnamwar.govt.nz. 1965-07-16. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
^ The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History By Spencer C. Tucker "http://books.google.com/?id=qh5lffww-KsC"
^ "Chapter III: The Phillipines". History.army.mil. Retrieved 2014-02-24.
^ Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310
^ a b Associated Press, 3 April 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North."
^ Soames, John. A History of the World, Routledge, 2005.
^ Dunnigan, James & Nofi, Albert: Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know. St. Martin's Press, 2000, p. 284. ISBN 0-312-25282-X.
^ Shenon, Philip (23 April 1995). "20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 February 2011. The Vietnamese government officially claimed a rough estimate of 2 million civilian deaths, but it did not divide these deaths between those of North and South Vietnam.
^ "fifty years of violent war deaths: data analysis from the world health survey program: BMJ". 23 April 2008. Retrieved 5 January 2013. From 1955 to 2002, data from the surveys indicated an estimated 5.4 million violent war deaths ... 3.8 million in Vietnam
^ a b Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
^ a b Sliwinski 1995.
^ a b Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.
^ Factasy. "The Vietnam War or Second Indochina War". PRLog. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
^ DoD 1998
^ Lawrence 2009, p. 20.
^ Olson & Roberts 1991, p. 67.
^ Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960, The Pentagon Papers (Gravel Edition), Volume 1, Chapter 5, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), Section 3, pp. 314–346; International Relations Department, Mount Holyoke College.
^ "Vietnam War". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 5 March 2008. "Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in its longest and most controversial war"
^ Digital History, Steven Mintz. "The Vietnam War". Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
^ Vietnam War Statistics and Facts 1, 25th Aviation Battalion website.
^ Kolko 1985, pp. 457, 461ff.
^ Charles Hirschman et al., "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate," Population and Development Review, December 1995.
^ Shenon, Philip (23 April 1995). "20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 February 2011.
^ "fifty years of violent war deaths: data analysis from the world health survey program: BMJ". 23 April 2008. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
^ Warner, Roger, Shooting at the Moon (1996), pp. 366, estimates 30,000 Hmong.
^ Obermeyer, "Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia", British Medical Journal, 2008, estimates 60,000 total.
^ T. Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule, (1996), estimates 35,000 total.
^ Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980, (1982), estimates 20,000 total.
^ Taylor, Charles Lewis, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, estimates 20,000 total.
^ Stuart-Fox 1997, p. 144, which estimates 200,000 by 1973.
^ ?America's Wars? (Report). Department of Veterans Affairs. May 2010. http://www1.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf.
^ Anne Leland; Mari–Jana "M-J" Oboroceanu (26 February 2010). ?American War and Military Operations: Casualties: Lists and Statistics? (Report). Congressional Research Service. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf.
^ Lawrence 2009, pp. 65, 107, 154, 217
^ Kueter, Dale. Vietnam Sons: For Some, the War Never Ended. AuthorHouse (21 March 2007). ISBN 978-1425969318
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