Having rebuilt their forces and upgraded their logistics system, North Vietnamese forces triggered a major offensive in the Central Highlands in March 1975. On April 30, 1975, NVA tanks rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, effectively ending the war.
1955-1975. The Vietnam War was a long, costly, and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.
Unlike Afghanistan, which fell before all U.S. troops could be withdrawn, the South Vietnamese government remained in power for more than two years after the Jan. 27, 1973, peace accord, heralded by President Richard Nixon as “an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”
America did not experience a “lost victory” in Vietnam; in fact, victory was likely out of reach from the beginning. There is a broad consensus among professional historians that the Vietnam War was effectively unwinnable.
Among the more startling of the many disclosures was that the government's real reason for carrying on the war was not to assure the independence of an ally, South Vietnam, as the government had said over and over again, but the far more ambitious geopolitical aim – likely to take years and years to achieve -- of ...
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was driven largely by the rise of communism in Southeast Asia after World War II, and the fear of its spread, which developed in Australia during the 1950s and early 1960s.
The US army had superior conventional weapons but they were ineffective against a country that was not industrialized and an army which employed guerrilla tactics and used the dense jungle as cover.
The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North. The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved.
The most significant material constraint on using nuclear weapons was the risk of a wider war with China. U.S. leaders worried that a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam or the use of tactical nuclear weapons there could bring China into the war.
The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.
According to John Kerry's testimony, Vietnamese civilians were often subjected to shocking violence. Soldiers raped, mutilated, shot at, and brutally murdered civilians. Troops also intentionally destroyed Vietnamese villages, well beyond the destruction typically wrought by war.
At about 1505G, Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist [North Vietnamese] boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first.
The active ingredient of Agent Orange was an equal mixture of two phenoxy herbicides – 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T) – in iso-octyl ester form, which contained traces of the dioxin 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD).
The longest war in history is believed to be the Reconquista (Spanish for Reconquest), with a duration of 781 years.
Vietnam is now considered to be a potential ally of the United States, especially in the geopolitical context of the territorial disputes in the South China Sea and in the containment of Chinese expansionism.
> Fought in: Spain
The longest continual war in history was the Iberian Religious War, between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Moors living in what is today Morocco and Algeria. The conflict, known as the “Reconquista,” spanned 781 years — more than three times as long as the United States has existed.
U.S. General Considered Nuclear Response in Vietnam War, Cables Show. WASHINGTON — In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top American military commander in Saigon activated a plan in 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon B.
The congressional leaders rejected Nixon's lobbying to pass a resolution giving the president the power to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam at his own discretion, but were willing to reconsider if the British joined in. One of the congressional leaders opposed to the resolution was the Senate Minority Leader Lyndon B.
The USA was afraid that communism would spread to South Vietnam and then the rest of Asia. It decided to send money, supplies and military advisers to help the South Vietnamese Government.
In the aftermath of the war, General Westmoreland, the primary leader of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) for the majority of the war, put forward the argument that the United States could have easily won had the United States not restrained their means from the offset[25]: this would have been achieved with ...
The Viet Cong were South Vietnamese supporters of the communist National Liberation Front in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War). They were allied with North Vietnam and the troops of Ho Chi Minh, who sought to conquer the south and create a unified, communist state of Vietnam.
Thus ended the third largest war in American history, with no clear-cut victory on either side and with neither side completely satisfied with the situation, but willing to accept it as the end of a conflict unprofitable to the policies of both the Communist and non- Communist worlds.
A military government was instituted, and on July 2, 1976, the country was officially united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam with its capital in Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The 30-year struggle for control over Vietnam was over.
1. North Vietnam's invasion of the South in 1975 led to reunification and the formation of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in July 1976. It has since been ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).
The U.S. Army reported 58, 177 losses in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese 223, 748. This comes to less than 300,000 losses. The North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong, however, are said to have lost more than a million soldiers and two million civilians. In terms of body count, the U.S. and South Vietnam won a clear victory.