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Learn About the Vietnam War

Between 1945 and 1954, the Vietnamese waged an anti-colonial war against France and received $2.6 billion in financial support from the United States. The French defeat at the Dien Bien Phu was followed by a peace conference in Geneva, in which Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam received their independence and Vietnam was temporarily divided between an anti-Communist South and a Communist North. In 1956, South Vietnam, with American backing, refused to hold the unification elections. By 1958, Communist-led guerrillas known as the Viet Cong had begun to battle the South Vietnamese government.

To support the South’s government, the United States sent in 2,000 military advisors, a number that grew to 16,300 in 1963. The military condition deteriorated, and by 1963 South Vietnam had lost the fertile Mekong Delta to the Vietcong.  In 1965, Johnson escalated the war, commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and committing ground forces, which numbered 536,000 in 1968. The 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese turned many Americans against the war. The next president, Richard Nixon, advocated Vietnamization, withdrawing American troops and giving South Vietnam greater responsibility for fighting the war. His attempt to slow the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam by sending American forces to destroy Communist supply bases in Cambodia in 1970 in violation of Cambodian neutrality provoked antiwar protests on the nation’s college campuses.

From 1968 to 1973 efforts were made to end the conflict through diplomacy. In January 1973, an agreement reached and U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam and U.S. prisoners of war were released.  In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was reunited.

CONSEQUENCES:

1.  The Vietnam War cost the United States 58,000 lives and 350,000 casualties. It also resulted in between one and two million Vietnamese deaths.

2.  Congress enacted the War Powers Act in 1973, requiring the president to receive explicit Congressional approval before committing American forces overseas.

It was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the twentieth century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government.

A succinct history of the Vietnam War
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/subtitles.cfm?titleID=71

Declaration of Independence, Democratic Republic of Vietnam. September 2, 1945
http://www.vwip.org/articles/declar01.htm
Documents relating to the Vietnam War
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam.htm

Handouts and fact sheets:

The Tumultuous 1960s
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us38.cfm

Recommended lesson plan:

Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/teachers

Quizzes:

Test your knowledge about the Vietnam War

Recommended books:

George Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975
A balanced account of American involvement in Vietnam.

Learn more: Vietnam War Bibliography

 

Recommended film:

Platoon
Based on director Oliver Stone’s experiences as an infantryman in Vietnam, this film offers a harrowing and heartbreaking glimpse into what it was like to be a soldier during the Vietnam war.

Comprehensive reviews of this movie:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1016405/

Hollywood and Vietnam

Recommended Website:

The Wars for Vietnam
http://vietnam.vassar.edu/
This site provides an informative overview of the history of the war supplemented with primary source documents

Vietnam Documents
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam.htm
A collection of documents relating to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the United States from 1941 to the fall of Saigon.

 

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