Consider the classic analogy of the frog and the pot of boiling water. Put the frog in a pot of water that is already boiling, of course he is going to jump out. But put him in a pot of water at normal temperature, and then slowly increase the heat, he won’t jump out until perhaps it’s too late. Many have sought to tie this analogy to their cause or argument, but it’s plain to see that it fits in as well as any with the case of the Americanization of the Vietnam War.
The U.S. didn’t get to half a million combat troops deployed in theater and more bombs dropped on a small, backward sliver of the Asian continent than had been dropped in all of World War II combined overnight. It happened slowly, over time and in increments. Each increase was done because it was needed in order to stave off disaster, because the last one hadn’t lived up to expectations and each one was meant to be the last one. There would be no more troops, and there would be no more bombs. After this one last phase. And so on it went.
The U.S. had inherited a mess from France. They wanted to prop up and sustain the South Vietnamese, strike a knockout blow to Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese, promote capitalism and halt the spread of communism, and wanted to do it all without having to spend too much effort or attention on it and be home by Christmas. If all those goals seem somewhat contradictory, that’s because they were. In 1964, the U.S. was its own worst enemy.
In the fall of 1964, the South Vietnamese government was on the brink of collapse. President Ngo Dinh Diem had been assassinated in a military coup a year earlier, and the country’s political structure had remained in a constant and ever fluid state of flux ever since. It was often dizzying for those trying to keep up just who was and wasn’t in power at any one time, as talk of coup, rebellion, and intrigue ran rampant through the corridors of power in Saigon.
The South Vietnamese would offer little resistance to the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army if attacked. Such was the situation on the ground inherited by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who became President following the assassination of John F Kennedy. Johnson’s cabinet was deeply divided on how to respond to this threat. Kennedy had established a firm precedent that the United States has a lasting and meaningful interest in the fate of South Vietnam. Johnson was a serious believer in the domino theory, which said that if one country fell to communism, it would cause the other nations in the region to follow suit (Herring).
Allowing South Vietnam to succumb to its ever more likely fate was not an option. Johnson was adamant about this, even as some of his advisors and many U.S. allies voiced dissent to increased involvement. But Vietnam, despite its acknowledged importance and significance, was not Johnson’s top priority. His Great Society social reform programs were his most important goal, and while he had no intention of allowing Vietnam to slide away, he wasn’t going to let US involvement there jeopardize the Great Society at home. This competing interest motivated Johnson to avoid taking drastic and decisive action in Asia.
He began his piecemeal increase by adding a significant amount of aid to the South Vietnamese government. While some of it was meant for economic purposes, the majority of it went to the ARVN, the South Vietnamese military. This aid, combined with an increased number of US advisors and trainers, was meant to bolster the military so that eventually it would be strong enough to fend off the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) and defend South Vietnam on its own, without direct US support.
Money and equipment went to soldier’s wages, specialized training, uniforms, and equipment, including everything from rifles to tanks to jeeps to helicopters (Herring). But this effort largely ended in disappointment. Language and cultural differences led the US trainers and the Vietnamese to be cautious and wary of each other, each chafing over perceived slights by the other. Morale was always low. Desertion was rampant throughout the ranks as a mandatory draft was instated. Overall, the ARVN combat effectiveness was nowhere near what it needed to be, and it showed when their units faced off against NLF guerilla forces, losing badly (Herring).
This failure to quickly build the ARVN into an effective fighting force, along with continuing political turmoil, made Johnson believe that further escalation was still required. The hawks in his cabinet, including but not limited to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated a large scale aerial bombing campaign against the North in order to cripple its war fighting capabilities and to stem the tide of NLF and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers that were now streaming south along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other routes of infiltration.
The incident at Tonkin Gulf, where two US destroyers came under attack (the severity of the attack is disputed) from North Vietnamese torpedo boats, gave the administration cause to first target the military facilities where the boats had originated, and then to expand into what became known as Operation Rolling Thunder. A massive bombing campaign against the North, Rolling Thunder was initially limited to military bases, anti aircraft sites, and major industrial centers, but it would eventually be expanded to all industry, railroads, bridges, and other infrastructure sites.
However, as Herring notes, the escalation of bombing was done slowly and piecemeal, ignoring one of the cardinal rules of airpower, which is to strike all major targets at once, destroying them before the enemy has time to move them, hide them, or construct defenses. Rolling Thunder’s execution allowed the North Vietnamese to do all three. Major industry was moved underground; bridges were camouflaged, and anti aircraft batteries provided by the Chinese and Soviets became formidable barriers to US airpower.
The next major escalation came with the introduction of combat ground forces. Two battalions of US Marines were deployed to Da Nang in 1965, and after that the number of ground troops quickly rose. At first only allowed to remain on base and defend themselves if necessary, Johnson eventually, and in secret, authorized offensive operations. The enclave land strategy, which involved holding major bases and cities, gave way to what became known as search and destroy, as American units roamed the jungle, attempting to draw out and defeat in battle the NLF and NVA.
When they achieved this end, their superior firepower and training gave the US a high win percentage. But most of the time, the North Vietnamese didn’t cooperate and, instead of fighting, would refuse to engage and instead fade away into the jungle, living to fight another day (Herring). This became the defining cat and mouse game of search and destroy, and indeed of the entire ground war. The NVA were outgunned on every engagement, and they knew that. Instead of taking their chances in open battle, they chose instead to use booby traps, ambushes, and their knowledge of the terrain to try and stay one step ahead of their pursuers.
This largely worked, frustrating the Americans and saving the Vietnamese much in both manpower and equipment, which they used instead to terrorize the villages in the countryside whenever the Americans were elsewhere. These tactics did much to turn the people of South Vietnam against the Americans, a relationship that had been ambiguous to begin with. This in turn drove a wedge between the two sides, giving an advantage of both propaganda and intelligence to the NLF.
The escalation and Americanization of the war hurt its popularity back in the United States, but not as much as has been popularly believed. The anti war movement, as noted by Herring, was actually a small minority of the population. It just happened to be an influential and vocal one (Herring). People such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Fonda came out against the war, and dramatic examples of protest became commonplace, perhaps culminating in the immolation of Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire and burned to death right outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office window.
President Johnson, who believed incorrectly that this meant a large segment of the population was actively against the war, sought to silence this group by deploying propaganda and political maneuvering. But this in turn backfired and in fact caused more people to come out against the war than before. Indeed, it was hard to defend having such a large force halfway around the world for murky and ill explained reasons and against the wishes of many of our allies. Why was the most powerful nation on earth trying so desperately to pound into submission a poverty stricken Third World sliver of Asia, people asked.
If one suspends their own opinion and takes at face value that South Vietnam had to be propped up and defended, then in principle, Americanization was the right move to make. But it was poorly executed. Strictly speaking, Americanization referred to the large influx of American men and equipment into the combat zone, with the increased responsibility and influence that comes with them. The South Vietnamese would not have survived as a political system without major American intervention. The NLF would have swept through any pathetic resistance the ARVN could muster and the fighting would have been over quickly, as nobody had truly convinced the South Vietnamese people that the North was their enemy.
First, Rolling Thunder should have been and could have been a huge blow to the North Vietnamese ability to wage war. The quick and efficient destruction of major industrial centers, transportation hubs and military centers, done all at once instead of slowly and over time, would have robbed the North of sources of arms and production. In reality, the North was allowed to move and hide most of their most vital stores, while being given time to rebuild and replace what was lost.
As far as the ground war was concerned, the proper strategy would have been a mixture of the enclave and search and destroy strategies that predominated US operations between 1964 and 1968. Population centers needed to be protected from the NLF to win the support of the people, showing them that their welfare was a priority, not an option. At the same time, US units who could quickly navigate the jungle, Special Forces mainly, should have engaged in search and destroy operations, seeking out and engaged the NLF when they didn’t expect it, turning their own game against them. Had this been done on a limited basis, it would have forced the ARVN to remain relevant in the fight and would have avoided the lethargy that gripped them as an attitude of “Let the Americans do it” became prevalent.
Combined with increased emphasis on cultural understanding and a more relevant and more effective economic aid program that created sustainable economic activity and gave the people hope for the future, these military strategies could have won the war. A resounding aerial battering of North Vietnam, without restrictions, could have been such a blow that China and the Soviet Union saw the conflict as a lost cause and they could have chosen to not send the military aid in arms and personnel that they did. It could have changed the way history played out.
Herring, George C. America’s Longest War, Fourth Edition. 2002. McGraw Hill Higher Education.
Zac Johnson - My name is Zac Johnson. I'm a 22 year old senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, majoring in political science. I'll graduate in ...
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