The Vietnam War: everything you wanted to know

[Music] Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. [Music] I'm Ellie Corsohn. The Vietnam War was one of the most seismic events of the Cold War, American history, and of course the history of Southeast Asia. Unsurprisingly, it's still a subject of fierce debate. Why did the US embark on this ultimately futile military adventure? Why was American power not able to prevail as it had done before? And might things have been different if JFK had lived? Well, in the latest in our Everything You Wanted to Know series, we put these questions and many more to the Vietnam expert Mark Atwood Lawrence. He was joined in conversation by BBC History Magazine editor Rob Attar. Welcome to the latest in our Everything You Wanted to Know series, where we combine your questions submitted via social media with some popular internet search queries. Today we're talking about the Vietnam War, and our expert is Mark Atwood Lawrence, who is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas in Austin. He's an expert in the Cold War and the author of a 2008 history of the Vietnam War. So, Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Great. So, just to kind of ground our listeners, do you think you'd be able to give us a very brief summary of the key events of the conflict in Vietnam, and then we'll explore some of those in more detail? Certainly. It's a tall order, I must say, because the Vietnam War is so complicated and took place over such a long period of time. In fact, one of the questions on which many historians will disagree is how exactly to date the Vietnam War. And at the heart of that question is what we really mean by the Vietnam War? For many Americans, of course, the Vietnam War is the period of a long series of conflicts in Vietnam that directly engage the United States. And I'll assume for our purposes that that's largely what we're talking about, although I think we'll probably want to spill backward in time into earlier periods of conflict in Vietnam that involves, say, the Chinese, the Japanese, the French, right? There's a long series of conflicts that played out in Vietnam, of which the Vietnam War, that is to say the war that engaged the United States was just one part. But if we take just that limited definition of the Vietnam War, it's still awfully complicated. Where do we date the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam? And I tend to take a relatively long view of the war, so I would probably make a case for, we should probably think of the end of the Second World War as that moment that really drew the United States into Southeast Asia. Of course, a time when the United States was increasingly embracing an active role on the world stage in literally every part of the world as the Second World War came to an end. And Vietnam was just a very minor place in the American policy making mind at that point, but it did start to register as a place where the United States had strategic interests. That interest grows across the early years of the Cold War. By the early 1950s, the United States makes certain decisions to engage itself more directly in Vietnam on the side of France, which was waging a war to re-conquer Vietnam from 1946 to 1954. Vietnam, of course, as many folks will know, was a French colony dating from the late 19th century in the aftermath of the Second World War of Vietnamese nationalist movement wanted to secure independence for Vietnam, France for a variety of reasons that we can get into, wanted very much to hold on to Vietnam as a colonial territory. The United States intervenes for a variety of reasons on the side of France, and that really marks the beginning of direct American engagement in Vietnam. In 1954, France is essentially defeated, and the outcome of that conflict divides Vietnam into the geography that would prevail across the remainder of the period that I think that we're most interested in today. That is to say, Vietnam was divided into what we conventionally called North Vietnam and South Vietnam, with the communist dominant in North Vietnam and anti-communist alive with the United States dominant in South Vietnam. And essentially for 20 years thereafter, the United States struggled and eventually fought to keep South Vietnam independent and separate from North Vietnam as a state that would be aligned with the United States and the West. Across the late 1950s, the United States pumps vast resources, economic aid, military aid, military advisors on the ground advising the South Vietnamese army to help this nation become more robust and to defend itself against a growing insurgency and then against cross-border attacks by the North Vietnamese forces, which were of course interested in reunifying Vietnam on their terms. By the middle 1960s to make a long story short, those efforts are not working. South Vietnam is deeply imperiled by a combination of insurgency from within South Vietnam and attacks from across the border from North Vietnam and Americans make the decision to commit American combat forces. So 1965 is an all-important year. From 1965 to 1968, Americans increasingly escalate the degree of American involvement, more and more troops, more and more military firepower. It doesn't work though for a variety of reasons that I'm sure we'll talk about. In 1968, there's a very important turning point where American leaders come to terms with the fact that they're doing no better than stalemate in Vietnam and the domestic home front is starting to turn against the war. And for these reasons, American leaders, the Lyndon Johnson administration essentially makes the decision to begin winding down the war through negotiations, through withdrawals, through a variety of devices that no doubt will get into. This agreement is finally signed in January of 1973, which enables the United States to withdraw its forces, putting it end to this eight years long, bitter, inconclusive, politically divisive, draining struggle. The war for the Vietnamese continued for another couple of years before the communist finally achieved victory and conquered South Vietnam and folded Vietnam into a new unified Vietnamese state. So that's a quick overview of the American involvement in Vietnam. Thank you so much for that really helpful summary and there's lots of things from there that I think we'll want to explore further. Just one thing I thought would be helpful to clarify is just to explain exactly who the Americans are fighting and South Vietnamese are fighting because there's a North Vietnamese army but also the Vietnam and what's the connection between them? That is an excellent question and has been a matter of debate and controversy honestly since the war itself. But what's important to bear in mind is something that I touched on very briefly just a moment ago in 1954, a war between Vietnamese nationalists in France, the traditional colonial power in Vietnam, came to an end. But it came to an end in a very particular way. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or what we conventionally call North Vietnam, which was under communist control and South Vietnam or the Republic of Vietnam, which was anti communist in orientation. And this is the state that the United States would increasingly bond itself to over the late 1950s and then fight alongside in the 1960s and 1970s. But who are the adversaries? Who are the United States and South Vietnamese allies fighting? And there are essentially two forces, this is one of the things that makes the Vietnam war so complicated. There are insurgent forces who emerged from within South Vietnamese society who sought to overthrow this anti communist government in Saigon and to bring about a new regime in South Vietnam. And then across the border there were the North Vietnamese forces, the North Vietnamese army or NVA as it was sometimes called. Now what exactly was the relationship between the NVA and the North and the insurgents, the group that are sometimes called the Viet Cong, or became called very frequently by American forces, the Viet Cong. What exactly was the relationship? I think we now know with some confidence that the relationship was always very close and very tight. The South Vietnamese insurgents were taking direction from the North Vietnamese communist party, from the North Vietnamese army. And there was a close relationship really throughout the American war. But it served the interest politically of the insurgents in the South to maintain the idea that there was an important distinction, right, because it lent greater legitimacy to the struggle within the South to be able to claim that this was a kind of authentic bridge. grassroots, spontaneous kind of resistance against the autocracy in South Vietnam. But this is one of the problems that Americans struggled with across the war. They were essentially fighting two different, in somewhat distinct entities, the insurgents within South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese army coming in increasing numbers as the years passed across the 17th parallel in fighting in the South. And then a question going right back to the start of this story, which came in from Stephen T. daily on Instagram. And he wanted to know how did communism take hold in North Vietnam? Wonderful question. And I think a good answer to that question really has to go back to the period of French colonial domination. Vietnam in the late 19th century, early 20th century, was very much like many, many other colonized parts of what we would eventually call the third world or the colonial world in the 20th century, which is to say that European colonialism was enormously disruptive. And over time, they're developed a nationalist movement that sought to at least place constraints on the colonial power or ideally overthrow that colonial power and reclaim independence for the indigenous population. Such a nationalist movement emerged as it did so many places in the late 19th, early 20th centuries in Vietnam. A very important moment though comes around the First World War that strongly radicalizes the Vietnamese nationalist movement. It turns the Vietnamese nationalist in short toward communism, toward Leninism as the path that was most likely to bring about the ultimate goal Vietnamese independence. Why was that? Well, long story short, it seems to me it was the frustration of the nationalist movement around the time of the First World War. Ho Chi Minh, the great nationalist leader in Vietnam, along with other Vietnamese nationalists, made appeal after appeal to the Western powers gathered at Versailles in the aftermath of the First World War to live up to their own principles of self-determination and create a free and independent Vietnam. The Western powers wanted nothing to do with this. George Clements, so David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, wanted nothing to do with this and essentially rebuffed these kinds of appeals from Ho Chi Minh and from many other nationalist movements. The response by the Vietnamese nationalist movement was, as I've suggested, to move sharply to the left and to embrace communism as the ideology, as the political program that would over time bring about Vietnamese independence. After the relationship between nationalism and communism is one of those complicated issues that historians just like policymakers in the 50s and 60s and 70s struggled with, because what Americans faced in Vietnam was unquestionably a complicated blend of nationalist motives and communist motives and the balance changed over time. It would be naive, I think, to claim that it was always just nationalism and that communism was just a kind of thin overlay. There were clearly leaders of the Vietnamese movement who were very strongly oriented toward the communist bloc. Coming to one of the most fundamental questions, which is a populated genetic search query, why did America go to war in Vietnam? The United States went to war in Vietnam for a variety of geostrategic and domestic political reasons. There is no single answer to your question. I would suggest that there are, in fact, four answers and I'll touch on them very briefly and then we can unpack them as you like. The United States had embraced in the early days of the Cold War the notion of containment. The strategy in short for dealing with an apparently expansive communist bloc would be to see to the communists the territories that they already controlled as a consequence of the Second World War, but to try to contain the communist bloc within those borders and the methods for containment would be economic, they'd be political, covert operations and military if necessary. By the mid-1960s, those methods short of military intervention no longer seemed to be working in Vietnam where the communists were, seemed to be on the march, very much moving steadily towards gobbling up South Vietnam and folding it into the larger communist bloc. So Americans responded in Vietnam in a way that their core ideas about the Cold War had conditioned them to think really since the early days of the Cold War, to do whatever it took in short to keep a piece of non-communist real estate, South Vietnam in this case out of the hands of the North Vietnamese. So it was kind of a local application of a broad principle that was embraced in the early Cold War. It seems to me a second important answer is to emphasize what became known as the domino theory or the domino principle. It's one of the curious facts of American intervention in Vietnam that Americans never really attached an awful lot of importance to anything tangible in Vietnam itself. Economically it wasn't terribly important. In terms of the political influence it exerted around the region, also not terribly important, but what really worried Americans is that the loss of all of Vietnam to the communists would unleash a domino effect as Dwight Eisenhower famously called it that would topple loves in Cambodia and Thailand and Malaysia and Indonesia and in some of the more expansive versions of the domino idea, even India, Australia, New Zealand would be imperiled. So Vietnam was in some senses where the fight was and Americans felt they needed to intervene there to stop a dangerous unfolding or falling of the dominoes there after that would really imperil the whole region. And when you're talking about Indonesia or Malaysia, you're talking about areas that really did have enormous tangible value to the United States and also to American allies. Credibility is a third point that I would want to throw into the mix here. Americans worried as they thought about Vietnam and the risks of losing South Vietnam to the communists that if that happens, American credibility in the eyes of both allies and adversaries around the world would be called into question. Allies would look at Vietnam and say, well, the United States didn't really do what was necessary to prevent South Vietnam from falling into communist hands. What good is the American word to our security? So Americans, again, you can see this so spowerfully in the decision making record. Worry about this intangible matter of reputation. And by the time you get to the Kennedy and Johnson administration, this concern about upholding America's credibility as reliable ally really is driving American policy making very powerfully. And then there's the domestic political component. And leaders appear to have imbued the idea in the early days of the Cold War that would be a heavy political price to be paid if a piece of non-communist territory were lost to the communist under one's watch. And this goes back to especially the McCarthy period when the Truman administration was beaten up relentlessly for losing as people put it at the time, China to the communists. Later after the argument runs, politicians of really both parties worried incessantly about what would happen to them individually but also to their party if a piece of real estate, very much including South Vietnam were lost to the communists. So a very powerful line of argument about the war, it seems to me, that numerous historians have emphasized over the years is to suggest that it was really domestic political concerns that drove the United States forward in Vietnam even as it became increasingly apparent that achieving American goals in South Vietnam would be very, very difficult. And then you, something you referred to in an earlier question, an earlier answer actually, John C on Instagram wanted to know what did the US military advisers sent in the early 1960s actually do? So this is before the kind of large-scale US troop intervention. Are these people actually fighting, were they literally just advising the South Vietnamese? It's a great question and the short answer is that the number of advisers and certainly the roles that they played changed over time. So in the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration makes the decision to send Americans, so-called advisers, into South Vietnam, to work alongside, to train even to lead South Vietnamese forces into combat operations. All with the idea of bolstering their abilities to fight on their own and to improve their effectiveness as a military force. Over time, as the political and military problem grows in South Vietnam, Eisenhower and then Kennedy and then Johnson in his early days would increase that number very dramatically. So it grows from a few hundred advisers to many thousands in the early and mid-1960s before the United States makes the all-important decision to cross over it into a direct combat role. But the roles also change, so it's a matter of conventional wisdom about the war that there was this so-called advisory. period that preceded the combat phase of American involvement. But the early days of that advisory period looked quite a bit different. It seems to me from the last phases of that advisory period, not only in the numbers of Americans who were involved, but also in the roles that were being played. So by 1962, 3, 4 Americans were increasingly participating directly in combat operations, flying the helicopters, flying the aircraft, leading South Vietnamese ground forces into the fighting. And this became a source spot for American political leaders, the Kennedy administration, which really wanted to keep a lid on domestic public concern about the war. We now can see was very cautious about sharing information with the larger public about the pretty much direct combat role that Americans had undertaken by 1962 and 1963. Later on, many critics would say that I think was some reason that JFK was deliberately deceptive about this in his effort to avoid a kind of broader public furor and pressure for further escalation that he knew would come if it became clear that Americans were in fact fighting and dying in what an ordinary person would probably conclude was combat. There's a good deal of change over time. And actually on the subject of JFK, we had a question came in specifically about him from Guy Wilson 308 on Instagram. And he said, "If Kennedy had not died, do you think the outcome of the Vietnam war might have been different?" This is one of those questions that bitterly divides historians. I would say that the idea that Kennedy would have acted differently from Johnson and possibly wound down the American commitment or found some alternative to direct intervention of so many thousands of American troops. This idea has actually gained strength in recent years as more historians have dove into these questions and more evidence has come to light. But I have to emphasize that the evidence is inconclusive and that this issue remains very much a subject of debate on which reasonable people can disagree. For my part, I would say this, I think there's no question that Kennedy, when it came to foreign policy questions broadly and Vietnam in particular, was a more subtle and nuanced thinker than LBJ was. I also think that Kennedy, despite the grand rhetoric of paying any price bearing any burden, was very cautious about the uses of American power and military power in particular. Much more so, in fact, than LBJ was. There are some paradoxes here that we can get into if you like. My sense is that if Kennedy had been reelected in 1964, he would have struggled mightily to find ways to deal with the Vietnam problem short of the direct intervention of American combat forces. Now, someone could say that was simply not going to happen. There was no way to save Vietnam short of the scale of American combat force that LBJ ultimately committed. What are you saying then? Would JFK simply have cut and run, found a way to wash American hands of Vietnam in order to avoid that very unhappy development of introducing thousands of American combat forces? Here's where no one can really know. I think there is a strong argument. Stronger than I would have said five or ten years ago as I get further into the study of the Vietnam War, that JFK would have found a way to negotiate and even a kind of face-saving agreement that would have amounted to concession ultimately in Vietnam in order to avoid taking that dramatic step that LBJ did. But as I say, many of my colleagues would say, "No, that's simply not true." Kennedy understood the very same pressures that LBJ did and even if he acted cautiously in Berlin, Cuba, and Laos and other places around the world, Vietnam was a place where the political dangers were simply too grave and he would have behaved more or less as LBJ did. I know that's not a clear crisp answer to the question, but I hope there's something there that lends a little bit of light to this really interesting question. Definitely. Actually, when we're talking about the US effort, I think it's important to remember that there were actually some other countries involved. We had a specific question on that by Guy Alex Wilson on Facebook and he wanted to know which other nations sent armed forces to Vietnam to assist US forces. South Korea was by far the most important ally of the United States and the South Vietnamese sending as many as 50,000 troops at the peak commitment to South Vietnam. Australia and New Zealand are also very important parts of the international effort in South Vietnam. They sent combat forces as well, significantly smaller commitments, but still significant fighting forces for sure. Australia is being perhaps predictably somewhat larger than the New Zealand contribution, but some areas of South Vietnam were assigned to the Australians they fought. I think we can see in retrospect relatively effectively in those areas. That's a very interesting dimension of the larger military history of the war. The Philippines and Thailand sent for a small numbers of combat forces. Then there was a whole array of other nations, Asian, European, that sent other types of contributions, non-combat contributions, so say medical supplies, food, economic support for the South Vietnamese government. These were governments that were very careful not crossing that line into a direct military contribution, but nevertheless wanted to line up alongside the United States. Of course, there were also communist powers who were supporting the North Vietnamese side as well. Were they sending actual troops? Mainly in the form of financial resources, weaponry, things like that. Mostly the latter, mostly military equipment, economic support, supplies of all types. But we do now know, thanks to some really breathtaking research in the last 20-25 years, that China sent as many as 160,000 troops at its peak at the peak level of commitment in 1966-1967 into North Vietnam. Now those troops, it is important to add, did not engage in combat. They did functions like road repair, repair of industrial facilities that were bombed by the United States, other kinds of economic support operations behind the lines in North Vietnam. But of course, it does not take a lot of imagination to see that this commitment would free up more in North Vietnamese manpower to go off and fight in the South. So there was a sort of indirect but very real contribution, I think one could say, to the war effort. For the Soviet Union, we now know that there were some Soviet technicians in North Vietnam, particularly in the later 1960s and early 1970s, as the Soviets became by far the most important supporter of North Vietnam. This is much smaller number of individuals than had been the case in connection with China, but they played significant roles in helping the North Vietnamese in particular to operate with the increasingly sophisticated military technologies that the Soviets were sending into North Vietnam. And a question that's come in from today's rewind on Instagram, and their question was, why didn't the US invade North Vietnam? I mean, this always seems like the obvious thing to do, America has huge military power, why not just send the tanks in? So this idea certainly came up and got some very serious high level discussion within the joint chiefs of staff among civilian policymakers at various points. And I think you're quite right that they're lingers to this day, the sense that this was the thing to do that would have brought, had it been done early enough and decisively enough, a different outcome to the Vietnam War. But I think we can see all sorts of reasons why American leaders stop short of that, what after all would have been an extremely bold and provocative move into North Vietnam. Among the calculations that factored into American thinking about this question were, I think first and foremost, the danger of provoking a major war against China in particular, but conceivably against the Soviet Union as well. Very few American policymakers would ever have argued that Vietnam was worth World War III. And so for this reason, Americans were careful about keeping the war sufficiently limited so that it would not threaten the regime in Beijing or perhaps Moscow in a direct way that would have led to a strong response from those countries in a way that would have risked escalation to general war and of course to the nightmare scenario of nuclear war. So one might say, well, why get involved at all in a war if you at the outset accept those limits? And that's a different and also a very interesting question. I think that that fear absolutely factored into this. as well. I think related to that, it was also a domestic political calculation. American leaders starting with Eisenhower and certainly continuing through Kennedy and Johnson, the Johnson administrations, understood that it would be a hard sell on the American homefronts to risk a major war in Southeast Asia. Political leaders expressed consistently across these years that the American public was not particularly well informed about Vietnam. It was a difficult and very complicated issue, even though levels of public support for American policy were relatively high in the early phases of American employment, they still understood, I think, that it was going to be difficult politically to motivate the United States to think about this as a major war, you know, on the scale of a second world war, even Korea. And particularly, particularly, I think this factor becomes important when Lyndon Johnson comes into the White House with his extremely ambitious domestic agenda. For him, even more than JFK, it was very unappealing to let the Vietnam work grow into this giant commitment that would suck the energy out of every other dimension of political life in the United States. He wanted to pass civil rights and voting rights and Medicare and Medicaid and education bills and so on and so forth, the great society. And for him, I think this was a very powerful reason to keep the war limited. Still to come on the history extra podcast. Some commentary in recent years has claimed somewhat tongue in cheek that in the end the United States won the Vietnam World. Considering there wasn't a big US invasion and that kind of attempt to defeat the North Vietnamese, what was the nature of the fighting during the Vietnam War? Was it pitch battles? Was it more guerrilla warfare? Sure answer was both. It was all of the above. But here's what's here's the important point to add very quickly. It was all of the above, but in a combination that changed over time. I think there's a conventional idea about the Vietnam War that it was a guerrilla war. It was that classic war out in the jungle where American conventional forces were hunting down an elusive enemy that was sometimes hard to distinguish from the local population. Now some of that is absolutely true. In some places at some times that really was, I think, the dominant flavor of the war. But even from 1965 there were also dimensions of the war that entailed big units of Americans fighting out in the hinterlands against clearly identifiable large units of the North Vietnamese army, wearing uniforms, not operating in populated areas, sort of pitched battles. So the Battle of Yadraeng, which I think was really correctly understood as the first major American military commitment of the war, is a battle of this type. In 1965 at a time when I think the prevailing wisdom tends to think, okay, this was like a guerrilla war that grew over time. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, though there was certainly some of that guerrilla flavor left to the war. No question about that. The war had increasingly become a war of major military operations. In 1972 the North Vietnamese launched a major conventional invasion of the South, heavily reliant on Soviet supply tanks. And this operation, I don't want to exaggerate too much, but more closely resembled the pitched battles of the Second World War than it resembled the guerrilla fighting that I think we sometimes associate with the Vietnam War. So the balance really, really changes over time and I think when we're thinking about the Vietnam War, we should allow space for the fact that in some places at some times it involved big units of soldiers wearing uniforms and operating tanks and other kinds of heavy equipment, not only on the American side, but on the communist side as well. And we're talking a lot about the American war effort. So is it fair to say that by the mid late 1960s they are the dominant partner in their coalition with the South Vietnamese? I think in many ways that's a fair generalization, but I would hasten to add the number of South Vietnamese troops operating on their own territory was of course always larger than the American military commitment. And this is of course understandable since it was after all. South Vietnamese territory and a key priority for the South Vietnamese government throughout this period was to mobilize its own society and put enormous numbers of their own citizens into uniforms and underarms. Clearly after 1965 the United States, as many historians have put it, takes charge of the war. And it's a mixed blessing in many ways. The upside, I suppose you could say, for the United States was that the powerful momentum that communist forces had built up in 1963 and 1964 was blunted. The introduction of American combat force really did have a very powerful effect, not necessarily of tilting the overall balance towards some type of South Vietnamese, US victory, but absolutely in changing the situation from a situation where there was strong momentum on the communist side to something more like stalemate. So the introduction of American combat force really does stabilize, I think you could say, the military situation. And this was a significant effect. But one has to ask, what was the political effect? What was the effect on morale of the sudden infusion of this enormous American military juggernaut into South Vietnam and many, many commentators, including memoirists from the time, ordinary recollections of American GIs who fought on the ground, has emphasized that the arrival of Americans, the taking charge of the war, really kind of put the South Vietnamese forces into the backseat, demoralize them, created even more problems with leadership and motivation than had been present before and had been a big problem before. And I think many commentators about the war would say that this effect had a long lasting effect in terms of diminishing the fighting effectiveness of the South Vietnamese army in a way that would make it very difficult for that military to take over from the United States in the early 1970s as the United States withdrew its forces in hopes to push a powerful, almost million man army to the fore to carry on the fighting against the North. And then on a related subject ready, a question from George Samuel on Facebook and he said, did the Americans, and I suppose he means the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, ever get close to winning the war? Some historians would say yes. There's a powerful line of arguments that's gotten some, some of its key contributions have come in very recent years that would suggest that the United States had two good opportunities to win the Vietnam War. What winning actually means is an interesting question, but we'll put that to the side just for the moment. One line of arguments suggest that the United States had a path to victory in the early 1960s in a period when Americans were working in tandem with a South Vietnamese leader named No Dinsium. No Dinsium is overthrown in a coup at the end of 1963, but for some historians this was a devastating moment that kind of pulled the rug out from what might have been a winning political and military strategy for the United States. The other moment that some historians looked to in claiming that the United States had a formula for victory was the period after the Tete Offensive of 1968, so really 1969, '70, '71. The claim is that in this period the Communists had been really very badly hurt by the very intense fighting of 1968 and 1969. The Americans and their South Vietnamese allies dominated the battlefields in a way that really they had not done up to this point since the escalation of American forces. So it's really just a matter of consolidating this position and enabling the South Vietnamese regime to kind of get its house in order, increase its effectiveness, but militarily the war had been in some senses one. Now, I and many, many scholars of the war disagree with this way of thinking about both the early 1960s and about the post-Tet period. This is not to say that these historians who argue in the ways I've described don't have a point. Did the war go better for the United States and the South Vietnamese after the Tete Offensive then has sometimes been understood in conventional writing about the war absolutely, but didn't go decisively better such that you could really claim that the formula for victory was at hand. This is where I and many, many of my colleagues have a lot of doubts and long story short, I think one can easily see that the South Vietnamese regime remained after the Tete Offensive extremely fragile with very little support out in the countryside. The communist apparatus in the South, even though it had been badly hit by TET and the aftermath, still remained sufficiently strong to exert significant political and military influence in the South. And then also, one can easily see that the North Vietnamese by 1969, '70 and '71 understood that the American home front was turning against the war. And that really they didn't have to necessarily engage in fighting at the same level of activity that had been so devastating in 1968 and 1969. They could sort of wade it out in confidence that time was on their side. And I think this would have been a very rational and reasonable calculation on the part of the communists. If we acknowledge that the communists were thinking in those terms, I think it helps us to see that really, the Americans and the South Vietnamese didn't have the war one so much as the North Vietnamese had adopted a different strategy that didn't prioritize direct military conflict in quite the same way as had prevailed for a time in '68 and '69. That would change in 1972 with another major North Vietnamese offensive. But for a time there, the communists clearly hung back. Again, on a related note, we had this question from The Golden, from Golden, on Instagram, which was, why didn't the US cut its losses earlier on? If there was no clear path to victory, why carry on this war for eight, 10 years? Terrific question. Why did the Vietnam War go on as long as it did? You know, we can now see that Lyndon Johnson and his advisors made the decisions to fight the war in 1964 and 1965 in full knowledge of the problems that would, in fact, be set the military effort once the United States had begun escalating in '65 and so forth across the years down to 1968. So you could even extend this question to ask, why did Americans choose to fight at all, knowing that there were big problems looming? And look, I mean, I think there's, as with so many questions about Vietnam, there's no single answer. There's a range of considerations that one has to take a count of. And I'll just hit on two or three of these recognizing that we could probably spend all day on this question. Look, the United States, let's remember what the United States was in 1965 and '66 and '67, a nation that, within easily living memory, had sent 12 million soldiers to fight all over the world, this multi-front war, this amazing mobilization of American resources, the Second World War. This was a period in which the American economy was performing at a level that hadn't been seen in all of human history, I think one could argue. There was, in short, a strong sense of confidence. No problem was beyond the capabilities of the United States to solve. And I think this is a very important factor to bear in mind. Sure, American leaders understood the problems, but they also had a tremendous amount of confidence in themselves, particularly in their ability to defeat a nation that was so weak, was so fragile, was so materially backward to use a term that was tossed around so much at the time. Another important answer to the question, I think, is the domestic political factor. In a nutshell, no president who dealt with a Vietnam problem wanted to be that president who lost a war. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, all of them in different ways made this very explicit. Don't want to be the president, a president who lost a war. And I think there's personal credibility that stands behind these kinds of comments. But there's also a calculation about the fortunes of their political parties, everything that they represented. They understood that there would be, I think, probably rightly, that there would be a heavy political price to pay for being the leader who fails to defend American interests. In American honor at some level with sufficient vigor, the political price would be devastating. And so there was this really pronounced temptation that I think each president who dealt with Vietnam fell victim to where they did enough to avoid defeat on their watch and to pass the problem along to their successor in order to avoid the political consequences that would flow from defeat. But at the same time, there was also a growing opposition in America to the Vietnam War. So you mentioned earlier that initially the war was quite popular, when does that begin to change then? I think it changes gradually in 1966 and 1967, as more and more Americans are being sent to Vietnam. Draft calls are increasing. And of course, bodies are starting to come back from Vietnam in increasing numbers as well. And there seems to be, despite all of the assurances of progress that were a steady flow from American political leaders, also there was in these years, and a somewhat more critical take in the media on the war and a growing awareness that really, the war had settled into not a defeat for the United States, but a stalemate with no clear end in sight. By 1967, this problem was really weighing on the Johnson administration. But the Johnson administration makes a decision really to double down on the war. In fact, at the end of 1967, LBJ brings general West Moreland, the overall commander of US forces back from Vietnam. He gives a series of speeches, making the case that, look, this is hard, but we have a formula for success. We just need a bit more time. But there are big demonstrations in 1967 at the same time, so you can really start to see by late 1967 that the tide is turning in terms of American public opinion. The TED offensive of early 1968 would really affirm this trend toward growing skepticism about the war. Walter Cronkite, the voice of America, makes a famous statement suggesting that the United States no longer seem to have a path for victory. It just settled into a bloody and endless stalemate. I think that that statement captures the mood that was increasingly besetting the country. And thereafter, opposition to the war would become a very important factor that LBJ, and then of course Richard Nixon had to factor into his policy making as they thought about how, at what pace, the United States should disengage from Vietnam. And then we had a question from Stone Lee H on Instagram. And they asked, what role did civil rights and black power groups play in opposition to the war? The civil rights movement was in a difficult dilemma in 1964, 1965, as the war escalated in Vietnam. Let's remember at the very same time, Martin Luther King, other leaders of the civil rights movement, were trying to work with the John Cine administration to win passage of these transformative pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of '64, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I think it's fair to say that King and others around him were skeptical of American escalation in Vietnam. But they understood that it was, at least for the moment, important to mute their criticism in the interest of what they believed, I think, understandably, to be the larger cause, the larger interest. And they understood that there might be consequences if they spoke out too strongly about Vietnam. But in 1966, 1967, the dilemma really becomes even more acute for King and other important leaders of the civil rights movement. And they begin to speak out more strongly against the war. In April 1967, King gives one of his most famous speeches at the Riverside Church in New York, where he explicitly denounces the war. And he even characterizes the United States as the leading purveyor of violence in the modern world. He makes the case that the war was siphoning crucial resources away from America's own problems, very much including the racial problem and emboldening a craven autocracy in Southeast Asia against the will of its own people. I mean, the critique is just scathing. And I think this reflects a larger transformation of much of the civil rights movement, toward a much more critical take on the war. And this move into a more critical position absolutely empowers and feeds into the growth of the Black Power movement, this really interesting wing of the larger Black Freedom of Struggle that gains momentum, I think, in part on the strength of a critique of American militarism that is, of course, closely associated with the war. So I wouldn't want to make the case that the trajectory of the civil rights movement, the Black Freedom of Struggle, the growth of Black Power, is only attributable to the war. I think there are other dynamics at play there, but absolutely the war feeds into the growing radicalism and the kind of fracturing of this civil rights movement into different strands that embrace different degrees of radicalism. And I suppose one of the reasons for this opposition to the war will relate to the next question, which was from Willie P123 on Instagram. And he just really wanted to know about the US war crimes in the Vietnam War. And I suppose we should also actually discuss crimes queued by the other side, the MVA and the Viet Cong as well. You know, it seems to me when we think of war crimes in connection with the Vietnam War, very often our minds go to one episode to the Miele massacre in March of 1968. American forces carried out this terrible atrocity in the hamlet of Miele resulting in the deaths of somewhere between three and 500 Vietnamese civilians. A question I think that has hovered around the war very much down to the present is to what degree was that anomalous, to what degree was that representative of patterns of behavior that may never have resulted in the same level of death and destruction as at Miele, but nevertheless characterized the American war effort across the whole time that Americans were engaged. You know, this is an area where historians of course disagree, but what I would say about this is that we now know that there was a pretty consistent pattern of atrocities committed by American forces across the whole time of American engagement in in Vietnam, but a lot depended on the level of discipline and morale within particular units. Some units were much more apps to commit atrocities than others were a really interesting subject for social scientists who looked at the American performance in the war is what is it about some units that seem to have led to much higher incidences of atrocities, whereas others maintained much tighter discipline and that remains a really fruitful area of investigation down to this time. An interesting question of course has gotten some attention is why didn't we know why didn't Americans know more in detail about American war crimes or atrocities during the war itself. And I think we can pretty clearly see now that there was a consistent effort within the military as we might expect to suppress these kinds of ugly episodes that of course call negative attention to the military and to the whole war effort at a time when it was already under a lot of stress for a variety of other reasons. And of course a lot of these episodes took place far out in the hinterland of South Vietnam under very difficult circumstances. And so I think that has to be factored in as well. We also now know that atrocities were certainly not the sole province of the United States, other participants in the Vietnam war were also guilty of horrible episodes, including most famously the assassination of large numbers of South Korea. And so we know that there were a lot of numbers of South Vietnamese civilian administrators during the communist occupation of the city of Wei in 1968, an episode that's gotten a lot of attention that really highlights the fact that the North Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam war certainly capable of really a trocious behavior that certainly rises to the level of war crimes as well. And the most horrific aspects of the Vietnam war was the use of chemical weapons. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about how that came about and the impact of those. Yeah, the use of chemical weapons is really fascinating dimension of the war that's got a lot of attention and of course generated a lot of controversy among historians, memoirists and of course veterans organizations that suffer the consequences of some of these chemicals that were used in such copious quantities while they were serving in the war. And so the principle of chemical warfare deployed by the United States was the use of defolence. So Vietnam as we, as I think we conventionally know is a place of dense jungles, very green place with lots and lots of acreage covered with intense rice cultivation. And where cultivation was not the main business, very, very dense jungles. So Americans concluded pretty early on really this goes back to the advisory period under JFK that some military advantage could be gained by destroying the vegetation, either food crops or the dense jungle canopy under which the communist could could hide their forces. Americans really from 1962 start using defolence of different types and defoliate, you know, vast parts of of South Vietnam. This was of course controversial at the time and would only grow in controversy as it became clear that some of these chemicals had very devastating health consequences effects that we show up not only in the men and women who suffer the consequences directly underneath these these chemicals. But also future generations would be affected by birth defects as a result of these chemicals agent orange, of course, is the one type of of these chemicals that's gotten the most attention, but it was one of several types of defolence that were used during the war. And enough controversy was generated by the American use of defolence that it produced some action in the United Nations in the early 1970s to constrain the ability of countries to use these kinds of materials in war. And I suppose we should also briefly discuss the fact that the war did spill over into some neighboring states to particularly allowing Cambodia, I wonder if you could explain why that came about. Historically, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos are deeply interconnected. These were the three components of the French colonial construction that that they called Indochina and Oshin. So from a long way back, there was deep interpenetration of these of these societies. They were at one time, in fact, a political unit. But absolutely, even after these three countries gained their independence, they remained deeply interconnected and never more so than during the most intense phases of the Vietnam War. And there are various reasons for this. Communist forces, whether the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army, found great advantage in using Laosian and Cambodian territory for two purposes. One, especially in the case of Laos, for the transport of soldiers and war material from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. This was the Ho Chi Minh Trail that people will no doubt have heard of. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran largely through Laos. It was a series of trails along which North Vietnam sense enormous amounts of troops and equipment from North to South Vietnam. To South. And a quick look at a map will make it very clear, I think, why this was an attractive option. It enabled the North Vietnamese to go around the border directly between North and South Vietnam and to infiltrate troops and supplies in a way that was much less likely to invite direct American and South Vietnamese opposition. The other use to which communist forces put neighboring territories applies more in the case of Cambodia. As the war dragged on became more intense, communist forces found it very useful to use Cambodian territory as sanctuaries to use the term that was often thrown around in the 1960s and 1970s. And so, the communist forces would fight for time in South Vietnam and then for whatever reason would pull back in order to husband their strength or regroup for further fighting down the line. And it was very convenient to do that in Cambodia where the risks of American attack were much lower, where there was much more opportunity to regroup without the constant threat of American harassment. Communist military bases inside of Cambodia became increasingly controversial as the war dragged on within the United States. A lot of pressure was applied to LBJ and then to Nixon to authorize attacks into Cambodia to disrupt this increasingly elaborate network of communist bases. But it took a long time for American leaders to come around to the idea that they should take the risks, largely political risks of extending the war into territories that were formally illegally neutral. That was a big step politically and diplomatically, even if militarily we might say it would have made good sense to carry the war into those areas. And then a seemingly simple online search query but one that might have a more complex answer who actually won the Vietnam War. Some commentary in recent years has claimed somewhat tongue in cheek that in the end the United States won the Vietnam War. And their evidence for this is usually that Vietnam is now intensely capitalistic society, a vigorous market economy. Some would also say that because of the growing power of China, Vietnam is increasingly inclined geostrategically toward the United States and forming increasingly important partnerships, even if not a formal alliance or anything close to them. that very useful military relationships with the United States and is increasingly interested in being part of an integrated capitalist global economy as reflected in Vietnamese membership in the World Trade Organization and other international bodies. But look, I think that that line of argument has to remain pretty tongue in cheek because those outcomes were not particularly visible back when the key decisions were made to fight in Vietnam and what American leaders in the 1960s and 1970s were trying to accomplish in Vietnam was the indefinite security of a South Vietnamese state that had an anti-communist orientation and was aligned with the West. And I think it requires no imagination to see that in 1973 and then especially in 1975 with the final conquest of South Vietnam, American policy failed. And so I think it is reasonable to assess the American performance in Vietnam on the assumption that the overall result was a failure of American policy. - And then on the reasons for that defeat, Neil Smiley, Osmond on Facebook wanted to know which had the bigger influence on the US pulling out of Vietnam. Was it domestic opposition or the inability to destroy that Vietnam and the NBA? - That's a very hard question. And my simple answer, which would be very disappointing, is to say it was both. But look, here's the way I think I would tackle the question. I'm going to say that it was somewhat more about the domestic political situation than it was about the military situation in Vietnam itself. I think there's no question by the late 1960s and especially across the early 1970s down to 1975 that American leaders were under intense political pressure to wind down the war. They understood that there was really no alternative politically. And that really had a profound effect on driving the decisions that ultimately result in the agreement that enabled the United States to withdraw its forces. And then the lack of a re-intervention in the war as it became clear the communist would achieve ultimate victory in 1975. But the reason for my hedge and complicated answer to this question is that this political judgment that the war needed to be wound down on the part of presidents but also in the minds of so many Americans rested on I think an accurate assessment that there was no military path to victory in Vietnam. There was a recognition that Americans had tried and tried and tried almost everything under the sun and yet the military problem remained unsolved. So I think sometimes there's a tendency to draw a too bright align between political and military as if these two things are not deeply interwoven with each other. In fact, as the famous military strategist and author Carl von Klausovitz reminded us all centuries ago, war is politics by other means. It's senseless to think of military operations as disconnected from politics. If the American home front and American politicians made a judgment about what needed to be done in Vietnam in the early 1970s, I would argue that that was deeply interwoven with, I would say a pretty accurate assessment of the prospects for achieving the military outcomes that Americans had fought so long and so unsuccessfully for by the early '70s. One last popular search query. How many people died in the Vietnam war in assuming that we have figures for all the participants? A lot depends, of course, on how you date the war. The easy statistic is to say that just over 58,000 Americans died because Americans were, of course, fighting and dying for a relatively limited part of what a Vietnamese person might understand as the Vietnam War. The really complicated question is, OK, how many Vietnamese died? And it depends, of course, on whether you date the war from 1945 or 1954 or 1959 or 1965. But let's say you split the difference and take 1961, a period of dramatic acceleration of fighting on both sides and then go down to 1975 in the ultimate North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. Even here, there's a lot of fuzziness, but the number, I think, that has a lot of credibility to it is somewhere between two and three million Vietnamese died as a consequence of the fighting both civilians and military people. Just finally, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the legacy of Vietnam. And if possible, could we do it twofold on what was the impact on America of this defeat? And also then, how did it affect Vietnam, the country that had been eventually unified in 1975? If you don't mind, I'll take the Vietnam side first. When the fighting finally came to an end in 1975, the sitting government of North Vietnam was a very hawkish regime, very closely associated with the Soviet Union that had a very rigid sense of how the country needed to be knitted together into a single political entity and how the country as a whole, but especially the southern part, needed to be reformed and restructured to bring it into line with a communist model of economic development and political organization. And they're ensued for about 10 years, a very difficult, repressive time in Vietnam, where the principle goal of the government was to achieve this overhaul of southern society in a way that carried enormous terrible implications for so many people in this out, especially, predictably those who had cooperated or were seen to have cooperated with the United States and with the South Vietnamese regime. There were reeducation camps, political repression, people who were persecuted excluded from jobs and opportunities to support themselves and their families and so forth because of the positions they had taken during the war. Some were executed as well, although the bloodbath to use a term that was sometimes tossed around in the mid 1970s was more limited than some of the worst predictions anticipated, which is not for a second to diminish the fact that there was enormous bloodshed, but it was not what it might have been according to the worst predictions of the moment. Across the border in Cambodia is a different story, and I think that deserves to be very much part of how we think about the consequences of and the legacy of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. But to stick with Vietnam itself, in 1986 a very important moment comes. This is of course at a time when the Cold War globally is starting to wind down, when China is well along the road to a really fundamental transformation of its society, especially through the embrace of capitalist market economics. Vietnam somewhat belatedly follows the same course. It dramatically liberalizes the economy and backs away from this rigorous kind of economic restructuring that had been the order of the day for about a decade. And those decisions really lay the groundwork for the Vietnam that we know today, where the Communist Party still rides high, it's still a one party state, but with much more economic opportunity and economic dynamism and indeed capitalism than anyone, I think would have been able to predict in those first years after the end of the war. So we have now this peculiar Vietnam that is nominally communist, and certainly authoritarian in many dimensions of its daily operations, but permits at the same time a wide array of free market activities. In the United States, the legacies of the war, deserve an entire program of their own. The generalization I would offer is that the war produced division and controversy in a society that for a time after the Second World War had been strikingly unified and consensus oriented. And then saying that, I don't mean for a moment to diminish the many ways in which the United States was a dynamic and divided society across those years from 1945 to let's say 1968 or so, of course, but in relative terms, I think what the Vietnam War does is it accentuates division within American society. And as we would see over time after the end of the Second World War, many Americans remains convinced that the principal lesson of the Vietnam War was that the United States really needed to be careful about how it used its power globally in the years to come. The Vietnam War had taught that the United States, despite its claims to immense power, despite the claim that its model of political and economic development was applicable to everyone around the world. In fact, it discovered that the United States didn't have the answers for all the world's problems, and therefore needed to be very careful. If it wasn't careful, it would have embroiled itself in more Vietnam's as it went for trying and failing to impose a new plan. oppose itself on the wider world. But for other Americans, the principal lesson of the Vietnam War was that the United States needed to use its power and influence even more effectively. The principal lesson was that the United States hadn't done enough to achieve victory in Vietnam, to achieve the goals for which it fought so long and hard. The critique was that weak-willed politicians or an ineffective military or the anti-war movement or the media, there are various culprits. Prevented the United States somehow from using its power to full effect. And I think to this day, we see a very vigorous debate between those two points of view. In connection with Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we saw many Americans arguing that this was another Vietnam. And once again, we needed to understand the limits on what the United States could achieve in the world. And others saying, no, the solution is to stick with these challenges long enough. And eventually, we would achieve success. I think one of the things that's really striking is that this debate, which of course, is largely about geopolitics in the use of military force, seeps into every dimension of American life. You can see it, for example, in the literature, and especially the film of the war, also a film like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now, very much, it seems to me, embraces that critical view of the war and reinforces this idea that, look, there was nothing the United States could do in Vietnam that would have brought victory. And then you have Rambo and missing an action that very much buttressed this idea that there was a winning strategy, but weak wills Americans of whatever sort weren't willing to do what was necessary. So this debate, I think, is likely to continue for an awfully long time. And it's been, if anything, reinvigorated by the controversies connected to Iraq and Afghanistan. That was Mark Atwood-Lorrance. His book, "The Vietnam War, a Consize International History," is out now published by Oxford University Press. You can find a link in the episode description. There's plenty more on the conflict, including a number of other podcast episodes at historyextra.com. Just search for Vietnam War. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Ben Ewitt, Jack Bateman, and Brittany Colley. We'll be back tomorrow when Leo Hollis will be speaking about a strange inheritance case from the 18th century.