Post-World War II and the Long Road to Vietnam

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Post-World War II and the Long Road to Vietnam


In the post-World War II era between 1945 and 1950 many new nations and colonies of Europe found themselves engaged in insurgencies and civil war. Vietnam was no exception. France fought a determined enemy that was Communist-Marxist and supported by both China and the Soviet Union. Given the lessons of the failed French involvement in Indochina as well as numerous other insurgencies across the world (such as Algeria), should the United States have avoided engaging in combat operations in Indochina?

 With the end of World War II the United States found the peace she fought so hard for tenuous at best with the rise of Communism sponsored by the Soviet Union. Ideologies were now pitted against each other with both nations, in diametric opposition, fighting a new “cold war”.  Both the US and the Soviet Union used proxy states or supported regimes that were allied in opposition to the others influence. The ideas of democracy and free markets were now threatened by Communist and Marxist-Leninist ideas extolled by the rigidly controlled central authorities of Russia and her allies.

France had failed terribly in extinguishing the Communist insurgency of Indochina. The North Vietnamese Communists had established themselves in Hanoi and was fully supported by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. 1954 saw the terrible defeat of the French military in Dien Bien Phu and the United States was alarmed. The Soviets were consolidating gains in East Europe, and simultaneously exporting her support and ideas across the globe, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The US State Department seriously believed in the “Domino Theory” where by one nation is consumed by a Communist insurgency and thus knocking off each of her neighbors as they too collapse under the weight of populist Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideologies.

This, then, is where the United States found herself and decided that Vietnam would by the very place the US would make a stand against the Soviets and Communists in a “hot war”.

The United States lacked any real history of involvement in countering insurgencies on the scale that was necessary in Vietnam or, against an insurgency that had very deep backing. The Spanish-American War and the Indian Wars of the West saw the U.S. Army fighting the Moro rebels in the Philippines and Native American tribes across the frontier. Those efforts were hardly remembered across the U.S. Army of the 1950s and the U.S. Armed Forces were, in 1964 for example, traditional, orthodox, and oriented towards countering Soviets in Europe. The ‘Nuclear Triad,’ missiles, submarines, and strategic bombers, were the bedrock of the Western Democracies. President Eisenhower, having led and fought World War II, disbelieved the US should actively pursue combat in Asia. Next, President Kennedy, youthful and having suffered the ignominy of the Cuban Missile Crisis, believed in a far more active and firm position in dealing with the Soviets. And it was finally, President Johnson that fully committed to engaging US forces in the long and difficult struggle called ‘The Vietnam War’.


The former US Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara stated that “the United States had failed to study fully a proposal made by France's General Charles De Gaulle in the early 1960s for neutrality in Vietnam” (Reuters 1997).

The media played a tremendous role during the Vietnam war. Color television broadcasts from the field painted a very grim picture. Public interest grew with the news cycle and “when American policy in Vietnam began to fall apart, the media began to send back an image that conflicted sharply with the picture of progress officials were trying to paint” (Solomon 2005).Weekly news typically finished with rolling names of those US servicemen killed that week. The media doubted US involvement from the very start and the daily news reports served to both, paint a grim picture, but more importantly, assist the domestic opposition to the war in the US. The anti-war movement was fuelled by several factors to include registration for the draft (mandatory conscription), the daily news reports from Vietnam, and the US governments continued statements that “things were going well”. University campuses were quickly turned into anti-war opposition movements across the United States. The “draft” was extremely unpopular. And the media began to openly criticize official US government reports and information on the prosecution of the war.


The lessons of the Vietnam War are multifaceted, and while some are glaring, many are nuanced but very real today. The Armed Forces of the United States are “all volunteer”. There is no draft, no mandatory conscription. As such, the ‘anti-war movement’ is all but non-existent. The most important lesson that the US government learned, however, is the central control of media. Media and press coverage is tightly controlled. All press personnel must be “credentialed” and registered with Department of Defense (DoD) Public Affairs agencies. Press personnel are then “embedded” and not allowed to freely travel. All travel must be coordinated by the PAO and assigned military personnel. And the ultimate form of control? The DoD may revoke “Press Credentials” at any time and eject the Press from the conflict zone.


Orthodox arguments state that the United States should have avoided direct participation in a counter insurgency in Indochina. The U.S. Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency of the early 1960s was unable to foresee or predict the collapse of communism, the failure of centralized economies or the tremendous cost associated with executing a counter-insurgency. Instead, a commitment in the Republic of Vietnam was seen as containing the ambitions of Communists in the Moscow and Beijing. And commit to the RVN the United States did. But once committed to conflict, she failed to see how the draft and unfavorable press would fuel a nation-wide anti-war movement that would affect both foreign and domestic policies with dramatic results. A complete study of the Vietnam war, begs the question: ‘Could the US have won the war if fought differently?’ “Norman Podhoretz, who believes that American intervention in the Vietnam War was "an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses," has concluded that "the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether."(Record 1997) 

Revisionists argue otherwise. And we shall explore the revisionist argument in the future. The debate has never ceased nor abated, and contemporary scholars and historians are making some very interesting and profound arguments that have significance with respect to contemporary military affairs. 

 

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References/Citations

Solomon, Normon, The News Media and the Antiwar Movement, Fair, Fairness and

 Accuracy in Reporting, 2005, Retrieved from

http://fair.org/media-beat-column/the-news-media-and-the-antiwar-        movement/

 

Reuters, News, “Vietnam War could have been avoided,” McNamara says, Desert News, June 1997,                            Retrieved from

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/568031/Vietnam-War-could-have-been-avoided-McNamara-says.html?pg=all

 

Record, Jeffrey, Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?, Parameters, Winter, 1996-97.



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