Chapter 10
Shifting the Burden: Leaving Vietnam
In This Chapter
Analyzing the repercussions of the Tet Offensive
Changing of the guard: The Nixon leadership
Building South Vietnam while getting U.S. troops out
Providing fodder for antiwar protests
Going beyond the Vietnamese borders
Enduring the final months until the arrival of peace
The Tet Offensive in early 1968 and its aftermath affected the antiwar movement and shifted the U.S. position in Vietnam as government officials began to recognize that they were losing the battle at home. It also widened a rift between President Lyndon Johnson and members of his own Democratic Party over his war policies. Realizing that he couldn’t win a second term, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run again. Division in the Democratic Party had been slowly building since the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed in 1964. Questions about U.S. goals in Vietnam had pushed Robert Kennedy to challenge Johnson even though a challenge from within the party of incumbent president is rare. The Tet Offensive, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and the riots at the convention in Chicago all but assured the election of a new commander in chief.
After Republican candidate Richard Nixon triumphed in the election of 1968, he recognized that he needed to shift the U.S. strategy. Not only was the country not winning the war, but the administration’s policies were also losing the war at home — more and more Americans opposed the war. Nixon knew that something had to be done. Vietnamization, a term Nixon coined for placing more responsibility for the war on the Vietnamese, was his answer, designed to appease all sides of the debate. Implementing this plan, however, turned out to be full of difficulties.
The Aftermath of Tet
With little prospect for victory in the near future and the growing pressures at home, Johnson saw that he needed to change his strategy in Vietnam. With no clear way to use military force to make the North Vietnamese accept U.S. terms, the question became how to withdraw U.S. troops to ease the problems on the home front while still pursuing the important objectives of the war. Johnson concluded that a negotiated settlement was his best option.
Seeking negotiations with North Vietnam
Johnson’s offer to begin formal peace negotiations opened a new set of talks set in Paris. After he dropped out of the presidential race, Johnson continued the bombing campaign in the South against the insurgents and pressed the North Vietnamese for a negotiated settlement in Paris. Though the Johnson administration had been trying to negotiate since the early stages of the war, they accomplished little because both sides followed the same strategy of talking while fighting. Each side tried to gain an advantage on the battlefield that could be used to compel concessions at the bargaining table. Thus the talks in Paris weren’t making much progress until Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate and the current vice president, broke with Johnson and began to advocate a total cessation of the bombing.
Sensing the shift in the U.S. position, the North Vietnamese suddenly dropped their resistance to including the South Vietnamese government in the negotiations, in exchange for including the National Liberation Front (NLF), also known as the Viet Cong, and halting the bombing campaign entirely. North Vietnam’s offer was designed to boost Hubert Humphrey’s campaign because they believed that Nixon, who had built a career as an anti-Communist, would be more difficult to deal with than Humphrey.
Johnson, not wanting to appear as though he’d turned down a chance for peace, was forced to end the bombing campaign on October 31, 1968, in a televised address to the nation. Having gained an important concession in the cessation of bombing, the North Vietnamese went back to the strategy of talking while fighting. The Paris talks stalled again for another five years.
Electing a new president in 1968
By March 1968, when LBJ announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection, the Vietnam War had driven a wedge in the Democratic Party. Since Tet, public opinion polls showed a sharp increase in opposition to Johnson’s conduct of the war (see Chapter 8 for more on the public’s reaction to Tet). Johnson, the great consensus builder of Congress, had lost the consensus among his own cabinet. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s resignation in early 1968 reflected the struggles within the administration. Sometime during the fall of 1966, McNamara concluded that the war couldn’t be won using the current strategy. Though he continued to try to influence Johnson, he began to feel like an outsider within the administration. Finally, in June 1967, without the knowledge or consent of the president, McNamara commissioned a massive study of the roots of U.S. involvement in Vietnam — this study became known as the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked to the press in 1971, shedding important light on the subject and fueling the antiwar movement.
Originally, the primary race for the Democratic presidential nomination was simple; the sitting president seemed the shoe-in for the party nomination. Eugene McCarthy joined the race as an antiwar candidate and quickly received the support of thousands of young idealistic college students and antiwar protesters. After McCarthy did well in the first primary race in New Hampshire on March 12, 1968, it began to look like a challenger may have a chance after all. Four days later, Robert F. Kennedy joined the race. It looked like a three-way race between Johnson, McCarthy, and Kennedy. Kennedy’s entrance in the primary race put further pressure on the president.
Surprised by McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire and facing fears of a loss to McCarthy in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, Johnson withdrew on March 31, leaving Kennedy and McCarthy along with Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president who joined the race after Johnson withdrew, as the democratic hopefuls. On June 4, Kennedy won the pivotally important California primary but was assassinated that evening as he left a celebration of his victory. Johnson’s withdrawal and Kennedy’s assassination made Humphrey and McCarthy the Democratic candidates. Yet many Americans weren’t ready to accept anything less than a victory, and at a turbulent Democratic National Convention, Humphrey squeaked by McCarthy while Richard Nixon secured the Republican nomination.
Humphrey starting singing a different tune, though, by September, when he broke with Johnson and condemned the bombing — but by then it was too late. Nixon was already gaining ground, based on the rumor that he had a secret plan to end the war (which, as it turns out, wasn’t really the case — see the next section). Many Democrats were disillusioned and sat out the 1968 election, believing that Humphrey was only a different face on the Johnson policy. At the polls, Nixon squeaked by with 43.4 percent of the vote, compared with Humphrey’s 42.7 percent.
Playing the Cold War Card
Once elected, Nixon recognized that Johnson’s policy of escalation did nothing to bring U.S. forces closer to victory. Johnson’s attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with the North Vietnamese were also failures, although he’d tried both force and concessions.
Kissinger, a man of the world
Henry Kissinger, a German Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1938, was secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1973 to 1977. He also served as assistant to the president for national security affairs from 1969 until 1975. Kissinger was educated at Harvard, earning his PhD in political science in 1954. Before his government service, he was a member of the Harvard faculty.
As a liberal Republican, Kissinger supported Governor Nelson Rockefeller for the Republi- can nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968. However, ever the pragmatist, Kissinger switched his support to Nixon when it became inevitable that he’d receive the Republican nod in 1968. Though not always agreeing with Nixon, Kissinger not only supported but also greatly influenced policy throughout the president’s administration. Some of his greatest achievements were the détente (a lessening of tensions) with the Soviet Union and the opening of diplomatic relations with China in 1972. He also negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (culminating in a treaty, SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In 1973, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Le Duc Tho of Vietnam for their work on the Vietnam peace accords.
Although he certainly wasn’t good-looking, Kissinger was sophisticated and dated some of the more attractive Hollywood talents, such as Jill St. John, Shirley MacLaine, and Candice Bergen. When asked how he attracted such beautiful women, Kissinger replied, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
As Nixon assembled his top advisors, he clearly had foreign policy in mind, choosing either men who held similar views to his own regarding cold war strategy or those who would follow him without question. Nixon’s greatest ally was Henry Kissinger, who, as national security advisor, dominated the foreign policy ideas of Nixon’s top advisors.
Nixon’s approach to Vietnam was based on a larger global strategy in which the superpowers would work together to uphold world stability. To achieve this consensus, Nixon and Kissinger began to work at improving U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. They also sought to create diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, which would end the 20 years of animosity that had existed since China’s Communist revolution (see Chapter 4 for more on Nixon’s dealings with the Soviet Union and China).
The main goal of this strategy was that after Nixon and Kissinger achieved these diplomatic objectives, they could persuade the Soviets and Chinese to influence the North Vietnamese into accepting a compromise settlement. As it turns out, the two men were masters of this type of triangular diplomacy, in which they used a third party to manipulate concessions from their primary opponent.
Taking Initial Steps Toward Vietnamization
Nixon’s global cold war strategy took some time to establish. In the meantime, he was still facing major pressures at home. In his first few months in office the protests had subsided a bit as moderate antiwar protesters waited to see what Nixon would do, yet it was clear that most Americans expected some action. Nixon had to begin withdrawing U.S. troops and deescalating the war effort, yet he had to do so without encouraging the North Vietnamese to press on toward a military victory.
Reassuring South Vietnam
Central to Vietnamization was the effort to reassure the South Vietnamese government that the United States wasn’t abandoning their cause. Several steps were focused on proving to the South Vietnam government that the U.S. was still committed to its struggle:
The U.S. began equipping the ARVN with the latest military hardware, providing more than 1 million of the newer M-16 rifles in addition to 40,000 M-79 rocket launchers and 12,000 M-60 machine guns.
Training programs were intensified to ensure that the ARVN could defend the nation.
Though some of the responsibility of the U.S. Air Force was transferred to the South Vietnamese Air Force, the United States remained deeply committed to providing U.S. air support for South Vietnamese troops.
Withdrawing U.S. troops
In June 1969, Nixon announced the first troop withdrawals with a return of 25,000 soldiers, thereby effectively undermining renewed antiwar criticism at home. The removal of the troops began to shift combat strategies on the ground in Vietnam. With fewer troops, the massive sweeps in which large numbers of combat troops moved through an area destroying any enemy they encountered had to be abandoned in favor of smaller unit action, which reduced the number of troops and the amount of area they could clear. The result was a decrease in U.S. casualties after 1969, yet the ARVN casualty rates remained high.
As the U.S. contingent shrank, the ARVN increased in size. The South Vietnamese forces accomplished this growth by lowering their draft age to 18, something the United States had done three years before.
Negotiating with the North
While building international relations with the Soviet Union and China and bolstering the ARVN forces, Nixon continued the talks with the North Vietnamese. The North continued to talk and fight, biding its time and trying to rebuild its forces in the South, which had been severely damaged by its defeat in the Tet Offensive. The North Vietnamese were well aware of the U.S. antiwar movement and the fact that time was on their side. The United States followed the same strategy of talking while fighting. Both sides hoped to gain some advantage in the process.
Sensing the stalemate, Nixon chose to borrow a page from President Eisenhower’s history and sought to coerce the North Vietnamese into negotiations by making them fear he was willing to go much further than Johnson had in order to win. He tried to pressure the North Vietnamese into compromise by creating fear that he was willing to annihilate the North Vietnamese people in order to win. Though Johnson had been careful not to target population centers, Nixon began to approve them as appropriate targets. Nixon called this his “madman theory.”
In July 1969, Nixon sent a private message to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, through a French neutral party, threatening that unless he saw a diplomatic breakthrough by November 1, he’d resort “to measures of great consequence and force.” Ho’s answer, which arrived in Washington on August 30, rebuffed Nixon’s threat by simply reiterating the standard Communist stance regarding the reunification of all of Vietnam. Though Nixon interpreted this as a “cold rebuff,” and began to plot his first massive bombing campaign, the response likely wasn’t written by Ho himself because he’d been suffering heart failure since early 1969 and died on September 2 at the age of 79.
Ho’s last exhortation to his people was to carry on the fight all the way to victory. Though the antiwar movement was slowly undermining the U.S. war effort, the North Vietnamese showed great support for the war, and Ho’s death only strengthened their resolve.
Feeding the Protest Fires
As Nixon sought to refine his strategy, he implemented several new tactics. Though he did his best to keep his new programs under wraps, such changes always leaked to the public at some point. Each time the leaders of the antiwar movement caught wind of anything that seemed to be an expansion of the conflict, it breathed new life into the protests, which limited Nixon’s ability to make new policy.
Eliminating Communists: The Phoenix Program
The Nixon administration instituted a variety of programs ranging from those focused on controlling corruption in the South Vietnamese government to those seeking to undermine the Viet Cong efforts to rebuild following Tet. As part of the Vietnamization strategy, Nixon’s programs had mixed results; the most controversial was the Phoenix Program, aimed at destroying the Communists’ political structure. The CIA created this program with the co- operation of South Vietnamese officials, with the primary goal of identifying Communist agents and supporters working in the South and then assassinating them to render them useless as an effective fighting and recruitment force. The Phoenix Program also focused on confiscating weapons and supplies to further undermine the enemy. The program was highly effective at eliminating people, yet the question of how many were really Communists is a troubling one (see Chapter 8 for a discussion on distinguishing Communists from nationalists).
To eliminate the leadership of the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese agents infiltrated the Communist cells and identified Communists and Communist supporters, who were then either imprisoned or killed. Although the CIA described these efforts with the soft term “neutralizing,” many reports of the Phoenix were troubling. One problem was that village chiefs were often given quotas to fulfill and thus killed just to satisfy the requirements, identifying all the victims as Communists, regardless of whether they actually were. Often, a mere suggestion from a jealous neighbor could lead to the neutralization of an individual or family. Pervasive corruption within the South Vietnamese government was another problem. Some estimates claim that 70 percent of the true Communists were able to bribe the ARVN troops to gain their freedom. At home in the United States, many critics saw this program as little more than organized murder, particularly after journalists began noting that the numbers killed were significantly higher than the number of weapons confiscated. The CIA claimed that in the first year of the Phoenix Program, they neutralized almost 20,000 Communists. By the end of the program in 1975, they cited 60,000.
After the war, North Vietnamese officials admitted that the Phoenix Program had crippled their recruiting efforts and had disrupted many of their cells. Although they stated that they didn’t fear a division of soldiers, the infiltration of their own ranks was tremendously destructive.
Hitting the press: The My Lai Massacre
Though some soldiers refused to kill unarmed civilians, others fired their weapons at point-blank range into the crowd of frightened and huddled villagers. Some were forced into a large ditch, where Calley and his men shot them all. At one point in the midst of the carnage, a helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, sickened by what he saw going on below him, set his chopper down and began rescuing any villager he could. At one point he even ordered his door gunner to open fire on any U.S. soldier he saw who was still executing the villagers. Thompson radioed details of the ongoing massacre to his command, and Charlie Company was pulled back. The U.S. military immediately began a coverup of the atrocity, calling it a great victory against the Viet Cong and mentioning that about 20 civilians had been accidentally killed in the battle. Even General Westmoreland himself sent his congratulations to Charlie Company.
The story may have ended there had a discharged soldier by the name of Ronald Ridenhour not sent letters describing the massacre to U.S. congressman Morris Udall and 30 other prominent politicians, including President Nixon. Two separate investigations began after the letters in March 1969, and 26 U.S. soldiers were put on trial, yet only Calley was found guilty of murder. At their trials, the others insisted that they were either following Calley’s orders or, in the case of higher-ranking officers, that they hadn’t given Calley orders to kill noncombatants.
As the four-month trial of Calley unfolded in the U.S. press, the antiwar movement was reinvigorated. Many Americans were shocked to hear the testimony of soldiers who admitted firing clip after clip of ammunition into the villagers. The facts that only three weapons were found in the village and that many of the dead were women and children, even babies, horrified the American public. The massacre also deeply hurt the reputation of the U.S. Army. Even strong supporters of the war who truly disliked the peaceniks found that they couldn’t explain or defend the massacre. Though this incident happened while Johnson was still president, the fallout was on Nixon.
The rest of the story of the tragedy in My Lai
Though William Calley was sentenced to life in prison at hard labor, many Americans felt that his conviction was wrong. Some people excused Calley’s actions believing that they were understandable and merely the natural result of war. Others, however, felt that though Calley should be punished, the real respon- sibility lay with the U.S. Army itself and that Calley had simply become their scapegoat.
In early 1971, under pressure from both support- ers and critics of Calley, Nixon announced that he’d review Calley’s case, and three days after the trial, he ordered that Calley be held under house arrest in a comfortable apartment on a stateside army base. On November 9, 1974, after serving a mere 3 1/2 years, Calley was paroled.
Widening the War
Although part of the Vietnamization campaign involved withdrawing U.S. troops and replacing them with South Vietnamese forces, the other part of Nixon’s strategy included the measured use of American military power that went beyond Johnson’s strategy regarding acceptable targets in the bombing campaign and a willingness to expand the war into other Southeast Asian countries. Nixon referred to this strategy as his “big-play tactic,” which consisted of three objectives:
To weaken the ability of the North Vietnamese to wage war in South Vietnam
To bolster ARVN forces by reassuring them of continued U.S. support
To intimidate the North Vietnamese into accepting U.S. terms for peace
Moving into Cambodia
Nixon’s first application of his big-play tactic was the expansion of the war into Cambodia. The goal was to take the war to the enemy, hitting him in the places where he believed he had sanctuary. Though the Cambodian government had proclaimed neutrality regarding the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese were using the country as staging and supply points for their movement of troops and supplies to the South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Cambodian government, under Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had allowed the North Vietnamese to violate their territorial integrity in exchange for North Vietnam’s promise to not support the antigovernment Cambodian Communists, called the Khmer Rouge. The Johnson administration had been reluctant to go after North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia because of fears of expanding the war. However, Nixon decided that the benefits of bombing the bases there outweighed the risks of widening the conflict. Nixon began his attacks on the Vietnamese bases in March 1969 with Operation Menu. Operation Menu lasted 14 months and included 3,600 B-52 bombing raids over Cambodia, dropping a total of more than 100,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia (Figure 10-1 shows a B-52 on a bombing mission).
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Figure 10-1: B-52 bombers brought the fight to Cambodia. |
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Courtesy of the Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University
Cognizant that recognition of the extension of the war would generate criticism from the antiwar movement, Nixon worked hard to keep this operation a secret. Government officials didn’t tell Americans of the bombing campaign, yet when the news inevitably broke it created a tremendous backlash against Nixon for expanding the war.
In April 1970, a month before the bombing ended, Nixon allowed U.S. and ARVN forces to clearly cross into Cambodia for the first time in the war to destroy the Vietnamese bases. The Cambodians cooperated with the U.S. incursion and provided the U.S. military with intelligence regarding the location of North Vietnamese camps. The campaign was a military success, as the U.S. and South Vietnamese troops destroyed 800 bunkers and captured large amounts of weapons and supplies. The extension of the war into Cambodia had three primary positive effects:
It proved to be an important test of the ARVN forces, which was maturing into a strong standing army.
It disrupted the flow of supplies and men from North Vietnam to the South and disrupted North Vietnamese military plans.
It bought time to allow the Vietnamization campaign of shifting the burden of fighting to the ARVN forces to begin to work.
Though the incursion and subsequent destruction of their bases and weapons created a setback for the North Vietnamese, it didn’t produce the decisive victory over the Communists that the Nixon administration had hoped for. In fact, the widening of the war had a number of negative consequences for the Nixon administration.
Gaining another dependent
Politically, the results of Operation Menu were less satisfying. Though the North’s war strategy was disrupted, the U.S. and ARVN offensive hadn’t intimidated them into making any concessions at the bargaining table. The new problem created by the widening of the war was that the previously “neutral” state of Cambodia had shifted toward the U.S. position, effectively pushing the North Vietnamese into closer cooperation with the Khmer Rouge (see the “Beware your friends — from Lon Nol to Pol Pot” sidebar). The Cambodian government removed Prince Sihanouk as head of state and placed Prime Minister Lon Nol in charge of the new government. The U.S. invasion created greater political instability in the country, forcing the United States to accept Cambodia as yet another dependent nation requiring U.S. support.
Facing a backlash: The antiwar movement
The most devastating effect of Nixon’s widening of the war was that it touched off some of the most vigorous and tragic antiwar protests at home. In response Nixon asserted that the invasion of Cambodia was hastening the end of the war, yet many Americans interpreted this move as a betrayal of the effort to wind it all down. Instead, they saw this operation as a widening of the conflict into a previously neutral nation.
This massive objection created a credibility gap for Nixon similar to the problems that had plagued Johnson from 1966 to 1968. Anger over this perceived betrayal led to violent confrontations. At the news of the Cambodian invasion, previously unfocused resistance at college campuses across the nation suddenly got a clear focus. See Chapter 9 for more in-depth information about the antiwar protests.
Beware your friends — from Lon Nol to Pol Pot
As was often the case of U.S. policy in the region, the expansion of the war had some unintended consequences as it promoted the rise of the Communist regime of the Khmer Rouge under the control of the brutal leader Pol Pot. U.S. leaders thought they’d found a perfect ally in Prime Minister Lon Nol — he was anti-Communist and even helped the United States depose Prince Sihanouk for supporting the North Vietnamese Viet Cong. In protest, Sihanouk threw his support to Pol Pot. Because of Sihanouk’s popularity and the resistance against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s popularity grew, and Lon Nol’s support waned.
When the United States left Vietnam in 1974, the Viet Cong left Cambodia, and within two years, Lon Nol’s government collapsed and he fled to the United States. Sihanouk was returned to power in 1975, but he didn’t remain in power for long. The Khmer Rouge dismantled the government, Cambodia became a Communist republic, and in May 1976, Pol Pot became prime minister of Cambodia. His regime was extremely harsh on political dissent — opposing the government meant arrest, possible brainwashing, and often a painful death. During his 3-1/2-year rule from 1975 to 1978 the Pol Pot regime practiced genocide on their own people, killing nearly two million people while the economy, particularly in cities like Phnom Penh, was almost utterly destroyed.
Having a fallout with Congress
In May 1970, after lengthy investigations revealed that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (which stated that the president had the authority to use whatever force necessary to stop South Vietnam from falling) had been passed based upon some false statements by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Senate repealed the resolution. The men had claimed that both attacks in August 1964 had occurred, when they knew that the second attack hadn’t happened and that there were serious doubts about the first one. Further both men claimed to have no knowledge of the relationship between the South Vietnamese attacks on the isles of Hon Me and Hon Nu and the U.S. Desoto patrols although they were well aware of the coordination of the two missions.
The dogged pursuit of the truth by Senators Wayne Morse, Earnest Gruening, and J. William Fulbright led to inconclusive debate in congressional hearings in 1968, yet these hearings laid the groundwork for others to finally prove that the resolution had been passed based upon false information. The fact is that Congress never declared war on North Vietnam, and the sole justification for Johnson and Nixon to pursue the war had been based on this fraudulently obtained document. Senator Morse, one of only two senators who had voted against the resolution in 1964, had stated, at the time, that its supporters “will live to regret it.” In May 1970, Morse was finally vindicated.
On December 22, 1970, as a means to further restrict Nixon’s ability to widen the conflict, Congress passed the Cooper-Church Amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill. This amendment prohibited the use of any U.S. ground forces for operations in Cambodia. Though Nixon wasn’t restricted in his use of air power, this amendment definitely foreclosed the opportunity for further operations like the Cambodian incursion.
Relying on the ARVN in Laos
Nixon had no choice but to continue withdrawing U.S. troops in 1970 and 1971. The process of Vietnamization continued as U.S. advisors trained and supplied the growing ARVN force. Though the administration experienced a violent backlash against the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon boldly decided to try a similar operation in Laos in 1971. Again, the goal was to disrupt and destroy the North Vietnamese supply lines and buy more time for the South to strengthen itself. The difference in Laos was that Nixon had to limit the use of American personnel and rely primarily on ARVN troops. If successful, he’d have a real sign that South Vietnam was ready to defend itself.
The invasion focused on the town of Tchepone, which lay about 20 miles inside the Laos-Vietnam border. (The assault was named Operation Lam Som 719, after a Vietnamese village that withstood an invasion by the Chinese in 1427.) Nixon hoped that the use of an all-ARVN invasion force would mute protest from the home front, although the ARVN troops were given U.S. air support for the operation. This attack was another bold thrust by Nixon, yet it wasn’t the first U.S. action in Laos. Since 1964, the CIA had been conducting covert operations in the country, and the U.S. had been heavily bombing Vietnamese positions there. Unlike the Cambodian invasion, which attacked isolated North Vietnamese sanctuaries, the assault into Laos was taking on a much larger and more entrenched enemy, including North Vietnamese tank and artillery regiments.
While U.S. air power pounded the North Vietnamese divisions, the invasion force of more than 21,000 ARVN troops captured the town of Tchepone on March 6, 1971, which had largely been reduced to rubble under heavy U.S. bombing raids. Having succeeded in their original objective, the South Vietnamese forces began their withdrawal, although intelligence indicated that the North Vietnamese had rushed troops and artillery to the area and that a counterattack was imminent.
As the ARVN forces withdrew, the North Vietnamese ordered their troops to make massive assaults on the South Vietnamese forces, hoping that a decisive victory against the ARVN would prove that the U.S. strategy of Vietnamization was a failure. Under pressure from the North Vietnamese, the orderly withdrawal of ARVN forces fell apart, as even the elite airborne and marine units panicked and fled, leaving behind tanks, artillery, and equipment. Only the heavy use of U.S. air power kept the situation from being a total rout of the South Vietnamese forces.
Although the mission had succeeded in disrupting the North Vietnamese preparations for a major invasion of the South, it also revealed the weakness of the ARVN forces and the failure of Vietnamization. For many U.S. military planners, the fiasco of the ARVN retreat raised questions about whether Vietnamization could ever work. To the North Vietnamese, the retreat signaled that they could defeat the ARVN even though it had been substantially improved by the U.S. training and equipment.
Coming to a Head: The Easter Offensive
For President Nixon, the backlash over the Cambodian and Laotian invasions, including the congressional limitations on his power to wage war, emphasized that time was running out on the American ability to keep fighting in Vietnam. Well aware of Nixon’s domestic dilemma, the North Vietnamese decided to turn up the heat in the war with a new offensive in 1972. Their strategy was to take advantage of the political pressure created by the upcoming U.S. presidential elections.
Knowing that Nixon could ill afford to send any more troops, the North Vietnamese felt that the U.S. inability to respond to a new push on the battlefield may put enough pressure on the ARVN forces to collapse the South Vietnamese regime. They were also driven by the changes occurring on the diplomatic front. Because of improved U.S. relations with both China and the Soviet Union, the North Vietnamese feared a future reduction in Soviet and Chinese aid and felt compelled to push for a victory before this could happen. Therefore, both the United States and the North Vietnamese had powerful incentives to negotiate and felt that the time to end the war was rapidly approaching.
The North Vietnamese offensive was called “Operation Nguyen Hue,” named after the famous Vietnamese nationalist leader who stopped Siamese expansion into Vietnam in 1785. The operation involved more than 200,000 men. The battle plan called for three separate thrusts into South Vietnam. For the North, the best possible result was that their offensive would cause the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The worst-case scenario was that the offensive would further damage morale in the South and continue to undermine the success of Vietnamization. In any event, operation Nguyen Hue would give the North a better position at the political bargaining table.
The Easter Offensive took American military leaders by surprise. In the weeks just before the attack, U.S. secretary of defense Melvin Laird stated that a large-scale enemy invasion was “not a serious possibility.” The North Vietnamese invasion shook the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces on three fronts, which ranged from the Demilitarized Zone in the North, through the central highlands in the middle of South Vietnam, and a thrust toward Saigon in the South.
Bombing Hanoi and Haiphong: The U.S. response
Though U.S. troop levels in Vietnam had been reduced to about 70,000, America still had tremendous air power to call upon. Responding to the attacks, Nixon ordered a renewed air campaign against the North called “Operation Linebacker.” Nixon removed almost all the restrictions on the bombing campaign that had been in place throughout the war, including the bombing of population centers and military bases near the Chinese border. He also ordered the bombing of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and Haiphong, the most important port in North Vietnam. Nixon also ordered the mining of North Vietnamese harbors including Haiphong.
The round-the-clock bombing raids targeted North Vietnamese fuel and ammunition supplies. In addition to the sustained air assault on the North, the United States also employed large-scale bombing missions in the South to support the ARVN forces.
In the southern attack, amidst heavy fighting, the ARVN forces held the city of An Loc but only with the aid of heavy bombing by U.S. aircraft. ARVN forces also held the city of Kontum in the central highlands, yet again the crucial element was U.S. air support and heavy bombing. The heaviest fighting was the northern invasion in Quang Tri, where it took the ARVN ten weeks to finally dislodge the North Vietnamese forces from the city. Here, too, the use of U.S. air and naval support was key. Each day an average of 25,000 rounds of artillery shells were fired, and U.S. bombers flew some 40 missions per day as well.
Dissecting the North Vietnamese miscalculation
The Easter Offensive was a disaster for the North Vietnamese. They sustained tremendous damage from the American bombing in the North and had lost more than 100,000 men in the assault. They had seriously miscalculated both the fighting ability of the ARVN forces and the power and will of the U.S. forces still in Vietnam.
Although the Soviet Union and China protested the bombing campaign, their objections were fairly muted, clearly seeking to maintain the relations that they’d been developing with the United States. The North, fearing they’d lost vital support from the Communist superpowers, recognized the need to reach an agreement before the 1972 U.S. presidential elections, when Nixon, who was likely to win reelection, would no longer face the pressures and restrictions of an election year.
Though pleased at their own ability to repel the northern invasion, the South Vietnamese leaders recognized that American air power had been crucial in their victory. As the U.S. forces continued to withdraw, the South Vietnamese would no longer be able to count on that air power. Thus, for both the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, the Easter Offensive underscored the need to end the bloodbath that the war had become.
Clearing the Last Hurdles to Peace
Both the U.S. and North Vietnamese leaders came to the same conclusion following the Easter Offensive: Military strength hadn’t led to victory, and political considerations called for compromise. Talks between U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese politburo representative Le Duc Tho resumed in July 1972. On October 8, they concluded an agreement that called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam within 60 days, as well as the exchange of prisoners of war, and democratic elections in the South, which would include the National Liberation Front (NLF) Viet Cong. The plan also called for peaceful reunification of North and South Vietnam into one nation with national elections, and an American contribution to rebuilding the country.
Nixon and Kissinger were pleased that the North Vietnamese had dropped their demands of the removal of the Thieu government in the South. But President Thieu rejected the agreement, calling it a plan for a coalition government — something that the South Vietnamese government had consistently rejected. The plan began to unravel. The North Vietnamese leadership, believing that Thieu’s rejection of the agreement was a U.S. trick because they thought Thieu would never defy his powerful American allies, accused the United States of purposely undermining the agreement. Kissinger scrambled to get the negotiations back on track before the U.S. presidential election, proclaiming on October 31 that “peace is at hand.”
Following Nixon’s landslide election in 1972, Kissinger turned his attention to convincing the South Vietnamese that the United States wasn’t abandoning them to their fate. He initiated a massive airlift of war materiel to the South Vietnamese, transferring hundreds of aircraft (giving the South Vietnamese the fourth largest air force in the world) as well as tanks, trucks, artillery, and munitions. Nixon promised Thieu that he would seek to renegotiate the peace turns and promised that “we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”
On December 13, Le Duc Tho, feeling that Kissinger was trying to renegotiate some of the issues that had already been agreed upon, suspended the deadlocked negotiations and returned to Hanoi for consultation. Nixon responded to the delay by initiating a renewed bombing campaign, Linebacker II, oftentimes referred to as “the Christmas bombing.”
Beginning on December 18 and lasting for 11 days, Linebacker II was the most devastating bombing campaign of the war. U.S. B-52s and other aircraft dropped 40,000 tons of bombs focused on the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor. Though the bombing severely weakened the North Vietnamese foreign supply lines, it also created international criticism for the United States. The Chinese and Soviets protested the bombing, as did many of the U.S. allies in Europe. The antiwar protest in the U.S. also briefly flared, and polls showed Nixon’s approval ratings drop to 39 percent.
Epilogue: The fall of Saigon
After watching the ARVN strength decline in late 1973 and 1974, the North Vietnamese resumed their efforts to attain a military victory over the South Vietnamese government. Though President Nixon had promised to return if the peace efforts broke down, the Watergate scandal had already forced him to resign. His successor, Gerald Ford, called on Congress to support the South Vietnamese government, yet the years of war and protest had eroded the desire to continue U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The ARVN forces collapsed under the North Vietnamese assault, and the provinces fell one after another, until the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.
Scarcely one day after Saigon fell, the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and the Republic of Vietnam was effectively ended. If nothing else, the new name of the South Vietnamese capital was a symbol of the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The American involvement in Vietnam was over.