1 gen 1965 anni - First U.S combat troops arrive in vietnam

Descrizione:

Operation Rolling thunder: Massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam authorized by President Johnson in 1965; despite lasting three years, the bombing made North Vietnam more, not less, determined to continue fighting.

Despite congressional approval of force, Johnson’s campaign that fall included a pledge that there would be no escalation in Vietnam — no sending “American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Privately, he doubted the pledge could be kept. Once the 1964 election was safely behind him, Johnson began an American takeover of the war in Vietnam (see “Firsthand Accounts”). The escalation, beginning in the early months of 1965, took two forms: deployment of American ground troops and intensive bombing of North Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, the first marines waded ashore near the city of Da Nang. By 1966, more than 380,000 American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam; by 1967, 485,000; and by 1968, 536,000 (Figure 27.2). General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, pushed Johnson to “Americanize” the ground war in an attempt to stabilize South Vietnam.


This figure graphically tracks America’s involvement in Vietnam. After Lyndon Johnson decided on escalation in 1964, troop levels jumped from 23,300 to a peak of 543,000 personnel in 1968. Under Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization program, beginning in the summer of 1969, levels drastically declined; the last U.S. military forces left South Vietnam on March 29, 1973

Meanwhile, Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam that began in March 1965 and continued for three years. Over the course of the war, the United States dropped twice as many tons of bombs on Vietnam as the Allies had dropped in Europe and the Pacific combined during the whole of World War II. To the surprise of McNamara and other American leaders, the vast aerial assault proved largely ineffectual. The North Vietnamese quickly rebuilt roads and bridges and moved munitions plants underground. Instead of demoralizing the North Vietnamese, Operation Rolling Thunder hardened their will to fight. The influx of American military power devastated Vietnam’s countryside, however. After a harsh but not unusual engagement, an American commander told a reporter that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” — a statement that came to symbolize the terrible logic of the war.


The Johnson administration gambled that American superiority, in both personnel and firepower, would ultimately triumph, making up for the weakness of the South Vietnam regime. This strategy was inextricably tied to political considerations. For domestic reasons, policymakers sought an elusive middle ground between all-out invasion of North Vietnam, which risked war with China, and compete disengagement. “In effect, we are fighting a war of attrition,” said General Westmoreland. “The only alternative is a war of annihilation.”


Vietnam War

An American officer shouts orders as a wounded soldier awaits evacuation near Saigon during the Vietnam War in 1969. The soldier is attended by a medic as they seek cover beside an armored troop carrier.

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